Thursday, May 24, 2007
The Good News Keeps A-Coming!
I just received word that my first story is to appear in an upcoming issue of The Writers Post Journal. I took a writing class on a whim after I was turned down for a full-time job at the school where I teach. This was one of the stories that I wrote for that class. I guess things have a way of working out.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Oh, Sweet Irony!
Revenge is sweet, but I don’t think people could possibly love it as much as they do irony. Is there anything more satisfying than seeing a self-important windbag fall prey to the same weakness that he excoriates in others (I’m thinking right now of Christian preachers who are closet homosexuals)?
But irony, while satisfying to recognize in the lives of others, is hard to acknowledge in oneself. I took a graduate class a few years ago in Romantic poetry. My teacher was a knowledgeable man and a good scholar. He was also a member of what I like to call the masturbatory school of literary criticism. He would sometimes read a line from Wordsworth or Keats, then sit back, gaze into the air, and say what a great line that was. That was it. He was usually right, but I didn’t think I needed a professor to tell me that.
As a writing teacher, I have become a card-carrying member of the same school of criticism. I’ll read from one of the essays my students were supposed to have read, and just comment on what a great passage it was. I don’t tell my students about that graduate class, though. There are some things that are just best left unsaid.
It is with this sense of irony in mind that I gather my thoughts and try to figure out what to say about Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. It’s this year’s “One Book, One Philadelphia” choice. Like The Things They Carried (last year’s selection, I think), this is a memoir written by someone who went through a deeply traumatic experience (Why do they have to be memoirs?). For Eire, it’s having to leave Cuba after the Revolution and becoming a refugee, then a foster child, in the States. While this is a good book, written with a self-deprecating, caustic humor and a bitterness and guilt of childhood, I can’t imagine it would go over very well at a book discussion in Philadelphia.
What I liked best about Eire was his tone. You should read the book yourself, and if you do, you’ll probably notice that my post “Portrait of the Artist” (see below) was a poor attempt to emulate Eire’s style.
So it turns out that there’s very little I can offer about the book, except saying, “What a good book that was!” If anyone ever decides to cover Alanis Morisette’s song, and wants to change the words to reflect things that are truly ironic and not merely unfortunate, this would fit well.
But irony, while satisfying to recognize in the lives of others, is hard to acknowledge in oneself. I took a graduate class a few years ago in Romantic poetry. My teacher was a knowledgeable man and a good scholar. He was also a member of what I like to call the masturbatory school of literary criticism. He would sometimes read a line from Wordsworth or Keats, then sit back, gaze into the air, and say what a great line that was. That was it. He was usually right, but I didn’t think I needed a professor to tell me that.
As a writing teacher, I have become a card-carrying member of the same school of criticism. I’ll read from one of the essays my students were supposed to have read, and just comment on what a great passage it was. I don’t tell my students about that graduate class, though. There are some things that are just best left unsaid.
It is with this sense of irony in mind that I gather my thoughts and try to figure out what to say about Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. It’s this year’s “One Book, One Philadelphia” choice. Like The Things They Carried (last year’s selection, I think), this is a memoir written by someone who went through a deeply traumatic experience (Why do they have to be memoirs?). For Eire, it’s having to leave Cuba after the Revolution and becoming a refugee, then a foster child, in the States. While this is a good book, written with a self-deprecating, caustic humor and a bitterness and guilt of childhood, I can’t imagine it would go over very well at a book discussion in Philadelphia.
What I liked best about Eire was his tone. You should read the book yourself, and if you do, you’ll probably notice that my post “Portrait of the Artist” (see below) was a poor attempt to emulate Eire’s style.
So it turns out that there’s very little I can offer about the book, except saying, “What a good book that was!” If anyone ever decides to cover Alanis Morisette’s song, and wants to change the words to reflect things that are truly ironic and not merely unfortunate, this would fit well.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 1
I just got an email from Mark Alexander. He runs the site that has all of Richard Mitchell's writings. He's working on Mitchell's entry for Wikipedia and he's compiling remembrances from people who knew the man. Here's the first installment.
Richard Mitchell was the most important teacher I ever had. The best think he taught me was that I had a lot to learn, about reading, about writing, about living. After my first class with him (Masterpieces in Western Literature, Spring 2000), I started to fill in the deficiencies in my education. I’m still working on it.
I took Adolescent Literature with him in the Spring of 2001. I didn’t need the class, but I wanted to see if I could improve on the less-than-stellar work I had done for him in the first class.
I anxiously awaited the return of our first essays. He was not very punctual about returning essays. I think he said he had left them at a friend’s house for a week. He didn’t give me my essay, but instead told me to see him after class. I had been feeling pretty good about my work, but this request scared me so much that I remember little of his lecture.
