Scutigera Coleoptrata: The House Centipede in My Head

shiver

I’ve been inspired to write a poem about anxiety. A scholar named Tony Hoagland wrote a neat article in the Writer’s Chronicle this month about the role of images in poetry that I think could make a good reading for the next time I teach poetry if I ever get to. He suggests not only focusing on image, but on using “orality” or manipulation of sound in language, and then making the images have a particular connection to place. So I decided to commemorate this past few weeks, which have contained all the stress that a midterm possibly can, by starting to draft a poem along those constraints.(Hoagland mentions Keats' "Ode on Melancholy" as a great example.)

It does look like I’ll keep my job for another semester, which is great. But just after that welcome resolution, I had a stack of midterm papers – all students in all classes – to get to before our vacation out West. The vacation was a good stress, until we looked over our budget upon return, and it became a bad stress. Add this to the coming around of my student loan (I won’t say how much, but it’s more than you would imagine in your worst fears.). Poverty is a never-ending albatross for us. Add this to my interview with Collin College, scheduled two days after returning for work, which involved flying to and from Dallas, TX in a single day. Guess how well I did on that interview. Now I sit under another stack of papers which need to be done in time for next week’s round of student conferences. These double my week’s workload by the way. Bring on the anxiety nightmares.

me: last week

Those sweaty, strenuous dreams are the basis of the images in the beginning – and very rough draft – of “Scutigera Coleoptrata,” my tentatively titled poem-to-be. In future drafts, I will incorporate more recent dreams…thinking of keeping a dream journal by the bed. Because man, I have some whoppers, and plenty of insomnia-time to write them down.

Maybe you’ll recognize some of these.

Scutigera Coleoptrata

The house centipede’s dorsal plates are wedged staunchly between my incisors.

They feel like corn nuts.

I’m stepping over piles of overcoats in a demolished parking garage

draped in vestments of black plastic. I can’t catch up.

I find a sickly feral kitten, ash-colored, blind, bloated with zebra mussels.

Deep tunnel feculence daubs my knuckles. Milorganite hangnail!

I can’t find my aubergine kicks, my chartreuse scarf, my true black tankini.

The pool is closing!

The stairs to trigonometry wreathe and stoop. I am truant again.

I truckle inside an important municipal pipe outside Tracadero.

The crimson rodent skitters metallically outside waiting to eat me.

My steering column convulses and I veer off the ramp, careening from the interchange,

wrecking in the black-tailed prairie dog habitat.

My screams sound like revving.

Steeped in rennet, the moon ignites, flickers, plummets into the skyline.

City hall goes dark and my mother won’t stop whining.

Ann’s Memoir Part blahblah: Ode on My Most Hated Season

Lawton, MI vineyard, Thanksgiving

 It’s March 22, technically spring, which to us in Wisconsin is really winter-lite-plus-muddy. It’s 28 degrees, and the air is wet and smells like newly uncovered dog poo. That’s the smell of relief. For this part of my memoir (maybe?), I recall the winters of the northern Midwest.

I’ve never lived anywhere but the Midwest, possibly the most unforgiving climate for a person with RA. I’ve tried to get away, and still hold out hope that I may get a job in the southern US, but not because I hate the Midwest. I just hate the Midwest winter. When I talk about moving to Texas, or New Mexico, or Louisiana, I find it remarkable how many of my comrades say they would “miss the seasons.” I tell them I too miss the seasons. I miss spring, fall and summer. I miss them for five months every year – sometimes more. But you’ll miss the snow, they say. Eventually, you’ll come to miss the snow. No I really won’t. Not eventually, not ever. I’m envious at people’s selective memory for these winters, and a little resentful. I’d like to fill in those gaps for them now.

The snow comes before the real cold. When you see that first flake drift down, it dawns on you. The sentence is long. It’s November now or even October. It will be April, or even May, before your feet feel warm again. When you no longer smell the sweet scent of dying leaves, because the cold has turn everything to soil, that’s when you realize. It begins.

No sense in cleaning that floor until April.

