Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Monday, May 28, 2012

Day 4: Jonathan regains his brilliance

On the fourth day of my sabbatical, I have regained my former brilliance. Ideas flowed together magically before 9:30 in the morning. This chapter will be called "Postmodern Lorca: Motherwell, Strayhorn, GarcĂ­a Montero." It is like the missing chapter from Apocryphal Lorca!

In a few weeks of not working on my scholarship at all, I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas.

The break was still probably necessary, of only to show myself that I am capable of feeling like an unproductive brute.

4 comments:

Thomas said...

I'd also say you've regained your "Mayhewianism":

"I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas."

Jonathan said...

Yes, but I can't do that on purpose. If I try to write a "Mayhewianism" it doesn't work. It has to just arise organically. For example, that sentence originally didn't have the part about the mafias movies. That's the touch that makes it a Mayhewianism, but I can't do that in every sentence.

Thomas said...

That's how it works with flashes of high style. You (unintentionally) produce it. We canonize it.

Thomas said...

Also: it seems to me that this one is an example of "Mayhewian disjunction": Mayhew's "but", if you will.