Some Projects

I'm off to another conference (sigh). This makes three out-of-towns in October, which is really high on the "¡Aye Carumba!" scale. So high, it's actually prompting a change in behavior on my part: I'm planning to back off outward expressions of my creative life, at least for the moment. Rift is out, and there's a certain amount of work to be done there with readings and events and promotion, but other than that, I'm itching to make new things and finish old projects. This means I'm not necessarily going to say no to new projects and appearances, but I'm going to start selecting things that fit into the "create mode" rather than the "present mode." There is a time and a place for present, but I feel like I've been presenting myself into a place where my store of created material is becoming depleted pretty fast. The tank isn't on empty, but it's not on full either.

I want to finish a collection of interlocking stories I've been working on for a really long time. It's called Small World, and there will be six long stories of about 25-30 pages each. In each story a character and/or situation from a preceding story will take center stage. In fact, each successive story will add to the plot and subtext of the earlier stories. Yes, it is a little bit like LOST in story format.

I want to throw myself into the blog a bit more. I am working on short memoir posts. On my trip to DC this week, I'm going to be sketching these things out. I'm also working on some ideas about how a creative life and family life spark when they bump into each other. I'll have a long first post out this Sunday.

And finally I want to work on my retelling of the old folktale "The Little Red Hen." In my version, the hen asks for help from a pig, a cat, a goose, and a coldwar-era Soviet tactical robot.

A Pause for A Political Message to America

So far, we have allowed the market to develop and oversee the healthcare system in the US. According to the NY Times this morning, small businesses are buckling under the weight of health care costs. So, I'd like someone who prefers a market solution explain why it is logical to allow the markets to remain in charge of health care. I don't want to hear about small government or tea parties. I want a real economic argument for why choking small business is central to the American ideal. Though I generally consider myself to be a liberal, in this area my conservative stripes show. I am very concerned about the protection of small businesses, and it doesn't seem as if the un(under)regulated healthcare system is currently taking any interest in doing that. Small businesses employ 40% of the labor force, and the current market system hoses them in a number of ways: they can't negotiate with insurance companies like corporations can, and they don't have enough employees to reduce risk enough to reduce individual premiums. They current system "favors" large-scale corporate employers all the way through.

Our history of anti-trust legislation shows that corporate interests don't take a "care for the community/good neighbor" approach on their own internal moral compass. Some government intervention, through statute, has been almost constantly necessary. (I do understand that many would debate this, too.) Some government intervention in healthcare seems similarly necessary to keep Main Street solvent. Many are suggesting that the current jump in premiums is a cash grab prior to legislation that might deplete insurance company earnings. I guess I have to take the term "earnings" with a little bit of irony. Perhaps "take" might be better.

When the day is done, I feel as if the current healthcare debate is really a referendum on corporate versus individual interests in our country. I sure hope that corporate domination isn't America's only lasting legacy to the world. We have done cooler things than that, like invent jazz and public libraries.

A Night (or two) in the Gallery

I recently spent a couple of days in Salt Lake for the opening of a show I did with Utah painter, Jennifer Rasmusson. I've been mentioning this project for the last few weeks on Facebook and Twitter. Jennifer and I have been wanting to collaborate for a couple of years, and eventually one of the galleries that represents her agreed to the experiment. It was really one of the most enjoyable and challenging things I have ever done with my writing in a long time. The process began a couple of months ago. We shared our work and had a few long conversations about what was possible. After those first meetings, we set a few ground rules. First, we didn't want to create the show around the idea of illustration; the images and words had to be on an equal footing and not duplicate each other too much. Second, we wanted to influence each other so that we all wound up in a new place. And third, we wanted to explore the relationship of reading and looking, which is a really complicated matter, one I am really interested in looking into a little more deeply.

Once I had written a few of the prose pieces, we started thinking about how to represent the writing so that (a) it would present itself as something to be read, and (b) it would seem like a painting and not a book, zine, or other printed matter. We naturally went first to the idea of letterpress, which looks great, but has the problem of "aura."

