taurus in the 3rd house, The Possessed, research papers..

Why am I so plodding? My reasoning plods along when I write, I spend two paragraphs meticulously proving that something isn't the case and withholding details. I usually get stuck writing the introduction over and over again, trying to make the summary shorter or withhold parts and rearrange it and keep coming back to the same thing. I just spent two paragraphs proving that Dostoevsky's The Possessed is not a novel of action where a nihilist plot is planned, perpetrated with a violent denouement. Nor is it a novel that simply maps or allegorizes ideas depriving them of their force. I keep trying to pull this novel apart and it keeps snapping back like toffee! And the funny thing is, I think I'm pulling in the wrong places, but am unwilling to let go something I've been trying to say for a long time. And it's the beginning, the introduction. I haven't even gotten to the meat of the paper yet or used any details from the text because I'm scared to get into it and believe I don't understand it. This novel is really tough, just when I think I've gotten the bigger picture, I'm flummoxed over details. There is much mystification, characters hint at things, but once I think there's hinting throughout the novel, I see a detail and am proved wrong! It's so weird,

here's a picture of a man eating Karamanmaras dondurma. It just makes me happy. Dondurma can be pulled like taffy too. But yeah, here I am, plodding along. And I thought writing research papers was my thing, but the sentences are long and not full of easy, glib insight like those of literary critics. College English teachers forget to tell us that we have to mature beyond the introduction-body theory and be a little more flexible. I'm trying to be flexible like Joe Louis, be able to spar and hustle (I don't speak boxing and I know Joe Louis is a heavyweight). What is the art of criticism? I don't know. Nobody told me. So I'm going to have to teach myself. Just like the art of teaching. God knows. One thing I know, a teacher can't be an idiot. A teacher can't look moony-eyed at such a book like The Possessed, like me. They've got to feel it out with their heart and mind, with truth seeking integrity. How the hell am I going to teach kids to question or ask why? I fetishize history. I've got all kinds of ignorance and fear of what I don't understand or haven't studied. I fear nihilism, I fear deconstruction, I'm beyond reactionary. Plus I feel like I want to influence them and nudge them and push them and talk into them. I want to set my coat over a puddle for them. And give to them. And you can't do that. You can't do that, claim to want to give to someone you don't know, have no connection with yet. My hypothetical students. How am I going to let them float downstream? Students need to be left to think, to breathe, to grow on their own. And there's all these issues, I read on someone's blog, for instance, that "counter-transference" occurs in the teaching setting. So apparently I have to have the techniques of psychotherapy under my belt. It's going to be a long road. I can't picture what its like when my children are invited on a playdate or go play outside. One minute out of my sight and I imagine myself looking out the window, watching them, as George Carlin said, play with a stick. It's selfish to want to give to something whose needs you don't even know yet, whether student or child. Who are you fulfilling? You. And that's not giving. Giving means that I would have to back away when needed, allow the child the gift of self-development and self-reliance. Who the hell knows. I think about this in my spare time, I think about students. And history. I even imagine giving a sex ed talk to young people and what I would say. I want to be good at what I once thought I was good at and what I've now set out to be good at. Writing and setting out to teach.
Suddenly, I'm far from glib. And run off at the mouth like a leaky faucet (complete with awkward English and folk expressions, apparently). Lately, something is happening that I'm both angry and am talking as if it were to save my life (about completely irrelevant things, of course, astrology, myself), sending people links and information that I hope they like and don't know they want because I can't restrain myself. Something to do with Uranus and Mars in Cancer.. I just keep talking and running off at the mouth, telling too much about myself and getting embarrassed. It is as though my mind is out of breath. Simultaneously, expressing myself is no easier. I'm avoiding expressing myself with this paper right now. And I'm afraid the people I'm talking so much at disapprove of me, don't like me, think I'm silly, even though I don't know them (astrology bloggers). What a dork to talk about myself, I can't help it.
But seriously, the mind has to be nimble. And all of my ignorance and stubbornness with regard to learning that I've really been discovering these four years, I've got to break myself of that. It seems the more I learn about astrology in my confused way, the more ignorant, delusional, self-obsessed (Uranus/Jupiter aspects) I appear.

This picture is from an article on Oblomov written by Gary Shteyngart in the New York Times. Oblomov is the Russian slacker novel.