A Declaration of Intent, and lines from Chartres/Dunfermline

I hereby declare this blog open for business again. Perhaps having an even more ludicrous amount to do (by my own procrastinatory, layabout standards, anyway) will actually get me writing here again. I had a few posts drafted and ready to go when I drifted into silence after that crashing victory for Spurs at Wigan, but was never quite happy with them, so held back. The anxiety of publishing, and a rabid, doomed perfectionism (doomed given my lethargic nature) - just what I started this blog to get over. So, nothing much for this post, but more, I hope, to come.

And in fact, so as not to begin again with a complete lack of anything remotely stimulating, a few lines read a few days ago in Dunfermline, with snow driving horizontally outside and my anvil eyelids propped up:

I went to Chartres for windows: angled my neck

to the stained light.

You did your cathedral thing: merged with the oak pew;

Lowered your lids over eyes as blue as the glass.

They stood out enough then for me to jot them down, but now seem like nothing special, banal even. But perhaps putting them up here again I'll see it again, if not now then later; or perhaps someone elsewe'll see something in them. They're by Dorothy Molloy, from a poem called 'Chacun à son goût' - they might even be the whole poem, now I can't remember, and the book was my father's, a Bloodaxe (?) anthology of new Irish poets, so right now I can't check.

If there's anything worth saying here (and I doubt there is, or at least that I'm saying it) it's how little time we tend to spend thinking - or at least writing - about this kind of reading experience, the text that seizes us at a particular moment, that assumes a luminosity as we drop into sleep that seems quite gone when we awake.

That reminds me of something else. The other night, in a particularly fevered state of anxiety over the thesis (although nothing like pre-Berlin days) I dreamed a whole library shelf of phantasmagorical titles of books I must look up and read. When I woke up I could only remember one: Michael Baxandall, On Memory: Tottel's Miscellany. If only it existed. And then, a day or so later, I had the urge to call my thesis something like Sonnet Sequences and Aesthetic Distinction, as a sort of antagonistic homage to Christopher Warley's Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction. He has a great piece on his blog, which takes Italian email addresses (specifically the '@', the chiocciola, or snail) as its slithering-off point - although it's perhaps not ideal reading for a timid blogger tentatively sticking his antlers back out into the pseudo-public blogosphere for the first time in months. Still, his idea of a slog - a slow-reading blog - is one I like. And I like too what he says about what English professors are for. I'm extrapolating from that to what GTAs - in what ought to be the final throes of writing-up - are for, too.