Seven Seals Upon Us (or Merry Christmas Eve?)

David Foster Wallace on the Metro

Yesterday, I took the Metro at rush hour. It’s panic-inducing to ride even for a few minutes smashed up against someone in a business suit, one foot stuck under a roller suitcase, one hand gripping a metal pole for balance. I apologized to a woman on crutches who pushed by and tried to ignore the smell of everyone’s sweat souring their cologne and perfume. The train got me where I needed to go, though, and after I struggled out at my stop, I was quite relieved to be heading toward the escalator and back above ground, even if it meant once again braving the freezing winter air.

As I weaved through people on the platform, I passed a woman in her twenties who stood with her mother. The woman wore a stylish black wool coat with a matching hat and high-heeled black boots. She was placing earplugs into her ears. Their white cord trailed down her shoulder. Her mother was bundled in a bulky aquamarine coat and wore a white tasseled hat and pink scarf that covered her chin.

“No, mom,” the younger woman was saying. She continued inserting the earplugs as her voice rose. Then she pulled her mother farther from the train doors. “We’re just going to wait until it’s less crowded. I’m not riding crammed in with a bunch of weirdoes.”

“Jesus Christ,” her mother said. “They’re just people trying to get home.”

Ok, so she wasn’t David Foster Wallace, but she reminded me of Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College. Only, he talks about people in grocery stores and how we forget that the world doesn’t revolve around any one of us.

Later, I went into a neighborhood furniture and knick-knack shop. I wandered among pewter side tables, mirrored dressers, and mahogany shelves, stepping sideways to fit between furniture to get from one end of the store to the other. Colorful vases, used books, and ornate hand mirrors cluttered the shelves and tabletops. Everyone else in the store seemed to know each other. When a man came in, someone shouted across the room and asked how he was.

“I’m happy as a lark,” he said. He sounded like he meant it. He certainly looked happy as he found his way to the used book section and chatted with the employees.

R. has a neighbor who always greets us with “Best day of my life,” in response to being asked how he is. He runs ten to fifteen miles most days, even when icicles hang on the trees, and never seems to frown. I have yet to detect any sarcasm or cynicism from him. Well, maybe when he talks about the Redskins. But even then, he refuses to give up on the team.

One of the employees at the Trader Joe’s near R.’s house is also of a similar nature, as if he were part of the same clan as the neighbor and the man in the furniture store. When customers ask how he is doing, he tells them, “Every day is a holiday.” He also seems to mean it. Every time. I sometimes wonder if he and the neighbor know something I don’t, were let in on some secret of life because it’s in their nature to bounce when they walk.

I don’t know what the answer is, but considering these people got me thinking more about the speech. Here’s the beginning:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

—C.

Damn, I am Fine Looking

It has to be one of the most cliched, boring tourist photographs known to travel photography, one that every visitor to Washington, D.C., snaps with their pocket cameras (and beyond), but I must say, my love for D.C., my home, aside, there is something breathless about it.


This was the view last night:

It's All Downhill from Here

The Birth of Cool

Synesthesia, Fantasia, Josh Ritter, and Your Favorite Sounds

The book I want to write about is somewhere in a box. Not much else needs to be said about the state of things the last week and a half. I’ll have to discuss that particular story collection another day. Instead, I thought I’d muse on something else that’s been on my mind: sound. The shape and color of sound, the way we write about sound, the way sound infuses you at a concert, and my list of people’s favorite sounds. Also, many of us in the nation’s capital are extremely sad that Tai Shan, the youngest of our pandas, will be leaving. His parents are on loan from China as part of a breeding and conservation effort, but Tai Shan was Born in the USA. His parents are scheduled to return to China next year.

When I talk about the shape and color of sound, I am being literal. As a synesthete, I “see” sounds. I don’t actually see colors that aren’t there, but with every sound, I automatically picture a shape and often a color. I think about this a lot when I’m writing; it enhances my descriptions, though once in a while, someone comments that describing a character’s voice as orange, for instance, is nonsense. However, many other artists and writers are also synesthestes—we experience synesthesia, in which one sense is crossed with another. Synesthesia has many forms, but in my case, I see color with every sense (it seems my visual cortex never shuts off). Taste, touch, sound, letters, numbers, words, ideas, concepts, months, weeks, groups of people or things, pain, pleasure—all of these have color. It helps me organize and remember. It also helps me identify what I’m hearing or what I’m feeling—what instruments are used in a song or what kind of pain is hurting my stomach, for example.

In writing, sound often gets neglected. Luckily, being able to see sounds helps me to think about its textures and subtleties. Even beyond writing, though, what we hear can get taken for granted. Sometimes I like to simply be still and pay attention to everything around me. I start with the smallest details. Sight: The shadows overlapping on the sidewalk, the lady bug crawling on a park bench. Touch: the breeze on my neck, the blades of grass scratching my ankle, the pebbles pressing through my sandal. Sound: distant shouts from a baseball game, the jangle of a dog's collar, someone ripping open a candy wrapper, the clack of heels on concrete, the rustle of newspaper blowing across the road.

I once read that people become addicted to noise, that we stop really hearing what’s around us, that we constantly need noise, have to fill up what we think is silence because we’ve become immune to the smaller sounds. Walking around a city is a constant barrage of noise—sirens, horns, trucks rumbling, bus brakes hissing, more horns and sirens. Yesterday, a cement truck with its rocky load churning and churning followed me for blocks and around a traffic circle. The city is an assault on the senses. And when we urbanites get away from the constant auditory barrage, we often fail to hear the nuances of other sounds. The article I read said that if someone who was used to constant noise were to go camping, for example, it would take a couple of days to be able to “hear” the detailed orchestra of nature. It is too easy to forget this kind of hearing, this kind of listening.

On an afternoon several years ago, during one of my high school track meets, I stood by the track cheering on my teammates. One of our fastest runners stood next to me. “Spikes on a track are my favorite sound,” she said. She meant the spiked shoes runners wear and the sound of those small metal points going up and down against the dirt lanes as the runners raced to the finish line—sweat and speed as sound.

Her words struck me. At fifteen, I had never thought about my favorite sound. People always ask about your favorite color or food or book but nobody ever asks about your favorite sound. So I started to. I began a list and tacked it up on my bulletin board to remind me to consider sound when writing.

Some of our favorite sounds:

Ice skates on ice, slapping mud against a pottery wheel, dried leaves beneath your feet, the scratch and fuzz of an old record playing, logs popping in a fire, typing on an old typewriter, revving a car’s engine, falling snow, the ocean tide, falling rain

The original list contains more, but that’s in a box somewhere, too. Tell me other favorite sounds—I’m always curious what people will say because it often gives some kind of insight into who they are and also because it forces me to think differently about what I hear and listen to. For me, all of these sounds have different shapes, colors, and textures, and in some way, people give this to me when they make me more conscious of sounds to listen for.

