The empire never ended
I've never really talked much about why I didn't finish Graduate school. If you asked me about it, I probably said "it wasn't doing it for me."
The true story is that it did do it for me. To the point where I realized that I didn't need to spend another year and another $6,000 to complete my education.
Here's the real reason I gave up on Grad school (even though I was more than halfway through and had a GPA of 3.95... the highest in my life):
After the first year, my artistic pretensions were completely destroyed. Along with any belief in the difference between high and low culture.
My pretensions had held back my writing. I always felt like every story had to mean something. Or to mean nothing. That is no longer my goal when I write.
Now I want my stories to interact with a reader in somewhat the same way I interact with people in a group setting. Mostly, I try to be funny. Funny in a way that's relevant to the content of the conversation and also plays off the disconnect between the context and commonplace signification. (That's a fancy way to say thematic and literal "punning.") I may occasionally say something meaningful or interesting. But I'm not trying to. And if I do it comes out of the moment.
That's what I want my stories to do. And Graduate school wasn't going to help me write that way. Although, in a way, it did/does.
The worst part of Grad school is that it burned me out on reading. For almost two years now.
Fortunately, that feeling is subsiding. And I now feel a strong need to read. But I'm having a hard time motivating myself when my current obsession is learning CSS, ASP and other web languages.
I need to decide whether to jump into those books. Some of the graphic novels on my list. Or the more famous Philip K. Dick and Patricia Highsmith books I've been hankering to read.
It's all up in the air.
The true story is that it did do it for me. To the point where I realized that I didn't need to spend another year and another $6,000 to complete my education.
Here's the real reason I gave up on Grad school (even though I was more than halfway through and had a GPA of 3.95... the highest in my life):
After the first year, my artistic pretensions were completely destroyed. Along with any belief in the difference between high and low culture.
My pretensions had held back my writing. I always felt like every story had to mean something. Or to mean nothing. That is no longer my goal when I write.
Now I want my stories to interact with a reader in somewhat the same way I interact with people in a group setting. Mostly, I try to be funny. Funny in a way that's relevant to the content of the conversation and also plays off the disconnect between the context and commonplace signification. (That's a fancy way to say thematic and literal "punning.") I may occasionally say something meaningful or interesting. But I'm not trying to. And if I do it comes out of the moment.
That's what I want my stories to do. And Graduate school wasn't going to help me write that way. Although, in a way, it did/does.
The worst part of Grad school is that it burned me out on reading. For almost two years now.
Fortunately, that feeling is subsiding. And I now feel a strong need to read. But I'm having a hard time motivating myself when my current obsession is learning CSS, ASP and other web languages.
I need to decide whether to jump into those books. Some of the graphic novels on my list. Or the more famous Philip K. Dick and Patricia Highsmith books I've been hankering to read.
It's all up in the air.
Labels: Mark
posted by M S Martinez at 1/10/2008 09:40:00 AM
1 Comments:
I for one am glad to hear you are writing again, I always liked it when you would write every day. It was inspiring to watch. Funny writing even better.
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