It's just the dead. The dead, the dead, the dead.
On New Year's Eve at midnight, for one minute all the animals can speak and it's only by the bitter grace of knowing it won't do any good that they don't tell you how badly you've hurt them, or for how long, or what a different world would have meant to them. Instead, they whisper "I love you" to each other and slump together back to sleep.
The dead want you to hold them even in pieces. Whether it's you in pieces or them. As long as it isn't both, we can make this happen. Even.
They walk to the end of the driveway every day to check the mail even though they can't pick up your envelopes for you.
The animals die together and this is what most of us mean by "flock."
Knit a cotton shroud for the spring. This is what most of us mean by "fog."
War makes the dead irritable over all the incursions. They want you to mail them back their damaged skin, priority. They want me to speak and say, "I love you," but they want me to say it to the fog and I don't think anyone will hear.
Clouds shredded in pieces and it doesn't matter which height. Look down. Look down.
On New Year's Eve at midnight drums will beat like hearts, but like empty hearts, all skin, no blood, all stage, and try to drown out the drowning.
Don't shoot. Sing the dead back to sleep like a flock of orbiting meteors.
27 December 2011
24 December 2011
Foiled
Approaching the holiday with nowhere to go and more dark thoughts than I care to leave myself alone with, I'd made plans to spend it working on my dissertation. Starbucks, the company website said, would be open everywhere, normal hours, to 10 or 11. Lies, it turned out -- I worked at Spot, near me, til they closed at 5, then came home to grab food that wasn't entirely sugar and starch, popped back out to the Starbucks I thought would be my place for the night: closed. Drove downtown & found that one dark as well. I had some momentum earlier and I'm going to try to get it back, but I still have a lot of trouble working at home, so it may not happen.
In years I've felt better, I've put up a Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees. Driven around looking at people's lights. I've even left out cookies, as an adult; I love arbitrary, happy festival things, knowing they're arbitrary and liking them just fine that way. Before grad school, I even used to bake, usually something different for each family member, something for a Christmas party or two, sometimes something for a friend. I've always wanted to go out caroling. Used to decorate my parents' house up sometimes.
And: I've spent 7 out of my last 8 Christmases alone, going for 8 out of 9 this year. I had been trying to decide whether working at Starbucks would count as being alone or not, but now that that's moot, I can say, yes, I will be alone yet again. Nation is full of people who hate holidays, yet get to have them, and I can't make a life such that I get to do any fun gift shopping or decorating or holiday cooking, which I'd actually enjoy. Proof that the universe is neither just nor sensible right here.
I don't even know what I'd ask for, if I made a Christmas list, because the things I want seem so distant as to be unreal. I'd like things to change for the better; afraid to try to specify any more than that because of the almost perfect certainty that I'd be setting myself up for disappointment.
I suppose I can ask to revise another 2, possibly 3 chapters, but that's up to me to do and not Santa -- and sitting here, I already feel far more like lying down than like working. Other than that? Can't even say. Little purpose in doing so & less ability. Just get it over with so I can go find an impersonal setting with wireless and caffeine on Monday.
In years I've felt better, I've put up a Christmas tree. I love Christmas trees. Driven around looking at people's lights. I've even left out cookies, as an adult; I love arbitrary, happy festival things, knowing they're arbitrary and liking them just fine that way. Before grad school, I even used to bake, usually something different for each family member, something for a Christmas party or two, sometimes something for a friend. I've always wanted to go out caroling. Used to decorate my parents' house up sometimes.
And: I've spent 7 out of my last 8 Christmases alone, going for 8 out of 9 this year. I had been trying to decide whether working at Starbucks would count as being alone or not, but now that that's moot, I can say, yes, I will be alone yet again. Nation is full of people who hate holidays, yet get to have them, and I can't make a life such that I get to do any fun gift shopping or decorating or holiday cooking, which I'd actually enjoy. Proof that the universe is neither just nor sensible right here.
I don't even know what I'd ask for, if I made a Christmas list, because the things I want seem so distant as to be unreal. I'd like things to change for the better; afraid to try to specify any more than that because of the almost perfect certainty that I'd be setting myself up for disappointment.
I suppose I can ask to revise another 2, possibly 3 chapters, but that's up to me to do and not Santa -- and sitting here, I already feel far more like lying down than like working. Other than that? Can't even say. Little purpose in doing so & less ability. Just get it over with so I can go find an impersonal setting with wireless and caffeine on Monday.
18 December 2011
pew pew pew
Six or seven years ago, I was involved in this clusterfuck of a documentary project in Baton Rouge -- Andrei Codrescu was teaching a class in documentary filmmaking, which, since this was Andrei, appeared to mean giving MFA students access to video cameras and no oversight. I imagine there were a lot of gross, fairly awkward stories about poets he'd seen drunk; that was a major component of the poetry workshop I took with him, anyway. A couple of the students in that class decided their documentary was going to be a "poetry combine," something Andrei had done in New Orleans, where he'd filmed poets who were friends of his going around and doing New Orleans things, and then they'd written poems about it and done a reading. The students were going to do theirs in Baton Rouge, with local poets, which immediately presented difficulties, since Baton Rouge didn't have nearly the doing-things resources New Orleans did, or local poets to do them -- but our budding auteurs decided to take on the challenge. They asked me to be in on it, and without getting a lot of details, I said, oh, sure.
Unsurprisingly, with inexperienced students basically making things up as they went along, the process was far from hitch-free. Things were supposed to start off with an evening at a blues bar downtown, and no one got ahold of me to tell me when (or if) people were getting there. The next morning, I met everyone at a coffee place, where the directors sprang on us that we were supposed to write collaboratively, which appeared to be news to everyone, not just me, and not news we were thrilled to get, because none of us were experienced with or interested in collaborative writing. A couple visual artists were involved, and they seemed more into the idea, but the poets all kind of went, uh, yikes. To this day, I'm not sure I'd even know how to write collaboratively -- Poetry Band is the only creative project I've ever gotten into, and that works partly because we avoid stepping on each others' toes by working in different media.
