Writing inspiration: Why do you write like you're running out of time?

Hamilton was an exuberant genius who performed at a fiendish pace and must have produced the maximum number of words that a human being can scratch out in forty-nine years. 

--Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 5.

 I came to Alexander Hamilton through two sources:

1. I am and have been for some time a huge fan of Ron Chernow, having read his Washington biography, all 35+ hours of it. I have Nancy Isenberg's Fallen Founder but haven't read it yet. These are for fun reading (not related to work) and there hasn't been a lot of time recently to do any.

2. At one point in my life, probably the mid-century males portion of it, I read and reread obsessively Gore Vidal's Burr and, to a lesser extent, 1876. 

Burr was the best piece of fiction that Vidal ever wrote, at least that I read: Washington, D. C., the supposed third volume in the trilogy, although it had been written much earlier, was too louche and decadent, and the other American historical novels (Lincoln, Empire) relied too heavily on a few stylistic tricks.  Vidal was much better as an essayist.  But Burr was exceptional in Vidal's canon, maybe because the acerbic wit that Vidal brought to it seemed temperamentally suited to discussing Burr.

So, knowing that Chernow had written Washington, I downloaded his bio Alexander Hamilton and got about halfway through it when I started hearing about a musical based on it.

Yes, that one. 

I bought the soundtrack and am now obsessed with it.  Quite apart from the amazing lyrics, though, it's a great piece of writing inspiration for the story it tells.  Hamilton writes his way out of the West Indies, writes as Washington's "right-hand man," writes 51 (or so) of The Federalist Papers, which I think I last had to read some of in high school, and writes writes writes for the rest of his life.

One thing that struck me forcefully this time: Burr was 48 at the time of the duel and Hamilton was 49 (if you accept Chernow's date of 1755 for his birth).  Middle-aged. Old enough to know better, which makes the whole thing more sad, somehow.

But still, an inspiration to writers.

Blogging thoughts, Dr. Crazy, and why pseudonymity at this late date

Like other bloggers of years past, Dr. Crazy is hanging up her blogging spurs, to use what might be a Historiann metaphor, and is going public with her name instead if you know her on Facebook. I've been reading and enjoying her blog for many years, so like a lot of other readers, I'll miss reading her.  Part of her reason is this:

If tenure means never having to say you’re sorry (as a certain Madwoman once said), then full promotion means that you don’t need a flipping pseudonym. I have things that I want to say now that I want to own, and I want to write in ways that speak to the value of my discipline, of the humanities in general, and of the work that we as faculty do in higher education.

Dr. Crazy is right (always, am I right?) in a lot of ways, and now with the promotion to full, I shouldn't be afraid to post under my own name.  In fact, I do have another blog, but I don't post the same things.

But on that blog, I feel obliged to be professional and interesting.  As is amply evident, I don't feel the need to be either here, because I figure if you blogfriends don't care about the post, you'll just skip it and move on.

What can I post here that I can't or won't post there?

• Over on the real name blog, my voice is more temperate.  Here, not so much.  I can be irritated and extravagant and no one minds.
• On Real Name, I don't get irritated and post rants about email.
• I don't critique MOOCs, because to do so would be to bring down a hailstorm of mansplaining and also youthsplaining about how if I just understood the shiny technology of today, I would not be so thoughtful and critical about it. (A favorite MOOC post: "MOOC 'n' Bake.")
• I don't make fun of articles in The Chronicle, NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, or Inside Higher Ed.  
• To be more positive, I don't cite their creativity and brain research and write those posts, either.
• I don't write satires about the English Department of the Future or the New Office Commons.
• I don't post fantasies about the classroom as airplane or the Mad Men writing group or inventions I want to see or  wandering through blogland.
• I don't publish any posts about the Laocoon manuscript, or arguing with your brain, or writing inspiration, or the "dither and blather" of the writing process, or writing houses.
• And it goes without saying that nothing over there is about job searches, teaching, grading,  or service.
• Or MLA. Or gender in academia.
• Dear Ms. Undine is a lot of fun to write but obviously can't appear on the Real Name blog. 
• On a more literary or cultural note: No Mad Men. No reflections on mid-century males or childhood reading. No movies. Maybe I'll port some of those over if I ever come out and use my real name.

Recently, I decided to post over at the other blog and wanted to upload a picture using one of those little cards that you remove from a camera (can't remember what it's called). I have a Mac and absentmindedly slipped the card not into the card slot but into the DVD drive.  What followed was frantic and I hoped non-destructive probing into the DVD drive to get the little card out without killing the DVD drive.  It worked, and the DVD drive seemed to be fine.

But if you believe in signs and portents, then you would logically think that the universe was sending me a signal not to post over there, at least not right then.

It sent me here instead.

Your thoughts? 

Was there ever a time of idealism in college?

Dean Dad has an interesting post about artists and the advice being given to them:
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But where some variation of “follow your dreams” would have gone when I was in college, I heard “learn a trade” and “get good at living on very little money.”

