Category: academia

Government Cheese: There’s Only One Way to Write a Novel

 

Writing a novel is a sustained evocation of mental energy, of shifting energetic states, and you have to acknowledge that on some level if you want to do it. This isn’t me pulling out the crystals. I’m saying that the state of mind involved in writing a novel is very different than that of a short story or a screenplay. It’s sometimes compared to an endurance run, but that doesn’t fully encapsulate how it feels when you’re actually writing. Maybe nothing can truly convey the feeling. You have to experience it for yourself.

The act of producing creative writing (maybe of producing any writing) seems subjective in the extreme. But look at the multitude of writing programs out there. There must be something about the practice that’s objective and teachable. I think, maybe: grammar, spelling, punctuation, awareness of voice, economy of language, paragraphing, dramatic tension, plot structure, metaphor, concrete detail, chapter dynamics, dialogue, symbolism, mood, perspective, cliché avoidance, implicit characterization, theme, and narrative summary.

Those are probably the things that can be taught. But they can’t really be taught. They can only be presented and absorbed. You get them or you don’t. You get them by reading, by being quiet and listening, by discarding the methods, formulas, and nostrums that purport to teach you about doing them so that you can experience the actual, unmediated thing. You have to get writing at the soul level, if you’ll excuse me for shouting from all the way back at the crystal counter.

Yes, I’m being romantic. Making art is a romantic thing. It’s not replacing irrigation systems or baking pies or doing basement plumbing; though, I should note that if you treated basement plumbing like an art, like something you have to essentially intuit through doing, through long observation, through cultivating appreciation, even through love, it would be pretty damn romantic, too.  Basement plumbing can be an adventure like novel writing. Ready? Bring me the PVC Charlotte pipe and some Oatey. This draft isn’t going to write itself.

In my first university creative writing workshop, the instructor said to the class, “I know a lot of you want to be writers. If there’s anything else you can do with your lives, do it. Because this is no way to live”—said the associate professor on the tenure track with his third book being turned into a screenplay for Miramax. Oh, I know, I thought, hard times.

What he was really saying was, “I’m special. None of you are special like me. So don’t try to be.” That ditty gets sung in every creative field (maybe in all fields) by those trying to reconcile crushing impostor syndrome and sunk costs with the countervailing sense that they’ve had to make deep violating sacrifices to get where they are and now they’re due for some cheddar. Bring on the cheddar, the sugar, the cash, the dancing girls. You owe me. “You” being the entire world in general and certain key individuals who haven’t yet come across with the goods. I want it and I want it now. See this contract? It’s a two-book deal. Look at it. LOOK AT IT.

Sure. So while he was saying this to us, I was thinking that I didn’t know if I was a writer, but I did know that I never wanted to be the sort of person who tells a room full of young, optimistic people to quit while they’re ahead.  To my credit, as a writing instructor, I have never done that.  Because you never know what somebody can do and talent is mostly hype.

You (yes, you, my little cabbage) can write a short story today.  You can write a good short story maybe next year (if you write most of the days between now and then and read a lot).  If you lay enough pipe, maybe you can write a novel, too. And my message to you is not that you need to be special.  No one is special.  My message is simple: time is short. So get to it.  Don’t quit while you’re ahead.  Don’t quit while you’re behind.  Don’t quit.

But I’m starting to sound like a motivational speaker, which is not my intention. Yesterday, in one of those weird end-of-day office conversations that only make sense after a gallon of coffee and a greasy cafeteria lunch have brought one around again to a deep appreciation of the plumbing arts, someone said that nobody wants a conservative artist the way nobody wants a hippie CEO.

Artists need to be liberal and romantic.  CEOs need to be stapled down and pragmatic. Otherwise, the great chain of being will snap into the abyss.  Apples will fly up.  Sad clowns will laugh again. And all the stained glass in all the cathedrals of the world will shatter at once.  If I’m not up at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron, drinking Albariño Do Ferreiro out of a human skull and speculating about beauty, am I even human?

