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

Hmmm… my plan to write about food and therefore garner a ton of new readers hasn’t panned out thus far. Maybe I should change my name to Michael Pollan? Anyway, moving on…

Day 2. Your favorite sweet dish.

Don’t ask! No, let me explain. I was a latchkey kid; my mom and dad both worked full time, and my younger sister and I came home every day and let ourselves into an empty house, at which point she promptly started talking on the phone until dinner time, and I started baking. Once I figured out a few recipes, I realized pretty young that I had a talent for pastries, cookies, cakes and pies, and the advantage of baking in the afternoons was that I could then devour whatever I’d made before anyone else could (I had a hell of a metabolism back then). In the 70s and 80s, upper class aspirational California was pretty much defined by Sunset magazine, which I pick up occasionally at my therapist’s office and think is so bourgeois precious it makes my stomach hurt. But my mom loved it, and it had recipes — fairly complex ones, from what I recall. This was the equivalent to throwing down the gauntlet in my pre-teen/teen baking years. So, this orange cake has thirty five ingredients? Whatever, Sunset. You can’t keep me down! And I’d make a huge fucking mess and something delicious.

To this day, I find baking more relaxing than meditation or long walks or whatever people do to relax. My husband jokes that when he hears the mixer starting up late at night, he knows I need to wind down. But my current challenge is how to get rid of stuff I bake; I can’t eat entire cakes anymore, and ever since a colleague referred to my offering baked goods to students as kissing their asses for good evaluations, I don’t bring them treats anymore. Often I just pack stuff up and hand it off to a homeless person. So baking becomes a social service, and that’s better than wasting the stuff.

Favorites, though? A good chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream. Anything lime/lemon based. Dark chocolate chunk cookies with pecans, dried cherries and sea salt. Zucchini bread. Apricot bars. Bueberry pie. And a million more.

Although I am juggling multiple writing projects at the moment, nothing’s on a hard deadline and I have really been feeling slack about not blogging regularly here or at the place where I (slack on) group blog(ging), WeWhoAreAboutToDie. So I’m ripping this meme off of several people. I mean, shamelessly, everybody seems to be writing and reading books about food (except me), so maybe I’m just attention whoring. We’ll see how long this lasts; I may just answer the whole thing in one shot if I get bored with it. Is there anything you think I should be blogging about instead? If so, please let me know here, on Facebook, via email, etc.

Day 1. Any dietary restrictions?

Not so much restrictions as much as preferences, i.e. I will not fucking touch mayonnaise, pickles, beets, that yellow mustard that comes in squirt bottles (dijon is fine), soy milk, soy cheese, innards, veal, lamb, rabbit or most alcohol. These are primarily about being grossed out (what is the purpose of mayonnaise? why do pickles smell like Satan’s boogers?), but also a little bit about not eating things that are cute (I can’t even eat chocolate Easter bunnies or Peeps). Soy milk and most soy products make me bloat like a beached seal. But even though I have acid reflux, I still eat everything on the list my doctor gave me of foods to avoid. Life is short, and Zantac works great.

Day 2. Your favorite sweet dish.
Day 3. Your favorite savory dish.
Day 4. Your preferred degree of spiciness.
Day 5. Your signature dish.
Day 6. Are/were you a picky eater?
Day 7. Your favorite fruit.
Day 8. Your preferred cooking technique.
Day 9. The kitchen of your dreams.
Day 10. Your favorite local fast food place.
Day 11. Your favorite snack.
Day 12. Your favorite fast food dish.
Day 13. The first dish you’ve ever prepared.
Day 14. Your favorite vegetable.
Day 15. Your most spectacular cooking failure.
Day 16. Your favorite food preparation utensil.
Day 17. Meals planned in advance or spur-of-the-moment ideas?
Day 18. The favorite dish of your childhood.
Day 19. Least favorite dish.
Day 20. A food preparation secret you’d like to learn.
Day 21. Your favorite dairy product.
Day 22. Variety or routine?
Day 23. Your favorite herb[s] and spice[s].
Day 24. Your favorite local restaurant.
Day 25. Haute cuisine or home cooking?
Day 26. If money was of no concern, would your eating habits change?
Day 27. Your usual way of dealing with leftovers.
Day 28. Your favorite beverage on a hot summer day.
Day 29. Lots of small snacks or three square meals a day?
Day 30. Are you comfortable with your relationship with food?

