October 2009 Archives
Another Bad-Great Day at the University of Nebraska
Well, it's another bad day for the University of Nebraska and financial scandal. The Lincoln Journal-Star is on the job again, this time with a headline that reads
$40,000,000!
or the amount of money that's charged each year on credit cards held by University of Nebraska employees, much of which has gone for non-approved items. (As a friend and I said to each other, "Where do we sign up for these credit cards?" I don't know of any faculty members who have them.)
So now, in addition to my Porsche Cayenne, I want my $628 fountain pen and my $15,000 airline ticket to China. (Yes, you read that figure right. I wonder what kind of legroom that buys?) I'd like my $3,500 worth of office furniture and decorations, and I'd like my golf outing, please. Not that I play golf, but you know. I could walk around and ogle the plaid.
What sucks the most about this, though, is that regular folks are going to look at that massive $$$ number and those flagrant violations of policy, and, in the midst of a depressed economy, they're going to think the whole enterprise of higher education is one nasty hog-trough, when in fact these perks aren't making it down to the people who actually teach their kids. Which is a shame. I've got classroom computer equipment that won't work out here, folks, and no markers for the dry erase boards.
However, all y'all out there who are fellow members of the money-isn't-everything club can enjoy this video my sweet son Grey spontaneously, coincidentally just sent, called "What Teachers Make," a nice little piece of talkback from Taylor Mali.
In other news, a big warm congratulations to the outstanding young poet and creative nonfiction writer Madeline Wiseman, who just passed her oral capstone. ABD, baby! All but done.
And can I just gush for a second about what a fascinating experience it is to do an oral Ph.D. exam with not only a super student but also the iconic Hilda Raz, Barbara DiBernard, and Amelia Montes? Like, it almost makes giving up a Friday afternoon kind of fun. Like, when I flash back to 3 years ago at all-male Wabash, I can see that an afternoon like this one was almost unimaginable to me then. Five women in a room, conversing on the doctoral level about poetics, pedagogy, and trauma? We've come a long way, baby. Yes, sir.
We all have. Bottoms up.
or the amount of money that's charged each year on credit cards held by University of Nebraska employees, much of which has gone for non-approved items. (As a friend and I said to each other, "Where do we sign up for these credit cards?" I don't know of any faculty members who have them.)
So now, in addition to my Porsche Cayenne, I want my $628 fountain pen and my $15,000 airline ticket to China. (Yes, you read that figure right. I wonder what kind of legroom that buys?) I'd like my $3,500 worth of office furniture and decorations, and I'd like my golf outing, please. Not that I play golf, but you know. I could walk around and ogle the plaid.
What sucks the most about this, though, is that regular folks are going to look at that massive $$$ number and those flagrant violations of policy, and, in the midst of a depressed economy, they're going to think the whole enterprise of higher education is one nasty hog-trough, when in fact these perks aren't making it down to the people who actually teach their kids. Which is a shame. I've got classroom computer equipment that won't work out here, folks, and no markers for the dry erase boards.
However, all y'all out there who are fellow members of the money-isn't-everything club can enjoy this video my sweet son Grey spontaneously, coincidentally just sent, called "What Teachers Make," a nice little piece of talkback from Taylor Mali.
In other news, a big warm congratulations to the outstanding young poet and creative nonfiction writer Madeline Wiseman, who just passed her oral capstone. ABD, baby! All but done.
And can I just gush for a second about what a fascinating experience it is to do an oral Ph.D. exam with not only a super student but also the iconic Hilda Raz, Barbara DiBernard, and Amelia Montes? Like, it almost makes giving up a Friday afternoon kind of fun. Like, when I flash back to 3 years ago at all-male Wabash, I can see that an afternoon like this one was almost unimaginable to me then. Five women in a room, conversing on the doctoral level about poetics, pedagogy, and trauma? We've come a long way, baby. Yes, sir.
We all have. Bottoms up.
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"Grip" Arrives!
My lovely issue of Fourth Genre arrived in the mail this week. (Is it me, or do those inscribed tablets look awfully phallic?)
If you're a Pine Manor-head, or you went to Marcia Aldrich's panel last year at AWP (where she read the piece aloud), or you picked up one of Fourth Genre's little brochures at the AWP book exhibit (which featured it), then you know I'm excited about the at-long-last publication of my little creative nonfiction piece, "Grip." Here's the beginning of it:
After the journal had accepted it, they asked if I would write another essay about how it had been composed. This turned out to be a very odd thing to do, but I did it, and it's in the issue, too: "Getting 'Grip.'" The idea, I think, is that these how-I-wrote-it essays are supposed to be useful to people interested in the craft or process or something. I'm not sure how useful mine will be, though I tried to make sure it kept a snappy voice and wasn't just deadwood in tone. (It also thanks UNL grad student and Prairie Schooner managing editor James Engelhardt, who gave me feedback on a revision, for saving me from my cetological excesses. Don't ask.)
