You call yourself a writer, but what do you really do?

Will was the first person I knew who called himself a writer. Not my roommate Will, the pre-med who I thought was my best friend until he moved out and stopped talking to me. No, the Will I met in Paris.

He’s a lanky fellow (a former swimming champion), with long humanities-major hair that goes over his eyes, and a favorite leather jacket he always wears. And he’s from New Orleans, a Southerner. He was an international studies major, but that was for his parents. He was a writer.

It takes courage, I think, to call yourself a writer. Courage not because it is hard but because it is easy (I’m not plagiarizing from JFK’s inaugural just there, because I switched it around. He says “and we will do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”, and the last part he says with his wonderful accent so it’s like “hahd”, in this melodic descending tone that makes me melt inside).

Everyone can say they’re a writer. And many can do it with a trace of honesty. Maybe they do write when they get home. Maybe they have several unpublished Great American novels under their beds. But a writer has to show people their stuff. And, I must admit, a writer’s stuff has to be good.

So I was impressed when Will said he was a writer. He’d published a few things, but it was more that he was a writer than that he wrote. I was in the midst of a tryst with Hem, and I was attracted to the solitary male outcast writer with mysteries fluttering in his wake and a one-euro bottle of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And then Will turned me on to Faulkner, whom I had heard of, slightly, but had never read, and here was a whole new male writer of the lost generation that I could idealize and idolize.

And it made me feel less pretentious and arrogant and stupid and fruitless and conceited to sit down and write when I knew that Will, who was infinitely cooler than me, was writing too. He was cooler than me because he wore cool clothes and listened to cool music and wore a leather jacket and was from the South, and outsiders are cool.

And here’s the confession: I liked talking about writing with someone. I liked being able to talk about books and authors and have it be about the books and the authors and not about the theories and the symbolism and the metaphors. The truth is, I had never really read like that, out of school. I didn’t read for pleasure. And if I did, it was either stuff like Robert B. Parker, Harry Potter, or big biographies that my dad really likes. It was never Faulkner. It was never Hemingway. So, in a sense, though I don’t think Will really taught me much about writing, except a bit about how to be a writer, he did teach me a lot about reading.

And, he taught me about drinking, and cussing, and the mythical Southern Gentleman

Bad Assignments

There are certain days, which tend to be more concentrated in winter quarter, where I simply cannot work. Often these days are incited by some particularly egregious assignment.

In this case, it is an assignment for my Ulysses class: to search on JSTOR for papers on Ulysses from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 00’s and analyze how the critical approach to Ulysses has changed over the decades. I like Joyce. I like Ulysses. As an Econ major, I even like JSTOR. I hate English literary criticism.

So, the obvious solution to a sucky assignment: don’t do it for a very long time. I mean, I could collapse while making hot cocoa with Bailey’s, or I could be electrocuted plugging in my computer to watch videos on YouTube. And if that happens, I will be happy I didn’t spend my last moments looking for critical perspectives of motherhood in Ulysses from the 60’s, 70’s, and today.

The other reason I didn’t want to work was I talked to my parents. I found out about this program Columbia College has in Prague in the summers, and I’m trying to find a way to pay for it and justify the cost. I’m thinking it might make more sense to just take that money and wander in Europe for twice as long, just observing and writing.

Maybe my dad and I and one of his relatives who speaks fluent Hungarian will go to Hungary to the village where my grandfather that I never met grew up before he came here. In any case, my mom said in passing that I was “floundering” and it would help for me to take a personality test.

Now, I hate it when I am condemned by a single word. It is quite possible that my mother did not mean “floundering”, precisely. And she had the idea because my dad found a personality test helpful in his college days. But, the word makes me worry that I am, in fact floundering.

It’s been hard for me to get to a point where I really am thinking about wandering. Even now, I have to push myself to do it, to explore. And I need to know that floundering is not the same as wandering, that not having a plan for success is not the same as failing.

