Category Archives: Literature

Up Again So Soon … Still Recovering in Twelve Steps

Posted on 27 March 2009 | 3 comments

I am awake. It is 2:23 AM. I am watching King of the Hill. I love my life. I think I will stay up for another hour and a half so I can watch Roseanne. Then I will go to bed and sleep until noon … which never happened. I didn’t sleep until noon. I slept until 6 then slept again from 8 to 11. And, I am still recuperating from that little overnight shenanigan in twelve steps. These twelve steps would not be followed if Izzy lived with me. 🙂

  1. I admitted that I am powerless over sleep deprivation—my life had become unmanageable. I couldn’t remember anything about what I was doing or saying.
  2. I came to believe that beer could restore me to sanity. Beer can always restore.
  3. I decided to turn my will and my life over to multiple helpings of that specific elixir, choosing hops, yeast, and malt over the newly discovered bliss of Aquavit.
  4. I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. I was weary and worn. I decided to drink.
  5. I admitted to the bottom of the first pint the exact nature of my wrongs: I stayed up for far too long. I admitted my desire for sleep to the bottom of another pint and another and another and another and another and another, and then I admitted these wrongs to all those around me. Loudly and slurred. I am shleeeppyyy, I said before I slipped into unconsciousness.
  6. I was ready to have my sleep restored to me. I wanted my sleep to be restored to me.
  7. I humbly asked the bartender to facilitate my eventual sleep—I put my insomnia in his hands.
  8. I made a list of all the beers which had harmed me, and became willing to make amends to them all.
  9. I made quick amends to the beers I loved and was kept from injury by two angels—one flaxen, one titian, both Southern—who escorted me home.
  10. Once I was safe, I continued to take personal inventory of my level of alertness, to reassess my evening consumption, and to hope for the veil of sleep.
  11. I sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand [Them], praying only for knowledge of [Their] will for me and the power to carry that out.
  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I tried to carry this message to insomniacs, and to practice these principles in all my affairs. I especially thanked my caretakers and nursed my bumpy head.

Seriously, I have been so busy, I haven’t even been able to write here. I continue to feel guilty but simultaneously fulfilled with my level activity. I feel guilty because I cannot make last minute plans with people. I am simply to busy to squeeze people into the schedule.

A friend of mine and I were supposed to get together today, but she had to go to South Bend. She asked me earlier in the week if we could get together another time in the week, and after I checked my calendar, I had to write to her to say that there simply were no other days we could meet. I literally had a school function, studying, or some other thing going on every single day.

Several days in the past three weks I have had twelve or thirteen hour long days, and the day that sparked the twelve-step list was a 20 hour day: I got up at 6AM and worked until 2AM the next morning. Really.

I am fulfilled because I have never been happier with the work I am doing. My assistantship with all of its oddities is the best one I have had. My courses are plodding along well, and I am continually challenged by my directed reading and the Morrison class. Ideas for my dissertation are ruminating nicely inside my too full head, and I am sated by the information with which I am gorging my hungry mind. Jasbir Puar, I will understand your writing one day.

In my spare time, I learned that my neighborhood grocery store should be receiving six-packs of glass bottles of Faygo, but that if I want to order a 24-pack of cans of Faygo, it will cost $15 to get it delivered to my house. This would, of course, be a moot point if my neighborhood grocery would just carry Rock-n-Rye Cream Cola. Not diet. I despise Diet Cola. If I wanted zero calories, I would just drink water.

My brother and I are going to Nashville this weekend for a little break, so I hope to be able to access this site to report on our activities. I am sure we will haev fun. I know for sure we are going to Jungle Jim’s in Cincinnati on the way home, and we are going to the Apple store to get his new computer. I am excited to be away for a bit.

3 Comments

Posted in Beer, Insomnia, Literature, Reading, Relationships, School, Writing

Roseanne and J. Alfred Prufrock

Posted on 6 March 2009 | 3 comments

At this point, your guess about why I am up at 4 AM watching reruns of Roseanne is as good as mine. I suppose there are worse things I could be doing right now than watching Darlene and Becky banter across the old brown couch. I forgot how funny the early episodes are, and I forgot how much they remind me of my family. Before the show started taking itself so seriously and before Tom Arnold came into the picture, it was a beautiful simply complex portrayal of blue-collar life in Lansford, a town not unlike Hartford City.

I am watching an early episode in which Jackie and Booker start dating. Most of the episode is filmed in a bowling alley, and the subplot is Becky’s first rendezvous with Chip. I remember why I love Darlene (Sara Gilbert). I think I might have wished she lived in Hartford City.  I look back now and think that she reminds me of my friend, Tisha: sarcastic, smart, and a little feisty. My life is better for knowing Tish.