Tuesday, I turned in grades. Today, I returned the pile of library books I’d checked out over the course of the semester (dangerously, Berkeley faculty are allowed to keep books checked out for a year, which means I often find books about topics I was researching months ago scattered in odd corners around the house). Today, I’m doing laundry, trying to get it up on the line on one of the first sunny days we’ve seen in this freakishly rainy and clammy month of May.  And making granola. And yogurt. And walking around barefoot.

It’s summer.

Hopefully, I’ll find out whether or not my new book proposal has found a home sometime soon, but in the meantime, I am selfishly and happily digging into research for it anyway. At this point, if it doesn’t find a home, it’s likely I’ll be trying to publish portions of it in essay form, and who knows, maybe I’ll put some of it up here. Meanwhile, this summer I’ll once again be working doing Grove Talks at Cal Shakes (imagine what a museum docent does, but with plays). They’re doing Steinbeck, Shaw, and the two Shakespeares: The Scottish Play and Much Ado.

I came here intending to write a long blog about entering into the last remaining months of my thirties and all the shit that goes along with that, and you know what? I don’t really care. Years ago, a writer friend and I had a long conversation during which we discovered that most of our favorite mutual writers didn’t start writing anything interesting until they were in their forties, and I long ago gave up trying to be conventionally attractive (actually, I never tried; it’s just impossible in my case), so a few new folds and wrinkles and gray hairs are really, in the long run — not a big deal. Really, my teaching career, the books and essays I hope to write, my relationships with other people… these things all outweigh the fact that I was born in 1971. That’s just another date on the calendar.

Of course, I may be sounding different about this come January, but I’m hatching plans to be in a foreign country for that particular date, one where (as my friend L says) they “revere older women”. And preferably don’t speak English at all.

I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Tompkins as a guest speaker in my class this morning. Dave’s the author of this fat new opus of a book on the history of the vocoder called How To Wreck A Nice Beach — a mishearing of the vocodered phrase “how to recognize speech”. We had a blast listening to vocoder lore and clips from everything from Silly Willy Toothpaste ads from the thirties to Kraftwerk to local hyphy legend Mac Dre (RIP). Dave mentioned that he loved hearing people’s “the first time I heard a vocoder” stories, so I downloaded some Egyptian Lover and came up with this.

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard a vocoder was in junior high, probably 1984, when I was thirteen and going to Claremont Junior High in Oakland. Claremont’s an aberration – a school with primarily African American students and teachers smack in the middle of what later became one of Oakland’s whitest neighborhoods, Rockridge. But the cutoff for the school’s district includes the much more diverse neighborhoods of nearby North Oakland, so everyone piled on the 51 bus to head south after school and all of the stores in the area were plastered with “no students allowed” placards. When I was a student there, there were about 300 kids, maybe eight or ten of them were white: me, plus two hippie girls who wore those long twirly print skirts, a shy blond girl who never talked to anybody, another blond girl who screamed a lot curing gym class, and a couple of guys who called themselves the “Jew Crew” and tried to breakdance battle some guys on the playground at recess. Cardboard sheets and punches were involved. In spite of the fact that I was physically awkward – I shot up to 5’ 10”, my current height, in the space of about a year – I decided to attempt to go to a school dance. Let me just tell you right now that I cannot dance at all. It’s painful to watch me try, but I had no idea of that fact when I was thirteen. I figured I could always cling to a wall. I walked up there from home, a few blocks away, wearing a dress my mom had purchased at the Gunne Sax outlet in San Francisco. It was pink taffeta, and had an asymmetrical ruffled hem in grey, and puff sleeves. This sounds hideous and 80s, and it was. The closer I got to the gym (a typical cavernous, peeling Oakland Public Schools type of building, probably full of asbestos and mice), the more I could hear a pervasive, low rumble that sounded like the cars driven by the older dudes – always wearing sunglasses — who’d pull up to Claremont at the end of the day to pick up the foxier eighth grade girls. I’d been told by a couple of friends that one of these girls had had sex with our cute substitute teacher in the janitor’s closet. But those cars had the same asshole puckering rumble as the gym where I was regularly humiliated during gym class when I failed to vault a pommel horse, lob a volleyball, run the track without fainting, or walk across a balance beam without getting a concussion. To be fair, I could do twenty consecutive layups at basketball.

