Category: books

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.

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.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

What if it’s all just pornography?

I once drove a forklift in a magazine distribution warehouse for a living and got to know romance, action adventure, and western paperbacks of the 1980s and 90s fairly well, since we handled a high volume of grocery store book sales.  I read the cast-offs that got damaged in the sorting process on my breaks.  The writing was usually atrocious, but it was an incremental education in what readers actually want. 

Years later, when 50 Shades of Grey sold 15.2 million copies, I wasn’t shocked.  When James Altucher called the book great literature on account of its sales figures, I shrugged.  Someone was bound to make the “volume of sales” argument.  It fit with what I was packing every day into forklift innerbodies.  And it fit with what I knew about the mentality of the publishing industry, where books are “units” and the bottom line runs deeper than all literary pretension.

Recently, I had a long email exchange with a romance writer friend of mine about changes in her genre, which is now almost unrecognizable to me, since I haven’t done a lot of romance fiction editing and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a warehouse-level view of what is being shipped. 

I learned some interesting things from her about the how genre fiction publishing is evolving. But I came away with one difficult unanswered question.  Why do the main characters in romance novels now all seem to have unremarkable porn names—i.e. names suggestive of bank managers and legal assistants in gray office complexes somewhere in middle America?  Ethan Chase.  Julie Steel.  Laura Woods.  Richard Ward.  Shannon Green.  One gets the impression they should either be overseeing new accounts on the 15th floor or having a highly choreographed threesome in the back of a speedboat somewhere in Florida.  Or both.

There are no more 70s porn names. Nobody’s named “Hung Johnson” or Cyndi Squeals anymore (and I suppose there never were in romance writing).  Now there’s just boring character names like Sean Parker, Katie White, and Corey Davidson and equally boring characterization to follow.  At least the Fabio romance novels of the early 90s had lurid bodice-ripper paintings on the covers to go along with “Pirate Fabio” or “Fabio in Space” or “Fabio Conquers the Cavemen” or “Fabio and the Secret of the Dragon Crystal”—basically all the same book with a different configuration of adjectives. They never called him “Andrew Roberts.” He was always Fabio, the bodybuilder who got his nose broken by a duck on a rollercoaster in Williamsburg, who now wants to ravish you and save the dolphins.

Thinking I might do some research on the evolution of character-naming trends in romance writing and porn and write about it for a magazine, I did some digging and found a news story about how porn sites have seen a dramatic uptick in popularity as a result of Covid isolation.  It got me thinking about a Wired piece from 2015 on how social media, cell phones, and the internet in general have disrupted the entire porn industry.  I wondered whether there was a relationship between how audiences were being trained to consume online adult entertainment and how they’re reading romance fiction, which often blurs the lines between erotica and tamer forms of storytelling.

I discovered that online pornography seems to be heading toward extreme minimalism in terms of story, characterization, and acting, emphasizing short clips appropriate for “tube” sites as well as smartphones.  The companies still making longer “movies” routinely expect to see them cut into more easily sharable segments.  This affects everything from the way people are hired to what they’re paid to how long they can expect to legitimately work in the field.  But culture magazines like Wired aren’t interested in how this tech shift might have overturned adjacent industries like literary erotica and romance fiction.  As a book editor, I am interested in that, especially in the aesthetic changes (some might say aesthetic fallout) that have ensued.  My friend didn’t have answers, but she thought it was interesting, too.

She said many of the in-house style sheets currently handed out to low-status and even midlist romance writers now require interchangeable sorts of everyman characters.  If Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw had an unremarkable name, at least she distinguished herself through Bushnell’s idiosyncratic narrative first person (and on TV through Sarah Jessica Parker’s ironic Magnum P.I.-esque voice-overs).  But even though the TV series ended in 2004, it was still squarely within the female-oriented rom-com story genre—occasionally with a racy B- or C-plot but nothing too far outside the (fairly permissive, though still present) bounds of HBO propriety.

But now there seems to be a blankness creeping in.  The protagonists seem increasingly like pornographic blank slates, primarily distinguished by lowly positions on the corporate hierarchy, by what they own and don’t own, and who they have to worry about at work.  There’s an unremarkable ex or a lingering, equally blank high school / college boyfriend.  And then there’s Christian Grey, who’s going to make everything happen, but who is about as interesting as a self-cleaning oven.