The day is recorded in a poem in my book, called "the poetry combine: a collaborative documentary" or something. We stood still in full Louisiana sun and listened very politely while a guy from a second-line jazz band played trombone and talked about jazz, which left me with permanently damaged skin. My whole right shoulder and arm scarred, all these tiny white dead spots, and ever since, if I get tan at all, you can see them. (I almost never get tan, and that's part of why -- it looks gross, so I avoid the sun even more than I would otherwise.) We went to a plantation, stood still in more full Louisiana sun, and listened to an appallingly well-fed white woman who taught folklore at Tulane talk about compair lapin, a character who came over from Africa, where his name, presumably, would not have been in French, and who eventually morphed into Brer Rabbit. She talked about how nice it was that families had these stories to hold them together through difficult times, like, you know, slavery.
I'd wanted to go to a plantation since moving to the area, but because I'm an ignorant Yankee, I thought the plantations today would be run by African Americans and they'd be these probably beautiful but grave points of very ugly American history. No -- in fact, the one we visited, the Laura Plantation, was unusual because they hadn't knocked down the slave cabins, and was considered quite daring and progressive for that. Most plantation tourism is really about how beautiful these houses are and the "elegance" with which Southern gentry lived before the War of Northern Aggression. Blithely, our speaker told us that these cabins had in fact been rented by families up into the 1970s. They were joined together in duplexes, one room per family, each just the size of the cabins I stayed in during Girl Scout camp, although with wood sides instead of canvas ones and a fireplace in the middle between the two of them. Grievous physical labor and abuse, rape, infanticide, grossly dehumanizing verbal abuse, and trying to live as a family in one room half the size of my current (small!) living room, joined next door to another family in equally horrendous circumstances -- but isn't it nice, how they told such clever stories and those eventually became part of "our" culture? That's what these cabins are really about. Right. It was easily one of the most ideologically upsetting situations I've ever been in. Our documentarians were kind of excited to have this woman on tape -- because, remember, we were filming -- saying jaw-droppingly tone-deaf things, too.
We may have done some other things -- not sure -- but our last stop was at The Hole Experience, a piercing and tattoo studio out in the sticks where I was going to get a tattoo. I'd wanted to have iconic-to-me animals put on each foot and the back of each hand, one for each element: turtle for earth, lizard for fire, frog for water, dragonfly for air, and this was a plan I'd had for a while. All creatures from my rural Missourian childhood. For the combine, the directors offered to get me the foot tattoos, which sealed my involvement. Important things this taught me: tattoos should never be free, and they should never be filmed.
The shop where the tattoo artist I'd wanted to do my designs worked turned out not to want us filming inside, which was a shame, but we respected it. Well, we had to. One of the students heading this up found another artist out at the edge of town at a studio with the same name -- presumably, they were owned by the same people, but maybe had different managers, because this one was fine with being on film. The artist was a douche, plain and simple, and although I knew not to get a tattoo designed by a douchebag, I went against my better judgment and told him to go ahead and draw up designs. I told him I wanted them to just be black, no color, and he immediately got out his book of tribal flash. No, not tribal, I want them to look like a turtle and a lizard, not like shitty faux-tribal tattoos. I thought I'd gotten it across to him, but he didn't have designs ready until the day of filming, and -- of course -- when we got out there, tired, sunsick, simultaneously wound up and exhausted, with the pressure that we had to do this whole thing in one day, the designs were stupid beyond stupid. Chunky tribal-style bullshit.
I put on the show, like this was the most fun I'd ever had in my life, and although I never saw the footage, I'm sure it came off that way, but I was so not happy from go. At least I only got the one, but still -- any time you're telling yourself, "maybe it's not so bad," that's not a permanent change you should be willingly making to your body. By the next day I was already sobbing about it, but there it was. I think I emailed the students who were doing the video -- may have left voicemail? -- about how upset I was and how much it was likely to cost me to get rid of it, and one wrote me back what I remember as a very cold-fish, obnoxious response. I've been walking around with this stupid-looking black tribal turtle on one foot ever since. Other people did poems or drawings or whatever their thing was; there was a reading/show for it, which I believe also got filmed, but I wasn't involved. No idea what became of the project, although Andrei no doubt gave them an A.
Yesterday, I went in for a laser tattoo removal treatment. Not that I have nothing better to spend my money on, but this thing has continued to bother and embarrass me for years, and getting a tattoo lasered and, eventually, replaced is more achievable than saving up for the car I probably need. It stings -- I have a high enough pain tolerance that I've had doctors comment on it, and I'll definitely admit that it hurt. Very short-term pain, though, and holy macrophages, Batman, but about 12 hours later, when I took the protective gauze off, I could already see a huge difference. The whole thing got lighter, even that quickly, and patches are already almost completely clear. I thought I'd take a "before" picture last night, but it was already on its way into "after." I'm planning to get it lightened enough to be covered over -- two big, gorgeous Betta splendens, one on each foot, chasing each other like the Pisces symbol, with stars, if we can make it work, in the shape of the Pisces constellation with half on each foot. I have an artist here I want to work with on that, but I have to knock out this mistake of a turtle first. I now imagine that'll be all of one or two more laser sessions.
This, and I bought myself a really nice pen (Pelikan M400 in white/tortoise) and a pretty nice bathrobe (one of those two-layer microfiber & terry spa-type ones), both things I've wanted for a couple years. A bracelet and earrings made out of antique typewriter keys, the latter of which I improved markedly by adding a bunch of beads, because god knows nothing is ever quite busy enough for me. During my exams, I learned that I'm one of these people who shops when she's stressed and I didn't do much of that when I was crunching my hardest on the dissertation, so I guess this is probably blowover from that. Or it could be that it's Christmas time and I'm buying gifts for myself in lieu of having anyone else to buy them for, or anyone else to buy them for me. Plus still no interviews, plus still nothing under me like a job I care about or a plan or a life. Started a crochet project (Interweave's Dahlia shawl; Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino in Spanish Moss). Going through revisions but there's no urgency -- I found, for example, that I had several nearly identical pages in two chapters, because I was trying it out in each place and forgot it, and no one said anything about that. They definitely didn't read it, and it's a fair bet no one ever will. Meaningless project unless it gets me a teaching job or at least gets read (and honestly, not very meaningful if all it ever does is sit on ETD and occasionally get downloaded by some other clueless grad student). So: lots of limbo.
I'm even thinking about paying off parking tickets with my next paycheck -- surely a sign of not enough in front of me to do.
