In Which My Font of Useless Information Pays Off

I will be the first to admit that my brain stores a lot of trivia--yes, I was the person you wanted on your team for Trivial Pursuit, me and someone who could answer the sports questions. Usually my knowledge elicits a quirked eyebrow, or a comment along the lines of "How do you remember these things?"

To which I always reply, "I'm just a font of useless information."

Sometimes I vary my response and say, "I'm just a font of worthless information."

But today, my magpie brain paid off. My spin instructor put together a ride playlist of songs from 80's movies. To sweeten the deal, she gave out stars to people who could name the song and/or the movie it came from. No star for artist's name, more's the pity.

I won!!! I got 10 stars.

Maybe I should be embarrassed. Maybe it shows that I'm pathetic.

Maybe you would ask, "So, you can name song titles, artists, movies, and probably whole plotlines of these movies, yet you still cannot tell me the plot of Bleak House?"

Sadly, that statement would be true.

Others of you might be asking, "What did you win?"

A copy of the CD of course.

As I pedalled, I thought about those 80's movies, about characters with whom I identified then, and the characters that speak to me today. More on that in a later post--it gives you time to go watch Footloose again. Or Fame. Or The Breakfast Club (choose your favorite John Hughes film: Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off).

As for me, I'm going to watch Purple Rain--I haven't ever seen it before.

Ah, Prince. Ah, the joys of androgyny. That subject, too, is a post for another day. My work day of many meetings must begin.

A Lake District to Call My Own

Sandy Longhorn has a great post about submitting (she's trying to follow Kelli Russell Agodon's advice to submit like a man) and networking. I responded to her post, but I've been haunted by these ideas for several hours now, so I decided to write further in a more developed post.

In her post, she concludes, "Finally, I'm thrilled about these acceptances, of course, but there is a little voice nagging at the back of my head. The little voice is saying something about not really 'earning' these because one editor is an online friend and the other sought me out based on previous work. I'm wondering how much gender there is in that little voice. Is 'networking' a bad word? Does it devalue the work itself? And then I think of all those DWG poets (dead white guy poets) who were all closely interconnected (I'm thinking of the Romantics in particular) and who exchanged letters and social visits with the editors of the major journals of their day. And then I think about the fact that I've had requests for poems a couple of times in the past and those requests did not lead to publication. Hmmmmmm...I'm going to keep working through this, and you can bet that I'm going to keep Submitting Like a Man!"

This quote set me off to thinking about all those dead white guys and their networks. I think of artists' groups that have been formed as support groups for artists doing work outside of what their culture supports. In fact, I would argue that the reason we've heard of them at all is that they had a group to sustain them in the early years.

My Brit Lit background will show here; I think of the Lake District writers of the early Romantic period, the later Romantics who had a variety of groupings, the Pre-Raph poets and painters, the Bloomsbury group. I think of those clusters in New England just before the Civil War and the Beats. I think of more feminist groups from the 1970's onward than I can count.

What stands out for me is that these groups believed in themselves, even when everyone outside of the group did not. I have always loved those tales of fierce support and mourned the collapse of those groups as individual members found success.

Feminist scholars, including me, would be quick to point out that those earlier groups of dead white guys were made possible by the work of women. Go read Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals, if you don't believe me. She does enormous amounts of work in terms of cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Various members of the group take long walks, and Dorothy walks too, unless she's sick. I once figured out that their daily walks averaged 11 miles! On top of this, she kept her journal and worked on Wordsworth's poems, both in terms of creating them and revising them and writing out clean copies.

Or consider the case of Mary Shelley, a young widow who devoted much of her life as a widow to establishing the worth of the work of her husband Percy Bysshe. She had quite the motivation to do so, beyond her belief in his work. She needed money, and if she could establish his artistic worth, then perhaps monetary worth would follow.

On Diane Rehm's show yesterday, Andre Dubus III said that if he was ever a wealthy man, he would just go out and give money to single moms, because single moms have it the hardest in our culture. Mary Shelley's plight shows that single moms have always had a tough time.

As a literary scholar, I've always wondered what creative work has been lost to life circumstances. Look at what Mary Shelley did produce. If I had to choose one piece of work to represent the greatness of the Romantic time period, it would be Frankenstein. Yes, I said it, and I'll stand by it. I'm claiming that Mary Shelley was the best writer of the Romantic time period. The best. Not the best female writer. No. The best.

Yes, I realize that she wrote very little, compared to some of the more prolific writers of the time period (like, oh, say, Wordsworth or Byron). And yes, I do wonder what she would have written had she not had to work so hard to provide bread for her children.

Like other feminist scholars, I will always wonder what wasn't created. I realize you could make that case for certain male writers too (like Keats). But women have faced obstacles that men simply do not face--like childbirth. The invention of birth control methods that women can control may turn out to be one of the greatest enablers of female creativity since literacy.

