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Two things about this reading from our visiting writer I feel so lucky to have scored my first year here:

• “There’s no such thing as formlessness.” — This as a kind of refrain toward the end of his reading “No Easy Task”. TSE (fortunate poetic initials; I’ve heard Thomas now twice make Prufrock jokes) read with James Middlename Louis/Lewis, a saxophonist, who played along. It was great, a performance more than a reading, esp. for this poem about performance. At any rate, I found it useful advice, particularly at a time when I’m wanting less control in my paragraphs, or I’m wanting to exert less control over my paragraphs.
• Poems don’t have a lock on poetry. — This in response to a person’s question about the pressures Ellis feels to progress as a poet, or with his poems. Poems are something we exchange or talk about in workshops, but poetry is something harder to grasp and something larger. Something regarding imagination, invention, and so on. I, self-absorbedly, tried to see if there’s a nonfiction equivalent. I think some would argue that essays don’t have a lock on essaying, and that’s true in a way I can’t do much with. It’s true that poets and fiction writers essay. I often like to say that memoirs don’t have a lock on nonfiction, but again—Ellis’s statement isn’t quibbling over subgenres’ ownership of the genre. I see it as a project: what art of nonfiction can the nonfictioneer practice beyond the page. What, that is, other than winning at pub trivia night, which I hope to do again this Thursday with my stellar team: Panda Express?

Perhaps what’s most exciting about Thomas being here this year at USF is that his latest book, Skin Inc., has a section titled “The Judges of Craft”. Here’s its epigraph:

Thanks for your note. We’re actually very interested in poems that address issues of race and racism and wish we could run more of them. Most of what we get in that regard is mere subject matter; that is, there’s not enough craft to carry to content (though this is certainly not the case with “Spike Lee at Harvard,” which I am sure you’ll place somewhere very good).

There’s enough to be said about “craft” as a concept and as a law in the instruction and proliferation of writing, but that’s another post. This one’s about this: yearlong visiting writers are such a valuable resource (potentially) to writing programs they should be granted a kind of tenure. It’s an incredible thing to have a well published, well respected member on the full faculty who’s leaving at the end of the year. Every program needs such a shake up.

The Schadchen^[†] was defending the girl he had proposed against the young man’s protests. “I don’t care for the mother-in-law,” said the latter. “She’s a disagreeable, stupid person.” — “But after all you’re not marrying the mother-in-law. What you want is her daughter.” — “Yes, but she’s not young any longer, and she’s not precisely a beauty.” — “No matter. If she’s neither young nor beautiful she’ll be all the more faithful to you.” — “And she hasn’t much money.” — “Who’s talking about money? Are you marrying money then? After all it’s a wife that you want.” — “But she’s got a hunchback too.” — “Well, what do you want? Isn’t she to have a single fault?”

It’s not without tedium, the book, but not an unwelcome one to read alongside Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking (for teaching) and Barbara Walters’s How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything (for before bed, and for learning much about how to be a considerate person).

Herblock coined the term McCarthyism in an editorial cartoon he did for the Washington Post, my childhood home’s daily paper. He won multiple Pulitzers. In this house in Sonoma County N & I are staying at (its backyard pictured right) there’s a copy in one of the bedrooms of Don’t Call It Frisco, a collection of daily columns Herb Caen wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle (among others). It’s my new daily. Caen coined the term beatnik; his Pulitzer was honorary.

There’s a post to be written about what it means to begin my life in a city where one Herb combated political corruption and to end it (conceivably) in a city where another Herb spread gossip. But that’s not this post. This post is about two things I learned from reading Caen’s book this afternoon—half of which concerns Frisco^[1] movers-and-shakers of the 1950s and is thus chiefly unreadable.

FIRST THING: Narrative turns the merely uncanny into jokes

Greg Hobson, an aspiring artist who sells suits at Moore’s […], walk[ed] in Bernstein’s Fish Grotto and ask[ed] for a whole crab. When it was brought to him, he studied it carefully and then decided: “It’s the wrong color. Bring me another.”

Well, they thought he was a little peculiar, to say the least, but they brought him another. This one was O.K. […]

As you’ve guessed by now, Hobson wanted the crab for painting, not eating, And after he’d done the crab’s portrait, his fellow workers at Moore’s admired the canvas so much that it was hung in the suit department.

A few days later, a suit customer walked in, saw the painting of the crab, and said: “I’d like to buy that to hang in my office.” Which he did. The purchaser: George Skaff, then manager of Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.

Greg Hobson’s crab was home again.

I can think of a tweet or a Fun Fact: The painted crab at Bernstein’s was actually bought at Bernstein’s. Wacky, huh? Only in New York!^[2] Backing up, starting from the top, delaying the end—now you’re on your way to a joke.

SECOND THING: Perspective matters a lot and it’s hard to get out of your own

I won’t blockquote the whole thing because it’s not that good, but Caen talks about some reportage misfires, one being the car that never moved. He got a call from a woman about this car that had been parked across the street from her house for more than five years, but the weird thing was that the license plates got updated and the tires were always full of air. Who would bother with such a car? Caen called up the neighbors. Got no answer from the very house where the car was parked, but was told a similar story by the guy next door. Every day, same car, same position.

Caen wrote it up in the column the next day. Then he got a phonecall from the car’s bewildered owner: he worked every night from 11 to 7 (and I guess back in the 1950s it was possible to leave all night and find your same parking spot waiting for you). “It was simply that the three neighbors I had checked had never talked to him, and had never seen him drive the car,” writes Caen.

I was reminded of a thing that happened in grad school. I had four different offices on the third floor of Andrews Hall over the seven years that I worked there, and throughout that time there was a certain member of the faculty who, it seemed, was always in the men’s room when I went to the men’s room. Every time. Somehow this came up in conversation with my friend Tyrone. “He’s gotta piss like seventeen times a day,” I said. “I mean, he’s always in there.”

“You see him so often,” Tyrone said, “maybe he’s saying the same thing about you.”

I couldn’t’ve been given a better lesson in POV had they bothered to design a whole course around it.