The Business in Front of the Classroom

I'm standing in front of the classroom, by pant legs are soaked from running to class in a thunderstorm. I'm sweating through my sweater and floundering. My students seem to be staring at me, blankly, wondering what my credentials are. What on earth can this 28 year old teach me about my life? I feel them thinking this as I reiterate what a memoir is. After thirty minutes of talking at them, I ask if anyone has questions. Suddenly, a student takes her glasses off and cradles her head in her hands. She abruptly announces: "I think I might be in the wrong class."

This is a rocky start.

My teaching experience, up until today, has been limited to Thai children, who have no interest in learning English. If I remember correctly, some of them branch off in the forty student classroom and begin doing their make up in the back of the classroom. Many days ended with me walking home from school in daze, wondering: "What am I doing wrong?"

And now, I have a classroom full of 9 older students, all of them over the age of 55. They have lived lives that I have no idea about. And now, it's my job to teach them how to focus their efforts on writing about one facet of their journey thus far. And now, one of them has questioned my methods. The student who looks like she's having a meltdown, "who might be in the wrong class" is making my world fall apart. I wonder how many of her are in the classroom right now. Will they rise up and rebel against me?

She admits that she had no idea what a memoir was. She was under the impression that she would be free to write about her entire life. When I explain that she's thinking of an autobiography, she looks like she's not the only one under that impression. There will be a mutiny, won't there?

That's the way the first class ends. I pack up my things and watch as the students file out the door and wonder: "What am I doing wrong?" I will beat myself up over this for the next week, until I sit down to plan the second class, the night before it starts. I make a lesson plan for myself, guiding me through the two hour class, I make a PowerPoint with graphics and videos, I copy off examples of memoir writing and articles. I exhaust myself with planning until it's out of my hands and in the hands of fate.

The second class, is not so precarious. Students return as I set up my "act", they take their seats and wait for me to preform for them again. The nervous student from last week tells me that she almost didn't come back. That she thought about dropping altogether. It sounds like a threat, a challenge for me to prove myself. She's now become my main motivator. This one student is the litmus test for the entire class and if I can impress her, I might make it.

This time, I'm on my game. I give them so much valuable information that they furiously write notes, ask questions, make comments and share experiences. I assign them their first serious home work assignment: go home and write a 750 word essay about a specific theme in their lives. They appear to be up to the challenge.

The third class is where things take a miraculous turn. Students return and they sing praises of my skills. It's so odd, validating and unexpected that I don't know what to think. They've written their essays and want more. Unfortunately, the class ends after one more meeting. Knowing this, makes them feel an urgency I've never head of. They want more classes, they want more time with me. They've only just gotten in their groove that they need more motivation to write. One students said that she's contacted the director and complained that we need more classes. Another student, suggested that we all meet outside of the class at a local coffee shop and continue class. In other words, I've changed the way they see the written word.

At the end of class, I pack my things, shut down the class computer and say goodbye to my students. I'm moving in that all too familiar daze, but this time it's slightly different. It's not disappointment or anxiety. It's a sublime realization that I'm doing an okay job at this teaching business. In fact, I might be good at it. I might actually know what the hell I'm doing!

I don't know if I've been praised of motivating another person to write and write well. Their excitement is motivating to me and I now know what it means to work hard not to disappoint another learner. I have one more class meeting with them and I'm nervous and excited to feel their energy again. I have to make a plan, I have to find a way to invest in their writing goals and push them forward.

Is this what teaching is? Having already been on the opposite end of teaching, the frustrating one; this is exhilarating. I've learned that this is quite possibly the thing that I was meant to do.

How To Write a Memoir

Why does the story of my life need to be told?


This is the question I will ask on the first day of my Memoir Writing class at the university. My students, who are older people (55+), will have lived lives that probably warrant recording, but why? What have they seen though out American history? What changes and events have they experienced? What makes those changes and events so important?

