blogger, slogger

Another day, another post. Many other bloggers, I notice, post only on weekdays. This makes a certain amount of sense. Everyone needs a break, and one can be more reliable for five days a week instead of trying to cover the full seven. I didn't put too much thought into the decision to try to post every day. I suppose my feeling was, and is, that creating a work of art is not a 9-to-5 job. The artistic work, whether I actually advance it or not on any given day, suffuses my life, pervades it. And so I thought I would try to post every day.

One of my thoughts was that on most weekdays I could talk about the actual work of writing, for it's true that I generally only write Monday to Friday (need a rest), while on the weekends I could be more free to venture into related topics, things like the thematic content of what I'm doing, or its history.

In practice, it's not clear what I might actually write about on any day, whether week or weekend. My usual approach is to sit down and just think about my project in relation to my day. What has happened, what have I thought or felt, that relates to it? Sometimes it's not even that: something seemingly unrelated hijacks my thoughts. I just accept all this. It's the world of the writer, germane or not.

Lately I've had a strong feeling of slogging. Sometimes it's enjoyable slogging, but it's slogging. I look with dissatisfaction at my own slowness. This morning I keyed notes from Robin Lane Fox's Alexander the Great (recently saw a new edition of it in the bookstore, now with favorable blurb by Oliver Stone, director of the flopped cinematic epic about Alexander's life--good: Fox deserves to sell all the copies he can). I've keyed up to page 196 (of 498). I often feel that I should have got this done already; why haven't I already read this book and keyed notes from it? This kind of pointless self-nagging haunts me from somewhere early in life. I enjoy keying notes from my research books; it's a puttering clerical job that I find pleasant, with easily measurable productivity. I can move my project forward (so I think) without creative effort. That pleases me. But creeping my way through this large book feels slow--a slog--even though many other research books have already melted before the onslaught of the tortoise.

And I do get feelings of synchronicity: the just-in-time delivery of what I need. For example, last night I arrived at chapter 14 of Alexander the Great, in which Alexander enters Egypt after conquering the city of Gaza. Fox discusses aspects of Ptolemaic Egyptian culture that I haven't encountered in my other sources, in particular the relations between the priesthood and the pharaohs--just as I arrive in chapter 17 at the place where I will need this knowledge. Such synchronicities are very encouraging, and help me sweep aside my worries about the sense and salability of what I'm doing. But it takes presence of mind and confidence to remain strong in the belief that one is always at the right place at the right time.

Nonwriting activities? Today Kimmie and I went strolling in the East End neighborhood of Strathcona: a resplendent day at the climax of summer, with a warm breeze pushing through the quiet streets, rustling the leaves of plane-trees and oaks and maples. Little hundred-year-old rowhouses huddle at the sidewalks, painted cheerfully, with fig-trees and planters made of cast-iron bathtubs and little plank catwalks leading from the sidewalk to their narrow, shady front doors. Up the street, the near-windowless blocks of project housing: masses of pale brick, empty-looking as a school closed for summer.