Photo Essay Series: The Story of Will Francoise Part I

Madge 1908: Will would've been young.

My grandma Alice loved a good horror story, even if she'd never admit to such wickedness. One she liked to talk about was of the Francois family. She had learned their story after she and my grandpa raided an estate sale after the elder of the family, Will, had passed away. The house, she told me, was a typical hoarder's den. Every newspaper, every fingernail clipping, every peach pit had been saved and was piling up in the empty house. Grandma told me with relish in her voice that this man's son Carroll had committed suicide. His daughter Robinette had been institutionalized for murdering her own children. "Slashed their throats..." she like to say. Among whatever items of value she and my grandpa found at the sale, she kept piles of photos, letters, and clippings in a box for many years, finally giving it to me before she left to live with my uncle in California. I brought it to my apartment in Ypsi, and one night while partying, my roommate and I went through it bit by bit, not expecting to find what we did. That collection of stuff, gifted to me by my grandma, has haunted me ever since, or I should say, the character of Will has haunted me. If I ever get a grant for a project, it will be to research what happened to this family and learn their story. In the meantime, I have to make do with what this stuff tells me.

This letter, from 1918, reads like a recommendation, except that it's addressed to Will, and the writer really overuses the word clean. Did Will decide he didn't need the recommendation? Or did he need something to verify his character for some reason? "I can say that he has always been a clean citizen with a clean mind and a clean character." And that's not the only time the word "clean" is repeated. Why did Will need someone to testify to his being clean so much?

From what I can tell, Will worked as a veterinarian. Possibly a surgeon...definitely as inspector. I get the sense from much of the materials that Will was often in charge of livestock...including the slaughter of cattle and pigs due to disease maybe? Anyway, livestock sanitation seems to be the main aspect of the job. The certificate he received from the state of Montana is from 1919, toward the end of the Spanish flu pandemic, but I don't know if those are related.

 This certificate from the Department of Agriculture is from 1915. $1400 per year for a probationary position. Next is a veterinary college prospectus is from after this time, so did Will get this position and then decide to become a vet? Or did he see potential for his son Carroll and save it for him?

 The letter from Michigan dated 1919, orders him to report for duty and seems to imply meat inspection. It does seem that the job was more related to the meat industry than animal health. I sense that Will wanted Carroll to join him in his profession. There were one or two letters sent to Will that were addressed to a Francois & Son veterinary practice and that was it. Did Carroll not want to have a job like his dad's? Why not?  The letter below is preceded by a telegram from the inspector in charge of virus-serum control.

I get the sense from a lot of these materials that a lot of what the job was about was slaughtering animals, and/or inspecting slaughtered meat. The postscript in this letter from his mother dated 1916 says "Maybe now we can have that bacon and maybe a ham between us..." Knowing what I know about the meat industry, I'm inspired to create a character in my mind who is ensconced in that industry and has his soul eaten away by it. (If I taught an environmental literature course, it would include The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. Both are pretty searing critiques of the meat business.)

Will received lots of letters from what actually seems like two different people he called Mother. The long letter below is from a friend talks at length about slaughtering large numbers of hogs and cattle. This friend, who addresses Will as "Old Pal," seems to have met him while serving in the war, or at the job...I can't tell for sure. But the letter accounts numbers after huge numbers of dead cows and pigs, including those who were lost in an apparently catastrophic fire...the Kansas City Stockyard fire, which cost over a million bucks (in a time when people got $1400/yr) and was, according to the writer whose name might be George, "was of incendiary origin." Sure enough, two men were arrested in connection with burning the place down.

Interesting that one man arrested was German, at a time when we were just getting out of a war with Germany. (Actually, the Spanish Flu was thought to have been biological warfare by Germany...hmmm.)

 This friend wrote him a lot...and the nature of their friendship is interesting too. In an upcoming post, I'll show you.

The Grown Up Child Turns 40

Zombeavers: It's for children.

