“Feeling Fake in the Classroom”
I enjoyed this recent Chronicle article, which talks about the disconnect between the tools you give students to learn how to write and the way you actually write. More soon!
Work is Infinite — and this somehow comforts me
In preparation for a retreat for writing teachers at one of my schools, the head of the program sent us a chapter from A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity, which essentially talks about time management and finding the time to write. I am not sure how we are going to be using this chapter for the retreat, since it does not deal directly with teaching the way that our past readings have. However, I was struck –hard–by the following passage, in terms of my own relationship to writing.
Work is infinite; time is finite. Therefore you must manage your time, not your work. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. If your work is successful, it generates more work; as a result, the concept of “finishing your work” is a contradiction in terms so blatant and dangerous that it can lead to nervous breakdowns–because it puts the pressures on the wrong places in your mind and habits. [...]
Instead of trying to finish your work, you need merely to find time to do your work; then simply concentrate on doing it the best you can. (28-29)
Brilliant! It’s so simple, and yet, exactly what I needed to hear: “the concept of ‘finishing your work’ is a contradiction.” I have some problems with the rest of the chapter, in which Atchity mostly preaches self-discipline (duh) and hiring someone to do your housework (um… yeah, I’d love to, on my vast adjunct pay — what??), and in many ways he says nothing new–I see parallels in particular to Anne Lamott’s “take it bird by bird” philosophy. But this idea that work will actually never be finished is strangely comforting and illuminating for me.
It will never be done. So just sit down and do some of it, dammit! And then eventually, a project will be done. And you will move to the next project.
I know this, but I’ve been having some difficulty with the middle lately. I need to set some deadlines for myself. And I’m actually motivated now to try to set aside an hour a day even during the semester for my own writing (though I fear, if I can even keep one non-teaching hour aside, it will be devoted to writing cover letters instead of books).
Does being vegetarian mean you don’t like food?
As class prep looms over my head and the hours left to work on my book slip away, I turn my thoughts and keyboard to something completely different: food.
Last week, I had the pleasure of catching an episode of “Top Chef Masters” that was perfect for me. I usually watch “Top Chef,” but I have never watched the “Masters” show before. The main challenge was to cook lunch for an “indie film actress” (who turned out to be Zooey Deschanel) and her friends, so immediately I thought “ah! She must be vegan.” I was just getting annoyed about this being considered such an enormous challenge when Zooey announced that not only was she allergic to both soy and wheat gluten.
HA! Ok, that is a challenge.
No one (that they showed, at least) complained about the soy allergy. A couple of the chefs said they had experience with wheat gluten allergies (and one of those chefs won the challenge with a dish that included quinoa pasta, which I didn’t even know existed). But what they really seemed to complain about was the vegan portion of the challenge. Statements about how they had to take the best part of cooking out of the equation , and how the restrictions were “off-putting,” abounded. You’d think these people never cooked a vegetable! One of the judges really made the circumstances seem dire. As Slashfood joked:
But to hear Gael Greene describe it, the real winners of the night were Deschanel and her animal flesh-challenged friends. The grande dame of food criticism repeatedly referred to them with the pity one would reserve for a feral child forced to subsist on water and dust: “The vegans seemed so surprised — God knows what they get to eat!”
Well, they should be surprised by such delicious food, shouldn’t they? That’s not because they’re vegans — it’s because they don’t necessarily eat gourmet food on a daily basis! Not many people do! Especially gourmet food that’s been prepared for a competition where the chefs’ reputations are at stake on national television.
But then, “Top Chef” has never been very vegetarian-friendly. In one memorable challenge from a few years back, a chef was assigned tofu as one of the ingredients for a dish. He cooked it in beef so that it would, you know, taste like beef. He got tons of praise from the judges for his creativity, and Tom Collicchio said that if he’d been assigned tofu, he wouldn’t know what to do. (This from a guy who is paid to claim that Diet Coke tastes good (!) and is “simple.” Have you seen the list of ingredients on a diet coke can? Makes me seriously question his “Top Chef” cred.)
In a challenge earlier in the same season, groups of chefs were assigned to design a menu based on a particular animal’s diet. One team’s animal was gorilla, which is a strictly vegetarian eater. They added lamb to their menu. Lamb! I mean, if you can’t stick to the vegetarian diet, at least choose something that seems more plausible for a vegetarian who’s fallen off the wagon. They didn’t even get criticized for it.