But maybe I should just accept the floundering moniker. Maybe what I really need to do is accept failure itself, complete and utter failure, so I can be happy with any kind of success. Maybe I need to listen to my mother

La Pared de los Crypto-Jews

I’m sitting in Café Catedral (or Catedral Café, I’m not sure) in Little Village, trying to work. Two cops are sitting by the window, at a table that stands on a platform a foot above the floor. It is a pedestal, almost. They are Latino, and since they work in the area, it’s almost certain that they speak Spanish. Yet, when they talk to the waiter, also Latino and with an accent that shows he is a native Spanish speaker, they speak English, telling him that it is good the place exists because it is taking the place of a Starbuck’s. “It’s not corporate,” says one of the cops.

Across the table from me, Laura is working on her BA, I’m not sure which one, she has two. But, it’s either the one about coffee, and efforts of Starbucks and others to be “responsible,” and what it is about coffee that makes people care about fair trade, or it’s the one about NAFTA and the effects on immigration. Either way, it is bizarrely relevant in this place with tables that look like copper but are actually plastic.

The cops’ radios have been chattering but I can’t hear them anymore because “Barbie Girl” just came on. Yes, “Barbie Girl”.

“Stanger than Fiction” was filmed here, which was the first movie Laura and I went to while actually dating. There are pictures in various places of Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the owners, I assume.

Also, there are more crosses than I’ve ever seen in the same place before, and images of the Virgin Mary. One area is labled “El Rincon de los Solterones”, I think, and one is “La Pared de las Virgenes”: the Wall of the Virgins. There’s Mary painted on wood, Mary with child, Mary on pedestals, several on pedestals hung on the wall.

Then, in front of the Wall of Virgins, there’s a menorah. Unmistakable: a Shamash, and 8 candles. I don’t know if it’s because of some PC thing. But I like to think it’s not. I like to think it’s a symbol of the crypto-Jews.

While it sounds a bit like they’re secret agents, in reality the crypto-Jews are a group of people, mainly Latino, who secretly practice Judaism while pretending to be Catholic. At least, they used to be pretending, the ones who fled Spain during the Inquisition, leaving for the New World.

But, the parents didn’t always tell the kids that they were in fact Jews. So now a fair number of people who consider themselves Catholic, some priests even, are discovering that their weird familial traditions, not eating pork, lighting a menorah, lighting candles on Friday night, that these aren’t just familial traditions, they’re extant artifacts of their family’s Judaism. You can get a DNA test done now that looks for traces of genes that are more prevalent among Jews.

Anyway, I’m really hoping this menorah, a hanukiah really, that’s standing here right in front of the Blessed Virgin with Christ Child, is really a key to some long twisted identity, a story of intrigue and suspense, of hiding in the attic like Anne Frank, of secret messages and ceremonies conducted in silent darkness.

But it’s probably just a PC thing.

In which I forgive the city of Chicago and Robert Frost

I’m pretty hard on Chicago, I know that. And I know it’s not fair. There are days, at least hours, where I find myself loving the [Windy/Second] City [that Works/of Big Shoulders]. The North Side is genuinely cool, Bucktown and Wicker Park and such. And Belmont, which I learned is only called Belmont by U of C students who know it by the name of its El stop. It’s actually called Lakeview.

And Greektown is good, though I haven’t been there since my Greek friend started inviting me over to his house for real Greek food. The West Side has a sort of charm, though it feels empty to me, like a desert in the middle of civilization.

Downtown has its moments; there are days when you can barely walk the crowds are so big, and that’s what I’m looking for from a downtown. Of course, I’d prefer if the people were more determined to reach a destination, since now they just kind of wander around in big crowds instead of moving. But whatever, that’s cool. Keeps it different from New York. And I certainly haven’t given the South Side a fair shake.

My shameful confession: I haven’t been south of 63rd street except in a car, unless you count Beverly.

And I’ve always meant to go to the Checkerboard and such, but I still haven’t. I know there’s so much here, but it always felt off-limits. I’m going to try to fix that my last few months here.

The truth is I’m often unfairly judgmental. It helps me justify my judgments of myself. If I’m going to detest what I think and what I do, I might as well detest the place I’m in. But I’ve come a long way in learning to stop hating my personality, even if I judge it. So it’s only time I stop hating this city even though I judge it.