I’m beginning to suspect that the romance genre is actually now about consumerism itself: corporate style, money, granite tabletops, the Ivanka Trump winter collection, and the bourgeois dream of neatly trimmed lawns and not having to worry about paying for your route canal because the arrogant Ferrari-driving CEO wants to take care of it for you.

Maybe it’s all about suburbia, even when it’s about dragon crystals. Maybe it’s the same formula, just more direct: young, shy-and-willowy Victoria Grantwell works for an attorney named Jonathan Charles, who has a lot of money and devilish good looks. Ravishing ensues—somewhere in the vicinity of walnut wastebaskets and corner offices. By the end, Jonathan Charles is so moved he has an emotion.  All because her passion taught him how to love.

I realize I may have just described the plot of Jerry Maguire. Maybe it was all porn from the beginning.

Disappear Here

I lead a mostly inward existence.  The part that isn’t, my small public-facing side, is bound up with my art, with what I write and submit for publication.  In this way, I’m constantly reinforcing and reiterating my identity, performing it.  I have to do this.  We all do if we expect to survive, immersed in the strange demimonde of the writing life. 

Since you never know if you’re any good and there is always someone saying you aren’t—including your own inner sadist—you have to affirmatively decide that you’re a writer and reject all arguments and criticisms to the contrary.  When you can do that and put words on the page, you are one.  If you can’t do that and you’re still waiting for permission, you’re not.  Not yet, at least.

A big part of making that decision and then constructing your identity publicly involves not letting respectability get in the way.  In 2013, feeling like I’d discovered this and that it was true, I wrote “The Discipline: In Your Head, Off the Street, and Away From the Club.” At the time, I thought I was articulating a set of beliefs and practices that could make it possible for creative people to continue in spite of the ubiquitous, overwhelming pressure to stop. 

Here is the concluding paragraph.  My sentences tend to get long and loopy when I’m writing Something Very Serious:

People enmeshed / immobilized in a fugue of “respectability” (in my opinion, a parasitic set of social mores and strictures that slowly consume the time and energy–life–of innocents whose only mistake was doing what they were told from an early age) will say you are crazy, unambitious, stupid, a loser.  They will do this because you haven’t had the time and wouldn’t spend the effort to become a stakeholder in their hierarchy of values.  I have experienced this first-hand and still do from time to time when the ripples of life-decisions I made in my late 20s come back to me.  But I do not have regrets.  I have largely overcome my personal demons, the emotional, familial, social fallout associated with owning my life.  That’s why this is a discipline.  You have to practice it.  It’s not something you do once.  It’s a way of life.  And I want that for you if you want it for yourself.

Seven years later, I feel less certain about this.  I think I was shoring up my identity for myself, talking to myself in the mirror, convincing myself.  While I’ve had a considerable amount of positive feedback from writers about that essay, it now seems more like a lacuna than a manifesto—a place where the reader can deposit her anxieties and, if only for a little while, dismiss them.  But the question remains: was I talking myself into or out of something in that piece?  What was the real opportunity cost of deciding to set foot on this odd, widely misunderstood, extremely demanding path?

Over the years, I’ve stayed faithful to the discipline, mythologizing my life in the way of a writer trying to buffer himself against the world.  A lot of creative people do this, using their imaginations not only to produce work, but also to perform their identities as artists in order to keep the cynical, draining importunities of late-stage capitalism at bay.  Unfortunately, just as an actor can get lost in a role, forget himself, and believe he is the character, it’s easy to mistake self-construct for reality, map for territory.

I’ve often lost myself, performing a writerly persona.  And I’ve had to return to the great voice-driven modernists I’ve always loved—Celine, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Melanie Rae Thon, Brett Easton Ellis, John Fante, Denis Johnson, Isaac Babel, Osamu Dazai, Ryu Murakami—as a corrective.  In their fiction, the “constructedness” (“artificiality” isn’t quite right) of idiosyncratic first person always reminds me of the distinction between map and territory, between the “author brand,” or as Foucault says, “the author function” in discourse, and the unknowable human beings who’ve disappeared behind their texts.

As the constructed persona, I’m perfectly fine with the discipline “in my head and away from the club,” living on the edge, by my wits, freelancing and being a ghostwriter in a plague year.  I’m even writing a novel based on it.  I maintain a fierce, self-aggrandizing positivity and narrate myself as the protagonist of the story, on my hero’s journey, making the raw material of my life into text I hope people will find interesting.

But this is a plague year.  Millions are out of work.  The economy is flatlining.  Although it may seem like that would have less of an effect on someone leading the introspective writing life, I’ve realized that without society, there’s nothing for me to eschew, no place get away from.  Self-isolation means something different when everyone’s doing it. 

