FML: "I Heart Wilson: The Story of Us"

What I remember, four months ago:

I get offered my first English Major class since quitting a professorship in Albany.  This is a big deal, folks, because of a strangely classist system called "tenure-track," which I walked away from and was assured I would pay for, indefinitely.  A deep love for Auburn, alongside a deep love for two grown children who will never move, prompted me to make the deeply painful choice of happiness over career.  And then?  I get the gift of you, English majors, one more time for the road.  Most probably for the last time.  You were a gift from Dr. Frank Walters and a quick response on an email to our Composition Director.  You were worth every bumpy, nutty, confusing, emotional, victorious, academic, life-changing moment of the last four months.

Sometimes, we have to make the hard, very costly, decisions that feel more like jumping off a cliff than flying.  When I think about my career, I always identify with Forest Gump: game legs, good intentions, strange road.  This is what I hear most in my head when I look back at the last four months:  "And I was running . . ."

A long time ago, an English teacher (about 24 years old) saved my life.  Certainly, I do not see myself as the savior of my students, but here's what: you all save me, every day.  This is why I heart Wilson.  We are the same.  In trying to teach, I learn.  In trying to play a role, I become real.  In reaching for that perfectly crafted warrant, thinking I am full of it, I find truth.  Writing saves my life, every day.  I hope we never forget this semester.  I hope we always jump, risk, and somehow fly (even if it's by the seat of our pants) because anything else isn't living. 

So . . . "Advanced Composition?" I think we made it.  In these blogs, sweated out over fifteen weeks, we composed.  We advanced.  They are the story of us.  (And I heart Wilson.)

With much gratitude,
Dr. Kat

FML: "Writing Crap and Other Musings"

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FML: "Portrait of My Body and Other Horrors"

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FML: "Freestyle"

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FML: "Writing Blindly"

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FML: "The Whole Damn Shooting Match: You, Me and John Wayne"

FML: "Using a Warrant (Not the Band)"

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FML: "All Things Steve Almond"

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Four Months Later . . . "Music as Text"

Well?

Four Months Later . . . "Our First Run: Universe in the Pause"

For all of these, as this is your final exam, I will post last.  :) Last one in is a rotten egg?

Writing Crap and Other Musings

Sheesh.  After talking about lean writing, verbose writing, soundbite writing, warrant writing, personal writing . . . what to do  . . . I wish I was just at the beach where I could think better . . .

Then I saw what I was doing and had a memory.  (The class sighs.  Dr. PD has a memory.  Again.)

I was stuck.  Chapter Three of my dissertation had my butt in a sling.  Really.  Nada.  Books piled on the floor, some of which that had become make-shift coffee tables, were crunching in on me.  I think they call this writer's block.  I tried everything: wine, t.v., calling my bff and running it all down again, re-reading, screaming, pacing, and railing at the sky that I should have gone into another major.  My dear friend and mentor, Frank Walters, ran into me in Haley Center and saw that we were quite near a fundamental breakdown and out of mercy sat me down somewhere on a bench.  After the wailing and teeth grinding subsided a bit, he offered his well-earned, academic-type advice:

Write crap. (Language cleaned up here for formality purposes.)

Not out of self defense, not as a last ditch effort, but very much ON PURPOSE. Aggressive crap writing.  Take that.

Right, I'm with you.   An English prof saying write poo?  Seriously?  What I would have given to have heard that all along.

And so I did.  I wrote a load of ka-ka.  Laughing all the way.  Somewhere along page twelve, I had an idea.  My muse grabbed my brain and went: Have you thought of this?  Brilliant.  Yes.  I couldn't stop.  And it wasn't ka-ka.

Here's the thing: I had forgotten it was a joy ride, screams and all, and had made it straight up work.  Now.  That's not what we are in it for, is it?  Turns out, I can revise crap and make it gold once the muse starts singing.  (P.S. That chapter is still my favorite.)

You ever notice how that paper with all the angst and sweat that you thought was crap got an A?  You ever notice how that one that was perfect got a B?

