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.

Thoughts on my sister

Apparently I have this blog. It's been a long, long time since I've written anything here, thought I've wanted to write things every now and then about various parts of my life. I never know the right format, however, to share the feelings that settle on my heart, nor do I know if my thoughts or feelings are even of sufficient value to justify turning toward them and thus away from "work," "others," and whatnot. But here I go.

So where to begin. I honestly don't know how to state the very thing that occupies my mind, the memory that is clouding my eyes with salt water and congesting my chest with pain. So let me just state it here, forthwrightly, clearly: my sister died a month ago and today I'm reliving every lost opporutnity I had to tell her how much I loved her.

In the Mormon tradition family is paramount and eternal, everlasting and foundational. I recall, as a young kid, regretting the thought that I'd be stuck to my family forever, hating the constant fights, the hurt feelings, the ever-present sorrow that seemed to infect my mom, the depression my father carried around like a bundle of bricks in a faded-blue backpack, my sisters with their insecurities. My sister--the sister who inspired this return to this blog and the one whose recent death lingers on my mind--felt similarly, though she shook off the constraints of theology to live with what she felt was more freedom. And at her death, I find no comfort in any sense of Mormon family continuity or anything of that like. But rather, I'm comforted by the realization that my sister lived her life rougher than a goddamn tornado.

I ramble. I'd like to say something more, something about pain, longing, love, but I'm led to this song to explain everything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjecIllOEio

The Forensic Turn

Yesterday I went to a talk by Eyal Weizman, an architect and art historian. His paper was fascinating, to say the least, and I'd like to touch on a few points that he brought up. 

First, he wonders how epistemologies of human rights changed in "the forensic turn." He looks at how in Guatemala a particular case about the remains of the dead went from evidence to a "rights-bearing subject." That's super interesting. He's mostly looking at questions of indigeneity, but I think that his theory has some significant implications in other realms of analysis. 

He calls forensics not about science, but about the presentation of a science. In this sense, it's all about rhetoric. How does forensics and rhetorics compare? Well, to Weizman forensics is about how things say things, or the speech on behalf of inanimate objects. What does the inanimate say? 

Part of me wonders if this is simply a reemergence of objectivity by another name. Certainly objectivity isn't entirely bad, but it would certainly be awful if it masks itself under the garb of some sort of "truth." 

A word that I loved: Osteobiography, or the study of bones and how they are always haunted by animism. Life gets read from the bone. Events of our life become material. The bone gets exposed through life like how photography gets exposed through light. Fascinating. 

Much of Weizman's analysis looked at the 2008-2009 Gaza strip attack. Over a thousand people were killed (in buildings, and sometimes in their own homes) and there is still very little witness and testimony recorded. Weizman turned to some photographic work by Amnesty International, but in doing so he focused on how the photographers were less interested in capturing the human bodies that spoke about the trauma that occurred, and more interested in documenting bullet holes, shell cartridges, and other material markers of warfare. 

Does this focus on the material leftover--the forensic datum--equal a type of fetish? He is trying to rethink the fetish as that which embeds us into the materiality of an object. I wonder if that is sufficient to explain how the forensic pathology works in our contemporary world. 

Figuration, Line, and Paul Klee

On a recent trip to the Art Institute of Chicago I became perplexed before this Paul Klee piece entitled "Fleeing Ghost." 

I don't know if I was drawn to it with a sudden sense of awe because I immediately thought of its relation to my work in a similar vein, I'd like to think, of how Walter Benjamin used the same artist's "Angelus Novus" to explain his philosophy of history (that there is a constant building of events, disasters, occurrences that we--as humans--aren't privy too but that the "angel of history" can see). But perhaps I'm trying too hard to have a sense of the critical work I'm engaged in. Either way, here's how I'd look at the painting.

I'd first point out how the ghost's subjectivity is figured by line. Line itself demarcates the apparent wood grain from which the specter arises. The line gives the painting a sense of cheapness, a sense of a hurried job. I suppose that's one of the things I like about the painting.

I'm being completely unintelligible right now, but I suppose that's ok--this is a blog. The Klee painting, to me, figures figuration such that all the lines, colors, and assemblages that we say constitute the subject are always fleeting. Soon, the ghost will evaporate, as all bodies do, and the progress of history--referenced, I suppose, by the arrow at the bottom of the page--will continue, as if the evanescent manifestation of being was simply an exhale.

I'm still staring at the painting. My mind transports to the Art Institute and I'm standing in a well-lit room, rocking back and forth before this Klee. I reflect on the impossibility of the moment, the ridiculous circumstances that led me to approach paint-on-wood as something worthy of contemplation. I'm speechless. I sit down and pretend my body is a statue.

Paper idea...

