Yikes, another person visited my bio page today (that makes 2). This is getting to be almost nerve-wracking. I will attempt in this post to wrap up my general thoughts about the writers' conference so we can move on to...well, there is nothing pressing to move onto, but we oughtn't dwell on the conference forever. The other people who were there have probably pared their manuscripts and contacted agents already, and I haven't even finished unpacking my bags yet.

Ten years ago, I was pretty determined that attending a writers' conference, tempting though it was for the mere possibility of being able to go somewhere and get drunk with bookish girls, dreaming of which consumed 90% of my waking thoughts at that time, would be tantamount to an admission of failure or at least a lack of serious artistic commitment. I remember reading some article in which an attendee spoke about some fairly well known author whom I did not particularly care for ripping their manuscript and thinking to myself "Good God! If I am not already a far greater writer than said author, what is the point of writing at all?", etc. Of course a part of me still believes this and understands that there perhaps is no point in writing at all, but coming to such a realization doesn't put an end to all one's problems if one maintains at some level the will to continue anyway. Naturally my real hope in going now was that I would simply be recognized upon arrival as so superior that great efforts would be undertaken immediately to ensure I received an appropriate contract and such compensation as my talents merited; the pragmatic will guffaw at the absurdity, naivete, etc, of such a mindset, but what else can one suppose is going to happen? I could not undertake such efforts and essentially devote the entire active part of my adult life to them if I did not imagine them worthy of circulation among the worthiest people. I am neither disappointed nor discouraged by this aspect of the experience nearly so much as by the extreme difficulty I had conversing with other people. I think this last is because people always want to know what your job/field is, and mine is not one I can declare without feeling acute shame and disgrace, even if the other person's job is equally crummy to my own, because let's face it, unless the other person is extremely attractive or humorous, if he has a similar job to mine, I have to suspect he is a loser too. The job question hangs over every interaction, and kills 99.4% of them. You have to be a professional to make friends even at Bread Loaf

Classic-type (meaning any old) literature seems not to be studied as fervently as contemporary writers. Seventeenth and Eighteenth century authors of own tongue other than Shakespeare, whose style and understanding of the language, both in prose and poetry, ought to be studied at least as models of gracefulness and precision of thought, are entirely ignored. Besides the deeper understanding of the manner in which our language developed and was wont to be used by men of talent and penetration, I cannot but think it is invaluable to retrace the manner in which human thought has developed, especially now that we are so sophisticated as to take many things that were quite wondrous and stimulating to our ancestors for granted. In the 487th Spectator (September 18,1712--yes, I'm still reading it) Addison has a quite good piece on dreams, which is one of those subjects about which clever modern people have become at least breezy if not cynical towards. The quote by Nabokov about the intellectual mediocrity of dreams is well known and often quoted, but Addison provides some insight as to how the experience of dreaming contributed to spur human intellectual development into any number of fruitful directions, particularly the existence it suggests of a nonmaterial aspect at work in the universe. Nabokov--whom I admire but think is too flippant here--is disappointed with the quality of the reading his sleeping mind generates for him in his dream, while Addison is still able to find it marvelous that the sleeping mind can generate such a plausible story as never existed before almost as an instinctive action. This does not make him a greater intellect than our hardheaded and unsentimental modern thinkers--this is not my point--but I think it opens up a more layered understanding as to how and why we are intellectually developed to the point we are that a lot of clever people do not seem to think is important.