It’s the mental shifts that get you. Your life is a river of thought, of energy.  You cannot change the course of the river—even if the uncertainty and lack of agency implicit in that realization cause so much anxiety that you run to the methods, formulas, and nostrums for at least some semblance of control. In this work, there is no control other than revision, which comes as an afterthought.

First and foremost, there’s the river, which twists and turns, shifting through the landscape of your weeks and months.  You have to let it carry you.  And the only way to do that is to trust it’s heading somewhere. That sort of trust doesn’t come from the world telling you you’re special. It comes from being afraid and doing it anyhow.

Don’t all rivers flow to the sea? If you don’t believe me, listen to the King:

Like a river flows

Surely to the sea,

Darling, so it goes

Some things are meant to be.

Which is to say, you need to let it happen and get out of the way.  Let it flow, holmes. What will be, will be.  There is nothing more authentically human than experiencing something with that degree of inscrutable inevitability. And being afraid.

My various writing instructors (assiduously not teaching novel writing, ever) over the years must have had the facility with language to express these things.  I suspect they didn’t because novels are what sell.  Novels are, as the abovementioned instructor put it on a different occasion, where it’s at. Novels bring the cheddar, the government cheese (in his case, the state college cheese).

Why teach 15-20 youngsters every semester how to become your competition when you could derail them into decades of story writing and frustration?  Instead, be sure to impart a short-form aesthetic that, while certainly beautiful, will also certainly not help them into an associate professorship and a novel optioned by Miramax.  Teach them scrimshaw instead of casting in bronze. You’re the bronze guy, after all.

We may not be special.  And the world may not need another novel (or another plumber, though, if I had to choose, the latter always seems like the better option), but when we get down to it, the world really doesn’t need anything.  It doesn’t need another accountant, another inflatable beach ball, another green-eyed cat with a striped tail.

Like the cat, you’re here because that river of energy coalesced into the shape of a person. You want to write a novel because that same energy put some mysterious sacred geometry in your head that makes you see in the dark with a writer’s eyes. And that means even if there’s something else you can do with your life, you don’t have to. You can do what you want.

Ang Lee wrote:

At one point, my in-laws gave their daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for me to open a Chinese restaurant – hoping that a business would help support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided: This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.

Afterward (and with a heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations, it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.

The next morning, right before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back and – standing there on our front steps – said, “Ang, don’t forget your dream.”

And that dream of mine – drowned by demands of reality – came back to life. As my wife drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly, deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.

Sometime after, I obtained funding for my screenplay, and began to shoot my own films. And after that, a few of my films started to win international awards. Recalling earlier times, my wife confessed, “I’ve always believed that you only need one gift. Your gift is making films. There are so many people studying computers already, they don’t need an Ang Lee to do that. If you want that golden statue, you have to commit to the dream.”

But back to drinking wine from human skulls: do it, mon petit chou, and have no regrets. Many people have uttered words over Albariño Do Ferreiro at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron regarding the subject of beauty. Why not you?

 

Oda a Frank McCourt

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Frank McCourt,

he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas . . .

Working at a state university provides certain unasked-for pleasures, certain unwanted fringe benefits, and a wide assortment of things you thought you’d left behind a long time ago, not unlike drinking turned wine instead of putting it in the compost. Why do you do it? You’re not broke anymore. But you have various poor-person habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. You don’t throw the past-date wine out. You drink it or it’ll go to waste.

Likewise, you know better than to have idle conversations with students dressed in black in punishing tropical humidity outside the big humanities building. But you have certain adjunct writing instructor habits, which are nearly impossible to kick. 87% of your digestive system knows better, but the idealistic 13% that’s still refluxing with teaching takes an interest. You don’t avoid an inevitably stupid and pretentious conversation. You start right up.

Oh, you’re MFA students? Fiction writing? I was something of a fiction writer myself a long time ago.

