Twitter Me This

I've recently joined Twitter, and was promptly welcomed by my much tech-savvier friends to the "Twitterverse." Until this week, I avoided joining for reasons which remain quite murky to me. I can only hope that the process of writing them out, as I plan to do here, will clarify those reasons to a shiny sparkly finish. Without further ado, let's take the plunge into Murky-ville together!

Until seeing a presentation in technical communications recently at a conference, I would have argued that Twitter was an unnecessary timesuck living parasitically off the back of the greatest of timesucks, the internet. What is the use of yet another social networking tool for those who already post to facebook, write a blog, keep up with e-mail, use all of their unlimited texts, and call their parents back home on a regular basis? Oh, little did I know.

A techcom professor presented a fascinating case study of a group of folks from Wichita, KS who named themselves "ICT2DC." They describe their group formation process as: "meet on twitter, celebrate Obama's election, & take a road trip to the Inauguration." Each separate piece of this process provides plenty of thought-food, but we'll just start with "meet on twitter."

The idea of actually meeting someone new on Twitter astounds me. Three days into my Twitter experience (For which there should really be a word. I suggest "Twittience," although I am open to other, better neologisms.), I have eleven followers, with all of whom I have an "in-person" or "real-world" relationship. Of those eleven, ten I met while studying engineering outside of Boston, MA. These are the people I turn to when I can't figure out how to resize a photo or I just need to mainline some quick conversation about scientifically nerdy stuff. They're fantastic, and provide a fabulous counterpoint to the English/literary/book-centric mindset that could easily overwhelm my life. I feel more balanced and knowledgeable for their friendships, not to mention less like a humanistic, technophobic Luddite. It would certainly be a steep and slippery path to that latter state of affairs if I limited my interactions with my mac to the necessary word-processing and e-mailing of everyday graduate student-hood.

But had I not had those friends already, had I not made some mixed-up choices at seventeen about what I wanted to be when I grew up, had I not met these smart, funny, interesting people who just happen to build robots and widgets and real things while I make mountains out of intangible molehills, had none of these things happened, would I now be enjoying a tech-fix on Twitter?

I would wager not.

But this group who met on Twitter: they found each other through shared interests, particularly shared political interests. Were I to go scouting for people from here who think like me and happen to post on Twitter, I'm still not clear what added value I would bring to my life. The ICT2DC group actually got together in person and took a thoroughly blogged and tweeted road-trip to the capital. Although the experience sounds interesting, it's not one I'm up for. I have close relationships here in Vegas, not to mention dogs and school responsibilities. Road-tripping is a blast, but riding in a borrowed van with five potentially smelly people who I don't know well enough yet to make fun of for being smelly? Pass.

If Twitter doesn't provide new friends who may cross over into real-world friendship, then what about new friends who stay happily ensconced in the Twitterverse?

Cue a discussion of the law of diminishing returns. I have met a fantastical array of amazing people in my quarter-century or so of kicking around this earth. Many of them I already communicate with almost exclusively on-line, as they're out of the country, or leading busy busy lives, or at least in a distant time zone. But the on-line communication reads as an extension of their personalities, an on-going development of adult relationships which can encompass adult concerns as well as memories of good times in high school or college.

I worry that meeting new folks through on-line media would detract from the attention I can pay to folks I already know without adding substantial social or personal benefits. This worry--or fear, even--relates directly to the overwhelming heaviness I feel every time I consider trying to keep up with daily, or even weekly and monthly publications. There're too many, and they just keep happening. There's never an end in sight.

Aha! I feel a break-through. My fear is not that I will meet new people, but that I won't know when to stop meeting new people. Life just washes over you, again and again and again, without even the brief respite a true tide waning would provide. Shutting off entire avenues of communication, like Twitter, is not a reasonable coping strategy, but it is at least a clear one with easily defined boundaries. Just don't do it.

Call me the anti-Nike, but I do pride myself on having overcome this fear even before I figured out its true nature.

But then, I can't really claim credit for that. Really, despite all my mental bulwarking and hedging of bets, I succumbed to the lure of Twittience for one simple and underwhelming reason: A totalizing lack of resistance to peer pressure.

This one's for you, Miks. Don't worry, I really am enjoying Twitter.

