Voice

For several years now, I’ve been trying to redevelop my writing voice. I’ve written endless pages of garbage trying to discard the words and phrases that became stuck in my throat after 10 years of academia. Academic writing, for those of you that have never done it relentlessly, is conventional, in every sense of the word. You present papers at conventions (okay, conferences, but not that dissimilar). You are harangued by editors (and peers) whose ideas of punctuation were formed by reading Romantic novels (meaning novels from the early to mid 1800s, not novels from Harlequin). You cannot be creative with academic writing. Well, you can, but there will invariably be someone who marks out all the good stuff until you’re left with a dry, academic paper, and all of your conversational grammar has been wrought into a wooden, prescriptive grammar that no one in their right mind would speak aloud.

This is not to say that there aren’t excellent academic writers. There are, and I know several of them. But for me, writing academically was like putting on a suit and a starchy, ironed, button-up shirt. Sure, I could do it, but it never felt comfortable. I’d much rather wear jeans and a sweatshirt. I like to start sentences with “And.” I like to treat commas like rainbow sprinkles. I like to string words together simply because they sound pretty. Sound, I think, is essential to writing, even more essential than, say, whether or not you use “you” in a sentence. Everything I do when I write connects to sound. And the sounds of academia are frequently, it seems, the sounds of asses braying on an Orwellian farm. I’d much rather listen to the sounds of Billie Holiday and T’ai Freedom Ford, thank you very much.

It’s not that I regret academia, or ever being an academic. I don’t. Not really. I regret not following creative writing the way I wanted to, of being too afraid of being poor(er), of being too excited that my dad finally took an interest in my life when he advised me to write on the side, and pursue something else as a career. I tried, but when I went to grad school, I chose English, because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life, and by that point, also couldn’t imagine writing for a living. Hencely, I became an academic. (Yes, I made that word up. You can only make up words in academia if they begin with “post” and end with “ism.” Here, I do what I want!) And I liked teaching, and reading, and losing myself in ideas, but I never got to create the way I wanted to. I never got to write, really write, in my jeans and sweatshirt, fully at home in my skin. And I sorta got used to the suit and the starchy shirt, ill-fitting as it was.

Post-academia, I kept trying to put on the starchy shirt and make it fit, even though it never got more comfortable. Eventually, I started writing for me, and it was painful to see how awkward and strange my voice had become. So I wrote every day, trying to find my voice again. It’s still different. It’s still feels strange sometimes to hear myself on the page. And god knows, I miss the lightning speed of my former voice, when I could write 10 or 20 pages in a matter of hours.

But I like this newer voice, too. It’s not done yet, but the jeans are broken in and the sweatshirt is oversized and comfortable. There’s a lot I’m still test driving. But test driving is the nature of writing, too. And it’s one of the parts I really like.

Resolve

For the past several years, I’ve taken on daily challenges. I’ve written a poem a day (which quickly became a haiku a day, and was in collaboration with my buddy Julian (who has been my partner in crime since high school). Julian made a Buddha a day. You can find this entire project HERE. ). I’ve take a photo a day. I’ve written 500 words a day. I’ve created every day. You get the idea.

So this year, I’m going back to writing every day, but 300 words a day. While 500 words a day was great, it left little time for revision or going back to certain pieces to flesh them out more. And the year I left it vague so that I could revise more, I generated less writing (surprise). So, I’m trying out a lower word count so that I can still generate some ideas, but also have time to revise as needed. (The 300 words suggestion, btw, comes from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird.)

To compliment this resolution, I’m also going to focus more on putting my (creative) self out there. So, expect more blogging. Maybe more pictures! More stories. More words. More sharing. I have a tendency to hoard all of my writing, like some sort of ink dragon, and so I’m going to try to be better about that.

Obviously, all this writing will require a great deal of sitting at my desk, and my life is already pretty sedentary, what with my desk job. So to offset this, I’m going to walk or run every day this year. I’m especially excited about this resolution because I don’t tend to make fitness resolutions. My running game is better than it has been for some time, and I want to keep that business going. So here’s to miles in 2020!

And there’s one more thing. I’m going to make room and take time. I tend to fill up my schedule with tons of activities and events, leaving no time for creative lassitude, which is deeply important to me. I need lazy days to ruminate and think and do nothing. I need to let ideas simmer and see what happens. I need the space to pluck ideas from the ether and create with them. I need room for my soul to breathe. And that’s one of the most important things I’m going to work on this year. Leaving time and space for spirit.

