Productive Dissertating

What better way than eating leftover chile rellenos, chicken burrito, and refried beans to procrastinate disseration work? Oh, there's also laundry that needs to be done and yesterday's New York Times to page through. Thelonious Monk is on the turntable. I'm home alone. There are long days ahead for the rest of the week. Might as well write a blog post! Brilliant. This dissertation is going to be gooood.

Why not write? If you don't really want to be a writer, or at least make your living around words (or art or music) one way or another, then it's fairly likely you're not a friend of mine.

I was talking to someone recently who had given up an apparent 'dream job' of running the creative writing department at a small college in Vermont. She quit because she wanted to be a "writer who teaches, not a teacher who writes." Administrators also made it 'easy' for her to quit, she said, by providing no health insurance, no tenure track possibilities, and pretty much nothing else in terms of benefits. So she spent a year laying the groundwork for other opportunities and finally took the leap. It's a leap so many dream of taking yet fear life outside of the security of familiarity and steady income. We opt for security and relative certainty rather than whatever it is 'out there' that seems so scary. I've taken a leap once or twice, but it is intimidating. That said, it's also well worth while.

Writing essays seems like fun. In it, there is reporting and writing, sort of like journalism. But closer, perhaps, to creative nonfiction. In reading a Q&A with essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan today in The Economist's Prospero blog, I was struck by a few things. Those things aside, the part that makes it relevant to The Topophilian is in his answer to the last question, in which he discusses being uprooted at the age of 13 and moved from 'the south' to Ohio:

Displacement rips something you take for granted—your connection to a place—out of the natural sphere and places it into the abstract, self-conscious sphere, where it becomes something that has to be thought about.

There are days when I feel like the Southern identity is all just a bunch of self-serving bullshit that hasn't meant anything in 150 years, but there are also days when I think there's something to it. People speculate that it has to do with historical consciousness, which is probably right. It has to do with the sheer power that comes with marginalisation. A sense of otherness throws your life into a certain relief. People in the south are sensitised to these questions.



This sense of identity and otherness that Sullivan talks about, the sense of self set against other influential beings around us, highlights many juxtapositions for most people trying to figure out unfamiliar surroundings. Sullivan goes on to talk a bit about his nearly "pathological sensitivity" to geographical landscapes and then uses two well-known examples of what one could consider place-based literature to tie together notions of identity, place, writing, and the landscape:

Look at Hemingway's Michigan stories and Faulkner's Mississippi stuff. Nobody could say that Hemingway's writing about Michigan isn't dripping with a sense of place—that it isn't observant; that the attention paid to place there isn't deep. The difference is that Hemingway's real interest lies with the characters. They happen to move against the backdrop of a natural world that's very finely observed, but it’s not a part of their character. In Faulkner, the landscape is the main character. You get the feeling that he's writing about a wounded landscape. 

Oops. Monk needs to be flipped over. The laundry is not quite finished. There are dishes to be washed.... Dissertation work is so productive!