Scholarist

Recovering after a day and a half of illness, you slowly begin to reorganize your thoughts, trying to determine just where you left off and what needs to be done. You’re also too tired to start any thing in an organized way. Illness is all about the future, that time coming when you think you’ll have the energy for all your half-baked sickbed schemes.

- Mobile post

A hosted weblog application that renders Markdown files stored in a Dropbox directory. Any progressive blogging tool should render Markdown or Textile.

Winer: The idiocracy of social media. Its a “bubble on a bubble” and there’s really no “there” there anymore.

Pinboard blog writes about the [social graph][PB]; its there to sell you
stuff, and that’s the only reason its there.

[PB]: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

Robert Atwan edits the _Best American Essays 2010_ and his introduction
makes a very good point about reading Shakespeare. You read him slowly,
making connections between bits of language, imagery, tropes, etc. These
things are everywhere, literally on every page, and a diagram of any
play is not so much a “Freytag Pyramid” of rising and falling action,
but a network of passages connected to one another. Appreciating this
means reading slowly, going back over passages and rereading. An author
like Shakespeare rewards “slow reading” because everything is there,
waiting to be found. It seems that reading Shakespeare is a life
activity.

Nabokov talked about “major” and “minor” readers: “A good reader, a
major reader, an active reader is a re-reader”.

Slow, patient, close reading, always with a pen in your hand.

September 30 2011

It seems that the heart of American literature, or at least all that’s
good in American literature, is in Thoreau’s _Journals_. Thoreau wrote
these to a high standard, and the sentences and paragraphs in his
journal as as good as anything in _Walden_. There is no doubt about the
quality of the _Journals_ or of the labor that went into them.

What the _Journals_ give up is Thoreau’s ongoing self-invention. Through
the daily entries, Thoreau documents his development as a writer and a
thinker. Since he had few models, and had testy relations with those, at
best, he made up much of it as he went along. It was a hard road, and it
took him years to shake off the nonsense he learned at Harvard (at least
until 1850 or thereabouts).

There’s nothing more American than this, or at least nothing more
positively American. Canby says that in the 1830s a man could do
anything he wanted except make a living as a artist or writer.
Thoreau figured out a way to do just that, and documented the steps he
took, one day at a time, for 25 years.

The _Journals_ are a detailed exploration of a mind, and in this sense
have the same aspirations as Montaigne’s _Essais_. They aren’t
constructed as the _Essais_ are, though, in that Thoreau doesn’t build
them up into bigger pieces, revising and fitting them together (except when
he draws extracts for a piece meant for publication, like _Walden_ or
_Walking_). Instead, the _Journals_ are writing-in-process, daily
writing, much like Pepys’ famous diary, though without the nitty-gritty
of daily life. Like Pepys, Thoreau couldn’t help but write everyday.

If I had to say what Thoreau’s great accomplishment was, it would be
creating a new form combining the _Essais_ and the _Diary_. And what a
form it is.