CHICAGO

I'm currently sitting in a café called The Bourgeois Pig trying to work on my dissertation. The writing isn't really happening, though you can't say I didn't try. I worked on a few sentences, parsed out some parts where I really slip into some vagaries, and just overall tried to hone in my point(s).

Writing a dissertation is obviously hard work, but writing it in Chicago is exciting and even harder. I mean, there's so much to see and do, so many calls on my attention, that I really can't see myself doing much work in the next hour. I had hoped to get some good breakthroughs, but I really need to be more deeply immersed in the material before I can feel ready to write.

I obviously need to get rid of this insistence on controlling my writing conditions. Or I just need to write and not worry about other things, like Facebook and Twitter and whatnext.

My friend whom I met at SCT has just arrived to the coffee shop and we spent a good little bit catching up. She's a delightful and wonderful friend who has been very gracious in opening her door to me while she lived in Boulder. I stayed with her and her partner for a few days while I attended a conference. To this day, that experience has filled me with memories that I cherish. Does that sound sappy? Don't answer.

The year of 2012 brought a lot of profound changes to my life. And when I see friends I met during that year I am filled with a lot of joy, thinking at how people stick around and stay real and build memories.

I used to be so afraid of life and of love. I suppose I still am, after a manner, but now I feel a great sense of happiness and joy at the prospect of continuing to build awesome lives with wonderful people. So, tonight's Chicago and I feel very, very happy about that.

The Trouble with Writing Literary History

I'm writing a dissertation chapter on Jeffrey Brace's slave narrative. It's challenging, disheartening, and rough. I don't know entirely what I'm trying to say about this very interesting and important man and the story he told to the lawyer Benjamin F. Prentiss. My brain is currently in this heavily forested area that refuses to see any light or direction on how to proceed. It's utterly frustrating.

I've stopped wanting to give up on this chapter. Perhaps that's not true, but I'm going to write that out and keep it to assure myself that, indeed, I am not going to stop. I am going to press on. I suppose. But ARG. Fucking shit. This is so damnably hard. So incredibly gut-wrenchingly hard. I don't know if I have whatever it takes to write a dissertation.

In the past, my writing relied on serendipity (which I can't spell without the help of spellcheck). Now, I just steamroll through stuff, writing out whatever it is that comes to mind. I have apparently lost the ability to distinguish between important and unimportant, useful and unhelpful. I'm trapped in this awful spiral of self-doubt and depression. I've ceased being a good partner to my boyfriend, because I'm not as smart and capable as I should be.

Holy shit. Where is this rant going? Seriously, I went from enunciating my inability to write effectively on this chapter to questioning my ability to be in a relationship. I suppose one needs to take a break from the grind and do something else. But today, I'm not going to stop writing. I'm going to keep at it and work until I write something good and brilliant and true. What that is, I know not what it'll be. Close readings of a particular narrative? Sure, why not. It helped me in the past.

I'm reminded of this bizarre Walter Benjamin quote from his “On the Concept of History” (alright, I'll confess, I'm not reminded of it so much as it's the current opening quote to my chapter and I told myself I'd at least do a quick reading of it in this blog post): "The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history."

If this is true, then I suppose I have my rationale for working on Jeffrey Brace. Nothing should be lost to history. All things should be considered. Nothing left out. But then that honestly leaves a writer or a critic with an impossible task of considering an infinitude of associations, contexts, allusions, and environments. No stone unturned in this type of historical writing, but all stones hide more stones that hide more stones. And so what fortress or what walkway will I build with the things I assemble? I suppose that's the important question I need to ask myself.

I also need to ask myself some pretty tough questions about why I have chosen to think about this particular individual. I remember as I was trying to finalize my prospectus, I found myself wanting to find some early national slave narrative, feeling it would make the perfect inclusion in my critique of republican political ideology and the early United States. That's some pretty fucked up shit. I mean, setting up a research question that requires locating a text that speaks at some pretty challenging socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I need to step back a bit more and ask myself why I'm working on what I'm doing and the implications for doing so.

(What's up with this spatial metaphor of stepping?) 

Ok, I'll continue the thought. And I'll do it by thinking up a rationale for why I'm working on Jeffrey Brace. I'd say that Jeffrey Brace emerges in my project as a figure of exceptionality--a black Revolutionary War veteran who joint-authored his own life narrative. His writings are called "memoirs" because of their relation to his memory, in that the occasion of composition was Brace's telling of his life and Prentiss compiling them in writing. There's little unique to this situation. It's a common occurrence for these relations in nineteenth-century abolitionist writing. So what's interesting is to trace out how and where Brace emerges to seek to control the narrative's significations. There are multiple of such moments in the text. But even that isn't the real reason I'm focusing on him for this chapter. I suppose I need to go back to the drawing board for that.

Oh, Bananas

It has of course been a rough day. And then I saw this little art piece by Robert Gligorov called "Tutti Frutti #1" that sort of put everything in context. 

Bananas, of course, have a long-standing tradition of being eaten as mushy sex organs. I can't number the times I've pretended to give a banana a blow-job because, let's be honest, some jokes just write themselves. 

There's something stomach-turning about this piece, however. I don't know if it's the color of the fruit or the peal or way the banana skin resembles nothing I'd ever want between my lips. Perhaps, though, it's the shiny head that sort of nobs toward the corner of the frame, begging for attention. 

But whatever it is, this image is both frightening and desirable. I may not eat a banana anytime soon, but I'll certain be thinking of peels more fondly than ever before. 

