Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air. Read more »

A couple years ago, Sam posted a link to the youtube video of this strange, jolly guy singing. The internet has christened him Mr. Trololo or Trololo Guy, and he has achieved the revered status of meme-hood. This weekend he made a holographic guest appearance at Coachella, alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, to the delight (or terror?) of all the stoned people there. Tupac, apparently, also dropped by.

(I can’t seem to make the video embed correctly since it’s not from youtube, so I’m linking it above and embedding a video of a stoned person at Coachella instead. The video below is probably funnier anyway).

Every once in a while, when I’m wading through the endless shallow sea of student writing that constitutes most of my life during certain times of year, I stumble upon something that surprises me. Something that makes me glad.

Here are some of the remarkable things that I’ve found while wading:

1. An expository essay on how to cook, cut, and sell meth. Among the helpful tips: a paragraph on how to not get caught. The trick, it seems, is never to tell anybody your name, never to sell to anybody you know personally. Also, it helps to own a business in the industrial district that refinishes bathtubs. The smell of the chemicals used to re-enamel the tubs hides the smell of the chemicals used to cook the meth. Read more »

Last week, as I was trolling google images for pictures of Solzhenitsyn, I was surprised at the number of odd photos I found of him shaking hands, laughing, and basically doing anything at all except being in a gulag and speaking truth to power.

Here, for instance, is Solz smashing a massive forehand from the service line while wearing loafers.

Solz crushes a forehand winner.

Here he is signing autographs for some shirtless guy. Read more »

The dissident among his adoring fans.

In his 1967 “Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers,” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not pass on to society its pains and fears, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.”

Solzhenitsyn’s letter is primarily a call to end Soviet censorship of the arts, but this question of the political and social work of literature seems, now, to be his more controversial claim. I can think of no living artist who would, as the Congress of Soviet Writers did, vocally support government censorship of the arts. But many American writers would readily dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion that literature must warn against “threatening moral and social dangers” as antique. Read more »

You will be walking today, and you will see someone with the mark on her forehead. It will take you a moment to comprehend, the grey smudge. It will seem like a mistake or like something from a world besides our own. There will be others. Not most, not many even—depending upon where you find yourself walking today. But there will be others, walking, bearing the mark on their foreheads. By the time you see her, she will have forgotten it. She will think you are just staring. Later, when she looks up from washing her hands, she will see it and stop. The smudge above her eyes, fainter now. She will be startled at first. Then she will replay the preceding moments, imagine herself at her various mundane tasks, the shadow an interlocutor between her and each. The shadow marking her. The psalmist says our lives are like the flower of grass: now bright, now gone. We carry our death with us, a smudge above the eyes, an interlocutor between us and everything.

Body of a Dancer by Renée D’Aoust

Here’s something I don’t usually say: I majored in theatre. Normally, I opt for the also-true: I studied playwriting. But, really, the first gives a more complete picture. Like all the other playwrights, directors, designers, and stage managers in our program, I took classes in acting, in movement, in voice. I took stage combat where I learned to pretend to fight with a rapier and dagger. I took stage makeup where I learned to give myself realistic-looking wounds and bruises using latex and pancake makeup. I was no good at any of this. Worst of all was anything that involved me moving my still-awkward, recently post-adolescent body across a stage. The problem, according to the acting faculty, was that my brain got in the way.

At one point, I remember worrying myself into near-paralysis trying to remember whether it was natural to walk with arms and legs in opposition (right arm with left leg) or in tandem (right with right). Flummoxed, I wrongly opted for the later and went across the stage like some kind of retarded marionette.

This total incapacity for movement when I think anyone else is watching is my point of entry into Renée D’Aoust’s new book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Unlike me, D’Aoust (pronounced “Dao”), who trained at the elite Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is competent of mind and body. Her book is a series of essays that chronicles her immersion in New York’s strange world of modern dance.

