Recently in devastation and general pathetic-ness Category

It's an evil winter wonderland out there, with crazy 22-below-zero wind chills and walls of horizontally blowing snow.  Our apartment building is so old--with its original 1905 windows semi-intact--that I woke up this morning with a breeze blowing across my face.  This is not the kind of holiday chillin' I hankered for.

All of our books are gone, already hauled in boxes over to the new (better insulated!) apartment, and our art is down, so the walls even look nude and cold here.  Just our furniture, clothes, and computers remain.   We move on Saturday the 16th.

Classes start Monday, and as I prepare for the first week of the semester, I'm taking heart from the words of Anatole France:  "Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things.  Awaken people's curiosity.  It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.  Put there just a spark.  If there is some good flammable stuff, it will catch fire."

I like this very much. 

But of course, I can't help but wonder if the notion that I can open minds by trying--that teachers do so, as we often tell each other and ourselves--is a kind of vanity in itself. 

Rather:  In what ways is my own mind still closed?  How can I learn to open it?  That seems like the more honest and gentle way to move forward.   Teachers do succeed in opening minds--we hear about it from grateful students who write to say so.  But I think it may be in ways we don't even anticipate, much less plan for.  Students remember the most casual comment, dropped in haste.  Small things make an impression.  That's why teaching is such a careful business.  It's good practice in mindfulness.

I'm teaching intro to women's literature--to women, for the first time!*--and autobiographical nature writing, which is a new course for me.  In women's lit, we're beginning with fairy tales (widely understood by scholars to be the narrative products of women:  mothers, nurses, the much denigrated "old wives")  and then working through about 200 years of intertextual responses:  Jane Eyre, The Yellow Wallpaper, A Room of One's Own, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bluest Eye, The Bloody Chamber, The House on Mango Street.  Should be interesting.  

In autobiographical nature writing, we'll be reading environmental lit--and writing, writing, writing.   We'll go outside once the weather warms up, but before that happens, we'll be watching two documentaries, which I recommend highly if you haven't seen them:   Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides and Arctic Dance:  The Mardy Murie Story.  

Grey left.  I did howl--quietly, at home.  Parenting is such an ambivalent practice.  One loves so passionately, so profoundly--yet really wants the kid to grow up and get on with life.  I won't go into detail about the particulars of our situation.  I'll just say this:  I always face Grey's visits home (now that he's been away at college) with trepidation--there will inevitably be tensions, arguments, friction, as he defines himself and his life in a different way from ours (and lets us know that in no uncertain terms)--and yet, I'm always wrenched with sadness when he leaves.  It took me a good 24 hours to recover after his bus pulled away.  Are other parents laid so low?  Is there a manual for this?


*Teaching women's literature and feminist theory at an all-male college is an education unto itself.  I recommend it highly.  For short periods.

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.

One of my colleagues always signs his emails with this passage, below, from Gilles Deleuze's "Mediators."  In our era of compulsory Facebook status updates, in a time when teenagers photograph themselves doing nothing and report the most boring drivel of their lives to someone at the other end of their cell phones (is there really someone on the other end, listening to whole streams of the stuff of which I catch snatches at street corners?), I have to say:  I like this passage. 

Of course, the irony is that I'm blogging about it.  (Of course, another irony is that I write memoir.) 

I may just be feeling curmudgeonly as my days fill up with meetings and classes where I'm compelled to utter things, and where (the weakest of) my students feel that mere self-expression is entirely sufficient--that no craft, reasoning, or particular significance is required.  I may just be grieving for solitude and silence.

Be that as it may, here's your Deleuze du jour:

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.  Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves.  What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

It's not wholly true, obviously, because sometimes "[r]epressive forces" do "stop people from expressing themselves," as you know and I know.  But it's an interesting way of thinking about where we are now.   

So I'm mooning around, packing, unwilling to leave, listening to Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands" and Peter Mulvey's "On the Way Up" way too many times.  Who on the AWP board of deciders decided to schedule this conference over Valentine's Day, anyway? 

