An American Horror Story: "Birth"

I knew I was right! This "horror story" is the horror story of the European invasion and contamination of America and the decimation of the original people and landscape of this country. The "new inhabitants"  (the ghosts) of this "Murder House" (our country) are, I suggest, the "newcomers"—the Puritan settlers, if you will. They aim to over take the "infantile" and innocent land, with little regard for the lives that are living. Yes!!!!! I knew it!

As I just finished watching this episode, I want to say it was very..."moving," but that sounds weird for a "horror story." I suppose, though, considering some of the horror in U.S. History, there are some very heartbreaking episodes in our past as well. The more I think about it (in my PTSD haze from this semester), Walter Benjamin's writings would probably have been the better choice for analyzing this series rather than Michel Foucault, although both scholars have relevance. Really, in all honesty, the best social theorist to use is Reinhold Niebuhr. Unfortunately, he wasn't one of the critical lenses we had to choose from to do our analysis in American Studies.

More to come as I take it all in. What a frickin' brilliant series this is...I would guess a lot of people don't "get it." But that's the American mentality for you...

An American Horror Story

So, I've been thinking way, way too much about "American Horror Story" the FX show created by Ryan Murphy. I actually wrote a brief essay about it for my American Studies class that I am posting below. I actually didn't have the "room" in this particular essay to say everything that I have seen within this series, so maybe I'll go back and reinforce my theories and theoretical frameworks about the show at another point. At any rate, my thoughts on the arch of the series, mainly on the pilot episode are below.

American Horror Story:  

Consequences of the American Dream

Much has been written about John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charitie” that it hardly needs any introduction. Winthrop’s text serves as an architectural “blueprint” or foundation upon which our home has been built. Noble spirits still stir within the house that America has built. However, underneath the house there are other souls that have been sealed, shelved, and bricked behind the walls of dark and forgotten spaces in that house.

Winthrop embarked on his voyage to the New World in 1630. He was well aware of the horror stories and disastrous ends of many earlier settlements; he and the other passengers knew they might encounter any number of unexpected monstrosities in the wilderness, “thou knowest not what evil may come upon the land” (Model). Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charitie” was constructed as a theological “thesis” that he hoped would provide a model by which they should work together to ensure success in their new home. It was a manifesto meant to establish rules for securing God’s blessing on their community through the practice of affection and devotion to brotherly love and familial fellowship. Winthrop called on the settlers to “rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community…so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace” (virginia.edu).

Unfortunately it did not take long for the family fellowship to part ways and decay into something altogether unharmonious. A new kind of creature, the spawn of desire and anxiety began to pervert the foundation of filial devotion. The communities, once “all in each other knit together by this bond of love,” began to fall asunder. Individual desire for the pleasure, profits, and material possession resulted in a miscarriage of promised fidelity. The Puritans’ protestant ethic produced a genealogical inheritance of individual greed that runs through the blood of generations of America’s descendants. The “pursuit of happiness,” became equivalent to a drive to occupy the land, to acquire and collect material goods and wealth, and to exhibit individual displays of affluence, and power. The avarice and extravagance are traits that mark characteristics of the American Dream that is, in reality, an aberrant illusion, and the monstrous consequences of pursuing such extravagant happiness is unleashed in the television series American Horror Story.

American Horror Story’s allegorical relationship to the American Dream is deeply infused into the series by producer Ryan Murphy and his writers. Each episode plants more prescient clues for viewers who are paying close attention and draws them deeper into the dark and empty places of our history, which is loaded with sublime symbolism. The expedition into the main characters’ lives—the Harmon family—is for them a “New World” journey into Truth; however, they are not prepared for the kinds of truths they will encounter. In American Horror Story, the Harmons are representative of a corrupted genealogical inheritance that hides in the murky recesses of the American psyche.

