art-student debt

At L.U.S.K. it's rare that we honor another writer's birthday, or even our own, but Chelsea Martin's this past Sunday drew me to her Facebook wall and then this piece she wrote about student debt and her longing to buy a house. She's a small businessperson with five published books, but it appears as if she could also use even more debt relief than this Congresswoman would like to offer. In honor of Martin's birthday, I'm strongly considering ceasing to encourage my daughter to embrace the arts as anything more than an avocation although I'll certainly look forward to her return to art day camp in a few weeks. Pottery and painting worked fine for me through age ten, and I can't remember why I stopped attending University City Arts League classes. Possibly I'd become even more obsessed with street sports and half-court basketball, or maybe it was the move to J. R. Masterman, and the homework that greeted me at my new school.

Philadelphia wandering

I flew in on remarkably small planes from GSP to Dulles to Philly and a few hours later, I was visiting my older sister and her family in always sunny University City. After we all ate at an Indian restaurant, I walked back through Penn and Drexel's campuses and saw new buildings and construction all over. The University of Pennsylvania had a whole bunch of new restaurants where I used to frequent the other movie theater as a kid. It was either the Eric III on Campus across from the library on 40th or the GCC on Walnut. But that was so many years ago and now even the Marathon Grill that replaced the Burger King is long gone. It seemed like a happy, healthy, economically stimulated area on an early Saturday evening, far removed from any evidence that American median incomes have slipped by four grand over the past four years or that our median family is worth 77K. It's probably bad form to bring all that up, yeah, I know.

So I walked down Walnut in the colder-than-I-thought-it-would-be weather and popped in to the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore to make sure my same signed paperbacks of Fight for Your Long Day were still on the shelf. Yep, they were. Untouched and unread, so I took them out to check for my signature and then replaced them all save for one which I left open to display, leaning on the paperbacks on a higher state of shelf. Will someone find it and read or at least give it a quick glance? Will a reshelver take this as a clue that it's time for the books to be returned? There appear to be sales in new and used online, but it's a little unclear if the everchanging quantities of new and used available on amazon are genuinely indicative of such.

Who cares, right?

Yeah, so I sauntered over to the magazines and found the latest editions of Boulevard and The Paris Review. Boulevard had an Anis Shivani follow-up, a retort and reply, to the AWP/MFA gangs who've been dissing his disses on the question of whether creative writing can or cannot be taught, or is not or is a form of therapy. And, well, I must confess it is making me feel a little better right now, the writing is therapeutic I should say, but the whole thing seems like some ridiculous binarism than even kids who didn't write their first messages on IBM punch cards can easily debunk, deconstruct, or de-whatever-they-want-to-call-it.

For the average applicant, as talented as she or he may be, the programs themselves seem increasingly impossible to gain admittance to although evidence suggests that in some cases cheating and plagiarism can work for other elite programs. If I remember correctly, George Saunders reported almost 600 applications for 6 spaces at Syracuse, so there seems to be very little reason not to resort to criticizing them as part of one's own quest for readership. If I'm not mistaken, Roberto Bolano did worse than this kind of thing as a young poet in Mexico, and I'd suspect that this is part of how he established his "name" even if he wrote his long novels years later in Spain. The actual writing of the books would be the minor problem, right?

Hah!

But back to rejection and economic doom, Saunders's underlying economic message is that one is most likely to become just another rejected statistic who has lost hundreds of dollars in application fees so that a handful of select writers might indulge in tuition wavers and "generous stipends," all the while dreaming of healthy salaries, quality health benefits, and secure retirements that may prove to be entirely out-of-reach or nonexistent. The finances are most likely to be middling at best either and any way unless the poet is willing to resort to some other art for the sake of turning a buck. But aside from the fact that he is dying, just like the rest of us, and must endure such terminal pleasure in cold, dreary upstate New York, Saunders is doing quite fine.

Me? I played it warmer, if poorer, and stayed in South Carolina when my wife moved to Ohio for her good opportunity. I wanted to live with my daughter full-time this year, but there was no job for me, and I couldn't bring myself to apply for one of three sales positions advertised at Subaru of Dayton or return to begging for adjunct classes while some other "important" writers write the same books over and over again. (I'd love to see more of these capitalist repeaters show some cojones and say something public, and positive or negative, about Fight for Your Long Day. Books are being written on top of women with no benefits teaching six classes, and the higher-ups mostly ignore this situation.)