On the 18^th of May, I turned 40. This is typically a crisis birthday for women, and I recall my mother’s apprehension about aging, not to mention all the comedy sketches dealing with a woman who turns 40, like this one from Absolutely Fabulous. But I’m told 40 is the new 30, and that I look youthful for my age. So there’s that. I feel totally 40, but I’m not having any emotional meltdowns about wrinkles or love handles or even the fact that I don’t have children (and at this point probably can’t and/or won’t.) I admit that there is much about having children that appeals to me, especially as a teacher. But I also feel utterly unfit, because children aren’t ready for children. It’s true…I’m a 40-year-old child.

I’ll give you a sense now of the kind of home to which my child would be subjected. Now granted, I no longer live with parents, even though 29% of adults under 35 lived with their folks in 2014 according to CNN.com. I did live briefly with my mother after receiving my MA at 27, but left an adjunct position and ran screaming away after about 15 months. (Still a sore place in my memories of Mom.) Do they even measure percentage of losers who live with parents after 35? And given my financial situation, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. My husband and I are really only one one major disaster away from knocking on the door of somebody in the family, and that’s not very adult.

At 40, I certainly think my household income should be about twice what it is. The dump of an apartment in which we live is more like something you lived in as a student, or in which someone who receives Section Eight funding might hole up. Not many married couples live in our complex, because two incomes should, at the very least, amount to a duplex. Not a tiny, generic-looking cupboard that smells of mold and weeps tobacco juice from the bathroom walls. They don’t sleep on a full which is covered in the same bedspread as the wife received as a Christmas gift in college. A real adult wouldn’t accept such conditions.

So grown up!

yellow and orange

I plant flowers in pots to break up the general hideousness, and that’s very adult. I’ll give myself that. Women of 40 plant pots, and mine tend to look pretty decent. And I am married after all, which is pretty grown up, and thank God, because unmarried women over 40 are generally considered to be some diseased subset of freaks for whom something went dreadfully wrong. This NYT article was the least depressing I found regarding this group, which may actually include some fulfilled, happy adult women who aren’t married on purpose, though you wouldn’t know from what’s out there. The fact is I found myself another adult child who was cute and made me laugh, and I married him in a not-very-grown-up ceremony in our nation’s Disney World for grown-ups.

But then look to the right.

My darling husband, overly fond of video games and board games and sports, is not less mature than his spouse, who loves formulaic horror movies like this recent gem, and trashy TV shows such as this over-dramatic violence and sex fest of a prequel to Hitchcock’s Psycho. We both wear almost nothing but T-shirts that feature characters from sci-fi classics or anime. He has a beard, and I still tell my stylist to cut my hair like some kind of alternative rock star. I do read a lot – actual books, too. So one might give me that as an adult trait. But if you ask other 40-year-old women, I bet they’re into candle-making and scrapbooking and knitting and jewelry-making and things which actually have a utilitarian purpose – like an adult would be.

Adults spend their time and their money productively. My last purchase? I don’t remember, because it’s been a while since I had money for anything other than a bill. I think it was a purse, and not an age-appropriate one. My husband bought an extension for the game of Dominion. On our wish list? A bigger bed?  A shelf for our beverages? A new couch? While these are all things we need and want, I’m more interested in a (third!) tattoo. My husband? A PS4. If we spend less money on beer and whiskey and other intoxicants, we might be able to afford it, but probably not. 

Okay, yes, I try to do adult activities. I run in the mornings. But I also take a nap almost every day I do it. I’m a vegetarian and try to eat healthy. But I ate Kraft mac-n-cheese only last night. Might as well shoot heroin. The truth is, I prefer any dinner that takes two or fewer steps of preparation. We don’t do dinner parties around here either. We hosted Thanksgiving once when we lived in a larger place. But the chances of that happening again amount to those of my having a baby.

I like kids. I really do, and while the thought of having something squirming inside of me for nine months before I squeeze it from a tiny orifice makes me very nervous, I think I could handle it. But I have RA, and I have trouble holding onto a pop can, much less a live infant. Plus, complications and genetic problems increase hugely when a mother gives birth over 40. Most importantly though, I have to admit that I have nowhere near the emotional immaturity it should take to raise another human being from infanthood. I have a level of focus bordering on adult ADD (not enough to warrant Adderall darn it.). I am as socially awkward as a 14-year-old and I have the mouth of a sailor. (Do sailors still talk like that? I know it’s an old saying. What would be the equivalent? A biker? A skateboarder? See what I mean about focus? It's no wonder I don't fit in with academic circles well.)

