A List of Writing Tips from College Teachers

Never refer to an author by his/her first name. If the author is a woman, do not refer to her as "he."

Cite your sources, and use the proper citation style for the class you are in (your syllabus likely mentions it). Any ideas you include that didn't come from YOUR brain MUST be cited, both parenthetically and in your works cited. Quotation marks are not sufficient.

Support your claims with evidence.

The word is "nowadays," not "now in days." Regardless, use another word (and be sure the words you do use are spelled correctly).

Triple check the name of your core text. Similarly, always spell your professor's name correctly.

When revising an essay, always make the corrections your professor suggested on the rough draft. Our memories are longer than you think, and if you submitted your essay electronically, we have a copy of our comments.

Italicize or underline a book title. Quotation marks are for other kinds of texts. Also, a book-length work of non-fiction is not a novel, and an essay is not a story.

On Over-(and Under)Thinking

It's been a while, as the faux-metal emo among us might have it. The semester usually gets away from me, and this one in particular ended pretty powerfully and busily. But I'm still here, and I'm still writing. My summer projects are all dissertation-oriented - I'm not there yet, but I'm trying to think of the next phase as an integral part of it (which, in fact, it is, whether I think of it that way or not). I'll plan to write more focused and specific posts about that work over here, and save this space for less professional musings (for the four of you who read this primarily, I suspect, as people who love me).

I did want to get some thoughts down here on overthinking, though, since I'm good at it and I've been doing a fair bit of it as I embark on this next project. Some of my research interests as a comp-rhet person center on process, so my overthinking sometimes can morph into the framework for actual projects. I love to talk to my colleagues and my students, for example, about their processes as they write. Lately, the idea of what my Process Will Be on this Next Important Project has made it hard to get much Actual Writing done. Guilt comes along with that, and also Intransigence.

But I've made it through to the other side (where actual reading and writing live), and that in itself makes me think: we, as thinkers and doers and teachers, need breaks. But we also have a lot of thinking and doing and teaching that happen when we aren't looking. Every time I talk to a mentor or a friend or a loved one about my work, I'm adding to the thinking I'm doing. It's like a low-level buzz - never really off, for good or ill. It's underthinking: happening all the time, feeding into the actual work that happens. It's part of the reason I do what I do.

Happy summer to all!

Reflections

I'm writing on a train, and it's a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don't recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete,  and to edit it, I'd need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can't see what I'm writing, and then I write anyway. He's got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin's great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don't have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don't travel this way that often, there's an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus. 

On the other hand, I've been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I'd call my mom on the way and she'd be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle's house. Sometimes I'd chatter with her, and sometimes I'd be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It's now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We'd moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could. 

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That's when I thought I'd go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don't remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn't the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I'm not crying. I'm still. I'm cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It's very interesting, I'm finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother's loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it's like she's behind a wall, and I can't reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine. 

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he's probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I'm doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra Perl's Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you're not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for a professor the previous term, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of "oh g-d, am I prepared enough" and "oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people." I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester. 

I try another version of one of Sondra's questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about - I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There's a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it's almost as though there's no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn't have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don't seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees' outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin's edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there's no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven't been there before. (I haven't.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn't want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She's not worried about someone else's coughing. She's like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There's a bit of me in her somewhere. 

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I'd reached the edge of my strength. I didn't know how much I'd need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don't, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.

My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Alison Barker for tagging me!

1. What are you working on?
Long answer: article edits, syllabi, comprehensive exam prep, a memoir, a novel, some journal articles

This week: comps prep essays, notes, and reading

2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I guess it depends which genre you're talking about. Academic writing is an interesting one, because I straddled the gap between college and my MA at NYU obsessed with theory and its jargon. I think I thought that I could only be a successful academic writer if I wrote like that, and I also thought that I needed to pretend I understood it. In my Ph.D years, where I am now, my writing is much clearer, I think, and I'm less attached to slippery, polysyllabic words. Ultimately, I guess, I'm much more interested in how to make my writing elegant and clear than how to make it sound fancy.