Working Monday through Friday in the admin wing of an academic department far removed from anything you studied, before you got old and late-stage adolescents stopped taking you seriously, adds an unmistakably robust bouquet with fruity secondary notes. But striking up conversations with grad students who actually are in your field—which should be a better experience but isn’t—finishes with a mouthfeel of straight vinegar. You meet Eden and Zan and speak to them about their writing program. You know you shouldn’t, but you do.

It’s hard being the sort of person who can find meaning in anything. Zan explains this when you ask him why he wants to be a writer. He snaps it out, the elevator pitch of a theater kid, which is what he was before he arrived to do a master of fine arts in creative writing. He smiles, condescending and awkward at the same time. He asks what you’re studying and you tell him you aren’t. You’re an admin in Obscure Social Sciences Related Department. Ah. He smiles again and puts his arm around Eden, who has the same smile, though perhaps slightly meaner, and gives off tentative girlfriend vibes or lost soul with boundary issues vibes. Because you are old, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Makes you think of something Harry Bryant says to Deckard in the first act of Blade Runner: “You’re not cop, you’re little people.” In that noir retroclone cyberpunk world, Bryant can back up his elitism with violence. In the insecure incubative MFA world, Zan backs it up by continuing to smile while meticulously rolling a cigarette. You’re a university admin office drone? You’re little people.

College kids these days don’t really smoke, which is why he does. Eden doesn’t, though. Her thing is just staring intensely at you over his shoulder until something happens.

Nothing’s ever going to happen. You ask if their names have always been Eden and Zan or if those are stage names or pen names. Zan says he doesn’t like being limited by personal history.

You notice Eden has a very thin ring through her septum and you try not to look at it. Every other student seems to have one. It’s not so edgy. It’s like a tramp stamp or various pronouncements etched on the upper arm, almost compulsory now. E Pluribus Unum. To thy own self be true. In loving memory of the world’s greatest grampa, Leonard Johnston, 1958-2020. Brad Is My Love. The Truth Hurts. Sure, sure, don’t be a jerk. She might have technicolor Foghorn Leghorn playing a harp on her inner thigh but she’s got the soul of a poet. You’re just old and cynical.

She does have Foghorn Leghorn on her thigh. Or a menacing chicken wearing boxing gloves who looks a lot like him. But you’re not staring at the nose ring. So don’t even start with the thigh. Let the kids smoke and sweat like they’re supposed to and tell you about how much meaning there is in the world.

You make things worse by asking what they’re reading. He’s reading the Marquis de Sade’s stories. Because of course he is. She’s reading We Were Liars, a YA horror novel. Zan asks what you’re reading and in a flash ofpreventive insight you say, “Spreadsheets, mostly.”

He expects something like that. Or, “Nothing. I don’t read,” which would also have been acceptable in the grand calculus of the little people, the wee folk up in some administrative office, who putter about in a haze of Obscure Social Sciences Related data. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, ye Schweinehund. Cast ye them not. Nay.

She says she’s reading Angela’s Ashes in her narratology of memoir seminar and it’s cool because Frank McCourt was, like, 60 when he published it and then he won the Pulitzer. You say you think he might have been 66, not 60. And she looks at you.

But who gives a shit about Frank McCourt? “Not I,” said the cat.

Dark Passanger

Marketing isn’t the root of all evil.  But, if evil exists, marketing’s probably involved.  And, for creative types trying to survive in a world generally hostile to their values and intentions, marketing can serve as a kind of anti-life navigation system, offering a thousand opportunities to sell out and ten-thousand more to destroy oneself.

Marketing also keeps the lights on, puts food on the table, and may even allow an artist to run a convincing simulation of normal life if she’s very lucky and not overwhelmingly stupid.  It’s everywhere all the time.  We engage with its principles, its ubiquity, on a daily basis.  This is why, as writers and artists, we often don’t like to talk about marketing or even acknowledge it exists.

