Tag Archives: philadelphia

October 28, 2017 · 11:28 pm

Voids; and, Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Song on the End of the World’

I assume no one is checking this anymore, since I never write anymore.

So I assume this is going out into the void, but that’s fine. I have been tired this week. So deeply tired. Tired in the marrow of my bones.

I don’t want to talk about thehashtagMeToo – the whole fucking point is that I don’t want to talk about it – that is, it’s a big part of why I’m so tired this week – but these comics slice it up true.

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“I don’t remember what I wore to the rape, darling”

The husband keeps asking me if it isn’t gratifying to see so much attention being given to the matter, and so much weight.

Sure? I guess? But it turns out I had enjoyed forgetting that I lived in a monkey house, had enjoyed having forgotten how to smell the stink of it.

This is complicated by the fact that he’s kind of trying to defend Matt Taibbi a little, because he and Taibbi were young and in the former USSR at the same time (they didn’t know each other, but the husband did follow the Exile, Taibbi’s paper, like all ex-pats over there then).

(Sidenote: I thought tonight – not for the first time, but a little bit more deeply, in light of my current mood, and in light of the fact that my mom sad-liked the post of those comics on my FB – about how my mother must feel. She lives her life with the knowledge that both of her daughters were molested by her partner. By the man she chose to marry and live with for 18 years or whatever. And she didn’t notice, and so didn’t do anything about it. How the fuck do you live with that.

Not blaming her, you understand: just thinking about how one lives with one’s mistakes, and how some are harder than others. Literally one of the reasons I have never wanted kids is because I know it’s impossible to protect them from the world, and the world is brutal, and I don’t think I could live with the guilt of inflicting it on someone else. I don’t know how you get back up from ‘my husband raped our daughters.’ But she did.)

Myeshia Johnson is another reason this week has broken me a little. If you missed her interview, you really should go back and watch it. She is… a fucking superhero. Composed, tactful, circumspect, honest. In the wake of losing her husband and being insulted by her president. If you saw it in a movie you wouldn’t believe someone in her situation could be so poised and calm.

But that’s where we are, isn’t it: in an extremely badly written movie. And the writing keeps getting worse and worse.

I’m teaching King Lear right now.

(Backstory, because I forget if this news made it into TDP before I stopped writing: I was offered two ‘Shakespeare in Film’ classes at Temple this fall, and one Latin class at Penn. Both are delightfully fun. And I’ve been offered an ongoing, though part-time, gig at Temple in the classics department, so I’ll actually be teaching Greek there in the spring. Teaching Greek!! It’s a fucking dream. Temple classics, non-tenure-track, was literally my ideal job. I’m having some trouble making my peace with the title ‘adjunct’, but that’s a manageable problem, as it does seem like a relatively stable gig for the foreseeable future. I mean, until Temple decides to cut their classics program, but bridges and when you get to them and so forth. For now we have some breathing room for a minute.)

So I’m teaching King Lear. You know, the story about the narcissistic authoritarian king who lacks foresight and thoughtfulness to such a degree that nearly everyone around him ends up dead. The one who is going increasingly insane. The one whose children and children-in-law are sociopaths.

I really regret choosing this play.

Here are some choice quotes from last week:

“By day and night he wrongs me. Every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds.” (Lear 1.3.4-6)

“A hundred knights!
‘Tis politic and safe to let him keep
At point a hundred knights! Yes, that on every dream,
Each buzz, each fancy, each complaint, dislike,
He may enguard his dotage with their powers
And hold our lives mercy.” (Lear 1.4.340-7)

Monday I’m lecturing on Lear’s descent into madness. His fall, and the carnage that accompanies it.

Also Monday, as you may have heard, we can expect to see the first concrete and material outcomes of Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s relations with Russia.

The timing is killing me. Not really in a good way.

So life is life. And it plays out like it always does, in fits and starts, with ups and downs, with calm moments and with tempests.

(Sidenote: thank god I put Tempest as our last play, and not Lear.)

(Sidenote to sidenote: these kids are fucking killing it, and doing awesome papers and presentations. And my Latin students are life-affirming. I remember why I loved teaching so much that the old job was an acceptable compromise. I’m not making any money, my health insurance situation is up in the air, I’m working fucking constantly, and I have no long-term stability to speak of… but that’s America, so I guess I’m doing fine in this context. thehashtagAmericaFuckYeah!)

