Old Month, New Place

September: Wrong to call it timid,
I remind myself, shambling
into work.  More of an alertness
reflected in the bright black eye
of starlings.  Flocks massive and light
in the sumac at the edge of the lawn.
Or Tibetan prayer flags attentive
to the smallest change in breath
coming now out of the door
labeled north.  I can see
the whole valley as the leaves
give up.  Morning is dark. The heart
crumples and expands
like a paper bag.
It wakes in a dark room, 
my September body,
with light trickling in
the windows of my eyes.

HEAT

Got it going, the 100,000 BTU furnace.  Something primal there. Saying HEAT to the cold, saying NOT HERE to the phlegmatic winter. Watched them set the tank full of propane with their small crane.  A beluga whale full of liquid gas explosive. It is smaller than I thought, and I am actually rather fond of it, sitting like a good dog next to the storage shed. I could take a picture, but there are so many dumb details of the actual reality that a photograph would distract you with: errant blackberry branches, bits of wood, irrelevent tufts of grass, shanks of broken pipe. If I were to paint the scene of tank-and-shed I would clean it up by running it through my consciousness, and that would organize the scene, simplify it. Maybe attention is like an ore, needing to be refined and tempered. It takes a long time to learn to do that, and then it gets called something voodoo like art or skill or expertise or taste or wisdom. Observing simply and simply observing is an accomplishment. 

All this is to say that I know I’m a bit strange in my enthusiasms. Rather German, perhaps. The register boots are new and when you look down the grates you can see light—reflecting back from the shiny new tin. The boots are in turn connected to new big pipes, also shiny, running in parallel between the joists. They are connected to square heat runs from which the runs sprout. The whole thing is sort of like a very shiny beetle with pipe-like appendages extended everywhere. The entire assembly links up to the furnace, of course, and it’s a very good furnace. When it’s on, you can barely hear it, and it sucks new air through a 4 inch straw from outside and vents through an identical pipe.  It’s amazingly efficient at putting heat into the air, leaving none to slop around, so the exhaust can run through PVC pipe (!) to the outside. The blower ramps up very slowly and then, at eight minutes, kicks in to high power, all very quiet, though the force is so strong it actually blew one of unscrewed register grates off the wall upstairs to clatter into the hallway and scare the kids.

I enjoyed that very much.

So we have heat now, very fancy, state of the art, but down in the basement we also have an old inefficient wood-burning stove that will, if you keep it stoked, heat the entire house and it smells good – though consuming literally tons of wood and creating piles of ash. I’m going to use it this winter. I look forward to overcast days down in my newly created high-ceilinged basement, six-foot florescent lights and 1,000,000 lumens falling from between the free joists, banks of screws, bolts, caps, pipes, boards, nails, screws, springs, washers, and tools all on one wall, books on the other, a chair, a table saw, a big-ass vice bolted to a sturdy workbench, fire in the woodstove, and all around me the silent and odorless backup of propane heat, thrumming through the pipes over my head, running heat to my family above me while I work on interesting solutions to interesting problems written in wood and wire (and paper). Re-threading, leveling, connecting. Breaking things down and making things coherent. There is a certain joy in that, leaning against all that is insubstantial. 

Wheel inside a Wheel

This morning I parked my car in the lot and got out into a light rain. Nothing surprising. The sky was low and the asphalt was riddled with dots. In contrast to the car’s coffee and exhaust, the parking lot, near a stand of trees, was fresh and sharp, wet and cold. Fall in the air and the same sort of feeling that drives the geese to array themselves and travel hit me as it does every year. Must be the slant of light, the cold, the smell of autumnal weeds fizzing at the margins of fields and yards, the colors: raspberry and yellowpurplecrimson, the sort of colors that make me think of dyed wool and medieval celebrations (not sure where that last one comes from). Doesn’t matter. At my age there is a certain resonance to fall that gets deeper every year. The urge to travel, to find horizons, to build fences and fires. Maybe I can blame it all on my pituitary gland. Circadian rhythm. The earth is a drum.

And as I get out of the car I’m thinking vaguely of Yeats’ political theory about the gyres, two intersecting spirals that represent the apposition and opposition of everything, that explain history and my place in it. I think it’s cool Yeats found an image, a figure, an emblem to crystallize his feelings about growing older in troubled times and the poet’s role in that turmoil. Such a literate mind at work, it invents an ideogram.

My ideogram is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel. These appear in clocks and car transmissions as far as I know. There is a complicated mathematics to the synchronized wheels, as any kid using a Spirograph can sense, but my feeling as I get older is that there are many, many wheels, maybe an infinite number, that all spiral, spin, and revolve. At times, a master wheel – in this case, the seasons – pulls the contraption around to a particular notch and the inner and outer wheels turn madly on their frictionless pivots in response, compensating and adjusting. So the wheels today are being 50, fall, the beginning of the day, the end of rain, the opening up of a new part of my heart work in my new house, the death of my acquaintance Matty, the end of the book, and the like.