For the record, in car sales, the opportunities to write are even more fleeting than they are for the adjunct instructors of English comp, but health benefits are generally still available for full-time workers at the dealerships. When I sold Toyotas over 20 months in Philly, I'd drink beer and scribble in a bar late at night, but I never produced anything more than the roughest sketches. I was tired, naye, exhausted, most of the time, and it's as if nothing has really changed over time.

So I put down Boulevard, hoping Shivani is enjoying the fact that he has so many readers for "frenemies" (a term borrowed from this recent Alexander Chee), and although it's the one I'd prefer to be loyal to, and its editor was briefly kind to one of my rejected stories, alas, I'm just another writer with a kid who shouldn't be indulging in any full-retail-price literary journals, and so I felt like I was doing something wrong when I purchased The Paris Review instead, at a corporate-U. B&N no less, by slapping down a plastic amazon card. Its contents included a "novella" by Sam Savage, an interview with both a poet and fiction writer, and news of their $10,000 prize, which although I'll never win, I might enjoy indulging in dreams of such.

So that's it. Then I left the bookstore and walked home, through the mad, overbearing construction at Drexel University, buildings being built on what used to be the cement sidewalk, where I could likely still be an adjunct instructor if I hadn't made the decisive break in August, 2007. No novel and no little girl I'm almost certain, and now it remains to be seen as to whether this newish trajectory produces any more books or kids.

I'm feeling more optimistic about the second novel. A second child seems highly unlikely.

But one way or another, the second novel, the true first novel and the weirder and more original one, is going to come out.

For some crazy reason, maybe just the 45 minutes of editing I put in at 7 a.m., I know this to be true.

dale drews

I won't be able to do this justice but wanted to get some notes down on the passing of a close family friend. Dale Drews shared many, many Thanksgivings with us at my mother's old apartment in University City. I met him in the very early 1980s when he lived around 49th and Osage, and I was lucky enough to see him a couple times recently and he even got to meet Yiyi and Xiaoli.

I learned all kinds of things from Dale over the years; topics of instruction related to sociology, history, hot sauce, pacifism, humanism, the difference between agnosticism and atheism, the University of Chicago, and how a young man from Iowa knocked on the door to gain admittance. I'm not sure I ever would have become a college instructor or tried to write a novel whose main character is an adjunct if I hadn't known Dale during my formative years. And I'm almost certain that knowing Dale and what he was about and believed in was a main reason I was so intent on devouring Marx, Rousseau, and other continental thinkers when I went off to college.

In fact, I recently chose one of Rousseau's quototations as the prefatory quote for the novel, and I know it is one that Dale would enjoy discussing and then perhaps adding a final comment in his very dry wit. It is even the case that his medical emergency in 1994 was what put me in front of a college classroom for the first time; I proctored a final exam for one of his classes at West Chester University, not knowing that within two years I'd be a teaching assistant at Temple with my own papers to grade and soon after deeply rooted to my own adjunct shuffle around town in Philly. So perhaps the way he led his life helped lead me to my own.

Almost every year we came together for Thanksgiving, Dale would say a few words before we ate; a paraphrase would include, "in reaching for these dishes, we are reaching for each other, and in reaching for each other, we are reaching for the highest."

Now Dale, world willing, has attained the highest. Peace.

lamont b. steptoe

If you find yourself yearning for some poetry and discussion from Lamont B. Steptoe, I discovered you can google "lamont steptoe" and get plenty of entries for this American Book Award winner. Here's a nifty interview from 2007.

Lamont currently keeps watch over what was the Southwestern edge of University City (until the realtors and migrants decided UC should extend to 52nd Street or so), and you can find him on the 34 line, the 42 bus, the walking path, bicycle, or by other means heading West after a day in center city.

Here is what amazon can offer if you'd like to read his poems.

I suspect that getting in touch with Lamont is the best way to access his most recent work. If you see Lamont in person, and are interested in travel narrative, I am certain he can deliver.

Stay warm.