Been selfish once or twice, I had to learn how to sacrifice

(quote: Cee-Lo Green, video: Persistence Hunt of the Male Kudu)





I just had my last classroom experience for the foreseeable future. I grumbled through it, bearing the last fluttering whimsies of my professor, I scribbled a haiku in the margins of my notes. I bent my ear for hints toward the final exam I'm writing over the next week. When it was over I walked out of the room without a word to anyone. Not wanting anything to disturb that last lonely hustle home. It's been a long dig. Eight years of school, upward of sixty classes passed, perhaps 2,000 actual attendances, two degrees as different from each other as one can get. Whatever paid my rent, this has been my job for as long as my job has mattered. And there's some perspective now: the Engineering gig was an obvious bid for money. Harried by parents and the environment I grew up in, I wanted financial independence. And I sought it. The English gig was more desperate. I thought I needed the institution to articulate the insights I've been wrestling with for years. I thought being forced to read, I would be forced to read what I needed to. I thought that studying literature was the same as writing it. And bygod I wanted to write it. And between my workshops where I plied the craft as intently as I could muster, I came across interesting ideas. I learned a lot about where to look, the people that were asking the same questions I was too mealy-mouthed to ask myself, what words can mean. But it felt like a distraction in many ways. Studying in vectors that I only needed parts of, stealing time from my own wanderings. The thing I learned about myself in college is that I am an autodidact. A disproportionate amount of the knowledge I have that genuinely interests me has been self-taught. The influences on my writing are essentially all writers that I found on my own. And sitting in that class today, realizing as people gushed about how much they liked William Dean Howells, all I thought about was my plan for the next year. The research I'm ecstatic about, the big writing project that grows more solid every day, the half dozen other small projects I will finally have time to see through. I sighed, a big long sigh while the bubble-sheets came around to review our course, So glad it's over. Almost as glad as I am that I did it.

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I've been reading interviews in The Paris Review the last few days. Norman Mailer, Kerouac, Burgess, Nabokov (who is kind of a dick it turns out), Huxley, etc etc. These may be the best writer interviews I've ever read. Long enough to matter, incisive and productive in getting the writers to talk about the process. They show revised manuscript pages so you can see how the 'genius' writer hacks away at his work. The writers talk about how they work, how many hours a day, what time of day, by what method marks are made on paper, what stimulants or relaxants they prefer, their thoughts on the canon. All of this tragically uninteresting to nonwriters I should think. But I could read this stuff all day. So interesting to see little tiny things that I also do in their description of writing. Not stylistically or actually within the work, I mean habits and superstitions and compulsions. When they talk it seems familiar. Someone buy me a subscription, pretty please?


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Anyone who's been in my apartment knows I live in squalor more or less. One raggedy couch, a cushion on the floor where I work on a wobbly desk, typing on the missing keys of a battered MacBook, looking through cracks in the screen. A lot of that is going to remain, but I'm about to enter a period of strict discipline. The goal to write 20-30 hours a week until I buy a plane ticket or have an aneurysm. So, I'm finally capitulating to comfort: Reorganizing furniture, buying a massive dinosaur of a keyboard (an IBM M Type for supreme clackiness, whiskey-resistance, self-defense), plugging in a huge new LCD monitor so I can actually see what I'm writing. I'm going to bask in the consumerist endorphins while they last.