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[I still feel this way.]
Olin Memorial Library, 19-06-07.
This is the image of me attempting to craft, from nothing, a future. The image of a girl-woman seated in the great expanse of air and windows in a library reading room.
Her hair knotted ingeniously, sitting on her heels in the too-low chair, squinting and pulling faces as she peruses lists of requirements, demands, standards. She cannot hold herself against these lists, cannot compare with cold scrutiny some image of herself with the abstract of desirability.
She has sent off, already, one cry for help, one request for rescue, whose destinataire has either not received it or been unwilling to respond.
She turns to examine the summery cascade of freckles that spill down from her shoulders, the six bracelets of wooden beads on one wrist, the Touareg device in silver on her right index finger. She stands and stretches and walks away down to the ladies’ to examine her prototypical self in the mirror.
“What is this?” she would wonder aloud if not for the librarianess standing next to her. “What is this fleeting thing in this mirror, here?”
That figure has learned herself, over the years, she realizes. The woman in the mirror has learned to say “I”.
But what now? Now with this “I” tucked cleverly in her pocket, where will she go? And how will she get there?
She can no longer contemplate these long lists of demands, can no longer face the prospect of opening some line of communication for the sake of marketing a self she is not sure of. That it is there, this self, she is certain. At least there is that.
But what can it do? When push comes to shove or when the shit hits the fan or when simply it comes down to it, of what is this self capable?
There is, of course, no way to know. That is what she cannot face, today, as the wind outside the window fades and the trees on the hill grow still and silent. What she cannot face, today, in this library that has cradled her through all her mind’s misadventures and furious yearnings, is the possibility that it ends here. That the next step is too brazen and broad for her small form to manage, that the path may be not only meandering and twilight-obscure, but may also be simply not there.
This is me vigorously pretending that I don’t have a million things to do today, that I am not behind on my research, that I don’t have to send out my first application tomorrow. Denial is delicious.
The fact is, reader, that sometimes I need these long mornings. Sometimes I need to get a decent night’s sleep, tell the alarm to fuck off, waddle around with my coffee, play loud girly music, read my blogs, try not to eat my own brain while I catch up on the news. Sit around in my jammies til noon. “Weakling!” cry the Gods of Academe. Fine. Whatever. Sometimes, it feels good to be a weakling.
I’m healing. I had a very long weekend of not accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish — and not accomplishing it by the most roundabout route possible. I was working, or at least it sure felt a whole hell of a lot like working, but I couldn’t be sure, because I had nothing to show for it.
Breathe, I told myself yesterday morning when I woke up panicking about that nothing-to-show. I’m sure you’ll find something worthwhile in that — hey! that pile of notes. See? You have something. Stop freaking out, eat something, and look at your notes.
Poor scraggly little ruffled thing though I was, I did get my shit together as I usually do, had coherent things to say in both of my classes, got more done on the application front than I expected to. Still, by the end of the day I was in a bare-nerve state to match any I’d ever achieved — and that’s saying something. I wasn’t so much on the verge of tears as unable to prevent my eyes from streaming. I didn’t so much feel like crap about myself as I was unable to tell for certain that I had a self. I felt like wailing out of sheer protest at the universe, but I just couldn’t be bothered to wail.
Then someone who is an important figure in my life gifted me with an incredible kindness. The sort that makes me feel cared-for and smart at the same time, cared-for because I’m smart, that makes me feel like I have a future ahead of me after all, the sort that feels at this time of the year like nothing so much as an act of grace.
So I’ve allowed myself to take the morning off, to smooth myself over. The best thing about this moment was that it meant that this person has faith in me — and more importantly, that I now have to live up to that faith. The bar has been set. I can see it. It’s one I owe it to myself to clear. That’s inspiring.
I’ve devoted this week to the last major stage of my application process, the one I expected to provoke the most angst, despair, and gnashing of teeth: the revision of a chapter of my undergraduate thesis to submit as a writing sample.
I’ve not yet finished — I still need to rewrite the introduction to give a sense of the chapter’s relevance to the whole project, tweak a few sentences, make sure the cuts I’ve made haven’t disrupted the argument, and run it by Professor Wry (who, I’m sure, will be as glad as I to see the very last of this bit of juvenilia). But, reader, so unexpectedly, this process has been a joy.
It has been a joy to find that, somehow, over the course of the past eighteen months, I’ve become a better writer, a better critic, a stronger thinker. I have revelled in this opportunity revisit this piece from a distance, and with it to revisit the self who wrote it, to reconcile my current self to that former one, gently to correct her peculiar syntax, to smooth her ragged sentences, and to cure her of her overfondness for the word “discourse.”