I woke up at 3 AM—I laid in the bed for about 45 minutes before I gave in and finally got up—in order to begin memorizing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I am sure Bec will be thrilled that I am trying to memorize another poem. I think she got her fill of “A Supermarket in California.” I can’t imagine I woke up so early for T.S. Eliot, although the beauty of the poem does not escape me. Here is the opening, a loose interpretation of a sonnet:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

I am sure my early morning can be attributed to the stress of the coming two weeks. Or the stress of the next few months. I am take my comprehensive exams in August. While I realized they were looming around the corner like a teenage tranny at RuPaul’s dressing room door, making my book list and going over it with Debbie yesterday really hammered it home. I have six months to prepare for the biggest test of my life. And I have to pass it.

Because I have to break up my serious study time into small chunks, I tend to spend a lot of time stumbling around on the Internet. I have decided to stop calling it procrastinating, because I have learned some interesting facts and been able to find some helpful websites during these mini-breaks. I found this site last night. I couldn’t resist reading some of the other posts on the blog, but the one I originally stumbled onto was the best. This morning I found this: F*** My Life. You, the viewer, actually get to vote: does the person’s life really suck or did they deserve what happened? Genius.

It’s now 4:44 and the episode that’s on—Dan wants to get a family photo to send into their high school reunion committee and it just so happened that when he and Roseanne broke up for a week their senior year, he slept with the woman who is organizing the reunion—reminds me of how I feel about high school reunions: they are a mechanism by which some people reassure themselves that their lives turned out better than others. I am not sure this is how reunions function for my class. Maybe I am naive. Maybe when I finally get my PhD, I will go back to a reunion. Maybe I won’t.

I had a couple of good beers last night with my delicious chicken etouffee.  The first one was an oldie but goody: Skullsplitter Scotch Ale. I am finding that I really love Scotch Ales. They have some body and nice complex taste. I also had a nice Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. Usually, okay sometimes, Chocolate Stouts are too sweet, but this one was particularly tasty with some nice coffee undertones. Brooklyn’s was the chocolate equivalent of Breckenridge’s Vanilla Porter.  I would drink it again. And again with HomeMade Peppermint Chip Ice Cream.

Maybe I am awake so early today because I am excited to get Minerva out of the garage, give her a bath, fill her up, check her tire pressure, and ride her all over the countryside. I mean I can’t go too far today, but I a girl can dream (funny Freudian slip I accidentally typed cream to begin with). I have until one o’clock when I am supposed to meet Julie at the Blue Bottle for coffee. Maybe I can talk her into beer at the Heorot.

Adult swim is really weird at 5 AM. Is it idiotic or genius? Frequently, the line is very fine, like one pixel fine.  And, I think Drew’s cat pooped over by the fish tank again. This is why I don’t get up early as a rule. This is why I am glad we are going to pull up this carpet this summer.

Oh, and I cut my hair last night.

Also this.

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Posted in Beer, Literature, Motorcycles, Reading, School

Sometimes Things Are What They Seem

Posted on 15 February 2009 | 2 comments

Right now I am sitting on the couch in my living room watching Natural Born Killers with Becky’s nephew Jacob. He is staying with us for a couple of days. When I asked him why he was on break in the middle of February, he responded by explaining that the rich kids at his school needed to go skiing. While some of his classmates are at Breckenridge, he is here. In Muncie. Brave young man that he is.

I had forgotten how strange, how deranged, how fucked up this movie is.

It is very fucked up.

The most fucked up.

Only Tarantino and Stone together could make this fucked up shit happen this well.

*

I spent the weekend in Chicago. I miss it already. I spent the hours of sitting at CElla’s booth counting the numbers of writer stereotypes I saw. Apparently, there is a school somewhere that teaches a class in how to dress as a writer. Hopefully they teach their students how to write as well.

Perhaps, though, they concentrate more on teaching their students how to look like Rembrandt:slf_prtrt_gorget_beretWe counted the berets (particularly those paired with a scarf), the long flowing skirts, the Nathans (men with beards, plaid shirts, and corduroys), men with leather vests, and women with tall leather boots. I hope they can write as well as they dress. There is something to be said for originality, in both realms.

*

I went to some excellent panels while I was there. The best ones involved writers that I already knew I loved: Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, and Dorothy Allison. From each woman I took new strength, insight, and inspiration.

Clifton reminded me of the universality of suffering and how common the female experience is. She reminded me that good writing reaches the heart whether or not we have shared experience. I have never had an abortion but that didn’t keep me from weeping at Clifton’s reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother” and her reading of her own “Lost Baby Poem.” I was moved deeper than I have been in a long time. I didn’t have to have my own abortion to understand the implications of their words. My guts moved at them.

Kim Addonizio reminded me not to take myself too seriously. There she was on the stage at one of the largest sessions at the conference laughing at herself as the woman who was signing her poems made the motions for vibrator and dildo. The same sign for both but the former with a little jiggle of the wrist. Addonizio has the kindest eyes. And the most sincere laugh. What do you say to a woman whose poetry changed your life and made you want to write something other than the shit you wrote before? I stood before her smiling and saying, “Thank you.” It was all I could say.

I hope I never get the opportunity to speak with Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. I would probably throw up like on South Park when Stan talks to Wendy.