Where memoir is concerned, I'm working on a grief memoir about my mom. What I don't want it to be is just that - I want to include as much or more of her happy, healthy, amazing life as I do of her illness, her death, and my experience soldiering forward without her. 

3. Why do you write what you do? 

Most boringly, I write because it's expected of me, but I wouldn't have chosen a career path so centered on it (academia) if I didn't love it. It frustrates me routinely, but then, so does love.

More profoundly, I write to honor my mother, who died unfairly, painfully, and too soon, and who gave me a voice and a desire to use it. She was one of the most poetic and clear writers I have had the pleasure to read. (Her personality was like that, too.)

I write because I feel most like myself when writing is part of my day.

I write because I can't stop - I have written on the walls of my bathroom and I write when I run (I pause and I take notes on my phone). 

4. How does your writing process work?

I could write a dissertation about that. I try to write at least 750 words a day, my favorite motivating tool for which is 750words.com. (It's free! It's fabulous! You should use it.) I don't always get that many down, but I like having a no-frills platform that I can access on any browser. I write on my iPad a lot, since I'm often in transit between home and campus and/or yoga studio or what have you.  

Lately I have been rediscovering my own handwriting. I carry a small notebook now to jot in, rather than my usual habit of using the app on my phone. (I do both, actually.) It's very nice, and I'm rediscovering the ways in which my thinking is facilitated differently by different technologies. DragonDictation fits into this nicely (also free! You should also try!).

My dear friend Valerie Wetlaufer, an amazing poet, did this awesome process tour as well: check her out!

(More From A) Real Brooklynite on Girls: Whitewashing and Books

You may have seen my thoughts on "Girls" before. I have many more thoughts that I am trying to tie together into some sort of narrative coherent enough for at least an article. I suspect that Hannah's impending move will provide lots more thought fodder next season. (What details will the show get wrong, one wonders?)

"Girls" is set in an otherworldly Brooklyn. The borough has been fictionalized out of its multi-cultural, socioeconomically diverse reality, (seemingly) solely populated by white, trust funded hipsters. Much has been written on these dynamics and their validity, and, indeed, they underpin the organizing principle of this volume. I started watching the show really angry about the lack of diversity until I realized what story Dunham is trying to tell: tales of a very inward-focused tribe. The main Girls aren't afraid of people of color. They don't know any. They aren't really interested in other white people, either - they're the navel-gazingest characters I've seen on TV since, I don't know, Seinfeld. In connection with this, what interests me is how these and other identity-focused questions impact the curious literary sensibility of the show, one that molds itself out of odd social dynamics, tribal modes of discourse, and an almost bookless world.

Midway through the third season, in a trajectory marked by increasing vapidity and hostility among the Brooklyn trust fund hipsters, Hannah and Shoshanna evoke literature and literary thinking in the middle of a drag-out fight. In response to being called "unstimulating" by Hannah, Shoshanna snorts, "What is this, a Jane Austen novel?" (She goes on to snort, "I'm so fucking sick of all of you.") The context of the argument is (fictional) years of resentment (played out in actual seasons), and it comes out in the fight in different versions of what each character says another "always does." Writing becomes a device on the show - the characters love hearing themselves put words together in a formalized speech.

I am interested in considering representations of literature and thinking on the show. How does the trope of the high culture novel (and maybe other literary tropes) pushes back against the "lower culture" aspects of the girls' lives? How does the show's depiction of life impact its art and art appreciation? How do the girls work out their own anxieties relating to thought and education and reading? How does the trope of the Jane Austen novel both articulate and press back against the world Dunham and her actors are creating? (Preliminary answers: through class/privilege, and through race.)

The Economy of Adaptation (Scattered Thoughts in Death in Venice)

One could write a whole paper on the economics of adaptations, but I'm interested in the other meaning of the word - how do adaptations get transferred from original text to adapted text and in that, how is the original "meaning" (a concept I'll problematize later) transferred?

