I came thisclose to skipping class tonight. It wouldn’t have been a great idea, since I missed class last week because I was in the middle of getting lost on my way to Disneyland. I had a hard enough time catching up with the reading I missed as it was. However, I was having one of those days.

I woke up feeling pretty good - the sun was shining for the first time since I got home, I had good cereal and coffee, I’d gotten an email from an old friend, and I was feeling inspired. Somewhere in between sending out an email, reading some of a fantasy novel, and having lunch the good feelings dissipated. I didn’t want to do anything. No writing, no home-work, no class. I stuck my butt on the couch and watched reruns of Buffy and Angel. Comfort television usually makes everything better, but tonight it wasn’t working. It’s strange - I haven’t had many anxious, depressed days since I got my meds together. I’m not sure what’s going on for me. There’s nothing in particular going on - Tom’s home from China, I’m home from Disney and the desert, my birthday was on Sunday. Things are fine. Just can’t put my finger on it. (Maybe it’s hormones? PMS finally? *gasp*)
I managed to get myself on Muni, though I was going to be about fifteen minutes late to class. I didn’t miss much beyond the professor’s introductory remarks and the beginning of attendance. I am glad I went - we spent the class in groups discussing the outlines of stories we’ve been reading. My group focused on “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. I hadn’t read this story since undergrad. I love it just as much now as I did then, and it was fun to look at how it was written. And heartening, because I actually understood it - unlike some of my classmates. Unfortunately the professor called on one of the ‘didn’t get it’ people to explain our group’s progress. She hemed and hawed and a few of us had to jump in and save things. Another woman and I practically strained something rolling our eyes at each other. There’s nothing like some healthy mocking and brain-strain to make a girl feel better.

We also read a bit of an interview with James Baldwin. There were a couple of great quotes, but this is my favorite. “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent - which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artest is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer … finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in an certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next - one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.” I can only hope that I can wrest a bit of art from the hurt and help in my life. James Baldwin did it in such an amazing way. It’s important for me to remember that hurt helps a writer’s life, eventually.

Another good quote: “One writes out of one thing only - one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” All I can say is, yes! I aspire to this - one day. It’s endlessly encouraging to know that Baldwin doubted his writing as well.

Posted on February 27th, 2007 by Kat
Filed under: Writing, General