This middle-class family is trapped in a nightmare and far from living a life in a land of milk and honey in accordance with the Americana Dream. As the Harmon family disintegrates, we see how the past is always present, and our haunted history has left scorched scars that cut deep to the bone. Perhaps American Horror Story is a comment on Walter Benjamin’s claim that there is a “secret agreement between past generations and the present one,” and the “secret” may reveal some terrible deformities pulled from some spaces we would rather not enter; frightening places that conceal some very disturbing episodes in American history. Further, as Benjamin would claim, the reparations “to which the past has a claim…cannot be settled cheaply (254). The American legacy is hidden within a house of horrors and filled with ruthless, grisly figures and the ghosts of our bloody past.

I claim that the terrifying scenes of violence, rape, and blood in this American Horror Story make a statement about our history—that it is a history that has been continuously manipulated, altered, renovated, and reassembled from only pieces that we only wish to salvage. American Horry Story asks us to look at the deformed, mutilated, dismembered parts of history that have magically disappeared. It “peels back the wallpaper” to reveal a very different picture of America made up of images deemed too outmoded, unseemly, or too distasteful to include in the story, and unfortunately for the Harmons, their California dream house is the ground upon which the scattered bones of American myths will be resurrected from the dead. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, relentlessly digs through some remains of our ancestral legacies, and places them in the “basements,” “attics,” and “crawl spaces” of the metaphorical house that America has built. American Horror Story unveils some deeply dark and very sinister phantasms through shocking spectacles of sex, violence, and gore. However, it is the heartbreaking implosion of a bourgeois American family that makes this series so unnerving.

The pilot episode of the series introduces the Harmons of Boston, Massachusetts. Ben Harmon is a doctor of psychiatry and psychology professor, and he is married to his lovely wife Vivien, with whom he has a teenaged daughter named Violet. Viewers meet the family as Dr. Harmon is in the process of relocating his family from Massachusetts to California. The reason for the move is because Ben’s has held a secret that has unsettled them all. He has been having an affair with one of his students, which began not long after the devastating miscarriage of Vivien’s seven-month old fetus. In the bloody “afterbirth” of the wounded marriage, Vivien agrees to stay with Ben, provided they leave Boston and move out-of-state. Violet, though, is extremely unhappy; not only does she resent the cross-country move, but she also feels neglected and estranged from the family because of all the drama surrounding her mother’s miscarriage and her father’s infidelity. Ben is hoping that the move out West will restore Vivien’s faith in his marriage vows and rekindle her love for him while he resumes his medical practice in Los Angeles. As the family drives down a L.A. freeway Vivien remarks, “The light is different out here somehow; it’s softer,” to which Violet, sulking in the back seat, retorts, “It’s called smog.” Violet’s comment does prove prophetic later; soon enough they will encounter some very “toxic assets.”

The move seems promising when they discover a Victorian house in a very fashionable neighborhood that is priced far below market value. The impressive architecture of the house is meticulously appointed with exotic rarities: original Louis Comfort Tiffany lighting; rare wooden staircases, cabinetry, and moldings elegantly crafted from the once plentiful American Chestnut Tree—now almost completely extinct because of disease. The house is also adorned throughout with hand-colored and custom-designed butterfly stained glass window. The real estate agent informs them that the home is a spectacular early twentieth century Victorian “built by the doctor to the stars at the time.”

Their sales agent, Marci, gives them the grand tour and explains how “the previous owners loved this place like a child; they restored everything” but when Viv notices a mural underneath a loose corner of wallpaper, Marci quickly replies, “Oh the last owners probably covered it up; they were modernists.” However, the house is cloaked in more than just a little “modernism”—it seems the house has an untoward history, which Marci, only hesitantly reveals. “Speaking of the last owners, full disclosure requires that I tell you what happened to them,” she then whispers, “murder-suicide.” American Horror Story does not seem to designate the house as an evil place, but as a very child-like, and at times an abused victim. The house is a delicate and complex residence; it must be lovingly maintained and cared for and gently loved.  The home’s permanent housekeeper, Moira O’Hara, shares advice about tending to the house with Vivien,  “This house has a personality, feelings…mistreat it, and you’ll regret it.”

