No More Evil Echo Chamber

Illustration by Steve Cutts

This year, I resolve to farm a full one hundred rejections, and to help accomplish this, I plan to spend at least twenty minutes a day writing. Not a whole lot can be done in twenty minutes, I know. But the reality of the modern writer means that’s all most of us get. I’ll hopefully be able to return to this blog at some point, at which time I will share what I’ve discovered about the kind of writing that can be done in tiny increments. For now you can view the prezi I made for a conference presentation on just this subject.

In the meantime, my most important New Year’s resolution is to spend a half-hour or less on social media. This means removing the FB app from my phone, which would leave only Pinterest and Instagram, which are mostly pictures and therefore far less a time commitment.

I will still have a FB profile, and I will check in with certain people whose photos I want. I’ve really appreciated the ability to connect with family members who I don’t see nearly enough. Distance keeps me away from so many people I love I can’t stand it sometimes. I miss my brother and his family, my dad and stepmom, my childhood friends, my college friends, my grad school friends, everybody, so goddamned much. Thanks to FB, I’ve been able, in some small way, to see my nephews grow up, and that means a lot.

But FB also tends to be an echo chamber full of noise. After this election, that noise has been characterized by panic and pessimism more than ever before. I already felt bombarded by advertising and other virtual refuse, which crowded out everything neat that I once enjoyed, like cool articles from Atlas Obscura and Dangerous Minds and Literary Hub and The New Yorker. Photos of people I’ve been missing. News that a friend has a book I can buy. To find any of that these days, I have to scroll for ages through fake news, DIY crap that no one will really ever do, stupid videos whose promises always fall short, idiot quizzes made to scour my profile, ads for shit I don’t need or want. And now I have to read about Trump. So much Trump. I don’t want to read the headlines about Trump, but I can’t stop myself.

Maybe you can relate…don’t you sometimes feel yourself going crazy, but it’s so very subtle – so gradual that you can’t be sure? But you know if you don’t take steps at some point, it will all of a sudden be too late? You don’t need to go far online to find some of the science – or pseudoscience (who knows the difference anymore) – that links social media with mental health problems. That points out how a platform meant to connect us actually isolates us from each other. Who knows if any of it is true…you’ll find plenty of contradiction about that.

Which is kind of the point, and since the election I’ve become more aware of a FB feed as a place where you choose to read and believe exactly what you want to, made easy by the fact that your friend list tends to be people with similar or the same world view. I’m also beginning to understand the way in which the Left is capable of producing nearly as much fear-mongering, post-truth, anger-exploiting, semi-real news as the Right. Furthermore, we Liberals are just as vulnerable to believing it, especially now that the shoe is on the very, very wrong foot.

I’m not saying that this isn’t a time to be angry and afraid. Undoubtedly, there is something very disturbing happening right now. I would argue, however, that it has been happening since Reagan was president. It’s only somewhat accelerated now, or perhaps just more visible. If we want the trend to change, we do need to take some sort of action. We need to make our concerns known one way or the other. But I would argue that social media provides an appropriate outlet or platform for neither of those things.

Instead I see my brain being stabbed by tiny needles of anxiety and fear every time I log on. I see my friends too, digesting little puddles of poison. I feel it eating us up inside. Sinister little termites of information made to breed and spread but never go anywhere. I feel their munching even now. Chewing away at my ability to face even the most mundane aspects of my daily routine. Chewing away at my joy for living. And chewing away at my time. Time that could be spent reading and writing poetry, which is what keeps me a human being.

I’m not done being angry about where our nation is going. But I am done letting social media design and cultivate that anger. I am done staring at a tiny screen every time my anxiety makes me fidgety, when I have more than enough books and litmags sitting in my apartment unread. In short, if it’s not a picture of Jameson, Halen, Kenison, Owen or Wes, I don’t want to look at it anymore. Unless it's a puppy or kitty. 

Image Additions and Abductions: More Exercises from English 221!

Abandoned: School in Beaver, IA

This week's exercises worked with and against images devised by our reading. Today, we replaced concrete nouns/images used by the original poet/author with our own stuff. I thought this would be really tough, but I wound up with a pretty decent idea for a story. I took a paragraph from David Owen's "Dime Store Floor" and rewrote it using some image-sets I'm pretty obsessed with (as those who've seen my Pinterest well know). Swamps and abandoned buildings. I see this as having real potential as a short-short for the new grouping I've been working on.

The Tower

The next place we try to teach Davy a lesson was an abandoned structure that was called "The Tower." It was surrounded by chain link fence topped with barbed wire that had been cut apart and cast aside by some brave delinquents we grew up with. The original "Tower" became our favorite smoke spot later, but it was the first destination we were warned against by our parents and teachers, as far back as the third grade.

The first place we tried was the 32nd street bog, just over the hill and through a woods from Davy's house, which I passed on my route to school. The bog grew red algae and splotches of purple loosestrife and smelled 1000 years old. One day, my friends and I decided to rid ourselves of Davy by luring him into the bog and up an old oak tree with a low, chair-shaped branch perfect for perching over the bog's murky waters. We coated the oak-seat with algae to make it not just disgusting but slippery, so Davy would fall right in - maybe get stabbed in the eye by a cattail. We tried it first and found it hardly slippery enough. The algae emitted an odor of fish eggs and dead frogflesh, and turned the butts of our jeans rust-color.

Last week, we also worked with genre-switching: turning a poem from the reading into a scene, and a scene from the reading into a poem. The latter can involve just gathering some of the concrete nouns, imagery and/or metaphors from a story and piling them together, as I did for the following, which is after Raymond Carver's "Cathedral." This is one of my favorite stories, and the poem didn't turn out half bad for a first run-through.

