I'm back writing my blog, after almost two years. Still figuring out what makes a good blog, but lately I have gotten some good ideas from some blogging colleagues, so i'm trying it again, branching out a bit, including more topics.
Writing is one of those things I didn't quite realize I signed up for when I became and academic. I was more into it for the wisdom and knowledge, of exploration, stretching and opening up new vistas. Writing became part of the job, but I am still far from feeling like it comes easy. Having taken enough writing classes to appreciate the necessity of being willing to write "shitty first drafts", I am able to work my way through a piece of writing in ways that are less painful than some earlier work. Reading a lot would seem to present one with a great object lesson in good and bad writing, and what makes for either kind. And it does.
Very rarely an academic book, however, pulls me right in, from the first sentence. Usually it takes at least the first page or paragraph. Today, however, I started reading a book whose first sentence seems to be a handy nutshell, or at least a great opening into the subject of the book. It is found in Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350. Here it is:
"Europe is both a region and an idea." I strive to write sentences like that. It opens up, rather than shutting down. It acknowledges and invites the contemplation of multiplicity.
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1 comments:
Hey Dr. Grau,
(Procrastinating work) I have to respond with one of my favorite first lines of a book. It's Joan Didion, from The White Album, a wonderful book:
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
And the last sentence of the first paragraph:
"We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
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