Category: Obvious Things

I recently refrained from posting anything about the #HeterosexualPrideDay Twitter hashtag designed, it seemed, to make people indignant. But I’ve been thinking about it. And I’ve been thinking about white feelings of marginalization and malinformed notions of fairness and came up with a kind of parable.

Is it a parable, Jesus?

Imagine you are a student in school, and this is the year you have the meanest teacher you ever had. She^[*] gives demerits or detentions for the slightest note-passing, or talking to your neighbor. She grades on a 1-100 scale even though most of the work is qualitative and impossible to assign points to, and thus when you are handed a 73 on your paper and your quiet friend who never studies gets a 92 you have no understanding of what has happened.

In short, she’s a tyrant. You don’t have to be here. You could drop out of school. You could ditch most days. But you know that there are consequences for these actions, and you have a plan for your life that entails you passing this grade and eventually graduating. And so you’re stuck. You’re stuck with a very mean teacher who has all the power in the room.

One day, your teacher comes in with the principal behind her. She is shouting something about chairs. She has just one chair at her desk and one stool at the front of the room, whereas the twenty-five of you all have chairs behind your desks. There is an imbalance of chairs between teacher and students. Furthermore, she is forced to stand and write on the blackboard while you and your classmates get to sit all day. “It’s unfair,” she says. “Why should students get special treatment?”

The principal brings in a custodian and together they take away all of your chairs. You’re now forced to stand during class, while your teacher sits. Still, though, she hands out detentions left and right. Still, her grades seem punitive and unreasonable.

Any white person complaining about the lack of a White History Month or white representation in media or advertising or on packaging is this teacher. Every straight person wondering where the straight pride parades are is this teacher. From a fundamental inability (or outright refusal) to understand how she has all the power in the room, the teacher’s actions have made a bad classroom even worse.

And worse for everyone. No bad teacher’s job is going to get easier or more rewarding with twenty-five pissed off students glaring at her every morning.

I know it goes without saying to anyone reading this blog, but if you number among the majority in a situation, you have power those who don’t number among you can’t access or use in any way. When these people make something of their own (a holiday, a parade, a hashtag, a T-shirt) that doesn’t include you, it cannot take that power away from you. The only thing that can take power away from you is laws and policy.

But then again, you have all the numbers to vote against it.

[This is going to be a useless and boring post for anyone not looking to nab a convenient Global Entry interview at the San Francisco International Airport. (Or not my mom.) But because the information on how to navigate these waters is (from official govt. sites) hidden or (from Yelp and other such places) wrong and misleading, I thought I’d do a public service here. You’ve been warned. Click away.]

On April 11, 2017, I got the notification that I was approved for Global Entry, and was invited to schedule an interview to complete my application. I logged onto the official system and the soonest appointment was in November. (I’m flying abroad in late May.) This is because Republicans have defunded the government, and we should all feel nationally disgusted.

Neal found online that SFO accepted walk-ins, meaning you didn’t have to wait until your official appointment. Here are some notions from the general wisdom online (all of these are false/no longer true, btw):

• The SFO Global Entry office only takes 6 walk-ins a day.
• Walk-ins are only accepted first-thing in the morning; or, similarly, to be accepted as a walk-in, you have to be there before the office opens (at 7am).
• To ensure being seen, you should show up before 5am.

Again, ALL OF THIS IS WRONG. IT’S WRONG. DON’T LISTEN.