Anyway, the issue also includes pieces by Heather Sellers, who's appeared on this blog, and Lisa Buchanan, whose work I have loved forever, and woolly wild prolific man du jour Ander Monson, with whom I read once on a panel at Ball State and who persists in never recognizing me when we bump into each other, which is a feat, but maybe when you have bushy hair and an electric manner it's hard because everyone always remembers you even when they don't leave much of an impression themselves (you can see I've given this far too much thought), as well as a very nice interview with Brenda Miller, done by Marcia Aldrich and some of her students, who felled me with their brightness.
It's a good issue. Even if the inscribed tablets are like phalluses or ghosts.
Non sequitur: It's interesting to be teaching Meridel Le Sueur this week--or this year, I should say: her reportage on Depression-era suffering is becoming all too widely relevant. Even her tossed-off observations like this one:
Next week, we read Hurston's gorgeous, gorgeous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and that brings us up to 1937, and then we stop reading primary texts and the students start felling us, I hope, with their brightness as they read their research papers aloud as if we're all at a tiny scholarly conference.
Professionalization is apparently the name of the game, and I'm doing my bit by all these game young people who wish to do this for a living.
If you're a Pine Manor-head, or you went to Marcia Aldrich's panel last year at AWP (where she read the piece aloud), or you picked up one of Fourth Genre's little brochures at the AWP book exhibit (which featured it), then you know I'm excited about the at-long-last publication of my little creative nonfiction piece, "Grip." Here's the beginning of it:
Over the crib in the tiny apartment, there hung a bullet-holed paper target, the size and dark shape of a man--its heart zone, head zone, perforated where my aim had torn through: 36 little rips, no strays, centered on spots that would make a man die.And it goes on. It actually turns out to be sort of a love letter to my son.
Beginner's luck, said the guys at the shooting range, at first. Little lady, they'd said, until the silhouette slid back and farther back. They'd cleared their throats, fallen silent.
A bad neighborhood. An infant child. A Ruger GP .357 with speed-loader.
It's not as morbid as it sounds, a target pinned above a crib: the place was small, the walls already plastered full with paintings, sketches, pretty leaves, hand-illuminated psychedelic broadsides of poems by my friends. I masking-taped my paper massacre to the only empty space, a door I'd closed to form a wall.
When my stepfather got out of prison, he tracked my mother down. He found the city where she'd moved. He broke a basement window and crawled in. She never saw his car, halfway up the dark block, stuffed behind a bush.
After the journal had accepted it, they asked if I would write another essay about how it had been composed. This turned out to be a very odd thing to do, but I did it, and it's in the issue, too: "Getting 'Grip.'" The idea, I think, is that these how-I-wrote-it essays are supposed to be useful to people interested in the craft or process or something. I'm not sure how useful mine will be, though I tried to make sure it kept a snappy voice and wasn't just deadwood in tone. (It also thanks UNL grad student and Prairie Schooner managing editor James Engelhardt, who gave me feedback on a revision, for saving me from my cetological excesses. Don't ask.)
Anyway, the issue also includes pieces by Heather Sellers, who's appeared on this blog, and Lisa Buchanan, whose work I have loved forever, and woolly wild prolific man du jour Ander Monson, with whom I read once on a panel at Ball State and who persists in never recognizing me when we bump into each other, which is a feat, but maybe when you have bushy hair and an electric manner it's hard because everyone always remembers you even when they don't leave much of an impression themselves (you can see I've given this far too much thought), as well as a very nice interview with Brenda Miller, done by Marcia Aldrich and some of her students, who felled me with their brightness.
It's a good issue. Even if the inscribed tablets are like phalluses or ghosts.
Non sequitur: It's interesting to be teaching Meridel Le Sueur this week--or this year, I should say: her reportage on Depression-era suffering is becoming all too widely relevant. Even her tossed-off observations like this one: Indeed.
Statistics make unemployment abstract and not too uncomfortable. The human being is different. To be hungry is different than to count the hungry.
Next week, we read Hurston's gorgeous, gorgeous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and that brings us up to 1937, and then we stop reading primary texts and the students start felling us, I hope, with their brightness as they read their research papers aloud as if we're all at a tiny scholarly conference.
Professionalization is apparently the name of the game, and I'm doing my bit by all these game young people who wish to do this for a living.