He continues:

What I didn’t see, though, was youthful idealism.  I didn’t see what I used to think of as teenage bravado.  I saw some very young people who had been forced by circumstance to act in ways that used to be the province of their elders.  I saw young adults, rather than teenagers. 

In many ways, that’s great.  Given the very real economic obstacles many young students face, a certain gritty realism is appropriate.  And if memory serves, teenage bravado can be wearing in its own right.

But that “bulletproof” teenage stage -- that, in retrospect, relies on a base of economic security -- serves a purpose.

Dean Dad's take on this is interesting, for he sees it as a generational issue, whereas I see it as a class issue.

Although I went to college in a time that was supposed to be somewhat idealistic, the people I knew at public universities never went through a "bulletproof" stage of economic security where they thought "follow your dreams" was good advice. Idealism costs money, either immediately or in the future, and they knew it.

That's not to say that people weren't idealistic, or that they didn't do the same stupid things that college students have always done, but they understood the "gritty realism" of the consequences. The idea that you could throw yourself on the economy like a trampoline and bounce back wasn't part of the equation.

Private universities or elite publics--sure.  My friends who came from upper-middle-class professional backgrounds knew they could do whatever they wanted. If they made money in the summer working for their parents' friends, it went toward backpacking in Europe and not toward next year's expenses.  It's not that one was wrong and the other right, but they were different experiences.

I've been thinking about this because of reading other Mid-Century Males, Jack Kerouac and other Beats in particular.  Kerouac didn't want to be tied down, which may be the understatement of the decade, but whenever he got the urge to travel, which was most of the time, he had two things going for him: (1) plentiful manufacturing or service jobs that he could get easily and then leave and (2) like Allen Ginsberg, a family that, though not wealthy, would scrape up the money for bail for him when he got in trouble with the law.

The same seems to be true for the following decade, the 1960s, as I mentioned in a post about a year ago in talking about Sara Davidson's Loose Change:

What I actually took away was that people in those days could quit, drop out, or do any damn thing they felt like doing, and there would be someone or something to pick them up afterwards: plentiful jobs, more jobs than there were applicants, seemingly;  a network that would allow the main character, with just a phone call from one of her parents, to go to Europe and work as a translator in Italy; and a generous system of social service benefits that wouldn't let them fall into poverty.  They could change the world--or at least the upper-middle-class white women in the book could--because the world was going to support them financially no matter what they did.  I realize that that's probably not true, but it has a truthiness to it and seems true, given what Davidson describes.

  I think Dean Dad is right, but only partially so.  The idealism gap, if you can call it that, was always there for some students, but now it's hitting the class that used to be told "follow your bliss," and that's what speaks to the troubling reality that he's talking about.

Through a glass eye, darkly: listening to the Alternavoice

Flavia has good a post up about a book that she read and that, quoting Dorothy Parker, she says she wants to hurl with great force out of her house.  It's a book about a guy having a mushy, lukewarm crisis of faith. She also says that she doesn't necessarily finish books any more once she's given them a fair (100 pages, more than fair) chance.

Finishing books? Not necessarily, any more.  I recently tried a modern classic, but after reading the preface about how it would be challenging, frustrating, and confusing, even a little boring with all the digressions, but that the 1000+ pages would be totally worth the effort, I let the Kindle app quietly return it to the library without forging ahead.  Maybe I'll try again in twenty or thirty years. If I'm going to work that hard, I'd rather work, if you see what I mean.

No, the thing that worries me a little is that in rereading some classics, including my recent stretch of visiting the mid-century males, my first reaction is often no longer "This is a Timeless Classic with Enduring Themes and Universal Truths," the gospel I was taught, but "Oh, great--more twentysomething guy problems."  As Mark Twain once said of James Fenimore Cooper in a very different but totally hilarious context, I'm seeing through a glass eye, darkly.

I can't tell whether this is a gender issue or an age one, since I've read so many more novels since first encountering those classics. I can still appreciate all the formal stuff and even a little stylistic fancy footwork, but in the big Crisis of Faith moments, a still, small voice in the back of my head is saying something like "Dude. You are worrying about this, really? Get a grip."

The Alternavoice hasn't always been there when I read. I think reading all the junk on the web has cultivated it, from listicles to the faux questions at Slate and HuffPo and now all the news sites.  It's not there with everything I read, which is a good thing.

And the Alternavoice isn't all bad.  It slips out in class sometimes, in some almost-snark pointing out problems in a text. I don't want to go all trollish on a piece of writing, of course, but it's good for the students to see that what we're reading isn't holy writ and that there's another way to look at the hero's dilemma.

Maybe I need to write up an assignment where they can let their Alternavoices loose, but once it's out of the cage, as evidenced in my brain in the last year or so, it's out for good.

Do you have this voice when you read literature? Is there some situation or plotline that especially brings it out?