Here’s what happened with us, today, Thursday May 4, 2017:

1. Reading Yelp reviews of this, we decided to show up just before noon.
2. We parked, as folks suggested, in the G garage, but the G garage wasn’t initially visible. First you have to follow signs for International Terminal, then once you are heading there go to International Hourly Parking, and THEN you’ll see a sign for the A and G garage. You for sure want G (to the left).
3. We arrived at the Global Entry office (follow the clear signs) right at noon. There were maybe 20 people sitting and standing around. We were discouraged, having thought from online reading that we’d get seen within minutes.
4. Within ten minutes, an officer came out of the locked office with clipboards. He first asked if anyone had an appointment. A number of people did. They got checked in, and were thus at the top of the list.
5. Neal said we were walk-ins and asked if there was a signup sheet. The officer handed it over and Neal put our names in, along with the Program Membership numbers that were written on our Global Entry approval letters. (Print this out or screenshot it on your phone if you can’t print.)
6. We were in the middle of the second page of walk-in signups. There were 10 names ahead of us in line.
7. How It Goes I: Every 10 minutes, an officer comes out. They ask first “Anyone have an appointment?” If they have an appointment that day, they will get invited inside first. It doesn’t matter when their appointment is. If their appointment is 3 hours away, they will be ushered in. Always.
8. How It Goes II: If no one around has an appointment, they will announce the next name on the walk-in list. So: If you don’t get your name on the walk-in list you will never be seen.
9. Just before 1pm, an officer announced that they were taking no more names on the walk-in list until the 3pm shift started. How many total names were there on the list at that point? I don’t know. My guess if that 5 or 6 more walk-in folks showed up after us.
10. By 1:15/1:20 it was clear that all the appointment folks had all been seen. More and more folks from the walk-in list were being called. Also: many of those walk-in folks who’d shown up hours ago had given up and left.
11. Neal got called right before 1:30. I got called around 1:45, having to wait for a number of 1:30 appointment folks to show up and get seen. One guy had a 3:30 appointment, but still got to leap ahead of us all. So: If you have an appointment SHOW UP THAT DAY WHENEVER YOU’D LIKE and you’ll get ushered warmly inside.
12. We were back at the garage at 2pm. It cost $20 total to park, paid via our Fastrak.

Where our federal government is so visibly awful is when it comes to transportation. This is not a failure of Government as a concept, it is a function of post-80s life in the United States (i.e., the only life I’ve ever known). It’s unconscionable that we were told we had to wait six months to complete our application?our application not to be accosted in customs?when the truth of the matter is we just had to show up on any random afternoon and be seen in good time. But that’s the world we’ve chosen to live in.

To say nothing of how much money it cost to get a passport ($135) or to enroll in Global Entry ($100). To say nothing of how much time it cost to get these: 2 hours to prepare req’d materials and visit a post office to apply for a passport; 3+ hours to apply for and get interviewed for Global Entry. All this aside from the cost of traveling abroad. Leaving the country is now a privilege for the wealthy, which is another shame we should all nationally feel. The United States?in the name of, what…? national security??makes it extraordinarily difficult to leave the country and see how life is lived elsewhere.

Like a cult does.

Not right now, at least. But this one came from a student in my graduate fiction workshop, the first such class I’ve taught, which is ending tonight. The exercise or prompt involved taking an object?each of us wrote the name of an object on an index card, then these got distro’d at random?and … I think we had to either sketch the outline for a story or write a scene in which that object and got used, mentioned, or looked at in different ways.

Use The Object To Progress The Work was the gist of the exercise.

I didn’t bring any paper to class, so I had to use the index card itself. The object I got was “notebook”:

• Slam notebook seen as object passing hands near lockers between two rivals of narrator.
• Narrator in next class; passing mention of its designated notebook, places for notes taken, homework, etc.
• Daydream/reverie of what narrator’s page in slam book might look like. Dark and mean. Reveals a sense of narrator’s self-regard and martyr fantasies.
• Nicholas Sparks reference in dialogue at lunch.
• Oh, and there’s a new car that narrator has driven to school that day that narrator is sad people aren’t noticing, the newness. Also, there’s a threat of its removal from Dad if bad driving record.
• Narrator gets hands on slam notebook and finds the relevant page. Under name it says just “who?” or “Nobody.”
• Scene of confrontation/violence or humiliation in class; public exposure for perhaps the first time.
• Student drives home and misses a stop sign. Gets pulled over. Evocative use of cop’s notepad to issue an official ticket for narrator to then be codified criminally.

