I still read this thread sometimes, though, and try to figure out what if anything it all meant. I miss the Postmodernist. And I seem to have decided to blog again, despite myself, or because of myself, however ongoingly unreliable I continue to be, sub specie aeternitatus.

But oh, Ms. O, am I glad to see you here! In my head I privately refer to all this as the Real Name™ problem, (no) apologies to Am•z•n. And I completely agree—I’m sure it would change how I wrote as much as/more than what I wrote about. And then I also consider 1) how much I leave out now anyway, since some of those who read this share offices and houses and lunches and dinners and workshops and ex-husbands and hometowns and genetic material with me. And 2) that I wouldn’t stop writing the (relatively?) unfiltered stuff, but in fact the filter would change, would turn fictive, and there would just be a long time before the next post. Say, two or three years. For example.

It’s still stuck for me on this arm-wrestling between the practical idealism of the non-zero-sum game/the interwoven feeding-into-each other art forms, and the Realpolitik of being finite and not having met any of my fortieth-birthday literary, um, goals. Though this sounds so silly when I type it that I actually laugh aloud, and just think of the father in The Road looking at his son in amused disbelief, when the kid asks, “What are our long-term goals?”

I’m starting to think this is the kind of decision that I can’t make in suburban Tartarus. I walked last night around our neighborhood’s sidewalks until my feet in their sandals were blistered and hot, and my limbs were heavy, and yet I felt no sense of relief from my oppressive thoughts. Not to sound like I’m in a Jack London novel or anything. I just feel really, really fucking stuck, which surprises me, because I also don’t really think any of this matters, either in the small local how-do-I-best-do-writing sense, or the large universal the-sun-will-explode-and-eat-our-books-and-cities sense.

Some as-yet-undifferentiated or at least -articulated chunk of it comes down to a kind of “Good Old Neon” sense of my own pervasive, profound fraudulence, as well. Which is where the (poor, unwitting) Postmodernist’s introject comes in, pointing out to me meticulously just where I am Swiss cheese. Nonetheless it feels like real information; it doesn’t feel like just random blips of premenstrual self-loathing and rancour and recrimination. But the Professoressa says, when you feel like you are being given real information, stop anyway, and wait, and wait some more. Before you do anything, listen. Wait. And—her favorite two pieces of advice—drink lots of water and go on lots of long walks.

Thinking about a quick escape to Santa Fe or Flagstaff or ANYWHERE BUT HERE to do just that. The Brujo still has three weeks left to teach and we don’t go to LA until June—oh! And I forgot to tell you—I finally got an idea for Ignite Tartarus! “WHY WE STILL NEED FEMINISM.” With charts and graphs and brutal inescapable statistics, heh heh.

I got the May maudlins real bad, honey. And when you have them, by the way? Probably best NOT to reread The House of Mirth. Holy fucking EDITH that book is just UNRELIEVED TRAGEDY page after page after page. It’s positively FRENCH in the totality of its merciless stripping-away of any single advantage the protagonist temporarily possesses. While doing so in such staggeringly brilliant prose as makes me place my head in my hands and moan aloud in envy and greed. E.g.:

“…and Percy, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of accumulation.” OH SNAP.

The best is that I bought this copy from Cursie’s, the thrift store across the street, for 25¢, and it’s an edition from the fifties which comes with the handwriting of the original owner in the front:

Susan Hughes
Chi Omega House
p. 101 trapped by society

Miss Hughes appears not to have noticed any irony in thus dedicating her book. I treasure it inordinately.

Okay, sorry, this should all go on goodreads anyway. Social networking, you are KILLING ME. Or at least entangling me in your knot and confusing me greatly.

And another thing playing into all this—a speech the Professoressa gave last year at the Women’s College convocation, in which she said:

Be cautious about markets. Protect yourself and those you care for from too much vulnerability in markets. They are seeping deep into our society into arenas where they have never been allowed to operate before. Pay attention to this. I also try to take all the admonitions about making myself competitive in the marketplace with more than a grain of salt; I ration my exposure to such messages and try to keep my balance when they seem unusually loud or pervasive. In Plan B, one shapes a life, not a career. A good life requires good work, because, as someone said, “work is your love for your community made visible.” And only you, not the marketplace, know what is your good work.

This (and all the rest of her brilliant shadow-address, in which she functions as the psychological priest of the college by reminding two thousand insanely ambitious women of the importance of surrender, openness, and Plan B) is swirling around in my brain along with Wharton, Martin Eden, Jude Hawley and Sue Bridehead (“It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one”), Paul Fussell, Living by Fiction, Invisible Man, Sontag’s Salmagundi interview, the agonizingly bad essay I read last night on Melville, and great indigestible gobs of Wallace. But this is what I came to grad school for, right? To have all the certainties messed up and moved around and rearranged and disarranged and complicated insolubly?

Plan B. What is Plan B? I’m going for another walk.

It’s not my own privacy I am worried about—having no non-bloggy connection with you, it’s fine for me that oleoptene is everywhere but here connected to my name. Still—I probably am more candid here than I am on my own blog because this is not connected with my more-prominent-than-me husband, because I don’t think of clients of his doing searches on him and arriving here.

