Also, if there’s a corollary but equal condition to Writer’s Block it is surely Writer’s Surfeit.
Also #13
Greetings from the last day of the fall semester where I'm patiently waiting for all my stragglers, laggards, and slowpokes to get their final assignments in so I can further procrastinate assembling my final grades secure in the knowledge that, once again, and delays are entirely my own fault.
The part that's hard to explain is that, for myself and most teachers I know, the exhaustion hits the second the final class has been dismissed. Powering up to wade through the mountains of marking and grading that follows is an entirely separate battle and one that must be fought with one eye on the calendar and the other on your inbox.
Which is why I haven't been writing. But I think there's an opportunity here: because I've not been writing as much as I want to or even as much as I feel like I need to, my drafts and notes have piled up to the point where I don't know what I want to write about. Too many choices, too many thoughts, too many opportunities. Call it Writer's Surfeit.
Surfeit is one of my favorite words. Once again, I know exactly where and when I first encountered it: Alan Dean Foster's "...Who Needs Enemies?," a collection of his short stories from the late seventies and early eighties. One of the stories I was most drawn to featured a surfing contest on a planet where forces had aligned such that every few years, the planet's oceans rose up in massive waves that riders travelled from all over the galaxy to surf. But I couldn't understand why the story was called "Surfeit." (Read that as surf-ate.)
Once I got the joke, well, I'm a sucker for a good pun and Foster was and is a master at serving up a short story title that serves as a punchline for an otherwise straight forward science-fiction story.
Which brings me back to writing. It turns out that Writer's Block and Writer's Surfeit share a cure: put your butt in the chair and start writing.
So. Indulge me while I attempt a curative by putting together a few of the tidbits and stray ideas I've been thinking about.
Here I am in the gym, feeling good and reflecting on the fact that all the olds were right: eating right and exercising do make me feel better about myself. Next thing you know, I'll find out their hoary old aphorisms and maxims about managing finances and relationships were also right. It is so damnably galling I feel the need to raze Florida or something to fully express how appalled I am.
Avoiding the culture wars is damn near a full-time job these days. Occasionally, I'm not up to the task and get suckered into some debate or other where the other person is being willfully disingenuous. Increasingly I find myself borrowing a line from the late, much-lamented Bill Hicks: "Four questions for you: Yeah? And? So? What?" You'd be amazed how much it sucks the air out of the strawmen and whataboutisms that take up so much of the discourse.
The way language works in my head: "Chat GPT." That's cumbersome and irritating. I'll call it geh-peh-tuh. That'll teach the machines who's boss. Geh-peh-tuh. Geput. Jeppt. Wait! Nope. Gone too far, sounds too much like gypped1 and can't have that. Fine, “stupid robot” it is.
I've been getting a lot of questions from students that I think will be good articles for Learned whenever I get back to it. Things like, what's the difference between a medical condition and a medical disorder? How come magazine is used for a type of reading material and the thing that holds bullets? Is there a difference between the case of "bookcase" and that of "briefcase?" All these questions, and others, make me think I was on the right idea with "No Two Words Alike" but that I need to address things to a learner's perspective.
News from the front lines of the research: there seems to be a disconcertingly large number of teachers telling their students that the results from a.i. tools are trustworthy most of the time. This is directly counter to everything the experts tell us about generative a.i.
It's always nice to make connections on this app; it's always nice to know someone is reading. And this past week I got a shoutout from Ante Perkov at Reading is Hard. He linked to my "Over Winter" post so he could share in my absolute disdain for winter. Please check out his work.
And, that's it. I've made my word count. I've officially started writing again. Now that I've cleared some of the cruft out of my brain, maybe I'll be able to get something a little more coherent onto the site for next week. And, if not, well, it's not like we're short of things to read these days, are we? You might even say there's a surfeit or something.
Both “gypped” and “gypsy” are derived from slurs for the Romani people.