tradion and literature

“Tradition…involves, in the first place, the historical sense…[which] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

--Eliot, from Tradition and Individual Talent

The presence of the past circulating surrounding no one writes or creates in a vaccuum but not simply to follow tradition find one's place within but allow the ideas and influences both overtly and subtly of all of the writing that has come before use this in the moment of creation this will move into the future as those in the future reach back into the past and participate in tradition.

Sounds simple but the problem like Woolf points out is that women writers have no tradition to follow, they must them go back to 'Shakespeare's Sister' and create or imagine the writing she would have done, create the tradition within their present, do the writing that has not yet been done, use a type of retrospective creation, the present and future of women writing will then work itself out...

some preliminary thoughts...for end of the semester writing...

thought for the holidays

"The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

--Virginia Woolf from A Room of One's Own

what could be interpreted as self-titling

i am thinking about academic titles. since i am suppossed to be writing the body of the paper i am trying to figure its title instead or first or in a way to get to what the paper is going to be. but a title is not a thesis or even a real focus or is it? when i search articles i look at titles and open the most interesting (as well as those that seem clearly approproate to my needs)...they may not even be always interesting in a unique or weird sense but in a way of lyric or poetry, or sound or tone or rhythm...the sound of a title, its music: musings on academic specification...see like that, or something like that. i find myself putting thoughts and sentences into title-speak, the sound and rhythm of a title...

i have written some real ones of late. first i started with this:

'the nonfiction of poetry or poetic nonfiction, what are genre boundaries and where do they fall?' a title which may obviously seem rather large and general for a 6-page paper the difficulty of which became apparent after writing the proposal that went along with this...

i did some more reading and modified the title to this:

'unwritten narrative, my life as autobiography' a clearly intruguing and potentially vague title that at least focuses on one particular work...

i have been working toward (notes toward titling) titles for another project, here are some starts:

'silence and sounding poetry: (insert something about anne waldman's sung poem 'dear john cage' and john cage's book silence)
'silence and the sound of poetry: (et al.)'
or
'why sonic poetry? how poetry can be used as a space for sound'

clever, i know...

i even sound-titled my composition course:

'Hypertext Culture: Making Connections, Making Choices' which is certainly not as lyric as some but may still have some ring to it

but alas, i am now working toward the title of the most current project which might include something from the following:

'duree: time and tradition in woolf, benjamin, and eliot'
'tradition: writers doing retrospective creation'
'woolf, benjamin, eliot, and the death of the aura: how the past infects the continued presence of literary tradition'

this last one includes some immediately apparent fallacies of whatever nature and will be seriously diseregarded but i do still like it for not simply its length but the rhythmic qualities that happen in a longer title...

on that note i will title my next move this:

'distracted creative tendencies: the philosophical investigations of titling and the new contemporary move toward the actualization of academic writing'

sundays

sunday is obviously the day to write to the blog. i think about it periodically during the week but am never at or near the computer when the thoughts arise. when i am at the computer i am always in a rush to check email and then get back to the reading of the day, there is always plenty, or move away from the internet and work on the writing of the day for one class or another.

for a while during the semester i spent time each morning writing not on the internet and not for any classes, on the computer but in word instead of blogger, b/c this is the writing that i do that will or may eventually lead me into other writing or may begin a continuation of writing. for the most part though, these morning pieces are pieces and fragments often of nonsense...

here is a sample of something that is more coherent:

"look up quotes and write them down gather words and phrases gather all of the good thoughts and bring them together create and build a world of clever thinking all cited on the page.

"stories and rearranging stories can we or should we continue to tell or create and add onto the real of what may be happening. can we distinguish genres at all even. can you assume an understanding….

this is from 5/13/05 b/c of late i record this writing onto the laptop computer (instead of this immovable corner desk model) on which i am not presently working.

you get the idea.

as the semester has progessed though naturally it becomes more difficult to do any sort of writing or thinking even that is outside of what is next due for which class or another. blogging seems simple when you are already on the email or general internet but there is more to it than that. i am a more calculated writer. thinking time is as much or sometimes more than writing time in the process. that is not to say that i spend lots of time crafting what and how to say whatever. for example i did not think about this post before starting to write, not in detail and not specifically. so maybe that defeats my theory. but i was thinking of another post which i may still include seperately since i have now detoured from that original idea. yes another aspect of the writing process. what i really wanted to add here is that writing on the laptop or in a paper notebook is a space to get away from calculating and constructing, to spend time genuinely on the page with zero thought of not even criticism but the simple fact of thinking someone might see or read what you've written. i don't even let db look at what i'm writing when it is in that context. any sort of censored writing for whatever reason it is internally or externally censored will be different from what happens silently and completely between a writer and a page.

last year i was unemployed for a while and i had time to spend writing and i used it. i miss that, the usual story, making it work into schedules that are always already...

website

i've created a website.

go to englishweb.clas.wayne.edu/~jdarling

i still need to link everything together. from the website will be links to this blog, delicious, to the courses (syllabi) that i'll be teaching, and other professional and writing things...

next semester my 1020 composition class will use the site as a main place for course information, linking to class members' blogs, whatnot...

it's still under construction.

what do you know.

and etc.