I am extremely anxious about what will come of this week and these indictments. It won’t be good. No matter what happens, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Another quote from Lear:

“To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. / The lamentable change is from the best; / The worst returns to laughter. … O gods, who is’t can say ‘ I am at the worst’? … And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’.” (Lear 4.1)

This play is too dark, too bleak. Too on-the-nose. I wish I hadn’t chosen it.

I wish we didn’t have to do this thing we’re going to have to do, as a country. As a world.

I’m so tired.

Czeslaw Milosz, ‘A Song on the End of the World’ (Warsaw, 1944):

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits the rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

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September 6, 2017 · 10:52 pm

In memoriam

This first, you’re going to need it:

Jenna Burleigh.

She was 22, a transfer student to Temple University, from just outside the city. She grew up here, and nurtured a love of theater and orchestra and musicals at the Kimmel Center and the Walnut Theatre. She was a film and media studies major and was so excited to be starting her new life.

How do I know this?

Because I had students do a free write on the first day of class. Here are some excerpts of hers:*

I’m really excited about this class & excited to learn in general! I’m a transfer student so I’m excited to be at temple in the city that I love. [anecdotes about seeing shows with her family as a kid] Now that I’m a film major I live for seeing [the plays etc] put up on the big screen & all the creative possibilities directors have. I started watching the new Romeo & Juliet tv show on ABC that takes place after they die which is an interesting perspective. [a bit on her checkered past with Shakespeare], but now I’m excited to try to fully understand [Shakespeare’s plays] better. Overall I’m just super excited to learn & for all my classes to start.

She was 22. Friends and family describe her as vivacious and deeply committed to justice – she was actively involved in LGBTQ+, racial, and feminist concerns, and had no time for bigotry or ignorance.

Thursday night, she went out to a bar, as college kids do.

She didn’t come home.

We got messages from the school that she was missing.

She wasn’t in class on Friday.

Her body was found on Sunday, and security footage helped police track down her killer, who confessed.

Last night, while I was putting today’s lecture together, I was thinking about how she should have been learning about Shakespeare’s language, and taking notes on what kinds of puns he favored, and the sorts of grammatical machinations he was especially fond of. She should have been studying for her astronomy and psychology classes. She should have been learning about film theory so she could more cogently read the movies that she loved.

Instead, she was being dead, because some asshole wasn’t satisfied with whatever she offered him, or refused him.

She went home with him Thursday night, for whatever reason, and he had defensive wounds the next day, so she didn’t go down without a fight.

The details are too awful. She reached out to friends for help, but it was the middle of the night, and the friends didn’t see her messages until Friday morning.

(God bless those friends, they must feel so guilty. It’s not their fault. Decidedly not their fault. It’s 100% the fucking goddamn MURDERER’s fault.)

She died of strangulation and blunt force trauma.

(I’m not linking to any articles, but you can google her name, there are plenty of articles out there, and more details than I know have come out since I last sought out information.)

There’s a memorial for her tomorrow, which I will attend,  and for which I will need to be able to keep my shit together, so I am writing this in the hopes of getting a bit of catharsis from it.

Those of you in college, those of you with people in college, those of you who teach people in college: studies have shown that the first six or eight weeks of college are the most dangerous for young women – it’s called ‘the red zone’, apparently. Look out for each other. Reach out for help – even to a stranger, to a random bartender, to a cab driver, to a passer-by – if you’re scared. Trust your gut. Take care of each other out there.

And, men? Y’all best come for your boys. Obviously thehashtagnotallmen and everything – I’m married to a blessedly good man, I’m aware there are plenty of them out there – but y’all got to step up the pushback against this kind of toxic masculine entitlement. We ladies can’t do it. The men who buy into it don’t listen to us.

requiescas in pace et in amore, discipula

And, because that’s all too much:

