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Mar. 2nd, 2005 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusI've written almost 8 pages today, bringing me to about halfway through the novel. I've never felt so psyched about it. There was always an air of half-desperation around it before -- it's something I have to do. Now I can actually see it amounting to something.
All I did was quell a little voice inside me that self-censored. Some of the stuff I censored was because it was too controversial, and some of it because it wasn't sufficiently literary. I was cutting out the hard parts and replacing them with television.
But my English Lit studies did exactly what I hoped they would -- they taught me how to write. Except they taught me that the standards I was living up to were meaningless, and I already knew how to write in a way that wasn't contrived, and that was honest.
There were parts of the novel that needed to be written -- not that I needed to write them, but they needed to be written -- and whenever I finished it, it was like a body missing an organ: it couldn't come to life. It was missing parts that were already supplied to me, and which I couldn't put on paper -- too prudish, too squeamish.
As Margaret Atwood says, "You can write anything in this country because nobody notices." Besides, I don't think anybody could outdo Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers for controversial. Somewhere between the vibrator that achieves sentience, and the threesome with Adolf Hitler, I got to thinking that it made South Park look like Leave it to Beaver. I'm nowhere near that extreme, and I can write in complete sentences.
In other literary news (is this boring to other people? -- should I have a poll?), my professor was talking about the limits of postmodernism today. A postmodernist himself, he's an unusually open-minded one, and is happy to present the other point of view.
And today he came up with a really good point: it's interesting that white male postmodernists decided that language was meaningless within a decade of women, queers, and ethnic minorities really finding a voice and a place in literary studies. Postmodernism is an effective tool for shutting people up because it undermines the value of language.
Anybody interested in anti-postmodernism might want to check out an Atwood poem called "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written." It's about the dangers of deciding that language is meaningless.
All I did was quell a little voice inside me that self-censored. Some of the stuff I censored was because it was too controversial, and some of it because it wasn't sufficiently literary. I was cutting out the hard parts and replacing them with television.
But my English Lit studies did exactly what I hoped they would -- they taught me how to write. Except they taught me that the standards I was living up to were meaningless, and I already knew how to write in a way that wasn't contrived, and that was honest.
There were parts of the novel that needed to be written -- not that I needed to write them, but they needed to be written -- and whenever I finished it, it was like a body missing an organ: it couldn't come to life. It was missing parts that were already supplied to me, and which I couldn't put on paper -- too prudish, too squeamish.
As Margaret Atwood says, "You can write anything in this country because nobody notices." Besides, I don't think anybody could outdo Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers for controversial. Somewhere between the vibrator that achieves sentience, and the threesome with Adolf Hitler, I got to thinking that it made South Park look like Leave it to Beaver. I'm nowhere near that extreme, and I can write in complete sentences.
In other literary news (is this boring to other people? -- should I have a poll?), my professor was talking about the limits of postmodernism today. A postmodernist himself, he's an unusually open-minded one, and is happy to present the other point of view.
And today he came up with a really good point: it's interesting that white male postmodernists decided that language was meaningless within a decade of women, queers, and ethnic minorities really finding a voice and a place in literary studies. Postmodernism is an effective tool for shutting people up because it undermines the value of language.
Anybody interested in anti-postmodernism might want to check out an Atwood poem called "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written." It's about the dangers of deciding that language is meaningless.