Aura was described by Walter Benjamin as the quality in a work that comes from its uniqueness as opposed to having been mass produced through mechanical means. Items that are one of a kind demand a different aesthetic response than ones that are reproduced or even commonplace. He would have had a ball with the internet.

In any case, we didn't want things to look printed, but we wanted them to have the look of type so that viewers would be encouraged to read them rather than to take the words as images without meaning attached to them. This led me to some interesting thoughts on something writers at one time or another have to really address. I might have been primed by Michael Chabon's recent interview with Teri Gross in which he discusses the idealized reader every writer has to construct, the entity who will get the jokes and puns and allusions the writer puts on the page.

Books are mass produced and distributed (many copies of one thing), and in the case of a blog, like this one, many readers are brought to a duplication taken from a single copy stored in a server, so that an infinite number of temporary copies exist at any one time.

In a gallery there is, however, only one painting. That is, I gather, the whole purpose of the gallery. Yes, paintings can be reproduced, but the whole thing about a gallery, the aura they are trying to create, is uniqueness. When you buy this painting, you're getting an exclusive deal—that's the arrangement the gallery is selling.

One other interesting thing I had to consider in working on these stories meant to be seen in a gallery and not read in a book, is that the gallery is a social environment, like a theater. The other people in the gallery, the other works adjacent to it, all exert a force on the reading. We don't read in a vacuum, but we do often read alone, or in pseudo-loneliness: on trains, in waiting rooms, or on flights.

I got the first sense of these pressures on the night of the opening. We have one large collection of work called "The Conversation" in which we matched small paintings with small story paintings that consisted of a short bit of dialogue. Some dude came in and bought two of the stories, effectively splitting them from the context of their partner image. As he walked off with one of the gallerists, the small crowd of about ten people went into an outrage. They said things like, "You can't split them up, you just can't. Make him come back and buy the nest."

Then, the next day, the night of the gallery stroll, a man came in right as the gallery was closing. He looked like a speed metal A and R guy, drove a white BMW, and his girlfriend looked like a cross between a bond girl and a cocktail waitress at Caesar's Palace. He took a look at the large diptych of Jennifer's on which I had written a field of words in charcoal (pictured above). It sold early the night of the opening to a beautiful young woman and her hip husband, who also bought my favorite story/image combination.

This guy took one look at the little red dot that means the painting was no longer available and said, "Aw, shit, man. I wanted that one." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and then walked around the gallery and said, "Who bought it?" When he realized it was uncool to be asking that, he said, "You don't have to tell me." One gallerist named the couple. Our guy said, "Her? Dammit."

The amazing part about it, was the painting was still there and would be for the rest of the show, setting the aesthetic. The works which were off limits were still there, flaunting themselves. Except in the rare book market, there will always be many other copies of a book, so it's not a big deal. With a painting, there is one, and that creates a lot of desire, in that context. It's really interesting to watch those pressures at play.

Needless to say, this experience was not only interesting but slightly intoxicating. My wife (she and I collaborated on paintings—a future post on that is coming) and I left, wanting to create, and you can't ask for a better experience then that.

Crossbones Valentine

I found this little watercolor painting lying around in the house this weekend. While I was scanning it Ike came up and told me he painted it. Then Zoë appeared, crying that she had painted a heart and Ike ruined it with all the "Halloween stuff." Ike did not deny it but agreed, saying, "I put in the bones and the scary parts." Zoë harumphed and stomped off. I don't like to side with one kid or the other, but the Halloween parts are really the most amazing thing. It's pretty great blown up, too. We might print it and frame it.

Requiem for a Dream

Because of my recent focus on the fiction writing side of things, I realized that I hadn't been to an academic conference in a while, and I decided I should keep my head in the game. I got a PhD instead of an MFA because I have an interest in and knack for the nerd mongering that goes on in the upper vaults of the ivory tower. Just to keep it real, I gave a paper on heist films.

