friend to words and animals

Can the Shins possibly sound better? The new single is unassailable. (Also, this album probably came out, like, five months ago. Old!)

Back when I was still crying over these things–I don’t know which it was that day: publishing the names of abortion patients, the rapey thing with the ultrasound wand, or yet another bullshit personhood bill–I was, well, crying over one of these things, the most recent of a million, and M was trying to console me and I was trying to figure out why I was crying over this one and not the one the day before and I realized: something is taking the place of my outrage. More and more, this stuff is hurting my feelings.

“This stuff is hurting my feelings,” I said to M, unable, anymore, to raise up the fury that had been keeping me afloat, keeping me on top of the unending torrent of proposed bills that so blatantly come from a place of misogyny (even that word, “misogyny”–it sounds so innocuous for what’s going on. How about “CUNT HATE” In all caps like that? That maybe begins to somehow express the violence behind the current large-scale attempt to legislate women right out of our own fucking personhoods).

I am and have been angry, yes. So angry I didn’t know how to even start writing about it. But more than angry now, I just feel bad. I feel bad that we are still in this place, as a society. It hurts my fucking feelings that quite a lot of people (as it turns out) dismiss me outright because of my gender, and don’t just dismiss me but deem it necessary to control me. And if you think I don’t feel this in the “liberal” arenas of academia and writing/publishing, think again. When a male student calls me a “feminazi” or tries to give me advice about how to teach, I feel it. When I read articles (and there are so many of them recently, it seems) about how female graduate students and professors get shafted in letters of recommendation and student evaluations, I feel it. When contributors and commenters at a popular indie-lit website like HTMLGiant launch a full-scale attack on a young female writer who, not coincidentally, directly confronts and thus threatens many different aspects of male privilege in her writing (Google “Marie Calloway” if you have the stomach), I feel it. When people like Roxane Gay and Meg Wolitzer actually still have to remind people that women writers deserve respect (in 20 fucking 12), hey I feel that too.

Today I read Aubrey Hirsch’s essay on the Rumpus and encountered this:

The right is lobbying against my reproductive freedoms in all forms, at all levels, in every way they can. Some days it seems that every news article I read is an attack. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t affecting my self-worth. What’s wrong with me, I wonder, that I can’t be trusted with my own freedom?

And I felt–god help me–relief. I know I’m supposed to be angry, and I am, but I have this sneaking suspicion I’m not also supposed to feel belittled or sad. I’m not supposed to take this personally because then the terrorists win. I know that, I get it. But still, beneath all the rage that I can muster on a day-to-day basis there is, deep inside me a, like, Precious Moments hummel with the big eyes and giant teardrops squeaking, “Why are you picking on me?”

When Hirsch admits to her own humiliation, fear and damaged self-worth I’m able, finally, to own and begin to navigate the messy currents of my own responses, the ones that aren’t about rage and telling people to go fuck themselves–because these are the easy, crisp, phallic responses–but the ones that come tangled up in guilt and fear and vulnerability and anxieties that maybe someone knows something about me that I don’t. So thank you Aubrey Hirsch (and Roxane Gay and Meg Wolitzer and Marie Calloway) for doing the hard work of breaking us out of our own ingrained misogynies. Some may misunderstand this as preaching to the choir, but make no mistake: we, all of us, still have work to do.

(And thank you to M, who responded, “It hurts my feelings too.”)

I just turned off the movie “In Time” acutely aware that I can never get back those 36 minutes. Seriously, I never abandon movies. I just watched “Dream House” all the way through, for instance.

Let’s start with the way Justin Timberlake pauses whenever he says the word “time.” And actually, to prove to myself the movie did teach me something, I’m not even going to bother dissecting it further. Just watch five minutes of it and you’ll see what I mean. It’s like it was written by a freshman comp student who just had a unit on metaphor and also Benjamin Franklin.

I’m thinking about bad writing because I just showed my students the charming documentary “Bad Writing.” In the film, the narrator and bad writer Vernon Lott interviews writers and writer-teachers about his own bad writing and the bad writing of others. He interviews Daniel Waters, for instance, who wrote the very good “Heathers” and the universally reviled “Hudson Hawk.” I remember “Hudson Hawk.” It was very stupid and very entertaining, and Dan Waters is clearly a talented writer. For instance, the movie never sounds like it was written by someone who is still in the process of becoming fully literate. Who writes movies now? Because they are getting worse and worse, and particularly the writing is just god-awful. Take, for instance, the aforementioned “Dream House.” If M. Night Shyamalan had a retarded brother, he would have written “Dream House.” (That’s assuming Shyamalan is not already his own retarded brother.) That piece of Oscar junk starring the adorable lad from “Third Rock From the Sun,” you know the one where he has cancer and gets angry at the world? Even that felt insincere and cliched, and that was supposed to be good.