I have much more to say about synesthesia as related to sound and the other senses, but that’s a whole different post, and the book I want to refer to is—you guessed it—also in a box. Or, OK, I confess, I put all my books into paper Trader Joe’s bags to make them easier to carry. It’s somewhere in a bag, which somehow seems worse than it being in a box. In any case, I haven’t even touched on the colorful effect of music, but I wanted to mention Josh Ritter’s concert that R. and I attended last week, which was filled with many hues. Attending any kind of musical performance is always fascinating and entertaining because of the show of colors and shapes caused by the music. It’s Fantasia in my head. And Josh was fantastic, especially because you could tell how much fun he was having. The crowd was having it too. He’s also quite funny.

--C.

Amongst the Static (Life)

So, I've entered into a friendly photo competition with some associates, and this week, the first week of the competition, required the inclusion of a tree in the photo. This one was clicked earlier this afternoon. Thoughts?

Another Day at the Office

What Once Was (And Never Will Be)

Bookkeeping: Dreams of My Own Library

Sometimes I sit in bed and surround myself with books. Usually it’s a weekend morning before I have fully woken up, and I’m wrapped in my sweater coat—picture an afghan with a hood and sleeves. A cup of tea steams on the nightstand. The books sink between folds of quilt and sit on top of pillows. I’ve pulled off the shelf any novel or essay collection that might offer an inspiring sentence or paragraph and allow me to think in that slow, thoughtful way where ideas and images take their time shifting across my consciousness. I flip through the books, read a page here, a line there. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for, a section underlined in pencil or notes in the margin. Other times, I let the covers fall open to see what a book wants to tell me. I pretend it does, in fact, want to tell me something, and it’s fun for the moment.

It’s not just that the books are imparting a message. It’s that the writers are speaking. They put themselves into these works. I’m sitting in bed surrounded by books, but really I’m surrounded by voices, by people, by the lives and intellects of writers whose words endure. The paperbacks and hardbound works wait for me on my shelves. The physical books are comforting. I can keep them and open them when I need to, and they feed my imagination and take me out of myself. Having them neatly lined on the shelves is soothing. They remind me of the work I want to do and the things that I have learned and studied. Too much of the everyday makes us forgetful of art and thinking and ideas. Books counteract the routine.

So it is always with some consternation that I try to explain this to people who don’t desire shelves filled with books. They don’t seem to understand. They want to know why I keep so many volumes, especially because I have had to move frequently over the past few years. Yes, I keep taking my books with me. Everything else in my life may be transitory, but at least they last. Friends who have helped me move refer to my “library.” The truth is I do want my own library. I want an entire room filled with books. Maybe I could even get one of those ladders that wheels across the shelves. And maybe a secret passageway behind one—yeah, I’d like that. That would be like living in a book.

I learned recently that one of my relatives won’t let her husband keep too many books because they collect dust. They also pile up if you love them as much as I do—but isn’t that why shelves were invented? While I understand the avoidance of clutter, it never crossed my mind that books would constitute clutter or that anyone would actually believe they did. The situation perplexed me.

Of course, for other people, it’s not books. They feel the way I feel about books when it comes to vinyl records or surfboards or baseball cards or antique trains or paintings (my relative has many of those on her walls, so for her, I realize, it is art). I can appreciate these kinds of collections. The saving, the preserving, the reminders of what we’re passionate about. They are the things we keep because they say something about who we are.

This past weekend, I had to pack—again. Maybe it’s because I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet, but whatever the reason, it was particularly painful to take the books off the shelves. The set of Joan Didion first editions, the series of Virginia Woolf books—they were in their place, and putting them into storage felt neglectful and wrong. I set a few choice books in a bag to keep with me while I find a new stopover. That seemed to help. In any case, it will have to do. Moving my books time after time can feel like an impractical and unnecessary burden. But they make me happy—in the same way R. says sports and music (and his books, too) make him happy.

I’m hoping they—I—will soon be in a new home—but that’s just it; for so long I haven’t felt like I’ve been in a home, only temporary way stations. And maybe the real reason I refuse to give up my stacks of novels and story collections is because I don’t have a place where I belong. Instead, wherever I go, my books make me feel at home.

—C.

Movement in Four Parts; Scenes as Snapshots

I.
They drive all day in the winter air, windows down, cold like they cannot catch their breath. Balancing out the sunroof, camera clicked, accelerating away intoxicated silly, they will dream of this later, hear of it in someone else’s song, double take it in the rearview. They will smell the winter in some other icetime, shake their heads to something lost.

Later—a cactus in the window, silhouetted by a Pennsylvania sky, November and blue.

II.
From the doorway he says I take too much shit. Only, he is not saying it to me. He is looking at me but saying it to them and he is saying she takes too much shit.

In my office, he leans back and presses his foot against the wall I repainted the week before. His shoe leaves a print. He tells me he doesn’t understand why I’m so unhappy.

I want to tell him to wash off the shoe mark.

III.
“Admit it,” she says.

“Nothing to confess.” He shifts his weight from foot to foot, then stands with his fists in his pocket.

She leans over the railing. The porch banister is glossy and slick with dew. The moisture soaks through her sleeves. She needs to know about an almond tree, with almonds still green, and whether he has seen one growing, in a walled garden with sweet basil. Or what about cranberry fields flooded for harvest, red beads floating and glinting with water? In Maine, maybe, just before the leaves changed?

He takes his hands out of his pocket and steps closer.

“Remember that time?” he asks.

“I remember not being able to get warm again,” she says.

IV.
When I insist I’m going to break, he takes me to ride go-karts. He’s relieved I’m no longer pressing his Honda Civic’s gas pedal to the floor. We laugh. We forget. But he can’t keep up; I lap him.

Another weekend, we drive to the coast and sit on the harbor rocks. We leave responsibility behind. I’m so sick my lungs hurt when I inhale the freezing air, but I don’t care.

“Don’t want to go back to real life,” I say.

On the bright blue water, white sailboats escape to open sea.

“This is real life,” he tells me.

—C.

Methods to the Madness: How We Write

The Wall Street Journal had a great article by Alexandra Alter that interviewed authors about their writing processes. (A subscription is needed to view the article online.) The interviews reminded (and reassured) me that there’s no right way to write a novel and that authors do all kinds of creative and eccentric things to produce. Junot Díaz writes on the side of the bathtub. Dan Choat keeps color-coded note cards in his pocket. Russell Banks works in a converted sugar shack. John Wray rode trains all over New York City with his laptop while working on Lowboy. To portray a character who is a poetry professor, Nicholson Baker donned a floppy hat and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures.