We've talked about risk taking. Yeah, yeah.  Gotta stay in the parameters of the assignment, research the field, cite correctly . . . but once you get that, you got it.  Sometimes, the risk is worth it.  (Says the girl who included The Da Vinci Code in her dissertation.) But wait: isn't this the same as our daily, grinding lives?  Lesse--don't speed, don't drink too much, go to class, don't be late for work, brush your hair . . .
Where is the muse here?  Does she get to sing off of paper or are we all a bit too pansy to try that out?  I'm thinking here that really being awake, really throwing it out there in our lives (even though it may start out as crap) could lead to our favorite chapter, the love of our lives, the job that makes it all worth it, a lesson of unfathomable proportions.  Can we revise crap?  As long as it's not in print yet, I think so, and that print is pretty much the tombstone, yes?

I wrote this purposefully forgetting rules of grammar and propriety (except for not saying the word shit, which I just gave in on) in order to get something out.  I know where the edit button is.  Sometimes you just gotta say  . . .

Portrait of My Body and Other Horrors

I'm sitting here actually trying to link "Portrait of My Body" and "Why We Crave Horror Movies."  Sober.  I think I've got it, but it all seems a bit too strange for a blog, or for sharing, or for thinking even.    I wonder if several of us were pulled in easily to "Portrait" simply because we wanted to connect to it somehow, have the scars made beautiful or the imperfections justifiable.  What a jolt those of us must have had when it all went wrong halfway in and our tender author betrayed us, made it a bit uncomfortable, and stank up the room.  I wondered the same thing halfway through King's piece.  It was all fine and good until he started saying things like "we" and "madman," and sheesh, so close together like that?

Which brings me to another bit of a loser supposition: what if certain folks are right?  What if there is no "true" us, only the performer on paper?  What if we cannot escape him/her simply because we (the reader) are the intended audience for us (the writer) and, here's the kicker, we know what we cannot bear to hear?  Then, riddle me this Batman, is there any point at all to this academic, masturbatory, narcissistic exercise called writing?

Come on.  You didn't think I was that innocent, did you?

Let's try something here.  Portrait # One:

Long fingers.  Granma loved them, called them piano chasers.  (And they were, years ago, chasers along porcelain sound). Here, a sliver of a scar in the shape of the glass that sliced it, either side of my middle right knuckle.  Hands just beginning to crepe up a bit after years of washing dishes, cleaning houses, working dirt.  They held babies and stroked hair and clasped others and enunciated sentences.  Married by joints that ache when it's going to rain and sometimes just because.  They were the prettiest thing I had and are now the most belligerent sign of my wisdom.  The left one bears a wedding ring so heavy that it has left a permanent, soft dent.  I find comfort in them, the bones and the thinning skin that are the closet thing to my writing, my history, my life.  My hands.

Sookay.  Now.  Portrait # Two:

Cuticles long scarred by permanent teeth, ripped and bit and torn until they bled.  I curl the tips under to hide the flesh when I pay in cash, cut the nails to cripple their chances of self-mutilation.  Veiny and branded by a drop of velvety hot grease -- a moment of self-defense against someone I loved.  Fingers so long that they will have no choice but to become claws in the next two decades, bony things that held cigarettes and formed obscene gestures and slapped a friend once in a drunken rage.  I am terrified of these appendages for they just might one day turn on the rest of me in jointy glee.  Premeditated.  Justifiable handocide.  My hands.

Saalright.  Pick one.  Which portrait is true?  Why, both, of course.  And neither.  Somewhere in the middle.  Whatever I choose to remember or believe or tell.  I think that may be the point, after all: to tell the truth, but to tell it slant (English majors, unite).  Tell it ugly, sometimes, otherwise the writer in you will call bullshit on the whole sweet thing.

And for reasons beyond my own understanding this morning, the following verse just came into my head:

Would you believe in a love at first sight?  Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time.  What do you see when you turn out the light?  I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.

KPD

Free Style



So . . . last one in is a rotten egg.  I lead these things to the point that it occurs to me: what would happen if I didn't once?