I feel like we didn’t even know how good we had it when “Hudson Hawk” came out and was declared bad. It’s like when Charlotte Bronte called Jane Austen a boring faker but then, 150 years later: Twilight. You would take it back now if you could, wouldn’t you CB?

It’s regrettable because it isn’t such a great movie itself, but more and more I’m reminded of “Idiocracy.” One of these days, we’re all going to be sitting around watching, “Ow, My Balls!” and laughing until we fart and then laughing some more.

I haven’t said much here recently about my exams. I passed them! So thank god. I’ve started a couple of posts about how it was to take them, but it’s a difficult thing to put into words. I feel like I have slight PTSD. I feel like someday I will be really proud and relieved, but I’m not quite there yet. Much of the time I feel like I’m floating just above and to the left of my general life situation. I don’t know if there’s literally a disorder called anxiety displacement but that phrase describes the first month, post exams. It’s still hard to know what to do in crowds.

The short story is that I read and studied until it felt unhealthy. Because at some point I couldn’t study anymore and I didn’t know what else to do, I got a haircut and bought a nice blazer which I wore to my exams. Like how in our twenties we used to put on makeup and wear skirts to work on mornings we were hungover. The week of, driving home from school, I caught myself accidentally deconstructing a song on the radio–I can’t remember which, but that’s when I started to worry that I might be permanently altered in some core, antisocial way. M & some friends gave me a mock exam. When I got home that night, I cried and cried and cried and I knew I would never be able to do it, but it happened anyway. The night before orals I saw the 3D Harold & Kumar Christmas movie which was a good choice because I couldn’t deconstruct it at all, even accidentally.  Weirdly, I had anxiety dreams before exams about M’s committee, but not my own. (Even though I did well on both sections, the thing that was the worst, for a while after, was every time I tried to go to sleep the orals kept replaying in my head–the questions, my responses and a fair amount of revising (had I actually said that? I hadn’t meant that at all. What I meant was…). It was driving me crazy until my anandamide finally kicked in and now it’s all a bit more peacefully hazy.) I took a day off between my orals and my writtens to go to the new H&M that was opening that very day at Fashion Place Mall, but when I got there at 10am there was a line three blocks long just to get into the store. I turned around and drove back home (it’s a long drive) and I don’t remember what I did after that until I opened my exam question at noon the next day. I briefly hyperventilated/cried, then I went for a five-mile walk in a snowstorm which helped immensely. After that, I wrote until my back gave out. 71.5 hours. And then it’s a blank again for about five days, when my committee chair emailed me the good news that I had passed.

There were 123 texts on my list. 100 of them were new to me and by my best guess I read about 95 of those last year proper. After the jump, my reading list–most of which I read in 2011–plus the extras I was able to or had to sneak in around the list.

[Read more →]

Before the break sent us back to our families, M & I took a last-minute, cheap-ticket trip to NYC (and sorry NYC friends–it was such a quick trip we kind of flew below the radar). We’d been walking the dogs about four miles a day since I finished my exams. This turned out to be accidental training for a weekend that basically consisted of walking all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and looking at buildings. Buildings! When I lived there, I didn’t always notice them. They tend to hunker down at you. It becomes a city survival strategy to focus on the sky and the sun and the birds and trees when they can be found. Plus there are 8 million people to navigate. The architectural wonders of the place kind of gray out. I hadn’t been back for five years, which turns out to have been enough time to reset my eyes and brain. Everything looked beautiful and new and I felt like a tourist, which is to say I absolutely loved being back. I gawked and pointed and photographed and really saw the city, maybe for the first time since I moved there in 1999.

When you live in New York and environs, you sometimes love it and sometimes you want to kill yourself. But this visit was not ambiguous in the least. I’d meant to pack Lorazepam because I was a little worried about anxiety and overstimulation–just being in the midst of all those people again, and me grown so soft over the years–but apparently I wasn’t worried enough because I forgot to pack it. It was fine though–it felt like coming home, but without all the baggage that goes along with actually living there.