Perhaps I’m being a little dramatic, but put yourself in the shoes of someone with terrible joints and limited hand mobility. Here’s a day in the life of winter. You pry yourself from a warm bed while it’s still dark out, and the cold hits right away. It will hit harder when you get naked, and even harder when you emerge wet from the shower. Your coffee doesn’t get cold, because you swill it so hard out of desperation for warmth that it’s soon gone. This is a through-the-body cold. A cold in your guts cold.

 By the time you get warm, you have to leave for work. But you can’t just go. You must put on a scarf, hat, mittens and coat. The hat is not negotiable, so doing your hair doesn’t have much point. You grow comfortable with flat, bedhead hair. You and all your Midwest brethren are “schlubs”. Pasty, ragged and splotchy. There’s no pretty in this weather. You also have to put on boots at the door. My personal favorite is when the laces are so caked with road salt, you can’t tie them. You can’t do anything with gloved hands, so you have to take them off and rest them on the floor while you tie your boots. Then put them on again.

For me, a fall is dangerous. Because of my size and my RA, my bones are deteriorating fast. I’m basically gristle and bone powder. But each day in the Midwest, you must walk on ice. Often, property owners do not shovel the snow on their sidewalks until a thick layer is plastered onto them by foot traffic. This layer melts and freezes, melts and freezes, until it is a solid ice rink. This gives birth to the precarious “corn cob walk” that Midwesterners adopt, in which each step is taken with slow and sweaty deliberation to avoid a broken hip or concussion. There’s nothing quite like the sound of the back of your own head hitting ice-coated pavement. I know.

My windshield. February.

Should you make it to your car intact, you must often break a layer of ice to open the door. Assuming it starts, and you’d better hope your battery is up to snuff, you must scrape, scratch, and sometimes chip a layer of frost and/or ice to be able to see. This after brushing off a layer of snow up to five inches from the entire body of the car, much of which ends up on your body. Now you’re wet. The snow removal instrument of your choice has made its home in the back seat now. The hope is that you won’t often need to use the teeth feature on the back on the scraper, because the ice on your windows has to be broken up before being scraped off. You’re still wet when you get into your car, and if you’re lucky, the heat has kicked in. With my car, this doesn’t happen so fast.

If you’ve ever had your fingers and toes stepped on, you might be able to approximate the feeling of below-freezing temperatures, even on covered extremities. There’s not much point in makeup this time of year. The cold turns skin into a red, dry carpet of nerves. It makes your eyes water. Much like being spanked. That’s what winter is here. A long, long spanking.

I-94

Driving on snow-covered roads – now that’s a real peach. Most Midwesterners can say they’ve risked their lives up to ten times every year just trying to get to work. Accidents abound, often due to the very same selective memory I mention above. If you don’t slow down your driving significantly, you risk “spinning out” or just ramming into the car in front of you despite your best braking. Did you know you’re supposed to turn into a skid? We in Wisconsin do. Even the most careful driver isn’t safe when it’s early and the plows haven’t yet made the rounds.

Of course you might not make it out of your driveway at all some mornings. Not without the help of a great big shovel. Depending on the depth of snow, it may take an hour to free yourself. You can hope the snow is airy and light, but it’s just as likely to be as wet and heavy as clay. But your wheels won’t go on it, so you get to work. The front steps and the driveway have to be cleared as well as the sidewalk. When I first moved to Milwaukee I lived in a flat in a corner house, so we had double the sidewalks. One year, the snow fell ten inches a weekend when my roommate Kerry was gone to New York. It took six hours, broken up by a couple of hot chocolate/Irish Breakfast breaks, and one 20-minute nap. The next week my arm muscles exploded. Anyway that’s what it felt like.

 

You arrive at work sweaty and yet cold, red blotches on your face, snot oozing out of your nose uncontrollably, hair pressed down against your skull in strings, flecks of mud and salt and wet all over your pants. Sun rises when you sit at your desk, goes down before you leave.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The winter here isn’t just hard. It’s a metaphor for failure and disenfranchisement. The lack of mobility. The constant fear of injury and illness. The absence of light. It’s a reminder to me every year that I am mediocre. That is why I am still here, in the Midwest, after years of study and the hopes of leaving. In summer, the Midwest is okay. Good beer, bratwurst and kielbasa on the grill. Lakes wherever you are. Fishing and golfing galore. Bonfires. In the fall it’s downright awesome. The brilliant leaves in ochre and crimson and fiery orange. Cider. Good beer. Even I can forget then that I didn’t succeed and maybe never will. That I’m stuck here in the land of the underachievers because I’m a mediocre teacher and a mediocre writer. Winter provides that reminder, and it doesn’t just whisper in my ear gently, boy did you ever mess up your life. It burns the message into my cheek with a fire brand.