I’m totally fine with the “Top Chef” contestants cooking meat every week — most people are not vegetarians, so why would it be a vegetarian show? — but do they have to be so utterly thrown by it? There are such things as vegetarian — and even vegan — chefs (who would never, by the way, be invited on the show, since the challenges often revolve around cooking a particular meat, and sometimes even butchering it). There are even (gasp!) vegetarian dishes at regular restaurants. It’s not really that crazy.
I resent the idea that because I am a vegetarian I don’t like food. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Some of the most astounding flavors in the world come from vegetables. Look, I get that bacon tastes good; I don’t dispute that. But heirloom tomatoes from the farmers’ market! Fresh carrots out of the ground! Tender spring peas! Onions! Peppers of all different colors and flavors! Bright, beautiful beets! Just-picked silver queen corn! Aren’t these foods just as delicious in their own ways as a steak? Don’t they deserve more respect?
I also get that vegans can be annoying. I don’t, for instance, like PETA. (I’m not even going to link to their site, so there.) Their tactics remind me too much of right-wing anti-abortionists. But I have never (to my knowledge, anyway) tried to make someone feel bad about what they eat, so I don’t like it when someone makes fun of what I eat.
(Well, the one thing I can imagine making someone feel bad about eating, if they had the stupidity to eat it in front of me, is force-fed meat. “Project Runway” adopted a no-fur stance after season 1, and I’d love to see “Top Chef” take the same kind of stance against frois gras and veal.)
One nice benefit of eating vegetarian is that you usually know what you’re getting, though. I saw The Cove last night, and one of the many disturbing revelations contained in that film is that dolphin meat, which contains toxic levels of mercury, is being packaged and sold in Japan as whale meat. I mean, I don’t recommend eating whale meat either, but it doesn’t have toxic levels of mercury in it. Generally it’s hard to disguise something else as a mushroom or a piece of asparagus.
The Cove made me re-think some things, too. This summer I ate a few scallops and fried clams at one of those New England seafood shacks (it wasn’t even a whole order of either, just a few bites). I have often thought about going back to eating a few non-vegetarian things, like seafood or fish. But The Cove really reminded me that I don’t like the idea of a creature dying for my dinner, even occasionally. I don’t expect anyone else to think about dinner the way I do; I honestly don’t. But that is a line I can’t cross for my own personal peace of mind.
UPDATED TO ADD: Well, the vegans lost again: the first contestant to get kicked off “Top Chef: Las Vegas” used seitan in her dish. Padma said the dish was like a vegan pub midnight special or something. Although, to be fair, while everyone (judges and contestants alike) was totally baffled by the decision to use seitan or what it even was, judge Gail Reubens (she of the shinyshiny lipgloss) said it wasn’t the use of seitan that bothered the judges, it was that she “didn’t cook it in a way that tasted good.” OUCH!
Sensation and History
Since I began researching for my dissertation, I have discovered that there are sometimes sensationalistic practices in the writing/telling of history. This should not really be a surprise — after all, sensationalism in journalism has become very common — but at the same time, I have still been surprised by it.
Part of my research has to do with nineteenth-century drug use. Surprisingly, there really isn’t a whole lot out there about the social or literary history of drug use (which is where my interest lies), so I have read a bit outside of what would usually be considered “serious” scholarship. But what I didn’t expect was to find flat-out misinformation.
For instance, I heard a historian say on a History Channel documentary about the history of drugs that Queen Victoria took marijuana for menstrual cramps. I did a little research and discovered a few other sources that repeated this claim, but none of them cited their sources. After some further digging, I found one book that claimed what I had come to believe: that while it’s not out of the question that Queen Victoria took marijuana, there is no direct evidence that she did. Rather, her personal physician wrote an article for the Lancet praising the use of marijuana for the relief of menstrual cramps. Maybe he prescribed it for the Queen, but so far I haven’t found evidence of the prescription.
A while ago, I came across a book called The Secret Lives of Great Authors, which claims to contain juicy gossip and little-known facts about famous writers. The front of this book proclaims that Louisa May Alcott was an opium addict. Inside, an account of LMA’s addiction is given, along with the explanation that she became addicted after being prescribed medicinal laudanum. Now, this is indeed how many 19th-century women (and men) became addicted to opium, but the thing is, the book gives no source for this, and I can’t find evidence in her biography. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, since two other books say she was addicted to morphine. But in any case, The Secret Lives of Great Authors also refers to the “gambling and drug-addicted heroine of her autobiographical 1872 novel Work: A Story of Experience.” Now, I don’t know what the writer of Secret Lives read, but it wasn’t Work. LMA did write sensation fiction in which women took opium, but Work is much more of a didactic novel, and the heroine’s one secret is that she was an actress at one point. Perhaps someone could point out a tendency toward gambling and addiction in actresses, but Louisa May Alcott didn’t — at least not in that novel!