My hideous dress and I walked into that pitch black gym and found our way to the nearest wall immediately. The noise was crushingly loud: bass bass bass and more bass. Over it there was the occasional blat blat of an overworked speaker and this disembodied robot voice talking about an Egyptian Lover. A girl I was friendly with grabbed my arm and attempted to teach me a dance called the Smurfette; eventually somebody put on some Prince (Purple Rain had just come out, and my older sister took me to see it in a tiny movie theater in the back of a shopping mall) and a guy who was probably a foot shorter than me shuffled along with me way out of rhythm with When Doves Cry. That’s an impossible song to dance to, seriously. I exited early to find my mom standing cross armed, with a pissed expression in the lobby between two massive guys from Tech – the high school down the street – who were sparking some weed. All the way home I heard the robot voice saying EGYPTIAN LOVER BABY. EGYPTIAN LOVER BABY. Later that night, I bundled the dress up in the back of my closet. That was probably the last time I ever wore pink.

Egyptian Lover, \”Egypt Egypt\”, 1984

What’s up, neglected blog? Remember me? That person who filled your pages with updates about book reviews and readings for a year or so? Yeah, not so much of that going on lately. I did a little Friday Five thing over at Deckfight about the best things I’ve read lately, but other than that my life has been mostly about teaching and this new book proposal. Speaking of the former, we had another big day of walkouts and marches last week — a national day of events to defend education. It’s getting more and more dire at Berkeley and at schools throughout California and the US. I think Berkeley gets hit particularly hard because we are so huge — there is always someone “disposable” when you’re working at an institution of this size. And my own department keeps getting squeezed tighter and tighter because writing seems to be perceived as one of those troublesome subjects that gets in the way of the ones that bring in corporate grant money (I don’t even teach creative writing, mind you — I suppose people expect those grant apps will be written by robots?). But even while the economy lurches toward “improvement”, those crumbs haven’t dribbled down into higher ed.

A friend recently re-posted a link to this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece that caused some mumblings around the blogosphere of humanities types who either nodded in sad agreement or protested that it goes to extremes (you need access to CHEd articles so, in a nutshell, he says that people shouldn’t bother to pursue PhDs in humanities because you’ll end up a suicidal adjunct, and yes, he uses the word “suicidal”). While I agree that there are plenty of reasons not to get an English PhD right now, I also think the argument has problems, i.e. there are plenty of people with PhDs who are terrible, terrible teachers anyway and the academies were well rid of them but for one problem: they’ve got tenure so they are never going away. Many of them do everything in their power to avoid teaching required courses like the ones I teach, and this creates a market for cheap, disposable labor in the form of grad students and adjuncts. It’s a self perpetuating cycle. There are plenty of terrible adjunct faculty too, plenty of terrible high school and K-8 teachers, just lots and lots of people who are straight up in the wrong career and are doing untold damage to millions of students.

Teaching is a vocation, period. The money sucks, the work is hard, there is little in the way of feedback about your performance and the rewards are sporadic. If you don’t love it and work hard at being good at it, you shouldn’t be doing it and you sure as hell should not be sitting perched in your cozy, secure tenured gig scoffing at those who do it well for sh*t money because you are doing something important in your research (which results in some impossibly dense, practically unreadable tomes that nobody wants to read but does anyway so they can kiss your ass at MLA). A fellow comp teacher was told recently by a tenured person that he is “doing God’s work” by taking those classes off the tenured person’s plate; a guy at a party recently called my program “heroes” for doing the same. A grad student at Cal said to me years ago that it was awesome that I taught comp so she could “have the poetry classes all to [her]self”. Guess what she’s got now? Tenure. People, we do this job not because we’re unqualified for anything else, but because we care about it, okay? So don’t gloat about how happy you are to wash your hands of it.

Do I wish I had tenure? Do I wish I occasionally taught creative nonfiction? Hell yes. Please give me a job like that; I’d be a pig in sh*it teaching comp classes and creative writing. I’d be blissful about the occasionall lit seminar. I could use the security, the better money, the time to write, the occasional essay that works without a thesis statement. But primarily I want to keep teaching because I think I’m good at it (students: you are free to disagree), because I love the classroom, because the stuff I teach actually helps people later on. You can’t write a good cover letter/resume/etc without a comp class. But if you got a PhD in humanities and assumed you were better than the people who teach comp classes and you’d never stoop to our level, well, that sucks, but the reality of this market has been clear for decades now, so you should maybe have seen the problem coming.