The pandemic has changed everything in the course of a few months and we have changed, are changing, along with it.  As Guitar Slim liked to say, “The things that I used to do, lord I won’t do no more”—not as a matter of preference, but as a matter of survival.  Like most people, I want to live past next month.  Yet, in order to do that, I need society to play along.  And right now, society just isn’t up to it.

In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins, published a very dark, pessimistic appraisal of our future with COVID-19, observing that “After weeks in which it made sense to hope that something would happen to end this nightmare, the prospects for deliverance are more remote than ever.”  He might be right.  If he is, what then?

I read about drug cartels, poachers, and conmen taking advantage of the lockdown hysteria.  I get into online discussions with fellow writers about whether Andrew Cuomo is doing the right thing and whether Bret Stephens knows what he’s talking about.  And I ask the question everyone’s asking: if it all goes dark, what will become of us, of me?

It’s necessary to offer something to the world and receive things from it if you intend to function outside a monastery or an ashram.  But, practicing my creative discipline, I’ve always felt I could be happy sitting in a small room, surrounded by books, with a narrow-ruled steno pad, a laptop, and a small refrigerator.  I have a lot of memories and thoughts to explore.  I have the voices of other writers always drifting around in my head and a very small circle of friends in the world who write to me.  I’ve never wanted much more than that.

But these days I feel transparent and weightless, untethered.  In one sense, it’s fine.  I’m not afraid to die.  I’ve accomplished most of the things I set out to accomplish in my life.  But I would like to finish this novel.  I’d like to see my third book of stories find a publisher.  And even teach story writing to a few more people before I go.  Those things would be nice, but they’re contingent on systems that are undergoing radical changes.  I fear the old world is slipping away.  I fear I am, too.

“Everything was all right for a while. You were kind.” She looks down and then goes on. “But it was like you weren’t there. Oh shit, this isn’t going to make any sense.” She stops.

I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Disappear Here.

— Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Writing the Hard Thing

Writers on the pain of hindsight in publishing: 'It's like a bad breakup – you have to move on ...

If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long.  But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.”  It means what it says. 

The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them. 

I know this about myself.  I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process.  I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating.  Nothing lost.  Everything in motion.  And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working.  Being a writer, I tell myself a story.  But it might be bullshit self-deceit.

The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of  “productivity.”  And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh.  Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory.  Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward.  Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do. 

The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing.  They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else.  I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention.  I hate obeying.  But am I achieving anything in my disobedience?  For that matter, is achievement even the point?

When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed.  I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform.  Being an artist is not about “closing.”  Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy.  I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units.  I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition.  I want the serendipity of inspiration.  I live for it.  And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.

Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself.  It’s terrifying sometimes.  Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever.  In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.

“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year.  More than that and people forget who you are.  You won’t be able to position it.  You’ll be starting over.”  Six years later, my second book was done.  And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over.  From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before.  I wasn’t starting over.  I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.

Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult.  Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult.  Putting in the years is difficult.  Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary.  Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count.  One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down.  One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.

Of course, there might not be a bigger process.  Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony.  Maybe.  Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else.  It’s always possible.  The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.

It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end.  Apocalypse.  Tragedy.  No one at the wheel.  Inhuman corporations controlling everything.  And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units. 

Capitalism wins.  It usually does.  But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline.  That is a reality you must not accept.

How does a writer know what’s real?  Is it moonbeam or production line?  Is it both?  Can it be both?  Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes.  For the rest of us, maybe not.  For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand. 

Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success.  But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely.  So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort.  And that intersection has to do with luck.  Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon.  Nobody cares.  Their units don’t ship.  And yet they also have the favor of the moon.

Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam.  They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others.  And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism).  Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations.  Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.

A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it.  Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that.  You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work.  You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do.  But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.

So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by.  I’m turning 46 this month.  I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books.  These have been hard things.  Are they enough?  Will they ever be enough?

Don’t worry, I tell myself.  There’s bigger process at work.  There must be.

Solving climate change one slick magazine at a time.

Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters

 

2010

First, a Sincere Declaration of Thanks

I’ve spent most of my life running in circles looking for something authentic, then waiting for permission to explore it, and harshly criticizing myself when I didn’t get that permission.  Maybe other people have different experiences, but this has been mine, my personal through-line from childhood to the present.  So I try to be as sincere as possible when I write about my frustrations and failures.  Because what else can I do?  While it’s true that sincerity doesn’t make you friends, at least it makes you the right sort of enemies.  I imagine this blog post will do more of that.

