“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.

[et_in_arkadia]

 
Sitting at work kind of sucks. We know this. I don't even really hate my job; you could say we have an intensely love-hate relationship, with lots of UA,PF (unresolved angst, primarily financial).

But sitting here, working on various projects, both "important" and mundane, I'm struck as I often am by the work day itself: we get up early, sit

Comments

[toctoc]

I've said this before but maybe worth saying again: I am a total cheerleader for you blocking out time for yourself to write without blocking out an accompanying time to angst about blocking out time for yourself to write. Carpe noctem.

Forgive me this grad school moment: one way of reading Bartleby the character is as an allegory for procrastination/being unproductive. Everyone has a Bartleby, particularly Melville, which is why he has to kill off his Bartleby in the end, the one inside him that always prefers not to . Maybe that's why we feel it so much when Bartleby dies--much as we may find the narrator frustrating or even downright hateful, we can see that there's a part of him that's in debtor's prison, slowly starving to death--& that he can't help trying to take responsibility for it. Even when what's dying is the part of you that's apathy & regret & eating all the lotus, it's hard to see any kind of dying as a good thing. It's not that scrivening is a particularly high calling but there aren't really any good

[et_in_arkadia]

Thanks for reading, commenting and the complimenting, duckling. You know how much it means. It appears I have at least at last carved out a space to do so (write, write angstily about the angst of writing), and since you're the only "RL" person who knows about it, I shall probably continue to do so with less forbearance than I would under my real name. Internets are funny like that.

Ah, this grad school moment I really love. And I think much of that interpretation is so very true -- why would such an ultimately pathetic, weird, nigh-unconscionable character still demand our sympathy, still make us wish things could have been different, if Bartleby wasn't a part of us we're either actively repressing, currently acting out, or trying to make behave differently? And the narrator, who has "succeeded" in capitalist enterprises, so intriguingly invested in someone who refuses to bend to them...

So excited for Burn Notice to eat your brain in a delightful way. It does that. Also blows stuff up.