What does all of this mean? I feel like it’s almost like the old telephone game. There are bits of factual information here, but then there’s a leap into sensation. Is it just that we want to believe that these apparently upstanding women were secretly naughty? I mean, they probably were, and it makes for a good story, but that’s no reason to abandon evidence altogether, is it?
How to Write in a Book
I enjoyed reading this post by Laura Miller on different methods of writing in a book or taking notes for a book. As someone always struggling to come up with a good method, I am impressed with hers, though also somewhat intimidated, as it is far more organized that I can ever imagine being.
“Fired from the Canon”
Over at the new website Second Pass, they have a blog post up called “Fired from the Canon” about 10 “classics” (rather loosely defined as novels other people try to convince you everyone should read) that you don’t have to bother with. It’s a fairly bold list — you could pretty easily come up with a list like this that no one would really argue, but they’ve chosen a few quite popular and loved books. Read the post here, and then come back here and tell me what you think. I have personally only read four of the ten, but here are my thoughts on those:
-One I loved when I read it, but agree you can only read before you turn, say, 22, and if you haven’t by then, you shouldn’t bother.
-One is a book I only kinda read. Like, I read it for a class, but I can barely remember anything about it, and one of the reasons is because the “idea” is more important than the characters, if you know what I mean. So I agree with that one as well.
-One of them I giggled aloud when seeing it on the list just because it makes me feel like I’m not alone, and because it seems to me the boldest choice on the list. I don’t agree that you should skip it necessary, it just made me laugh that it was there.
-One is my least favorite book by one of my favorite authors, and I completely agree with the assesssment.
If you know me at all, you will probably be able to figure out very quickly which of these is which when you see the list. Come back and argue or agree with the list, please! Fun!
Megan Fox and Jennifer’s Body
This is the only photo I could find of Megan Fox that didn't totally objectify her. But maybe she finds that empowering?
I was going to write a thing about Megan Fox, and how I was confused and surprised because in a recent Entertainment Weekly article she called herself a feminist, and the reason I was confused is because it was part of this exchange:
How did you feel about being sexualized like that [by being in a bikini in the movie Bad Boys II] when you were 15?
I thought it was awesome. I was going to a Christian high school and I wasn’t a feminist yet. I hadn’t sat back and analyzed society yet. I was 15! I just did what I was told to do.
and I didn’t know why this was actually different from what she does now — because she has analyzed it and decided it’s ok?–and how in the same article she also says this:
“I think all women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. That’s what our purpose is in this business. You’re merchandised, you’re a product. You’re sold and it’s based on sex. But that’s okay. I think women should be empowered by that, not degraded.”
and that seems really conterintuitive to me, and I don’t really see how you can be “empowered” by being a product, but then I don’t know whether I should just be happy that a young and famous woman is calling herself feminist, since that’s so rare, but then what exactly does she think feminism is? And do I think she’s wrong? And who am I to tell her she’s wrong? And why am I seriously in an imaginary debate about feminism with a 22 year-old movie star? But then I read and saw more interviews with her and she’s kinda funny and sarcastic and she is making fun of Transformers II to the extent that super-dude director Michael Bay who’s got to be one of the grossest guys in Hollywood felt the need to retaliate by claiming full responsibility for her entire career, along with the careers of Nicholas Cage and — get this — Will Smith, and so I started to be on her side. (More on Michael Bay in a clever Bitch magazine blog post here.) And then I read a rumor that Michael Bay claimed Megan Fox’s audition for the first Transformers movie was to wash his Ferrari, and I don’t know whether to believe that, and if it’s true, whether she did this before or after she discovered feminism? And is there any possibility Michael Bay could get any more disgusting?
Will there ever be another "Ginger Snaps"? (I don't count the actual sequel.) Should I try to write it?