Academic conferences are strange beasts. In theory it sounds like the coolest thing possible: get a bunch of super dweebs together to talk about the things that fuel their rockets. These people, being in such close proximity, will generate a field of raw intelligence that will blot out the sun. It all sounds to me like a kind of Burning Man for college teachers.

In this temporary geektopia, the world is writ small, and then enlarged again, through the magnifying properties of something people in the know like to call a discourse. When the conference ends, I always expect to return from the mountain, touched by the one or more of the Muses. I always think I will be furiously scribbling notes in the airport and on the flight home. I imagine I'll return to the classroom, tell everyone to stand on their desks and throw out the syllabus—we'll guide ourselves through the rest of the semester with excitement. The upgraded courses will be so full of new ideas and features that students will shut their phones and start taking notes on pieces of paper with real pencils and pens and love learning forever.

But it almost never works out like this.

My experience with academic conferences is so unlike the hope I always hold for them. What's the most depressing, I'm afraid, is the simple fact that most academics are absolutely dreadful in front of a crowd.

If you've never been to one of these conferences or seen one of these presentations, imagine Miles Davis and his late–career disdain for the audience, minus his ability to play the trumpet better than ninety-nine percent of everyone who as ever put a horn to their lips. The issue is not their ideas, or even their passion. They all seem so tired (I guess I'm included), and these presentations are often the last thing on our long list of things that must be done, a list that dominates the other lists of things we want/hope/wish we could do.

Know that I don't arrive as a hostile audience. I am sincerely hoping to have my mind blown. I am the kid who, full of hope and ecstasy, orders sea monkeys out of a comic book, and when they finally arrive I end up, chin in hands, watching clumps of brown powder fall lifelessly to the bottom of the fish bowl.

Usually, on the last night of a conference. I retire to my room. Watch some television, and think to myself as I pack my bags that these hotels and conference centers are where ideas come to die. I want to have a different attitude, but a pattern has been emerging, and I have been observing it for fifteen years now.

There is hope. For every conference, there are a number of confederate ones that take place over dinner, in the elevators, and in the Q & A sessions that follow the gray wasteland of the headliners. I am always energized by the things people say when they are not on the schedule.

So, here's the conference of my dreams: take our proposals, put a dozen of us who appear to be likeminded into a room, bring some nice treats, close the door, and come back in two hours.

Subject: The Outside

This might be the best student evaluation I've ever gotten. This student wasn't in my class this semester because he'd been incarcerated. He writes:

Dr. P,

Once again the simple minded folks at the Utah DOC have set me loose upon society. I want to express thanks for the great things your mentoring provided to me. I can and will write, perhaps even shit people will want to read. In spite of the fact you have previous knowledge of this, I want to say that you are a great mind, you have and will continue to inspire. There are great writers who are a little mental, or a lot. I count myself among them, the really disturbed and dysfunctional, unique futuristic writers. I know your [sic] probably thinking, "Get off my leg."

Thanks anyways. Warren (not his real name)

Well, good luck, Warren. Stay out of the pokey, and write something that counts. Do I really hope that all of my incarcerated students think about me on the inside? I guess that would be kind of awesome, sort of...

Young Writers

I know that because I'm only forty, I am technically a young writer, but teaching introduction to creative writing now for seven years has taught me that there are even younger writers out there. They are not fools, but they are callow, and when their feathers come in, they will realize that writing, like flying, is as much work as it is joy. And, in fact, some of the joy is in the work. It must be in the work or you'll quit.

I'm just coming off the big push to get a novel done and out into the world, which comes with a lot of work: e-mails, phone calls, websites, tweets, and Facebook updates. There is so much of this non-creative labor in publishing that I now take time with my students who wonder about publication to make sure they understand that getting published can be a real monkey's paw.

They imagine a life where they have made so much money from their creation that they can retreat to their Scottish castle and dream in peace. Of course, the chances of that are somewhat like winning 24 million in Powerball and then having a meteor slam through the roof of your house and smash your head to smithereens while the ticket flutters slowly to the ground.

