You're Damn Skippy, Son!

Yeah, that's right. I just finished the long-awaited second draft of my prospectus. And I think it's pretty good (a rare first response for me when I've just finished a writing project). I offer no details here, as I'm ready to just forget everything for a few days. But in celebration, I offer to the world this list of Books You Just Gotta Read If You Want To Feel the Place of the West:

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
William Cronon, just about anything, but especially his article "A Place for Stories," and Under an Open Sky
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (old school, baby!)
Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (even older school!)
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Kent Haruf, Plainsong (just a great contemporary Western novel)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

There are, of course, so many more (and even more bad ones), but I just plain dug these books and learned a lot from them. Let me know what you think.

Oh, yeah. And celebrate good times, come on.

Return and Redux

Okay. So it's been four months. We all mark time every now and then, though, right? Or tread water. Pick your metaphor. Either way, what it comes down to is that I've been making little traceable "forward progress" with this project. Well, that's not exactly true, as I've been reading a lot. In the past few months, I've put together several bibliographies, including a qualifying exam reading list, which I'm currently working my way through. I hope to file my prospectus by the end of March, then take my exams (written and oral) around mid-May.

Of course, before I do any of that, I have to actually decide what this project is going to look like--at least in theory. So, it's time for a new draft of the prospectus. The last one has served me well for the...oh, dear god...last seven months, but it's time to revise and reformat. Reading over the famous first draft, I find much of use, but much that needs to be made more specific, given a greater sense of direction. Also, there's that minor matter of department requirements, which asks for a certain format--something much closer to an actual project proposal than what I have heretofore accomplished. But I think I can hack it. And so I sit down this weekend to see what there is to see, to say what there is to say.

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Some new concepts that might make it into round two: phenomenology & perception, authenticity, place & memory, being "out of place"...and hopefully much more. I will also have to give more specific attention to how I will actually engage with literary texts (and which texts those might be).

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But since this is my first entry in so long, I find it boring to just talk business. Instead, I offer this rumination to the world: I'm increasingly fascinated by the idea that memories are almost always placed, but quite infrequently seated in an actual sense of time. Think about it. It's rare that when we remember an event or an interaction, that we have a real sense--attached to the felt experience of that memory--of the date. We may know the date, we may locate the event in an established chronology of our life, but do we actually have a sense of the time? I don't think so. But almost always we have a sense of place in our memories. That is, part of the memory is a felt experience of location, a sensed interaction with the "setting" of the event.

Perhaps this is too abstract, or just plain batshit crazy. I don't know. But it's got itself into my mind. It speaks to the relationship--almost always taken for granted in modern philosophy (and physics)--between space and time. But from the perspective of lived experience, I see a big difference between these two. Time is almost entirely an abstract concept, whereas space can be felt, perceived. Do we ever really perceive time? In an organic connection to our natural surroundings, we may sense the cyclical seasons, or the feeling of aging, but are these themselves time? I'm not sure. But space is (at least in my mind) immediately sensible. We can feel space. Our senses--all of them--perceive it, and perceive it differently depending on its dimensions.

Then again, can there be a spatial sense of time? Is "distance" only a spatial concept, or also a temporal one?

Bah. The mind turns. Slows. Grinds to a halt.