Unsurprisingly, with inexperienced students basically making things up as they went along, the process was far from hitch-free. Things were supposed to start off with an evening at a blues bar downtown, and no one got ahold of me to tell me when (or if) people were getting there. The next morning, I met everyone at a coffee place, where the directors sprang on us that we were supposed to write collaboratively, which appeared to be news to everyone, not just me, and not news we were thrilled to get, because none of us were experienced with or interested in collaborative writing. A couple visual artists were involved, and they seemed more into the idea, but the poets all kind of went, uh, yikes. To this day, I'm not sure I'd even know how to write collaboratively -- Poetry Band is the only creative project I've ever gotten into, and that works partly because we avoid stepping on each others' toes by working in different media.
The day is recorded in a poem in my book, called "the poetry combine: a collaborative documentary" or something. We stood still in full Louisiana sun and listened very politely while a guy from a second-line jazz band played trombone and talked about jazz, which left me with permanently damaged skin. My whole right shoulder and arm scarred, all these tiny white dead spots, and ever since, if I get tan at all, you can see them. (I almost never get tan, and that's part of why -- it looks gross, so I avoid the sun even more than I would otherwise.) We went to a plantation, stood still in more full Louisiana sun, and listened to an appallingly well-fed white woman who taught folklore at Tulane talk about compair lapin, a character who came over from Africa, where his name, presumably, would not have been in French, and who eventually morphed into Brer Rabbit. She talked about how nice it was that families had these stories to hold them together through difficult times, like, you know, slavery.
I'd wanted to go to a plantation since moving to the area, but because I'm an ignorant Yankee, I thought the plantations today would be run by African Americans and they'd be these probably beautiful but grave points of very ugly American history. No -- in fact, the one we visited, the Laura Plantation, was unusual because they hadn't knocked down the slave cabins, and was considered quite daring and progressive for that. Most plantation tourism is really about how beautiful these houses are and the "elegance" with which Southern gentry lived before the War of Northern Aggression. Blithely, our speaker told us that these cabins had in fact been rented by families up into the 1970s. They were joined together in duplexes, one room per family, each just the size of the cabins I stayed in during Girl Scout camp, although with wood sides instead of canvas ones and a fireplace in the middle between the two of them. Grievous physical labor and abuse, rape, infanticide, grossly dehumanizing verbal abuse, and trying to live as a family in one room half the size of my current (small!) living room, joined next door to another family in equally horrendous circumstances -- but isn't it nice, how they told such clever stories and those eventually became part of "our" culture? That's what these cabins are really about. Right. It was easily one of the most ideologically upsetting situations I've ever been in. Our documentarians were kind of excited to have this woman on tape -- because, remember, we were filming -- saying jaw-droppingly tone-deaf things, too.
We may have done some other things -- not sure -- but our last stop was at The Hole Experience, a piercing and tattoo studio out in the sticks where I was going to get a tattoo. I'd wanted to have iconic-to-me animals put on each foot and the back of each hand, one for each element: turtle for earth, lizard for fire, frog for water, dragonfly for air, and this was a plan I'd had for a while. All creatures from my rural Missourian childhood. For the combine, the directors offered to get me the foot tattoos, which sealed my involvement. Important things this taught me: tattoos should never be free, and they should never be filmed.
The shop where the tattoo artist I'd wanted to do my designs worked turned out not to want us filming inside, which was a shame, but we respected it. Well, we had to. One of the students heading this up found another artist out at the edge of town at a studio with the same name -- presumably, they were owned by the same people, but maybe had different managers, because this one was fine with being on film. The artist was a douche, plain and simple, and although I knew not to get a tattoo designed by a douchebag, I went against my better judgment and told him to go ahead and draw up designs. I told him I wanted them to just be black, no color, and he immediately got out his book of tribal flash. No, not tribal, I want them to look like a turtle and a lizard, not like shitty faux-tribal tattoos. I thought I'd gotten it across to him, but he didn't have designs ready until the day of filming, and -- of course -- when we got out there, tired, sunsick, simultaneously wound up and exhausted, with the pressure that we had to do this whole thing in one day, the designs were stupid beyond stupid. Chunky tribal-style bullshit.
I put on the show, like this was the most fun I'd ever had in my life, and although I never saw the footage, I'm sure it came off that way, but I was so not happy from go. At least I only got the one, but still -- any time you're telling yourself, "maybe it's not so bad," that's not a permanent change you should be willingly making to your body. By the next day I was already sobbing about it, but there it was. I think I emailed the students who were doing the video -- may have left voicemail? -- about how upset I was and how much it was likely to cost me to get rid of it, and one wrote me back what I remember as a very cold-fish, obnoxious response. I've been walking around with this stupid-looking black tribal turtle on one foot ever since. Other people did poems or drawings or whatever their thing was; there was a reading/show for it, which I believe also got filmed, but I wasn't involved. No idea what became of the project, although Andrei no doubt gave them an A.
Yesterday, I went in for a laser tattoo removal treatment. Not that I have nothing better to spend my money on, but this thing has continued to bother and embarrass me for years, and getting a tattoo lasered and, eventually, replaced is more achievable than saving up for the car I probably need. It stings -- I have a high enough pain tolerance that I've had doctors comment on it, and I'll definitely admit that it hurt. Very short-term pain, though, and holy macrophages, Batman, but about 12 hours later, when I took the protective gauze off, I could already see a huge difference. The whole thing got lighter, even that quickly, and patches are already almost completely clear. I thought I'd take a "before" picture last night, but it was already on its way into "after." I'm planning to get it lightened enough to be covered over -- two big, gorgeous Betta splendens, one on each foot, chasing each other like the Pisces symbol, with stars, if we can make it work, in the shape of the Pisces constellation with half on each foot. I have an artist here I want to work with on that, but I have to knock out this mistake of a turtle first. I now imagine that'll be all of one or two more laser sessions.
This, and I bought myself a really nice pen (Pelikan M400 in white/tortoise) and a pretty nice bathrobe (one of those two-layer microfiber & terry spa-type ones), both things I've wanted for a couple years. A bracelet and earrings made out of antique typewriter keys, the latter of which I improved markedly by adding a bunch of beads, because god knows nothing is ever quite busy enough for me. During my exams, I learned that I'm one of these people who shops when she's stressed and I didn't do much of that when I was crunching my hardest on the dissertation, so I guess this is probably blowover from that. Or it could be that it's Christmas time and I'm buying gifts for myself in lieu of having anyone else to buy them for, or anyone else to buy them for me. Plus still no interviews, plus still nothing under me like a job I care about or a plan or a life. Started a crochet project (Interweave's Dahlia shawl; Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino in Spanish Moss). Going through revisions but there's no urgency -- I found, for example, that I had several nearly identical pages in two chapters, because I was trying it out in each place and forgot it, and no one said anything about that. They definitely didn't read it, and it's a fair bet no one ever will. Meaningless project unless it gets me a teaching job or at least gets read (and honestly, not very meaningful if all it ever does is sit on ETD and occasionally get downloaded by some other clueless grad student). So: lots of limbo.
