In thinking about the questions posed by Mytili and Elisabeth for this forum, I’m struck by the (logical) necessity to frame these questions in relation to public institutions — be they academic, publishing, or technological structures — that determine or shape the production and reception of our writing. Although the "personal" is mentioned as an umbrella term ("Is inclusion of the personal a taboo, an innovation, or has it been worn out by overuse?"), the invitation to the forum does not pose a host of questions about the personal to the extent that questions are asked about the institutional pressures in our lives. I’m neither trying to assert a polarity between the private and the public, nor suggesting that these questions do so, but am interested in observing how much the "personal" or "private" restlessly unsettles all of my imagined responses to the host of questions so thoughtfully posed by this forum. I can’t begin to think of "models of critical writing" without almost viscerally feeling the compressed time of my days, the need to make use of time efficiently, the need not to waste words or move in tangential directions because (like so many) I’ve got a kid to pick up (and any number of other realities might be inserted here at the end of this sentence).

Probably this has to do with my schedule these days, with wanting to garden but spending much of the day in my office trying to finish a manuscript that never wants to end, while knowing my "work day" will end when kindergarten ends, and that I need to make the oatmeal cookies I promised for my daughter to take to her class for snack tomorrow, and then I need to rush back to school for an evening graduate seminar in "Feminist Poetics," which seems a remarkably wonderful and appropriate course to rush to after such a day. But exhausting in rapid shifts and forms of attention. None of this schedule is unique to me; and no event in the day is distinct, finally, from any other. They echo into each other, and I think of Virginia Woolf as I mash butter into sugar and explain measuring to Chloe. (And of course think of Woolf’s concern with how "Chloe" is measured and learns to measure). And then I think, how so very banal and typical and clichéd that I locate my academic experience in relation to the domestic and the maternal, and maybe even how self-centered, given this stage in my life. (I would have written a different response ten years ago). And so I undercut myself.

This undercutting comes from somewhere, and I suspect it’s related to the training I’ve received as an academic, which powerfully prompts me to analyze my critical ground to the degree that much gets censored. And what is interesting to me is not that everyone should know about my daily life but that I censor its possibilities for taking me somewhere in terms of my critical writing. I wonder how I might more fully allow the echoes that go on throughout my day, that carry soundings from one arena to another, to more fruitfully be admitted into the process of critical writing, whether or not the process shows up in the final product. Thinking back, it’s the essays that allow the process to show up (I just taught DuPlessis’ "For the Etruscans" last night) that first prompted me to consider how the essay form functions to contain and censor; what I’m interested in thinking about now is how those efforts to contain and censor are internalized in my thought processes. When I spoke earlier about "different forms of attention," I meant that the boundaries between ways of thinking so often descend from the form of writing/creating we are doing, so that I begin thinking in certain ways that differ depending on whether I am moving toward an essay or a drawing or an oatmeal cookie or a chat with my daughter. I’d like to disturb that originary moment (which isn’t originary at all), in which the shapes of my thinking are too often determined by the shape/genre/form of the product.

While I love the "innovative" essay, I also realize I can’t focus on writing that essay as an end in itself. This has partly to do with my own sense of insecurity and partly (largely) to do with practical knowledge of the hierarchies of the academic institutions in which I work. I’ve read too many files as a member of a search committee or a tenure committee. And we all know that the ability to stand up at MLA, for instance, and read off of a randomly arranged series of notecards is "allowable" for only a few. I’d like to think this won’t always be the case but in the meantime, I’m trying to tackle the issue from the other end — where the essay gets started in our heads, what shapes the directions we feel free to take or prohibited from considering, what happens when a different focus of attention is brought to the matter.

Although I like to think that a more permeable focus would help me not to feel pulled in a million directions (and unfocused about most of them), I also realize that many tasks in critical writing do involve isolated, systematic, and synthetic processes that demand a comprehensive grasp of an issue (and thus, lots of research, reading, thinking) and an ability to situate a discussion in relation to other discussions. I actually enjoy these processes, but at the same time they are probably the most problematic for me when I think of issues of time and writing, because they suck up time, lots of time. So, in deciding how to choose my time, I most often find it imperative for professional reasons to read that extra article, etc. rather than sit and write in the kind of relaxed (which doesn’t mean unfocused or unthoughtful) manner I’m enjoying right now. This choice is intensified by the overwhelming amount of information available now, and the difficulty of letting go of the notion that I have to keep up with everything. Technology terrifies me in this way, because it presents itself in my life as a way of demanding more from my time, asking that I keep track of and make use of more information. My own terror, I’m sure, closes me off to many of the benefits of technology and of the web, and perhaps as time eases up I can also relax in front of the computer. Who knows. And so, it’s now time to turn off the computer and pick up Chloe. No cookies today, but maybe a little PBS and some time in the yard before class tonight, thinking about Erica Hunt and matters of the sandbox.