Let’s pretend the MFA isn’t an unstoppable force and needs defending by me…

This review got me all in a tizzy.  I read it this morning and thought responding to it would be a great blog post, but then I started reading through it again, and there were just so many points I wanted to make, and I was having such a hard time sifting through which were the important ones and which not, and I also found myself defending ‘the writing program’ as an institution more than I wanted to, that I stopped with my detailed response (if you can believe it—there’s a detailed-response draft in a folder on my computer) and decided to write this instead.

Elif Batuman wrote a book called The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, about, well, what the subtitle says.  It’s been well received and sounds interesting.  I’ve heard her interviewed, and she’s very personable and not shy about staking out her position.  She says in this review of The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl, that she wanted to be a writer and chose a PhD over an MFA.  She’s reviewing a book written by a PhD about the MFA phenomenon.  She not only analyzes the book, but also uses it as an opportunity to complain about MFA programs.  I tried in this post to separate those two different critiques—of the book, of what she calls “the writing programme” (its’ from the London Review of Books, hence the English spelling in any of her quotes) but what I’ll usually call “the MFA”—but it’s hard to know if I succeeded.

A Good Life's Day

I distinctly remember, during my first great self-improvement kick when I was (officially) unemployed (officially unemployed = the government sent me checks), catching myself one day thinking that I didn’t have enough time to do all the things I wanted, but that one day (when some nameable or unnameable thing or series of things, happened) I would.  Then I realized I was unemployed, I had essentially no external responsibilities; that, in fact, I would never have more time than I did at that moment, in that day, in that group of days.  What was it that I lacked time to do?  I don’t remember exactly, but as it was during one of my self-improvement kicks, it was something along the lines of learning a language, reading the collected works of Shakespeare, engaging in some kind of exercise regimen, or starting to eat healthier.  Something good for me.

When I am in the grip of a self-improvement kick, what happens is I add blocks of time to my schedule, piling them up one on top of another like legos, until—inevitably—a day can no longer support the edifice I have constructed.  Then entropy takes hold, sometimes violently—the whole thing topples—but more often slowly—blocks are removed outright or put off until tomorrow for so long that the urgency to do the thing is lost and eventually forgotten.  It is amidst these cycles made up of peaks of organization and troughs of entropy that I navigate through my life.  My moods often lag behind where you would expect them—it is often at the very lowest of my moods that I begin to organize my life (sick of moping, of being unproductive, or simply needing something to make the decision of what I should do when there is absolutely nothing I want to do) and often when I am happiest and most productive that I start to disregard the organization and let my life slip toward… not chaos, I don’t think, but impulse (if I am happy and productive, I trust myself to allow my feelings choose my activity).  Eventually, either the lack of structure leads to a change in mood, or maybe the melancholy returns because it is time for the melancholy to return.

The melancholy has been here of late.