This entire system can be ported to language, where rhymes (slant, rich, and full) stand for the various synchronicities that the wheels carry. Where characters and their motives are the distances between stars. Where genres are the toothy wheels. (Caution: Extreme number crunching needed to communicate between these two systems. See the formula at the right).

Regardless of the system, today I felt in the balance. I remember learning to ride a bike and realizing that it’s not in the hands and head, it’s in the butt. You drive with your ass. It’s correcting on the fly, not pointing, stiff, white, and vector-like, at the end of the driveway. It’s pointing and cycling, spinning and wobbling. Balance is dynamic. Look again at the formula above. It’s obvious.

Sometimes in poems there is attempt to talk about the plentitude of accepting what’s around us. I remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But to carry on” or the poems of Stevens, and I found it again recently in a poem from a friend of mine, Brian Fay:

The sun shines over the bare branches of trees
unconcerned with autumn, unafraid of the cold winter,
focused only on buds, blossoms,
and cool green leaves in all this sunlight.

So for me, this morning, there was a moment when the constellations aligned. When my age was exactly the time of year, of day, of the decade, of my waking hours.

Locking the car, I hefted my books and walked inside.

White Geese

In the beginning, just the barn. The barn and the old house, left there by the absent owners, a broken and fascinating thing, an artifact lit by bare bulbs over a floor my father forbids us to walk across. You might fall through. Falling through a floor is absurd. Behind the kitchen sink, outside the window there, a high pile of cans and weeds, broken glass and blue-bottle flies, tall nettles, wild hemp and ragweed grown over my head, a forest during the day, stalks thick as my arm.

They never spoke. Or I don’t remember them speaking. My father rented a dumpster and worked hard in the way parents do, invisibly, on the periphery of a child’s awareness. My mother stayed home, I think. I spent most of my time in the field of the new farm, tracking down a litter of rabbits who died one by one in my bedroom later. I would also walk down to the fence where the bull used to kill people. Or that's what they say. Down the way a ways was a thin vein of water and I followed the creek, oblivious to the mosquitoes, hoping to get ticks I could pull out of my scalp when I got home.

It was weeks we drove out to work around the abandoned farm, pulling up nettles and bed springs, rotted clothing and chicken bones, plows and gears and cardoors, milk jugs and tin pans burnt thru. Manure three feet deep in the barbed square paddock where they cows had been kept and ignored until they starved was fuel for the weeds that grew madly there, their enthusiasm and joy arching over the kid paths we created. My parents kept working silently on the cinderblocks and broken chairs, and we kept getting warned about exploring the dilapidated house until one night my father drove off with a red tin can of gas in the trunk of his Dodge Dart and that evening the whole farmhouse—the bare lightbulbs, the pornography stuffed in the walls, the swaybacked floors, the whole flimsy tinderbox of it all went up in a scorch of fumes and fire and light and burned for three days even after the tornados and rain came. He said teenagers in a white car did it, and I believe him. The heat made the air ripple hard, it radiated too hot to stare at even through the carwindows and you had to turn your head as if seeing something shameful.

My parents separated and then got back together and she said her nose broke from tripping on a toy or a chair. And we went back to the farm to continue working, my mom more gone this time but me left with new pants striped all the way to the ends of the bell-bottoms but they are the wrong size but they fit. We are ported to Bible camp where we learn how to believe and about true faith. We learn about Muslims and Jesus and memorize daily verses for a prize at the end -- a framed picture of Jesus -- and I find thrilled smile and there may be a picture of skinny me somewhere smiling with long hair and striped jeans with Jesus looking sidewise at me over my head in a box in some little Iowa church in Altoona or Napier or Nevada or Boone, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to find it, I hear the whole town was sucked up in a tornado, the windbreak poplars and the buildings and mobile homes and the spare junk we leave lying around.

That tornado stepped around our farm. The barn stood empty, that is what we were told by the former owners. There are many more days of cutting and hauling, trees to cut up. Not till long after dad he bought the place do we finally fight down the debris and underbrush and my dad he is at the barn door, exploring, and opens the door and inside he is horrified, he sees a dozen white geese penned up for weeks no water no food burst out of the half door screaming for water this is what I saw and clamor down to the creek there this is what I remember and drink and flutter and crash about I saw this they have been there all along weeks now this is true, we ignored them, our derogation, terrible to contemplate and I feel inside what it means to be captive and the barn is empty finally, the door hanging open and blackness inside and the geese escaping down the creekbed, white bodies smudging the creekbed and for years the dreams that burst out late at night in the summer that the white geese are penned and waiting for me, still there, and I should do something but it’s too late, should have rescued them, should have opened the door to something I did not yet know how to name.

Powerlines / Endicott / rhetoric

Powerlines

The powerlines up above the place where I'm staying in Endicott, NY is one of those torn up places that give off an odd mix of sense of desperation and possibility. You know the sort of place: wheel ruts dug deep in the clay from stuck jeeps, small pools of tepid water, green bursts of opportunistic weeds surging up in the margins. It's the sort of place that makes you want to toss your beer bottles against rocks or the horizon. The sort of place that attracts teenagers and pigeons. It’s a broken place where anything can happen. And it’s hard for the cops to get to.