After class he led me to a small seminar room, windowless and barely large enough to hold the table and chairs. He followed me and closed the door behind him. The room got smaller. Then he handed me my paper and I saw, in his barely legible handwriting, A+. He called it “one of the best undergraduate papers he had ever read” (I wrote his exact words down as soon as I left the building. I refer to them often, especially when my writing is going nowhere.). He asked what my plans were after graduation, and I told him I was applying to graduate programs. He said that was a good idea. In fact, he told me he had planned to “kick my ass” if I had answered otherwise.
For some strange reason, there was a stack of original issues of The Underground Grammarian in the middle of the desk. He asked if I knew who put them there. Having never been in that room before, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I told him that I had read them all online and learned a great deal about writing in the process, but had never seen an original. So he grabbed a stack, gave them to me, and sent me on my way.
I think I was one of only a few students in his classes who took him for anything other than a crazy old professor. Having him as a teacher was my most important experience in college, but most of my classmates probably don’t even remember his name. I became a college English teacher 3 years ago, and remembering Mitchell has helped me cope with many an uninterested student. It seems like I’ve never stopped learning from him. I probably never will.
Richard Mitchell was the most important teacher I ever had. The best think he taught me was that I had a lot to learn, about reading, about writing, about living. After my first class with him (Masterpieces in Western Literature, Spring 2000), I started to fill in the deficiencies in my education. I’m still working on it.
I took Adolescent Literature with him in the Spring of 2001. I didn’t need the class, but I wanted to see if I could improve on the less-than-stellar work I had done for him in the first class.
I anxiously awaited the return of our first essays. He was not very punctual about returning essays. I think he said he had left them at a friend’s house for a week. He didn’t give me my essay, but instead told me to see him after class. I had been feeling pretty good about my work, but this request scared me so much that I remember little of his lecture.
After class he led me to a small seminar room, windowless and barely large enough to hold the table and chairs. He followed me and closed the door behind him. The room got smaller. Then he handed me my paper and I saw, in his barely legible handwriting, A+. He called it “one of the best undergraduate papers he had ever read” (I wrote his exact words down as soon as I left the building. I refer to them often, especially when my writing is going nowhere.). He asked what my plans were after graduation, and I told him I was applying to graduate programs. He said that was a good idea. In fact, he told me he had planned to “kick my ass” if I had answered otherwise.
For some strange reason, there was a stack of original issues of The Underground Grammarian in the middle of the desk. He asked if I knew who put them there. Having never been in that room before, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I told him that I had read them all online and learned a great deal about writing in the process, but had never seen an original. So he grabbed a stack, gave them to me, and sent me on my way.
I think I was one of only a few students in his classes who took him for anything other than a crazy old professor. Having him as a teacher was my most important experience in college, but most of my classmates probably don’t even remember his name. I became a college English teacher 3 years ago, and remembering Mitchell has helped me cope with many an uninterested student. It seems like I’ve never stopped learning from him. I probably never will.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Portrait of the Artist
I sometimes rationalize that the reason I haven’t been able to write anything worth reading is my childhood. Many artists lead tumultuous lives full of disappointment, addiction, and sadness. Many of their lives end tragically. Not so for me. I grew up fairly well off in a suburban neighborhood. None of the artist-stuff happened to me. Sometimes I used to wish that it had. If only I could’ve had bad parents, like O’Neill, or suffered from poor health, like Flaubert, or been in a war, like Hemingway. Anything at all and I could’ve used that tragedy for inspiration with my writing.
No. My life has been comfortable. In fact, the only emotional scars I carry from childhood result from things I’ve seen on television. One night my parents were watching Gone With the Wind. I was sitting on the floor, arranging my baseball cards in plastic sleeves in a brown binder. This was a full-time occupation for me. I would separate the players by team, then I’d start over and do it by position. Then by skill level. I even resorted to separating them by age, by place of birth (all this information was on the back of the card). Anything to pass the time. Sometimes, now, as a grow man, I think wistfully of those days when I could spend an afternoon pointlessly arranging baseball cards, and not have to worry about having put off something important that I was to do. Sometimes I have these thought as I type something for my blog. My desk is by the window, and I see my neighbor mowing his lawn, though it’s impossible to tell what’s just been cut because he already mowed it less than a week ago. Another neighbor is watering her plants, though it looks like it’ll rain later on. It’s not baseball cards, but it’ll do.
To get back to the movie. I remember a man in the movie was screaming loud enough to distract me from my distraction. He was the Confederate soldier with the wounded leg. The doctor was just explaining how they had no medicine and how they badly needed more supplies. He looked at this poor soldier’s leg, and announced that he had gangrene and needed the leg removed. Instantly someone appeared with a saw, and since there was no medicine, there was no prep needed for the procedure. “Noooooooooooo! Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaasssse!” the soldier bellowed, and then he was silent. I asked my mom if he had died, and she said he had only passed out from the pain.
