Sunday, May 14, 2006

IT'S DONE
Well, I finally managed to finish this thing, some two months in the making, without killing myself. The final count before last-minute editing is: 7677 words, approx. 26 pages. I've done far worse... and actually, I think this one came out quite well in terms of readability [EDIT: this is incorrect. I was only thinking this was more readable because I'd forgotten that I spent about a month just trying to get the necessary VOCABULARY together for this thing, and what a vocabulary it is... probably I'm going to get a lot of complaints about this]. It's much more tightly argued than my previous attempts, although as a piece it's necessarily incomplete (for reasons which I note).

I think this'll all fit in the space of one article. But Dagger, as a favor: if it gets cut off, could you tell me so I can resubmit? Arigato gozaimasu! (the last part is a footnote)

I'm really beginning to wonder how much I'm getting accomplished with my writing these things, or really with anything that I'm doing around here. I think these little essays are good work, and I think I'm accomplishing a lot just "practicing my chops" as it were. The difficulty is getting any of this understood, though, or at least getting feedback, which I think I've totally failed at for the past five months. I've said this before. On the one hand I don't want to write scribblings that only "communicate" by setting one cliche off of another (actually I'm not sure if I CAN even write this way anymore, at least when I'm trying to be serious). On the other, getting blank stares and being totally ignored, rarely even worthy of an "I don't know what you're talking about," is getting me nowhere. It's like trying to get traction in alabama mud, I have absolutely no one to speak back to. On the boards, especially, there have been a number of threads where I've tried to work out, as rigorously as I can, the issues in question... only to have the threads continue in the same way as before, frequently going back to the exact same ideas that I did away with in my post. I must conclude that no one is reading these things; previously I thought that it wasn't asking too much to scan a page and a half of text (tops), which now seems hopelessly naive. I can't see what I'm doing "wrong," at least not in a way where I can fix it and still have what I'm trying to do mean a damned thing. Rhetoric isn't going to fix this, neither is compacting all of my "opinions" down to two or three sentences that say nothing. I don't understand, I really don't, and I worry that that will make me, in the end, an exceptionally poor teacher.
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