I would like to make associations to a few points at this juncture. First, I suggest that Murphy has styled the house and series as an allegory to the colonization of America, and further, what I will call the Great Regression of America, or even humanity. Evidence for this claim appears particularly through Moira. In each episode she appears as a dualism: the Moira Vivien and Violet see has the appearance of a mature, responsible, and considerate older woman; she is nurturing and kindly cares for the house. The Moira Ben sees (along with other male visitors to the house) is a seductive, sexually perverse, temptress who neglects her cleaning chores. Her inattention to the housekeeping allows an atmosphere of “contamination” to enter the house, which also references Violet’s comment on the “smog” or toxic pollution. In addition, if one allows for the Greek meaning of Moira (spelled μοιρα), there appears to be another connection. Moira refers to all three of Greek “Fates” as a collective. Literally, the word means shares or allotted portions. The name has come to mean fate or destiny in modern dictionaries. American Horror Story is infused with countless images and dialogue that concern parts, separations, dissections, and dismembered bodies. My contention is that the house is a metaphor for the American landscape; Moira is a metaphor for stewardship of the land. The inference here is that the caretakers of the land prior to European settlers (Native Americans) generally respected and maintained the land. On the other hand, the Puritan settlers became separated and did not remain “knit together in a body made whole by God.” The settlers were seduced by the sensual and material wealth of the land, and subsequently penetrated the wilderness and perversely raped, abused, and contaminated the landscape of the New World. Thus I believe Murphy is contemplating and calling attention to the final “destiny” and fate of the America.

Secondly, within the above there are Foucauldian ideas at work. The first is Foucault’s attention to explaining how power seeks to continual extend its domain by consuming new technologies or “territories” to sustain the status of systems of power. In the History of Sexuality Foucault theorizes that nineteenth century doctors set “traps” to catch children who seemed prone to traits “designated as the evil to the eliminated” (42). However, Foucault states that the apparatuses doctors used did not create a “barrier system” against the alleged evil or perversity. Instead, the medicalization of power further “advanced…expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further” until “indefinite lines of penetration” allowed an “incorporation of perversions” to proliferate—and all these new divisions and disciplines served to extend more power to the “technology of health and pathology” (44).

Additionally, Foucault’s theories on systems of power often focused at the affect on the body—both the social body and the individual’s physical body. In between these two “bodies” is imposition of power placed on the family. Foucault writes that parents were “left with the suspicion that all children are guilty, and the fear of being themselves at fault;…they were kept in readiness in the face of recurrent danger,” and he states that the entire power structure of the “regime took hold of the family milieu” (42). The importance of the “home” and “family” in American Horror Story is detailed in the “backstory” of the various occupants of the house. The “pathology” of the house is revealed like weekly therapy sessions, with each episode exploring another part of the history of the house. This home suffers from an ailment, and the viewers (to borrow a description from Foucault) must discover what infections or contaminations are hiding in the house by “tracing them back to their source, tracking them from their origins to their effects, searching out everything that might cause” terrifying problems.

Ben’s first therapy session in his new practice, which is based out of his new home, is with Tate Langdon. Tate is a troubled teenage boy who dreams about committing atrociously violent acts, and the dialogue is worth quoting at length when Ben asks Tate to tell him about his dreams:

TATE: It starts the same. It always starts the same way.
BEN: How? Tell me.
TATE: I prepare for the noble war…I’m calm. I know the secret, I know what’s coming, and I know no one can stop me, including myself.
BEN: Do you target people who have been mean to you or unkind?
TATE: I kill any people I like. Some of them beg for their life. I don’t feel sad; I don’t feel anything. It’s a filthy world we live in. It’s a filthy, goddam helpless world. Honestly, I feel like I’m helping to take them away from the shit, the piss, the vomit that runs in the streets. I’m taking them somewhere clean and kind. And there’s something about all that blood, man. I drown in it. And the Indian’s believed that blood holds all the evil spirits. Once a month in ceremonies they would cut themselves to let the spirits go free. There’s something smart about that—very smart. I like that.

Ben diagnoses Tate with depression, but the truth is that Tate’s problems go much deeper than that. Actually, Tate is dead, although he appears to be unaware of it. He was killed by SWAT police and died in his bedroom—which just happens to be upstairs in what is now the Harmon’s new home. His “fantasy” is already in the past; it actually happened in 1994, seventeen years ago. Perhaps we should consider Tate a confused “ghost,” but that Tate is living his past in the present somewhat echoes sentiments of in Benjamin’s Philosophy of History when he writes that the past “history is the subject whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of now…the historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and the present comes to a stop” (261).

