Friday, May 16, 2008
Although I would have liked to have gotten some writing done today, I decided to spend some time tidying up my workspace instead. Now, I have always been the sort of person for whom clutter is normal. If anything, I prefer the chaotic to the ordered, if only because the law of entropy tells me that anytime I clean something, it's just going to get dirty again. (Seriously, why make a bed if you're only going to unmake it later? Unless you're having guests over, of course.). The problem, I find, is that during periods of heightened stress (marathon paper-writing sessions, especially) my manageable mess evolves into a sort of all-encompassing mass of clutter, which can be depressing to look at and can make the simple act of walking a treacherous ordeal. So, I cleaned up and already I feel better. Furthermore, though I thrive in clutter, I loathe the other, non-human entities that flock to piles of paper and books, clusters of empty diet soda cans and discarded packaging materials. So, yeah. I have the feeling writing will be a bit more pleasant now.Other than that, I have made some more progress in Diary of a Bad Year. I especially enjoy Coetzee's skewering of university life. Like Elizabeth Costello before him, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year regards universities as business enterprises wholly unrelated to education. Elsewhere, the fictional author at the center of the novel, blames the over-usage of poststructuralist theory in literature departments for the increasingly absurd misappropriation of its relativistic thought by paranoid, dimwitted politicians eager to find meaning hidden where nothing is hidden.
I'm also finding that, by reading the novel in the traditional mode I described yesterday, the book reads very smoothly, enabling the reader to make subtle (and not-so-subtle) connections between the various characters and sub-texts. So, yeah. I'm enjoying it.
For tomorrow: It's a busy day, so just read some more.
Labels: Diary of a Bad Year, Dissertation, J.M. Coetzee