For everyone who's looking forward to meeting up with old friends, and for everyone who, like me, can't wait to get back home, here's your Rumi du jour:

Bonfire at Midnight

A shout comes out of my room
where I've been cooped up.
After all my lust and dead living I can still live with you.
You want me to.
You fix and bring me food.
You forget the way I've been.

The ocean moves and surges in the heat
of the middle of the day,
in the heat of this thought I'm having.
Why aren't all human resistances burning up with this thought?

It's a drum and arms waving.
It's a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill,
this meeting again with you.

You know who you are.

So James and I crunched down the hill into the Haymarket last night, past the light-and-greenery-wrapped lampposts in the snow like something out of It's a Wonderful Life, to the open house at Indigo Bridge Books, which was lovely.  Owner Kim Coleman was there welcoming everyone, hugging kids and making sure people found what they sought.  The counter was full of cinnamon rolls, coffee, and apple juice.  Folks were playing the piano and singing, and it was great:  a warm, cozy beacon of books and light on a frigid December night.

I toddled over to the thriller aisle, because--hurray!--my marvelous agent Mitchell had just sent me más páginas from my novel manuscript (an attempt at a hybrid chica-lit literary thriller) with his wonderfully cogent notes scrawled in the margins.  May I just say this for the record?  I love my agent.  He's so smart and has such a great ear.  And luckily, he seems to love this book--or, at least, this book's potential. 

Alas, he finds it, as a would-be literary thriller, not quite thrilling enough.  I've got the literary part down, he says, but I'm weak on thrills.  (Which makes utter sense.  As a professor, my big thrills now are things like a particularly good day of class discussion--woohoo!--or a tasty dinner out.  But that's exactly the quiet way I like it.  Anyway, Mitchell suggested that I read a couple of thrillers, just to remember what actual suspense is like, rather than my usual fare of micro-drama, e.g., Will my problem student show up for the final?)

(Btw:  No.)

So there I was in the thriller aisle, picking up these short, fat, mass-market paperbacks, reading the first two paragraphs, and putting them back down.  Thrills they may have contained--I'll take it on blurb-faith--but the writing was driving me nuts.   Sometimes I can tolerate crap writing (I've devoured Patricia Cornwell novels like the next masochist, sure), but last night I just couldn't. 

And I'd already read all of Dennis Lehane's smoothly written Patrick Kenzie novels and all of Joanne Dobson's hilarious, working-class-girl-turned-academic-at-a-
private-liberal-arts-college Karen Pelletier mysteries--which I heartily recommend to all my fellow repressed academic women out there, but which might actually be part of my Mitchell-identified problem.  Booklist's starred review, after all, says, "Few are better than Dobson at recording the minutiae of academic committee-speak, powerplays in . . . jargon, and what ignites a classroom."  Ooooh.  Talk about thrills.  LOL.  So what was I to do?

Luckily, I lit on two books:  Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which includes the novella-length City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room.  And they're both great, and I can't put either one down, so I'm going to have to read them in tandem.  I am apparently the last person on the planet to have not read Paul Auster, but if you're among my woeful kind, a caveat:  Auster's City of Glass gets off to a slow and annoying start (my two-paragraph test nearly had it back on the shelf), but it picks up speed quickly, and then his sentences begin snapping so crisply into place.  And then the surprises start coming. 

Pamuk's novel, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, hits the ground running with an opening chapter engagingly titled "I Am A Corpse": 

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.  Though I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what's happened to me.  As for that wretch, he felt for my pulse and listened for my breath to be sure I was dead, then kicked me in the midriff, carried me to the edge of the well, raised me up and dropped me below.  As I fell, my head, which he'd smashed with a stone, broke apart; my face, my forehead and cheeks, were crushed; my bones shattered, and my mouth filled with blood.

Ahh:  no composition classrooms here.   As I fell, my head, which he'd smashed with a stone, broke apart.  Much more like it.

