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landingtreeEssay on the Peirene Fountainhouse is in. I would definitely rather not have finished the essay late enough to see light coming into the eastern sky, but, well, it's preferable to finishing the essay that late and not getting to see light coming into the eastern sky. Our house does have a good outlook.
This is the first time I've actually stayed up all night working, though I've gotten to three and four. I don't plan on it because of the way my mind turns to soup -- the last three hours of work should have taken one and a half. (Well, the very last hour should have taken five minutes. First note to self: spend some time when it is not immediately essential learning to format and convert images). I am now very tired, but this wonderful space in my mind is opening up labelled 'Things which are not essay writing but are not procrastination either'; it's been a few days since anything except minimal household tasks went in that category.
And that's my Classics degree done. Unless I do come back in a future year to take Honours, which I thought hard about for this year and decided against, (or unless the essay I just submitted is far worse than I believe it is), I have no further structural reason to engage with anything to do with the Classical world at all. Second note to self: I'd like to anyway. I abandoned history class in the first year of high school (due to a teacher who was a dab hand with a personal anecdote, an even dabber hand at spreading minimal information as widely as possible across a plan of study, and a JFK conspiracy theorist) on the basis that I'd keep reading a range of history books in my own time. This plan wilted completely three chapters into a very Freudian biography of Napoleon. (It wasn't until the year before last that I got a fairly well-anchored sense of where Napoleon fit into world history. Thank you again, Mike Duncan and your history podcasts). So I will set myself a reading goal that matches my actual present non-fiction/self-assigned books reading rate: before July, I will read one secondary and one primary Classics text. Possibly I will read more, but I will at least read those two, I will have started one of them before April, and I will write about them here.
I started university with no goal but to learn things. I have learned things, and I'm going to keep learning things, and I'm happy about that. On the other hand, these last few months I've found myself largely at sea in terms of thinking about the future, because of the complete lack of ultimate aim I went into study with. I have an ultimate aim: it is to write fiction. I have no feasible paying job jumping up and down saying, 'Vocation! Over here!' so my hopes for finding a job, when I do, is that it be something that doesn't use the same mental muscles as fiction-writing, leaves some space for fiction writing, does good in the world, and is interesting. No university subject has pulled me back again and again the way fiction does; whatever I'm studying lights up from within with very bright flashes from time to time and then goes dark, and I feel like I've only just begun to learn the sort of discipline with which I can pour energy and enthusiasm most usefully into the dark parts. That's if I'm learning it at all. This essay I just wrote about Peirene is not particularly good -- I mean, it is coherent and presents a fairly large amount of information in English sentences, but I didn't learn much while writing it. I had Corinth available to me and I chose Peirene, partly because Peirene is wonderful, but mostly, in practice, because that was the topic I could see my way into with least effort, least new thinking. New thinking is the entire point of an essay. It bothers me that I noticed this so close to the end of writing one, when I bumped into someone else from the trip and we re-enthused each other -- at that point there was still time to read and learn and think, but not enough. The essay is mostly a sign saying, "Go and read the first book which answers to the search terms 'Peirene Spring scholarship'." (An essay doing that should at the very least include better fine print, i.e. "and then discard some of its more speculative claims").
This year I am studying part-time on the other half of my conjoint degree, Ecology, which I had decided last year I would not do. I was going to finish with Classics alone. I am also, this year, going to write a book, or some of one. I had settled on wanting to write the book; the decision was, pair it with Ecology, or look for the most substantial job which would still leave a book-shaped space around it. This is an amazing choice have, a lucky choice. Choosing Ecology only makes sense if I do not use the kind of thinking I used on the Peirene essay. Third note to self (well, this is all note to self really): at any point when I am bored with a research process or a writing process, ask why. If that produces no result, walk around a block and up a hill, drink coffee depending on the time of day, and ask why again. Then talk to someone else about it. If the answer is still "because this topic is bloody boring", then well and good, but it is likely not to be.
