There are some weeks when I will get more of my poems and stories done. There are weeks when I will get more of my French done. There are weeks when I will get more of my dissertation done. But rare there are weeks when I get all of them done in equal measure. Last week, for example, I have failed to work on my diss, although I did get some of the readings done. Now, I need to go back to it, and begin to work on it. Meaning, actually WRITE. I have been post-poning that ever since I got up. I know I won't get over this feeling of not-being-productive until and unless I crunch some words into that document. But I am resisting it, resisting it, resisting it. This is gut-wrenching work. But so is writing a poem. So is writing a story. Honestly, I don't take any claims of something coming "naturally" to anyone too seriously. Simply because nothing comes to me naturally. I have to work god-fucking-damn-hard for any halfway decent lines I write. And I don't think I am especially stupid.Anyways....
I have been working steadily towards the story I began last summer, and now I am seeing the end. Although what it will be is a shitty first draft. But whenever I get to work on it, I feel a kind of fulfillment, because this is a project that I had such a hard time with when I began, and even now, it just seems to be driving me crazy. But I am happy that I am working on it, and seeing some light. Finally got some great feedback on my Bindudi story from Valerie. As usual, her suggestions are dot on. So, now, I will have to some time to go back to it, and try out the revisions. Let's see when it finally happens...
Also got some good feedback for my Bildungsroman I poem...looking forward to do the revisions sometime this coming week.
Have been reading a collection of Anton Chekhov's short stories. It is fascinating to see how skilfully he uses the "chance encounter" format to come up with stories which are scathing in terms of representing the multiple forms of social violence, the social hierarchies and the way human beings cope with them. I realized, that Chekhov wrote quite a number of short shorts, "flash fiction" as we call them today. But I didn't have my regular irritation about it. Probably because, nowhere does Chekhov reduce his narrative into sheer triviality, superficiality, even when he writes a very short story. He was writing very short narratives not because he didn't have the adequate social eye, but he was using the short-form simply because sometimes they fitted the material he was dealing with. After all, if one is building up a story around a chance encounter between two long-lost friends, for example, and using that meeting to reveal things about the two characters, there's only so much one can write about it. The question, then, becomes, how does one "read" the society, the culture, the ideologies and the power structures into this brief interaction. Within the seemingly trivial and useless conversations. Chekhov's brilliance lies in the fact that nothing was too trivial for him. Nothing was beyond his sociological eye. Hence, the great stories we have today.
Have also just begun Tarashankar Bandopadhyay's Dhatri Debota.
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