Buried Buried Buried Buried Letter Letter Letter Press Press Press Press FEB TWENTY-THIRTEEN
Buried Letter Press February 2013 Š Buried Letter Press 2011-2013 Cover Photo Untitled by Mark Condo
Buried Letter Press Akron, Ohio
Untitled single arranged photos Mark Condo Columbus 2000
~Buried Letter Press~ Proper noun: 1. the particular magazine dedicated to innovative and quality criticism of art in all of its various forms, such as literature, music, film and theater, visual art, etc. 2. a provision of encouragement to artists and patrons worldwide.
FEBRUARY 2013 Make Your Own by Rachel Baade The Open Notebook by Robert Miltner Wrapping up the Year: Rites of Passage by Heather Haden Conjunction Junction, What’s your Function?
by slm young
MFA: The Tourist Trap by Matthew C. Mackey
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Make Your Own Images provided by wikicommons
by Rachel Baade
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It's no secret that superhero comic books aren't particularly friendly to women. The men are idealized power-fantasies whereas the women are merely props to the men. Even if a female is the central character, she poses prettily to the viewer at every opportunity, even if it doesn't make sense. At conventions, companies hire booth babes, models hired to stand in revealing costumes, to lure men to their booths. Books on how to draw superheroes focus on different body types for men, while for women they emphasize how to make the woman overly sexy. Understandably, many women get the feeling that they aren't welcome in the industry as either readers or creators. Most of the female fans in the comic industry read manga, and it's easy to see why. While Japanese comics are divided by gender, both are still accessible to people not of the target audience. In addition, Japanese comics have a plethora of comic genres, while American superhero comics are a very specific, singular genre in themselves. Unfortunately, this doesn't do much for prospective creators as most manga publishers only translate, although a few take on English language manga. Therefore, many female (or female friendly) creators end up going indie, put up their work online for free, or both. A few hopefuls try for Marvel and DC since they are the giants in the American comic industry. Marvel and DC both profess to want a bigger female audience, yet they constantly make editorial decisions that guarantee to keep women at arm's length. Either they come off two strongly towards girls by doing things like the shrink it and pink it marketing strategy, or they focus too much on trying to appeal to the male fan base as well that they lose any interest women may have had in the first place, like Marvel's Girl Comics which had a three issue run in 2010. They are so afraid of losing their straight, white, male demographic that they can't climb out of the well-worn rut they have made for themselves. Oddly enough, the film adaptations of comic books have had no problems garnering a female audience. The objectification of women tends to be extremely toned down or even deconstructed. Marvel's Thor movie even has one of the few instances of the female gaze in a comic movie, slowly panning across Chris Hemsworth's shirtless torso like comic books often do to female characters. Unfortunately, female fans of the films who try to move into the print comics find a cold welcome. This feeling is compounded by the many stories of fans and creators who are harassed, dismissed, and jeered at comic book conventions to the point where some just don't feel comfortable attending any more. Many conventions and exhibitions showing comics don't feature or even invite any women creators, despite the growing amount in indie comics. Amazingly, San Diego
Comic Convention attendees were 40% women, yet the ratio of female to male guests was one to five. Heads of such events claim they don't want tokenism, but why should it be difficult for them to find female comic creators in the first place? In fact, during a panel at the San Diego Comic Convention in 2011 when Dan Didio, the head of DC, was asked to hire more women, he demanded to know who he should hire. After the convention, fans put together a list of over a hundred names of female comic creators prominent in the industry. The outcry didn't end there. Many comic fans were vocal about the lack of women writers when DC was promising more diverse comics in their reboot. The creator lineup for their New 52 had just one woman on the list, Gail Simone, whose career in comics started by brutally mocking the very industry she works for. While upset at the decision by her superiors, she gave the best advice to marginalized groups underrepresented in the industry: I have seen, a million times, people with complaints about art or comics or film or music, dismissed online with the simple comment, 'Make your own, then.' ...It’s always struck me as a bit sad, that in a community like Tumblr, you have thousands of artists and thousands of writers, many of whom are very witty and very talented. And many have aspirations to be comic creators. But few make that leap. What I would like to see is this…why can’t some of those artists and some of those writers get together and build their own little rocket ships?” While this is easier said than done, many were already making their own, and they enthusiastically compiled lists, made communities, and even self-published books like Womanthology (an anthology of 140 female creators) to celebrate women in comics using Kickstarter money. In this day and age, where print on demand and funding sites like Kickstarter cut the risks of print runs and storage, making your own comics is now a viable alternative to a shrinking industry trying to thrive on hyper-masculinity. Although it can be difficult to get the word out about a selfpublished work, many publishers expect the creator to carry that responsibility solely on their own shoulders. Thus, rather than containing themselves in the single genre that superhero comics have, many women are now reaching into the more forgiving avenue of indie comics to explore more female-friendly stories. There is some crossover, however. Comic artists sell best at comic conventions, and thus women artists there still have to deal with the boy's club feel. At these conventions, it is not uncommon for female comic creators like Kelly Turnbull to be ignored in favor of their male assistants because women making comics is such an alien thought to most fans. Fortunately, many female-driven stories have been seen that may not have ever been published otherwise, many of them going beyond the superheroes that the main comic book publishers specialize in. The best way to change an industry is to change it from the inside. Gail Simone chose to change it by working for the very same companies that propagate the status quo. She attempts to make superhero comics more inclusive for everyone, seeing the importance of being welcome in the media. Others choose to work outside of it, and even more simply vote with their dollars. Until DC and Marvel figure out how to cater to women in their comics, many fans of comics are content to spend their money elsewhere. Only now is the comic industry recovering since the Comics Code reduced the industry to one lone genre. With comics' accessibility expanding to being free online to paying a few bucks for an e-book in addition to the limited shelving on a comic book store, superheroes aren't the only game in town. Conventions line Intervention for indie works and web media are popping up everywhere. However, the problem remains if women keep being shoved off into a niche. Womanthology and other projects like it, for all its showcasing of talent, shelve women separately from the other creators. Women must be able to let their work speak for itself, but the industry's malecentrism ensures that change will be slow in coming.
