Subway Diary

When I don’t have much to write, or don’t feel that I have much to write, it’s usually because I haven’t read much the previous day — which is rare, but increasingly common the more hours I put into my day job. It’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which my reading time, my free leisure time, gradually shrinks away to nothing. Certainly, my manager at work, and certainly yours, have very little interest in saving time for us think, write, and feel. Certainly, it would never cross their mind to save time for that — and it probably hasn’t crossed yours.

I had the terrible — terrible to me — thought that I have turned to theater and in this case, blogging, because these are more digestible forms of discourse than poetry or fiction, which I began my literary ‘career’ with; that, cognitively, I’m writing or have written, stuff that no one has the time or the muscles for. Whatever little scraps of money I make from my writing are more likely to come from these more public scribbles than from the work I truly invest my powers in: the writing that takes years; the dense, ‘experimental’ (god forbid), the modernist.

I’m not complaining — just observing. American life is structured to defeat leisure, reflection — which are the component fuels of literature (plain and simple).

I enjoy writing my ‘Subway Diary’ partly because it’s a way of intervening, of thinking about my thinking, or thinking about my writing as an extension of the environment my brain is literally in. It’s ‘meta-cognition’ (a lovely and misunderstood buzzword) — but in…