The hour badly spent

Thanksgiving is frankly more of a hassle than not, and becomes more so as I get older. It’s come to be that there’s too much stuff to do on these "vacations" for me to actually enjoy them. And then there are so many reasons I just plain don’t enjoy them.

First, it takes on a Thursday. We all know what fucking Thursdays are like, what they do to you.

Second. Airline travel.

Third. Being home = not all it’s cracked up to be.

Let’s get this one out of the way: everything there reminds me of an ex. It was an appallingly miserable, painful relationship. I’m happy it’s over. I would be MUCH MUCH HAPPIER without that unseen presence lurking around. You know exactly what I mean. The abrasive familiarity of old haunts. The ticket stubs you stashed away so you’d never ever forget that one night on the town. The casual inquiries from mutual friends ("Talk to so-and-so lately?" "No." "Oh. She and I just had lunch together the other day." "Really? How did you keep it down?").

Let’s get this out of the way too: I just don’t do the family thing. Everyone wants me to see everyone else during the few days while I’m there, whether or not I feel like driving 20 miles across town to make small talk about "studies" and "what are you going to do with your hair." Then I’ve got another frenzied rush through traffic to LAX, where I can tuck myself into a plan.

Fourth: I read Eclipse (book 3 of Twilight. Chaste is the new porn), and man, that book is nothing but looooong.

I’m sorta glad that’s over with. Smallville picked me up in Kansas City. She probably couldn’t register this at the time, pumped full of cold medicine as she was (way to operate heavy machinery!), but it was just great to see her. I launched right back into my information compulsion, oversharing the minutae of Starcraft battle strategy. Since she didn’t pass out, I’ll have to assume it was entertaining. Back in Manhattan, everyone’s apparently sick. The same pukey head-cold bug has apparently hit all of Kansas, and seeing as how I don’t get any (a) sleep or (b) vitamins, my only hope lies in whether or not contraband Adderall boosts the immune system. My fingers are crossed. It’s good to be back.

Lately, appreciating poetry feels more and more impossible. Some pieces are accessible, but too much of them are all Ezra Poundish, too moderney and inscrutable (maybe I’m just far too lazy to scrute). Wednesday night I went to former Poet Laureate Charles Simic’s reading of his own collected works hardly knowing what to expect, either from him or myself.

Liz Dodd delivered the introductory speech, as she is wont to do. She is actually getting more and more prolix each time she does this, drawing on more interpretations and more metaphors and more more with each speech. The next day’s Collegian article would say that she "opened with an elegant and insightful introduction of Simic, beginning with a brief biography and ending with an exploration of some of the themes within his work." Heh. It simply made me restless; intro is like bling, and the less, the better. Too quotey, I wrote down and showed the Hipster. We ducked behind the people in front of us to laugh, hoping the Eyes of Dodd couldn’t see all the way to our irreverentially muted mirth at the back of Forum Hall.

The Former Poet Laureate began by taking us into his first poem, "Shelley," with a portrait of his own life as it was when he was writing the poem. The portrait did not lack for fine detail, which is to say that as he talked about his life in New York City in the 80s, "a period where nothing much happened to me," he admitted, he began to drift. Nothing much piled on and on, slightly garbled. Perhaps the Former Poet Laureate is nervous in front of crowds? "I was wondering how someone could be the Poet Laureate and have so much trouble speaking English," my companion later remarked. I began to wonder if this was the actual poem (the streaming of consciousness of an Old, which would have actually been amazing). Too New Yorkey, I noted to the Hipster. She agreed. Another bout of stifled laughter.

At length he started to recite "Shelley." The next day’s Collegian article would read, “’Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying king,’ he read, his voice rising with import. Then a new tone of conversational story-telling came." Nominally a tribute to the Romantic poet, the piece felt like a ghostly observer gliding through a world of discrete scenes. A hunchbacked shopkeeper. A three-fingered waiter. A man bloodied and half-conscious after a street fight steadies himself upon a lamp post. Every setting is slightly wondrous but vaguely threatening; behind the observer/narrator’s keen eye lies a restless fear of fully apprehending what’s around him.

His subsequent selections grew a bit lighter, often more ironic. "His poetic voice fit his accent," commented Hipster. "My Beloved," a love poem about the impossibility of writing a love poem, was, for this post-happy hour crowd, a bit easier to digest.

“In the fine print of her face/ Her eyes are two loopholes/ No, let me start again/Her eyes are flies in milk/ Her eyes are baby Draculas/ To hell with her eyes/ Let me tell you about her mouth.” Then her breasts. Then her legs. Then the carnal treasure between them, like the precious key to freedom for a jailed convict. It was a perfectly awkward metaphor, so much so that, amid the audience’s reaction, one laugh rose higher and rosier than all the others in Forum hall. "That was a naughty laugh," Simic remarked, his Slavic inflections leaning on naughty just so. That laugh came from Elizabeth Dodd.

He goes on to other poems. By and by I actually begin to like them, although he did offer another babbling introduction to "The Note." Too explainey, I scribble and show the Hipster. She rolls her eyes, exasperated but not acerbic. Of late she has remarked that I seem "happier," that my "eyes look different" these past few weeks, and I’m fairly sure the way she rolls her eyes at my (charmingly?) predictable jokes has something to do with this.

