“The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
- Roland Barthes
Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum’s English 668K at the University of Maryland, I have been alerted to the fact that searching for me on JSTOR brings up my very first publication, “Cheese.”
Honest to goodness, I’d completely forgotten about this. “Cheese” was a short story I wrote when I was 20 or 21, I think, in the first year of my MFA program. It’s old enough that the file on my computer is listed as being “Microsoft Word 1.x-5.x,” and I’m certain that it was converted at least once, when I made the transition from the MS-DOS machine that got me through the MFA to my first Mac PowerBook. It’s from several lifetimes ago, as far as my writing is concerned.
What’s on JSTOR is not the entirety of the piece, needless to say. (At least I hope it’s needless.) I shopped the story around to literary magazines for a while, the last of which was Mississippi Review. Fredrick Barthelme was still editing it then, and after a couple of months or so, I got a letter from him. An actual letter. He told me that he was planning on doing a special issue on first paragraphs — nothing more, just first paragraphs — and that he wanted to publish mine.
And thus it came to pass that my first real publication was composed of nine out of the 5825 words I’d written. The remaining 5816 never saw the light of day.
It’s not without reason. I’ve just re-read the story, and… let’s just say that it’s imperfect. A friend from the fiction workshop I originally wrote the story for gave me a great note about the first draft, saying that its quirky tone was a bit too unrelenting for the story to do the work it wanted to do. “It’s like if M*A*S*H was all Hawkeye and no Trapper John,” he said. “You couldn’t stand to watch it.” 1 I wasn’t really able to hear what he was telling me at the time, but boy, do I get it now. Quirky isn’t the half of it. It’s painfully cute, the kind of cute that only comes from studied avoidance of the real thing the story actually needs to work out.
There was something in Barthelme wanting to publish those first nine words and pushing aside the rest that confirmed for me that something was wrong, but I wasn’t ready to deal with what exactly the wrong thing was. I more or less stopped writing fiction not long after that. My interests gravitated first toward playwriting, and then toward screenwriting. And then, bizarrely, while working in Hollywood, toward a kind of critical nonfiction, which sent me back to grad school — and the rest is history.
I’ve wondered periodically whether I could work my way back into writing fiction, but I’m not sure that I would be much better at it now than I was then. I certainly never had any intention of returning to the old stuff. So having the students of English 668K uncover the existence of this long-forgotten publication created a mini return-of-the-repressed style freakout for me. Not only is the repressed back, but evidence of it is on JSTOR. But I’m resigned, I suppose: with those nine words out there, I suppose the rest may as well be, too.
In any case, safely buried below the fold, and announced this far into the post in a way that might usefully prevent anyone but the most determined from actually finding it: the rest of the story. 2
* * *
CHEESE
I don’t have enough cheese in my life.
Or maybe it’s too much. I don’t know. At any rate I’ve narrowed the problem down to cheese and that’s a good step in the right direction.
Look, don’t ask for perfection because you’re not gonna get it. I have measured out my life in cheese balls and somehow come up short.
Take last night. I make an honest attempt at staying home and get nowhere for it. I try to eat and can’t and try to read and can’t and the tube is out of whack again (you can never have too much whack in your life, or too little for that matter; whack is not the problem). So instead I just sit and smoke and try to ignore the tremors in my legs.
This apartment is closing in on me, see? I’ve lived here for the last three months and in that time I’ve been able to stay home for a complete night by myself (on a night other than Sunday when all the bars are closed) twice. I thought this apartment would be better than the last one (or the one before that for that matter) but it isn’t. I’ve lived in three apartments since I left Sheila two years ago and none of them have been any different.
Sheila was closing in on me too. We’d spent the majority of our married life planning for the children that thankfully never arrived. She spent her evenings with whatever domestic craft she happened to be addicted to at the time and picking out baby names. I became a vegetable. Eggplant, I think. And married eggplant at that. Now I just sit and smoke and wait for the tremors to carry me out of the apartment.
These tremors entered my legs in the last year of my marriage. Five years of eggplanthood had finally gotten to me or at least to my legs. At any rate one night my knees started shaking after a particularly rattling conversation with Sheila and when I stood up my feet automatically led me to the door.
She had been talking about her father, who had died when she was a little girl, and sitting next to me telling me how she hadn’t felt this secure since before he died. I got really cold all of a sudden and said something horrible to her about how I couldn’t be her father much less the father to her kids apparently and she went off to the bedroom and my knees started shaking.
“I’ll be back later,” I hollered as I put on my coat and something pulled me down to my friend Rick’s bar. And I went out and I was back later and the tremors went away for about a week but then they came back more frequently and powerfully until I told Sheila one night as she bent over her pasta maker that I wasn’t going to be back later.
“Why?” She looked at me with the rounded eyes of a five-year-old who’s just been told that Daddy’s leaving. I grabbed onto the counter to keep my knees from shaking too violently. This was just the – the what? the look? the attitude? What ever it was, it was smothering me.
“I’m not sure. I’m missing something.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to find out.”
She put down her spatula and used the corner of her apron to wipe the tears out from under her eyes.
“What about Kristina and John Junior?”
Those were the names of choice that week. The previous week and been Taylor and Elizabeth.
“They aren’t here yet. They won’t miss me.”
Then there was this really horribly tearful scene between us and the more she cried and told me that she didn’t know what she’d do without me the more my legs shook until I couldn’t take it anymore and I had to just walk out.
That was a little over two years ago. I’m sure you probably think I’m heartless and callous. I’ve never been what anybody wanted me to be. I’ve managed to disappoint everyone I’ve ever cared about even though some of them may not know about it yet. And now I’m trapped in the middle of this search here. I’ve been looking for two years and I still don’t know what for but I think I’m getting closer.