American Horror Story explores the idea that Tate’s surreal condition has been congenitally impressed on him; he is a product of “bad blood” inherited from his parents. The “tainted” blood theory is reinforced later when we find out that Tate’s sister, Adelaide, is a “mongoloid,” and his dead brother, Beauregard, suffered from Proteus disease (the disease that afflicted John Merrick, the “Elephant Man”).  In later episodes, viewers learn that there is indeed “bad blood,” particularly between Tate and his mother. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault theorizes that medical establishment categorized malformations as regressive throwbacks to humans’ primitive ancestry. He claims the scientific “medicalization” of social conformity systematically forced “the encroachment of power on bodies,” and forced the classifications of medicalized disciplines for mechanizing the “natural order of disorder.” Individuals found to be “‘contrary to nature’ were stamped as especially abominable”; they were considered “criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being, confound the law” to regulate the body’s natural functions (38). In Tate’s case, he suffers from no anatomical disorder of bodily parts; instead the site of his disorder is the mind.

When John Winthrop spoke about keeping promises of covenants and following affection in the fellowship of brotherly love, he did so through comparing these values to the body:

There is no body but consists of parts and that which knits these parts together, gives the body its perfection, because it makes each part so contiguous to others as thereby they do mutually participate with each other, both in strength and infirmity, in pleasure and pain…The several parts of this body considered a part before they were united, were as disproportionate and as much disordering as so many contrary qualities or elements, but when Christ comes, and by his spirit and love knits all these parts to himself and each to other, it is become the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world… the body being knit together by every joint, according to the effectual power which is in the measure of every perfection of parts, a glorious body without spot or wrinkle; … Love is the bond.

We humans, however, do not have the power to knit together the body or the mind once it is split apart; that wreckage is of humanity’s making. American Horror Story reminds us that the past is the present and ignoring acts of oppression in the cause of some higher forces that may contaminate the bodies of the oppressed, but it also contaminates the minds of the oppressors.

Professional Writing 8: Does American Rhetoric Use Undemocratic Vocabulary?

The boundaries of two of my classes this semester have collided in a rhetorical "mash up" of sorts. Through my writing class and my language class, it is becoming clear to me how more and more Americans have come to dismiss rhetorical arguments about American public policy-making as merely one-sided pieces of propaganda that have no merit.  Americans have either tuned out or are not included in legitmate debates about our Great Democracy that demand our critical consideration. There are many reasons that rhetoric has become the eqivalent of a four-letter word, but that is a topic for another post. However, let me go on record as saying that I believe the reasons for our' dismissive attitude toward rhetoric are valid.

Last week in my writing class, the conversation about rhetoric turned to the state of American education and the observation that young people are no longer "readers." The discussion included ideas about how to motivate young people to read more and the barriers that prohibit their reading proficiencies and critical understanding. It's a real concern because the future of our democratic society depends upon an educated American population. However, much of the "politi-rhet" about advancing the state of our educational institutions is pure rhetoric only—there is no "functional rhetoric." By that I mean that the purpose of rhetoric and the rhetorical argument is to spur the audience to some sort of tangible action to address the exigence of the situation. Yet American rhetoric has not been able motivate citizens to action over our failing educational system or even change the tunnel vision of those who have real power to affect significant change.

However, believe it or not, rhetoric molds our history, culture, and language and has a profound impact on "public discourse" within our grand democratic American Experiment, as de Toqueville called it, and  America is constantly evolving, which renders the "experiment" semper novum. Therefore, incorporating new "vocabularies" into our society becomes particularly important when there are certain voices in public rhetoric that are missing from the democratic process on which our country is built.