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The Open Notebook by Robert Miltner Leaning over the hood of my old Ford station wagon, Alberta Turner signs her name to the Withdraw Form so I can drop her Writing Poetry class at Cleveland State University. She’s published two books of poetry so she’s the first real writer I’ve known. She’s known for her fairness to students and for wearing practical shoes. Rumor has it she’s never driven a car in her life and takes the bus everywhere. She knows I am dropping the class to hitch-hike to the West Coast. “OK, I’ll only let you drop the class,” Alberta says, wagging a finger at me, “if you promise to keep a journal. A very detailed journal. After all,” she says, putting her pen in her bag, “that’s what writers do.” All right then, I think, that’s what I’ll do. Nothing looks unusual about this notebook. Black cover, slightly more rectangular than square, unlined white pages. Just as equally it could serve as a sketchbook, or be pressed into use as a ledger. But I'm using it as a journal. I’ll write in this journal as I hitch-hike out West with my college friend Bo one summer in the 1970’s after we’ve graduated. We are restless, unsettled, filled with a need to get something out of our systems before the system pulls us in to day jobs, careers, occupations, routine, the whole near-death middle class experience we’ve gotten educations for. On the inside the cover of my notebook is my name and my parent's address, so if it gets lost anyone who finds it can mail it back home. All I'm taking is a backpack, a sleeping bag, a harmonica, some traveler's checks, and this notebook. What more could I need? We are traveling from Ohio to California to see my brother, then from there to British Columbia on the promise from another college friend of summer jobs as wildfire fighters. No matter that I have no experience; I know someone on the job who promises he can get us in. What I possess instead of experience is my romantic view of the world. I also possess my notebook. The ride across Indiana and Illinois with the perfume salesman who chain-smokes cigars: that goes in my notebook. Seeing the Mississippi, the length and expanse of it as I cross over it on a bridge while I sit in the passenger seat of a sedan driven by an old man who just points at things and never talks: that goes in too. And the week in Rapid City, just after the killing flood, where Bo and I stay for a week shoveling mud out the windows of people’s houses, then sleeping, with aching arms and shoulders and backs, on the high school gym floor. This in exchange for two bus tickets for an all night ride into Denver, the young Lakota woman sitting next to me, beading and singing Neil Diamond songs to herself. That goes in. I put everything in. The Rockies. Snow-capped peaks. Blue spruce and ponderosa pine, aspen leaves spinning in the wind. Crazy-deep ravines and morning-glorious valleys. The sound of water moving quickly over rock and echoing off boulders. Mule deer and wild mules. Switchbacks and straight drops. Hot sun and cold shadows, air so thin I feel giddy.