[My first apartment, on 5th between A & B]

The first day was nostalgia day: we walked all over downtown and found our old haunts which were, by-and-large, all still there. Maybe what surprised me the most about this trip is how little Manhattan has changed.

[Fresh Montauk little necks at the Old Town Bar]

The most pressing question before this adventure began was whether or not my shoes would hold up and if my shoes held up, whether or not my feet would. I own only two pairs of shoes actually comfortable enough to walk around all day in: my cowboy boots and my brown Dansko clogs, neither of which are especially fashionable. In fact, when I bought those clogs, after I’d moved to Iowa just before grad school, it felt a little like giving up. But the clog as a general shape has come back into style since then. There was no time or money to buy new shoes, so I chose to wear the clogs, figuring I could style them with wooly socks and tights and hope for a kind of hoofy Scandinavian vibe. They really held up and so did my flat, car-spoiled feet.

[St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Ave]

I was also a bit nervous about returning as a non-smoker. Smoking and New York are like cheese and olives in that they enhance each other and they’re both kind of smelly. But it was really okay. In fact, compared to the old days, hardly anyone seemed to smoke anymore. A bartender in Brooklyn told us packs were going for $12 in the city. Everyone seems to have given up and decided to have children instead. In the morning, on our way to the subway, we passed a comical number of high-end baby strollers pushed by middle-aged nannies of varying ethnicities. They were all on their way to a fake-turf park where dozens of little white children in tiny pageboy caps and baby-sized converse orbited around each other and their caretakers like hip little atoms.

[Matt, Met]

We went to the Met. I love the Met. Compared to the MoMA and the Guggenheim I suppose it’s a bit stodgy, but its spaces are vast and beautiful and its permanent collection has a little of everything and the park is right there for a stroll after.

Lilith is always my favorite.

It’s her glass eyes.

We wandered around Chelsea, looking at storefronts…

And stumbled across the High Line, which neither of us had ever seen in person. It’s my new favorite thing.

That feeling that the city is hunkering down over you–the High Line takes that away. You get up there and you have views, which is a revelation in New York.

It was also good for casual peeping, another true city delight.

We couldn’t afford to stay in Manhattan–apparently room prices have continued to rise right along with rents–but we found an inn in Brooklyn that was reasonably priced and decided to book it, even though we weren’t too familiar with Brooklyn, except for that one semester I taught a class at 826NYC and I knew how to get from the subway to the storefront and a few bars and restaurants in between. But that’s just a tiny slice of Brooklyn, which is intimidatingly large and on not one but several different and confusing grid systems (at one point, we were walking north, but the street numbers were going down?). But luck! Turns out the inn was half a block from 826. The only and tiny area of Brooklyn I knew is where we stayed. This gave us just enough courage to do some exploring in Brooklyn as well and the newness of Brooklyn balanced out the nostalgia and familiarity of Manhattan.

[The Brooklyn Public Library]

[Library door detail]

[Richard Meier's On Prospect Park]

I’m especially susceptible to the siren song of nostalgia. I’m writing a novel about it–how it empties and flattens the present and the past; how it’s a stand in for other, more difficult emotions; how it tricks. I was worried this trip would show me something difficult or sad or then-muddled-but-now-clear about my past, when I lived in New York. It scared me a little–I feel like I’ve changed so much and those were often difficult times. But ultimately the things I loved the most on this trip were new to me. Any time my brain wanted to follow a shadow around a corner, my eyes found something new to drop anchor on. The shadow city would slink away and this shining new thing would be forever emerging, greeting, as if to say again and again “I’m here!”

I have much to say about this, especially as a woman writing inside an institution, but I don’t have the time I want, right now, to comment. Soon though. In the meantime: start here, then go here, and finally read the excellent blog in question.

One of the things about reading 124 books as quickly as you can is that you start making connections all over the place with everything. It gets all “A Beautiful Mind” up in there. I realize that Matt’s funny Pennsylvania phrase “redd out,” which means to clean or organize (“I redd out that closet last week, but it still smells like deer antlers in there.”), appears in Jane Eyre, making it not a Pennsyltucky OR a PA Deutsch thing but a 19th-century Anglican thing. And then my brain starts to take a little trip I like to call “Which Slightly Differing Account of the Rise of the Novel in 18th- and 19th-Century England Do I Really Believe and Will I Be Able to Keep Them All Straight When the Time Comes?” And then I start to go through them: Watt, Hunter, Moretti, Armstrong, etc. And a little while later I snap to and I realize I’ve been wandering around Smith’s for like 45 minutes, clutching a bag of rabbit hay and a stick of deodorant, muttering to myself. Something like this happens about once a day now.