Did you have a crappy day yesterday in the face of all this mass manufactured Hallmark artificial love? If, so, you might take some consolation in reading this short essay I wrote for my friend Daniel House’s website, RockandRollDating. The site has a series of pieces my musicians about “Dates from Hell”, and I had a good time — looking back from twelve going on thirteen years in my current relationship — remembering how truly shitty dating can be when your date announces he’s headed to jail and might not see you again for a while. The essay’s called “The Curse of the Parking Ticket”.

A friend made a kind suggestion recently that in light of the recent Paste and Pitchfork articles about the death of indie, I should chime in and write some blog entries about that topic. This seemed especially important when I read the Paste piece and realized that if the writer had read my book, she might have come to some different conclusions. However, I am not in the mood to address this issue today. I will probably be in the near future, since my students are about to begin their unit on punk and indie in the 80s and 90s, but Fridays are not for book matters, or teaching matters.

Because my classes are compressed into Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, I treat Fridays like the Sabbath. I teach long days and have office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays I grade and do prep. That’s right — my course work eats up six days a week. This is not to say I prep and grade for more than eight hours a day, but there is always some task, faculty meeting, recommendation, email, committee, etcetera to be dealt with. And I don’t even have tenure! (side note: a tenured professor told me once that post-tenure, all he did was “f*ck around”, and then he smiled like a smug reptile.)

But this is not what I wanted to write about either. Rather, I wanted to write about writing. I fear this a narcissistic exercise much like painting about painting, acting about acting, dancing about dancing, or f*cking about f*cking (the latter, however, kind of makes sense). Many books about writing as craft or writing as process have the icky after-sensation of accidentally seeing your mom naked. And it’s not like I came here to write on of those mushy gushy inspirational pieces where some well-meaning soul tells you to drink a certain herbal tea or take yourself on an “art date” to get inspired when your muse is stuck in reverse or whatever, but rather the opposite. Students often seem frustrated in my classes — not because I am (usually) a jerk (okay, I am sometimes a jerk), but because I cannot offer them some formulaic method for writing.

One student asked me last semester exactly how many sentences should be in each paragraph. Others want to know precisely how many quotes they should use, how many sentences of analysis per quote, and so on. Usually they come in writing five paragraph essays, and if I assign a five page essay I am often dismayed that it consists of five page length paragraphs. I do not blame high school teachers for this, or elementary school teachers, or any other teachers. I blame the crumbling edifice of public education in California. But my students have to learn to write sometime, or else they will not survive Berkeley. That’s why they get placed in my courses.

Over the years, I’ve test driven a number of different books and essays that purport to teach people how to write, and none of them have worked. Sure, you can cobble together good suggestions from different sources, but as for the magic formula for writing so many people seem to seek, I have yet to discover it. For me, it’s lots of strong coffee, friends to complain to, cats, crappy reality TV, baking, cursing a lot, psychotherapy, playing the Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” over and over. I do not write much during the semester, because my attention needs to be focused on others’ work, and in the summer when I have a little more free time, I can’t write unless I have a project at hand. At the moment I am in the scary in between moment of having finished a book proposal but not being sure whether it will be published.  And in the meantime, that leaves blogging, emails, the occasional assignment for a book review or an essay. There’s no formula or plan for me when those things happen. I just marinate on a topic, research it, talk to people about it, think about it, and then one unplanned day I sit down and pound it out. This is not a teachable formula, so I’ve never been temped to ask people to pay me to learn it, because that would be ridiculous. Nor is it how I teach writing at Berkeley; I use a mishmash of sources and handouts and advice from colleagues, and over the decade I’ve been there I’ve managed to help hundreds of students pass my class. But that’s not “creative writing”; it’s academic writing, which is somewhat more teachable.

Sorry; I had to take a break and listen to the Geto Boys again. Anyway, you get the point. It’s not that I think creative writing can’t be taught at all; after all, I do have an MFA. It’s just that I sometimes mistrust the creative writing industry — the flyers I see for workshops that cost more than my rent, the books that purport to help you unlock your inner writer, the mugs and stuffed animals and pens and notebooks emblazoned with inspirational slogans and so on. It’s just clutter, not magic. When I got my MFA I received four copies of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as gifts, and while they were sincerely given, I just had to laugh. Rilke certainly has a lot to teach us, but it’s not in the advice he handed out — it’s in the poems. And that, I suppose, is the magic formula for learning to write. In the long run, you just have to read.