In which she frets about graduate school
Here the NY Times Book Blog writes about “Cinderella Schools”, MFA programs where rags become riches, and where acceptance to Iowa doesn’t even matter because your prose is just so pretty.
Well, okay. Over at Tom Kealey’s blog (which is getting too obsessive, in the weeks following MFA Program deadlines, to comfortably read) they call them “Sleeper Programs” and I read about them with great interest because I am realistic about the quantity and quality of writers who want to flee into the shelter of a reputable MFA program.
The comments section is rife with embittered readers who can turn a phrase (writers themselves, undoubtedly) and have an ax to grind when it comes to MFA Programs. Criticisms run the gamut from “probably shouldn’t spend your money for a degree that won’t prepare you for the real world” to “commodifying the mentor student relationship is insulting and detrimental” to “real writers shouldn’t need permission to write” to “MFA programs only make writing teachers”. The most educated and succinct critic in this section levelled the most biting critique:
America used to produce Great American Novels. From Moby Dick to Gravity’s Rainbow, they were big, new, confident, and a little bit crazy, like America herself. Novelists were cowboys, riding the horse of their obsession, pushing forward the frontier of fiction.
The novel, too, is the cowboy of the culture, always against the establishment, government, law; always seeking new territory in which to be free. The only major literary form invented after Aristotle, it has no classical rules, it embraces change. The most individual literary form, the novel best expresses America, the pre-eminent society of individual rights.
The novel, constantly destroying its old forms and inventing new, is not a genre, it is a process of perpetual, ongoing, creative destruction, like the modern industrial capitalism alongside which it grew up. And novelists are artists, yes, but also entrepreneurs, who create, own, and sell a privatised myth.
But the American literary frontier has closed. Since the sixties, literary writing in the United States has been slowly professionalised, bureaucratised, and institutionalised.
The cowboys now go to cowboy school. And less and less people read their books. This is unsurprising: the university is a system that could have been designed to wreck the Great American Novel, the novel of the individual, the roar of life.
Which was all very depressing to read, believe you me. A few points I won’t bother to make at Papercuts, but will console myself with here:
A good MFA program might serve the same purpose as patronage in royal courts of old. The bard is afforded a pittance and a place to eat and sleep and in trade, s/he is allowed to write.
I think most writers go to writing programs to get their brains exploded, to find out about all of the things they CAN do with writing. I would observe that people by and large don’t need any help homogenizing, and that higher education can help diversify and — dare I say it? — educate them out of benevolent ignorance. I sure as shit wouldn’t know a ghazal from a quatrain without years spent toiling at an institution of higher learning.
And now that my wounds are salved, I still want to get an MFA.
For the Unreliable Narrator, weeks late.
In the Origami Fields
Where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair
into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled
violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no
more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be
torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,
I understand only this:
It is a lonely place that can burn so fast.
Sabrina Orah Mark
This morning I taught my first class of children. I was far more intimidated by the prospect of teaching 4th graders than adults, though as it turns out I am a lot more flummoxed by the uncomprehending stare of a Spanish-speaking adult than I am of a boisterous or sometimes skeptical 11 year-old. Who’d have thunk. It is very much as Dana warns: teaching children is as much about establishing manners and order as it is the counting of syllables in a haiku. Thankfully, Ms. Caldwell was on hand at all times to rein in any mayhem that might be brewing in the classroom, and I was free to, well, haiku. I don’t think I’d be cut out four 4th-grade teaching. On the other hand, the kids were reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell and I about lost my shit when I discovered as much. Talk about benefits.
The hunt for a job has turned up one lead: serving Italian food at a mid- to upscale restaurant in the Knox/ Henderson neighborhood, filled to brim with yuppies (which typically means immaculate restaurant decor, watery cocktails and bland food). I like to think of it as “the place where the Apple Store lives”. So I have been very industriously preparing for this new job — it requires 4 matching click pens, check! And a wine key, check! And a mini flashlight, check! — but I interpreted the dress code too loosely. To wit: where one pair of black slacks were required, I substituted one pair of so adorable Calvin Klein pinstripe flares. Where one button-down, long-sleeved shirt was stipulated, I substituted one very modest, long-sleeved cotton v-neck. I stepped in the front door and was ushered promptly back out again: “Not even close. Come back tomorrow!” And so I walked home, irritated by this strutting preening cockerel of a restaurant manager’s alpha-dogness and my own inability to color within the lines, precisely the sort of big-picture free-wheeling close-enough attitude that’s cost me at least, oh, maybe three jobs now?
A set back this minuscule would never have tripped me up, even a year ago. My ego is currently so fragile that I am seriously considering crawling into bed for the rest of the afternoon. I am on the edge of something very dark and very ugly.
Jonanna very sensibly points out that ordinarily she would encourage me to say “Fuck that guy. Moving on!” but she can already smell the panic building from across town, so maybe not so much. I guess tomorrow I will spend money I don’t actually have on an outfit I’ll probably never wear in order to keep a job I don’t particularly want to appease the shrieking angry harpies (who look, strangely enough, like my mother!) who take sharp instruments to the inside of my skull while I am trying to sleep and sing songs about my utter ineptitude at, you know, life.
Those bitches need to be put in their places.
It would be nice, though, to piece together a life this way. Some freelance work here, teaching a class there. A part time job doing something I could stand (like sorting books, why hasn’t the Public Library called me back yet?) and a lot of free time to write and a lot of personal mobility.
In other news, there is no news.
