day 2
Sun 30 Oct 8:55 Darkly cloudy
Lie awake this morning thinking about all the things I could write about and the pressure to write at all. So is this Morning Pages or a Substack post? Maybe it was too early to share this on socials. The fishbowl effect of feeling hyper-seen while also invisible – a drop in the ocean of content – can be paralyzing and discouraging. Courage! As Stanley Tucci whispers to Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada. “Instead of memorizing a binder of names, this past summer I tried to commit to memory the arguments of fifty or so books of literary and historical criticism adjacent to my PhD topic in advance of the Qualifying Exam I took at the beginning of this month.
Certain books of interest included David Marno’s Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention; Lucy Alford’s Forms of Poetic Attention; Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric; and Juliana Spahr’s DuBois’ Telegram. I remember when I met Juliana, in her backyard garden, as an undergraduate in Cecil’s workshop. Rob is close with her from their time together in Hawai’i. DuBois’ Telegram treats with skepticism the role of literature in political resistance. She talks about the CIA and FBI and nationally-endowed support (awards, grants, publications, residencies) for the arts that systematically neutralize and repress what is truly radical in literature. I suppose this speaks a bit to what I was wondering yesterday, implicitly, about my feeling shut out from that business venture called ‘PoBiz.’
I had so many trusted friends and mentors who would not endorse my decision to get the MFA. You don’t need it, they promised. You’re already a writer. It’s not worth it… I feel grateful to have been given the gift of time, as they tell you to say, and I had some earth-melting experiences of, literally, love and loss during my three years in the ‘polar vortex.’ I imagine I would have had some versions of these experiences anywhere, and that your twenties crushes your ego like porcelain ground into dust regardless of your choices in this dimension. I met RM – whose birthday it is today – see IG for tribute poem post – and he has given me more support than I have even been able to recognize and use, I’m realizing now that we’ve been apart for going on six years. One time I stood in his office waiting for him and picked through the items scattered on a table near his desk – there was an old Florida driver’s license – he looked like nothing but trouble, I could not resist cradling it. He told me about running into a beloved professor when he was an MFA student there, Lorna shaking her head approvingly, calling him “rude boy.”
I met David Marno last week when he gave an excellent talk about the idea of English-professing as a ‘calling’. He used Ralph Williams’ novel Stoner, a depressing book by the sound of it, to raise questions about the English department as a workplace and site for vocation. He talked about the monastery and cited the main character’s description of the department as a ‘refuge,’ but only for certain people, not for everyone. I’ve been operating with this sort of positively-spun asylum concept for my whole life; it occurs to me that my hypersensitivity and chronic pain, which I have only sort of acknowledged and begun to reckon with in real ways in the past five years, is responsible for my stubborn belief (or is it just a fear?) that the academy was the only place I could survive. Because I cannot keep a consistent schedule. Because my interests are not economically generative. Because I do not like group work, small talk, or smiling at people I dislike.
But of course the academy creates as many problems as it appears to solve. I still feel obliged to smile at plenty of people I dislike. I have never been so financially insecure as I have when under the bare wing of the UC. The lesson I have learned in the last three years of the PhD can be summed up, and has been, by Jake. “That’s the twist at the end of the movie: You’ve been in the ‘real world’ this whole time.”