Again, take last night. The tremors in my legs finally pull me out the door like they do every night lately. I head down to Rick’s. Rick’s is my standard first stop on the nightly search for – for what? if I could put a name to it or even a number I’d feel better about the whole thing. As it is all I have to know it by is the sneaking suspicion that somewhere something is going on without me and then my legs start to shake. As if all that much could possibly be going on in a town half taken up by the university. I’ve lived here all my life and I still don’t know what there is about this place that makes it worth staying. But everyone does. Stay, that is.
I walk in the door to Rick’s and the usual crowd is there. I’ve seen them all before, people that I don’t know or rather only recognize and wouldn’t recognize at all out of context for that matter. I nod my hellos and scan the tables to see if it’s here.
Rick is behind the bar. He is your standard friend from high school and college with whom I had fallen out of touch until the end of my marriage. I had always known that we had a great deal in common. His marriage was ending at the same time. He hands me a Bass Ale and a pack of Marlboro Lights as I walk up.
“Little early tonight, John.”
“Yeah, well…hey – how’s the bar biz?”
“Standard. How’s Magruder and Son?”
“Sub-standard.”
We both shrug and smile. This has been a running joke between us for a while now only in light of my last income statement for the store it’s no longer particularly funny.
Rick and I were closest in college – back in those stupidly idealistic days before Sheila and the business when female spouse and children and gainful employment were all four-letter words. Neither of us has a wife or kids but we are both gainfully employed now (dare I use the word work?). He who had been voted most likely to own a bar in high school now does. I run what used to be my father’s automotive parts store. It’s all been downhill since the original Magruder is gone and buried and now the Son is Magruder and no one is the Son. Success has never been a part of my repertoire. If you don’t believe me, ask Sheila. I’m sure her version of the story will be out in paperback soon.
Andy, the resident philosopher/psychologist, is sitting on a stool near the end of the bar. I sit down on the stool next to him and light a cigarette.
“What’s up tonight, Andy?”
“Loneliness.”
I look at him a little more closely and realize for the first time that he is almost twice my age, old enough to be my father. I also realize that I know nothing about Andy and he knows nothing about me despite the fact that we’ve talked almost every night for the last year or so and I have a strong desire to keep it that way. You can’t disappoint a first name like Andy.
“Beg your pardon?”
“We’re discussing loneliness,” he says.
“Any new developments?”
Rick wanders down to this end of the bar, drying a beer mug. He shrugs at me. Andy turns his barstool to face me and smiles enigmatically.
“You know what this world needs now, John?”
“Love sweet love?” I answer and instantly regret it.
“Every man on this planet is looking for the same thing. This includes you even though you may not know it.”
“What am I looking for?” I put my beer down on the bar and stare intently at Andy. He’s a bizarre old guy but he usually knows what he’s talking about.
“Someone who can make cheese. Nothing fancy, mind you. No Camembert or Romano or even Swiss for that matter. Just something solid like Cheddar. Someone who can make a good solid Cheddar.”
“Cheese.” This guy’s gotta be kidding. He tells me he’s got the meaning of life and then he gives me cheese?
“Yes. Cheese.” Andy’s eyes glow. “It’s someone you can depend on, someone who makes cheese. Someone who won’t let you down.
“Cheddar cheese.”
“Yes. Cheddar cheese.”
“So that’s all there is?”
Andy stares at me this time.
“To what?”
“To life. To everything. It’s all cheese?”
“Life is nothing, John.” Andy puts a hand on my shoulder. “Life is nothing. It’s the living part that’s tough. Get the living part down and the rest is cream cheese.”
“Cheese.”
“Sorry.”
“And the living part?”
“Someone who can make cheese.”
We both sit back and face the bar. Andy glows, probably feeling rejuvenated for having spread the good news about cheese. For my part, I’m just convinced that this guy’s a nut.
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“But, come on, Andy…I mean…cheese for cryin’ out loud. Sheila used to do stuff like that, but…”
Andy looks at me for a moment and then sits back again.
“Ah…I understand now.”
“Understand what?”
“Cheese can’t help you. Cheese is your problem. Cheese is your past. Come to terms with your past.”
“What does my past have to do with this?”
“Trust me. A lot. Come to terms with your past and then perhaps you’ll understand.”
I stare at Andy for a second. Then down my beer.
“See you later.”
“Sure, John. See you later.”
I walk back down to the other end of the bar, where Rick is wiping off a section of the counter.
“Weirdness.” I reach for my wallet to pay my tab.
“Leaving already?”
“Yeah, I’m kinda tired,” I lie. I give him the money and shake his hand.
“Before you go, let me ask your opinion.”
“Sure.”
“I’m thinking of adding fried mozzarella to the hors
d’oeuvre menu. I’ve been taking a poll and some of the regulars seem to think I’m sliding too far to the fern bar side as it is and that the mozzarella would only make things worse. What do you think?”
“Mozzarella.” Coincidence, I think. Gotta be coincidence. “Well, sounds standard for the bar biz.”
“Yeah. Good luck with your parts.”
“Maybe someday I’ll be able to put them together.”
We both shrug and smile. Another running joke. Maybe
someday I’ll be able to come up with some new material.
Now perhaps you can begin to understand my problem. It was only nine-fifteen at this point and usually I don’t leave Rick’s until at least ten-thirty or so but then usually I don’t have people preaching the saving powers of cheese and picking on my past.
Why is it that everyone insists I haven’t ‘come to terms with my past’? The past isn’t my problem. The problem is the present. I can’t deal with the present. The past is over with. No sweat. You wanna know about my past? Here it is:
I grew up with the perfect father who expected me to be the perfect kid. I wasn’t. I married the perfect woman who expected me to be the perfect husband. I wasn’t.