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Besotted
Nadirs by recent Nobel-Prize winner Herta Müller arrived in the mail this week, and in between reading Jean Rhys and Gloria Anzaldúa for class (how spoiled am I?), I've become besotted by Müller's dreamy, disturbing tales. Really weird stuff, beautifully rendered. Yum. The University of Nebraska Press has paperbacks in stock.James and I are headed out this evening on a red-eye to New Orleans to see his parents, who are in their 80s and basically tons of fun in a crusty, Old-World kind of way. Alas, I'll be lugging along my backpack full of grading and prepping, so I won't be tons of fun: instead, I'll be the nerd in the corner, working, while everyone's dunking beignets, more's the pity.
It's odd to be, as so many writers now are, employed by an academic institution. Writers--according to legend, anyway--tend to be wild iconoclasts, while academics can be very careful and dull--i-dotters and t-crossers, lovers of Robert's Rules of Order and that kind of thing (for all their traditional reputation as sherry-swiggers): Let's write a memo. Let's form a committee. The writer housed within academia is an odd hybrid, a squiggly peg in a very square hole.
And it's an odd thing: academia wants writers (or, perhaps more accurately, it wants the revenue that writers generate, given the boom in the popularity of creative writing courses over the last half-century), but it doesn't want to adjust to their wild, hairy ways.
I think it might be simpler if we were warehoused over in fine arts with the dancers and actors and painters and sculptors, rather than in English departments with the scholars. No one would expect us to show up for boring meetings; they'd assume we were drunk on absinthe or waking up in the wrong beds. What a relief that would be! (Even if the quiet truth were that we were ensconced at our desks somewhere, listening off into the dreamworld of some new line or fragment or story emerging from the murk. . . .)
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Categories:
Fall Break & All You Artists
So UNL's got fall break for two days, which means I've got time to catch up on grading and blog to you.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.
Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
So lately I've been thinking about creativity and self-doubt. And the long-story-short of my convoluted, haphazard inquiry is this: Given that the world does not clamor for your art or mine, that the world does not beg for another book (when it publishes 250,000 a year in the U.S. alone), that the world wants you instead to feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, reverse climate change, maximize profits, and march on Washington--and meanwhile, the world wants to cut your pay and jack up your utility bill--given that you're slogging away in the midst of all that, and that no wildly adoring audience clamors for your voice and vision, how can you keep helping yourself make art?
A weird thing about blogging: sometimes when your brain has announced a theme-of-the-week, everything from the world comes sailing straight at it, on point.
An interactive sculpture by Miranda July:
Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.Here's Jay Smooth's vlog on the little haters inside--which you don't need to view unless you happen to be subject to bouts of perfectionism, procrastination, or both:
(I'm having trouble embedding it, so just go here.)
And here's Mother Teresa's view (hey, this blog is nothing if not eclectic):
If you are discouraged it is a sign of pride because it shows you trust in your own power. Your self-sufficiency, your selfishness and your intellectual pride will inhibit His coming to live in your heart because God cannot fill what is already full. It is as simple as that.(For "God," it helps me if I read "emptiness," as in the Buddhist sense of no-ego, or presence--which for me functions as the real, true ground of art-making--but hey, whatever gets you through the night. You fill in the blank.)
Keep making your art. This is a shout-out of love to you and your beautiful persistence. Maybe nobody needs your art, or maybe lots of people do. You can't know. Maybe the people who'll need it aren't even born yet.
The point is, you need to make it. It's how you're built. So keep on.
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"Mystical and Cool": Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie, and--Margery Latimer?
Tomorrow will bring to fruition a dream 15 years in the making. I will get to hear the work of Margery Latimer being discussed by graduate students.
I've been working on Margery Latimer since I tripped over her work in grad school. Researching a paper on her husband Jean Toomer, I started reading the wild, hilarious, moody, beautiful, out-of-control work of his first wife, who died in childbirth at the age of 33. I fell in love with Latimer's novels and short stories, with her directness, her grace, her rocky sense of humor. My dissertation scrapped itself and began anew--about her. Hell-bent on recuperating her for a contemporary readership, I published four articles about her work and gave endless papers at conferences about her.
And then I got tired. My own writing started taking off. And she remained obscure.
At Wabash, where all the students were young men and where the curriculum listed toward the conservative, I occasionally taught one of her short stories--but hesitantly. Latimer's kind of a weirdo (my favorite kind): a leftist, a feminist, a mystic intensity-junkie excited about the body and female sexuality, an enthusiastic crosser of class, gender, and racial boundaries, a writer who blends searing poetry with the absurd, a brilliant thinker decades ahead of her time. And Wabash was a place where students, assigned to read Jean Rhys, asked why they had to bother with "a slut." Classic. I once had a summer research assistant there, a bright young thing who openly derided the worth of Latimer's work and questioned the time I was spending time on her. (Like the whole world wasn't already doing that.) Even my kindly mother-in-law asks, "Her? Still? You're still working on her?"
