assorted thoughts
Oct. 10th, 2024 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agletbabyam coming to the end of a whole thing, which means i have to edit some older work, and had a very heartening realisation - which maybe shouldn't have been a realisation at all - that my writing has improved in the process of doing a phd. i guess it's all part of the same piece of work, and i haven't finished it to learn from it, so i hadn't quite computed that two years + hundreds of papers read + more than a hundred thousand words written, would make a difference. i am noting this down as a reminder to myself that writing is a way to get better at writing. don't stop once done!
had a flash of epithany that: one thing that fic writing is basically useless for, when it comes to 'Learning Writing' is hard editing - in the sense that the whole thing is darlings, and there's no need to kill any of them. on the other hand, academic writing? darlings abandoned everywhere. i think i only just properly understood the use of that phrase for the first time
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someone i follow on tumblr posted, ages ago, that they'd be interested in nominating about 6 writers, and just read them for a year. i absolutely could never do this, but i have recently felt more serious about being completionist with writers i admire, and i find it an interesting thought experiment. my immediate thoughts are something like,
1. dickens (was on a kick last month, but i do think too much dickens in one year would melt my brain)
2. henry james (i find him so interesting and his big novels so hard to commit to)
3. there's a couple of writers i've recently read one or two books, which i've really enjoyed. it feels like a deep end plunge to nominate them, but at the same time, commiting to something less known would in itself be interesting: annie proulx, iris murdoch, george eliot, graham greene
4. (i would need someone genre: maybe le guin, but maybe someone more pulpy like larry niven or samuel delaney.)
however, this is obviously a very limited list so far: very white, very anglophone. this in part reflects my academic research, which is in many ways about the manifestation of local 'classic literature', which is overwhelmingly both of those things. but i've also been pretty awful at reading stuff in translation in my own time the last couple of years, for reasons i'm not totally clear on myself. so, recommendations? your list? (i cannot promise to get to recommendations soon rn, but i will add it to a longer list which i am slowly making shorter.)
it would be interesting to come back to this post in a year and see how many of these guys i've managed to read, and who i would nominate anew.
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had a flash of epithany that: one thing that fic writing is basically useless for, when it comes to 'Learning Writing' is hard editing - in the sense that the whole thing is darlings, and there's no need to kill any of them. on the other hand, academic writing? darlings abandoned everywhere. i think i only just properly understood the use of that phrase for the first time
* * *
someone i follow on tumblr posted, ages ago, that they'd be interested in nominating about 6 writers, and just read them for a year. i absolutely could never do this, but i have recently felt more serious about being completionist with writers i admire, and i find it an interesting thought experiment. my immediate thoughts are something like,
1. dickens (was on a kick last month, but i do think too much dickens in one year would melt my brain)
2. henry james (i find him so interesting and his big novels so hard to commit to)
3. there's a couple of writers i've recently read one or two books, which i've really enjoyed. it feels like a deep end plunge to nominate them, but at the same time, commiting to something less known would in itself be interesting: annie proulx, iris murdoch, george eliot, graham greene
4. (i would need someone genre: maybe le guin, but maybe someone more pulpy like larry niven or samuel delaney.)
however, this is obviously a very limited list so far: very white, very anglophone. this in part reflects my academic research, which is in many ways about the manifestation of local 'classic literature', which is overwhelmingly both of those things. but i've also been pretty awful at reading stuff in translation in my own time the last couple of years, for reasons i'm not totally clear on myself. so, recommendations? your list? (i cannot promise to get to recommendations soon rn, but i will add it to a longer list which i am slowly making shorter.)
it would be interesting to come back to this post in a year and see how many of these guys i've managed to read, and who i would nominate anew.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-27 11:04 am (UTC)I've mostly read O'Hara in anthology, which is why I want to read more, but I think Lunch Poems is where I'd start in terms of collections - it's basically poems distilling his experience walking around NYC on his lunch break, observing and thinking. I also like Having A Coke With You a lot, which is his most famous poem, but it's so romantic