Mac Attack

Kinky Friedman? Not so much.

2009-01-25T09:26:00.004-06:00

I'm trying to make my way through a Friedman novel, Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned. It's about a novelist who, for 7 years, can't write, until he meets a very attractive woman and strange man, probably a con artist team, who suck him into their twisted orbit and provide him with writing fodder.

I'm having trouble getting through the novel. First of all, there's something embarrassing and vaguely incestuous about writer main characters who write/talk for a quarter of the novel about the act--or implications of the act--of writing. Second of all, Friedman, who I remember as amusing, isn't very amusing in this novel. The humor level is low. Third, there doesn't seem to be a plot that I can discern. I want to put this novel down and forget about it. And it's a library book, too, so there's nothing material at stake--no cognitive dissonance to deal with.

But the good girl in me, the dutiful daughter, who started the novel, thinks she needs to finish it.
Why can't that dutiful daughter take over when I need to write something of my own?

I've got a Charlaine Harris Shakespeare novel from the same library haul I could read instead, and I can snack on a Harris novel with the same voracious focus I apply to a bowl of Doritos. Plus, I've got two more of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (which I actually purchased) waiting for me.

And a new semester begins for me tomorrow, which means that this is the last uncluttered reading afternoon left to me for three months. Why am I wasting my time on Kinky?

Decided: Two Birds will be dumped. Damn the good girl and her literary monogamy. I'm tapping into my inner slut.

Query

2008-12-13T11:45:00.003-06:00

I'm reading Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke right now, about 5o pages in. I'm not sure what to think.

Has anyone out there read it? What's it about? Where's it going? Who's it for? I find it hard to pay attention while I'm reading and don't know the source of that ADD. The characters are reasonably vivid and well drawn. Perhaps there are too many of them to keep track? In some of the drinking/dialogue scenes, I feel as confused as I do when I (foolishly) attend Happy Hours on Fridays at the local bar.

Since some of the novel is set in the Philippine jungles, I'm intrigued. Lizzie and I may be spending June-October of 2009 in Manila (the chances are about 90% right now, actually).

Hurry Down Sunshine

2008-11-19T20:32:00.003-06:00

I just finished reading a memoir by Michael Greenberg, Hurry Down Sunshine. His 15 year old daughter, in the summer before her sophomore year in high school, literally loses her mind, tumbling down a manic rabbit hole and ending up in the psychiatric ward.

The book is an examination of mental illness, particularly how it changes not only the patient but her entire family, unraveling the links between each member, making each question who he or she is, what reality means, or normal, and who's responsible for the unbearable state of affairs they all find themselves in. The writing is eloquent, searching, and bald (where it needs to be). Greenberg doesn't make any apologies for his blindness, for the cruelty that is--briefly--unleashed in him as the grieving father. After all, he's lost the daughter he thought he knew, and she's been replaced with an unstable model. Again and again, he describes the girl looking back at him in the hospital, and then at home afterward, as an alien.

The book both fascinates and horrifies me. More than anything, it scares the shit out of me. As soon as I closed the book, I had to come here and write this, as if to vomit it all out of me. Otherwise, I'm afraid I won't be able to go to sleep tonight. I'll lie in bed and my thoughts will swirl around the inside of my skull.

I'm frightened because I've got an aunt who's schizophrenic--and her grandmother was, it turns out, not dead as everyone in the family thought but, instead, institutionalized for decades with unspecified "psychosis." I'm frightened because Dave's mother is bipolar. I'm frightened because my grandfather killed himself. I'm out of the woods, and so is Dave. We've made it this far with nothing more than the usual seasonal blues, the dips in the road of middle age, the grinding depressions of daily life as adults in the social machine. But what about our darling girl?

She's never been a phlegmatic child. She's always been a bit dramatic, a girl given to swings of enthusiasm and flights of fancy about herself. Her visions of her own prowess are not grandiose but I wouldn't call them realistic, either. "My goal is to do gymnastics in the Olympics," she announced, after a few years of lackluster YWCA courses on the balance beam, the shabby horse. Later, "Maybe I'll be President," she said. "Or a veterinarian. I can't decide." Is this the normal range of motion for a somewhat precocious only child with indulgent academic parents?

Her room is an ungodly mess. When I bothered to clean it, she'd come home and go ballistic, screaming under her breath, muttering, and flinging things. She refused to throw a single thing away. "I need that," she'd say, piling on top of another piece of flotsam: wrappers from Halloween candies, pieces of paper with a few scribbles, bits of broken plastic.

"This is not normal," I said, one day. "I worry about you."

And that brought her up short. She was about six, I think, and her cheeks flushed as she looked back at me. "What do you mean?" she wondered.

"I mean that it's not normal to want to keep everything," I said, "or to get so upset about throwing anything away. There are people who are sick, who can't throw a single thing away. And I guess that I worry that you might be sick like that."

"I'm not sick," she said, hands on her hips. "I just know what I like. And I like my room the way it is."

After reading Greenberg's book, I'm a little heartened. Lizzie, if anything, is a neurotic like her parents, more intent on keeping control of her domain (and keeping us out of it) than attached to the flotsam of her rambunctious experience or her rough and tumble imagination. She's no longer attached to the idea of the Olympics. Her dreams seem more realistic and manageable. She's not convinced that children are natural geniuses or that she's got the divine news we all need to hear--news we'll lock her up to deny.

What I did learn from Greenberg is pretty simple--as parents, we have to endure whatever our children (and life) throw us, day to day. And we have to be kind to them, to love them as they are, in each moment. Further, we have to love ourselves in the same way.

A Trifecta

2008-11-15T14:10:00.004-06:00

I'm reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, and it's making me think a lot about gender roles, Islamism, other modes of living/being, war, family, marriage, motherhood, and love. It's quite well written--vivid, evocative, sometimes painfully so.

I know that I bring distrust, anger and pre-judgment to this novelist's world because I assume that the society he writes about denigrates the female, that its violence is often leveled against the woman, and that its religion is suffocating. I assume these things, however, because of my ignorance. I know very little about Afghanistan, its history, its culture, its religion.

Of course, Hosseini writes his novel to expose the injustices (for men and women) in this world; his point of view, in other words, is my point of view. In that way, I trust his narrative eye, am appalled where I need to be appalled, and hopeful where he allows me to be.

In a week or so, we'll begin to discuss the novel in my senior level creative writing seminar, and I'm looking forward to the students' input. At the same time, I have no idea what they'll say about the quality of the writing, the point of view, or the themes the novel takes up. One of the students--a young man who distinguishes himself for his love of magical realism and his somewhat effete demeanor during class discussions--has already announced that he "hated" The Kite Runner (a novel I loved). Gee, I thought, when he dropped that little tidbit into the middle of a discussion, and here I assumed you'd like a novel that comes from a place other than the boring kitchen-sink American realism you've been excoriating for most of the semester.

*

I'm in the middle of a book of poems by Philip Schultz, Failure, and I'm a bit miffed with it so far. The poems are certainly accessible, and most of them deal with the title theme, but I don't know why the book was awarded a National Book Award. Though the poems are well written, they are curiously flat, and devoid (at least for me) of any real insight into the nature of depression, failure, grief, or the lack of human connection the poet seems to find in poem after poem. Perhaps what I'm noticing is a self fulfilling prophecy, or something like the imitative fallacy: write about failure, and your work is ultimately just that, a failure.

*

In the spirit of multi-tasking, I'm also reading a self-help offering: The Mindful Way Through Depression (Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn). I chose the book for its last author; Jon Kabat-Zinn helped me to get through the worst years in Michigan, when I was on the job market for three years, a new mother, and all three of us were shoved into a booger-box 2-bedroom apartment with two very hairy cats. Now that the winter months in Green Bay are nearly pressing down on us again, I thought I'd try to get a leg-up on the depression and remind myself how to live more mindfully.

So far, I've learned that depression becomes a habit of mind. In other words, after suffering a depression (usually in response to some external event), we--or our minds--become more habituated to depression. Negative thoughts, small irritants, lead us down familiar pathways, spiraling inward (or downward) into more serious depression. We begin to fret, we feel the old depression coming on, and we tell ourselves Stop that, make yourself better, which itself is a negative thought. So, the authors tell me, we need to figure out how to interrupt that pattern, how to get our minds off the fretting circle it makes between past and future, and back to the present moment. We need to do less "doing" and more "being."

Funny, and ironic: as I read these ideas, I think with one part of my brain that, yes, this makes sense, and with another part of my brain, shit, this is all your fault again, isn't it? I will try to meditate, I know I will, and I also know that I'll beat myself up over it (mentally) for a while,
"doing" it wrong.

It's Odd

2008-11-12T08:13:00.002-06:00

I just got a response on something I wrote last year. It's like a voice coming from the past, making me revisit, reread what I wrote, which is funny because what I wrote had to do with The Time Traveler's Wife.

While I was reading, and thinking, it occurred to me that I liked the blue background of my blogspot set up. So why did I stop writing here?

It might have had something to do with the split attention--writing here, writing in livejournal.com. Livejournal is my default, I guess. Plus, I can lock it (heh) when I want to say something incendiary.

Wait. I'm always blowing things up. In fact, (at least in the past), to blow things up is one of my prime motivations.

So that can't be the real reason.

I said when I made the split--the split between the nitty gritty details of my personal life, such as they are, and the somewhat mundane details of my intellectual life--that I needed to keep spheres separate. Facebook, I declared, for the teaching stuff. Livejournal for the ranting about hemorrhoids, children, pets, husbands, grocery shopping, etcetera. Blogspot for the heady musings about books and written babies (so what if most of them are miscarriages or family planning non-events?).

Maybe I haven't had an intellectual life for the last year and a half. That's a possibility.

I have been reading, though, and rather voraciously. I've become, too, a slattern in my reading habits, picking books up, reading half way, a chapter or two, even to the last 20 pages, and then letting plots, characters, nonfiction investigations, and poets go. I've been reading trash, and high art, and creative nonfiction, and letters, and blogs, and online journals, the New York Times Sunday edition...

So I suppose I have had an intellectual life of some sort--a slutty life, but a life nonetheless.

Maybe the real reason I haven't been here is something I can only explore in the locked environment of Livejournal. Maybe it has something to do with grief, depression, loss, denial.

I'm dipping into a variety of books right now--sort of the Old Country buffet of reading. Yesterday, I slipped for a twenty minute block into Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story, in preparation for teaching a creative nonfiction workshop. She says she had to create a persona for herself in order to write personal nonfiction (something approaching memoir but not there yet). She says she's discovered that it's crucial to find this person, this self, the "who" talking in the essay or book, in order to tackle a subject with focus and detail and oomph. "I longed each day to meet up again with her," Gornick writes, "this other one telling the story that I alone--in my everyday person--would not have been able to tell."

Yeah. Maybe I've lost that person, the one who used to write this blog with such aplomb, the one who loves to drop bombs for the sheer sake of hearing the weeeeee-thump and then seeing the pieces rain down.

Or it could be that I'm just lazy.

Time to Go

2007-07-14T10:14:00.001-06:00

Tomorrow, Lizzie and I will hop on a plane and end up in Pittsburgh, PA, where Mom lives. We'll meet her and niece Abby, 4, who is staying with her for a few days while her mom, my sister, Erica, attends a veterinary conference in Washington, DC. Should be good times.

That is, as long as Lizzie and Abby manage to arrange a princess diva detante. Both of them are strong willed, imaginative only children who like to be the center of their own self created dramas. The rest of us are bit parts in the pagents of their lives. Last time we visited Erica and her family, last Christmas, Lizzie complained (after only an hour or two) that Abby was driving her crazy with her (then) 3-year-old demands. Suck it up, we told her. You don't remember how you were when you were that age, but we certainly do. And isn't payback a bitch?

This will be Abby's first time away from home without Mommy, too, so we need to be extra solicitous. "Let's go through all the books you have that you've outgrown and see if there are any princess numbers we can take with us to Grandma's," I suggested, casual, breezy, yesterday.

Lizzie shrugged. She hates to divest herself of anything. Even the wrappers from old suckers still litter her shelves--treasures, she proclaims. Once, when she was 5 or so, I found myself saying, "Lizzie, this scares me. This is not normal." But that's another story.

Today, I dredged up a Borders giftcard Erica gave me for that last Christmas in Boston and announced that we should go to the mall today and use it, get some books for the trip.

"Great," Lizzie said. "I'll get a Roald Dahl book and maybe we can get a few princess books as well."

Nice. Deft. That's a quality diva move there--spending MY giftcard on another princess because the original princess is too stingy or abnormal to get rid of her old books.

So tomorrow we fly off with our new books, whatever they happen to be, and two suitcases, and two carry ons, and the best of intentions. Wish us luck.

What I Want

2007-07-10T09:39:00.002-06:00

I have a burning need to write something here, to be in the middle of an imaginary conversation--no, scratch that, an imaginary lecture, where I am holding forth and you are listening with baited breath (whatever that means), nodding in all the right places, giving me a 100 watt smile, and once in a while leaning forward to grab my hands and give them a squeeze.

I have a burning need to be in the middle of this imaginary holding forth, and for there to be a bottle of wine--no, make that two bottles of red wine--on the table between us. I want this conversation to take place in Arizona, at a kitchen table, at the battered, round kitchen table in my old 4 room rented house on Santa Barbara, next to the window that overlooks the raggedy ass shed in front of the abandoned dog run. I want the baked weeds cracking the red brown dirt to overhear our sudden laughter. I want it to be the summer, to know that outside it's 112 degrees and inside, where we are, it's about 90, but it feels cool compared to the sizzle of the sun on our skin where there's no shade. I want to say, "Shit, living here is like living in a nuclear blast," and I want you to laugh and agree.

I want to gossip about people we know, critique their conversations, their hair cuts, their clothing, their style of interaction, their inability to sustain human relationships past the superficial level, their sociopathic love of ideas and distrust of emotions. I want to see and name all the ways in which we are superior to them and their petty, intellectual concerns. I want us to gaze into each other's eyes with the puffed up sense that we are, indeed, the chosen. That we are special. We belong to the world in a crucial and identifiable way.

I want to be 20-something, and poor, and maybe just married. Not pregnant yet, certainly. Still in the prime of my physical life. Let me be flush with health and desire. Give me a poem or two in the mental hopper. A great idea for a short story and the time to write it. Throw in the two cats, but make them, again, spend most of their time outside, stalking the birds dumb enough to light on the starved ornamental orange trees in the broken tubs outside the front windows. I'll take the two boy cats instead of the two girl cats of those long ago years--the boy cats are just more grateful for me. They run at me with feline glee lighting their eyes, they rub their faces all over my legs, all over my cheeks, they bump me from all angles, trying to get their scent into me. They remind me that I'm special, that they belong to me in a crucial and identifiable way. The girl cats never did that; they reminded me that I was tangential, but necessary. That I was a loud, large feeding machine.

Let's sit at the kitchen table and let me talk your ear off. Let me work myself up into an inspired rant. Let me make new combinations of metaphor and insult sing through my catalogue of real and imagined abuses in our petty academic world, where we agonize over essays on William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop while small time mobsters turn on the ignition in their Caddies and blow themselves sky high, right outside the Ventana Canyon resort. Let me go on and on about this small life with the fervor of a true believer in my reality, in my fleshy pleasures, while you smile and nod and laugh in all the right places.

Let me think about how much I love you, sitting there, across from me, and how much I love this life, all its promises, all its small and sometimes delicious pleasures, and disappointments, and half-finished projects, as the afternoon falls down and the light across the table turns red, then purple, and the ceiling fan ticks the minutes away, pushing cooler night air across our faces.

New Purchases

2007-07-05T18:07:00.001-06:00

Lizzie's new bed arrived today--a full size canopy bed. Only when we picked the bed in the store, it didn't have the canopy attached. It was just a handsome four poster dealie-o.

The WG&R men arrived at 8:45 in the 8-12 window and marched into Lizzie's cleared bedroom. We heard them muttering to each other while we played Othello in the dining room. Banging and a bit of clanging.

"Well," said the bearded one, a small man who reminded me of a bit part in a Shakespeare drama, all ferrety goodness, "it's going to be .... in there."

"Excuse me?"

"It's going to be a tight fit in there, a little snug," he said. "That dresser."

They were all done. Ferret-man whipped out a thick stack of papers. "You'll need to sign this."

I looked at the slot for my signature, next to the fine print: "I have examined my purchase and everything has been installed satisfactorily."

"I better go in there and make sure," I half-joked, "before I sign."

The bed sucks up all the available space in the small bedroom. The dresser, up against a corner, allows Lizzie only 3 inches between bed and drawers. "Ooo," I said. "We'll have to rearrange."

But what the ------? The bed looked just as it did in the showroom, with the addition of a fugly white metal arched canopy frame, one of the rods slightly bent. "It comes with a canopy?"

"Yep." The guy waved the stack of papers at me. "See? You paid for it."

Indeed. 60.00 for the fugly hardware. The four poster bed itself, even with the flower applique on headboard and footboard, could be considered tasteful. Topped with the empty metal canopy frame, however, it reminded me of the rickety daybed I put in my grad school apartment living room, pretending to have a couch. Whenever we sat on it, it jingled and clanked, saying "cheap," saying "low rent."

After the WG&R men left, Lizzie and I hopped into the car and tore over to Linens and More. Of course they'd have a canopy topper.

Nope--just mosquito netting on cheap plastic hula hoops.

Back home, I called WG&R to see about the situation. The man who sold us the furniture, JW, didn't pick up his extension. I dialed 0# to speak to a customer service operator. "Hm," he said, "I don't think we sell the beds with the tops themselves. Just the metal frames. Let me call the store."

I sat on hold for a while. "I can't get anyone to pick up at the store," he said, finally. "It must be busy today. We're having a sale. But my wife was looking for one of those and I think she found it at Shopko. Or Target."

"Thanks," I said, and called Target. They had one full sized canopy left for 24.95, a Hello Kitty number. Oooo, I said, please hold that for me.

Shopko didn't have anything but the mesh hula hoops, for 9.95, marked down from 34.95.

We drove to Target and visited Guest Services. No, the canopy wasn't there yet. We waited while someone ran it up from the back of the store.

Only to discover that it was a hula hoop mesh number with a gaudy circus tent action on top, festooned with Hello Kitty advertising. Bleah.

Thinking like Whiz Mom in a Pinch, I toured the curtain and sheet section with Lizzie. "Look," I said, "We could get some of these sheer curtains and drape them over the top of the frame. What do you think?"

Lizzie shook her head. No. Ugh. Not what she wanted.

"Okay. How about draping a sheet over it?"

That was more up her alley. We picked out a full sized white flat sheet, on sale for 7.99 (back to college sale).

Back home, we heated chicken nuggets in the toaster oven and enjoyed our brand new airconditioning unit, which for 3000.00 delivers an even 75 degree coolness. I had a quesadilla or two. Willow followed me from stove to table, nosing me in the rear hopefully. Perhaps she thought she'd joggle a piece of ham or cheese out of my loose grip. Ha!

The sheet looks okay on the frame. I pinned it to each of the four corners with invisible safety pins. "Hey," I said, "I could use ribbons or something to pull this up," I pinched the middle of the swag hanging down, "and make it look really cool."

Lizzie shook her head. "I think it looks good the way it is," she said.

Whatever. Turns out we can order an arched full size canopy top, custom measured to order, on the internet. It will only cost us another 79.00 plus shipping and handling.

Golden.

Now I'm heading over to the hairdresser's for a color job. Actually, I'm sick of my hair touching my face and fantasize about having him whack it off just under my ears. But that would negate the whole growing-the-hair-out-as-long-as-I-can-ge

t-it thing. Plus, just the color will be over 100.00.

In preparation for that, I have to coax Willow out of the living room (she's crashed out here on my feet) and into her crate. I've already crated her twice this morning--once for the delivery and then again for the shopping trips--and have used the doggie biscuits and the Kong loaded with soft cheese. What's left for her?

Wish me luck.

Diary of a Mod/Mad Housewife

2007-07-02T12:36:00.001-06:00

6:45 AM

Woke from vaguely troubled dreams to Bowling for Soup singing "you could be my next ex-girlfriend."

7:00 AM

Walked Willow up the street. She sat on Brad and Diane's lawn and looked longing at their windows. She pooped on their neighbor's strip of lawny weeds, the strip near the street. I scooped it up into my blue plastic bag and dangled it, odiferous, like a testes sack all the way back.

7:30 AM

Finished a lemon poppy seed muffin and reheated coffee blasted with 2% milk. Read a New York Times Sunday Styles article, "The Shelf Life of Bliss," 3/4 of the way through, long enough to discover that the thrill in any relationship, whether legally married or simply cohabiting, drains out of the bottom by the 3rd year or so. And then it's just slogging thorugh the rest of the years as if through oatmeal, apparently.

Yesterday, Lizzie blithely announced that Brian, of the across the street neighbors, has moved to his brothers. "They hope it's temporary," she chirped.

Dave reached across the truck seat and patted me on the shoulder.

8:00 AM

Crated Willow, read a few pages of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games in the bathroom.

8:15 AM

Went into the basement and worked out. I'm doing interval training, which is supposed to burn more fat. Of course, I'm eating more fat, so it's not working out the way I'd perhaps anticipated. Whatever. (This is my new philosophy. It's like another and similar philosophy that I've been reading in other blogs: meh. As in, "Well, I just spent 6000.00 on a new furnace and airconditioner. Meh.")

While I worked out, I watched two episodes of Alias from season one: the one where Sydney saves her dad from a nefarous guy in Cuba and the one where she learns that her dead mother was a spy for the KGB and was responsible for killing a bunch of "innocent" CIA agents. I saw that latter plot twist coming for miles down the road and congratulated myself for it.

For the last 10 minutes of the second episode, I folded two baskets of clean laundry.

9:30 AM

Cleaned Lizzie's room. We've gotten rid of her bed because we bought her a new one, which is to arrive on Thursday. (Yesterday, when Lizzie announced that Hunter's and Ethan's dad had left his wife slash high school sweetheart just "temporarily," we were en route to deliver the futon couch to a student's house. This futon couch is the last vestige of our graduate school life. I can't say that I'm too sorry to see it go...)

Threw out a few things while Lizzie watched TV on the second floor, where she is sleeping until her new bed arrives: four deflated hot air balloons; a dessicated floral arrangement; various papers.

Pushed her dresser against a different wall. Removed the cork board from the wall where her new headboard will go. Rearranged the pictures and mirrors to accomodate the new location for the cork board. Took the raggedy area rug down to the basement.

Thoroughly vaccumed the hard wood.

10:30 AM

At Lizzie's request, put all the mirrors and wall hangings back in their original places. Determined that the corkboard would have to go to the basement, and that, after the bed arrives, the rug will be vaccumed and returned to its bedroom.

11:00

Vaccumed the dining room. Freaked out about the ugly brown spots on the carpet. Scheduled a cleaning for next week.

11:30 AM

De-crated Willow and asked Lizzie to take her outside to play.

11:35 AM

Took Willow from Lizzie, who announced that she intended to go across the street and play.

