in the hall of mirrors

Bookshelf

Enjoying Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf. He has a slightly unexpected style – very educated, articulate, intelligent – but at the same time rather stiff, with not infrequent falls into gracelessness. Perhaps it's just because he is a design engineer, who has become fascinated with books. I get the sense that he sometimes regards words as tools, to be logically/rationally deployed; and other times he uses metaphors and idioms with a drunken-sailor extravagance (which, in this case, also includes said drunken sailor's inability to exactly control his actions). However, it's still quite wonderful and sensible; it's lots of fun to go into the mechanics of books and bookshelves (more than you might think).

It occurs to me that the slight irritation – that slight ache of the teeth, as it were – that I feel at his style is more my fault than his. After all, he is not a stylist, he is a scholar; and I read too much for pleasure, too much for style. I should be spending much more time on scholarly literature; it's a shame that my own discipline (musicology) is not for the most part known for its interesting style, except for the contemporary radicals – but I should be reading them anyway.

Susan kept the books she needed to read, to work with, at home; at her office were only those professional books that she didn't particularly care about, or needed only for classes. Philip had vast and pleasant bookshelves at home, including his professional books. But I have made the mistake – and, although organizationally sensible, it probably is a mistake – of keeping all of my professional books in my office: a pleasant office indeed, but there is no couch to lie on, and there is always too much of the garbage of unimportant work (administration, classes) that is in the way....

...lazy...

Semi-demi-at-the-beginning-or-in-the-midst-of writing out the Sondheim/Heidegger paper. Various possible procrastination techniques from my extensive store of them are coming up, of course. There are a few concerts I have to see... the weather's a bit dim... have to make dinner... might play another game of computer solitaire....

Wouldn't it be interesting if I had somehow learned some basic discipline at a young age, and had always worked fairly regularly? What a different life that would have led me into....

Oh well. You can only be where you are. So I have about eight days left, which are dotted here and there with other minor responsibilities, to be dilatory and chaotic and finally get something written.

Eight days....

Sunny

The weather is sunny, and so am I (mostly – with a cheerfully anxious tinge to it).

Shows that I really should live in a warm climate, yes? Ah well.

Tonight, about ten people coming over – party/dinner – so cooking. As always I'm more enthusiastic than competent in the kitchen, so have gotten much advice and am trying to avoid getting too experimental. We'll see...

Since I'm busy of course (too busy to write this, mostly) and cheerful, that suggests that a lot of my depression is from inaction. No surprise, knew that really. However it also suggests, as do other details, that I would be just fine in a rather everyday, bourgeois approach to doing things and working – that, aside from being gay and having AIDS and feeling occasionally rather ill, and being artistic and perpendicular to everyday culture, the truth is I would be just fine in everyday culture. A domesticated gayness, a couple where both took HIV medications, an everyday job that wasn't too onerous... (hmm, John would be pleased, that's just what he wanted).

Which of course suggests, insidiously but probably quite accurately, that I'm not really cut out to write, at least not to write books, or to achieve difficult artistic things. In another era, one where I didn't have a job – say, if I were a non-working aristocrat of Edwardian times – I would probably be pleasantly busy, a diarist and casual essayist, a dabbler... which, to a large extent, I am.

Not a bad life, once you've given up expecting anything bigger....

Complexity / clarity

Perhaps it is because I was reading about Heidegger last night – and actually understood, and responded to, the simplest possibilities of the ideas of being and authenticity.... or maybe it's just that it is Saturday. And maybe it's just that I finally changed the bedclothes from the heavy winter comforter to a light summer cover (I should have done that a month ago... and I always notice how much it changes my sleep, and body's energy).

In any case, a lot of the tangled minor preoccupations that pull me down seem to be coming from a greater distance. They aren't gone – I woke to the same stomach pains I've had for weeks now, and the same (or nearly the same) ungainly exasperation at my aging, less than healthy body – but they seem almost summed up, reduced in scope to something distantly remembered, and frankly not terribly important. A valuable place to be: that detachment is what I clearly need to move forward into anything at all....

Consequences

A Monday morning, and a gray one: appropriate for these vague feelings of not being caught up, of not being ready, of not having done what needs to be done. Several administrative e-mails arrived Friday, and I haven't done anything about them; my digestion is unhappy, the back of my mind is turning over whether or not it's worth going in to the office today.

It's that Sunday-evening feeling of not having done work that's due, something that comes from school days. I was a smart but lazy child – which contributes to this disturbing dread of facing deadlines and consequences. I remember a PhD dissertation support group when I was working on my master's thesis – I was the only master's student desperate enough to join it – where we agreed that we were all in the group because things had been too easy for us when we were younger, because schoolwork had always been something we could toss off at the last minute, and we had never learned to actually work at it. A fault of the American system probably, as I suspect that the British system challenges students more.

As an academic who has created his reputation for twenty years on striking but fairly rapidly written articles, and who has never finished a monograph, that feeling of the consequences of not-working-enough has taken over much of the feeling tone of my life. In the past five years, since 'the Australian debacle' (a personal/legal immigration disaster of lost position, lost money, having to leave a partner and come here to a land where I am never really glad to be), I've gotten even less sensible about these things – to the point where I can't stand novels and films at the point where they become dark and stressful, at the place where the protagonist(s) are overcome with the enormity of whatever conflict is going to run the show. When things start to go wrong, when a student says something vicious about me to someone else, when I read about dreadful or miserable things in the news - I've become a real creampuff in these situations, and can't bear to think about such things, and retreat to my apartment, to lie on this couch....

Pathetic of course. Symptomatic of depression I suppose. Surprising what strength the feelings have, though.

A downer of a post. Sorry about that; the difficulty of negotiating between simply saying what is, as opposed to presenting my new blog in some more engaging way, is one of performance – am I supposed to be charming, or honest? Hopefully it will all, eventually, come out in the wash....