Fear of Fiction

I wrote before that I might write on this. Now I have, but I don't think I'm done. There's too much still that I haven't dug up.

Reading Maus makes me want to write about fiction. You see, fiction frightens me.

I fear the criticism it might engender.
I fear running out of ideas.
I fear not being interesting enough.
I fear writing stilted dialogue.
But most of all, I fear truth.

In Part I of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, finds and reads a short comic Art wrote about his mother’s suicide. For me, the suspense of reading that short comic before discovering Vladek’s response, of seeing how personal and critical that comic is, this suspense wore my nerves down to nubs.

Here would be a good place to point out that I don’t deal well with suspense. I cannot bear to watch any sitcom whose plot revolves around the inevitable revelation of someone’s deception. Just sitting there, knowing that Joey has been lying all along, and dreading the moment--because it will come--that Monica catches him in his lie. I’d rather change the channel, thank you.

Of course, the moment doesn’t always come in real life. For Art Spiegelman, it came when his father read a comic that Art never expected him to even know existed. Vladek’s response could hardly have been better: “It’s good you got it outside your system” (Spiegelman 104). But one could easily imagine a world in which Vladek did not find the comic, but in which the possibility that he find it dangles constantly, Damocles-style, over Art’s head.

And this is what I fear. What if I create something so personal, so critical, so true, that I stand suspenseful, every day, nervously glancing up to make sure that the possibility of a certain person reading it has not yet crashed down on me.

But wait, you say. Fiction is all about lies. So what truth is there to fear in it? And perhaps, yes, the things that happen in fiction are lies, and perhaps even the people are made up. Fiction is not about what happened, though, at least not the fiction I would like to write. Fiction is about how things are, and what people are like, and why we do the things we do. It may not have happened, but it must be believable.

I know that I’m making insanely gross over-generalizations here. ‘Fiction’ simply encompasses far too much for the things I say to hold true across the board. By ‘fiction,’ I actually mean, ‘the fiction I like to read, because that would be the fiction I would want to write.’ Certainly, I could write unbelievable and wildly popular romance novels if I desperately wanted to stuff my bank account, but I’m not that poor yet. Even then, I wouldn’t want to be writing them, I’d simply want to sell them. So ‘fiction,’ in this essay’s context, refers to something fictional I would be proud to have written for reasons entirely internal to the work itself.

Having worked out this definition, I don’t think I’ll ever write such a book. It frightens me. I can imagine, but only by straining and wincing, creating a portrait as raw and true as that of Vladek Spiegelman. In fact, the obvious thing to write after reading Maus is a portrait of one’s father. I can’t do that. I cannot submit someone so close and dear to me to such scrutiny.

I tend to forgive, to overlook one’s faults. I always go for the benefit of the doubt. I would make the worst cop, because I would believe every criminal that says she’s innocent. I am not naive. I am simply willing to make mistakes if it means the world I live in is a pretty good place.

Case in point: with that confession, I’ve hardly admitted a deep dark secret. And the confession itself is something of a gloss. At times, I try for forgiveness and fail. I am mean, and convince myself it was necessary. When I’m not avoiding thinking about the faults in others and myself, I’m focusing on them, bringing them into such sharp relief in my mind that all other thoughts fade away. But then, eventually, I find something shiny to distract me, and the world is a pretty good place again.

This is the other side of my fear of writing fiction. On the one hand, I do not want to write something so true that it offends my loved ones. I could give a hoot about strangers. Even if I overcame this aspect of the fear, however, I would have to contend with the fear of deliberately sending my mind into a dark place that it usually works overtime to avoid.

If best-selling romance novels are a field of flowers and butterflies, then fiction is the abandoned well at the field’s edge, with a thin voice screaming out of it to be rescued. I’d like to think of myself as a rescuer, but honestly, truthfully, painfully I am but a bystander.

Even this essay, non-fiction, uncritical of others, this doesn’t quite feel right. What matters? Art Spiegelman worries about portraying his father “like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” This worry is much bigger than any I can have about the few words I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I will borrow Spiegelman’s defense, and write “I’m just trying to portray [my fear] accurately!” (Spiegelman 132). Whether or not that fear matters to you, I can tell myself that at least I’ve done it a little bit of justice.