I remember liking winter when I was a child, and I’m glad to see my nephew getting a chance to enjoy the snow that way too. When the snow is just heavy and packed enough, you can build a decent igloo fort. Many an afternoon was spent in snow pants pretending I was on the Planet Hoth. Snow is the Midwestern pre-adolescent’s Play-Doh. Living in the country, we had many choices for our very own sledding hill as well. You aren’t from the Midwest if you haven’t knocked the wind out of yourself flying off a homemade snow ramp in the middle of a sled path onto a layer of hard pack.

Sometimes, it’s pretty. When the temperatures are especially cold, it falls like a light powder and sparkles in the sunlight or moonlight. The snow recently here has been in a kind of crème brulee stage: powder that has a crusty layer on top because of a light mist that has frozen and turned glossy like burned sugar. Most of the time, though, it looks like shit. Literally, God’s shit. And sometimes I feel like we are God’s shit and the Midwest is a celestial sewer. Not the blouse but the tag. Not the toaster but the box it came from. Everything you can’t use and don’t need. Everything you’ve seen before.

As pure as the driven what now?

On a brighter note, the sun is out and the snow is gone. Gone – my favorite snow stage. It will snow again, undoubtedly. But the end is near. The lilacs are coming. I’m not waiting up, but I’m waiting patiently.

You Can’t Have Your Adjuncts and Let Them Eat Cake Too

Dear Universities,

This spring, I will have reached the culmination of my job search in academia. For three years, I have prolifically applied to faculty positions all over the country. I have reached the pre-interview stage with three universities: Eastern New Mexico, Southeastern Louisiana, and Bowling Green. The majority of this year’s applications have been for community colleges, and often not tenure-track, but full-time and acceptable nevertheless. Alas, it seems I am an adjunct (or contingent instructor, otherwise known as a ‘lecturer’), and an adjunct I will stay.  On the one hand, I love this job. LOVE it. But I would have loved to write and publish more fiction, and I would have loved to pursue further scholarship on flash fiction, the notion of the hidden/revealed text, and the Midwestern gothic as well. As I will point out, the life of a contingent instructor doesn’t quite foster those possibilities.

So. You don’t like hiring tenure-track professors. At this point, most of you rely on contingent and/or part-time instructors for the majority of instruction. I get it. I think you’re in a race to the bottom, but I get it. You don’t want to pony up the pay and benefits that full professors demand. They don’t get THAT much. They can afford nice homes and a yearly vacation – that’s the extent of their vast wealth. But you don’t want to pay it. Fine. But meet an adjunct halfway will you? Most of them pull in about half of what I do, and don’t get ANY retirement or benefits. I make about 35K, and as long as I get a 75% load I get health insurance as well. (Was 50% before Act 10. Thanks Scooter.) This makes me, a lucky member of the humanities team at UW-Milwaukee, better compensated than the vast majority of my brethren. (Oh UW-system, how do we love thee? Must you change?) We can come down a little from the 70K-100K that profs make, but how stingy MUST you be? Can we get just 40K-50K? Use some of it for our health insurance and retirement even. We’re worth that at least.

And you don’t like tenure I suppose. Can’t wait to rid yourselves of the institution which allows professors the freedom to pursue study without unreasonable censure by colleagues within the competitive, political, and let’s face it, often downright catty sphere of academics. Whatever. But it would be nice to have some small modicum, just a teensy iota of security. If we write a thesis on how Hitler was right (or something that outshines the head of the department meow) by all means, can us. But contingent instructors are constantly subject to elements out of our control that could make us lose work. Enrollment. Budget cuts. Whatever it is, it looms over our employment every semester. As long as you’re saying goodbye to all these prof positions, can’t you guarantee us something? Anything? Wouldn’t that be better to foster some sense of stability and community? Otherwise, we’re driving all over the state to this college and that, trying to patch together enough work to pay the rent…if we’re lucky!