Last August, my wife and I were coming home from a family retreat to the ancestral cabin in the mountains east of Oakley, Utah. We stopped into IKEA for some cabinets, and as we were loading up, I noticed Brady Udall and his son Finn loading a whole kitchen into a U-Haul. He blurbed my novel, Rift, so after exchanging a couple of "small worlds" and "man it's hots" he asked about the status of the book. I told him I was in the last stages of editing. He said that's where he was with his second novel.

We chatted about how the publishing world is these day, which after the economic disaster of the last year and a half is just about as bad as every other non-essential business in the country. Brady used the "every man for himself." He was optimistic, but you could hear a tinge of the apocalypse in his voice.

The irony that we were having this conversation in the loading zone of an IKEA is not lost on me. Writers, along with other artists are always dealing with the marketplace, but we are less like money changers on the temple grounds than we are evangelists in the parking lot of Costco.

Since that conversation, I've been re-thinking my relationship to writing. I've been asking myself how much I really want a big book contract. I mean, seriously, if I got a call from Gary Fisketjon I wouldn't hang up on him, but I'm starting to wonder if there isn't something grand about being able to publish something on a human scale, something that keeps me balancing the hustle that large scale literary operations require with the niceness of the life I have right now. I just don't know if I'm ready for dog eat dogitude; I am really enjoying the relative slowness of my life.

Good Ideas of AY 2008-2009

The end of the year the pundits round up major accomplishments and newsworthy ideas and such and use them to fill a few news cycles. It's time for person of the year, gadget of the year, story of the year. Instead of aggregating other ideas, I thought I'd go through my notebooks and generate a list of my ten best ideas of the last academic year. Why not? Who else is going to? I also thought that for teachers the calendar year isn't as important as the academic one, so here goes.

1. Library Economy vs. Bookstore Economy.

One of my good friends and colleagues, Matt Nickerson, is a librarian. Through my association with him, I have learned that library use has changed a lot over the last decade or so. A lot of that change seems to be due in part to computer use. In any case, one thing librarians want to achieve is getting books and students together.

This has led us to a number of discussions on the subject of how professors get students into libraries. I responded at one point by saying, "They don't. Teachers bring the books to students in the form of text books. Then once or twice a semester they send them off to the library to find support materials."

The big idea is this: what if the library was the primary text? What would happen in a class in which you said that on a certain day the discussion would be on the subject of "first person narration," use the library and be ready for discussion? I am also imagining all kinds of hybrid assignments where I assign one text and students need to add two more two the mix—their choice.

2. Using Cloud Computing On-line Applications in the classroom.

This is now a no-brainer. Google Docs is my number one choice for managing tons of documents. The searching means that the Google Docs account can really be one big bucket into which I throw these documents. No complex filing directory is necessary. It is kind of a blunt instrument, though. It's almost just an online text editor. I don't think Google Docs is a good composing tool, but it is great for sharing documents and collaborating on them as well.

Adobe's Buzzword, is really beautiful and actually easier on the eyes than most on-line apps. It outputs really nicely to a PDF, which I can have students integrate very nicely into a digital portfolio. I have tried Zoho tools, and they just don't seem to work quite right for me and from my perspective. I have tried to like them.

The use of online apps for collaboration makes the most immediate sense, but once I gained a little facility with the tools, I started to learn a little about how to hack the basic use for some interesting results.

My best discover is the use of what I'm calling the Standing Evaluation. Because I use narrative rather than quantitative evaluation in my courses, I need some way to communicate my responses and feedback to the students. I have discovered that if I instruct a student to share a google document with me, we can use that document as a platform for the evaluation. It's ongoing, so I get to see everything I've written for that semester, and whenever I add anything it's within a context of continuity. I can really chart growth. Students like it because they have a chance to respond, like with your credit report, it's just less difficult: they are free to respond to any comment. The best students do, and it's a real joy to have a conversation about their performance.