Still, I try to avoid self-pity and, because of this, I usually take a long time to form opinions about what I’ve done or failed to do and how others have reacted.  I ruminate.  I turn things over, trying to see past faulty assumptions, convenient rationalizations, and other self-serving anodynes.  Most people probably do this to some extent, but I think I do it more.  Sometimes, it works.  Other times, what I took for a true perception, for reality, eventually dissolves into just another subjective field, just another corridor of the maze that I have come to think of as my life.  In a maze, you never know what the next twist will bring.  Usually, it brings another twist.

With this in mind, I should begin by saying that in 2010 I came very close to ending my life.  This essay is about that time, but it’s not just about depression and not really about suicide.  It’s not a success narrative where I write about how I overcame great difficulties and am now nearing perfectibility.  It’s not about taking revenge on others through a misguided petty hit piece.  And it’s certainly not about castigating myself for the many imaginary errors I’ve regretted and then dismissed over the last eight years in order to keep getting up in the morning.  It’s a slice of life—a big, fat, ugly slice that tries to embrace the broadest range of experience in order to get closer to the truth.  In this, it’s a lot like an advanced non-fiction exercise.

“Advanced” because it is not easy and not something you would assign to a 17-year-old English major in an introductory writing workshop.  “Non-fiction” because it’s a mode of creative expression that pretends a certain degree of inviolable objectivity, even though we know that’s impossible.  Every memoir, no matter how fabulous, must begin implicitly or explicitly with an assertion of truth or at least with a sincere declaration of authorial good faith: “I did this.  I saw this.  This happened.  At least, I think it happened.”  Rousseau’s Confessions does it with style:

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.  With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.

This is my favorite passage from the first part of the book because literary historians have proven that the Confessions contains many misstatements if not deliberate falsehoods.  Such graceful bald-faced prevarication is a rare and beautiful thing.  But I am not so talented.  And I have no plans to weigh my heart against a feather on the last day. 

Instead, I will put it this way: I suspect I am not a horrible person.  I have faith that I’m not even tactless.  I believe my greatest defect is that I lack the imagination necessary to see several moves ahead.  I lack interpersonal foresight, which has made me a poor manager of nervous egomaniacs and a terrible chess player.  But I love chess.  And that is a serious problem, even if I hate the high-strung pampered egomania of academic writing programs, because everything toward the end of my PhD program was just a version of that game.

Robert Greene, in the acknowledgements of The 48 Laws of Power—a book loved equally by goateed 25-year-olds with a Libertarian Bitcoin fetish and the morose IT professionals you see combing the self-help section for books on how to become an alpha male—has a similar protestation of sincerity:

I must also thank my dear friend Michiel Schwarz who was responsible for involving me in the art school Fabrika in Italy and introducing me there to Joost Elffers, my partner and producer of The 48 Laws of Power.  It was in the scheming world of Fabrika that Joost and I saw the timelessness of Machiavelli and from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born. . . . Finally, to those people in my life who have so skillfully used the game of power to manipulate, torture, and cause me pain over the years, I bear you no grudges and I thank you for supplying me with inspiration for The 48 Laws of Power.

If we read this carefully, we have to smile.  Greene is doing what we might call an “inverted Rousseau,” making the same assertion in a backwards way: this is a book about real things; therefore, I thank all those who have manipulated and tortured me for providing good material and, in the process, I declare my sincerity. 

Greene puts us on notice that his book is based on subjective material that emanates from his and Elffers’ lived experience, creating a Rousseau-esque escape hatch.  As The 48 Laws of Power is all highly subjective (essentially a kind of implicit portrait of Greene stitched together in historical anecdotes), the value of whatever he writes defaults to his apparent sincerity (“I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood”).  It’s not about an objective truth process.  It’s about rhetorical ethos.

That is wonderful because ethos might be the only sincere rhetorical mode.  After logos topples from an unstable foundation of assumption, appeal to authority, and generalization; after pathos is unmasked as merely a screen of emotion recollected in tranquility; the persuasive credibility of the speaker is all that remains.  In a world where absolute truth does not exist, everything is ethos.  And so I construct my own ethical escape hatch. 

