Back and Back and Back to the Notebook

A lot of my energy lately has been going into movies, so I don't have much writing news. Except this: for the last ten months, my book has been in the to-read pile of an agent, and last week she rejected it. It was a good kind of rejection, a kind that was pretty easy to get over, but it was still kind of deflating after waiting all that time.

And now I have absolutely no excuse not to revise the book. Which is actually more of a spirit-collapser than the rejection itself. Finding another agent to submit to is relatively easy; rewriting the whole climax and all the stuff that threads into it seems much harder.

At this exact moment I'm doing the dance of the damned: I wrote a couple of pages this morning on a story that's been kicking to get out of my head for months now. You'd think that starting would make it easier to keep going, but instead I'm casting around madly for something else to do. I'm caught up reasonably well on schoolwork and the apartment is clean enough and there's no money-work to be done and no e-mails to answer, so, the writing, it's what there is to do. And somehow I barfed up the first few pages before getting terrified and choosing to pace around and stare at Facebook and glance at my notebook from a few feet away rather than riding the wave.

No, it isn't. Coal mining is harder. I'm going back to the notebook.

...after I eat some lunch. And pick the right music. And maybe just vacuum a little bit.

Why I Hate Valentine's Day

My friend Ryan suggested that I write a post rampaging against Valentine's Day. I told him that I didn't think I could add much to the conversation that everybody doesn't already know (it makes single people miserable, it makes coupled people all pressured and weird in case they're not doing it right, it's an invented/retail-oriented holiday, blah blah blah), and that my reasons for hating V-Day were really my own unlucky experiences with the holiday rather than some larger and more interesting point. But I thought about it some more, and writing about my unlucky experiences seems like it might be a fun exercise. If you're not interested, no need to read on.

How to Appeal to Millennials: Confuse Them

Of interest to me in school last week and this week was how the students in my American Novels class reacted to Faulkner vs. Hemingway. The class was super quiet during the Hemingway week (The Sun Also Rises) and I thought it was because the class was just quiet and shy, but when we started Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), KABOOM, engagement. Talk talk talk. Most of the 25 of us had something to say. I was extremely surprised, because I was certain if anything they would be quieter and less engaged re: Faulkner than re: Hemingway. Papa is nothing if not direct, and Faulkner is...indirect.

Something I read in the DF Wallace biography a couple of weeks ago might hold the key to this. The author, D.T. Max, noted that younger generations had a much easier time with Infinite Jest than did older ones, and that it was an undergraduate who actually hit upon the reasoning behind that book's odd climaxless structure. Max posited that younger folks who pick up Infinite Jest have actually grown up in the world from which it is assembled - the world of, well, eternal entertainment; the fragmented and difficult and unnarrative world of 100 cable channels and slackerism and, eventually, the internet. So they are more poised to understand (by nature of living rather than by reading Barth and Pynchon) postmodernism or postpostmodernism than people who grew up on the Harold Bloom diet.

By the same token, I think that the cultural and artistic context of early Hemingway may be fading away, irrevocably. While Faulkner did write about a specific time and place, and did make use of cultural referents that are no longer in use, poverty and family issues will likely endure as relatable human problems for centuries to come. I think that means his work will be relevant to more generations than The Sun Also Rises will be. Critically, Faulkner's way of shattering a narrative into tiny pieces and gluing it together is something that the generation under me - actually literally raised on the internet rather than having it enter their lives in their ~ tweens/teens like me - understands possibly better than any generation prior. I love Faulkner even though I don't claim to understand him, and I think that a lot more people my age and younger are willing to read books from that place, rather than getting annoyed and insisting that everything must go from point A to point B in order to be a good experience.

I shared this with an English professor I know, and she went all quiet, which is a sign that I have a really good idea. "That's why my students now get Coriolanus better than my students ten years ago," she said. I admitted that it was Max's idea, not mine, but nevertheless it seemed like an idea that had been borne out by her experience of students over a couple of decades. So, go Max, go Faulkner, go me.

In other news, I finished the story I talked about last time that very same day, doing one of those writing marathons where I feel wrung out and hung over by the end of it and there are books scattered around that I don't remember consulting and I have sort of lost track of what the numbers of hours mean. I.e. is six o'clock dinnertime, or is it midafternoon? Ordinarily, since it's schoolwork, I'd neaten its corners as well as possible very soon after finishing the draft, and then I'd forget about it. But I think this came out pretty okay, so instead I'm doing the work-work thing where I let it ferment for two weeks and then look at it again. I might be totally wrong, it might be good for schoolwork and nothing else, but we'll see. It was fun to play.