Now, at long last, here at UNL, in ENGL 810, which is devoted to transatlantic modernist women writers (a category far too small to have ever made Wabash's course catalog), we've spent half the semester reading Stein, Woolf, Mansfield, and Larsen (with Rhys, Hurston, and Le Sueur still to come), as well as Bonnie Kime Scott's, Maureen Honey's, and others' analyses of the obscuration of most women writers of the modernist period. The class is a lovely, clever, insightful group of students; the context has been built; the stage has been set; my expectations are nervously high.
I've always felt like I'm not quite the scholar to handle Latimer--like I'm just a writer who sometimes writes about writers, not an academic heavyweight, and if some big-deal scholar could just get wind of how great Latimer's work is--some Matthew Bruccoli or Mark Hussey or Bonnie Kime Scott herself--then Latimer's reputation would be off and running. Sigh. Need I say that that has yet to happen?
I did find a reference online to a paper by one Sara Kosiba ("Margery Latimer and the Little Magazines"), but even Kosiba's academic affiliation is mysteriously hard to track down.
The dearth of scholarship about Latimer sometimes makes me think, Well, maybe I'm the only one. Maybe I'm the only weirdo in the world who connects with this weirdo's wild work.
But hey, if David Bowie knows who Latimer is--and compares her to Scarlett Johansson (and better yet, Jeanette Winterson), calling them all "mystical and cool," then maybe there's hope.
Guess I'll find out tomorrow.
I've been working on Margery Latimer since I tripped over her work in grad school. Researching a paper on her husband Jean Toomer, I started reading the wild, hilarious, moody, beautiful, out-of-control work of his first wife, who died in childbirth at the age of 33. I fell in love with Latimer's novels and short stories, with her directness, her grace, her rocky sense of humor. My dissertation scrapped itself and began anew--about her. Hell-bent on recuperating her for a contemporary readership, I published four articles about her work and gave endless papers at conferences about her.
And then I got tired. My own writing started taking off. And she remained obscure.
At Wabash, where all the students were young men and where the curriculum listed toward the conservative, I occasionally taught one of her short stories--but hesitantly. Latimer's kind of a weirdo (my favorite kind): a leftist, a feminist, a mystic intensity-junkie excited about the body and female sexuality, an enthusiastic crosser of class, gender, and racial boundaries, a writer who blends searing poetry with the absurd, a brilliant thinker decades ahead of her time. And Wabash was a place where students, assigned to read Jean Rhys, asked why they had to bother with "a slut." Classic. I once had a summer research assistant there, a bright young thing who openly derided the worth of Latimer's work and questioned the time I was spending time on her. (Like the whole world wasn't already doing that.) Even my kindly mother-in-law asks, "Her? Still? You're still working on her?"
Now, at long last, here at UNL, in ENGL 810, which is devoted to transatlantic modernist women writers (a category far too small to have ever made Wabash's course catalog), we've spent half the semester reading Stein, Woolf, Mansfield, and Larsen (with Rhys, Hurston, and Le Sueur still to come), as well as Bonnie Kime Scott's, Maureen Honey's, and others' analyses of the obscuration of most women writers of the modernist period. The class is a lovely, clever, insightful group of students; the context has been built; the stage has been set; my expectations are nervously high.
I've always felt like I'm not quite the scholar to handle Latimer--like I'm just a writer who sometimes writes about writers, not an academic heavyweight, and if some big-deal scholar could just get wind of how great Latimer's work is--some Matthew Bruccoli or Mark Hussey or Bonnie Kime Scott herself--then Latimer's reputation would be off and running. Sigh. Need I say that that has yet to happen?
I did find a reference online to a paper by one Sara Kosiba ("Margery Latimer and the Little Magazines"), but even Kosiba's academic affiliation is mysteriously hard to track down.
The dearth of scholarship about Latimer sometimes makes me think, Well, maybe I'm the only one. Maybe I'm the only weirdo in the world who connects with this weirdo's wild work.
But hey, if David Bowie knows who Latimer is--and compares her to Scarlett Johansson (and better yet, Jeanette Winterson), calling them all "mystical and cool," then maybe there's hope.
Guess I'll find out tomorrow.
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I Want My Porsche Cayenne
Academics aren't immune to economic downturns. In my English department, we were asked to consider giving up our individual office phones to save the university money. Fine; I turned mine in. We were asked to keep some of the lights off in the interior hallways in our building, which get no natural light. We did. Up on my floor, we walk in gloom. We were told to turn off printers when we're not actually printing something. Fine. Makes sense. The university is trying to cut the (nominal)
stipends given to Ethnic Studies professors who administer programs like
Latina/o and Latin American Studies for their 8 weekly hours of administrative labor and student advising; there were hearings; the stipends
are currently in limbo.