11:37 AM

Coaxed Willow down from the 2nd floor. Removed the stuffed rabbit from her mouth and threw it into the stairwell. Shut off the 2nd floor.

11:40 AM

Removed my shoe from Willow's mouth. Coaxed Willow into the kitchen with Gary, the stuffed elephant. Told her that Gary needed some chewing. Closed off the basement and its treasure trove of 1000 stuffed animals.

11:45 AM

Made Willow do a puppy push up (sit, down, sit, stand, down, stand) for part of the dog buscuit she'd been sniffing. She can reach the top of the mobile dishwasher now if she jumps up.

11:47 AM

Told Willow that Gary needed more chewing. On her bed.

11:48 AM

Attached Willow to the leash and took her outside. Told her to go crazy on the holes she's been digging. Our back yard is devastated--looks like a Faulknerian landscape, something the Snopes would be comfortable in. All we need is a big boiling pot and a few hefty women in gaudy ribbons to sit around fanning themselves in the folding chairs.

11:50 AM

Started responding to e-mails. Wrote to Mom. Looked out the window to see Willow pooping at the end of her rope, on the dividing line between our yard and the neighbor's.

Looked out the window to see Willow barking at the back neighbor, Ruby.

Looked out the window to see Willow hip deep in one of her holes, barking at ... me?

12:20 PM

Cleaned up the poop. Swept the dirt from Willow's newest hole back into it. She jumped and barked at the broom.

12:47 PM

I'm inside now, typing this. I've taken some testimonial pictures of some of these events and downloaded them from the camera to the laptop.

I look out the window and see Willow in the flower bed, digging behind the big hosta.

I contemplate killing her.

Instead, I go out and pull her out of the bed. Find a stick. Throw it to the other side of the yard for her to catch. She manages to get a smear of spit-dirt on my arm.

Now she's outside the door, yipping and crying. I look out the window in time to see her run back toward her hole. Along the way, her rope wraps around the bbq grill and, as she dashes away from it, pull it down and over with an impressive clang.

I guess that's my cue to end this and go out there. If I don't respond to your emails in a timely fashion, this is why.

In Memory of Cassandra Voss: A Collection of Her Writing

2007-06-01T10:15:00.001-06:00

Cassandra J. Voss, cherished student, friend, and daughter, passed away in a car accident on May 21, 2007. On earth, Cassandra inspired us all with her loving compassion, her generous, vibrant spirit, and vigorous activism. Truly, Cassandra embodied loving kindness.

A talented dancer, writer, artist, singer, and healer, Cassandra leaves us here with vivid memories. These writings show the range of her intellect and vision.

On Poetry
Cassandra Voss

Mainly, my poetry tends to be confessional. I feel drawn to poets like Plath, who shares her battle between a feminist consciousness, and a desire to be accepted (by society, but also by herself). I write to “kill the angel in the house” so to speak, and yet, I want to preserve the angel. Identifying the line where human’s free will to choose becomes grey, is I believe my strength in creative writing. My goal as a writer is always to bring the reader (and even more so myself) to that edge, that place where you are forced to make a decision, and where you will sit there for hours analyzing the possible ways to jump off the cliff, because you definitely cannot go back now. Finally, a conclusion is made, and through some catharsis you are free to let go.

In the future, I would like to develop my skills in writing about things external to me. I am often times so consumed by self wonder that I forget there is a world worth writing about which exists outside. I would like to experiment with different styles, and push myself to not just write poetry as if I was simply journaling about my day. Becoming more conscious about what I want to share with the world, instead of counting on it coming out of me at random, would be much more reassuring in terms of my creative skill. Yes, creativity is intuitive, but it can also be learned.

Salt on a Wound
Cassandra Voss

I dream of a bird whose body is similar to a peacock,
although it has a slightly longer neck.
Its feathers are green,
like a granny smith apple,
like the kind my mother used to
shake
salt on
to make them sparkle,
and then eat in devouring and passionate bites.
Her tongue absorbing the sour flesh,
down to the heart of the fruit.

The bird is a normal bird, it has
two black eyes
from which to see its way,
and a beak which it uses to speak
out of, and take in
its nourishment.
It differs however in its ability to fly,
for the poor creature has but one wing.

So it drowns in the air,
shrieking and yelping and
shaking
Its head over its green body,
just like my mother’s salt shaker
shaking
salt over
her granny smith apples
to make them sparkle.

I gasp, that I might be able to save the heart creature.
But in its desperation it
loses
its sight,
and springs through the window of the house.
Its feathers and flesh
cut by the separation of
glass, and old wood.

Splintering sound echoes,
and the bird is shaking on the floor of the room.
I think it dead, yet the echo of the break is alive, and the
shaking
of the bird, is just like
my mother’s hand
shaking
salt
on her granny smith apples
to make them sparkle.

But then, miraculously, or perhaps, in masochism,
the bird gets up and flies back out the same window
just to fall again.
This time, on the cold snake scale pavement, still
shaking.

I realize now that the bird will not die,
That in fact it is salvageable.

The bird’s open wounds bleed onto its sparkling green feathers,
just like the open wound on the skin of my mother’s
granny smith apples sparkle from the salt
she herself has
shaken
on.

Don't Worry. I'm not Sleeping Here Tonight.

Cassandra Voss

I feel as though I may snap. Like Charlotte, I may begin creeping around on the ground. It gives a whole new meaning to the color yellow—which I’ve been wearing to help my will center. It’s not helping though. Sometimes I’m just lonely. Sometimes I just want to be alone. What does it mean if I tell her that she has the cutest face when I used to say that you had the cutest face? Fuck you. Have you had sex with her yet? You’re not in love with me anymore. I still love you. Where is Woolf when you need her? The closest I can get to you is the indigo girls—but I can’t even listen to them in a room of my own. I miss you too gramma, say hi to Virginia for me.

I miss my mother.

miss my mother when I was a child, and sick, and she mixed orange juice and Fresca together in a giant green cup just for me.

always told myself that I would become a lesbian if he ever cheated on me, but I’d rather be single. I’m so sick of women. Passive aggressiveness. That poem about condoms last week was so great—how wonderful to worry about if you’re putting your penis in her vagina the right way. I bet she’s worrying about if you will believe her when she fakes it. I’m so sick of men who don’t know where the clitoris is. Would it be ok if I said I just wanted a good fuck—a good fuck with a man? Is that Antithetical to feminism? Would it be ok if I went out and got drunk, and in my vulnerability I slept with a boy who didn’t know how to put a condom on. Look at him pretending like it gets easier every time. Is that what scares them? That I see through their masculinity? Don’t worry. I’m not sleeping here tonight.

I miss my mother.
I miss my mother when I got my period, and she gave me two aspirin and a wine cooler.

feel like I’m going to crack. Like Edna Pontellier, I’m going to forget how to swim. I’ve become aware of my dependency on men. There energy is soothing like my blanket, or my mother…or my father, when I was very young. What can soothe me now? Live women do not do it. But perhaps, dead women can. Perhaps Sylvia had it right. To die is an art. Oh if I died, I could be with her now, express my love for her, kiss her burned lips and taste the fire from the stove on her tongue. But even though I love you, I cannot follow in your footsteps. I am not a martyr. So, instead of suicide I will write poetry and miss my mother.

I think I may be having a funeral in my brain, like Emily, isolating myself to the point of invisibility. I do like her poetry by the way. But I agree, she was also a martyr, Daddy’s little girl. I wonder if she ever had an orgasm? I like to imagine her with someone, perhaps a woman, although a man would probably make her father angrier. There they are in the garden, in the early hours of the morning, reciting lines from Paradise Lost and fucking in the dirt—right on top of the tulips. And I bet she’s thinking she loves him, but he’s too busy worrying about her father who might wake up from her loud moaning. She looks up at the sky and knows her mother is watching over her.

I feel like I just got back from a dinner party. Like Judy, making myself so full of women’s stories that I become sick to my stomach. I cannot distinguish anymore—do I miss my mother or you? No, it is not you. It is me that I miss. Wasn’t I an artist once? A dancer? A witch? I used to paint for days at a time without eating or sleeping, and I would cry over my work. When I was finished I would lie in my bed and dream about planting roses. But this institution doesn’t allow for that kind of freedom. I stay up writing poetry until 3 in the morning—there is no time for dreaming. I wake up 4 hours later and have to argue my feminist dissertation…

Don’t worry. I’m not sleeping here tonight…I just need a catharsis.

On Poetry II
Cassandra Voss

I guess it is no surprise to you that everything in this collection is... confessional. I have learned that that is what I write best... myself. I write what I know—loss, anger, love, appreciation... I have learned that these emotions are not around all the time, so when you feel them, write them, because you don't know when or if you will ever have them again. Do not wait a day, or an hour, or even a minute. Grab a pen, tell the guy you're fucking to 'hold his horses ' and write down whatever you need to write down.

The Painting That Speaks to My Chakras
Cassandra Voss

It says that my heart is connected
to my will.
That they spin together to light
my being,
and move me.
They're working together now
to try and absorb you away,
but you do not back down.
I see in the corner,
my belly has also attempted to
weave a net for you;
with intent to devour your pricking horn,
and save my green and yellow
center from all this work.
But you do not fall.

Cento For Plath
Cassandra Voss

Send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps
You do not do, you do not do
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell
I sought my image
A witch’s face?

Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.
Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out
They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks!
Herr God, Herr Lucifer

I am in control.
Some damned condition you are in:

A third person is watching

God’s Lioness
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
Do you do no harm?
Down here the sky is always falling.
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
She is used to this sort of thing.
She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints.

For Marion—
Cassandra Voss

You are my dark Goddess.
I hated You at first.
I hated You for taking him away from Me,
and tearing Me open.
I knew it was You, because he could have never done it himself—coward.
You are my Angelina Jolie.

Secretly,
I want to seduce You.
I want You to fall in love with me,
and leave him, tearing him open.
You know i have more passion then he does—You know because You crafted me—and him.
You are my black hole.

i love Your depth.
i love You for taking me deeper and wider,
so that I could remember how to be alone in the darkness.
I needed to remember the darkness,
alone.

I miss having a leech to lie with.
But now he’s stuck to You.
Although perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
Perhaps,
You love him too.
Of course You do.
In any case,

i understand.
I understand.

Tu l'as fait pour moi.*
Tu l'as fait entierement pour moi.*

So let’s celebrate.
Because it’s my cake,
Car c’est mon gateau,
and my knife,
et mon Couteau,
and my resurrected life.

Merci, Marion,
merci

The Scent of Dead Illusions
Cassandra Voss

Remember lake Michigan?
Do you remember how incredibly illusive we were?
Our brains were the mist that
rolled over the water and onto the sand,
and then back again.
Broken glass beer bottles cutting the fog
that was closest to the ground,
but we were walking on the air.
I remember it was cold.
I was glad it was cold, because it disguised the smell of
old
dead
fish.
Fish that lie carelessly buried in the sand,
some in clumps, all on top of each other,
as if they died while making love.
Our bodies were like those fish that night—
clumped together,
too hastily perhaps,
but we didn’t notice then.
I remember we were scared.
We even admitted it to each other.
What was lurking inside the giant black pine trees?
we asked.
We were waiting for some man or other creature
to jump out and attack us,
but we made it back to your car unassaulted.
I turned back and took in the lake one last time,
still illusioned, still
under its spell.
I wish I could go back to lake Michigan with you.
Lie on the sand like the dead fish, making love.
If I went back I could find it again,
us,
the two of us.
we are there, lying clumped together.
Dead, because the water has washed us ashore and then
left us,
eating the sand. We are not making love anymore.
The illusion is gone.
All that is left are fish skeletons.
but at least
when it is cold the
smell is bearable.

A Short Story
Cassandra Voss

Every detail of her character was blurry still. Just as her professor had said the grandmother stories were getting old, and she was sick of writing in first person. Her voice wasn’t as real as it had been before. Somehow through all the stress of her life she had forgotten who she was—I write for myself—but all she had been doing lately is writing to fill the gaping hole inside her, trying to fill up space with superficial energies. Not that her grandmother stories were completely void of depth, but never depth inside her, only external depth, only the depth of the situation—How interesting can my life be? —she thought, instead of asking the more important question— How important am I? — That’s what she really wanted to know anyway.

So, she continued to write in her hard cover notebook, the one that made her feel so unique, like such an individual, when all her classmates brought in their spiral bounds- What a joke—It was so cliché to be an individual, and now here she sat at 2 a.m. —just like a writer—doing it for it’s mere martyrdom effect, attempting to reach some edge, some breaking point, where, with a flick of ink something would strike her, something which she would collapse into, and where black runs would be all over the paper from her indulgent tears—How do I really feel about my gramma? …What is still inside me? Anything?

All she could think of was her vision of her grandmother as a high priestess, with long blond hair. She wondered why her grandmother didn’t give her luck when she played cards the night of her funeral.

Her writing was turning into a journal. She remembered her professor’s words— “No one wants to hear about your pathetic, boring life.” —The truth was, her life was boring. She was over being mad at her father, and sick of playing the victim with her stepmother. She had a best friend and a boyfriend—both of which she had stable, healthy relationships with. She got along with her mother. —I think writers purposely try to make themselves miserable in order to write good stories. What a bunch of fucking martyrs. There’s a topic I could write on ‘Women as Martyrs,’ how fucking original. —In any case, she kept writing in her hard cover notebook, fighting for some epiphany to leap up off the cream colored page destroying the gray lines that separated the words of her story.

This is so fucking abstract—Her character still lacked any real personality. In fact the only real character was a chair, or a ring, or some other object laid out in some extraordinary metaphor that was supposed to represent love, or death, or herself. God damn it, I’m supposed to be a fucking feminist, how hard can this be? —She thought she had already claimed her voice, but now she was unsure.

Finally, her soul lay open on the page. She was too exhausted to continue. —Maybe I’m not supposed to be a writer. —But this thought made her even more of a martyr then fucking Christ. —How do you not be a stereotypical writer? Where is my story, where is my fucking original story? Who the fuck am I? —That’s what she was really looking for; some sense of who she really was, some spiritual wholeness, some kind of original self. —It doesn’t exist. We’re always searching. We’re all always searching. That’s not original.

Reclaiming Slut

Cassandra Voss

I want to be a Slut—
overflowing and bubbling with passion.
I want to decorate my eyes
with black mystery,
and my hair with dark desire.

I want to call the shots.
I want all of them—
the cowboys, the pseudo intellectuals, the hippies, the biker dudes, all of them—
to want my body.
I used to wish that these men wanted to have my heart—but I don’t believe in that kind of ownership anymore—my heart is sick of being somebody else’s.

I used to want to be with these men because the accentuated my adventurousness, my intellectualism, my earthiness, my “bad ass” persona. —but it was all in vain.
Now I want to be my own cowboy, and I want to take a ride on my own motorcycle.

I want to buy my own drinks—
a very bloody Mary please.

I want to be a Slut—
I want to pretend to be men’s commodity, but then remind them that I am in control.
I don’t actually need them to salvage an identity—I don’t even need them for sex.

I want to be Mrs. Robinson.
I want to be Madonna.
I want to be the screamer that lives down the hall.

I want other girls to talk about me behind my back—just loud enough that I might hear.

I want to be educated in the art of desire,
and I want to teach men the tricks of the trade.
I want people to come up to me and ask me the questions they wish they could ask their mothers.
I want to wear black lingerie
as everyday clothes.
I want to go to the store and buy condoms—just condoms
and maybe a bottle of cheap wine.

I want to be a Slut—
don’t you love that word?
SLLUUUT—
Lemme break it down for you:
Sssssssssssss for Sassy,
Lllllll for lily’s like Georgia O’keefe draws them
U for Universal physical connection
ti-T for tentatively tasting tarnished men…
and women.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:

I want to be a SLUT—
do I need to repeat myself:
SLUT—
you know you want it again:
SLUT—

Here we go now:
Calling all straight As, all goody two-shoes, all nice Christian girls, don’t you wish you were a---

SLUT.

The Awakening (Not for Chopin, but for Flora)
Cassandra Voss

In my dream, I got a message from my mom, who said that my gramma died.

Bile duct cancer.

My gramma used to cut my hair, and every time she would say,
"A woman's hair is like her heart."

For the past six months her hair had been falling out,

and mine had been growing.

The next thing I remember is a glass on my gramma's kitchen table,
next to a white bottle of pills.

The problem is life.

And a half empty glass is more like milk, than it is like water,

you can't see it all.

The I woke up.

And the sound of love rang like a wicked laugh.

I found my scissors, and made my hair like my heart.

Conforming to the Soul

Cassandra Voss

Stand in line--straight, still, and soulless.
Or perhaps,
all one single soul.
All legs
all toes
all arms and wrists
all shoulders
all faces
reflecting one movement.
Quiet
black torsos,
pink legs,
Move.
One single string tied between them.
One pulls on the others.
If one falls,
they all fall,
tumbling down into
the emptiness.
Their only identity
tied up with the string.

On Literary Criticism

Cassandra Voss

Since my introduction to feminism in my later High School years, to formal education in Women’s and Gender Studies, my definition of feminism has constantly been changing, reshaping, becoming abstract, and then concrete and then abstract again, becoming separatist and then inclusive, and so on. In turn my interpretations of literature have also been constantly changing.

Literature is important because it has power. Literature has the ability to affect the way people think about themselves, and the world. However, if feminism has taught me anything, it is that we need to learn to read literature critically. We need to be “resistant readers.” [“How Feminists Read Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’”] has come out of the castle of critical feminist thought, and works to address the rationalization of many of my peers that just because a text is not presented in light of feminist criticism, does not mean that we are not allowed to analyze a text through a feminist lens. Also, it is the first essay I have written which forced me to consider how I impose my own experiences onto a text. For in order to be truly critical of literature, I must first be critical of my subjectivity, and work to acknowledge my own cultural, racial, and class privilege, and also attempt to recognize my own internalized oppression.

How Feminists Read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”

Cassandra Voss

In her essay “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels,” Rosalind Coward asserts that “As feminists we have to be constantly alerted to what reality is being constructed, and how representations are achieving this construction. In this respect, reading a novel can be a political activity, similar to activities which have always been important to feminist politics in general. (227-8). Coward names what I have struggled with as a feminist reader since my “click moment” one year ago when being a feminist became an innate part of who I was and exerted itself into every aspect of my life, including the way I read literature. Second semester of my freshman year of college I began reading “feminist” novels, such as Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which overtly allowed me to analyze them in terms of gender. However, my gender radar did not turn off when reading texts that were not considered open for feminist analysis. Thus, I became frustrated with my fellow classmates when I wanted to analyze classic texts, like Huck Finn in terms of gender, and they cast this interpretation aside as having no precedence. As Louise Rosenblatt states, “The literary experience must be phrased as a transaction between the reader and the text. Moreover, as in the creative activity of the artist, there will be selective factors molding the readers response” (35). In other words, as my relationship with feminism grew, so did the opinions that I brought to a text.

After reading Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” for the third time, (now as a feminist) I realized how many male dominated texts lacked a feminist analysis. I concluded that this lack was because no one wanted to discredit the masculine actions of men (such as going to war). However, for a reader to deny that there are anti-feminist components to these types of stories, or even just to ignore them is problematic. As the authors claim in Gender Studies: Terms and Debates:

Given that the tactical reading is an articulation of the subject’s perception of their own positioning, an understanding of the tactical response can be an important tool for the analyst in understanding that subject’s self-perception, and in making a different perception available to the analyst which reveals the (mainstream) assumptions governing her/his own positioning…For gender theorists, an understanding of tactical reading can lead to valuable insights into the ways in which conservative gendering practices are resisted and transformed, which might in turn provide models for the receptualisation of gendered relationships and identities (Cranny-Francis et al. 135).

If we as readers fail to read texts that are not usually critiqued in terms of feminism and gender, then we will continue to reproduce texts that are sexist and that perpetuate sexist ideals in society. However, if readers take a tactical approach to literature, as previously mentioned, then our resistance to a sexist text is also a political resistance to a sexist society. We are then able to reconstruct what we think real relationships and identities ought to be like in society. Thus, I argue that a feminist reader cannot place a text outside of the sexist society, which it mirrors. Regardless of whether or not the text has been written overtly for feminist analysis or not, a feminist critic will always, and should always, work to deconstruct conservative notions of gender within it.

In the very first paragraph of O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a feminist critic would immediately be set off by the sentence, “She was a virgin, he was almost sure” (90). This immediately sets up a sexual double standard between the male main character, and the female he is thinking about. A sexual double standard that feminist are uncomfortable with. As Rosenblatt explains,

A personal preoccupation or an automatic association with a minor phrase or an attitude toward the general theme will lead to a strong reaction that has very little to do with the work. A word such as home or mother or a phrase such as my country, with its many conventional, sentimental associations, may set off a reaction that tends to blind the reader to the context of these words (80).

Rosenblatt is correct that my reaction as a feminist to this phrase was strong. And although the main idea of the story is about men’s experience at war, and the literal and figurative “things that they carried” Rosenblatt is quick to assert that these “minor phrases” (like “she was a virgin”) have “very little to do with the work.” As a feminist it is impossible to read any text without reacting to anti-feminist phrases, or even words, and also analyzing in terms of gender. This reaction is further heightened by the recognition of a male author who clearly does not include women’s experience into the story, and equivocates misogyny as being merely a part of the natural male experience. As Terry Lovell explains in ‘Writing Like a Woman: A question of Politics,’

The development of the novel has been closely bound up with the social and political position of women…there is a fundamental continuity which firmly places them in a private domestic world where emotions and personal relationships are at once the focus of moral value and the core of women’s experience. In the novel women are ‘prisoners’ of feeling and of private life…Naturally, male writers have struggled against this taint of feminine identification (84).

Feminist readers recognize the complexities of gender oppression. In O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” a feminist analysis asserts that O’Brien’s masculine story lends itself also to misogyny. Although readers are taught to separate the author from the narrator of a story, a reader has a hard time distinguishing between the two, and often spends time discussing the life of an author and then applying it to the text. This is a valid response, sense the society in which one lives, and the experiences that person has had helps to shape that person and will, at least to some extent, affect that person’s writing. O’Brein, who served in war, was socialized in the army to be hyper-masculine, and a definition of hyper-masculinity assumes misogyny. Thus, in his story that comes out. The problem is not that his experience is wrong, or that he is wrong to feel the way that he does about women. The problem lies in the reason that he feels that way.

Readers who think that the main character in “The Things They Carried” is merely having “natural” feelings that a man has when at war, fail to take into account the crucial aspect of socialization that men at war go through. Or, if they do recognize this aspect, they fail to see it as problematic. A feminist reader recognizes the socialization, and then takes it one step further by asserting that that kind of socialization—of misogyny—is wrong, and O’Brien’s character’s failure to realize that reproduces hatred toward women. As Rosenblatt asserts,

Just as the personality and concerns of the reader are largely socially patterned, so the literary work, like language itself, is a social product. The genesis of literary techniques occurs in a social matrix. Both the creation and reception of literary works are influenced by literary tradition. Yet ultimately, any literary work gains its significance from the way in which the minds and emotions of particular readers respond to the verbal stimuli offered by the text (28).