The crux of problem appears to be that an increasing number of groups in the American population deprived of the language and support through which they might engage in discourse about public policies.  Currently, our educational system fails to support new segments of the population, and consequently, these new groups become only invisible shadows in our society, but their presence still haunts the changing relationships and associations within America's pluralistic society. When there is no shared dialogue about civic participation and responsibility, the cohesive structure of a society begins to break down. Whole parts of the population are left in a netherworld or limboland, occupying neither a common space or place within the fabric of the country.

For example, more than a century ago when African-Americans were freed from slavery they did not have the knowledge or vocabulary that could give them in a voice in America, and it was purposefully withheld from them to keep them under the thumb of majority whites. Black people could not go back to Africa because the majority of former slaves were not even born in Africa, but they were not given a the tools to engage in the commonalities that bind a society together, and as a result, civil unrest and violence eventually ensured. Now, in the 21st Century, large contingents of Latinos, a majority of which are Mexicans, have lived in the U.S. for 20, 30, 40, or more years, but have never been citizens of this country. Although the South and Southwest U.S. were the indigenous geographic area from which their ancestors may have come, Mexicans are not welcome here anymore. Those that have been able to live here for generations as undocumented immigrants may feel American, but they are not considered American. When they are "sent back," although they may never have stepped foot south of the border, they are misfits in the Mexican culture to an even more dramatic degree than they were in the U.S. Their voices are not part of the "grand narrative," suggests Claudia Galindo, a professor of linguistics and culture at the University of Maryland, of the American history as a nation of democratic equals.

Until Americans reimagine a culture that embraces the rhetoric and vocabulary of what E.D. Hirsch calls "a Pluralistic Nation," until we reconsider the way we all relate to each other—remember e pluribus unum?— until our country revisits the way we view each other, treat each other, and conceive of our democratic responsibilities, our nation is made vulnerable to a potentially disastrous disunity, such as one Arthur Schlesinger warned against in the early 1990s (yes, even we liberals must also consider the voices of the conservatives like Schlesinger). The "rhetorical situation" must be broadened to include the stories, cultures, and vocabulary of all groups that have had an impact on the American Experiment and will continue to have in the future. It is in the historic chronicle of our nation to embrace and adapt to evolving philosophies of what it means to be an American and to listen to the variety of voices that make up the "remarkably diverse racial, religious, and ethnic origins" of America (de Toqueville). This can only be achieved by unconditionally allowing immigrants, whether of legal or illegal status, the access to respectable public and higher educations. Through tolerance, justice, and ethical action, a productive population that contributes to the on-going welfare of America can be truly articulated.

In order to facilitate the great strengths of our nation in the future, the educational system must prepare itself to act on the rhetoric that our country's leaders regurgitate. It means educators much actively expand the cultural vocabulary of rhetoric in our classrooms to foster a more critical and dimensional conversation. It does not mean to pay cursory, "politically correct" attention to various cultural groups, it mean to truly engage in issues that address cultural conflict, the principles of a democratic society—a society that respects the voices of all America's people, not just those that control the rhetoric. The loss of true democratic debates and the disregard for moral justice in our country should be what alarms us most and should be recognized as a frightening crisis facing our country today. We must support leaders who fearlessly use American rhetoric to produce not the rhetoric of "change," but to instigate palpable, substantive results that focus on the welfare of all, particularly when focused on local community involvement and improvements. Only by giving all segments of our society the tools to enter into the critical debates that will confront our next generation, can authentic conversations about the endurance of our "grand experiment" extend democracy for all American people, by including the people.

Professional Writing 7: Stuffing Our Eyeballs

In the world of writing, "hunkering down" is a term taken from a section of essays in The Writing Life published by The Washington Post about "writers on how they think and work." "Hunkering down," can mean getting serious about your craft, but it can turn writers into becoming isolationists, solo adventurers,lonely wanderers in the phantasmagorical world of language. A Scrooge-like, Grinch-y recluse then emerges from an hazy veil of flickering images that casts shadows on a cave wall created by some magic lantern.  "Hunkering down" tends to beget some idea that the dedicated writer's only world consists of "spiritual and artistically inspirational" landscapes shaped by a profundity of words, sentences, and paragraphs.

