"9 to 5" and the Modern Office

Usually, one of our local PBS stations shows very old movies on Saturday nights. By very old, I mean movies that were made before I was born in 1965. However, last night, the station aired the 1980 movie 9 to 5. I was sucked right in, at least until the movie devolved into a curious crime caper.

It was interesting to see what the office was like 30 years ago: the dictaphone, the IBM Selectric typewriter. I remember lusting for one of those, before I lusted for a personal computer. There's that shot of the secretarial pool: all those desks, with nary a cubicle, in one huge room. People typed, ran the adding machines, and talked into the phone. How noisy it must have been!

Many of those office machines have gone into storage closets, but there's a scene where the Jane Fonda character battles a demonic copy machine. Yes, the demonic copy machine is still with us, at least in my workplace. Each time the IT department upgrades, we end up with a machine that has more places where a jam can occur.

I found the working dynamic fascinating, and thankfully, unfamiliar to me. There's that sexist boss, barking orders, sexually harassing the female workforce, stealing the ideas of the female workers while refusing to promote them. I know how lucky I am not to have experienced that. I know that there are many workplaces where women are desperate to keep their jobs, and thus unable to utilize the laws that could protect them from hazardous bosses. I know that I'm lucky because I'm educated, which so far has put me in a different working class than the characters in the movie, and I have knowledge of the law, and I have money for a lawyer, should I need it. Not every woman is so fortunate.

Still, the workplace has changed; most men realize they can't get away with their outrageous behavior forever, and the offenders have changed. Often, their behavior becomes more subtle and more difficult to prosecute. I dream of the day when all those dinosaurs die out. Sadly, I suspect that the dynamic has less to do with gender roles, and more to do with how some people abuse power. The abusive boss we will always have with us, but the nature of the abuse will change.

Every so often, I encounter an old-school kind of person, and I'm shocked at what he (it's always a he) will say. Luckily, so far, those people have never been in a position of power over me, and those people don't often last long in the modern workplace. Those people just pose too big a risk of a lawsuit to keep them around very long.

I started a poem once with these lines:

Yes, I will make that pot of coffee,
if you change the oil in my car.

I'd be happy to proofread
your project this week-end,
if you come to my house
to mow the lawn.

I could go on and on like that, but I can't figure out where to end the poem and what the larger point should be. I've played with lots of possibilities.

The other thing I noticed was how that movie set office emptied out at 5:00. Yeah, right, that doesn't happen these days. Many of us are working 8 to 6 or longer. Sigh.

As I think about how the office experience has changed, I think ahead to the next 30 years. How will our 2010 offices be unrecognizable in 2040?

Which Title Is Most Effective? Vote!!!

I've spent part of the morning assembling my working woman chapbook (some time ago, you may remember that I wrote about noticing how many of my recent poems discuss mid-life despair at working life and wondering if a book of those poems could work or whether it would be too depressing; unfortunately, I can't find the original blog post).

Now for the hard part: choosing a title. I don't have the same kind of trouble choosing titles that some people have written about. Some people can't find a title because no title seems applicable to the book as a whole.

On the contrary, I usually have at least 5 titles with which I am swoonily in love. I suppose it's a good problem to have.

So, I'm turning to you, faithful readers (both here and on Facebook). Which title would most appeal to you? I'm going to leave aside the issue of which title is most applicable to the collection, since they all are (perhaps I'll save that for a future blog post, if there's enough information). All of these potential titles are also titles of individual poems in the collection.

What I really want to know is which title would most compel you to pick up the book?

Here are your title options, in no particular order (you may also say, "None of them are appealing; try again":

1. Scout at Midlife

2. Sleepless Beauties

3. I Stand Here Shredding Documents

4. Meeting Hell

5. Penelope Plans a Play Date

Let me know what you think; if you want to expound on why/how you chose the one you did and/or rejected the others, feel free. And thanks for playing/voting.

Natasha Trethewey at Broward College Wednesday, February 10!

If you're in South Florida next week (your flight north was delayed by the massive blizzard that's forming today, you came for the Super Bowl and couldn't bear to leave, you've migrated for the winter, whatever reason), put this event on your calendar.

Natasha Trethewey will be reading at the South Campus of Broward College on Wednesday, February 10, at 7:30 p.m. The event is free (as is parking), and it will be held in the big theatre. Events at this venue are always lovely: enthusiastic audiences, a good mix of students and community, refreshments, books to buy (bring cash or your checkbook).

The South Campus of Broward College is located on Pines Boulevard, at the corner of 72nd and Pines. If you're coming from Interstate 95, take the Hollywood Boulevard exit and head west; you'll see the campus on your left, just before University Boulevard. If you're coming from the Turnpike, take the Hollywood Boulevard/Pines Boulevard exit and head west; you'll see the camus on your left, just before University Boulevard. If you're coming from points west (the Everglades?), take Pines Boulevard east, and you'll see the campus on your right; if you get to the Turnpike, you've missed it.