* * *

I had this great English teacher in high school. Everyone does, I guess. Mine was Mr. McGraw, whom I’m pretty sure doesn’t like me, though I don’t know why. But he taught me sophomore English (which we called Lower English, because we’re pretentious and we can’t call sophomores sophomores we call them Lowers which is short for Lower-Middler), and also a class on the epic poem.

Anyway, in his class one day Robert Frost came up and I made a sound and he asked me why, and I told him that I hated Robert Frost. He’s the kind of guy to pounce on a word, so when I said I “hated” him he interrogated me. I said I thought his poems were “stupid” which provided him more fodder for Socratic methodizing.

Really, I didn’t like Frost’s style of real simple language and simple images. I thought it was childish. And I brought up one of his poems that I can’t remember now but it’s about a newspaper blowing in the wind on a porch, or something, and the last line is “of a day I had rued.” And he kept asking why I didn’t like it and he pointed to “rued” and he asked whether a single word was enough to make a poem good. At the time I said no but now I realize that Mr. McGraw was right. “Rued” alone is a poem. It is enough.

The truth is, though I did not like Robert Frost’s poetry, the reason I “hated” him was because of my 4th grade teacher. Her name was Elly Seavy but she was clever so she signed everything “LECV” which sounds the same when you read the letters. I hated her because she made me a teachers’ pet, giving me special privileges and letting me work on advanced projects.

I now realize that my mother was no doubt involved, in her efforts to get the best for me, likely having talked to Mrs. Seavy and the school and god knows who else to make sure I was working “at my level”. But at the time all I knew was that none of the other kids liked me because of things like special treatment from LECV. So I hated her. And, when she mentioned that her favorite poet was Robert Frost, I started to hate him. (I didn’t buy Gillette products until a few years ago, because her husband worked for Gillette.)

I think my dislike/hatred of Chicago is similar to my hatred of Robert Frost. Chicago isn’t what I hate. Chicago is connected to what I hate. But I don’t know what that is, the thing I hate. Maybe it’s academics, maybe it’s this holding-pattern of a university. Maybe it’s the cold without the snow, or the snow without the mountains.

Whatever it is, I hereby forgive the City of Chicago, Richard M. Daley Mayor, for the crimes it never committed. And I hereby forgive Robert Frost for having appealed to a no doubt well-intentioned 4th-grade teacher, and I forgive that same teacher for treating me different, and my mother for having asked her to.

Now I can only hope they can forgive me.

Clichéd Clichés

The word “cliché” comes from past participle of the French verb clicher (pronounced just as we pronounce “cliché”: clee-shay), which means to stereotype. The word “stereotype”, now itself a cliché, was first used to refer to a printing technique in which, rather than use the original printing plate, a mold is made of the original and then used to create a copy of the plate, which is then ultimately used in the actual printing process. Thus, a cliché connotes something that has been mass-produced from a copy of an original. It is a copy of a copy, twice removed from truth and twice replicated.

While I hate colonialism, I find it difficult to hate the colonial nature of the English language. First, it’s helpful for everyone to speak a common language. Sure, it’s nice that that language is my first tongue, but I’ve still gone through the effort to learn two additional languages, and I can at least speak French better than most French people can speak English.

I remember one time in Prague, I mentioned to a particularly friendly waiter that I was surprised that everyone in Prague spoke fantastic English. “Of course,” he said. “Who in their right mind would learn Czech, unless they live here?” Given that my trip to Prague was part of a circuitous route home from Paris, I was a little taken aback by the waiter’s frankness. No one in the world was going to learn Czech, so they would buckle down and learn English. The French would never do such a thing.

The second thing I like about the English language’s colonial history is that, unlike, say French, English readily accepts words from the areas it has colonized. Ok, another word for it would be “co-opting”, but I’ll take the charitable view. The fluidity of our language is why we have so many expressions, why we can say “house” and “home” and mean different things. The French have “maison” to mean both, though they can use the somewhat awkward “chez X” construction, which literally means something like “place of X”. But, we can say “chez” to, as in “Chez Louis”. English has something like 600,000 words, compared to 100,000 in French and 200,000 in Spanish. And when another language has a useful word that English lacks, we just take it. Like cliché.