John Ames Mitchell

I'm thinking of writing a seminar paper on John Ames Mitchell, the founder of the magazine Life, in addition to being a novelist, artist, and architect. He's an interesting figure that I don't know much about, and he seems to be the type of conflicted figure that I enjoy writing about. He's both a product of victorian morality, and yet he's trying to reshape that morality through his writings. I wonder how much control he had over his magazine. The other day I read through several volumes of the magazine, but I couldn't develop a coherent sense of how the magazine works ideologically. 

Aesthetically, it is easy to get a sense of how the magazine works. It tries to be humorous, without pushing too many boundaries. Apparently a lot of Mitchell's friends and family didn't want him to stake his inheritance on middle-class entertainment, fearing that it was too far "low" for genteel readers. 

I just finished his novel The Last American, and I'm completely confused as to how to understand its political work. On one level, it seems quite misogynistic and nativist, yet the narrative's humor seems to disavow stable political stances and positions. There are a lot of descriptions of things that are "interesting," which made me think of Sianne Ngai's essay about the cute, the zany, and the interesting. She basically argues that we need to figure out how critique has created certain aesthetic categories. I'm fascinated with the idea of Mitchell--through Life--gesturing toward certain aesthetic categories that weren't entirely formed in the late nineteenth century. 

For one, the novel The Last American seems to be invested in understanding the cultural consumption of commodities as having a constitutive influence on subject-formation. In the novel, a group of Persians from the year 2951 journey by boat to America, discovering a decayed landscape with festering buildings and such. Everything from the sculptures to the literature are marked as being inferior artistic endeavors that malignantly affected Americans, destroying them. In this light, the Americans died because their culture was sick and inferior. 

Yet the irony of the story arises in the Persian's inability to understand the cultural objects they come across. They think a statue of a Native American is a god and wonder why it is in a commercial place and not a "Temple"; they find the remnants of the Brooklyn Bridge and can't understand its purpose. The bridge stands as a monument to the historical unknowable--the recognition that once one is in the past one cannot speak from the dead, nor with certainty expect the future to represent the dead as things were. 

The story ends with horrifying violence when the Persian man named Ja-khaz (yes, that's supposed to be funny) tries to kiss "the last American"'s apparent partner. A gruesome fight ensues, yet the violence of the moment is covered under the guise of humor. People's heads get hit with clubs and swords, causing a resounding sound of hollowness or woodness reverberating throughout the chamber. That's supposed to be humorous. To understand the novel, I'd need a good theory of late-nineteenth century humor--one that can account of doubleness, inconsistency, and whatnot. 

Wither historicism?

Always performing as a great provocateur, Walter Benn Michaels at a recent conference on campus asked: "Why should anyone care about what has happened in the past?" This question is loaded, because it indexes his critique of the way identity politics have been positioned to assert that the solution for latter-day inequalities can only be found through understanding the past. While Michaels focuses on how identity politics has failed to produce economic equality, I think he misses the boat in terms of how identity politics enables an ethical recognition that, in fact, presupposes economic equality.

Yet I would give to him the insight that contemporary identitarian discourses capitalize on difference in such a way that produces unequal systems of recognition. But, at the same time, I think it's important to realize that racism and sexism can be so systemic that an explicit discourse needs to be fashioned that will intervene in the body politic to see to it that bodies and individuals are respected.

In summary, on the level of theory WBM's ideas are great; but on the lived, embodied, and always embattled level, his attempt to get post-identitarian is hauntingly problematic.

Image/Text (and probably more to come)

I'm stuck. Or rather, my eyes are trapped within the broken confines of this Pere Borell del Caso painting. The flesh looks living. The shadows on the painted frame enhance the trompe-l'oeil sense of reality. The boy's look of wonder is the physiognomy of utter shock, mimicking the moment Pinocchio realizes he can move without Geppetto's strings. Made from the hand of del Caso, the painting interacts with my eyes with a livingness that the artist couldn't create but could only gesture toward. Yet still my eyes are trapped. 

The face that I look into evades my gaze and resists the association with mimicry. There's no representation here--the painting is wont to say--but rather a gesture towards the way images capture the eye with their faux-sense of reality. 

And so I reflect, here, on how my eye gets drawn to faces--both painted and embodied--and how the phenomenologically different experiences of gazing at texts and gazing at bodies needs some analysis. Sometimes I'm trapped by language, words enveloping me in an imaginary world. Is this world experientially different from being captured in the frame of a trompe-l'oeil? 

I wonder: how does language work and what are the limits of its being modeled via the visual? 

"Time is a healer": Iola Leroy and Historical Temporalities

I just finished Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and I must say that I enjoyed its sentimentality. Many critics have discounted the novel on the grounds that it seems to be detached from the political sphere, basking, instead, in the pleasures of sentimental identification. Yes, the marriage plots are pretty disturbing, rife with all sorts of heterosexism and patriarchial assumptions, but considering its temporal frame, one cannot ask for too much. Instead, I'd like to think about the novel as a response to competing configurations of temporality in an age where the politics of memory were all but central to the struggle for African American equality. Where some critics see a hermetic refusal to engage with the ongoing atrocities of racial violence in the 1890s, I actually see an emergent and radical questioning of the meaning and purpose behind memory and the uses of historicity to substantiate the mind's imaginings.

