goals report for October

Goals for October
I lost the 2 pounds I set as my goal. I finished the fun book Carrie loaned me, and I also read another fun book. I went hiking in the Smokies. Work on my website has begun. I made no progress at all on the book manuscript. I sent out my first job application.
 
Goals for 2011
Nutrition and Weight Loss: 16 pounds lost this year. I’m beginning to slide and eat more poison.
Exercise: Fair. Walking has become a once-a-week thing because of scheduling, and I often don’t make it to the gym.
Birding: Nothing additional, though I did write up more of my eBird reports.
Cultural events: Goal met.
Reading: Goal met and exceeded. I read The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance, a genre study, and also Tom Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
Writing: Nada.

Plan for November

• Complete the Moore chapter, which means 15-20 more pages, research, editing, and polishing. This is top priority for the month. If I finish, I get a weekend at Biltmore as my reward.
• Apply for jobs, which means writing cover letters and weekly reading of ads.
• Mop kitchen and dust library.
• Lose 3 pounds.
• Return to the gym weekly.
• Finish writing up eBird reports. Go on a field trip and one day of independent watching.

 

terminology and procrastination

I'm trying to get back on the writing train. I'm avoiding looking at my chapter, but I'm about to force myself. I've spent most of the productive hours of the day reading and taking notes. I'm researching Vernon Lee, who I think is a fascinating figure. Unfortunately, she isn't the focus of the chapter. I'm trying to learn about her because I'm thinking more about the intersection of ethics and aesthetics in George Moore's work. My current theory is that Moore left aestheticism because it was too isolationist, and all of his work has some sort of social angle. He's an activist, really, and quite the feminist for his time, and that didn't mesh with aestheticism. Vernon Lee went through a similar progression, but she's known as a major aesthetic theorist nonetheless. She blended aesthetics with activism through empathy, I think. Her version of empathy is sich einfuhlung, to feel oneself into something, a projection of the ego into the non-ego (which makes me wonder whether it can apply to people at all). This projection preceeds mittfuhlung, or sympathy, feeling-with. This feeling-with is usually what people mean today when they talk about empathy. I keep switching terms and I keep getting confused. I was using sympathy for a long time in a sort of stubborn dismissal of twentieth-century neologisms, but then to communicate to students I really needed to call it empathy. And then most of the research on sympathy looks at how characters sympathize with each other rather than reader sympathy. The major work I've found on readers looks at empathy rather than sympathy. When I ask students if they can sympathize with a character, they usually think of it in terms of excusing behavior or approving of the character, but when I ask if they can empathize, I get what I'm looking for.

So, anyway, the point is really about Moore and I'm trying to talk about what he's doing in a particular book and the techniques he uses to increase empathy and whether these are at the expense of aesthetics.