I think that novellas, in their economy of style, could seem to require more of their content to be included in an adaptation. Part of that is due to how we read: it's easier to hold onto descriptive phrases and small details in a book that has fewer of them (or even fewer words). Sparer prose is easier to remember but harder to film, in part, I'd like to suggest, because each word's role is deeper (not more important) than those in a longer work. By deeper, I mean that the overall sheen of a short work is more impacted by a given word than in a longer work.

Let's take some phrases from Mann's Death in Venice (trans. Michael Henry Heim). His lengthy description of Aschenbach at the beginning of the book is easily cast: just find (or adapt, through makeup and camera angles) an actor who looks the part and can also play it. However, take a detail like one about the hotel manager: "a short, quiet, obsequiously courteous man"(42). Short is easily cast. Obsequiously courteous may not be so easily directed, especially for such a small role. (I can imagine it being overdone, but it's harder to imagine it being as subtly struck as Mann's description.) Maybe I'd have an easier time of this if I were a better actor myself?) Even more complex is this description of the gondolier: " A "lightweight" outfit (52) is more easily portrayed than a "washable" one (ibid.).

This is a text of introspection more than action. There isn't even any dialogue until a third of the way through. In that vein and in contrast to what I've been arguing, the beach scene on 54-55 is written like a painting. It's easily reproduced, almost as through Mann were himself a set dresser, until Aschenbach starts musing on the sea and the "deep-seated reasons" that he loves it (55). I'm not sure that a voiceover would do any of the musings justice, although that's the easy solution to the problem I'm setting up.

One other complication that Mann's book throws in is that of translation. Michael Cunningham's introduction to the Heim translated edition (Ecco, 2004) foregrounds the issue of translation right away. He says that fiction in particular in "an ongoing process of translation" (vii) -- and his point that Aschenbach changes in the new Heim translation.

Mann himself offers something of an answer to my conundrum. In describing Tadzio and Aschenbach's preoccupation with watching him, Mann has Aschenbach say, "What discipline, what precision of thought was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique!" (81) and "he longed to work in Tadzio's presence, to model his writing on the boy's physique" (85).

First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

The Shape of Surprise

I'm a schedules person, generally, and I set goals. I like to have plans and I like to accomplish things. I am not fabulous at relaxing without another person to motivate me. (Motivate me. See? Even relaxation can be a goal - even when it should, arguably, just be.)

To honor the beauty that I know exists in openness (as yoga and my upbringing both teach me), I'm setting myself some mid-fall non-goals. They're only goals insofar as that's how my brain works. They aren't check off-able, or schedule-able. They just exist.

Make room for serendipity - and room within time, really.
Breathe more deeply.
Know that most things return. Most experiences repeat.
This is the life you're living. Live fully within it.
Nobody's keeping score but you.
More people admire you than you even can imagine.

Blogging Thoughts

It's been about two months since I wrote my first public blog post for a class in my doctoral program. I have been blogging for personal edification for about a year, and I've used Blackboard to post discussion questions for my previous master's degree. Blogging as a community in a context that only that community is familiar with, really (those of us in the class), is a fascinating web of meanings, interpretations, and author/audience interactions.

Taking the last point first, it seems that if we have any readers at all, they are also CUNY faculty or graduate students. Just as in a seminar class, we are our own audience, constantly taking turns shifting the course of the discussion by what we choose to declare or to ask. The structure that surrounds our writing environment is pretty open, too. Our professor's RA, who is also in the class, posts a web of references for the works we are studying, and we are meant to engage with at least one reference per week and comment on it. In addition, we're free to post on anything relevant to the course, and then other students (and our professor) can comment on that as each of us sees fit.

This web of connections is very different from the way I write my personal blog. I haven't quite figured out how to tip over to an astonishing (or even respectable) number of viewers/readers, so I often feel as though I'm blogging to myself. One might argue that all blogging is like that, except for people like Nick Kristof. One might point out that I'm free from the often insidiously vilifying comments that some people seem to spend all day on their computer in order to post. What I would like is to develop a reading and writing community around my blog - perhaps even a network of several blogs where we all follow each other. I'd rather be in dialogue than monologue.

