June 2007            

This sounds so negative, but feels merely observational
Posted Sunday, June 24, 2007 @ 01:44 AM

I am a thinker. This is the best I can say of myself lately, with a summer spent (so far) mostly in bed with my computer, books, and movies to keep me company. So much time has passed that it takes seeing a fellow ASFA creative writing graduate to remind me of life in a workshop. I see that they're revisiting a book we read and discussed for weeks on end, or I hear they've attended a reading by some poet we'd idolized together between classes or over lunch. Sometimes it is merely a joke—something along the lines of "Like, all it has to do in life is drift, and it's like fantastic. Like an aquatic Kerouac"—the kind of silly writer joke we used to crack day in, day out, as high school students.

I still ache for the je ne sais quoi of the creative writing department, but I feel that the life of a workshop, and perhaps even the life of a writer, has begun to escape me. While the brief encounters I manage with other creative writers rarely address writing in any way, I think we're all aware, at least vaguely, of who still writes and who doesn't. Though in a sense we all arrived at the creative writing department of our own accord, without help or dependence on any kind of workshop experience, some of us graduated with the drive to keep writing the forms we learned there, and others (like myself) haven't written a line of verse since. The transition from an adoring public—a small family of eager readers—to a much larger school of students who can't comprehend what that family was like—is something each of us has experienced. However, it wasn't merely the lack of comprehension that I found disheartening, but equally the fact that no family of trusted readers existed. Perhaps it reveals some great insecurity in me, but to write in that void and crushing silence is much harder than writing poorly in the face of great criticism. We've found some solutions; every now and then I receive a packet of poems from a fellow graduate, and I still write pages and pages of letters to some of them, often about things relating to our shared high school experience. But it has been strange to discover just how much I rely on readers. I have always kept a journal, but much prefer writing in places (like here) where I know someone is listening and might respond to what I've said.

I have the same trouble with photography, I think. I spoke recently with a friend who graduated from ASFA in music, and in catching up he explained his developing interest in photography. He's gotten a job at a camera shop, and as a result knows multitudes about lenses and bodies and the entirety of the Nikon line. Since he obviously does a lot of shooting, I asked about his process—what does he do with all those photos if he never updates his flickr photostream? He said he edits, and sometimes shares favorites with family and friends, but rarely makes prints—that mostly they sit on his hard drive waiting to be backed up.

This isn't to say that I create solely for an audience, but that perhaps they provide something essential for me that I have trouble finding on my own—a sense of purpose and organization, a timeline of where I've been or where I'm going, with whatever skill I'm exercising to share with them. Without them, I'd have semblances of the same—a definite record, an accumulation—but maybe not the drive to keep it up. After all, without a camera I still have eyes, and without paper and pen, I still think and observe.

This past week I made a trip home to Birmingham to see friends from high school, friends from childhood—for the most part, people I haven't seen in months (some, years), and may or may not see again over Christmas break. This is the business of college, and of moving away: you never know when you'll next see someone, or sometimes if you'll see them again at all. One friend whose family moved to Wisconsin this time last year has made a few trips back to Birmingham, and I've been fortunate to see him each time. Every time he visits he's certain to say, "This is probably the last time we'll ever see each other," and each time I remind him that he said it the last time he visited, too. Still, there's no way to be certain that his trips from Wisconsin and mine from South Carolina will ever align again. That is, if he visits Alabama again at all.

It is this trust and uncertainty that hides behind each visit with old friends—the trust that we'll see each other again eventually, but the uncertainty of what the circumstances will be, and how soon. Each casual lunch date or dinner reunion becomes a deep and serious discussion about our schools, our lives, our relationships, and our futures. She returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic and is working in museums and galleries for the summer, wants to apply for a graduate program at the MoMA in NYC. He is living in the same house with a new room mate. She, a bleeding-heart liberal, is seeing a conservative. She misses Philadelphia. She's working for a senator, then participating in an eight-week German intensive immersion program in Vermont before returning to school in D.C. I am surprised each time I hear what someone is doing for the summer, and what their plans are for the next few years.

We are all straddling the line between adolescence and adulthood in a very big way, but it's evident even in basic conversation. We ask the basic "adult" questions. Where are you living? What are you studying? Where are you working? Are you seeing anyone? Most of us are months away from twenty, many of us living on our own. Some of us are in serious relationships, others have been changed by them. But when the adult questions are over, we tell silly, immature stories about college—who has the worst room mate, who witnessed the craziest party, which drinking games are rampant on which campuses, whose dorm is the most disgusting and weird.

But there is something beneath all the conversation, present in every visit with friends, which unsettles me. Once, before a reunion with a close friend I hadn't seen in over a year, he confessed he was afraid. When I asked why, he explained that, though we felt as close as ever, the distance that had accumulated between us would surely show itself in our reunion—that he was sure I'd changed in some way. When I asked how I seemed different, he said it wasn't like that—neither he nor I knew how I'd be different—that I'd just changed, in big and little ways that I could never explain to anyone, and that you could hardly notice unless you were standing right before me. I find it is the same with my friends in Birmingham—we have all changed in ways we can't explain to one another, and in ways we hardly understand ourselves. My time with them is nostalgic and tremendously enjoyable—trying to catch up with someone in just a few hours makes conversation thick and lingering. But ultimately, with each interaction, there is something that is incommunicable—some desire or expectation, a need to be understood without explanation. Each time I return to a place I am living or have lived (Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Greenville), I feel like a traveler returning from a remote land without photos or souvenirs, or a man returning to his family from war. I have learned words in new languages, essential to my vocabulary, which do not translate. I cannot possibly explain the battles or events I've witnessed, much less the ways they've affected me.