When I write “cliche”, Word changes it automatically to “cliché”. It is strange, I think, that we are unwilling to make cliché a truly English word; we must keep the French accent and pronunciation. We write “oeuvre” instead of “œuvre” and “debut” instead of “début”, why not “cliche”?

I think it has something to do with the word cliché being itself cliché, a sort of mockery of its own pretentiousness. French is clichéd. Who would be caught dead anymore saying “je ne sais quoi” in seriousness, or “raison d’être”? But we don’t translate them, “I don’t know what,” and “reason to be”. We want to keep them out of our language so we are not responsible for them. And cliché, too.

But I think we should accept clichés. They are, like their etymological cousins stereotypes, often based on nuggets of truths. Sometimes when I’m a bad mood I am disgusted at almost everything I think or say. How trite I am, I think. Then, the realization of my own triteness itself becomes trite. And that realization, like I’m the first one to recognize the banality of my realization of my own hackneyed self-doubt, that becomes trite.

And so I enter a spiral (oh, how overused is that image!) of self-hatred that has no end. It is a vicious cycle, a catch-22, etc. etc. And I have to stop myself. I have to accept the fact that in millennia of human history and with more than 6 billion other humans living every second on this planet along with me, that almost every thought I could have has been thought before. Every word I have uttered has been uttered before. And every smart, clever thing I imagine has been imagined before by someone who thought themselves just as smart and clever.

So, the cliché becomes exactly that which ties us together in one humanity. The cliché is the common thread that we should not despise, but celebrate and explore. I am not the first, and will not be the last, 22-year-old who dreams of escaping to foreign lands to find myself and maybe start writing. Indeed, I know several friends in the same position. But the fact that I am not unique in this respect does not mean that my personal experience will not be meaningful. If anything, it will be meaningful to me, and that should be enough, right?

I shouldn’t care how many other people have done the same thing or thought the same thing or said the same things. I shouldn’t care about clichés.

Writing days

I had a good writing day today. There are some days when I can’t get stories out of my head. I mean, everywhere I go I’m thinking “Oh, I could have him see a headline in the newspaper, then he’ll know about…” or “What if he was home schooled?” Probably not too good for my GPA, but it’s nice because it makes me feel like a writer, and that’s hard for me. And it reminds me that I like this stuff.

Ok, I like econ too, I like it a lot. And most of my classes I both wanted to take and actually liked. But I didn’t like them the same way I like my writing classes and I don’t like econ the same way I like writing. I think it comes from this strong belief that I will never really support myself on my writing, writing of any kind. Maybe journalism, I guess, but that’s not just writing, it’s different, it’s facts and writing. So writing is always avocational whereas econ, even though I know I will never be an i-banker or a consultant or anything, econ always feels vocational. You don’t do lit reviews in your spare time. No one sits back, grabs a beer, and starts running regressions for the hell of it, or worse, for the beauty of it.

But at the same time, I had this little twinge, a moment where I was suddenly concerned that my writing was becoming nothing more than a craft. I was trying to figure out how a guy who works a 7:30 to 4 shift could not get home till 9. And I felt like I should insert some random “he spent four hours at a bar” or “he ran several errands, getting new keys made, going to the bank, etc.”. Then I was like, is this a puzzle that has been made and carved already? Am I simply putting the pieces together in a prescribed order? Where is the art in this?

The answer I came up with, to the problem with the story, that is, was to have him go see two movies. The beauty of it was that it so fit the character, I was actually surprised I hadn’t been planning on doing that in the first place. Of course he would go see a movie. It’s dark and silent, and no one will be looking at him. He can hide even better than he could sitting in his room where his parents might knock on his door.

This was craft, but not a craft. It was technique, as my teachers call it, instead of directions. So I’m ok with it. And I might even be ok with writing by numbers, as long as I can sit down and plop words that are chaotic and meaningless and yet meaningful to me.