It’s a great servant but a terrible master.  When we’re honest, we’ll admit it’s usually functioning as the latter not the former in our lives.  It’s an invisible presence everywhere we go, our dark passenger, the demon elephant in the center of the room that we can’t bear to look at but around which everything else moves.  Like this paragraph, marketing runs on clichés, uses clichéd logic and clichéd sensibilities to transform art into commerce.

Marketing sees creative works in terms of units, thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the greatest novels ever written because of its sales figures, considers a velvet painting of a dolphin under the moon superior to van Gogh’s Sunflowers due to consumer research in China and data from post-menopausal office workers who can name every Kenny G album in order of release.  Marketing has no taste.  It’s crass, often dumb, and worships the bottom line.  But I couldn’t say these things yesterday to a group of fashion design students in their early 20s.

I work in an academic department that houses a fashion design merchandising program.  And sometimes, because I’m an old, often befuddled, straight white guy who looks like he found his wardrobe jumbled up in the “Men’s Bin” of a dollar store, I stand out to post-adolescents who want everything to be cool, edgy, beautiful, and, above all else, culturally relevant.  In a perfect world, we’d never speak, since explaining the arcana of fashion to someone like me would be tantamount to explaining the physics of a bicycle to a cockroach.  But, for better and worse, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In this one, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the interesting, friendly fashion design professors, who are always willing to answer my questions about what they do.  And I’ve even had a few conversations with some of the less insecure and fragile program undergraduates—who no doubt took down their dolphin wall art last summer; though, mom probably couldn’t bear to toss it and put it back up in the den.

What I am able to say to these students (especially since they are not my students) is very limited.  As for the question of whether it’s possible to lead a creative life and also make a living at it, I do not talk about the amount of suffering that normally entails.  I don’t tell them to enjoy these years because art school (of any sort) is a beautiful opportunity for them to focus exclusively on their creative work without having to labor in a basement and worry about food stamps.

I don’t point out that getting a college education is tantamount to buying time and that, even if they aren’t on student loans, they’re on existential student loans.  They’re staking years of their lives on a gamble that these studies are going to mean something.  Unfortunately, many of them seem to be waiting around to be told what that something is.

There are no answers, I could say.  There aren’t even questions.  There’s only time and space, what you want to do versus what you have to do, and the attendant marketing.  But these are the ideas of someone who’s been working in a creative field for almost 30 years—not a 22-year-old in a fashion program worrying whether her top is culturally relevant.

As Hemingway writes in “The Capitol of the World,” about the young Spanish waiter who gets killed while pretending to be a bullfighter, “He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions.  He had not had the time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end to complete an act of contrition.  He had not even had the time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.”  That’s a perfect expression of what I saw in my recent conversation with four fashion students—they haven’t had the time to even understand that there are things they don’t understand.

It’s perfect except that I hope they live to somehow broker a peace between their illusions and the harshness outside their university incubator—if only because, like the young man in Hemingway’s story, they’re beautiful, noble, and so very ignorant in seemingly equal proportion.  And who doesn’t love that combination?

I also went to art school.  For me, it was an MFA creative writing program close enough to the black sun of the Manhattan publishing industry that the amount of status anxiety, absurd catty competitiveness, Machiavellian exploitation, desperation, and self-marketing (which, at times, seemed more like a highly intentional, entrepreneurial form of prostitution) met and exceeded anything I’ve seen in these fashion students.  That’s good, I suppose.  But, like a spouse, maybe you tend to get the person you deserve.  Nobody’s innocent.  If you marry a good person who can stand you, it means you did something right.  If you go to an art school that doesn’t kill you with marketing, maybe you’ll be okay.

There’s only time and space and how you choose to spend it.  I wish more people would choose to spend it making art.  I wish fewer people would spend it worrying about marketing themselves and whether they’re going to be able to get married to someone beautiful, travel to new and exotic locations, make their parents proud, attain true and lasting happiness, and be famous all before the advanced age of 30.  But maybe I haven’t had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.  I’m not trying to be a bullfighter.  I know what life is all about.  Right?