3. The Hobbit is a heist narrative.

I have been working on ideas about heist films for a while now, and it hit me over the head like a sack of money: The Hobbit is a heist, Gandalf's 14, if you will. More on this later. I have the seeds of a conference paper germinating at the moment. I does foil my initial heist paper thesis that the heist isn't a good genre for fiction but that it works best in film.

4. Putting an old lampshade iMac in the kitchen.

It's not the fastest, but man, that rotatable, tiltable screen is great for brining up a recipe or watching the Daily Show on Hulu when you're cleaning up.

5. Not getting a snow blower.

We're getting to the point that (a) I can be outside without worrying that the kids will kill themselves, and (b) Alisa's been helping, and it's kind of nice to be out there shoveling with her. It can be quite lovely, in facr. Not an issue, though, for another six months probably. I do have a leaf blower, which I pretty much can't do without.

Proud Parenting

The other day my kids were having breakfast in the kitchen, perched on stools at the counter. My youngest looked at his sister, swallowed a bite of his cereal, and said, "It's duck season."

Zoë, without a pause, said, "Rabbit season."

Just as quick, Ike said, "Duck season."

Back and forth they went until Ike said suddenly, "Wait, stop. Okay, Zoë now it's rabbit season. Boom!" Then they both collapsed into fits of laughter. It was a pleasure to watch.

I was beaming. This meant that my labors had been successful, at least partially so. You see, this is a triumph in parenting for me. I have been trying to give my kids what could be called a classical education in cartoons. I started them with Steamboat Willie and moved them on to Felix the Cat and Fleisher Brothers Superman serials. They are well acquainted with the more contemporary Pixar and Miyazaki. Thanks to YouTube and Netflix, I have been able to widen the survey to include Warner Brothers.

I had no idea if any of this was working until that morning. I am so proud of these kids. Nothing shows me a literate mind more than getting a joke. And, did they ever get it. Bravo, kids. Bravo. You make your old man proud.

Old School/New School

We try to have simple rules around my house, real simple principles that can govern a lot of situations. The baby/toddler principles were this:

1. You can't say no to parents.
2. No throwing unless it's a game, and the other person wants to play.
3. No one can remember rule #3.
4. No one can remember this one either.

The new principles are coming out like this:

1. You are responsible for your own mess.
2. The dining room table is not a storage unit.
3. If it's not yours, ask.

We are also working on one kind of additional practice with the kids. They are getting frustrated a lot these days. So, when frustration mounts, particularly with something we are helping them with, my wife and I are trying to train them to say, "Thanks, but that's not how I want it."

We want them to say this instead of screaming.

It might be too much to ask, but if we don't start now, it'll just be terrible for the next 15 years of our lives.

To Do List: Making it Public

My friend Scott Rogers faithfully publishes a to do list at the end of every semester, which he makes public, and for good reason. Every time I read it, I feel more compelled to push forward on my own projects.

To finish out the semester, I need to:

1. Read 2020-01 Portfolios
2. Read 2020-02 Portfolios
3. Update 1010 Figurator™
4. Draft 3030 Acceptance Letter
5. Send 3030 Acceptance E-mail
6. Follow up on Illustrations for Bullhorn
7. Read 4000-level Playwriting Assessment Submissions
8. Notify 2020 Students Who Need Final Conference
9. Enter Grades for 2020 Courses
10. Enter Grades for 3030 Course
11. Grade 1010 Final Essays
12. Enter 1010 Final Grades
13. Work on 3030 Magazine Template
14. Go to Honors Final Screening

That should just about do it.

Ramadan Trash Talk

A few weeks ago, I was in Boston to work on ideas for a text book I may be writing for a publisher I really respect. After the day-long battery of meetings, I returned to my hotel, and seeing that I'd have another hour or so of daylight, I headed out to Newbury street to scare up a meal and see if there was some book store I could skulk around in for a while.

