Terror and Pain and Other Awesome Things

So, BIG HUGE FANTASTIC NEWS: I started a new job this week. I'm still working at the University, but in a different department with far more responsibility and freedom. It's a distinctly grown-up feeling job, with nicer clothes and an incredibly hectic Outlook calendar and a steep learning curve and a lot more pressure.

Obviously, this is a huge step for me career-wise, but it's also frightening. Terrifying, in fact. But I keep reminding myself to breath deeply, to trust myself, and to trust the search committee that thought I was right for the job.

I also keep reminding myself that a yoga instructor once told my class that "Pain is good. Pain is just the feeling of your life force actualizing." Of course, she told us this as we were sweating and trembling at least three minutes into an arm-aching balance pose.

I keep telling myself the same thing this week: If pain is just my life force actualizing (!), then maybe terror is just my life changing, expanding, moving forward before my mind can wrap quite comfortably around all the changes.

So that's my philosophy and my hope for the next few weeks. I'll let you know how it all turns out.  :)

Howl, Howl, and Howl

What sound does a working woman in her mid-twenties make the morning after her first softball practice in two and a half years?

Why, how did you guess?

Softball practice was fantastically fun yesterday, but I'm paying for it today. I'm having trouble opening doors, people--I mean, lifting my arm, turning a knob, and stepping forward hurts. Who knew that throwing a ball and crouching for grounders and darting across a muddy field for an hour and forty-five minutes could do that to a body?

In less painful news, I finally saw Howl this weekend. Howl is a "biopic" about the obscenity trial that followed City Light's release of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems  in 1956, but the movie was nothing like what I expected.

I thought the movie would be a typical biopic in the style of Walk the Line or Lean on Me or Braveheart: conventional and predictable and utterly sentimental. Instead, the obscenity trial that the film is supposedly about serves as little more than a backbone for the 84 minutes of poetic action, a mere cage of plot line over which the filmmakers draped the central components of the film: the interview scenes with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the poem itself (which is read by Franco and beautifully animated). Really, the poem is what gives the movie all its heart and soul and interest; I wouldn't have minded a 45-minute movie with nothing but black-and-white scenes of Franco reading Howl in a Village bar spliced with bits of that lovely, vivid, frightening animation.



I was especially fond of the animators' portrayal of Moloch, the poem's "villain" (see above).

Once I got past expecting an actual plot to appear, I really enjoyed the movie, and I loved it best for reminding me of how much I used to love Ginsberg. He's one of my favorite 20th-Century poets, and I've read a ton of his poems and interviews. (In fact, the first poem I ever published was very Ginsberg-inspired, with long lines and stacks of lists and happy over-the-top joyful cosmic hysteria). He was severely out of vogue at my grad school, so I hadn't read him in years, but in 2004, I pretty much wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.

"You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!"

Watching Howl made me pull out my copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems: 1947-1995, which (according the the receipt I found in the book) I bought from The Raven Bookstore in 2005. I reread my favorite sections of Howl (the "I am with you Rockland" section and "Footnote to Howl" with all its holy holy holy holys) and flipped through to see what poems I had marked back in 2005. It made for a lovely evening, actually.

I would definitely recommend Howl (the movie) to anyone who's read the poem and, while I'm at it, to anyone who hasn't read the poem. I believe that Franco reads the entirety of the poem over the course of the movie, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of getting to the heart of what Howl (the poem) is all about. They also did quite a good job of portraying Ginsberg as the complicated figure that I always imagine him to be: a poet, a revolutionary, an unloved lover, a square, a Beat, and an all-around brave and joyful human being.

Eat, Pray, Love

Honestly, I was hesitant to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. It was just so damn popular--so popular that it spawned a Julia Roberts movie (an outcome that, I think, many a writer would dread). C'mon, I thought, how could Eat, Pray, Love turn out to be anything other than cheap tourism and stories about tiramisu and hunky Italians and faux-spiritual enlightenment and steamy tropical romances?