That’s my past in a nutshell. I have no trouble dealing with that.
My father was perfect. He was a first-generation American, son of dirt-poor immigrants. He had started out by working on people’s cars and then began supplying parts to all the repair shops in the area. He became the leading auto parts dealer in the state. He had a beautiful wife and a son, a son who he expected to carry on his name and his tradition. What more could you ask for?
I was never quite enough to measure up to his standards. Or my own for that matter. I slid through college (the first Magruder to get a degree) by drinking beer and shooting pool. Nothing else seemed to matter – I knew I could never be perfect, so it seemed pointless even to try. Then there was Sheila who loved me and Dad who asked me to take over the business and suddenly there was the question of doing the Right Thing.
My father sat across the kitchen table from me while my mother washed the dishes after our weekly Sunday dinner on the Sunday before I graduated from college. My degree was in history and I wanted to go to grad school and had been accepted (marginally) but my father thought otherwise.
“You have known that I wanted you to take over the store for years now, Jonathan. I’ve been counting on you.”
Counting on me. Counting on me. What sane, well-adjusted individual in the world would bother counting on me? My father. And Sheila. My mother just stood in the background and smiled wistfully at me. She never contradicted my father but she never gave me any opinions on anything for that matter so I really don’t have the foggiest idea what she thought about the subject. My father just stared at me with disapproval in his eyes until I had to say yes. And he and Sheila were both happy with me. At least for the moment.
I thought I wanted more than anything to do the Right Thing. I took over the store and got married and both institutions are bankrupt now. I suppose it’s just not in me. My mother died three weeks after I told her that my marriage wasn’t working out. My father died two months later of a broken heart. Okay, literally he had a massive coronary. I’m still convinced that it was losing my mother and watching his auto parts empire go down the toilet that did him in.
In other words, don’t get to know me too well, okay? I’ll disappoint you for sure. The Right Thing is utterly beyond me. The last time I tried, two people died for it. I should have a sign hung around my neck: This Guy Is Dangerous. His Failures Are Registered As Lethal Weapons.
And the thing that really gets to me is that even though I missed my mother and father and regretted not being able to please them the things I really seemed to miss were beer and pool. I stood around at my father’s funeral and had visions of eight-balls dancing in my head. Sheila said that it was a perfectly normal reaction, to think of things that don’t cause pain at a time like that, but I know the truth. I can’t even feel guilty right.
But this is all past and that’s not the problem. Last night is the problem.
Last night: I leave Rick’s and walk out to my car, trying to decide where I want to go next. I get in the car and drive as carefully as possible (considering that the tremors have taken over my right leg completely and the gas pedal is jerking uncontrollably) to the Ocean View. Never mind that there isn’t a body of water within fifty miles of here. The Ocean View is a quieter place – a piano bar – that serves the middle-aged failure set. Usually my last stop of the night but somehow I have this need to be on familiar territory.
I open the door and walk in and all the first names are in their proper places. That’s all I know anyone on my nightly runs by – first name. Steve is behind the bar. Laura is waiting on a table. Chris is sitting at the piano. My life is a long series of first names without lasts. There is no more formality in this world. Or originality for that matter. Anybody could be a Rick or a Steve or a Chris or a John. Not just anyone could be a Vladimir Magruder, world renowned auto parts king of Russo-Irish descent.
Steve pulls out a Bass for me as I approach the bar and reaches out to shake my hand.
“Little early tonight, John.”
“No kidding. Weird night out there.”
“They’re over there.”
Steve motions to a table in the corner of the bar where the lighting is especially dim. Four of my compatriots, fortyish men who smoke too much and spend too much time in bars, sit around the table arguing heatedly.
Steve pours a glass of Zinfandel for someone at the bar and I turn and head toward the Oblong Table.
I sit down at the table without saying hello or paying much attention to what these four are arguing about. My efforts are too concentrated on keeping my legs still and my mind is stuck on the disapproving look that stayed on my father’s face even into the casket. My right knee continues twitching, almost imperceptibly. Perhaps the past is causing me some trouble, I think.
“I still don’t understand what all the goddamned fuss is about.” Henry the accountant leans back in his chair glaring at Ed the doctor across the table. Ed tilts his head toward me.
“Ask John then. Maybe he’s got an impartial opinion.”
Henry smiles at me and I await this entry into a philosophical debate like I await a molar extraction.
“John, these aging yuppies and I are disagreeing on a point of taste.” He leans back in his chair and waits while I light my cigarette. “What do you think? Personally, I think Brie is an utterly useless cheese. It has no flavor.”
I was wrong, I think. It’s the present after all. The past is easy compared to this.
Sam the teacher puts his glass down on the table and points at Henry.
“But you admitted yourself that you’d never had baked Brie. And that makes all the difference in the world.”
“I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between baked Brie and the box it came in.” Henry looks at me, as though some subtextual understanding has passed between us. “Now give me a good Bleu. That’s real cheese.”
“Bleu? Oh, for chrissakes, you’ll kill your tastebuds with that stuff. The only decent cheese around here is Edam. And that’s only if you can find a decent imported.” Ed reaches for my pack of cigarettes and takes one out.
Paul the lawyer, who hasn’t said anything to this point, suddenly pushes his chair back.
“Oh, what would you know from cheese, Ed?” Paul stands and turns to me. “Don’t pay any attention to him. The guy eats Velveeta. I have proof.” He walks off toward the bar with his empty glass in hand.
“You guys are getting off the subject. The point,” says Henry, “is whether or not the success of Brie is solely attributable to the exaggerated self-importance and general pretentiousness of our generation. Which I think it is. John?”
