persiflage

I’m liking my writing streak. It’s helping me feel like a people, and giving me a small smile to rely on when, for example, I instead rip through the first chapter of theologian H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture in order to set my mind right for an exam question.

(I likely could’ve gotten by without it. But I always feel better when I’ve reviewed a whole in itself rather than someone’s targeted summary.)

Today, however, has not been a writing day. There’s been Other People’s Schedules — since I scorn those who barrel past others’ reasonable needs for flexibility, my self-concept pinned me to a flabby morning with a scant 20 minutes of Hebrew — a friend-lunch (huzzah!), time-sensitive grocering, setting the house in full order so it can be washed well.

I feel flattened and it’s only 8:20pm. Felt flattened by 6:30pm, but house-straightening (including dishwasher emptying and laundry storage) required a yeoman — what’s a yeo-woman? Goodwife? — effort, and I am yeo-ing. So much for chipping away at my finals tonight.

So this isn’t really writing: that is, I’d better not spend an hour crafting this or it will sound like Drunk Memoir. (A has shown me some Drunk History episodes, which I find sort of funny and sort of upsetting.)

This post actually is me looking longingly at my bedtime book, which currently is Anne Fadiman’s Confession of a Common Reader when it’s not the biography Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief by Roger Lundin. (P.D. James failed the bedtime test, so she waits for the holidays.)

And Ms. Fadiman is both a sesquipedalian and skilled in the art of persiflage. It’s the closest I’ll come to Bedazzled(tm) anything, but boy howdy I like the sparkle!

Fadiman on her early sonnets, Shakespearean, not Petrarchan:

My success-grubbing disposition craved a certain amount of challenge but was loath to assume an optional handicap that the more philistine members of my imagined reading public might not even recognize. (p 32)

With a wink, she later implies there are zero late Fadiman sonnets. But really, I think it’s reasonable that she focus on this form for her literary calling. Not everyone can play persiflage.

**

Just a little more laundry, and then bliss! of pajamas and bed and book. Tomorrow will be another day, and the in-class final can only last three hours. (Heck, a blog post normally takes me an hour. Time flies when I’m rummaging for words.) Anne, friend, I’ll be there soon!

One thought on “persiflage

  1. im reading this on my laptop for once which means i can make a comment that says I LOVE YOU AND I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU <3 <3 <3

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