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write.  And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it.  We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared.  People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated.  Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss.  We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!”  Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul.  He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen.  Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me.  But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford.  And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable.  One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar.  That’s bullshit.  You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves.  So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’”  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock.  Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you.  Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul.  I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared.  I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am.  The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me.  It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation.  I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings.  Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage.  Nothing.  No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation.  You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work.  There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions.  Turn up the amp.  Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right.  Too bad for you.  You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Laughter in the Dark

I have been plagued by anxiety and depression my entire life, since before I had words for it.  And recognizing that these are highly idiosyncratic inner states—admitting that there is no general cure or perfect treatment that can always be prescribed for how anxiety and depression can link up with each other in the mind—I feel confident that avoiding medication has mostly been right for me, while it may not be right for others.  I choose alternatives like exercise, diet, reading, and worst case, staying in bed and just riding it out.

Still, I have moments when I wonder whether it wouldn’t be preferable to take some heavy mind-flattening chemical that lets me shuffle dimly through my days, sleep soundly every night, and never feel upset or afraid.  Because, in the end, every life must come to the same conclusion, whether one chooses to suffer or not.  As the saying goes, at the end of the game, the pawn and the king go in the same box. But I don’t suffer constantly from anxiety and depression, only sometimes.  And that’s what makes the straight-edge option viable.

The capriciousness of my mind keeps me wondering whether any given day might turn horrible without warning or reason.  Living in that uncertainty was, for many years, its own kind of torment.  It took me a long time to learn how to flow with my inner states, to recognize the onset of certain nasty, petrifying feelings arising seemingly out of nowhere, and say, well, it looks like today is going to be one of those.

Yesterday was one of those.  Maybe today will be, too. Maybe being halfway through Blood Meridian made it worse.  It certainly didn’t make anything better.  McCarthy’s writing seldom does.  It’s not something one reads for pleasure.  At least, I don’t.

I read him because I have a certain abstract appreciation for phantasmagoria and beautiful sentences.  But it’s not like reading The Sun Also Rises or Never Let Me Go.  I never feel close to McCarthy’s characters.  He doesn’t let the reader identify or care too much about the people in his books.  Instead, there’s a cold distance, a stipulation that the reader detach himself from the narrative and view it through a thick pane of glass.  And Blood Meridian seems more essentially this than any of McCarthy’s other writings.

This morning, I found myself on page 178 (of my third reading) of the novel.  And I was having problems with it.  I closed the book and thought, fuck this, trying to recall whether, in 2003 or 2009, I also said fuck this around page 178.  I don’t know.  But I do know the tendency to tell the book to go fuck itself gets strong at least once a read-through.  I never felt like saying that about The Road or Suttree or All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men.  Sure, they had the pane of glass, too.  But there’s something about BM that gradually makes me feel as though I’m visiting the novel upon myself instead of merely reading it.

So I resolved to return it to the library.  That’s it.  Boom.  Done.  I’ve read the damn thing twice. Shouldn’t that be enough to say I’ve done my due diligence on McCarthy’s magnum opus?  It should be enough. I have Maupassant’s complete stories waiting in a dual-language edition and by god . . .

But then I felt worse. As Donald-45 might put it: “So much worse. Sad.” And I started to laugh (actually laugh-cough because I’m at the end of the first month of The Cold I Cannot Kick). The ponderous weight of my unfortunate, Kafka-esque gallows humor reasserted itself. And I saw how much more Gregor Samsa I’ve become over this last year of sickness and dread.

I often feel like the world is knocking me around. Obligation is both the cause and the formula: I find myself obligated to do a certain thing and must therefore tolerate a comparable amount of abuse. Mo obligation, mo abuse. It’s that simple. And I’ve never had more obligations than I do at present. Maybe the reason I find Blood Meridian so hard to swallow is that, not unlike Gregor, I’m constantly taking my medicine (straight-edge option no longer available), constantly being force-fed bad-tasting syrupy obligation after obligation, and asking for more.