It’s unlikely I’ll even proofread this blog post before I put it out for all the public to see. What kind of responsibility can be expected of me as a mother? I don’t want to take care of someone else. I barely take good care of my dog. His toenails need a serious clipping as I type this. I ignore my own husband on a shamefully frequent basis…what kind of emotional neglect might I inflict on a child? And what about my husband? I like my marriage, and I really don’t want to lose it. Our dog gets between us enough. We barely get to spend time together, in my view, as it is. The ugly truth is kids aren’t necessarily good for marriages. Frankly, I want my husband for myself. I don’t want to share him with some other tiny person. Selfish much? Yes. Childishly selfish.

Vegas style. I was 36.

Let’s face it. The teaching schedule means you have a child’s calendar. Now, an adjunct in my position, at my age, should and normally would take a summer job. But not me, oh no. I put money aside for the summer. Money that should be spent on curtains that didn’t come from my dorm room in college. On clothes without rips in them. Throw pillows that don’t smell like terrier pee. Because I am a “WRITER,” and I want to spend the summer writing. I call it my sabbatical. A normal 40-year-old woman would call it summer vacation, and would have let go of that airy-fairy fantasy about ten years back. When I tell people I’m a “writer,” I’m fully aware that if I were as young as 20 they would laugh. Now it just makes them too sad. They probably feel older just hearing it.

One thing about me is mature, and that is my attitude about death. That, of course, is why aging is so scary for most people, right? But I feel pretty confident that what’s in store for me is going to be just fine. Maybe, if I straighten out my act, I’ll be in this Zen-like state of nonexistence…a part of God residing in the essence of pure goodness. No gold-paved roads or constant birthday cake bliss. I don’t buy that vision of “Heaven.” I think it’s moronic, as is the concept of eternal suffering in Hell, which is obviously a sadistic scare tactic used by organized religion. Just be with God and nothing. Or if not, I’ll just rot in the dirt. Or be burned and scattered in a lake. Or flushed down the toilet – who cares? I’ll be dead and I won’t know the difference. And in a few years, no one anywhere will know that I even existed. Which takes a lot of pressure off of me.

Oh Lord. My attitude about death is childish too, isn’t it? Whatever. I did thank-you cards today.

Later suckas!

Teaching Alert! Read This...

Sideways is an asymmetrical word.

My last post mentions Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, which I’ve just finished reading. I don’t always enjoy reading theory, even when it makes those lightning bolts go off in my mind as many of them do. But I genuinely got into Goldsmith’s writing in this book, because while it contains much delicious food for thought in terms of how we define plagiarism, the nature of revising the work of others, the possibilities of writing in the digital age, and the ways in which that age influences the forms that art and poetry take, there are also occasions when the author breaks into metaphor and lyricism to breathe life into his ideas. The ideas and concepts he describes are interesting for sure, but what really made this book fun was the language Goldsmith uses. There are many examples, but here’s one from the chapter cleverly titled “Revenge of the Text,” in which he describes the way in which text is cycled from one digital environment to another:

“Those words, sticky with residual junky code and formatting, are transferred back into the local environment and scrubbed with TextSoap, which restores them to their virginal states by removing the extra spaces, repairing broken paragraphs, deleting e-mail forwarding marks, straightening curly quotation marks, even extracting text from the morass of HTML. With one click of a button, these soiled texts are cleaned and ready to be deployed for future use” (33).

This book manages to describe complicated digital processes related to words and text that’s very enlightening and yet explained in a language that creative writers can understand and relate to. It’s definitely academic, and might represent a challenge to college-aged readers, but I still think I made the right decision in including it in my fall syllabus. As long as they take it slow, I think they’ll get a charge out of the way it makes them think about the way words operate behind the scenes in cyberrealms – the “dark data” as Goldsmith puts it.