Snow and City Politics

I hate that there is not more snow here. It snowed in October, for God’s sake, and now it’s almost February and there’s hardly an inch on the ground. It was worse before, of course. From December through half of January there was not a single flake that remained more than a moment.

I came to Chicago expecting it to be warmer and have more snow. In truth, I found the opposite. It probably has something to do with the lake, and the ocean, and how the lake is not like the ocean. No salt smell, and less snow. But I miss snow, because without snow winter is just bare trees and flowerless flowerbeds. Without snow there is no play in winter, just toil. And without snow there is just ice.

Of course, the snow in Chicago isn’t always great, even when it comes. It’s good for the first day or so. But then the salt machines come, and in Chicago salt is a political issue. You salt the neighborhoods or they’ll throw you out of city hall. Never mind whether the cars rust and the water is contaminated. Salt them roads. And that means the snow, at least on the roads, turns to slush. And then the slush turns to mud. And then the mud gets flung this way and that, onto the pristine white snow, making everything a grey dirty muddy mess of ice and water and cold and grit. And I hate that.

It’s not unique to Chicago, I know. All cities have the same thing. Cities just don’t go well with snow. But I think they sand more here, because it’s colder and there’d be more ice. And in general I have very little faith that anything the Chicago public works do couldn’t in fact be done better if there was less money involved. See, Chicago’s huge, comparatively. I didn’t realize at first that all the neighborhoods were actually once separate communities. So this whole huge area is under one jurisdiction, and that means the stakes are higher, which means the potential gains from corruption are higher. It’d be like if Boston annexed Revere, Quincy, Cambridge (that’d be the North Side I guess, or maybe Lincoln Park), Brookline, Everett, Somerville, and Medford. And maybe more, I don’t know the exact numbers. But anyway, anyone nowadays would look at such a move and see it as a huge political power grab that would be detrimental to the well-being of the people of Boston.

What I don’t know, is whether anyone thought that when Chicago was gobbling up the likes of Pilsen and Hyde Park and Andersonville. And, if so, what did they do about it?

Ah, Chicago

Last night I went with Laura to see Megan do a reading at Webster’s Wine Bar which like everything in this city except for poverty and government malfeasance and bottled-up culture is up on the North Side. It was snowing and we drove and we got there early because I had thought the traffic from the Bears game might have spread to 90/94 but it hadn’t.

I guess I had this image of people rushing the streets because they won and the Bears really haven’t won in a while. But, first, it’s hard for people to rush the interstate, and second, all the people that I know who are diehard bears fans are from way out in the burbs, ‘cause that’s where the people who have the time and energy to care about football and the lack of haughtiness to admit they care about football live. Anyway, the streets here are so wide there wouldn’t be a problem even a mob had developed.

I remembered when Laura, and Zoe (that was the first time I met her) and a bunch of other social-justicey people marched in the pro-immigrant (notice, not pro-immigration, pro-immigrant) march that took up a whole bunch of the city, and there were tons of people, and in some parts we weren’t marching, like we weren’t doing that conga-line walk you do when you’re in a real crowded party, but were actually walking, and you could even run if you wanted to, because the streets were so wide.

In Paris, after ’68 and the chaos, they widened a bunch of the streets, and Napoleon did it too before that, to make it easier to deal with revolutions.

It’s moments like those that I miss Boston, I miss the enclosedness and the crampedness. The narrowness. Yeah, sure it’s a pain in the ass to drive in, and I’ve yelled my share of four-letter words while sitting in Boston traffic with people cutting you off and cabs being cabs, with my windows up so no one could really hear me, but still I yelled and banged the steering wheel with my fist until it hurt. But that just makes you walk, and cities are meant to be walked in. Fuck cars. Here, you can drive everywhere, you just can’t park.

Thinking about this, and reading my journal from last summer, I remember a sort of, verse I guess, a paragraph I wrote that I, like most things of mine, at once like and hate:

I do not love the perfect places, boredom citified. No! Give me narrow streets, with daring daredevils upon them. Give me Roxburies, and accented accentuated Dawchestuhs. Give me squeaky trains screeching in the dark. I’ll take my commons to graze on and rebel in, and you can keep the Park. I want brick! Red! Red brick with golden domes built to top the hills.

