the faceting machine
Friday 26 September 2008 | someone left a cookie
Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. (CG Jung)
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Suffering from near-crippling anxiety, Wallace found himself unable to write. “I don’t think he’d been able to write for more than a year,” says his father. Wallace told the human resources department at Pomona College that he would be unable to teach there in the fall, and he was granted a medical leave for the fall semester.
His students at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., remember the committed, engaged teacher: Amanda Shapiro had taken writing classes with him the past three years, and recalls the copious comments she got back from him about her assignments. “He would write five pages of notes on a six-page story,” she says, “and put so much care and thought into helping us as writers. He would type out the letters, and then annotate them, in pen, with little smiley faces and notes and corrections.”
His sister Amy described emotions ranging from disbelief to sadness to acceptance, of a sort. “Inevitably our thought was, if only he could have held on a little bit longer,” says sister Amy. “And then we realized, he did. How many extra weeks had he hung in there when he just couldn’t bear it? So we’re not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him.” (salon.com, via anatomy of a dress)
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He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn’t escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, “Oh boy, don’t even get me started on teaching….The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work….I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it’s a little bit horrifying.” He looked like a trapped animal. He’d been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself. (Julian Gough for Prospect)
•There was an essential fanaticism…the sense of an entire life thrown into the great project of creating works of art. Even if we grant that you can be as original within the university as up in your garret, we must concede the possibility that something is lost by living a divided life. Intensity perhaps. The ability to focus hard and long on big, ambitious projects. A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it. It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require “balance” and “shifting gears” between teaching and writing, but below that civil language lurks the uncomfortable fact that the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.
But times have changed, and these days teaching creative writing is more of a job, with all of a job’s commitments and a job’s demands. And those demands often crash up against the necessary fanaticism of the writing life. “Death by a thousand cuts” is how a colleague of mine described the academic life. Papers, students, classes, meetings, grades. They come all day like electric jolts, making it hard to be a good monk. (David Gessner for the NYT)
•We went to the movies. We went to the big multiplex Bloomington theater to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. As we were buying the tickets, the girl in the booth asked us: “Do you know this has subtitles?” We looked at each other. “We just have to tell everyone that,” she explained. “So,” Dave asked her, “Do some people find out that it has subtitles, and then change their minds?” He spoke slowly, but sincerely. “Yes,” she told him, “We’ve had a lot of people walk out and ask for their money back.” “Amazing,” he said to me, as we walked away. But this is Bloomington, Illinois, I was thinking. This is middle America. You’re amazed?
We stayed in the theater long beyond the credits, after everyone had left the theater. When we finally left, we walked through the parking lot trying to fly, the way the characters do in the film. We kept jumping, running, and jumping—but we couldn’t fly. (the magnificent repat blues [his former student, and friend] via—yes—crazymeds.us)
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Sheesh…. Now I see what you’re saying. I even read this, but didn’t register who it was about . Not even sure why it registered now.
This line stuck out to me: “And then we realized, he did. How many extra weeks had he hung in there when he just couldn’t bear it? So we’re not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him.”
Sad. :(
More to be said on this topic, but Electric Company theme is summoning me.