Off-topic: Mid-century Male Writers, Salinger edition

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Apparently my reading for pleasure these days involves revisiting some of the twentieth-century writers, the Mid-Century Males, that I read back as an undergraduate. J. D. Salinger is one; isn't he for everyone at that age? Catcher in the Rye was okay, but in a short story class we read (and I reread many times) Nine Stories, later discovering on my own, like just about every late adolescent everywhere, Franny and Zooey, my favorite of his works. 

Recently, I saw the Salinger documentary and checked out of the digital library Kenneth Slawenski's Salinger: A Life, Joanna Rakoff's My Salinger Year, and, because the other sources mentioned it, Joyce Maynard's At Home in the World. Apparently I was the last person on earth to have read Joyce Maynard years ago without knowing about The Salinger Connection, so I wasn't influenced by that when I read her.

Slawenski's book made much of Salinger's horrific WWII experiences, which started on D-Day and ended 299 days later after he helped to liberate concentration camps, something that the documentary emphasizes with a whole lot of (deservedly, I suppose) portentous music. Rakoff's My Salinger Year is delightful. It's a memoir of her year in the mid-1990s working at The Agency (Harold Ober and Associates) and handling both Salinger's fan mail and her employers' charmingly eccentric terror about encroaching technology. It's 1996, but the IBM Selectric is still king of the office.

 Maynard's book is similar to the first two of hers that I read years ago (Baby Love, Looking Back).  She's a keen observer of her own life, but only of her own life, and only of herself as the primary person within it. As she says many times in At Home in the World, she's not a reader, and she doesn't seem to be able to make those connections except through pop culture, although she's very good at the specifics of that. When she reports incidents like threatening to cut off her long braided hair and her husband Steve saying, "It's your hair," the implication is that he's too stolid and isn't paying sufficient attention to her misery. Less sympathetic readers might think that she's being a drama queen. That doesn't prevent her from making some good observations, though.

The whole Salinger thing that she was pilloried for is only a part of the book, and apparently, in another interwebs development I totally missed, everyone is in a pro- or anti-Maynard camp: either "How dare you malign The Great Man?" or "How dare The Great Man have acted so cruelly toward women?"  Maynard's take on the relationship, in the new preface, is not so much "what was I thinking to quit Yale and move to New Hampshire with Jerry Salinger?" as "how could he violate my innocence by overpowering me with his adoration? Shouldn't we think of 18-year-olds as girls instead of women?" It's a fair question, but really, who could have stopped her or any of us at 18? That's not a hornet's nest I'm willing to wade into in this space.  

Salinger's writing advice--which is why I read the book--is actually sound. Salinger on writing: he writes every day, and by about 6.30 a.m. he's in his writing room, later apparently the famous writing bunker where he would stay for weeks at a time. He shows Maynard at least two manuscripts but says that writing for publication is all just ego and being of the world, which he condemns.  Given that Salinger seems to have had the biggest ego in the Western Hemisphere, this is a little disingenuous, but all right. The documentary says that there are books lined up to be published in 2015 and beyond.

Here's the thing that struck me, wanting as I did the details of the writing life: Maynard and Salinger eat their breakfast of thawed frozen peas and then both of them go off to their writing tasks.  Maynard never mentions that in the memoir; it only comes up in an interview in the past couple of years.  Two writers, living in a house together: that's the portrait that the interview gives and that she's trying to avoid. Yet elsewhere she describes her writing routine, and she's a remarkably disciplined and productive writer.

Instead, the memoir section about her life with Salinger is all about making herself small, about buying a sewing machine and cooking badly and leaving her stuff strewn around the house and feeling wounded and above all not writing the memoir she's been contracted to write. It's clear that she did feel diminished by his treatment, as who wouldn't? Yet by the end of the year, the memoir has magically been written, with an epilogue heavily influenced and partly written by Salinger himself because she wasn't being specific and honest enough about what she was writing.

That's the frustrating part of this memoir: it has the wrong focus, or maybe the right focus for Maynard but the wrong focus for someone who wants to read about writing. Even though the focus of any Maynard book is always going to be Maynard, front and center, she zeroes in on her father's alcoholism and her mother's weird obsession with her as defining, formative moments.  No doubt they were, but this makes the whole thing come off as another of innumerable recovery/abuse memoirs. She has had the experiences, though, and the talent to make more of the memoir than this. 

What I wanted to see more of was the narrative that's trying to emerge here and can't, of Salinger trying to teach her something about writing and the approach that writers have to take to make it mean something. It has to be honest and something you care about, he tells her; there's no glory in taking pot shots and writing snark about beauty contests and Pillsbury Bake-Offs, although she does.  Salinger warns her about this and about adopting her mother's voice as she has adopted her mother's methods of applying to contests, pitching stories, etc.

When she shows up at Salinger's door in 1997--which I think took a lot of courage, by the way--he tells her that she had the capacity to become something but has become nothing, or something like that. She's obviously made something of herself, having had a successful career,  and she is a survivor, but is there anything in what Salinger says? Or is this just another case of a powerful man falling in love with an image that he creates and trying to destroy the image when she turns out to have a voice of her own?