I always appreciated such places for their moon-like beauty. My S.O. said she once went up to these same powerlines and punched a guy in the face when he dared her. Then he dared her again and she hit him again. I guess he hadn't worked out the nuances of flirting quite yet. She's not a teenager now, so that must have been...a long time ago. But the powerlines haven’t changed much, she says. I suspect it’s one of those permanently scarred places that will always elicit a sense of poverty so powerfully that it almost makes you giddy. It elicits blunt force trauma. I imagine my S.O. and this guy taunting each other near the fence at the top that surrounding the buzzing electrical exchange station. It hogs the best view, but you can stand with your back to it and look down on the whole city to see the distant, symmetrically carved hillsides that slope down to the rivers like the keels of capsized boats.

This must have been an invigorating place a hundred years ago. Imagine overlooking the confluence of the Chenango and the Susquehanna rivers and the long undulating wooded valley they muscle through. The possiblity! The exotic distances brought close! The fecundity of 10,000 trees!

It's still beautiful here though it's a rust-belt city that’s been exploited for jobs, polluted, and ditched. We have a brownfield down the hill from here where IBM dumped trichlorethylene for years, creating a carcinogenic plume under the city. The New York Times says the case is now to the Supreme Court, but regardless of what happens there, people aren't going to move. Where do you go? Hawaii?

It's sort of numbing to see how the place has been torn up and how people have been treated. We’ve lost a sense of possibility here, of futurity. It's hard to imagine this place supporting people (much less indigenous creatures and forests) in the future. My dad says that Michigan, where he grew up, used to be a vast woodland; now it's mostly an interstate with some nice ranch-style houses. Oh, and there's Flint and Detroit, making the pollution of Endicott and Love Canal look like nothing. Yikes. Now that GM is bankrupt and they've closed the plants in MI (highest unemployment in the nation, the web tells me), I suspect powerlines all across that state will be teeming with teens.

It's hard to overestimate the weight of the American Dream when it breeches and capsizes on a city. Cortland, where I teach, has been waterboarded for years as various industries left or died (Smith Corona and Corning Glass chief among them). Here we have the abdication of IBM, Endicott-Johnson shoes, and many others. The effect is not only on specific companies and the network of tangential organizations connected to those companies (restaurants, parts suppliers, public works projects, schools and on and on), but it's felt in the heart as well. When we lose communities and neighborhoods, it's vastly alienating. It tends to strip those who remain of any sense of shared enterprise. Thus there's no speed bump that slows your thinking as you sit in your car contemplating the erection of yet another Walmart in the last green lot left. It doesn't matter anymore. The fact that what seems like a good idea today will be a tax-barren empty shell in 20 years literally isn’t conceivable.

As the economy dies down, daily life is eventually lit only by the blue flickering of our own individual desires, which sometimes can be stoked enough to illuminate our immediate family, sometimes not even that. When you're only worried about surviving day to day, you can’t notice ugliness of culture, architecture or food. When you're in it for yourself, you lose your senses. We become inured to the needs of others and the inner lives of other people. People and events that stand outside our lifetime fade like photographs and atrophy. Family disappears from our stories. We lose a sense of our grandkids and great grandparents. Reviving receding phantoms is a hard sell for a culture that has trouble meeting the demands even a short book represents to the imagination, for a culture that can’t picture what hundreds of gallons of trichlorethylene does for generations of kids in your hometown.

Sometimes I think we're spiders. We're in a web, a net of relations that ties us together in various forms of cooperation, even in the midst of competition. What's easy to forget when things are going "well" (that is, when we can ignore the fact that everything changes), we can also ignore that we depend on each other. The irony of a working system is that the very systemicity that gives it identity tends to fade from view, the way a novel or movie can lose its material immediacy when we're caught up in it. It's ironic when that happens, but it's also unreal. Problems bring us back to our fundamental interrelation (Kenneth Burke talks about this irony in the context of war).

So I'm up at the powerlines that day, stone cold sober but not bitter. Looking at the city I see a lot of desperation. I told a friend once that driving into Cortland (also in central New York) and seeing the thick opaque plastic over the house windows gives me a feeling like I just took a big hit off a cigarette. The depressing rush. The wave in the pit of the stomach.

So we tend in teaching to be too territorial. We are so busy building careers and speciality knowledge that it's hard to think big, to solve real-world problems. This is hardly a new complaint, but it's newly acute for me.

The discipline of rhetoric, though, is a pretty strong solvent, and hard to keep walled up in the academy. It was never meant to be an academic discipline, anyway--it kept failing to meet the standards of rigor and rarity that astronomy or geometry might. Rhetoric is cross-disciplinary, as is a student’s experience. We don’t have enough models for using rhetoric is high school or across disciplines, though I was thrilled to read Steven Johnson's new book and hear him discuss ecology as a cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary science, using insights from physics to farming, a practical and somewhat transgressive move discussed also by Jim Zebroski ("Rewriting Composition as a Postmodern Discipline: Transforming the Research/Teaching Dichotomy." Ronald and Roskelly. 168-182). What are the problems that we face, and how can students pull from their education to address the problems of their lives? I'm the first to say that in some ways we adults know more than kids do about what might be a valuable resource, so I'd argue that Shakespeare, as "useless" as it seems, is in fact useful for solving problems of understanding character and developing a sense of the beautiful and eloquent--ditto physics. But we each have a responsibility (literally response-ability) to find our own topics and audiences.

