Photo Essay Series Part Two: Will's Old Pal

Picture Postcards Unfilled

This next installment brings us more from someone who may be called George Newberg, although he signs as "Geo." which may mean something else I suppose. Will kept at least a couple of lengthy letters from this gentleman, one of which you read in the previous chapter. My sense is that they served in the war together, and/or both worked with the former Bureau of Animal Industry, established to protect the public from infection or disease contaminated meat products, eradicate animal diseases and improve livestock quality. As in the previous letter, the writer provides astounding mathematical detail about his work slaughtering pigs and cattle. This one talks about being assigned to viscera and then to heads, as if once the animals were slaughtered there was some process with the body parts. I can guess that this involved inspection for disease and/or destruction. He expresses some dislike of the work, which I can certainly believe given how meticulously he counts every task. This letter is dated 1918, which would have been right before Will's son Carroll was born.

On the next page, the writer confesses to drinking his first b-e-e-r (he does a lot of hyphenating in this letter) in 17 years. Obviously, this is a transgression for him, maybe because he's an alcoholic. He swears he won't have another for another 17 years, quoting Edgar and saying Nevermore! Wonder what drove him to have that rare beer. He refers to a speech he planned to see by Rabindranath Tagore, a poet who became active in promoting the rights of Indian poor and ending the caste system. This friend strikes me as a free spirit and possibly more liberal than Will seems.

On the third page, he talks about seeing Hip Hip Hooray (tickets $.50 - $1.50) at the New York Hippodrome...there's a lot of history in the letters from this friend. He seems very interested in what's happening in the world, which contrasts a bit from what seem to be the women in Will's life, and perhaps that's a quality of the time. (More from at least one of these often disgruntled women in the next chapter.) He doesn't mention that Houdini performed in the old Hippodrome though, which was torn down in 1939 and replaced with a more modern and uglier building used now for offices. He also refers to meeting Emil Hirsch, a Jewish writer and activist who wrote a feminist article titled "The Modern Jewess" for a publication called American Jewess. George says that "Although a Jew, he is a fine gentleman and a brilliant scholar..." At that point, the writer provides some interesting characterization of his relationship with Will. Now times were different then, and it's possible men were allowed to express their friendship in ways that wouldn't automatically be considered sexual. But I also think it's possible to call it what it is after the fact. In a particularly sentimental moment, the Old Pal writes: "What glorious shower baths we used to have! Wasn't it a grand and glo-ri-ous feeling?" What would you make of that? He talks of meeting in front of Frank Adair's which I assume is named after the snobby British actor of the time. 

Finally, he refers to attending a burlesque show starring a vaudeville actor named Lew Kelly, who played a character called "Professor Dope" or a great "imitator of a dope fiend" as the writer puts it. (I can't help thinking about Cypress Hill's "Dr. Green Thumb." Classic weed anthem.) This would have been not long after the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act to police coke and heroin in the US. These vaudeville shows featured a lot of racist black brute characters too. Interestingly, dope legislation was highly racialized too. With coke it was black people, heroin Chinese immigrants, and weed of course it was the dangerous Mexican.  (That's right - you can thank racism for the fact that you can't smoke a joint in your own yard.)

There's a short story here, and I think this letter writer for providing all these cultural and historical details. This little card, sent later, features a change in outgoing address, as if the writer was no longer sure where to find Will. The card is blank inside. There are no more addressed to Old Pal.

The cover photos, btw, are of picture postcards that were not filled out. They are of Crooked Lake in Michigan, a popular fishing lake, of which there are two, but this may likely refer to the Pinckney location.

Summer Reading Frenzy: A Post of Odds and Ends. Mostly Odds.

Happy Father's Day Dad!

The best thing about all this time off during summer is the amount of reading I’m allowed to do. True, much of it is related to work anyway, but I’d never get this much in during the school semester. This week has brought some very unusual books my way, and feeling a little brainless, I thought I’d do what I used to do at Current and smush three short book reviews together. All three of these books represent big risks taken by the writers – other than that, they are about as different as three books can get.