I realize my mouth is hanging open and I try to force
something intelligible to come out of it.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to give this some thought.” I drain the last of my beer and stand up.
“You can’t leave yet. You haven’t given us your opinion.” Sam looks at me half-desperately, still clinging to the worthiness of Brie.
“I don’t eat much cheese.”
The three men still sitting at the table stare at me silently for five seconds too long, then turn and resume the argument. I walk to the bar, passing Paul on his way back. He smiles at me and rejoins the table.
I walk up to the bar. Steve smiles at me.
“Need anything else, Jonathan?”
My left knee jumps slightly.
“Nope. Have a good one, okay?”
“Thanks.”
I stand there and wait for a second to make sure he doesn’t have any cheese comments to make. Then I turn around and leave the bar.
See, I’d started expecting cheese. It’s the Purple Car Syndrome. You never see a purple Gremlin anywhere until the day you buy one. Then you see four on the way home. See? No one ever talks about cheese in bars. It’s all the power of suggestion. It’s all I heard.
And the more I thought about cheese, the more I thought about Sheila and her damned domestic crafts. She would make some of the most amazing things using everyday kitchen staples and I’d sit at the table and stare at her in awe. But more and more the longer we were married, she would talk about babies and things and what a great father I’d be. I loved that woman more than anything I’ve ever loved any other time in my life but she wanted me to be a father. How could I possibly be a father when I couldn’t even be a son?
Which leaves me with the question – What can I do? In college I used to think it was pool. But then I gave it up when I married Sheila and started running the store. And then as my knees started twitching and I started smoking more and more, I started seeing pool tables in my sleep. I wound up leaving Sheila the day after I had shot my first game in over five years. I lost the game but I had the bug back. So I’ve been shooting pool regularly again for the last two years and getting worse and worse at it for all my trouble.
Knowing as I do now that cheese (or the lack thereof) is my problem only makes the situation worse. There’s something incongruous about pool and cheese. No matter how you try you just can’t find a way to put them together into some sort of coherent whole. Trust me. I’ve been trying all morning.
But last night. I leave the Ocean View and walk out to my car knowing full well that the car will wind up perhaps of its own volition at a little pool hall about a mile off campus. This is where Rick and I wasted many a Friday afternoon and evening wasting ourselves. I’ve been back contributing my quarters to the relief fund of this particular place since I’ve been on my own again. Measuring out your life in quarters is somehow less disconcerting than profit and loss statements. Not to mention cheese balls.
So I get in the car and start the engine and the car does this momentary godawful convulsion thing and then calms down. I’ve been meaning to check that for a while now but there’s something about cars that still paralyzes me. I mean, for all the parts that I’ve got access to and despite the fact that I know how to put them together I couldn’t build an engine that would run to save my life. There’s some magical element that’s missing – some sort of dust or potion that can turn a pile of interconnected metal and PVC into a functioning machine.
If I could wish for one thing in this world right now, I’d like to find out what that is – what that one key to congruency that I’m missing is.
On second thought, perhaps I don’t want to know. They’d probably tell me it’s Cheez Whiz.
So I look up and to my utter lack of shock and surprise, the car and I are sitting in the parking lot of the Hurricane. Exactly where I knew I’d be. It’s like I hit some sort of automatic pilot once I leave the apartment.
I pull my stick out of the trunk and walk in. The Hurricane is this sleazy place just far enough away from campus to attract the die-hard pool types but close enough to have its own supply of burgeoning hormones and hairspray.
The tables in this place are notoriously the worst in the state but since I’ve been shooting on them on and off and then on again for the last twenty – well, for quite a while now – I’ve basically figured out how the tables run. Which ones have cracked slates. Which ones are slightly tilted. Which ones have warped felts. Not that I can compensate for any of this, mind you.
The only bartender working last night is a guy probably half my age that’s only been here for about a month. I don’t know his name yet, but apparently he knows mine and he says “hi, John” and automatically pulls out a Bass for me. I still can’t decide if that puts me at ease like I’m at home here or something or if it’s too damn comfortable and I should start going some place where I’m a little less visible.
People are milling around and I put a couple of quarters up on a table and wait for one of the guys that’s shooting right now to lose. Rick taught me to shoot pool when we were in high school and we would run around on weekends trying to find places that would let us in without carding us. The only thing that’s changed in this place since then is the new army of video games lining one wall. I can’t stand the stupid things.
My beer is gone and I light another cigarette (I think I’ve been chain-smoking; I can’t remember) and go get another beer. The bartender looks at me and as he gives me my change (turns out his name is Frank) he asks me if he can ask me a question. Great, I think. Now I’m giving advice to bartenders.
“Sure.”
“You ever eaten a muffaletta?”
“Yeah.” I think I know what’s coming.
“What kind of cheese goes into one of those things?”
Yep. I knew it.
“I beg your pardon?” Stalling, you see.
“I’ve been trying to think about it for hours and it just isn’t coming to me. What kind of cheese is that?”
I stare at him blankly for a second and try to figure out if he has some deeper meaning in this question. If the world is trying to tell me something tonight. No, the guy just wants to know what kind of cheese goes into a muffaletta.
“Provolone.”
“That’s it!” He looks positively ecstatic. He turns to some friend of his sitting down at the end of the bar and yells, “Hey, Joe! It’s Provolone!”
Joe brings a palm down onto the bar.
“That’s it!” He turns to me. “Thanks, man. That’s been making us nuts all night.”
I glance quickly from one to the other and listen for a second as they discuss this newest revelation. Someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn around and it’s the guy from the pool table telling me my quarters are up. I start to walk over to the table and the bartender yells “Hey, John!”