To look down from the powerlines and see, with "open eyes and open hands" the city one lives in can be terrifying. I'd rather get hit in the face (twice!) than flirt with the idea. But kids know what hurts and deserve a sense of interconnection and promise. They deserve a chance to tell their stories. Schools can give this to them much better than they do. I'd like to see schools provide kids with a chance to ask the hard questions about the difference between what is and what should be, and not lavish too much respect on the tidy divisions between disciplines ("content areas"). I'd like to see schools as places where kids and adults work together to make shared sense of shared problems--which automatically implies a rhetorical, problem-posing, and community oriented learning. It implies a different way to think about the center or coherence of a school in its practice.

One of the models we can use for this is both ecological studies and composition studies. Why not invite (and support!) teachers--who tend to be disposed to interdisciplinary study already--in the practice and inquire into these questions? Here is a really radical question: why not have them work together across levels, districts, and subject areas? Now that would be powerful.

--David

revised 7/16/10

50th birthday

Tomorrow I turn 50, a milestone. Or fifty of them, stretching back to when Eisenhower was president and the Beatles were unknown. Penicillin was rare and the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. The interstates were just being built. Hawaii had been a state for only five months. John F. Kennedy was just elected and took the reins. The US sent the first troops to Vietnam.

One of my first memories was looking at the far away mountains in Texas from the steps of graduate student housing. My parents would tell me elaborate stories about how lovely it was there and the bridge and road that took you there. I remember watching TV when JFK was assassinated. My dad got work in Iowa. I remember the many space shots and the moon landing. I lived through Vietnam, Woodstock, Kent State, and the drug culture. I started driving (usually with my parents) when I was 13 and on my own all the time in a 1967 VW Beetle by the time I was 16 (12-volt engine finally, but still the funky tubular bumpers and no head restraints). "Women's Lib" was a big deal. I remember The Whole Earth Catalogue I poured over at the house of a neighbor in Iowa, a bearded man who lived with two women. I worked "walking beans" for weeds, detasseling corn and wandering through the fields, exploring. I was always exploring. I hated school, wore a headband to class in the early '70s at my deeply rusticated school, and felt strangely out of place. I read all the time, was sick a lot, was very interested in science (I cut my teeth on bio textbooks), read more, loved waterbirds, and beat up on my brother mercilessly. There weren't a lot of people around. We didn't have a color TV until I was maybe 14 or so. My dad would come home with stacks of punched cards that he used for his dissertation research; there were no personal computers. The first new car he bought was a 1967 Dodge Dart, no carpets, no radio, bench seats. I wonder if it had seatbelts.

We moved to Tennessee in the 1970s, and I felt a little out of place. Worked in a bar there, had a pretty girlfriend, never studied. Took root in English studies, though, esp. poetry and literary theory. Got into grad school in Syracuse, got married, had two wonderful boys, got my Ph.D. at S.U., and found work at nearby Cortland. Took over my dad's finances as he got older and my sister and I found him a place to live in Little Rock. Got divorced, bought a house, met my soulmate, met a son that a high-school girlfriend had by me and gave up for adoption. Trying to sell my house in Syracuse and am looking to buy with here here in Tully.  [footnote: found a house as discussed in other posts].

Nathan is 29. Joe is 15. Eli is 13. My girlfriend's kids are Drew (14) and Jackson (9). I'm blessed in every way: I have a job, enough money, an apartment, a car; my parents are alive and they love me. So do my friends and family. I even have a dog who loves me. I know how to write, I'm in a 12-step program that has changed my life and will do so for the rest of it, and I'm healthy as a horse. A fifty-year-old horse, maybe, but I can still gallop, rear and buck.

That's it. Some of the best things have been the kids and Jacqueline. Good friends. A good education. Music. I'm 49 tonight and I want to learn how not to take things personally, to let things go, to let other people take up more of the load, to be in the moment. All work I have to do, good work. I don't want for anything material, and I'm not bitter or resentful, frightened or obsessed. It's been a good ride. Though "sometimes all the light's on me / Other times, I can barely see," I'm grateful. Not Dead. So far, this has been one of the most interesting periods of history, both lacking in some fundamental securities and oversewn with too many insulations against danger. The environmental exploitation I see discourages me sometimes. But it's always on the edge. I've been lucky.

The Notebooks

So forgive the set up: a summer evening with distant thunder, cool wet breeze sloshing in the windows, trees filing up the sky like a tattered scrim, and me at my computer.  Almost too romantic to be endured.  If there were a few fireflies (or better, a moon or the tracers of distant fireworks) the metaphor of my passion would be stapled to the genre FOREVER.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.  And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle.  Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:

The notebook for “business.”  In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills.  Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.

The notebook devoted to “sex and women.”  In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does.  It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.

