for myself: on the fear of revision

How I Learned to Love Revision (even though I still worry over it) by Karen Outen http://www.glimmertrain.com/fmoct08.html

I'll admit it: Revision used to terrify me. When I was a new writer, I mistook revision for something that interfered with the creative process, rather than the only way you get what you want from it. I wasn't alone in that thinking. In my teaching now, I see young writers continue to butt their heads against the idea of revision. Either they mistake real revision for something that fits nicely into a sentence like this: "If I just change this one sentence, then it'll all be fine"; by thinking this way, they fail to take advantage of the opportunity to truly re-envision their stories. Or they think, as I once did, that revision "ruins" the spontaneity of their writing. The general fear of revision is, of course, simply our fear that what we want from our stories cannot be achieved.

Over the years, most of what I've learned about revision, I've learned from someone named David. First, there was the novelist and teacher David Bradley, who gave me permission to write a crappy first draft and then decide what I wanted from it. In David's words: Revision makes it possible to have what you want. Revision is not like writing again. You know what you're doing this time.

I learned my latest lesson in revision, oddly enough, from my engineer friend David. During the fall of 2008, David's son, Tim, enthusiastically volunteered him to build voting booths for Tim's fourth-grade class so that the kids could participate in some way in the historic 2008 presidential election. Tim's teacher envisioned a cardboard booth, a handwritten paper ballot, the basics. But she didn't know David. He took on the task with his customary ingenuity and enthusiasm, and before you know it, those simple voting booths were hooked up to a circuit board that David designed to record and tabulate each child's vote electronically. I haven't seen the voting booth—and David is as modest in describing it as his son is ebullient—so I can only imagine the stunned look on the teacher's face when she saw her simple cardboard booth outfitted with sophisticated electronic capabilities.

I asked David why he'd taken on such a lofty project. He's a busy professor with a young family and tons of other responsibilities. Wasn't this just one more burden for him? No, he assured me, it was fun. The joy of it, he says, was coming up with his design, beginning it, and anticipating what would go wrong. He told me that in any project, once he hits the thing that won't work as he imagined, the question then becomes, how will he get what he wants anyway?

His answer clicked with me immediately, and I said, "That's revision!"

He said, "Yeah. That's what you do when you write, right?"

Well, yes and no. I hardly approach the revision process with that much joy—but why shouldn't I? If I understand that the process really is about learning who your characters are, digging into the heart of the story you've created, and seeing what the story has to teach you beyond your initial expectations, then I must be open to giving over to the unexpected. So why fear revision? I am essentially asking the same questions when I revise that David asked in building his circuit:

What was I thinking when I set out to build this?
Can it work?
Is it working?
Have I discovered something better during the creation process?
In essence, writing—apparently like engineering—requires that we invite the gap between possibility and reality, the possibilities that led us to the stories in the first place and the real world of those stories once they are created. What I discovered from my friend David the engineer is that his creative process allows for failure, for the unknown, for that moment when he feels, "This can't be done." Not only that, but he embraces that moment as one of greatest possibility and discovery. It is the moment that moves him most outside of himself and most truly into the realm of creation.

How often do we approach revision fearing what we'll discover about our stories? What if at the moment when we begin revision, we allow ourselves to dwell most significantly and earnestly in the possibilities of our stories? As I've come to think of it this way, I've found that the moment of revision is in fact the most exciting time. David Bradley's right: You know much more about what you're doing by that time. Your characters have already revealed so much of themselves to you. What you bring to that knowledge then, is the clear-eyed reader, the one who asks the hard questions of each moment and line of dialogue, the one who turns over each gesture looking to see what is unearthed, the one who both embraces the failure of a scene and wards it off by relentless questioning and re-envisioning. The way that we serve our stories best in revision is in that spirit of expectation, wonder, and, yes, enough fear and trembling to invite the unexpected.

Butler's observation of the post-election high

"In California, he [Obama] won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction?"

Read more.

「我懷疑你是要偷渡!」

「我懷疑你是要偷渡!」 是陳界仁被AIT簽証面試官羞辱後所發想的創作計畫。http://ccjonstrike.blogspot.com/

希望陳界仁對後帝國主義老大心態的批評從美國開始但不停在美國。接下來的第二個計畫應該把台灣放在對應於美國的位置去理解台灣發給簽證時的惡形惡狀，在台灣的脈絡下這第二個計畫應該可以讓性別議題更有效地發酵。

Keep record: On Sarah Palin

So looking forward to this discussion.

FLOWTV: CALL FOR PAPERS

Hockey Mom or Sarah Barracuda? Addressing the Media Coverage of Sarah Palin

In light of the overwhelming surge of discourse following John McCain's selection of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, the editors of FlowTV invite submissions dealing with the media treatment, reaction, and handling
of Gov. Palin as a politician, a woman, a "Hockey Mom," a wife, an Alaskan, and a Conservative. We hope the following quotes serve as a jumping off point - what we view as some of the most poignant examples of the recent media treatment - but we encourage submissions to look to viral video, spoofs, celebrations, editorials, Facebook status updates, blog entries, and myriad other sources of coverage.

Submissions should be between 1000-1500 words. Because of the topicality of the particular subject, we welcome submissions as soon as possible, and no later thanSeptember 30th. While we seek neither diary entries nor diatribes, submissions need not be overly formal or academic, and we encourage the incorporation of images and video. Additionally, we encourage alternative perspectives from students,
non-Americans, bloggers, etc.

Please send submissions and inquiries to Anne Petersen


Co-Coordinating Editor

For more info, see http://flowtv.org/?p=1711.

keep record

Sounds like a very interesting conference, esp two panels which specifically deal with post colonial issues as expressed by artists.

http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/postcolonial-studies/afterlives.php

[Theme]

In recent times some scholars have proclaimed that postcolonial theory has exhausted its critical energies- at the very time that it has been taken up by scholars and activists not located in English or Literature departments, the area where postcolonial theory made its early impact and sometimes found an institutional home. The Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths is organising a conference on the “Afterlives of Postcolonialism”- the ‘after’ referring both to its life/lives after the proclamation of its death, and also to its life after/outside the study of literature. In what ways can/has postcolonial theory been taken up by artists, architects and scholars of art and architecture, by those who study politics, anthropology and sociology, and area studies, and to what effects? Does it merely provide another way of ‘reading’ texts, to does it have the potential to destabilize and reconfigure practices and disciplines? And what happens to postcolonial theory when it moves into politics, art, sociology, and area studies; what mutations does it undergo, or need to undergo? Drawing upon speakers from a range of geographical (India, the U.S., South Africa, Palestine, the U.K.) and disciplinary locations (everything from architecture to art, film, music, politics…), involving practitioners as well as theorists, this conference asks whether postcolonial theory still has any life in it- and what sorts of lives it is leading once it travels outside of literature.

累

大概是前半學期太緊繃了，雖然已經進入最後四個禮拜但我覺得好疲累啊，上課還是賣力演出，學生也還算乖，但要上課這件事就讓我感到無力，也或許是還不習慣這樣長的學期。話說這才是我的第一學期，也還沒進入教書兼做研究的雙重壓力，我竟就這樣吃不消，真不是個好現象啊。