Once I accepted the impracticality of giving the thing the genuine overhaul it really needs — of revamping the argument, changing the basic language through which I conveyed its central concepts, revisiting the source-texts and updating the research — I settled into the simple pleasure of becoming my own co-author. That pleasure derives simply from the fact of this distance, this remove from that former self: I wouldn’t argue now what I argued then. That in itself seems a minor miracle.
Miraculous, too, that I have made peace with the breathless undergrad who first gathered and dived ecstatically into this material. Much as I would like to present a more mature writing sample, that girl is what I’ve got, and I am proud of her. I have no desire, as I had thought I might, to redact her or to revise her out of existence. Instead I’ve simply dressed her up, and next week I will send her out to be my ambassador. She’s a little green, it’s true, but she’s beautiful, and I trust her.
And while she goes out into the world, I can retreat and set my current self to work, in the present tense, where she will learn by fits and starts until she, too, will cede her place to a newer, stronger self.
The good news, reader, is that I have (almost) drafted my statement of purpose. The bad news… well. The bad news is that it will inevitably read as all such grabby-needy self-sale documents read. The following is a rough translation from what I have written into how it will appear to its lofty destinataires.
Dear Professor Elegant Linen-Trousers, FancyPants University,
HIiiiii!!!!!! So I’m doing all this really fantastic stuff right now [NOTE TO SELF: BE MORE SPECIFIC HERE] that is super-relevant to Your Area Area You Dabbled in Briefly Fifteen Years Ago, and I’m really really pleased with myself for being so fabulous. And smart! Don’t forget smart. Sooo I’m applying to NAME OF INSTITUTION HERE Some Institution that is Not Yours But Is A Strong Rival of Yours, because I think the work that is happening at Your Institution is revolutionizing Your Area, and I’m like so totally excited to be part of the revolution, man! Heavy.
[TRANSITION NEEDED!!] Okay so I did this sweet research paper this one time, right? And it like totally had to do with WHATEVER INTERESTS MAKE SENSE FOR THE PROGRAM exactly what you work on in so many exciting ways! Well no no no I don’t mean exactly, exactly, just kinda, I mean I’m original and innovative and everything and not just some copy-cat sap. Girl scout’s honor. Aaaaaanyway then I got this really rad, super-competitive awesometastic fellowship/prize/pat-on-the-head thing and did so much sweet research that ii”m not going to really tell about in detail because I don’t really remember it all that well and even if I did it doesn’t make any sense at all to me! Teehee. So I wrote this other thing that totally has everything to do with Your Colleague’s work in Field Your Colleague Has Never Worked On But Once Tangentially Said Something About. And that was totally awesome and I learned all this crap.
You know what else I really love, I mean besides mint-chocolate chip ice cream? I really really really love this Really Exciting Thing That’s Happening In The Field Right Now but That You Hate Because It Was Inaugurated By Your Evil Nemesis Whose Name I’m About to Drop as My Personal Hero. I’m using the work of Your Nemesis, whose work changed my life and rescued me from the brink of suicide, to do toootally awesometastic research, well not really research so much as vague thinking, in Area You Hate. How neat is that!
And then I won this other thing!!!! Which has never been heard of outside my tiny-ass college, but it was like so sweet and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and enabled me to do more research that I don’t really understand that has everything to do with Your Area!!! I mean, not everything, exactly, but, well, you know.
Name Drop, Name Drop, and one more Name Drop for good measure.
[DON'T FORGET -- PUT PARAGRAPH ON UNDERGRADUATE THESIS HERE! BUT FIRST REMEMBER TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOUR UNDERGRADUATE THESIS WAS ABOUT, IF IT WAS IN FACT ABOUT ANYTHING]
This project was deeply influenced by your thinking and I am very grateful for that will you please advise my Ph.D. dissertation.
Oh!!!! And Your Institution also has that Awesome Institute/Center/Program-Thing! Which I know absolutely nothing about but am totally totally prepared to praise to the skies because I just know it will be crucial to my research!!! Oh, man. Sweet.
SO now here I am over here working on these run of the mill MA term papers two really really exciting innovative original interesting research projects that just happen to involve the edgiest areas of the field! Look how eeeedgy I am. Neat! [NOTE: DEVELOP TERM PAPER TOPICS BEFORE FINALIZING DRAFT!!] These will dovetail seamlessly into a gorgeous innovative original exciting dissertation on [MAKE UP DISSERTATION TOPIC! QUICK QUICK!]
And then I’ve got all this other awesome experience that actually has nothing to do with the field, your area, or the academy at all but I’m throwing in here because there’s this awkward space between now and the end of the page and THERE now it’s full.
Oh right yeah and I have teaching experience? And am deeply invested in continuing the Great Tradition of Learning by teaching freshman comp at Your Institution? And stuff? Sweet!