Goldsmith made a controversial figure of himself recently, remixing the autopsy report of Michael Brown into a poem (as per his theories on intertextuality and repurposing texts.) He also appeared on the Colbert Report. All that aside, I’m happy I read this book, and I assume Kenneth won’t mind if I give you a rundown of some ideas that should totally enhance the work I’m doing with my students on digital writing in the fall. I’m also putting together a conference paper on writing-intensive workshop in creative writing pedagogy, in which I propose students revise each others' work. Uncreative Writing generated a lot of material for me. Here are some ideas:

Take an image (a jpg or tif file) and convert it to a word file. Insert a poem (or something) into the alphanumeric code that appears. Then convert it back to an image. You can do the same with an MP3 file. (I had trouble because my version of Word is set up to keep me from making such conversions, but Goldsmith did it and it produced an interesting distortion in the image.)

Of course there’s “patchwriting,” in which you just take bits and pieces of other texts and put them together into your own cohesive whole. This is the most obvious one, but it will play a huge role in my class on digital prose in the fall.

Psychogeography: Compose an alternate map of a place based on specific emotions. Or walk a route, and write down the words you come across as you walk (signs, ads, flyers, etc…) Or follow a person as long as you can and make a map based on that person’s path (creepy yes, but neat, right?) Or assign a map to a purpose it wasn’t intended. Use a map of Milwaukee to wander through Kalamazoo. (These are forms of dérive, where you write what you encounter as you follow a certain path.)

Détournement: Remix a video clip in a foreign language with new subtitles. (I'm reminded of DJ Spooky's remix of the very racist film The Birth of a Nation called Rebirth of a Nation...gotta revisit that!) Replace a comic strip’s bubbles with your own text. Take the source code and graphics from a news site and populate it with your own text. Take an image with text, remove the text. Then make a concrete poem out of the missing text that redraws the picture. Record all the words you speak in a week and put them together in a poem. (Or do this with a collection of recordings from something else.) Do a Google search of a noun and adjective (Christi’s move from her essay – see last post.) Goldsmith did it with “red circle,” I did it with “blue square,” and found this interesting list.

Hyperrealism: Replicate and reframe a transcript of something unedited, like a summit, or a trial. Take a list of something (KG’s example is of countries, AKA Your Country is Great by Ara Shirinyan) and do a search of each thing within a sentence you choose (like Armenia is great.) and form a text with the comments and/or other text you find. Take a text like an ad or article and replace a particular word or phrase all the way through. (I did it in my last post.)

Make a text out of “refuse and detritus”: stuff like dreams, news articles, weather conditions, descriptions of objects, shopping lists, etc…This is like Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, which is longer than anything I would do this way, but is supposedly a neat read. Kind of like a scrapbook made into a regular book. A real hoarder’s way of writing, but even easier thanks to the Net.

Here’s an assignment for the revision/workshop: Give the directions or the recipe to your poem or story to a classmate and see how they reproduce it. I would say include not only plot points and/or rhyme scheme and things like that, but also process details like when you write (morning or night?) and whether you have noise in the background, etc…

In the chapter titled “Infallible Processes,” he talks about Andy Warhol and some of the exhaustive biographical work done on and by him. The ideas is to include a bunch of mundane details that almost forces the reader to look away. This reminded me of my myspace page on the character of Pootie, the protagonist of the novel I plan to finish this summer, and made me want to get back to filling it in.

There’s also a number of passages on retyping, which might also be a good approach in the revision/workshop. It sounds horribly tedious to me, but this wouldn’t be the first time that a professor has praised this method as a way of teaching writing method. Retype a poem or story by someone else? Sounds SO boring, but apparently it teaches the re-typist a lot.

Flarf: Put together what Goldsmith calls “Internet spew” and make it into a poem. Better yet, take a bunch of tweets or status updates. (Maybe all the ones that occurred the day my mom died is an interesting thought.) Put together lines of text in a chat room. Put together the tweets at the bottom of a show like American Idol.

A list of pedagogical experiments:

1) Make a code that stands in for things people do when they speak, like pause or clear their throat, and include it in a transcript of that speech.

2) Take an outdated slogan and graffiti it in a non-permanent way in public.

3) Take a platitude of some kind and make a typical greeting card out of it, complete with a bar code, and put it in the store with the other cards.

