Minute particulars

Someone was recently asking me to write a post about time management and writing, it is something I should weigh in on: but I am not always a good role model, to say the least. I like the part where I read and think and get a first draft down on paper as a speaking script, but it is not as enjoyable to turn it into something publishable: I am pleased with this essay, but also full of self-reproach that I did not turn it into an article shortly after I first wrote up the basic material in 2006!....

(This essay may also be the first publication in which I have cited Facebook crowdsourcing as a scholarly source.)

Available through JSTOR now, anyway: "The Minute Particular in Life-Writing and the Novel."

Collation

Fifteen ways to file your cats. (Via Becky.)

Also, via Jane Y., knitting for reptiles!

I am having some satisfying work on my essay about minute particulars in life-writing and the novel. Also exercising up a storm and waiting for winter to stop.

Enchanted by a pair of novels and a novella originally recommended by some source now lost in the past of the internet; they are not of the highest literary genre, some people don't like reading stuff like this, but they are the kind of thing I particularly like, and so beautifully done I hardly can stand it! Appealing (gay) characters in fantasy world loosely based on seventeenth-century Holland, some magic but not excessive and narrative based on a crime detection plot rather than something more fantastical - they are absolutely delightful. A collaborative project by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett: Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams. Must seek out more of Scott's novels and/or reread novels by Ellen Kushner!

Seeing Parsifal on Wednesday next week at the Met (this was a good teaser, but you may need a New Yorker subscription to access it) and 1 Henry IV on Thursday. Culture, sport, light reading - all good....

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot"

The award for best quote of the day goes to William Blake by way of Cynthia Wall's great book The Prose of Things.  Blake wrote this in the margin of his copy of Reynolds' Discourses:

To Generalize is to be an Idiot.  To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. . . . Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime.

Note to self

It is very strange: I've been thinking at the back of my mind all day about a review I drafted last week that didn't come out quite right and that I didn't have time to sit down with properly during daytime hours today due to other obligations.  But as I finished tomorrow's reading for lecture (the first two books of Tom Jones), not only did the brand-new first paragraph of the reimagined review burst into my mind, I also near-simultaneously thought of a different and better way of handling two representative arguments about the 'minute particular' in a talk I'm giving next week.  I feel more alert and cognitively capable than I have all day; have scrawled down a rough version of the new opening for the review as well as a memorandum about my intended mobilization of notionally opposing arguments about detail and historicity by Hartley and Sheridan, and will shortly stop work to try and wind down for the night....

Better set alarm very early to work on that review properly and get it sent off before my 10:30 appointment at the gym: nighttime is mentally active, for better and for worse, but writing proper generally needs to be done before I get sucked into the vortex of the rest of the day!  This post can be considered a thank-you note to Fielding for prompting intellectual activity, even if I do not love his novels the way I love Richardson's.