Had a dream that I was on a plane full of famous writers and the pilot kept making announcements about their accomplishments: “Colson Whitehead’s on this flight, and he’s got a MacArthur Genius Grant! Jhumpa Lahiri over there has a Pulitzer and she’s HOT… Richard Ford’s got a Pulitzer too… and Kaya Oakes just got on the plane and no one cares.”

Essentially, there are two kinds of writing one can do in this lifetime: writing that’s destined for publication, and writing that may wind up in limbo. These days, the former is becoming less and less probable for most of us. It is harder than ever to get published in magazines, because there are so few of them left, and it’s harder than ever to get a book deal, because publishers don’t want to touch anything that doesn’t have some sort of commercial appeal. And thus if you have an idea, you can write it, but there’s no guarantee anyone will ever read the damn thing.

This is not an earthshaking revelation, I know. But it does make me get up some days and wonder what the hell I’m doing, what the point of the hours spent researching and learning and drafting something really is. Envy is inevitable when you’re writing into a publication void: if you’re like me, you can see books by people you know prominently displayed in local bookstores, people you like and admire, who are good writers who work hard and change the world, and still experience the kind of teeth-gnashing jealousy you thought you last felt in junior high. And the jealously is about the same bottom line: why can’t I come up with a commercial idea like that? The junior high version: why am I not popular? Rejection these days is not about the quality of the work, but about the saleability of the concept. Publishers say things like “there’s no sales angle” instead of commenting that your writing just sucks. It’s not about the writing: it’s about how to pitch it. And that’s bleak, bleak, bleak.

I know, many of you are thinking, shit, lady, just put the damn thing on Lulu and self publish. Which is not a concept I reject; in fact, given the fact that commercial publishing seems to be flailing as hard as some of those oil-slicked Gulf dolphins, self publishing may be the only way for most of us. But you still have to pimp it harder than a motherfucker if you go that route, and the idea of that is so objectionable to me for so many reasons that I can’t handle it. Seriously, I have to deep breathe into a paper bag to read from my work to twenty drunk people in a bar; do you know how hard it is to beg people to buy my books? If I had the money, I would hire a publicist, but I don’t have the money. Are there grants for that?

This is the thing: for decades (I’m that old now) I wrote reams and reams never knowing if they were going to be published, and that was fine. And then there was a book, and another one, and I began to think, oh, maybe I am good enough. But then it comes down to numbers. And then the message is no, you are not good enough. And that’s a lot of pressure to contend with, the numbers pressure, the pressure to have a marketable idea. It’s rather antithetical to the creative process, isn’t it? Rather than thinking, this is a great idea, one has to think, this is a book a lot of people will pay for.  And there isn’t any such thing as a middle ground between those two, most of the time.

It’s a gray day in Oakland; please excuse the self pity. I will always write; I don’t have a choice about that. I’m just no longer sure whether anyone will get to read any of it beyond this blog. And that’s kind of scary.

Borrowed from the internet in general and several people I know, a book meme.

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Dunno; John Ashbery, maybe. Though I stopped buying new books by him after Girls on the Run.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

Shakespeare, if you count various editions and single play paperbacks from when I taught Renaissance seminars at St. Mary’s.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

Whatevs, dude.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

This is where you expect every woman to say Darcy, right? If we’re being honest, Mister Spock. Or Hamlet. But my first love was really Kermit the frog. I like cerebral guys with green tinges to their skin.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?

Shakespeare and/or the Bible.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

Something by C.S. Lewis, probably.

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

Beautiful Children by Chales Bock. Insanely overhyped.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

Oh gosh, I’m up to 40 odd books this year already and nothing’s blown my socks off.

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

As a teacher, I resent the idea that I would force anybody not enrolled in one of my courses to read anything.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

Bob Dylan.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

I haven’t liked a book-into-film adaptation since Wonder Boys, and that’s the odd case where I liked the film better than the book.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Watchmen... oh, wait.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

Seeing as that I barely remember my dreams, this is hard to answer. When I worked at a bookstore hosting a pretty prestigious reading series, I met a lot of famous writers and ended up having nightmares about most of them.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

I read shitty trash books on vacation, usually chick lit or fluffy YA. Twilight is probably as terrible as I’ve gotten through.