I'm in the process of planning this class, which starts in mid-April, and I've been thinking about lives that have been written down. I sit amongst stacks of books, borrowed from the library, all filled with tales of other people's lives and ask: Why were these lives so interesting that they were deemed publishable?

As I sift through them, I noticed that these people know about to spin a good yarn about one facet of their lives. They have careers, childhoods, neurosis or travels that are intriguing enough to read about. They write about these events in such a way, the reader is pulled in and forced to see the world through a new lens.

Just by reading, you're taken from your bus ride to work to Anthony Bourdain's kitchen in Manhattan, where the sous chef is screaming at a coked out waiter about beef wellington. You're feeling the exhaustion and anxiety of Barbara Ehrenreich's 10 hour day of waitressing for below-minimum-wage. You're in the car with Hunter S. Thompson on an amphetamine addled journey to Las Vegas.

From the most mundane to the frantic, individual lives are so colorful that most must be recorded. Just by reading these books, I think of my own life. All 28 years have been fraught life changing events that need recording. The fear of dogs began when I was eight. I was chased up the block by a yappy dachshund who forced me to jump on the hood of a park car. I blame my mother on that embarrassing day. Her fear of dogs transferred to me and it would be something for me to deal with for years.

I can express this story in a poem, that's my medium. I want to let my students that they can express their stories in different mediums as well. Their stories don't have to be chronological chapter accounts that start at the crib and end today (that's technically an autobiography, anyway). They can write essays, a book of poetry or draw the whole thing like Persepolis. So long as they tell a good story.

I'm really excited to learn from my students as well. They have a lot to share with me about living in Toledo, OH, raising children, fighting in wars. My job will be to teach how to share with the world. I look forward to the task!

James Baldwin Thinks You're Unhappy

What would James Baldwin think of our First Negro President?

If he met him today, what would he say? The closest we have to such an answer, is in the book The Cross of Redemption. It's an collection of essays, speeches and letters written by James Baldwin and I'm enthralled by it, reading at the laundry mat, in between washing cycles and folding.

In the speech, called Nationalism, Colonialism and the United States, Baldwin recalls a conversation he had with Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy promised, "'. . . that one day---thirty years, if I'm lucky---I can be President too.'" Baldwin claims that he's not so wrapped up in what happens on the day this "first Negro President" takes office, but what kind of country he'll be president of.

And then we get into what the Negro Problem actually is, in 1961, how it pertains to the former days of colonialism and what it says about nationalism today. According to Baldwin, there was no Negro Problem, instead there is a nation-wide degradation of culture at the hands of capitalism.

Whew! It took me a while to read and then reread this speech, but I think I might have a grasp on it. Reading essays and speeches written by James Baldwin is difficult for me because of his tricky but elegant way of streaming together ideas. It's like reading Faulkner but more exciting!

He then asks us, the audience, Americans, why we're blind to how unhappy our lives are. "It is astonishing that in a country so wealthy, and with nothing to fear in principle, everyone should be so joyless, so that you scarcely meet anyone who hasn't just come from a psychiatrist, or isn't just running off to one."

The main distraction at the time was this supposed Negro Problem and Communism. The minor distraction that Americans had in aiding their blindness, that made them feel better about Harlem riff raff and Cuba located 90 miles away, was having a small piece of "American living."

Having a "Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence," is what's making everyone think they're "just fine." Baldwin finds it bewildering that in a country "so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak." Well, when everyone is so comfortable with the materialism they possess, there's hardly enough room to be revolutionary.

Baldwin speaks a bit about the middle class and it's complacency, citing that "there is nothing but a middle class in this country, because no worker thinks of himself as a worker." Evan and I have talked about this ever-expanding illusion of the middle class. After our country's last financial crisis, you'd think that people were more aware of the shrinking middle class. But we all think we're in the comfortable middle.

If Baldwin were alive today, he would see that there is a new exploited group of people. With hardly any manufacturing jobs left in America, the information industry is quickly becoming blue collared. That includes most college students and their professors, retailer and anyone else who isn't "making" something.