I'm even thinking about paying off parking tickets with my next paycheck -- surely a sign of not enough in front of me to do.
14 December 2011
Crows again.
Another day appears to be creeping by without any requests for interviews at MLA. If I go two years in a row without even getting an interview, I don't know. . . well, I don't know a lot of things. It throws my whole career into question -- the only life I've ever tried to make, for which I've given up a lot of things I would really like to have had. Proceeding out of that question mark, a lot of other serious problems: do I keep trying; if so, do I go back to adjuncting, looking at $24k a year, if I can even get full-time teaching, possibly without benefits, leaving myself very little time or energy for an independent creative or scholarly agenda, with my loans coming into repayment; if I don't keep trying, what do I do; can I handle not trying again; can I handle trying again.
There's time -- a little -- MLA doesn't start til January 5 and a decent number of my applications only had deadlines of Nov 15, 28, 30. A very few had Dec 15 deadlines, and all that group but one were poet positions, so they may be interviewing at AWP at the end of February. I've been told that people get interview requests a matter of days before the conference sometimes, and it at least used to be traditional for Yale to make their calls on Christmas Eve. Not that Yale was hiring, at least not in my field, but the point might bear considering.
All the same: I now have two terminal degrees and a book out. I've successfully applied for international research grants (well, fine, one), have a scholarly article coming out next year, have tons of teaching experience -- and I'm not even getting interviews. I'm not alone, either; the discipline has vastly oversold its seats, and has been doing so for years and years. Someone should tote up the number of new PhDs awarded in English each year for the past, say, ten years, and the number of job postings in the US for English professors. It's got to be on the order of hundreds to one, and every year a new batch of PhDs floods out into a world without jobs for us, pushing everyone that much farther away from our intended careers.
If we think like capitalists, it's not even in higher ed's interest to improve the situation for the deeply indebted, un- and underemployed people it's producing. Colleges and universities get very highly-trained people to teach their shittiest classes, and they get them cheap. We're beat down, we're scrupulously trained to live poor, we're naive about other options and how to make any of them work, and we're really, really dedicated to students and teaching. If you don't have any one of those traits, you won't make it through a PhD anyway. Our being extremely intelligent, creative, and capable of teaching much more advanced, specialized, lively classes is somewhere between a nice lagniappe to irrelevant. In some situations, it may be a liability, because as with any other low-end job, if you look like you might (and might be able to) jump ship, places may not hire you anyway. Because adjunct and instructor positions are all one-semester or, if you're lucky, one-year contracts, though, fortunately our better abilities are rarely a detriment to securing insecure and exhausting employment.
It's even to a school's advantage to overwork its contract work force, because if you can pay us so little that we have to take on 4, 5, 6 classes just to get by -- and I've known people with families and kids who somehow teach 7 and 8 a semester -- we have nothing left to devote to advancement. I remember a friend who was on a fiction-writer search several years ago, going through CVs while I was on the phone, and saying about one, "Wow, this guy hasn't done anything in six months. I wonder if he sent us an outdated CV or something." The person hadn't published a new story or given a reading in all of six months, and that was so deviant that it put the document itself into question, along with, of course, the applicant's candidacy. Readings are not easy to come by, even with the blessing of a major city that happens to have a relatively thriving literary culture. You have to go to a lot of readings, most of which will be awful; you probably ought to organize some and invite other people, to incur favors; you have to walk a very fine self-promotional line between making an ass of yourself and vanishing -- and even with all that, you still have to be right place/right time lucky. Publications are at least as rough. And six months out, you already start to look like someone who doesn't know enough about what s/he's doing for a committee to take you seriously. Once you move beyond the assured poverty of working as a graduate teaching assistant into the uncertain and even worse poverty of adjuncting, keeping your CV up takes herculean dedication and a willingness to do without other interests, including a social life. It's more to ask of oneself than the psyche is built to sustain, and a lot of us fall into that pool and never wade out -- which is only to many institutions' advantage.
In some ideal world -- in the world where I'd like to live -- college and university administrators understand how important the humanities are; humanities faculty make the importance of their fields clear. There's a culture that encourages and, oh goodness, requires students to take literature, history, languages, philosophy, so classes can fill and departments can justify real hiring lines. There are some schools where that culture still has a good hold, and on one hand they're elite as hell, but on the other, they're they places where I am probably best suited to teach based on my strengths. They're by far the exception, though, and plenty of other equally well-qualified people, plus, probably, plenty of better-qualified people are applying. Here I am, then, with the last 10.5 years of my life over and nothing yet to move on to. I always look forward to the winter solstice, like it's going to mean something, and it never does. It ought to. If the universe were ordered, it would; when the universe appeared to be ordered, it did. Sun coming back to us and all that. Not today.
I wish humanities departments would get themselves out of the job-training trap. What we do does not prepare students for careers, at least not careers doing anything different what we ourselves do, and it's not even ethical at this point to encourage bright young people to go to grad school in literature. As long as we accept job training as a rubric by which to judge the worth of an aspect of education, we're fucked. What we need to be talking about is joblessness training. Resourceful, informed critical thought; the inquisitiveness and optimism that founds positive cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-class interactions; the same inquisitiveness and optimism that helps you adapt to totally unexpected situations like radical career changes, or straight-up unemployment; the knowledge and attitudes you need to enjoy free or nearly-free things like having really intelligent discussions about books. These are the things that, sometimes, make our miserable lives tolerable, and while of course one hopes the world will be kind to one's students, there's not enough kindness to go around. They would make others' miserable lives tolerable, too, if we'd get up the rhetoric to secure the resources to provide the classes in a context of institutional respect, and get students taking them.
State universities will never go for joblessness training. The ivies might, but it'll still be a long while before their student body has to face these pressures. Small private colleges, maybe, depending on their values, and, well, their donors' values. Let me tell you, I would love to get to one of these places and go to town on establishing why these programs that aren't money-makers and that don't produce money-makers deserve serious support. As much as I loathe meetings, those, I'd go to and I think I could do real good advocating for this cause that's deep in my heart.