Or perhaps I'll turn out to be wrong. Perhaps one of the greatest enablers of creativity, female and male, is community. In my comment to Sandy's post, I talked about how today we're using the Internet to form communities, communities that may perform some of the same functions that face-to-face groups performed in an earlier age. Through online connections, we can feel that we aren't crazy, that our work has value, that we should persist. We can come away with inspiration. I know that some blogger friends exchange manuscripts, and many more of us will review book and interview authors and help with publicity.

These connections could even lead to publication, and there's no need to feel strange about this. In fact, that's the way it should work. It's the way that it worked for countless artists in the past.

Will future literary scholars look back at our time in breathless wonder at what we've been able to create? I envision a future me, who reads about my work and charts out my connections and says, "I wish I had had the kind of Internet community that Kristin had" (in much the same way I have yearned for a Lake District to call my own).

In many ways, we're in uncharted waters, since our connections don't rely on all of us being in the same geographical place. In fact, with various technologies, like cameras and lightning fast Internet connections, we can form relationships that are almost real-time. Long ago, we could have corresponded by mail, but it would have taken lots of time (and during some periods, lots of money). We could have exchanged manuscripts and bookmarks and collaged cards, but there would have been long weeks and months of silence.

Of course, you might argue that the silence would have left us time to do more work. I have frittered away more time than I care to think about, not only going to worthwhile blogs but in reading absolute drivel.

Of course, I always read drivel, but it was drivel on paper, not on pixels.

No, I am grateful for these Internet connections, even if with them, comes the temptation to distraction. Once I considered getting an MFA, even though I had a Ph.D., because I wanted a larger literary community, and I was unsure of any other way to do it. I was impatient with the friend-by-friend literary community building on my local level, and frustrated with the slow pace of the mail in communicating with friends in other places. And of course, there's that age-old frustration of other commitments (work and family chief amongst them) keeping my community apart for long periods of time.

Now I feel that I'm part of an even larger network. If my local friend is too harried for lunch, I'll spend my lunch reading and responding to the blogs of my favorite far-flung poets.

In the not-too-distant future, I'll talk about the process about moving from the Internet realm to the real-world realm and some etiquette implications.

But for now, I'll fix an additional pot of coffee and invite everyone over for virtual scones to celebrate our Internet Lake Districts.

The Birth of Blogging (Back in the 1500s)

Today is the birthday of Michel de Montaigne. Many literary historians credit Montaigne with creating and perfecting the art of the personal essay--although many of Montaigne's contemporaries found his digressions distracting.

I first started teaching the British Literature Survey class in 1992. I taught British Lit from the beginning to 1789, a dizzying task. I remember talking about Montaigne and the personal essay and seeing blank looks. Students could understand the road from the Mystery plays to Shakespeare to 18th century farces to the movies they loved. They understood how poetry had evolved. But essays? They hadn't really read essays and couldn't be convinced that essays, particularly personal essays, were important. Who cared what one individual guy thought about things?

My how life has changed. Now I have many students who want to refuse to read anything that isn't based in fact. They feel that a true story has more validity. They scoff at writers who "just make stuff up," as if it's somehow easier and therefore more dismissible.

I used to refuse to read memoirs, just generally, on principle, unless the author had actually done something interesting--and going down into a self-destructive spiral was not how I defined interesting. I loved to read memoirs by writers and collections of interviews with writers and other artists.

I still do, but now I'm watching those memoirs unspool in real time. I love hearing a poet talk about assembling a manuscript and then hearing that the manuscript will be published. I love seeing those steps: choosing a cover, assembling a book tour, planning individual readings. I have learned so much.

So, thank you Montaigne. Thank you for thinking that a regular person's insights were important enough to capture, that we didn't have to be a queen or a king to be worthy. Thank you for writing down your thoughts. Thank you for publishing them. Thank you for hacking out the trail that would be traversed by so many important people.

Movie Disappointments and Perfections on Oscars Week-end

So, on this Sunday when lots and lots of people will tune in to see the Academy Awards, I have movie disappointments on the brain. I have not actually seen many of the movies that are nominated for awards this year, or any year. Gone are my high school years, the early 80's, where my friends and I went to several movies a week-end. Given the fact that fewer movies were made back then, there were a few points in the year when we had actually seen everything that was released.

Ah, high school, back when I had scads of free time. High school took up about as much of my time as my current job--why did it seem I had more time? Was it the fact that there were fewer other distractions? Fewer movies, fewer television channels, no Internet? Was I better at time management?

Anyway, back to movies. On Friday night, we watched the latest (was it the latest?) Woody Allen movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona. It had gotten good reviews, so I took the chance. As I suffered through this movie, I tried to remember the last Woody Allen movie I really enjoyed. Then I tried to figure out why the critics liked this movie. I wouldn't have added it to the Netflix queue if I hadn't heard good things about it.