Do kids know what slam books are?

Last week I said I didn’t get why writers decided on the academic conference model for their annual get-togethers. I mean, I get it: we’re writers in the academy. To be allowed into the Ivory Tower and be subsidized by it, we had to play by some rules. Is that it, really? I don’t buy that we need to be scholarly in our conferences?even though our travel costs are, on the whole, covered by universities. Or: I don’t buy that we need to be scholarly the way scholars are scholarly.

To that end, here’s a few ideas on how to make a writers’ conference not only more enjoyable, but a better place for the transmission of new ideas:

• Ban the reading of written papers. I acknowledge I’ve got a low threshold for boredom, but I can’t be the only one perpetually bored by these. The thing with the paper is that despite its endgame (i.e., being read aloud to a group of quiet strangers) the aim of the paper (delivering new ideas about writing) doesn’t offer room for most people to make it listenable-to and engaging. It’s a written thing, and as writers we work to make it our own?when what it should be is everybody else’s. Ban the reading of written papers.
• Ban the reading of PowerPoint slides. Just because you have visuals doesn’t negate the above.
• Require any PowerPoint-style lectures to follow a PechaKucha format. Limit of 20 slides, each shown for just 20 seconds. That’s 6 mins 40 seconds for you to get new ideas across. It’s Twitter for conference presentations. Or, I don’t know, pick some other format?but provide restrictions, as Oulipan as they need to be, that writers will rise to the challenge of.
• Early deadlines for panel materials. Often the panelists on a panel don’t all know each other (when they do, get up and leave the room). This can be made a productive thing. Get half of them to turn in to the conference their materials (notes, slides, etc.) one month prior to their timeslot. Then send these materials to the other half of the panelists, who in putting together their talks should in some way acknowledge and respond to the first half’s. In short: force a conversation to happen across the panel. (Bonus outcome: no first-draft papers that were written on the plane ride over.)
• Strategize a few They-Said/They-Said panels. I say “strategize” because these can’t just go to anyone, but similar to the above, I’d much rather watch Writer A and Writer B size each other up at the dais on where they each stand on, say, place in nonfiction?with more of a two-way interview format going on than, of course, a debate?than I would Writer A talk, then Writer B, then Writer C, and then Writer D. A and B don’t need to disagree on anything, but each should have strong, new ideas and be curious about the other’s. Here’s a model in print of what I’m talking about, with Jennifer Egan and George Saunders talking about the future in fiction.
• On- and offsite readings need to showcase unpublished work in progress. We can all get access to polished work through the books/journals they’re in, but what’s hard to get access to is an artist in the midst of a project?except, of course, when we convene each year. So let’s take advantage of that moment by getting exposure to, and then maybe talking about, the anxiety of being only partially done with something.
• Accept only panels that have a diverse body of writers. I was talking about this with a friend at NonfictioNow. They blamed the whitewashed nature of the conference for its paucity of new ideas. And I thought: Wait, it’s not like the only new ideas are about race or gender. And then I realized: This wasn’t their point. It’s not that the only new ideas in writing, or the academy, anymore have to do with identity. It’s that a diverse environment stewards the airing and dissemination of new ideas. We conference in order to share new ideas. Put a bunch of different people in a room and you’ll end up with a dozen new ideas before lunch. Try it with people who share most things in common, and odds are those commonalities will get celebrated or reminisced about. Those are old ideas. They’re maybe even tired ideas. A writers’ conference shouldn’t be a family reunion, as much as we all annually miss each other.
• POST AWP16 UPDATE: Four white women is not a diverse body of writers.

I need to run to an appointment here, but that’s just a few off the top of my head. There are imaginative ways of doing anything. AWP is like the missionary position of conferences. Let’s all try to be sexier.