Together, these goals cover the four worlds of the Kabbalah. I can’t take credit for coming up with this—it was my husband’s idea to create resolutions that covered the four worlds, and I loved it immediately! What a fantastic idea! As we drove back from Virginia, just in time to unpack and watch the ball drop, we discussed our resolutions and how they would fit into the four worlds. I love what we came up with! I’m looking forward to this year very much, and I hope 2020 turns out to be as promising as it seems right now.

Fingers crossed!!

Jeep woes

And I’m overdue for a blog post, so I thought I would pop in and say hello!

We’ve had some car troubles, and the biggest part of the trouble was getting the Jeep dealership to actually look at the car. Jeep kept our car for almost a week and half before running a diagnostic on it. I had to call Jeep headquarters to contact the dealer because the dealer would 1. not answer the phone and let it go to the full voicemail box in the service department 2. answer the phone, and tell me someone would call me back, which they never did 3. answer the phone, and put me on hold, and leave me there.

Seriously.

When I called Jeep headquarters to complain, the dealer managed to look at the car and fix it that very day. However, when we went to pick it up, they hid it at the back of the lot and blocked it in with other cars so that we couldn’t leave. I took pictures. They knew we were coming. Petty.

Anyway, the Jeep is now back, and fixed. And since it was under warranty (oh yes, all this for a car under warranty. And no loaner offered.), we didn’t pay for the repair. We still might sell it, because who has time for this whenever your car needs to be fixed?

Oh, almost forgot—the reason we took it in? The service engine light came on. When we told them what had happened, they said we should have made an appointment. Again. Seriously?!

Hence, the blogging delay. Jeep took up for more of my mental real estate this week than it should have. But now I have all this space for thinking and writing again! Hooray!

Fragility

It’s been a strange week.

Last Saturday, at a punk rock band reunion show in RVA (that’s Richmond, VA), I learned that two people who had been quite influential in my life had not thrived in the intervening years. One had gone “into hiding” (as he had evidently called it) in Florida, and wanted no contact with people he used to know—he was “off the grid.” One of his former bandmates had managed to track him down and glean this information. I was sad not to see him, but also, in a strange way, heartened. I had imagined a far worse situation for Jeff. My high school bestie and I had actually imagined that he had overdosed some time ago, so it was relief to hear that he was alive, and, in many ways, unchanged. Jeff always had been an overachiever in paranoia and conspiracy theories. There’s something comforting, really, in imagining Jeff somewhere in Florida, having his groceries delivering through a slot in the door, watching TV and chainsmoking, and talking to himself about Gershwin.

Greg didn’t fare as well. He used to own a record store, and I feel confident in saying that there was not a single person in the room at the sold out show who wasn’t affected by him and his store. His store was the hub of the RVA punk rock scene for many years. I spent hours with my bestie at Greg’s record store after school. Greg recommended new music and saved new albums for us. He was insightful and funny as hell. After college, I dated his stepson for a time, and it was his stepson who told us at the reunion show that Greg had become addicted to heroin, gotten arrested, become homeless, and had gone back to New York somewhere. That was the last he had heard, and he had heard it several years ago.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot. About fate. Not the destiny sort of fate, but amor fati, the Nietzschean sort of fate, where who we are is what we become. For Nietzsche, our characters make our fate, and the idea of amor fati is the idea of loving your fate, no matter what it is or where it takes you, because in a way, we design our own fates through who we are.

Then, earlier this week, my coworker died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. He was a gentle, kind, quiet man, whom I didn’t know very well. But I saw him every day. He smiled every day. And now he’s gone. I keep thinking I see him walking past my office. I keep thinking I’ll run into him in the hall. The day we found out, I heard another coworker crying in the bathroom. Grief and mortality have clouded my office.

And all I can think is that we are such fragile creatures. We try to forget our fragility. We like to pretend that tomorrow is certain, that our trajectory is certain, that we know where we’re going. We tamp down our doubts and we look away from the abyss. We have to. It’s too deep and too big. The emptiness yawns before us and we step backward. We’re meaning makers, and there’s no meaning in the abyss. We are far too delicate to live without making meaning, without the certainly that we’ll have a tomorrow. We plan. We grocery shop expecting to make breakfasts and lunches and dinners all week. We go to work expecting that we’ll always go to work somewhere. We fix our houses and apartments expecting to always live beneath a roof.