Finally, Dorothy Allison taught me that she isn’t my Yankee-ass’s granny, which I take to mean that she isn’t my mammy. I don’t want her for my granny or my mammy; I just want to read her writing and have it change me for the better. I want to know how someone can love and hate a place at the same time, how someone can hold onto their past while simultaneously purging it, and how my writing can reflect all those things I loved about growing up somewhere like Hartford City, but how it can also betray the fact that I need so desperately to never return to it. How does she do that? I think humor and honesty. Without saying it, she said it.

Sometimes things are what they seem; sometimes they aren’t.

The worst panel was about being a gay writer in the Midwest. This panel quickly digressed into an advertisement for Chicago, and how they (Chicago Queers) feel so oppressed because they don’t get the publicity of San Francisco or New York. They don’t even get as much press as LA: “We have big events and they don’t get into the Advocate or Out.” gay-boys“Sniffle, sniffle, and dry your eyes,” I wanted to tell them,”come to Muncie to see the real Midwest. Then you can go home and choose one of your many gay bars at which to drown your sorrows, while the queers here in Muncie all join up at the one, the only, Mark III Tap Room. Seriously. Get rural in the Midwest and then figure out why half the room got up and left your session.”

*

I had two new beers while I was in Chicago: Belhaven Wee Heavy and The Reverend Avery Ale.

*

Mickey and Mallory just shot the Indian on a bad trip. Things will begin to go very badly for them. It will involve lots of biting snakes and my favorite song on the soundtrack. And, Jacob will still be moving his hand keeping time to the music. Or, he will  go upstairs and go to bed. And so will I.

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Posted in Beer, Feminism, Literature, Queer, Reading, School, Writing

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

Posted on 29 January 2009 | 2 comments

What do “The Second Choice” by Theodor Dreiser, “Hands” by Sherwood Anderson, and “The Wagner Matinee” by Willa Cather all have in common? The fact is that I have to teach them all for my ENG 605 Literature Pedagogy class. Also, they are all written during the early part of the 20th century. They are dirty and gritty and explore all of those ideas that make us cringe: industry, relationships, sexuality, public and private domains, music, and modernization in all of its forms.

I think I could spend the entire class period talking about Dreiser. Well, now that I think a little more about it, I could spend a whole class period talking about each story. Each story is thick and voluminous, not easily explored in one pass. Short stories remind me of the Grand Canyon: on first glance you think you’ve seen it all (yeah, it’s a big hole), but then you realize that there are layers of color, trenches and rises, shrubbery, animals, and a river way down there at the bottom that you can barely see from the rim.

Teaching is about gleaning. It’s about looking around for the scraps that no one will notice and that no one cares about until you point them out, or until your students point them out to you. I think teaching resembles standing next to a dumpster of knowledge, poking around in it with a stick. You find something new and suddenly everyone wants it. In teaching that is good.

If everyone is interested enough to talk, then you know you’ve hit some sort of truth or importance in text. Your resonance strikes with someone else’s resonance and before you know it you’ve blown a speaker!

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Posted in Gleaning, Literature, Modernism, Pedagogy, Reading, School, Teaching, Writing

Snow and Brokenness

Posted on 14 January 2009 | 2 comments

Once a year, I like snow. Today is that day. I won’t still like it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have liked it yesterday. Today is the only day I will like it. And it is beautiful!

Falling in small concise flakes with an occasional conglomeration of them posing as a larger flake or two, the snow has made the usual greyness of Muncie a pristine white. I won’t say the snow has blanketed the city—that would be cliche.

Is it cliche to say that the snow only covers the sins of the world, but the snow doesn’t make them disappear? Is it cliche to say that the snow is a bandage with a wound festering under it? Is it cliche to wish that melting snow would leave behind healing and love?

Today’s snow may be beautiful, but its’ beauty doesn’t change the fact that the world is broken. People hurt and people suffer. We no longer live in Eden. We have yet to see paradise.

I just had a conversation with a woman who is becoming a friend. I wanted to remove her sorrow like the non-beating heart it is. I wanted to make it better, then, but I can’t. I wanted to tell her it will all be okay. I can’t promise that. Things don’t always work out. If they did, we’d have nothing to celebrate.

Today, I celebrate the snow. I celebrate Walt Whitman and his ability to understand. I refrain from singing the body electric, but “I Sit and Look Out” is one of my favorite poems of his:

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all the oppression and shame,

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,

I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate.

I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see these sights on on the earth,

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,

I observe a famine at sea, I observe sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;

All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

Walt wasn’t silent, though. He wrote it all down. Sometimes the written word resounds more fully than the spoken.

Whitman amazes me because he wrote such sad, and anguished poems as “I Sit and Look Out,” but he also wrote about beauty and life. Take for example this short poem: “I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother,/ The sleeping mother and babe—hushed, I study them long and long.” How beautiful!

Maybe a better metaphor for the snow is this: The earth is cradled in the bosom of snow. I feel cradled today. I want to study the snow long and long.

2 Comments

Posted in Grace, Literature, Queer, Relationships, Religion, Winter Weather