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Foucault, maybe? I did manage to get through Finnegan’s Wake. Difficult fiction is easier for me than difficult literary theory, which is boooorrrrring. That’s why I don’t have a PhD.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

Two Noble Kinsmen, Berkeley Shakespeare, 1985 and Henry VIII at Ashland sometime in the 80s. Pericles at Cal Shakes a couple of seasons back. I’m still waiting to see live productions of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens and the Henry VI plays, ahem, Cal Shakes. And I’d be curious about seeing the disputed plays, too.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Tolstoy, bitches!

18) Roth or Updike?

Ugh, neither.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

Ugh, neither. And why are they paired together? Is the next question going to ask me to choose between Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Safran Foer? (for the record: none of ‘em, Franzen had it and imploded)

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

SHAKESPEARE

21) Austen or Eliot?

Eliot. Again, why are these two paired? They have nothing in common.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

French novelists, probably. I’ve never read Flaubert or Proust. A friend of mine was listening to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (I do speak and read French, very badly) on audiobook and described it as a child laying in bed waiting for his mommy to come in… for three hours of audiobook time. But I do live the Monty Python All England Summarize Proust competition skit.

23) What is your favorite novel?

I’m rather fond of David Lodge’s Changing Places, if only for the nostalgia factor of a time when UC Berkeley had money and prestige instead of just prestige.

24) Play?

Hamlet and Lear. I never, ever need to see Midsummer, Twelfth Night, or Romeo and Juliet again.

25) Poem?

John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and/or the Shakespeare sonnets and/or John Berryman’s Dream Songs.

26) Essay?

I’m a huge advocate of creative nonfiction, a genre I practice, but I don’t have a favorite essay.

27) Short story?

Something by Richard Brautigan. Probably “1/3 1/3 1/3″.

28) Work of nonfiction?

Thomas Merton’s books, at the moment.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

Har dee har har… now you ask?

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Someone mentioned above.

31) What is your desert island book?

Shakespeare, I guess. Though I really don’t like desert islands. Why don’t memes ever ask what you’d read in the Nunavut ice fields?

32) And . . . what are you reading right now?

What Happened at Vatican II, John O’Malley; New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard; The Winter Sun, Fanny Howe.

Had a good time at the very, very hot (I mean literally — 90+ degrees in Oakland yesterday) East Bay on the Brain reading last night with my buddy Sam Hurwitt and a host of other readers. Kudos to Lauren for getting a successful reading series together. I ran one for a while, and it’s a pain in the ass but worth the effort. The night before, I did my first talk of the season at Cal Shakes, which meant two public speaking gigs back-to-back, and this after a different and pretty major public speaking gig a couple of weeks back. I was just leaving for a book tour around this time last year, which means that K.O. inc. has developed a habit of talking a lot in front of people in the summer. Which is one of many reasons why I am going on an eight day silent meditation retreat in July. I did a three day warmup retreat in January, and it was a revelation; not only is it a total relief not to speak, but being among a whole mess of people who are also not speaking, and thus being relieved of the burden of small talk, you are actually able to think.

As a person of Irish origin, my extreme verbosity is probably a given (my late father would be nodding at this idea, while talking — and cursing — a lot), but because I teach, and therefore talk to people for a living, and seem to have inadvertently developed a secondary career also involving talking, I get pretty sick of my own voice. Thus the idea that one can go days, weeks, even in some cases months and years in a nonverbal setting becomes rather appealing. Of course, the flip side to not talking is the need to express oneself otherwise, which in my case means writing, which means… more words. That’s the catch-22, I suppose. Without words, more words. And more and more and more.

Summer on the Berkeley campus is weird. While it’s nice to imagine that most of the students vanish, due to the tuition increases many more of them stick around to take summer classes. Classes are so impacted during fall and spring that a big percentage of undergrads take 5 years to graduate, which has become financially untenable for a lot of people, so they cram a few courses into summer in order to accelerate their escape. And a lot of new students come to campus in the summer to find housing, attempt to understand the illogical campus layout, and buy lots of overpriced Cal branded shirts. Yesterday I was walking from the gym to the library, normally a deserted path around this time of year, when two massive tour groups of incoming freshman in Cal hoodies swooped past me. My initial annoyance with this passed in a couple of moments, because I finally got hit by the phenomenon colleagues have described for years: they looked like babies. I think it was because so many of the guys had Beiber bangs. It was hard to believe they weren’t wearing diapers under their jeans.

