Reading and Writing

Today I finished Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet for the first time, and I also read Annamarie Jagose’s and Wayne Koestenbaum’s memorial essays on Sedgwick in PMLA 125, no. 2. The book was empowering - I feel, thanks to Sedgwick, that I have a firmer grasp on the possibilities and the methodologies of cultural studies than I did a month ago. The essays were stinging, because in reading them I saw two professional scholars script their responses to that book, and to the rest of Sedgwick’s career, in language I am not capable of invoking for myself. In short, Jagose and Koestenbaum are better writers than I am (it goes without saying that Sedgwick is equally beyond my reach). I thought: “Who taught you to write like that?” and I also thought “When did you have time to write this essay? Don’t you have reading and teaching to do?” These experiences are leading me toward a conclusion that I have spent, and continue to spend, my waking hours resisting. Perhaps I need to think of myself less as a reader and a learner than as a writer? The consequence of this would be: More writing, less reading. If I don’t read something, oh well. If I don’t write something, disaster. This would be a radical shift in priority and possibly in lifestyle. I wonder if it’s the way to go, and I wonder if I’m capable of it.

Another anecdote, to refract the first: I am in my fourth week of a German for Reading Language summer intensive course at Columbia, and the other day I found myself writing an email to my professor, my DGS in the Columbia English department, and two senior professors in the German department. In this email, I wanted to describe my satisfaction that something had taken place, and so I wrote “Das gut.” I figure, it’s the easiest sentence in the world to write “That’s good” in German, and I swear I’ve heard that phrase uttered colloquially to mean precisely “That’s good.” And I had just learned about relative pronouns and thought “das” could mean “That’s” if I wanted it to badly enough. Within seconds my professor wrote back to tell me I had just written “‘property’ or ‘holding,’” not “That’s good.”

The moral of both stories in the same: There is a vast difference between reading and writing, even though my massive and ever-growing library of read and unread books testifies to my aching desire to elide that difference.