So what kind of country is Barack Obama president of? With the exception of The Negro Problem and Communism, things are pretty much the same as they were in 1961.

• No one produces anything, instead, we consume everything. 
• We're still fighting the tired battle of States Right, not with integrating schools, but with gun control, immigration reform and abortion rights. 
• We're still using, what Baldwin called, "a paternalistic" manner in which to police the world. We're no longer disciplining  Red Vietnam, but our new problem children are Iraq and Afghanistan, who refused, for a decade, our help to spread freedom and democracy within their borders.
• Americans are still unhappy and don't know why. 

So there we are. Some things never change and sometimes we never learn from the past. Who really knows what Baldwin would think of Obama. While it's fantastic that there is a black man that can call himself leader of the free world, I think Baldwin would ask us, "Just how free do you think you are?"

writing books

For some reason I thought I was could just assemble a motley crew of poems into a book and send it out. I'm a little lazy. That's not how you write books. I'm almost certain of it. And besides, the bushel of poems are struggling to figure out how they know each other.

"Were you written by the same person who wrote me?"
"Maybe, is she the same one who was obsessed with Sartre two years ago?"
"I'm not sure about all that, my author was on a big squirrel kick."

This is to say, most of these poems lack cohesion. A certain over-arching theme to bring them together. And then there's that whole statement of purpose you send a prospective editor. I don't have one of those either. I have no statement that clearly says what this gaggle of poems represents or who the lunatic who wrote them is.

My husband came up with a terrifying idea. "Why don't you fill in this collection with new poems? That should tie them together somehow."

You want me to write more?? You want me to actually work at this? And that's when I got down to the root of the problem. I was stuck in a corner and I wasn't prepared to write my way out. I thought it would be easier than this.

This is what happens when you haven't created in months. You feel bloated with medieval humors; lackluster, dull and frustrated. I've been suffering from the malaise of "not creating." Let's mix more medical metaphors: Assembling a chapbook was supposed to be the band-aid covering a gushing head wound!

When it didn't work, when I became light-headed from the blood lost, I had to return to the drawing board. I read three books. Four chapters of a terrible paperback romance, two essays out of a sexual identity book, and about six poems from an anthology.

Reading. Who knew that was the trick? I'm being ironic, of course. I know that to become a decent writer, you must get out of your own head and into a book.

The very act of reading produced two poems today. This effort must be done, much to my chagrin. My husband reminded me that there are no short cuts in creating. I have to remind myself that although I am the deity over my own work, I'm not necessarily God. I cannot create a chapbook in seven days.

Ringing in the New Year to the Tune of Existential Blues: A Review of Cornel West's "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir"

            In his review of the 2009 memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir, Scott McLemee derides Dr. Cornel West’s reflective work, calling the text “the most disappointing thing I have read in at least a year.” The focus of McLemee’s critique centers on the reviewer’s belief that Brother West did not make good on a late-1990’s promise Dr. West made to compose “an intellectual autobiography ‘modeled on black musical forms.’” In short, McLemee felt let down by the memoir, arguing that it did not meet the intellectual and scholarly standards put in place by Dr. West’s earlier writings (most notably, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism). Compared to McLemee’s favorite conceptually dense and stimulating Dr. West texts, Brother West is only, at its core, about “how Cornel West feels about Cornel West.”

            To be honest, I can see where Mr. McLemee is coming from. There were several moments during my reading of Brother West where I stopped, looked up from the book, and thought, “My goodness, this man wants us to know a lot about how many people he knows and how important his scholarship is to the American racial-political-economic discourse.” The following selection from the memoir, which McLemee also cites in his review, nicely demonstrates an example of West’s “West-centeredness”:

“I like seeing Race Matters translated into Japanese, Italian, and Portuguese. I like seeing The American Evasion of Philosophy translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Italian. I like that there are hundreds of thousands of copies of my book Democracy Matters translated into Spanish. There’s also an edition that’s selling in the French-speaking world. I like the fact that all nineteen of my books are still in print with the exception of the two that won the American Book Award in 1993” (248).