[Arthur] suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was: because of the shadows of the corn stooks on a golden evening, because the sheep’s tails would rattle when they ran, and the lambs, sucking, would revolve their tails in little eddies; because the clouds in daylight would surge it into light and shade; because the squadrons of green and golden plover, worming in pasture fields, would advance in short, unanimous charges, head to wind; because the spinsterish herons, who keep their hair up with fish bones according to David Garnett, would fall down in a faint if a boy could stalk them and shout before he was seen; because the smoke from homesteads was a blue beard straying into heaven; because there were puddles, and leaky gutters, and dung hills with poppies on them; because the salmon in the rivers suddenly leaped and fell; because the chestnut buds, in the balmy wind of spring, would jump out of their twigs like jacks-in-boxes, or like little spectres holding up green hands to scare him; because the jackdaws, building, would hang in the air with branches in their mouths, more beautiful than any ark-returning dove; because, in the moonlight there below, God’s greatest blessing to the world was stretched, the silver gift of sleep.

– T.H. White, ch.18, The Book of Merlyn [The Once and Future King]

________________

* Yes, I do have qualms about sharing her words with you, and I may change my mind and take them down. However, I also shared them with the school to be used at her memorial service, and in any case this blog isn’t indexed for google searches – and anyway no one reads it anymore now that I hardly ever write – so I think it is okay. More to the point, I think it paints a beautiful picture of how enthusiastic she was about the world and her place in it, and I intend it as a tribute. That said, if you have objections, I am happy to hear them in the comments.

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August 8, 2017 · 11:19 pm

Continuing absurdities

Huh, that’s the first post I’ve named ‘continuing absurdities’. That seems unlikely.

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Here is one absurdity:

Now that I am unemployed, I’m tempest-toss’d into the health care Marketplace. Which I figured was fine: my income now is just unemployment, which is about $400 a week before taxes – until I hit $11,000 paid out, at which point we wrap that relationship up. So I called up my state Medicaid office, thinking my income was low enough to qualify.

Turns out?

Not low enough! A single childless woman making $1600/month before taxes isn’t poor enough. Which isn’t that absurd: I’ve lived on that before, and certainly could do it again, even in Phila (which, to be fair, is not one of the ‘classy’ expensive cities). But I might have to drop some ballet, which would be a bummer.

Anyway, non-starter, so, intrepid, into the Marketplace went I.

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Funny story: turns out there’s a minimum income in order to qualify for subsidies with the ACA. In PA at least (I don’t know if it’s federal or not), that’s $16,000. Make at least $16,000/year? Great! Have some help buying health care, which is totally not a public good and definitely it’s completely normal for it to be governed by the Free Market and capitalism, what could possibly go wrong?!

So I make too much money for Medicaid, but too little money for tax subsidies. Right. That makes sense: I’m just the sweet spot of poor to be completely fucked.

Now, to be clear, I am not completely fucked: I have a little money in the bank, and I have a husband (well, ex-husband, technically) (which will only be funny to old friends) with resources, so I will be able to stay on my meds even if it means spending $380 a month on insurance in the unsubsidized Marketplace, which it does, for the cheapest plan that has decent pharma coverage.

But what the fuck is everyone else supposed to do. I asked the ACA woman on the phone, and she was silent for an uncomfortably long time, and then she said, I guess go to community health care clinics?

Wow.

This is not a complicated mathematical problem – the solution is to make the Medicaid ceiling be the same as the Marketplace floor – it’s just fucking political chess.

With people’s lives as the pawns.

So I’m pissed about that. I wrote a ‘thank you’ note to Bob Casey, our *good* senator, for fighting to save the ACA, and a rather more critical note to our *other* senator, Pat Toomey, who can’t seem to get far enough up Trump’s ass, or at least is so busy trying to get farther up that he can’t be bothered to hold a town hall.

(Google Tuesdays with Toomey if you want more on that.)

Anyway, ultimately the husband and I remembered that the subsidies are based on the annual 2017 income, and that I spent the first half of 2017 being employed, and earned some $22,000, and I ultimately qualified for a ~$200 credit. So I now have good health care for $198/month, which seems reasonable, given the absurd system within which we’re working.

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view of Phila from Temple’s liberal arts college building

On the plus side, my old department asked me to pick up a Latin class this fall, so there’s that!