If you're interested in grammar, language mechanics, the evolution of internet language, etc., go read this. I'm off.

Fun on a Deadline

On Saturday I got word of an acceptance for a story that I kind of hope marks the nadir of fucked-up topics about which I choose to write. I kept sending the story out because I believed in the language, but the topic is so unpleasant that I'm not sure I really thought it would find a place. Yet it did. More details to come when the issue is released.

Then on Sunday I got started on a story I need to have written by mid-March in order to workshop it in one of my classes. It's an idea I've been kicking around for a few months now, since I saw a Russian opera called Eugene Onegin, and I think that the idea and my plans for it fit into the necessary rubric for the class. This is the class with experimental literature, Hybrid and Narrative, so I found it a little harder than usual to determine my approach.

Yet I had fun writing the first thousand words of this story, and honestly it's the first time since I was drafting Highbinder that I can remember having real, rollicking, feet-kicking fun when setting something down on paper. Often I feel passionate and determined when I'm writing, but when I'm revising, it's work. It's fascinating work, but it's also demanding and tedious and full of uncertainty.

Real fun is hard to come by in either of these situations. I'm looking forward to writing the rest of it.

I'm nearly finished with revisions on the story featured in this post. Usually I don't take so many months, but 1) holidays and 2) these revisions have kind of trickled in, forming a stalactite, instead of slamming through the front door like motorists when the DMV opens. I have a specific market in mind for this story now that it's 99% done, and the market was (probably?) supposed to open for submissions at the end of January, and it hasn't opened yet, and of course I can wait as long as they need me to wait in order to submit it because it's my first-choice market, but the time investment of submitting stories and waiting for them to be rejected so I can submit again is already frustrating enough. After this first round I'll start simultaneous-subbing it, but I want to give this market the chance to give me a truly painful rejection before I dust myself off and try again.

Speaking of which, happy Monday.

Play a Miniature Lament for Me

Yesterday I got a ninth rejection for a story with which I am perfectly content as it is. I'm constitutionally opposed to trunking it, because it's a story I loved while I was writing it, loved slightly less when I revised it, and love possibly more now that I've gotten used to those revisions.

It is not a story that I'm proud of having written in terms of its topic or character focus. But the language, yes. I said it how I wanted to say it. If you're a writer, you know that's a miracle, and it's a miracle I don't look on lightly, and I just want someone else (preferably an editor) to love it as much as I do. But no one does.

Anyway. For one of my classes, I'm having to write every week, and two weeks in it's turning out to be really good for me. I don't know what it means that historically, my exercises, often completed in a couple of hours, usually end up more reader-friendly than the stuff I labor on for weeks. But maybe it means the same thing as, you know, the above. That I have no idea what bits I write are any good and what bits I write are sucky.

Does anyone else have this problem? Because I would really like to feel less alone in it.

Reading Is Magic for Muggles!

[In trying to find a clever title for this post, I Googled "reading slogans" and some of them are exactly as lame as I remember from my elementary school library. This list. Egh.]

One of the things I love most about learning, especially learning in multiple fields, is how everything winds together. This week we read Plato in one of my classes, and were discussing the allegory of the cave; I mentioned in class that if you come from a film studies background, the allegory of the cave is always where you start, because that's what cinema IS. Two or three of the students turned around in their chairs to look at me, and although they could have been thinking "God, shut up," or "You are such a suckup," I think (from their faces) that they were thinking "Wow, I didn't put that together, but it is so cool."

It is! School is cool! And it's remarkable to me the way that philosophy verges on language verges on linguistics verges on math verges on philosophy. That's a tiny circle, but it can get bigger very easily, because everything does connect. You can interpret the allegory of the cave, just to take one particular foundation of Western thought, in any of a dozen fields of study and I'm pretty sure it will shed light (heh) on all of them in some way.

Sigh. Learning is so dreamy.

I've ended up with two classes this semester instead of three: Major American Novels II and Hybrid in Narrative. One is a very standard, straightforward class on...major American novels and the other one deals in experimental lit, both reading and writing. I believe that they will reflect very interestingly on each other. There have already been connections, of course, barely two weeks in. I'm bummed out about not getting into either of the other two classes I was gunning for, but them's the breaks.

