New Projects
I’m still going! Exhausted, and ready for the end of term, and staring down two more writing deadlines (what? I have to submit that conference paper to the proceedings? Humbug), but I want to point you to a new little project here.
One of the best things that happened to me this summer was getting a summer cold, because it meant that I had a good excuse to sit around and do nothing but drink tea and read, and it went a long way to re-igniting a love of leisure reading, which had been rather cold after years of higher education.
While I had pretty much nothing to post about, blog-wise (or at least no energy to do so), I started to miss having a place to put up quotes and references to what I was reading.
So. Some women get piercings, I start a new blog.
True to say, I don’t know how long I will have concurrent blogs: I think this current one, weighed down by my younger, less mature self may slowly phase itself out (how could it phase itself out any more slowly than it is at the moment, you might well ask), unless I am hit by a sudden wave of inspiration in the coming months, while the new one may grow in new and unexpected ways. I had the same feeling for the last six months of the online journal I kept in undergrad: it started to feel as if it no longer fit, and I needed a fresh start. Now that I’m four years older, I look back at the “new” self of 2007-2008 and realize how much more confident I am in myself,* how much less I want to be critical and sarcastic and full of complaints. I’m both more convinced by my beliefs, and less convinced by my capability to argue about some of them, and I want to put myself forward less, as if such a thing were possible on a weblog.
So, a project for Advent quiet: Into Deep Water.** The first quote is Wendell Berry, and I hope my more technocratic friends can forgive me.
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* Anyone who knows what great confidence problems I have will find this truly remarkable.
** I’m not saying that I think I’m so “deep”– this is taken from the motto I adopted for 2011***, from Luke 5:4, “Duc in altum, et laxate retia vestra in capturam.”
*** If you say that your goal for the new year is to adopt “duc in altum” as your motto for your faith, and then forget about it… God will not forget, and he will teach you to trust him. This is my lesson, two health scares later. (I’m still trying to learn the trust– it looks like “duc in altum” will be my theme for 2012 as well.)
Really, I joined Goodreads because Beth had joined and was busy forcing people to join, in that non-forcible way that she has. But also, I joined Goodreads because it gave me a way to document the reading I was doing that was not professional – and I certainly don’t do enough professional reading either! – and clasp it to my chest as a reminder of how much I loved it. Novels stolen away piecemeal over lunchbreaks and in sunny windows, hidden behind the greenery so that people frequently walked past without realizing that I was there. The ones who did notice that I was there no doubt thought me crazy, but there isn’t enough sun in this city for me to turn my nose up at it when the clouds do part.
I’m on Goodreads! It was the first thing I signed up for under my married name, but I couldn’t get into it.
Well, for me, it’s just a reading log, but even that is something that I really do clutch to my chest, metaphorically speaking. Look, I read. I enjoy this.