Obsession and Laziness

Monday saw me entering in the final grades for three of my four classes.  I won't receive the final assignment for my fourth class until tomorrow.  So, what to do with today.  Well, that's were obsession and laziness come into play.

A former mentor of mine once told me that the writing life when viewed from the outside will look like "sheer idleness".  In some ways, he was right.  After getting Shea dressed and ready for school, I returned home to a stack of graphic novels I need to read for my "Graphic Novel as Literature" course.  I've read three in the space of the day.  I turned on the electric blanket in the bedroom, crawled back into bed, and read, read, read. 

The diversity of the materials kept me reading for hours on end.  "Ghost World" by Daniel Clowes and its angsty teenage discourse kept me going for the first hour or so, but I had to put it aside.  It won't make the syllabus.  "Asterios Polyp" by Daniel Mazzucchelli was a fascinating voyage into the life and mind of a 50-something retired architecture teacher where he puzzled over the nature of duality.  It had images ripped from Dante's "Inferno" and asked the question: What is the opposite of love?  Hate?  Or indifference?  Not exactly your flights and tights expectation from the medium.  It's a lovely story.

I poured over graphic novels and essays about graphic novels.  I'm finding that my hobby, my personal obsession with the form, actually has a place in academia.  It's new-ish and not entirely accepted, but it is there and I might have found my specialty.  I love hybrid forms, chocolate in my peanut butter, and the examination of the tension between image and text gets me excited.  I've come up with the titles for two academic papers already.  The titles influence the content and I'm interested to see how these ideas play out over the course of a term.

Although the biggest victory today was the nap.  In reading the graphic novels, I fell asleep with the book open on my chest.  I don't remember deciding to nap, but rather was enveloped by it, surprised by it, and found the dream both restful and dreamless.  When I awoke, the book was still open on my chest and I reentered the narrative dream of Asterios.  Dreaming while awake, and dreamless while sleeping, I had a good day.