And then we don’t.

And sometimes, a surprisingly often number of sometimes, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But what we can do is remember how fragile we are, how fragile each other are, and see that about ourselves and the people around us. We are wondrous, magical, hopeful, delicate creatures. And we should try to remember that more often, and be kind, and generous, and giving, as much as we are able. And for as long as we can.

Tract Man

Yesterday when I walked to the post office from my work, I ran into Tract Man. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, and I was delighted to run into him. I adore Tract Man. He is a tall, thin, older white man, with a grey beard, and he’s usually wearing sunglasses, pale jeans, and long sleeves in all weathers. He carries a black backpack which I assume is full of his xeroxes. And he stands on the street corner, handing out xeroxed pages of passages of books. Most of the pages are a combination of handwritten passages and cut and pasted passages and typed passages, although some are all handwritten or all typed. Every page has a handwritten title identifying the theme of the passages. Most have some sort of marginalia that he has added to explain the passage or make his point. They’re almost like little zines.

I call him Tract Man because the literature tends to swerve into the political—although not always. Frequently, it’s actual literature: passages and quotes from books he loves, mostly non-fiction, but with a smattering of fiction thrown in. He adds to these passages his thoughts on the world, on government, on society and morality and spirituality and history and civic duty and human rights—the sky is the limit for tract man. Thoreau comes up often in his tracts, and, surprisingly so does Toynbee (who never seems to be quoted much these days by anyone). He’ll quote Ibsen and Jung together. Or Plato, Malcolm X, Ayn Rand, Camus, Carlyle, Gandhi, and Swift, all grouped together in way that would probably surprise all of them.

I enjoy his groupings, the way he arranges thoughts emotively and thematically, rather than historically or academically. His pairings and groupings are fruitful and interesting, and he doesn’t so much as argue as place ideas on a platter and hand them to you, leaving you to make of it what you will, his notations notwithstanding.

Tract Man delights me for this very reason. He stands on the street corner, handing out his xeroxed tracts, his zines, to anyone who wants one. He’ll ask you to choose what interests you if you want to read one. He never shoves them in your hands, he only offers. He’s enthusiastic if you stop to take a bundle of xeroxed papers, telling you his favorite parts and his favorite thinkers. Not everyone stops. But he’ll stand there for hours, handing out his pages.

I can’t imagine how much money he spends on his xeroxes. Or how much time he spends painstakingly copying down passages, adding his thoughts, writing carefully and legibly in his neatest handwriting, almost a font within itself. I wonder how long he has handed out his tracts, if he goes to colleges other than the one where I work to stand on the street corner and hand out pages of ideas. I wonder how heavy his backpack is. I imagine him pouring over books late at night, marking and underlining passages for a new tract, a new dispersal of thought, so that he can introduce someone to an idea he loves, to a thinker he loves, so that he can, in his own way, influence the world and make it into something better.

It’s such a small thing to do, such a personal endeavor, and Tract Man has so much passion and enthusiasm and belief and kindness that when I see him, I wave big and pick up my pace. He knows me by now, and he’s bubbles over with enthusiasm because he knows I keep all of his tracts. Sometimes he’ll hand me everything he has in his hands to take with me. And I do. I keep them all. I have pages upon pages of his notes and ideas. I read through every one. I know so much of what he believes, but I don’t know his real name. He’s just Tract Man. We never talk for long, and I don’t always see him out on the corner. But he always comes back, handing out his pages, and sometimes I happen to walk by, and see him pointing out his favorite passages with a student or another passerby, enthusiastic, nodding, smiling. And I’m always struck by what seems to be his personal mission: to hand out ideas, to offer things to read that might inspire people to read more, to think about the world around them a little differently than before.

Such a small thing, but it’s enough. I’ll take it.