I mean, I haven’t gotten the actual contract yet, and it won’t be much money, but I don’t really need the money (I mean, more money always makes life easier, but I’m perfectly fine just now), and they’ve added me to the online site as a teacher, and my people are generally acting like it’s a done-deal – like, the email they sent to the woman responsible for approving me as a hire basically said, We signed off on her PhD, so she’s fucking qualified, so please just do the requisite formality paperwork ASAP. So that seems reasonably likely to come through.

And today I had a meeting/quasi-interview at Temple for an adjunct gig teaching writing and – get this – Shakespeare in cinema. The woman seemed more concerned about my competency to teach writing than to teach a cinema class on Shakespeare, which is bizarre, but whatever. She actually said something like, I mean, Shakespeare is all classics-based anyway. And I was like, Well, I mean… kind of? But sure. I’ve heard the phrase mise en scene before, and these kids are 19 years old: I know more than they do, and I’m a quick study, so bring it on.

This seems to be contingent on my former boss speaking well of me on the Reference Contact Call, but I imagine she will – if for no other reason than that it would reflect poorly on her to have employed a bad teacher for six years.

So all signs point to me having three classes this fall? One classics, one writing, one… cinema-Shakespeare?

Oh, also we might nuke North Korea, of course.

So everything seems fine and normal.

Which is to say: Everything is so fucking weird right now.

But also there are hints of normalcy and some hints of a non-disastrous, if not clearly promising, future (at least at the personal level, if not the global) which are helping me breathe a little easier.

I’ll take it.

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‘normal’ is relative, y’all

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May 9, 2017 · 11:45 pm

Translatings

Nothing new or interesting to report, and still exceedingly introspective, thus no posts for a while. I don’t think there have been any rejections or acceptances or any kind since last post —

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(though the local suburban school 1-year visiting position did start interviewing, and I haven’t heard anything, so I guess they’re not interviewing me, oh well)

(quick side note: I’m not doing great, honestly, since last week was the end of my obligations on the campus of the school where I have spent the last twelve years, and it’s not at all clear yet what will come of the career I have spent the last 18 years building, because no one has expressed serious excitement about seriously hiring me, but it’s fine, we’ll make it be fine, it’s just proving a little more complicated than we hoped it would to make our way back to fine. Who knew making a life was so complicated.)

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(Which just made me think of this song, which I used to sing in harmony with my best friend B back in the 90s when we were both desperate and free and wild and open to the world, and now we both have PhDs, and she is tenured at a community college in Texas, and loves it, and her little sister just died, and her daughters are growing up, and life is fucking layered as fuck is all I mean to say:

)

(Because I can’t just walk away from a parenthetical without closing it.)

— and I have just been working quietly, head down. Translating the Iliad mostly.

Stupid project, isn’t it. In light of everything else. In light of the book I ought to be giving my energy to. But I am finding such comfort in the quiet orderliness of translation. And loving reading this poem that I am so in love with so slowly, sitting with every line, thinking through every construction.

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I’ve been especially eager to get to the Catalogue of Ships, and I’m almost there – about 100 lines to go, so I’ll probably get there tonight, and start with the catalogue tomorrow.

The Catalogue has always puzzled me (nor am I alone in that, by any means), but it makes more sense now that I’m reading the poem so closely, it makes a natural climax to the introduction, a logical restarting-starting point. And I am looking forward to it as an extra meditative section, a list, a reckoning, an accounting. No narrative, just numbers. Just a recounting of how it was.

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That is feeling so holy to me just now, in light of the insanity that is my country’s government, in light of the threats they have brought home to us, in light of the new ‘papers please’ law in Texas, in light of the petty and cruel DoJ case against that pro-immigrant group in Seattle, in light of my uncertain career, in light of my inability to reach out to my family even as it seems increasingly likely that my sister will need brain surgery for her epilepsy and my grandmother approaches 90. In light of my new progressive lenses that speak to my increasing age.

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In light of the several silver locks I have that I love – they are so brilliantly, flashingly, beautifully white against my dark hair! – but tomorrow I am dying them, in light of an agist world in which I need to look as young as possible in order to maybe get another job. Should the fates be so kind.