Bounce off our reading of the week: memoir.  Who will begin?

Writing Blindly

Here we are again.  I'm at a bit of a loss, so I will start with what has always worked in my writing: memory.

It's 1978, and for the very first time, I am happy.  My mother has separated from my father, getting her graduate degree at MTSU, and the movie Halloween just hit.  Twelve is awesome in 1978, people.  Poprocks, pet rocks, mood rings, and our very first junked-out slasher flick.  Sigh.  So much life left.  So much Fleetwood Mac left.  I am happy.

I suppose I still hold my mother accountable for the fall, the woman that had the audacity to finish her degree in a city that she didn't love.  And so, the day after Halloween, I began a long goodbye.  We packed and planned, refuted the idea of a Christmas tree (ornaments were airtight in Tupperware), broke up with friends and puppy loves and sent our dog, Bugger, to live with a neighbor.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started to tear up the green shag carpet in the corner of my room and leave the notes.  "This was where I learned to play the flute . . . whoever finds this should know I was happy . . . the sound the toilet makes in the middle of the night is not a ghost."  Scraps of paper to no one, shoved tightly under green fibers, probably scrapped without being opened when said carpet was scrapped for hardwood.

This is what I thought of when I read the article, "I Am Writing Blindly." I don't want to make more of it than what it was, just an adolescent shove to the universe.  Surely, those pieces of paper meant nothing more.  Except . . .

Why, over thirty years later, do I think of it?  Our author posits that narrative, and the storytelling it weaves, makes us human.  An impulse.  Finding God in the next sentence.  Why not something else, then?  Why writing?

Instead of going long, this time, I'm going to leave it here.  Call it an experiment.  Whatever.  I guess I'm writing blindly. 

The Whole Damn Shooting Match (You, Me, and John Wayne)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8sNeozweTM

"Courage is being scared to death . . . and saddlin' up anyway."  John Wayne

I'm not sure why it took me so long to come to this particular blog day.  I've been toying with the idea of simply skipping it, and perhaps that's what caught my attention.  Why was I avoiding this one?  Because "Demagogue Days" was so political? Ranty?  Leftist?  I think we all know me better than that by now.  So . . .

What's in my craw? 

I found it over my third cup of coffee.  Fear.  Let's have a chat about saddlin' up, shall we?

I'm with Almond, all the way down to the last level of Dante's hell.  Pissed and self-righteous with him, hurt and indignant with him, embarrassed and vindicated with him.  It came as quite a jolt that Canto XXX left the two of us (yes, the two of us) in the dust, so to speak, and horribly grieved at the real fallout.  When do my rants, valid or not, take me away from my intended heroism?  How many times have I been right, had a warrant (and boy, did we cover that one), filed my exquisitely crafted injunctions with the proper authorities and found myself, smoking gun in hand,  so far from my cause?

Just to be clear, I'll provide disparate examples of such shenanigans:

1. Professor X warns me that I am too emotional about my essay subject.  Obviously, Prof X is an Anal, Archaic, Sexless Fart who is part of the great conspiracy to rip the passion out of my writing.  Final essay firmly refuses to examine AASF's alternate take on said well-loved subject (damn skippy!) and lands in a slap of dust and glory on AASF's desk.  Take that.  Flash forward to my first B. 

2. With doctorate firmly in hand, and under sudden and decidedly unwarranted attack from an uptight academe, I (and my little warrant) saddle up and ride into Town.  After all, others like myself need defending.  Freedom of speech and religion and all that.  I think I was feeling a little less John Wayne and a bit more Clint Eastwood, circa High Plains Drifter. (Of course, I completed forgot that Clint was dead, nothing more than a vengeful ghost with a bone to pick.) The rest was all pathos-driven-Facebook-diatribing, cost be damned.  My mother isn't quite over it yet.  

Let's now look at the fallout, shall we?

1. I publish the B paper in a well-respected academic journal.  Accolades all around, self-satisfied grunts, and AASF will still not speak to me in the halls.  Word.