On some level, I feel the same way about writing here, which may explain my uncertain or infrequent visits. I have changed in so many tiny ways I can never explain to you, and so much of what I would write is too close and too truthful, and so instead of writing here I hardly write at all. Instead I am constantly thinking over my experiences. I understand now what it is to be a reader and a thinker without writing, how it is that "adults" are always speaking about jobs and houses, how it can be that, as you grow older, the process of really knowing someone slows down so much that it feels like it hardly happens at all.

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A strange assortment of incomplete, unpolished, unpublished entries
Posted Monday, June 04, 2007 @ 05:09 PM

Written May 03, 2006, 10:28PM, titled "Correspondences as literature":

I try to pretend it isn't obvious, and maybe I'm still fooling some people, but I'm one of the biggest packrats I know. I think if my foolery is working (foolery?), it's because I'm organized. I take notes, I keep a calendar, I run organizations and (usually) get things done on time (but that's sort of a lie).

My packratism is something I'm thinking about a lot, lately, since it finally may have some major consequences. For instance: my book collection? I'm not sure where it will live for the next four years. I don't know who to give away and who to keep. Do all the poets come with me to college, or just a few of them? What about the novels? Will I really need to reread novels, or do I just like to see their spines stacked together on the shelf—tiny little realities lined up in a row. And how am I supposed to whittle down my movie collection? Where will my turntable fit? Even if there's room for it all, do I really want to lug it out at the end of second semester?

And my posters, flyers, clippings, articles, and kitsch. What of those? Do I make a scrapbook and carry it around with me, and pretend it's my old bedroom? Sometimes I imagine finding the artifacts of my life when I have grandchildren, or better, a total stranger thumbing through them at an estate sale or in a junk shop. What would they think of my posters all together in a scrap book? How carefully would they sift through old letters to find me? I think about Zelda and F. Scott—how he saved all her letters and she saved almost none of his, and how sometimes you read her letters and you try to find him in them. When she writes "I told mother about the man you met," you suddenly remember how much he must have written her, and you wonder "What man?" and how many things he must have said that she never referenced.

And sometimes I think about how, when I'm thirty, I might not remember someone vividly—that we may have shared an important and moving moment that I can't recollect. Even now, I forget who went with me to see what movie (or sometimes that I've seen a particular movie at all). All of this, in some way, has contributed to my inability to throw things away, especially paper things. School notes, letters, emails before GMail, IM conversations before CD burners, notes passed in school, receipts, symphony programs, ticket stubs. I have a little bit of everything. I think, more than anything, I can't throw things away because I know how cool it will be to find them again in ten years—even something as insignificant as a dated grocery list.

what stays, what to throw away

what kind of thing is in the trunk, photos

how I've never really shared it with anyone

why share it now?

what's the point of saving all that? there's some stuff in there I haven't read since I printed it out.

now, CD instead of print. but what about email?

how do you back up gmail anyway?

dave eggers inbox

why didn't I think of that

I sort of did

before I thought about publishing a book of correspondences (which no one would find interesting, really)

it's weird how to you, conversations are so enlightening and interesting and pivotal and mind-blowing, and anyone listening in thinks you're crazy or boring. it's all about the connection you have with someone and that doesn't always survive time -- is that what I'm trying to preserve?

talk about that moment with gene in starbucks "we'd have conversations" and the girl looking up and thinking "you're crazy"

where would I keep all that?

what would I do if it burned?

excerpt the piece.

the future of literature

whether it will survive
an attempt to make it survive
even though mine's only a personal literature

mention inmedium?

reference 1
reference 2
reference 3

Written December 15, 2007, 5:59PM, untitled:

Early Thursday morning, a fog rolled into Tuscaloosa and covered everything. A good, thick fog in the South is almost as rare as snow, even for a place right on the river like Tuscaloosa. I opened my blinds at nine and saw nothing but white, could barely see the sidewalk three floors below my window.

Break-ups are a kind of death. I smell him everywhere—on clothes I haven't washed, in the pages of books I loaned him, for a second as I'm walking to class behind someone, their scent stirring in a way that reminds me of him. I think of Jack Gilbert's poem, "Married."

[poem]

With someone so suddenly gone, your mind rushes to remember the lasts—the last time he kissed you, the last time you saw him, the last place you sat together, the last place he touched you.

Written March 5, 2007, 11:05AM, titled "A weekend in New Orleans":

There is something utterly exhilarating about just getting in the car and going—road trips which are planned, but that seem as easy as throwing a suitcase in the back and buckling your seat belt. Feeling much more secure about school and our places among friends, our by now well-established group has realized quite suddenly what an opportunity a weekend presents. Syd and I took Martin Luther King weekend to drive through Mississippi and up to Memphis.

Joe and I went to Atlanta last weekend to see Of Montreal and visit friends.

[photo]

This weekend, Joe, Peter, Cory, and I drove to New Orleans, and stayed in Joe's dad's apartment while he was in Gulf Shores for the weekend. From visits with his dad, Joe knew enough of the city to navigate the twenty or thirty blocks from the apartment to the French Quarter, and with our collective knowledge of music and Joe's experience with the city, there were very few hours over the course of the weekend when we weren't listening to jazz. With Joe a live music fanatic, Peter a music major, pianist, and trombone player, Cory an avid listener, me a music lover and former pianist, and all of us easy-going and spontaneous, we didn't have any trouble enjoying ourselves.

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