I talk my way out of jail just outside of Grand Junction, Colorado. A young local sheriff picks us up for hitch-hiking. Makes us take off our belts and remove our shoelaces. Gives us chipped beef on toast for dinner. Asks us where we are from, where we are going. I tell him we are going to Marysville, California to see my brother off before the Air Force sends him on a tour of duty in Thailand. The sheriff looks at us then like he is really seeing us, like we are real people, not just two college hippies he’s rounded up to keep the citizens safe. He pulls up a chair outside our cell, talks for almost two hours, telling us stories about his childhood in flat-ass Nebraska, about when he was in the service, an Army grunt in Vietnam. Then he drives us back out to the highway and gives us ten dollars for breakfast when we get into Utah. The back seat of the blue Volkswagen Beetle is filled up to and past the window with boxes and clothes. She’s moving from Salt Lake to San Diego, and Bo and I have to share the one empty front seat if we want a ride. We’ve stood for two days on the roadside in Salt Lake, under the sun, in air so dry it splits our lips, and we’ve lived on granola and apples and the awful rusty metal-tasting water we drink from the one working faucet at the gas station at the service plaza next to the highway. As the little Beetle comes off the ramp and merges into the slow lane, we see a guy--no hat, mouth open--holding up a canteen which must be as empty as the look in his eyes, imploring in pantomime for a ride. We’re not the car to help him. I try to blink the image away but my eyes are too dry. The false dawn in Nevada is Reno in the night, neon and light and 49 cent breakfasts all day long. That goes in the notebook. The exit ramp that leads to a two-rut dirt road that disappears into the desert, into the dark. All there, in my notebook. We climb into the hills above Marysville, California. After Nevada, we want to sleep under the stars. In town, we bought fresh tomatoes, onions, peppers, some local red wine. The fire is down to good coals and the vegetables are just starting to simmer when a woman rides up on a horse. Curlers in her hair. A pissy look on her face. She could be Barbara Stanwick, for all we know. “This is my land,” she tells us from the saddle, “you’re trespassing and you’ll have to leave.” Bo tells her we’ll leave first thing in the morning. “Then I’ll have to send for the authorities,” she answers. We look around. All we can see is the same rock and scrub we climbed up through. Cops coming to chase us out seems unlikely. We keep cooking as she rides off. We’re digesting our ratatouille and passing the bottle of red wine between us when we hear the sound of a car motor, see headlights bouncing, and hear the frame of the car scrape and bounce on the rocks as the cop car--we can see its light rack--works its way up the hill like it’s a jeep out four-wheeling. Bo hands me the bottle of wine. “Drink up,” he says, “I think we’re leaving.” Marysville. The Army base. My bother's apartment. The balcony of the apartment where we sit up all night drinking beer until the sun comes up. What we talk about all night, he and I, Bo sleeping on the couch in the living room. About our childhoods, our lives now, the future. About his going halfway around the world to participate in a war neither of us supports.
When we leave in the morning, I think about all the possible futures that might happen. Or not. I turn back to watch my brother wave goodbye. The Pacific Ocean at sunset. The incomprehensible sense of vastness. The light breaking on the waves. The hard bed of the green pickup truck we ride in then the whole basket of artichokes we eat around a fire south of the Redwoods, shared with some California girls who own the pickup. Some yard we wake up in, a dog yapping at our faces, above us the lowest branches of the Redwoods as far up as I can see. The coastal road we hitch-hike that takes us into Oregon. Blackberry thickets in flower. The sun, always the sun, always the ocean and the sun. When we cross into British Columbia, we give the border guards the name and address a friend had given us of someone we don’t know in Vancouver, a calling card to get in to Canada so we don’t appear vagrant. We hitch-hike two days to get to Kamloops. We go to the address where we are to find our college friend who promised us the firefighter jobs. He’s not there. But a letter, with our names, is. “Her name is Inga,” it reads, “and we’ve gone to Ireland.” Bo says they should go to hell. I don’t exactly disagree. We hand the letter back and forth like it’s a dead bird neither of us wants the responsibility of burying. Bo and I move like game pieces along the Trans-Canadian highway, hopping from one youth hostel to the next, in by 10 and up by 6. We sweep up and wash dishes and prepare meals in exchange for a mattress on a linoleum floor. For almost three weeks we work the orchards picking fruit with hippies and farm workers. The work is honest and feels good and real after classrooms and writing papers. We drink nights in the pubs, take local girls in through the Ladies and Escorts entrances. Some nights it feels like we’re starting fires instead of putting them out. Midnight, halfway between Kamloops and Revelstoke. We get dropped off on a moonless stretch of road as the van that brought us this far turns off on a side road. If it were not for the light from a billboard, we wouldn’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces. We roll out our sleeping bags under the billboard, since it feels misty and damp here in the mountains, like it could rain. Bo tells me to use a piece of rope, like he’s done, to tie himself to the support post for the billboard