Have We the Patience to Endure?

...Hart Crane says yes, we do. This week I've been asked to blog my inspiration, in an effort to combat the exhaustion/burnout that April seems to have wrought. Short of blogging Adele's whole discography, I turn to a book that I flip through for inspiration, just about every time I write (unless my procrastination has made such a luxury unavailable). I'll start with an important preface: blogging about this makes me slightly uncomfortable, because its possibly to read such efforts as either artificially or sycophantically motivated. I'd tell you that this is not the case, but you're not likely to take my word for it.

What is this book, you ask? Michael Snediker's Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions, of course. I discovered the book a several semesters ago, and I'll admit that for Will Danger, Michael's prose was difficult and slow going at first, though easy/difficult might be a pretty useless way to measure someone's writing anyway. Lame/awesome might be a more appropriate system, and Queer Optimism obviously falls toward the awesome end of this proposed spectrum. The book absolutely takes time to get through, but the time is well worth taking. There is much here to learn on a sentence by sentence basis, both about optimism's workings and about writing more generally. The book has fun with its words, and reminds me that academic writing can be difficult, important, and fun, all at once. I am quite indebted to the recently-tenured Michael for a number of reasons: teaching me to think about affect, recovering Elizabeth Bishop's poetry for me, being one half of the team that kept me learning (and from getting lost) in my London adventures, and keeping me writing, even when my brain is running on empty.

I don't want this to turn into a book review, necessarily, because smarter/more useful people have already provided glowing reviews. Instead, I think I'll offer you some passages from the book, in the hopes that you might find in them the same inspiration to keep writing that I have.

"Even as I think there are some forms of hope worth defending, I'm not interested, for present purposes, in demarcating good and bad hopes, hegemonic and nonhegemonic attachments to futurity. To the extent that my own project seeks to recuperate optimism's potential critical interest by arguing for its separability from the promissory, I'm here insisting that there are ways of resisting a pernicious logic of 'reproductive futurism' besides embodying the death drive. If Edelman opines that all forms of optimism eventually lead to Little Orphan Annie singing 'Tomorrow,'... I oppositely insist that optimism's limited cultural and theoretical intelligibility calls not for its grandiose excoriation, but for its (no less grandiosely) being rethought along nonfutural lines" (23).

 "Exegesis lies beyond my aims, insofar as my ambition is less to explain these smiles (at worst, tantamount to explaining them away) than to argue for their collective value as a subject of inquiry...Why presume the indistinguishability of smiles and smirks? Why presume that a smile is not only a facade, but a facade for suffering? What does it say about Crane scholarship, and criticism more generally, that a smile, critically speaking, so seldom is allowed to be a smile? As such questions suggest, my subject is not only Crane's poetry, but also the specific manner in which this poetry as been understood and misunderstood" (44).

"I turn to anecdote in the realization of (and subsequently, in the wish to enact) the difficulty of sequestering feelings from metafeelings. Or to conjure Isabel Archer or Maggie Verver, the frustrating and exhilarating perviousness of thinking and living. Anecdotes, in their move to the subjective, sometimes are viewed as escapes from the discursive. I'm not telling this particular story as a retreat from the discursive or critical, but to note the strangeness of having felt like an allegory for my own subsequent academic work" (219).

Srsly, guys. Read it. The book does some really neat conceptual and linguistic things and has a remarkable knack for evaporating my writers block. Also, in keeping with the prompt for this inspiration-post: I found the weirdest thing in my copy of Queer Optimism. There's some Chipotle rice folded into a few pages which, in addition to being kind of gross, does more work to sum up my life than I'd like it to. I am Elizabeth Lemon.

Goodnight, folks.