If I don’t maintain perfect discipline, if I don’t visit an outsized portion of responsibility upon myself and make sure everyone around me is satisfied and at ease, what then?  Unlike the unbending, ruthless, willful characters in Blood Meridian, I might be undergoing a certain metamorphosis. None of them turn into giant cockroaches. Various other beasts and demons, maybe, but not into Gregor Samsa.

I am the giant cockroach of the Family and Consumer Sciences Department, sitting in my dark office at 6:15 AM (the lights go off if I’m too still—I have to remember to wave my arms every five minutes), worrying and ruminating, struggling with this novel, but really with myself, asking, “Where did I go wrong?” Because I most certainly did. And here I am, obligated and tolerant, feelers extended.

One imagines that cockroaches don’t read novels. Or, if they do, that they prefer works in the Tumblr-Tik-Tok genre of “dark academia”—Hogwarts without the magic and with double the soapy intrigue. Dark because cockroaches don’t like light. And academia because, well, have you been to college?

Yes, I feel sorry for myself and I probably shouldn’t. Blame the anxiety or the “evening redness in the West.” I feel kicked around by life. I feel anxious and depressed and inappropriately tolerant in the service of my many pressing obligations. But I also know that, in an hour or two, when someone knocks on my office door with an urgent dilemma that only I can fix, I’ll be courteous, friendly, and prompt. And I’ll smile, hoping they don’t look too closely at my face.

I try not to twitch in my ill-fitting mansuit; though, the metamorphosis seems just about complete.  I know this because I will continue visiting Blood Meridian upon myself.  I will tolerate the book to the end. Perhaps, instead of Maupassant, I’ll read some Donna Tartt next along with my other hive-mates.  But, for now, I can console myself with the thought that if I stay very still when I laugh, it won’t turn on the lights.

Vexation of Spirit

Spring semester, 2024, begins tomorrow and I will be teaching another section of “Mindfulness and Skillful Living,” a hybrid class that combines a fairly demanding research and writing component with daily mindfulness meditation and journaling. On paper, it looks like a fluff class and, not surprisingly, the course is always full with a ten-student waitlist. In practice, it’s kind of ferocious. And students can often feel overwhelmed by its level of seriousness.

This time, I’ll be co-teaching it with the chair of the department, who originally created the class. We’ve made guest appearances in each other’s sections and we work closely together on a regular basis. So I mostly know what to expect. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the first day of instruction always gives me pause.

Despite all efforts to the contrary by university bureaucrats and dodgy malingerers coasting through tenure, nothing in academia ever stands still. If you want to be an effective teacher, you have to accept this and learn to move with the interpersonal, departmental, intellectual, and even biorhythmic currents of the semester. At the same time, you have to profess something, which does not mean you have to be agreeable or popular.

It makes me think of spinning plates. Let them start wobbling and you might as well prepare for death. As Martin Amis puts it in Money, “If you so much as loosen your seat belt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do?” Well, you can shut your mouth and get to work, for one. Keep your head down. Keep them plates in motion. Indiscipline was severely chastised in the university’s ancient monastic predecessor institutions. And so it is now. Brother Severus, do hand me the scourge.

Co-teaching is much harder than going it alone. It adds yet another spinning plate, the need to keep an open, deferential space for your colleague, who may (in fact, who should) have different ideas, reactions, and assumptions. As a co-teacher, you’re less like the captain of a ship and more like a highly engaged, small-time politician somewhere in rural Wyoming.

Sometimes, the course will seem like a town council meeting. Other times, like a church bake sale. Yes, we can do it like that, but have you considered this other alternative? Yes, certainly, I understand your concerns and I think we should definitely address that in week three. We’ve accounted for the issue in the workshop component at the end of the semester, but let’s bring it up at the meeting. No, that was not my intention, but I hear you and I like your idea. . . . Everything will be fine.