Kelly Link’s collection titled Get in Trouble Stories really inspired me. I first encountered Link’s writing during one of Liam Callanan’s fiction writing workshops at UWM, in which we read her story “Magic for Beginners.” I can’t remember whether it was the novella workshop or the magical workshop, because Link’s stories are both magical and usually really long. I’m not sure whether you’d call her work “magic realism” or “speculative fiction.” But her take on fantasy writing, if that’s what you might also call it, is really refreshing and new. My creative writing students tend to be very interested in sci-fi and fantasy, but they tend to be trapped in the formula. Kelly Link is a great example of someone who breaks all the formulas and actually writes speculative and fantasy that we haven’t all read before. Link strikes me as someone who is constantly imagining and occupying other worlds, which may be inspired by places like Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe, but are something else entirely. It’s speculative fiction for those who aren’t necessarily diehard fans of speculative fiction, because it’s mostly inspired by the real world (or specifically, the people in it.) Featured are a demon lover employed as an actor with an infamous sex tape, a story of teenage-girl jealousy in a world where you can buy your daughter a life-size boyfriend doll who moves and talks, and a haunted house that gets transplanted overseas piece by piece like the London Bridge. The settings feature environments that sound like they come from a dream: floors covered in moss, floating blood bubbles that serve drinks, rooms with metal walls featuring miniature warzones – Link invites you into her madness and doesn’t spare details. This should be required reading in a beginners speculative fiction class, especially if you don’t want the same old shit.

Next I read Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant. As some of you know, I teach a course on migration and gender in the global economy, and sex work and sex trafficking is an important unit in that class. Part of the students’ grade included a debate over the legality of prostitution, and I’ve always felt there was something inherently lacking in the arguments that I and my students put forth. Grant (a former sex worker) really spells out what that lack is: the voices of sex workers themselves. Our discussion about sex-trafficking, and in particular the way that the global economy supports its existence, tends to frame our understanding of sex work in general in way that oversimplifies the issue. We read the column of Nicolas Kristof on sex trafficking and sex slavery, which represents at least one level of understanding about the situations of underage and involuntarily trafficked women forced into a life of prostitution not only by their captors but by a life of abject poverty from which they can’t escape. But to understand all sex work through this lens alone, as Grant points out, may actually be counterintuitive to justice for prostitutes who, for reasons of survival or lifestyle or other, have chosen this work. It reinforces the notion that no woman of intelligence with any self-regard would choose such a job, and denies agency and autonomy to women – maybe even guarantees that a damaging stigma against them continues. My students have trouble imagining why a woman might intentionally engage in this work, but a lot of that has to do with long-held insecurities and fears about sexuality in general. They also wonder what kind of future lies in such a career, and what Grant points out is that prostitutes have other lives – other occupations besides sex work such as advocacy, taking care of family members, getting an education, artistic ambitions, etc… I was reminded of the recent exposure of Somaly Mam, an advocate for young Thai prostitutes, many of whom are trafficked, who was sold into sexual bondage in her youth. Sources accuse Mam of fabricating some or all of her stories and the stories of some of her charges. In the documentary I show my students, Mam refers to a “darkness,” a hole in her memory in which many of her experiences as a prostitute have disappeared. However accurate or factual her story may be, this condemnation of a woman who has helped so many young girls regain a sense of self-love smacks of the way in which these women are denied the right to tell this kind of story on their own terms. As Grant puts it, “Off the stage, she knows there is also a script for how her story will be received. She’s often accused of not being capable of sharing the truth of her own life, of needing translators, interpreters. But part of telling the truth her is refusing to conform the story to the narrow roles – virgin, victim, wretch, or whore – that she herself did not originate,” (33). This silence is created as much by groups invested in rescuing women whose efforts, however well-intended, may actually make it more difficult for women to safely do what they need to do right now to get by.