And lest you think the novel lacks for experimental high jinks, you should know that the third chapter, "I Am A Dog," is narrated, not by a dog--no, that would be far too easy--but rather by "the figure of a dog drawn on rough paper hastily but with a certain elegance."  Just fyi. 

None of which, however, gets me any closer to the title of this blog-post.   So.

Yesterday, at lunch with my writers' group, talk turned to the feeling of being a fuck-up, which none of us--tenured professors all, and with lovely fat vitas, etc.--has been entirely able to shake.  

Then this morning, I read an interview with a homeless man in Madrid, whose friend had died in his arms of the cold.  I was startled to read about his background.  Fermín said,

I was seven when my parents got divorced. My mother had psychological problems her whole life. She's such a strict Jehovah’s Witness that she finds it impossible to live with someone who’s not from the same religion. She couldn't have a husband who wasn't a Jehovah’s Witness, she couldn't have friends who weren't Jehovah’s Witnesses, and her children weren't her children if they weren't Jehovah’s Witnesses. She abandoned them all; she threw me out on the street. She told me to get out of the house for not accepting the "truth". To her I don’t exist.

My father is on his third marriage; he likes whores and going out at night. He’s a Gitano [Spanish Gypsy]. He believes the man rules the house and is the one who makes or breaks. When things aren’t going well he ups and leaves, he abandons everything, he gets out. My father wanted nothing to do with my brother and me. My mother with that load of shit of a religion has no idea either. So I had to get by on my own.

Poor Fermín.  I thought of how what we're taught early about our worth and our place in the world can affect our sense of ourselves for our whole lives.  So I had to get by on my own.  I thought about wildly over-confident colleagues I have known who were raised with comfort, ease, encouragement, and a sense of entitlement.  Even when their work is technically kind of a yawn, they feel just fine about themselves.  I had a therapist once who wondered at the fact that, given the gorier aspects of my background, I held down a job at all. 

But I think there are lots of troubled people who manage to function--and function well:  to be good parents, to be socially generous and professionally competent.  I know a lot of people like that, and you probably do, too.   

I thought about how I still fight doubt and anxiety, and how my writer-friends at lunch came from backgrounds of painful difficulty.   We're high-functioning, yes.  We're relatively solvent; we're overachievers; we give back.  But we still feel like fuck-ups.  When the phrase "high-functioning fuck-ups" was uttered, we all laughed in recognition. 

I don't need to add that the holidays, when your family is split or dead or hostile, are just that much harder.   I dreamed last night my Dad was alive, and we were moving to South Carolina to live with my Aunt Lou (who doesn't actually live there), and there were palm trees and bright water like the Key West of my childhood, and she was still married to Uncle Gerry, and all the cousins were there, and we all played softball together, laughing, on a green green lawn. 

Then I woke up. 

At the holidays, secret weeping's entirely acceptable.  

We are built to be loved and cherished.  When that goes wrong, we're damaged. 

Yet we are optimistic.  And we are multitude.  We work hard.  We love our friends and our family.  We go out and celebrate at little indie bookstores.  We wrap presents and send our hearts out across the country to the people we miss.  We forgive the shit that happened to us, and we try to change.  Then we get up and do it again.  We persist.  We search.  And we are knocked out by our gratitude just to be here, just to have this beautiful chance.

So to all of you high-functioning fuck-ups out there who hurt like hell yet still get up to wash your face every morning, I'm wishing you the very happiest of holidays.  You deserve it.  You've come so far.  To annoy you with Hemingway's words:  you're strong at the broken places--even when you feel weak and miserable there.  You persist.  You search.  You're broken and gorgeous and kind.

And you're the folks who make the world go 'round, the folks I love the most.  So take care.  Stay warm.

As rejection letters go, the one mailed out by Noreen Cargill, the Administrative Manager of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, is extremely nice.