I especially appreciated reading about Hilary Mantel’s strategy of tacking parts of dialogue, descriptions, and interesting phrases to a 7-foot-tall bulletin board in her kitchen. I, too, have a bulletin board and do something similar with sentences turning in my mind, overheard conversations, and images I want to capture. I also make “story boards,” which allow me to cut up typed pages and rearrange scenes and even sentences. The physical construction helps to see what I actually have written and how I want to proceed. Once, I papered over an entire wall in my bedroom with parts of a novel I was working on. I stayed up late into the night pinning up pages. When I woke the next morning, I’d forgotten about it and scared myself when I turned over and saw the page-covered wall.

Other strategies I’ve tried have involved note cards and a large, circular piece of wood my grandmother found in her garage. I’ve written on the back of typed drafts, jotted notes and ideas on staff-meeting agendas, scrawled on scraps of paper late at night, written e-mails to myself—all as a trick to feel like I’m not doing actual “work.” Other times, the tricks are ways to get at the material developing in my mind. I’ve made myself sit on a rock by the river until I could see an entire story in my head and then gone back to the dorm-room computer lab with a bag of M&Ms and written until 3 a.m. Though now that I have a 9-to-5 job and healthier habits, I have trouble allowing myself the extremes of writing late into the night with candy for fuel.

In September, I visited my father’s cousin in Florida. One evening, we had dinner with a friend of hers who is a painter. The painter told me how she and two of her friends used to set up their easels in her kitchen and paint on Saturday mornings. But to make those scheduled painting hours fruitful, she said, she needed “dreaming time.” I call it thinking time, but it’s true—art requires expanses of time where nothing concrete emerges but lots of thinking and dreaming is done about what will later materialize.

That’s the other thing I liked about the Journal article. It reminded me that no (well, very few) great novels are written over night. Sometimes it does take years. Sometimes you do throw out a hundred pages and start again. The article talks about how Kate Christensen “was two years and 150 pages into her first novel … before she discovered what the book was really about—so she dismantled the draft, threw out a bunch of pages and started over. The process repeated itself with her second, third and fourth novels.” It also described how Margaret Atwood has abandoned two books after a couple hundred pages, keeping a single sentence from one and working two short stories out of the other.

This past week I’ve been writing longhand in a yellow legal notepad, putting down bits of scenes and ideas that interest me for the fiction I’ve been working on. It’s premised on the characters in the story that I’ve been reworking, re-imagining, and finally thought I had tossed aside. And while the recent work is problematic in its lack of coherency, it feels like it is leading in the right direction. Sometimes this kind of mess is necessary to get to what I’m really going to write, even if the time it takes to make the mess can be anxiety-inducing. And with each new project, the process is different. Each new piece requires finding the rhythm and a way of working again. I often liken writing to running. It’s really painful getting started, getting back in shape, but once you pass the pain threshold, it’s easier to keep going back for another run, and once in a while, you have that really great run that feels like flying. The other days, though, you just have to keep showing up. And you break through.

For the moment, I've decided to stop worrying about hammering out a completely planned plot and just see what happens with the images in my head. So it helps to remember that other writers work from images, too, and that those images begin to tell their stories. The Journal article describes how Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient “started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.” Choan said his novel Await Your Reply began as “scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy's severed hand, resting on ice.”

Though maybe the best takeaway from the article is when Ondaatje (who apparently doesn’t understand writer’s block) says, "If I get stuck, I work on another scene.”

Then there’s Atwood who says, “Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you'll get a plot." The article continues: “When questioned about whether she's ever used that approach, she adds, ‘No, I don't have to.’"

--C.

Confessions of an Abortion Addict

While activists on both sides of the abortion debate have expressed outrage over Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict and its author’s confession of fifteen abortions in as many years, Irene Vilar is right to tell her story despite its difficult truths and the backlash that has come with it. The story is not one of choice but addiction and suffering and ultimately Vilar’s journey to overcome them. It is a story of being defined by one’s history, of seeking out self-destruction, and of finding a way to survive, even if on shaky terms.


In discussing the book, it is important to know a little bit about the women in Vilar’s family. Vilar’s grandmother is Lolita Lebrón, the Puerto Rican nationalist imprisoned for 27 years after she “stormed the steps of the U.S. Capitol with a gun and a national flag in her purse,” a story Vilar chronicles in The Ladies Gallery. (This first book makes no mention of the abortions, glossing over the reality of what Vilar was going through, something she seeks to remedy with her second memoir.) Her mother, Lebrón’s daughter, used a controversial birth-control pill that the U.S. was testing on poor Puerto Rican women, and at age thirty-three she underwent a hysterectomy but received no hormone treatment. Vilar writes of her mother: “Between the uncle who violated her, the rich father she didn’t know, the mother who had abandoned her, and the town that just watched, she was the fight arranged even before she knew it, the almost cliché casualty of colonialism. She was the sacrifice.” When Vilar was eight, her mother committed suicide, jumping from the family’s moving car as Vilar tried to hold her back.

It was with this history that Vilar (who now has two daughters) left Puerto Rico to attend Syracuse University. She fell into an obsessive relationship with literature professor Pedro Cuperman—she was sixteen; he was fifty. More than not wanting children, he believed a family, a house, any actual responsibilities encroached on his freedom. Vilar writes, “He loved to move, to travel, and to dip his feet in seawater. … He loved to lie down and warm his belly on the hot sand. Above all, he loved to do this in the company of a woman. Except something troubled him about this: he might have to pay for the company with his freedom.” He demanded perfection from Vilar, setting out to shape her while she was still young. He tells her how “women’s desire for children killed each one of his love stories, how each of his companions couldn’t endure the high price it takes to live life in freedom.” Vilar strove to please him; he was her addiction even before the pregnancies and abortions, which seem to have been a rebellion against his hold over her.

Indeed, the lives of her mother and grandmother were rebellions against their own—and their nation’s—powerlessness. Both her mother’s suicide and grandmother’s effacement of the individual (she proclaims that she is the Puerto Rican nationalist movement) are a fight against what holds them hostage, and Vilar acts out her own powerlessness through multiple abortions. All three women are extreme in the ways they attempt to overcome their helplessness. This isn’t about abortion as much as it is about Vilar’s relationships—from the past and the present and with herself. This is about finding out who she is and how can she gain any kind of control. It is about a woman who needed help she did not get and could not give herself.

In this sense, the critics of Impossible Motherhood are not asking the right questions. It took fifty-one tries to find a publisher (Other Press) willing to let this story out into the world. What some pro- and anti-choicers alike seem to miss is that this is an individual story, one that does not make a case on either side of the debate about a woman’s right to choose. It is rare for a woman to have as many abortions as Vilar had, which Emily Bazelon points out in her Double X column discussing the book. In her introduction, Vilar admits her abuse of the procedure, her abuse of the right women have fought for in order to have control over their own bodies, but it is a larger question of feminism and selfhood that is really at stake with this memoir.