We began in Novels with The Sun Also Rises, which I tried to read in my high school years and which bored me so horribly that I went back to...jeez, what was I reading then? García Márquez? I found it a lot easier to read this time, but I don't think I'll ever really love Hemingway. Some of the other students in the class also found the book boring. Next is As I Lay Dying, which I've read and liked, and I'm kind of giddy with anticipation about what the folks who haven't read any Faulkner are going to think of it. Some of them are going to hate the shit out of it, and I can't wait to hear about that.

Incidentally, at the beginning of 2014, I started a paper journal to record my impressions of all the things I take in: books, movies, operas, etc. In part I did this to keep those opinions away from this space, because I was using them as an excuse to put up posts on days when I couldn't think of anything to write about. In part I did this to collect all my intake in a way that is actually easier to index and recall than what I have here. (The search box on this site is so unreliable that I kind of can't believe it.) And a third part was that I could write as much as I wanted about books and movies, without worry that I'd bore anyone but myself; the piper to pay is that I have to write it all by hand. 

So I've been reading at the same pace as ever, but talking about it somewhere else. In January I've read some Ann Patchett, some Robert Stone, Mary Gaitskill's first novel, a biography of David Foster Wallace, a fascinating novel by Lionel Shriver, etc. And I did a ten-day marathon of all six original-series Star Trek movies, about which I had a lot to say. But I feel far better organized when I divide my life into separate boxes rather than tangling it all together.

Of course in reality it all goes together, like all the fields of inquiry do. But that doesn't mean you're as interested in the whole pattern as I am.

Reblog: Unsightly

Today, my work appeared on Role/Reboot for a second time (yay!) in the form of an essay defending pubic hair. In the interest of riding that wave, here is a blog post about body hair that I wrote and posted here in December of 2011. Some aspects of it are no longer accurate, as I don't teach yoga anymore and I do actually leave my pits unshaven for months at a time, a practice I've grown to love. But that's a whole other post. Enjoy! 

It's Catalog Season in our mailbox, and the other day we received a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog - we probably purchased a single gift from them three years ago or something and are now on their holiday list ad eternium. As is the Schlemmer way, they had a lot of cool stuff in there, but something that particularly caught my eye was a home electrolysis...thing, a little machine about the size of a lady's electric razor that did permanent hair removal after numerous repetitions of swiping the thing over your unsightly body hair.

At first glance, I thought, YES, this is like a zillion times cheaper than salon electrolysis would be, and yes I'd probably have to swipe for several months in a row, but NO MORE SHAVING MY UNDERARMS, thank God, sign me up.

Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the idea of actually having no hair under my armpits. Ever. Again. Or on the tops of my toes; the little golden hairs that have grown there since I was in middle school are deeply humiliating to me (which is why I'm telling the whole internet about them). Or...well, no, those are the only two places that have hair I'd like to be permanently rid of. I'm kind of conservative that way.

The more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by the idea of forever removing that hair. I never let my underarm hair grow out for more than a day or two, in part because I don't like to show hairy pits to my students when I'm teaching yoga and I teach a few times a week. But the idea of it gone forever was very disconcerting.

I think it's because I've never quite reached comfort about the amount of hair removal women are societally requested/required to do, and which I go on and do in order not to be frowned upon in femininity. Every time I see a woman with publicly fuzzy pits, I give her a little mental fist-bump: way to not conform, grrl. I wish I had your fuck-'em-all attitude. But I don't. It's not a step I feel comfortable taking, and that kind of bothers me, that I'm not gutsy enough to let my armpits be what they are and to hell with anyone who'll disdain me for it.

There's always the "I want to be as awesome as Patti Smith" defense.
Which, you know, is a thing.

I can't think of any occasion in the future where I'd want my armpit hair to grow, nor can I think of any kind of life situation I am likely to experience in my remaining years on this planet where I won't regularly "need" [want? have?] to remove it. But that hair is a part of me, the real me who sweats during exertion and gets crud under her toenails and relieves herself via urination and defecation. These are human things, and the way that our society paints over them with obsessive hygiene and creams and powders and soaps and unguents of every possible configuration, consistency, and aroma, is something that I'm often grateful for (on subways, etc.) but I'm also often kind of dubious about. It smacks of a lack of acceptance of our essential humanness, and it leaves us all with a shade of illusion over the bits we most genuinely have in common, for better or worse.

So although there's a big part of me that can only think of how awesome it would be not to have to scrape my armpits raw every day or every couple of days, there's another part that's warning me no. Don't ditch that unsightly hair. Our unsightly parts are the parts that keep us grounded and whole, the parts that prove that under the most expensive perfume and the most perfectly coiffed hairdo, we are still beautiful animals with feet of clay.

Or, as the kids say, everybody poops.