If Obama Appointed You Chair of the NEA

Usually, my favorite escapist fantasy that involves careers has me daydreaming about being Supreme Court Justice: job for life, weighing in on important national issues, office in downtown D.C., my own parking space at National Airport--what could make a job better?

This morning's story in The New York Times has me thinking about being head of the National Endowment for the Arts. Actually, it was this ending of the article: "Cultural mavens like himself feel they “have one of their own” in the White House, he added. 'It makes the arts community feel finally, for the first time in a long time, there might be some wind at their back.'"

And I thought, wait, cultural mavens didn't see Dana Gioia (exiting Chair) as one of their own? Why? Just because he was a poet and not some big theatre producer?

I know there are many poets (and other arts people) who hate Gioia for any number of reasons, but I'm not one of them. I thought that some of his ideas during his tenure at the NEA were very cool, although I'm not sure I'm remembering them perfectly. The one I remember most? A Shakespeare production in every state, put on by travelling Shakespeare companies. Of course, we could argue about the merits of Shakespeare. It's not hard to see a production of Shakespeare in any corner of the U.S. in any given month, is it? Far better to put on a touring production of August Wilson's plays, perhaps. So maybe cultural mavens were right to feel that Gioia wasn't one of their own.

The article made me think about what I'd do if Obama had appointed me to that position. I've been thinking in that direction for many of Obama's appointments. Basically, Obama must say, "Here's a mess--want to try to fix it?" Some people rise to that challenge. I'd find it overwhelming, depending on how much budget I had to work with.

I've always told my students that they should plan what they would do in leadership positions, because they may very well find themselves there some day, and it might be sooner than they think. I tell them about Nelson Mandela, and that the reason that he was prepared to be president of South Africa was that he spent all that time in jail (more years than most of my students have been alive) planning for what he would do if he took over the country. He didn't nurse anger or bitterness. No, he planned, along with his compatriots, who were jailed with them.

Then I give them a copy of an interview (in the fabulous book We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews) with Jello Biafra which has this challenge: "It's time to start thinking, 'What do I do if I suddenly find myself in charge?'" (page 46 of the first edition). Many of my students find this idea to be a wonderful writing prompt.

So perhaps as I sit through boring meetings, that will be my daydream prompt. I'll dream bigger than just becoming dean. What if some future president called upon me to be the Chair of the NEA? How would I promote the Arts and various artists during my tenure?

New Poem up at "Qarrtsiluni"

One of my poems is up at the online journal, Qarrtsiluni. For months, they've been publishing work on the theme of Economy. A darker poem of mine will also be published shortly, but for now, you can enjoy the more humorous poem, "Collective," by going here. You can even hear me read it, if you're so inclined.

I got to the office early and decided to be big and brave and listen. It wasn't too bad. Ever since I was a child, listening to my voice on the tape recorder, I've always felt repelled when I heard my voice. But I guess 40 some odd years of listening to it has given me a certain fondness for it, even though I'd change it if I could. I'm getting to that midlife age where I'm just happy if body parts are still working--at a certain point, one knows how many ways the body can go wrong, and likely will go wrong, if we live long enough.

Qarrtsiluni is such a cool online journal, and I've thought that long before they published my work. They show the possibilities that exist for an online journal that paper journals can't match: recordings, collaborations, links, art that would be too expensive to print on paper. They've got a call for submissions posted now--if you're an artist, go check it out on the right sidebar when you link to my poem.

Poetry Postcard report

I counted up the poetry postcards that I've written for this project, and I've written 10 (but I'm trying to mail them out one at a time). I thought, wow, I'm a third of the way through. So far, I've only gotten 1 postcard, but I'm not surprised. When my mom goes on vacation, she mails postcards each day, and I receive them in clumps.

I'm photocopying my poem before I send the postcard, not because I think they're fabulous as is, but because I like having a record. I'm finding the postcard confining, but a good exercise in restraint. I'm keeping the photocopy to use as a prompt to a longer poem later.

Here's one that I wrote last week that I like:

We snack on salmon
that once swam
in a cold northern sea.

We sip wine that tastes
of minerals from the soil
of a different continent.

Our provisions have travelled
further than we ever will.

I find that not only am I writing these small postcards, but I'm writing longer poems too. Hurrah!

It's probably not too late to join this experiment, but I can't tell you for sure, because the website always recognizes me, so I can't see what the first time visitor to the site would see. It's great fun, and I'm such a sucker for mail delivered the old fashioned way: with a stamp, to a mailbox.

Happy Birthday, Percy Shelley

Today is Percy Shelley's birthday. Although I never liked much of his poetry, I did use his play, "The Cenci," extensively in my dissertation, so I feel a bit of fondness for him. His personal life, however, gives me pause.

He left his pregnant wife and toddler to run away with Mary Godwin (who would go on to write Frankenstein)--underage Mary Godwin. The two left a trail of wrecked lives behind them: the pregnant wife committed suicide; Mary Godwin's half sister, Fanny Imlay, felt so abandoned that she committed suicide; Claire Clairmont (Mary Godwin's stepsister) ran away with Mary and Percy and began an ill-considered affair with Byron. Three of Mary's children died during the first years of their travels (staying ahead of bill collectors). Reread Frankenstein with those biographical facts in mind.