Last week, we received an email from the administration prepping us to expect further cuts--to hiring, to travel, etc. These follow the job searches that were frozen last year. There's going to be a special session of the Nebraska legislature due to a dive in state tax revenues, said the email, so we should prepare to think creatively about ways to tighten our belts further.
Okay, fine. We know the unemployment situation; we've commiserated with our colleagues in California and elsewhere; we know things are tough all over. Hey, if they're cutting back even at Harvard, surely we can do without luxuries. Right?
But not everyone at the University of Nebraska system is feeling the pinch. Harold Maurer, chancellor of the medical center, "gets a 2009 Porsche Cayenne and membership to two Omaha golf clubs," while UNL chancellor gets a Lexus and a country-club membership. Athletic director Tom Osborne gets a 2009 Chevy Tahoe. Bo Pelini, the football coach, gets not only a 2008 Nissan Armada and a country-club membership but also a 2008 Nissan Quest for his wife. Over 50 administrators and athletic staff receive private country-club and athletic-club memberships, and over 80 get vehicles as perks, from 2009 Honda Pilots to BMW X5s to Saabs to Lexuses to Porsches. The Lincoln Journal-Star broke the story last week.
"It is higher education upside down," responded Georgetown University's Pablo Eisenberg. "The money ought to be going to academics, to those teaching."
Ha. Ha. Ha. As scholars and artists, we've been schooled for so long in the hard truth of our own devaluation that Eisenberg sounds sweetly naïve. Correct, perhaps, but naïve. We all know what's most highly valued at academic institutions: suits and coaches. This new revelation--they get Porsches, we give up our office phones--is just the latest slap in a long, long series.
But how about this: the money ought to be going toward reducing class size. I have 20 students in graduate classes. I have 30 in undergraduate classes--classes that are supposed to be discussion-based and writing-intensive. How the hell is that supposed to work? What does that say about the University of Nebraska's commitment to the quality of education?
Get this:
Oh, is that not how business gets done? Oh, are golf courses the places where important deals get made? Excuse me, but if the times they are a-changin' in light of the global financial fiasco (caused precisely by the greed and gambling of the golf-playing, Porsche-driving rich), then maybe the business practices of bureaucrats and coaches need to take the hit that everyone else is taking, because last time I checked, teaching and research don't get done by jacking up class-enrollment caps and cutting back on compensation for labor, either.
Next time someone asks me to pinch pennies, you'll hear me laughing all the way down my dark hallway.
Protesters at UCLA
Last week, we received an email from the administration prepping us to expect further cuts--to hiring, to travel, etc. These follow the job searches that were frozen last year. There's going to be a special session of the Nebraska legislature due to a dive in state tax revenues, said the email, so we should prepare to think creatively about ways to tighten our belts further.
Okay, fine. We know the unemployment situation; we've commiserated with our colleagues in California and elsewhere; we know things are tough all over. Hey, if they're cutting back even at Harvard, surely we can do without luxuries. Right?
But not everyone at the University of Nebraska system is feeling the pinch. Harold Maurer, chancellor of the medical center, "gets a 2009 Porsche Cayenne and membership to two Omaha golf clubs," while UNL chancellor gets a Lexus and a country-club membership. Athletic director Tom Osborne gets a 2009 Chevy Tahoe. Bo Pelini, the football coach, gets not only a 2008 Nissan Armada and a country-club membership but also a 2008 Nissan Quest for his wife. Over 50 administrators and athletic staff receive private country-club and athletic-club memberships, and over 80 get vehicles as perks, from 2009 Honda Pilots to BMW X5s to Saabs to Lexuses to Porsches. The Lincoln Journal-Star broke the story last week."It is higher education upside down," responded Georgetown University's Pablo Eisenberg. "The money ought to be going to academics, to those teaching."
Ha. Ha. Ha. As scholars and artists, we've been schooled for so long in the hard truth of our own devaluation that Eisenberg sounds sweetly naïve. Correct, perhaps, but naïve. We all know what's most highly valued at academic institutions: suits and coaches. This new revelation--they get Porsches, we give up our office phones--is just the latest slap in a long, long series.
But how about this: the money ought to be going toward reducing class size. I have 20 students in graduate classes. I have 30 in undergraduate classes--classes that are supposed to be discussion-based and writing-intensive. How the hell is that supposed to work? What does that say about the University of Nebraska's commitment to the quality of education?
Get this:
UNL Chancellor Perlman had lunch with a prospective donor and breakfast with another at The Country Club of Lincoln in recent weeks and often uses the club for UNL-related events, he said in an e-mail response to Journal Star questions.How about this for a creative budget-trimming idea? How about Perlman meets with prospective donors in his office? (Where, presumably, he still has a phone.) How about they have lunch at Panera?