It could have been a sexy movie, but it was dull. It could have been an interesting exploration of alternative relationships, a triad, not a diad. We only got about 10 minutes of that. It could have been an interesting exploration of art and what it means to be a creative person, but it fell back on that old stereotype that artists are barking mad people who will stick a knife in you (both literally and figuratively) and shoot you. I even had hopes for the scenery, but alas, no. And what horrible, stilted dialogue--NOBODY talks like that, particularly not beautiful, young women. Sigh.

Then yesterday, we watched the remake of Fame. What a hideous movie. We couldn't keep the characters straight because they were barely developed (much like the Woody Allen movie). Were the characters talented? Hard to say. The male dancer who wasn't good enough? We saw him in his first week of class, but we never saw him dance again--and we get the interview that he has with the dance teacher where she tells him he'll never make a living by dancing, but maybe he could teach. Well, I'll just have to take her word for it, won't I? And my spouse was the one who noted that the other students wouldn't have seemed nearly as talented without all their electronics. The lunchroom scene for example--it began with a boombox.

It was SO bad that we watched the first part of the original movie. SO MUCH BETTER. What a relief to see students playing instruments in that lunchroom. What a delight to think of a lunchroom that had two old pianos just hanging out there. What a delight to see students improvise. What a delight to see students dancing like they've actually been classically trained. Ah well.

And then we switched gears. We watched When Harry Met Sally. And let me take a quick aside here to say how wonderful it is that my husband was perfectly happy to have this chick flick film fest with me. We wouldn't want to do it every Saturday. Some Saturdays we will watch nothing but Westerns--and then I get the Best Wife Award.

I'm happy to report that When Harry Met Sally still holds up all these years. Witty dialogue, crisp plotting, beautiful settings, perfectly done minor characters, truly funny bits. It was a great way to end my disappointing movie streak.

Will I be watching the Academy Awards? No, I will not. I just don't care enough to suffer through all those hours and all those commercials (I feel that way about a great many things these days)--I'll just catch the recap tomorrow.

Would You Blog for a Living?

Recently, I've heard of several people who just up and quit their jobs. My first thought was to wonder how awful the job must have become for someone to just quit in this economy. And then I wondered if there are some people who are just better off than I am. I know that economists tell us we should have 6 months to 1 year of salary in our savings account. Yeah, right.

But then I wondered if those people had better jobs waiting, which led me to a different train of thought. What kind of wonderful job would have to be offered to me to get me to leave the safety and the known qualities of my current job for something else?

Well, it's getting hard for me to think of voluntarily trading in my current salary for something lower; in my younger years, if the job looked better, I might not have given a salary cut a second thought. Likewise, I'm getting to the age (45) where I need to think about health insurance and retirement.

So, let's say that all of those factors stayed the same. What would I like to spend my days doing, if anything could be possible?

My friend and I had a conversation yesterday about whether or not we'd really like to be paid to write on a rigorous schedule. She said that even if she was able to write whatever she wanted, she wouldn't want to work out of her home. She needs the human interaction that her job gives her.

Many days, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed with human interaction and the thought of staying home writing appeals to me. Would that appeal wear off quickly? Hard to say.

Yesterday, I saw this article about a woman who makes a living blogging, so the topic was on my brain. Of course, if you read the article carefully, you'll find out that it isn't just blogging pays this woman's bills. She does a lot of speaking engagements and some product endorsements, and she's written 2 books. Still . . .

So, if you could blog the way you always blog, but make a living at it, would you want to? Or would that be too much pressure?

I'd do it in a heart beat. I already feel the pressure of a self-imposed deadline; I used to think it was just because I was a student, but it has persisted. I write, even when no one is there to crack the whip (well, no one but me). I wonder if/how my writing would change if someone was there dangling carrots.

Thursday Infrequencies

I walked outside this morning at 5 a.m.--fog! Silvery, misty fog. I've lived in parts of the country where fog in the morning would not be unusual, but we don't get much fog at my house at the southern tip of the U.S. We're three miles from the beach, so there's usually too much breeze for fog to form. There's also either too much moisture in the air, which would result in
rain, not fog, or not much moisture in the air at all, especially in the non-summer months.

People think of South Florida as humid and hot, but most of the rest of the U.S. east of the Mississippi River is much more hot and humid, at least in the summer. Here we break records if our high temps go above 96 degrees; I've lived places where the summer highs were 110 for days at a time, and those temps weren't record breaking. Likewise, with our beach breezes, the humidity doesn't really get dense, the way it does in many other parts of the country.

So, fog this morning. And then I went for a run, which is also infrequent for me these days. Four days a week, I go to spin class, and I force myself to pedal at a furious pace. My plan is always to run 2 other days during the week, but I rarely do. Some days I walk. On fewer days, I run. Some days, exercise is just not part of the plan.