frame, so we don’t roll of a cliff. I laugh, but do so anyway. When I wake in the morning, I find I’m not on the edge of a cliff. Bo shrugs his shoulders. “Could have been,” he says. My stomach flip-flops as I realize that, though I tied the rope around my waist, I never tied it to the support post. Could have been, I tell myself as I untie the rope. Bo, who’s nearly out of money and time, takes the Trans-Canadian back East to Ann Arbor where he says another friend has a job waiting for him in a bar called the Blind Pig that will be opening soon. When a car stops to pick him up, I hand him his pack, shake his hand, wave as he drives off. After crossing the border, I continue south toward California to locate a distant cousin I’ve never met who teaches at San Jose State. I’ve decided to try graduate school on the West Coast. South of Olympia, Washington I meet a young soldier hitch-hiking home for the weekend, on furlough. “Dumbest thing I ever did, signing up,” he tells me, shaking his head. We share cigarettes
waiting for a ride. He invites me to stay the night and I do. I stay for over two weeks. There are about a dozen or so people living in an old farmhouse and they are happy I’m here since I’m old enough to buy them cases of Rainier Beer. Each night, they build a huge bonfire in a cleared field surrounded by trees. All their vans are circled around the fire, doors open, radios tuned to the same station out of Tacoma. Sounds like a outdoor concert. Everyone has a better Bigfoot story than the last one. We sleep where our eyes close, where our knees buckle. Oregon and endless rain. In Portland, I stay in a youth hostel in a church basement; it’s the last one going south. Just before 10 and lights out, I go to get my toothbrush and realize someone has gone through my pack. It must have happened while I was washing dishes. My pocket knife is here, my harmonica, candy bars. Even my money is still in the backpack. The only thing missing is my notebook. I find my distant cousin’s name on the list of English faculty at San Jose State. After his name are the letters LV. There is not building marked LV on the campus map. The student at the information desk tells me the LV means he’s on leave. “A Sabbatical,” she says, “I heard he went to Paris to write.” My pack on my back, I turn toward the highway again. It feels like someone has gone through my future and taken my distant cousin I never met an even greater distance. Paris, I think: I hope he took a notebook, because that’s what writers do. Berkeley and a ride to Arizona. I jot odd notes on scraps of paper I push into my pockets. Ed, a large bearded guy, will put new brake pads on the old Mercury I riding with him in. “It’s rusty,” he says, “but it runs like a top.” In my mind I have an image of a car spinning in place: not what I want if I plan to move on. In Flagstaff, I hand him tools, run into the trailer to fetch him cold beers, shine the flashlight where he needs it. If he can get the brakes to work, he tells me, he’ll drive me to Denver. The mountain air in Flagstaff is refreshing, I think, as I watch his legs stick out from under the car. Ed asks me for another beer. “You’re out,” I tell him. “Well,” he says, “why don’t you hitch into town for a six pack while I’m finishing this up?” he asks. I walk down the long gravel driveway, surrounded by mountains, till I get to the road. I stick out my thumb. Two years later, I’m living in Denver, working days at a landscaping job. At night I take classes in rooms in office buildings rented by Metropolitan State College, a school so new it doesn’t have a campus yet. My sociology class in an office building; my classroom is on the second floor between a lawyer’s office and a title agency. Most of the notebooks I own now are for class notes, assignments. In my backpack I keep one notebook for story ideas, metaphors and images for poems. One day I come home from work to find a package has arrived in the mail from Ohio, from my parents. When I open it, I find a black notebook, the one I had stolen in Oregon.
My hands are practically shaking. This is the notebook with names, addresses and phone numbers of people I met traveling from Ohio to British Columbia and down to Portland. With my first impression of the Pacific. Of deserts and mountains and roads and campsites and hostels. Of my brother and the war. Of my changing life. But when I open the notebook, it’s blank. Looking closely, I discover someone has removed--with a razor blade--all the pages I’d written on. All that’s left are the blank pages and the black cover. I call my parents to find out where the notebook was mailed from. They don’t remember. They just rewrapped it and mailed it to me. Maybe there never was a return address. They’re not sure. Neither am I. I try to puzzle it all out but I draw a blank. The best riddles are those we never solve, ones we never know the answers to. Once we fully understand something, we lose interest. It’s like what Charles Simic says about good poems, that we keep going back to them because we can’t solve them. So I put the one-lost notebook away, decide to move on to something else, something new. Maybe come back to it one day. In the meantime, I’ll let it read me. I think about these riddles when I read the names of cities, states, rivers, and mountain ranges on the maps in the road atlas. Places I’ve been, want to go next, go to someday. My eyes are as open as the road atlas page, as open as the window I look out, as unsolved and open as my black, black notebook. Forever an open road to me, it haunts my memory in a way the written word can never do. It calls me to write. If Alberta Turner were here, she’d tell me to answer the call, to write. She’s say, that’s what writers do.
