Fencing Bear at Prayer

I'm thinking too hard about this post already. Steady! Breathe! Okay. What does it mean when I say that I want to write like Elizabeth Gilbert ? As a caveat, I should perhaps note that this is hardly the first time that I have taken another writer as my model. Indeed, one could easily chart my life as a writer as a series of efforts at awestruck imitation: Anne Frank, whom I took as my model when I was 12 or 13 and had just started keeping my diary; Anaïs Nin, another diarist, whom I idolized in my early years in graduate school, at least until I got to Henry and June ; my graduate advisor, Caroline Walker Bynum, whom it is hardly a secret I worshiped and so desperately wanted to be ( I wasn't alone ); A.S. Byatt, whose descriptive prose is possibly the most exquisite thing ever written in English, even if I do find her characters somewhat depressing; Elaine Scarry, who somehow manages to write the most complicated philosophical arguments using extraordinarily plain vocabula...

Thanks to Luo , I am now feeling much more hopeful about "Fencing Bear at Prayer" as a project. Indeed, Luo has given me a wonderful way to conceptualize it: "What you're doing in this blog is more like what a 'real' medieval/monastic writer would do, perhaps? Writing is like wandering in a dark forest of words and thoughts. We dabble, linger, constantly get lost, but also run into the marvelous. I assumed that this blog, with its monologue and contemplation, was part of your academic project, in which the aesthetic and personal experience is an important subject?" To which I can only reply: "Yes! Yes! Yes! But..." But how much does the aesthetic and, even more to the point, personal experience belong in an academic project, if at all? This--I realized as I walked into campus with Joy this morning to mail in my passport application , pick up the gadgets that I ordered to go with my new toy , sort my emails and update my homepage --i...

I wouldn't be sitting here blogging, right? My husband is concerned that one of the things that is making it difficult for me to get back into my academic writing is the distraction (my word, not his) of keeping this blog. It's not "real" (again, my word) writing, he insists, by which (I think) he means, not publishable; it is too easy, not critical enough, more to the point, not criticized enough. I write what I want when I want, to no deadline but my own. Nor am I subject to either editorial or (that mixed blessing of academic writing) peer review. Each blog post is short, ephemeral, as on- or off-topic as I please. While I may take risks personally, if not professionally, in writing about some of the things that I do, I risk nothing in the way of formal criticism. To be sure, I had fantasies the first year I was keeping this blog of (heaven forbid) "being discovered," but I have long since laid those to rest. No " Stuff White People Like "...

1. Yes, that's Kapla . In our living room, floor to ceiling. Jacob's ladder or the Tower of Babel? We're not sure. Whichever it is, it is certainly a good metaphor for the struggles I've been having these past few weeks with my book. Theories on what will happen when it comes down? 2. My father loved math, more even than cars. He spent most of his life thinking about math, reading about math, doing as many problems in math as he could. If he could have had one wish, it would have been to have someone to talk with about math who loved math as much as he did (Freudian typo: I originally typed "does"). If only he were here now to have this conversation with his grandson; he would be so proud. (And, yes, that's calculus on the white board in my son's bedroom; my son is 13.) [Update: My son says he's corrected the equation now.] 3. Elizabeth Gilbert has achieved turiya, the fourth level of consciousness in which one's understanding and...

Having finished Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) a few days ago, this morning on my way to yoga and fencing I started listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2006). The contrast could not be more telling. In Robinson's book, the aged narrator John Ames is recounting for his young son memories of his life as a congregationalist pastor. Both Ames' father and his grandfather had been pastors before him, if of a very different type, the younger a pacifist, the older a fiery abolitionist who had served as a chaplain in the American Civil War. I've known about Robinson's work for years and have greatly enjoyed reading her essays , but still I had been nervous about taking on Gilead . What if it was too Calvinist? What if it conjured up for me all of the memories that I have of my childhood, growing up Presbyterian without the aesthetic richness of the liturgy I have come to enjoy? I recoiled at the thought of immersing myself in this restricted im...

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a very interesting talk a few months ago about changing the way in which we think about creativity and genius. Rather than, as we have since the Renaissance, insisting that creativity is something that comes from within, as the personal responsibility of its human author, it would be much healthier, she suggests, to think of it in the way in which the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as something that comes from outside, inspired, as it were, by the gods. Or, rather, not exactly the gods (or God), but instead something at once more personal and yet still not ourselves: our "genius." And what is a genius? Gilbert suggests something "rather like Dobby, the House-Elf." Okay, maybe not the image I would have chosen, but it makes the point: not everybody's genius is, well, a genius. As authors and artists, we are dependent upon the inspiration we are given and sometimes, our genius isn't really up to it. So, Gilbert argues, it's r...