delta days

Semester progressing acceptably. Still trying to wrangle the details of advanced time management, but hey, it goes.

Finally finished culling the poems for delta journal. A surprisingly civil, (mostly) yelling-free process. Haven't seen the fiction, but it looks like we're going to have a pretty fine journal on our hands when all is said and done-and printed!

(Though I have to say, it kind of sucks when you're the only one in the room i.e. on staff who doesn't get published in your own print.)

In Fear of Old Irish

So in this coming semester (two days and counting--ergh) I signed up for a class of Old Irish. Why? Unsure. It is almost as related to modern Irish as Old English is to modern English. And I had no plans at all to learn/use Irish anyway (though its status as an endangered language is sad). But, hell, they're offering it, and when else am I going to get to learn Old Irish?

The professor (who, in addition to being the linguistics undergraduate advisor and the only linguistics professor currently teaching classes, has quickly become my favorite person at the university) is offering the class as an independent study for one of her grad students who needs it for her concentration, but is allowing some others to take the class too. End result: My being intimidated and/or amused by five super-smart graduate students and an undergrad senior. Professor advertised this class as one of the hardest languages she's ever learned, taught, or studied. But extremely linguistically interesting. Which intrigued me to the point of enrolling, perhaps foolishly.

Anyway, took a look at the book. I feel like I could learn the crazy arbitrary rules for orthography (spelling), if I could figure out how to pronounce half the consonants. I don't know how to palatalize l or n or f or really any other letters besides s and maybe g. Too bad! All of the consonants are sometimes palatalized and/or lentited! Or some combination thereof. Nor do I know how to make a voiced bilabial nasal fricative (m with slightly open lips? no idea.). My book even has cartoons of sheep being "amusing" put there specifically to try to ease the stress of learning this language. I find myself actively yearning for the simpler days of my advanced Latin textbooks.

This is swiftly becoming a matter of pride/stubbornness. My arrogance got my into this class and. by the gods, it's going to get my through it . Languages and the process of learning them and how they work has always been fun for me, or at the very least pleasurably interesting. Dammit, I will learn the basic grammatical structure of this language. And I will enjoy it.

One good thing: no graded work. So if I just look really earnest and eager and try really hard, I should be fine. Right?

Amateur poetry marathon!

Running the first leg of the literary marathon that is reading/judging the poetry submissions for delta, LSU's undergraduate literary journal. All 240 pages of them. I'm on page 97 of the first go round, and honestly just thinking of finishing this pile is a little exhausting. Doing the preliminary read-through now, then I'll go back and attempt to read them again and actually judge them in a day or two, but knowing my wishy-washy tendencies, it'll probably take at least one more read-through after that to get it nailed down.

That being said, I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the submissions--it's a completely open process, anybody can submit, so I was kind of expecting more angsty love poetry written in couplets, honestly. Good job LSU's writing community, I suppose. (Though, selfishly, I could wish for the submissions to be less impressive, so that mine would stand out more. But as a writer with integrity and respect for talent, of course I won't do that.)

This upcoming issue will be awesome, once we grind this all out. Back to it!

Sauntering Vaguely Improvement-wards

So if I wanted to be really ambitious this new year, I could make the following goals:

-Make a budget. This would require having a rough estimate of combined household income, which is a slippery fish indeed. Both Boy and I wait tables, and while I have heard tell that it is possible to budget in this line of work, I strongly doubt our capacity to do it, at least while our finances are structured as they are.

-Donate and/or volunteer. I've already put a little money into Kiva micro-lending but I could really afford to put a little more, I guess. Ideally I'd volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, and actually gain useful construction skills. Anyone with me?

-Cook more. This is both for the sake of food and for the sake of money. It's hard sometimes, though, considering how picky of an eater I am and how un-creative I can be in the kitchen. However, currently cooking a big ol' pot of red beans and rice, made with only a few glances at the recipe. My Cajun family would be proud.

-Write more. I don't even need to talk about this one.

-Oh, also read more. Ideally at least 12 books this year, one per month, hopefully off my "To Read" list.

I'll be keeping these in the very back of my mind this year, because if I think about them or actively plan too much, they will absolutely not get done. Things like this have to lurk in the corner of my mental vision to be truly effective. So here's hoping! If you have any recommendations (recipes, good books, local volunteer opportunities) to help me inch along this path, do let me know.

Should we believe in NaNoWriMo?

AkddJust finished reading this article on one of my frequented news sites by one of their book reviewers on why one shouldn't participate in National Novel Writing Month (which, this year, I didn't). Somehow I missed this when it was first published in November, but it's still reasonably relevant, so what the hey.