2010 was the worst year of my life, the year after my mother died of lung cancer; the year after my first book was published; the year I got my PhD in English; the year I attended my last AWP Conference; the year I traveled to the deep South for an excruciating week-long job interview and realized the English department clichés also obtain south of the Mason-Dixon Line; the year I got very ill; the year I was admonished by my mentor for questioning the value of my degree and told to be grateful for indefinite unemployment; the year my father began another surly adolescence; the year I began to think that there was no place for me in this world.  There are many years I’d relive if I could.  2010 is not one of them.  But I have been told to be thankful for these experiences because they have supplied me with a lot of inspiration.  As such, this writing is my sincere declaration of thanks.

Prelude

You never know what the next twist in the maze will bring but, in 2009, I think I was doing as well as could be expected when I stood in front of the department graduate adviser’s desk and said I needed a leave of absence to visit my mother in hospice.  For some reason, that moment stands out as a prelude for the upcoming year.

The adviser, the department’s resident medievalist, seemed to exist in an acid vapor of contempt for all creative writing students and their keepers.  She disliked me in particular because I’d dropped her Old English seminar the previous semester and she’d taken it personally.  Since I was doing a PhD with a creative dissertation (the final product would become Gravity, my first story collection), I didn’t need to be in her class.  But she needed me there.  Or, at least, she needed to feel loved by as many students as possible.

This was the woman who would thereafter try to prevent me from graduating so that my funding would run out.  This was the woman—whether due to old workplace feuds or out of resentment that there were more creative writing events on campus than dramatizations of Piers Plowman and undergraduate maypole dances—perpetually tried to block funding to the creative writing program and force out the graduate students depending on tuition waivers.  Her style of chess was to kill the pawns first.  Attack the supply lines, starve the more dangerous units in their fortifications, and wait for winter.  Classic medieval siege tactics.

However, standing before her desk, I was barely aware of the billowing acid cloud.  I was half-blind with grief.  All I thought about was my mom and how I had to get back to California to see her.  Looking back, I’m surprised I even had the wherewithal to stand up straight, much less ask for a leave of absence.  But I was very responsible.  I took everything seriously.  I thought a lot about my future in academia, especially in creative writing instruction.  And I felt my future depended on me contentiously following up on every detail.  I was, essentially, as sincere as I have ever been in my life.  I shouldn’t have been that sincere.

Given my emotional state, what the adviser said to me didn’t register until I’d left the building.  The conversation went something like this:

“I need a leave of absence to go to California because my mother is dying of cancer.”

She rolled her eyes, looked out the window as if she were considering it, sighed, then shook her head.  “No can do.  You only have so much funding.  Your funding will not cover you for another semester.”

“My mother is dying.  She doesn’t have long.  I’ve completed my course work.  My dissertation only needs to be approved.  I don’t even need any more credits.”

Another sigh.  More contemplating the clouds.  “Well, that’s really too bad.  You have to be in residence or your funding will run out while you’re gone.  Good luck.”

I stood there, trying unsuccessfully to process this. Then she rolled her eyes and asked me if there was anything else.

The grief robot turned and left her office, got on the elevator, rode it down to the bottom floor, walked out to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and stared at the water for a long time.  Only then, did he think of the graduate adviser rolling her eyes.  Over the ensuing 9 years, the moment of her eye roll would be impressed in his memory as a perfect metaphor, a perfect image foreshadowing all the inspiration and gratitude to come.

The Tragedy of Not Dying

A hospice is a horrible place.  It’s like being given a lollipop for a bullet wound.  You’re bleeding out and everyone tells you to enjoy your lolly.  It’s cherry.  It’s got a smiley face.  Why aren’t you happy? Visiting my mother with my father there added another layer to the experience.  In spite of the pain and horror of the place, in spite of watching my mother waste away in her bed, hallucinating and suffering and being afraid, I came to understand that my father’s grief was different from mine.  I was feeling bad for my mother.  He was feeling bad for himself.

This was still 2009.  My only course, aside from empty dissertation credits, was a German reading and literature seminar.  The professor, a kind old man about to retire in his late 60s, loved his students the way he loved his trees—which is to say, far more than he loved the university.  I asked him for advice because he was the only person I could ask.  And he made it possible for me to exist in two places at once.  I gave my own writing students two weeks of work and held online course meetings via Skype and I emailed my German professor my work, which made it seem like I was present.  This is what allowed me to fly to California and see my mom for the last time.

