Restless with not enough occupation I peck around for kernels to engage my focus. Headless. After a weekend of Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (the horrible substitute class) and reading James Shapiro’s “Shakespeare and the Jews,” I try to return to my novel. 

Always haunted by language’s layers as I try to explain to my friend after reading his brilliant analysis of sex in Titus Andronicus coupled with my own search for a word to link two thoughts in a sentence sends me in search of Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness.” Needless to say I get distracted while looking for the page in contents by another essay “Who is Speaking,” that relates in my mind to my comment on friend’s presentation paper:

A brilliant paper marred by contemporary culturally sexual perspectives proposed by the use of “bawdy” and “tawdry” that impose claustrophobic sexual values onto Shakespeare and by association Woolf’s androgynous openness. Will anyone else notice? I am just very picky about language. I refer to the dictionary constantly in my own writing. Lydia Davis does the same. Besides bawdy and tawdry are not worthy of you.

 Hejinian writes:

“To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed, worldiness  is an essential feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not just a theory of techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of language, worldiness is essential to poetics” (The Language of Inquiry 31).

Attentiveness to language is crucial to my writing. Writing has the luxury of revision, returning to the page over and over to contemplate meaning, speech is reactive, no matter the level of awareness things culturally rooted in the mind slip off the tongue. If the page allows more thought what is the responsibility of the writer?