I don't think I've written a single thing at university while feeling that I fully understood what I was writing about (except possibly the propaganda campaigns of Antony and Octavian, because the fact that Octavian won, became Augustus, and cut off the textual transmission of pro-Antonian material dead, makes for a nice manageable little research topic -- though I'm sure even that has several levels of higher resolution). But I've developed better instincts for the point at which I understand enough. And it's nice to look back through my folders and see the little things that most excited me when I got to them, which for the most part I still think are exciting. The meta-mythology of British intellectual explanations of myth, laid out in a delightful lucid textbook. (That book has given me my only experience of putting down a book, leaving the library in which it is contained, walking two blocks, thinking, "No! Cannot stop now!" and going back again). The wonderful simple efficiency of sponge structure. I first really understood the possibilities of coffee when I sat down to read Porphyry's 'On the Cave of the Nymphs', which, sans caffeine, had struck me as impenetrable, and, with caffeine, buzzed through my head in a wild excess of coherently over-reading the hell out of Homer. (The email I wrote toseahearth immediately afterwards had the subject line 'Coffee symbols death life bees!!')
In February I am going to finish two stories currently going by 'The Kept Forest' and 'Hearth-ash Child'. After February, I am going to work on only one story, for an only mildly flexible value of 'only'. It's another manifestation of 'bright flashes of light and then darkness' that I tend to jump wildly from story to story as the enthusiasm or the new solution takes me, and though that has seemed like a good method for quite a long time, I'm beginning to find that even story-beginnings I'm happy with are fading into the zone of 'This was written by someone other than me. I could honestly have finished it then, and now I can't'. Not that that's wholly a bad thing -- I once wrote something I think is evil, and I'm very glad I didn't submit it anywhere before I had time to work out why it was. But it will be useful to try to finish an actual novel draft. Of course, I'm vacillating over which novel it will be... I thought I'd settled on 'Novel with far too many worlds to deal with which may actually be about the fact that it can't possibly have a plot', but (probably because those are the terms in which I'm inclined to think about it at the moment) 'Novel which is not The Lives of Christopher Chant and hopefully can be prevented from wanting to be, with mirror magic' is currently ascendant. Whatever I choose by the start of March, this shall it be.
This is the first time I've actually stayed up all night working, though I've gotten to three and four. I don't plan on it because of the way my mind turns to soup -- the last three hours of work should have taken one and a half. (Well, the very last hour should have taken five minutes. First note to self: spend some time when it is not immediately essential learning to format and convert images). I am now very tired, but this wonderful space in my mind is opening up labelled 'Things which are not essay writing but are not procrastination either'; it's been a few days since anything except minimal household tasks went in that category.
And that's my Classics degree done. Unless I do come back in a future year to take Honours, which I thought hard about for this year and decided against, (or unless the essay I just submitted is far worse than I believe it is), I have no further structural reason to engage with anything to do with the Classical world at all. Second note to self: I'd like to anyway. I abandoned history class in the first year of high school (due to a teacher who was a dab hand with a personal anecdote, an even dabber hand at spreading minimal information as widely as possible across a plan of study, and a JFK conspiracy theorist) on the basis that I'd keep reading a range of history books in my own time. This plan wilted completely three chapters into a very Freudian biography of Napoleon. (It wasn't until the year before last that I got a fairly well-anchored sense of where Napoleon fit into world history. Thank you again, Mike Duncan and your history podcasts). So I will set myself a reading goal that matches my actual present non-fiction/self-assigned books reading rate: before July, I will read one secondary and one primary Classics text. Possibly I will read more, but I will at least read those two, I will have started one of them before April, and I will write about them here.