            It is difficult to read a couple hundred pages about Dr. West’s intense emotional and spiritual connection to those whom he refers to as “the least of these,” only to be confronted with an unabridged “Gratitude” (i.e. “Acknowledgements”) section that serves as an inflated who’s-who list of Ivy League faculty and internationally-acclaimed intellectuals. In fact, I don’t remember West individually naming any of “the least of these” whom he has encountered in his ample bluesman wanderings—although I do remember him, on many occasions, engaging in some heavily-seasoned academic name-dropping.

            But for all of Mr. McLemee’s gripes (many of which are justified), and for all of Dr. West’s unabashed mantra recitation and self-promotion (“I’m a bluesman in the life of the mind, and a jazzman in the world of ideas,” ad infinitum), Brother West floored me with its heart and message; a heart and message I needed in my life right now. While I agree that the memoir could have done more theoretically and substantially, what it did do was enough for me to love it and need it. 

            And, to be fair, it is important to note that Dr. West did not intend for the memoir to reach for original or unique theoretical heights. Nor did he intend for the text to serve as a model for how others should think or live their own lives. In a 2009 interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Dr. West said he hoped his text could work “maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice.” And, in reaching towards these hopes, I think Brother West was successful.  

            In the chaotic midst of academic paper deadlines, graduate-level reading assignments, other graduate school application submissions, and planning lessons and grading student papers, I had forgotten, from the fall of 2010 to the early winter of 2012, about death. Not forgotten about death’s existence as a concept—the human tragedies plaguing the covers of international news periodicals have made it so that death is in my line of vision, in plain black and white, every day (whether I want to look at it or not is another matter.) People who were once now aren’t, because of a bomb or a bullet or a disease. But death as an end did not feel real, that is, it did not feel like a personal reality (i.e., something that could happen to me, as a twenty-something-year-old taxpaying white man living in Middle America) in the face of such dynamic and multi-faceted life (viewed both through my eyes and the eyes of computer and television screens) until I read the following words in Brother West:

“To be human is to call for help. We [West and his friend, scholar James Melvin Washington] saw birth itself as a catastrophe: you’re thrown in space and time to die. The flesh fails. Then the question becomes simple—how you gonna cope? Life is shot through with contradictions and incongruities. But that doesn’t mean that any ol’ life is acceptable” (101).

            Dr. West’s call to be present in the understanding of our mortality is, of course, nothing new. The well-known theologian Thomas à Kempis, in his seminal early-fifteenth Christian treatise On the Imitation of Christ, writes:

“Very quickly there will be an end of thee here: look what will become of thee in another state. To-day we are here, to-morrow we disappear, and when we are gone, quickly also we are out of mind…Thou oughtest so to order thyself in all they thoughts and actions, as if thou wert about to die” (43).

            What West and his Medieval Catholic forebear are calling for is not to be confused with any Tim McGraw song-styled pop philosophy. Their advice is not for the faint of heart, not to be painted into an alliterated aphorism like “Live, Laugh, Love” and placed above one’s kitchen sink. What Dr. West calls “the death shudder” is the understanding of a cold-blooded reality: We’re here. We’re not always going to be here. And in the moment between here and not-here, we’re going to have a chance to decide if being here was worth it. That moment will be lonely, painful, and potentially terrifying. But it will no doubt come. So what do we do while we’re here to make that inevitable moment less awful?

            Dr. West spends the entirety of Brother West answering that final question with a resounding and unequivocal “Love each other!” And I say, in the funky words of one of West’s poetic idols, Marvin Gaye, “right on.” Mr. McLemee is spot-on with his critique that Brother West did not bring many new philosophical or sociological ideas to the table. But what it did offer was a re-presentation of a handful of very old ideas, maybe the oldest ideas: We’re here. We need each other. So let’s be good to each other.