Waterfowl Lullaby

after Miguel Hernández

I see you on a beach, one
of many you have been to.
You eat seaweed
from the rocks to keep salt
always at the ready. Your eyes
tint my skin, they grow roots
under my feet. They give
sense to my shape.

There is nothing I can say
to change your hours. Each one
comes and goes, a wave
evaporating into sand.

My sister is an island, lying
in the ocean. Please laugh,
laugh into the wind. I can hear you
in the taste of the desert,
sucked dry but for faint traces
from beyond the places I have been.

The ocean is a sky. You will die
if you fall into it. But the bird
can wave the white flags
of its wings and fall, falling
which is flying which is floating
and each one remote
from the beach where a wave’s
dissolution ends only itself.

The body with wings beating
flies blind and erratic,
the sun has never
shone so brightly.
How have I never seen
your outline pasted
against the clouds?

Now, so far from the water,
the sky distinguishes
shades of blue only
from itself. How, how
can I tell it your eyes
go deeper, you know more
than it will in seasons of days?

Your eyes are the Pleiades
less five, leading only in loops.
They cry out for corporality,
for the death of all illusions.

You remember, you remember me.
You remember each one of me,
and you are the only one.
Tell your eyes if they no longer
see me, I will not cry. Stay blind
to what’s happening
and to which thing
I tell you is a lie.

Nabokov & Neologisms

At some point in Memphis, after my laptop was stolen, I began recording words on loose paper stuffed into the profuse pages of my dictionary. No computer meant no internet, which meant trolling for unknown terms in my large cochineal Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. It had been a graduation gift from my parents when, at seventeen, I was preparing for a new life in Boston, far from their home in Montgomery and my high school in Mobile. Although I must surely have been given the book at some gathering or other congratulatory event, I clearly remember opening the package alone in my room at my parents’ house. The generous windows welcomed in huge swathes of summer light, marking out the shifting rectangles of warmth that I followed around the room for catnaps when I still lived at home. With that familiar illumination, I perused my new treasure, this book that would slowly reveal new thoughts, useful terms, hopelessly precise jargon, and a raft of memories floating along behind each.

The practice of tracking each of these things came to an unmemorable stop with the purchase of a new computer. Mac’s dashboard screen, so helpful for keeping up with sports stats and stock prices, lets you link directly to an on-line dictionary, putting you at just a few keystrokes’ distance from the definitions you need. Searching for and learning terms this way happens in the moment, however, putting the emphasis directly on the need, not on any kind of pleasure or enjoyment of the process itself. You lose the phylogeny of a word’s slow insertion into your vocabulary, the seductive tangibility of the crepitant pages, the numinous experience of an unexpectedly apt word jumping from the page in its unmistakable bold print, as though to say, I’m here! Use me! Pass me on to others and make me your own!

Phylogeny, I looked up while an undergraduate. I no longer recall the source of that word, but the words which precede and follow it fire up the associative links in my head, rushing me from one possibility to another. In the penciled chaparral of script filling my unlined printer paper, the back of which contains the final page of an essay by my mother on Falstaff’s character in Henry IV, Part II, I find the following list leading up to phylogeny: cognomen, opalescent, lambency, lambent, antinomy. After phylogeny come: neoteny, numinous, affinal, consanguineal. I wonder, was this list not drawn from the theory I read for a course on sociology and anthropology? Certainly cognomen, phylogeny, affinal, and consanguineal could slide unnoticed into any text on cultural exploration and family relationships. But opalescent? Numinous?

Now there is a word which I am glad to have learned. Whenever I discover it in new places, I feel the thrill of discovering an old friend’s good fortune in unexpected circumstances. I have used the word in poems and love letters, as a one-word description of my favorite person, to explain the strange choices that have led me here, to a singular moment in a particular place, where I never expected to find myself, or to find myself writing, describing the way words demand to be written, as a sort of birth certificate marking their entry into my intellectual life.

An amalgamation of inconsequential circumstances led me to once again take up my dictionary and its loose-leaf additions while reading Speak, Memory. A lucky amalgamation, that is, as Nabokov is far too erudite for the internet dictionary to be of more help than hindrance. To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.