However, the craft of writing is initiated by the opposite experience. It comes from watchful observations of the outside world, interactions with and between people, the exploration of places and times that fall outside the boundaries of the familiar, and attentive awareness to surrounding conversations. Wendy Wasserstein, acclaimed playwright and author writes, "the joy of being on the road is having dinner alone" (The Writing Life, "Holiday at The Keyboard Inn"). Dinner is a time to become a student of other people's lives rather than live in the solitary world of the mind. It is a time to immerse oneself and to "listen carefully . . . to judge harshly the surrounding couples," and to speculate about their private lives.

There tends to be a notion that the "serious" writer is some irascible loner, such as William Faulkner or, more recently, Cormac McCarthy, although the latter is known more for his hermit-like persona rather than his Faulkneresque irascibility. "Hunkering down" conjures an image of the lonely writer hunched over a slaving hot keyboard. However, to be an authentic writer, one must engage in the outside world, and make time to put aside the remote, virtual world that exists only on the printed page. Otherwise, as Patricia Cornell writes in her essay, which is also included in The Writing Life, "If I stop seeing, hearing, touching,

there will be no story. I will be a writer with nothing to say—a violin with no music to play," which inadvertently rhymes and might be used as a kind of mantra to accompany a writer on the journey to a final destination. Or, as David McCullough, author of the critically acclaimed book-turned-mini-series John Adams, quotes, "What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything."

"Hunkering down" means, then, not only getting serious about the so-called writing life, but also never forgetting that real life is rich with meanings to write about. We must “stuff our eyeballs,” as Ray Bradbury says, with metaphors and symbols of the actualities of the surrounding landscape—living metaphors that only then “bid [writers] jump to run and trap them” with words that subsequently “stuff” the page with “compacted truths of a life” that echoes with the refrain, “Live forever!”

All quotes are taken from The Writing Life, edited by Marie Arana, 2003)

Professional Writing 6: The Art of Shorthand

I conducted my interview today with the author of my choice, a woman who is a published writer and an academic at a local university. As many writers can be, she was somewhat difficult to get talking, although a bit surprising since she is a professor too. There was also a big hiccup because I couldn't get a digital recorder as I had thought I was going to be able to do in order to tape our conversation. Our conversation took about an hour and a half, with me scribbling furiously since I couldn't record the interview. Sure wish I knew shorthand. Que será será.

1. When did you start to write, seriously?

2. How would you characterize yourself as a writer? Your style,
your tone, specifically?

3. Through reading your books, I got the feeling that you got away
from writing and academia for a long time while you worked on
the railroad, although I'm sure that it still shaped who you were
a working class person—your world view, etc. How did you get
back into writing again after having been distanced from it in
many ways during your years on the rails?

4. You mention reading poetry as a sort of guiding force,
particularly Wallace Stevens. What other writers or writing
shaped you as a person and as a writer?

5. Wallace Stevens writes, "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal . . . its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have." Does he express here what ultimately drives you to write non-fiction.

6. How did you first find an agent or a publisher? How difficult was
that, and what were some of the responses that you first got
when you submitted your work?

7. How do you balance the truths in your autobiographical writing
and your relationships with people whom you depict? What kind
of consideration do you take into account when writing about
some very personal details involving the people in your life?

8. What has been their reaction?

9. How do you want others to think of your writing? And how do
you think other might describe your writing? Does that please
you?

10. Your writing exudes a certain kind of critique of modern
American culture. What issues in American society do your feel
your work bring attention to?

11. What kind of response do you want to elicit through your
writing? From others, and from yourself, perhaps, too?

12. Autobiographical or memoir writing in many respects can
be more difficult because what you may find interesting and
intriguing, may sound like whining selfindulgence to others.
How do you decide what life events or epiphanies you can build
some kind of "arc" around, and which ones may be less
attractive to readers—despite the fact that they be significant to
you?

13. You writing, by the nature of its genre is very personal.
How does "developing an authorial voice" in your writing differ
from your own personal voice. Or does it?

14. In your life you've made decisions that opened you up to
a larger community of people and experiences. What has that
done for you as a person and a writer?

15. Plot, characterization, setting, voice, tone: all these things
are used to describe writing and literature in general—but which
of these qualities do you feel is most imperative in bringing
writing to life?

