Literary Networks and Modern Magazines

There was an interesting discussion of the Stanford Literary Lab's second pamphlet, authored by Franco Moretti, over at a group academic blog called Magazine Modernisms. I decided to stick my oar in.

Wrestling the Gators of Adolescence

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this novel, from its lush descriptions of the dystopian swamp amusement park industry to the mystical experience of journeying through the deep everglades. At Swamplandia! all the alligators are named Seth. It took me a little while to figure out where Russell was setting her course between absurdity and pathos, but once I did I really started enjoying the book. The descriptions of Kiwi Bigtree's employment at the World of Darkness, the Walmart of fun factories, were hilarious.



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Writing in the Real World

It's been a summer of major changes in my life: completing grad school and moving on to my first job as a fellow at Arizona State University. As I adjust to a new position where I am "doing" almost as much as I am "thinking" (for a very word-based, university definition of doing), the impossible has occurred. I've begun to miss the abundant time I used to spend just sitting at the keyboard, writing. And think about writing. And fiddling.

I still do a fair amount of sitting and fiddling in the new job, of course, but my full agenda there does not include any special time for research. There is no gilt-edged appointment in my office Outlook calendar. I need to make that time myself, and I've begun to wish I was a faster writer. I mean, I'm fast enough at drafting proposals, emails and memos, but I don't have the prodigious speed that some academics seem to have for polishing off whole essays in an evening. I can barely read whole essays in an evening.

So my ambitions for this year are to practice the arts of making time and of thinking through problems on the go. It's dawned on me that my new slate of responsibilities is not a temporary condition, and that the period of graduate navel-gazing is done forever.

The positive side of this new reality is that I am actually starting to enjoy working on my own stuff once again. It's still a challenge of will to revise dissertation work for publication, but I am really starting to look forward to some new projects and fresh directions. Who knows, maybe I'll even put more time into this blog?