I started university with no goal but to learn things. I have learned things, and I'm going to keep learning things, and I'm happy about that. On the other hand, these last few months I've found myself largely at sea in terms of thinking about the future, because of the complete lack of ultimate aim I went into study with. I have an ultimate aim: it is to write fiction. I have no feasible paying job jumping up and down saying, 'Vocation! Over here!' so my hopes for finding a job, when I do, is that it be something that doesn't use the same mental muscles as fiction-writing, leaves some space for fiction writing, does good in the world, and is interesting. No university subject has pulled me back again and again the way fiction does; whatever I'm studying lights up from within with very bright flashes from time to time and then goes dark, and I feel like I've only just begun to learn the sort of discipline with which I can pour energy and enthusiasm most usefully into the dark parts. That's if I'm learning it at all. This essay I just wrote about Peirene is not particularly good -- I mean, it is coherent and presents a fairly large amount of information in English sentences, but I didn't learn much while writing it. I had Corinth available to me and I chose Peirene, partly because Peirene is wonderful, but mostly, in practice, because that was the topic I could see my way into with least effort, least new thinking. New thinking is the entire point of an essay. It bothers me that I noticed this so close to the end of writing one, when I bumped into someone else from the trip and we re-enthused each other -- at that point there was still time to read and learn and think, but not enough. The essay is mostly a sign saying, "Go and read the first book which answers to the search terms 'Peirene Spring scholarship'." (An essay doing that should at the very least include better fine print, i.e. "and then discard some of its more speculative claims").
This year I am studying part-time on the other half of my conjoint degree, Ecology, which I had decided last year I would not do. I was going to finish with Classics alone. I am also, this year, going to write a book, or some of one. I had settled on wanting to write the book; the decision was, pair it with Ecology, or look for the most substantial job which would still leave a book-shaped space around it. This is an amazing choice have, a lucky choice. Choosing Ecology only makes sense if I do not use the kind of thinking I used on the Peirene essay. Third note to self (well, this is all note to self really): at any point when I am bored with a research process or a writing process, ask why. If that produces no result, walk around a block and up a hill, drink coffee depending on the time of day, and ask why again. Then talk to someone else about it. If the answer is still "because this topic is bloody boring", then well and good, but it is likely not to be.
I don't think I've written a single thing at university while feeling that I fully understood what I was writing about (except possibly the propaganda campaigns of Antony and Octavian, because the fact that Octavian won, became Augustus, and cut off the textual transmission of pro-Antonian material dead, makes for a nice manageable little research topic -- though I'm sure even that has several levels of higher resolution). But I've developed better instincts for the point at which I understand enough. And it's nice to look back through my folders and see the little things that most excited me when I got to them, which for the most part I still think are exciting. The meta-mythology of British intellectual explanations of myth, laid out in a delightful lucid textbook. (That book has given me my only experience of putting down a book, leaving the library in which it is contained, walking two blocks, thinking, "No! Cannot stop now!" and going back again). The wonderful simple efficiency of sponge structure. I first really understood the possibilities of coffee when I sat down to read Porphyry's 'On the Cave of the Nymphs', which, sans caffeine, had struck me as impenetrable, and, with caffeine, buzzed through my head in a wild excess of coherently over-reading the hell out of Homer. (The email I wrote to
seahearth immediately afterwards had the subject line 'Coffee symbols death life bees!!') In February I am going to finish two stories currently going by 'The Kept Forest' and 'Hearth-ash Child'. After February, I am going to work on only one story, for an only mildly flexible value of 'only'. It's another manifestation of 'bright flashes of light and then darkness' that I tend to jump wildly from story to story as the enthusiasm or the new solution takes me, and though that has seemed like a good method for quite a long time, I'm beginning to find that even story-beginnings I'm happy with are fading into the zone of 'This was written by someone other than me. I could honestly have finished it then, and now I can't'. Not that that's wholly a bad thing -- I once wrote something I think is evil, and I'm very glad I didn't submit it anywhere before I had time to work out why it was. But it will be useful to try to finish an actual novel draft. Of course, I'm vacillating over which novel it will be... I thought I'd settled on 'Novel with far too many worlds to deal with which may actually be about the fact that it can't possibly have a plot', but (probably because those are the terms in which I'm inclined to think about it at the moment) 'Novel which is not The Lives of Christopher Chant and hopefully can be prevented from wanting to be, with mirror magic' is currently ascendant. Whatever I choose by the start of March, this shall it be.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-02 01:37 am (UTC)