In those first awful trips to the hospice, I’d naïvely hoped that my father and I could come together in our grief and support each other.  Of course, this was pure fantasy since he’d always enjoyed being a father but had rarely done any fatherly things.  I could count the number of times we’d gone to movies, the one thing we could do together because it involved no conversation.  And there were a few other misadventures over the years where my mother badgered him into going to some school play (he stood by the door to be the first person out) or taking me fishing (we did a U-turn at the access road to the lake and went home) or camping (it rained and so we packed up in the middle of the night and left).  He never beat me and he brought home a paycheck.  To the best of my knowledge, he never stepped out on my mother.  But he was never involved more than that; though, he lived with us in the same house—somewhat more than a housemate, somewhat less than a relative.

So my hope that he would be able, somehow, if in a manly way, to share this painful experience with me, was not based on reality.  After a certain amount of talk about how sad he was, it became noticeable that he never talked about my mom.  He sat by her bed, lost in his own self-pity, as the cancer ate its way through her brain and wasted her body.  As she died by inches, he proceeded as usual, focusing on his own needs above all else.

I witnessed this.  My wife witnessed this.  But I was so aggrieved I could barely speak.  Sometimes, my wife had to help me walk from the car to my mother’s room.  Have you ever been so upset that you can barely walk?  Until you have, you won’t know the feeling.  When you have, you’ll never forget it.  It transcends description.

I focused completely on my mom.  I waited for her moments of clarity.  I told her I loved her.  I told her the good things about my PhD program.  I made jokes and she tried to laugh.  One day, my great aunt—a stately old Italian woman who sounded like my late grandmother and seemed covered in the old-world charm that vanished with her generation—showed up with a peach and a kitchen knife.  She cut slices and fed them to my mom with a smile on her face.  Even now, as I write this, I cry a little because it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.  That kind of goodness doesn’t exist much in this world.

It was a very difficult time.  Two weeks later, I returned to finish my program.  In one of her last moments of clarity, my mom had ordered me to go back.  She didn’t want me to see her die and me being in the PhD program meant a lot to her.  I think she felt ashamed that she wasn’t going to be around to take care of my father and me the way she always had.  And knowing that I was going to get a doctorate was a relief, as if it would be the next best thing.  She also had a lot of pride in her appearance and the cancer had been unkind.  So when I offered to stay, she insisted that I not.  About two weeks after that, my father called and said to say good-bye to her.  I told her I loved her.  And I think she died shortly thereafter.

I miss her every day.  But this isn’t about that, either.  It’s about the aftermath, how everything changed as a result of her death.  Some people are the linchpins of their families.  When they go, everything goes.  That was what happened.  I flew back again for her funeral.  She was buried holding a photo of my father and me.  It was a closed casket and I don’t remember much else, just bits and pieces.  I was out of my mind. 

As we moved toward the Fall semester of 2010, I felt melted down and recast as a different person.  I’d lost my happy thoughts.  I didn’t go out or talk to many people other than my wife and my program mentor.  I stopped writing fiction.  Most of what I did was perfunctory.  But I knew I had to get my degree.  Even if I collapsed afterward, I would complete the PhD.

The Reading Series

The year before, I’d allowed myself to be persuaded that working as the assistant coordinator for the university literary reading series would “look good on my resume.”  And I did my best as the monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, flier maker, venue securer, introducer-to-the-introducer, complaint taker, fielder-of-calls from mentally unstable bookstore proprietors, irradiated scapegoat, and general handler of said low-rung celebrity infants terribles. 

Sometime before I left town for good, one of the faculty members admitted to me that the assistant coordinator position was really only supposed to entail flier making and that the professor who was getting paid to be to be doing the other things had dumped the rest on me.  But by then I was so depressed that I couldn’t summon the necessary outrage.

One writer wanted a per diem that wasn’t in his agreement.  Another wanted intel on, in his exact words, “the most fuckable students who might be around.”  The butch lesbian poet would only communicate with me through an intermediary because I was straight and male.  The playwright was supernaturally high throughout his entire visit and had to be physically guided to the stage.  The “local writer,” penciled in because there was a vacancy in the schedule that month, struggled to contain her spiritual darkness through the entire event such that when I handed her the honorarium (significantly less than what the other, slightly more famous writers had received), she snatched it out of my hand, hissed a “Go fuck yourself,” and then smiled broadly at an approaching faculty member.  These were some of the more endearing ones.

