Academic Writing is...
...like pissing with the toilet seat down first thing in the morning and trying to get it all in the pan.
Marooned in the library, musing on the barely-existent parallels between my attempts to finish a rough statement of intent by five o' clock and England's quest to bowl out Australia by close of play. I'm not a cricket fan, really, despite having been brought up in Freddie Trueman country. But I'm a sucker for displacement activity. Hey, writing about my fondness for DAs has become one in itself- I'm at two removes from the SOI now. Shit. It's always like that time I wrote my English coursework in sixth form: all day on the beer, started at two in the morning. But I pulled it off.
When the SOI is finished, I'll post it so someone can tell me it's already been done.
More displacement now, because it's been a while since a Moths reading list:
In Italy...
Alexander Trocchi- Cain's Book. This was alright, I guess, but I wish I'd read it when I was sixteen or something.
Henry Green- Concluding. Read this again and still don't know what the fuck I'm going to write about it.
Collette- Claudine at School. Not just for titillatory purposes- the above is also about a girl's school and it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.
Celine- London Bridge. Celine is great but if I wanted to read all of this I'd have needed more time. Unbelievably dense, atmospheric, often vomit inducing. Effluvia features heavily.
Am currently reading The People's Gift of Love by James Meek, in a stable-doorish attempt to rectify my ignorance of everything written in the last ten years (except Ian McEwan novels). I haven't decided about it yet: the themes are very appealing (cannibalism, gulags, Russian castration cults, the Trans-Siberian Railway and so on) but it's got a fairly Led Zeppelin-esque approach to metaphor and a cast who are, frankly, hamming. Am waiting to read The Town By the Sea by Chris Paling, which I've finally got my hands on but can't open until I've finished the Meek because I'm trying not to be a dick and finish some books occasionally.
Anyway, the non-show must go on.
jx
Marooned in the library, musing on the barely-existent parallels between my attempts to finish a rough statement of intent by five o' clock and England's quest to bowl out Australia by close of play. I'm not a cricket fan, really, despite having been brought up in Freddie Trueman country. But I'm a sucker for displacement activity. Hey, writing about my fondness for DAs has become one in itself- I'm at two removes from the SOI now. Shit. It's always like that time I wrote my English coursework in sixth form: all day on the beer, started at two in the morning. But I pulled it off.
When the SOI is finished, I'll post it so someone can tell me it's already been done.
More displacement now, because it's been a while since a Moths reading list:
In Italy...
Alexander Trocchi- Cain's Book. This was alright, I guess, but I wish I'd read it when I was sixteen or something.
Henry Green- Concluding. Read this again and still don't know what the fuck I'm going to write about it.
Collette- Claudine at School. Not just for titillatory purposes- the above is also about a girl's school and it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.
Celine- London Bridge. Celine is great but if I wanted to read all of this I'd have needed more time. Unbelievably dense, atmospheric, often vomit inducing. Effluvia features heavily.
Am currently reading The People's Gift of Love by James Meek, in a stable-doorish attempt to rectify my ignorance of everything written in the last ten years (except Ian McEwan novels). I haven't decided about it yet: the themes are very appealing (cannibalism, gulags, Russian castration cults, the Trans-Siberian Railway and so on) but it's got a fairly Led Zeppelin-esque approach to metaphor and a cast who are, frankly, hamming. Am waiting to read The Town By the Sea by Chris Paling, which I've finally got my hands on but can't open until I've finished the Meek because I'm trying not to be a dick and finish some books occasionally.
Anyway, the non-show must go on.
jx
posted by Joe at 4:53 AM
2 Comments:
academic writing is also head butting a blank sheet of paper until you made a fair sized pulply mess of brain and blood and showing it to a supervisor and he/she/it tells you the want a slightly different-sized blob...
P.S. the link on your site is wrong I'm at
http://jhomunculus.blogspot.com
more posts up soon on job hunting and bar loopers!!
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