And yet, I tend to let Percy Shelley off the hook a bit--I used his work in my dissertation, after all. I'm not willing to give everyone such a free pass.

For example, it's hard for me to like Wordsworth, now that I know the biography of Dorothy Wordsworth. I will always wonder if Coleridge's story might have had a happier ending, had William Wordsworth been a better friend. With those facts in mind, I've lost my adolescent love of Wordsworth's poetry.

I never loved Percy Shelley's poems, so perhaps there was less estimation to lose. And yes, I have a Ph.D. in British Literature, and yes, I understand that it may be a mark of lack of sophistication to let my judgment of authors' personal lives to color my estimation of their work. I'm also a feminist, so it's hard for me to discard relevant facts, particularly when I think about how much creative work was done by men because the women in their lives took care of the details of daily life: the cooking, cleaning, childcare. And many women did the hard work of the business side of writing for male writers whom they loved: transcribing, keeping a journal for male writers to cannibalize, working for publication, publicizing.

Imagine what kind of writer you might be if you had a Dorothy Wordsworth in your life. Read her journals from the Grasmere period and dream a little dream.

We likely wouldn't remember Percy Shelley today, if Mary hadn't devoted much of her life to securing his reputation. Frankly, I think she's the more interesting writer, and I find it intriguing that for over 100 years, she was remembered primarily as Percy's wife. Even when I was in undergraduate school in the mid-80's, textbooks still rarely recognized the genius of Frankenstein. Now I could make a cogent argument that that book is one of the most important literary works to come out of the Romantic movement.

So, happy birthday, Percy Shelley. You were smart enough to choose a good wife, even if she was underage and you were already married to someone else. Perhaps, in another hundred years, we'll look at your biography differently. After all, my favorite P.B. Shelley poem, "Mutability," promises that the only thing we can count on is change: "Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but Mutability."

On this Day, in 1492

On this day, in 1492, Columbus began his journey to "discover" America. Of course, he had other plans, and plenty of other people had been here before him, some discoverers, some settlers (for a great book on the subject of the "discovery" of America, I highly recommend Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World).

So, if Columbus left today, that means it took him 2 months to get to his goal. I suppose that's not long, in the overall scope of things. And yet, at Charlestowne Landing, I saw a boat that was a replica of the boat that some of the first English settlers used to get here. It was teeny-tiny. I can't imagine sailing up the coast to the next harbor in it, much less across the Atlantic. Maybe it would have been easier, back before everyone knew how big the Atlantic was.

I've often wondered if Columbus (and other explorers) ever woke up in the middle of the night and said, "What am I doing here? I could have just settled down with my sweetheart, had a few kids, watched the sunset every night while I enjoyed my wine." Of course, back then, a lot of options were closed to people, and that's why they set off for the horizon. No job opportunities in the Old World? Head west! Sweetheart left you for another (or died)? Head west!

It's easy to feel full of enthusiasm at the beginning of a project. Far harder to keep up that enthusiasm when you're in the middle of a vast ocean, with nothing but your instruments and the stars to guide you, with no sense of how far away the land for which you're searching might be.

I'm guessing that many of us have similar feelings during our creative lives. Maybe we have a manuscript that we feel is good, but no publisher has chosen yet. Maybe we have a batch of poems that seem to go together, but we have no sense of how to assemble the manuscript, while at the same time, we know we need to create 20 more poems. Maybe we have a vision of the kind of job that might support our creative selves, but no idea of how to get to where we want to be from where we are.

What can we learn from Columbus? To answer fully would take more research than I have time for right now. But I keep thinking of the ship's logs and the captain's journals. Perhaps we need to do a bit more journalling/blogging/notetaking/observing/calibrating/focused daydreaming.

Or maybe we need to just set sail, knowing that we're going to be out of sight of land for awhile. Maybe we need to get over our need for safe harbor, for knowing exactly where we're going.

Or maybe we need a benefactor. Who might be Queen Isabella for us?

And we probably need to know that while we think we're sailing off for India, we might come across a continent that we didn't know existed. Columbus was disappointed with his discovery: no gold, no spices, disappointing land. Yet, he started all sorts of revolutions with his discovery. Imagine a life without corn, sweet peppers, tomatoes. Imagine life without chocolate. Of course, if I was looking through the Native American lens, I might say, "Imagine life without smallpox."

Still, the metaphor holds for the creative life. Many of us start off with a vision for where we'd like to go, perhaps even with five and ten year plans. Yet if we're open to some alternate paths, we might find ourselves making intriguing discoveries that we'd never have made, had we stuck religiously to our original plans.

Cooking Shows, Meaningful Work, and a Sauce for Your Salmon

In this article in this week-end's The New York Times magazine section, Michael Pollan asks this question that's essential to understanding the time in which we live: "How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves?" He goes on to think about the evolution of cooking programs, from Julia Child to our current crop on the Food Network, and to wonder what it all means for us. He asks why we don't watch T.V. shows where people change the oil in a car, and he comes up with some interesting opinions. He asks what really made us evolve into being human, not just one more type of primate: the invention of language, the invention of fire? He makes a persuasive case for cooking.