Oh, is that not how business gets done? Oh, are golf courses the places where important deals get made? Excuse me, but if the times they are a-changin' in light of the global financial fiasco (caused precisely by the greed and gambling of the golf-playing, Porsche-driving rich), then maybe the business practices of bureaucrats and coaches need to take the hit that everyone else is taking, because last time I checked, teaching and research don't get done by jacking up class-enrollment caps and cutting back on compensation for labor, either.
Next time someone asks me to pinch pennies, you'll hear me laughing all the way down my dark hallway.
Protesters at UCLA| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Keeping On
Thanks to everyone who's sent kind words about my birthday! I've got to say, the view from 42 looks just fine.
And while the whole world may be thrilling or griping about Obama and the Peace Prize (GObama!), I'd just like to say how good it felt that Herta Müller, 56, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got asked "whether winning the prize while relatively young could hurt her work" (emphasis so mine).
Oh, yes. Break out the Champagne. Bring on the medal for stamina.
I like her calm response to the hoopla of the award (which she seems to be thoroughly enjoying): "I am now nothing better and I'm nothing worse. . . My inner thing is writing. That I can hold on to." I love it when people aren't swayed by praise or failure.
I'm lifting a glass, too, because the House voted yesterday to include crimes committed due to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability under federal hate crimes legislation, extending protection to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and the Senate will likely agree. Hurray! It's about time.
As Müller, who grew up under Ceausescu's brutal dictatorship in Romania, says, "I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live."
Let's keep writing our way toward the worlds we dream.
And while the whole world may be thrilling or griping about Obama and the Peace Prize (GObama!), I'd just like to say how good it felt that Herta Müller, 56, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got asked "whether winning the prize while relatively young could hurt her work" (emphasis so mine).
Oh, yes. Break out the Champagne. Bring on the medal for stamina.
I like her calm response to the hoopla of the award (which she seems to be thoroughly enjoying): "I am now nothing better and I'm nothing worse. . . My inner thing is writing. That I can hold on to." I love it when people aren't swayed by praise or failure.
I'm lifting a glass, too, because the House voted yesterday to include crimes committed due to gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability under federal hate crimes legislation, extending protection to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and the Senate will likely agree. Hurray! It's about time.
As Müller, who grew up under Ceausescu's brutal dictatorship in Romania, says, "I wanted to live by the standards I dreamt of, it's as simple as that. And writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actually live."
Let's keep writing our way toward the worlds we dream.
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Categories:
Happy Happy Joy Joy!
I just learned that my collection of personal essays & creative nonfiction, ISLAND OF BONES, has received its first greenlight at a lovely university press: the editor loves it!
(May we all just pause for a moment to dwell on how blissful the words "I love the collection" feel? Aaah. There, now.)
The manuscript still has to be vetted by outside readers, and then voted on by the press's publication board, so it's not a sure thing. But the editor is on its side, and that's a great start. Hurray!
Now, I don't know if I've been infected by working on a literary thriller or what, but to me, ISLAND OF BONES would sound a little creepy if I didn't know the reference. (You old-school conchs are already smiling.) So let me just tell you that Cayo Hueso, literally "bone key" or island of bones, is what the Spanish-speaking folks called Key West before English speakers got there and thought Hueso sounded like West-o, and presto: a name, mangled. Lost in translation. Key West is where my grandparents and great-grandparents lived, where my dad was born and raised, and where we traveled every year to stay with family, fish off the piers with the cousins, and inhale way too much of my grandmother's black beans, fried sweet plantains, and roast pork.
Key West was the island, the rock, of my highly peripatetic childhood, the place we could always go home to. Now only one person in my family--my aunt, a high school librarian--lives there; the rest have been squeezed out over the decades by skyrocketing housing costs as the island became not a home for ordinary working people but a resort for the wealthy. Even my aunt is planning to leave as soon as she can afford to retire.
"Island of Bones" is the title of an essay I wrote that will appear in The Other Latino, an edited collection by a bunch of different writers that's forthcoming from University of Arizona Press sometime--2010, I think. I thought it made a good title for my own collection, which is really personal and intimate and sort of picks up where The Truth Book left off. Most of the pieces, though, aren't nearly as harrowing as the book. It's about being a writer, a mother, a daughter, a sister, about being an academic, an intellectual with working-class roots--about how to configure an identity with complicated ethnic, class, religious, and gender elements, about dealing with the long-term psychological impact of violence. Some of the pieces are forthcoming in journals and anthologies, but this collection will put them all together in one handy book (and I hope it comes out in straight-to-paperback form).
Anyway, I'm very excited about the fact that an editor likes it, and I hope it keeps moving forward through the editorial process. Wish me luck, people!