And then I was going to also write about how Megan Fox is in the upcoming horror film Jennifer’s Body, written by Diablo Cody, and how I have mixed feelings about Diablo Cody as well but generally I have a soft spot for her somehow and think she gets a lot of crap, possibly because she was so praised for one movie, which is not her fault, and it was a cute movie, no matter how overexposed it got or how you feel she handled the abortion issue, and how I am cautiously excited about how Jennifer’s Body looks like it could maybe, just maybe, be a new Ginger Snaps (though not as good, nothing could ever be as good), or maybe it’s just going to suck and really piss me off. But then the Bitch magazine blog beat me to it. So I didn’t write what I was going to write. But somehow it’s still here anyway.
Here’s the preview for Jennifer’s Body, if you’re interested. Thoughts?
How I Research
How I research:
1. Look up interesting keywords on MLA Bibliography
2. Download whatever PDF full-text articles I can find.
3. Submit a flurry of ILL requests for what isn’t available full-text.
4. When those come, download them to the same folder as the others.
5. Never read more than about a page of any of it.
While electronic resources have made it easier to acquire articles, I feel it may have stopped there, for me at least. Confronted with the idea of reading the whole thing online, I simply skim a little bit and then save it for later, never to return. I could print it out, but most articles are 20-30 pages long, which is a lot of paper and ink, and now that I don’t officially belong to any department, I can’t use their printers and ink. Instead I just collect and collect but never read.
I was always one of the few grad students I knew who preferred writing to research anyway; I always wished I had the problem some of my colleagues complained about, feeling that they could never start writing because they hadn’t read everything yet. I love to read, but only novels; I never truly learned to love reading scholarship. I always jumped into the writing before I was ready. This is still my problem. And I am quick to blame technology for what is probably just a personal flaw. (Though perhaps I can at least claim that technology has exacerbated it — what do you think?)
And So It Begins (kinda, or continues, or something)
Ok, so I read the Germano (or most of it, and it’s one of those things you have to re-read). I took some books out of the library and ILLed some others. I read a short story that could be incorporated. I even read a scholarly article and dissertation abstract (one that was really interesting!) on related topics that have come out since I finished.
You guessed it; I am working on turning the ole diss into a new book.
The reasons I am trying to do it:
1) I actually think my idea might be interesting.
2) Maybe it will help with my job search.
3) I don’t know, what else am I going to do? I thought about that dissertation for so long that I don’t have any other ideas left now.
Here are my biggest worries:
1) That I will end the summer with nothing concrete to show for it.
2) I am too lazy to do the necessary research.
3) That my idea is stupid, or that I’m too stupid to fully explore my good idea.
(You would think that getting the PhD would help with these self-confidence issues, but I still have the nagging feeling they just gave me the degree to be nice.)
The Death of the Book
When I was in college, I majored briefly in English before I switched to theatre. What would possess someone to make such an impractical move? Could it be the stench of a decaying profession calling to me? Because, as you may have heard, theatre is dead, and it was certainly already dying when I was 19.
Now it would seem that books –that is, the physical incarnation of text on pages with a bound cover, not text itself — are going the way of the dinosaur. What is it about me and a love for the impractical, the unfashionable, the hopelessly out of date? Could this be linked to my interest in the gothic, in tales of the undead and ghostly?
Today (instead of writing the aforementioned book that is supposed to come out of my dissertation), I read this article on the BookExpo America publishing convention, where books were essentially lamented as dead — or dying, at least. I also read a Chronicle article called “Reading Dickens Four Ways,” in which the author reads Little Dorrit in book form, as an audiobook, from her Kindle, and from her iPhone.
The Chronicle writer is really interesting in how open-minded she is to all these experiences. She documents others’ heated opinions about each way of reading, but only dislikes one of those ways (the Kindle, but mostly because it’s just not as good as the iPhone).
She also asks this question: “do I like reading, or do I like books?” She concludes that she “love[s] books as much as anybody. But [she] love[s] reading more.”
I like that sentiment. It’s so optimistic and practical. And I suppose it explains why I am able to read so much online, even though I pretend to hate reading on screens. However, I think I am just more dedicated to the idea of books than she is. Who knows — I’ll probably be proven wrong. I have been known to deride quite a few technological trends or breakthroughs and then come to like them. Maybe I’ll be reading Little Dorrit on my (currently nonexistent) iPhone someday too.
But dammit, I really love books. I love the way they smell, and how they look, and how they feel in my hands. I can read online every day, but the things I read aren’t novels. Novels need to be held. It’s part of the full experience.
I will be really sad if they die.