The connection between ripe fruit and sexual organs is really intriguing. The metaphors, to use a cliché, write themselves. But it's late, I've got a goal to do some actual, hardcore (seriously, these metaphors) writing tomorrow. I have a goal to send my dissertation advisor my next chapter draft by the end of the month. Don't know if I can do it, but I can sure give it a shot. 

Bad Headpaces

I'm in a really bad head space today. I can trace it to a few things.

First, my entire Facebook feed is being inundated with my LDS friends freaking out about the excommunication of two Mormon activists who have tried to make their church more open to difference.

Second, I only have one week with T.J. before he goes to California, we both go to Utah, and then we see my sister get married.

Third, I feel at a total and complete loss when it comes to writing my fucking dissertation. It's a huge mess and I want to crawl in a hole and mumble profanities to the moles.

The headspace is made worse with the feeling of failure that haunts me right now. I feel like I'm unable to write and work like I used. A few years ago I could write and work and think and read and all of that shit without the least problem. Now, I get distracted every few seconds, letting my mind ramble to Facebook or Twitter or some other bullshit online thing. I need to work on my focus, obviously, and I need not let myself get pulled into mindless and inane endeavors.

Even as I write all of this out, I feel like I'm simply reinscribing my obsessive, Virgo-esque personality. Yes, I'm hard on myself and yes, I don't let things go lightly. But still, that has worked for me for so many years. How can I give it up now?

But I need to let go of unhelpful and unproductive dynamics. I guess? Well, maybe not. Maybe I need to bask in the uncertainty and waste of life for a bit. Maybe I should refuse to clean myself up each day, intentionally choosing to just be without the pressure of productivity and all its capitalistic bullshit.

So, moral of the story is, I have no fucking clue what it is I'm doing. Each day is the same bullshit of rereading some book, my mind never focusing on anything, and then at some point in the afternoon I sit in front of a computer and type words that never emerge into anything coherent. That's what I'm doing now, only the location is a crappily bourgeois coffee place called Caffé Bene right next to campus. It's seriously the worse place ever. Perhaps that explains my bad headspace and my throbbing desire to throw my computer across the room and break out into song.  

Blog Pastnesses

Wow, I found this blog after years of unuse and I feel like I'm coming home to a house that is less exciting than memory had served. I suppose I'm looking this up because last night my boyfriend shared his journal from his travels through parts of South Africa. In hearing him read, I was left with this longing feel--a longing to have had such travels and a longing to be able to write about them so vividly. The pacing of when he tells a story and when he pans out to discuss other things was pretty amazing. He could be driving in a car with a passive-aggressive woman and then contemplate the significance of brooding storm clouds. I like that. 

And so now I sit here, typing on a computer while he sits in the other room, listening to Daughter's "Landfill": "don't you dare look back walk away catch up with the sunrise." The most memorable line "I love you so much, but I hate your guts." What more can be said for a song that the singer plaintively whispers and the guitar squeals like a hurt rabbit?

I have this problem with writing things down electronically. I tend to want to erase things immediately, severing myself from a past that I cannot recover. That's the case with my old blog, hopkinspoesyprose.blogspot.com. I totally deleted it. I did it in a fit of anger, I believe, because I was trying to distance myself from people in my past. Not a big deal, just a few women I had dated and broken up with. 

What a weird post this has become. I'm not nearly enough self-aware of my writing to make this interesting, but it's what I do. 

Examinating

Tomorrow is my PhD special fields exam, where I'll be asked a collection of questions that I wrote, studied for, and otherwise thought were appointment. To say I'm nervous is not to get at the intensity of feeling that I'm experiencing right now. I feel unprepared, to say the least, and I worry that I'll have sufficient to say when things open tomorrow.

I'm supposed to briefly touch on what I'm interested in exploring: how queer theory might help me think about how the state operates in the legibility of gender and race in the nineteenth century. If queer theory questions the stability of identity, the foundations of subjectivity, then queer theory would help me think about the vectors of power and representation that foreground the worlds of the early national and antebellum US.

What would a literary history look like that began with John Marrant's meditations on Indian removal, that then turned to writings on the relationship between state power and education (or futurity, rather) and seduction? Marrant practices a mode of being that resists assignation into particular categories.

Alright, that's a rambling mess. What if I thought about conversion in relation to seduction? Wouldn't that allow me to turn from John Marrant to other seduction narratives, helping me get at the material that gets suppressed and unstated in the seduction narratives of Charles Brockden Brown?

As I write all of this out, I'm beginning to sense how unwieldy my archive is. I mean, I've really got a ton of material that doesn't entirely cohere on its own. Must. Work. Harder.

Funeral, Band of Horses, Memories and Photos

I'm looking at a photo of my sister laughing with two of our nieces and nephews. She's got a huge grin on her face. No, scratch that, it's a full-fledged smile. Cheesy, if you will, and clearly evidence of some happy moment.

It was difficult, these past few years, to remember this smile of my sister. She learned the art of mastery and self-control, where a front could hide an internal pain or discomfort.

When she came out to see me--when we took a brief trip to Chicago--she only cried once. It was in the car, driving through fields of Midwestern grain, and I asked her how, beneath all of the smiles and laughter, she was really doing. Her voice choked briefly, ever so briefly, and she just said it was so hard to continue and she didn't like her life. She then stopped, caught her breath, and told me she didn't want to think about things anymore. I respected that, changed the subject to music, and we eventually arrived to Chicago. I'd like to imagine that Band of Horses played.

Or perhaps it was Mumford and Sons. I introduced her to these two bands during that trip, and she absolutely loved them.

Anyway, I'm now listening to Adele sing "Someone Like You." My eyes are sore from tears. My throat hurts, and I've accomplished nothing of the things I ought to do. My special fields exam is in a week from tomorrow. My heart hurts. Things taste bitter.