On the fourth day of my sabbatical, I have regained my former brilliance. Ideas flowed together magically before 9:30 in the morning. This chapter will be called "Postmodern Lorca: Motherwell, Strayhorn, García Montero." It is like the missing chapter from Apocryphal Lorca!
In a few weeks of not working on my scholarship at all, I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas.
The break was still probably necessary, of only to show myself that I am capable of feeling like an unproductive brute.
4 comments:
I'd also say you've regained your "Mayhewianism":
"I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas."
Yes, but I can't do that on purpose. If I try to write a "Mayhewianism" it doesn't work. It has to just arise organically. For example, that sentence originally didn't have the part about the mafias movies. That's the touch that makes it a Mayhewianism, but I can't do that in every sentence.
That's how it works with flashes of high style. You (unintentionally) produce it. We canonize it.
Also: it seems to me that this one is an example of "Mayhewian disjunction": Mayhew's "but", if you will.
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