I’d been so hopeful, so excited.  I’d thought I had every reasonable chance; I’d twice been nominated by Bread Loaf Fellows, and my reference was a Bread Loaf faculty member--I was as much of an insider as an outsider could be.  I’d actually been there before, too, once as a paying contributor and once as a scholar, so I knew the ropes well enough to write a reasonably well-informed application, which I kissed it for luck when I sent it off—early.   

Every night before I fell asleep, I thought about reading my work in the Little Theater, sharing a room in one of the cabins with a cool new writer, walking through the Vermont woods during breaks.  I planned the craft class I would teach.  Positive visualization.

I also planned the nonchalant way I’d spin it aloud to my husband and best friends if I weren’t chosen:  I’d have a less chaotic August.  I’d have more time to write, more time to be at home, to work on preparing my fall classes.  I rehearsed my concession speech, but my heart wasn’t really in it.  In my veins, I knew, ran the unstoppable blood of champions.

When the letter came, so thin and anonymous, I turned my back to my husband and opened it, hiding my face just in case.  When I read its kind, logical refusal, I couldn’t speak.  I just shook my head.  Half-heartedly, I tried a few phrases from my concession speech, but the nonchalance was nowhere to be found.  When he tried to hug me, I was stiff.  He tried to put his arms around me.  I shrugged him off.

“I just can’t right now,” I said.

He moved off down the hall.  I phoned the writer who nominated me, who was driving and couldn’t talk.  So we hung up.  I didn’t mention the letter.  She said she’d call back.

I went to the little corner of the living room where my desk stands.  I sat down and looked at the manuscript of the novel I’d been working on before the mail came.  And then, to my chagrin, as my husband’s shadow hovered in the hall, I felt my face begin to crumple.

My husband is an extremely kind man.  He is not a writer.

He came back, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of me.  “It must be a blow,” he said kindly, and then I began to sob.  Quietly, miserably.  The thought of Bread Loaf had lit my immediate future with a gold and glorious glow.  Now the lights were out.  

I’d imagined reading in front of the audience of luminaries, the way I’d seen Jhumpa Lahiri and Samantha Chang dazzle us when they were Fellows.  I’d hoped to impress my agent, who’d be there this summer, and make him believe that signing me would eventually turn out to be a shrewd literary choice, if perhaps never a lucrative one.  I’d dreamed of my well reviewed, commercially ignored book on the shelves at the little Bread Loaf bookstore, getting a second chance.

“I had everything lined up,” I told my husband.  “Which means it’s about the work.  The work’s just not good enough.”

My husband is a practical man.  “The odds were pretty rough,” he said.

Only 6% of more than 1100 applicants for merit-based financial aid received awards, said the letter.  66 people.  And only two of them, if things go as they have in years past, will be Fellows in creative nonfiction, the award for which I applied.

“It said you made the final round.  You could have been number three.”

“Or number thirty.  The letter doesn’t say how big the final round was.”   Or number a hundred and thirty.  Or maybe they put that on everyone's letter, to soften the blow.  My pessimism is one of my less appealing qualities, and it flares up wildly in the midst of disappointment.  I also possess an unpleasantly staunch resistance to consolation.  “It’s not that I think there aren’t any writers more brilliant than I am out there.  I know there are.  I just thought I had a chance."  My moaning goes global.  "I just want to win something.  Just one thing.  One definite thing that says my work is good.”

“You know your work is good.” He nods out our window toward the university campus.  “It got you your job here.”

“But you know how I’m always nervous, always worried that I’m lesser than.”  My colleagues are heavy hitters, Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, Poet Laureates, Famous Editors. “And it would have been so affirming if Bread Loaf’s answer had been otherwise.”

“Well, this isn’t the end.  There will be other conferences,” said my sweet, patient, hopelessly out-of-the-loop husband.  He brightened.  “What’s the best conference?”

“Duh,” I wailed through my tears.  “Bread Loaf is the oldest and most prestigious writing conference in the country.  In the world!  Everyone knows that.”  All you have to do is read the brochure copy.