As a kid, I used to read a lot in the summers. My house was far out of town and there were very few neighbors. It became the summer babysitter’s main job to drive me and my siblings to the public library once a week where I would check out like 20 books at once and somehow read them all in five days so I’d be stuck bookless for two days until the next trip which meant I actually had to spend the interim playing with my brother and sister. And by playing I mean bullying. I’m still sorry, Jenny and Marshall. Me without reading material was generally bad news. Books weren’t just my escape, they were my mood stabilizers, my Xanax. But that was then, when there was something to escape (teenagerhood, a family self-destructing in slow motion) and minimal responsibilities outside of walking and feeding the dog. Book overload in the adult world has had the opposite effect. For the last two or three days, as I slog through to the end of my list, I feel weepy and angry, disconnected with my life and the things around me (dogs, Matt, dinner), a bit adrift. Today in class, as an illustrative metaphor of some or another research concept, I drew a little desert island on the blackboard. There was a chalk palm tree, the brown hump of the land, and the shark-fin waves around it. In a quick flash, I realized the picture was also a picture of my current geography. Away.

(BTW, I just totally Freudianed “end of my list” as “end of my life” up there. It’s apropos: this list has been my life for quite a while now.)

But I meant this post to be funny and somehow it’s begun to sound bleak. I don’t feel bleak. Right now, after reading my Arcades Project excerpts, I feel happy and relieved to be only two brief texts away from the finish line and also like I *really* want to go to Paris. So why am I tearing up at the Onion’s Steve Jobs story (“Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies”)? Or, more to the point, why has reading 122 books made me feel like I have really bad PMS? Where crying becomes a nearly thoughtless response to almost any kind of external stimuli?

Is it that my head is so full of books? Or is it that this really intense, hard thing that I’ve been planning and actually doing for years is finally starting to come to an end? In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes Eugene Sue: “A novel is not a place one passes through; it is a place one inhabits.” Here is my desert island, my Away.

I’m finishing up my reading tomorrow. Then I’m spending some QT with a few friends and just enough booze. Then I review for a month. Which is not the same thing as reading. I’ll miss it, I’m sure. But I’m ready to be on the mainland again.

So I was at the DI today looking for sweaters. DI stands for Deseret Industries, which is basically the Mormon version of Goodwill. I’ve done a serious DI shopping day in September every year since I moved here and if you wonder why I make this an annual event, consider my best finds over the years: a tailor-fit camel-hair blazer, a black DKNY 3/4-sleeve, boatneck, midi-length dress, a brown 70′s leather trench, a vintage 70′s orange and gray wool ski sweater, a handmade pleated wool skirt from a woolen mill in Scotland, a handful of awesome belts I’ve paid $.50 each for and, today, a red v-neck cashmere sweater and a classic white Polo crewneck sweater, plus three more vintage leather belts. All in brilliant condition. In four years I haven’t spent $100 there in total. I may be academically critical about the creepily easy relationship between Mormon culture and late capitalism, but you won’t find me complaining about it when it’s time to go back-to-school shopping.

It’s one thing to thrift when you’re 20 (for ponchos and old Levis, for instance) or when you live in a city where vintage boutiques sell adult clothes (at premium prices), but it gets harder as you age and professional dress becomes a necessity, while at the same time your earning potential stagnates because you do things for a living like read books and write stuff. But the DI is that special in-between place where I’m somehow able to find high-quality adult staples for the bargain price of practically free.

That said, when you walk into the ladies’ section of the store, the first thing you notice is the denim shirts. Racks and racks of denim shirts. Some appliqued, some with snaps. Short-sleeved, long-sleeved, collared and tunic. More denim shirts than anyone has ever dreamed. The second thing you notice is the button-front column skirts. They come in every flavor from khaki, to stonewashed denim, to black rayon and something I can only think to call “Christmas brocade.” These skirts: they’re so long and unflattering! It takes the breath away. Every unsorted thrift store has it’s fair share of hideous clothing, but only in Utah do you see the “modest” cast offs in such vast array.