They'll have to interview me, though. At the very least. Meanwhile, it's just the anxious emptiness and the desperation.
There's time -- a little -- MLA doesn't start til January 5 and a decent number of my applications only had deadlines of Nov 15, 28, 30. A very few had Dec 15 deadlines, and all that group but one were poet positions, so they may be interviewing at AWP at the end of February. I've been told that people get interview requests a matter of days before the conference sometimes, and it at least used to be traditional for Yale to make their calls on Christmas Eve. Not that Yale was hiring, at least not in my field, but the point might bear considering.
All the same: I now have two terminal degrees and a book out. I've successfully applied for international research grants (well, fine, one), have a scholarly article coming out next year, have tons of teaching experience -- and I'm not even getting interviews. I'm not alone, either; the discipline has vastly oversold its seats, and has been doing so for years and years. Someone should tote up the number of new PhDs awarded in English each year for the past, say, ten years, and the number of job postings in the US for English professors. It's got to be on the order of hundreds to one, and every year a new batch of PhDs floods out into a world without jobs for us, pushing everyone that much farther away from our intended careers.
If we think like capitalists, it's not even in higher ed's interest to improve the situation for the deeply indebted, un- and underemployed people it's producing. Colleges and universities get very highly-trained people to teach their shittiest classes, and they get them cheap. We're beat down, we're scrupulously trained to live poor, we're naive about other options and how to make any of them work, and we're really, really dedicated to students and teaching. If you don't have any one of those traits, you won't make it through a PhD anyway. Our being extremely intelligent, creative, and capable of teaching much more advanced, specialized, lively classes is somewhere between a nice lagniappe to irrelevant. In some situations, it may be a liability, because as with any other low-end job, if you look like you might (and might be able to) jump ship, places may not hire you anyway. Because adjunct and instructor positions are all one-semester or, if you're lucky, one-year contracts, though, fortunately our better abilities are rarely a detriment to securing insecure and exhausting employment.
It's even to a school's advantage to overwork its contract work force, because if you can pay us so little that we have to take on 4, 5, 6 classes just to get by -- and I've known people with families and kids who somehow teach 7 and 8 a semester -- we have nothing left to devote to advancement. I remember a friend who was on a fiction-writer search several years ago, going through CVs while I was on the phone, and saying about one, "Wow, this guy hasn't done anything in six months. I wonder if he sent us an outdated CV or something." The person hadn't published a new story or given a reading in all of six months, and that was so deviant that it put the document itself into question, along with, of course, the applicant's candidacy. Readings are not easy to come by, even with the blessing of a major city that happens to have a relatively thriving literary culture. You have to go to a lot of readings, most of which will be awful; you probably ought to organize some and invite other people, to incur favors; you have to walk a very fine self-promotional line between making an ass of yourself and vanishing -- and even with all that, you still have to be right place/right time lucky. Publications are at least as rough. And six months out, you already start to look like someone who doesn't know enough about what s/he's doing for a committee to take you seriously. Once you move beyond the assured poverty of working as a graduate teaching assistant into the uncertain and even worse poverty of adjuncting, keeping your CV up takes herculean dedication and a willingness to do without other interests, including a social life. It's more to ask of oneself than the psyche is built to sustain, and a lot of us fall into that pool and never wade out -- which is only to many institutions' advantage.
In some ideal world -- in the world where I'd like to live -- college and university administrators understand how important the humanities are; humanities faculty make the importance of their fields clear. There's a culture that encourages and, oh goodness, requires students to take literature, history, languages, philosophy, so classes can fill and departments can justify real hiring lines. There are some schools where that culture still has a good hold, and on one hand they're elite as hell, but on the other, they're they places where I am probably best suited to teach based on my strengths. They're by far the exception, though, and plenty of other equally well-qualified people, plus, probably, plenty of better-qualified people are applying. Here I am, then, with the last 10.5 years of my life over and nothing yet to move on to. I always look forward to the winter solstice, like it's going to mean something, and it never does. It ought to. If the universe were ordered, it would; when the universe appeared to be ordered, it did. Sun coming back to us and all that. Not today.
I wish humanities departments would get themselves out of the job-training trap. What we do does not prepare students for careers, at least not careers doing anything different what we ourselves do, and it's not even ethical at this point to encourage bright young people to go to grad school in literature. As long as we accept job training as a rubric by which to judge the worth of an aspect of education, we're fucked. What we need to be talking about is joblessness training. Resourceful, informed critical thought; the inquisitiveness and optimism that founds positive cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-class interactions; the same inquisitiveness and optimism that helps you adapt to totally unexpected situations like radical career changes, or straight-up unemployment; the knowledge and attitudes you need to enjoy free or nearly-free things like having really intelligent discussions about books. These are the things that, sometimes, make our miserable lives tolerable, and while of course one hopes the world will be kind to one's students, there's not enough kindness to go around. They would make others' miserable lives tolerable, too, if we'd get up the rhetoric to secure the resources to provide the classes in a context of institutional respect, and get students taking them.
State universities will never go for joblessness training. The ivies might, but it'll still be a long while before their student body has to face these pressures. Small private colleges, maybe, depending on their values, and, well, their donors' values. Let me tell you, I would love to get to one of these places and go to town on establishing why these programs that aren't money-makers and that don't produce money-makers deserve serious support. As much as I loathe meetings, those, I'd go to and I think I could do real good advocating for this cause that's deep in my heart.
They'll have to interview me, though. At the very least. Meanwhile, it's just the anxious emptiness and the desperation.
08 December 2011
Anatomy
I think of my prose as muscular and my poetry as all broken bones and blood. There isn't any skin because I don't trust what it does.
Alternatively, the wind blows open the door, the house howls, and I can open my mouth and explode from the inrush of freezing night, or I can sing so hard it pushes the outside back outside. But I can't shut the door. I could never forgive myself.
I've finally made an appointment to get a tattoo lightened so I can cover it over with a much better one.
The Mississippi basin holds the continent's endocrine system.
Alternatively, the wind blows open the door, the house howls, and I can open my mouth and explode from the inrush of freezing night, or I can sing so hard it pushes the outside back outside. But I can't shut the door. I could never forgive myself.
I've finally made an appointment to get a tattoo lightened so I can cover it over with a much better one.
The Mississippi basin holds the continent's endocrine system.