The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)

The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning.  He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).

The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;

The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues.  This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;

Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers.  The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights

The notebooks.

David

Burning It

You say “It’s not what we pictured”
(autumn hills in lugubrious flame)
So I say steal all the pictures,
I say smash their cheap glass
break frames & cheap flowers,
the graceful cheap bamboo fronds,
the cheap birds winging over cheap forests,
the soundtrack paintings, all the filler fields of wheat,
the fungible bulk colors signed by machine,
pre-recorded guitar solos over drum machines
clicking with the intelligence of a roach,
the stiff, formal hug of our personal ambitions.

Take them to the parking lot of that cheap hotel,
the one where we made love with an eclipse
outside our window then froze all night.
Make a pile of our garbage can plans,
pour turpentine into them, diesel and alcohol
until it soaks deep. Climb up on the dump.
See how the cold air trembles with excitement?
Scratch the last match fast against the sandpaper.
I love you. Now drop it.

DIY

He’s looking in The Family Handyman
for the device, the perfect jig
to hang a week, letting it dry and twist, curl up and air out.
The hanger must be clever and strong,
an ingenious clevis, toggle bolt or cotter pin

to handle days loose as layers of cardboard tied
with silk scarf, as an aquarium of marbles,
as scalloped waves fastened with irridium glue and salt,
a week composed of Plato’s Phaedrus, an iffy power steering pump,
the smell of distant burning and a new MAC OS, shorn cornfields,
crumpled student sentences and junk mail.

The miracle hanger is not in the table
of contents, the index, nothing online,
nothing under the cushions, no tips
in the junk drawer. It was here, though.
The apartment is studded with bent nails.
A dizzy auger left holes in the bed and walls
before it sucked blood from the dog
and left in your new car.

The Hat: A Christmas Story

Warning: it's not pretty, there's obscenity, and what I'm shooting for is not to sneer at the holidays, but to play with some realistic fiction. You were warned.

<|> |<|>|<|>

The Hat

Though it rained all night and melted most of the snow, grey-white ice lay in the shadows between houses. Detritus of the winter emerged: a blue-and-white child’s glove, flattened cigarette packs, bits of black plastic. The couple was walking their dog now that the rain had stopped. Christmas lights burned in the windows. The woman wore a long blue wool coat and immaculate hiking boots. She walked with her arms crossed and her bare hands tucked under the woolen arms of her coat. She held the blue leash in her right hand and their new dog darted back and forth on the bare sidewalk. Her husband walked beside her. They didn’t speak. He wore a large furry Russian hat and smoked a cigar. The smoke billowed up behind them as they walked, grew thin and disappeared.

“Fucking dog,” the husband growled when the animal lunged in front of his feet. When it squatted in someone’s yard a moment later, the sudden stop jerked the woman’s leash arm open, making her twist stiffly. She made mewling sounds to coax the dog to hurry while they waited. It strained and trembled, then bounded onto the sidewalk. “Goddamn fucking dog” the husband said. The woman jerked hard at the leash but the dog pulled away at the end of his collar anyway, choking and scrabbling.

A man had come out on his upstairs porch to smoke a cigarette now that the rain had stopped. His house had a giant candy cane cutout hammered into the front lawn. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted down to the couple. “You want me to clean that up?” he said. The dog started barking at the man. The couple kept walking without speaking. “Hey!” the man said. He was barefoot and leaned on the banister with both hands. “You gonna leave that shit there for me to clean up?” The tiny dog lunged into the collar and in so doing its blue leash tangled around the legs of the husband, forcing him to stumble. The dog yelped and ran from him, forcing the woman to spin on one heel. Blue smoke from the cigar filled the air.

The husband grabbed the collar and neatly flipped the dog over. He held it to the ground by the throat with his left hand and made a fist with the right. His gloved hand hit the dog in the belly, the chest, the face. He stood over the animal and twisted his body to put all his weight into it. The dog yelped and struggled and the skin on its face was cut against its teeth. The husband’s fluffy hat fell to the wet sidewalk and rolled against his wife’s boots. Blood spattered on the husband’s coat and when he stopped, the knuckles of his glove had been cut open. “What are you doing?” cried the man on the porch. He stood up, cigarette still between his fingers. “What the hell are you doing?” he said. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault, you asshole,” he said, his voice thin and trembling. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault” he repeated. The husband and the wife stood still for a moment. The dog huddled at the extreme end of his leash, mouth open, panting. The woman bent to pick up the husband’s beautiful hat.

“Where do you get off being so vulgar?” said the woman to the man on the porch. “Just who do you think you are?”

Haiku October '09

Writing in Coffeehouses

A room with a view

Music no one listens to

Words I do not share.

The Teacher

Jacqueline's small hands

explain a huge story

to her computer.

Nulla Dies Sine Linea

Today's frantic grab

for the rip cord, miss, miss:

such a lovely fall.

Finding Eli's Favorite Hat

Between the buxom

hay bales, E's hat, lost in play:

when did he grow up?

After Rain

Parking lot puddles

plain, flat, cold limestone, simple

reflect tree, cloud, mind.