See you in the fall, Prof!
hugs and kisses!!!!!!
<3 mouse
I am smart. I am sometimes even elegant. I have done some interesting things in my small way. I’m also spunky and snarky and fun. Given my level of experience, I have an excellent research background. I’ve been very well trained by very smart people in critical inquiry and worker-bee discipline. I get worked-up and combative quite easily, in a sometimes annoying but on the whole endearing way. I have a pretty broad world view, but I’m humble before the expanse of what I don’t know. I’m kind to my friends, and deeply loyal. I generally know what I think and I’m not afraid to say it, but I’m also willing to do the long, slow, difficult thinking that makes strong opinions productive. I’m really, really good at kicking a shoddy argument to shreds. I laugh easily and have a tremendous appreciation for irony. I speak confidently and clearly in public situations, but have also learned the immense value of listening. I’m great at synthesizing multiple threads of a debate and creating something new out of them. I don’t mind sludgy grunt-work as long as it’s leading to something beautiful. And there’s nothing I love so much as a great big intellectual challenge.
Sure, I have my weaknesses, loads of them, even. But for the most part, I’m pretty awesome.
So why the fuck can’t I convey that in a goddamned 2-3 page statement of purpose?
I am supposed to be reading a Certain Classic Text of early modern literary scholarship, but since I am sick to bloody death of hacking away with a blunt hatchet at what I sincerely hope has been for some time a very dead new historicist horse, I instead choose to spend these precious moments pondering this date, designated (American) National Coming Out Day.
A friend just pointed out in another venue, which is quasi-private and so not going to be linked here, that “coming-out” is laden with some pretty serious issues about for whom and where coming out is a powerful thing to do, about how issues of visibility and legibility are fraught with all manner of consequences (and not just for those queers who are “at risk,” as the quaint political parlance has it). I’ve never actually thought about it that way — I’ve thought about the marriage debate, certainly, in terms of visibility and legibility issues, in terms of how marriage is one among many means of making a public, theatrical (not to say performative) gesture that aims to render queerness legitimate, not to mention transparent, to a straight audience and within a straight structure. One reason among many that the ardent desire in certain homonormative circles to continue carrying the marriage banner, to the detriment of many other issues, really makes the little angry mouse in me go ROAR. (Thanks in particular to Professor Revolutionary and Pretty Dyke Friend for being partners — or, in the case of Prof R, commanding officer — in my coming to possess the tools for seeking articulateness on the issue.)
But it never occurred to me to use those terms to describe the coming-out narrative. Which is odd, I suppose, because I tend to think of coming-out as a kind of forced performance. Forced, because I find that I am rarely in control of the terms of that coming-out to nearly the empowering extent one would suppose available on the basis of the “You go girl!!” attitude many LGB(T) communities tend to use to encourage coming-out. I feel generally fairly settled, comfortable, happy in the rudiments at least of my own queerness until I am faced with a straight medium in which communication is for me unnatural. How, for example, to boil down years of feminist awakening, of assessment and constant re-assessment of my sexual, erotic, and political alignments in a form comprehensible to the straight men I now find myself living with?
My response to a query from one of them as to why I was interested to know if there were any interesting, attractive women — no, no, not men, women – in Brit Uni’s physics program, in which they’re Ph.D. students, was, playful-smirkingly, as follows:
“… Uh, because I’m a big dyke.”
Hello. You could hear the crickets all the way from Liechtenstein. Well, I’m guessing you could, because I couldn’t hear much for all the contained laughter going on inside my head.
It worked fine in the moment, answered the question, shut down a discussion I didn’t want started, and was just puzzling and freaky enough to please the part of me that believes that queer women should always do their level best to make uncritically straight men as uncomfortable as possible.
But it said absolutely nothing about me to its immediate audience, except perhaps that I’m maybe just a little bit tougher than they thought I was. Oh, and that I’m sexually off-limits to them (insha’allah). It wasn’t meant as a coming-out, as a declaration, as a dis-closure or dis-covery: on the contrary, it was intended to mark off an impregnable border, to close an open route into my personal life and sexual identity. Despite my sometimes exuberant attitude, despite my occasional explosiveness, I am a fairly reserved person in many ways, and becoming more so. Sexuality and eroticism are no more private to me than are most other aspects of my life, but they are private, and I feel no particular joy at the continuing need — practical and political — to keep making them public, making them objects of strategy and Identity, rather than revealing them as I choose to those close to me, as continually unfolding layers, pieces of myself given as gifts in trust.
If this is slightly incoherent or internally contradictory, it’s because I’m still working these things out as I write this, using the writing as a way to work them out.