02 December 2011
SPOILER ALERT: she gets the degree
Defended.
Yes, as of yesterday afternoon. It lasted barely over an hour, and everyone was astonishingly pleasant. Hardly anything was said about the chapters on actual poets, so it's possible, and far from unheard-of, that no one read the thing, but the conversation we did have was still excellent, so I have no particular complaints. I got some major and meaningful compliments on both the book -- that what I'm saying about Eliot, for example, is genuinely new, particularly because of the context of the other poets with whom I'm associating him, which indicates that the work seems to hang together (though that's outlined in chapter one, so, again, no evidence anyone necessarily read beyond that); that my highly unorthodox theory about myth is actually right; that I could teach queer theory, even though I don't even identify as a queer theorist, per se. This last came from my advisor, and since QT is his bailiwick, where his reputation is, that was a surprising and very positive casual comment for him to make. I'm not really capturing it. People said a lot of excellent things, and I'm so uptight about anything positive happening to me that I'm not even comfortable typing them out.
They also asked some very real questions, including starting right off by asking me what I mean by "the irrational" and suggesting that this might not even be the right term for my concerns. I, uh, would have liked to have had someone raise that 4 or 5 years ago, when I first began framing this project in precisely those terms, but I guess bringing it to the defense is better than never addressing it at all. (I guess. Oy.) I got an excellent suggestion from Don Revell, whom I asked to be an outside reader (and who was great -- I don't know him beyond liking his work and having seen him speak at a couple conferences, but that was enough to ask him if he'd read my diss, and he did, and turned out to be an awesome asset). He pointed out first that the concepts to which I hew are -- I used the word myself -- phenomenological, measurable, issues of scale, and that measure has a lot of resonance in poetry. Then he suggested that what I'm after might be something more like the disruptive rather than the irrational; on first blush, I was too busy thinking, oh, shit, this is such a key term for me and I don't know how I can afford to punt it, but he's so right. Plus, key to me or not, I'm using it in a different way than poetics usually does; poetry as irrational usually invites a lot of fruity crazy-person bullshit about intuitive and how you can't analyze poetry because it's about synthesis and I don't even know what all useless non-statements. I have no wish to be confused with those people, so I do want to sharpen my language, and what I'm talking about, those inarticulable experiences of confronting death, desire, the natural world, connections to others (and Otherness), etc., are of interest to me for their disruptive character.
I did not, however, have an immediate answer for how I could rework the manuscript to trade out talking about the irrational for talking about the disruptive. Fortunately, no one on my committee asked me that, but I was already asking myself as the meeting went on. Toward the end, my advisor, who is, well, not a math person, asked me something like, "irrational numbers, isn't that a thing in math?" He's right -- and much righter than he could probably have guessed. Dig:
A number of other thoughts came up, several more about clarifying or doing more with some of my key terms -- materialism, community, movement (as transfer, now, as metaphor), sense (which hinges between logic and somatic experience). I got some platinum advice about how to position myself within major questions in modernism, which has always been a struggle for me. About all I can come up with is that I trouble the idea of modernity as new, and instead focus on its connections to its history, vexed though they are; as a corollary, I then trouble the whole idea of novelty that's ruled our critical and pedagogical practice for the past century -- which is accurate, but not a thing you really say to people. Coherence and synthesis look old-fashioned & totalitarian when you're invested in novelty and difference, which most 20th-century lit people are. My take is that there's a lot of unexcavated possibility, in Ovid as much as in Eliot, but no one hears that; they just hear that you're skeptical of the new and they discount you for that. I've tended to look at other people writing on the period's poetry & said, ehhhh, I'm not even really arguing with them so much as doing something different from them, & then looked at people writing on myth & I'm really doing something different from them, and given the whole problem a big, dissatisfied shrug.
One of my committee members said that he'd like to see what I'd say if I took up, e.g., the Frankfurt school -- who write about myth tons and take it seriously, but who treat it as ineluctably and perniciously conservative. That's precisely why I'd shrugged them off, but he's absolutely right that I could probably tease out all kinds of interesting and useful complications and divergent illuminations within that body of thought, and, disagree with them over myth or not, I love those people. Or, well, I love the younger, more literary ones. Not so much the more directly political ones, but still. That should be a great tack to follow.
The biggest, though, I've saved for last, and not only because it was the last thing we talked about. Someone, I forget which person, asked me how I position myself vis-a-vis queer theory. There is kind of a lot of deviant sexuality in my dissertation -- I mean, when Tom Eliot is the straightest poet you have on hand, that is a queer batch of people. That wasn't intentional, though; it was just that the poets whose work seemed to be doing the things in which I was interested also had nonnormative gender identity positions. The big reveal is in my Spicer chapter, the last one, where I argue that poetry itself is kind of queer, the paradoxical but actual experience of being both inspired, receptive, yielding control, and of having mastery not only of craft but at the level of ontology, to create this thing that didn't exist before. I argue that it's especially legible in Spicer because of his poetry's content and its context in his life, but that this is a necessary condition for what I ended up calling Orphic poetics. Right. If I'm right that myth and poetry share their project of articulating the disruptive, approximating it aesthetically/verbally, though, and I think I am, then I'm actually saying that mythmaking is queer in these same ways. How crazy is that? I love it! This plus the Frankfurt school on myth, if I can get enough read to write about them well, will give me an awesome afterword, which is one thing I was hurting for.
The committee were fully satisfied with what I have and told me I was done, which also supports my suspicion that they didn't read the whole manuscript, because I know one of the Eliot chapters (I ended up with two) is riddled with typos. The other probably is, too, and since Spicer was rewritten from scratch and Crane only really written for the first time in the last three months before I handed it off, I imagine they may be similarly sloppy. Since I scheduled myself six weeks between defense and the graduate school's deadline, I want not only to fix those things, but to see how much of the rest of this I can get a start on, too. It's not like I'm busy otherwise -- largely because burying myself in what turned out to be a 364-page manuscript fairly well broke all my other bonds, responsibilities, and interests. If it weren't for job applications, I don't think I would even have known what to do with my brain this past month.