This is loosestrife...in case you wondered.

Go On Bub Get the Stuff

(after Carver’s “Cathedral”)

Though I touch my fingers to every part of the its face

Juice dripping from scalloping potatoes on a draining board

The poem died in Seattle without even the smallest compliment

green eyeshadow on a pig

straight pin in a baby’s nostril

yellow slacks and purple shoes

beard on a blind man

half of a twenty-peso coin spent on metaphor

Going to ambiguity you should sit on the right

Coming from you should sit on the left

Too much white in my iris

The image escapes

My eye ever on the roam

very little water scotch man

strawberry pie juicy thigh

I am trying to have a ham radio conversation with Guam, the Philippines, Alaska, Tahiti, Poetry

I imagine myself in Portugal

Imagine men wearing cowls, men dressed as devils, skeletons, lords, ladies

But I am not inside anything

Smooth the wrinkles from the bag, the poem says

Press hard

Don’t fudge

Keep your eyes closed

 

More Mysterious Will Francoise Part Five: Eleanor

Two women that appear in more than one of Will's photos...who?

In a previous letter, which upon study I’ve decided might come from Will’s “adopted mother” Mae, there was mention of a kind of tussle between them that prompted Mae to slip him a letter expressing her anger over being “deceived.” It bade him destroy it, but he didn’t obviously. The letter refers to a girl over whom this deception was to have occurred. The below is a letter from a woman named Eleanor, and it seems pretty obvious that proposals of a kind must have been made. It’s dated just after Will cut out from Cali to Michigan, just after the blowout between him and Mae occurred, so it wouldn’t be far-fetched to suggest the incendiary woman is this Eleanor.

The language in this letter reminds me a lot of an epistolary novel called The Coquette, which I read for a graduate seminar in 19^th Century American Literature. That book was in fact written toward the end of the 18^th century, so it’s wild that I can draw such a parallel to a letter written in 1914. The Coquette was written by Hannah Webster Foster and published anonymously as a true story in 1797. It’s supposed to be the collected letters of Eliza Wharton, which tell the story of her relationships with two suitors which eventually leads to her fall from society and her death in a roadside tavern along with her illegitimate stillborn child. She’s called “coquettish,” because she hesitates to respond to one suitor’s proposal while continuing to communicate with another man who obviously attracts her. She eventually loses the honorable suitor due to her wishy-washy ways and ends up pregnant by the more rakish guy she likes (who is married at this point and therefore no option.) This was an era in which you married who was appropriate for your standing and reputation, whether or not you felt much for them. To keep a guy waiting who was a decent match by that definition because you couldn’t imagine loving him was a fast track to social, and eventually actual, death. I’d hate to think so little would change more than a century later. 

The reason Eliza doesn't want to commit to bachelor #1 is that he is a preacher, and she's not sure she likes the idea of being a preacher's wife. Being a preacher's wife means 1) a life of piety and service and 2) a life of, if not poverty, very simple living. Eliza's a girl who likes to dress up and have a good time, thus, the life of a preacher's wife would be out of the question if it weren't for the fact that she's over 30 and therefore on the edge of becoming a spinster if she doesn't settle.  

Now here's part of the letter from Eleanor to Will:

Rain, rain, rain, it rained almost every minute for last three or four days and doesn’t act as tho there would be any stopping tonight –

Cute. She continues...

I have often wondered whether or not I am very different from others, this I know that within me there lies depth of affection with which I shall someday respond and I tell you truly that if that response is to be for you I shall give myself gladly without any stop or stay – but until I am sure may I offer you the best friendship of which I am capable with the privilege of telling you if that pure friendship should become more than friendship – Will, not for worlds would I be untrue to either you or myself by making a promise which I could not conscientiously keep – however I want you know of  and feel my interest in you and whatever you may do – you know there are somethings and some people in this life whom we can never forget no matter how wide the gulf that lies between or no matter how dark the night thru which we pass and I wish I could help you more in this perhaps most important period of your life…

Not saying no, in other words, but not quite saying yes, to giving herself to Will. The "important period," she refers to, I'm thinking, is the start of Will's career as a "veterinary practitioner" of sorts. Perhaps she hesitates to make a solid commitment, because he hasn't yet established himself. Or perhaps being married to someone who spends his days elbow deep in pigs and horses is something she seriously needs to mull over.

Can we not face whatever comes a little the better for having had the experience of knowing each other?

It's possible the hesitation might even be due to Will's adopted mother-figure and the volatility of that relationship. Perhaps it has already created a rift in their burgeoning relationship. 

And for part of which I feel myself responsible, and I offer you all that I can and be true to both of us – the more I say the more useless and empty do the words sound so take me at my word is all I ask and take and use fully whatever I offer will you?

There's an apology here for sure. This is not what Will wanted to hear, and it gives me the sense that whoever his wife ended up being (my guess is the Emma of a certain telegram to be seen later) it is not Eleanor. And who could blame her. Busybody Mae stuck her nose in early. View the below.

This is a clipping that, supposedly, Mae delivered to Eleanor. Like a real bitch. The content is obviously referring to Will's health being not-so-spectacular. So many of the letters refer to this, whatever it may be. Perhaps he went to Cali to improve his health. Certainly better off there than Michigan if you're a person with health problems. I can testify to that. But Will can't have been happy about this kind of meddling. Especially since it can only hurt his chances with Eleanor more. Like the people in this silly little news-clipping story, she might not want to marry a sick person. As a dented can myself, I would certainly not have appreciated the insinuation implied. Perhaps this is what Mae intended, perhaps not. But an intriguing possibility, no?