The Borders of Things

Confessional Blogging

I'm not a good blogger.

But I've dealt with that. I have no excuse for my laziness, nor my lack of rigor in making this site what it could be. There will be time, I suppose.

I have been having a good quarter. There is no excuse for busyness, either. I think I am becoming a full-blown caffeine/adrenalin/nicotine junkie (in that order), with a healthy dose of alcohol to bring it all down on the weekends. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Actually, I've been pretty healthy overall. Just moving. I'm a shark in the ocean, baby; gotta keep going forward or you sink.

Enough with the pseudocorporate pep rally baloney. I still really love graduate school and its going well. I just need to remember to schedule in purge days. How else will I keep my figure? I've been working on American poetry "After Modernism" (problematizing any critical terms such as postmodernism used to describe that period) and I may have found a literary love. There is something about poetry and the way we can talk about (and through) poetry that has revitalized me. I've been specifically focusing on the somewhat obscure poet George Oppen, particularly his serial poem "Of Being Numerous." Go check it out. He is of particular interest to me since I can approach my theoretical and philosophical urges through his work. Very cool.

Incidentally, I have just been accepted to present my first conference paper, which will be on George Oppen and the possibilities of poetry. This is exciting and terrifying. But I am mostly excited. It's so funny that I get paid to do this. I don't understand it (although I'm immensely grateful).

In my other course, I am reading "Heart of Darkness" (among other things) with a focus on the political import of literary texts and the relationship of that import to theory. This is a major question, (I write on the worst day for US troops in Iraq thus far), and I don't think it can be fully contained. But just when I feel that theory is absolutely useless (particularly any political theory, which, if you think about it, is something of an oxymoron), I discover an amazing although nearly impossible to read writer like Gayatri Spivak. Reading a recent essay on Marx (more specifically, on re-reading Marx), I see the possibility of theory's work in our world. A possibility, mind you, but one that is nevertheless real. In particular, her willingness to challenge the ideas of both Left and Right politics, in a time when those ideas seem to be the totality of our discourse, is quite refreshing.

But I digress. (I think this entire post is but one long digression. Yet another confession.) Let me get to the heart of this: I love you, my readers, very deeply. I do not write this lightly, and I do not say it as an excuse for my self-indulgent prose. Sometimes in the visual noise of existence we lose sight of our being, but ultimately it is love, because God is love. In our sentimentalized world we perhaps degrade such a construction, but I believe that you are hard pressed to find more profound words, words written so that an 8 year old can understand them, words that give us hope, and light, and existence. So I echo those words to you. Remember to pray.

Posted by pjaussen at January 26, 2005 01:10 PM