Feminist readers, and other types of resistant readers, take into account the socialization of the author and the language itself. “Interestingly, resistant readings of this kind, which locate gendered identities which are very conventional and sometimes misogynistic in texts, have recently been attacked for their tendency to construct the (compliant) reader as victim” (Cranny-Francis et al. 121). However, as Rosenblatt states, a text only has power over us if we allow it to have power over us. A feminist reader does not claim that a compliant reader is “victim” to a text, but victim to the socializing of society. A reader who has been taught to experience things in a certain (gendered) way will be bringing that experience to the text. Thus, the “transaction,” as Rosenblatt defines it, is based on the reader’s prior knowledge of that experience, based on the general societal consensus. However, a feminist reader emphasizes that not everyone experiences the same thing the same way.

Often a text is considered great if it allows the reader to “relate” to a main character or main theme of the story. As Rosenblatt explains,

The ability to understand and sympathize with others reflects the multiple nature of the human being, his potentialities for many more selves and kinds of experience than any one being could express. This may be one of the things that enable us to seek through literature an enlargement of our experience. Although we may see some characters outside—that is, we may not identify with them as completely as we do with more congenial temperaments—we are nevertheless able to enter into their behavior and their emotions. Thus it is that the youth may identify with the aged, one sex with another, a reader of a particular limited social background with members of a different class or a different period (40).

Although many agree with Rosenblatt’s explanation of the sympathetic reader, feminists argue differently. The claim that human beings have “multiple natures” which allow them to sympathize with others of a different age, sex, class, ect. is not valid, because gender and class are social constructions, not innate to human beings. For example, consider why when discussing “The Things They Carried,” unless there is feminist in the room, readers are unlikely to talk about gender issues. However, when discussing an overtly feminist text such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” readers immediately jump to natural explanations for the narrator’s insanity such as post pardon depression. In Gender Studies: Terms and Debates,

Critic Elaine Showalter argued that women ‘are expected to identify with a masculine experience and perspective which is presented as the human one’ (1971, p. 856). The canon, feminists argued, was an engendering practice enacted through specific readings of a selection of texts characterized by the dominance of dead, white males.” As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose governing principle is misogyny. (Fetterley 1978, p. xx)” (Cranny-Francis 112).

Feminist readers break away from labeling men’s experiences as human experiences. In effect, when feminists question the so called “human experience” by asserting that—wait a minute, but that’s not my experience—the compliant readers become upset, because that questions everything that they have been taught about the way to read literature.

A feminist critic will always question conservative notions of gender within a text and within a society. To read from a feminist perspective is a political action that allows the individual and the collective community of readers to deconstruct society’s construction of gender. However, feminists must be careful to not reproduce binary notions of gender in their deconstruction. For example, to claim that a woman’s experience at war is innately different then a men’s experience at war perpetuates thinking about emotional differences between men and women as innate. In reality, the way in which someone emotionally deals with or expresses oneself is complexly constructed by society. And so, it is my own journey as a feminist reader to recognize where my own experiences impose themselves onto a text, and that they may not be the experience of everyone else, not even every woman.

Works Cited

Cranny-Francis, Anne, et al. Gender Studies: Terms andDebates. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2003.

Coward, Rosalind. “Are Women’s Novels Feminist Novels,” Eagleton 155-60.

Eagleton, Mary. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Cambridge & Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Lovell, Terry. “Writing Like a Woman: A question of Politics.” Eagleton 83-5.

Rosenblatt, Louise. Literature As Exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983.

O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A guide to Narrative Craft. Longman: New York, 2003. 90-102.

Where Do You Go When You Die?

Cassie Voss, 1996

In memory of William Olson

Where do you go When you Die?

I believe you become nature. Sometimes you dance in the wind. You see the sky light and fluffy, and you become the clouds. Your bright puffy white looks down on the earth and you become the ground.

Your deep rich soil is strong and plentiful. You feel the warm bright light touch your surface, and you become the sun.

As you dim you see something out of the corner of your horizon. It’s a beautiful, blue crescent moon. You see it and you become it.

You see an old friend from the past, and she sees your face on the moon. You wink at her and then make her a shooting star to wish on. As you watch the star gliding through the night sky you wish you were it and you become it. As you settle your five points shimmer and you rest into a peaceful night.

Does Dying mean you’re gone forever?

I believe you’re never gone but just in a deep dream that gives you a better look at yourself. All the good things that you remember are held inside your heart like a picture in a locket. Your attitude when you were in the past is the same when you die. If you die happy that’s how you stay. If you die grumpy that’s how you stay. Therefore be careful, because Attitude is everything!

Why are you scared to Die?

Why are you scared to die? I think most people are scared to die because they think that they won’t see their old friends and you’ll just rot away. When really you remember everyone and love them forever! You see them off and on visiting in dreams and blowing their plants. You whisper to them of the deep dream you’re in. They seem scared because they’ve never heard an invisible person before but you know that in their heart they understand what you are saying. So why worry besides you’re just in a deep peaceful dream.

The End

* You did it for me.

* You did it all for me.

2007-05-18T06:04:00.000-06:00

To simplify my life, I'll be posting primarily on drmacd_snc.livejournal.com. Visit me there!

Glazed with Poetry by the White Woman

2007-05-01T14:00:00.000-06:00

After a penultimate Poetry Writing class meeting, I feel charged with poetic energy, like a backyard messiah fired up with the suburban word, ready to spread it around.

Yeah, we talked about sex. A lot about sex. After all, what discussion of poetry is complete without a knock-down-drag-out session of sexual metaphor building?

But, first, I talked. Lectured, rather. I used my power as a professor to talk at the (un)fortunate captive audience, reading poems that have spoken to me--just a smidgen from the pantheon--about the nature of, the purpose for, the audience of poetry.

Here's the list (I only read portions, and then babbled on about why I'd chosen them, including vast patches of shameless self-promotion which I will call Whitmanic Rhapsody):

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
"Adam's Curse," W. B. Yeats
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
"Asphodel, that Greeny Flower," W. C. Williams
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats," W. H. Auden
"Diving into the Wreck," Adrienne Rich
"The Bear," Galway Kinnell
"The Poem You Asked For," Larry Levis
"The Mountain," Louise Gluck
"I Go Back to May 1937," Sharon Olds
"The Words Continue Their Journey," Margaret Atwood

After my "lecture," interrupted only now and again by the running discourse of Asperger Boy, I asked the students to write for about 5 minutes about what they thought poetry is or should do. Their answers, shared after a small bathroom break, leaped from here to there, from the warm, loving, embracing mother/home/lover who then slaps you in the face and kicks you out of the nest, to the bottle for feelings, to the dominatrix/Old Testament god, to the conversation piece in the singles' bar.

Ever the Whitmanic wheelbarrow woman (so much depends upon/ the slickly fuckable wheelbarrow,/ glazed with hot poetry,/ next to the white woman), I wanted to pour every idea into a body and then to examine that body from every angle.

So my question now is not what poetry can or should do, or for whom, but this:

If poetry were a person, who would it be and how would you interact with him or her?

Poems from Nana Peterson

2007-04-27T11:34:00.000-06:00

A package came yesterday for Lizzie. It contained three Little League trophies belonging to Dave (1976, 1977) and three packages of poems, one for each of us. "Celebrate April! National Poetry Month," the slip of covering paper reads. My package contains work by Margaret Atwood.

How lucky can a woman get? I have wonderful in-laws, and my mother-in-law, particularly, has always nurtured my poetry. (Of course Mom has, too, but since we're supposed to take our parents for granted, that's what I'm doing--most of the time.)

Reading over the poems as I nibbled on aging Easter eggs this morning, I was reminded how much I love Atwood's work. And, because I followed up a student poetry reading last night with a trip to a bar for dessert and was, unfortunately, pegged at once as the chaperoning professor rather than a winsome coed, Atwood's "aging female poet" series spoke directly to me.

Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines
Margaret Atwood

Amazingly young beautiful woman poets
with a lot of hair falling down around
their faces like a bad ballet,
their eyes oblique over their cheekbones;
they write poems like blood in a dead person
that comes out black, or at least deep
purple, like smashed grapes.
Perhaps I was one of them once.
Too late to remember
the details, the veils.
If I were a man I would want to console them,
and would not succeed.

I am lucky to be surrounded by a few amazingly young beautiful woman poets. My AYBWPs, however, don't write poems like blood in dead people, nor do they let their hair fall down around their faces. My AYBWPs remind me how fun it is to speak our poems aloud, to see the faint lines drawn in the sand and, grinning, to step over them. My AYBWPs (I use the possessive so lovingly) are feisty, loud, amusing, involved, over the top rabble rousers. They do not want to be consoled by a man, men in general, but they do want to be noticed. I know I was one of them once, and, inside, still am. I remember the details, the veils, and am not ashamed to say that I enjoyed them. Still, the melancholy in this poem, the bitchy crone posture, gives me a wonderful thrill. A necessary lift.

iv
Margaret Atwood

My daughter crackles paper, blows
on the tree to make it live, festoons
herself with silver.
So far she has no use
for gifts.

What can I give her,
what armor, invincible
sword or magic trick, when that year comes?

How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her?

I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone's voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can s ee it.

Iron talismans, and ugly, but
more loyal than mirrors.

There's so much in this poem that hits me, umph, on that deep level, the subterranean level of poetry in the body. "How can I teach her/ some way of being human/ that won't destroy her?" How can I read those lines and not feel them, like a soft knife in my womb? This advice, I realize, I've given myself, will give Lizzie, have given to writing students: "Be/ ruthless when you have to, tell/ the truth when you can,/ when you can see it." Yes, that is the point, at least for me, finally.

The Words Continue Their Journey
Margaret Atwood

Do poets really suffer more
than other people? Isn't it only
that they get their pictures taken
and are seen to do it?
The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.

Some days though I want, still,
to be like other people;
but then I go and talk with them,
these people who are supposed to be
other, and they are much like us,
except that they lack the sort of thing
we think of as a voice.
We tell ourselves they are fainter
than we are, less defined,
that they are what we are defining,
that we are doing them a favor,
which makes us feel better.
They are less elegant about pain than we are.

But look, I said us. Though I may hate your guts
individually, and want never to see you,
though I prefer to spend my time
with dentists because I learn more,
I spoke of us as we, I gathered us
like the members of some doomed caravan

which is how I see us, traveling together,
the women veiled and singly, with that inturned
sight and the eyes averted,
the men in groups, with their moustaches
and passwords and bravado
in the place we're stuck in, the place we've chosen,
a pilgrimage that took a wrong turn
somewhere far back and ended
here, in the full glare
of the sun, and hard red-black shadows
cast by each stone, each dead tree lurid
in its particulars, its doubled gravity, but floating
too in the aureole of stone, of tree,

and we're no more doomed really than anyone, as we go
together, through this moon terrain
where everything is dry and perishing and so
vivid, into the dunes, vanishing out of sight,
vanishing out of the sight of each other,
vanishing even out of our own sight,
looking for water.

Atwood so poignantly gets to the center of the matter--the matter of "being" a poet. Of choosing to write and, presumably, to try to publish (and thus communicate) poetry. Do we really suffer more than others? Is it that we're defining those who don't have a voice, or, as Whitman would have it, giving voice to the voiceless, the "others"--and thus doing them a celestial favor? Are we a doomed caravan, a desert tribe, lost, stuck in the place we've chosen for ourselves (the Sahara of literature?), having taken a wrong turn on a pilgrimage, having lost the guiding star? Perhaps. What Atwood so nicely captures for me here is the sense of wandering I experience when I write, and read, poetry. It is a sense of blue loneliness, invested at least a bit with the fear of never finding the place I seek, or even knowing the place I seek. The landscape is a "moon terrain/ where everything is dry and perishing" and "lurid/ in its particulars, its doubled gravity." How wonderful to realize that what we might be looking for is not God, or a lover, or a chance to talk with that elusive other, but water (which is probably all of these things at once, and more.)

Nana, if you're reading this, thank you for the poems! I've got a taste for Atwood again. I'll have to go to the bookstore and pick some of her up, take her home, eat her smothered in hot fudge, whipped cream, nuts and a cherry. (Oh, and I hope you realize just how much you look like the aging Canadian siren...)

Asking for Directions

2007-04-26T11:36:00.000-06:00

A Twenty-Minute Writing Exercise from The Poet's Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, eds. (p. 246-7)

I Can't Remember

I can't remember if the last time I saw you was
that Christmas in San Carlos, when Lizzie pitched
a tantrum on the dining room rug (Liz and Mike
were in Tahoe for the week and we were squatting
in their house); you said, shaking your silver head
over the Caesar salad, to Aunt Wendy, covering
your moving mouth with a spotted hand,
"In my day, we had the kids in bed by 7:00,
ate alone at 9:00," as if the absence of their living noise,
the triumphant crash, bang, and scream of them making
their unholy mark on the world were some sort of
half-recalled heaven--

that's not how I want to remember you,
not as a sudden old woman in her 90s,
frail, confused,
a grounded traveler guarding her remaining days
against the brush of death's
mind-numbing cloak.
Even then, when I could tell we'd lost
quite a bit of you already,
I loved you with an ache that went deeper
than your son's early death.

When I got the email about your diagnosis,
I sat at my desk, here at school, alone,
and stared into the glowing screen--
as if there, in the shifting light, I could see
the flit of your young body on a Rhode Island beach,
the reach of your legs, pedaling on nothing,
to the sky.

Appointment in Samarra

2007-04-15T14:43:00.000-06:00

Dave used to tell me things about this novel. Actually, he used to tell me about the story O'Hara uses to begin his novel, a story about Death meeting a man in the market. The man is startled to see Death and runs home to his master, asks for a horse and money so he can escape Death and run to Samarra. The master gives him everything he wants and off he gallops, hell bent for leather. The master meets Death later, and Death explains--Death was surprised to see the servant in the market. "I have an appointment with him later, in Samarra."

I can't remember the contexts for Dave's discussions of the story, or O'Hara's novel. No doubt he had a point to make about how hard it is to escape our fates. Or else he wanted to call my attention to this novel, which doesn't get much airplay, but--now that I've finally read it--does, to my mind, another number on the same sort of world that Fitzgerald takes on in The Great Gatsby.

Even though I've read The Great Gatsby at least two times, I can't really remember much about it right now, except that Daisy (I think that's her name) runs over someone with her car, and Jake (is that his name?) comes back from obscurity with lots of money to throw massive parties and to try to win Daisy over to his side. She plays him for all he's worth, runs over someone, and then ends up with her brutish once-rich faux-aristo husband again in the end. It's one of those novels designed to expose all the savagery of the idle American rich, and as such is a classic, one of the top dozen novels a person should read in order to call herself an educated American. (I've no doubt exposed myself here, or at least exposed my faulty memory banks, by committing all sorts of errors in fact and plot and theme. Oh well.)

In any case, my experience of O'Hara's novel was quite good. As I was reading the story, which deals with several middle class families in a small Pennsylvania town outside of Philadelphia, I was pleasantly shocked at O'Hara's treatment of sexuality (blunt, unromanticized, only half euphemized) and marriage (blunt, unromanticized, not euphemized at all) and alcoholism (ditto marriage). Looking at the copyright date, 1934, I expected the story to suffer from the brittle self consciousness of many Depression/Prohibition era novels that didn't quite make it to the "must read" lists of the later part of the century, the cracked patina of the hordes of "hilarious" black and white screwball comedies that used to define American Movie Classics (before they started chopping movies from the later decades into tidbits with commercials--in fact, is there even an American Movie Classic channel anymore? Wow. I don't think there is...) But the novel does a very good job of getting at middle class suburbia, men who sell Cadillacs, country club frat boys, and their bored, desperate wives, and at the spiritual vacuity that leads them to self destruct.

I'm sure that Johns Updike and Cheever owe a small tip of the hat each to O'Hara, who years before them captured the angst of Eastern suburbia, the general pointlessness of daily human interaction, and the material strivings of communities divided by religion, ethnic origins, money, and politics--but mostly by a sort of spiritual sterility.

(I note from the site where I found the picture for this entry that Fran Lebowitz called O'Hara 'the real ... Fitzgerald,' though that citation can't be verified because of the vagaries of Wikipedia, and that Updike has been one of O'Hara's consistent supporters. What do I learn from this? That I should trust my gut reactions.)

For those of you who've recommended that I read McCarthy's The Road, you'll be happy to know that I've decided to include it in my senior creative writing seminar in the fall. I have yet to read it (just ordered it from Amazon.com, which has suckered out of me the 75.00 it takes to get my selections sent to me free on the 2-day plan) but, based on the blurbs, very much look forward to it. I love post apocalyptic narratives (don't ask me why, because they scare the shit out of me... it's probably because they scare the shit out of me that I love them). If you've got a favorite post-apocalyptic narrative you'd like to recommend, drop me a comment. The best ones I've read lately have been, in order of greatness:

1. Orynx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
3. The Stand, Stephen King
4. The Children of Men, P. D. James

STD notes

2007-03-28T20:12:00.000-06:00

I'm sitting in a hotel room (tv burbling in the background) in Pittsburgh, PA, typing this.

We're here to attend the annual Sigma Tau Delta National English Honor Society convention. This year, there are over 700 English majors in attendance, and 12 of them are ours. Wow.

Tonight, some of us went out to dinner. We walked down to the strip district, through thinning rush hour traffic, making only a few mistakes in navigation (my fault) that led us into one dead end at the Amtrak station. "Is this the shitty part of town?" Stewart asked, as we threaded our way under the rotting overpasses, past deserted carpet warehouses, kicking through blowing paper cups and cigarette butts.

We found a restaurant in the middle of the district, a two story bar with an iron grill railing along both street and balcony. We took up two four tops on the balcony and ordered hopefully. Zach and I went hog wild and chose the Lobster roll. We were disappointed. Was it even lobster in the roll? It was all ground up, a ruddy mess shoved into greasy slabs of buttered toast.

We must be English majors; though I'm sure most of us are pretty good with math, we babbled and bobbled over the bill for far too long, until finally we figured out a decent tip and left.

Tonight, the Rectangle readings--one great story about zombies and some well-written but strangely distant pieces of creative non fiction. I sat in the audience, closing my eyes at times to blot out the sudden blare and thump of music from the next ballroom, the words bouncing off the grotesque fleur-de-lis pattern of the yellow (yes, yellow!) wallpaper, reverberating. I tried to swim my way through the words to their hearts, to find the center of each matter, to see into the speaker, the writer, the light that defined him or her. It was difficult, if not impossible. I yearned for a more solid sense of story, of connectedness, instead of the swirling sensation of glancing acquaintance.

Ah, well--as we filed out of the ballroom at the end of the reading, into the Hilton hallway where the air was fresh and cool on our fevered faces as two moist mother's hands, I felt the building connection between those of us from Wisconsin, drawing together easily as we walked down the hallways, planning the next three days, teasing each other about outfits and parties and this blog (I'm not going out to drink, I said, because I gave up alcohol for Lent and because I need this time to write about them on the blog).

This entry has no thesis. It swirls around a warm center. That center is filled with nothing that I can put into words.

Pissed Rigid

2007-03-19T11:26:00.000-06:00

It's the first official day of my spring break and I'm sitting in my living room with the blinds still drawn, stewing.

Last week, prompted by the office assistant in charge of updating our faculty information forms, I went back to my vita to add my few new publications. In the meantime, I started to wonder what happened to a few items, such as the poem supposedly accepted to a journal two years ago--no sign of the journal yet, the book review accepted a year and a half ago (again, no contributor's copy), and the batch of poems a former student solicited from me for her own university's mag.

I sent out a flurry of emails, determined to discover what had happened, if anything, to my work. First, I found out by looking at the online version of the book review's journal that, indeed, my piece was published a year ago. My name, however, was misspelled--annoying, since this is a fairly reputable literary journal. I'm assuming that book reviewers don't get contributor's copies; they certainly don't get a contributor's note, nor do they get a more than cursory overlook of their last name. At least I didn't have to delete the line on my vita.

Today, I got a very apologetic email from the editor of the journal that did, in 2003, publish my poem under a new title (they didn't like the old one, which was "Necrophilia," and changed it, probably with my help, to "Grace," but didn't a. inform me that they were indeed publishing it under a new name, or b. send me my contributor's copies). So that's nice--I can add that line in my vita back.

I also got another apologetic email from the former student. Her editor decided not to use my work "this time" but wants me to send again next year. This is what's chapping my hide just a bit. First of all, when I worked for a literary quarterly and we solicited work from an author, our editor did his damndest to select at least one of the poems in the batch for publication, even if, on reflection, he didn't much like them. Second of all, we made sure that we kept in contact with the writer throughout the process. This particular process has been going on since the beginning of last semester, or longer. The editor did not ONCE get in contact with me personally to let me know that a. my stuff wasn't good enough and so b. I could send it elsewhere. And now I'm supposed to want to submit my shit again next year?

Please. PLEASE. I not only feel offended (my stuff wasn't good enough, even--especially!--after solicitation) but annoyed. No. Beyond annoyed. Fried. Pissed. Pissed rigid.

It's one thing to be rejected. It's another to be blown off, forgotten. The least the editor could feel would be a modicum of guilt, a little shame. Something! A little apology. So sorry to get your hopes up and make you send me something, and then to take so long to mull it over in my peabrain.

So I'm sitting here in my living room with a gray cloud floating over my head. I'm sick of sending poetry out to little pissant journals with an inflated sense of their own self importance, waiting as long as a year for it to come back with a standard form or, worse (at this point in the game), a handwritten "note" saying "sorry, try us again next year" or some other claptrap.

Why? Why should I try to "date" you again, moron? It's a failed seduction. You've sent me a come on, so I've put myself out there, and now you've said, Eh, sorry, not interested. In fact, so not interested that you're not worth the time and energy it would take me to reject you. Try me again next year when perhaps I'm more desperate.

Right. And maybe next year I'll have finally grown a set of metaphorical balls on me (sorry, feminist friends) and I'll have better journals to sleep with.

And maybe I'll be writing in a genre that gets more respect (and reading time) than (sorry again, folks) poetry.

The Evil Genius

2007-03-17T13:21:00.000-06:00

I am almost done with Wilkie Collins' novel, something I found in our college library, something old and green-clad, crumbling yellow browny pages that threaten to evaporate as I turn them. There's some real crazy gender role stuff going on in the novel. It turns out that "evil genius" refers not to some villainous man tying women to railroad tracks but to a governess (of course) who disrupts a happy family (wife, husband, spoiled only child, spoiled mother-in-law/mother-of-wife) with her evil neediness and pale, wasted good looks. Once she's taken in by the family and the bloom is finally on her rose (good air, love of child, regular food, affection), the kind, loving father-husband of course falls in love with her and everything shits the bed.

Well, at first we're to assume that Sydney Westerfield (the governess) is in fact the "evil genius," but it turns out that the coiner of that phrase, Mrs. P, the mother-in-law/mother of the wronged bride, is herself the E. G. The man in question is not an evil genius (frankly, he's too stupid to be a villain and, in my humble opinion, should probably die in the last 40 pages); he's a victim of his dick and circumstances, according to the semi-sympathetic narrator.