Moving to Tully, NY

August 29, 2009

Hi,

Writing you from this cheapo chair, bought from a Goodwill store in rural New York and still smelling like a clean, dry grandmother’s house, is a pleasure. The chair is in our living room, a large, old boiler-heated room in beige. You can’t tell from inside the room whether we’re in Syracuse or Binghamton or Cortland, but when I look out the window it’s pretty obvious we’re in Tully, NY.[1] This town has about 867 people, but we’re not even inside the city limits. We live in a cornfield. The house looks like it was set down here somewhat accidentally, as if an outtake from the Wizard of Oz. You can see Jacqueline’s kids’ school from the upstairs windows (Drew’s 13 and will be going to the middle school; at 9, Jackson will be going to Tully Elementary). There is a large flat grocery distribution plant a few cornfields over, several crucifixes from the churches emerging like periscopes from the corn—and lots and lots of green.

The fields are striated, now that we’re in the last inch of August; the farmers have peeled back alternating swaths of alfalfa. The combines are coming for the corn, and the whole scene reminds me of that sort of magical painting style of rural scenes by that Iowan painter Grant Wood. We’re in a valley about five miles wide with hills on either side that rise away to the east and west. Everything slips north and south between these ridges: the river, the railroad, the interstate, the minor highways. Cut east and west, though, and it gets weird. And interesting. You go through several geographical anomalies caused by the glaciers. This region is where they stopped, dropped their gravel, dug deep plunge pools, and created a series of hills that look exactly like ships turned upside down, their keels exactly the same arc.

We’re already started to explore these places. My Joe and Eli will be down here from Syracuse for as often as I can get them (they are not moving), and every other weekend; Drew and Jackson Deal are 24/7. The six of us have vague plans to travel to Tinker Falls with the dog (always the dog), go hang-gliding off the Morgan Hills cliff, ski at the several local downhill slopes, and canoe down the Tioughnioga River. Some of these seem more likely than others, but they are all possible.

Everything is possible. Getting your hair cut here, going to the doctor or dentist, eating at a family-owned diner, going to the bank, the library, the used bookstore. You can’t go to the local bars—there are none. There is a good meeting on Wednesday nights, however. At school I have a gym and a pool, and work is now only 15 minutes away—for the first time in ten years, my commute is shorter. Jacqueline has uncomplainingly stretched her commute out to 50 miles each way. In fact, there has been very little complaining in this whole venture. Leaving schools, families, neighbors, close friends, houses and all that has been a difficult. GF (GirlFriend) and I grew up in our respective towns and have ligatures there. I’ve been in Syracuse since 1983—and now that seems long ago. They play music from that era on the oldies stations now! It’s not fair! So this is a season of exhilaration and extremes. The mental soundtrack is tearing a worn sheet into dishrags. That making-by-ripping—that’s what it feels like lately. Not bad, just bit changes, lots of bits.

Even making a new life is possible. Buying a house in Tully is possible. Getting married is possible. Fall is possible. Writing is possible. The line between what’s possible and what’s inevitable is blurry. We are going to practice steering by bright rural stars.

Oh, and I didn’t mention the train, which runs next to the house and scares the hell out of me daily. It’s only mournful and soothing from a distance, through the rain, when you’re holding a steel guitar. Up close it is very much like God’s own two-note soundtrack for the Apocalypse.

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[1] David Franke and Jacqueline Deal. Formerly of 361 Rt. 11 South, Apartment 1. Tully, NY, but now in our new house at 793 Tully Farms Road, a very cool place if I say so myself!

Fashion Blues

I’ve always had trouble getting dressed. I no longer scream when they pull a shirt over my head like I did when I was little. I don’t generally struggle any longer to tie my shoes. But I still face problems, serious challenges, every day when standing in front of my closet. Where others might see a field of sartorial possibilities, I see nothing but a matrix of subtle rules and conventions at work, vague and implicit lines in the sand of fashion, brightly colored invitations to cause some sort of stylistic misdemeanor.

Negotiating these tripwires takes a sensitivity and determination I have trouble mustering before breakfast. I try to get the upper hand by enforcing upon my clothing a strict hierarchy in order to control the chaos. That’s why, except for those on the floor, all my shirts face the same direction. It lends a sense of order and helps me in my private moments, those long minutes when I peer into the dark closet at a thousand errors waiting to happen. I feel every day so much like I did when I used to try to write essays in college. So many mistakes just waiting to happen. So many hidden rules. The malicious grammar of clothing rustling in my closet, waiting for me to pick something wrong. Often, I find myself exhausted by the time I sit down to my humble bowl of cereal, wearing only underwear at the breakfast table, utterly defeated.

Like writing, dressing is generally a private business. Nobody wants to see you in the midst of the process: the agonizing, the trying on, the tearing up and throwing away. The tears. The recriminations. Nobody wants to see you trying to balance on one foot, metaphorically or actually. They just want to see the product, and don’t want to be shocked by it. The recondite flowchart that steers us from error is of course quite secret, as I’ve mentioned. I have yet to find anyone who is brave enough to tell me about it. They’ll even deny that there are any rules, defaulting to the tired line that “It’s just all about how you feel.” But this is plainly not the case. There are, for example, a whole set of tacit and unspoken guidelines about matching things up and the way they go together. Some are plainly not recommended any more than mixing chlorine bleach and ammonia, or oil and water, or my brother and your new car.