Let’s jump ahead for a taste:

Tell me now, you Muses, you who keep your houses on Olympus,
for you are goddesses, and you are present here and you know all things,
and we have heard only what people say and ourselves know nothing at all.
Tell who, then, were the leaders of the Danaans, and the kings.
I myself could neither report nor name the whole crowd,
not even if I were given ten tongues and ten mouths,
not even if my voice were unbreakable and my heart made of bronze,
except that you Olympian Muses, daughters
of Zeus of the aigis, remembered all those who came under the walls of Ilion.
I will afresh speak out the leaders of the ships and name all the ships together.

There are those who are taking names, and keeping clean accounts, and there are those who will make sure that we remember. And so many things happen that are beyond expectation, and we might not live long enough to see righteousness through, but we are taking notes, and we will make sure they are passed on, however corrupted.

nolite te bastardes carborundorum

However corrupted and ungrammatical, the point comes through clearly.

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April 28, 2017 · 10:43 pm

Both / and

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I am excited for whatever adventures are coming / these coming adventures are going to be exhausting and challenging and unpredictable, and I’m not looking forward to it.

I am fucking relieved to be leaving this job / I hate having this major change imposed on me.

I loved quite a lot about my old life / I can make a new life I love as much.

I feel silly and whiny / I think it’s important that people be honest with each other about the ways in which life is hard.

I am terrified of never getting to teach college again / I can’t imagine that no college would ever hire me again.

I’ve made more with less / I’m terrified of making this work.

I’m extremely anxious about not having health insurance / the current administration is too incompetent to ruin the ACA, so I’ll probably have something?

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I’m afraid I’ll never publish anything academic again / I have plans to work on my book this summer, and at least I won’t have any classes to prepare, so I’ll have plenty of time…

I’m ashamed of a potential gap on my CV if I don’t get teaching work next year / I can make a workable narrative for a year off, possibly even two, so long as I’m productive.

I could go on forever like this / I’m sick of thinking about it.

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Ballet was great and hard and challenging and demanding and rewarding. I pushed myself and did a little better at some things than I did in last class. My husband is thoughtful and kind. My cats are hilarious and delightful. I finally got my new prescription, and should soon have progressive lenses – I’ve crossed that threshold! I’m officially old I guess! And now I’ll be able to read comfortably while also being old.

I still don’t know who I’m going to be if I’m not a teacher / I guess I’ll make it up as I go.

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I’m scared and sad and excited and anxious and curious and eager.

For those keeping score of the Rejection Game: I’ve got six literary journal submissions out, of various combinations of essays and poems. I’ve got two pending full-time faculty applications (one a gen-ed thing at a suburban school, the other a classics one-year shared between two local liberal arts colleges – either one would be interesting). I’ve got two adjunct applications out, and two nearly ready to submit (I need to figure out how to write a letter for a community college – I’d actually quite like to see what teaching there is like, but it’s going to be a delicate dance, convincing them that I’m eager to move from a world-famous R-1 to a community college). I’ve chosen a journal for resubmitting my two most polished rejected articles, though that will take some doing, because I need to update them and actually address the peer reviewers’ comments, where relevant (i.e., I’ll be ignoring the character assassination review by one of the dream paper readers who was just an asshole and had nothing useful or positive to say, but there were some helpful suggestions in the other reader’s report, and I’ll finally get around to reading the reports on the meter paper, which I never did because I am a delicate flower).

But we learn to live by living, and I guess that’s what I’m doing, so.

Thanks for sharing my little sideshow with me now and then.

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April 26, 2017 · 12:48 am

Untethered; triangulations

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Again, surprise: I ended my day – this last day at the school where I have spent the last twelve years, first as student and then as professor – not crumpled and broken, but curious and relieved.

Uncertain but willing.

Game.

Office hours tomorrow, of course, and then grading, and next week’s grading meeting, and I am on the payroll until June 30, which means I am insured and belibraryed until then, but then….

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Well. Time will tell. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on such a precipice, but here we are, and the world spread out before us, and who knows what’s to come, and there’s some pleasure in that anticipation.

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But three poems, because I have been reading so much poetry, and these three – one old friend, two new – are me right now in a nutshell.