I'm wondering about WC's narrator. You see, the wronged wife, Charlotte, is strong-armed by her mother and her lawyer into, horror of all horrors, filing for and getting a Divorce. The Divorce allows her to keep her daughter but ensures that she will become the scourge of civil middle class English society. So Mrs. P. allows the misapprehension of widowhood to cover over the "fact" of her daughter's Divorce, so that a new and woefully ignorant man can be reeled onto her daughter's hook. Madness of all sort ensues. What does the narrator think about all this? Clearly, he thinks that Charlotte was a chump to allow the governess access to her loving husband in the first place. Also, he thinks that Divorce is a sin. He probably wants us to see the ex-husband as a supreme putz. After all, ex-husband has managed not only to lose his family, but also the repentant governess, who sees that she will never truly have her "lover's" heart, and gives him up.

What will happen in the last 40 pages? I predict that Sydney will not survive--the bottom of the pond has been calling her name, despite her selfless act of contrition and her attempts to patch things up with her former mistress, Charlotte. I predict that the lumpen ex will manage to rewed his ecstatic former wife, Charlotte. The spoiled only daughter will remain spoiled. Somehow, Mama P will get her comeupance.

What else is new?

2007-03-14T18:25:00.000-06:00

I managed to spill disgusting swamp water, percolating under Steve, the Christmas tree, all over the living room floor last night. (For full, gory details, check out drmacd_snc.livejournal.com.) That was last night, at 10:10, when I should've been going to bed.

Now I'm sitting in the living room with the laptop on my, well, lap, and I'm trying to think of what I need to do--other than get up and go to the bathroom, change pants, practice qigong, (can I just insert how much I loathe the standing postures? the pine tree, sitting at a desk, and holding the basin for 5 minutes each? ugh. i can't get my brain to stop leaping all over mundane, idiotic things like a squirrel in the back yard), think about bathing the girl (who is sitting in front of the boob tube watching a very bad movie on Cartoon network and I'm letting her), set up the dishwasher, make the proper bibliography for all the critical articles I want my Intro to Lit students to read (ha and double ha to that one, Batman--they'll read those articles when Hell freezes over), moisturize my hands...

Or I could read those books that are collecting on me. I'm in the middle of Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud, still. Now I've got three more books to read, all of them about raising strong children/daughters. Lizzie's past her crisis (the latest one) with the kids across the street but I've invested over $30.00 on the books and, by God, I'm going to get my money's worth. Eventually.

Today I went into campus thinking I'd spend the day working on my own writing. What did I do instead? I can't rightly say. But I burned up the entire day, all the way to past 5 PM, and I don't have a single line of a single story or poem or essay (except this, and what's this?) to show for myself. In the middle of my time sink, I tried to update my vita, looking for those "forthcoming" poems--the ones that So and So journal promised to publish in 2004 and then absolutely nada, the silence of death. So I tracked them down, or tried to, leaving voice mail messages and emails, sprinkling my electronic crumbs around the internet. The net result is that I ended up deleting a line from the vita. So instead of accomplishing anything, I really de-complished something.

This will depress me if I think about it long enough, so I won't. I'll change my pants, practice qigong, insist that Lizzie soak her rear end, and read a chapter of EL&IC.

But what about the bibliography for the articles you want those kids to read? Eh. Maybe you should just delete that paper from the syllabus.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2007-03-08T19:45:00.000-06:00

That's what I'm reading right now.

I have to thank Missie for foisting it on me. I went by the Reader's Loft one afternoon last semester, before it even got that cold, in a funky low mood, wandered the new store, pet the cats, and wondered what I should read. Missie suggested Foer's novel.

"Ick," I said. I didn't like Everything is Illuminated. I'd read a few reviews of Extremely Loud and was already thinking I'd give the new novel a wide berth. Too much trouble. All that postmodern posturing, semi blank pages, pictures, weird/selfconscious/pretentious moves by novelists (male) decades younger than me. Savvy little animals in tight black pants trolling cocktail parties in Nueva York.

"I loved it," Missie said. "This is the one that'll convince you. It's going to blow you away."

Or something like that. God, I can't even remember the name of that guy in the poem who everyone wants to be, the one who goes home and puts a bullet in his brain. Richard Corey, yeah, that's the guy--thanks Student X. Your autism must make your data collection work better than mine. Or is it your age?

Back to what I was saying--

I ignored the book, which I bought more out of a sense of guilt than anything else (Missie and I had had a strange moment at a writing group meeting a few weeks before this encounter, and I was still feeling rather tentative around her, apologetic. As if I needed to buy the book she'd recommended in order to smooth her metaphorical feathers. Missie, if you're reading this, here's an insight into my turgid little mind), for weeks that quickly turned into months. Finally, after finishing that Ruth Rendell number I bought in the library bag sale, I was forced to turn to Foer.

And, by gum, I'm loving the novel. The narrator's a precocious nine year old, Oscar, with a bevy of mental challenges--OCD, mostly--no doubt brought on by his father's death in the 9/11 tragedy. He finds a vase in his father's closet, and inside the vase he finds an envelope with a key inside. On the envelope is written BLACK in a red pen. Oscar decides to find out what lock, in the vast area of New York City and its 5 boroughs, fits the key. The kid is funny, tragic, insightful, naive, driven--everything I want in a narrator.

The only drawback, and this I remember as a pernicious frustration from Everything is Illuminated, is that Foer doesn't like to create a new paragraph for each new speaker. He throws all the dialogue together in a single paragraph without tags--

"Did you throw out the trash?" "What trash?" "The trash I'm looking at right now, you loser." "Don't call me a loser." "I will if you are one." "Am not." "Are too." "Not." "Too." "This is ridiculous." "I know you are but what am I?"

--so that conversations hit my eye in a barely differentiated lingual wall. That's probably Foer's (pathetic) intention as an author.

I like my dialogue spaced out, like my Sunday afternoons, dude.

All My Messages

2007-03-03T20:49:00.000-06:00

--came back.

They're all there now, lined up, the unread and the already read (raw and the cooked), waiting for my action. Respond, file or delete.

So I'm free to resent them, lined up like that, demanding their snip of attention. I'd rather finish reading the Ruth Rendell novel I've been meandering through (Grasshopper, something I picked up for about 13 cents at a 2.00 per paper grocery bag library sale), or watch another episode of Arrested Development on DVD, or the episodes of 24 that have stacked up on the box.

I collected first drafts of semester-long projects from my senior creative writers last week. This afternoon I read through a few of them, marveling at the energy in their prose, at the sloppy use of commas, at what gets left out as much as what gets put in. One of them sent me a story 106 pages long, a first-person buildingsroman about a feckless stoner who learns the secret of life: delayed gratification. The story was fun to read, even though some of the most necessary scenes were missing from the draft. It's not a story, I emailed him, but a novel. A novel missing crucial scenes. I wonder how much of the storyslashnovel is autobiographical, if the "lost weekend" story has become, now, the "lost undergraduate education and transitional year afterward" story, and if the writer has been mired in the same hair-raising antics as his narrator for the last four years.

Did I mention that I read that story on my computer screen, and used the Word comment function to respond to it, tapping my end comment in with the pads of my fingers, exposed now and fully functional at about 80 wpm because I finally remembered to whack off my burgeoning fingernails? I feel very 21st century.

Yes, I got all my email messages back and read them, and responded to a few of them, and got a little annoyed by some others (pressure on one front to attend the high school reunion in Acapulco even though I have already announced that we need a new roof, I don't want to return to high school mode, I can't get someone to be with Lizzie in the mornings while Dave has to go to work, and--hm, maybe I didn't mention this--I just don't want to anymore; on another front, irritating emails about meetings I didn't attend, emails that create anxiety in me about not attending those meetings, number one, and then about what kind of work is going to be dropped in my lap as a result, number two. It might've been better if they'd just disappeared completely, as I'd suspected.

Or hoped?

A Wee Bit Freaked Out

2007-03-02T14:13:00.000-06:00

I was just trying to read my email via the college's webmail program and, in the middle of trying to delete a message I'd responded to (simplification program for life: touch a piece of electronic mail once and then move on), the screen went up to the top and I got the message that I have 0 messages now. Zero. Big empty donut hole.

Of course now I'm thinking there must've been 10 or so crucial messages in that list that I didn't get a chance to see. Maybe Mom wrote me a message from Boston, where she's visiting my sister, my sister who's supposed to be having an operation, and maybe Mom wrote me an email to say that things aren't going as well as they should, I should drop everything right now and book a flight. (Yeah, yeah, that kind of important message comes by telephone. It's just fun to have a dramatic moment now and again.)

Maybe I got a message from an editor of a challenging publication with a history of rejecting me--Ploughshares, or Passages Northwest--begging me for a new submission of at least 3 poems if not 5. (Yeah, yeah. Dream on.)

Maybe someone from the dim past discovered my email address and got in touch with me again after 20 years of silence--the first serious boyfriend, F, from college, who has disappeared leaving no forwarding address into the bowels of New England. He's written me to tell me all about his life since 1986, when we graduated, in detail. He's going to be in Green Bay soon with his family and he'd love for all of us to get together, only I have to email him back and let him know if it's okay. Now I'll never be able to send that email to him and that'll give him the impression that I want him to stay lost, he'll make a mental note, and that'll be the last I hear from him ever again. (He's not the sort to go to a college reunion. Well, neither am I, come to think of it.)

Why did this happen? Is it a mirage or reality? What was the last thing I did before the obliteration event (OE, henceforth)? I was checking my spam quarantine and I found an email from a high school friend in there. Great! I clicked on the whitelist button. Slowly, achingly, the little wheel at the bottom of the screen churned and churned and churned. Bing, the window came up. Beth's message was gone--delivered, I assumed.

Then I went back, paged back, to the email window. Responded to a student's email. Hit SEND. The wheel chugged and chugged and chugged. And then, after a longer pause, it stopped. And the screen was collapsed. O messages.

I shut down Firefox and restarted it. Logged into my webmail account. Still 0. I checked my files. After another long hangtime, I got 0.

The rational part of my brain tells me that the college system went down momentarily. The email program hit a snag in the stream. I'll check again later and all those messages will reappear.

But what if they don't? asks the part of my brain known as Worry Wart. WW is a real bitch. She likes to insert herself into my daily routines like a small electroshock device. Her favorite message is this: 'You forgot your purse.'

I didn't forget my purse today. I did lock us (Lizzie and me) out of the house this morning. WW hit the panic button. Lizzie watched me go into the garage and freak out further (WW up a notch) when I realized that the extra key is no longer in the flowerpot. "Hey," Lizzie said. "I have a key."

What?

"Yeah, in my coat. Zipped into the sleeve."

Phew. WW recedes with my heart as it slides back down my throat.

One disaster averted. Will this email inbox be the real disaster? Strange, but with an inbox set to 0 I feel unmoored, set loose, drifting. Even if it is an illusion.

I hope it's an illusion.

Come to Think of It

2007-02-24T11:33:00.001-06:00

Yes.

I'm going to unlock that post.

Because secrecy is stupid.

Dizzy Pep Talk

2007-02-24T11:12:00.000-06:00

I haven't been active here in a while and that's making me feel guilty.

I must be, deep down, Catholic. Or Jewish. Or just guilty, sinful, bad to the bone.

But I've been writing on Facebook and Livejournal. In fact, I just wrote something for Livejournal that makes me feel a bit queasy. I locked it, felt guilty for locking it, felt damn guilty for even writing it in the first place (sworn in some cases to secrecy, blah blah, but who can carry the load of all that emotion without exploding? Fuck secrecy, in fact. It's one of the causes of what happened to make me write the goddamn post in the first place). This is like being on one of those creaky merry-go-round devices you find in some parks, the kind that you grab onto and run with, then leap into the middle and try not to puke.

And, and Kyle, I read through all of your blogs--you must be going through a massive growth spurt of some sort (intellectual, emotional) and you're having the requisite growing pains, the kind that keep you up and night in a low level whole body moan. Ugh. Anyway, that's my spot analysis/diagnosis, for what it's worth.

I'm not gonna say, hey, you'll get over it, because what if you don't? I'm over 40 and I'm not over some of the stuff that mushroomed out of my early 20s and probably never will be. I still think about that first serious, longterm boyfriend--wonder where he lives, what he's doing, if he thinks about me, if the story of our relationship has warped him at all. Narcissism? Whatever. It's my life. It's your life. You have to be able to live it, to write about it, talk about it, and not continually, obsessively apologize for it, or feel guilty about it. If your friends can't let you be, if they have to keep licking at the sore, chewing on it, until it gets bigger then (she said, putting on her mother hat), probably they aren't your "best" friends. It's like any relationship that goes sour--you can't breathe right or see the thing until you're out of it, until you get some space.

Oh. Hm. Seems like I pep-talked myself just now, eh?

Vibration

2007-02-17T11:29:00.000-06:00

Meg suggested that I could have written, yesterday, about how she vibrated me during our college's first ever presentation of the Vagina Monologues. My phone was in my coat pocket, and the coat was draped against the back of my seat, and while one of the young actresses presented an impassioned version of "My Vagina was my Village," it began to vibrate.

VVVVVVBBBBBZZZZ. VVVVVVVBBBBZZZZ.

On my left, KC looked around.

Why is this phone so fricking vigorous? I wondered. I wanted to clutch the pocket and see if I could mute it, but I knew it was buried down near the bottom of the seat, under me, and I'd cause more of a ruckus trying to get at it. I thought it was my friend Amy calling from Texas (the Bush state, how appropriate would that be?)--we'd been playing phone tag for days. But it was Meg, who'd gotten her Valentine's Day present from New College, a phone interview that went stunningly well, that ended in a "I'm sure you'll be hearing from us soon" exit line.

Our college is Catholic, and so getting the Vagina Monologues has been a long, strange trip. Every time we get the idea that we'll do it, someone in the Cardinal Newman Society gets wind of it and starts a bombing campaign.

Afterwards, some of us stayed behind with a few of the actresses and a professor who teaches Feminist Theology to talk about the production, and the impediments against it. Some of the actresses, all of them students at the college, thought that it might have something to do with the "vulgarity" people ascribe to the word, vagina, or to the repressive nature of Catholic conservatism, wanting to shut sexuality into a box that can only be opened after marriage, and then only for a second before clapping it shut again. Some of us thought that the idea of pleasure is too upsetting to the Puritanical American sensibility.

I think it has a lot to do with love; love is a dangerous, unsettling activity. It opens us up, makes us take risks, makes us vulnerable, might even change our minds. Love takes work. Love takes thought, effort, energy.

It's hard for us to love ourselves, especially if we're women. Self love is power, confidence, assertion, empowerment. If I say, hey, this is what I want and I demand it, then I'm aggressive, potentially a bitch. If I say "vagina," I make people look at me, see me, hear what I have to say. Think about me. If I say that I love my vagina, then I say that I love myself, and at the same time I take that part of myself out and show it. Make it seen.

Do we want people who have historically been taught to love others above themselves to turn that love inward rather than outward? Do we want women to celebrate their bodies, themselves, over the bodies of their husbands, their children, their country, the law, God?

Probably not.

Running Out of Gas

2007-02-16T11:57:00.000-06:00

It's getting very hard to fill two different blog spots, I tell you. I just finished typing a story about Lizzie into Facebook, which I then copied into LiveJournal and appended with another scene, and now here I am, on empty.

I could write about the disappointment I experienced with the Nevada Barr book on tape, Blind Descent, that I checked out of the library. Tape 2 was completely screwed--every other phrase or so was gargled or deleted--so I had to return it after getting a whole tape in. Boring.

I could write about how hard it is for me to remember things lately, but that's old news.

I could write about the Qigong class that I'm starting this afternoon, or how I can't drive Dave to his appointment with the oral surgeon (he's getting all 4 of his wisdom teeth yanked) because of it, which makes me feel guilty and less than uber-wifely, but that's ho hum at best.

I could write about the quiz taker down the hall, making up a missed exam and coming, now, to the end of her 50 minutes, so that means I have to get up, ugh, and go down there and pry it loose from her hands. The equivalent of doing the dishes.

I could just announce that I've had it, I can't keep this pace up, I can't think of pithy things to write about writing (or anything else, for that matter), so I quit, I'm going back to one blog and that's it. But that would just be a momentary tantrum and I'd regret it later. Like at the end of the sentence. And I'd delete it and have to think of something else to write.

I could pull down one of the binders overhead and see what I was writing 18 years ago, since I've got all the letters I wrote on my first computer (a Macintosh Plus) printed out, or dip into one of the dozens of notebooks stacked on a shelf behind the comfy chair, here in my office, but usually that makes me a mixture of bored and queasy. Also embarrassed for myself, the self I was in the past.

I could read some of the poems I was writing when I was an undergrad, but I did that yesterday. I could look at my dissertation notes (saw into my veins with a dull knife) or the letters Daddy Roy MacDiarmid (the dead one) wrote home from college and grad school. The first will make me dizzy and the second will make me lonely.

This has become one of those arch, self-indulgent meta(non)fictional accounts of my arch, self-indulgent middle class middle aged life.

So I'll just end it and go to the bathroom (turns out I've been holding it in for a bit here, inventing urgency). Piss out this discontent, this vague ennui, go to lunch, read my students' love poems, and Qigong myself into the weekend.

Teacher Man

2007-02-15T12:03:00.000-06:00

I'm now reading the latest, greatest offering from Angela's Ashes writer Frank McCourt. It's fun and it makes me slightly embarrassed. He writes, in the first three chapters, of how he's not teaching correctly--instead of covering the material, he's telling stories about himself. He knows that the students are pulling him off the track of the lecture deliberately. That they'd rather do anything but what's required. Still, he lets them. He allows them to pull him off the track into his life, his past, into story land.

Of course that's what I do. I tell stories about myself, Lizzie, Dave, high school days, that have nothing very much to do with the subject at hand--literature, how to write a poem about grief. When I do it, I feel the same elation as Mr. McCourt. Time passes before we can catch it. Bells ring, classes change. Sometimes, before that happens, someone in the class offers her own story.

I'm sure that McCourt's lurking thesis is that this is real teaching, after all. Still, we have to suffer through that sense that we're misleading them, that we're taking them away from their destination, that we're incompetent, selfish, self-involved shysters rather than teachers.

*

Talked to a friend this morning about what it means to be an Adult Child of an Abusive Parent. "Turns out," I said, "all of my friends are Adult Children of Abusive Parents."

She snorted. (She's a therapist.) "Well, duh."

"I've gotten through all the descriptions of the problem and now I'm at the part where I learn how to heal. Problem is, I don't want to heal. I think I want to hang on to this problem."

"You've got to stop repeating the same old stories from the past. Got to move on," she said, as if she'd managed, somehow, to put away her own horrifying stories of neglect and abuse, along with all the clothes and books stacked in her basement. As far as I know, she's still restacking, reboxing, the same old shit.

I was talking to her on my cell, walking from the car to my office. It was about 10 degrees and my hand had already started to go numb, along with my ear. I can't stand people who need to talk on their cells while they're walking from place to place, as if the sound of their own thoughts would be too terrible to endure. I frowned, even though she couldn't see it. "What if I give up these stories and then don't have any more?"

"Maybe you'll find new stories to tell," she said.

Like a happy one, maybe? Right. Because everyone likes to read happy stories. They're so much fun! And happy people write so much about their happiness--just look at all those novels written by happy people about happiness. Let's see, there's ...

Fuck it. Give me my darkness. I like how it tastes. What's that poem by Stephen Crane about the man eating his heart in the desert? It began to run through my head as I steered my cell conversation into new kittens and 104 degree fevers. The narrator of the poem is eating his heart in the desert and he's asked: why are you eating that heart? So he says something like "Because it is bitter, and because it is mine." Yeah.

Something tells me I'm done reading AC of AP, and done talking about it. But not about the past, or the evil people and events that give it that nice, rich coffee color.

----

If you're interested in reading that poem, here it is: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/196.html

2007-02-12T11:39:00.000-06:00

I'm wondering what the deal is with my Christmas cactus.

It's blooming madly now, big juicy chartreuse blossoms that hang over the side of the pot. I haven't bothered to water the plant for weeks now--the less I water it, the more it blooms. If I do water it, in fact, the blooms implode--shrivel, harden, fall off.

At the same time, the blades (for lack of a better word) twist and shrivel, curl up, look as if they're exhausted, done in, ready to kick the old bucket. "Wow," said a student once, "Is that thing okay? Cause it looks like it's dying." The leaf-blades, usually a nice medium green, have turned dark, brown and purple, weighted. It's as if the whole process of blooming has sapped the plant's system.

This is definitely a metaphor for something--probably the writing process. Or peri-menopause. Maybe marriage. Love, of course.

A little internet research yields these facts: Christmas cactuses need to be in cooler places, not exposed to drafts. Well, my office plant is right over the heater and heat blows up on it, when heat comes out of the register (it's certainly not coming out now), and it's right in the window, where I'm sure a draft wiggles through the panes. Christmas cacti are not as drought resistant as some of their relatives (they are not true cacti) and so they need to be watered as soon as their top soil gets dry to the touch. If we want our cacti to bloom again after Christmas, we should give them "uninterrupted dark periods" for about 12 hours every night--close them in a closet, for instance. Well, some of that goes on in here. But I'm sure that the parking lot light shines in over it, and the low lamplight from the walkways, and the diffused starlight from behind clouds. If the cactus gets too much light, it'll turn reddish (ah ha!) and wilted.

According to all this, I should immediately a) water the plant, b) move it off the window ledge, c) pinch off some of the old blossoms so that it'll make new ones.

But if my plant is in a metaphorical relationship with my writing process, what I should do is to, for once, leave the damn thing alone. Let it bloom in desert sand. Let it suck the very marrow out of the old soil, starving, over the draft, in direct sunlight, turning red with the effort, burning up, exploding into blossom.

Deranged Woman

2007-02-07T11:46:00.000-06:00

I finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife and have embarked on P D James' The Children of Men.

"It's a pretty good novel," Dave said, "but it's uneven."

It was a bit hard to get into, at first, but I blamed that on a stiff 1st person narrator and the small, blurry type. (It's not me, right?) Once the novel slipped into alternating 3rd person with 1st person, I was hooked. And I wondered by James bothered with the 1st person at all--her POV character is annoying, one of those "can't feel, can't be involved" middle aged divorced professor men who suffers not only because, when she was 18 months old, he ran over his daughter and killed her, but because he couldn't feel the appropriate grief over the accident, her death, his wife's anger and blame--only horror over what he'd done. In short, it's hard for me to like this guy, and he's a pompous ass on the page.

I like reading about him, not with him.

Right now, I should be reading what I've assigned for tomorrow--three short stories, all of them under 5 pages--Chopin's "Story of an Hour," Atwood's "Happy Endings" (a personal all time favorite), and the ubiquitous Kincaid offering, "Girl." A chapter on "Witnessing" in Adonizzio's and Laux's The Poet's Companion.