In my other job, the admin one, I spend a lot of time looking at CVs, syllabuses (let’s avoid the faux-Latin ending just once in our short lives, shall we), and schedules. It gives me double vision. I see what I’m doing as a lecturer and what other faculty are doing, have done, will be attempting in their courses. Often, I am dismayed, mostly at myself and my lack of pedagogical precision. Some professors have pristine, metallically sterile assignment sequences that run identically every semester like some kind of cyborg utopia, while mine are more like serendipitous Rube Goldberg machines that induce a strong belief in miracles.

Meanwhile, I’m a short-story writer, writing another novel, which often (maybe usually) feels like clawing my way up a rock face centimeter by centimeter. It’s the first plate to start wobbling when my multiple jobs, masks, roles, institutional Kabuki performances claw into my creative energy. It’s the central fear I carry every semester—that I won’t be able to keep everything spinning through the air or that the quality of my work will decline in spite of my efforts or that my comforting façades won’t be believable (I masquerade as a human, painfully aware that I’m actually a hideous alien space ghost).

Anyone who has tried to write a novel knows it’s a tremendous gamble. All those small hours need to add up to something more than just lost sleep, frustration, and bad nerves. All the things you’ve sacrificed or left undone to take those hours will eventually need attention. All the relatives and old high school pals on the internet, who resent your attempts, will still need to be kept on mute. The rent will need to be paid again. The neighbor dog will need pets. And you will admit you have human needs and are not actually a hideous space ghost, even if you regularly feel otherwise. But go on.

So it begins. And there is nothing I can do to call a false start or a raincheck or a postponement for bad weather. Spring 2024 will commence, all cyborg systems go, mayoral press conference down at the Bob Smith Agricultural Community Center to begin right on time, Alcatraz autopsy dungeon ready.

Nevertheless, I can’t help think of the ultimate lines from Ecclesiastes, “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

Ok Boomer

Consider this hypothetical.  You’re standing in your kitchen, cutting slices of cheese with a razor-sharp carving knife.  You realize there are such things as cheese knives, but you don’t have one.  For those readers currently languishing in suburban opulence, who can’t imagine someone not owning a cheese knife, I’m here to tell you such people exist, and they are probably more numerous than you have imagined.

Anyway, you’re cutting some cheese.  It’s not difficult because the knife is a diamond-sharp Japanese “Zebra” blade, perfectly weighted for carving your burned pot roast, which is otherwise as uncuttable as second base.  Now let’s say you drop that knife in a moment of privileged carelessness and it goes point-down through the top of your foot.  Stop screaming.  You’re not going to die.  But there is quite a bit of blood welling up in your slipper.  Better attend to that.  You limp to the bathroom, whimpering and cussing, and start looking for the antiseptic.

In spite of what you plan on telling your spouse (My hand was wet.  It just slipped.), you really have no idea why or how this could have happened.  All you know is that it hurts.  Did you deserve it?  Think about this.  Did you deserve to have a skewered foot?

One argument says, yes, if you hadn’t been worrying about your Bitcoin investments at that moment and whether the new walnut end tables really express your essential joie de vivre, you might have paid closer attention to what you were doing.  You might have taken better care.  Now small ripples of dread and frustration will radiate through your life for the next few weeks the same way pain radiates through your foot. 

Your mindset will be affected.  Your spouse’s mindset will be affected.  Maybe your acuity at your job will temporarily decrease.  Your irritation levels with Ralph, your neighbor, when he decides to fire up the lawn mower at 5:40 AM next Sunday, may run considerably higher.  You might even speak harshly to the cat—a small thing, like the cat himself, but surely not something he, as a fellow living being, deserves.  You’re the one who dropped the knife, you careless dolt.  There are consequences for everything.  Close your mouth and own up to them.  Be an adult for a change.

But another argument says, no, accidents will happen.  No one wants to injure themselves and no one ever truly asks to be hurt.  There are so many opportunities in modern life to harm yourself or others that it’s likely to happen, now and then, even if you aren’t naturally accident prone. 