"The Note" turned out to be pretty good; a lighthearted persona poem, terse, but long enough for a story, with a surprise ending and a dead mouse (Ha ha, spoiler alert).

Simic finished up with a poem about a boy on a somewhat failed date. Dodd was the first to stand up. Flowery trousers notwithstanding, she affected the most Creedlike pose possible, holding us all in suspence for a good ten seconds for her cheery announcement.

"There are books! For sale!"

[K-State Collegian]

The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple arrived at Friday’s Visiting Writer lecture at four on the dot, right on time. The Dodd had already begun her introduction of memoirist Meredith Hall.

Hall explained, before reading, that she had lost a tooth on the plane on the way to Kansas. "It seems to me the only thing people can notice about me. I wanted to tell you that writers from Maine don’t always have teeth missing." Charming! The Olds have the best comic timing!

Hall was ostracized from her small New Hampshire town at age 16, when she got pregnant. Even her parents wouldn’t have her any more.

"It’s a powerful story about being a girl in a world where people don’t want you," said Susan Rodgers. Susan was the head of the creative writing program last year; she abruptly left K-State in August, after she and her husband got jobs at Oregon State Uni.

Hall read chapters from Without A Map, about the months after she was kicked out of her father’s house. She wandered around Europe, broke, stealing and selling shit to get by, relying on the kindness of strangers for the occasional place to crash. She met other families, other drifters, all sorts of people who didn’t speak English.

There was a real sense of disconnection between her and the people and places around her. This was partly due to the difficulty of communicating with people whose language she didn’t speak; much of the process consisted of pidgin sign language and heavy, rigorous observation, in addition to picking and choosing which truths she wants to reluctantly reveal depending on the person listening; but it was mostly because she was in exile. She was hugely depressed. She never missed a chance to remind us of that! It was like an eternally dissatisfied wine-taster, sampling and spitting out everything, all snap judgements and no intimacy. She was romanticizing her isolation. Five minutes into it, the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Blogger was getting bored. He started passing notes to the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Hipster.

Blogger: I hate memoirs. I will never, ever read one.

Hipster: Aww…I like them! I like this. You don’t at all do you?

Blogger: Is it that obvious?

Blogger: It’s starting to remind me of Huck Finn

Hipster: How?

Blogger:

1. i can’t quite figure out where she’s going with this.

2. this is almost exclusively her inner life - little interaction with the outside world except to observe it and move on. not quite like Huck, but it’s getting monotonous.

3. the present tense has NEVER EVER SOUNDED MORE ANNOYING to me

4. sorry; only 3 things

Hipster: haha i do agree that it is getting monotonous

Blogger: it’s a travel blog. It feels like IT MIGHT NEVER END

Hipster: yeah I know, and damn you for mentioning the present tense, because now that is bothering me

Ha ha, he’s sorry he ruined it for her, but he really wonders whether she expressed her guilt to him.

The book was originally a collection of autobiographical essays that had been printed individually in various trade publications. Publishers know how to market "memoirs" but they don’t know how to market "a collection of autobiographical essays." Hall didn’t know how to convert her "autobiographical essays" into memoirs, so she called around and spoke to some other authors for help. In the end, she took the title of each of her essays and added "chapter X" to each of them. Clever!

So the reading was kinda dull. Afterwards, at the House of Dodd, Hall was the belle of the ball, still charmingly toothless, warmly engaging everyone including the Underminer but especially a Pretentious Literary Douchebag chatting her up. The Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple split up and floated around. They shared a Disgustingly Self-Absorbed glass of white wine, passing it off when their paths crossed. All in all, this soiree was much more fun than expected, except for one glaring omission.

Normally, if Erica Hateley is at an event, all the poorly-dressed slackers have a leader to inspire them. But her absence left the slackers feeling empty, adrift, and pathetic. When the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple stepped out for a smoke with its Underminer, Emily Kennedy stepped up to the plate to lead us.

It turns out that Emily is just as awesome as Erica, except no quirky accent. Except! She also does a pretty good Saucy Aussie impression. "I’m not down with the vag," Erica once told Emily, "but if I were," blah blah blah (we were still processing the confirmation of Erica not being down with the vag so we didn’t hear anything after that, but we know we want to hear Emily do Erica’s accent some more). It was great! Now the slackers have a new punk-rock-girl crush, and Erica has her very own underminer!

After that the Disgustingly Self-Absorbed Couple left to go see the Laramie Project. The Underminer left too, not only so she could go see the Laramie Project but also because she needed to broadcast some more underminerey sweeping generalizations.

This scene was unseemingly heartwarming, which NEVER happens. Elizabeth Dodd, Karin Westman, and Meredith Hall are all talking as though they are actually BFFs. Also, Tanya’s husband lurked around and Kim Baltrip sat back in the foyer. Dr. Westman has this way of craning her neck and tilting her head when she’s listening to someone, and she did just that with Hall. It was cute! The Hour Badly Spent was deeply moved.