To call this a memoir is reductive. It is a history of modern dance, a critique of Martha Graham, a rendering of the world of dance both inside and outside the studio. Read more »

What stayed with me was the strangeness of it. Sarah’s story wasn’t especially well-written. There wasn’t much in it that was novel except the act of writing it down, heavy with mystery and a sense of loss, and sending it out into the world rudderless. It was like stumbling upon something secret, and I wanted to know more. To enter further into that mystery. So, naturally, I turned to the internet.

Last month, I wrote about Sarah’s story, which I found handwritten on the flyleaves of a used book I bought online. That post includes a transcript of what little she left for the amateur internet sleuth, so I won’t belabor the details here. But there are a couple highlights that, if this were a TV mini-series, would surely appear in the “Last Week on…” montage that rolls before the theme song:

1. Sarah met and fell in love with a man named Mike. Mike was a park ranger who, according to Sarah’s friend Stu, had started an Outward Bound program in Seward, Alaska, where Sarah’s story takes place. According to Sarah, Mike was “her second half.” He “changed [her] life… gave [her] pure love.”
2. Sarah misspells his name when she writes it out. Instead of Michael Adrian Vanbeek, the standard spelling of the two given names, she writes “Micheal Adrain Vanbeek.”
3. She writes in vague terms about the loss of the relationship. Twice in the draft, she approaches this subject and then jerks away from it, like she has accidentally brushed against a wound.

Mike Vanderbeek is the one who looks like he's being attacked by the guy in the jean shorts.

Since I didn’t have any helpful information about Sarah, I began by googling Mike. I made the rookie mistake of starting with his full name, both Sarah’s rendering and the spelling-corrected version. Of course, this yielded no real results. Then I tried “Mike Vanbeek”—too many results. Then I tried searching “Mike Vanbeek” and “Outward Bound” together. Here where it got interesting.

Google suggested that maybe I meant “Mike Vanderbeek” and Outward Bound, and it showed me what I would find there. Mike Vanderbeek, as it turns out, started Outward Bound’s Alaska program in Seward. He was indeed a park ranger, an advanced mountaineer, and he would’ve likely been in Seward in the summer of 1997, when Sarah sets her story. All of this fits, but all of this information is found around the edges of the articles. For Google, the thing you need to know about Mike Vanderbeek is that he is dead. Read more »

her, maybe

I have a strained relationship with writing exercises. The whole idea—the open-ended prompt, the furious silence in the room while the pens scratch the paper, the cramps between the knuckles, and most of all the sharing that follows—thinking about this feels, to me, like thinking about a girl who I might’ve had a crush on in high school. In retrospect, the whole business seems like evidence of my poor taste. Writing exercises are that person who you desperately hoped wouldn’t friend you. But then they did.

Now that I am teaching undergrad creative writing classes, I find myself in a strange spot. I have zero interest in writing exercises, but I know that my students love them. And I also know that they’re probably good for my students at this stage in their writing lives. They were, with some qualifications (fodder for another post), good for me when I was in their shoes. Incidentally, I also know that many writers far more accomplished than I also love writing exercises, so far from judging the practice, I find that I need to reassess my dislike.

I also need some good writing exercises. That’s where you come in. Read more »

This is an ironic cowboy. Image credit: Ric Szopa

Every year about this time, the good people at Lake Superior State University produce a list of words that ought to banished from the English language for at least a year. Longer, in some cases. This year’s list is helpful, certainly, even though it includes at least one word that I didn’t realize was in the English language to begin with. (Do people really say “trickeration”?)

All told, they have modestly limited themselves to a scant dozen words and phrases that deserve banishment. I am in favor of a more thorough purge, and as we all know, a good linguistic purge begins at home. So here is the list of words that we (by which I mean, principally, I) really really need to stop using this year. And probably forever.

1. irony/ironic/ironically: Alanis Morissette killed it once in 1996. It has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of everybody who lives in Brooklyn, and/or Portand, and/or wishes that they did. Alas, the time has come for it to die again for a while. Adios, compadre. Read more »