(May we all just pause for a moment to dwell on how blissful the words "I love the collection" feel? Aaah. There, now.)
The manuscript still has to be vetted by outside readers, and then voted on by the press's publication board, so it's not a sure thing. But the editor is on its side, and that's a great start. Hurray!
Now, I don't know if I've been infected by working on a literary thriller or what, but to me, ISLAND OF BONES would sound a little creepy if I didn't know the reference. (You old-school conchs are already smiling.) So let me just tell you that Cayo Hueso, literally "bone key" or island of bones, is what the Spanish-speaking folks called Key West before English speakers got there and thought Hueso sounded like West-o, and presto: a name, mangled. Lost in translation. Key West is where my grandparents and great-grandparents lived, where my dad was born and raised, and where we traveled every year to stay with family, fish off the piers with the cousins, and inhale way too much of my grandmother's black beans, fried sweet plantains, and roast pork.
Key West was the island, the rock, of my highly peripatetic childhood, the place we could always go home to. Now only one person in my family--my aunt, a high school librarian--lives there; the rest have been squeezed out over the decades by skyrocketing housing costs as the island became not a home for ordinary working people but a resort for the wealthy. Even my aunt is planning to leave as soon as she can afford to retire.
"Island of Bones" is the title of an essay I wrote that will appear in The Other Latino, an edited collection by a bunch of different writers that's forthcoming from University of Arizona Press sometime--2010, I think. I thought it made a good title for my own collection, which is really personal and intimate and sort of picks up where The Truth Book left off. Most of the pieces, though, aren't nearly as harrowing as the book. It's about being a writer, a mother, a daughter, a sister, about being an academic, an intellectual with working-class roots--about how to configure an identity with complicated ethnic, class, religious, and gender elements, about dealing with the long-term psychological impact of violence. Some of the pieces are forthcoming in journals and anthologies, but this collection will put them all together in one handy book (and I hope it comes out in straight-to-paperback form).Anyway, I'm very excited about the fact that an editor likes it, and I hope it keeps moving forward through the editorial process. Wish me luck, people!
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Categories:
Protecting the Vulnerable
"California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger line-item vetoed $20 million from the state budget which would have funded 94 domestic violence shelters and centers," according to a recent press release from the National Organization for Women.
Yet domestic violence increases by a factor of five when families slip below the poverty line. With the recession's massive job loss, especially male job loss, more women and children will be at risk for physical and emotional trauma in the home.
This is not the time to cut the safety net for vulnerable people. If we can bail out bankers, surely we can provide safe haven for battered women and children.
Yet domestic violence increases by a factor of five when families slip below the poverty line. With the recession's massive job loss, especially male job loss, more women and children will be at risk for physical and emotional trauma in the home.
This is not the time to cut the safety net for vulnerable people. If we can bail out bankers, surely we can provide safe haven for battered women and children.
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Categories:
Sunny Sunday
Hello, lovely and loyal people! Okay, a lot to tell you:
• The brilliant Anna Deveare Smith is 59 and still on fire.
• As funny as some of the new comedy The Invention of Lying genuinely is, its gendered beauty politics truly suck. So do its racial/ethnic politics. Both suck worse because of the film's oft-repeated, explicit messages about them: about seeing past outward appearances (but that only works in one direction: women must see past men's outward appearances to how smart and interesting Ricky Gervais is--oh, wait, I mean, men are--underneath), and about the continuing & deplorable presence of racism (but whoops! only one person of color speaks more than a single line, and he doesn't speak many).
The film's satirical "insights" about the constructed nature of religion, moreover, won't be terribly new to anyone who's ever watched a Monty Python movie, been raised atheist, or fled a fundamentalist cult. Screenwriter Gervais, however, seems quite taken with them.
In the final scene, the pretty, vacant female beauty object ends up pregnant and serving her home-cooking to Ricky Gervais and their male child. And is that an apron she's wearing?
Verdict: same ol', same ol'. But it thinks it's smarter. Pass.
• I'm enthralled right now by a series of beautiful essays by Faye Rapoport DesPres. She's one of my Pine Manor students, and I'm reading her MFA thesis. Her work is beautiful: humble, curious, probing, and true. And so moving. Or else I'm turning into a middle-aged crybaby.
You don't know her name yet, but you will. Watch for her work.
• A bad day: the first time you forget your dead dad's birthday. Ouch.
It's been 7 years now--he would have turned 70 last week--and sometimes I still miss him so painfully. Other times, I don't think about him for a few days on end. Whereupon I feel acutely guilty. I'm told this is normal. Sigh.
Dad, Dad, Dad. Why'd ya have to go and do it?