Spent the night on a good-sized sofa stretched along glass-fronted BILLYs full of poetry books. In the morning, I read this:

I cannot go on
restricting myself to images

because you think it is your right
to dispute my meaning:

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

I show it to my friend Peter, whose copy of Glück’s The Wild Iris it is, and I wow at it. “I’m stealing that,” I say, pointing at the final two lines. “Somehow. Might be a good epigraph for something.”

“It’d be a good epigraph for something about comedy,” he tells me.

Poets! They’re like drum sanders; you should be able to rent one out.

This idea’s been festering for a little over a year now. I’m ready to (hastily, between classes) articulate it I think.

Young people (i.e., people my age or younger, people who grew up using the Internet in at least high school) are embarrassed by the Internet, or by our constant use of it, our continual reliance on it, our generation’s identification with it.

Sure: it’s embarrassing. The internet is as stupid as it is useful.

The way this embarrassment gets expressed is fascinatingly by co-opting the language of people who aren’t good at the Internet.

When my students and some friends talk about the Internet, they—all of them, almost exclusively—talk about “the Interweb” or better: “the Interwebs” (referring to that moment when Bush referred to “the Internets” in the 2004 debates). I observed a student’s class where he made a tumblr for the course and called it “English 200 blawg”. This is the same thing. A blog for a class is an embarrassment. But if you can spell it or refer to it in a way that is consciously wrong or malapropistic, it’s like this signifier to the party of the second part that you are aware of how embarrassing it is to be talking once again about the Internet.

Adults just say “blog” and “the Web” and “the Internet”. They remain only objects, with way less significance. This isn’t about irony so much as it is about utility and self-doubt. It’s either pure humility, or the performance of same.

(I said it’d be hasty.)

The earnestness, no the seriousness behind the tone of the rest of this post on a blog’s comment section perfectly encapsulates the Internet for me.

[The start of a new feature on this blog it’s anyone’s guess I’ll keep up on a regular basis. “Obvious Things”. It stems from advice better writers have fed to my ears and eyes over the years, most recently from Pixar’s Emma Coates: “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.” I’m a loose tramp for the obvious idea. I welcome it right on in. Invention for me is a list-making process of weeding out obviousnesses, in the hopes that through dogged force I can find something interesting to say.

This week: obvious things to ask Ray Lewis, should I get the chance to interview him a la Visa & the NFL’s contest.]

1. Why are you so goddamned terrible?
2. Are you worried about losing brain functions via concussion?
3. Or have you already lost brain functions?
4. Was it from a concussion?
5. Do you think you make too much money, especially given the unemployment rate these days?
6. Have you read and did you enjoy Poe’s “The Raven”?
7. Can you tell me a little bit about why not?
8. Is “Ray” short for “Raymond” and if so, why not “Raymond Lewis”?
9. You’re only three years old than me, almost to the day, but why do you seem so much older?
10. Do you think that your being good at sports helped you get off easily with a misdemeanor plea in the Lollar-Baker stabbing deaths case of 2000, and during your 12-month probation did you go ahead and drink anyway because like why not you’re in the NFL?
11. Why do you think the Ravens haven’t been to the Super Bowl since?
12. Is it something the matter with you personally? Or are you more interested in placing blame elsewhere? Where, exactly?
13. Shouldn’t your favorite color be brown/various browns and not purple? That is, weren’t you lying to that little girl in your Visa commercial?
14. Do you even know that girl’s name?
15. My name is Dave. Do you like it?
16. I don’t have many black friends. Are you available?
17. I’m gay, does it show? Are you in the market for a gay friend?
18. What I’m saying is, even after some of those earlier questions, could we right here set up a kind of quid-pro-quo situation re friendship that would just dump all the world’s salt in the wounds of every actual NFL fan who didn’t win the contest I did win?
19. Did you see Dark Knight? How aren’t you like Bane, do you think?
20. What’ll it take to get you to admit right here that you voted for Romney?