Some people seem entirely amphibious - equally able to express themselves in speech and writing. But I think I'm less a salamander and more a ... well, what? Not a fish, because I don't expire completely when moved into the medium of talk. More like a seal, maybe - an animal that can happily spend time on land but is a bit ungainly out of the water and moves around awkwardly. Here I can share my reading in a medium that works better for me (and is also more convenient for you to look at). You don't have to like it, or agree with it, or even read it all. But at least it's getting an airing early enough in the timescale of the project to have some potential influence. By the way, please do keep commenting. No pressure to do it all the time or to write at length but connections appear and new possibilities occur to me when you respond, which I find interesting.
There is something about reading these posts that I am finding very useful. I am a bit stuff on my writing at the moment - trying to write about cultural studies and aesthetics and rather than sit there worrying I am reading these posts. Then something usually pops into my brain. It is like these fisher mean> 'after hours without a bit we had fallen into a sullen listlessness, leaving our rods to fish for themselves while we stared into the sky and wondered whether we should be doing something different with our precious day. Everything was very still, very quiet and just on the edge of tedium'. Then one of the men's rod is stolen by a huge fish. This idea of drift and being out of control is interesting. Sorry I got lost there in the comments.
ReplyDeleteI think your blogposts are great to read. There is a process that becomes visible, the writing moves freely in many directions, you escape the straitjacket and blandness of much academic prose today. A space like this is necessary for us, for the kind of knowledge we are exploring. It is like the attentive gaze of an artist, a medium in itself but one that requires the conditions of observation that are so hard to achieve in meetings, project events and activities and what we have come to call 'research' instead of 'scholarship'. In those environments we have to constantly promote what we are, what we do, what we want. We miss the careful observation, the non-judgemental exploration, the 'free labour'of which Einstein said nothing great happens without it. For me your blogposts are signposts pointing in the direction of a type of prose that some have been great in - DeQuincey in English letters, Bloch, Benjamin in German letters, and that has to be returned to its legitimacy in the academy.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think also they are a different kind of meeting place where we can meet and talk but in a half in between space, early morning or between tasks. We do not have to travel, which frees Johan up but also we can think untrammelled by the kinds of straitjackets we normally have to wear - teaching, research articles. Instead, with Richard's help, we are guided around a strange and wonderful world of slimy fish and errant fisher people in various unruly spaces.
ReplyDeleteI have really enjoyed this process, though I am late to party (and hoping to catch up soon) I felt that I needed to do 'the reading' or look into lit review texts before I could read the blog, but that was a mistake as it is here where the 'work' is getting done. The discussion is the most important part but you can't have a discussion if someone doesn't 'say' something. 'You don't have to like it, or agree with it, or even read it all' but you can't make the choice to agree or like or ignore if the comments aren't there to begin with. It makes me think back to my earlier comments on writing, I have to get something on the page before I can think about what I am trying to day. Recently I have started to try and write more like I speak which has been very interesting for me as I have spent most of my time studying for my PhD looking at the differences between speech and writing. I have started to see the two like Snell (2013) views dialect and standard; as part of a repertoire with no discreet boundary. Though this is not a well-formed idea yet.
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