If you’re reading my blog, I trust you feel insecure about something. Blogs exist in this ironic space whereby they can somehow shore up your insecurities and mine at the same time: yours because you see how much worse off I am; mine because I know you rely on my abjection to feel (momentarily) secure.
But there’s got to be a healthier way to do this.
There’s a trend in the webcomics/webart community of publishing a sped-up screencast of the process of making an artwork. (Here’s a recent speed draw from vid games webcomic Penny Arcade.)
Speed draws situate product as part of practice and illustrate something I have said a dozen times in the front of the classroom: a paper is not the instantaneous result of a moment of genius, but is a kind of freeze frame taken from an ongoing and potentially endless act of writing and revision.
One of the more intimidating characteristics of MSA X is that you only get these end results. I heard maybe 24 papers in a three-day period, and although some of them showed signs of years of labor, many sounded so effortless as to have been imagined into existence over a vodka martini the night before.
Speed writes would have to be orchestrated differently—one model: Jon Udell’s tour of the Wikipedia entry for Umlaut—but it would be comforting to see that Douglas Mao’s exceptionally lucid and nigh-conversational talk on Stevens in fact took so many days to compose, so many analytical revisions, and so on.
Interesting. I was thinking, at this year’s MSA, that one of the reasons I like this conference so much, and go to it year after year, is that the seemingly effortless prose is a thrill. Modernist studies folks are simply lovely, elegant writers, and that always gives the conference an aesthetic texture that I appreciate – especially as an escape from atrociously inelegant student writing.
Wait, did you just formulate a master-slave dialectic theory of blogging?
I’m going to have to wash my brain of that image.
Hilaire, can you compare Modernist talks to those from Victorianist and 18th-century conferences? I would have thought Modernists more fragmentary and paratactic than their Victorian peers.
Hmmm…don’t know…I don’t ever have contact with those communities. I don’t generally do literary conferences – maybe they’re all as lovely.
Maybe I like fragmentary and paratactic. :)
It could be that there is a certain – elegant – ironic tone in modernist studies that I like. Probably the thing that drew me to the period in the first place.
Hmmm…don’t know…I don’t ever have contact with those communities. I don’t generally do literary conferences – maybe they’re all as lovely.
Maybe I like fragmentary and paratactic. :)
It could be that there is a certain – elegant – ironic tone in modernist studies that I like. Probably the thing that drew me to the period in the first place.