The Origins of “A Body by the Wayside Strange”

Over on Facebook, Jennifer Barber, who published my poem “A Body by the Wayside Strange” in the 16.2 issue of Salamander, asked me to write a paragraph about the poem’s origins. However, since I am only ever concise in poems, this paragraph has turned into several, and I thought I might as well also offer it up as a blog post.

As long-time readers of this blog might recall, I had planned to write a new collection of poems for my dissertation from the PhD program at the University of Cincinnati loosely based on Alabama history (and I now hope to get back to that project now that I’ve finished the PhD). In the course of things, I became obsessed with the murder—really the cold-blooded lynching—of a young black man, Michael Donald, in my hometown of Mobile in 1981, by the local klavern of the United Klans of America, then the most prominent KKK organization in the country. Donald was chosen at random to be murdered and hung from a tree in order to send the message that African Americans shouldn’t be allowed to serve on juries. At the time Josephus Anderson, an African American, was being tried in Mobile for the murder of a white Birmingham police officer, and the Klan worried that black members of the jury would acquit Anderson. In 1981, I was in first grade. I wasn’t aware of the lynching at the time, but have since been horrified to learn that such an act could happen in my lifetime, so close to where I grew up. And when I tote up the degrees of separation between me and the murderers, I find my mother temped briefly for the father of Henry Hays, one of the killers, and supposedly Hays had a high-school crush on my aunt. Too close. Too close.

I read court transcripts and autopsy reports. I returned to Mobile’s downtown from which Michael Donald was abducted to be taken across Mobile Bay where he was murdered and to which his body was returned to be hung from a tree.

Mobile has magnificent trees: Colossal and ancient live oaks scarfed with Spanish moss. Magnolias with fragrant white blooms the size of hands and their smaller, lavender cousins, Japanese magnolias. Dogwoods that my first-grade teacher taught us Christ had been crucified on and whose blooms resembled both his cross and crown of thorns (she also had us pray behind closed doors even after some lawsuit had squarely forbidden prayer in school). And camphor trees, the invasive Asian import that can sprawl as large as a live oak. It was from the branch of a camphor tree that Michael Donald’s body was tied. Almost any time of year, if the angle is right, you can catch the sparkle of Mardi Gras beads deep in the branches of the live oaks that line Government Boulevard and other parade routes. To think of what all these trees have seen in their hundreds of years . . .

I struggled—still struggle—with how to write about the case. I am white, and I don’t just want to be a voyeur who profits off of other people’s misery, and yet, of course, all writers profit from their subject matter. I’m also wary of misrepresenting the voices and stories of my subjects and the documents I’ve studied. For some poems, this anxiousness led me to make found poems of documentary material with clear citations of my sources. But there can be only so many found poems, only so many citations.

To counter such anxieties, friend and writer Molly Gaudry suggested I try writing morning pages (a practice outlined in Julia Cameron’s The Complete Artist’s Way). “A Body by the Wayside Strange” grew out of that. Writing first thing in the morning let me lose control. Gone were my old, stiff measured lines. Gone was any sense that I needed a poem to take on only a small but well-defined part of the larger story I wanted to tell. Instead, my mind wandered from details of the area’s habitat—an iridescent beetle impaled upon a barbed wire fence by a shrike, the creaking canebrakes on Mobile bay where it’s said the last boat of slaves illegally brought from Africa to America hid—to the accounts of Michael Donald’s family who knew something was wrong even before his body was found because he was not the kind of young man to stay out all night.

When I finished a messy draft, I sent it (as I do just about everything write) to my dear and trusted friend, the accomplished Cynthia Arrieu-King (poor Cindy!). Cindy worked magic to shape and tighten the lines and title, which was originally “What Makes a Body by the Wayside Strange Is How You Use It,” a sterile echo of my own anxieties about writing about a tragedy affecting real people, many of whom still live.

The poem is one I have mixed feelings about. I’m still anxious about its subject matter and whether or not I do it justice. Formally, the lines are dreamier and more sprawling than I usually go. In many ways, it still feels like an early morning draft, but perhaps its rawness is fitting.

My favorite time of the year!

God, I love back to school season. I start getting into the spirit of the season when emails from Staples land in my inbox with daily deals for penny pencils and fifty cent reams of paper. Then my heart thrills in Target to see the signs that say something like “Dorm Central This Way!” I don’t buy the penny pencils or decorate with dorm decor (much anymore, that is—every now and then I can’t help a kitschy desk lamp with spangles!), but I still love the feeling of possibility that new school supplies suggest. This year I will be organized! This year will be the best!

Even as I put off making my schedule of readings and assignments, even as I wonder a little anxiously whether or not I’ll bond with these new fresh faces, the commercial spirit of the season revives me, whether or not I buy anything. That’s how I know I’m American, when shopping inspires the old sacred faith of changing seasons. Plus, certain kinds of pencil cases and tiny magnetic clocks can be a real bitch to find other times of year.

But wouldn’t you know it, even as I carried four cotton shower curtains that I was considering making into curtains for my office back to Target’s shower curtain section because I found surprisingly reasonable real curtains, I saw a student who took my classes both semesters last year. His face lit up to see me (as I’m sure mine did in return, but I couldn’t see my own, and probably would shriek to see the crown of fuzzy curls that for once in my life I let myself leave the house with). His face lit up to see me! His batty old teacher. The young woman who was his companion leaned into the aisle with a sneer that seemed to say, Who’s my man looking at like that? and then seeing threatless me politely gave us space to catch up. The young man leaves in a week to go the University of South Alabama (or “South” as I grew up calling it) in my hometown of Mobile. It’s unlikely that I would have taught him again at Alabama State since I teach only freshman comp, but I told him to stay in touch, and I mean it.

This morning, my thoughts are especially with those bright and hardworking students I bonded with last year. I hope they all do stay in touch, and I’m looking forward to meeting my new classes a little bit more with those students in mind. This year will be the best! And I’m going to be so organized!

I don’t know what kind of writing I want to do anymore.

I don’t know what kind of writing I want to do anymore, I decide while punching holes in a copy of my dissertation so I can put it in a 3-ring binder. This is a familiar ritual, where I first gather up work I’ve shunned and then revise it and submit it for publication. The poetry section of my dissertation is, itself, yet another incarnation of a manuscript I first submitted to contests three years ago before deciding I was only wasting reading fees. Following the poetry is a plus-sized article manuscript, which, even flipping through six pages at a time to hole punch, still causes my heartbeat to rise anxiously. (And let me acknowledge now, since it wasn’t really appropriate to fit into my actual dissertation acknowledgments, that there is no way I could have finished that unholy monster of an article without the gentle loving kindness of my dear friend clonazepam, aka generic Klonopin, the grad student’s little helper.)

In the months since I defended my dissertation, I haven’t looked at it save to upload a file to the graduate school or to send a copy to my mother who asked sweetly to read it or to a friend who was formatting her own diss. Instead, my job now relatively secure until I go up for tenure, I have plunged into the luxurious depths of downloading to my Kindle and gobbling up fantasy novels with surprising speed–or at least a speed I was never able to reach with my grad school readings. All five of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, devoured like so much scorched horse flesh by a black-scaled rebel of a dragon. The Hunger Games trilogy, raced through as if my life depended upon it. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, read awkwardly while feeling out of place (I’m a life-long awkward adolescent). The Long Walk—my first Steven King novel!—plodded through anxiously, to the delirious, unforgiving end. And now I’m neck-deep in the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, which tastes, I imagine, like the sugary fake blood favored in Hollywood.

Besides learning that Steven King is a better writer than I’d imagined (did my fancy creative writing schooling make me snobby? you betcha!), I’ve also been reminded why I first wanted to be a writer—because I love reading so doggone much—and the books that I first fell in love with weren’t the rarefied poetry books I’ve since aspired to write but rather speculative fiction and what is now called young adult fiction. As disappointed as I am with A Dance with Dragons*, I rather like George R.R. Martin’s argument that fantasy, science fiction, and horror are all cut from the same cloth, that they are “flavors, if you will, of imaginative fiction, romantic fiction—the great romantic tradition as opposed to realistic tradition in literature.” [And thus the writing of this post took a two-day hiatus so that I could scour all of Martin's recent interviews on the web to find that exact quote---even if I'm no longer exactly sure why I needed to quote him in the first place. The grad student dies hard.]

And all that is preface to say that in the past few weeks, I’ve toyed with returning to blogging, but wondered what I should blog about—what I watch on TV, which I’ve come to love the way I also love books and find newly valuable? my efforts to teach myself to cook like an adult? My attempts to get to know the city I’ve lived in for a year but sequestered myself away from while working on the dreaded dissertation? the original project I founded this particular dissertation for, my explorations of Mobile and Alabama history?

I’ve also considered taking up fiction. I’ve had a couple of fiction workshops (as a product of the MFA and creative writing PhD system, I feel compelled to list my bona fides however unfide those bonas might be). I have a twinkling towards young adult fiction, and I’ve gone so far as to purchase a special notebook to put my ideas in. (So far, blank!)

On another screen, I have a half-written guest review of a film for the terrific feminist film blog Bitch Flicks. And by half-written, I only mean the scattered notes I jotted down immediately after viewing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a whole week ago but have since neglected.

Ah, and I’ve just now taken an hour’s detour to write a comment on a post at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “On Hiring” blog. (An hour? For a comment? Seriously?) Which is to say, I’m mightily distracted by all the kinds of writing I’m interested in, and worry (always worry) about my ability to stick long enough with any one kind to produce anything at all. Other evidence being this very post, which began as a distraction from the poetry manuscript and from which I’ve been distracted by emails to writing groups and blog comments.

It’s a right royal mess, it is—both this this post and my larger predicament. Is it even a predicament? Am I troubled by having too many interests? Do I wander off to a new project as soon as the current one gets difficult? Is there some kind of attention disorder going on? It’s certainly a predicament in as much as I must publish to get tenure, and if I don’t get tenure, I must publish so I can be competitive for a new job. It’s not even publish or perish. It’s publish or publish!

I guess I’d best post this rambling mess before I take another two-day break and decide to double its structureless length for no apparent reason. It’s not like I’ve got any conclusions. (I should probably also unlink the blog from facebook because I shouldn’t subject facebook to every unaccountable thought I have, but I still need to commit to something, to write something, even if its random, messy blog posts.)

*That’s another post, surely, but perhaps I should say I’m disappointed with it in the way that only someone who’s been enthralled by the series and remains dedicated to it can be “disappointed,” which is to say, I can see Martin working hard here, where the early novels seemed effortlessly magical.

Review of Falling Skies

{So if you are one of the two or three people who foolishly follow my blog, some explanation may be in order. It’s been about a month and a half since I successfully defended my craptastic dissertation, and I’m trying to live out a few of the dreams developed while I was living the ascetic life of a crappy scholar for Life After the Dissertation. One was to start blogging about the TV and film that I do so enjoy watching. Part of the craptastic dissertation was about the television show Lost, but that doesn’t in any way make me an expert about TV. What I’d like to do is to write a post about once a week about whatever I’m watching. I probably won’t cover any series episode-by-episode, but I would like to practice writing about whatever I’m watching.}

After only the double-episode premier of Falling Skies, I’m ready to declare that it’s pretty much awesome, and you should watch it. Only, please stay awesome, my new best friend, Falling Skies. Crappy old Heroes was once pretty good too, so I know how  something that starts off promising can eventually become truly terrible.

Almost everybody writing about Falling Skies has already nailed two of its strong points: (1) the story begins well after the alien invasion—some six or so months later—so we don’t have to spend initial episodes plodding through a whole bunch of familiar holy-shit-alien-invasion-apocalypse stuff that we’ve already seen (2) and the show is way more interested in the characters and their relationships than all the technical mumbo jumbo of the aliens. Sure, we may get more technical details in time, but that’s not the most important thing. These totally fantastic characters are!

Instead of repeating all the familiar conventions of alien invasion narratives, we start with what I think is a pretty brilliant opening. The camera pans across and fades in and out of a series of children’s drawings while various kids’ voices parrot what has no doubt become to them an already familiar story about the alien invasion—one probably explained to them many times by the adults. After a minute or two, the camera pulls back, to reveal the conversation between a particular kid and a woman who talks with this kid as a teacher or a counselor might. And just like that, we’ve got the bare bones of the back story of the invasion and the family dynamics shared by this kid (the adorable Maxim Knight as Matt Mason), his gun-toting history professor father Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and brothers Hal (Drew Roy) and Ben (Connor Jessup). While Matt stays with the camp, dad Tom and Hal fight aliens, and Ben is presumed to have been enslaved by the invaders. Not only is this an efficient means of providing back story, but it does so through the lens of a child’s understanding. And oh! my! God! is there anything more heartbreaking than a young child’s completely reasonable fear that his remaining family might not still be alive come the post-alien-apocalypse version of dinner time? Zing! I’m on the hook!

That I give a crap about this fictional kid in a fictional world is what I love about Falling Skies. Another way to reframe comments about the show’s reworking of genre stereotypes and being primarily character driven is to say that this is a television program (or at least a two-hour premiere) that is concerned with craft—narrative craft. This is precisely the kind of show that gives my literary mind the fuzzy tingles and make me feel like a proud member of the Church of Television as High Art. In my unwritten and completely unnecessary manifesto of Why I Love Television in the Aftermath of the DVR, I would argue, not terribly originally, that contemporary television in the form of the serial drama is the heir of the novel, partly because it can take the time to develop a number of characters in mundane but meaningful ways.

Falling Skies is brilliant because, as thrilling as the premiere was, as much as it jumped right into the action with little exposition, it really took its time with subtle, seemingly unimportant moments. I particularly loved the tiny birthday celebration for little Matt Mason held as the 2nd Massachussets, a rebel unit made of one hundred fighters and two hundred civilians (hello military versus civilian theme!), rested on their march from the city to a new, supposedly safer location.

The celebration is simple and includes but a single cupcake, a match as a candle, and the gift of what this old bird can only call some kind of weird two-wheeled newfangled skateboard. What I love about the scene is the silence that follows as Matt tries out his new wheels and the entire regiment watches. First we see father Tom’s relief that the birthday wasn’t spoiled after all (he’d been too busy killing aliens to plan the party, but older son Hal provided the skateboard), then his joy that, OMG, his son is still a little boy who can enjoy a birthday. I mean, alien invasion or not, the well-acted, nuanced father-son relationship is a bittersweet concoction of love balanced anxiously with the fear of disappointment that I’m sure all parents must feel at one time or another. I bet there are more than a few parents who currently feel overwhelmed by the difficulty of adequately celebrating a child’s birthday in trying times, due in our society more to the economic crisis than an alien invasion. (Oh, might we read Falling Skies as a metaphor for the crushing effects a failing economy has on its citizens!?!) The camera follows Matt and then his friends as Matt shares his new toy communally with other the kids, and the whole crowd seems enraptured in an eloquent silence. When the scene came to a close, no character tidily summed it up for the audience in dialogue. Rather, Will Patton’s matter-of-fact Captain Weaver made eye contact with Tom, who announced it was time to move on. And that, sweethearts, was that.

Falling Skies trusts me with these slow moments, and in turn I trust that it’s going to take me somewhere. It doesn’t feel like the insanely complex jigsaw puzzle that FlashForward did, which was more concerned with plot than lingering on character development (hey, I liked FlashForward and its characters, but those relationships were rushed from the start–and, so far, we don’t have to juggle nearly as many characters to be emotionally invested in). But already there have been these tiny little clues that I trust are going to lead somewhere that have been revealed in what I feel like are fairly crafty, organic scenes. (OMG, the mechs have two feet, while the skitters have six! What’s that all about?)

Which leads me to my final point. My favorite thing so far about Falling Skies is how we’re given background information in what feel like organic conversations that, I think, also move the plot forward. As I already noted, the series opens with an ensemble of children’s voices recounting the version of events as they have been told. That Tom Mason was a history professor offers him ample opportunity to draw parallels between the current conflict and historical conflicts. It also affects how other people talk to him. When Dr. Anne Glass, the lovely pediatrician who has become the group’s lead physician, asks his opinion of the relationship between the military and the civilians, the conversation doesn’t just serve as commentary for the audience’s benefit; it’s also a conversation in which these two educated people find companionship and get to know each other in a way that might lay the ground for a possible future romantic relationship. Similarly, the camp’s school teacher invites Professor Mason to observe his class and discuss ideas some of the children came up with in a brainstorming session about the skitters, as they call the invading aliens.

I love that the program uses intellectual discourse not only as a problem-solving method (and I love how the camp teacher is encouraging open, critical thinking!) but also as a way of building or feeling out relationships. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the conversation had at gunpoint between the outlaw John Pope (Collin Cunningham) and Tom, as his captive, where they question each other about what they’ve learned about the aliens. As these men hint at the power each of their groups holds and feel out each other’s capacity for strategy, we learn that “skitters,” the 2nd Massachusetts’ term for the aliens is by no means universal. Pope, while resting on a high school stage littered with the iconic broken columns and state imagery of fallen civilizations and groups, tells Tom that he and his crew call the aliens “cooties.” Besides building tension between these two men, cunning leaders cut of very different cloth, this scene also reminds viewers that we don’t know if the 2nd Massachusetts is connected to a larger resistance or if all semblance of higher order has been demolished. Perhaps foreshadowing some future revelation, Pope, while clearly not as educated as Professor Tom Mason, is nonetheless a man who thinks about things, indicating that intellect finds many forms.

I think part of the reason Falling Skies is able to accomplish so much in its double episode premier is because it has actually limited what it’s trying to accomplish. We’re given just enough information about the alien invasion to understand the characters’ situation (and to get a sense that the writers know what they’re doing and that more substantial answers are on their way). This is something most emulators of Lost have failed to do. In their rush to promote the originality of their concepts and to play with time like Lost did, they often left viewers behind. FlashForward required viewers to pay attention to every little detail from its opening moments and keep track of dozens of characters, any one of which might become important from one episode to the next. NBC’s truly terrible The Event was almost unwatchable in its skipping back and forth between dozens of characters now and in the past in the space of just a few minutes.

Early on, Lost was able to maintain its focus by juxtaposing flashbacks of a single character per episode with the current island narrative and cleverly used the airplane engine sound to cue viewers to such shifts, and only very slowly, very subtly revealed its concept. Falling Skies, at least so far, lets concept take a backseat to character and thus far has resisted playing with time. At this point, I’d find a show that doesn’t play with flashback or time travel or alternate universes refreshing, and I’m about as big of a fan of Lost and Fringe as you will ever meet outside of Comic-Con (and, actually, I totally want to go. Many rooms are less than $200 a night, if you can get one when they go on sale at noon on March 9). The one moment we think we might be viewing a flashback—when the camera opens on little Matt waking up in a well-appointed child’s bedroom—we’re quickly brought back to the present when his professor father, scruffy from the march and toting a machine gun, opens the bedroom door to wake him up.

By maintaining a simple narrative timeline and focusing on developing characters the audience can empathize with, Falling Skies is laying the foundation for what could be one of the best serial dramas in years. Here’s hoping tonight’s episode maintains that momentum!

Totally Uplifting Advice about How Not to Shoot Your Eyes Out in Graduate School

I’m a recent graduate of graduate school (by Jimminy, John Irving got the Gradual School part right!), so who better to write a blog post about how survive its terrors than me! Also, I’m acting out some fantasy wherein I write an academic advice column in the voice of a writer for my new favorite blog, The Hairpin. Their “Ask a Dude/Lady/Queer Chick/Clean Person” advice series is bloody brilliant, mate.

If PhD school—as I sometimes like to call it, since my grad school experience also includes a lovely three-year stint in MFA-land, which is pretty much the most magical place ever—doesn’t make you want to die, then you’re doing something wrong. Of course, wanting to die sucks, so my philosophy on making it through PhD school is sometimes you got to do it wrong, so life is still worth living. Seriously, that sounds insincere, but I stand by the heart of the idea.

So first—consider this a legal disclaimer—if you haven’t already started PhD school, you should most definitely think twice if you value things like time, money, self respect, and the ability to find a job. Not that you shouldn’t go, mind you, but you should know what you’re in for, both in terms of the physically painful jail sentence you’re committing yourself to (seriously, you are going to hurt yourself reading and writing) and the piss-poor job opportunities that await you. Yes, I’m a tenure-track-job-holding graduate, so you think I should be all, Rah-rah! Do it! It’s shagging awesome! But your parents or other callous relatives who may have snidely questioned if this is really what you want to do, alas, have a point. Just know what you’re getting yourself into and all. Also, it helps to realize that pretty much everyone in PhD school is really dogdamned smart, so it’s not as easy to be the smartest kid in the room as it used to be. You probably think this is true for everyone but you (I sure did!), but no, it’s true for you too. There may be some ego adjustment, and lemme tell you, ego adjustment, oh my God, she is never, never pretty. (See On Hiring and this and this and this—that’s right, the almighty Chronicle of Higher Ed says, “Just Don’t Go.” That’s like Nike switching their motto from “Just Do It” to “Fuck It All.” See the whole sack full of mess you are getting yourself into!)

So, anyway, how to survive PhD school by fucking some shit up (Apparently “fucking shit up” was my signature phrase in undergrad. I forgot all about it until an unlikely reunion last year.):

• Prioritize.Yes, right out of the box this sounds like every piece of advice from ever. PhD school will make you realize that you can’t do everything. And by everything, I mean housework! I mean pleasure reading! I mean washing your hair! I mean being able to afford fancy things like food! I mean having the spare time to pamper yourself with luxurious, extravagant activities like shopping for food!

  Yes, I am saying you might not have time to wash your hair or buy food, not that it really matters because you won’t have any fucking money for shampoo or food. But smile! These are the best days of your life!

  So here’s what I think is important: Studying and saving up money to go out to eat and drink with your friends. You might think I’m encouraging  alcoholism, but really, I’m encouraging group coping, which is about as priceless a thing as there is. You may not have a lot of things, but you’ve got your fellow PhD school friends, which you may now feel free to call “colleagues.” Pin that to your thrift store tweed blazer!

• Trust me when I tell you the following statement is totally true: “If I learned anything in grad school, it’s how to drink.” So, to contradict my above advice, I want to offer up this: keep your drinking under control so you don’t have to give it up, okay?You may have to dry out someday, but trust me, you most definitely do not want to do it in grad school. (Why, do I say “trust me”? It’s not like I ever tried this. I’m just guessing that when your entire social world revolves around functions that serve alcohol, trying to quit will suck mightily.) That old saw about everything in moderation is true. Just know what your moderation is. When I hit intergalactic battle mode studying for my comprehensive exams and basically lived as a shut in, I became very good friends with an off-brand of boxed wine that sold five liters of sangria for $17. I’d have one or two tiny IKEA tumblers over frozen blueberries a good 3-5 nights a week, while I watched the TV shows that came to take the place of face-to-face friendships. Ah, so sweet and so cold! Worthy of a William Carlos Williams poem, to be sure. Any more than my two tiny tumblers and I’d have trouble sleeping (you know because after more than two tumblers of wine, who the hell gives a fuck about moderation), which meant studying would be a right royal bitch the next day. But just a single tumbler full, and I could get back on the theory reading train right after my show was over, as absolutely thrilling as that was.

• Don’t feel bad about neglecting things you feel obligated to do.In general, girls seem more concerned about keeping up their living spaces than dudes do—total socialization, I think, and not at all universal or essential, just a trend, methinks. It is totally okay to not vacuum for a month. Or ever. Unless it makes you sick, then by all means, keep yourself from getting sick. It’s okay to say no to just about everything. You may need to explain to your parents and those carefree first and second years that your world is falling apart and you need vast quantities of solitude to get your shit done, so you can’t hang out with them during your “free time” because all of your free time is dedicated to freaking the fuck out about this horrible, horrible situation you’ve gotten yourself into. Wow, it sounds a little like maybe you’re considering an abortion, but we all know you don’t have time to get laid. We’re talking about your entirely questionable choice to go to graduate school, sheesh.

• Related: Figure out how to live simply. For me, product of the burbs that I am, this meant Sam’s Club, which was about as close to me as any other store and which allowed me to survive on shopping only about every two weeks. I think it saved me money, and it definitely saved me time. Frozen chicken breasts, frozen veggies, frozen fruit, boxed wine, fresh milk and giant bags of lettuce every two weeks. Tada! You’re almost eating like an adult! Living simply also meant learning how to go without washing and styling my hair every day. Good lord, the time I have spent in front of a mirror applying various burning hot tools to my poor tortured hair. There are way more important things than how your hair looks when you’re writing a paper about Ali G and The Merchant of Venice, which for some reason I chose to write about.

• This rule is an extension of rule 1. I have placed it here for no good reason. Lacan talks about the return of the repressed. Or Freud, or somefuckingbody. (Freud first, then Lacan, then Žižek, and probably lots of other people, too. I really do know this.) Friendships and relationships become things you have to prioritize, too. At maximum peak stress out times, I was known to break up with whatever boyfriend I might have had. For sure, all my years of study have made me pretty damned good at quitting people, both of the romantic and non-romantic sort. So I’d use facebook to get that social-y feeling and yee olde telephoney to stay in touch on regular basis with like two people, plus my fam. If facebook keeps you from actually having to see the people you care about face-to-face, it counts as a time saver! Doesn’t grad school sound super fantastic? Did I mention qualifying for public assistance? Or that you can’t go bankrupt on student loans? In for a penny, in for your entire future financial stability, I always say.

• Go outside. Look up from your book. Grow something. Put your hands in the dirt. Ride a bike. Watch a dog lose its mind with joy in the first snow of the year. Get lost in the woods (but take your cellie, okay! You don’t have 127 hours to spare, and you need both hands if you want to graduate before you run out of funding—unless, of course, you’re already good at typing with just the one hand). This place called “outside” helps you keep this thing called “perspective.” Life does in fact continue outside of books and papers! Breathe! There is dirt and air and sky and kids fighting in the street! There is life outside of this! (See also This Is Water.)

• Related: Do whatever it takes to not burn out. This varies for everyone. Some folks throw themselves into vegan cooking. Some folks run. Some folks eat everything in sight. Some folks get student-rate massages at the rec center to work out reading cramps. Baby, whatever you got to do to still be in this thing tomorrow, do it. You know, but try to make choices that don’t totally sabotage yourself. For example, heroin is probably not a good choice.

• Seek professional help. Seriously. Don’t wait until you find yourself crying halfway up, halfway down the stairs of your crappy townhouse, unsure of whether you should go up or down or whatever. Don’t wait until you break down in tears in front of the director of grad studies in the middle of a committee meeting. Your school probably has counseling services. They’re champs about scheduling things so that the waiting rooms are mostly empty, but I bet if you placed a hidden camera in there, you’d catch a solid majority of your department’s third years and up trotting in and out. A good counselor can help you deal with the above mentioned ego adjustment and talk you through reasonable strategies for surviving this bastard-ass gauntlet of merciless hell you’ve gotten yourself into. Also: Klonopin, the grad student’s little helper. Ask for it by name.

• If you decide you want to do something else with your time, with your life, that is A-okay. The world will go on. You will go on. Everything will be just dandy. It might even be a whole lot dandier. A few words of caution, though: if doing something else is the route you’re destined for, it’s better (and much, much easier) if you figure this out sooner rather than later. Every year you spend in grad school is a year you’re not making money or saving for retirement, and holy cannoli, by the time you graduate, that wily honey badger will be sneaking up on you. Not to panic or anything, coz we’ve got some stellar first-rate Social Security that’s totally going to take care of everything. (Just kidding, you’re screwed! Just kidding, just kidding! The life of knowledge takes care of itself! You are doing something valuable, wonderful, and beautiful! You don’t need money because you will never retire!)

That’s pretty much it for the general stuff. You can figure out on your own your favorite study accoutrements (study chair? tiny electric dictionary? tiny-ass netbook?) and the study strategies that work best for you (take notes on a blog? back everything up to dropbox? master the interlibrary loan?). Good luck out there! You’re gonna make it after all!

Revival

It’s been not quite a year, but long enough for my sister-in-law to conceive and deliver a new, beautiful baby.

I no longer live in the house with the holly bush whose thorny leaves protect fledgling brown thrashers from a Beagle’s bred-for purpose. I live in Montgomery and teach at Alabama State. When I visited Montgomery two Aprils back to do research for the project that was supposed to be my dissertation, I wished I might land a job here, and so I have. That project was temporarily shelved so I might finish the dissertation more quickly, but even that took a year longer than I expected. I defended on May 13. Emma Claire was born May 20th.

Already a month of summer vacation has come and gone, and only ten short weeks  remain.The list of things I wanted to do after the dissertation seems fuzzy now. Honestly, I’d love no more than to stay abed all day reading trashy fantasy novels. And how I’ve done that!

But I also want to return to that old project and new ones, to blogging and cooking proper meals, to discovering the city and its citizens that I’ve sequestered myself from this first year lest I fail to finish the dissertation. Of course, I want to write and read and generally nourish my writing self. And visit friends and family (though I desire no road trips more than 3 hours drive from Montgomery; I’m all drove out).

I feel like I’m waking up from a long, long nap. There is much I want to do, and I’m glad to have some guilt-free free time at last, but I’m also a bit sleepyheaded, and I’m happy to take my waking slow. For the moment.

Thrashers and Cotton Flowers

Lately, in the evenings, I’ve been going outside to read theory for the academic portion of my dissertation. After the sun hits a certain angle and the evening breeze from the west picks up, it’s quite comfortable in the shade of the maple tree, even in low 90s upper 80s, even with lower Alabama’s famous humidity.

Yesterday, I noted both a fledgling brown thrasher on the ground near the maple tree and that the cotton’s blooming. Or now, thanks to the blooms, I know it to be cotton. Otherwise, cotton, soybeans, and peanuts all kind of look the same to me: green shrubby things planted in rows.

I watched the fledgling on and off all day, bringing him water and seed and consulting the internets re: fallen fledglings. The fledgling eventually pipsqueaked his way to the holly tree, which makes a good, prickly shelter, so I finally let the dogs out in the early evening, as I usually do. Alas, Zoey, my otherwise slothful Beagle, very nearly got another fledgling hopping around the loropetalums by the house, but I chased her off into a field and corralled the other puppies.

Today I tried to take some pictures. It’s overcast and dreadful hot, which means crappy, washed-out light, immediate condensation on my lens filter, and not much sweaty patience on my part to figure out better setting for the camera (or constantly wipe the condensation from the lens).

Anyway, here’s what I got:

Fledgling Brown Thrasher

Parent Brown Thrasher

Note the difference in eye color. As the fledgling gets older, his eyes, like his parents’, will turn a striking yellow. The long beak is helpful for plucking grubs from the ground. The parents (there are two guarding the little fellows!) made a commotion when Zoey was chasing down one of the pipsqueaks. Afterward, I tried to track it to make sure it wasn’t hurt, and indeed, the second one was much better at hopping without getting its feet all caught up in its wings like the guy now hiding in the holly. His feathers are better developed too. He’ll be just fine. The parents tried luring me away by making the fledgling’s call a bush over and then fluttering off to the maple while the fledgling hid silently in the lower limbs of the loropetalum.

White Cotton Flower

Pink Cotton Flower

It seems the cotton flowers start off pink, then as they open in the sun, turn white, slightly buttery. There are both tight pink blooms and buttery white flowers on the same plants, at any rate. Also, they’re in the same family as hibiscus, thus the family resemblance.

Now I’m just waiting for the shade and breeze so I can work outside.

The Least Interesting of Posts

No posts for a while because I’ve been busy working on finalizing the dissertation, which I’m trying to knock out before I start work at Alabama State in the autumn, which, okay, is really only 6 weeks away, the autumn semester starting so much earlier than the autumn quarter I’ve become accustomed to in Ohio.

The things I’m doing now are not as interesting to readers as my travels might have been: rereading theory pertinent to the critical portion of my dissertation, which happens to be combining two seminar papers on Lost and Heroes, and apartment hunting from a distance. Somehow I plan to defend August 2, move to Montgomery say around August 5, and start teaching August 16.

It feels like it’s all happening so fast. All good stuff and yet I still manage to feel anxious. Will I find a place I like? Do I need to order books for my new classes? (I don’t yet know my schedule.) Will the dissertation be a giant stinker? It’s enough to make me want find out exactly how much chocolate I can eat and throw myself into watching Buffy episodes by the dozen.

Even with Montgomery two hours from home and having visited for two weeks this spring, I worry about starting all over in a new city. A girl only has so many moves by herself left in her. Thank dogness for the homes listed on craigslist that are pet friendly.

So that’s where I am, contemplating the virtues of walkable neighborhoods and short commutes, reading Zizek, Fink, Lacan, and Haraway, suturing together one last paper, revising and reordering poems.

And then I begin a new life in which I can afford as many pizzas as I want.

Today

Circled the lots and garages at the Vienna Fairfax station buzzard-like for an hour or more today. Finally got 10 bucks in change and fed a 12-hour meter.

Everyone on a train looks sad and awkward and lonely.

Things I did not expect to see today: Ducks and their concomitant duck poop; two police officers giving a dog water on the Mall; an empty but spinning carousel outside the Smithsonian. [Note, "carousel" does not look the way I expect it to. It feels dirty, way too close to "arousal."] At first, I thought the police had the dog sniffing a backpack, but they were just giving him water. (As everyone knows, all dogs are boys and all cats are girls.) I took their picture. When they walked past me later, I confessed: “I tried to steal your picture when you guys were giving water to your dog.” We laughed, they kept walking.

I liked the Rodins best in the sculpture garden.

Like this lady:

And here again from another angle:

Even more best, I liked an audio exhibit. Here’s what the sign for it looked like:

[I'm tired. I'll let the sign do the talking.]

“Sunset Song,” two versions of the murder ballad “The Banks of the Ohio.” The volume is controlled by a light sensor. As the light dims, the song gets quieter. As the sun sets, the song fades into silence. Le Awesome. If I hadn’t needed to get back to my meter at Vienna/Fairfax, I would have stayed and listened to it go a few more rounds.

I read and took copious notes on the first 18 pages of Zora Neale Hurston’s unpublished biography of Cudjo Lewis titled “Barracoon.” Only a hundred pages to go!

I lingered over onion skin typing paper with Hurston’s own hand corrections. I held and read a handwritten letter explaining why the bulk of the work is in the voice of Cudjo Lewis. Oh, yes, my nerd heart swooned. If her fingerprints haven’t been worn off the paper of the manuscript already, then it’s possible those sheets have both our prints own them.

I hear in the manuscript three voices: a generic voice of historical recounting, Hurston’s own unmistakable poetic voice, and the voice of Cudjo Lewis that takes dominance. I don’t know what I can do with this, but I want very much to do something with it. Only, Hurston is so good. Anything I do will pale, pale, pale. Also, Howard has very strict policies about publications, which include dissertations. I was told that if I want to quote even a sentence of it, I need their permission. I do not like permission. I like behaving in a realm where there is no question of permission because all I have is right. This realm is, of course, entirely imaginary.

I want to find out more why this manuscript hasn’t been published. I think initially there was a question of plagiarism. In an early version Hurston borrowed too heavily from Emma Langdon Roche, and that may have marred the legitimate work she did for “Barracoon.”

I’ve checked out but haven’t even opened a box of papers and “drafts, various” related to the project. Imagine the treasures!

Tomorrow, I go the Library of Congress to watch twenty minutes of silent film shot by Hurston, including two or three minutes of Lewis. I believe it is the only known moving image of a slave who was born in Africa. I’ll return to Howard on Monday.

I’m so tired. And oddly sad. I has a lingering sad. I miss my peeps. All of my peeps. I miss even the strangers in Alabama who are not so cold and distant as all these herded, suited masses. But as soon as tomorrow night I will be seeing old college friends I’ve missed for years and years. They’ll bring me round, I’m sure. Then this weekend the national zoo and the Smithsonians. I need some zooseum cheering. Alas, Jessy’s mostly too broke for train rides to NJ and Philly. Though a certain Chicky says Atlantic City is only four hours by car, and really, that’s almost nothing—heck, that’s only an hour further away than DC is for me, apparently, as it took me three hours from hotel to Howard U. Gawd, I could use a Chicky visit. And maybe some craps. Or crêpes. Crêpes would probably be better. In lieu of crêpes, I accept fresh cannoli. Oi, this blog has gone the hopscotch way of a missive to Chicky. 10-4, good buddy. Over and out.

P.S. Did I ever tell you about my estranged maternal aunt who met her husband over the citizens’ band? He was something of a local country music legend and lived on the same street my daddy grew up on (the same street I grew up on)? Small world, both of those boys marrying Harrison girls. Her name was Snake Eyes. She used to call me Jake.

“An Argument Worth Rehearsing”

[Title borrowed from An Education, a movie that, in retrospect, I was probably a bit too critical of in a guest review for Bitch Flicks. It is, as I admitted, a fine movie, and for a movie that presents itself as something of a feminist critique of culture, I think it pulls some punches it really could have landed, but I wonder if that that intellectual disappointment makes the film any less of a decent movie. Regardless...]

My own argument worth rehearsing is one that I’ve been playing over in limited variation in my head since I began my project. Sometimes I ask myself what right have I to write about the things I’ve chosen as my subjects. Sometimes I interrogate my intentions and purposes. Often I wonder about what it means to be a white woman today who’s become so fascinated with a form of ritual violence that was most frequently visited on black men of the past.

I always fall asleep before reaching any lasting, singular conclusion, and rarely do I pose the question to myself simply: Why am I drawn in my exploration of Mobile history to some of its ugliest, most horrific manifestations?

I’m tempted to blurt Quentin Compson style, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t hate it.” But what’s that got to do with the price of tomatoes?

Now, having driven through four gorgeous Southern states today, what I want to answer is this: I think America is an infinitely fascinating place and that Americans are a terrifically interesting people. I am enthralled with how we became the people we are and, to borrow from Faulkner again, Mobile is “my postage stamp of native soil.” I am, of course, curious as to how all this may or may not have shaped me, my family, and the Mobile of today, and I remain convinced that Mobile’s history is not isolated from but indicative of issues of race and history that shape all of America.

* * *

Part of my deliberate decision to leave Alabama for graduate school was to put some physical distance between me and home so I could better see what was home really is. I felt strongly I needed that distance, as up to that point I’d written mostly about my own tiny life, and I couldn’t always tell what about my life was particularly Southern or generically American or just idiosyncratically my family’s. I wanted to open myself to changes I knew I couldn’t then envision, and moving that far away to another region seemed like a pretty good start. Part of what I ended up learning is that the South is connected to the rest of the country and the world in ways I’d never really thought about. Foods I’d enjoyed my whole life were suddenly filed under “ethnic” in the international aisles of Ohio supermarkets, Columbus and Cincinnati connected to the South through the culture that African-Americans brought north with them on the Underground Railroad and in the Great Migration.

What are my feelings about being from the South? In Quebec and Ohio, heck even in South Carolina, I encountered some pretty cartoonish misconceptions about Alabama and first grew to defend my home state and then, as the years passed and my first-hand experiences of home grew further away, to wonder myself at what South really is, such that by the time I moved back to Alabama last August, I felt something like a foreigner and was, again, unsure of the accuracy of my perceptions of home.

I’m not sure of how to explain it, but I feel this need to figure out for myself what my own connection is to this place, what role it’s had in making me, what role I might have in making it. My first understanding of myself as an Alabamian came, I think, in fourth-grade Alabama history. I remember in odd specificity the Cassette Girls and the difficulties the French faced in adapting their cuisine to the gamy meats available here. Of slavery and the Civil War (pretty much all discussion of race was limited, if I remember correctly, to the far distant past of the Civil War, with next to nothing being made of more recent history), what I remember isn’t from our textbook but from conversations I had with classmates on the playground, either at P.E. or waiting for my mother to pick me up after school. I remember sitting atop what I can only describe as a rusting exercise tower with a black classmate, a girl whose face, hair, and red shorts I remember, but not her name. We talked about the difference of our skin being nothing “cause we’re all red under our skin where the blood flows.” I remember a boy with girlishly long finger nails who told me matter-of-factly, “I’m a nigger. You’re a honkey. That’s just the way it is.” I remember announcing to a white girl named Athena that when I grew up, I’d move to California or Alaska and get as far away from Alabama as I could because I ain’t like them whites that owned slaves. In my memory, it feels as if everyone agreed: Yes, we are not this place, and dammit, we’ll leave to prove it, but maybe it was my own private fascination. I remember “white” and “black” as being just as primary to identification as “girl” or “boy,” that to leave them out when talking about a girl or boy was to be deliberately vague and ambiguous. I remember “white” and “black,” as being such powerful master signifiers that there was discussion of whether or not the Vietnamese who’d moved to the area as refugees after the war were white or black, and it was finally decided that they must be white. I remember volunteering to read announcements for Black History Month and being told I couldn’t because I was white. I remember wondering even how you could tell whether dogs were white or black, not their fur which could be any color, not even their skin that with the hair pulled tight away looked almost iridescently blue, but that somehow dogs owned by blacks and whites must themselves be inherently different in the same what that what make white and black people different seemed to be more than just skin color, which even to my ten-year-old way of thinking seemed too simple and too stupidly superficial a thing to have such an importance placed upon it. Skin color? That’s all? There’s gotta be more to it than that. But what? But what? I swear I remember asking my parents what made whites and blacks different, and maybe they’d say something about melanin, and I’d say, “I know, but I mean, what besides skin?” Because clearly it was more than skin, but also if it was more than skin, maybe the color of your skin didn’t actually make you white or black but something else did. What was it that really made us as different as we were taught? What did we know of who we were? We were eight, nine, ten-years old. It was all a mystery. We repeated what we heard teachers and our parents say. We tried to make it all make sense in our own childlike ways, but it never quite did.

Now, I believe that what makes us different isn’t our skin or even ourselves: it’s hegemony, I’ve learned in my studies, that which “supposes the existence of something which . . . is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway.” It is, I think, to put it more simply, history. History made us different. History made these relationships that we were born into.

Much is made about how in America we get to choose who we are. Isn’t that the American Dream or part of it or a version of it? That everyone has the opportunity to remake his- or herself according to his or her own vision? While I believe that perhaps not enough is made of how the opportunity to reshape one’s self is not equally distributed among individuals, I nonetheless think that this idea that we as Americans get to choose who we are is important. Certainly we have some choice in how we see ourselves and in what kind of a people we want to be as we move through time. Moving back to Alabama, with my hard-earned decade of Ohio graduate studies, it is necessary that I engage what my personal choice to move back to the South means, besides being close to my family and being able to find food like what my Mawmaw cooked so readily available. I don’t know that I can reconcile the things I love about the South with the parts that horrify me. But I can’t not try.

Maybe I should just chalk it up as navel-gazing at a regional, historical scale. I’m not good with the answers, but asking the questions feels like a meaningful start.

My own argument worth rehearsing is one that I’ve been playing over in limited variation in my head since I began my project. Sometimes I ask myself what right do I have to write about the things I’ve chosen to write about. Sometimes I interrogate my intentions and purposes. Often I wonder about what it means to be a white woman toay who’s become so fascinated with a form of violence that was most frequently visited on black men of the past.