You also might have a problem with the smaller teaching load profs enjoy, and with the concept of sabbatical. Most profs I know come back from those hiatuses with books written and huge national or international projects completed…or they spent the time as a visiting writer somewhere else. But you don’t care. To you it’s just some paid vacation is that right? Okay. But you need to allow a contingent instructor some time to do professional development. Adjuncts and non-tenured lecturers have heavy teaching loads, especially if you consider that they commute from school to school, and are expected to provide service as well. My employer is gracious – a 4/4 is considered full time, and my largest classes get to about 25 and that’s all. But  a lot of adjuncts aren’t so lucky and it seems some of you find it excusable to increase the load more and more. If you’re going to do that, you can’t expect us to serve on committees and develop and assess curriculum in order to keep the job, okay? There are only 24 hours in a day, darn it. Shouldn’t your students get more time with their instructors, not less? This is not to say that adjuncts aren’t efficient as hell. An adjunct instructor can make the most out of one comment on an essay. We can make one hour count like 20. Imagine what we could do though if we actually had 20. Or at least got paid during our summers off instead of having to work the grill or the steamer forthree months.

Because adjuncts, even despite the hardships of the job, are the BEST. I bet many students will say that their favorite and best professor wasn’t a professor at all. And the students don’t know the difference, at least not initially. A teacher is a teacher is a teacher. But there is a difference, and you know it. You want to be a business – not a garden of knowledge. You’ve abandoned academic excellence for the bottom line. The problem is that the product you’re selling should be knowledge and excellence. If it seems to you that the Humanities in academia exist just to create jobs in the Humanities in academia, what’s wrong with that? Since when does a self-sustaining economy present a problem? And you know what, don’t accept grad students into programs if you don’t plan on replacing full faculty. Oh you’ll find a job somewhere…just not here. Not ethical.

You do a disservice to your undergrads as well, though they may not see it at first. You offer nice dorms, and a pretty campus, and great sports teams, but not tenured faculty. (Yes, I know that budget cuts and lowered public fundingaren’t the only reasons for all this faculty downsizing.) That stuff will get students on the floor, but it won’t help them win the game and you know it. I know perfectly well that my acceptance into grad school, and maybe even my editor job, had absolutely everything to do with my having a degree from the University of Michigan. Your advancement in the world of academia and outside it has more to do with the University you came from than maybe it even should. That I worked with people like Lorna Goodison, Ralph Williams and LindaGregerson mattered and still matters.

If you aren’t offering academic excellence, or the pursuit of new knowledge, you are not giving the students what the university is supposed to be selling. Where to find the newest ideas about paranoia and conspiracy if not from my old prof Tim Melley? I know what I know about women in the public sphere because of what I learned from Kristie Hamilton. My scholarship on the Midwestern Gothic will have everything to do with what I learned about women's anger from Gwynne Kennedy. Innovation. The birth of a conversation about human beings. This is why you have full, tenured profs. At the very least, you offer employment to scholars that makes them active contributors, not only to the growth of knowledge, but the economy. If you aren’t doing any of those things, what are you for? Job qualification? A student can get that from any number of perfectly serviceable community and vocational colleges, and for much, much cheaper.

True, at Michigan, I had some great grad instructors too. In fact, I first understood what a union was when the grad instructors at Michigan started picketing. (The grads at UWM had a union too, still do, though decertified and voiceless thanks to Scooter.) Now, adjuncts are getting noisy too. This is the worst time ever to organize, but you can only push people so far. Tell you what, if you’re super nice to us, who make up half of your teaching staff, we’ll not only teach like rock stars, we’ll serve the growth of the university too. We’ll publish and do research when we can (summer maybe?), and we’ll do our students proud. If not, we’ll go seek jobs in the non-profit and/or private industries. Not because we want to, but because we have to. Have fun finding someone to teach those classes at that price.

Face,

Ann Stewart McBee, PhD