“Well, but you have a long career ahead of you.  You’re still young,” he said.  In point of fact, I had just returned from Walgreen’s, where I’d purchased my usual box of Clairol Dark Brown Root Touch-Up.

“I’ve been publishing in national journals since I was twenty-two.”  I’m forty, practically antique for a Bread Loaf Fellow.  They’re usually young, hip, and inclined toward gorgeousness, like Danzy Senna and Amy Benson, the writers who’d been the Fellows in the two workshops I’d attended.  Like Michael Lowenthal and Tayari Jones and Ben Percy, with his unlined face and impossibly deep voice, and Camille Dungy, who has no pores.  “When is it going to happen for me?" I whined.  "There are so many awards out there—dozens and dozens of awards.”  Reading the “Grants & Awards” section of Poets & Writers is a special kind of self-torment, an acquired taste.  “Can’t I win just one?”

“You’ll win something.”

“I should have gone in 2006, when I first got nominated, when the book first came out.”  He nodded sympathetically.  I thought back.  Why hadn’t I?  “But I really wanted to take Grey to college.”  Bread Loaf’s August dates that year had conflicted with the drop-off dates at our son’s school.  It was his freshman year, a mythical rite of passage, when boy becomes man, all that.  At the time, it seemed I couldn’t possibly miss it.  Now, examining it in the harsh light of Bread Loaf’s rejection, it seemed like a pathetically unmemorable experience.  We unloaded a million boxes in the rain, hugged, and said good-bye.  Big wow.  Our son, who seemed unmoved at the time, hasn’t mentioned it since.  Family, schmamily.

“I should have gone to Bread Loaf,” I moaned piteously.

I flashed back to the time in my early twenties when my graduate professor, who’d written a paper about my first story, had wanted me to go with him to AWP, to stand there as Exhibit A and look full of promise while he delivered “How Minimal Is Minimalism?”  

At the time, I had no clue what AWP was.  I didn’t have the money to travel, and I didn’t want to leave my pre-schooler alone for that long.  My professor asked me where my priorities were.  I didn’t know.

“You’ve been doing other things,” said my husband, trying to console.

“I feel like Mr. f**king Holland.”  Mr. Holland’s Opus, a feel-good movie that warmed the hearts of millions, hadn’t warmed mine.  It had scared me.  A music teacher who foregoes his true love, composing, on behalf of his
students and other responsibilities is finally rewarded at the end of the movie—when he’s old and gray—by his devoted students’ performance of the one decent work he’s managed to complete.  Light bulb!  They were his opus, all those students whose lives he touched over the years, blah blah.

F**k that, I thought when I saw the movie.  The poor man should have followed his art, his heart.  But when push came to shove, I graded papers, pinched pennies, prepared for classes.  It was clear:  I was a small, small person.  I lacked courage and drive, as well as talent.

And here I was, a thin piece of paper in my hands, with my husband’s kind eyes gazing at me hopefully, willing me to cheer up.

“This is such a lousy business,” I said, speaking of writing.   “There’s so much insecurity.  So much self-doubt.”  He nodded again.  

“I know.”  It may have been something he’d heard before.  He may have wanted to add a few other nouns.

But my lovely, patient husband held my hands, brushed away a few more tears, and finally got me to smile a weak, grateful, co-dependent smile.  We hugged, and he headed down the hall to his office.

I sat at my desk.  “We do appreciate your interest in the Conference and only wish there enough awards for all of the deserving writers,” ends the letter from Bread Loaf.  Yeah, you and me both.

The letter is immaculately professional, immaculately kind.  The Bread Loaf folks probably sit around a table and analyze the text from every angle before they send it out, knowing that sad, embittered rejects will parse it, blast it, blog endlessly about it. “Good luck with your work.”

I sighed and set it aside.  I turned back to my novel manuscript, not at all sure of its worth.  

But, as Pushkin would say, there’s nothing for it. My confidence dented, my compass wobbling, I got back to work.

----

Epilogue:  The next day, this appeared--complete with get-back-out-there playlist--on Tayari's blog.  She's the best.