Needless to say, it was not the greatest collection of individuals.  They generally came across as worn out, mediocre, vain, full of fear, full of resentment, and perpetually on the hustle for any crumb of recognition.  Calling them fools wouldn’t be accurate because they were all reasonably intelligent.  They simply knew the score too well, knew they should have received more for their dedication and efforts.  You could see that loathsome awareness stamped on their faces.  Now they were privileged to read their work to the smirking tenured faculty who hadn’t hired them, a menagerie of twitchy English students, and whichever townies may have wandered in looking for free wine.  It wouldn’t get much better than that.

I disliked the visiting readers even though I saw myself and my fellow grad students reflected in them.  Most of the people featured in the series that year hadn’t been picked for life’s cheer squad.  They were the leftovers, the understudies, the adjuncts with slim books from presses you’ve never heard of.  Many, it seemed, faced depression so considerable that they were pharmaceutically enhanced 100% of the time.  I wondered more than once how they could continue to produce writing.  The greatest irony was that most of them had already gone further in their careers than anyone currently in my PhD program stood to go.

There were a few exceptions, a few graceful and brilliant souls who’d agreed to come as personal favors to various faculty members.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them as well as the moments of hilarity you find in every English department.  2010 wasn’t all doom and gloom, just most of it.

The second time I was told to go fuck myself was around 3 AM on a Sunday morning toward the end of Fall semester.  My insomnia had become pretty dependable at that point and I was already awake when the phone rang.  I got out of bed, told my wife I had no idea who it was, and shuffled into our tiny living room, where I sat on the couch and listened to the breather on the line.  He was panting hard.  I thought it was quaint that in this day and age people still gave breather-masturbator calls.  The caller ID came up with nothing.

When he realized I’d said hello and was listening, he rumbled out a “Go fuck yourself” and hung up.  I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about the human condition.  Then he called back.  It was F, one of the few grad students who’d been asked to read in the series.  He mumbled some things and then shouted that he thought I had a problem and should get help.  He was drunk off his ass.

I asked him why he felt that way and he broke it down for me.  F had read with his wife, you see, and I’d made the mistake of introducing him before her.  Neither of them were ever going to get over it.  Plus, she was a Navajo princess and I’d introduced them as husband and wife.  You don’t do that to a Navajo princess.  Didn’t I fucking know that?  What was wrong with my head?

“Princess?  Really?  I thought you guys were from Pittsburgh.”

He hung up again and didn’t speak to me until I ran into him at the AWP Conference a few months later—where he was keyed up and sweaty, slapping me on the back, telling me how he’d been featured in a very cool spontaneous reading held on one of the convention center’s escalators that drew an enormous crowd.  Now he had a pocket of phone numbers to network.  Amazing.  He didn’t remember a thing about calling me in the dark and telling me what I could go do with myself. 

Or maybe he’d repressed that memory along with his courtship of the Navajo princess, that hard winter living as tribe’s writer, the majestic swish of his khakis as he hunted buffalo, armed only with an unpublished manuscript.  I haven’t seen him or heard a thing about him since the conference, but I suspect he’s either got tenure by now or he’s back in Pennsylvania selling pre-loved automobiles like it’s a poetry slam.

The End, My Friend

Depression is a very idiosyncratic and personalized illness.  But those who have it tend to have a few things in common, one of which is that depression can be cumulative in its gravity and magnitude.  Today, you’re not feeling good.  Tomorrow, you can’t get out of bed.  The day after that, you’re standing on a chair with a vacuum cleaner cord around your neck and you think you’re the only one in the history of the world who’s endured such a linear degeneration.  Feeling alone is a big part of it.

I felt alone until I discovered  Darkness Visible by William Styron and recognized a lot of what I’d been going through.  I don’t know how I found the book, whether it was in the fiction section of the library where I sometimes studied or whether I encountered it in a used bookstore or somewhere else.  While it wouldn’t be true to claim that the book “saved” me, I can say it helped enough to get me down off the chair, multiple chairs, actually.

Reading it was an emergency measure, but it was something I could depend on.  I didn’t talk about my feelings.  I’ve never been very good at that, not even with my loved ones.  But I could read someone else talking about his.  And since I loved Styron’s fiction, I felt like I could trust him.  If he said it, I could accept it enough to be able to think about it.  And that was usually all it took for me to keep going.

By Spring break, I was prepared to submit my dissertation.  I missed my mom horribly and my wife and I returned to California to take care of the empty house where all my mother’s things sat gathering dust.  My father wouldn’t go near the place.  When he wasn’t drunk, he was hard at work rediscovering his hormones in erratic, awkward, and desperate ways.  Our relationship, never substantial to begin with, began to splinter irreparably when, out of guilt, he started to regularly criticize my mom. 