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Wrapping up the Year: Rites of Passage by Heather Haden The Old Year has gone. Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time. All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!”- Edward Payson Powell
The spirit of giving is still upon us. Although the official holiday season is behind us, we are not yet in the clear with what is arguably the largest commercial holiday looming upon the horizon, especially in our neck of the woods here at Buried Letter Press, with the American Greetings headquarters only an hour north in Cleveland. As I wade through the parade of parcels which arrive in the months between November and February I realize that the inundation of these gifts is largely due to the act of non-seeing and of the concept of the veil. Paper swaddles our gifts, concealing their contents – or at least we hope. Recently I learned that a father bought a guitar for his son this past Christmas, and after wrapping it, he intentionally mislabeled the package to throw the boy off the trail. The bright child became suspicious and looked up the dimensions of his hoped-for guitar on the internet and measured his father’s wrapped package. The young boy thus cracked the code. I am sure that this story will become a hallmark in this family’s memory just as in my family memory it is a beloved moment when time and again, my dad theatrically shakes his gifts, one by one, exclaiming, “How did you know?! You’ve given me my favorite thing: sailboat fuel!” Far be it from me to constrict the idea of gift-giving to the mere materialistic sense; many of us superstitious folk may feel as though the post Mayan apocalypse days are a gift – already a month past and counting! Many more view the mere dawning of 2013 in the same precious light: time is a gift that is wrapped in the past and future. Each day during the coming year, we peal back a layer. No matter the year, as the cycle unfolds and we see with perfect hindsight, the less the future is concealed from us. The act of unfolding can span time, or it can be a mental act that only takes an instant. For example, in the 1960s, the Bulgarian-born, American artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (today known by the mononym Christo) and his wife, the Moroccan Jeanne-Claude began wrapping objects to use this idea of concealment as his medium. These objects ranged from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Seeing the 1961 “Wrapped Chair” at the Cleveland Museum of Art mummified in cloth does not disguise its identity as a chair – viewers can recognize it in an instant. In fact, parts of the chair are blatantly left uncovered and the mind’s eye only has to peel back the partial layers of cloth to mentally reveal the rest of the chair. Yet, a square parcel swaddled in fabric lends itself to much more ambiguity that requires time to optically probe its Christo, Wrapped Chair, 1961.
surface and wonder, what is inside? Examining Christo’s 1961 Package, one may only guess as to what is hidden through its physical dimensions and through the tactile interaction between object(s) and cloth: the rounddisklike impressions that the object imparts to the material; the overall lumpiness of the package; the projections that indicate this is not a simple, flat object. Unlike the boy measuring the box of his concealed guitar prior to Christmas, it would be much harder to guess what lies beneath the twine and drapery. The beauty is that for Christo this may not be any singular object at all but an amalgam of junk configured into a vanguard shape which is simultaneously alluring and eerie. These smaller works are more often attributed to Christo alone, while the larger wrappings, covering entire monuments and stretches of Christo, Package, 1961. landscape, are a nuptial collaboration between Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The first building they wrapped was the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland in 1968. H.H. Arnason and Elizabeth C. Mansfield, authors of History of Modern Art, describe the couple’s wrapping of the Kunsthalle aptly: Here, the urban environment is transformed by the simultaneous absence and presence of the building: the exterior is hidden, but the volume and materiality of the museum assert themselves even more emphatically thanks to the wrapping. Read as a veil, the fabric summons associations with disguise and mystery. As a shroud, the wrap instead suggests the ritual and memorial functions of the museum as a tomb for culture. Banded with rope, the building also resembles a consumer object, packaged for delivery. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings function on multiple levels: veiling, shrouding, and delivering. This last function brings to mind a piece that I recently viewed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, what I would call a temporal sculpture, as part of their inaugural exhibition, “Inside and Out: From the Ground Up,” on view until February 24th, 2013. Walead Beshty’s sculpture includes its life story within its title: 16-inch Copper (FedEx® Kraft Box ©2005 FEDEX 330504 REV 10/05 SSCC), Priority Overnight, Los Angeles-Beverly Hills, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, trk#848232311426, December 16-17, 2011, Standard Overnight, Beverly Hills- Wrapped Kunsthalle, 1968, Bern, Switzerland. Cleveland, trk#800105416430, September 20-21, 2012, 2011. Not only does the name of the work include an ongoing record of the “check-ins” of the copper cubes, but the copper, interacting with all who touch the box along its transit, collects the fingerprints of FedEx workers, museum employees, and everyone in between. Both the growing label and human marks are visible memories of the accumulation of time, space, and travel. The fingerprints over time will cover the box like a veil. In this sense, time, touch, and motion will conceal the shiny newness of the copper, yet as David Norr, Chief Curator of MOCA Cleveland writes, these boxes are “endlessly tied to the present moment. FedExed from one location to another, the Walead Beshty, 16-inch Copper, 2011. On works record the handling and atmospheric conditions they have loan from the Dana Eitches Collection, Los Angeles, for inclusion in MOCA been subjected to during transit.” Visually similar to Donald Cleveland's “Inside and Out: From the Judd’s boxes, such as those on view at the Akron Museum, one Ground Up” exhibition.