Just looked at my syllabus and realized that, shit, I went over the wrong chapter in workshop yesterday. I blithely discussed the chapter I assigned them to read for tomorrow, "The Shadow." None of them called me on it.

I hate it when I discover that I've shuffled reality, after the fact. It makes me feel like a ditzy mess. No. It makes me realize that I'm a ditzy mess.

In the same vein, I also forgot to bring my own second text with me to class yesterday. And I made this wildly inappropriate comment: "Wow, what a justification for having crabs--'my genitals have become a playground.'"

Students tell me that they talk about me in other English classes. That they've started a list of things that I say. That, for me, it's all about sex.

Huh. For such a "sexy" ditz gal, I'm the biggest prude I know. The last time I ranked "having sex" above "doing the dishes" or "grading a set of essays" was . . . I don't remember. I'm like one of the characters in James' novel, who, hopeless and barren, futureless, give up sex as a fruitless activity.

What I really like is that look of open-mouthed, glassy-eyed shock I get when I say things that are supposed to remain silent. I'm Pandora, ripping the lid off the box. I expose. Streak. I'm wrong. "Sometimes you're so wrong," said one of my friendly helpful friends, "and I just want to be able to tell you that." Out of control. Inappropriate--I hate that word, and yet aspire to it. Sometimes my goal is total squirming, hooting embarrassment. Deranging.

Time Travel

2007-02-02T12:18:00.000-06:00

Right now I'm reading The Time Traveler's Wife, which I'm enjoying, despite my inability, at times, to understand the complete mechanics of the central character's time travel.

This is Audrey Niffenegger's first novel and it's pretty good. I'm reading it with two eyes--first, I want to enjoy the story, the strange and interesting twist on the old formula, the romance. Second, and this is probably a bigger eye than the other one (causing me an astigmatism, but what the hell), I want to figure out the secret, the impulse, the drive behind the first novel.

How does one do it? What's the seed I need to eat in order to stay behind in the land of novel long enough to churn one out? What's the drink I need to quaff in order to chase down the seed, so that I not only create a novel but get the gumption to find an agent, write and send out short stories for publication so that, perhaps, I can find an agent, someone who will believe in me, in my "product," or my potential products, who will water me so that I grow into a novelist and then market me in the Home Depot of first novels?

Shit, my metaphors are colliding as fast and furious as my ego with my critic.

Back to Niffenegger's work: perhaps the most clever bit of her concept is the idea that this man, when he's stressed, travels back and forth along his own time continuum. He meets his wife to be when she's six and he's 36, though in real time they are only 8 years apart. He's experienced marriage with her for years, then, before he comes back to find her before the story begins. When she finally meets up with him in "real time," when she's 20 and he's 28, a librarian at the Newberry, he doesn't know who she is, even though they have a history together--her entire cognizant childhood--already.

Using time travel as a metaphor for memory and story is quite interesting, though it can also be confrustrating (confusing and frustrating). My betamax brain can't always entirely grasp the physics of his time travel and thus the rules of the novel's universe. But, unlike Pychon's vast and enervating novelverse, I can skip over the blips in the radar and keep going, reading at least for the "good bits"--the trouble in the marriage, of course.

Because who can deal with a spouse who can't live in the present?

Seeking Another Woman's Skin

2007-01-31T16:05:00.000-06:00

In St. Vincent de Paul,
warehouse for shed skins,
fetid, brown-smelling,
thick and rank in their racks
as reptiles in a back-
water zoo,
shirts seething next to
moth-eaten coats,
rows upon rows of
loose-kneed pants, faded skirts,
crumpled T shirts and cracked shoes,
I plunge chapped hands
into cold polyester,
the smoke and stink
of other womens' lives--

try on a pair of faded Levis,
trail my finger over a yellow spot
near the crotch--
a drop of mustard, or
trace of blood washed
into a half-moon, acid kiss
of a lover, his wrathful
tear, maybe the faint hiss
of his cigarette--

on me, it's a half-
smile, small and sly,
yellow tongue
flicking the taut zipper.

Under this stranger's skin
I am naked, raw and
nearly new.

Blood Rage

2007-01-29T10:58:00.000-06:00

Grandpa, you crusty cigar chewing old bastard--
Why'd you have to do it that way?
The old gun to the head routine. What a cliche.

It's your fault, you know,
I'm such a drag on the emotional economy,
your dark cloud that visits every winter

and stays through spring.
I hate it, your lack of faith, your thick black sludge
slogging through my blood.

Take it back, you asshole--your rage
pricking every root of every hair,
your voracious hole demanding

more, more, more,
impotent voice that breaks loose
in molten curses--

dragonfire searing, mostly,
those dumb enough to love us.
Your hand pours wine down my throat--

glug glug glug--
liquid sugar to plug
the bottomless gullet.

But you taught me to drink poetry, too,
a kinder savior than the stern patriarch
who ruled your cold Lansing home

and the silent Methodist church.
You must've hated them, Calvinist
father and mother,

silent Sundays, dusty Bible--
you never talked about your childhood,
ran away as soon as you were able,

left me that ability to run
but not the ability to face forward
or forget.

Gave me your square cleft chin,
blue eyes that squint as if against
a bone-crushing wind,

the temperament to dive
again and again into raucous waves,
figure the best way to crash in hostile seas,

and this white white skin, pale as skim milk,
your son's death suit,
cloth fit only for burning.

I want to drag you out
of senseless nothing,
your planned afterlife,

smack some sense into you,
you crusty son of a bitch,
fucking old cancer coddling wreck,

knock you around Tutu's blue living room
until you say you're sorry,
and pull me into one of those bear hugs

that took my breath when I
was just a lost kid without a father--
hold on and beg you to stay.

Pipe Down

2007-01-26T12:02:00.000-06:00

In the early 80s, American girls in Mexico City,
we loved to dance, jiggling new breasts and tight buttocks
to Chic, Earth Wind & Fire, Shakakan,
pumping our fists in the air and moaning ahhhhh
freak out!
as we leapt off Joanne's double bed
to stick a landing--
arms straight, fingers wide and stretched--
jazz hands, she called them--
on the tan carpet
cluttered with our polyester shirts, whirled
and thrown off in sweaty dance passion,
and our tight Calvin Kleins, kicked off leg by leg,
and her new Candies, hard wooden quotation marks
around the scrambled comment cast
by my chunky leather "chastity" belt.

Joanne's mother, frowning under big glasses,
mousey blonde hair frosted like a cake
in waves over her shiny forehead,
would've told us to pipe down
if she'd heard us
shouting we are family with Sister Sledge,
Joanne's anthem,
but her mother was floating alone in the pool,
under the moon,
as her father, who worked for PPG, flew
on a mysterious errand,
across the dry divide between Mexico and the States.

Now Joanne's got three kids of her own,
a balding builder husband,
and a million dollar house in Southern California.
At a Palm Springs spa a few years ago,
none of us danced.
Joanne, reserved under a cropped cap
of highlighted hair, roused into an echo
of that old dance passion
only to declare "gay" a "lifestyle,"
curling her lips,
as if "lifestyle" were something that needed to be
stamped out at once,
like a carpet fire
caused by a hopeless drunk's cigarette.

While she talked, I stared at her fingers,
still graceful, long and slim.
They flared as she spoke--
jazz hands, wide and strong,
sticking the words
like raw notes
under my skin.

Kitchen Confidential

2007-01-24T14:42:00.000-06:00

That's what I'm reading right now. It's a fun ride, especially after Against the Day. Of course, the graphic descriptions of the food abuses that go on behind the scene make me loathe to run out and spend a lot of money at expensive dining establishments in the near future.

Of course, after I listened to Fast Food Nation I swore that I would never, EVER eat at McDonalds again. A few weeks later, I chomped down on a double cheeseburger and inhaled a large fries with only a twinge of guilt and disgust for my fluid morality. The same thing happened when I read Nickeled and Dimed in America--I thought I'd never shop WalMart again. I already knew they were the devil, anyway. It was just further ammunition. Needless to say, I've darkened their doors more than once since then. AND I've contemplated hiring the Merry Maids to tackle the clutter.

I promise to read McCarthy's The Road before 2008. In the meantime, I'm avoiding what I'm supposed to be doing this minute, which is to be rereading Act I of Death of a Salesman.

(As a side comment to the anonymous poster who suggests that the tragedy is not that Willy's job doesn't have meaning for him but that it doesn't have the meaning he thinks it has--what I'm saying is that Willy should have a job planting or building things. He's good with his hands. But he doesn't think those jobs or callings have enough cache and so he demeans himself for doing them, then demeans others, like Charlie, for not being able to do them, and denigrates his son for "drifting" from ranching job to ranching job. So, sales is not what Will's been called to do.)

I hate the Linda character for her martyrishness. Shit. That seems to be the story of so many of our lives. I guess that, in this way, and in others, I am too much like Biff.

And on that happy note...

Deep Dark Mysteries

2007-01-22T12:40:00.000-06:00

Back in the office for a new semester. Feels a bit shiny, even though I don't teach until tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm making plans for the first day of class, which involves reading the first assignments again. Making plans = thinking about doing it, stacking the books on my desk, and then writing in livejournal, AIM, talking to students and colleagues, getting hungry, and etcetera.

*

I have a question for movie aficcionados: what's the last line that Ennis mutters to the shirt on the closet door at the end of Brokeback Mountain? I can't figure it out, despite rewinding and replaying at least 3 times.

Maybe it's supposed to be a deep dark mystery.

*

I think next I'll read Kitchen Confidential, or Children of Men. I also have a Wilkie Collins book sitting on my desk here in the office, The Evil Genius, and its beginning is pretty good. Sucks me in. I'd rather read that, in fact, right now, instead of going over Death of a Salesman for the umpteenth time.

Still, I always find something interesting in Death, every time I read it again, talk about it again with a class. Work is such an integral part of who we think we are, who we become in the world. If our work is inauthentic--if we're not doing what we're "meant" to do--then the whole world is off kilter, as it is for poor Willy.

Well thank the lord, or whoever, that I get to do what I like to do, which is to read and write and talk about reading and writing (and myself) to a captive audience.

Plot Anxiety

2007-01-20T12:55:00.000-06:00

Perhaps I spoke too soon about Against the Day. I seem to be reading at my usual rate, but no nearer the end each time I finish.

I'm somewhere in the 800s. There are so many characters in play that I have to blank out the need to remember who they are when they appear again. Perhaps, I tell myself, they are all variations on the same theme--the women variations on the sexual spy, the men variations on the lone Eastwood cowboy.

I have no background in WWI history. All that machination, the political intrigue, arguments about borders, alliances, allegiances, religious preferences--it goes, fffft, over my head. I'm sure this makes me a shallow person, but when the novel delves into explanation mode I check out. Skim. Eyeballs fluttering to the back of my head.

I just want people to have conversations, for Christ's sake. I want them to get into arguments. I want them to throw things at each other, pull out knives, take a walk, reveal secrets, chase each other down, figure out the goddamn mystery.

Oops. Wandered into a familiar complaint zone.

Two votes for Cormac McCarthy's The Road for my next challenge. Humph. If the novel's going to be deliberately obtuse (as I seem to recall, the author of A Reader's Manifesto raked McCarthy over the coals for being difficult for difficult's sake. He also skewered Annie Proulx, who I happen to like. He had a bug up his ass about their "sentences"--a quality of sentencing that critics fawn all over and that the author claims is just incomprehensibility) I don't want to tackle it right now.

Give me plot or give me TV!

I have to write a poem from my soul...

2007-01-19T10:50:00.000-06:00

A friend texted me the other day: "I know what I want for my birthday. A poem from your soul!"

Bastard. I've put off the activity and tomorrow is his birthday. What am I going to write?

Part of me wants to write a version of Larry Levis' "The Poem You Asked For." This poem slowly takes on human form, beats up the poet, slicks back its hair, and heads off to the asker's house. Ha. There's something violent in a requested poem.

No. Rewind and delete. There's something violent in me these days when I face the task of writing a new poem.

Facing this particular request, I ask myself: Do I have a soul? And if I have one, does it want to write poems?

Hum. If I have a soul, it's a dark viscous material on the bottom of my stomach lining right now. It's black and sludgy. When I move, it lies inert. When I walk through a shopping mall, as I've been doing far too much lately, it hides from strangers' eyes. It doesn't stir as I pull out my credit card. It doesn't care how many pairs of black slacks I purchase, or about the expanding range of colors in my turtleneck collection. It's reptilian, cold-blooded. A kind of liquid parasite.

Does it want to write poems? No. Mostly, it wants to be left alone. It wants to hide in the recesses of my body where it's dark and practice complete stillness. It doesn't want a mind. It doesn't want to be roused into conversation. It wants the safety of TV, of superficial narratives with predictable plots, characters who are types, who change in the usual, seen-it-all-before ways, not the image blasting mind bending torsion of poetry. And it certainly doesn't want to create a poem designed to connect with another human being, one it cares about fundamentally.

Pynchon Update

2007-01-18T22:22:00.000-06:00

I think I might actually make it through Against the Day by Tuesday, when I have to begin to teach again.

What's next?

Chicago Diaries

2007-01-15T12:21:00.000-06:00

We’re safely ensconced in the Embassy Suites Chicago Downtown/Lakefront. It’s quite posh—two rooms, a sink in the bedroom, a little mini sink, fridge, microwave area, a ceiling fan in the living room area, and a fold out bed for the girls. They’re on the bed now, their teeth brushed, their various pills taken, reading their books.

The weather, of course, hasn’t cooperated. It’s been spitting an icy rain on us since the late afternoon. By the time the girls and I arrived in Brillion to pick up Dave at Ariens, it was positively glowering, the last embers of a weak sun dissolving into muddy purple clouds. There was no differentiation between the road and the sky, and the whole bleeding mess was making me drowsy (me and my head cold). So I told Dave that he was driving. Isn’t that what men are for? Husbands, anyway?

No incidents of road rage, no spinning cars or cars flying into the ditch (that’s Michigan), no close shaves. The most alarming car aspect is the fact that we have to pay 35.00 a day for parking here. And that’s the “budget” parking garage next door. We had to wind around and around and around the parking garage, looking for a parking space. The spaces must be narrower than we’re used to in supersizeme Wisconsin, because the space we finally found smelled funny to me—I thought it was really a walkway, or a margin for error. But no. We discovered a number painted underneath the car when we got out and sniffed around.

There must be a convention for girls in leotards—gymnasts, or dancers. As we got off the elevator on the 12^th floor to look for our room, we encountered a tense knot of about 15 of them, clustered around an emotional dark-haired woman in an expensive track suit. “You don’t have to get a platinum metal to be best in show,” the woman told them. “I’d be lying to you if I said—“

And then I was down the hall and out of range. Dave brought up the rear. “An emotional moment,” he said.

We wondered what was going on. Dave went back to the car to retrieve our camera (hard to get all our flotsam and jetsam out of the car in one load, even with the two girls acting as pack mules). When he got back, he remarked: “There must be something going on at this hotel because there were tons of rug rats milling all over the place.” Good. Because the glass elevator reminded us of our hotel in Mexico City, the totally unkidfriendly place, and I don’t want a repeat of that experience, especially for Lizzie’s 10^th birthday celebration.

When we got into the room, Lizzie exclaimed at all the amenities. “This birthday trip keeps getting better and better,” she announced. The cockles of my heart flared into a crackling blaze. She and Jaimee set to work photographing the construction site across the way.

Tomorrow, we’ll hit the American Girl Place and the Field Museum. We’re set to meet Zolt and Julie and Grant for dinner. I saw a Pizzeria Uno close to the hotel. Yes, a chain! Eventually, Lizzie will grow up and perhaps her tastes will expand to encompass the unique flavor experience, rather than the mundane or predictable, as is her current bent.

To prepare for the trip, I watched a few episodes of The Office, the American version, while doing intervals on the recumbent bike. In one of them, Michael Scott goes to New York City for a corporate meeting. He’s speaking to the camera excitedly about how much he loves the hustle and bustle of the big city. “Oh,” he says, jumping off the curb and dashing between a bus and a cab, into the street. “There’s my favorite New York pizza place. I always get a slice when I come here.”

It’s a Sbarro, of course.

This morning, we woke up around 7:30. I thought it was 6:30 (but should’ve known from the light coming through the window that I was wrong) because the clock in our bedroom is a whole hour wrong.

I’m still reading through Against the Day, so the time warp bedroom seems appropriate, as the novel is turning out to be about world domination and time.

In any case, we roused ourselves and the girls and went down to the Sky Lobby for our complimentary breakfast, which turned out to be a huge smorgasbord buffet line with everything from made to order omelets to donuts to the usual vaguely snotty trays of scrambled eggs. We loaded up with bacon, sausage links, eggs, hash browns, pancakes and fruit, and made our way to the last open table for four. In less than ten minutes, the girls had dispatched with their breakfasts and were staring at Dave and me with hawkish attention.

Up in the room again, we showered and etc., while the girls waited impatiently with their American Girls. Kirsten and Elizabeth were both dressed in their best doll finery when I finished with my shower and dressing.

“When are we going to the American Girl Place?” Lizzie demanded to know.

“I’m ready whenever you guys are.”

Lizzie and Jaimee arranged the girls on the chair and Dave sat by the door, playing with his Mac. No one looked up at me. I was going to give my hair a blow-dry vacation, and my eyes a mascara free weekend, but the sudden lack of interest in my readiness sent me back to the bathroom, where I applied goop to my lashes and blowed my hair into the usual mushroom cap with a flip.

“Now I’m totally ready,” I announced. “We better get going before I find something else to do.”

The girls packed themselves and their perky AGs into the elevator and we were off. We walked the 8 or so blocks to American Girl Nirvana. A cold wind drilled into my ears (I forgot to bring a hat, goddamnit) and my thighs in their Levis grew tree trunkfish with cold. We arrived and the girls giggled shrilly with glee as we swept under the royal awnings, through the golden glass doors, into the site of what can only be described as a commercial sinkhole.

Girls and their parents milled and moiled through three separate floors of commercial chaos, looking at doll dioramas, picking expensive boxes of outfits and dolls, filling their baskets eye-high with AG goodies. Some mothers and fathers arranged their progeny in front of this glass case or that, smiling with rigid intensity as they snapped digital memories.

As we descended to the “Character Floor,” the lowest level, a girl at the end of the line stumbled and then bent down to pick something up. “Get out of the way,” her father growled, kicking the box out of her grasp and bumping her to the side. As we passed them, off the elevator, I could hear him lecturing, “There are tons of people behind you. You can’t bend down like that and block the flow…” She had long brown hair that glistened a bit in the golden lighting from recessed ceiling lamps; she appeared to be in her early teens, a bit too old for her father’s fussiness. This is a family out of balance, I thought, channeling Cesar Millan.

Actually, it felt like a commercial world slightly out of balance, as if I’d been sucked into a living, breathing catalogue, every minute swept into the beating heart of American commerce, where girls are converted into women with the spank of money, the urge of consumerism, the driving impulse to spend. I had to sit down because my back started to hurt. I stretched my hands to my ankles and held on a bit, letting the muscles shriek as they pulled, assuming the position.

Then we were out. We went to the Water Tower shopping mall for lunch on the advice of the AG cashier, and found an international themed food court. Dave and I had burritos the size of my head and the girls had grilled cheese and French fries.

Back to the hotel to dump the AGs and their new finery, then out into the world again. Taxi to the Field Museum. Hurrah! It was discount day, so we all got in for free. Which was a good thing, it turned out, as the girls wilted after only an hour in the museum, and began to whine, or pre-whine, to leave. At first, we couldn’t find our way out of the maze of stuffed animals. Eventually, though, we got out of the labyrinth and onto the cold sidewalk.

As punishment for their short attention spans (turns out that the AGs and their finery were working their siren calls on the girls), we walked back to the hotel, a mile plus through the cold parks along the lake.

And now here we are, waiting for Zolt and Julie and Grant to show up for Pizzeria Uno dinner.

I’ve got a sinus headache thing that two ibus have not kicked (yet). My teeth hurt a little. I’ve dozed on the bed for a few minutes with Against the Day propped on my chest. Lizzie and Jaimee have attired their girls in their new togs and are creating vast oral scenarios in the living room for them. (All day long, we’ve bumped into clots of girls with their AGs in tow, their smiling suburban preppy mothers—usually mothers—leading the rear.)

Our hotel is populated with AGites, the Michigan men’s gymnastics team, some sort of dance conference for pre-teens, and preppy guys dressed in Dave’s uniform: jeans, sweater, collared shirt, comfortable lace up shoes. On the way home from the Museum, as we slogged through the frigid park, the girls pattering through a series of louder and louder playground slap songs, Lizzie commented, “I keep forgetting that we’re in Chicago. When you said we had to go back to the hotel, I thought, what hotel? Oh, yeah, I remembered, we’re not in Wisconsin anymore. But I look around and we could be in Wisconsin.”

Yep. In the other room, Lizzie and Jaimee are doing just what they’d do if we were on Reed Street and they were in her room, or the basement, or the living room.

Dinner was fun. Pizzeria Uno promised a 2-3 hour wait, outside in the cold, so we went down the street to Pizzeria Due, which promised a 1.5 hour wait, again outside, so we went around the corner to the California Pizza Kitchen, which promised a 10 minute wait. After 20 minutes, they showed us to a set of back to back booths.

"Um," I said, "this isn't going to work." The woman looked at me blankly. "We're having a reunion," I said, in Spanish. "We haven't seen each other in a year or two. We need to talk and we can't talk like this."

"It will take longer, then," the woman said.

No problem. At least we were inside. Grant, just turned 2, climbed up on the waiting bench and stood. "Down," Julie said. "Grant, tooshie on the seat." He looked at her, weighed his options, and bent his knees a few inches. When Julie looked away again, he straightened them.

Pizza was good, if not authentic Chicago. Lizzie and Jaimee snapped pictures like maniacs at the other end of the massive booth we finally scored. Grant pointed at them and crowed, in between stacks of his board books.

(I would share some of Lizzie's pictures, but it turns out that the cable enclosed with the camera is wrong. After calling Nikon about it (and one has to search through the website to find a phone number), I discover that I will have to doall kinds of faxing gyrations in order to get a replacement cable swapped out. It's easier, and they know it, to just go to the store and get one that fits. Bastards. This will get me onto another rant, about the Nintendo DS and Game Cube scam, but I digress...)

It was great to see Zolt and Julie and Grant, who has Julie's fair coloring and Zolt's face--flashbacks to Zolt in the classroom, Arizona, sitting in the row next to the door, grinning ear to ear with the sheer pleasure of learning, one of the only people in the room to express it, that same energy in Grant's glee as he stacks the last book and I squeal with pleasure for him, clap my hands, yayyyyyy Grant and Zolt!--even in the hustle and bustle and wait wait wait in the cold of Michigan and Wabash Avenues. It felt as if there was nothing much to say to Zolt, since he's been reading all these entries.

Yesterday morning we got up, ate our complimentary breakfast, loaded up the car, checked out, and took a taxi to the Shedd Aquarium. Lots of cool fish, and a Soldiers Field next door packed to the top with Bears fans celebrating the play off game. Made it through that experience in 2 hours, then back to the hotel in another cab, pay parking, drive out. We breathed a sigh of relief when we found 94 and were headed in the right direction.