How awful to be so torn. Instead, with the dictionary resting open on my lap, it becomes a table on which Speak, Memory can spread itself out, the halves flapping open like Nabokov’s beautiful winged butterflies. The dictionary is a foundation, whose material being reflects the other’s hard covers and gum smell. The two can relate to each other, and I can travel, back and forth, along the path established between them by the mutual experience of simply being a book. No division of attention here, but rather the creation of a conversation, in which one asks and the other answers, all--it feels like--for my benefit.

I wish that, like Nabokov, I could confirm my memories. If only there was a witness to my linguistic ramblings, who could remind me gently, Oh, no. “Antinomy” was definitely in Infinite Jest. Remember? When the boys play Eschaton? Or, “opprobrious”? That’s one of Matthew Arnold’s, back when he was on his religious kick. But then, I retract my wish.

For isn’t one of the most startling qualities of words their ability to shed associations and be seen in a new light? This is how poetry can so affect the senses, shocking us into a vision of a dead crab shell as a little traveling case with such lavish lining! Or slowly, carefully reversing our expectations to reveal shepherds’ feeding their lambs with teapots rather than teats. Just knowing what a word means and where it comes from does not make me its master. If such were the case, every time I wrote down a new definition and placed it back into my dictionary, I would have merely added another static datum to the database in my head. I refuse to treat words as static. I would rather not remember where they all came from, if it reminds me to treat each one as an unlimited province of possibility, overlapping with some other provinces, and coterminous with the rest, as far as the mind’s eye can see. As the user, not the master, of this language, I do not own my words, but usufruct allows me to enjoy their lambent fruits.

This is just to say

I have read
the dreams
that Freud dreamt
and studied

and which
I have probably
now overthought
for myself

Forgive me
my fascinating dreams
so sweet
and so cold

A New Year's Reading Resolution

My good friend Cara once gave me the best reason ever for not eating fast food. "We eat a finite number of meals in our lifetimes," she said, "so why eat crappy food?" The same sentiment applies to reading, which I would argue is as essential an activity to my personal fitness as eating. With that said, let's do some math.

The average lifespan for an American woman is 79.1 years. We'll go ahead and round that down to 79 for simplicity's sake (although rounding that number down does make me a bit squeamish). Depending on the length and complexity of my current reading, I get through anywhere from 1 to 4 books a week. If last semester's coursework is a good benchmark, for at least the next 4.5 years, I'll be hitting closer to the 4 than the 1 on average.

So in my lifetime of 79 years, minus the 25 I've already lived (again rounding, since I'm really about 25.3 years old), I have 648 months of reading. Actually, the 52-weeks-in-a-year measure is probably a better way to calculate, since the whole 4-weeks-to-a-month thing is decidedly inaccurate. Thus, I can more accurately say that I have 2,808 weeks of reading left to me. That works out, using an estimate of 2.5 books per week (hereafter referred to as bks/wk), to 7,020 books.

I should point out that books hardly constitute the whole of my reading. As a graduate student, and future professor (cross your fingers, kiddies!), I'll be supplementing books with papers, articles, The Chronicle of Higher Education, department memos, colleagues' drafts, submissions to publications, online reading for fun, and the New York Times Magazine on Sundays. Let's stick with books for now, though, because doing these calculations with page counts sounds just a wee bit daunting.

So 7,020 books. A lot, yes? But not really, considering UNLV's Lied Library has a million-plus volume collection. I must be choosy, with this whole reading endeavor.

But I really like the way I've gone about reading until now. It's haphazard, true, and all over the map, granted, but it's led me to some really remote and interesting corners of the reading world. I just finished Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram (points earned for most first names in a name), on loan from a colleague/boss-lady at UNLV's Academic Success Center. I learned a number of things from that novel, including that Australia drafted soldiers to fight alongside Americans in Vietnam. What a strange tidbit to be elided from American history classes, but discovered in a book about India.

Before that, I read Roberto Belaño's 2666, hoping I would like it better than his Savage Detectives, which I read for a course last semester. I did like it better.

Next up, we've got Amartya Sen's Collective Choice and Social Welfare. I heard an interview with Sen on NPR's Planet Money podcast, and was intrigued by his thoughts on the centuries-long misunderstanding of Adam Smith's theories about the free market and the invisible hand. Sen has a book about these ideas coming out, but I want some background reading on his economics before I get into the new book. I'm trying not to take everything at face value these days, especially on the big questions like, "Why is there poverty and what can we do about it?"

