Sometimes seeing the greatness of others depresses me. It's not in the sense that I am jealous and that I wish I could be like them (because I am, and I do) but because the talent and skill these people play with appears so genuine, meaningful and universal. Anyone who reads or sees or feels those works is affected and knows it. The thought is so startlingly beautiful.
In the other room, as I write this, they are talking of "projectile shitting."
This is how I see myself; sitting in a room in between one where many people sit, and another in which only a few sit. There is a glass window built into the wall. I stare through it every day, watching them speckled sporadically around the room, drinking in their blank expressions and savoring their bored twitches. I want to speak with them, hear about their days and their conversations with one another, but I can only hear the roar of people from the room behind me. They stuff my ears with their loud voices. The sound feels like cotton balls drenched in hydrogen-peroxide. It hisses and hurts, but I know it is good for me.
In reality, I am sitting in front of a computer worth more than my car pouring through essays for the Review. Right now I feel like a critical bastard because these essays, supposedly the cream of the crop of this years contestants, are utter shit. Okay, okay, maybe not "utter shit," but they are pretty bad. Not beyond help or editing, mind you, but in the "this-is-my-first-draft-but-I'm-pulling-an-all-nighter-since-it's-due-tomorrow-so-I-just-gotta-get-this-shit-done" sort of range or, the "look-at-me-I'm-such-a-great-writer-and-you-should-be-so-impressed-because-look-at-how-many-semicolons-I'm-using!" sort of mindset. I don't know which style bothers me more (I admit that I am guilty of both types in my own right). It annoys me that this level of caliber is let into the Review, yet another essay was originally let in but then later rejected because it needed "too much editing". I simply don't understand. This is probably going to be the shortest Review they've seen in years, I guess because not a whole lot of people submitted work, or because so much was rejected. But if these are the essay that made it in, I'd hate to see the work that wasn't. Yeesh.
However, it's hard for me to take myself seriously (or maybe I'm taking myself too seriously...dun dun dunnnnn!) when I haven't submitted anything for the past two years and I'm only editing. Editing is easy. Editing is something I'm good at. But writing essays from scratch is hard. I know that. As I'm reading through the unbelievably huge number of TWO. WHOLE. ESSAYS. I'm trying to figure out what exactly the prompts were for them. Is this the final essay for an introductory art history course, or is it an in-depth compare-and-contrast essay given in the middle of the semester for a higher level Greek and Roman Sculpture class? Is this essay for Children's Literature or for Germanic Culture?
I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that I can't tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment