Tag Archives: Joan Didion

On my not-ironic love of Valentine’s Day

14 Tuesday Feb 2012

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When Thanksgiving comes around at the end of November, I don’t particularly need it. I enjoy the holiday and all, but I practice daily gratitude and don’t feel low on the meter.

But then November gives way to other holidays and relentless winter and, even in a mild winter like this, I need an extra boost of gratitude come February. Valentine’s Day has always been my favorite holiday (for a while for no other reason than my favorite color is pink, and I look bad in all of the other holidays’ colors–orange, red, green? Yeesh). Since being in Pittsburgh, though, I’ve taken to seeing Valentine’s Day as a pink-coated second chance at Thanksgiving. (Winter is the worst.)

Next week also brings about the beginning of Lent, which, in the Christian tradition, leads up to the greatest sacrifice made in the name of love.  Because this is my blog, and I can make this juxtaposition, my birthday falls toward the beginning of Lent every year, which often leaves me remembering the sacrifices people have made out of love for me, be them my parents or my friends or teachers or clergy or whomever.

For the past several months, I’ve been thinking about how many people in my life don’t have to. Parents and sisters aside, my life is entirely made up of people who don’t have to love me or help me or entertain me or any of that. But they do.

Since I’ve written versions of this post in the past, I’d like to take the time to reflect on what I’m particularly grateful for right now, in this moment.

* My parents, who continue to encourage the series of terrible choices I’m making with regards to some kind of romantic writing career. Also that my dad frequently reminds me when I’m spun in panic that I always land on my feet and get what I need when I need it and that I should have faith in that.

* The Nanny fam, who are the best employers on the planet. They have taken me into their home and trusted me with the girl-child, whom I love. Hanging out with her every day is like hanging out with a high freshman who has just taken intro to philosophy. I pick her up from school, where she’s eating canned mandarin oranges on a hot dog bun (*not what her mother packed for her) and her friends are eating ketchup with a spoon and comparing bellybuttons. But then we’re coloring and talking bells at Temple and compassion and why it doesn’t snow every day or how babies come out of tunnels and it hurts a lot (*my response as to how the baby gets out of the mama’s stomach. Johnny-on-the-spot, I am). I can’t think of a better way to spend my afternoons.

* In the last year, I have made a concerted effort to wander in micro steps away from the back pew that I’ve been duct-taped to for the last three plus years. And now I’ve been rewarded for it with a gaggle of wonderful women and clichés about getting sucked into committees and all of that. And the church kitchen. There will be much to say for so many years about the industrial magical kitchen.

* Finishing grad school means being thrust full-force into the non-school writing community, which, by this point, is filled with must-dos instead of don’t-have-tos/maybes. It also means being excessively grateful for every person who passes on my name or who takes a chance on my work. (It also means being continually grateful for one of the first writing lessons I ever learned and have adhered to ever since—don’t miss a deadline. Also, gather twice as much information as you think you’re going to need and the story writes itself. Invaluable.)

* My friends who are ever-wider flung, but who eventually manage to wrangle me into a phone call or a visit or a series of ridiculous Twitter conversations. This bullet-point could go on the longest and will thus be the shortest, but suffice to say that I have way too many friends who make a far greater effort than I do, and they usually do so when I need them to do so most.

* Teaching is brand new in the past year after a decade alternating between wanting it and not wanting it and trying to decide which age/grade/type of teaching I could possibly want. Being able to explore teaching creative writing at the undergraduate level at two different institutions has been amazing. I have some crazy talented students, many very patient students who laugh at my awkward jokes and tolerate that Joan Didion is the only author to show up twice in the semester. That’s right–between two classes this semester, I have worked in four Joan Didion days. How could I not be grateful for that? (Thanks, self.)

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!

(If you insist: spew in this.)

Sincerity, writing, and faith

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

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Because God has an excellent sense of humor, I am a confirmation mentor.

“You know I’ve been Presbyterian for like a minute and a half, right?” I asked my confirmand and my pastor and have said to everyone who’s been on the receiving end of this story.

No one seems to mind this fact, and so on we go, exploring the denomination, larger Christianity, faith in general and other Big Questions.

You know what’s really hard about that? No. Scratch that. You know what’s really easy about that? Being glib. It’s really easy to turn the whole thing into some big chucklefest. It’s really easy to brush the whole thing aside with a dusting of “you know, God, or whatever.”

What’s hard is being sincere. Not even in answering the questions, but in asking them in the first place.

I live in a world of academics and writers, many—but not all—of whom are decidedly not religious. And, you know, what I’m about to say probably isn’t even about religion, not really. It’s probably more about spending too much with the deconstructionalists and the years of reading books that have no author, no reader, and no text. It’s more about talking about what’s problematic than what is magnificent.

First: I love things. I unabashedly love a great many things. Virginia Woolf, TV, Sweet Valley High, Joan Didion, the mall, whatever my daily new favorite thing is. I do a weird jazz hand flutter to go with the high-pitched voice. I talk about my favorite things ad nauseum.

But you know what I don’t do? I never talk about what really matters. I never allow anything to get assigned actual value in the public sphere. Maybe it’s because assigned value eventually skis the slippery slope down to marginalization and oppression. Maybe it’s because TV taught me to be too cool for anything to have meaning. Maybe because books taught me that all the good stuff is left unsaid.

Being sincere is hard. Always. Being sincere means being vulnerable. And to be sincere about faith, about religion, about God, is the most vulnerable I can imagine being, since faith, religion, and God are something I consider more personal than anything else in my life.

Even talking about writing is less personal. Talking about writing is often cynical. Forget the market or readers or digital forms or the academy or any of that. Think about the act of writing itself.

Writers talk about writing all the time. They talk about it with each other and they talk about it online and they blog about it and it fills a majority of air space in the classroom. Writers talk about the problems they are having or the ideas that they have or wish they had, the books that they’ve read and that have inspired them. They talk about habits formed, habits broken, habits desired. Write every day. Write when you feel like it. Write in the morning, first thing. Write late at night, last thing.

Writing is hard. Always. It’s so hard. Characters never do what you want them to do, dialogue always sounds forced, the exposition is always a sinkhole. Sources don’t call back, facts don’t add up, it’s all situation and no story. The Internet is full of distractions, coffee shops are full of poseurs, desk chairs are woefully uncomfortable. (Full disclosure: I hate my desk chair. I spend more time during the day rearranging myself in it than anything else.) And the bottom line question, always: so what?

So what? So what? So what?

Writing is hard.

And it’s all true. All of it. (Sorry, coffee shop people, of which I am one on occasion–and a poseur always.)

But you know what? I love to write. I do. I really, really love it. Sincerely. I love learning new things and talking to new people and sitting down and making the puzzle come together and untangling knots and mixing metaphors with great aplomb. I love when things really get going and I forget that I’ve had to pee for the last hour and my sternum makes weird noises when I finally stop hunching over the keyboard. I love that I forget I possess a cat.

(See, even in a blog entry about sincerity, I can’t be completely sincere.)

And you know what else? I don’t think, in the nine years I spent as a student in higher ed, I ever once said those things—aloud—to other people. I don’t think, in being Presbyterian for a minute and a half and a life-long Christian whose first memory is of standing in my crib while my grandma teaches me the sign of the cross, I ever once said—aloud—to other people what I actually live by. I don’t think I’ve ever said, with sincerity, just what I mean when I say I have faith, am religious, believe in God.

Because who wants to be seen being sincerely, vulnerably enthusiastic about God?

On my cube walls, I have a few of those Tumblr-decorated quotations. You know, where words are different sizes and put together in a casually artful way. My favorite is by the inimitable John Green:

…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

May we all live this—really.

It takes a little time

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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I didn’t love Blue Nights immediately upon reading it.

This may come as a complete and total surprise to anyone who has listened to me talk ever. I have been stupid in love with Joan Didion’s writing since I was seventeen and first read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” When we read said essay last month in the class I teach, I declared it Happy Joan Didion Day and told my students they would never again experience such a good day.

Let’s put it this way: while my tattoos and my cat are all out of Virginia Woolf books, I did, in fact, dress in homage to “On Keeping a Notebook” for both my first and last class as an MFA student because I have also loved that essay since I was seventeen and wearing the plaid [cotton] dress seemed in keeping with the general neuroses related to both.

What I don’t think I’ve ever talked about is how I read.

I am a terrible first reader.

To say that I read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release would not be overstatement. And to know that I’ve read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release means that I read the same quotable passages and the same ponderings on the major themes and the same doubts about the book’s insularity.

And, in actually reading Blue Nights, in one day, into the hours far past my bedtime, I know that the book’s been rushed. By them, by me. Because how do you not wildly consume Didion (especially if you’ve got a review deadline)?

In “A Veil of Words,” Jeanette Winterson writes of people’s difficulties with Woolf’s novel The Waves. She says, “The pace of Woolf’s writing is carefully measured. In The Waves the pace is slow. This is not a defect. Nobody would expect to play a piece of music at twice the speed of the score and be able to enjoy it. Yet, in literature this is happening all the time.” (Her advice on how to go about reading The Waves is invaluable and could ultimately change your mind about the book if you were so inclined to hate it by page two and would not like to try again.)

I am a terrible first reader because I’m a rushed first reader. I hate not understanding my boundaries. I don’t like not knowing what lies ahead, how the book or story or movie takes its rough shape. I don’t know how to make my thoughts happen if I don’t know what all of my thoughts are supposed to be. Especially with a book as hyped as Blue Nights, a first reading is not much more than a semi-subconscious attempt to find all of those aforementioned quotable passages, ponderings, and doubts. It’s not unlike seeing a movie in the theater with the trailer fresh in your mind. Where does that fit in? And that?

It’s a horrible, non-contextualized mess.

The blue nights to which Didion weaves her thoughts are among my most anxiety-ridden. I spend them thinking, Get it over with. Go on, be night already. (That I don’t do well with lingering transitions would be an understatement times ten.) That same rushed resentment I feel during those evenings is the same feeling that always accompanies a first reading, especially for a book with any sort of poetic leanings whatsoever.

Like The Waves, Blue Nights (and, before it, The Year of Magical Thinking) are books of pacing. There’s no real plot, not one we don’t already know from articles and interviews and living in a literary world. They’re all books of repeated images and phrases that mean little if not savored in time with the author’s intentions. They’re all books that benefit from multiple readings because their images and phrases become symphonic in their vast interconnectivity and there’s just no way for [me] to fully live that in fewer than a half dozen readings. Because, the first time, I read thinking, Go on, be night already.

But, in the first read, there are pings. There are, of course, the quotable passages (that will need immense distance in both time and space to become as meaningful as they ought to be, but over-use has already made them as itchy as a Top 40 song). But there are the other, more personal moments. The sentence I underline for myself (the sentence I underline for myself being the very first reason I don’t often lend my books to people). There are movements appreciable mostly only to writers (those, too, underlined, although with less apprehension of the passing glance).

Though it’s been noted that Blue Nights is a veritable who’s who of a generation of a certain brand of celebrity, it’s also, especially when paired with The Year of Magical Thinking, a veritable Easter egg hunt of Didion’s previous work. I could very gladly go through both books and for so many of the anecdotes write in the margin the corresponding essay from Didion’s oeuvre. And it’s because of those things, the pings and the eggs, that I know I will someday love Blue Nights with the same boundless enthusiasm that arises every time I see Joan Didion in print.

In sickness and in deep, glorious sleep

22 Monday Feb 2010

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There are few days I love more than the day after you’ve been sick.  Not the last truly sick day that gives you, in detail, reasons to scrub your bathroom more often, nor that day after when you’re mostly okay, but things could fall apart again.  I’m talking that next day, when you open your eyes and the muscles that had started hurting for no apparent reason have stopped hurting and you feel rested like you’ll never feel rested until you get the flu again.  You could, if asked, take over the world.

I do things like skip on that day.  I skip while I clean and change my sheets and go outside (this time to find it shoveled and somewhat hospitable).

Needless to say, last week brought about my yearly battle with the stomach flu.  (This blog entry: now featuring 30% fewer TMI details, though I will say that the appeal of moaning on the bathroom floor completely loses its appeal when you’re lying in stray kitty litter.)

My downfall came without warning Thursday afternoon, when I, exhausted, took a nap, and woke up with unexpected results.  If I do my math properly, I spent about six hours awake on Friday.  There was a one-hour period mid-afternoon where I found the strength to call my mom to whine, and, halfway through what would be a reasonable conversation, I cut my mom off and said, “Okay, sleepy, night night” and passed right the hell back out.  Woke up for another couple of hours, then right to sleep for another twelve.

I would pay for that experience.  Seriously.  I’m not even positive I’ve gotten eight hours of sleep more than twice in the past month.  It’s the same ol’ business everyone else complains about – too much to do, too much anxiety, blah, blah, blah.

Ulysses, thesis, misc. reasons or whathaveyou, there was absolutely nothing I could do about this.  As much as I love the day-after exuberance, I do so also love having no choice but to succumb to that kind of sleep.  (Of course it took exactly one day of real life to put me right back into my old sleeping schedule. I hate you, anxiety.)

Now I’ll let you walk away thinking you read something far more brilliant and articulate because you’ll end on some words from Joan Didion’s essay on migraines:

And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.

Xanadu in pearls

14 Saturday Nov 2009

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Show1(Assed out in Cat’s living room.)

Two years ago, I got a phone call from Mary.  When we talk on the phone, we talk on the phone, a multi-hour adventure.  This time I was sprawled across my bed, probably avoiding my roommate, when Mary said, “I have an idea.”  And she went on to describe an art show where book artists and poets came together.  Mary has many big ideas, but this one was definitely the biggest, and then all of a sudden we were all in Cambridge and it was happening.  (All of a sudden for me at least, who Googled like three things over the course of two years.)

Show2(People working hard while I text other people and take pictures.)

We got up Friday morning (some of us anyway), starting to drag a little from long days and lack of hours slept.  MeLaina directed people around the kitchen, preparing foods I don’t understand.  As the afternoon went on, people disappeared from the kitchen, reappearing looking rather dashing, proving once again that, if you scrub a creative writer with soap and water, you can usually find a real person underneath.

Show3(I have no reason for posting this picture except that it amuses me greatly.  My camera died shortly thereafter, leaving me completely without pictures for the actual event.)

Almost three years ago, we had the inaugural poetry prize book release party.  Standing on that porch in the warmth of a late-April night, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be, that this was the life that I wanted to lead.  For some people I know, an event that size would be passé or dull, but when you’re not growing up in the New York literary scene, when you’re not going to school in ivory-suffocated New England, it’s only on a magical spring night that all your dreams come true.

When I think about these things, I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” and her description of New York:

“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South….New York was no mere city.  It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.  To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.”

To stand in that art gallery Friday night, the cold November air waiting outside, the gallery itself crowded with people who thought nothing of it, was to have that other night all over again.  (Almost.  I needed a Brillo pad to scrub off all the New England pretentiousness when I got home.)  To be surrounded by people I adore, doing what we do, and perhaps wearing pearls all the while.

The twenty-something years are supposed to be dedicated to finding out what you want from your life.  I know, I desperately know, but it’s just been a matter of getting there.  Even if I can’t have that life every day, it was exactly what I needed as I hit the halfway mark, reminding me why I’m doing this in the first place.

Word games

28 Tuesday Jul 2009

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Fair warning: I’m cheating here and there this week as I finish up my summer class.  Today, I’m participating in a word challenge as issued by Mrs. Scribe.  She assigned me the following five; if you’re nice, and leave a note, I might do the same for you.

Pop culture: The institution of pop culture has always fascinated me, but as a member of this side of the divide in high school, I had to spend my requisite years sniping at my sister that she was nothing more than a lemur.  After almost two months of this project, I’m glad to say I’ve found quite a great deal of joy, but I’m also still adamant that folk music is the superior musical genre (you really can’t sway my Susan Werner and Dar Williams love, sorry).  While I’ve never been the type to give praise just because I’m supposed to like/love something, I did give an extra moment of pause as I considered this year’s fiction issue of The Atlantic.  Was it full of actually really good writing or just snobbery?

Writing: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six years old.  It’s the only activity I’ve ever stuck with, which I’m hoping bodes well for my future.  For a long, long time, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, which is how I wound up bounding into Mrs. Scribe’s fourth period Journalism 1 class twelve years ago.  The problem was this: in twelfth grade, I took Mrs. Scribe’s AP English class (which we students lovingly called AP Scribe), wherein she introduced me to the likes of Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson.  She also made us read the Washington Post Magazine every week, which completely embedded my love of Jeanne Marie Laskas.  When I got to college, I learned that you could study AP Scribe for real and, like, make a life out of it.  So now I’m in the MFA version of AP Scribe – known better as creative nonfiction – and trying to figure out how to make an honest go at this amazing world she introduced me to.

Friends: Friendship is something I take tremendously seriously.  While I have a great number of acquaintances, you really have to be someone special for me to consider you my friend.  But, once you’re there, you have to try even harder to get out.  If you’re my friend, I will be there for every tearful late-night call, I will cheer you on for every choice you make, all of it.  Over time, I’ve found that the people I’m willing to do that for are usually willing to do that for me, too, which is why I maintain friendships with people from elementary school forward.  It was hip with several of my college friends to refuse to associate with their former high school friends, which I find to be a load of crap.  If you were good enough to be my friend at one stage of my life, chances are you’re good enough for the next.  That’s not to say that some friends don’t naturally drift apart, but I’ve never put the severing line down just because I thought I should.

Fashion: Speaking of my days in Mrs. Scribe’s class, the first time she met me, I was in a cheerleading uniform.  (She was wearing chili pepper earrings and a denim dress; details like that are mini encouragement moments for my chosen genre.)  My absolute favorite part of being a cheerleader (and being on the crew team as well) was that, at least two days a week, I didn’t have to decide what to wear to school.  Even if half of that time was spent wearing orange polyester, it still gave me a readymade image, a style that distinctly put me into a group (no matter how badly I didn’t actually fit in with that group).  The first day of eleventh grade was baffling to me; I had quit cheerleading by that point and had no idea how to make a first-day-of-school impression anymore.  How did I pick my first day of MFA outfit?  I wore a Joan Didion reference.  Couldn’t make that up if I tried (yet another reason I write nonfiction.  Who the hell would make up something like that?).  (Also, I think what really made the impression was threatening to puke all over JML.  Win some, lose some.)

College: College was where I finally learned to do school.  From about third grade through about my junior year of undergrad, I just couldn’t grasp the concept of doing my work at all, doing it well when I actually did it, anything like that.  Middle school was especially brutal.  In high school, I made As in only two classes – journalism and gym, and gym ended after tenth grade.  I’ve still warbled here and there, but, the longer I stay in school, the better it turns out (much to the chagrin of my parents, who want nothing more than for me to get a real job.  They’re proud of me and all, but my mom says she’s tired of worrying if I have enough money to feed myself).

Done!  Who else wants to play?

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