Audiobook thoughts: Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers

I’m currently listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers. I’ve never read or listened to any of Gladwell’s books before, and he’s been on my list for a long time. But this book, I deeply hope, is not like his others. The arguments he makes are thin and specious, and the examples he picked to illustrate his points seem intended to sensationalize, rather than cement, his argument. The studies he cites, however, are fascinating: the default to truth, where humans want to believe what other people say is true. The problem with transparency, where peoples’ presentation of emotion can fail to match their actual emotions. The connections between alcohol and sexual assault. The coupling of behaviors to time and/or place, such as the coupling of suicide to the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s a lot of great stuff here. But then he uses it to argue that Brock Turner’s rape of Emily Doe was a failure of communication due to alcohol (WHAT?!). And that the arrest of Sandra Bland was caused by miscommunication and poorly implemented policing tactics (again, WHAT?!). He discusses so many interesting concepts, then uses them poorly to argue that we don’t communicate well with strangers. He insists on using the term “strangers” even when he discusses people who have known each other for years, which I find reductive at best. His whole argument, in fact, seems reductive at best. And sloppy. He fails to consider thousands of variables, and instead cherry picks data and examples. It’s troubling at best, and infuriating when he does things like blame alcohol for campus rape.

I can’t decide whether I consider this book dangerous or just sloppy. I’m not even sure I want to read anything else by him. (I probably will, because I suspect/hope his other books are more rigorously constructed.) This one, however, is poorly thought out. He never considers power dynamics in the relationships between people, or cultural differences, or systemic biases like racism or sexism. He never considers monetary motivations or economics, most notably when he talks about Jerry Sandusky. He focuses only on miscommunication, nearly claiming (and definitely implying) that all other factors are irrelevant. If he acknowledged these variables, and argued that he was adding another layer to them, I could get on board. But he’s not. He’s arguing that these are all events due to miscommunication because we have trouble understanding and reading people. And in order to make this argument, he says that Brock Turner was just really drunk and not reading Emily Doe correctly because she was really drunk. But Gladwell has very little to say about how he dragged her behind a dumpster while she was unconscious.

I’ll finish the book because I don’t have much left, but I’m unimpressed. The only reason I can see for using the studies he presents in the way he does is to create a sensationalist, controversial book for the sake of being sensationalist and controversial. It’s a real shame, because the studies are interesting and could be used to create some interesting insights. But he doesn’t do that here. This book isn’t good journalism or good argumentative writing. To me, it seems like Malcolm Gladwell is suffering from his own inability to communicate with strangers with this one.

Ephemera

My writing schedule has been a little derailed lately. Not writing every day feels strange and unsettling now. I don’t feel like I’m getting any REAL work done when I’m not able to write. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing ideas or lists or sketching out drafts or freewriting, I have to write something in order to feel like I’m fully present in my day. And for the past several days, I’ve written almost nothing at all. 

I don’t believe in writer’s block anymore. But I do believe that some ideas or thoughts are just so unsettled, that it’s impossible to capture them until they become a little more substantial. Until they solidify a bit, it’s like trying to catch mist with a net. And I’m not sure if I’m swinging my net at ideas or at air. 

What I’m not writing, in particular, is my memoir. My memoir is my main writing project at the moment. But instead I’ve been looking at old family photos, photos from before I was born. Photos of my grandmother, of her sisters, of my great-grandmother. A photo of my father in Vietnam (the only photo I know, so far, of him actually in Vietnam. He’s wearing camouflage fatigues and standing with a thin Vietnamese man in a black t-shirt and blacks shorts, and black Converse sneakers.). Photos of family reunions. Photos of my grandparents. So many photos, and nowhere near enough. 

I’m not sure what I’m thinking while looking through these photos. But that’s okay. I’ll figure it out eventually. And my net will be ready. 

The lyre of Orpheus

I had planned to write next about Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, but we went to the symphony on Sunday. And whenever I go to the symphony, I get ideas. I keep a little notebook in my purse to jot down these ideas, and inevitably, during the first performance of the evening, I slowly creep my hand into my bag and retrieve my notebook and pen as quietly as I can manage. 

Sunday’s performance opened with Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. I had never heard of Dimitri Shostakovich, and I was spellbound. His symphony reminded me of all the things I remember that are no longer fresh. Like: the moment after my grandparents died, and I went to their house with my mother to help clean it out, and a vine had grown through the casing of the dining room window and spread up the wall towards the ceiling. In the hallway outside the dining room was a door that led outside, but it was permanently shut, and high above the ground with no steps. My grandmother kept a planter in front of it. I had always wondered why that door was there. I remembered walking up the stairs to the second floor, and how difficult it was to make a slinkly slink down the carpeted steps. I remember the attic room with closets full of my mother’s and aunt’s old clothing. I remember the bookshelves filled with their old books. I remember the kitchen table by the window with the country green plantation shutters.