Ten miles past the exit, Dave remembered that he had to go to Brillion to pick up his truck from work, so we wended through a lot of back country roads around Denmark, bleak farms all brown and gray, waiting for this snow.

It was dark by the time we got to Ariens. Dave got his truck, I drove Jaimee home to De Pere, and then we made it back to Reed Street around 5:54. Phew. Home again.

Notes on Notebooks

2007-01-10T10:04:00.000-06:00

I try to use a writer's notebook to keep my ideas flowing. Following Julia Cameron's new agey coda, outlined in The Artist's Way, I occasionally revert back to the 3 page a day diet, longhand, written without censorship, meant to be unread (for quite a while). I also follow another Zenny woman's advice, Natalie Goldberg, and I let all that stuff (euphemism) percolate in the "compost heap" for --

Well, forever. I've got a shelf full of notebooks somewhere that haven't been cracked in years. I'm afraid to open them. I'm sure that those little nit bugs, the feathery gnats that are now rising up in clouds from Steve 's dirt, (Steve's our Madagascar Dragon Christmas tree, purchased from Home Depot on fire sale), will fly right up my nose as soon as I spread the pages.

I'm not sure that the notebooks work for me. And yet I keep assigning them to my students, and collecting them, and counting the entries, all the while trying not to read the entries on love lives, crushes, hatreds, boredoms, fighting down my intense voyeuristic streak. (The reader in me.)

Well, I'm not sure that working out at least 5 times a week is "working" for me, either, and yet I continue to do it. In fact, if I'm not able to exercise, I get panicky. I am afraid that my thighs and ass will balloon up and anchor me to the earth. I won't be able to move. I'll wake up and find myself trapped in a loathesome life, a bloated, snorting, sweating, half naked wreck.

The theory is this: one has to keep the juices flowing. Dad (a bloated, snorting, sweating, half naked wreck) used to put the pedal to the metal when we'd be on family trips, pushing the Aspen station wagon up to 80, 85, 90, on those hillock roads in Mexico that might lead us to Zihuatanejo. "I'm blowing out the bad gas," he'd say. And in Mexico, there was such a thing as bad gas--dirty gas, leaded gas, catalytic converter eating gas.

Maybe the notebooks are a way to blow out the bad gas so that, later, when I (theoretically) sit down to write something "real," something destined to be a recognizable animal (short story, essay, poem, novel, book), quality will come out. I'll be focused, laser sharp, witty, writing with a purpose.

Maybe the notebooks are also a way to cheat the old censors, the ones that sit in judgment in my head, saying, "God, what are you thinking? Who asked your opinion? You're still a dweeb who can't match her shirt to her pants, her flood pants, aren't you?" Maybe the notebooks allow me to vomit all that censoring stuff out and then put it away in the compost pile, forget about it.

And maybe the notebooks are just another way for me to circumvent what I should be doing--writing a recognizable animal--along with the blog, the journal, the syllabus, the email, the (sorry, friends) letter of recommendation...

Running with Scissors: A Nice Break

2007-01-07T15:26:00.000-06:00

So. I haven't given up completely on Against the Day. Once I announced that I wanted to drop the book like a hot rock, the plot came back into action. I like the sections where the Chums (boys in a balloon) fight with each other over ridiculous adolescent shit, faux spy intrigue, and I like the out-West portions with lost sons and fathers. I also like the sections of the novel devoted to the noirish detective, Lew. So I've forged ahead. I'll just speed read the parts that confuse me (a habit created and honed in graduate school) and sink my mental teeth into the parts where I get gription.

In the meantime, I've started to read Augusten Burrough's Running with Scissors as comic relief. (Thanks, Kyle, for the great Christmas present!) It's fun, intellectually nonconfrontational, and vaguely reminiscient of one of my faves (who I recently misnamed, whoops, in a previous post), David Sedaris. Both B and S are borderline obsessive compulsives, gay from the cradle, with crazy family situations, notably the mothers. Both B and S seem to cure themselves, partially, with cigarettes. Both have very tenuous relationships to established authorities (schools). Both write wryly and yet fondly of their childhood "abuse."

I have to confess that I like S about 25% more than I like B. Why? B is not as anally obsessed as S. I like a good anal obsession.

When Is It Okay to Throw in the Towel?

2007-01-05T12:51:00.000-06:00

I have a friend who gives every book 50 pages. If she's not hooked within 50 pages, the book goes back to the library, or is left on the airplane seat for the next potential reader, or into the trash. "Life's too short," she says.

I'm trying like Hell to read Pychon's Against the Day. But every page makes me more confused. I think there's a story underneath the verbiage, but I'm not sure. Whole fat paragraphs float past my eyes. I catch a word here or there, grasp at a setting, think I can discern characters, but for the most part I find myself confused, frustrated, clueless.

I felt the same way when we first moved to Mexico and I knew enough Spanish to flesh out a dialogue: Esta Susana en casa? Si. Esta en la sala? No, esta en la cocina. Trying to understand the world around me, a world that rarely contained Susana, her house, the living room or the kitchen, was like trying to read Pynchon's frustrating novel. I knew there was some important shit going down, but I wasn't part of it. I was standing on the outside of it, panicked, frantic to get in, while men and women and children danced (at least that's how it seemed) around me, pointing and laughing. For all I knew, a bus was aimed right at me.

According to my friend's apt formula, I should bail on the book. I'm around page 180, 10 or so characters and ... 7? 56? ... settings and at least 30 subplots (some of them dead ends, as far as I can tell) in. I've given P's nightmare world 3x the amount of attention my short life can afford.

And it's making me feel stupid, as well. I should just jettison it, right?

But here's the deal. I've spent 26.00 on the book. I did NOT check it out of the library.
It's fat -- heavier than a bread basket filled with pumpernickel.

I'm an English professor. Can English professors admit defeat? Or, if they can, when is appropriate? And should they just keep that information to themselves, so as not to dispel the illusion of literary mastery?

Further, the New York Times gave the novel a great review. (Well, a mostly great review.) This adds to my feeling of failure. What's wrong with me? Have I been spoiled by Chick Lit, mysteries, thrillers, and other tawdry pleasures?

Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad

2007-01-02T14:25:00.000-06:00

Just finished speed reading that novella, by one of my favorite novelists.

It was just the right mixture of alternate point of view remake (Penelope and Oddyseus), first person narrator, poetry interludes (the Chorous, composed of the 12 maids hung by O. for "fraternizing" with the suitors), bitter women, feminist in-your-faceness, and just punkish wry humor. It's not very long, either. Took me about an afternoon to read. (Well, I'm a fast reader. Sometimes too fast.)

I'm a great fan of Atwood, though a retired professor friend, Bob, told me once that she was a pain in the tuckus when she visited one of his colleagues as a Guest Reader. The colleague called Bob and said "Help." Bob had to go over there and provide entertainment, I guess, as she worked and worked it. I got the impression she was something like Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest.

I try to keep these anecdotes out of my head when I'm reading great novels, such as Orynx and Crake. I don't think there's been an Atwood novel that I haven't admitted is very good, even if I don't particularly groove on it. The only novel that I didn't particularly groove on, if you must know, was The Blind Assassin. Supposedly a mystery, one of my faves, and a sci fi novel. But it was just boring, in parts, in my humble opinion. If I went back to reread it, though, I might change my mind.

The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Cat's Eye--all of these novels are great. Atwood's short stories are always short (a quality that many writers don't seem to possess), witty, and instructive. "Happy Endings," the ubiquitous short story found in every literature anthology known to human beings on a college campus, is one of my favorites. Given the choice, someone in a 25 person Intro to Lit course will always choose to write about it.

Hip hip hooray for Atwood!

Now I'm starting, at last, the fat fat Pynchon novel. It begins oddly (I'm one chapter in) with some Hardy Boyish banter about some kids in a hot air balloon.

Oh. My. God.

2006-12-31T16:05:00.000-06:00

So I go away for a week vacation and what happens?

James Brown dies. Gerald Ford dies. Julia Roberts announces (oh joy!) that she's pregnant again. Dave loses his cell phone.

All my blogger data--my username, my password--disappeared from my mental harddrive.

I just spent over 30 minutes trying to retrieve it. Somehow, I got it into my head that I was an "old blogger," not a "beta blogger." That's because I already have blogger's blank spots, a kind of early senility.

But here I am again. Sigh. Obviously, it finally clicked that I didn't need to 'switch' to the new blogger because I was already there. Duh. And then my information worked in the boxes.

*

I'm still bummed about the missing cell phone. Not that the cell phone was any great shakes--as phones go, it's the "old phone" that weighs at least a pound. (Remember those first cell phones from the 80s that weighed 5 pounds and were the size of a water bottle?) I'm worried that someone found it rolling around the plane to Providence and thought, hm, free calling to Costa Rica. Andale!

Like the time when, in high school in Mexico City, we discovered that the pay phone outside the principal's office was broken in a groovey way--you could call anywhere on it, for any length of time, and it didn't charge. People lined up to call their friends in Switzerland, Peru, Argentina; some of us had lived all over the world, so the possibilities were endless. It's not that we were pining to speak to these far flung friends and relatives; it was the lure of the "free." Most of us, I think, were pretty "good" (aside from the guys who liked to hold lit cigarette lighters underneath their unsuspecting friends' Levis at lunch, or the date rapers) but the broken phone was an attractive nuisance. It took the Powers that Be (certainly not the principal, Mr. Dingman, a nice but entirely ineffectual man we called Dingbat) at least two weeks to cop to the problem, maybe after someone used it to call in a bomb threat to get out of a math test.

We called Dave's phone a few times, hoping to hear it ring from a pair of pants, or a coat, or the bottom of Jen's closet. Nope. It rang the requisite 8 times before the message came on: "The party you have called has left the vehicle, traveled beyond the service area, or...."

Jen says she's going to think optimistically. The phone is in some dumpster somewhere. It's just a matter of getting a new one.

I like to think it's rolling around under a plane seat and that when we called, twice, it fizzed on the radar screen.

*

Over the vacation, I read a fun Neil Gaiman novel, Anansi Boys. I liked American Gods quite a bit, and Anansi Boys is just as witty. Gaiman's sense of humor is dry, and sharp, like certain excellent white wines. I found myself chuckling and sometimes laughing out loud, but didn't feel the need to share everything aloud with Dave (or whoever else would listen)--the way I do with Neil Sedaris. Perhaps Gaiman's prose is solid enough, his wit grounded in a flavorful theosophy (wrong word?), to stand alone; I don't have to share it in order to validate the experience. Also, I wanted to hog it to myself.

I also read Dickens' Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket of the Hearth. All of the novels and novellas were instructive, in some way, shape or form. I've decided, though, that I prefer the musical Oliver! (one of my childhood favorites) to the novel. Both are cloying and sentimental, but Oliver! is shorter and you can sing along. Most of the time, I wanted to smack Oliver Twist with a two by four for his incredible idiocy. Every time he walked alone out of the house, he got pinched by some evil doer. He should have learned his lesson: always travel accompanied by an adult. The Christmas Carol is always fun, and relatively (as far as Dickens goes) brief. I like the idea of ghosts, the ability to revise the future by reviewing the past, and the main character's comeuppance. The Chimes was just weird. Most of the time I spent trying to figure out just what was happening (lots of innuendo and double speak about fallen women, you see) and then not caring what was happening as I skimmed the surface. Too many exclams! Always a bad sign in Dickens! And an intrusive narrator! Blimey. Finally, The Cricket was an interesting turn-about surprise ending story, the kind that O. Henry later popularized as a "snapper."

Now I'm in the middle of The Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Scott Turow. Excellent so far; none of the stories has been a dud. (Some might be a bit formulaic in their moves, but isn't that what we want from mystery stories, after all? At least for me, a good part of a mystery's pleasure is in following old paths with new characters, or following new paths with old friends.) Andrew M., former student and now JVC volunteer in Philly, complained once (or twice or three times) that most of the Best American Short Stories were spotty at best, and that the "genre" edition BAMS was always a cracking good read. "What's up with that?" he wanted to know. When we try to be literary, we usually lose quite a few of our audience. At least Dickens knew his readers; he can't help it if they've moved on.

I have yet to read Pynchon's new tome--it's very fat. I'll get to that next.

*

Happy New Year to everyone!

Christmas Card

2006-12-22T09:50:00.000-06:00

We're deep in the snow of Christmas cards and Christmas (mass mailing) letters, and pictures of grown up kids (how did the time pass so fast, and where was I?), and other holiday reminders.

Next to my head are three boxes of cards I bought to send our own missives. They're making good dust catchers.

Why do I feel so guilty as each new card arrives? Why don't I get off my spreading ass and at least send cards to everyone who's sent us one?

Because.

Because I'm lazy. A kind of laziness settles into my skin and sinks into my bones that paralyzes me.

Because it's raining today, rather than snowing, a sleety gray rain that's coating everything in the world with blech.

Because tomorrow we're heading off to Boston, then Philly, and we're not packed, the house is a mess, people around here are dropping off Christmas presents and I feel compelled to reciprocate, the cats are insane, jumping on all the furniture and demanding my yelling wrath, I'm still in my pajamas, I haven't had breakfast yet, and Lizzie's scootching to open her presents but we have to wait until Dave gets home from work.

Because I have nothing very exciting to write in each card. I could point everyone to the blog festivals, but then--what if they're not all people I want to invite to the festival? Somehow, I don't think the hyperreligious aunt and uncle in Texas want to read about my problems with happy pills.

Because a kind of holiday inertia (not to be confused with the lazy paralysis described above) has me by the throat.

Because the last place I want to end up is the post office.

----

We're leaving tomorrow, so I'll be writing again in the New Year.

Happy holidays, merry Christmas, feliz navidad, happy new year, happy kwanza, hannukah, etctera and so forth, everyone.

L.

Holidays are the exact wrong time to

2006-12-19T17:12:00.000-06:00

try to jump start the writing routine. I'm lucky if I get out of bed in time to get Lizzie to school.

Today, instead of writing, I:

worked out (weight lifting, beginner routine, as prescribed by a book checked out of the library and due back Dec 27)
watched 3 episodes of BBC show Coupling (like Friends mixed with Sex and the City, with stupid laugh track added; without the laugh track, I'd give it 4.5 stars out of 5)
tried to wash the Netflix DVD because episode 3, "The Inferno" (as in "Lesbian Spank Inferno"), gargled
showered
blow dried hair
languished in the bedroom applying make up
went to Wal Mart to buy cookie items, as well as more holiday presents that will be impossible to transport in suitcases...
made cookies
listened to 2.5 tapes of the Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose saga with one ear
fixed last two batches of chocolate chip cookies after first two batches came out puddly
watched Lizzie run into the house ("Bathroom!"), out of the house ("I'm going across the street!"), and into the house (click--blare of TV)
tidied the kitchen
washed dishes
watched Lizzie run out of the house ("I'm going to roller blade!"), into the house ("I'm going back across the street, but I'm not gonna roller blade!"), out of the house ("Bye! I'll be across the street!"), into the house ("I'm gonna roller blade and then I'm going back across the street. I just came to get my helmet and stuff"), and back out again (slam).

Now I'm writing this. Does this count?

I'm in the midst of a debate with myself. Should I take my laptop on the vacation, Dec 23-31, as we travel to Boston and then Philadelphia, rent two cars, and a hotel room in Northborough, so that I can continue this obsessive writing?

Or should I just take a week off?

Right now, I'm leaning toward the week off. It would make the most sense. I can read, hang out with relatives, not talk about writing, not get all bummed out about politics and academia and not writing (not writing my own stuff, as opposed to this--but wait, this is my own writing, damnit... oh, and now I'm using the ..., which I always tell students to avoid, since it's like falling into the non terminal into infinity echo chamber from Hell).

Week off it is then.

Dear Santa:

2006-12-18T11:28:00.000-06:00

When you come to our house, early this year, could you please find the sense of humor I seem to have misplaced? I would also like the ability to

a) turn myself off so that I smile politely but float in a happy place when people get off on topics that wind me up,

b) speak with grace and conviction on such topics before turning myself off,

and

c) enjoy myself in the moment while visiting relatives.

Please don't spoil Lizzie any more than she's already been spoiled. She gets everything she's ever wanted, either from me, her father, her family and friends, or you. You are her repository for transitory desires. Whatever she thinks she wants, in other words, she adds to a verbal list and promptly delivers to your proxy (me). And then, wha la, she gets it. How in the world is she going to deal with adversity? With desires delayed? Denied? Destroyed?

Maybe I should invent a reason to punish her? Make her suffer? Doesn't suffering build character?

That's what Dad always believed, anyway. And look how we turned out.

I need a routine, and a God played by Bob Newhart

2006-12-17T07:46:00.000-06:00

I need a schedule for my life so that I get more writing done.

It's easy to see correlations between exercise and writing. I get up in the morning, roll out of bed, slam down on the alarm, and shuffle off into the basement. I get on the treadmill, or the recumbent bike, I watch whatever TV on DVD's come from Netflix*, lift some weights, maybe, get sweaty. Then up here for breakfast. Shower. Motivate Lizzie. Out the door for both of us.

I should get up, roll out of bed, slam alarm, write. Then shuffle off into basement, etc.

At present, however, I get up at 5:45 to leave by 8:30. Slow in the mornings around here. No action is economical. If I added writing to the mix, I'd have to get up at 5:00. Or even 4:45.

Sounds like a big fat hairy excuse even as I type it. "If you really wanted to write," my mother says in my ear, sweetly, "then you'd make the sacrifice."

"And it wouldn't be a sacrifice," says another sweet voice in the brain. "Because you love it. Right? Isn't that right? You love writing."

I visited a therapist for a while during my last mid life crisis, at least until he decided to retire and move to Florida. I complained that I get caught up in life drama, in people being their own stupid petty selves, etcetera and so forth. Why don't I just write? the therapist wondered. Well, I said, that's just another huge stressor. Procrastination. Avoidance.

Therapist Man arched a Bob Newhart eyebrow, fiddled with his pad on his knee. "I thought that you'd love to write. All writers love to write."

Do we? If his innocent comment hadn't thrust me into an existential whirlpool leading to the hell of despair, I might've been able to muster the beginning of an answer.

Okay, so part of me does love to write. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this right now. Instead, I'd be getting dressed for church. Or watching TV. Or reading Oliver Twist.

But another part of me hates it. It freaks me out. There's too much riding on it? It's lonely? It's crushing? It points out all of my inadequacies? It makes me want to become an alcoholic? Words are never enough?

Shit. I have no idea why the act of writing is sometimes, lots of times, like praying to a God I'm not sure exists (or a God who, disgusted, abandoned the universe eons ago). There's something comforting in it. Addictive.

But it also seems silly, and totally pathetic. Like David Brent's frantic attention-getting antics around Tim's desk. What if God just arches an eyebrow at the camera, as if to say "Fuck this noise. I'm outta here," gets up from his desk and walks away?

Of course, I work out, and work out, even though I'm stuck with this body for good and all. Any changes are purely cosmetic, and fleeting. And yet, I continue.

-----
*They're ignoring my list right now, skipping over Homocide and sending The Office. Can't really complain. I need comedy at the moment, especially comedy that deals with the petty ridiculosity (not a word but apt here) of human beings in the workplace. Watching Ricky Gervais, aka David Brent, contort himself like a psychotic clown makes me laugh on an existential level. I can trick myself into thinking that I don't work with such clowns. That we aren't all pathetic losers just under the skin.

Knitting vs. Writing

2006-12-16T22:37:00.000-06:00

What different brain cells are used when I knit, as opposed to when I write?

I'm wondering, because for years I've let the knitting, the crocheting, go. I used to put together long, involved projects--bags made out of fine cotton yarn in many colors, afghans, sweaters, scarves. At the same time, I wrote my dissertation, a few poems, and so forth.

Now, it seems that when I do knit, or crochet, I don't have the brain space to work on writing. Even this is coming hard tonight, after making two hats today. And starting a scarf (that will probably never get finished. I'm terrible at finishing).

Maybe it's just a confluence of things: yarn work, pesky cats, vacation, some reading of Dickens (Oliver Twist) and some listening to The Name of the Rose (heavy brain drain no matter how it's sliced), the fact that we watched two musicals tonight (Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair), two days off from blogging, a crashing Firefox program (when it doesn't load, I give up and shut down, don't write anything here), and a kind of hangover from finishing the semester.

I don't know why I spend money on yarn projects. Most everything I make is semi-ugly. The furry scarves I've made for the last few years have all unraveled on my friends, or gotten lost at the backs of their closets. I start projects and never finish them, and when I go looking for needles to start a new project, I find half finished squares of indeterminate use all over, tangled into themselves and all the needles. Looking at all that mess, I get the same knotted feeling in my brain that I used to get in years 2 and 3 of dissertation writing.

By the same token, I don't know why I spend time on poetry projects, either. I can't finish those, and (as some readers have said, and these readers' voices tend to linger long after their bodies have disappeared) they are semi-ugly.

Penelope stitched and unstitched her sampler, putting off the suitors and waiting the long 20 years for Ulysses to get back from his adventures. When he finally arrived, disguised as an old man, she didn't recognize him. She made him do tricks to prove himself--and in a rage, he pulled down their matrimonial bed. Or something like that. Maybe, getting a look at what she'd been waiting for, those long 20 years, raveling and unraveling, she thought no fucking way.

2006-12-13T17:23:00.000-06:00

What happens when I get up in the morning and think Today I'm going to write my own stuff?

I end up doing everything else in the world: grading essays; running hither and yon to buy Christmas presents, or mail them; attending the ever popular "go to a meeting" dance (it's a line dance that goes around and around in a circle); visiting a friend's classroom; lunching at the Caf to use up my three "free" hits of the semester; lifting weights; driving Lizzie to swimming, gymnastics, or dance class; picking Lizzie up from the afterschool program or her school newspaper meeting; watching television off the box; watching TV on DVD... Imagine that sentence indeed trailing off into the ether of forever, ad nauseum.

And do I ever write?

No. Most of the time I simply revise. I open the file with the full intention of printing it out and sending it away and. And. There I am, four hours later, ass flat, poems 1-30 in various stages of disarray. It's the same impulse that makes me rearrange the furniture, again and again. What? Am I hoping for the perfect arrangement, the one that will scream God's name?

I just realized something, typing that. The perfect arrangement = death.

Okay. That's enough self motivation for this afternoon. Time to drink wine.

Kyle and Me: Beat Like Red-Haired Stepchildren

2006-12-12T17:09:00.000-06:00

Hey, Kyle --

What a shit couple of days it's been, eh? Really sorry about what happened with your poem. I didn't want you to find out for a while, at least until the end of the week, when finals are over.

As I wrote in the last post, "Gather Round" isn't my favorite of the two poems. I like "Look Both Ways" better--love the last image of the whistling coffeepots in basements. Sweet. But "Gather Round" is as good as anything else in the magazine this issue, an issue that you slaved over. I know, because I saw you slaving. And it looks fabulous.