• Good news and bad news from my indefatigable agent: the good news is that he loves the writing, the characters, the dialogue, everything in THE DESIRE PROJECTS. The bad news is that there needs to be a damn precipitating crime within the first 50 pages if it's going to fly as a literary thriller. Qué rigid!
I'm like, But the crime comes at the end of the book! Isn't that cool and unconventional?
And he's like, No.
Drawing board, here I come. (The drawing board has welcomed me back so many times now, it just leaves its arms open.)
• Last but not least, I'm trying to put together some thoughts for you about gender bias in the academy. I keep dinking around with this topic in my mind, but something happened last week that I think is going to crystallize it. I just wish I had a little more time to fool with it; work is insanely busy right now: we have external reviewers analyzing our department all week for academic program review. Would you like a little extra madness with your madness? Oh, yes, please, just pile it on.
• The brilliant Anna Deveare Smith is 59 and still on fire.
• As funny as some of the new comedy The Invention of Lying genuinely is, its gendered beauty politics truly suck. So do its racial/ethnic politics. Both suck worse because of the film's oft-repeated, explicit messages about them: about seeing past outward appearances (but that only works in one direction: women must see past men's outward appearances to how smart and interesting Ricky Gervais is--oh, wait, I mean, men are--underneath), and about the continuing & deplorable presence of racism (but whoops! only one person of color speaks more than a single line, and he doesn't speak many).
The film's satirical "insights" about the constructed nature of religion, moreover, won't be terribly new to anyone who's ever watched a Monty Python movie, been raised atheist, or fled a fundamentalist cult. Screenwriter Gervais, however, seems quite taken with them.
In the final scene, the pretty, vacant female beauty object ends up pregnant and serving her home-cooking to Ricky Gervais and their male child. And is that an apron she's wearing?
Verdict: same ol', same ol'. But it thinks it's smarter. Pass.
• I'm enthralled right now by a series of beautiful essays by Faye Rapoport DesPres. She's one of my Pine Manor students, and I'm reading her MFA thesis. Her work is beautiful: humble, curious, probing, and true. And so moving. Or else I'm turning into a middle-aged crybaby.
You don't know her name yet, but you will. Watch for her work.
• A bad day: the first time you forget your dead dad's birthday. Ouch.
It's been 7 years now--he would have turned 70 last week--and sometimes I still miss him so painfully. Other times, I don't think about him for a few days on end. Whereupon I feel acutely guilty. I'm told this is normal. Sigh.
Dad, Dad, Dad. Why'd ya have to go and do it?
• Good news and bad news from my indefatigable agent: the good news is that he loves the writing, the characters, the dialogue, everything in THE DESIRE PROJECTS. The bad news is that there needs to be a damn precipitating crime within the first 50 pages if it's going to fly as a literary thriller. Qué rigid!
I'm like, But the crime comes at the end of the book! Isn't that cool and unconventional?
And he's like, No.
Drawing board, here I come. (The drawing board has welcomed me back so many times now, it just leaves its arms open.)
• Last but not least, I'm trying to put together some thoughts for you about gender bias in the academy. I keep dinking around with this topic in my mind, but something happened last week that I think is going to crystallize it. I just wish I had a little more time to fool with it; work is insanely busy right now: we have external reviewers analyzing our department all week for academic program review. Would you like a little extra madness with your madness? Oh, yes, please, just pile it on.
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Categories:
Greyby Number
Happy Birthday, Baby Grey! My son and only turns 21 today, and I'm wishing him all good things.
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
He's in the midst of his senior year of college. At the moment, he's just gotten back from protesting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh and is trying to wrap his head around what he saw there.
When he was little, he made up the magical "Greyby number" (Greyby, of course, being a meld of Grey and baby), which was, if I'm remembering correctly, more than a billion and more than infinity. Why not? When our family would part or talk on the phone from far away, we'd say, "I love you Greyby number!"
If I said, "I love you to the moon!", he would say, "I love you to the stars beyond the moon!" And so on. You can just imagine.
Okay, back to earth. I've been attending way too many bureaucratic meetings this week, so I'm very grateful to my friends for three good links:
From writer Tanya Whiton, who sussed out my swoony admiration for Jane Campion (remember that tea-cup, shot from above?), this interview about Campion's latest movie (the one about Keats and Fanny).
From Sandra Cisneros, who first introduced me to Mercè Rodoreda--"the greatest Catalan novelist of our time and quite possibly the best Mediterranean woman author since Sappho," according to her translator--this piece about Rodoreda in The Nation. (Forgive me for sounding like an ad for cheap perfume, but if you like Jean Rhys, you'll love Rodoreda. Swoon.)
Lastly, for you denizens of Star City, my charming colleague Sonam Singh offers a heads-up about this Friday's opening at the Sheldon, "Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists." Maybe see you there!
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