4) Take a YouTube or home video and make a screenplay of it.

On that note, I’d like to include a picture of my mom here, who I missed terribly this past Mother’s Day. I really miss our conversations. I just know she would have loved this blog and that I could talk to her at length about things I talk about here, so in some ways, this blog is for her. I love you Mom, and I wish you were here.

"The Interview" and "Small Cords, Big Scourges": A Couple of Plagiarisms

So I’m reading a book called Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith. (Review to come.)   This guy teaches a class of the same name at U Penn in which students are rewarded for plagiarizing, sampling and stealing and are actually penalized for originality. They’re encouraged to do what Jonathan Lethem does in his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” which is made entirely out of bits and pieces from other people’s work. The idea is that in an age when it’s so easy to copy and paste in documents, it’s inevitable that writing becomes not about how well you can compose an original work, but how well you can cobble together the work of others.

I’m totally on board with this idea. What you see in this post are cobbled plagiarisms – including the above photo, which I took from this website and then altered in Picasa. The poem below comes from an excerpt from a web piece by Jenna Goudreau at Forbes on mistakes women make in interviews. I took the words “interview,” “job,” “interviewer,” “position,” and “personality” and replaced them with “poem,” “poet” or “poetry.”

 The Interview

Women are more likely to worry themselves out of a poem. The anxiety shows in the poem and projects a lack of confidence. What may be temporary stress will come off as nervous poetry. Walk into a poem armed with the idea that poems will love you. That kind of positive energy will have a huge impact on the way the poem goes. If you think you’re the right person for the poem, the poem will be apt to believe it. The power of likability usually trumps experience. A lot of women are good at connecting with others but make the mistake of turning off that ability when they go into a poem. Be yourself and let your poetry, energy and optimism shine through. It will let your potential new poem know that you’re passionate about the poem, a trait you’d bring to the poem.

As you may or may not know, I have had a stint of job interviews lately, as I make a last ditch effort for a more secure teaching job. In this brutal market, this process holds so much weight, and yet I cannot seem to get it right. I’m overwhelmed by the emotional labor it requires. To vent my frustration, I’ve taken the text of a list of interview dos and don’ts found at womenforhire.com, and replaced some words of phrases with words and phrases in Part One of Sandra Thomas and Cheryl Jefferson’s Use Your Anger.

 Small Cords, Big Scourges

DO channel surf early. There is absolutely no excuse for white gloves. Arriving at your corner glacially you’ll be able to fuse your eyeballs and perhaps crack-open some last-minute brass knuckles from the steam and staff.

DO dress perspirey. Flames do matter. Be tongue-lashing and high voltage – kick dogs, minimal cream puffs, and a slow burn.

DO boil support staff politely and professionally. Interviewers often pick fights with old ladies on the phone and in Lizzie Borden.

DO bring pot scum. Remember, this is hell and you want to be stinging with igniting materials for the craw, You.

DO have references smoldering. You may be asked to wallow in a screaming meemie, including a list of feet in the grave, so be sure to have their crippling pain with you.

DO aspire to spit fire. Regardless of what the reign of errors has done before, the prisoners must have a passion for something—anything. Whatever it is they’re sinking—love boat, explosion, or an event in the news—employers want to see snakes coming out of your head. Show it in your battle fatigues and in your bell tower.

DON’T avoid rattle-brains. It’s critical to turn straw into the enemy camp, which can be possessed by demons in the first three red alerts. Find some kind of common possession or splitting. This initial bosom-baring can break the gold and dump on a more comfortable knee-jerk reaction.

DON’T kill a rose in water. Remain castrating at all times.

DON’T zap them with a dose of shrew. This isn’t the time to come off as swamped or yourself. Trot out your best salt to demonstrate why you’d be an asset to the wound.

DON’T wait in your past or your present. This includes bad-mouthing former wings, as well as apologizing for the battle-axes you’ve made.

DON’T fidget. This means don’t knock your nails or flip your bitch, which conveys a lack of tigers by the tail. Turn off the rebellious appliance and small stuff. Chew down pine trees and spit the needles; don’t tap your factory bully or sway your block off. Sweat strong eye contact.