We also talked about a possible additional chapter. One problem here is that academic presses apparently want manuscripts around 90k-100k words, which is IMO tiny, if you want to do anything right. This makes my dissertation already about 100 pages long. It's always easier to cut than to add usefully, but cutting 100 pages out, woo -- that'll be a bear. If I write another chapter, it'll be a bigger, angrier, more muscular bear. I do want to, though, because one of my primary goals for Apostate is to demonstrate that mythopoesis is a live activity, right now, with all sorts of salutary aesthetic and sociopolitical potential. I want therefore to bring the book's historical scope forward to the late 20th century, early 21st if I can
I've been thinking for a while that Derek Walcott's Omeros would take that niche, and have been ruminating over a notion of recolonizing the canon, some kind of redirection of the technologies of colonial power back at the empire. Part of this, cynically, is that it would be nice to have someone in my book who isn't white. Such is the scene. However, I recently reread Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and I was flipping through her Sappho a while ago, and, man, stylistically and thematically, she's so much more in line with what I'm doing and so much more exciting a poet for me. There's queer erotics, bodily monstrosity, acting from the margins -- plus she does such interesting things with absence, and that's something I haven't yet dealt with much. There are things to say about her, I think, through notions of privacy and elision and silence, that would end up making some interesting claims about how and whether we engage texts so ancient they aren't only about myth, but partake of myth in their own being. One of my committee members also brought up Nate Mackey, who of course is another poet whose work I just love, and at one point I had thought he'd be the dissertation's final chapter. I'm not currently sure I could say much about him that would be all that distinct from what I say about Eliot, and since I wouldn't be overturning a lot of misreading in order to make those statements, they wouldn't be as interesting made about Mackey as they are about Eliot.
Not that I've sat down and done the least bit of real work on any of these poets, though. What I'd like to do, if I can land a job that will afford me the support to do it, would be to work up articles and/or conference papers on all these people, see how well I like the possibilities for writing deeper treatments of their work, and look at how any of them would reconfigure the manuscript as a whole. Being able to establish my erotic Orphic poetics, via Spicer, will be a much more powerful move if I can then go on to show someone around today who's doing it and doing it spectacularly. It'll also make disregarded/demodernized Crane seem suddenly more relevant, let me show the aesthetics I see H.D. championing in action long after her day, etc. Word count or not, then, chapter the next is something I want to do. Need to find out how.
I'm happy with the dissertation, and with the time to make it one step better. Very happy with the tenor of my defense. In order to stay that way, I have to refrain from thinking about any other aspect of my life, which, unfortunately, is hard to do since the dissertation was the main thing I've been using to keep from having to think about the rest of my life.
I passed, though. Ten and a half years of my life tied themselves up and became the past. Whatever comes next, I'll never go back there; it's not even possible, and that's a loss that's cause for at least modest ecstasy.
Yes, as of yesterday afternoon. It lasted barely over an hour, and everyone was astonishingly pleasant. Hardly anything was said about the chapters on actual poets, so it's possible, and far from unheard-of, that no one read the thing, but the conversation we did have was still excellent, so I have no particular complaints. I got some major and meaningful compliments on both the book -- that what I'm saying about Eliot, for example, is genuinely new, particularly because of the context of the other poets with whom I'm associating him, which indicates that the work seems to hang together (though that's outlined in chapter one, so, again, no evidence anyone necessarily read beyond that); that my highly unorthodox theory about myth is actually right; that I could teach queer theory, even though I don't even identify as a queer theorist, per se. This last came from my advisor, and since QT is his bailiwick, where his reputation is, that was a surprising and very positive casual comment for him to make. I'm not really capturing it. People said a lot of excellent things, and I'm so uptight about anything positive happening to me that I'm not even comfortable typing them out.
They also asked some very real questions, including starting right off by asking me what I mean by "the irrational" and suggesting that this might not even be the right term for my concerns. I, uh, would have liked to have had someone raise that 4 or 5 years ago, when I first began framing this project in precisely those terms, but I guess bringing it to the defense is better than never addressing it at all. (I guess. Oy.) I got an excellent suggestion from Don Revell, whom I asked to be an outside reader (and who was great -- I don't know him beyond liking his work and having seen him speak at a couple conferences, but that was enough to ask him if he'd read my diss, and he did, and turned out to be an awesome asset). He pointed out first that the concepts to which I hew are -- I used the word myself -- phenomenological, measurable, issues of scale, and that measure has a lot of resonance in poetry. Then he suggested that what I'm after might be something more like the disruptive rather than the irrational; on first blush, I was too busy thinking, oh, shit, this is such a key term for me and I don't know how I can afford to punt it, but he's so right. Plus, key to me or not, I'm using it in a different way than poetics usually does; poetry as irrational usually invites a lot of fruity crazy-person bullshit about intuitive and how you can't analyze poetry because it's about synthesis and I don't even know what all useless non-statements. I have no wish to be confused with those people, so I do want to sharpen my language, and what I'm talking about, those inarticulable experiences of confronting death, desire, the natural world, connections to others (and Otherness), etc., are of interest to me for their disruptive character.
I did not, however, have an immediate answer for how I could rework the manuscript to trade out talking about the irrational for talking about the disruptive. Fortunately, no one on my committee asked me that, but I was already asking myself as the meeting went on. Toward the end, my advisor, who is, well, not a math person, asked me something like, "irrational numbers, isn't that a thing in math?" He's right -- and much righter than he could probably have guessed. Dig:
- Irrational numbers are those which cannot be represented by a fraction or ratio. Inapt to proportion, division, reason; they are inarticulable by ordinary numbering systems. (And the articulate is that which is jointed, divided, cut into pieces, and only therefore spoken; the unspoken/inarticulate is silent and also whole. As pain. As I've said before.)
- We have to invent ways to represent them -- pi, e. Draw an immediate parallel to catachresis or at least to innovation broadly conceived.
- If we do try to represent them numerically, they extend the system beyond its own bounds, nonterminating, nonrepeating.
- They progress (nonterminating) but their progress cannot be predicted (nonrepeating).
- Compare 22/7, one of the common approximations for pi. Inexact, but functional; doesn't change the reality of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, but lets us bring it into mathematics, albeit in a deformed form.
- Compare also the succession of ways we've approximated pi: 25/8 (Babylonian), 3.141666 (Ptolemaic), 3.141864 (ancient Chinese), a sigma equation called the Madhava-Leibniz series (Indian and German independently), various later series, and the familiar 3.14. Each came to be through a different approach; each serves different ends, e.g. accuracy vs. convenience, well. Data points around an attractor.