            Sometimes a slim, readable reiteration of old ideas proves more valuable to an audience than an esoteric jargon-heavy doorstop, especially if said audience is likely marinated in 24/7 messages (visual, tactile, and sound-based) that promise it it’ll never die (or, perhaps more dangerously, that dying won’t sting too much) if it buys this or that thing (while slyly omitting the wicked and unappetizing death-shudder fact that the thing will likely outlive its buyers, regardless of the buyer’s best efforts). I appreciate Dr. West’s blues-based effort to tap readers on the nose and say, kindly and with gapped-tooth mouthfuls of tragi-humor, “The results are in. You’re not going to make it. But try to do some good before you go.” It was a nose-tapping I needed and will continue to need until that final not-here moment.

The Politics of Teaching Finger Painting: A Revisited Look at Contemporary Elementary Education

            The local coffee shop is covered in abstract art depicting nude, Caucasian female bodies in suggestive positions. Full-grown adults order their lattes and vegan scones and, while waiting for their goodies, stare at the paintings and giggle like schoolchildren. I sit in a booth beneath one of the fleshy paint globs and grade papers and think about the nature of writing. A wiry, salt and pepper-haired woman in designer glasses approaches the art display and takes in each piece with a look of awe and puzzlement. She finds the work a flowing homage to human reproduction (probably), and enjoys the way the artist has rendered her subjects both hyper-flexible and ambidextrous. She stares at the peach swirls of entering and takes deep, audible breaths. She is a picture herself, of artistic appreciation and hard-thinking.  I sip my breakfast tea and remember how happy and confused she looked when I raised my hand in her small, stuffy classroom one seemingly long-ago autumn.

            The woman, of course, was my Teaching Elementary School Art instructor from a failed undergraduate education degree life I don’t really like to talk about these days (for fear that the anger I hold towards the current American public education system might boil up from my belly and burn my tongue.) Her course was fantastic: twice a week a handful of potential grade school teachers met in the basement of the university art building and learned how to bring the joys of the visual and plastic arts to kindergarten through sixth grade students. We finger-painted, we sculpted zoo animals out of papier-mâché, we burnt clay pots in the university’s outdated kiln. Our instructor was a neo-Midwestern-hippie who hadn’t succeeded in her attempt to write the next great American novel and had instead decided to try her hand at educating future educators. She was kind and energetic and loved to help us discover the creative selves that hid beneath the surface of our wannabe “professional teacher” veneers. In short, she was the delight of the education department and one of the only reasons I didn’t have a nervous breakdown in the fall of 2007.

            After dropping out of the education program and switching to English (because a teacher had praised my limericks in fourth grade), I loathed seeing my old education professors. For the most part, they were by-the-book, stalwart pedagogues from the American educational old-school. They looked down on innovative teaching techniques and told drawn-out stories in class about the “good ol’ days,” when they could spank mischievous pupils with thick wooden paddles and not worry about jeopardizing their tenure. I struggled in these professor’s courses because they refused to listen to any of my progressive ideas about education (almost all of which were most likely a combination of idealistic, naïve, or impossible-to-execute silly-babble), and I refused to believe that their archaic classroom knowledge (some hadn’t had classroom experience in nearly twenty years) had anything to do with contemporary education. My struggles led to below satisfactory grades until I eventually had to leave the program, not truly knowing if I was a “bad” teacher (do bad grades in poorly facilitated courses actually equal a double negative of academic promise?) For a time I thought my leaving the education department meant the backwards instructors had won, and when seeing them on campus, they often gave me smug, almost pitiful, smiles that I took to mean, “you just couldn’t handle the way things are always going to be when it comes to teaching.”