So: new friend Carrie Fountain [I just discovered her, and I am a little obsessed], ‘Yes’ (whence):

I am done smoking cigarettes, done waiting tables, done counting tips
at two a.m. in the neon-dark dance hall, done sleeping with young men
in my apartment, done facing them or not, thinking of oblivion, which
is better than nothing. I am done not wearing underwear because
it’s so Victorian. I am done telling men I don’t wear underwear because
it’s so Victorian. I am done with the night a guy spread my legs
on a pool table, all those balls piled up in the pockets. I am done.
I am never going back. When I see that night on the street I will
drive past and never even glance over. I am done going to grad school,
nodding in your workshop. I am done teaching English as a second
language, saying I pointing to my chest, saying you pointing to them.
I am done teaching the poetry class where no one talked and no one
listened to me and outside the window the cottonwood wagged
its sun-white leaves in the breeze as if to say, I give up, I give up. I am done
being a childless woman, a childless wife, a woman with no scars
on her body. I am done with the wide afternoons of before, the long
stare, the tightly closed door. And I am done, too, for the most part,
with the daydream of after. I am after for now. I am turning up the heater
to see if that will make the baby sleep another fifteen minutes
so I can finish this poem. I am done thinking of the past as if it had
survived, though sometimes I think of the past and sometimes I see it
coming, catching up, hands caked with dried mud, head shaved clean.

And old friend Charles Simic, whose ‘Friends of Heraclitus’ has comforted us before, and now does so again, for a wholly different reason (whence):

Your friend has died, with whom
You roamed the streets,
At all hours, talking philosophy.
So, today you went alone,
Stopping often to change places
With your imaginary companion,
And argue back against yourself
On the subject of appearances:
The world we see in our heads
And the world we see daily,
So difficult to tell apart
When grief and sorrow bow us over.

You two often got so carried away
You found yourselves in strange neighborhoods
Lost among unfriendly folk,
Having to ask for directions
While on the verge of a supreme insight,
Repeating your question
To an old woman or a child
Both of whom may have been deaf and dumb.

What was that fragment of Heraclitus
You were trying to remember
As you stepped on the butcher’s cat?
Meantime, you yourself were lost
Between someone’s new black shoe
Left on the sidewalk
And the sudden terror and exhilaration
At the sight of a girl
Dressed up for a night of dancing
Speeding by on roller skates.

And another Charles with whom I have a more cautious, suspicious relationship: Charles Bukowski, ‘the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck’ (whence):

I suppose so.
I was living in an attic in Philadelphia
It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the
bars. I didn’t have any money and so with what was almost left
I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer
looking for work . . .
which was a god damned lie; I was a writer
looking for a little time and a little food and some
attic rent.
a couple days later when I finally came home
from somewhere
the landlady said, there was somebody looking for
you. and I said,
there must be some mistake. she said,
no, it was a writer and he said he wanted you to help him write
a history book.
oh, fine, I said, and I knew with that I had another week’s
rent—I mean, on the cuff—
so I sat around drinking wine on credit and watching the hot pigeons
suffer and fuck on my hot roof.
I turned the radio on real loud
drank the wine and wondered how I could make a history book
interesting but true.
but the bastard never came back,
and I had to finally sign on with a railroad track gang
going West
and they gave us cans of food but no
openers
and we broke the cans against the seats and sides of
railroad cars a hundred years old with dust
the food wasn’t cooked and the water tasted like
candlewick
and I leaped off into a clump of brush somewhere in
Texas
all green with nice-looking houses in the
distance
I found a park
slept all night
and then they found me and put me in a cell
and they asked me about murders and
robberies.
they wanted to get a lot of stuff off the books
to prove their efficiency
but I wasn’t that tired
and they drove me to the next big town
fifty-seven miles away
the big one kicked me in the ass
and they drove off.
but I lucked it:
two weeks later I was sitting in the office of the city hall
half-asleep in the sun like the big fly on my elbow
and now and then she took me down to a meeting of the council
and I listened very gravely as if I knew what was happening
as if I knew how the funds of a halfass town were being
dismantled.
later I went to bed and woke up with teethmarks all over
me, and I said, Christ, watch it, baby! you might give me
cancer! and I’m rewriting the history of the Crimean War!
and they all came to her house—
all the cowboys, all the cowboys:
fat, dull and covered with dust.
and we all shook hands.
I had on a pair of old bluejeans, and they said
oh, you’re a writer, eh?
and I said: well, some think so.
and some still think so . . .
others, of course, haven’t quite wised up yet.
two weeks later they
ran me out
of town.