And while much finger-pointing can be done, much blame laid at Vilar’s feet, (and much has been with death threats, hate mail, and demands that Vilar be put behind bars) the real question is, what is going on here? How did this happen? Why is the need for self-destruction so great that it results in a cycle of pregnancies and abortion—of filling and emptying, of seeking a greater wholeness only to destroy it?

How can feminists condone a hard look at the truth and the questions Vilar raises about women’s empowerment in relation to the men in their lives? In relation to themselves? About what it means to be an overachiever as a way of coping with your mother’s suicide? To be an intelligent, driven young woman and be caught up in the controlling ideas of the man you have lost all rationality for? To find refuge in an abusive relationship? To take care of everyone but yourself?

In writing about her marriage, Vilar never names her husband, using instead “he,” “him,” and “my master.” That’s right. Vilar (and any other woman for that matter) wasn’t alone in getting pregnant. The criticism I’ve seen sounds as if Vilar is solely to blame, but he left her alone in it. In many ways, her pregnancies, subsequent abortions, and more than one suicide attempt were cries for help. He wanted an idealized freedom which meant never being responsible toward anything, including his wife. The abortions, though not the underlying problems, could have been prevented had he simply used condoms.

Which brings me to the book’s main problem. So much is missing. We never see an actual confrontation between husband and wife about the problem of birth control. Very few in-scene reactions allow us in. So much of this is brave to tell, but we are lacking too many scenes that would illuminate the particular horror of Vilar’s story. Instead of the actual details of finding out she is pregnant and what it was like right in that moment, we instead get lines like, “When summer 1995 came around, we were still in Syracuse and I was pregnant again. I didn’t tell him this time.” But how did it happen AGAIN? And what did he say the times she actually told him? I especially would have liked a very clear picture of Vilar “forgetting” to take her birth-control pills. How much reflection and processing happened in those moments? It is only near the end in a much-needed section that we get some clues to what was going on in her mind: “Feelings of inadequacy, helplessness, and disorder faded in the face of the possibilities of my reproductive body. An excitement, hyperarousal, almost euphoria surrounded my maternal desire. The craving gave structure to the confusing morass of events that made up my life.”

An important detail about this book: as much as anything else, this book is about writing and how Vilar became a writer. It is because of “him.” When he found out about her family history, he told her she had stories to tell and that she must write them. So she did. When they were on the sailboat and he demanded his writing time, she wrote as well. That’s how her first book emerged. But in Impossible Motherhood, Vilar regrets the way his ideas invaded her own, that she actually described her mother’s death “as my redemption instead of my doom.” But when she is writing, she doesn’t become pregnant; she “remembers” to take her birth-control pills—which raises the questions of self-worth and the way something creative and productive is able to fill certain voids.

Another striking picture the book offers is of Vilar’s strength and how it grows. First we see the nervous student, the frantic young wife afraid to do anything to upset her husband, terrified of not being perfect—by the end of the book the tables have turned. Her aging husband displays weakness and lets Vilar control the ship during a storm; eventually she overcomes his hold. She becomes the skilled sailor. She becomes the noteworthy writer. But it is he who taught her, he who shaped her, he who led to this second book where she finally escapes, though not without scars and his mark upon her. As despicable as he is, he has taught her to sail, to write. By making her, however, he ultimately loses his power over her. And when she is successful, he is threatened; she has gone beyond the realm of his control.

Parts of this book are sickening. They should be. That is the reality of an addiction and the need for self-destruction and that is what we should be examining—not whether this individual story speaks against a woman’s right to choose. This memoir raises important questions that need discussing and is an effort toward a greater understanding of our ideas about addiction and women’s helplessness as well as empowerment. For further reading, see this interview Vilar gave to the Los Angeles Times.

--C.

(Image courtesy of Amazon.com)

The Jamily (or Why I'm Hardcore)

Just as a quick follow-up to that last post (check that one out first if you haven’t):

Whenever someone asks me, “How many times have you seen Pearl Jam?” and I reply, “Oh, somewhere in the 20s,” and they say, “My lord, Pearl Jam has come around here 20 times?” and I reply, “No, I’ve seen them in a variety of different cities,” and they say, incredulous, “You take trips to see a band you’ve seen 20 times already?” when I say, “Yes,” always, without fail, I get that look. It’s the same look as when someone asks, “You paid how much for that first edition Hemingway?” or, not believing the seemingly impossible words I’ve just uttered, “You don’t eat French fries?” It’s a look not far from disgust; it’s a look, at the very least, of admonishment, as if I were a child and I’d done something so stupid, so beyond belief, that it seems impossible even a child would do it, let alone an adult. A grown man. It’s a look that immediately reminds you of your parents. It’s a look you never thought you’d have to see again, now, being an adult; now, you make your parents proud; that look, you’d hoped, was a thing of the past.

So, look, here it is: “I’m going to see Pearl Jam next week. Four times. In one week.”

If I meet you on the street and you ask me why, what I’ll tell you is this: “Every night they put on a new show. They’re not like other bands, who just repeat the same set list over and over again night after night; Pearl Jam doesn’t just change the order, they change the whole set. There’s a different energy and different song selection. It’s not really the same show like you imagine.”

While all of that is true, you can tell I’m being defensive (and dry) in my response to the You I encounter on the street; the reason: how can I possibly, in mere minutes on the side of the road, explain to that twisted look of ridicule and derision that no matter how many times I see Pearl Jam, I will never tire of the feeling(s) the experience produces, I will never tire of running into fellow fans outside the venue who, when I ask where’s a good place to get food (because, I say, I’m not from around here), they say, hang on a minute, we’ll take you to our favorite place, we can grab something together; I’ll never tire of spending an entire day sitting outside a ticket booth with seven other strangers, who, in a mere matter of hours, become friends for the long haul, friends who, when I’m later in jeopardy of missing the show for which we’ve been waiting around all day, risk missing the show themselves in order to get me in, and later offer lodging when I explain I have a very long drive home; I’ll never tire of the immediate trust when I offer to sell something to someone online, someone I’ve never met before, never spoken to before, and I say, “How do you want to work this?” and they say, “I’ll just send you the money, you’re a Jammer, it’s all good.”

I will never tire of having a family.

Because if the one thing we want most is to live forever, the second thing we want is for our family to live forever, too. And more than just escape, more than simply shutting out the aforementioned insidious voice, the music allows this Ponce de Leon dream, this Frankenstein intrigue, to become reality. From the creativity of five individuals, from the sounds of string and drums and wood, something greater is composed: a whole.

I do want to live forever. We all do. But as much as that is true, I can’t imagine Forever without Family, without the whole. And while my sister is around the same age as me, my parents are beginning to get old, and gradually, with each passing year, the inevitable begins to stare you in the face just a little more clearly. The clock ticks louder. The voice gets louder. In all likelihood, barring a Kurzweillian cure, I will one day have to face that day, the one that will be worse than anything I can even begin to imagine. And while nothing—nothing—will ever begin to fill that hole, on that day, at least I’ll know this:

With the Jam, I’ll always have a family.