I don’t have kids, so this idea that young people look young is a lot different than gradually watching someone grow up. When I see my friends’ kids or my nieces, the experience is more like watching a slide show with missing slides — hey, s/he’s walking! Oh, s/he’s in college! Shit, that happened fast. But when it comes to people older than me, it’s also a blur. I seriously cannot figure out how old people are by looking at them. Everyone between thirty and fifty looks the same age, and past fifty I usually lump everyone into their sixties, only to find out a lot of them are actually in their seventies and eighties. So I frequently underestimate people’s ages by decades, which is flattering, sure, but kind of disconcerting from my end. Having had older parents, grandparents who lived into their late nineties, and older siblings born nearly a decade before me, maybe I’m just used to thinking of older people as my peers. And that’s fine, but this sudden awareness that teenagers look like children after years of thinking they look like adults is really freaking weird. I’m still embarrassed about the time I referred to my iPod as a Walkman in class and my students teased me about it for months. Then again, they were born in the nineties*. Let’s just let that sink in.

*On a related note, a friend recently commented that going to the upcoming Pavement reunion concert was going to mean mingling with balding, pear-shaped peers, and that Berkeley would have a run on babysitters that night. I’m not attending that particular concert, but I drove by the Temescal (Oakland’s Williamsburg) street fair last week and gawked at the number of straw fedora sporting, ironically tattooed moms and dads. Generation X, welcome to the sedate years, now featuring cash-in nostalgia reunions by your favorite bands, who have their own babysitters to pay.

No, it’s not me getting divorced; in fact, as of this month I’ve been married for seven years and drummer dude and I have been together for thirteen years (yes, thirteen! we were a mere twelve years old when we met, just two kids with a dream…). Actually, I think I want to divorce Slanted and Enchanted. The dear thing was published a year ago this month, and things didn’t work out as we’d expected. We were young and naive when our time together began almost four years ago; I nurtured it from a small article into a sort of big book, we signed contracts, we started a bank account, we did taxes together. I have it to thank for the first year I was ever able to deduct writing related expenses, because it was the first (and thus far, the only) year my writing ever brought in an income. And then stuff went wrong. The publisher thought we could handle things on our own, and I mean everything; then people got laid off from the publisher, people quit the publisher, the publisher fought Amazon, more people got laid off, and so on. And we were not good on our own because I was tired of the thing, to be honest. While touring and reading from it was fun, other aspects of life together were nothing but a gigantic pain in the ass.

I started working on a new book last September, which is in limbo for now, but from the beginning I found it a lot more attractive and enticing than the old bag. It also shook up my writing in what I think is a good way; maybe this is dumb to admit, but I think it might actually be… good. Interesting to me, anyway. I always tell my students not to fall in love with something they’re working on lest it fail in some way, but teachers never follow our own advice.

So I have a new project. And some other things I’m keeping on the mental back burner. And maybe some of you other writers can relate to this, but I’m not the same person I was when I wrote S&E; in fact, I’m not even the same writer. And the book before that? Even more alien. It’s like when exes of years and years ago find you on Facebook and you look at the friend request and think, “why? Don’t you remember we broke up for a reason?”

I wish you well, little books I wrote. Someday I might even find you interesting again.

An odd thing occurred yesterday: in spite of having had a perfectly pleasant week off before my summer job at Cal Shakes begins, I totally lost a day. I mean that I laid in bed for fifteen minutes last night and was unable to recall a single thing I did on Friday other than making pasta with asparagus. In fact, much of the week became a fuzzy blur of naps, books, and a couple of nights out. What really disturbs me about this is the fact that I know I must have done something on Friday, but what the hell was it? I’m not writing much at the moment, but part of me thinks this is a sign I should be writing here or somewhere more regularly just so I don’t start feeling like summer never happened when late August rolls around.

Anyway, that food meme? As you can see if you scroll down, totally lost interest. Honestly, though I admire a lot of food related writing, I’ve never been interested in doing it. Plenty of people I know and work with really get into prose about gardening, cooking, and so on, but food is pretty much sustenance to me and that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong — it’s abundantly clear when you see me that I like eating and cooking, but writing about eating and cooking is just not my thing. I’ve got to learn a lot about Steinbeck in the next few days, and about Dorothy Day, and I’d like to maybe keep working on the book-in-progress, and that’s gonna be enough for now, I think.

But by way of not totally wasting your time, here are the books I’ve read since the semester ended. This looks like a lot for three weeks, but, hey… I like reading…

The Adderrall Diaries***, Stephen Elliot

Just Kids***, Patti Smith

She Who Is***, Elizabeth Johnson

The Pastures of Heaven***, John Steinbeck

My Life With the Saints***, James Martin

Run**, Ann Patchett

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, Annie Dillard

*just started this one

**disappointing

*** awesomeness