key difference in Beshty’s work is that while Judd, as a Minimalist, intentionally avoided the human mark, Beshty’s work adamantly engages it by necessity of the work itself being physically engaged in its transport. Reflecting on the ideas of time, motion, and veiling, are we as individuals as vulnerable to these elements as the copper material that Beshty employs? On the precipice of 2013, works such as those by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Beshty can help us to reflect upon how we reveal and conceal ourselves from others and the marks the year has made upon us, vessels in our own rites of passage through seas of experience, people, and places. Has the passage of time concealed our memory? How has hindsight been the tool of revelation? Over the Christmas holiday, I was speaking with my aunt about supernatural vision. She described that when a baby is born with a thin layer of skin over his/her face, the most human veil, that the baby is believed to be able to have a heightened sense of spiritual vision. All are endowed with self-awareness, and due to our culture, each December 31st, we vow to ourselves to lift the veil from our own vision. Each year we are reborn. The New Year is personified as a baby, after all! As the late journalist and author Edward Payson Powell said, “Let the dead past bury its own dead. The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.” Allowing the past to bury its own dead sheds light upon the ways in which the wrappings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude may be seen as a shroud, emphasizing the function of the museum as a tomb. Just as the New Year commands the clock, so does 16-inch Copper yield to the present moment. The veil of time sends us into the year wrapped in a temporal cloak that we must embrace and accept in order to see to our resolutions. The spirit of the New Year possesses us, allowing us to annually unveil the past twelve months from ourselves and, like Janus, we see the past with clarity and turn to face the coming year, the most mysterious gift of all, wrapped in the fabric of time, woven with copper thread.
Image Notes: Image 1 (Wrapped Clock): Photograph by the author. Image 2 (Wrapped Chair): http://www.clevelandart.org/art/1996.29 Image 3 (Package): http://eyelevel.si.edu/2010/08/package-1961-by-christo-.html Image 4 (Wrapped Kunsthalle): http://www.leninimports.com/christo_cards.html Image 5 (16-inch Copper): http://thestyleletters.blogspot.com/2012/11/contemporary-chic.html Source Notes: Arnason, H.H. and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art: Painting, Scuplture, Architecture, and Photography. Sixth Edition. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2010. 479-80.
Conjunction Junction, What’s Your Function? by slm young I wonder as I type just those few words that make up the title of this piece, how many of my students would be able to correctly do the same. There are, after all, at least two grammatically “tricky” elements in the title—an apostrophe and a possessive. To make matters even more grammatically tenuous, the apostrophe is not forming a possessive and the possessive is formed without an apostrophe. Lands alive! What am I doing? Many people argue that language is a living, breathing creature; it evolves. In my lifetime, I have witnessed evidence of this evolution. Why, then, can’t I accept the fact that grammar doesn’t need to be taught, the way that cursive writing has been dropped from curriculums? My students would likely say that I’m boring them, and perhaps I am boring them, but shouldn’t someone care about their grammar? So many students seem not to have learned grammar before they reach my classroom that I have to wonder if it is never taught, or not taught thoroughly enough, or if the problem is that grammar is so freaking boring that students can’t possibly be forced to listen long enough to learn anything about it. I will attest, teaching grammar is akin to pulling teeth, and when my students have that glazed over look in their eyes, I begin to feel as if I might be causing them actual physical pain. I persist, however, because I think grammar is important. I think grammar is a little like freedom. My dear reader, don’t scratch your head. I’m not trying to be trying. I really do believe that knowing grammar is freeing. To be able to articulate in writing, one’s deepest thoughts, desires, and passions, or to simply write a letter to one’s credit card company without the fear of being perceived by the reader as ignorant, or lazy, or less-than, this is freedom, isn’t it? The ability to write with ease and to communicate with whomever one wants, this is the very meaning of freedom. I enjoy the solace that rules afford us. The rules of grammar are, to me, like the notes of a familiar song. It’s like putting my arms through the sleeves of my favorite gray hoodie. I feel safe and warm inside those rules of usage, as if despite the chaos of the world and relationships, the upheaval of family and job, the ugliness and monotony of, say, January in Ohio, I still can rely on the rules of usage to be always unfailing in their certainty. There is safety there inside those rules. The flipside of the coin, however, is that correct usage can also be a constant source of frustration. If you know the rules and are bothered by their misuse, then the problems follow you everywhere. You see the grammar mistakes everywhere you go. On the six o’clock news. In the local newspaper. At the gas station. On Facebook. I should just admit it. I am a grammar snob. I judge people who misuse their theres. I can’t help it. There and their and they’re aren’t particularly difficult as far as homonyms are concerned. It’s not as if it’s a difficult rule, such as when to use who or whom, or even lie, lay, or laid. I can’t even admit that I know all the damn rules that I love so much, but I’ll be the first to scoff at someone who gets it wrong. I’m terribly insensitive and judgmental when it comes to writing, even though I would consider myself liberal-minded about most other issues. And apparently, this makes me a LGF (Liberal Grammar Fanatic) and apparently I am not a phenomenon. I am just like all the other LGFs out there. According to Jessica Love, we’re ubiquitous. I read Love’s essay, “The Liberal Grammar Fanatic: Why do grammatical errors turn Jeckylls into Hydes?” and longed for her to give me an answer to this seemingly contradictory position I hold—why am I liberal about everything except grammar? Love argued that variations of spellings and usages should be considered “diversity.” As the true LGF that I am, I would call it perversion.