I turn around and raise my eyebrows.
“One more – lasagna?”
“Lasagna?”
“What kind of cheese goes in lasagna?”
“Ricotta.”
I drop my cigarette on the floor and step on it and head over to the pool table before I get too embroiled in this conversation. As I’m racking the balls, this guy I’m shooting against – he’s about seven feet tall and as big around as a pool cue (the word beanpole comes to mind) – introduces himself as David. Another first name to go with Frank and Joe in my collection. I never heard anyone call my father by his first name. Perhaps when you’re perfect you earn a little more formality.
David breaks and sinks the eightball before I even manage to get my stick out of the case. I zip the case shut again and shake his hand.
“It’s just not my night.”
He looks somehow sheepish.
“I’ve had nights like that.”
Yeah. This kid’s all of twenty and he’s had nights like that?
I stand and watch him as one by one he strips the table clean of balls. Two girls pass behind me and my radar goes off instantly. I turn to look at them and one is the spitting image of Sheila when I first met her, the Sheila that I loved, the Sheila that didn’t need a father. She had been in my French class and she had some sort of fire about her – some potential that I’d been missing in my own life. Little did I suspect that this was a pure baby-making force that would wind up being frustrated by my own insufficiencies and rechannelled into things like herbs and yogurt cultures.
I catch a word of French from the mouth of the Sheila-child and tune in to her conversation.
“Neufchatel? I suppose that would be fine,” her friend responds.
“I know we already have the Port and the Gouda, but I think the Neufchatel would be a nice touch.”
“Sure.”
“Besides, I have it on good authority that Frank’s coming to the party,” the Sheila-child says, eyeing my new friend the bartender, “and I hear he likes Neufchatel.”
I watch them for a second as they collectively drool over Frank of the Neufchatel desire.
“Thought about Brie?”
They both turn to me, wide-eyed.
“Beg your pardon?” She is close enough for me to touch, to put my fingers over her eyes and gently shut them. That father-figure look is dancing in her pupils.
“Brie. Thought about Brie?”
“Not really,” her friend says, looking nervously at the Sheila-child who just stares at me.
“Make sure it’s baked, though. Brie’s nothing if it’s not baked,” I tell her as though cheese isn’t actually the farthest thing from my mind and as though she can tell what I’m really thinking. My right knee twitches silently.
“Thanks. We’ll remember that,” her friend mumbles as she drags her off by the elbow. I watch them as they move to the other side of the bar, the Sheila-child staring straight ahead and her friend shaking her head and looking nervously over her shoulder.
I reach into my pocket and pull out my change. I only have one quarter left so I decide to break my code of ethics and give one of the video games a shot. I walk down the row against the wall, inspecting the troops. I spot one on the end that looks like Pac-Man, something tame enough for me to handle, but as I get closer I see that the little thing running through the maze is a mouse and that it’s being chased by cats all over the screen as it attempts to get to the little pieces of – you guessed it ¬ cheese. I’m momentarily paralyzed by the screen and David is behind me getting ready to break for a new game and for just a second I’m convinced I hear him say Gorgonzola. I drain my beer and grab my stick and leave.
I sit in the car for a second, lighting a new cigarette and attempting to control the twitching in my legs. My hands are shaking so badly that I drop the cigarette between my legs after I get it lit and then I hit my head on the roof of the car when I stand up to keep from burning myself. I pick the cigarette up off the seat and sit back down slowly, concentrating on evening out my breathing. Stupid damn habit, smoking. It’ll kill me one of these days.
I started smoking when I was fifteen and I had first met Rick. We’d sit in his bedroom and smoke what seemed like cigarette after cigarette (but now I know it wasn’t because now I know what cigarette after cigarette really is) and talk about how we were never getting married and were never going to be tied into any job to the point where we got boring like our parents. Then one day my mother found a half-smoked cigarette in my jacket pocket. She never said a word about it to me. She just told my father.
I came home from Rick’s house that evening for dinner and Dad was sitting in his chair reading the paper. He let me get past him before he started – I suppose so that he wouldn’t have to look at me.
“I thought you had more sense than to smoke, Jonathan. I suppose I was wrong.” His newspaper didn’t so much as rattle and his head didn’t so much as raise. That was all that was ever said about the subject but I relive that moment every time I light a cigarette. My father sitting placidly in his chair with his feet on the stool in front of him and my mother in the kitchen quietly grating Parmesan cheese for the spaghetti and the disappointment hanging heavy in the air between us. The first in a long series of full first name disappointments. He only called me Jonathan when he was disappointed and I rarely remember being called anything but Jonathan from that point on.
But that’s the past and it’s over and not really what’s bothering me. I inhale deeply off the cigarette and try to burn my father out of my lungs. Once my eyes have cleared I start the car and drive to the friendly neighborhood Circle K, where I buy my very own personal six-pack of Bass Ale and a new pack of cigarettes.
Last night ends with me driving in circles around town and drinking that six-pack of beer. I suppose I drank the whole thing. I’m not really sure. All I know is I wake up this morning with a splitting headache and the vague recollection of standing in Sheila’s front yard at four a.m. crying.
The most solid memory I have left of her is her hair brushing my face as she bends over me at my father’s funeral only six months before we separated trying to convince me that it really isn’t my fault like I keep saying over and over again that it is but I know better. She tells me that it’s just the shock talking and that it really isn’t true and offers me a cigarette as I dissolve into tears and she whispers “Jonathan. Jonathan, listen to me” softly in my ear.
Sheila remarried not long ago. She found the father she was looking for, apparently. Last time I saw her she looked radiant and domestic and all of the things that used to make me nervous back in the days of double boilers and cheese presses. Me, I’ve still got twitchy legs and a failing auto parts store and no concept of cheese whatsoever.
