My rubbish day yesterday faded into a rubbish night; however, I am nothing if not resilient and one thing I really like about myself is the ability to pick up the pieces of myself and put them together in some kind of order no matter how shattered they are. Days of crying almost always lead to subsequent days of productivity and optimism on my part; I wonder if that thing about purging your body of toxins in tears is real. Kinda seems that way. I got up this morning after some deep lunesta sleep (sans the creepy glowing butterfly), went to my pilates class, ran three miles, came back home and went to school, where I also had an alarmingly good day teaching. I even opted not to kill my irritating student and instead jokingly berated him, and being a pretty smart kid, he got the not-so-subtle hint. I swear I'd kick him out of the class, but he's a damn good writer and super smart, and I can't help recalling people I know who could never seem to make those two things line up with standardized expectations of achievement. I get this, and I'd probably be the same way if I didn't have some overriding OCD perfectionistic isms which dictate that failure is never an option, even if I don't believe in the definition of success. Don't ask me to explain it; therapists can't and there is no medication to cure it so there you go. Why do any of us have to subscribe to psychological norms anyway? Like there's such a thing.
Anyway, that isn't why I chose the title of this entry. Tonight I went to hear Laura read her amazing, poetic fiction at Naropa in Boulder. I normally eschew all such events with vigor, because the one thing I cannot stand most of all about readings of creative work is the complete claustrophobia I suffer in a room with so many enormous egos. Some of these people - despite their quasi-Buddhist, Indian fabric, layered linen attire and airy, dreamy voices accompanied by vapid stares and overuse of words like "juxtaposition" - are really just talentless egomaniacs in disguised as gentle neo-hippies writing political and nature poetry. I have no patience whatsoever for stories about going to India to have transcendental experiences and learning about osmosis in the process, or women who wear ridiculous sparkly purple tunics with butterfly belts and comically over-large plastic earrings that don't match with chips on their shoulders about "turf" and other such nonsense. There were three other people reading tonight, and sadly, Laura went last. While this proved beneficial for her to read her great work after we're all exhausted from the shite we had to sit through the previous 45 minutes, it was still largely painful. The first woman is one of those breathy-speaking, seeming lesbian but not women who just desperately want to be loved but are so utterly neurotic that being just an audience member is frightening; standing in her immediate presence must be akin to the approach of Harry Potter's dementors - like all the joy has been sucked from the immediate area and everything grows cold. She wrote a piece about fucking herself with tulips (which I still can't quite wrap my brain around in terms of physics, and don't want to but can't let it go), and the best line was her reference to her "cunt that smells of soup and bread" - it's one of those phrases that I will remember until my death bed as "what in the holy fuck is this woman talking about and, more to the point, why?" Worse yet, she said the C-word like she was ashamed of it, was coerced into using it for effect and when it came time to utter the word into the microphone, she just wasn't sure. Guh. I hate the word myself, but dammit, if you're going to use it (and let's face it - there's only one reason to and that's shock value), then do it - say it without reservation and let the sharpness of the hard "c" resound in the ears of those listening. This poor woman blathered on forever and the piece got weirder by the second to the point I stopped listening.
The second woman (the aforementioned sparkly purple affair) had a piece that was perhaps more interesting, but so incredibly self-indulgent, and she read it in a complete monotone that made me want to slap her, particularly since she went up there with the kind of confidence of someone who's convinced she's a rock star writer. Maybe she is, and I would probably have liked her writing if she had any skill to read it at all. The poet was utterly forgettable; he was sweet and I'm sure he's a nice guy, but bland poems that 8th-graders can write with a good thesaurus and a google search are of no interest to me. I'm not even sure anymore what constitutes good poetry. I can't remember the last batch I've read from the last decade that didn't make me either scratch my head and say "huh?" or want to chuck it out the window. Since when is a list of pseudo-existential questions a poem? I admit that while I've written perhaps a few poems I would consider good, I am not a poet. I don't have the flair or the continued patience it takes to - as Oscar Wilde says - "spend all morning putting a word in, and all afternoon taking it back out."
As we sat at the bar afterward, having delightful conversation filled with irony and laughter, I thought about a few things that suddenly put my life back into some perspective: (1) I really love what I do - I love teaching and I love learning and I'm blessed that I get to go to work and talk about Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Boondock Saints in the same hour; (2) I would like to find time to write more because I'm good at that too. I can't say that about a lot of things because certain insecurities scarcely permit the aforementioned affirmations, so this is huge.
One of the best moments, of course, was when Sparkly Purple Affair graced us with her presence at the Boulderado by coming upstairs to tell Laura that the bar was Sparkly's "turf" because (I'm sure) she felt like Queen of the Hill as the only one of the four from Boulder and Naropa. Laura naturally told her that most of the people at our table had already graduated Naropa years before (and nearly every person at the table is now a professor... ahem and thank you very much Ms. Not-Yet-Obtained-Advanced-Degree), and I don't know what was said after that. Sparkly did tell Laura that her work was like Chuck Palahniuk, which still makes me shake my head quizzically and confirms my suspicion that Sparkly may be able to put words together prettily or interestingly, but she's still an amateur. Laura's work is nothing at all like Palahniuk's, and even though I adore his work, I would daresay Laura's fiction is more compelling and certainly more artistic than Palahniuk, Times Bestseller and big movie deals or not. Take that, Sparkly.
3 comments:
Here's a fun game to play with your friends if you ever find yourself at Neuropsis poetry reading: each of you writes a list of twenty terms that you're likely to hear (enlightenment, awakening, awareness, cock, cunt, violate, transformation, "global consciousness" paradox, paradigm, pussy, etc), then switch lists with your neighbor. Whoever hears all the words on their list first gets to go and watch re-runs of Knight Rider.
(yeah, I never said it would be a LONG game)
I call it "Bisexual Buddha Bingo".
Cool, though, that there was someone worth listening to there!
That game would have been over in the first minute and a half of being at Naropa. Hee hee. Don't forget "destabilized identities" and "social fragmentation" - ha!
At least there are ridiculous folks out there to serve as foils people who are talented and well-dressed.
So, you gonna visit a brutha's blog, or what? (you know, with all your free time)
Get you a site-meter, you can see everybody who stops on your floating peice of ephemera on the info superhighway, too. It's sort of like reverse-stalking, dontcha know.
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