Form vs. Formula

I have been away for a long time.  One of the reasons—though certainly not the only one—is that I taught a January-term course this year.  In addition to the hectic teaching schedule, I prepared the class in South America, which proved challenging.  What spurs me to write at the moment is the fact that I received my teaching evaluations the other morning and have been thinking about them ever since.

First I’ll say that of a class of twenty, only four bothered to fill them out.  Instead of paper evals all the students fill out on the last day of class (where you can bribe them with food and the promise of early dismissal, as well as make a speech about how great they’ve been), the students have to go online during their own time and fill them out.  When only four of twenty do them, the proportion of extreme responses goes up.  One of the evaluations was outstanding and one was atrocious, I’m pretty certain the worst I ever received.  The other two were pretty good.  In addition to the number ranking, the students have the opportunity to write comments, which the angry evaluator took every opportunity to do.

That’s about all I want to say about them.  I introduce them mostly as an explanation for why my thoughts have gone in the direction they have.

San Telmo

San Telmo is the barrio where I live here in Buenos Aires, and it doesn’t get many tourists on the weekdays.  On Sundays, you’re as likely to hear English as Spanish on the street, especially at the antiques fair, the ferria.  On weekdays, I’ve seen lots of school kids wearing what looks like lab coats—perhaps they have the world’s most intensive biology-training program for elementary school-age kids.  Often, you see huge groups of them at the same time, but somehow without giving the impression that they’re on a field trip.

If we are judged by the company we keep...

...now would be a good time to judge me.  I have an essay along with three of the other fantastic writers who took part in the 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminars.  It's at Fiction Writers Review and you can read it online here.

On Cameras and Seeing

The second most popular question I’ve been getting, after “how are you doing?” and the like, is some iteration of, “Do you have any photos?”  The answer is no, as I said in my previous post.  When I have photos, it’s because someone else has taken the photos and sends them to me, or links me to them on Facebook, or something like that.  I don’t have a camera.  The evolution of camera-carrying through my life is something like this:

1)     I didn’t have a camera because my parents did.

2)     I didn’t have a camera because I didn’t think of it.

3)     I had a camera and took many worthless photos with it.

4)    I had a camera and took only a few photos with it, still mostly worthless.

5)     I carried a camera, took no photos, felt guilty about it, and also worried it would get broken or stolen.

6)    I stopped carrying a camera.

I was going to write more about this topic, until I saw this , which said most of what I had to say, and in addition was funny (and a little cruel) about it.  The shorter version goes something like this: while I believe a camera helps some people to see, for me, in the vast majority of cases, it has the opposite effect.

Why I don't post pictures...

Because I don't have a camera.

Why I don't have a camera will be the subject of a future post.

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.