 

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April 22, 2017 · 1:14 am

In which I really need the Powers That Be to take a beat

(for some reason my phone has decided that it can’t possibly save my instagram photos, so I’m just going to link them straight through.)

I wish I could say the day started with promise, but it didn’t even manage that: the day started with getting up early-for-me, and going to the dentist to get prep-work for two crowns done. Side-by-side crowns, so lots of filing away at teeth. Like, an hour of it, and then another half hour of fitting for the temporary crowns. My dentist is a glorious goddess, and endlessly patient with me, and I was on valium, but still.

More to the point: I know I’ve been talking a lot about embracing rejections and failures lately, and that’s true! That is an ethos I’m trying to make my peace with!

But there is an overkill there too, my darlings.

And we kind of hit it this week, and then blew past it.

Yesterday was the thanks-but-no-thanks from Temple, of course, and a day or two before that was the ‘kay-byyeeee from Vassar.

This afternoon around 5 was the ‘we loved meeting you but it’s not you, it’s us, and good luck’ from the local suburban school.

That hurt. It’s not as if it was super surprising – I’m not naive, I understand the odds of these things – but still. Fucking ow.

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Twenty minutes after that, randomly, extraneously, I got a second email rejection from Princeton, even though they already rejected me a few weeks back? … I guess reminding me how very much and very adamantly they really don’t want me to work for them?

That was salt in the wound, and put me over the edge: I actually had been getting ready for ballet, and reassuring myself that ballet would be palliative after the suburban school rejection, but Princeton’s second round was a sucker punch, and I went down hard.

At least my research funds are gloriously spent, and I even got the email that my reimbursement has been approved, so there’s that.

So. Yeah. thisisfine.jpg and all that. I’ve made more with less and so forth.

But gods I’m not feeling great.

So I went to a ball game.

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I printed out a scorecard first, and went prepared to score the game, and had a great row-end seat for doing so, and it was going gloriously, and I was loving the focus and guidance it gave me…

But then it started raining, and I went up under the concourse for the 5th inning, but then it was so cold that I gave up and went home.

I’m so frightened of losing the only life I’ve ever wanted, the life I’ve worked so hard for.

Not that I’d be the first, by a long shot; not that my loss would be unique or tragic or anything other than the norm even of the luckiest.

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But I don’t know that I have the neck for it.

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And yet and still we carry on, because we carry on.

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We’ve made more out of less, right? We’ll make it work, right?

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Can’t say I’m at a high point, darlings, but this is what we’re doing. So. Chin up and all. Let’s fucking do it.

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April 20, 2017 · 11:01 pm

More rejection practice

This week I got the ‘thanks but no thanks’ emails from both Vassar and Temple. I didn’t really want the Vassar job, and didn’t expect to get it, but the Temple one looked interesting, and I thought I had a decent chance. But there you are.

Still, I’m at 2 for 4, and .500 is fantastic in baseball.

So there’s one full-time application still out there, and one more due this Monday.

(That would be a one-year visiting shared between two area schools — slightly awkward in that one of them is the school I interviewed at last week, and the contact person is actually the chair, whom I met with about that other job, so… but surely they understand the situation, and I’ll send him an email or something. I’ll figure it out.)

I’ve got some leeway since I can do work for the husband, so I can continue to make some money and pay my bills even if no school will hire me, but that’s a pretty heavy blow to my self-image: who am I if I’m not allowed to be a sanctioned teacher?

Tuesday is the last class, and then I’ll start getting serious about applying for adjunct positions.

Y’all.

This is all for the good, I expect, ultimately, and I’ll make it work because I have always made it work, but goddammit I don’t want to do this.

A third of my noon class didn’t show up today, because fuck you.

I hate that class. As a class, I mean.

I’ve never had a situation exactly like this one: I like most of the individuals – they’re smart and funny and sharp and witty and wry, but they have no sense of responsibility to each other or to me, so they’re an utter disaster as a community.

I predict that half of them won’t show up Tuesday for our last class. Because, again: fuck you.

Tuesday’s going to be rough, I expect. Twelve years at this school!

Well.

Whatever.

Dark fucking days, and I think I’ll go listen to something dumb and mindless and eat some cheese, because, as my noon class students would say, fuck everything anyway.