I walked a few blocks, maybe a quarter of a mile, and I found Newbury Comics. For a while, I looked at comics and graphic novels and some really awesome kitch that would never fit in my suitcase. Over the store sound system was playing some very new, very early-eighties-sounding band, something I'm sure that cool people everywhere will soon be dumping on their iPods.

After I lost interest in the rest of the store's obscure Manga robots and badly done anti-McCain bumper stickers, I walked along the street, checking the menus of the street side bistros. While I was stopped and reading the menu of an Indian restaurant called Kashmir, I noticed two Middle Eastern dudes in their early twenties. They were dressed like they were part of a hip-hop entourage: pants sagging, ball caps perched high on their heads.

The one closest to me went up to the short iron fence and leaned across it. "Khalid," he said. "Yo, man. Khalid." I looked to where he was throwing his voice, and I saw another young middle eastern kid, dressed up in a white shirt buttoned to the collar and dark jeans. His shoes looked remarkably expensive.

He was with the kind of girl who I, when I was in college, would have thought was twenty-six but who I now understand, having taught in universities now for twelve years, just appears to be sophisticated. She was remarkably pretty, like someone going into broadcasting. Her hair was blonde and cut expensively, piled up for her date with calculated abandon. She appeared to wear no makeup at all, though that was certainly an illusion. Her fair skin was even and unblemished. She wore a light grey dress that lifted her breasts into view. Around her thin shoulders was a cream knit shawl. In college you could guarantee that I would have gone for the girl in the shawl.

Then there was a hand on the iron fence, rapping against the metal. "Khalid, don't pretend you don't see us."

The blonde asked Khalid if he knew these guys. He nodded. "They're my roommates," he said, and he took some of the flat bread and dipped it into a bowl and ate it.

The two dudes next to me on the street, groaned. The guy next to me pointed to the west above the roofs of the shops on Newbury Street. "The sun does not go down for another ten minutes, dude. You should not be eating."

Khalid looked at his date and shrugged. She checked her phone and then set it down. Khalid jerked his head to one side, to get the guys to move along.

"Aw, shit," the guy next to me said, then looked at his buddy who straightened his cap and repeated the oath back to him.

"I'm gonna call his moms," the other guy said. "He should be fasting. This is bullshit and he knows it."

"Ten minutes, Khalid. Ten minutes," the guy next to me shouted at his friend in the restaurant. Then the two of them made a show of dismissing him with a broad wave like two old men on a stoop. The waiter setting down more food at Khalid's table looked like he thought was doing to die in a hail of gunfire.

As they walked away, the guy who was yelling from the street shook his head and said, "But she's hot for a white girl."

"I know," the other guy said. "Damn hot." Then they walked off, joining the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk.

I live in a deeply religious community in Utah, where the thought is that by living together and sharing the faith, we can support and sustain our shared beliefs. Though I have lived in this community longer than I have lived at any one address in my life, I have never seen the young people of my own faith reaching out (however ineptly) to preserve the integrity of a friend. Not to this extent.

I can see now, the fear, that religious leaders have about mingling of faiths. Until this moment on Newbury Street I hadn't seen that scenario, (as old as the Old Testament) at play in reality, and I was strangely impressed.

I also felt as ambivalent as those young men must have felt. Khalid's date was hot. I can only wonder what was the rest of that date like? Did Khalid get lucky? If he did, how much would Ramadan observance have actually mattered in the face of that other indiscretion?

It's strange to say it, but really hope that one day, in my own home town, on the first Sunday of the month I might see two cowboys hauling a buddy of theirs out of some house, a fork in their buddy's left hand and a plate full of pie in the other. I hope they throw him in the bed of their truck and drive off, with a beautiful dark haired girl from Vegas in a tank top and jersey shorts watching on, screaming after him, "I'll text you."

I hope one of them says, "You can come back for dinner, bro, and you can kick my ass if you want to, but you're riding out your fast with us."

I know that doesn't say much for agency, but it would make a great story for General Conference.