I speak from personal experience. I have never "won" NaNoWriMo (i.e. successfully submitted 50,000 words before December 1), but each time I have participated, the raw outpouring of words, sentences, paragraphs it generated from me have set the right (write? Ha.) gears a-churnin', and when I closed the MS Word document full of the rambling I was hammering out for the contest, I set upon some other work that had bloomed within me, and produced some damn fine lines, some of which I'm still proud of and want to continue working with. These were dislodged, possibly generated, by the flood of NaNoWriMo forced through my otherwise (at least at the time) barren mind. The same is not true for all writers; some are just frustrated, bored, or exhausted by the processes of NaNoWriMo. In which case, it's not your thing, fine. But I do encourage most of my friend who write to try it.

In the article, Laura Miller paints the competition as solely for writers, which, okay, is mostly true. But there is always a pretty generous handful of people who participate who aren't. Maybe they've always dreamed of (or at least vaguely thought about) writing something, or maybe they just needed a quantifiable goal. Either way, a lot of them reach the end, which is more than I can say for myself. Then, ta-da, they end up with a goal achieved, and some sort of product at the end. And sometimes we all need to have that. So what's the harm in encouraging it? Yes, perhaps some participants think a little too highly of their final submission, and/or underestimate the necessity of the long, hard road of revision. That still doesn't detract from the benefit they and others might get from participating. Live and let live?

Instead of participating in NaNoWriMo, she argues, people should be reading-- that the proportion of readers to writers is disgraceful. Which, of course, is true. Dammit, people do need to read more.I need to read more, and I chew through more books in a year than most people I know. But she sees NaNoWriMo, and similar practices of do-it-yourself noveling as harmful to the culture of reading. She writes of seeing a NaNoWriMo event in a bookstore:

It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

I say "commerce" because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. "People would come up to me at parties," author Ann Bauer recently told me, "and say, 'I've been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this ...' And I'd (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read ... Now, the 'What do you read?' question is inevitably answered, 'Oh, I don't have time to read. I'm just concentrating on my writing.'"

Alright. I'll admit that that response is just as offensive to me. But I'm willing to bet a whole lot that these people were unbearably pretentious and arrogant anyway, and that this condition didn't suddenly come about just when they affected to be "writers". Reading and writing are not mutually exclusive occupations; just the opposite. Writers should be the most voracious readers of all. I'm sure Miller is aware of this widely held belief. And yes, arrogant fledgling writers who overrate their own ability are incredibly annoying, but that doesn't mean that this yearly event which allows people to have fun and eke out a creation is useless/harmful.

If National Novel Writing Month isn't your bag, don't participate in it. Don't read any of the resulting works. When people gush about the experience, politely nod and smile and change the subject, just as you do when they spout on about their new baby, or World of Warcraft. Miller suggests that people participate in reading challenges instead of writing challenges. (Incidentally, she posted an article on reading challenges today, I suggest checking out the links.) I intend to take at least one of those challenges this year. I will also be participating in NaNoWriMo.

Cake is doubly delicious when you have it and eat it too. I imagine books are as well. (See, if you take the cake metaphor, and writing is... oh, forget it.)

Ring Out, Ring In

So this is the new year?

Well, I don't feel any different.

Yes, using song lyrics to express sentiment on blogs/online journals/whatever might be slightly overdone, but, hey, it's true. And completely unsurprising, given (a) the nature of 2010 and (b) it's true every damn year. First of all, let me address (b): It's true for pretty much everybody-- you can throw exactly the right party, kiss the perfect person, wear the perfect dress, play the perfect song, but if you're expecting a magical tabula rasaness to descend upon you at the stroke of midnight, I'm afraid you will be sorely disappointed. Then again, I suppose it's all a matter of psychology, and you may well get washed away by your wave of optimistic ecstasy. Please also note that one night does not a year meake, no matter how auspicious or inauspicious it is as a beginning.

Now, (a): 2010 was not a year of dramatic changes, of breathtaking wonders (excepting Boulder), of either resolutions or revolutions. Some things happened, I suppose (as things tend to do), but it was only the grumblings of the Earth creeping along in its course. Mostly it was a year of...let's say furthuring. Growing and expanding what is already there, gaining a firmer hold on life, developing and rounding out myself and my life. Slow, boring stuff like that. I don't expect 2011 to be much different, but maybe the slop of progress could be a bit steeper?

New Year's Resolution, 2011: Make my life more beautiful.