2. I read the end of Almond's essay and drop my gun.  Shit. Tyler.  I had completely forgotten about Tyler.  But there he stands, hair in his eyes, that stray bullet all on me.  My student.  Well, damn.

You know, sometimes "my bad" doesn't quite cut it.  

I guess what I'm saying/asking/posing is something a bit like this: How far can our warrants take us?  Or, how far are we willing to go?  Personally, I don't think we can count the cost when saddling up, mostly because I think it might be too late.  I've asked a lot of you, stuff like honesty and passion, and so I hope it's not too late or too much to ask one more thing: foresight.  Temperance.  Just in those places where we have forgotten a little thing like ethos and we are galloping so fast toward our target that the townfolk get a bit blurry. I think Steve Almond, and I, are a bit trigger happy.  Maybe it's worse to be slow on the draw? Either way, when it comes to our writing (and maybe the rest), qualitative balance couldn't hurt.

One last thing.  Just for my Tyler who came up after class: I really hope the shooting match isn't over.  You were the point, all along.  

Using a Warrant (not the Band)

I'm sitting here thinking of 1984.  I can smell it: hairspray (Gen X was solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer, I contend), Marlboro cigarettes and other things that have a grassy, smoky aroma, Jordache perfume, diesel fuel.  It is my own warrant to speak of this time, and let me tell you, I do and often.  After reading "Tesla Matters (Dude)" all I can think of is this: what are our warrants?  How do we utilize them in our writing?  Do they put folks off? Draw them in?  When, and in what kind of writing, do we use them?

I would contend nonfiction deems them critical to the power of our message.  Let me prove this: how often have you been reading along, innocently accepting the message (or maybe trepidatiously) when BAM.  There it is.  A cultural misstep.  That is NOT what Reagan said, or Clinton, or Bush--the timeline is totally off--no one would have worn those shoes then . . .

(Yep, I totally just used all of the devices we talked about today.)

A professor I had once upon a time (her name was mentioned in class this afternoon) taught me something like this once.  It went something like: never break the suspension of disbelief with your audience.  You lose them.  Badly.

You know the moment.  You read the book.  And then?  There it is, the popcorn halfway up to your mouth, your feet jauntily hooked onto the chair in front of you, and there it is.  Bastards. Sophie (The Da Vinci Code) has a brother?  What the?  That was not in the book.  You look around, expecting riotous indignation from your fellow moviegoers.  Nothing.  Yet you have psychically left the building.  Over and out.  Suspension?  Nope.  Disbelief?  Yep.  The rest is just, well, garbage. I am personally still bitter about every single Stephen-King-book-turned-movie I have ever seen.  (One of the only screenplays he has written is Maximum Overdrive.  The others were Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Stellar.)

No warrant.  You can't  come in.  That is our right as readers, though, I believe.  To refuse entry when we call qualitative bullshit.

And yes.  I have cursed more than once in this blog.  Why?  Because I am about to use a warrant, and there is no way you would buy me if I came off as a pretentious, ivy-league prof.

It was 1984 and the Cradle Will Rock tour hit hard, right on the heels of the Back in Black tour (AC/DC, folks).  I had no intention of ever working for "the man" and had even less intention of staying chemically lucid for more than, well, five or ten minutes.  The t-shirt was black and had SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL emblazoned across the front, and it was about two years before most of us had even heard the word "aids."  And I was ruuunnning.  (Little Forest Gump for you there.) Smart kid, lost, angry, scared, with a serious Peter Pan complex and no vision of my thirties.  Kids like yourselves made no sense to me.  How did they study and mind and cut their hair and eat their Wheaties? No way, man.  Sunlight hurt my eyes and Walt Disney was blasphemy to my soul.  Purposefully, vehemently, I threw away my childhood when I threw up my lighter to David Lee Rothe in crimson spandex.  Part of me is still back there, waiting for the lights to come up and force me out into the street.  Strangely, all the songs and all the bands and all the beer-soaked nights add up to this one moment in my teenage wasteland:

And when some local kid gets down
They try an' drum him outta town
They say, "Ya coulda least faked it, boy"
Fake it, boy (Ooh, stranger, boy)
At an early age he hits the street
Winds up tied with who he meets
An' he's unemployed--his folks are overjoyed.