I do not love the perfect places. Give me tragic teams (though I’ll take victories betimes). I must have grit, dust to seed the clouds. For a snowless world has nothing in it for me.

Ok, that wasn’t about Chicago, but about New York, as you can probably tell. And in some ways Chicago is like Boston, with the Cubs, and the Irish, and the corruption. But I cannot move past the age, or rather the youth, of Chicago.

It reminds me of that kid in my Spanish class who is from Romania and is, what, 18? Maybe, if that, but he acts like he’s 10, not in a bad way, but in an innocent way. He’s the guy who always answers the teacher’s questions before she’s done asking them and raises his hand, when he does raise his hand, raises his hand with an enthusiasm and pure purpose and straining for attention.

And so, like Chicago, whose streets are young but whose buildings for the most part are just as old and young as most of those in Boston and New York and Philly, he looks old but at heart he is simple and young. And that’s the annoying part.

And Chicago is like it is because it’s here in the Midwest next to a huge lake it pretends is like an ocean and a river that is so paltry that they could actually reverse the direction of it (although the Charles isn’t that much grander), and all the lands flat so of course the streets are flat and straight and there’s just so much land anyway, every acre as good as the next acre so you can afford to have big wide streets and everything is built in the weird era between when cities were almost exclusively for walking except for the few who could afford horses, which was, like, most of human history, think Troy, and the period when everyone had cars, think LA, and so it has a real downtown-centered development but also has straightness and regularity.

It’s not the city’s fault, then, that it is this way, I know. Anymore than it’s the kid in my Spanish class’s fault, because I think a lot of his naiveté comes from him being a foreigner, like he didn’t know what Hanukah/Channuka/Chanukkah/ChaaaanuUuKahH/Whatever was because, why should he? All the Jews left Romania.

But while I like that kid, he’s a good kid, I don’t want to live with him, or really hang out with him even. In Chicago they manage to be both jaded and cheery, and I just want the jaded. Because Chicago is jaded from Daley, and the politics of the prairie that once ruled here, with downstate and such. But Boston is jaded from something else, something more ethereal, less political. I can’t quite place my finger on it though.

Maybe it’s the traffic.

Sing in me, Muse

This is my fourth, or fifth, or somethingth attempt at blogging, but I'm feeling good about this one. Each time I make a new blog, and it's all shiny, and I tweak it, and I'm happy, and then I do a few posts, and then I realize I'm a horrible writer and no one would want to read anything I wrote so why put it out there and why take the time when I could be watching West Wing?

My last attempt is extant here. I thought I didn't start writing really until I studied in Paris last winter, but upon reading that old blog for the first time in a long time, I realized I did write before that. And some of it's not even that crappy.

But this one, this one is going to work. I'm doing it now because:

a) Procrastination - homework sucks, even when you like it

b) I'm supposed to write every day for Nonfiction anyway, so I might as well do it online.

c) As Megan said, you can write pages and pages and pages of amazing prose in your journal, and put it in a shoebox under your bed, and hide it away from the world. That's fine. But you're not being a writer. So, here's my stuff, revealed naked, warts and boils and stuff included.

To explain the title: I like walking around in the summer with sunglasses on because people can't tell when you're staring at them. And not in a creepy way, just people watching, just looking at the people you pass every day, the girl wearing the ridiculous hat (fur in June!) and the guy with a limp and the woman scolding her child. I try (and usually fail) not to stare in a judging way. At the very least, I always feel guilty when I do judge. Or, mostly. And I like taking public transportation while wearing headphones, since people assume you can't hear them, so they talk as if you're not there. Nosy? Maybe. But that's what life is, it's conversations people didn't want you to hear. And it's little weird hats and the way a woman pokes a little boy in the chest to emphasize his sin and the throaty cough of a old woman on the El. So, as I have learned to do (and it is quite possibly the most important lesson I have learned in my life), instead of hating myself for doing these things and wanting to do these things, I will accept them, and channel them, and move on.

Here we go...