Allow me to provide an example. The word “however,” according to my Strunk and White The Elements of Style, should never begin a sentence unless the meaning is as follows: However hard I try, I cannot teach my students the correct usage of the word “however.” My students, however, use the word “however” at the beginnings of sentences (and paragraphs) all the time. It seems as though every essay I read includes this peeve of mine. (Grammar Girl, by the way, disagrees with Strunk and White on this matter, and believes that when used as a conjunction, the word “however” can be used at the beginning of a sentence, but I disagree with Grammar Girl since a conjunction is meant to connect.) I can’t explain why it drives me nuts when students misuse “however,” especially when I admit that I am guilty of bastardizing the English language for my own creative endeavors. Apparently I am a hypocrite. Or perhaps I just believe that a person needs to earn the right to break the rules. Love suggests four hypotheses for why the LGF is so concerned with and so occasionally enraged by the misuse of these rules, but the first hypothesis strikes me as the most interesting. The first hypothesis suggests that because liberals like to read, they (we) identify with the language in the literary canon. I can’t argue about the reading part of that hypothesis. The truth is that I did not have many grammar lessons in school. The last time I remember learning anything about grammar was from Mrs. Metzger, my fifth grade teacher, and perhaps the grammar was why I loved her so. Despite what I believe to be a dismally inadequate tutelage, I have managed to grow into a decent teacher of English. I can’t claim to have been taught all the rules, but books are good teachers, and I read a lot as a kid. Reading. I can’t help myself, I suppose. It seems to me, now that I’ve arrived here, that this is really why I care so much about the god damned rules. I cannot tell you how often my students report that they “hate reading.” And I simply don’t understand. I don’t want to understand their hatred of reading. I don’t want to know a world without books or rules or writing. A world without poems is like a world without the color red. It’s a world without water. Or deserts. Or dreams. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without water, or dreams, or books. And I like the rules of the game I play. Grammar rules are the tools of my trade, and I’d rather trade in words than in anything else.
MFA: The Tourist Trap by Matthew C. Mackey For the past three years, I have traveled around Europe, by and large, as part of a graduate program for creative writing. Every place I went, I stopped and, as condemning a practice as this is, “did the touristy thing.” In Paris, I saw the Eiffel Tower. In Italy, I jumped (Byronesque) in the canals of Venice. In Prague, I made sure to see Pražský hrad. In Edinburgh, I watched bagpipers. Everywhere, I went to museums, saw graves, visited churches, relaxed in cafés, climbed monuments, drank local beers and liquors, etc. etc... ad infinitum. I saw the faces of these incredible places, but very rarely did I stop to think about the authenticity of each place or even what authenticity meant. I had the privilege of working with Susan Schultz, editor of Tinfish Press, while in Edinburgh. An advocate of docu-poetry, a hybrid of investigative journalism and poetry, Susan emphasizes place in terms of its authenticity and relationship to the human occupant, usually pushing toward an examination of origin and history. Here we can set the term of authenticity as meaning both reality and genuineness. Susan views Edinburgh as a place that both mystifies its own existence and sells it by the pound. As a resident of Hawai’i, Susan has a unique understanding of “tourist-infested.” Here is what she has to say about Scotland: The Royal Mile in Edinburgh cannot be mistaken for Honolulu's Waikiki (or for Williamsburg, or for Washington, DC's Mall), except conceptually, but concepts can be as strong as facts. So this road of over a mile's length that runs between Edinburgh Castle and the Scottish Parliament, which abuts Holyrood Castle, presents an imagined version of Scotland as surely as the Hilton Hawaiian Village (re)presents a virtual Hawai`i. There are stores that sell kilts, stores that sell whiskey, stores that sell you your family's history for 10 pounds, bagpipers sounding their 8track repetitions. And there are the tourists, taking it in. Edinburgh feels familiar, precisely because it is full of people like us, wandering the paved roads looking for the vision of Scotland that we have imagined, if never seen. We are tourists of the tourists, as well as of the sights. Like Susan’s experience in Edinburgh, I looked back on my own excursions and wondered what eluded me by not digging deeper, digging through the romanticization, through the illusion. What would I gain from thought about the origin and history of how I thought about such places? Anyone can stop and find a pamphlet that briefly outlines the account of the Eiffel Tower, but one rarely stops to consider the significance of its authenticity or if it has any left. What exactly is “the Eiffel Tower”? Why does it occupy such a place in our consciousness that it demands to be seen? The tower is one of the most recognizable and most visited tourist locations in the world, and I wonder which is the real Eiffel Tower. The iron latticework of the 124 year old construct? The tormented dream of its creator Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel? Or the over-touristy, romanticized symbol of Paris that it is today? It begs the Cartesian question: Which is real, that which exists outside of our minds or that which exists inside? A far more important question presented itself the more I thought about authenticity and the impulse to be a sightseer. Standing in the Champ de Mars with the tower leaning over my shoulder, I posed for a photo. As the flash went off, I thought, “What am I doing here?” This isn’t the first time I’ve asked that question. In fact, I’ve often asked this of myself. Like many students plugging through a graduate program, the question was nearly constantly on my