Imagine attempting to wear an innocent checked blue and green shirt with blue and green pants. Nothing good will happen there, but you must admit that, at the level of theory, there is nothing wrong. Blue and blue, of any shade, are sanctioned. They have the same name, even. It has to be safe. Green with green is an approved combination. Blue and green are both good friends, the colors of the water, of the ocean, even of pirates. Put them all together, and you may think you have found a combination that will make the pretty ladies give you their hungry glances – but no. I have had women move to the far side of the hall when I strut by dressed in this checkered celebration, this profusion of plaid. Why? Because I violated a rule that everyone knows but no one will admit to: one must wear only identical checked clothing. Don't ask why. Just accept this as fact. Thinking will only exhaust you. Likewise, you cannot wear perfectly identical colors lest you be accused of wearing a pantsuit. I do not know what a pantsuit is, but when I bought a pack of RIT dye and dyed several shirts and jeans all the same color, I was not celebrated for my inventiveness. Ditto with khaki shirts + khaki pants. No one smiles in a good way when you wear five shades of brown (shirt, tie, pants, shoes, hair). What is wrong with brown?

We have established that identical colors are somehow bad, and that there are certain toxic combinations. Green and orange, for instance, are anathema for reasons no one wants to talk about, though I swear I have often seen lovely red-haired Irish women wear green and orange at the same time and no one laughed at them. In fact, people wanted to talk to them all the time! Another hole is torn in the rules for fashion. Red and green are apparently forbidden also — my best guess is that together they are redolent of Christmas. Though countless flags combine red and green -- South Africa and Italy and even Lithuania Minor come to mind -- does anyone ever think of South Africa as “The Christmas Country”? They do not! Perhaps someone can explain why, then, it is nearly illegal to wear red and green into the secular American classroom.

There are more rules. Pink and blue are bad (perhaps inducing gender confusion?), black and white are bad (waiter?), blue and black are bad (makes you look like a giant bruise?), yet the same fashion liberals will aver that “black goes with everything.” It plainly does not.

There’s more. Dark colors must go on the bottom of an outfit because they are heavy; if you wear, say, white pants and a black top, you are not only imitating a waiter in reverse, but you also seem imply to passersby that you might suddenly and uncontrollably capsize. Fear of witnessing me flip up in an extraordinary fashion misadventure is, I assume, what has driven my colleagues and students to avert their eyes when we ride up on the elevator together. Yet I was never warned of this danger, not once.

But I’m trying to tell you something important here.

There are many people who know these rules and are either unable, unwilling, or afraid to talk about them. Think with me for a moment about frequency, the issue of frequency. You can wear new clothes for the first time only after you have thoroughly washed them. The theory at work here seems to assume that rodents or pests crawl through new clothes, and that not until being run through the spin cycle should we risk putting them on (a theory that conveniently ignores the fact that we try on clothes in stores and don’t feel we need to bathe afterwards).

There is clearly a bit of duplicity at work here.

What baffles me is why we hide the rules with a straight face. I know a woman who would slather her nude self in oil-based house paint before she’d wear the same outfit for a second day. So there is to be variety. One is expected to dress a bit differently M-F, but not too predictably. For instance, if you dress Italian one day and Mexican the next, you are likely to be ostracized; in contrast, if one plans to eat spaghetti on Monday, and tacos on Tuesday, people assume you reflect good middle class household organization skills. Furthermore, it is tacitly forbidden to assign a certain outfit to each day of the week. Though in my experience it will take some months for people to catch on, when they do figure out that you have sequenced outfits by workday, you will be eating your lunch at the only empty table in the cafeteria for the rest of the school year. And nobody will help you revise your essays for English class.

I know of which I speak.

Summertime/working vicariously

Richard Hugo writes somewhere about the compressed academic year, how the years and even the hours are abbreviated, and how time moves so quickly through them. I'm at the point where I've waved goodbye to enough semesters to already be imagining the first day of the next one, much as a cool day in spring mirrors its cousin in the other equinox.

The irony of the calendar is that what I teach and what I do are almost exactly inverted. From August to May I do a lot of writing, but all of it is rushed and fragmented. Memos, emails, reports, applications, reviews, syllabi, comments on papers, minutes, recommendations, presentations, and more email. None of it develops any narrative line or builds to shared or linked visible product. It's these days (aggravated by lots of unfinished business in other departments of my daily life) that make me wonder if I'm really a writer at all. There is no scholarship, or very little; there is no blogging, letter-writing, memoir writing, writing of poetry, essays, or arguments. It's as if the frontal cortex were entirely given over to striated and anxious detail management. There's no narrative, and definitely no lyric. I get worried when the heart of what I am paid to do starts to feel like the work I used to do in a fast-food restaurant. When "customers per hour" is the criterion we measure ourselves by, then I might as well be the manager of a Wendy's. The fact that I'd probably get paid better for that sort of work is unnerving--but it just goes to show that work in higher education is expected to compensate us with other, less tangible rewards, such as the ability to wrestle with ideas and watch kids learn. So when that part is taken out, as it seems increasingly to be, then Wendy's starts looking like a smart option.