He was a self-righteous Catholic for most of my life, who often amused himself by telling me to get my ass to church and that since I’d been baptized I could never not be a Catholic.  But after a year of drinking, trash talking, and a pissed-drunk rape attempt on my cousin in front of me, he was ready to start up a relationship with an equally neurotic married woman who’d run after him at an event.

He confessed this to me one afternoon because I guess he couldn’t confess it to his priest.  Then he added that it was like a DH Lawrence love story.  Then he said she was going to get a divorce from her despicable husband and they’d marry each other.  Lovely.  I didn’t want to hear about it.  I especially didn’t want to hear him ask me to be his best man.  I could hardly speak.  It shows how detached and self-involved he was that he thought it was something he could ask me. 

“What about all that Catholicism?” I remember asking.  I don’t remember if he answered.

Around that time, because he wouldn’t help me clean out my mother’s things, I’d been over at the house, crying, putting her clothes in Goodwill boxes, packing up old photo albums, doing all the things we could have done as a family.  Instead, my wife helped and we did the best we could in a few days.  Much was overlooked, things from my childhood, things in the garage that I really do wish I could have kept.  But we only had so much time.  Now I imagine my father and his new wife paid at some point to have it all carted to the dump.  But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t been back in years.

I do recall taking to the gardener, who revealed that he’d had my mother making food for him right up to the point where she went into the hospital for the last time.  She couldn’t lie down straight in bed.  So she was sleeping sitting up in a chair in order to breathe, then walking around on crutches, cooking and cleaning.  According to the gardener, he screamed at her frequently.  She was fucking dying and this is how he treated her.  That’s abuse.  It’s horrible fucking abuse.  And my mother, who was just about a saint in every way, did her best.

My mother was a talented painter and sculptor, but he’d left her art in a shed that had a broken roof.  It rained a lot that year and most of her work was ruined.  I’d been standing in the backyard, looking at the shed, unable to get in because he neglected to give me the key to the deadbolt (probably because he didn’t want me to see what had happened) when he called with a task for me.  It was something small, something to do with getting a TV boxed up for him and cancelling the  TV service that my mom had in her hospice room.  I’d already taken care of it, but he spoke to me with contempt, as if I were very lazy.  He said, “After all I’ve done for you, couldn’t you take care of this one thing?”

I thought of my mother on crutches, making him breakfast.  I thought of her art destroyed through neglect.  I thought of my father drinking a case of my cousin’s high-end champagne and then trying to fuck her in front of me.  I thought of all the nasty things he said about my mother when she was gone, after he’d cried his eyes out for himself, after he blamed me for not being there when she died, after the sizeable amount of heirloom gold from old Italy that my mom wanted to come to me but that disappeared right around the time my father and his new cadaverous lady friend got a second condo in San Antonio.  I thought about all these things and saw that no matter what his paycheck had been worth, no matter how much I may have cost as a child, no matter what my mom and he may have given me as a teen or a confused 20-year-old, I owed him nothing. 

I felt something snap and a certain coldness overtook me.  My depression had come to be replaced with something more useful: calm, thoughtful anger.  We had it out.  He told my wife and I we had to be out of the house.  Within 48 hours, we were.  I’ve never looked back.

Gone for Good

I got my PhD without fanfare.  My wife and I went out to dinner and it was nice, just the two of us.  I knew I’d miss my mentor in the program and her brilliant husband.  I’d miss certain things about the university town and my own writing students, several of whom had become more like friends.  But I was glad to be done—done with the degree, done with my father, done with trying to hump the dream of being an academic creative writer.

In the eight years since the day we drove south, blasting M. Ward’s “Helicopter” with the windows rolled down, I’ve thought about 2010 quite a lot.  I still get depressed.  But I can cope.  I’ve learned that it is possible and, for me, even preferable to have a life outside academia.  And I’ve come to accept that family isn’t really who raises you when you don’t have a say in the matter.  It’s who you choose when you do.

I miss my mom every day and I write fiction every day.  As of this writing, I’m working on my third collection of stories with a novel draft mostly written.  I’ve published over 30 items in magazines, worked as a freelance writer and journalist, and lived in 9 countries.  I’m healthy.  I really don’t have anything to complain about right now.  And sometimes I even give myself permission to think I’m happy.  Somewhere, there’s a Navajo princess riding through the clouds over Pittsburgh, but I doubt our paths will cross again.