Just now it occurs to me that that moment of non-dis-closure was embedded in more privilege (I mean that in a simpler sense than it seems) than I had considered. It brings me back to a moment during the fall of my senior year in the Petri Dish, a period during which I was for the first time hanging out with queers of an older generation (who weren’t drum-circle-belonging, Starhawk-reading, Michfest-going, Catharine Mackinnon-worshipping witch-lesbians), whose radicalism I admired but who maintained a healthy awareness of a danger I’ve never had to sense. These were people more or less like me — Northeasterners, white, middle-class — and yet their experiences were totally alien to mine. What it must have been like to be coming out at tradition-laden universities in the early sixties, or seventies for that matter, I can’t possibly know. What it must have been like to come of age in a time and a place where coming-out was actively dangerous, had to be strategically considered, where complex (and hilarious, and powerful) devices had to be constructed to disguise one’s sexuality from a given Authority, I really just simply can’t know. Those same places are familiar to me now as relatively safe ground for queers.
Shamefully enough, it was only then that I realized that, for a lot of people in a lot of different positions (even within, say, white, middle-class Northeastern America) there might be more at stake in coming-out than there is for me.
I have not addressed communities to which I don’t in some way belong, and I won’t, because in this venue, from where I sit, it would be presumptuous at best, condescending and appropriative at worst.
The point is that this coming-out thing is damned complicated. If I had my way, National Coming Out Day would not be devoted to self-identification, but to ambush. Not coming out, but leaping out armed to the teeth (with words, in my case — very voluble words) not to explain ourselves to the straights but to cause a genuine chaotic ruckus. (My own personal ruckus would be a discursive one — I’m anti-violence, but then that’s mostly just because I’m diminutive, not physically fit, and unskilled with heavy arms. So.)
But coming-out is almost never about a ruckus. It’s about rendering queerness legible to straight people, about constantly framing, explicating, packaging and labeling queer identities so that straights can understand them, it’s about making straights feel comfortable with queerness. And all of that fills me with rage. But perhaps it’s changing — I see my friends changing it every day. We rage together, we light fires in each other’s eyes and send each other out into the world bravely. And we get more brave every day.
For the most part, it must be said, I just sit quietly somewhere out of the way and don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t demonstrate being worth talking to. I am not an activist by trade. But behind the stack of books, behind the quiet focus and the ink and the jargon, there is that fire.
It’s never been in any goddamned closet, and it’s not coming out, today or any other day, just to warm you up or make you smile. It has things to do (like burn a hole through the carcass of a certain dead horse, mentioned above), and you and your complacent tolerance are not on its list.
Unless, of course, you’re queer too — by which I mean you’re doing some good, hard thinking about sex and power and gender and eros and just exactly where you sit in the whole mess — in which case, fuhgeddabout the whole damn thing, let’s have a beer and laugh and maybe throw some shit. Or let’s just cuddle.
This past Saturday at the bookstore, I reached or perhaps passed my New Eden threshold. I was also doing inventory crap in the children’s section, which exists in some kind of eighty-dimensional timespace vortex and whither only the most stalwart of booksellers dare venture. This may have exacerbated the twitching, bare-nerve state I enter every time I pass that threshold.
Two of my coworkers, Birmingham and Lefty Sophisticate, stood chatting (talking aesthetics of invitations, I believe) behind me when the moment came to clutch the register’s monitor with both hands and lay my forehead against the screen while emitting an expansive groan of surrender. “Oh honey,” Birmingham said “why don’t you give all this a rest and go get yourself an ice cream cone?”
I didn’t get an ice cream cone, but I did have a walk and a cigarette, and when I got back I determinedly figured out how to open the drawer of the CD player (right hook to the control panel) and extracted another noxious contributor to my proto-postal disposition: the Putumayo World Music mix, “Weekend in Ibiza.” I replaced it with Joni Mitchell, and my day got worlds better.
I sat in the vortex of death children’s section singing “A Case of You,” happy that my sad, dusty alto voice was at its best at that moment, and articulating for me the process of depressurizing. When your basic giant dickwad walked in soon after, I was calm enough to defuse his situation and merely suggest to Birmingham that we keep a loaded automatic under the register.
Still, by the time I made it into the train to New York this morning, I felt like I was wearing my skin inside out. The only way I can describe this feeling is as a kind of aphasia. I said to Lyrical the other day that I feel isolated in New Eden because virtually no one here speaks my language, both literally and figuratively. I thought of it in terms of foreignness, of an irreducible difference between myself and my surroundings, of the impossibility of translation. But I’m now realizing that mine is an aphasiac anxiety — I attempt to express something, tell some story about myself, and whatever comes out is something entirely unintended that has a sense wholly unrelated to what I had wished to communicate. Or nothing comes out at all.