No matter how much care you take, there are acts of god; there are times you break your foot stepping off the train, even if you’re minding the gap; a tree hits your bedroom wall; a texting teenager rear-ends you 45 feet into an intersection and you almost get hit and have to wear a neck brace for a month; you drop your phone in the airport toilet; you forget your wallet at the register. 

These sorts of things happen whether or not you look both ways, don’t inhale, read Consumer Reports, wear three condoms, and keep your windows triple-locked.  Feeling ashamed and responsible for unforeseeable disasters is just adding insult to undeserved injury.  Sit down.  That’s right.  Have a cookie.  And tell me where it hurts.

Two good arguments: one about responsibility, the other about compassion.  One is not better than the other, but here we stand on the diamond edge of that Zebra knife between them.  Which one seems more persuasive on its face?  Well, that depends on our emotions, doesn’t it?  The argument that resonates more powerfully depends on who we are as emotional beings.  The one we choose says volumes about us and very little about the event itself.

Hold that thought.  Before we decide which argument style we prefer, let’s talk about how this distinction applies and let’s take it even further, foregrounding the discussion by characterizing the “baby boomers.”  Because the boomers have been the deciders, standing on that diamond edge since 1946.  And much of what terrifies us today was authored expressly and overtly by them choosing a flimsy kind of emotional “responsibility for the responsible” instead of the more compassionate feels—which tells us a lot about them, if not everything we need to know.  

The boomers spent the precious freedoms their parents bought for them as traumatized adults in WWII and before that as traumatized children of the misunderstood, alcoholic, Silent Generation—and the boomers act like they earned it all themselves through true grit and moxie. 

Actually, the boomers are the ones who economically fucked over Generation X.  The boomers built the nuclear stockpiles, created the student debt crisis, lusted after Gordon Gekko and Ayn Rand, and are the ones who currently despise millennials more than any others.  Well, we all despise the millennials.  But still.  We know who the boomers are.  We’re still dealing with their fuckery.

There’s an internet catchphrase going around these days, “Ok Boomer,” which the dictionary tells us is used “often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.”  Ah.  That sounds about right for the generation that established our current ruinous, self-serving climate politics. 

As Sorya Roberts puts it (quoting Michael Parenti) in “Happily Never After,” as the environment collapses, elite panic in “strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.”  Isn’t that a lovely vision of the future?  Most of the boomers won’t be around to see it.  They’re going to die on the golf course well before that.  But the rest of us might live to enjoy it.  That is, if we’re the lucky ones.

In the art world, particularly in creative academia, worsening since about 1975, boomer narcissism has taken this form: there is always room for talented people.  Oh, there are no jobs for you?  You must not be one of the talented few (like me).  Too bad.  Even though, in the boomer generation, you could get a tenured position with an unpublished manuscript and no teaching experience.    

“Always room for good people” is a veritable baby boomer mantra, the meritocratic fever dream of those steeped in imperial luxury, who turn beet-red when someone points out that the they got where they are because they were born into a fortunate time and place between global catastrophes; that the emperor is not a god; that the empire is not eternal; and that its luxuries were founded on a pylon of human skulls.  Boomers comprise a large part of Donald Trump’s “base,” the leering retirees in the MAGA hats.  And though academics generally despise 45, they conveniently overlook that he has more in common with them than any other generation.

So you’re a millennial or, hell forbid, a gen-Xer in your 40s and the socio-political-economic Zebra blade has now gone straight through your foot.  Are you trying to stay interested in the impeachment?  Are you crying “Why me?” when you realize that halving global greenhouse emissions by 2030 is neigh impossible at this point?  Have you been taking solace in Oprah’s self-care philosophies and burning Gwyneth Paltrow’s special candle?  Are you ready for what comes next?  Are you one of the anointed few like dad was?

You’re not.  You can’t be.  But why not just pretend you are, just for a bit, after the Bactine and the Band-Aids, while the Parthenon burns?