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April 19, 2017 · 10:58 pm

Frustrations

(There’s no way I haven’t already named a post ‘Frustrations’ — ah, and indeed I have, but only one! Not so bad.)

I have been reading and writing nights lately, rather than writing here. Reading and editing and writing poetry, reading this novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

I got to the description of The Day last night. The main characters responding to the news of the towers coming down. It was fucking brutal to read. So incredibly carefully and precisely and perfectly written. Never maudlin or overwritten. Consider: the grandmother comes over to the boy’s house, and finally finds him under the bed, and asks if she can join him, and she can barely fit, and can’t turn her head, but they stay there together, in silence, looking up at the bottom of the bed, and she picks at the carpet with one hand. I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but that is how you fucking write grief and panic and terror. It’s in the stupid useless things we do.

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And I’ve been reading all these different poetry journals, trying to find one that seems both suitable to my aesthetic and also not wildly out of reach while also also not being schlumpy. It’s a tricky target. And, in spite of all my joking about making rejections into my bread and butter, I do actually want some of these to be accepted someday!

I am unhappy with my new poems. They lack emotional depth. They lack immediacy. They are banal.

One on the gorgon has some promise – imagines her ignorant of her power and her mortality, and excited at the approach of Perseus, and utterly innocent and surprised by her tragedy.

And I’m finding some inspiration in London-in-absentia – I haven’t heard back from him since my last response, which was a few months ago. But having him as an audience is weirdly easy and inspiring, so I have a couple of pieces that take the conceit of telling him about my experience of living, because that seemed to be what interested him about me, and certainly is what continues to trip me up.

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One, for instance, is about how to end a friendship, because I don’t know how to do it, and yet am sort of trying to do it. I like how having him as quasi-interlocuter puts in relief how the passage of time doesn’t help or make it easier, it’s all so complicated and fragile and difficult, this being human. Being older doesn’t mean being better at anything, necessarily. I think there’s some promise there.

And there’s another one responding to his nonchalance after the election and contrasting it – not cruelly, just honestly – with how I imagine things going for women, which is, in short, not well. And responding at the same time to that famous picture of the woman who died in a motel room alone after a botched abortion, who died collapsed over her knees on the floor, naked, with blood pooling between her legs.

(I think I read an article by the… sister…? of that woman. She was, unsurprisingly, conflicted about this picture, and how it portrayed her relative, but I think she ultimately came around to accepting it as a useful Symbol.)

(Which makes me think of my rich friend, and how she objected to being made into a Symbol in that boat essay, and how it turns out that might be the hill we die on.)

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version 1?

I wish I could remember how long it used to take me to write decent poems. I do remember, at least, that I didn’t like most of what I wrote, and that most of it was tossed out after a few times through the wringer, so that’s some comfort.

And don’t get me started on the essays! I’m getting nowhere with the essays.

But only two more class meetings until I stop being a teacher at this school (in practice, at least). And two more months before I quit being on the payroll here. And nothing concrete lined up yet, so… at least I will have some time on my hands soon!

But I think this one is better, less noisy. But then I sort of think the noise makes the point.

But I think this one is better, less noisy. But then I sort of think the noise makes the point.

I haven’t said it in a while, so let me just reiterate: I can’t believe this is what we’re fucking doing. All of it. Broadly. Me with my little individual tragedies. My country with its real one. The world.

One of my clearest earliest memories – and I may have told this story before, forgive me, if so – is of being in preschool, I think (possibly kindergarten), and talking to my sister’s friend Angela on the playground. Angela was in 3rd or 4th grade, maybe, and we were sitting on a bench together, leaning over, bellies on our thighs, chins on our knees, and she was tracing meaningless geometric patterns in the sandy dirt, and telling me how it would be when someone dropped The Bomb. Nuclear winter and all that. And I was heartbroken and terrified.

And that was 1982 or whatever. I did not think we’d be back on that bench again in 2017, and yet here we are, with serious talk of thermonuclear war back in the headlines.

God fucking dammit.

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April 13, 2017 · 11:43 pm

Just the pictures

Moments from the whirlwind of the last few days; the story tells itself?

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from the car, yes, but I promise the traffic made this safe

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what I instagrammed

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but I think this one is better

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