A year of good .... reading AHEAD - revisiting my New Year's resolutions

Happy 2012!  Blogging vacations stave in my writing.  Last year, to cooper the writing barrel,* I uncharacteristically resorted to New Year’s resolutions.  What would happen if I revisited them?

1. “I vow not to write bad prose this year.”  What was I thinking.  See two resolutions down for the grisly results.  I remind myself that resolutions are aspirational.  I did what I could.  This resolution is promoted to 2012.

2.  “I’ll read Middlemarch.”  And I did.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles advances to the #1 pre-20th century British literature most-famous-book-I-ain’t-read slot.  For some reason, this does not irritate me as much as not knowing Middlemarch; nor does my lack of significant Zola, or the Henry James perplex.  The resolution served its purpose and is retired.

3.  “Finish fewer books.”  Meaning not what I wrote but:  abandon more books without finishing them.  Accomplished, although a disadvantage of the practice is that I have trouble remembering exactly which books I abandoned.  My memory palace is built for completed books, it seems.  Promote this one, too.  Abandon even more books.  Abandon even better books.

4.  “Write about music more.”  Jane Austen’s songbook.  A passion based on Hans Christian Andersen.  Massenet’s Thaïs.  I actually wrote, and deleted, an entire additional piece about Thaïs, tracing the musical motifs, which was valuable to write and deadly to read.

I wonder why more people do not write posts like these.  The key, for someone like me with only basic technical knowledge, is to write about music that has a text.  The connections between opera and literature are particularly rich.  Opera is just theater.

So more of this, more, more!  Something about Richard Wagner, maybe, or Charles Ives, The Concord Sonata, say.  What else would be fun?

5.  “Write shorter posts.”  Another triumph!  This is turning into one of those humblebrags.  I have been aiming at 500 words and staying under 600 when I want.  Going over when I want, too, but that has been rare.

The great advantage of writing a serial is that I can advance the beginning of an idea and receive feedback, spurs, corrections, and taunts, often from comments, always from myself, which may well improve the next day’s writing.  One decent idea at a time, that’s enough writing for a sitting.

Last year’s resolutions post was exactly 500 words long (that is just a regular old brag).

Tomorrow: plans.

The Federal Art Project poster atop the post is borrowed from the Library of Congress.  It depicts, with uncanny precision, the way I bring books home from my own library during the long winter.

*  This metaphor is terrible.  The attempt to use a more original, vivid verb in place of “hurt” is not by itself so bad, but once I had used it I felt the need to continue the conceit, because I had now conjured the smashed barrel, and, well, the wreckage you can see for yourself.  And thus, I demonstrate what vacations do to my writing.