Natasha Trethewey, you may or may not remember, won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago for Native Guard, a collection that left me breathless with both envy (the good kind, the kind that makes me want to be a better writer) and appreciation. I can hardly wait to see what kind of reading she puts on.

"Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot"--Happy Birthday, Betty Friedan!

Today is the birthday of Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique. If I had to choose a feminist book which changed my life, it wouldn't be this one. I'd probably give that award to Our Bodies, Ourselves.

I say that her book didn't change my life because truth to tell, I've never read the whole thing. I'm familiar with her argument, so in many ways, I feel like I have, but I haven't. I have a used copy, which I bought for 80 cents from George's Book Exchange on Broad River Road in Columbia, South Carolina (I know this because of the stamp inside the book)--that store probably doesn't exist anymore, and given all the development near the Columbia Mall area, I'd guess that the strip mall probably doesn't exist anymore either.

Here's the opening paragraph:


"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"

I feel like I've read this book because the central thesis is so familiar: women don't find fulfillment being wives and mothers. And let me revisit my idea that this book isn't in the running as the most influential feminist book of my lifetime. As I think about my life and my ideas (and ideals), I see the deep influence of this book.

I arrived at college declaring, "Marriage is a trap." I was convinced that children were even more of a trap--at least you could leave a marriage. I was convinced that the traditional role of women held nothing but heartbreak, and I was determined to carve out an alternative.

So, you'd think that maybe I would have majored in something a little more lucrative than English and Sociology. But for many reasons (love of literature, conviction that the world would shortly end in a nuclear blast, hatred of accounting and finance), I didn't want to join the waves of my generation heading towards business school. My artist soul rebelled at that thought too.

This morning, as I reread the first few paragraphs of The Feminine Mystique, I see the lives of modern women (and probably many men) reflected. So many parents that I know are running themselves ragged by trying to balance the chores that must be done to maintain life with the activities of their children with their jobs that must be done to bring money into the household. I know many people, still, who stare into the darkness as they wonder, is this all? People with children and without, people in their dream jobs and in other arenas, people who work at home and those of us who rarely see our homes anymore because we work so many hours--we're all still dissatisfied with our quality of life.

I chose not to have children, but as I think about my work life, I can't help but see some family dynamics in the dynamics of the work day. There's this person who functions as the 3 year old, this group who functions as the dysfunctional in-laws, this bully who reminds me of an abusive spouse, and luckily, for me, the majority of my co-workers who remind me of my loving family members.

I used to think that Betty Friedan tapped into something unique to middle class women, but now I think what she describes is a variation of the classic idea of alienation (see, my Sociology education continues to serve me!). Our modern lives alienate many of us from the people that we want to be. Our lives are out of sync with our values, our work even more so. We work hard to achieve balance, but we fail to see that we're playing a rigged game.

I always have this idea on the brain, but lately, I've seen it popping up on various blogs and in various newspaper articles. I particularly enjoyed this post on Historiann's site, which declares that balance is a myth. Even people with what once would have seemed like dream jobs in academia are overworked and stressed.

Of course, they probably always were. If Marx noticed that workers were suffering alienation, then it's not a modern problem.

How do we solve it? If only I knew.

I think it's important in our increasingly frazzled lives to remember what it was we wanted our lives to be. I had a vision of living some kind of bohemian life in a big city, where I'd stay up all night writing and spend the day in rehearsing whatever drama event was next and I'd cook wonderful meals for intriguing people who would fill my mind with thrilling ideas. And where would I get the money for this life? My younger self just assumed that I'd earn a living wage with my art.

So, my current life as Interim Chair of my department doesn't quite match what my sixteen year old envisioned. But I spend a chunk of time each day working in some sort of creative arena. I'm lucky to have friends, both locally and far-flung, who fill my mind with thrilling ideas (and there's books and blogs and all sorts of Internet reading). I do live near big cities, and have family in other big cities, so when I want to muster up the energy, I can do all the cultural things I once envisioned doing.

I find myself sinking into swamps of despair during those weeks when work consumes all my free time and there's nothing left for poetry, for leisurely meals with friends, for cultural events. Happily, those periods haven't lasted long--perhaps because my Sociology training, along with my feminist training and activist training and spiritual training, warned me that most work will happily consume every scrap of time you offer it. Every day I try valiantly to save some part of my life for me, for my deepest yearnings, the ones which the world doesn't reward with money.

Revising the Book-Length Manuscript

This morning, I woke up thinking about ways I might rearrange my book length manuscript, Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site. I did an extensive revision of the manuscript a few years ago, as I realized that my publishing trajectory might be different from a traditional one.

Before I did the revision a few years ago, I had a substantial chunk of my chapbook as the first section. I thought it would show to book publishers that my work was publishable. Plus, many of the first books I'd been studying seemed to do it that way.

But later, I reconsidered. After all, I had sold almost 100 copies of that chapbook, and I'm a firm believer that my mailing lists are going to be the main driver of sales. If my audience had already bought the poems once in chapbook form, why would they purchase them again? My hope, of course, was that they'd buy them again so that they got some new poems and a more permanent home for the chapbook poems.

Now it's becoming clear to me that for most of us, we're going to go longer times between book publishing (and I include chapbooks here) than we once might have, unless we self-publish. I've decided to see chapbooks as books in their own right, not something to be included in a larger work.

I have that luxury because I have a huge reservoir of poems. I have several manuscripts, many of them chapbook size, including my newest one that's book-length, When God Switched Fabrics. I'm feeling more excited about that one, but I'm not ready to give up on Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site yet.

I've decided not to revise that manuscript this year. I'll spend the year sending it to any publishers I've overlooked, and if I can't find a publisher this year, I'll think about a possible revision in 2011.

I am interested in how people decide to retire a manuscript. I have several. Some are products of my earlier writing life, and as time went by, I decided that my later work was more sophisticated. In fact, that's probably my main reason for retiring a manuscript.

Retire or revise? How do we decide?

Would James Joyce Have Watched "Lost"?

Tonight again I ask, as I have for several seasons now, "Do I really have the time and commitment to watch Lost this year?" Of course, this year is different--it's the last season. I might not have to ask this question again.

For the first several seasons, I was committed to the show. I delighted in all the twists and turns. Just when I thought I had figured it out, ka-blam, there went my theory. I loved all the allusions, even though I couldn't order them into anything that helped me figure out the story. I loved the fact that there was so much reward in watching the reruns, so many things to notice that I didn't catch on the first viewing.

In short, watching Lost is similar to my study of literature. Finally, there's a payoff for being such a font of usually worthless information! I'm the woman you want on your team when you play Trivial Pursuit (along with someone to answer the sports questions that elude me), but that skill for storing a lot of ephemeral information isn't usually rewarded many other places.

Today is also the birthday of James Joyce. I've thought of Ulysses, as I've thought about Lost this morning. They're similar in ways that might not ordinarily occur to us: lots of allusions both to popular and classical culture, a looping narrative, a story-telling style that can drive one mad (and is often driven by mad narrators), interesting juxtapositions, and a simple tale (or is it a simple tale) blown up into a huge endeavor.

I've written about James Joyce before, here, on Bloomsday, and I expect to write about him again. His accomplishments fascinate me, even as I admit that many of them aren't exactly readable. There's a reason that writers abandoned all the experiments that the Modernists undertook in the 1920's. Yet, we still find traces of those Modernists everywhere, especially in some of our more interesting and intellectual pieces of popular culture, like Lost.

I made my way to Joyce accidentally: as a new graduate student, I was in the last group to register for classes, and Tom Rice's James Joyce class was one of the few classes that still had seats left. Some of the more seasoned grad students congratulated me on my bravery, but really, Dr. Rice made it easy. You do need a guide with a project like Ulysses, and you couldn't ask for a better one than Dr. Rice.

Likewise, I didn't start out watching Lost. Although the apocalyptic, stranded on an island theme appealed to me, I was afraid it would make me afraid to fly on a plane. But in early 2005, after we came back from Christmas vacation with a long plane journey, we collapsed into a heap and got sucked into one of the repeats.

At first I would have said I was watching because those actors were so lovely to look at. But quickly, the puzzles of the narratives sucked me in, while the pleasures of spotting allusions and making narrative connections.

I get the same charge from reading poetry that I do from reading Joyce and watching Lost: the thrill of catching the allusions and realizing that there's far more at work than the deceptively simple surfaces would suggest. That's the same thrill I get from writing poetry too: trying to create something with rich textures in a tightly compressed space.

In Praise of Reading for Joy, not Education/Edification/Elaboration/Exasperation

In the past several days, I've come across many recommendations that we spend more time reading for joy, less time reading for the other reasons that we do. I was reading back through the Happiness Project blog and came across this post with the recommendation that we read only what we enjoy.

Yesterday, I picked up a book I was fairly sure I would enjoy, Nick Hornby's Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. It's the follow up to The Polysyllabic Spree, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I didn't even know there was a follow up until I read about someone else's reading of it on a blog that I can no longer locate. It's a collection of his columns where he talks about the books he's reading. I know that it sounds massively dull, but Hornby injects such wit into his writing that it's fun. Even when he's writing about books I've never heard of, he makes it interesting. He doesn't try to pass himself off as a trained literary intellectual; on the contrary, as this quote shows: "When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English speaking world seems like a minor infraction" (page 27).

The book has a preface that's a manifesto for reading for the joy of it. Hornby says, "If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity--and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured--then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program" (page 15).

He says this bit, which made me laugh, ". . . here's something else no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do" (page 17, emphasis Hornby's). As you read that sentence, did you feel a little tingle of shock? What, we should read just because we're enjoying it?

Indeed. Hornby pleads, "Read anything, as long as you can't wait to pick it up again."

I can't tell you how many piles of books I have that I can--and do--wait to pick up again. What a great reading goal, to read only the things which compel me to read above other activities.