            Several semesters into the English program, I saw my art teacher walking across the quad, stopping ever twenty or thirty paces to look at a tree or a squirrel eating acorns on top of a university garbage can. She noticed me as I walked by and smiled and stopped to chat. I asked her how she was doing and she gave a misty answer about trying to find meaning in the small things of life or something of that nature. She asked me how I was doing and I had to admit that I had dropped out of the education program and was pursuing a degree in writing instead. Surprisingly, her face lit up when she heard I was no longer working towards a life as a grade school teacher. Her hands when to her rosy wrinkled cheeks and she said, “Oh thank goodness, you would’ve made a terrible teacher! While we [the education faculty] were trying to teach young people about how to best convey material to their students, all you cared about was politics. I remember when you were in my class, I would be talking about how to teach students to paint and all you would talk about was, ‘What does the painting process actually mean?’ and ‘Why should we encourage children to paint?’ and ‘Why should we teach in the first place?’ You were only interested in the politics of it all!”

             I was shocked by her comments (I didn’t know I was so outwardly vocal as an undergraduate), but also felt strangely comforted by her observation. As she so keenly perceived, the reason I struggled in the education program wasn’t, as I had previously and erroneously thought, because I was a bad or inept student. It wasn’t even really because the instructors I had were bad teachers (although, to this day, I still find some of their ideas about education to be misguided and potentially damaging to student development.) I was a poor future-teacher candidate because what I care(d) about when it comes to education is at odds with what many education students and faculty in America care about when it comes to education.

            But, upon seeing my old art instructor at the coffee shop (inquisitive eyes and bright smile still intact), I am reminded of her comment about how I wasn’t a successful education student because I was “only interested in the politics” of teaching and learning. What I took as an attempt to encourage me when it was originally said (“it’s not that you or education are flawed individually, it’s that you don’t make a good match for each other because you have different, and opposing, values”), I now, after having taught college-level writing for the past three semesters, find troubling. What does it mean to “be interested in the politics” of education, and why, in the case of my undergraduate education instructors, is this interest necessarily considered a bad thing? Why is it frowned upon to ask the big questions of “Why does learning matter?” and “How should what we teach students affect them as human beings?”

            Now, after five more years of pedagogy instruction and practice, I find myself at a different place in my understanding of education than when I took my instructor’s Elementary Art Education course back in 2007. Where in the past I might have answered the question, “Why are you so interested in the politics of education?” with a confused smile and nod, I would now respond to the question with the question, “On what level are teaching and learning not overtly political acts?” Furthermore, I would note that it seems troubling not to consider the political ramifications of the educational process, for, at each phase of said process, value, meaning, and power claims are being asserted and exchanged. To ignore these assertions and their consequences is not only academically and politically irresponsible, but potentially harmful to the way we think about education and its value in our globalized human community.

            While I would like to approach my old instructor and inform her of my intellectual and pedagogical growth, she looks too happy observing the nude female bodies in all their twisted eroticism. And why would I want to bother her with something as disconcerting as personal empowerment in her moment of private aesthetic pleasure? I already know how troubling it can be to some teachers to combine the discourses of art, education, and politics.  

I’m Just Two Scrambled Eggs Away from Having Everything I Could Possibly Want

             Yesterday began with an all too familiar story about surviving panic attacks at Buddhist meditation retreats and the understanding that roughly fifty student final papers were not going to grade themselves by the end of the day. The understanding regarding the grading triggered a wave of anxiety that cycled itself back into the Buddhist meditation retreat story. The meditation retreat story provoked a certain level of existential dread. Comfort for the existential dread came in the form of knowing that writing matters (at least enough for there to be a required first-year writing course at a state university that demands students complete final papers.)

            The just-passed semester has been a collage of hectic moments usually spent wondering if this writing business (in strictly non-economic terms [for there is certainly no apparent immediate economic upside to lit-paper writing]) is worth the time and nerves required to pursue it. It has been an academic term of ritualistic quad-walking with one’s palms facing the sky in an “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself” stance. It has been a time of considering if there is something, anything, that would make me happier than I am when I’m writing scholarly papers that I know will never be published anywhere at any time (“I bet working in a cubicle isn’t nearly as bad as they make it look in Office Space. And hey, at least those guys never had any homework.” — The shameless things we tell ourselves to make it through just one more assignment that will maybe, just maybe, turn out to be the fated “last” assignment.)

