Resolutions really should be grand, sweeping in scale. They need to embrace large scale effort, whether physical or psychic, and they need a point or purpose—even if the point is widely viewed as trivial. Resolutions should be pronounced as though they were forged on a mountain top, chipped into gleaming and everlasting stone.
The more daunting the resolution — I want to run 30 marathons in 2011, for example — the better. Because when I wake up in March and realize that I will not come close to keeping them, they’d better represent monumental failures. I know in advance that I will not keep them, so why fail at trivial matters — e.g., I will stop smoking this year. For failure to excite us truly, we need to fail on a grand scale. If I want to climb Mt. Everest — because of course it’s there — then I want to climb the world’s tallest peak without benefit of canned oxygen; that’s just the way it is.
That said, here are my 2011 resolutions as they pertain to the written word:
Read Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, or In Search of Lost Time. In fact, read it twice, all seven volumes stuffed with approximately 1.5 million words. I think it was Truman Capote who said that reading Proust was like being hit by a tidal wave. If words were water, Lost Time would represent at least a couple of tidal waves. Also: be prepared to summarize its basic ideas. Note: try to squeeze in War and Peace, while I’m at it — just for the hell of it.
Write the following essays and have them published in the Journal for the American Medical Association (JAMA): “A Perverse Theory of Sleeplessness in the Fiction of James Joyce”; “Wallace Stevens and the Uninsured Mind”; and “Implications for Parkinson’s Sufferers in Ginsberg’s Late Poetry.” As a result, let these pieces be the impetus for JAMA to create a new award, in my name — the SF Award for Prolific Publication.
Article comments
1 - Victor Lana
This is a commendable list or resolutions. I would probably just choose one of these, and that would be the Faulkner one. I would invariably get stuck on Absalom, Abasolm! in March and by summer be mired in Light in August, but it would be worth it just to get that far.
Happy New Year!