He also addresses the question of meaningful work. He notes how many time-saving devices we have and asks, "So what are we doing with the time we save by outsourcing our food preparation to corporations and 16-year-old burger flippers? Working, commuting to work, surfing the Internet and, perhaps most curiously of all, watching other people cook on television." He talks about making a souffle and says, "How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow."

It's an interesting article, but I must confess to bias, since I've always loved Pollan's work; his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is one of my all-time favorites. I've also always loved to cook, and it's one of the few activities that I love that I still make time to do several times a week. In fact, cooking may be the only thing I love to do that I do more than once a week.

I've been feeling like a bit of a slacker because so many of our meals have been grilled lately, which takes so much less time and effort than a lot of the soups, breads, and casseroles that I make on a regular basis. I've really been enjoying the wild Alaskan salmon that we've had for the last several weeks.

Yesterday, I wanted something different to serve with our salmon, so I decided to experiment with sour cream. I love the taste of maple with salmon, so for one of the sauces, I put several gobs of fat free sour cream in a bowl, along with a swirl of real maple syrup. Yummmmm.

My spouse, on the other hand, is not as much of a sweet freak as I am, so I made a different sauce for him. I put several gobs of fat free sour cream in a bowl and several teaspoons of horseradish. Again, a yummy concoction.

These sauces couldn't have been more easy, but it's hard for me to count them as real cooking or recipe development. It's sobering to realize that many Americans couldn't do what I did yesterday: to think, hmm, how could I make something different to go along with this grilled salmon? In fact, many Americans couldn't figure out how to cook that slab of fish. As I waited at the fish counter, a man asked, "How do you cook that salmon, anyway?" Grill, poach, throw in the oven--how could you go wrong?

Well, there's one way--you could overcook it. The first time I cooked fish, I totally ruined it by leaving it in a hot oven for 45 minutes. I wanted to make sure I killed any bacteria, and I certainly did that! It was hard to even claim it as fish jerky.

Still, this is how we learn, and as one of the experts in the Pollan article asked, how many of us have learned these skills? Who will teach the next generation? Even a lot of the cooking shows rely on "foods" from the food-industrial complex.

Happily, just as earlier generations had monks that preserved learning, we will find that this kind of learning has been protected in pockets of people. Cookbooks can still be checked out from the library, and one can learn to cook by following instructions carefully--that's how I did it (and a generation and a half before me, that's how people learned to cook with Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking). I predict that we're about to see an explosion of interest in good food and sustainable agriculture, much the way Julia Child ushered in a new era. We see some glimmerings of that coming explosion in the interest in farmer's markets and canning and cooking at home. Perhaps, in twenty years, we won't even recognize the grim situation that Pollan has documented in his books and articles. Perhaps the changes he's advocated will have come to fruition.

Exercising in the Dark

My spinning class takes place in the dark--well, not true dark. There's the violet light that makes our socks and other white surfaces glow, and the wall sconces by each door burn softly. I always like that moment when the instructor turns off the lights, and I can only see a vague outline of myself in the mirror. In the dim light, most of us look like riders in the Tour de France.

I've often exercised in the dark--or at least, the halflight. My favorite time to run is early, early in the morning, long before most people drive to work. People always ask me if I'm scared, but I've felt that I was in more danger later, when the sun comes up and people speed through the neighborhood streets. When I run, at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, there's a car here or there, but I see them long before they see me, and I can stay out of their way. Most of the drunk people have already passed out, so they're not a danger anymore, the way they might be if I ran in the evening.

I like that feeling of invisibility. I like that no one can see my flesh jiggle. I like that I can look my worst while working on transforming myself into some version of my best self.

As I pedaled and pedaled during yesterday's spinning session, I thought about how my writing life and my exercise life are similar. I prefer to write early in the morning, before the world wakes up, before phone calls start and the stores open and a thousand distractions tempt me away. I like to attend to my own priorities before I go to the office and face the demands of my bosses, our faculty members, and our students. The demands of the day leave me too exhausted by the end of the day to do much more than collapse in a heap. But early in the morning, ah, that's a different story.

Metaphorically, we're all creating in the dark, in many ways. Most creative types head off in directions they wouldn't have anticipated in earlier years. Many creative people work for years before something they've created gains some traction. It's not unusual for a person to work on a project for months or years before they understand the true shape of it. Every beautiful creation stands on top of mounds of failed projects that came before it.

I tend to be a solitary writer, as I've most often been a solitary exerciser. Yet, I don't mind having a group or a partner. One of my most fruitful periods as a writer happened during 1996-1998, when a friend and I met weekly to share a meal and to show each other a short story we'd written that week. Likewise, the most progress I've made as a runner happened during the years I'd be training for an event with someone. I'd never sign up for a half marathon on my own--but to run with a friend? Sure.

I don't need a friend or a group to force myself to exercise, or to write, but it gives my life richness. I feel lucky to be the kind of person who can adapt to my current circumstances, whatever they are.