            But, alas, to grade one’s papers one must physically possess one’s papers (i.e., one must have said papers on one’s person in order to mark them with smiley faces or encouragingly constructive comments that always read snarky and elitist.) And the papers were asleep in my office, and my personhood was in my apartment wearing unwashed sweatpants and loathing the weight of final grade entry deadlines. So I drove in to campus, the recently-purchased used-Amazon copy of Stillmatic scratching through my car cabin, and thought about what it is like to wake up groggy and congested at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday in mid-December under gray Midwestern drizzle clouds. And it felt bad and strangely alienating in the same way one might feel bad and alienated standing idly by and watching a farmer harvest her crop knowing one had absolutely nothing to do with the maturation of the season’s bounty (one only partakes of the bounty [both visually and nutritionally], making one a disgusting harvest toady with no right to anything delicious and good.)

            And in my late-waking-upedness I hadn’t eaten breakfast, reinforcing the notion that I lack purpose and direction with my chosen life path (one should begin to ask questions about one’s vocation when one can no longer plan and execute a simple feeding schedule, no?) The English building that holds my office in its larynx was naked in the winter wind and abandoned of students off celebrating academic “freedom” with the families who likely pay for the opposite of the freedom. I climbed the cold stairwell alone and imagined the steam coming off scrambled eggs and a hot cup of tea, how these things, their flavors, might help me make sense of an academic life I don’t really recognize I signed up for. And there at the top of the steps was Marcel Duchamp playing chess and living a life I read about in a book sometime last year.

            The iconic, and iconoclastic, Dadaist dropped his flourishing art career to pursue a chess obsession that cost him personal relationships, art-money, and perhaps his wits. An old anecdote placed Duchamp in his Paris apartment every starry night of the year, maniacally solving chess puzzles found in international gaming periodicals. Early in the morning, when he had solved all the puzzles but the final, most difficult one, he would excuse himself from the board (and the genius-ghosts sitting on the other side of it) and wander downstairs, to a small café that propped up his second-story apartment, to eat scrambled eggs alone in a corner booth. Nothing but scrambled eggs, for he believed their protein (or maybe their hidden, hard-boiled potential for life) would inspire him to crack the last chessic riddle. He would eat eggs and smoke cigarettes and, in my imagination, contemplate the life choices one would have had to make in order to be in the position to be living such a life (i.e., to contemplate the things one would have to be not doing in order to have the time to do the things Duchamp was doing/eating/solving.)

            A life that revolved around the obsessive pursuit of artistic harmony (for maybe, in the achievement of the harmonic moment, the genius-ghosts will fly back to where they came from), be it on a canvas or toiletry supply store or sixty-four-squared wooden permacanvas. For a seemingly forever I wanted such a life, with its erratic, passionate idiosyncrasies related to eating times, caffeine intake, and protein life-force. And in the office hallway, with a stomach grumbling scrambled eggs divine, I tasted the life for an out-of-breath moment. It tasted confusion covered in cracked peppercorn and the mist of oak trees sagging in the campus quad. It tasted papercut blood earned deep in the pedagogy pulpit. It was everything I never wanted to feel confusion over. All of it soaked in marble tiles and asbestos-removed ceiling panels the color of Illinois winter.

            It doesn’t take much to curse the things one doesn’t have—the catalog of not-had things is limitless and writes itself into eternity (like a bastard Christmas list). But the breathing in of having everything one needs to live the life one already has: this takes the pain of a botched meditation excursion, a stack of ungraded final papers, a fountain pen dry of bulletproof ink, and a urinal nicknamed “art.”