mind, usually in a more vulgarized version. Of course, the late nights, the heavy reading, the constant writing, the too early mornings weren’t quite as fun as seeing parts of Europe, but the more I studied, the more sights I saw, and the traditional cornerstones of creative writing program I visited and recorded, the more I asked that question. I was concerned with my experience and what I was “getting out of it” rather than what the authenticity of my place and time allowed me. At the beginning of almost every class, introductions were made. I was amazed at how varied the backgrounds were of my classmates. Some were students simply perusing their interests. Others were “trying their hand” at a new craft after having been retired for X amount of years. Others were looking for a teaching career. Others were looking to “figure out” how to publish. And still, some, like myself had over-romanticized the idea of “writer,” probably after reading Baudelaire or Rimbaud, Neruda, Whitman, Kerouac, etc. Any writer can tell you that it is mostly shit work with little pay. But we dreamers have no sense for practicalities, usually. I, like many others, was looking for a vision of the MFA program and of writing that was imagined. To a large extent, the challenge of understanding the context of contemporary literature, and more acutely the position of self as writer within that context is not something that is typically addressed in an MFA program. So the authenticity of writing is scarcely addressed while learning the skill and technician is often overemphasized. Survey courses and genre specific workshops are usually the answer for such dilemmas. The hope, I’m sure, is that individuals will go on to study trends and patterns within the history and origin of their craft, finding for themselves the authenticity of writing, not just the pamphlet-version of it. The obvious analogy here is that many experience an MFA program as if they were tourists. Indeed, more and more criticism is popping up that workshops are not teaching writing, but rather they are teaching students how to effectively workshop. Since the workshop methodology is the sine qua non of creative writing programs, many enter into such programs because they want the workshop experience. The danger is that students may act and look the part of writers, but have no understanding of the authenticity of writing. For example, sitting in a bar with my hat pulled down, drinking a beer at the Golf Tavern in Edinburgh, I would hardly be mistaken for a foreigner. It isn’t until I open my mouth that my flat American accent would reveal that I am actually an outsider. The point is though I may be mistaken for a resident in Edinburgh, I have no idea what it’s like to be a native of Scotland. To reiterate, as a tourist in an MFA program, I have no understanding of the reality and genuineness of being a writer. I know the practice, I know the sights, I know how to fit in, I know where I need to go and what to do, but still don’t know “what I’m doing here.” Later in her blog, Susan writes: That I felt at home in Edinburgh to some degree because it is so tourist-infested was a source of discomfort, and mostly we avoided the Mile in favor of our lodgings north of Holyrood, down an ordinary street (Milton Street was blind, in a usage learned from Dubliners), close to a Sainsbury's and (oh my) a mall of sorts. More to the point, Edinburgh felt uncomfortably comfortable because it and Scotland are haunted by questions of authenticity, language (did Scots come from English, or is the other way around true?), nation, another country's militarism, the oil industry. Sam Kelly, head of the Napier MA in creative writing, told us at our opening dinner that Scotland is a country that is not a nation, a place obsessed with itself, unwilling to look outward because it is so concerned with what it is. I revisited Susan’s blog recently as I was framing my ideas about tourism and reread her last paragraph. Playfully, I reworked some of her language to better fit my analogy. This is by no means a comment by the author. This is just a rearrangement of her text: That I felt at home in a creative writing program to some degree because it is so tourist-infested was a source of discomfort, and mostly we avoided the workshop in
favor of our own rooms […] More to the point, MFA programs felt uncomfortably comfortable because they are haunted by questions of authenticity, language (did writers create the workshop, or is the other way around true?), identity […] the MFA is a program that is not an education, a place obsessed with itself, unwilling to look outward because it is so concerned with what it is. In MFA programs across the nation, and I might argue the whole of higher education, students are asked to “fake it until you make it.” Students learn how to act and pretend to be writers without actually knowing what a writer is. The theory is that eventually the student “makes it,” that the falsehood eventually becomes a reality. Again, I think of the real Eiffel Tower and trying to decipher the authenticity of its existence. Are MFA programs showing students what it means to be writers or what it means to be MFA students and graduates? Perhaps the real value of MFA programs is that they beg the question “what are you doing here?”
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