Perhaps this hasn’t been at all what you hoped to hear. No matter. I’m used to disappointing people.
[Cross-posted on my personal website]
I’ve just returned from two thought-provoking days of conversations about assessment and authority in new modes of scholarly production, the second in a series of three SCI meetings on the topic. We’ll synthesize the key outcomes and insights into a report very soon. For the moment, though, I want to think a little more about a question that occurred to me after the meeting: What is the place of beauty in academic writing? While this wasn’t something the group discussed directly, it did seem to be an undertone of certain threads of conversation.
I got home from CHNM on Friday evening feeling pretty brain-dead from the hybrid (and quintessentially #altac) work of wrangling meeting logistics and absorbing stimulating and thoughtful discussion. Ready to relax, I sat down to watch Pina and was entranced within minutes; the film is stunning. The clips of Pina Bausch’s dance company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, are mesmerizing; they are made even more compelling by Wim Wenders’ directorial work. Something about the visual beauty of the film and the dance it portrayed helped me to think about the preceding conversations about scholarly work in a new light.
One topic of discussion at SCI was the significance of the editorial process to the perceived quality and authority of scholarly work. Thinking about this while watching the film, I was struck first of all by the interviews with individual dancers that fill a substantial portion of screentime. Each dancer speaks admiringly of Pina (always referring to her by her first name), many of them noting her ability to draw out astonishing performances through her perceptiveness and laconic guidance. The task of ferreting out talent in academic spheres can happen at many different junctures, and is the touchstone of good mentors (and editors) everywhere. But I’m not sure that we give enough credit to the role, as stories of scholarly enterprise often favor a notion of individual struggle and success. Pina’s influence, by contrast, is clearly credited as a guiding force and catalyst, both for individuals and for the company as a whole.
The second thing that I thought about while watching the compelling visual display was the necessity of expertise and practice in the dance productions, no matter how unlike traditional repertoire they may have been. Pina’s company was known for innovative and risky works that departed significantly from traditional dance productions, but that doesn’t mean that the dances are sloppy or unrehearsed. On the contrary, it is clear that the dancers have a deep foundation in traditional training, that the unusual choreography is equally demanding of precision, and that the productions are meticulously rehearsed. The result is both beautiful and powerful.
As we talk about new modes of scholarly production that depart from the traditional mechanisms of academic authority, it’s worth considering what careful research and new lines of inquiry look like when separated from the formats that have long been customary. As the velocity of publication increases (and is done on an ever-thinner shoestring, even at traditional presses), the editorial process is condensed. Writers may not polish their prose to the same degree, and the work may not benefit from thorough content refinement, copyediting, or layout decisions that publishers have historically taken on.
Generally speaking, I think that making scholarly work public more quickly is a significant enough benefit that it can bear the risk of a few rough edges. At the same time, perhaps especially for literary scholars whose work revolves around the ways that words are put together into sentences and stories to create both meaning and beauty, I’m acutely aware of the power of a beautifully-written text. The care and precision with which we construct our arguments is, I think, directly related to the ideas that we express. It’s useful to think about written style in terms of code, too, in which syntax and precision are strictly necessary to create a functioning program. Someone might prefer the flexibility of Perl or the comparative strictness of Python or C, but once she has chosen a language for the program, the corresponding rules must be followed. Precision isn’t an aesthetic choice in this case, but a requirement for functionality.
All of this brings me back to my initial question: What is the place of beauty in scholarly writing? In a Twitter conversation with Kari Kraus, I floated three possibilities: It may be a core value to our scholarly enterprise; it may be a pleasant ancillary; or it may be a risky distraction.
I haven’t yet mentioned the risk factor, but it’s part of what initiated this line of thinking in the first place. Scholarly writing is, at its core, about the creation and dissemination of new knowledge; if that is the goal, then perhaps the packaging shouldn’t matter. Jason Priem, co-founder of ImpactStory and a participant at the SCI meeting, worried that too much emphasis on polished grammar or design could serve as a choke point, preventing innovative ideas and arguments from reaching an audience. Scrutinizing the surface of the work, Jason argued, means that only those who have learned the codes afforded by elite education will see their work accepted as valuable, which potentially reinforces problematic classist limitations on the creation of new knowledge and lines of inquiry.
The risk that Kari and I mentioned in our conversation considers a somewhat different angle. Rather than focusing on the rejection of good ideas that lack polish, we mused about the potential acceptance of weak arguments couched in beautiful prose. While I don’t think that this is an especially common problem in academic writing—I would love it if our problem was an excess of gorgeous prose!—it is plausible enough that it makes me pause when I think about whether beautiful writing could be considered a core value of scholarly work in the humanities.
Ultimately, I think that beautiful writing is akin to precise, well-rehearsed movements in dance. The movements themselves are not sufficient to establish an interesting, cohesive work, but they are both elements of the piece’s beauty, and signposts indicating the care and work that are its foundation. The same is true with stylistic precision or fine visual design: they not only affect the audience’s encounter with the work, but also suggest the hard work and craftsmanship that have gone into it. Admittedly, that would mean that beauty is one part substance and one part signal, and I think there’s a fear that signals are mere dissimulation. But we’re affected by signals all the time, whether they are intended or not, and so we might as well be aware of the ways those signals are created and received.