So there are a few literal minded readers who have managed to misread your poem. The comment to my last post is a wonderful support for what you're trying to do, though. You should take it to heart, rather than what the rabble has to say.

Indeed, we project onto others our own demons. We scapegoat. We find reasons to be mad. Rage, after all, is delicious.

And we are, as a country, shockingly illiterate. I don't mean that we can't read. Lots of us can read the words on a page, one after the other, and get a sentence out of them. But few of us can actually read the nuances there, the subtext, the hidden meanings.

Why? Many of us are lazy. Fearful. Full of slithering, whispering demons looking for a way out.

My time in Mexico taught me, more than anything else, what it means to be an American, both here and abroad. How are we viewed? We're loud. We're demanding. We refuse to speak the language of the country we're visiting. We dress funny (wear shorts when its clear that no one else, no one native, is wearing them), carry expensive cameras, and tend to buy cheap trinkets from the natives, crass bling that we actually put on our heads or around our necks like DUNCE signs. We're condescending. We're negative. We say things like, "Man, Mexico sucks." We look for Burger King and McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. We drink and drink and drink and vomit and pass out.

Okay, so I'm totally stereotyping. But some of my Mexican friends used to dress in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and wander around the Zona Rosa in Mexico City, stopping people on the street to say, in their best faux American accents, "Pear DOUGH nay, la playa?"

For them, that was the height of hilarity.

I'd come back to the States and, when I met people and told them I lived in Mexico, they'd ask: "Do you ride a burro to school? Do you have floors in your house? Do you speak Mexican?" One boy said, "Oh, yeah, I've been to Mexico. I think it was Albuquerque or something." When I explained that, no, I lived across the border, as in another country, he looked at me as if that country was Mars, and that in Mars we must spray shit mist on people when we talk to them.

So I've had an axe to grind about prejudice (I lived in AZ when they wanted to pass that racist 'English Only' bill, a bill that, as far as I know, they keep trying to get on the ballot) and ignorance since I could formulate words into lines and call them poems.

How do we, as red haired step children, bound to get beat as soon as we open our mouths, get people to listen to what we have to say?

Well, one good way is hold up a mirror and make them mad enough to want to beat us.

Rock on, woman.

L.

Irony, Persona Poems, and Seeing Red

2006-12-11T20:23:00.000-06:00

I got into a tiff at school today with a full professor who I'll name Dr. Q.

Our literary magazine just came out and contains a poem by one of the editors, a persona poem from the point of view of a KKK type white male bigot, calling all "likeminded" others to join his wretched cause. In the tradition of Browning's "My Last Duchess," the poem hopes to expose the man's evil through his voice, his hatred, his assumption of divine right.

It's not my favorite poem by this writer--when I first read the poem, I thought the point of view character was too flat, a cartoon caricature rather than a "real" person. In short, I thought the poem was too didactic. You might as well write "Bigots are evil."

Apparently, the poem is actually too subtle for some readers, including--to my shock--Dr. Q.

Picture this: I'm in my office collecting portfolios and final essays by email, downloading them to my computer, surfing on Facebook, generally enjoying the slowed-down pace of finals week.

One of my colleagues dips in. "Has anyone said anything to you yet about that poem in Graphos?"

"What poem?"

"You know, the one about the white supremacist."

"No. What's up?"

"There are a bunch of faculty all irate about it. They think it's a horrible, racist poem that has no business being in our literary journal."

"What? That's a persona poem. It's ironic. Who's the moron who's reading it literally?"

Dr. Q replaces my colleague in the doorway. He's tall and his hair sticks up, so he takes up even more room. He leans in. "This poem is completely inappropriate. It's a terrible racist poem that is entirely inappropriate for a college such as ours, that espouses human dignity and equalith for all people."

My entire body ignites in one fell swoop. I swivel in my desk chair and face the doorway. "It's a persona poem. It's ironic," I say.

"I'm shocked that you would print this poem. Students have come to my office to complain about this poem. International students who already feel as if they don't belong here. They read this poem and they're hurt and offended. They think it's putting them down yet again. It's terrible. It has the N word in it. It's full of hatred."

"I'm shocked that you're unable to read on a metaphorical level. I'm shocked that you're reading on a literal level."

"I thought it was ironic at first, and I tried to explain that to these students. But they said, how? How is it ironic? And I couldn't explain it."

I'll admit it. I wanted to get up from my chair and shout in Dr. Q's face. What are you doing teaching literature? If you can't explain irony, if you can't discuss persona, what good are you?
Instead, I tried to justify the poem: the writer is a woman of color. Who, if not she, has the right to use the N word? Who has the right to turn the language of the oppressor against him? And isn't it the professor's duty, his job, Dr. Q's calling, to explain how literature, how language, is as damaging as fists? Isn't this a teaching opportunity that he's calling "inappropriate"?

What about Faulkner? Now I was just lobbing balls at his head, trying to get one to hit. What about Browning's poems?

"This poem is not literature. It's entirely inappropriate. I have no way to judge the context. It's irresponsible"--I'll admit, I hate the word "irresponsible" when it's applied to something that I, as advisor, have allowed (tacitly) the students to print--"not to put something in the journal to explain that the writer is responding to an assignment, to create a voice that's entirely opposite from her own. I can't know that. Reading this, I can only see this voice, this hateful voice. And these students can't read metaphorically. English isn't their first language. They're going to feel attacked."

Blah blah blah. I can't represent everything that Dr. Q said because, I'll admit it, I'd gone into red nova by then. I felt that he was attacking me, as the advisor, my student, as the author (saying that she can't write about the attacks that she feels lurk under the most bland of white facades, the entitlement that many supremacists feel when they urge their compatriots on to acts of hatred and exclusion), the poem, as "irresponsible" and "inappropriate," and literature in general, as being metaphorical, and thus capable of misreading and misinterpretation. I just wanted to get his head into a vice and crush it.

Now that I'm no longer seeing so red, I'm wondering why I felt so angry. It's not as if I thought the poem was fabulous. I do think the writer of the poem is pretty fabulous, and she'd just been in my office with a Christmas present. I know how much work she put into getting the current issue out by finals week. I know that she would be, will be, devastated to learn that Dr. Q, or any other Dr., for that matter, was stomping around reviling the poem. And no doubt Dr. Q was equally bearish about his own students, the ones who didn't get irony and were offended by the literal words on the page, because they couldn't imagine a context around it, any distance from the speaker.

I think that, as in many things, my narcissism was also engaged. As an undergraduate, I loved the persona poem. I loved to show up the first person narrator as unreliable, to kill with ironic distance--like Flannery O'Connor, say. I have a soft spot for the disgusting point of view character. So I wrote my own persona poems with the N word in them, after living for awhile in the south, and growing up with a stepfather from the south, in order to show up that kind of genteel hatred. Get your reader to identify with your narrator, and then show that narrator to be infected with evil, with hatred, and thus activate your reader's shame. Your reader's complicity in that violence.

That's why I thought the poem in Graphos didn't quite work: I never identified with the speaker. He was just evil from the get-go, and got more evil as the piece went on. I was safely on the other side of the glass wall from him, not part of his particular hell. A more disturbing poem, a more nuanced poem, would make me complicit in his evil.

But my first semester at Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars, where the students are stronger, faster, able to leap capital T in a single bound, my persona poem tanked just as surely as my student's poem tanked with Dr. Q and his one-dimensional readers. I was shocked then, too. My fellow workshoppers said that the poem was racist (a girl watches and objectifies an African American on a bus; the African American, leaving the bus, gives the girl full eye contact, breaks the girl's reverie, saying, "Whatchu lookin at, bitch?"); one of them, quivering on the edge of his seat, implied that I was a horrible person for bringing the poem to the group. That I should be punished for putting such thoughts on the page. Only the workshop leader, a famous and graceful poet, came to my defense. "I think this poem is meant to be ironic," he said. "It's a persona poem. The trick comes at the end, when the narrator realizes what she's been doing, and her entire behavior becomes suspect." But that wasn't enough, we all concluded. If readers couldn't get past the first part of the poem, couldn't move past condemning the speaker and conflating her with me, and see the ironic distance created by the end, well, then it failed.

So I burned that poem. Especially after making love to a man for the first time and finding, the next morning, that poem on his dresser: "Ugly ugly poem," he'd written across the bottom.

Dr. Q couldn't know all this history, this context, when he stood in my doorway and half shouted that the poem was "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" and bad.

But he does know, now, just what I think of readers who can't get--or teach--irony.

The Little Friend

2006-12-11T08:37:00.000-06:00

I'm reading Donna Tartt's novel right now. I checked it out of the library and started the first pages before I realized/remembered that I'd already listened to most, if not all, of the novel on tape. In the car. Last year sometime.

But reading it on the page is a new experience. I remember vague outlines; it's the texture of the novel that's been lost.

Harriet, one of the central characters, fascinates me. I wonder if she's the character Tartt identifies with most. Harriet is a brooding, "pedantic," bull-faced 12 year old. She meets the world with a scowl, hands in fists.

The novel takes place in Mississippi, and drips with Southern hopelessness, humidity. As I read, I am thrust back into that year we spent in LA, New Orleans, Metarie, the vicious ankle biting insects, the crab grass, the putrid sewage canal in the back yard. Tartt's prose is muscular, detailed, without being precious or ornate. Though a few of the characters have become, with age, the maiden aunts that haunt Southern fiction, the fiction itself doesn't have the fragile, mothballed flavor of them. Thank God.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the novel is the fact that it's a kind of mystery. Harriet is trying to solve her brother's murder--her brother, Robin, was hanged in the back yard when Harriet was less than a year old. Twelve years have passed since the event and it remains unsolved; no one in Harriet's dysfunctional family wants to talk about the subject (they will remember Robin in technicolor, even embellish, embroider, his memory, but they bristle and keen when provoked with the actual murder). Harriet decides to take matters into her own hands.

I want to write such a story. I'm about a quarter of the way into the novel--Harriet has decided that she knows who murdered her brother and that she will enact a severe penalty: death--and delighted that I have three-quarters more to go before the end of the journey.

I'm enjoying this novel, on the second time around, more than I did Tartt's first work, The Secret History. I have to confess that Tartt is a genius, of sorts, at getting me to invest myself in her narratives. I had such a vivid reaction (negative) to one of the characters in her first novel that I can't get him out of my head. I've conflated him with a bad boyfriend, as well as with the (in)famous Ezra Pound. That novel took place in Vermont. The Little Friend is set in MS.

How does Tartt do it? Has she lived in both places? It would seem so, since her intimacy with setting (a setting that doesn't serve simply as a backdrop to plot, or character, but as instigator for them) is rich, layered, convincing. (A brief Google reveals that she grew up in MS and then went to Bennington for college, where the writer in residence declared her a genius. Oh my.)

Another thing that pleases me: Tartt must have a large incubation period. At least ten years lie between The Secret History and The Little Friend. I'm pleased by that because it gives me hope for my own languishing projects/stories.

Dog Whispering

2006-12-10T17:37:00.000-06:00

We are watching Cesar Milan, Lizzie and I, teach humans how to be calm dominant--pack leaders.

Cesar's slogan is something like: "I rehabilitate dogs. I train humans."

I want to be as calm energized as Cesar is with dogs. I don't want to be the human who needs to be trained (ugh), like all of the humans in Cesar's fascinating segments. I've always said that I want to be a force to be reckoned with.

I'm sucked in whenever Cesar's on the boob tube. I wonder if, when we get a dog this May, we'll be able to train ourselves to remain in a calm state of mind, a Zenlike master-subject relationship. What if I'm one of those women who gets dragged down the street by her beast?

The dog we grew up with, Sheba, was totally out of control. She scratched up the laundry room door, she barked at us when we were eating dinner, she'd escape and roll in whatever she could find that was dead.

Cesar tells us to live "in one zone only, the 'I can' zone." Mostly, Cesar argues, animals with obsessions, fears, and imbalances are picking up these wavelengths from us. Dogs don't have a past or future problem (as we do); instead, they live in the moment.

I need to get this dog soon. I need to be in charge of my own moment, not living in the past (where I don't get writing done, or I send it out and it gets rejected, again and again, or someone in a workshop setting says something stupid and thoughtless, such as 'No one gives a shit about your stupid life, Laurie'") or in the future, where I'm not writing or I'm bumping my head against ridiculous political walls at school.

This is how poetry sometimes feels:

2006-12-09T15:28:00.000-06:00

Is Anybody Out There?

2006-12-09T15:19:00.000-06:00

This is how I feel when I come to this spot and see, once again, that no one has responded. Responses are my only index of activity. Dumb, but true.

Should I just delete it? And, if so, how does one delete a blog? I went in search of the answer to that and found no answers. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. I probably don't want to be deleted.

To Blog or Not to Blog?

2006-12-07T12:11:00.000-06:00

I'm wondering if it's a good idea to blog every day. I mean, if there's always something up from Laurie, who will crave me?

It seems to me that I crave posts from those of you who are more -- reflective? meditative? canny? -- than I am. For instance, I would love to read daily posts by piefessor.livejournal.com.

And yesterday, I was reading recent comments on my stuff, and (I have to admit, I'm at sea here. How do I decide who to read? There are so many choices!) found raginglunatic,Great stuff there. But not a daily poster, either.

Then I want to be friends with people who I find commenting regularly on a friend's page, so I add them to my list, and that sometimes creates a weird dynamic, as with bark2themoon, who I thought I might know from SNC but who I didn't, so added to my friend list, which he found flattering, and returned the favor, but admitted was kind of awkward.

What's the ettiquette on this stuff? Can you friend someone whose comments you find funny, insightful, and trace to their page, which you find funny, insightful, (as is the case with p_j_cleary, sorry if that freaked you out, man), but who you don't know from Adam and will probably never meet?

Post daily? Post every other day? Post only when the spirit moves one to post? Or when one has something of substance (ha) to convey?

Or just give up and fall into the TV vortex for good?

*

Today is the last meeting for two of my courses. What do I have planned? Essentially, nothing. First, the students must evaluate me. That's always a laugh riot. At the University of Arizona, where I was a TA forever, the eval forms had this lovely question: "Does the instructor display any regrettable irregularities? If so, please comment:" Ugh. In most of my Comp 101 and 102 courses, required for every one of the 10,000 freshman students entering the U in any given year, it was probably a regrettable irregularity that I'd chosen to devote my life to the study and writing of literature. After the evaluation process, I'll check over a few notebooks -- count pages. After that, I have nothing on the docket.

Well, my Intro to Lit students do have to take a reading quiz. That seems substantial.

Maybe we'll have a meaningful conversation about the American psyche, such as we had today in my Fiction Writing class. We are appalled, as a class, at the strange mixture of prudery and sexual overload that characterizes our culture. We're in agreement that America, as a group (not as individuals), is adolescent in the worst way. We're ignorant, loud, obnoxious, obsessed with sex and violence, and immature.

Of course, none of us belongs to this group. We're bystanders with licenses to bitch.

During our conversation, as is my wont, I brought out yet another story about my favorite character (me): though my stepfather thought I was getting it on in backseats with a whole host of boys during those halcyon high school years, in fact I couldn't give it away. While middle and high schoolers today give each other blow jobs on school buses and provide live sex shows at parent-chaperoned house parties, back in the thrilling early 80s I watched the clock tick toward midnight on the night when I was supposed to "give myself completely" to my one and only high school boyfriend. "If you don't break up with this guy," said my stepfather, totally oblivious to the real goal of the evening, "you have absolutely no self respect." Yeah, Dad, and that's not the half of it. The moral of that story is that I was stood up for losing my virginity. Later, in college, when my first "for-real" boyfriend asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said, "To get laid." He fell off the bed, chastised me, and made me wait until January. The moral of that story? Real love means never having to say you're sorry, or something like that.

(At the YWCA last night, as Lizzie poked her way past the shower phase and into her pajamas, I managed to observe that not all stories have morals. She looked at me as if I'd sprayed shit mist on her.)

I felt a little guilty, just a bit, that we didn't devote the class meeting to what was on the syllabus--a last workshop, in groups, of the short story each student wrote. What about that workshop, kids? How will our festival of cultural repudiation help you to turn in a winning portfolio on Monday? I tell myself that these conversations are important because they stir us up, bring things from the bottom of the barrel to the top, show us what we care about. And that's what we should be writing about.

I have to admit, though, that my final comment about Blow Job Barbie, with the bendable knees and the school bus (sold separately), was totally inappropriate.

Open Letter to Dean B.

2006-12-05T15:00:00.000-06:00

Laurie,

Why the fuck has my visit not made it into your blog yet? Jaysus.

DB

Well, Dean, I'll admit that after our conversations on Friday regarding the dangers of posting my life blog-fashion on the internet, I've had occasion to pause.

What if, as you implied during one of our spirited chats, the creative juices are limited (sometimes severely so) and this blogging drains the well? What if I spend everything here and have nothing else to say, later, in a more publishable format? What if I write up your visit (which was hella hella fun) and a stunning, world class poem slips out of the database?

This weekend, one of my best friends called from Virginia, where she makes her home half the year (she spends the other half in South Africa, her country of origin). She's about to make the trip to the other side of the planet, so we have to make our phone conversation count. Somehow, the connection cut out in the middle of a sentence. I used the caller ID button on our crappy "second" phone (the one that is somehow radio controlled by the "first" phone in the kitchen) to try to get her VA number back. I put the 10 digits into my head, recited them once, twice, three times. Clicked back to TALK mode and tried to dial. After 8 or so unsuccessful tries, I lumbered up from my living room chair, stomped into the kitchen, and read her number off the sheet on the fridge. Finally, 5 minutes later, I got her back.

The moral of this story is that I can't even keep a 10 digit sequence in my head for the 3 seconds it takes to click from ID to TALK mode, so space up here is limited.

It's a very real danger, then, that I'm wasting my sweetness, my now fading blooms, on blogspace. I should be using all this lingering energy to write a volume of stunning, shocking, world altering poetry. Or some chick lit (money maker). Or a poignant memoir about the time we spent living in Mexico.

But I have so much FUN on blogspace. When I write a poem, no one has the chance to write back. To make pithy remarks. To laugh at my jokes, however lame. Here's the sad truth about my slim volume of poetry (available from Finishing Line Press or Amazon.com): I had to get 65 of my friends and relatives to buy copies of the book before it even went to print. That's right; I had to stand in front of my wooden wagon, hold up the promise of my poetry in one hand and huckster to the crowd with the other. It's a little too Wizard of Oz.

And, as you point out, writing this way leaves very little space for reflection or revision. True. I don't revise these posts. Much. I may backspace over sentences, move paragraphs around, delete sentences and words--mostly those pesky adverbs, cockroaches of literary spaces--but I don't have the time, energy or inclination to revise (re-see) much.

Problem: with poetry, I'm a compulsive reviser. I'm still revising "Consolation Prize" (once "In the Moon Palace with Daddy Roy" of the post mentioned below); every time I open the file to print and send it out, I revise. I'm in the midst of revising it now. (In fact, I should be revising it instead of typing this.) But revising can be fatal. I've probably squeezed all the juice out of it.

And, yes, it's scary to think that you might, at this minute, be reading what I'm writing to you. I'm getting a bit queasy and I think on it. At A's, as we laughed and told stories on ourselves, and ate our meals, a worm of doubt wiggled into the back of my consciousness. I'd devoted an entire entry, titled "Green Eyed Monster," to your visit, I remembered. Shit. Was it unflattering?

One reader suggested, in response to some questions I had about the ethics of blogging other peoples' stories as part of my own, that we should not write anything in our blogs that we wouldn't say directly to the person-in- question's face. Would I say directly to your face what I said, not even knowing you, in the post? Hm.

Flushed with wine and the pleasure of your conversation--Damn, man, you are one good talker! And, shit, your writing is fucking excellent. It's impossible NOT to like you, and want the best for you, and want to spend more time talking with you, about writing, about family, about life, about whatever, despite your annoying success. So, flushed, stupid, I confessed that you were the subject of that post.

Then I went home and reread. Delete? You thought I might. I thought I might. My fingers poised, for a second, over the button.

But who looks bad here? Me. I mean, I'm writing about a writer who I don't even know yet. I'm revealing my wicked, petty, small minded bitch-writer ways. I think all the shit falls on me.

Okay, then. Am I opening myself up to all kinds of weird harm here? "I'm amazed," one of my friends will say, after each of my poetry readings, "that you can be so raw and honest about yourself. I could never do that." This friend has also counseled me to play my cards closer to the vest, worried that the political arena will take this information and use it against me, as if in a court of law.

This friend isn't blowing smoke up my ass--she's dead on about the ways in which our enemies (who we might think are friends) can twist our words against us. Turn friends and acquaintances against us. Spoil the very connection we're seeking to forge. So maybe I'm just laying in kindling for a really good fire...

What the hell. At least I'll be warm.

-------------------------------------

Dean, the students loved you. It's too bad they couldn't come to the dinner and get a chance to relax with us, ask you questions, hear your stories, tell their own. You might recognize elements of your younger self in them. (Yes, teaching is a narcissistic pleasure at times.) One said today, "God, I wish he'd brought a bunch of his books with him. I wanted to buy one right then and there. I had to read the story immediately."

I can't wait to read that next novel, Harmony. It's going to be good. I bet it's going to be better than Please Don't Come Back. Why? Because now you're an experienced novelist. When you wrote Please, you weren't a novelist yet. Now you are.

It's a good sign, in my humble opinion, when the writing comes hard. I have to say that labor--giving birth--kicked the crap out of me. It took way too long, and hurt way to much, and there were too many scary parts where I despaired, and got sick, and thought I would never make it through the ordeal to the other side. And yet I did, and Lizzie, if I do say so myself, is the best fucking thing that ever happened to me. Pure magical realism.

Giving birth is one pain. Raising the child is yet another. Lizzie was hard. At three, she was fucking hard. I thought I would knock her into the next century at one point. After turning her over my knee and spanking her one night, in a red haze that bloomed in front of my eyes and burned in my hand, I found myself in my office here, breathing heavy, buying 50.00 worth of books on commando parenting. I'd become my stepfather, the villain of all my stories. The world was turning inside out.

That's what real work, real love, real insight does. Isn't that the magic?

So I'm sure you'll come out the other side. And your daughter will be there, looking at you, the way she did when she woke up from that nap and gazed into your face. What's a little book in the face of that recognition?

Shit. Stop me before I sentimentalize again.

Metaphorical Balls

2006-12-01T12:28:00.000-06:00

I have to admit that I love it when people respond to my posts -- not only do I know that someone's reading me, but I get a chance to think more about whatever it is that's obsessing me, whatever problem has me by the metaphorical balls.

Speaking of metaphorical balls:

Last night, I told Dave (after posting the previous), that I was tired of having the vagina. I've had a vagina for 42 years, after all, and I think it's time for a change.

I've had every hair color in the aisle -- black, blonde, red, brown, green. I've had a series of hair dos -- short, long, in between, chopped, straight, permed. I've used a curling iron, a blow dryer, a waver, hot rollers, plastic curlers, braids (French and Unfrench), and sponge curlers. I've been plump and thin. I've worn make up and not worn make up. I've rearranged the furniture into every possible permutation. Now I want the penis for a while.

