Networking

Dear XXX,
I realise that I'd already agreed to meet XXX this thursday morning for a long RA meeting (splicing together videos of british comedy for her to give as a lecture on a XXX Alums British Isles cruise... enough said). Would next thursday, or any day that week except fri, be any possible? Sorry for this mix-up - I overlooked my meeting withXXX .

XXX had some fascinating things to say about potential hires. I don't know where he gets his information from. How are you doing?

Best
XXX

conversation #4

XXX: morning
me: morning
XXX: (um, right?)
me: yup
how's XXX?
XXX: yea
XXX is pretty good
felt much better today
me: I'm glad
XXX: and there were no surprise visits from my somewhat bosses
me: phew
that's always a plus
XXX: also the magical flying pirate ship i'm working on in the modeling tutorial
me: !!!
XXX: is starting to look more like a pirate ship
and less like a bad modern art sculpture
me: hahaha
oh, dude
mad modern art is the best
was it all post-cubist?
XXX: heh
oh very
me: awesome
XXX: all kinds of geometric shapes popping out where they aren't wanted
me: hehe
if you were having an especially picasso evening there'd be the odd stray horse-head
XXX: mm
yes
me: which would be wholly undesirable
XXX: rather
though this program does have an amusing feature
whereby, if i wished, i could have random teapots
all over the ship
perhaps the ship is crewed by teapots
and sails on their steam
ha ha ha
me: (I just got an email that begins:

Those gloaming hours again in which I wonder what, given its virulence and ubiquity,the plague was doing around 1400 when it could have been cutting shorter John Lydgate's infinite flow.)
Wow -- is there a teapot button?
XXX: hah wow
me: that's amazing!
XXX: yes
quite literally
a teapot button
me: I
Love
Whimsy
XXX: or even a teapot paint brush, actually
and also that is a fantastic start to an email
wow
hah
me: haha - he is reading lydgate
and not liking him much
as you can probably guess
XXX: i imagined not
heh
me: How come your status is breaking?
XXX: oh
on break
break-ing
sorry
better?
heh
me: got you
sorry I just got paid
XXX: or wait did they do those commercials in the uk?
me: and was taking a moment to be happy
yup
XXX: ooooooh
YEA for getting paid!!
me: man I love it
money is great
oh! have you read quicksilver?
XXX: nope
that's neal stephenson, right?
me: yeah
XXX: i've just started the, um, cryptonomicron
it's my first of his stuff
me: or did I already tell you about it?
ah
XXX: nope
go right ahead!
me: cryptonomicon is amazing
XXX: greatly enjoying it so far
though i wish i had bought an edition with bigger pages and font
me: quicksilver is the prequel to Cypto. It take place between 1660 and 1715
XXX: but that is neither here nor there
ooh hmm
me: or rather the trilogy of books does
XXX: (nods)
24 me: um... it's a cast, operatic, brainy, sexy, swashbuckling, incredibly researched monster ofa piece of work
*vast
XXX: wow
that sounds, um, incredibly cool
me: It includes lots of liebniz and newton
and pirates
XXX: !
so cool!!
me: and about 5 seperate heists
and Louis XIV
XXX: ...hah though i admit i had some unkind thoughts about mr. isaac newton when i started calculus
similar to your friend's in that email
whoa
....i must read this book
me: monarchs coercively having sex with other monarchs' subjects
XXX: !
as proxy or by design?
or wait
don't want to know
me: haha, calculus, oh my
No, it's not graphically unplesant
XXX: oh oh not that
me: also... pepys, and the foundation of the royal society, and of MIT
XXX: was just interested in motivation
oh!
wait
mit?1
geeesh
this guy is rapidly becoming my idol
and i haven't even finished one of his books
me: haha
I will put quicksilver in the package.
XXX: yea!!!!! (does little happy dance)
me: woop woop
I will try to include short stories and maybe poetry too if there's room in the box
XXX: hah no poetry ;-) :-p
me: do you not like poetry?
XXX: though i, um, appreciate the thought
mm
me: you lose, dude
XXX: (bows deeply)
mah
other than (weirdly) a few authors/poems who stick with me
i am not a fan of poems
me: wow - that's a sentence I could never type
XXX: hah i know
me: mind you, that's cause poems are my thing
XXX: you like the dunciad :-p
heh yes
me: and how!
XXX: i have great respect for poems and people who like them
just not my thing
me: :-)
XXX: that's actually how i encountered claude rawson
me: fair enough
XXX: trying to dodge my poetry requirement
me: oh?
ha
XXX: i had to take something with poetry more modern than milton
me: oh noes!
XXX: and ended up winning an arguement to the effect that his seminar on satire counted
as it included pope and etc.
me: that seems reasonable
XXX: it was
...i'm glad they didn't check what i wrote my papers on ;-)
me: but .... but, what about all the great 20thC american poets?
XXX: .... (sigh)
me: Lowell? Frost?Bishop? Moore? Berryman? Ashberry? Roethke? Crane?
XXX: i like some frost
out of that list
me: (author's note: I am smiling)
XXX: i also like some atwood
hah hah i thought that might be the case
also i like eliott
for whatever sadistic reason
but i think this is because he writes long poems
me: yeah, whoops that was a fairly substantial oversight on my part
XXX: i need my narrative
(laughs)
and ironically enough
my first real literary paper (pre-college, but it was the first one i everwent to crit for) was on zukofsky
me: I know zukovsky not
XXX: mmm
likely better off
very modernist
me: ha
XXX: very "ooooh eliot makes cool allusions that are impossible to understand I must do this to but make it EVEN HARDER"
but i seized on the bits that i liked
like the idea of having an image that is tied to an idea
but is not a metaphor for the idea
my poem was about a grasshopper
me: Ok, this is interesting
XXX: zukovsky?
he is interesting
me: mhm
what you are saying is interesting
XXX: oh
hah
me: bozo, what else am I going to be talking about?
XXX: (laughs)
me: (except myself, of course to which I don't usually refer as 'this')
XXX: hah ha ha ha
well you could have gotten a bonus or something...
kidding
me: It's my first month on my new pay
for that is nice
XXX: yea!
but yeah
i've tried to explain my feelings about poems to people before
i can read them
but they don't really mean much to me
me: it ok if you need narrative
XXX: the way that stories do
me: it happens
it's sad
XXX: hah
me: but for some people
you know... that's all they have
XXX: (is laughing)
me: in seriousness, I get it
because I struggle with narratives
I'm like, you want to me to do what? Analyse it? What?
XXX: yes!
exactly!
me: but how!
it's so wishy-washy!
XXX: ha ha ha
you read it and are like "okay, that was nice. ....what? I have to write a whole paper on this?!"
i love how we are having the same conversation
me: see for me poetry is just the crunchiest, most economical, most beautiful words with none o the extraneous crap about people and stuff happening to other stuff and yadda yadda
XXX: or the same feelings at least
about the opposite things
me: yes!
XXX: mm and for me narratives allow you to meet real characters, people you can learn from and encounter like actual people, and provide a looking glass and a suggested pattern for what to do with your life
...i don't have the gift of being able to describe this well
you can carry ideas to their conclusions
without unneccessarily veiling them in allusions and cryptic language
gah
(gives up)
me: no, I think I see what you mean
I just think that there's more to life than narrative would have you believe
XXX: heh
me: take closure, for example
XXX: mm
me: and I'm sorry that I haven't finished your paper yet
the weekend got in the way
XXX: ha ha aww
's okay
i hear your thesis is quite brilliant
you have to send it to me sometime :-)
me: but what happens in closure is intensely interesting and reveals the fundementally problematic nature of narrative, which is that we actually have no idea how one thing causes another, only that one thing follows another
follows, even
I think poetry is interested in those gaps
XXX: oh ho ho.... that's not a problem of narrative
that's the point!
me: where the narrative isn't
XXX: to figure out how these things happen!
me: not where the narrative isn't interested - i was unclear - I mean, where it is absent
ok, that's a fair point
XXX: exactly! that's where we come in! that's where the engagement happens!
and not just in comics
more generally
me: and whoever has been talking to you about my thesis is telling porkies!
XXX: hah
now now i thought XXX was a nice person
me: she's lovely
XXX: who certainly knows what she's talking about
me: and ((((hugs)))) on your letter
XXX: thanks (sigh)
i kinda knew it was coming
and it spurred me into action in a sense
i actually emailed u mich and harvard
me: I still kinda hoped it wasn't
oh, good on you
XXX: to be like "yo. what's going on?"
(um, in that, "thank you so much for taking the time to read my email during this busy season" kind of way)
me: yeah, of course
XXX: yeah
i dunno
i'm almost relieved in a sense
because it would have torn me to shreds to be accepted without funding
and have to deal with that
me: yes
XXX: i also agree with what many people are saying about how funding difference poisons the atmosphere of a program
because i saw that happen when i was interning
about a quarter of us were paid
the rest of us were not
me: mmmm that's interesting, but not at all the atmosphere in Berkeley
XXX: and it created a lot of bad feelings and divisions
hmm
that's good!
wow
me: XXX is sufficiently sensitive to have picked up on that, as an unfunded person
XXX: ...maybe everyone there is supernaturally nice
(nods)
oh i certainly imagine so
me: actually, because she's unfunded she gets TAships and RAships
XXX: ooooh
me: and the funded people are anxious
!
XXX: i thought that the funding, um, was entailed upon taships
me: (anxious that they're not good enough)
XXX: and that if you weren't funded then you had no shot at such things
interesting
me: some people (eg XXX) get fellowships
XXX: (nods)
me: that is what being funded is
everyone has recourse to some funding
just unfunded folks have to work for it and don't get much
XXX: ahh
huh
interesting
me: ... and have to pay tuition in the first year
XXX: ....don't really want to think about it at the moment
ah
yes
me: no no I know
sorry
XXX: there is always that
me: sorry
XXX: 's okay (sigh)
my friend lectured me today
about how i appear to be "grasping for a scattershot of programs"
me: what about?
ouch
XXX: (sigh) that is not true
this all makes sense in my head
me: ouch
XXX: i am still angry
as you can tell
me: of course it does!
well, yeah
XXX: partly because i think he's just bitter as he did an english masters
and hated it
and is still not done with said thesis
me: they clearly have no idea of you, your interests, or your applications
XXX: (firm nod)
me: ((((hugs))))
XXX: (hugs) thanks :-(
i have to remind myself
me: people are occasionally rubbisyh; there appears not to be any way around this
XXX: that things other people say are not always true
just because other people are saying them
they are
me: no! absolutely not
of course not
brb
XXX: ok
me: I have fucked up at work
will be back
sorry
XXX: oh no!
you go!
good luck!!!
(hugs)