But what about the realities of contemporary scholarly production, in which editorial oversight and refinement are increasingly unavailable to scholars wishing to share their work as widely as possible? This is where a dose of cautious optimism comes in. As I’ve watched the innovative models of SCI’s partner projects—PressForward, MLACommons, and Scalar—I am hopeful that scholars will have more and more ways to participate in ongoing conversations about their work that lead to increased refinement. Post-publication review mechanisms, whether in the form of CommentPress or the multi-layered curation and editing of Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities, provide (arguably) richer opportunities for a scholar to work through ideas with input from a community of peers. The resulting work has the potential to be of higher quality than an article seen by only a few sets of eyes before its publication, and it is also likely to reach a wider and more diverse audience.
In the end, to recycle my own tweet, I just want to read (and, ideally, produce) more beautifully-written work. I hope that we’re creating systems that make that possible, and cultivating values that reward it.
Lately I’ve found myself in one of those periods — perhaps we might refer to it as “my forties” — in which I’m so overwhelmed with the details involved in just keeping up with the most immediate and pressing tasks ahead of me that not only have I not gotten to do any writing, I’ve barely even found the space to contemplate the possibility of what might write if I had the time.
This makes me profoundly sad.
It’s not just about feeling too busy — it’s about the busy making me feel unfocused and unproductive. As though the big picture is slipping away in the masses of tasks that take up the work day and bleed over into evenings and weekends. And days off: not too many weeks ago, I’d made a pact with a friend to observe the oddity of the Presidents’ Day holiday by really making it a day off, celebrating by lying around reading a novel. Instead, I spent the day catching up on the many work and para-work tasks that just cannot be gotten through in the office. I got a lot done. I couldn’t tell you what, but it was a lot. It was kinda great, and kinda awful.
Another friend recently noted that I’ve come to refer to my plans to take a genuine day off by saying “I’m going to lie around and read a novel.” And as a professor of literature, at least in my not-too-distant past, I’ve got to marvel a bit at the association I’ve managed to build between novel-reading and leisure. Sloth, even: it’s not just reading, it’s lying around reading.
At some point, probably right about when I stopped teaching literature classes, the prior association I’d had between reading fiction and work began to fade. Reading fiction became play again, the way it had been when I was a kid. In part, the sense of fun in reading came back because I let it — I gave myself permission to read whatever I wanted, without any pressure to make use of what I was reading by either teaching it or writing about it. Without any pressure for the reading itself to be important. It was just about pleasure.
What happened shouldn’t come as much of a shock: I started reading more.
I’m looking now for a way to return that sense of play to my writing, to lessen the pressures that my preconceived notions of productivity have placed on it. I want writing to become a retreat from work again, rather than being all about work. I want it to be the thing I can’t wait to escape back into.
In order for that to happen, I think I’ve got to give myself a similar permission not to take it quite so seriously. What might be possible if I didn’t feel the pressure for my writing to be of use — if I didn’t need for it to be important? What if I could let my writing be just about pleasure?
Can I build an association between writing and goofing off?
Can a day spent sitting around writing come to feel like a holiday?
I find myself at one of those moments at which everything is great and yet nothing seems to be working exactly right. I’ve got an enormous deadline just ahead — not, alas, the “boy, I’m going to blow that deadline and then I’m going to feel sheepish and guilty when I finally send the thing in two weeks late” kind, but the “I will be standing in front of a very large crowd of people unveiling absolutely nothing if this thing doesn’t get done on time” kind. And in fact I think it’s going to get done on time, if we can keep all the little parts working like they’re supposed to. But this weekend a whole bunch of the little parts stopped working. Freaking out may have ensued.
My stress levels, it is needless to say, are through the roof right now. And so Sunday morning, I finally managed — after an altogether alarming number of weeks — to get myself out the door and to a yoga class. And the class was mostly great, and I’m very glad I went, but I had the thing happen afterward where the class managed — I don’t know how else to describe this — to open one of those spots in my body where I shove a whole lot of anxiety and anger and sadness that I don’t want to deal with, and so all of that got released and came flooding to the surface. Needless to say, this is more or less the exact opposite of what I want from yoga.
I’m trying to leave myself open to the possibility, however, that it’s what I need, that exhuming all that negative stuff is a necessary precursor to developing the positive stuff I’m looking for. And so I tried to do the thing that I find so hard: to really let myself feel the anxiety and anger and sadness without either clinging to the feelings or pushing them away.
Saying that I find that hard is an understatement. For one thing, I have a thick streak of Pollyanna in me, one that fairly relentlessly shoves aside anything negative with a rousing internal chorus of “take off that gloomy mask of tragedy; it’s not your style” and other such anthems of indefatigable optimism.1 For another, however, and probably more importantly, I have spent so long as a scholar living in brain-on-a-stick mode — pushing aside all of the claims not just of my body but of my heart as well, in favor of a total acquiescence to the dictates of my head — that I find it really, really hard to actually feel what I am feeling. As soon as I start feeling something, I want more than anything to know what I am feeling, to name it, determine its etiology, decide whether it’s beneficial, and if not, eradicate it as quickly as possible.
Actually living with a feeling long enough to feel it? Unthinkable. Which may precisely be the point.
There’s a deep irony in this, given that I was a most over-emotional adolescent — and that adolescence stretched on longer than I might care to admit. It’s possible that I was referred to as “histrionic” on more than one occasion, and certain very close family members may or may not have compared me to melodramatists of screen and stage. (Often.)
I learned from those family members, of course, not just about what was seemly and what wasn’t, but also what was valued and what wasn’t — and it turned out that the ability to contain your emotions, to condense them into a little knot that can take up residence between your shoulder blades, to push feeling aside in favor of thinking, was a useful skill, professionally speaking. And I discovered that the more I rationalized, the less frequently I was told I was irrational, over-emotional, highstrung. The more, in fact, I was told that I was smart.