The Art of Fast Reading

I'm a fast reader. I've been one since I was a kid, and I swept the MS Readathon on an annual basis, toting home armloads of stuffed animals and trophies. (I'm glad to see it's still in existence - support it if you can.) The prizes felt pretty important them, but a quarter century or so later, I'm struck by the qualitative experience of reading (and writing) quickly.

There's certainly a balance to be struck - I notice that if I read too quickly, I skip words and sometimes meaning, and if I read too slowly, I get bogged down in unnecessary details. For me, reading quickly helps me navigate this disjunct, and it also assures that I'll find the curiosity and joy necessary to get through the hundreds of pages of reading required on a weekly basis in my PhD classes. 

Writing quickly isn't quite as slippery for me. I've been experimenting lately wi writing as fact as possible to see what comes out. My brain is usually a few steps ahead of my fingers, so that method works well for me. In a way, it does what Sondra Perl's groundbreaking notion of felt sense does when used in a writing classroom: it pushes away any overanalyses or fears or second guesses that can tend to hamper the writing process, and it allows me to explore my thinking more creatively than if my fingers are still. (There's an argument to be made here, too, for talking out loud, either as a writer at home or as a student in class.)

I'm exploring the power of speed and will keep it up in the coming weeks. After that, maybe I'll take another look at writing and reading slowly. I guess my stuffed animal days are over either way.

Collapsing of Past/Present(ation)

I've had an academic interest in temporality since I took Emily Apter's class on periodization during my master's at NYU. Now, the personal side is coming in: my mother's death is sparking an examination of my childhood and my family history. That history is also intertwining with my theoretical interests in developing ways (more later on this).

Personal history comes up in my dreams a lot. My mother is usually there, sometimes sick, sometimes healthy, always recognizable. (This isn't surprising, according to grief literature. She was there a lot before she died, too, but now it's almost constant.) When I am stressed, I tend to dream that she is angry with me. more often, though, she's part of the fabric of my unconscious. Last night i dreamed that she was retrofitting a van to give herself a place to get ready for work. Two night ago, there was a grandma in my dreams: she looked like mine, but was mean instead of adorable. (When I dream that my mom is mad at me, its much the same feeling of displacement - not that I didn't ever misbehave and make her angry, because Idid, but because for much of my life, i have been my own worst critic and she has been my defender.) I realized today, with a bit of a jolt, that I want to talk to my dead-for-ten-years grandmother about the loss of my mom. I want to know how she handled her own mother's loss. 

I'm wondering if part of this is a trace of my extreme unease and anger that my mother wasn't given to chance to see me achieve more of the things I planned on. (She knew me as a master's student, but not as a PhD student, for one.) Both she and my mother had careers and children (and in my grandma's case, grandchildren) when their parents died. 

Even sharing this information in a relatively public forum is a decision I didn't expect. When my mother got sick, I decided, somewhat consciously, to post a lot of information about my feelings and the trajectory of her illness on Facebook. This was in part so I didn't have to explicitly tell people things and also, I think, because I wanted to vent and let off steam. (My mom often read and commented on those posts, including on some about my fears of her death. It was heartening and painful all at the same time, but I wasn't going to keep it from her.) Now that I'm working on my book and writing so personally in a wider online forum (for the four of you who read this and for the countless millions who could), I'm struck both by how reticent I am to air my grievances and what I consider defects, and by how necessary it is. I think my academic work and writing will always carry the stamp of who I am, and I think that's the way I want it.

Movement (by (W)Rote)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the qualitative and intellectual differences between writing by hand and typing. (There's research out there, I know, and it's on my "delve into" list.)

Here's the fear I have of paper: it (can) turn(s) good ideas into ephemera that doesn't go anywhere.