Also on my reading list for the holiday vacation is assigned reading for next semester's courses. It runs the gamut from Aristotle and Plato to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. I'm comforted to know before even getting started that the spring reading will be as encompassing and eclectic as the fall's.

Each of those books, assigned or stumbled across, eats into my grand total of 7,020. I can try to read more, and certainly there will be times in my life when I do. Just as certainly, however, there will be times when I don't or can't. I need a different strategy to deal with my finite-lifetime-reading anxiety.

Here it is: Feel free to put something down. I'm guilty of trying, very hard and even desperately at times, to finish anything I start. If I don't, I feel as though I've given up too easily. If it was printed, it must be worthwhile, no? Well, no, actually. In a way, this train of thought wends its way back to my post on difficult reading. A worthwhile book for some is not necessarily a worthwhile book for me. And only I can make that call.

Thinking about my projected lifespan depresses me. Thinking about anyone's projected lifespan depresses me. It leads to one of those deep, dark pits that I deliberately avoid in my day-to-day thoughts. I suppose it's that kind of avoidance, driven by fear, that keeps me from writing fiction. That's a whole other topic, deserving of its own post, however. If I can force myself to climb down into the pit, that is.

But actively working towards making the most of my projected lifespan curtails the depression. It gives me hope. Hope that I am making the most, and hope that there is a most to be made. So for the first time in my adult life, I hereby make the following New Year's Resolution:

I will not finish a book just because. I will finish it because it's going somewhere, because it speaks to me, because it broadens my knowledge, because I can't wait to find out what happens next. I will read recommendations, required books, and random discoveries, as always. But I will not be afraid to put my reading down and say, "This isn't for me." In other words, I will never again read a book the way I read Snow Falling on Cedars.

And for good measure, I'll go ahead and put that resolution into effect starting............NOW.

The Crafty Christmas Corner

This holiday season has turned out to be a very crafty one, full of knitting, crocheting, felting, cookie-baking (See cookie buckets in photo!), and other assorted Martha-Stewart-style activities. Partially, perennial brokeness has habituated me to hand-made rather than store-bought presents. It's a habit I'm not planning on breaking though, because there's something beautiful about hand-made items.

My mother and sister have always been fabulous gift-givers. They find the most amazing, artistic, and apt gifts at bazaars, local stores, and farmer's markets. My inhibitions about spending money have prevented me from jumping on that bandwagon. But by making gifts myself, I hope to give some of that same warm-cozy to their recipients that I feel when I receive a gift from the aforementioned fabulous mother and sister.

Something else happens with a hand-made gift, somthing that makes hand-made gifts an appropriate topic for a blog about texts. They say something. They speak to the character and tastes of the giver as well as the receiver, and what they say about each person traverses, back and forth, the bonds that tie the two together. In a way, what these gifts say changes those bonds, strengthens them, weaves the past to the present and opens new avenues to the future. The weaving/growing/bond metaphor springs easily to my mind, since so many of the gifts I've been making are knitted or crocheted. They may take hours upon hours to complete, and I may be reading or watching TV or listening to This American Life while I work, but a good portion of the time I spend on each gift is spent thinking about the person it's for.

I think about the colors and patterns I've chosen for this person, hoping or knowing that they'll love them. This is the past. The experiences I've shared with him or her informs every choice I make.

When I painstakingly unravel and correct mistakes, I think about the moment this person opens their gift, and how I want that moment to be perfect and free of mistakes. I want to create a beautiful tiny space in their life that in some way reflects the space they occupy in my mind, a space I can go to to appreciate how wonderful my friends and family are. This is the present.

And when I've gotten into the swing of things, I let my mind wander and imagine the fun--and sorrows--I have yet to experience with this person, this wonderful friend, confidante, supporter, sounding board, inspiration. This is the future.

All these daydreams can't be drawn from a shawl or wall-hanger or pillow, no matter how loudly I think while I'm making those gifts. What can be drawn from the gifts is the care I put into making them, the concern I have for their recipient's tastes, and the time I have and will invest into my relationships.

I'm not big on receiving gifts myself. I enjoy knowing that people care, but I'm perfectly content with a hug and conversation on the phone or over a cup of coffee. But if I get one Christmas wish, it's that the gifts I give speak as loudly to their recipients as they have to me while I've been making them.