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. . . .)