None of these memories are fresh. I’m petrified by what I can’t remember. I remember how much I loved that house, and I loved it because it was my grandparents’ house, because my grandparents were there. But I can’t remember the wallpaper in the kitchen. Or the kitchen chairs. Or the floor. I can’t remember the stove. I can’t remember the tables in the hallway or the knick knacks on them. I can’t remember the color of the carpet in the downstairs bedroom. 

I can’t remember how many games of Go Fish I played with my grandmother. I can’t remember how many times I watched my grandfather flip over cards in his endless games of Solitaire. And I want to remember. I want to remember the sounds of their voices, their turns of phrase, the way they hugged. 

But sometimes, I can be caught off guard by memory sneaking up behind me, and I can remember everything, like the morning we spent shelling peas from my grandfather’s garden at the kitchen table. Or gathering walnuts in the yard. Or going to the pool in the summer. 

Memory is what makes our stories possible, our narratives of life and self and others. Even the spaces, the absences made of forgetting are just the spaces in the weave of the fabric. We don’t always notice the holes, but they're there, holding the threads together. Sometimes the holes are what allow us to notice the thread. Sometimes we see it on our own. And sometimes it takes an entire symphony for us to notice the way the past is held together in our minds, and to remember what we can of it. 

What you see, and what you don't

When the Ellen video circulated on social media (you know, the one where she justifies her friendship with George W Bush and sitting with him at a ball game and tells people to be kind), people outraged. Some of the criticisms levied against Ellen made sense: she’s privileged, rich, and rather insulated. All of these are true. But along with these criticisms came declarations, like: “I will never be friends with a war criminal. I will never support someone who treats people badly. I will never side with bigotry in any form.” It’s these righteous declarations that I want to talk about. 

Simulacra, an idea created by Jean Baudrillard, is when things and symbols and language don’t reflect our actual, lived reality, and instead, replace it. (It’s a strange and complicated idea, and if you want to read more, I recommend reading his actual books, but there’s also this summary.)  Declarations like “I will never support, befriend, aid, assist, side with, etc.” are obviously untrue. People interact with so many people in any given day, how can anyone possibly know the full range and breadth of another person’s ideologies or lived experiences? Let’s say you’re a college teacher. You’ve been teaching for five years. With four classes a semester, 25 students to a class, that means you’ve taught a thousand students. Now consider that 1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault. You’ve absolutely taught women who have been raped. But what about the rapists? You’ve taught them, too. You’ve given them feedback on their papers. You’ve met with them in your office. You’ve answered their emails. You’ve helped them. You’ve given them support. 

If you’re not a teacher, you’re not off the hook, either. Think about customer service that you provide, people you work with, the parents of your children’s friends. Think about the kids in your child’s classroom. Do you think all of them come from happy, healthy, functional families? And do you confront that, or do you look away?

Ah, but that’s all different. How can you know? Ellen certainly knew who George W. was. That’s true, and that’s a reasonable point. But I’m far more interested the act of making the declaration itself. “I will never support/befriend/etc. . . .” seems to be a declaration that equates to “I am not that kind of person. I am not someone who supports these actions or beliefs.” But what if you are? If you don’t know who someone is, shouldn’t you be responsible for finding out? If Ellen is responsible for her knowledge, aren’t you responsible for yours? Do you get a pass because you “didn’t know?” 

I’m not sure there’s a good answer here. But I do think that these sorts of declarations hide an uncomfortable truth. We are not innocent. We are not free of complicity. And when we pretend that we are righteous, that we don’t know or don’t support or don’t engage with people who have done terrible things, we are complicit in hiding those deeds and those doers. In creating the simulacra. In fostering the fairy tale that we have something to be righteous about. But what these declarations really say is “I didn’t see it when it was directly in front of me.

Not exactly something to be proud of. 

Hello

I’m just testing things out. Looking at formatting. Posting. Settings. Stuff like that. So far, so good!

Please enjoy this picture of the Scottish Highlands while I figure out what I’m doing.