But here I am, Dr. PD, thirty years later, talking about warrants.  I suppose I could have just "faked it," but I think I learned the regret of that decades ago.

And so.  I begin sentences with and.  And do a lot of ---- stuff like that.  Proper English?  Um, no.  But it's in line with the signature on my warrant.  I wonder, do we ever know the voice in our heads without examining the paperwork . . .

All Things Steve Almond

Fenway Park at Night

Hello, crew.  We are now popping off these blogs every Friday.  So here goes.


As I read Almond, I am struck with the feeling of two Steves.  I sense an almost expatriate, Vonnegut resignation, but I also find him digging up nostalgic American bones.  How do I, as a reader, balance phrases like: "The peculiar sickness of the American mindset may be located in the peculiar notion that the professional athlete . . . should serve as a moral exemplar" against phrases like: "Sometimes I need to pretend.  Sometimes I need a broken-down old stadium, stinking of beer and mustard, and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights?" (For Frank: this is "Red-Sox Anti-Christ.")  Or: "Our obsession with sport is clearly a symptom of imperial doom.  We must remember: All that held Rome together at the end was spectacle" against: "the chance to surrender my will is not without its sacred pleasures--a language, however primitive, with which to seek the solace of other men."

I think about how we talked, in class, of his self-effacement, his honesty, his outright brutality against a critic followed by his admission of pain, and I wonder: is it more beautiful to admit the ugliness we make?  To lean forward to our readers without our makeup on? It seems to me that the writers I love the most make sacrifice to their own, god-like readers this way.  It seems to me that I trust them more, then, feel more "involved" in their rants, diatribes, or observations than I would otherwise--even if I have been offended.  It's more, well, human. It's the least we can ask of someone who would like a moment of our time.

I shared my story with you all on Wednesday.  It put me at personal risk.  Yet, aren't I asking the same of you?  To write yourselves into being? To put yourselves on the old proverbial line and not hammer out some craptastic five-paragraph essay? I enjoy Almond because he seems to get that I need, as his reader, to feel him present in his craft.  Anything else feels like cheating.

At the very beginning of his book, we have a quote from Vonnegut:

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.  But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

And here we have it, don't we?  A writer looking back at American failure, broken ideals, salt marking the spot where a dream had been.  Not because he never had faith, or out of some misguided sense of smug, self-righteous finality, but out of grief.  Humanity.

Personally? I like the bar that high.

Music as Text



Go for it.  The song that means something to you!  I will join in later.  :)

Our First Run: Universe in the Pause

Alright.  Just to get started, I was still thinking about the "pause" we were discussing in class on Friday and realized we only really talked of the pauses before obvious life-changing moments.  What of the pause between the more simple moments, the space between cause and effect, and how they represent so much more?  I was remembering, the other day waiting for my dermatologist to swipe away a bothersome (in more than one way) mole on my face of how--just in the split second between the moment you slice your skin with a razor and the moment in which it decides to bleed, there is a bit of a pause.   Damn it, that is going to hurt in a second.  The skin, impeccably severed and clean in shaving cream or body wash, almost as if it is taking in its breath just before the scream of red frothing into pink, beading and tracing the line down a knee, or a chin, toward cold porcelain. How strange that a cut so clean, almost numb in its splice, can bleed so profusely, so insistently, before leaving permanent scars.  Those scars will become how you know your face, the turn of your jaw, the bend of your knee, the boney line of a shin.  They cost the least pain and the most blood, didn't they?  And-we inflicted them, however carelessly and with no malintent, upon ourselves in the swift turn of a hand, a ritual of hygiene, that will forever record an unremarkable Tuesday morning on our aging skin.

And so?  What of these pauses?  What of this pause?  Does it represent anything other than the minutia of daily life?