It’s now been a little less than two months since we’ve moved back to Brooklyn, and while I deeply miss living right by the ocean in Maine, I love having returned to the epicenter of a global metropolis. I feel like I’ve experienced much more in the past few weeks than I have in years, just in terms of culture—queer opera and movies and an antizionist Purim festival, among other things. I feel a bit spoiled for choice in terms of what to write about, so I figure I’ll spend some time on how I actually decide what I want to write about in the first place.
Everything is research, is the thing. It all ends up in one of my notebooks, one way or another.
This past winter, I purchased a course bundle on sale from the wonderful
and I’ve recently been watching the recording of their class, The People’s Research. It’s really been helping me bridge the divide I’ve felt sometimes between my former academic research practice and my creative process. Last time I wrote to you I talked about the importance of finding the stakes of your argument. Now I’d like to think through the process of getting there, or even better, getting lost along the way and doing something completely different.When I say “everything is research,” I mean that you don’t need to have a uniquely wild or cosmopolitan life in order to draw from it in your creative practice. Going to the corner bodega is research. Washing the dishes is research. Noticing the tree outside your living room window budding is research.
Research can be anything and everything that informs the way you live, think, behave, talk, and/or create. Personally, I tend to love reading a lot of academic writing; that which is frequently known as “theory.” It’s usually easy to recognize this kind of reading as research because that’s generally what the term connotes in literary circles—but I don’t think that the concept of research should be limited solely to academia.
What might become possible to think through if we consider the ways we live as research? Sometimes the distinct textures of light and shadow cast by a lamp can be part of the research that leads to a poem. I know I’m often inspired by something the foundational queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once said about how the best theory is the one where “the pressure of application runs in both directions.” How might the textures of light and shadow, to go with the above example, enable us to write more incisively and to see more clearly?
Despite having once been in graduate school for seven consecutive years, until recently I didn’t have much of a cohesive note taking practice. Sure, I scribbled things in the margins occasionally, but my reading notes generally consisted of underlining important passages in the text. As you might imagine, this halfhearted practice did not really lend itself to writing as there was honestly nothing to build from. While preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams, I did manage to write summaries and a few questions related to many of the texts I was reading; nevertheless the practice of note taking more broadly seemed somehow beyond my reach.
I suspect now that this was, at least in part, a kind of internalized shame response—I didn’t think that I had anything worth saying, and particularly nothing on the canonical texts I read in my program. What could I possibly have to say to Barbara Johnson’s masterful reading of Lacan vs Derrida on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”? If I could tell my past self anything, I would tell him to take notes, no matter how insubstantial the thoughts behind them. Because, and here’s the thing about any kind of research—by which I mean any form of examining the world—your instincts are valuable.
Some of the most helpful advice I’ve read on this subject has been from Kyla Wazana Tompkins in her essay on teaching theory, “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know.” She writes:
Think about the pieces of the text, phrases, expressions, moments that tweak your instincts, that bother and harass you. These intuitions and “feelings” are the ends of intellectual threads that you may want to excavate.
Linger over passages that are unclear or that strike you as particularly helpful or that don’t jar well with you. Why do those passages set off your instincts?
While specific to the density of theoretical reading you may find in academia, Tompkins’ advice seems to me to be beneficial for all manner of research. Say you’re watching a movie for the first time. What particularly strikes you; what stands out to you? What choices “set off your instincts” and what do you think might be underneath those responses?
Write it down. I mean that literally. Write it all down1.
These days, when I take notes on a piece of writing, I let everything onto the page, no matter how ridiculous it may seem. Even your seemingly dumbest thoughts may be inspired by key points in the text (or other cultural object) that you can work through.
A few more suggestions, particularly if you’re working on a difficult object—by which I mean, something that feels impenetrable; something where you can’t seem to find a foothold. For me that’s usually abstract art, dense theory, or experimental poetry:
Treat the author/creator as someone you can just have an open and curious conversation with. Yes, even if they’re famous/brilliant/untouchable. Especially then.
Try translating the text (or, for visual art, what you’re seeing) into your own words, and if you’re reading a dense passage, keep asking what and how a phrase follows from the prior phrase (trace the writer’s ideas through the piece). You will fuck it up! Don’t be afraid to fuck it up. Remember, every translation/interpretation loses something from the original, but it also gains something. And even a misreading can be fruitful.
Keep asking questions and phrase all possible answers as questions too, to help your mind stay open to the possibilities. This will help you take the concepts into your own bodymind and transmute them into something helpful for you.
Lastly, remember this quote from Hélène Cixous on translation: “It’s an act of reception—then you share a meal…We approach the same object, desire, fear, with different languages and different energies. But we meet. We exchange. We guess. That’s what we do with everything.”
We share a meal. We meet, exchange, guess.
Anything and everything can be your inspiration.
or draw it, sing it, dance it out, etc. Whatever helps you express and remember!