I love my job, but the center of it isn't coherent. The things I try to engender in my students--a sense of play, of curiosity, of competence through practice, revision, wonder, doubt and all the rest of the thinking asanas--are the very things I check at the door when the semester begins (well, by the time the first papers come in). I end up teaching "about" things I'm not myself actually experiencing. My lectures on rhetoric and writing during the semester become--at least to me--somewhat abstract, something I recall for my students, not something I embody. Of course I have my students reflect on their own writing. They practice reading closely. They take risks. But I only understand this vicariously. I feel that I'm being paid for having a degree, for managing the status quo, not for being a writer or scholar. Thus this tends to encourage posturing. It encourages asserting one's authority, though authentic authority comes more from modeling and immediate action than knowing stuff.

I'm hardly the first to notice this incoherence, and if I were to blame my college (or all academic institutions), I again wouldn't be the first. That's not needed, though. Those hoarse diatribes of how "the college is being run like a business!" really leaves me cold. The college IS a business. I want it to be solvent--hell, I want it to be rolling in money so that we can do all sort of good and interesting things.

That is not going to happen in SUNY Cortland, however. We are a small rural state school that survives on the margins. If the Ivy Leagues were Manhattan, we wouldn't be even in the suburbs. We'd be in rural Nebraska. We tend not to plan for the future because we're so preoccupied with surviving, and the latest budget issues have made it worse. Now there really ain't nothing to get by on. Our "funding stream" is taxes.  College is a state business built on a certain imaginary destination my state students will pay handsomely to achieve: "success." In my way of seeing it, "success" means often a) getting married, ideally to a person who looks good enough to be on TV b) getting a good job (read: a job that makes me more money than I know what to do with) c) buying a house and starting a family with my money and hot spouse.  Life of the mind, a sense of history, good work (not just well-paid work, but meaningful work done well) -- those things are not the values that organize my students or the campus.  When I feel their tug I feel anachronistic at best and stupid at worst.

What's assumed in all of this, of course, is that a, b, and c will cause happiness. That's a stretch (I assume most of our students don't look at their parents as models for happiness, for their parents, from what I hear, are often not such happy people). My sense is that "success" means not being one of "them," the poor, the have nots. "Success" is defined by an invisible and unspoken absent term, the lower class. No one is sure what that is or where those people are, but they sure seem to be a scary lot.  One of their few identifying characteristics is assumed to be poor grammar, which is why we worry about grammar at all in college.  But that is the subject of another post.

I am often a middle-level bureaucrat and my best energies go to supporting some very abstract entities called "the department" or "the college" or at its most grandiose, "higher education in the United States." I do not often feel as if I am participating in supporting, influencing, or developing these entities. Mostly, I feel like an "administrative assistant." I have an advanced degree, but spend more of my time collating than reading; more time deleting email than preparing lectures, more time in meetings than I spend with students.

This is ironic. Not evil, not oppressive, but ironic. I got into this business because I was fascinated with the ways you could say things and the way that ideas fit together and the way people make ideas over time. The best way to be immersed in these things this is to teach writing (and to write). I'm happy as a clam in the classroom, though I find it exhausting. I love to write and read for the same reasons.

How does this change?  I try to change it 1) by doing less in my college, less administration.  I put my energies into the classroom.  2) I try to create places with my colleagues to talk about our values (we recently (2010) had a great discussion of The Shallows by Nicolas Carr, and many said it was the FIRST TIME in their stint at Cortland that they had had an intellectual discussion on campus with their peers and 3) I try to do a good job and say not control things out of my control and 4) I keep myself sane by writing.

Or, better said, I try to stay sane when I'm not writing.

Two Boys at a Kitchen Table in the Mojave Desert (Found Photo)

Before he wrote his regrets

On the back, apologies for not seeing them grow up,

Their father must have crouched down

In the cold December desert sand

To frame his two grown sons, their four boots up

On a table they trucked down from town,

Two chairs, too, and a half-gallon of rum

In the half dark, both waiting for something magic,

Maybe some Mexican waitress, to bring them another drink. 

In their background wires thick as a man’s fist pulse

With juice bound for Las Vegas.

 

The boys watch their father’s failing smile,

His spirit slipping down like chair legs into sand. 

He regretting his lost chance, his boys’ loss, the wonders

Of the young & etc., and the boy on the left

 

Is already looking beyond the camera

At the truck he bought and paid for.

It’s gray and the flawed paint is peeling and behind it

The vast valley yawns like the jaw of a prehistoric ocean,

 

Which it was, crocodilian and omnipotent.

A distant sun rises over the hills’ knuckles

To the southeast, pouring light down the hill behind him

in a great wave, curling at the lip:

He holds his breath while he waits for it:

The picture is snapped up and the days of his future begin

Passing over him like water.