Thumbs Up



The semester's coming to a close and not a moment too soon. We are all aware of the dangers of obsessive study. Moreover, we are also aware that there's been far too much moping going on--and that fun as that is, it's the kind of thing that should perhaps be administered in way tiny doses. Doses tinier, at any rate, than the ones presented here.

So. Some additional complaints: (1) I wish I were a more efficient writer. I just cut fifty pages out of the novel. I'm not even counting the two discarded monster versions of the same thing that were abandoned at several stages--I think there might be stuff in there that might resurface as stand-alone material, but for now it's just sitting in various folders. (2) I'm loving the material I'm gathering for the dissertation, but I'm also keenly aware that I'm diving headfirst into this monster very soon--that if all goes according to plan, I'll be done with school and looking for jobs in schools very soon, this despite my knowing that the market is saturated, and that my areas of interest (the history of the novel, the 19th century novel, and contemporary American and British novels) are already likely flooded with other PhDs, and plus that academic life is apparently not terribly different from an academic novel.

And so. The opposite of complaints. I'm thrilled. Inexplicably so. There's a pile of clean laundry in the middle of my room, and as soon as I'm done with this post I'm getting to folding. (I am, unlike Achewood's Cornelius Bear, a fan of laundry.) I wrote a couple of pages in the newly trimmed novel and they are good.

Plus: just got the West Branch issues in which "Divers" appears and they're lovely. And Redivider has accepted "The Orlando Sonnet" and so it may show up sometime next year.

And I'll be presenting at AWP this year! Should you be attending too, you should say hi. I'll be presenting on Saturday at 9 am (it's panel number S111), on the relationship between academia and contemporary publishing.

Arms Outstretched

I wrote this bit a few days ago:

Somewhere, in some parallel universe, there's a dictionary of cumbersome words for cumbersome feelings. In this dictionary there's probably a word for the weeks where you're feeling slightly off all day, from morning to night, and where all the things that give you (I mean, by the way, me) comfort have been slightly tweaked, so that everything you love--exercise, reading, writing, company, solitude--is just slightly irritating, as are you. You, right now, are slightly irritated and in turn irritating. With yourself. With the world. With your face. With your vanity. With your monstrous self-regard. With your navel-gazing. And this irritation--which is very much a real irritation, a kind of minute physical void right below the sternum--

Anyway. It goes on. You needn't hear the rest of it, since it's more of the same. And, at any rate, the irritation is gone. It's been replaced by an inexplainable loneliness--inexplainable because this week I've not gone a day without spending at least a bit of time with people, all sorts of people, people whose wonderfulness is undeniable and a boon and a source of amazement. As in: these are amazing people, these people I know.

Listen: all I want to do right now is listen to sad music. Or, failing that, all I want to do is listen to love songs and run an inventory of all my failures. Let's set up a little index, a little catalog, a little database.

Here's what I love, though: that the heart keeps running its course oblivious to all common sense, like some hamster in some bright-blue wire-mesh wheel. The heart, the body, the world--we all go on.

Listen: I miss my hamster. I miss Molly.

Or, because you're here, because you're reading this, I'd like to know where you've been, where you're going, whether you've felt this tiny yawning void too. Did I say hello? Did I tell you I was happy to see you?

It's late--I should have been asleep half-an-hour ago. It's late and I'm not sure what I wanted to tell you. I'm a bit happy, I'm a bit sad. But that's all of us. Somehow, for some reason, it seemed really important to find the words for it and now I can't remember why.