I’m now at a crossroads, however, at which I am beginning to wonder whether there might be benefits — I mean, not just personal benefits, but real, actual, professional benefits, benefits for the profession and its relationship to the world — to ending the rational charade, to remembering what it felt like to feel things, even to let feeling sometimes take the lead.2 What would it be for academia to cultivate its relationship with its heart just as much as that with its head?3
Perhaps I’m over-generalizing what is in fact a personal, individual issue. But I don’t think so. I am coming to think that many aspects of academic life, from faculty meetings to hiring and promotion processes, including communication both amongst ourselves and with the outside world, would be much improved if we all stopped insisting that everything of value can be thought, if we focused on cultivating an emotional maturity to complement our intellectual maturity. If we weren’t too embarrassed to hit “publish” on a post that starts like this one, that’s so personal as to be all about how I feel.
I’ve just gotten back from a trip (about which, as I said on Twitter, I hope to be able to write soon) to find it pretty solidly fall around here. Less weather-wise, though there is the beginning of a little crispness in the mornings and evenings, than in a more intangible sense of atmosphere; my online pals are pretty much all back in class (except for those of you on the quarter system; your calendar confuses me, seeming to derive from an entirely different cosmology from my own), preparations for the convention are no longer strictly behind-the-scenes, and things have generally taken on a slightly faster pace. The year has definitely begun.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, the change of calendar year has rarely inspired me to the kind of stock-taking and resolution-making that the start of a new academic year does. It’s time to break out the new notebooks, to put on your stiff new bluejeans and shiny new sneakers, and make a plan for the year ahead.
My plan this year involves launching a major new endeavor at the MLA and beginning to plot a couple of others. It also includes a bunch of talks and conferences, about which more soon.
But it also involves turning some part of my attention to the next Big Project, which I think last week’s trip helped me figure out some crucial things about. One of the key things that I figured out last week is that space and time for working on that new project will not magically appear in my schedule. If I’m going to make any headway on this thing, I’m going to have to make room for it.
It’s the kind of realization that seems totally obvious, as soon as you’ve had it, and yet betrays one of those continually recurring blind spots that I have about my work life: I cannot do it all. If, as many have observed, there are tasks you have which are urgent, and tasks you have which are important, and if the urgent stuff is often stuff that other people ask of you, ensuring that the important stuff is properly prioritized is totally on you. Everybody else would be perfectly happy for you to go along attending to the urgent.
I don’t mean to make it sound as though I’ve figured out that “everyone else” is infringing on my precious time. In fact, the issue is truly my own: my tendency is to agree to do every neat thing somebody asks me to do, and (as I noted a couple of weeks ago), I need to do a better job of sorting through those requests, ensuring that the things I agree to do are in fact the things that will best support what I want to get done.
What this boils down to: I have a big writing project that I hope to make headway on this year. In order to do that, I need to ensure that any small writing projects I agree to take on are working, at least in part, toward the goals of the big project.
That’s my resolution for this new academic year: I’m making room for the important. We’ll see how well I do at sticking to it.
I find myself in that state again, in which I have a particular writing task — in this case a talk — with a pressing deadline, one that’s pressing enough that I really need to be working on it whenever I have time to write. (Being a talk, its deadline really can’t be blown.)
But for a whole series of reasons I won’t dig into too much right now, I’m struggling with the talk. It’s taking far longer to write than it should, and it’s just painful to work on. And so, as it drags on, the things that have been pushed aside in order to work on the talk are getting pushed further and further aside, and more deadlines are beginning to loom.
I’m caught in that eternal dilemma: put aside the most pressing thing in order to work on less pressing stuff that I might actually be able to knock off the list, but run the risk of not getting the talk done, or at least not getting it right? Or press on with the talk, hope a breakthrough comes quickly, and let the less pressing stuff continue to wait?
I have never found a satisfying solution to this particular kind of stuckness. What do you do when you’re caught in this deadline double bind?
I find myself in that state again, in which I have a particular writing task — in this case a talk — with a pressing deadline, one that’s pressing enough that I really need to be working on it whenever I have time to write. (Being a talk, its deadline really can’t be blown.)
But for a whole series of reasons I won’t dig into too much right now, I’m struggling with the talk. It’s taking far longer to write than it should, and it’s just painful to work on. And so, as it drags on, the things that have been pushed aside in order to work on the talk are getting pushed further and further aside, and more deadlines are beginning to loom.
I’m caught in that eternal dilemma: put aside the most pressing thing in order to work on less pressing stuff that I might actually be able to knock off the list, but run the risk of not getting the talk done, or at least not getting it right? Or press on with the talk, hope a breakthrough comes quickly, and let the less pressing stuff continue to wait?
I have never found a satisfying solution to this particular kind of stuckness. What do you do when you’re caught in this deadline double bind?
The funniest part of yesterday’s post — at least it’s funny to me — is how it got written: on my iPhone, on the subway. I remembered yesterday that, back when I started posting here semi-regularly again in the early summer, I began by jotting down some thoughts in this way, often standing with one elbow hooked around a pole, trying to keep my balance. I’d finish the posts started this way once I got in front of my computer. So I thought I’d try it out again, and yesterday’s post was the result.
Could my train of thought literally be a train of thought?
It’s more likely that these bursts of productivity on the train have to do with getting myself to start thinking before I get to my computer — in an environment with no network connectivity, where external circumstances often make it a good idea to pull inward and divert your attention from your surroundings.
I usually manage that by listening to French podcasts, which require a certain kind of concentration, but writing — perhaps a couple of quick paragraphs during the trip downtown — works even better, not least for helping to train my focus where I need it before I get to the office.
It’s easier to stay focused once I get there if I arrive with an idea already clearly in mind — one of those lessons that I think I need to relearn often.