I stand in a ballroom, freewriting at a piano, and even as I let my creative juices flow, I am thinking about the hassle of retyping when I get home, the pressure of my hand on the paper, the fear that I am consigning my ideas to closed off-ness. This is why I want, currently, to scan all of my college and grad school notes - to keep them usable. But really all it is is a matter of intention. Take the materials and use them. Of the rest, let go whatever no longer serves you.

Just move. Move on paper. Move on a keyboard. Find a spot in which to settle and be still, but let your thoughts out. Don't imprison them. Set it up to set it free, as my yoga gurus say. What good are they locked on paper or locked in a Word document? Let them fly.

The Hedonic Treadmill

I came across this not too long ago, and I find I am pondering, nearly to distraction, the phrase "hedonic treadmill." (It makes sense. I have several looming deadlines.)

What it sounds like: stagnant level of happiness. Satisfaction that goes nowhere. A gerbil on a wheel.

(The research in the linked article shows that the concept actually doesn't hold water, but I'll set that aside for the moment.)

Phone calls, music, warm weather: all of these things made a walk seem like an event. They all turn the mundane into the special. Maybe that's part of it.

I also think, though, that treadmills are highly beneficial. You might be seeing the same scenery, but your legs are tracing a slightly different pattern as you go, and your body is getting the benefits. A treadmill isn't stagnant at all.

So maybe it's all about perspective after all, as so much of my yoga learning is teaching me (and as I will doubtless find in grad school when it begins again in two weeks). The journey matters less than the way that you view it.

99th Problem

One of Jay-Z (now officially Jay Z)'s peeves must've been clutter. I have a solution. Put your piles of crap all in one place, to the best of your ability. Put it far from where you need to be productive or calm. I put mine on my bed. I may have to find another place to sleep, but I got more work done today than I think I might've otherwise.

Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still. 

Hisham Matar, Multilingual Selves, and Memo(ir/y) of Another

I discovered Hisham Matar by chance, on the New Yorker's podcast. I started listening idly, thinking that he was a writer my mother would have liked - she liked memoir, and tales of faraway places, especially the Middle East. I had to catch my breath when he described writing about his kidnapped father: "the challenge is trying to retain the person, and not have this event abstract them." I read this as how the hard part is keeping the person whole, or, in my case, as alive as possible. The challenge is to represent my mother as I knew her in a way that is recognizable to the others who knew her, and that is as authentic to her as I can make it.

Authenticity has always been an academic interest of mine, and something bordering on a personal fascination. When I lived in France, I wondered where my American self stopped and my French self began. I could tell that they were different. The tones of their voices were different. Their attitudes were different, too. My French self was tentative, in some ways, when words failed me, but also fairly argumentative, yet more polite with shopkeepers (as any Parisian will tell you, a pretty important skill). (Here I go again with the refracted self.)

Matar goes on: in writing a memoir, "the motor of the imagination, [which] gets excited about these black holes of not knowing, binds us to the person." The mysteries of my mother's life - the stories I have to reconstruct, the questions I can't ask, the specific emotions or thoughts to which I might not have had access - can only be filled in by me, now, and by the others left behind who loved her. We recreate her every time we talk about her, and we ensure that she will never disappear every time we say her name or picture her face or share a memory. The mystery, Matar soothes me, isn't as frightening as my mother's loss is. It's a way of knowing her in a different way, from a different distance, but it helps keep her alive all the same. 

As I write this post, I watch an Italian movie (by way of Austrian filmmakers), La Pivellina. The tale, of a red-haired circus performer who comes across an abandoned two year-old, utterly charms me. I have to look up to catch the subtitles and really understand (since, at this point, my Italian matches directly up with that of the eponymous toddler). But sometimes I let the sound wash over me, in its music that I'm not yet able to decipher. Head down, looking at my writing, I try to catch intonation and inflection. I try to guess what the characters are talking about. It's not entirely unlike trying to represent a person on a page in the way Matar describes it, particularly when you are delving into their past, a half reconstructing a story you've been told, and half inventing it.