The most obvious consistency of my posts, from week to week, is how reckless they are. Not in the sense that they’re the posts of a renegade bucking against the establishment; more in the sense that “this-is-barely-a-draft-and-I-haven’t-yet-come-to-a-conclusion.” It’s apparent that the posts were written in the last couple of hours before ten each Wednesday. It’s not that the writing is poor; it’s just that the phrasing is sometimes awkward, the examples can be unclear, and meaning is much less definitive than it seemed on first glance. These are the kind of things you can’t see until you put writing away—for a day at least—before looking at it again.

My weakness is also my code, however. I often exalt the act of eleventh-hour writing in my posts, either explicitly or implicitly. In “Simulated Bomb Defusal,” my post from week 3, I discussed Linkon’s idea of doing away with the final paper in research courses. I demurred because I thought it a better idea to combat the flaws of the research paper—painfully narrow focus, artificial use of sources, erroneous manipulation of theories—with unreasonable time constraints. Giving the student less than a week to write a first draft diminishes the possibility of being able to self-sabotage yourself. It was a dramatic retelling of the writer mythos, where the writer is less a scholar engaging in a methodical process than the hero of a contrived Hollywood blockbuster, finishing his or her work at the razor’s edge of world-threatening doom.

My tendency toward eleventh-hour exaltation can be found in week 4 as well, where I discussed Crosman’s “making meaning” dynamic. However, I began to care less about the possible evolution of specious interpretation and more about creating an amusing example of it (Wordsworth’s ode to zombies). The very thing I warned about in the post happened in the post: more thought was put into what the piece could mean than what it actually did mean. The same thing happens in the subsequent week when I discuss scenes from “The Simpsons” as a lens for the actions of Wilner’s resistant students. Not that the comparison isn’t arguably apt, but it’s trying to be self-consciously irreverent in a way that misses the point: meaning of the readings is understood, but not necessarily responded to.

The first post is somewhat different; it’s overly technical and formal, for a variety of reasons: I’m in my element (the teaching of athletics), and I’m assuming upon the reader’s understanding of certain aspects of swimming that are second nature to me but not necessarily to them; it’s the first post of the class and I’m unavoidably wary about what is expected; and also, it’s just not very good.

A specific conclusion I can come to is that these are perfectly viable rough drafts that require further revision. More often than not I discuss action–how one writes, how one swims, how one thinks— as opposed to theory. This is a side effect of the last-minute process; everything becomes less about constructing theoretically sound interpretations than about creating memorable ruminations upon how that theory is used. Memorable is good. Visceral examples are also useful. But, as the “Simulated Bomb Defusal” post intimated, they are useful more as starting points that undermine stiff writing. The ideas should be flexible and vivid, leading off in a number of directions; however, a variety of open paths leads to the same caveat inherent in reader-response theory: if any reading or interpretation is possible, then pretty soon none of them mean anything, since none of them carry any weight.

In short, I need to revise. This post too.

-Matt