I don’t mean this, really, in terms of actual spoken language — though there’s that, too. I can’t say what I mean, exactly, but it’s something to do with feeling that the edges of my self are eroding, or that the world has turned upside down and forgotten to take me with it.
What saves me, aside from frequent trips to Dishtown and New York, where kindred spirits resuscitate me, is that the ladies of New Eden Books are not what I expected them to be. To look at Boss Lady or Birmingham, I’d never have thought they were people I could get along with peaceably, let alone befriend. Getting to know these women, recognizing their complexity and allowing them to recognize mine, finding what lies behind what I thought I saw when I first met them, has been an incredible opportunity.
Some kind of leftover adolescent angst born of my high school self’s sense that everyone was evil and everyone was out to get her, some judgmental defense mechanism caused me to write off, for example, the Literary Hoover from the moment I met her. She was, to be fair, wearing something suspiciously pink and well-pressed, but according to my code of judgement I had no reason to believe that I had encountered in her the most voracious reader I’ve ever met. I had no idea I’d be finding myself relieved to have her standing next to me as the only person in a fifty mile radius who could get excited with me over histories of premodern medicine. Another coworker proved to have a delightful, easy laugh and an ability to talk about virtually anything with interest, and in still another I discovered an inexhaustible reservoir of silliness and affectionate sweetness.
Some of them even get me. Boss Lady has learned how and when it’s funny to tease me about my radicalism and sometimes-sardonic aspect, and Lefty Sophisticate laughs with me in my snarky moments and knows to squeeze my shoulder when someone buys a James Dobson book. At the end of a long day recently, Birmingham said, “I’m real glad you’re going to Brit City on the Sea — I think that’s gonna be real good for you.” This came as an incredible relief — she understands, I thought, that I don’t belong here, that it’s not inventorial misadventures making me twitch but a profound sense of isolation and a streak of wanderlust. She sees that I don’t fit in, and she likes that about me.
Just goes to show, mouse, I thought to myself: don’t you burn any bridges, because you never know when the straight blonde Republican ex-flight-attendant pink-pants-wearing tennis-playing fiftysomething Southerner is going to turn out to be your favorite new friend.
In which a certain Squadrato has tagged me to write eight questions, things I regularly wonder about, ponder, contemplate, etc. She is also anti-rules, and I like that about her.
1. Why, in the company of older men, is it so difficult to be a Good Feminist? I’m not talking nuance, kids, I’m talking straight-up no-two-ways-about-it women-aren’t-toys patriarchy-exists-and-does-stupid-shit Feminism 101. It should be easy as pie, but it ain’t. A friend just told me a story about telling off some guy for referring erroneously to her, a scholar in her own right, as the “date” of one of the “real” scholars at the conference she was attending (who happens to be a gay man, which is another issue altogether). Her story reminded me of a lot of experiences I’ve had, in which sticking up for myself or someone else has inevitably led to me feeling small and vulnerable and stupid, getting branded with the “crazy feminist” label and thus feeling I’ve given a bad name to the Cause, and so on. People call this “internalizing oppression,” and I say that’s a load of crap. The whole point of resistant politics is that whatever you’re resisting is also inside you, or it wouldn’t have any power. “Internalizing” means absolutely nothing, and doesn’t even remotely distinguish one person operating within a given power structure from another. So why does standing up for the simplest and easiest of all possible feminisms — because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to look myself or my friends in the eye the next day — make me feel more like a Little Woman than just about anything else can?
2. How long would it take me to become loosely conversant in Italian? To read Italian as well as I read French? To read early forms of Italian? My French fluency took about ten years, give or take, depending on your definition of fluency. I have some competence in Spanish. Will the next Romance language be easier or more difficult? Will it come more quickly? Where can I get some dollars for a year of lounging around somewhere in Tuscany having grapes fed to me by a luscious country lass while she teaches me to read Dante? Or, you know. Aretino.
3. Am I going to crash and burn here? Am I going to get my limbs chewed off by the big toothy maw of Academe? Really. I worry about this. There’s no way to know. Will it all prove too tough on my delicate little neurons? Or will I simply burn out? Will I walk out of a library somewhere someday, throw my reams of painfully accumulated notes under a train and run away for a life that would be unrecognizable to my current self? As I talk to my far-flung friends, hear about their adventures and their plans or lack of plans, I begin to realize how narrow is the path on which I’m setting myself. I’m beginning to realize how many other choices there are in life, how very big the world is (despite evidence to the contrary), and how wildly varied the available paths. What, in short, will become of me in this crazy world I’m about to throw myself (back) into?