Finally, I present Parse, by Craig Dworkin. I’m not going to lie to you – I did not really read Parse. To actually read this book is to redefine the purpose and experience of reading altogether, which was likely exactly what Dworkin was trying to explore. To explain, Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Parse: An Attempt of Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. Basically, Dworkin diagrammed every sentence in a book about diagramming sentences, and then published it. No I’m not kidding. I of course will not make my students of digital poetry and prose read this book in its entirety – they’ll just get a glimpse at a couple of its 284 pages. (He diagrammed the entire index as well.) This strikes me as one of those digital projects that disregards audience in a kind of masturbatory way, like the Twitter page of Vanessa Place. But I certainly appreciate the active resistance to old ways of reading and publishing that this work represents. I just don’t know what I’m going to do with this object now that I have it. It’s an artifact of value, but not as a read. The truth is, he probably enjoyed doing it. English nerds love diagramming sentences. But this is regarded as a “digital” project because it’s the kind of writing task that could potentially be programmed as Parse defies reading by the most persistent of scholars.

software and done in a few minutes by a computer. “Digital” creative writing, I’ve learned, applies to poetry or prose that begins with a program or algorithm, made possible (or at least a lot easier) because of the use of a computer as a writing tool. The idea is that the poet comes up with a system of constraints and a database of language to use. The poem itself is a result of largely random organization based on that algorithm. The author devises the instructions, the blueprint, for the work and the computer and/or the “program” does the rest. So for instance, I am just beginning work on a collection of interrelated flash pieces, all of which are based on some formal or content-based constraint. For the installment I’ve been mulling over lately, the young protagonist discovers that his spirit animal is a rattlesnake. I would argue that creating an algorithm for this is as challenging and creative as writing the piece from imagination. So far, I want the structure of the story to align with Mark 16: 17-18 in the King James Bible which refers to laying hands on serpents. I want a maximum of S and T and CH sounds, to imitate the sound of the rattler’s segmented tail. Since we’re delving into the spirit world for this story, I’m going to borrow from Ms. Link and create a wholly unfamiliar environment in which the protagonist moves. And I’m aiming for just 500 words. The trick is to let the algorithm do most of work and to intervene as little as possible – let the work become randomized by the constraints. Digital writing is about relinquishing control – relinquishing authorship. But I still want it to be legible, unlike Dworkin, whose

Parse defies reading by the most persistent of scholars.

This handsome dude I now call Dad...

No Regrets: Why I Won’t Say Don’t

As an English teacher, I come across many a student in the process of finding themselves a writer. Faced with a difficult choice, they come to me for advice on pursuing an English degree, or more specifically a creative writing degree. Should I do it? How do I do it? I do have an obligation to provide this student with a realistic view of what such a career choice entails: that you have a lot of intense reading and scholarship ahead of you, that you’ll probably have to teach whether you want to or not, that the field is enormously competitive, and even if you do make it to the top of the tower, you’ll never be even modestly wealthy. That’s only fair. Some would say if I were truly doing them a favor, I would say Don’t do it! There’s no future for us! Pursue Law! Pursue Business! Get a job in an office and move up the chain! The Humanities are a death sentence! But I won’t. I tell them what I did and what I’ve done. I tell them I’m happy and I’m not sorry. I tell them that if writing is what they need to do, then they should do what it takes to become a writer. And to tell no one I have put them on the path.

UVA dorms

 

Madison post Act 10

Judging from the endless doom-and-gloom posts about academia in the humanities from friends and colleagues on FB and so forth, this is extraordinarily irresponsible of me. But I resent these posts, because they assume that my current impoverishment is somehow my own doing – that it’s my fault that I have little money and job security because I chose a stupid career path. The attitude is that pursuing a humanities degree is hardly different from giving in to a drug addiction. Like we could have been something if we weren’t always looking to get our knowledge-fix. Like writing a poem is as big a waste of time as snorting an eightball of coke is a waste of money. I hate this attitude and I hate these posts. You’re upset that you are poor and jobless, I understand. But that is NOT the fault of your pursuit of humanistic knowledge. Your being a writer is not the problem.

UVA Charlottesville

I too feel very discouraged. It seems that when it comes to public education, the state of Wisconsin has taken a turn that I’m fearful represents the direction in which the entire nation will go. I remember that when Act 10 was passed, I cried and cried into my husband’s shirt, feeling like my entire life had been abig mistake and now my future was destroyed. The job market sucked already…colleges were responding to loss of public funds by adjunctifying and focusing on a business-like cash-grabbing philosophy instead of academic excellence and serving the students. Today, my favorite governor is working to ruin the UW-system and getting rave reviews about it from regents. First, the budget cuts.Now the plan is to dismantle tenure. Professors would still have something that would be called “tenure,” but the entire meaning of the word will be changed to something along the lines of “pretty much the opposite of tenure.” No highly desirable candidate will come near the place. But the administration doesn’t care about that at all. All they want to hire are adjuncts, so that’s what they’ll do. Students won’t really know they are being screwed over either – not until they graduate and try to get a high-paying job or get into grad school, and by then the banks will have them in chains.