16. You say in your book that you've always felt like you've
violated the "membership rules" of the communities around you.
You say, "not money, status, or happiness" is what you seek.How has writing helped your in your quest to find some
kind of niche?

17. You write a good bit about your partying, drug use,
alcohol use, and sexual preferences and experiences: Do you
feel that these unorthodox experiences and "altered states" of
mind contributed to your ability to "see beyond" the norm, as so
many authors have implied it does?

18. Self-abuse seems to be a thread that runs through some
of your writing, from wearing the hat with the silver wings that
calls attention to you in the rail yards and to the way you manage
your love life and substance abuse. What surprised you most
about yourself as your wrote about the search to find a sense
of place? or to be "a part of it all" (7) as you say in your
memoir?

19. How has your sobriety changed the way you approach
writing? Or has it?

20. On page 111 in the memoir, you write that you wanted to
become your own story, to find out who was the hero of your
own life. What was it that drove you to set your "hero's journey"
into motion? Is this part of that inner drive that some people are
born with—a need to search for and express some force of life?

21. When you look back on "your story," how did you
approach writing about it? What is your working method or
routine like? Describe it.

22. Can you read this passage on page 166? That is
beautiful, poetic language—is that kind of writing what became
your sober "high," because it's really heady, gorgeous prose.

23. Another theme that shows up in your writing is this idea of
"pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" (individualism) vs. the
uniting power of community. You write some in Railroad Noir
about the kind of entitlement and materialism that seem to
possess American youth today. How has that materialist
sentiment in society —and the dependence on social
technology to express oneself —changed the way that people
read and write today? Good thing or bad thing?

24. You write, back in your academic days that a literate
society was assumed, and after a few years as a writing teacher you "figured
out" how to these, shall I say, subliterate youth. How DO
you teach them?

25. On page 245, the last page of your memoir, Ellen, the
boatman says to you, "when you've come to the end of the trail, it
means you've lost it somewhere" . . . still feel this way? what
does that mean to you now?

Professional Writing 5: Shakespeare— Jungle Spud or Killer Bee?

I seem to operate on only two modes: busy, buzzy bee or hairy, stinky sloth. I know; neither of those animals lead much of an appealing lifestyle.

In case you are wondering, a sloth is a very bizarre-looking creature that really isn't directly related to any other mammal. All of their closest connected relatives died out during the last Ice Age. Now they live only in the rain forests of South America, sleep 15—18 hours a day, and expend energy only when it becomes absolutely necessary. They mostly just hang their atrociously smelly and hairy bodies from the forest branches; sometimes even after they die, they can have been found still just hanging from a tree. In other words, they are lazy couch potatoes, although based on their habitat, perhaps it's more accurate to call them something like jungle spuds. (See sloth picture below: honestly, can you imagine trying to get anything done with fingernails like that?)

When I am in school taking a full load of classes, I am always reading, researching, and writing, and I stay in a constantly stimulated state. My brain is in overdrive, making connections, looking for answers, budgeting time for deadlines on projects and papers, while simultaneously working out what kind of frozen or boxed meal I can throw together for my neglected kids while I am working. I am as focused on my target as a killer bee.

However, when I am not in school, or I'm not taking a full schedule of classes, I turn into a sloth—a mangy, slovenly, lazy jungle spud. I take a shower every three days or so, don't shave my legs or armpits, and just kind of "hang." This worries me about my ability to be self-disciplined enough to be a productive writer. Most profiles I've read of successful authors indicate that the prosperous writer does not wait until some momentous synaptic-rattling jolt of inspiration strikes from the sky. Quite the contrary seems to be the case. The process of writing is often described as an ritualistic practice of tedious trial and error, false starts, and humiliating frustration. It got me thinking about whether Shakespeare had a compulsary writing routine. Did Homer, Dante, or Proust sequester themselves in some kind of regimented writing routine? Did Sun Tzu cordon off special time in his ancient Chinese Day Runner so he could scribble a few scrolls of rice paper on The Art of War? I suppose it's possible that Sumerian scribes got up early each morning, had a cup of joe, and then carved out special time to sit in front of the ol' clay tablet until the sundial moved a certain number of degrees, just to make sure they could grind out at least a few lines of cuneiform each day.