The novel begins in the days before the end of the Civil War, with soon-to-be ex-slaves chatting in code to protect themselves from their exhilarating feelings about their upcoming freedom. A few chapters later, the novel's temporality goes back a few days, with the next chapter bringing us to the future, and the next plunging the reader deeper into the past. Throughout the novel, a smooth, uninterrupted timeline is continually transgressed with asides, vignettes, entire episodes seemingly tethered to the present moment but also completely immersed in an entirely foreign world. One purpose this shuffling between time zones offers is--in Faulkner's famous phrasing--to ensure that "the past is never dead. It's not even past." Why would it be important to question the severing between temporalities and periods? Well, in a post-Civil War world of a failed Reconstruction, the white claim that since slavery had ended the state shouldn't be concerned about any form of reparations denies the way historical relationships between competing collectives continue to haunt and determine the present.

Basically, saying that the past is in "the past" and hence unconnected to the present elides important historical and material powers of ideological subordination. At the same time, is not configurations of memory and temporality also beholden to the moment's hegemony, signifying that memory would be beholden to the representational apparatus available to the time?

At one point in the novel, a highly revered reverend exclaims: "Time alone will tell whether or not the virus of slavery and injustice has too fully permeated our Southern civilization for a complete recovery" (442). The emphasis on time de-authorizes the agency of the moment's actors, suggesting that the solution lies in futurity. Of all the problems of the novel, I suppose its emphasis on futurity is the problem I find most troubling. The future and constructions of temporality dominate the possibility for transcendence from the iron-clasp of slavery's aftermath.

Iola while a nurse during the Civil War feels that she "had lived through ages during these last few years" (344). Time here proves her master, dominating her understanding of how she has changed. There are other ways to thing about change--it can be spatial, not just temporal. What would a spatial configuration of ending the specter of slavery look like? Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted meditates on how the temporal marker of social change dominates war and racial memory of the 1890s. Or, perhaps, the novel is trying to counteract the very spatial configuring Jim Crow. As bodies were being drawn on racial lines, temporal models of social change became an alternative for the failed moment of embodied racial equality. The dream, in summary, seems to have been deferred on temporal lines.

Reflecting on her past, Iola states: "But it is useless . . . to brood over the past. Let us be happy in the present" (387). How should the past look to the present? How should futurity take into account the present and the past? Should we even draw lines of continuity to chart societal change? What present(s) are being suppressed in the effort to rethink connections over time?

Something I'd like to look at more is this interesting line: "Caste plays such fantastic tricks in this country" (430). Indeed, how does class configure in the spatial and temporal axes?

WORKS CITED
Harper, Frances. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Three Classic African-American Novels. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Sunday morning at a computer doing nothing.

The title of this second post is completely un unambiguous: I'm sitting in front of my computer reading news articles about the "Huntsman Girls 2012." There are a thousand things I could be doing with my time, but none of them sound quite appetizing on this lazy, Sunday morning. And so I'll probably read on, pretending that I'm interested in what three daughters of a Republican presidential candidate have to say through political parody. They certainly are clever.

This has been an eventful few months. It feels strange to write in a blog again. I don't really know what or who my audience will be; indeed, it is slightly embarrassing to even consider that this will receive any attention. But there's something cathartic about writing in a blog. I'll keep this up for some time.

In the interim, I need to finish a seminar paper...

The never-ending to do list

While I sit here, exhausted from a summer research fellowship, contemplating the sound of crickets outside my rented bedroom window, I grow sullen with the recollection of all that I actually didn't do this summer. I didn't read the rest of Moby Dick--indeed, I haven't finished a single novel that I had hoped to finish. I didn't work on finishing an essay manuscript for publication. I haven't begun to edit the essays for the journal I'll be working on this school year. And I didn't accomplish a dozen other things that depress me with their taunting looks.

Today a friend told me that I need to take breaks, that I need to know when I'm done with a project for the day and simply rest. The problem of not knowing when to quit runs in my family. My parents are in their sixties and they are farming a three acre garden. Similar stories about grandparents who never knew when to quite, to take a rest, to just do nothing, abound in my family tree. Rest has been a recessive trait in my family for generations.

But on one good note to begin this new blog, I heard back from an editor about an essay I submitted a month back. The editor would like me to bolster my argument with some stuff on intellectual property in the early Republic. I appreciate the editor's feedback, particularly because it was a very promising and complimenting readers' report for an editor known to be somewhat phlegmatic. I mean, there's no promise that the readers who will read the essay will like it, but, well, one must look for something positive amidst a morass of seeming failure and, well, wannabe malingering.