the still sad music of humanity

The whole point of crying is to stop before you corny it up.
(Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

The publication in 1994 of Listening to Prozac by Peter Kramer, in which he suggested anyone with too little "joy juice" might give themselves a dose of the "mood brightener" Prozac , lifted sales into the stratosphere. (Independent, 26/2/08)

Today, a major new study shows that Prozac, taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar types of drugs. For a profession normally diplomatic, the words today of one of study's authors are damning. "Given these results", Professor Kirsch of Hull University says, "there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients." (Guardian, 26/2/08)

The problem with depression is that people are generally disinclined to believe that it exists. Not that people disbelieve melancholy. Chaucer believed in it, and so did Durer. But they disbelieve, instead, that depression could be a condition worthy of medical attention. Never mind that an excess of melancholy was treated by emetics and blood-letting, before they got the circulatory system was figured out. The problem is that, having stopped treating it because the grounds for treatment were found to be faulty, which is fair enough, the treatment itself resurged because the condition was still endemic. Whether it's electroshock therapy, or some kind of analysis, or cognitive behavioural therapy, or anti-depressants, the past hundred years have (I guess) a pretty consistent theme of reworking and treating the Black Knight's complaint, assuaging his unhappiness as the dream is unable to do.

What I'm getting at is this: irrespective of whether anti-depressants work, or of whether blood-letting and leeches worked; we have been turning to doctors, asking for treatment for a pain we can't place but which saps the very life out of us for as long as there have been doctors.

Maybe anti-depressants don't 'work', however that functionality is calibrated. Maybe no anti-depressant treatment has truly 'worked' - for example, exercise is just a stimulated deferral - but perhaps it's more telling that we feel compelled to be treated. So what if the pills are placebos? To all intents and purposes I find it impossible to distinguish between a psychological medicine that works because it works, and one that works because you think it works. Any takers for that one?

I don't really mind if my antidepressants are placebos. And I am as hostile to Big Pharma as anyone else. It seems to me that antidepressants are just a heavily industrialised extension of an old solution to an old, old phenomenon: that we need institutions (and the very institution in particular that is the guardian and guarantor of our health) to recognise that we have interiority. Paradoxically, maybe we need an institutional recognition that there is something about consciousness that is indivisible?

In a way, that the latest treatment for depression is unmasked as a kind of quackery isn't a victory for the scientist who've produced this report, or the anti-Pharma activists, or for the people who say that depression is a self-constructing, self-perpetuating phenomenon. This is because we don't really know what depression is, beyond an ever more minute catalogue of its symptoms. We don't really know how to cure it, either. And we certainly don't know why it is that we keep taking cures that, though they work, demonstrably don't work. (Phrenology, anyone?)

it seems that there's a blind-leading-the-blind element here. Scientists devise fake treatments that work for a non-existent condition that is described by one analyst and philosopher as 'like death-in-life'. Other scientists then expose these treatments as bogus (although they too are wrong). New treatments are designed simply to meet demand. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We don't know what our antic disposition is (or why so many accounts of depression sound a lot like Hamlet's 'seeming' rather than 'being') but soon there'll be another cure for it. People will re-engineer SSRIs, perhaps, but there'll be something else, something new. It'll be wonderfully effective, too - it'll be the new wonder treatment for depression, until we figure out that in fact, it doesn't work at all. All this makes me think of that wonderful Simon Armitage poem, To his Lost Lover;

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

the another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

poetry

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?

I have been trying to remember this for years.

There was a young Lady from Bude,
Who went for a swim in a lake.
A man in a punt,
Stuck his pole in her ear
And said "You can't swim here, it's private!"

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Anaphora

Each day with so much ceremony begins, with birds, with bells, with whistles from a factory; such white-gold skies our eyes first open on, such brilliant walls that for a moment we wonder "Where is the music coming from, the energy? The day was meant for what ineffable creature we must have missed?" Oh promptly he appears and takes his earthly nature instantly, instantly falls victim of long intrigue, assuming memory and mortal mortal fatigue. More slowly falling into sight and showering into stippled faces, darkening, condensing all his light; in spite of all the dreaming squandered upon him with that look, suffers our uses and abuses, sinks through the drift of bodies, sinks through the drift of vlasses to evening to the beggar in the park who, weary, without lamp or book prepares stupendous studies: the fiery event of every day in endless endless assent.

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Walt Whitman in the Supermarket

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stocks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?