You could pass out from pain? That was news to me. I thought that I knew pain, but I had never passed out. A few years later, when my mom took me to a different doctor (my regular doctor was on vacation) to examine a wart on the side of my head, I experienced pain. This wart was right on my temple, covered by my hair. The only reason I knew it was there was because I had scratched it while washing my hair. The doctor saw it and told my mom (he never spoke directly to me) that he would burn it off. No Novocain, though, because the needle would hurt more than the procedure. Maybe he was right. If so, the needle probably would’ve made me pass out like that Confederate soldier, because the pain was by far the worst I have ever felt. But I didn’t pass out.
Of course there are those poor people who don’t use their suffering to create good art. But “That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” goes Nietzsche’s aphorism that has long since become cliché. Nietzsche, by the way, is another example of an artist (his work seems more like poetry to me than philosophy) whose bitter life led to great art. He spent much of his life in obscurity, chronically ill, moving from place to place in Europe seeking healthier climes. His last lucid moment occurred years before he died. He saw a man beating a horse, then intervened on the horse’s behalf. He then collapsed in the street and spent the rest of his life hopelessly insane. By the time people started to take his writing seriously, he was well beyond the point where he could appreciate it. How’s that for tragedy?
So since there’s no guarantee that you’ll reap the benefits of your suffering, maybe it’s better to be comfortable and create nothing. Unless you need to rationalize why you can’t seem to write anything worthwhile.
No. My life has been comfortable. In fact, the only emotional scars I carry from childhood result from things I’ve seen on television. One night my parents were watching Gone With the Wind. I was sitting on the floor, arranging my baseball cards in plastic sleeves in a brown binder. This was a full-time occupation for me. I would separate the players by team, then I’d start over and do it by position. Then by skill level. I even resorted to separating them by age, by place of birth (all this information was on the back of the card). Anything to pass the time. Sometimes, now, as a grow man, I think wistfully of those days when I could spend an afternoon pointlessly arranging baseball cards, and not have to worry about having put off something important that I was to do. Sometimes I have these thought as I type something for my blog. My desk is by the window, and I see my neighbor mowing his lawn, though it’s impossible to tell what’s just been cut because he already mowed it less than a week ago. Another neighbor is watering her plants, though it looks like it’ll rain later on. It’s not baseball cards, but it’ll do.
To get back to the movie. I remember a man in the movie was screaming loud enough to distract me from my distraction. He was the Confederate soldier with the wounded leg. The doctor was just explaining how they had no medicine and how they badly needed more supplies. He looked at this poor soldier’s leg, and announced that he had gangrene and needed the leg removed. Instantly someone appeared with a saw, and since there was no medicine, there was no prep needed for the procedure. “Noooooooooooo! Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaasssse!” the soldier bellowed, and then he was silent. I asked my mom if he had died, and she said he had only passed out from the pain.
You could pass out from pain? That was news to me. I thought that I knew pain, but I had never passed out. A few years later, when my mom took me to a different doctor (my regular doctor was on vacation) to examine a wart on the side of my head, I experienced pain. This wart was right on my temple, covered by my hair. The only reason I knew it was there was because I had scratched it while washing my hair. The doctor saw it and told my mom (he never spoke directly to me) that he would burn it off. No Novocain, though, because the needle would hurt more than the procedure. Maybe he was right. If so, the needle probably would’ve made me pass out like that Confederate soldier, because the pain was by far the worst I have ever felt. But I didn’t pass out.
Of course there are those poor people who don’t use their suffering to create good art. But “That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” goes Nietzsche’s aphorism that has long since become cliché. Nietzsche, by the way, is another example of an artist (his work seems more like poetry to me than philosophy) whose bitter life led to great art. He spent much of his life in obscurity, chronically ill, moving from place to place in Europe seeking healthier climes. His last lucid moment occurred years before he died. He saw a man beating a horse, then intervened on the horse’s behalf. He then collapsed in the street and spent the rest of his life hopelessly insane. By the time people started to take his writing seriously, he was well beyond the point where he could appreciate it. How’s that for tragedy?
So since there’s no guarantee that you’ll reap the benefits of your suffering, maybe it’s better to be comfortable and create nothing. Unless you need to rationalize why you can’t seem to write anything worthwhile.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Good News!
I just found out that I'm going to be published for the first time. It's an essay on Captain Ahab and it'll appear in a new journal called The Melville and Milton Review. Keeping this blog has brought some good luck.
Find the article here.
Find the article here.
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