- Compare then death. The statistical likelihood of dying from a given cause or at a given age, biochemical descriptions of the body in decay, psychological descriptions of grief and coping with loss, even religious systematization (rationalization) of death's meaning -- none of these have anything to do with the experience of actually confronting it, as a future for oneself or the manner by which one loses another. They might be called approximations.
A number of other thoughts came up, several more about clarifying or doing more with some of my key terms -- materialism, community, movement (as transfer, now, as metaphor), sense (which hinges between logic and somatic experience). I got some platinum advice about how to position myself within major questions in modernism, which has always been a struggle for me. About all I can come up with is that I trouble the idea of modernity as new, and instead focus on its connections to its history, vexed though they are; as a corollary, I then trouble the whole idea of novelty that's ruled our critical and pedagogical practice for the past century -- which is accurate, but not a thing you really say to people. Coherence and synthesis look old-fashioned & totalitarian when you're invested in novelty and difference, which most 20th-century lit people are. My take is that there's a lot of unexcavated possibility, in Ovid as much as in Eliot, but no one hears that; they just hear that you're skeptical of the new and they discount you for that. I've tended to look at other people writing on the period's poetry & said, ehhhh, I'm not even really arguing with them so much as doing something different from them, & then looked at people writing on myth & I'm really doing something different from them, and given the whole problem a big, dissatisfied shrug.
One of my committee members said that he'd like to see what I'd say if I took up, e.g., the Frankfurt school -- who write about myth tons and take it seriously, but who treat it as ineluctably and perniciously conservative. That's precisely why I'd shrugged them off, but he's absolutely right that I could probably tease out all kinds of interesting and useful complications and divergent illuminations within that body of thought, and, disagree with them over myth or not, I love those people. Or, well, I love the younger, more literary ones. Not so much the more directly political ones, but still. That should be a great tack to follow.
The biggest, though, I've saved for last, and not only because it was the last thing we talked about. Someone, I forget which person, asked me how I position myself vis-a-vis queer theory. There is kind of a lot of deviant sexuality in my dissertation -- I mean, when Tom Eliot is the straightest poet you have on hand, that is a queer batch of people. That wasn't intentional, though; it was just that the poets whose work seemed to be doing the things in which I was interested also had nonnormative gender identity positions. The big reveal is in my Spicer chapter, the last one, where I argue that poetry itself is kind of queer, the paradoxical but actual experience of being both inspired, receptive, yielding control, and of having mastery not only of craft but at the level of ontology, to create this thing that didn't exist before. I argue that it's especially legible in Spicer because of his poetry's content and its context in his life, but that this is a necessary condition for what I ended up calling Orphic poetics. Right. If I'm right that myth and poetry share their project of articulating the disruptive, approximating it aesthetically/verbally, though, and I think I am, then I'm actually saying that mythmaking is queer in these same ways. How crazy is that? I love it! This plus the Frankfurt school on myth, if I can get enough read to write about them well, will give me an awesome afterword, which is one thing I was hurting for.
The committee were fully satisfied with what I have and told me I was done, which also supports my suspicion that they didn't read the whole manuscript, because I know one of the Eliot chapters (I ended up with two) is riddled with typos. The other probably is, too, and since Spicer was rewritten from scratch and Crane only really written for the first time in the last three months before I handed it off, I imagine they may be similarly sloppy. Since I scheduled myself six weeks between defense and the graduate school's deadline, I want not only to fix those things, but to see how much of the rest of this I can get a start on, too. It's not like I'm busy otherwise -- largely because burying myself in what turned out to be a 364-page manuscript fairly well broke all my other bonds, responsibilities, and interests. If it weren't for job applications, I don't think I would even have known what to do with my brain this past month.
We also talked about a possible additional chapter. One problem here is that academic presses apparently want manuscripts around 90k-100k words, which is IMO tiny, if you want to do anything right. This makes my dissertation already about 100 pages long. It's always easier to cut than to add usefully, but cutting 100 pages out, woo -- that'll be a bear. If I write another chapter, it'll be a bigger, angrier, more muscular bear. I do want to, though, because one of my primary goals for Apostate is to demonstrate that mythopoesis is a live activity, right now, with all sorts of salutary aesthetic and sociopolitical potential. I want therefore to bring the book's historical scope forward to the late 20th century, early 21st if I can
I've been thinking for a while that Derek Walcott's Omeros would take that niche, and have been ruminating over a notion of recolonizing the canon, some kind of redirection of the technologies of colonial power back at the empire. Part of this, cynically, is that it would be nice to have someone in my book who isn't white. Such is the scene. However, I recently reread Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and I was flipping through her Sappho a while ago, and, man, stylistically and thematically, she's so much more in line with what I'm doing and so much more exciting a poet for me. There's queer erotics, bodily monstrosity, acting from the margins -- plus she does such interesting things with absence, and that's something I haven't yet dealt with much. There are things to say about her, I think, through notions of privacy and elision and silence, that would end up making some interesting claims about how and whether we engage texts so ancient they aren't only about myth, but partake of myth in their own being. One of my committee members also brought up Nate Mackey, who of course is another poet whose work I just love, and at one point I had thought he'd be the dissertation's final chapter. I'm not currently sure I could say much about him that would be all that distinct from what I say about Eliot, and since I wouldn't be overturning a lot of misreading in order to make those statements, they wouldn't be as interesting made about Mackey as they are about Eliot.
Not that I've sat down and done the least bit of real work on any of these poets, though. What I'd like to do, if I can land a job that will afford me the support to do it, would be to work up articles and/or conference papers on all these people, see how well I like the possibilities for writing deeper treatments of their work, and look at how any of them would reconfigure the manuscript as a whole. Being able to establish my erotic Orphic poetics, via Spicer, will be a much more powerful move if I can then go on to show someone around today who's doing it and doing it spectacularly. It'll also make disregarded/demodernized Crane seem suddenly more relevant, let me show the aesthetics I see H.D. championing in action long after her day, etc. Word count or not, then, chapter the next is something I want to do. Need to find out how.
I'm happy with the dissertation, and with the time to make it one step better. Very happy with the tenor of my defense. In order to stay that way, I have to refrain from thinking about any other aspect of my life, which, unfortunately, is hard to do since the dissertation was the main thing I've been using to keep from having to think about the rest of my life.
I passed, though. Ten and a half years of my life tied themselves up and became the past. Whatever comes next, I'll never go back there; it's not even possible, and that's a loss that's cause for at least modest ecstasy.
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