How Fantasy Football, Pearl Jam, and Posters Saved My Life (or An Ode to the Little Things)

The following sentence is written in all seriousness:

Sports saved my life.

Coming on the heels of C.’s earlier comments, some may think that I’m making light, trying to be funny, but I’m not. I’m serious.

Sports saved my life.

Clearly the above statement, like an overstuffed suitcase strapped together with buckling belts, requires some unpacking, during which time you will note that the original statement is a gross oversimplification, which neglects other equally oversimplified statements of veracity such as “music saved my life” and “books saved my life” and “Camus saved my life” and “writing saved my life.”

Sports saved my life is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather it is intended to give a taste, a sense, of the way in which forks and spoons and baseball bats and book jackets can make all the difference in the world, and, in fact, can be the world.

Daniel Gilbert got it right in his book, Stumbling Upon Happiness: we don’t know what we want, what will make us “happy,” and what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, we’re often wrong about. It’s not that guy you’ve been secretly pining over for seven years, it’s not the white picket fence and the kids and the two-car garage, and it’s not that trip to Paris or Peru, though all of those things might make you “happy,” they won’t bring you Happiness.

While I may be departing from Gilbert’s theory at this point, for me, sports are an example of what does make me happy. Fantasy football makes me happy, cooking with (or for) a friend makes me happy, writing makes me happy, and Pearl Jam makes me happy. It’s no coincidence Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note, if one wants to call it such, was titled: “Football Season is Over.” For Hunter, the symbol of the end was not some grand concept, some abstraction, but plain and simple football.

Why? Because football and cooking and listening to Pearl Jam are all distractions; they are ways of temporarily tuning out the voice that says, “You are going to die.” And the reason that voice is so pointedly insidious is that it makes you ask, “Why?” And no matter how much you twist and turn that lump of gray matter, you’re not going to come up with an adequate answer to that, the granddaddy of all questions. There is no answer (other than the obvious).

So, in order to avoid going the Heming Way, we let sports give us a distraction, a moment to shut the mind off, to block out the ever-present voice, to just be, and to be a part of something, a community, a where-were-you-when (fill in the blank), which, not coincidentally, is why that most famous question still gets asked by people of a certain generation: where were you when Kennedy was killed? And no one thinks of RFK or Jr. or anyone else, they know, and this question, if they have an answer to it, and in telling that answer, it makes them part of something indelible, part of something that will not die, something that the insidious voice cannot get to, cannot take away. And that’s all we really want: to live forever. To not be forgotten.

That’s why writers want to have been a part of Paris in the ’20s or ’50s, that’s why grandpa tells the same stories over and over again, that’s why basketball fans of my age talk about Michael Jordan as a god: we’re telling the voice, ha, I’ve beaten you, you can’t take this away from me, and even when you take me away, this will remain, and with it, I will remain.

For me, sports were the first to do it, to give me the upper hand, to make me a part of something at the primal level so satisfying that I didn’t even know it. Writing followed and cooking and collecting books, and a select handful of other things that touch a spot not quite discernable on the surface.

And when I’m old and gray, sitting in my rocking chair (and I do mean rocking), I’ll tell the grandkids, for the twentieth time, how when I was young—because when I’m old, I’ll look back at this time now as when I was young, even though now I already feel old—I’ll tell them, I used to go see this band called Pearl Jam, and the kids will look at each other and sigh, and I’ll look at each of those concert posters on the wall, each from a different show I saw, and I’ll know that each of those moments is forever, that my grandkids can listen to the CDs if they want, they can hear what that very night sounded like, they can look at my photographs, and nothing, no voice can take that away. That will remain. That is forever.

That will not die.

Giant Pandas -- What More Could You Ask For?

(Click on the link below to watch the panda bears live.)

If anything can make the workday better, it’s got to be the National Zoo’s panda cam.

You can view two different cameras to watch D.C.’s giant pandas -- four-year-old Tai Shan, his mother, Mei Xiang, and his father, Tian Tian. Giant pandas are endangered, with only around 1,600 left in the world. They eat mainly bamboo (up to forty pounds a day!) and have lived in bamboo forests -- which are now threatened -- for millions of years.

The panda cam is definitely something to smile at -- though I do start having thoughts about science-fiction films in which future humans are the ones being observed in a zoo. Does it make it better that pandas are so much cuter?

And think about this lifestyle: pandas spend ten to sixteen hours a day eating and foraging and the rest of the time, sleeping. D.C. pandas also get enrichment.

--C.

An Open Letter to the Local Public Library

To Whom It May Concern:

When you list a book on your website’s catalog, and next to that book you list a picture of the cover, and next to that picture you list the edition information, and below that information you list the ISBN number, it would be super if upon arriving at the library to pick up that said specific edition, it didn’t turn out to be a completely different edition of the book, which the librarian on hand confirms is, in fact, not another copy of the book being sought, but the only copy, the copy listed online as belonging to an entirely different edition, but yet, here, on the shelf, is not said edition.

It’s bad enough that sites such as eBay and Half.com employ this lazy and deceptive practice, but you Public Library, you, too?

Is nothing sacred?

Fear and trembling…

-R.-

"...and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?"

As a child, I went through a phase of experimenting with the idea of things happening or not happening because you believed or did not believe in them. Maybe our pet rabbit wouldn’t die after being bitten by the next-door neighbor’s germ-riddled cat. I tried refusing to believe it. I tried willing a recovery into reality. I wondered about the power of the mind and what would be possible if I could just concentrate hard enough. I knew it was stupid, but there was nothing else to do. The tiny thing was just a baby; of course it died.

When I was even younger, I thought that if you went to the hospital, you came out better. That was how it worked. Hospitals fixed you. You didn’t go there to get worse or even die. But when I was six, the doctors sent my grandmother home from the hospital because nothing else could be done for her. I thought someone had messed up. Being sent home to die, being sent away from the hospital still sick, did not fit with my six-year-old logic. The stories I’d been told had turned out to be only that -- convenient tales with convenient endings.

More than that, though, I thought about what it meant to hope for something even though you knew it couldn't happen, no matter what you did. I don’t mean asking some higher power to bestow me with millions of dollars. I mean not knowing what to hope for when I was told my 50-year-old neighbor would die of cancer. I knew he could not be cured because he and his wife came to our house one evening for my father’s opinion. My father is a surgeon and my mother is a nurse, and they sat with our neighbors in the living room, talking for hours. I have a memory of hearing my father tell our neighbor that he was sorry, but yes, our neighbor was going to die from his disease and he only had so much time. As his sickness progressed our neighbor turned into an old man, his black hair almost white, his skin pale, as if his body had to hurry up and finish its living.

