The hour badly spent

I’ve felt brain dead all week. Perhaps it was the changing weather? Perhaps I shouldn’t have started the week with Modernist poetry.

"I’m gonna memorize Prufrock," I said. Smallville rolled her eyes. I saw that coming. So did Prufrock.

And I have known the eyes already, known them all–
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

I’ve also been reading White Teeth, and I fear Zadie Smith’s “manic” prose has made mince meat of my brain.

Monday I missed an article deadline and an assignment deadline in playwriting, which set the tone for the rest of my classes. So it goes. I skipped class Tuesday and didn’t have class Wednesday. I returned to White Teeth. I’d read it for fun years ago, but this time, ugh. Not til I had marked up half the book did I remember that my copy was actually borrowed from Cherry. As a woman of integrity, she has most likely stayed true to her promise not to read The Hour Badly Spent any more, so I might be in the clear, but if not, uhh, sorry about that. I don’t know what I did Tuesday or Wednesday, so it couldn’t have been anything special. Both days, perhaps, interchangeable?

For I have known them all already, known them all:–
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Except not quite. There is, in fact, so much to do, pages to read, calories to burn, lessons to learn, paragraphs to write, concepts to master, and never nearly enough coffee spoons to measure it all.

The afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

A life of leisure. A guy hanging around with nothing to do, no deadlines, no steps to retrace; not even a job, no need to work that hustle, no-place to be in fifteen minutes. I had a colloquium to deliver. Would there be time, would there be time? Thursday nights, English 635’s class discussions focus on racial and gender oppression, which is just as important as it is tedious. This week was no exception, since many main characters are Jamaican & south Asian. After the break I quietly whipped out the laptop. Jimbo - one-third of our discussion fellowship - hadn’t shown up that night, but he IMed me from home.

The Opera Ghost: sup, yo. are you guys on break, or out of class?
The Hour Badly Spent: just got back from break. we’re on 1 last q
The Hour Badly Spent: this is actually not so bad
The Opera Ghost: what? oh questions?
The Hour Badly Spent: yeah
The Opera Ghost: im sick, btw.
The Hour Badly Spent: we heard :-)
The Hour Badly Spent: flu?
The Opera Ghost: yea.
The Opera Ghost: sad thing is my roommates are still trying to drag me out tonight.
The Opera Ghost: i think i may die if that happens.
The Hour Badly Spent: just bundle up and travel in a palanquin
The Opera Ghost: lol
The Opera Ghost: with a big wooden jug of brandy around my neck
The Hour Badly Spent: if u make me laugh karin [westman] might be pissed
The Opera Ghost: lol sorry
The Hour Badly Spent: ok, got it outta my system. must. stop. thinking of you as friar tuck.
The Opera Ghost: LOL

Whatever; it was funny. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

Then Karin snapped me back to the there-and-now, asking us about the genetically engineered Futuremouse© that brings White Teeth to its climax. Something occurred to me.

"Did anyone else see this as a nod to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?" Karin asked me to expound on the connection.

Mice are not, as is commonly assumed on Earth, small white squeaking animals who spend a lot of time being experimented on.
In fact, they are the protrusions into our dimension of hyper-intellegent pan-dimensional beings. These beings are in fact responsible for the creation of the Earth.

Indeed.

Glancing over this semester’s collective Collegian front pages, it feels like Manhattan is going through a crime wave. Stabbing rape rape stabbing rape rape rape. "If it bleeds it leads, if it’s sex it’s next" was at first annoying, then just unsettling, then, once it set in that this is not a temporary spike and that Manhattan-Kansas is in fact the rapingest town I’ve ever lived in, a special type of long-iced-over indignation rolls in. "I don’t understand why more women here aren’t up in arms," Madeline said to me the other day.

Perhaps because locally, the most prominent discussion of this issue takes place on the level of a gaggle of hippies huddling together in the rain. The point of consistently reporting the ugly stuff of this town is to raise total social awareness. The other day, Whitney Hodgin penned a pair of pieces, in which two K-Staters told deeply personal stories of rape and its aftermath (in both cases, the legal system turned against the women.

Whitney is a thoughtful reporter, and always manages to get her subjects to say things that add meat and depth to the topic. The articles came out excellent. The Collegian put them on page five, right across from Tim Hadachek’s weekly rant against the government. What urgent topic of great social and political import ran on page 1? "Many students unable to make decisions without help from ‘helicopter’ parents." Of course they can’t.

Among men — men who describe themselves as chivalrous, good guys, men who are oblivious to chivalry’s inherent rapeyness — the conversation begins and ends at "If I found a rapist I would Kick His Ass," with everyone else sitting nearby nodding their assent and scarfing down their cheeseburgers or whatever. If these good guys were listening closely, they’d notice something off about a lot of the dudes at that same table. It’s in their persistent braggadoucherie, and it’s in way they talk about the female teachers they don’t like. You will not see these good guys cheering at Take Back the Night.

Last year, my buddy Eric would party every weekend, telling me about it Sunday mornings over bummed Parliaments. "Some girl got raped at the party I was at last night," he’d tell me. Every weekend. "Were you at TKE again?" was my usual response. Then what? I don’t know. What do you say after that, not really knowing anyone involved?

Then there’s this friend I have. Her rapist still haunts her, in every sense of the word. She’ll be out at Mae’s, or at Finn’s, or at some old place, and OMG look who shows up! This happened about five times in the space of two weeks. She always notices before anyone else, being especially attuned to the particular tones of his voice, and he’s talking especially loud just to get her attention (he usually tries to occupy the booth behind her or the barstool next to her while she steels herself to ignore him). What’s my role here? I consider introducing myself ("Hi, how’s it going? Raped anyone lately?") but she signals "no" with her eyes. An uncomfortable silence ensues. FOR TWO HOURS. She spends the rest of the evening in a quiet trance, staring long-faced at a dark corner of the room. Hours later, nursing a cigarette on her balcony, when she’s ready to speak, I’m still not sure I’m ready to hear it, even though it turns out to be only two words.

"I’m sorry," she mouths.

Of all the things to say, why that? I’m sure I’ll never understand. So am I, I say back.

[K-State Collegian]

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.