4. How many people, aside from my creepy second cousin, actually participate in the culture of naked karaoke?
5. What is it, really, that annoys me about campy gay men, and mainstream gay male culture? Is it drone-ish conformism? Is it that I can’t stand certain traits – gossippiness, hypertrophied consumerism, pop culture connoisseurship, overconcern for one’s physical appearance and that of others – in women, and seeing the burlesque of it in men is just too much? Is it organizations like the HRC that give a bad rap to homonormativity? Why am I less annoyed by lesbonormativity (you know, U-Hauls, flannel, drum circles, Starhawk)? Is this fair? Am I allowed to maintain my prejudice and still consider myself a good person and a good queer?
6. Why is it so difficult to be a good caregiver? My dad, whom I love and who is very important to me, is having surgery tomorrow and I’m already finding it difficult to be sympathetic. I’m worried about him and I want to do anything I can to make this easier for him, so why have I been snappish and inconsiderate all day? Of course, it’s difficult to walk the line between caring and being taken advantage of — a recurrent problem between me and the old man — but why is it so difficult to say, “Okay, mouse, suck it up for two weeks, respond to and anticipate his every wish with a smile and a curtsy, and then you can go back to asserting yourself”?
7. What is the difference between eroticism and sexuality? This is one I’ve been working on for a while, because I insist that there is a difference, and that eroticism is more important to me than sexuality is, but I can’t for the life of me put my finger on why. I have a lot of relationships that I would term “erotic,” but with people with whom I would never dream of engaging in any sex act (aside from making out, which I think should be desexualized anyway). A lot of my crushes work this way, too. I started thinking about this in an undergrad seminar on early modern sexualities, about how one of the keys to unlocking the problems of talking about sexuality, and about its history in particular, might be the disarticulation of Eros and Sex. I have more to say about this, but for now I’ll leave it here. Please commment; I’m curious.
8. Perhaps most importantly, when the eff will the third season of Battlestar Galactica be released on DVD?!
I’ve realized that I am afraid of tagging. This may stop someday. For now, you know. Here’s a meme. Do it. Or something.
Posting in non-predetermined styles to resume shortly.
So, Adjunct Whore and Tenured Radical tagged me for the following meme. Despite the flurry of potential posts buzzing around in my little mouse-sized brain, a meme seems like an easy way to kick things back into gear around here, so a meme you shall have.
The rules state that I must write eight things about myself and that I must then tag eight people at the end. The rules were agrammatical in an annoying way, and I’m feeling petulantly anti-rules. So here’s some stuff. Eight stuffs.
1. I come from a fair amount of money. My parents both had a great deal of success in business, in the old fashioned children-of-working-class-immigrants bootstrap fashion. We’re not talking quarterly trips to Ibiza, or a tax bracket that would interest the White House, but you get my drift. This affluence tends to surprise me, periodically. I have never been denied an opportunity (within reason), but neither has it ever been communicated to me, implicitly or explicitly, that I could have anything I wanted without working for it or earning it in some way. I have a lot of obnoxious white-upper-class guilt that I do my best to suppress. One feature of this guilt is that I wonder, periodically, to what extent and in what ways people read me as “upper class.” The other day I told someone who knows me only moderately well that my father would be paying, straight up and out of pocket, for my M.A. Her eyebrows shot up as though she had learned something about me that she didn’t know before. I wonder about this, about how I present and how I’m read, in terms of many different aspects of Me, but the class aspect is the one I’m most clueless about.
2. I was raised Catholic, in a stubborn but resigned way, by my Italian grandmother. I ditched most of it after I was confirmed (hubristically, by her), but: I still have to resist the impulse to cross myself, on occasion — usually blasphemous occasions. I still have the urge, every six months or so, to go to Mass. When I go, I am always — always — disappointed. I have had what I would term, pour aller vite, “religious experiences” in virtually every old church I have visited. I have trouble disarticulating the religious from the historical as much in my affections for Christian architecture as in my affections for early Christian sacred music. Sometimes the part of me that is, irrationally, a Scots nationalist takes out a club and clobbers the Catholic remnant to bits and it’s a little hilarious, actually.
3. I have a fetishistic love for really fine clothing. I once fell in love — and I mean, in love — with, yes, an Armani coat. I tried it on one day, and went back to visit it periodically until it disappeared form the department store. I still think about it, from time to time. The second or third time, the saleswoman said, “It’s only five thousand dollars. You have a coat like that, you don’t need to go to college.” She was serious. I almost believed her. (Note that this love had mostly to do with the fact that this exquisite, long, grey-blue wool garment with its Chairman Mao severity softened by a dramatic bias, this coat, conjured a romantic image in my dilettantishly Russophile heart of a melancholic, beautiful young woman crossing the Neva in winter in this very coat. That young woman being me, clearly, in some misplaced fragment of a fantasy.) Generally, you wouldn’t know this from the way I dress. But I am constantly costuming myself in my head, and can’t get enough of fashion magazines, Madison Avenue, and so on.