The loss, I think would be a sense of you filtering, performing for an audience who wanted you to be something different than you are here—without saying that the voice of this blog is pure unperformed candor, it would be like, like—seeing my father performing in his job as teacher—the same face, voice, stories and so forth but turned to this other purpose of educating these other kids and somehow not-my-father? I’m not sure that the projection for students and colleagues and mentors and family members wouldn’t somehow change not just what you talked about but how you talked altogether?

But maybe I think what I haven’t wholly untangled is the knot of privacy versus shame versus protection of the innocent versus security in an age of freaks, creeps and stalkers versus the privilege of knowing that Superman is walking in the front door of the Daily Planet right now, cleverly disguised with a pair of glasses—that the layer of secrecy is enticing, a little, when we can hide our deepest secrets in plain sight?

Or maybe I just have a case of the May maudlins and really hate even the most inevitable of changes in something I love, something that is important to me.

I always answer my own questions, too.

The typewriter thing was only because right after I posted that link, someone *bought* it before I could. And I got very grumpy and/or paranoid. But this is our cyberswirl.

Well, and he isn’t here. And I went to Tucson and he also wasn’t there. Some who knew him are having a really hard time with his recent persistence in non-existing. And I just wish I could do something about that.

And for that record which no one is keeping and few of us even think to consult anyway: I roll only my eyes at people who think Sideways is a good movie. Not at love.

You? At the risk of having to hear your eyes roll from all the way across this desert that separates us (as well it should): you I care about. I’ve thought about you every day for more than four years and I’ll think about you every day for four or forty more, whatever my allotment, as long as I think. There is nothing special about this. It just happens to be so (if you’ll excuse my hyperbole regarding all tomorrows, since the future is undoubtedly inscrutable).

Somehow, astonishingly, there appears to be harmony and balance in our worlds. We aren’t alone (thank the fates or the gods or Nature), despite the constant inherent loneliness (see “silly” or perhaps “excruciating”). We have times and opportunities to create. Good people have our interests at heart (and we theirs). All I need now and then is to know you’re more or less okay (regardless of life’s inescapable horrors). The steady blip from secondhand radar seems to be just enough for my equilibrium. Please stay in range.

All right. Time to drift back into the shadows. This private ping-pong thread needs to be put to bed. Would it be okay if I were to occasionally allow myself to think of myself as (ahem) that gracefully aging older poet (I’m no poet) from your proximal dream? Might I earn and hold some measure of your respect? This would make me happy (happier).

PS The lowercase stiltedness was intentional, of course, a mask among too many masks, but thanks for all of the tidying nonetheless—if you only knew under what antiquated coal-mining conditions I labor—and the DFW reference was simply me mocking you (I have half of a sternum and a femur or two of mockery in this body, alas).

PPS Your question about the typewriter was too allusive for my feeble fever-ridden mind to contemplate.

This is not what I meant at all, at all. Or intended. I certainly never thought rabid strangers would re-assemble carefully shredded data like the crazed biographers in Possession. I didn’t think anyone would care that much. Bugger.

I also freely admit that I have been utter crap at finding even marginally appropriate pseudonyms. Bluh.

Finally, not only all that, but let it also number among my multifarious sins that I’m officially the slowest paper-grader in Christendom. It’s nearly 10 am and I’ve been up since six, here in this ugly office with helicopters slavering overhead like it’s in COMPTON or something (because today is graduation at the State School and we have this rather famous commencement speaker), and I’ve graded how many? SIX PAPERS. Bargh.

As for dam-busting, however, don’t you worry your fevered brow about it. I’m not a drowning man, I’m a tumbler! Born under punches. Take a look at these hands.

This whole unreliable thing, though, is finally, IM not so HO, completely frustrating. It has defied me and turned writhing and mutinous on its creator, as I should have known it would do, because such ingrate behavior is a definitional property of writing.

(I think, by the way, that the words you were groping for, there in those parentheses above, to modify “unreliability”? Were possibly, for example, “bloody irresponsible.”)

Alors: What [to quote a non-gentleman] Is To Be Done?

Yes, the latter. Could it be because it mimics an attempt at genuine inquiry?

(I’m just lamely trying to be [rhetorically interrogative and] funny…anyway I find myself asking “questions” of my students when I’m trying to trick them into thinking they’re being invited to a genuine discussion, instead of furtively trying to subject them to a crypto-lecture. It always leaves me feeling befouled afterward. As in, after every class.)

* “who is no longer here, he just isn’t”…are you on the wallace-l listserv too?! Or did I write this also somewhere else.

And you didn’t answer my question about the typewriter. I noticed that.

This time—and perhaps of undeniable prescient significance—it was one of my favorite pop songs: “Here’s Where the Story Ends”

I think you should write whatever and wherever you most want to write. If this is the space, so be it. It’s obviously brought a lot of people lots of pleasure. Still, your other website, with real names and real faces and the invited potential of shared voices, still whimsical and visceral and plucky, that sounds grand, too.

Whatever you do, don’t turn off the tap. Bust the dam.

Sleepwalkers or Guiltless or Death of Virgil? The latter, of course—why have I always insisted on asking you rhetorical questions?

Well, I was gonna make you the Modernist; but it just never stuck, somehow.

Whoever he was, he’s apparently gotta lotta time on his hands! A writer, obviously. I would be angry with this person but to be honest I kind of marvel at and admire the ingenuity.

Can’t chat now, busy plugging the leaks.

* OF COURSE YOU DID.