 

Ignatius in NO

Faulkner's door in NO

This agenda serves somebody who’s got a lot of pull right now, and whosoever it may be, they are not just endangering my income, they are crushing my dream. I never fantasized about having nice cars or big weddings or a monstrous house. I fantasized about characters and new words to use. I could have been a lawyer, but I couldn’t quit reading Stephen King and Maya Angelou and Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain. I could work for a corporation in their marketing department, but I’d just end up with cancer from the guilt. The only thing that got me through as a child living with pain was writing and reading. The only thing I ever wanted to play, furthermore, was teacher. That’s right. I realize now that the reason I hated school as a kid was that I wanted to create my own classroom – one that differed from my experience in all the right ways. The fact is, I NEED to write. I didn’t choose to be a writer any more than I chose to have brown eyes. It’s who I am. And teaching makes me happy, even when it’s really hard. Even failing at it is fulfilling. So I am doing it, damn it, for as long as I am allowed.

Miami U in Oxford

Peter Orner's class

I will continue, furthermore, to put worthy students on the path. Because you know who I hate? Former drug addicts in recovery who tell us, Don’t do it! Not even once! How easy for you to say. You got to enjoy it before things got out of hand. You know damn well it was a good time – at least in the beginning – and who are you to deny us that same fun? And just because you developed a crippling habit, doesn’t mean everyone who tries it once will do the same. Let us make our own mistakes, will you? We might just have a blast and walk away unscathed. We’ll have a blast either way and you know it.

 

AWP Atlanta

cream city table

I tell my students to be the writers they are, because where the path will take them is a wondrous place. Because I chose to pursue creative writing, I have not only made great friends, I’ve made friends who are talented minds capable of creating exquisite art with words. For conferences, I’ve traveled to New Orleans, Denver, New York, San Antonio, Charlottesville – cities to which I may never have gone. I wrote a novel to its end. I won $1000 for a story that was fun to write. I read my poems and stories to rooms full of people. I’ve seen it in print and on the internet. I’ve been a part of a community of people like me who were more interested in raising the human condition than in buying things. I was in charge of two magazines that went to print and were sold for money and looked pretty darn good.  I’ve read so many beautiful, amazing, inspiring poems and stories and scholarship.

Oody, Suzanne, Joe

UWM crew at Art Bar

I don’t think about money so much because my mind has been infused with more interesting things, like how trauma and storytelling and history are interwoven (thanks Tim Melley), how dirt and desire and the grotesque figure into fiction (thanks Patsy Yaeger), how poetry and art work with each other (thanks Brenda Cárdenas), how to tell a story about a woman’s anger (thanks Gwynne Kennedy), what troublemakers looked like in the 19^th century (thanks Kristie Hamilton), and how to teach a class on horror (thanks Leilani Nishime, my first-year English instructor, a grad). Furthermore, I’ve gotten the chance to sit in a room and talk to a group of people every week about true crime in history and about the literature of madwomen. Now, I’m going to get the chance to learn with some Honors students about digital creative writing. I refuse to see these as wastes of time. I judge that they are the best uses of free time that a human can spend. I don’t know how to put a price on these lessons because they are priceless.

 

G group, without whom there would be no novel

Me, Suzanne, Jen

To tell a student not to pursue that same doomed dream is to deny them years of incredible experiences. It is to deny them the opportunity to crack open the world and understand it on a new and magical level. To penetrate the obscure, the mysterious. To be engrossed by what it never even occurs to other people to notice. By making this choice, they are entering an enchanted world. Wherever the path leads, it takes you up someplace high, where you can see forever. And when you reach the bleak desert where the path peters out, you’ll know what I know. That it’s better to watch your dream disappear than to never have dreamt at all.

Writers Retreat at the Clancy's on Lake Buelah