I was thinking about this, flipping through the jeans, shuddering at the mail-order 80′s stuff which actually seems designed to cause camel toe, when it occurred to me that this season’s fall fashion is totally Mormon. Every September issue has at least two articles of clothing in common this year: the denim shirt and the maxi-skirt. Two indisputable Mormon staples. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to wear them together (I haven’t read my Vogue yet), but there they are. Is this after “Big Love”? I know the “prairie skirt” (the spring version of the maxi-skirt) was a thing somewhat recently and I seem to also remember a few photos of Chloe Sevigny in a braided bun floating around style blogs, but…is this still going on? It isn’t already so…last season? I mean, I thought it was cool when ballet style was a thing for five seconds after Black Swan but that came and went whiplash fast and that was a blockbuster movie. You’d figure a TV show would be even more flash, even less pan. Perhaps it has just sublimated then and dribbled out in this shape. Whatever the reason, I find it awesomely weird and weirdly awesome that Classic Mormon Housewife has quietly become an iconographic player in new millenium fashion. Yay for Classic Mormon Housewife! It must be really irritating for fashion-conscious Classic Mormon Housewives to know, year after year, that the fickle fairy of fashion has passed them by again. I mean the mini-skirt alone! That thing NEVER went out of fashion! Can you imagine?

So: Congratulations CMH, you are a fashion icon! I can only assume that if Romney and/or Huntsman have their way, the next first lady will also be the first fully embodied expression of CMH-as-fashion-moment! A Jackie-O for our increasingly conservative and paranoid times! And on election day, there I’ll be, the buttons on my skirt undone a little too high, my braid askew, my untucked denim shirt waving in the wind like another tired American flag. And I, I will salute you, CMH, you winged victor, you golden angel.

This is a fast one, since I’m so very close to finishing my reading/review of “Discourse in the Novel” by Eminem Bakhtin, a text I’ve been dreading for the last month or so and one I meant to finish before school started but couldn’t manage, due to that fear.

It’s weird how one can be afraid of reading certain books. I mean really: afraid of reading “Discourse in the Novel,” which, btw, you’ve read before? Yes afraid. Afraid that my brain is too full and nothing more will go in. Afraid of not being smart enough for this entire endeavor, in general. The usual. I’m trying to keep perspective. I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and said to myself, “At least no one’s firing you from your job, separating you from your friends and family and ultimately forcing you to emigrate from this country.” At least not yet! Hey-o, Perry and Bachmann!

M and I watch a few minutes of TV sometimes when we eat dinner. It’s the only TV we get really (except for the Buffy/Angel night I reserve for N and J once a week, although lord knows that is also equal parts drinking and Smith’s cakes) and tonight there was an episode of Nature with wolves, coyotes and foxes in Yellowstone. The dogs have not been as interested in TV since Westminster was on over Thanksgiving. Swayze sat about a foot from the TV and watched intently the whole time. Even Stella, who is deaf and so couldn’t hear the howling and barking which kept Swayze so rapt, paid attention through almost the entire show. At one point, when the lone “Casanova” wolf came up to romance a bunch of lady wolves from a neighboring clan, both dogs had their noses on the television screen.

I think it’s one of the best and weirdest human things ever, living with animals. They make life so much better. Seriously, first thing in the morning, feed a rabbit and watch it roll over on it’s back because it’s tummy is so full, then have a dog howl hello at you and just see how horrible your day can possibly be.

I feel okay gushing about my pets in that spare paragraph above. I would never dream of writing a book about them. Even though some people (hi mom) probably think I should. It’s possible I would make a million hundreds of dollars. I guess the real question is: how much is one writer’s pride worth?

Tom McAllister is taking an in-depth, up-close look at this very problem with his Inspirational Pet Book Review series at the Barrelhouse website. I have little else to say except this is a brilliant idea with exceptional delivery and you should read them all right now.

I have a new thing (one of those cross-genre beasts) in Tarpaulin Sky called “Anamnesis.” The word is pretty great in terms of narrative. In ancient Greece, there was this idea that we were all born with knowledge inside ourselves. Learning was a process of uncovering that existing knowledge; it was an anamnesis, a recollection. These days, the word also means “patient history.” I love this idea of stories stored inside the body and eventually, because of some rupture, of stories spilling out.

This whole issue is really beautiful and weird. You can read it (and you should) in its entirety right here.