I remember once he helped me with details crucial to a detective story I was writing, that one night he rid our yard of a prowling possum, and that another time he scared off a pack of coyotes roaming down our street after a brush fire. I remember also that I was afraid when I saw him sick and that what I'd been taught of prayers seemed useless. It seemed foolish to allow myself to hope he would recover; I didn’t want to ask for something only to be refused.

But before he'd been diagnosed, he and his wife had bought a motor home and drove all around the country. I held on to the idea of how much they had enjoyed themselves, that he'd had an adventure before passing away. I imagined them driving across Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico. His wife's foot had become swollen from all the driving, but it seemed proof to me that they had seen and done as much as they possibly could have. It seemed complete somehow.

So this is what is on my mind tonight: When is it right to be a realist, even a pessimist, and when is it right to be an optimist? If you refuse to give yourself false hope, you will be hurt less in the end. But if you never embrace possibilities, even those seemingly far-fetched, what will you gain? Everyone dies, miracles are rare, and if you set yourself up with false hope it is going to be even worse when the inevitable bad thing happens.

I wonder where the line is.

This is where I usually turn to books. Didion on the stories we tell ourselves, that give us order. Camus on the absurd. Nietzsche on the death of God. Thich Nhat Hanh on seeing our emotions as a river.

Tonight, though, how about Kerouac:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

--C.

"The lithium makes me thirsty."

(Jamison speaking at the University of Virginia)

Last month, we went to Politics and Prose to hear Kay Jamison read from her book Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir. Even though it was a rainy Saturday evening, the small neighborhood bookstore was packed. During the question and answer session, audience member after audience member stood up to thank Jamison for being brave enough to detail her grief over her husband's death as well as to share her struggles with bipoloar disorder. Her books, they said, had given them courage in their own struggles.

In writing An Unquiet Mind, the autobiography in which she reveals her mental illness, Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins, risked much professionally and personally. She chose not to treat patients after writing the book and feared the stigma attached to bipolar disorder. But by telling her story, and telling it as a way to get at a larger truth and the reality of her disorder, she has affected numerous readers, many of whom also feel at war with themselves as they deal with mental illness.

Many writers, especially memoir writers but even fictions writers, often grapple with what it means to bear their inner lives to the world, to leave something of themselves behind with their readers. Sometimes telling the truth is dangerous; sometimes it hurts the people we would otherwise protect, but what integrity remains in writing if we work in half truths and continue to remain silent when we should speak? By writing, we try to get at something essential, something that matters because it reaches others.

Hearing Jamison read reminded me of another book, for which she wrote the introduction: Unholy Ghost (edited by Nell Casey). The book is a collection of essays by renowned writers (including William Styron, Susanna Kaysen, Larry McMurtry, and Ann Beattie) on depression. It is another book in which writers unveil their darkest moments to get at a greater understanding of what it means to live with mental illness. The collection demonstrates the need to know we are not alone in our suffering, and these writers serve us in learning how to live by facing the hardest details head on.

In "Noontime," Lauren Slater explores what it means to be bipolar and pregnant:

The lithium makes me thirsty. The Klonopin helps me sleep. The thirst is tremendous and healing, gallons of coldwater going in me, my heart calmed in a cool sea.
...
I go, furtively, to the children's section of the store, where infant clothes hang on racks. I look around me to make sure no one is watching, though the secret is I can't say. I feel enormously self-concious handling these tiny outfits, these odd hooded gowns like what a miniature monk might wear. How do you care at noontime? I finger the frills on a little dress. There is a study that scares me. Schizophrenic mothers were compared to depressed mothers and it was found that the schizophrenic women were more effective as parents, because even though they were as crazy as bats, at least they were alive, they were responsive.

And I think of that study, standing very still in a store at Christmastime, holding an infant's dress in my hand and finding it definitely not cute. The pumpkin, too, is not cute and yet I am no longer crying, no longer thrashing about for breath. I will design my own kind of motherhood, a different kind of motherhood, this is what I think. Please God, make me well enough to love whoever she is. This is also what I think. I think the medications must be working, for my thoughts are clear, my mood even, my apphrehension deep but with a bottom.

These accounts are at times difficult to read, but for many readers they bring comfort because they are honest no matter how scary reality proves.

More to come on integrity in writing in view of Irene Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood.

Also, thoughts tonight for Loni and the Mykol family.

--C.

The Light, Motherhood, and Abortion

Something else interests me in the two lines I pointed out from The Stranger--both bring up the question of control and responsibility. Meursault states that it comes down to a choice: he can either shoot or not shoot. He has the ability, the free will, to do one or not do one. In this way, it is simple. Do or do not. He can choose--but does he? After he pulls the trigger, regardless of why, he states that he himself shattered his own happiness. He accepts the agency for his actions. The "why" doesn't matter.

R.'s point about the light as connected to Meursault's mother brings me to another similarity between The Stranger and Play It As It Lays. The main character, Maria, also connects her mother, and her mother's death, to the sunlight: "Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailabe in the Eastern dark."

One of the book's main themes is motherhood, and the entire novel centers on Maria's abortion and subsequent need to play the role of the perfect mother for her daughter, Kate, who is in a hospital for a mental and physical condition and cannot be what Maria wishes. Still, as if in penance for the abortion, Maria determines that she will get Kate out of the hospital, live with her on her own, and take up canning, the kind of domestic act that would prove her fit for motherhood. It is Kate that gives Maria purpose, if not reason.

One last quote about the light, as tied to life, death, and motherhood: "She cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born."

More thoughts later on abortion--and what it might mean to be addicted to it.

--C.

Stranger in a Strange Land (or Stranger No More)

C., it’s funny you should point out that particular passage from The Stranger, because it, along with a few others, provides a key insight into an element of Meursault’s character that is usually ignored. The oft-repeated response of first-time readers, whether they like the book or not, is that Meursault lacks any sort of emotions, but the passage you point out quite clearly demonstrates an emotion: happy.

See for yourself: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And to take the next logical step, the past tense demonstrates another emotion: unhappy (which, of course, is synonymous with any number of other emotion words).

There’s also something else about that passage that I think is important and am consistently surprised to never hear mentioned, though, to be fair, the scholarship on The Stranger is voluminous and it is quite possible I have just not come across it yet. Nonetheless, everyone who has read the book mentions all of the sun and heat references throughout. The culmination of this being Meursault’s reasoning for shooting the Arab on the beach: the sun was in my eyes.

Academics and casual readers alike have debated what this could possibly mean ever since the book’s emergence in 1942. Some of the theories are quite imaginative (childhood trauma—the sun represents the light at the end of the birth canal), some very physical and logical (he tensed up with the sweat and sun in his eyes—keep in mind, no first-person pronoun in the first shooting sentence), and some controversial (he’s a racist—the sun reminded him of his whiteness and thus he shot the Arab, a non-white).

I’m doing myself a disservice by posting this without a copy of the book in hand, but no one ever mentions the hints throughout the book that the sun is a representation of his mother, the sun, the moon, and the stars, which of course links back to another theory I have regarding the translation of that very famous first sentence of the book.