Yesterday, I got notice that two of my poems had been accepted for pacificREVIEW. Hurrah! And later, I stopped to think about how long it had been since my work had been accepted by a new venue, especially a venue that had been in existence for awhile. I've had good luck with literary magazines that are just starting, but journals to which I've been submitting for years but never getting an acceptance? Not as much.

Maybe I should have realized that my luck was turning when I started getting handwritten notes on certain rejection slips. But then what do I do with the experience of almost having a poem accepted by a journal last year (rejected in the final round, darn it!), and then this year, a rejection slip without any encouragement at all? It's always hard to know, isn't it?

So, I will do what I've always done, submit and submit and submit again.

In the meantime, I have some prose pieces to write--for money! As well as for love! That's been infrequent, but I'm hoping it will become the new normal. More on those pieces as they appear.

If you're a Florida resident, you have until tomorrow to get your chapbook manuscript in the mail for the YellowJacket Press Peter Meinke Prize--no entry fee! Now that's an infrequent event. You can get more details here.

Tomorrow, I have the day off. Yes, the rest of the world had Monday off, but for reasons mysterious to me, our school will celebrate Presidents Day tomorrow. I'll continue to wrestle with the poem I've been writing that thinks about Metro cards and subways. I used to keep a Metro card with me, even when I didn't live in D.C. My younger self saw that Metro card as a talisman, something to keep me from seeming ordinary and boring. My younger self thought that being ordinary and boring would be the WORST THING EVER.

Now, I'm thinking about subways and journeys and life and wondering how to create a poem that doesn't seem cliched and all too frequent. Today I'm thinking about being on a subway line to a destination that wasn't what I planned, but isn't that bad, all things considered.

Today, I'm grateful for the days when my life is ordinary and boring, and happily, my daily life is frequently ordinary and boring. My grown up self knows that unordinary lives are often wretched. Non-boring means that a family member lies dying or a hurricane has come through or the house needs repair or the court system has opened its gaping maw and sucked you right into its grinding jaws.

Let the subway ride of my life be normal and boring! Let me conserve all the energy that goes into engineering an eventful life go to my creative pursuits instead.

How We Know the World Has Changed

I keep watching events in the Middle East and shaking my head (often my response to the Middle East, no matter what's going on). I keep thinking about these world leaders who seem to have been in power forever, and now, suddenly, it looks like they won't be. I think about how we've spelled their names differently through the years (al-Gaddafi, Gaddafi, Qaddafi, and back in the Reagan days, weren't we spelling his name with a K?). These people begin to seem immortal, except, of course, they're not.

I remember when Reagan bombed Libya in April of 1986--the whole world expected terrorist retribution. I was headed home from college to work in my summer job as social worker in D.C. I took the Metro everywhere. I was convinced that terrorists would blow up the Metro and end my young life.

I was probably in far more danger from other human elements on the Metro than Libyan terrorists. I was working in a dicey part of D.C., and that was the summer that D.C. had the nation's highest murder rate. But I kept my attention at high alert that whole summer. I was expecting terrorists or nuclear attack or any number of threats.

The world has clearly changed, based on my Metro experiences a few weeks ago. Several nights I came home after the evening rush hour, but still a bit early for club hoppers to be coming home. Still, I was amazed by how many young folks were staggering around drunk in the Metro stations.

These weren't down-on-their-luck drunks or homeless people looking for shelter from the cold by buying a Metro card. No, these were well-dressed hipster types and the females who loved them. In my younger days, I wouldn't have gotten drunk and descended into the caverns of the subway stations. It just didn't feel safe to me.

Truth to tell, it still doesn't feel safe to me. I was also astonished at what people will talk about on the Metro. I eavesdropped--the quarters were close, so how could I avoid it? I remember a pair of young women talking about their sexual exploits. I also remember the unsavory men nearby who were listening--and I worried about these young women and what might happen if the unsavory men decided to follow them. The young women were so oblivious, and for a brief moment, I envied them. What kind of world did they grow up in and live in to feel so safe?

Not the world of my youth, that's for sure. I was taught that the world was a dangerous place. There were rapists waiting, and if you escaped the rapists, the U.S.S.R. would be trying to resume taking over the world momentarily--and maybe, we'd all blow ourselves up in a nuclear bomb. Ah, the waning decades of the twentieth century! How strangely nostalgic I feel.

And yet, how hopeful I feel with these events in the Middle East. It's similar to how I felt in 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. I cheered and yet worried for his safety. And yes, I know that it's a far distance from the first moments of liberty to a stable democratic country (South Africa still isn't really there), but how I love these first moments, when we can say, "Good-bye evil dictators! Be sure to release the captives on your way out!"