There is no question that man's ability to convey concepts and ideas to each other through complex languages preserved in pictures, symbols, and eventually, scripted language greatly contributed to the unique evolutionary development of human beings. It is what drastically differentiates us from lower animal orders. Archeologists and anthropologists have uncovered an amazing amount of information that was produced by ancient peoples, and these scholars believe that the earliest forms of communication, cave paintings, were not just decoration. They were representative of the transfer of important information and part of a ritualistic practice of some kind. So, here we are, back at ritualistic writing practices again.

I suppose writing does take take disciplined practice; hell, it is work. It had to have been quite a challenge for the ancients to develop alphabetical systems and methods of putting all those ideas down in perpetuity. When one looks at the work that it took to develop writing from scratch, today's authors have it easy—at least they don't need to undertake the monumental task of developing a way to capture language in order to share documented information with other humans. Most contemporary writers simply tap away on the ready-made symbols that decorate those little plastic keys on the computer.

Thinking about all this makes me realize how very little scholars actually know about the individuals who first revolutionized the way humans communicate or what kind of "writing methods" they used. Even within the Early Modern era this remains true. For example, although historians know a good deal about Shakespeare, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered about how and where he went about forming, drafting, and penning the prolific number of works that he produced. But I'll bet one thing's for sure: Shakespeare was no jungle spud.

I guess this means if I want to "bee" a successful writer, I'm going to have to shower, shave, and, of course, write on a routine basis.

Professional Writing 4: "The Lady and the Leg"

In "Reading Like A Writer," Francine Prose devotes an entire chapter to extolling the virtues of Anton Chekov's "profound and beautiful . . . involving" stories that made bearable her wretched bus commute between work and home. Clearly the woman savored the time she spent nibbling greasy sugar cookies and sipping soda whilst reading Chekov's work, but I agree with the "disgruntled student" who also got sick of Fran's mooning over this Russian—there are plenty of other authors who can inspire budding writers just as well as Chekov. I realize that I've made it clear that Prose's prose doesn't click with me, so if Chekhov is one of her favorite writers, then it is doubtful he will do much for me. However, seeing as though I have, I don't think, ever read any Chekhov, I will not prejudge his writing as a way to project my rejection of Fran on to Chekhov. Yet even his compatriot, Vladmir Nabokov (Lolita), is alleged to have called Chekov's writing a "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, [and] repetitions" (James Woods essay, What Chekhov Meant By Life).

This discrepancy in "taste" (ironically, I also care neither for sugar cookies nor sodas) between Fran and me brings up another important issue that is quite apparent in relief against our increasingly multicultural society. I refer to the idea that the master canon of Western literature seems to be the standard by which all writers must ascribe. The "profundity" of Chekhov's writing as described by Fran seems to emanate from his astute social observations about the intricate ways people connect with one another; however, the methods and modes through which humans interrelate can vary enormously between cultures. Social interactions differ to such a noticeable extent that it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the "norm" in one culture may be completely inconceivable in another. Thus, I submit, the level of importance of one author in a particular culture can also be rendered completely negligible in another. Fran's take on authorial imitation is not revolutionary or original; it is a technique that can be a valuable as a writing tool, but only as long as the aspiring scribe is imitating a writer whose work he or she admires.

I could go on nitpicking at Fran, but in the interests of appearing fair and open-minded, I will give props to her chapter entitled "Details." In that chapter she recounts a story that a one-legged lady tells about how she lost her leg. For the first time in Reading Like A Writer, Prose offers up something that holds my interest. I think the reason is because Frannie seems to finally use her own authentic observations and interactions with others as an example of good storytelling and characterization. The story of the lady and the leg is humorous and horrifying at once, and the details in this one paragraph tale leave a far greater impression on me than the rest of her entire book.

So, Fran adores Chekhov's "The Lady and the Dog." Fine. She can choose to use him as a model for her own work. I'll partake of the "The Lady and the Leg."