Regardless of how you want to translate Maman (a whole separate issue), the full sentence has been translated twice into English as ‘Maman/Mother died today.’ The problem here is that we are ignoring something very important about the original French structure: “Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte.” Quite literally: “Today, Maman is dead.”

While some may think it a stretch, it seems hard to believe that Camus, who was so very precise about his stylistic usage, did not have some intention with this sentence, which, for my money, lays out Meursault’s world, showing us an ordering of what is important: the first, and most important, thing is Today, right now, this moment. The second, the thing that causes everything else in this novel, Mother. And the third, the thing that finishes it off, that comes at the end of the sentence (and yes, think about that in every sense of both the book and life—the end of the sentence), is Death.

If this theory is correct, the English translation is a pretty big gaffe (which only goes to highlight the incredible difficulty of translation).

So, returning to your passage, C., Meursault is like a bottle up until this point, unbeknownst to him, and when the sun gets in his eyes, he is reminded of his mother (and her recent death) and he is in fact blinded for a moment, in which, without thought, the trigger is pulled. The famous four shots that follow are simply steam escaping the sides of a lid.

The Science of Sleep (or Wide Awake in America)

A long, long time ago, when I was a wee little lad, I was scared to go to bed. It wasn’t the drooling monsters beneath the mattress or boogeyman in the closet that fueled my fear, but rather the loss of connection with real, live people. The thought that at a certain hour everyone around me would be asleep, shut off from the world, in some bizarre state of suspended animation, drove me to a nightly state of anxiety and, thus, insomnia. There was something sinister in that temporary dropout from existence that, for my taste, too closely mirrored the other, even more sinister, dropout from existence.

When I was really young, my mother had to sit with me at night until I fell asleep and then quietly sneak out of the room, because if I woke up, or if she went to sleep before I did, I wouldn’t sleep at all. As I got a little older, to stave off the nighttime willies, I watched M*A*S*H. reruns for hours on end, until the local TV stations stopped broadcasting, and then I would turn to one of those stations, which likely don’t even exist anymore since the advent of cable, that had some seedy spokesman hawking some foundation or some product, which I vaguely associate with religious hymns and bald eagles for some reason that is no longer clear to me; around five or six in the morning, the regular TV stations would come back on air and it was usually about this time that I would actually fall asleep.

I suppose all of this was a sort of sad and telling state of affairs for an eleven-year-old boy, but I was only vaguely aware that something was off, in the same way that one can feel watched, look up, see no one there, and return to whatever it is that they were doing; the oddity, in my mind, was only something vaguely recognizable, something I figured everyone encountered, something not too far outside the norm, and thus something that, as ruminations go, could be brushed off as not worthy of deep consideration: it just was.

Although it was by no means clear to me at the time, looking back it is not hard to see that I obtained an obsession as a result of my insomniac nights. On the school bus one morning, I overheard one kid telling another that his father couldn’t leave the house in the morning without two cups of coffee. “He can’t face the day awake without it,” the boy said. Why an eleven-year-old would be discussing his familial coffee habits on the school bus, I don’t know, but the words stuck with me and I planned my strategy for the next morning.

“Mom, can I have some coffee?”

“Why?” She didn’t even turn from the countertop to look at me.

She wasn’t buying it.

“It smells good,” I said, “and I tasted Dad’s and it tasted good.”

“Get a cup,” she said, still not turning from the lunch she was preparing.

It had worked. I got my coffee that morning, my first cup of steaming black brewed coffee, which also seemed to me the marker of being an adult, and though, like so many things, I can no longer remember what my initial impression was, eighteen years later I can’t live without the stuff, despite the fact that more often than not it terribly upsets my stomach, despite the fact that my gastroenterologist has advised me to avoid it, despite the fact that, for me, it is a very expensive habit (because I have another obsession, and that is having only the finest of everything, but that’s a whole different sport, and we can play that one some other time, perhaps).

So, for a while, coffee got me through my days and kept me awake for my sleepless encounters with M*A*S*H and the seedy spokesman. While I’d always seen random electronics parts in the basement of our house, circuit boards and such, it wasn’t until the age of twelve that I encountered my first police radio, a gadget I believe my father had put together many years earlier (I’d eventually recognize the soldering as evidence of his handiwork). Unfortunately, he told me that it didn’t work, something about crystals being too old, which really piqued my curiosity: there were crystals in a police radio?

I suppose I forgot about the thing, though, because it wasn’t until Irv, a friend of the family, presented me with one of his old, barely functioning police radios that I actually got to hear one of the things in action. The radio consisted of a black rectangle the size of a school lunch box, but several times heavier, with lots of little knobs and a pullout antennae. When turned on, it sounded like an angry brood of cicadas that had indeed been sleeping for seventeen years, brooding the whole time and only now letting the world know about it. But something magical happened that first night as I curled on the floor in my bedroom, turning the knobs, adjusting the tin foil I’d attached to the antennae: I fell asleep.

And so began my fascination with police scanners, which, I later learned, my uncle also used to help fall asleep at night; I realized this when, shortly after that first night in my bedroom, I saw a similar device on top of my uncle’s dresser, just out of reach, and asked him about it, his answer providing confirmation that my situation, like that sense of being stared at, was not so unusual.

For many years, I lugged a slowly improving set of police scanners and overly large antennae with me from house to house and apartment to apartment; I had one in my college dormitory and one in my post-grad apartment, but when I made my most recent move, I took the still-space-consuming scanner back to my parents’ basement where it currently resides. I just didn’t have the room in my new place and the reception was pretty poor anyway.

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I found out earlier this week that my new phone has a police scanner built into it, and, to my great surprise, one that works far, far better than any of the hefty clunkers that came before it. Gone are the angry cicadas and fiddling of knobs, present is a crisp, clear signal with easily discernable and intelligible voices. Present is my choice of counties and states to eavesdrop on and a list of their most oft-used codes. Present is a portability never before imagined.

Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that I have been listening to the thing nonstop. When I wake up in the morning and prepare breakfast, when I drive to work, when I’m sitting in my office, when I’m grading papers, when I’m driving home, and when, as the whole thing began, I’m going to sleep. And there’s the rub: most of the time, I do sleep now.

So what was it, what is it, about the police radio that worked where such powerhouses as M*A*S*H and the seedy spokesman had failed? Certainly I had no clue at the time, and I can only speculate now, that it had something to do with quelling the sense of dread surrounding the thought that everyone around me was tuning out, falling prey to that netherworld of suspended animation, willingly giving in to the haze that awaits all of us at the end of the road, but that I couldn’t see allowing in so early. The scanner provided some kind of confirmation that, yes, you can close your eyes and we, the voices not of some far off land—as I used to try to assure myself with—but of Randolph Road and Briggs Chaney and 198 right down the street, will be here to keep the world turning while you rest. There was, and is, some solace in knowing that the roads are still roamed and activity still takes place, even at three and four in the morning, that there is a baker beginning his day beneath a single bulb, that a coffee pot is being put on, that a club owner is just shuttering his doors. I could close my eyes at night, let their voices lull me to sleep, and wake up in the morning with them still sitting on my nightstand. They wouldn’t abandon me; they would be there.