It's only fair. Why is he hogging it? Doesn't he want a nice, comfortable, worn in vagina for a few months? What else is marriage for, if not for sharing everything?

Why? he wondered. Why did I want the penis? Wasn't a small loan, now and then, lasting, say, 10-15 minutes, enough?

No. I want the testosterone. I want to hold myself in my hand. I want to cringe when people make jokes about smashing me in it. I want to get a hard on. I want to experience the divining rod effect -- stick looking for water to take a dip. I want to imagine that when I write I'm reeling off tiny children from my pen and my fingers, both substitutes for the center of gravity: my soft, changing, dangling, happy, vulnerable, out there penis.

Me and my penis. It will be a cheesy love story. Reality will go into soft focus, and violins will play in the background. I'll put my hands into my pockets and touch myself. I'll jingle coins and keys in my pockets, just to feel them bounce off my Beloved. I'll take my penis for daily walks, maybe twice daily walks. We'll tour the neighborhood. Hell, we'll walk all the way down to Lambeau Field and back. The cold won't bother us, or the snow. It'll just make us glow when we get home, where it's warm.

My penis will give me a new lease on life. Coursing with testosterone, pumped up through my skin and into my electric hair, I want to sit down at my desk with the idea that I'm going to print out my poetry manuscript, without revising it for the 11 millionth time, and then send it out -- to Ecco Press. To Vintage! To Knopf. Because, damnit, I'm worth it!

And then I want to do just that. I want to print it out, put it into an envelope addressed to Ecco, and put it in the mail. No quibbling. Just me and my penis on a mission for recognition.

I can hear some of you already. You're saying, Laurie, you idiot, the penis isn't going to help you do anything. You can send your manuscript to Ecco just as easily with the vagina.

Besides, the vagina is just as nice as the penis. Maybe even nicer. After all, it's a self contained unit. It's served you well.

Okay, okay, so sometimes (yes, lots of times) it had to be taken into the shop. And the mechanics could never figure out what was wrong with it. But that's just because lots of them had penises and didn't know what the hell to do with the vagina. Didn't you read Eve Ensler? What? Were you fucking sleeping during all those productions of the Vagina Monologues?

And didn't you learn anything in graduate school, anything at all? Are you just an essentialist loser after all, after all that deprogramming? Are you still on phallic overdrive, you silly twit?

Come to think of it, maybe you don't deserve your vagina. Maybe you SHOULD get to use the penis for a month or two. See how you feel. You'll be begging, begging, for your old coochie snorcher back.

Now you're just fueling all those fires, those boring, asinine Freudian fires -- penis envy this, penis envy that. Delete this shit before you do something stupid, like hit that "update journal" button.

Okay. It was a fine fantasy while it lasted. And I loved the look on Dave's face when I kept insisting it was my turn with the penis. He wanted to think it was a joke, he laughed, he smiled, he threw back the covers and offered to share, but about 5% of him, way back in his blue eyes, hunted for a place to hide it from me. Frantic. The cops banging at the door with the battering ram and the canisters of smoking tear gas.

Now. My vagina and I have some work to do. We have to find the address for Ecco Press. Then we're going for a walk around the block. We might even take in a matinee -- we're in the mood today for action adventure.

Blog Ethics

2006-11-30T21:43:00.001-06:00

I'm sitting on my bed with Raindrop. Lizzie's petting Raindrop. Dave's standing in the doorway with Ishmael. Both the cats are getting stroked.

I'm not getting stroked. Lizzie's not getting stroked. Dave's not getting stroked. He's talking about his X coworker, who used to give him a stroke. "Some things never change," Dave says, beginning a story as he rubs Ishy's neck.

I was going to tell the story, which involves poop, a back room, and emails, but now I can't. Dave announces that "it's rude to share that with the public."

So you'll never know what the story was about, on the very off chance that perhaps X will a) log on to the internet and search out this blog, b) find and read it, and c) recognize himself. Do people ever recognize themselves when cast in that yellowish light of an alternate and not always flattering point of view?

Probably.

But that hooks into another topic I wanted to discuss. I was going to save the topic for the blogspot venue but, what the hell. I'll unload it here. It has to do with blogging ethics.

I went to a poetry reading tonight. One of the fellow listeners said, as we exchanged blog addresses, that he never put poems he planned to send out for publication on his blog. "It doesn't seem ethically correct," he said. He might put a poem on his blog months, half a year, a year, after it's been published in print. "If someone's going to go to the trouble, these days, of publishing something in print, I think it's only fair," he said, to give them exclusivity.

What is ethical here? If I write in this blog, am I really publishing? And if so, isn't it self publishing? And does self publishing count?

Who's reading this? If I write about D's X coworker, am I being "unfair" to him if I paint him, as a dogowner, with a somewhat naive brush? Is that story about the back room and the bull mastiff his property and have I stolen it if I write about it here?

I began this entry by pointing out that I was not getting stroked. And I certainly don't feel stroked now. In fact, i feel somewhat attacked, or at the very least guilty, as if I've been caught eating someone else's cookies. And because I feel guilty, and low, and thus peevish, I want to take it out on someone, and who better than D?

"Oh," D says, back in the doorway, this time without the cat (they are wrestling and screaming, acting out our hidden aggressions against each other), "now you're going to write about me, aren't you? I'm going to get smeared in the blog."

You better believe it, buddy. Because if I can't write about the bull mastiff, the email and the back room poop, because that story -- which a minute ago you felt no compunction against sharing with me -- belongs to X, is the private property of X, even though you passed it to me and asked me to take a bite, then I'm going to write about you.

But now that you're out of the room, and Lizzie's packed off to bed, and Rain and Ish have bitten each other into a kind of weary truce -- a truce as ragged and balding as Rain's fur is getting -- and you've disappeared into the house somewhere, no doubt to brood over what I might be writing, I can't think of anything to fill that hole. No pithy stories pop into my head.

And it's no fun to wrestle myself.

Production

2006-11-27T22:12:00.000-06:00

How much is enough? Should a writer spend most of her time writing, revising, or should she put more of her time into trying to get her work published?

In the academic arena, writing and revising, thinking an idea through, sharing the writing with her students and other writers, that doesn't seem to be enough. "There's not a lot of turnaround here," the evaluators will say.

No, she has to publish her work as much as possible, in a variety of venues that make the powers that be quiver with admiration/envy.

Working at a small liberal arts college, where teaching is the focus, where undergraduates rule, seems to mitigate against publishing widely and often. Why? Because where does a woman get the time, not to mention the contacts? One has to write a slew of cover letters, get the poems (if that's what they are) ready for send out, find the addresses and the proper names, put everything together, mail it off.

(God, I sound like a whiner of the first order. Dave has to get up at 4:15 AM and leave the house by 6:45, in the dark, to drive 45 minutes to his tech writing job. And he has to sit in his cube doing tech writing for 8+ hours before he drives home again, in the dark.)

Poetry seems to be the worst biz for publishing. I've got a manuscript that I've been "shopping" around for years. It's probably no good. Or, not publishable. (Those two qualities might be mutually exclusive.) Try to get a first manuscript, book length, of poetry published these days (I'm not talking chapbook. I'm talking 56+ pages.) The writer, it seems, has to have infinite patience, has to commit hundreds of dollars to first book contests, and, if she has the good fortune to get her work accepted for publication, must then strong-arm all her friends and relatives and passing acquaintances into purchasing a copy of the volume in order for the publisher to give it a go at last.

What's the secret? Should I be spending more time in my office, listing all the great places to be published, and then shopping my pathetic poems to each, waiting for the inevitable rejections, revising them again, slipping them into a new envelope, and then sending them off to the next place on the list? What should my wish list look like? Should it read:

1. Poetry
2. New Yorker
3. Atlantic Monthly
4. Salmagundi
5. Ploughshares
6. ?

Who publishes poetry anymore? Who reads it? Even I don't read all the poems, or even half of the poems, in any given volume that happens to, finally, publish one of mine.

Maybe I should be writing fiction. But I can't seem to a) think of a story that's not ripped from the dull headlines of my life, b) write the story, c) revise the story, and d) send it out.

When I do stir myself, in a fit of action that happens about once a year, to send out 10 or so batches of work, sometimes it doesn't come back to me for over a year. On the other end, I imagine, are 2 or 3 overworked professor types and their minions, and stacks and stacks of unread poems destined for unread journals.

Perhaps they'll make their way to my poem in 8 months, read through it, and object to the title--"Necrophilia." They'll write me an acceptance letter that slams the title. I will respond, suggesting that they can change the title if it's that hideous, but, gently, outlining my reasons for selecting it. In the end, I would rather submit to their editorial will than lose the publication.

I will never hear back from them again. Since this seems to be a metaphor for the publishing game in general, I won't press it.

Should I?

Or should I simultaneously submit, crossing my fingers against the very off chance that a single poem will be accepted, simultaneously, by 2 venues?

It's because of these concerns that I find myself, mostly, writing and writing -- but not doing much revisiting or revising. And, certainly, rarely sending anything out.

Separate Blogs for Separate Lives?

2006-11-26T16:22:00.000-06:00

I'm wondering if I should start dividing my time, thoughts, efforts, stories between blog sites.

I got started on Facebook. What happened was this: Megan F bounced into my office and announced that she'd been instrumental at creating a Facebook group devoted to me.

"What's Facebook?" I had to get involved in whatever group was all about me, didn't I?

Twenty minutes later, I had my own Facebook profile, complete with a picture of mac & cheese. Why the favorite boxed meal of generations of kids? Because of a throw-away comment I'd made that generated the Facebook group: "I should be called Easy Mac," I said, referring to the fact that I don't give as many traditional letter grades as some of my peers, preferring written comments as attaboys and attagirls, and to leave punishment to their absence.

Over the months, I created my own groups, began to write Notes, typed things all over peoples' walls, read and responded to their notes, sent them messages, and earned this comment recently: "How many hours a day do you *spend* on Facebook?" This from a freshman in my Intro to Lit course.

I have to admit that I felt shame reading that. My defensive mode kicked in when I wrote back: "Not as much as you think."

But yes, Andrea, I will confess that I've become a Facebookaholic. I check it at least once a day, even on Tuesdays, when I begin teaching at 10 and don't end until 3, when I often have a meeting to attend until 4:30. I check between classes, after classes, during office hours, at home before breakfast, after dinner, before bed. Whenever something happens to me or someone close to me, I envision it as a Facebook opp.

And Facebook is just a gateway blog, you know. Facebook threw me to LiveJournal. LiveJournal hooked me to Deb, whose blog is on blogspot, and when she invited me to read what she'd written here, I created my own account.

What do I love about blogging? I love the illusion of instant connection. I love the fact that it's always on. I like writing something in the morning and then finding a note about it in the afternoon, posted by someone I didn't know (but hoped?) was reading it.

I like "journaling" with a real audience in mind. I like how blogging makes me marshal my thoughts. Blogging performs what writing workshops did for me (and sometimes, many times, not as well) back in undergraduate and then two graduate schools: it gives me the feeling of a deadline, the sense of a willing, compelled audience, and a writing community with promise. I never know who I'll meet through a friend, whose writing I'll stumble across, whose ideas will connect with, even inspire, my own thinking and writing.

But it's getting a little too crazy to have three spots to post the same ideas. That doesn't seem like a good idea. It should be something like 3 courses, 3 different foci. Perhaps I'll use this blog, which few know about yet, to write about writing. To post my drafts and receive some feedback from select readers. (Are you a select reader? Let me know.) Here, perhaps, I'll live again as a writing student, thinking about craft, trying to put my ideas about writing into transmissible form.

And I'll use LiveJournal, as I have been, to record the minutia, the stories of every day, as I have been for weeks now. There, I'll let it all hang out.

And what about Facebook? Sometimes I worry that what I say on LiveJournal is too much for the students who frequent Facebook to handle. Do current students (I'm not talking about ex-students here, who are no longer virtual adults but actual adults living actual lives beyond the College) need to know about my struggles with anti-depressants (and the disease that may require them), or constipation, or (shudder) perimenopause and all of its symptoms and implications? No. No matter what they say, students need the lines, the boundaries, between mentor and mentee to remain intact. I can't be a real friend, after all, no matter how hip and involved I try to pretend to be. Finally, I'm a virtual friend; there's an important time for me to step back, smile, and wave their boat, train, or plane away.

And I will reserve Facebook for teaching. Passing on the good word. Reflecting on literary research and pedagogy. Yes, the stick-to-the-ribs stuff.

At least for this afternoon.

The Goofball by the Socks--He's with Me

2006-11-25T12:23:00.000-06:00

Dave just got back from a shame trip to the Gap. I say shame, because I guilted him into going on this trip.

How, you may ask, did she do that? (Take notes, married ladies.)

Rewind to April, when it was Dave’s 41^st birthday. He’d just, under another cloud of guilt, cleaned out his closet and, in a burst of self sacrifice, decided to get rid of at least 4 pairs of shabby (ragged on the cuffs, stained along the legs) khakis. “I need new khakis,” he’d announced. So I got him a 100.00 gift card to the Gap, instead of buying him the kind of khakis (flat front) that I think he should wear.

Fast-forward to last night. The Gap card, filled with 100.00, is still smoldering in Dave’s wallet. After a delicious dinner at Angelina's, we’re at Ed and Kristy’s house for apple and pumpkin pie, Limoncello, and various art and golf talks.

“Ed,” Dave says, hands on his hips, “Do you know what store is in the same mini mall as Penzeys, in Appleton?”

No real beat. “Golf Galaxy.” Ed bobs his head and grins.

“Yeah, I just had to go in there the other day, when Brad and I went on a spice run. I tried that Sasquatch driver, too. The good news is, I still hit all my shots into the woods and the ones I get really good spin on slice right into the lake. So--“

“It’s not a matter of equipment,” Ed finishes.

They laugh.

“I signed up for their Advantage Club, so I get a free 12 minute lesson,” Dave went on. “I was looking at the coupon this week and it says that it expires on December 24, 2006.”

“I bet you’re going to make sure you run down there and get that lesson,” I said.

Dave grinned. “I got a little worried, so I called up. They said I could ignore that date.”

“They just want to get you into the store,” Ed said. “So you’ll spend money there.” He kept squeezing one of his heavy balls. Ed has a heavy ball, a slightly deflated exercise ball, Everlast finger squeezers, a balance gizmo that had Lizzie going for at least 30 minutes, windmilling her arms at an alarming rate, and a ball with rubber finger holes to stretch the palms and fingers that looks like a cartoon alien without a hand in it. That’s all the stuff that goes on the first floor. The basement, complete with heavy bag and punching bag, is another matter.

I shook my head. This had to be handled delicately. “Interesting,” I said. “You’ll drive all the way to Appleton for a 12 minute free golf lesson, but you won’t spend the Gap gift card I got you in April.”

Sheepish smile. Shrug. Ed smirked. Kristy leaned against her hands on the wall and sent me warm eyes over a Mona Lisa mug. Cheri played therapist: she didn’t say anything. Lizzie kept rolling on the exercise ball.

This morning, Dave announced that he had to go out shopping. “I’ll get the Christmas tree stuff we promised the church,” he said, “and then I’ll head over to the Gap.”

Solid. I swallowed my smirk with a sip of coffee. “Have a good time,” I said.

Back two hours later, he interrupted my blow-drying to make an announcement. “Well, it’s official. I’m really old.”

“Oh? No pleated khakis at the Gap, eh?”

“No.” He grinned. “All flat front, no cuffs. Ugh. And all the jeans are in a style I can definitely live without. Weathered, shaggy. ‘Distressed.’ But that’s not the real kicker.”

He dumped his neon green Gap bag, emblazoned with silver peace signs, on the bed. “It gets worse,” he said. “I was in Target, looking for the T-shirts and socks on the old man’s list”—we took two wish lists off the tree at church: one puzzle for a 6 year old, and T-shirts and ankle socks for a man in a nursing home—“and I was looking at the undershirts when two young women came by. They were looking at things and one said, ‘ I have no idea how to pick these things,’ and the other one said, ‘Why don’t you ask that man over there?’ ‘What, the goofball by the socks?’ the first one said. And I had to be the goofball by the socks, because there wasn’t anyone else around. ‘You’re evil,’ said the second woman. ‘That’s someone’s dad.’”

The goofball by the socks grinned at me, hands on his hips. “The kicker is,” he said, “that I’m someone’s dad. That’s the nail in the coffin.”

I told him that now I had a new subject for my blog—I’m married to the goofball by the socks. “That brings you down another level,” he said. I’m lower than the goofball because I’m married to him. I’m married to someone’s dad. “Because you could have married someone better, but you didn’t.”

At least the goofball dad has a nice new charcoal gray sweater and a pair of flat front khakis from the Gap. That’s got to be worth something, eh?

Day after Turkey Day, and Technology Rules Again

2006-11-24T13:42:00.000-06:00

We're about 5 pounds heavier here. Gravity is taking extreme hold.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, overlooking the backyard. It's sunny, getting to be afternoon, and across the table I'm burning a bunch of CDs for Cheri with her new screaming Toshiba laptop. She's going to learn how to use it herself, she says.

"Let me start the process now," I say.

"I can't learn it now." Cheri's voice takes on a sharp edge. She moves toward the stairs. "I have to go put my face on."

She and my mom have the same response to technology. As I hover over their keyboards, tapping in information, their faces tighten, their hands ball into fists, their jaws jut. If a screen disappears and another flashes up, they flap their hands at the wrists, like baby birds shoved to the lip of the nest. They're fascinated by technology, dependent upon it, and, at the same time, paralyzed in the face of its fickleness. It can save, and it can kill. Too often, they've seen it kill.

In fact, Cheri's job prospects look glum at the moment because of her inability--a physical impediment--to use a computer for any length of time. Her right hand and shoulder were injured in a long ago car accident; she is bound up, too, by a slow-growing bone cancer that ties her muscles into knots at the joints. She is legally disabled, in other words, but the therapy biz (in which she has 25+ years of experience) doesn't care. It's all automated now. A therapist has to fill out reams of paperwork, none of it by hand. In two recent job interviews, when Cheri added, "You do know that I can't use the computer system. I'm disabled," the interviews ended.

And how about that paper we've slaved over, perfected, the best years of our lives put into it, all that brain power--only, because we're moms and grandmoms, and because we don't think about these things, we forget--hell, we don't even know we're supposed to do it!--to save our work whenever we're dithering in the void? We hit a button, accidentally. Ka-ching! The goddamned thing disappears from the screen. From the computer. From the record of our lives. And we have to start over again, sure that we'll never get it back, that brilliance.

Mom's computer shit the bed because of a torrent of viruses she managed to get as she didn't read all her emails.

Cheri's old laptop blew up right after she got fired. Serendipity? Hence, the new one.

I'm wasting hours and hours looking at the different "skins" for this journal, trying to find the magic bullet that will rocket my thoughts into something resembling significance.

Lizzie's composed "My Christmas List," on the computer--"So you can read it," she said--and the top items are all technology:

1. Robopet
2. Gamecube
3. Avatar the last airbender game for gamecube
4. Transiperian (sic) orcestra (sic) on c.d.
5. Pokemn ranger for d.s.
6. Ipod
7. ipod charger (If I get it)
8. D.S. skin
9. Sims pets for D.S.
10. Sims 2 for computer (I think its at take 2)
11. underwear
12. love'n'licks husky
13. colored picks for my D.S.
14. Pokemon dungon blue rescue team for D.S.
15. Tecno robotic dog

I think the underwear is a lovely touch, don't you?

I've got a bunch of pictures from our turkey extravaganza yesterday that I should upload here, more technology, but we're late for our shopping date. As long as Guh's still in residence, I need to get my fanny out there with the credit cards.

Have technology, will travel. And spend, of course.

Guh (Good Half) is in the house!

2006-11-22T13:39:00.000-06:00

At least for the moment.

I've just been reading a friend's blog -- it's sweet, thoughtful, lush (with images she takes on her camera), mature, cosmopolitan (she teaches in Pullman, WA, and lives half the year in Chicago, with her husband, and her daughter is in college in Vancouver, so she travels as a matter of course), deep and meaningful. Wow. (You can read it, too: Spots Of Time.)

Reading it, I miss Deb, down to my bones. And I'm a little jealous (that green eyed monster, Buh's friendly familiar) at how textured and rich her life is, at how much she's attempting. She has always been so full of life, so eager to try new things. She's a traveling soul, a winged creature. If I were still a gag-me Jungian, I'd say she's a puer; her feet are not fully connected to the ground.

Deb's learning, right now, to be an emergency rescue ski patrol woman. I'm just trying to make it through 400 lb Tai Chi. And to keep my body at least 75% cleansed after the last ordeal. And to choose what to do, other than to write this, stretched out on my bed, on this glorious first vacation day.

And of course I'm just a little sad that all of Deb's rich life is going on somewhere else, where I am not, in a place filled with faces and lives not my own. I'm no longer part of Deb's inner circle.

Buh wants to make this all about me. Buh wants to bring the conversation home.

No, Buh. Take a hike. Guh is going to confess that she savors the small ache of reading about old friends' adventures on the other side of the country, far from the fly-over state she's in. Guh is going to take the time to read all about Deb's adventures, to look at the pictures, travel with Deb, get into her life. Guh is not going to beat herself up for being a somewhat shallow writer, obsessed with the daily minutia of maintaining an ego. Guh is going to be happy that she has such talented friends, such warm friends, who invite her into their lives and keep inviting her, as the years pass.

Last night, Amy, one of my bestest friends from AZ, called up. She hadn't yet read about herself in the last post, either. She confessed that she'd been reading me, obsessively. I am hugging that to myself and grinning so hard that my cheeks hurt.

Amy and I talked for nearly an hour, I in my kitchen, making and drinking tea, she on her staircase, where the reception for her cheap-o-cheap cordless is best. While we talked, she had to mediate with her two girls, Olivia, 4, and Molly, 2. They tried all their preschool wiles to lure her away from the staircase, everything from owies, to food requests, to video complaints. On my end, I smiled, reliving Lizzie's 4 and 2 year old ploys.

Mommy's talking on the phone, Amy said. Let Mommy have another minute please. Watch Clifford. Oh, Clifford is bumpy? The tape's not working?

I smiled harder, planning my trip out to San Antonio, where the weather is in the 70s.

I guess our adventures are smaller right now, because they have to be. It's just where we are in the stream. Guh has this neat ability to see the silver lining in the shit cloud.

Guh is going to find a good place to eat lunch, take Cheri and Lizzie and Lizzie's friend Renee out. It'll no doubt be some mediocre chain food we'll choke down, maybe Max and Erma's, or Red Robin. We'll eat hamburgers dripping with grease, overfried French fries, or a taco salad, more shredded cheese, chili meat, and iceberg lettuce than any sane woman can eat. Then we're probably going to tour the Target aisles, leave with a bag of chips (not on the cleansing list), some allergy pills for Cheri.

Maybe later we'll eat ice cream out of the carton, drink a bottle of cheap wine.

Life is good.