4. I have read Anna Karenina three times in the past five years. (See also: dilettantish Russophilia and romantic fantasies springing therefrom.)
5. Three facts in one. a) I live in suburban New England. b) I really enjoy crushes. c) Thus, there being no one in my immediate surroundings who fits my usual profile for crush-objects, I am developing a serious Housewife Problem. Reader, there are a lot of very buff, very well-groomed, very beautiful women running around this town, and they have nothing better to do than to walk the streets of New Eden during the day. They are completely fascinating. Some of them have brains, and that’s where we run into trouble. Only the sense that “Honey, you have to go because the kids will be home from tennis camp any minute” would be the creepiest possible thing to hear at the end of a clandestine rendez-vous keeps me away from what I have come to term the Stepford Precipice. Further evidence that I need to leave this town prontolike.
6. I smoke cigarettes. I love to smoke. I love everything about smoking, except for the fact that I can now feel eight years of accumulated crap attacking me from the inside. This is the stupidest aspect of my life that I can currently call to mind.
7. I really like kids. This fact astonishes me. My students in Mazamet have a lot to do with this. I had never worked in any sustained way with kids, had no idea what I was getting into, was in no way prepared to teach, and thought of people under fourteen as a foreign species. (Why have I forgotten so quickly what it was like to be a little kid?) But I loved my little guys, most of them anyway. I loved them as individuals, as people, which, simple as it is, completely floored me. Kids who remind me a lot of my fifth-graders, or of my junior-high self, come into the bookstore and savvily or sheepishly ask for recommendations, and I can’t get enough of talking them into reading the stuff I read when I was their age. (Yes, I may have sold thirty thousand copies of To Kill A Mockingbird in the past week.) Babies come through and my coworkers (all mothers, some grandmothers) coo knowingly but keep their distance, and laugh at how easily I can be enthralled by a giggly response to one of my silly faces. My cousin’s three-year-old, whom we’ll call Bruiser, totally captivates me. I don’t have any desire to be a parent, but I love being the Eccentric Lesbian Auntie, and wish my friends would get to work so I can do a lot more of it.
8. This morning I had coffee with a very good friend of mine from high school. He is a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps. He is leaving for Ramadi in March. I won’t see him again before he goes. And I cannot fucking handle it.
No tags for now because I’m lazy and antisocial. Next time, I promise.
Being a retrospective on the past three months and more of the Life of Mouse, in the form of a reading list. Not an exhaustive list, but a list. I am still, after an entire year of it, completely floored by my freedom to read whatever I please, when I please, and to do so for absolutely no reason at all.
+ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
+ Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
A wonderful woman at the wonderful English-language bookstore in Toulouse sold these to me. They were both read between Toulouse and New York, during a period vaguely defined in various time zones and zones of atemporality as “March 23.” On the curb outside my apartment, waiting for the taxi that didn’t want to show. In the terminal at Blagnac, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt, drinking my very last French Cappucino From One Of Those French Coffee Machines That Serve Abominable Coffee But Which Have Irreversibly Corrupted Me And Won My Eternal Devotion. On the little flight to Frankfurt, where I sat next to the most beautiful red-haired girl I’ve ever seen (she was reading Hannah Arendt in German, and drank tea). In the hilarious Goethe Bar at the Frankfurt airport. (Note that one of the many pluses to flying Lufthansa is that their hubs have amazing beer in their bars. Also thrice-life-sized foam statues of Romantic poets.) At the gate, in between being distracted by Lesbian Mommies and by the American girl with the violin (instantly romanticized) being harrassed by the German guard. On that eight-hour flight, with the two hippie boys behind me and my heart beating a mile a minute. Wonderful circumstances in which to read two fantastical novels by two wonderfully playful authors. I didn’t really love either of them, but that trip’s surreality coats them and enhances my memory of them.
+ Marguerite Yourcenar, Souvenirs pieux
The first segment of Le labyrinthe du monde, purchased at my favorite bookstore in Paris one week before leaving France. Transported carefully from Paris to Toulouse, from Toulouse to New Eden. Frequently coddled and admired prior to actual reading. One of the more beautiful, simply beautiful, books I own. If you, like me, are a Francophone bibliophile, you know what I mean about Gallimard editions. It cost a lot of money, and I didn’t really have room to transport it, and it’s quite heavy so it oughtn’t to’ve come with me in my carry-on, but I had to have it and it had to be with me. Associated irrevocably with a certain chance encounter. Read primarily at the Starbucks in New Eden, my favorite venue for exhibitionism. Encouraged, in this case, by my desire to broadcast my Francophonia and to invite encounters with other Francophones. A language is a terrible thing to miss.
+ Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations With the Past
Acquired (free!) at the “conference” at which I presented a wacky but much-loved (by me) paper on the work of a poet I love, mostly in spite of myself. When I arrived at JFK in that vaguely-defined day in late March, I almost breathed a sigh of relief, just almost. But sitting down to work out that paper, to wrest something from its original inchoate madness that I thought and think was worth salvaging, that was the homecoming I’d been looking forward to. And so Henderson’s book is bound up in that homecoming. Its conceptual framework is neat, too, as is Henderson’s unbelievable ability to convey critical nuance in plainspeakin’ English that just about anyone could read and understand.
+ Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I’ve been reading this for about a month, and am still only two-thirds of the way through. This is because this is one of the most marvellous things I’ve ever read, and I intend to savour it. I pick it up, I put it down, I read stuff in between, I go back and reread, I put it down, I read a few pages… I read a paragraph as I stand behind the New Eden Books register, I read fifty pages flopped upside down on the couch in the living room, I read and reread ten pages on the train into New York… and so on. Arty Friend convinced me that this was the way to read Proust, which got me comfortably reading Proust, and I have now learned that this is the way to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Oh, and I knew I would like it because it was recommended to me by an advocate of Dr. Charles Kinbote’s.
+ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Also read largely at Starbucks, for same purposes of exhibitionism mentioned above, only this time those purposes had a much more overt sheen of intellectual pretentions. Okay, okay, I only got a hundred pages in. But that’s better than my previous five-page run. Sometimes novels upset me, because I don’t know how to read them, and sometimes long novels upset me a whole lot. There. I said it. Now let’s get over ourselves and our pretentions to a literary education, damn it, and talk about reading this book. I will do it some day, and I absolutely love everything I’ve read so far. I’m immensely charmed, every time, by Dostoevsky’s pervasive humor. I forget that I am going to find it, and when it smacks me across the face, I just laugh and laugh, a wonderful, astonishing, creative kind of laughter — if slightly dampened by an abiding sensation, the skin-prickling perception of a lingering cloud of Doom and Despair, well, all the better for it. It’s this combination of elation and creeping, mad, cosmic sadness, I think, that tempted me for a while into thinking I could become a Slavist and be happy. (Who knew Ben Jonson would win in a barroom brawl against the Russians?)
+ Philip Roth, The Human Stain
I cannot stand Philip Roth. I had to attempt American Pastoral three times before I could make it through (on the fourth). I thought The Plot Against America was pure kitsch, pedantic, bombastic pomposity. Portnoy’s Complaint, frankly, disgusted me. I am, however, somewhat enjoying Stain. I do have substantive thoughts about this novel, but will say only that I am at the moment utterly flabbergasted by the fact that I know Delphine Roux. Really. A woman of my acquaintance corresponds to her every facet, with only very minor circumstantial differences. I have never encountered such a thing in a novel, and this blew me away. I am now, oddly, much more positively inclined toward the real-life woman in question. Perhaps because I am, somewhat inexplicably, drawn to Delphine Roux. I think this will merit its own post, in connection with some other things I’ve been thinking. In other words, my encounter in a novel with a real, honest-to-god, flesh-and-blood person is inducing unforgiveable vagueness, so let’s move on.
+ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The strangest novel I have ever read, or perhaps more simply the strangest experience I have ever had of a novel. Thirty pages in, I had to start over with a pencil in hand. I almost never mark up anything I read unless I’m reading it for a class, for a paper, for research, or in some otherwise vaguely official capacity. I wrote all over Jane Eyre. It totally captivated me, even the weird, displeasing third act. Contributing to all this wonder, perhaps, is the fact that it was the first novel I read upon coming back to the States, and, aside from the airplane interlude, the first novel I had read in English in six months. And the fact that the first time I read it, I was fourteen — which had the effect on second reading of causing what a poet I know refers to as a ‘temporal recursion,’ always an extraordinary experience in reading.
+ William Shakespeare, Cymbeline
I love this play. I love how generically perverse it is. How impossible it is. How Shakespeare deploys in it every trick he’s got in his not-so-immeasurable-after-all pockets. I reread it in preparation for seeing the Cheek by Jowl production at BAM a little more than a month ago. The production disappointed precisely because it failed to capture more than fleetingly the absolute all-out insanity of the text. Broad comedy is just one of many simultaneous generic and theatrical threads at work in the play — Cymbeline is, in a meta sorta way, about generic four-dimensionality. It also happens to be gorgeous, in the sweetly fantastical way in which all of the late plays are gorgeous. Reading it reminded me why I fell head-over-heels in love with the period. Total fucking insanity. In the form of extraordinarily beautiful theatre. I’m telling you, that’s where it’s at.