They are here still.

Knock-Knock

"Streams of stars have been dead for years."

One summer between semesters of graduate school, I found it difficult to read; I started novels but couldn't finish them. I was teaching -- of all things -- reading classes in Richmond, and on my time off I wandered around used bookstores hoping to discover a book that would allow me to enjoy reading again. I bought novels and story collections but still couldn't see them through. I sat in the garden of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum and listened to a spooky recording of "The Raven" playing in one of the old house's stuffy attic rooms. My roommate and I spent a hot July day exploring colonial Williamsburg. We swam in the James in the middle of the night. I drank raspberry-flavored lattes in a coffee shop that served vegan cookies. My students made me braided yarn bookmarks and crayon drawings and still I could not read.

Finally I opened a book of poetry by Phyllis Janowitz, which I had brought with me for the summer. Phyllis had been a professor of mine, but I had not yet read this collection. When I did, the words in Visiting Rites were like medicine, a kind of anodyne for whatever was making the normally pleasurable act of reading so painful. Phyllis' poetry brought me back to words in a way that helped me come back to myself.

Her poetry was playing in my ears again as I walked home from work today. From "Facts and Figures":

She will imagine a baby,
a toothless red mouth and a howl.
Newborn it will look like a pig.
She will allow no illusions.

She will give up her imaginary
plan for driving a subway
through measureless caverns
while moonlighting at Dunkin

Donuts, dipping heavy
crullers into honey, dusting
powdered sugar from her hands,
Or she will not imagine a baby

The frantic creature, like so many
others, will never be born.
Whatever she does will be wrong.
She finds this odd fact comforting.

One day after the poetry workshop I took with Phyllis, I stopped to talk with her. I remember her saying, "You can't help who you are."

I wasn't sure then if she meant that as a judgment. Now I realize the good or bad of it is irrelevant. Perhaps she is right, and there is comfort in that as well. What we make of poetry and stories -- of words -- is affecting because the writing speaks to each of us differently, depending on what we are going through when we read it. Books in this way have offered comfort, even the darkest ones, because the best literature gets at something inside of us and reminds us of who we are, regardless of whether we can help it.

--C

To Teach, or Not to Teach: No. 3 ?

There was an article on CNN Money today listing “College Professor” as number three on a list of the top fifty jobs in America. While, for many reasons, I couldn’t agree more with the ranking, there are also a few things about the university teaching life that aren’t widely known outside of certain relatively small circles.

For example, while anyone working at a university knows that not all faculty members are treated equally, those not working in academia, even most of the students themselves, and certainly their parents, don’t often realize that the title “professor,” which is nearly a universal address in college classrooms, is, for at least two-thirds of America’s university faculty, a sort of misnomer. Universities widely employ “adjunct faculty,” who serve in a role not so different from day laborers, standing on the street corner waiting to be picked up for the day’s (or semester’s) pay, toiling in a job that, despite popular perception, usually ends up requiring far more than the typical forty hour work week, and which most often gives the instructor no benefit coverage whatsoever, and, pretending the instructor can even get a full load at one university, which is typically defined as teaching three courses, they can expect to receive somewhere in the general ballpark of $9,000 compensation for the entire semester (and that is a generous estimate, assuming said job is at a fairly large university), which means that an entire year’s pay would be just about $18,000 before taxes. Sure you get the summer off, but on that pay scale, do you really? Can anyone actually working to support him or herself afford a summer off at $18,000 a year?

Which begs the question: when exactly are these adjunct instructors supposed to do their own work and research, which is cited in the CNN article as a necessity for the job (and job advancement). While adjunct instructors, and some low level, full-time faculty members, teach three to four classes a semester (six to eight a year), true professors, which means that they have a PhD, often teach only two classes a semester and have, or are in line for, tenure and sabbaticals, which, if nothing else, allow for a certain peace of mind.

Of course, the question of what you teach also has a large impact on the likelihood of your employment and pay scale. Teach in the technical fields and you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a job; teach in the liberal arts and may God be with you.

This, in turn, leads to the devolution of pedagogy in some basic required classes, and it’s hard to blame adjunct instructors saddled with somewhere between 75 to 100 students a semester for the decline. Consider the typical composition instructor (composition being a course notorious for being taught by adjunct instructors), who is expected to assign between four to five essays a semester; if we assume 75 students, four essays a semester, that means 300 essays a semester to be graded and corrected line-by-line and then extensively commented upon. This, of course, does not account for all of the other work to be graded in a typical composition class, not to mention conferences, which are incredibly useful, but incredibly time-consuming, among the many other required components of the semester.

Realistically, when it comes down to it, whom would you rather have teaching you or your child: an overextended, underpaid instructor teaching at several universities at once, scraping to get by, or someone with a comfortable schedule, comfortable salary, and comfortable workload?

The problem is that students, and their parents, often don’t know the difference when registration occurs. If this issue were made widely known to all concerned parties, it would seem inevitable that some sort of backlash would follow, which would clearly be detrimental to the university strategy of turning education into the next McDonald’s workforce, where labor is cheap and the quality delivered is often questionable.

Of course, this is only to highlight one of several serious issues with university teaching. More to come later…

Check out the CNN article here.

The White Album

A blank page. More than a blank page: Electronic white space infinitely expanding and only as tangible as a screen. Ink and paper gives way to pixels and codes, and still we write and discuss. Stone tablets and papyrus, now this. It is not the medium that matters but the words. At least, we want them to, need them to.

And so, R., I am listening. So we begin. What is more fitting than to start with the alternately daunting and exciting prospect of so much white space? It brings us right to the two novels we discuss the most and the two authors we come back to again and again. I am talking about Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and Albert Camus' The Stranger (of course, the photo from Café de Flore also inspired this post). Whiteness, the brightness of the sun, as if the essence is contained in vast nothingness.

From L'Etranger: "We stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot."

From Play It: "When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernadino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream."

In her essay, "Why I Write," Didion discusses writing Play It: "I had only two pictures in my mind ... and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book -- a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a 'white' book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams."

The elliptical is also the lyrical. Both Camus and Didion are masters of style with sentences that are as much a part of the story as the narratives themselves. R -- your turn on Meursault and the sun. How about these lines: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And speaking of lyrical -- readers, check out R.'s translation of Camus' Notebooks 1951-1959.

-- C.

Inspiration: Years Ago at the Flore

Don't you just want to dab your finger over one of those flaky crumbs?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Blogging

Let's begin. C., are you listening?