 Fortunately, I was wrong. My mom convinced me to give Gilbert a chance, and I'm so pleased that I pulled one of my local library's fifteen copies of this memoir off the bookshelves. It's a lovely piece of writing and self-exploration, a breathtakingly honest and cleverly written chronicle of Gilbert's sojourns in Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Gilbert's memoir is not literary-ly ambitious but personally so: She's writing the type of confessional non-fiction that holds very little back, and so a reader's enjoyment of the book hinges not on whether or not you like the story, but whether or not you like Liz Gilbert, Narrator. And though I did occasionally find her neuroses irritating, I really, really liked Liz Gilbert: I admired her emotional and spiritual bravery (both as a traveler and as a writer), even when I didn't necessarily "get" her.

Of course, this is how most personal essays and memoirs are meant to be. For example, E.B. White's One Man's Meat isn't brilliant because of its stories (in fact, I don't remember any sort of "plot" anywhere in the entire book) but because of the richness of White himself. It's the same with Gilbert's book: despite the way the memoir was marketed (as a sort of chick lit/humor/travel memoir hybrid), Gilbert's writing is so rife with personality and literary references and carefully crafted scenes that she places herself squarely within the tradition of classic personal essayists. Even when there wasn't much action going on (especially in the Italian chapters), Gilbert's voice, her obvious intelligence, and her wide-ranging literary and spiritual references make this book rich and worthwhile.

I ended up reading this very quickly and with great pleasure and found myself marking favorite quotes again and again. Here are a few that stuck with me, even after I was done:

"But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will leak away your innate contentment."

 "But what I have come to realize is that, when the patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian."

"My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well--the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born."

 And, finally, one very, very lovely bit of language:

"I walked home that night feeling like the air could move through me, like I was clean linen fluttering on a clothesline, like New York itself had become a city made of rice paper--and I was light enough to run across every rooftop."

All quotes taken from Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (Viking 2006).

The Supposed Hazards of Creativitiy

One of my co-workers and writing group pals sent me this video a few weeks ago. It's Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talking about how Western culture conceives of creativity. Basically, her argument is that it is necessary for writers, artists, and musicians to figure out a way to deal with the pressures of creativity in a positive, nurturing way. Gilbert does a great job with her talk, and I thought I'd share it here.

It also reminded me of Black Swan, which I really, really enjoyed. But  . . .

***SPOILER ALERT***

why does Nina have to die at the end? Why does she have to go crazy to be a great dancer? Why can't she just evolve into a fulfilled, well-rounded human being who can dance like hell?



The movie is beautifully made, visually stunning, and genuinely (and I don't use this word lightly) thrilling. But I think that it perpetuates a stereotype about artists and, perhaps more importantly, about artists who happen to be women.

Take 20th century writers, for example. Sure, there are plenty of male authors who have killed themselves, but Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two of the most famous and brilliant female writers of the 20th century, are notorious for their suicides. More people know them for their deaths more than for their writing. (C'mon, be honest--how many of you saw The Hours but haven't read the wonderful, revolutionary, life-changing novel that is Mrs. Dalloway?)

In fact, I don't know how many times I've heard Plath's breathtakingly beautiful and challenging poetry ridiculed by undergraduates simply because they don't like her personal story. They won't even give her poetry a careful reading because of how she died. She even gets the cliche of the mentally ill author permanently named after her ("the Sylvia Plath effect") while Ernest Hemingway gets to keep on being the lovable big "Papa" of Modernist literature despite his suicide by shotgun. He somehow has maintained his integrity in our culture; she has not.

These women, of course, are not the only writers and artists who have experienced creativity and mental illness at the same time, but their reputations are permanently marked by their suicides in a way that male writers' stories rarely are. And in some ways, I believe that our culture tells female artists quietly yet consistently that to be a great creator requires some sort of profound personal loss or damage: you'll lose your boyfriend, you'll lose your family, you'll lose your femininity (like the bluestockings), you'll lose your life. To create, the story goes, we must risk self-destruction and death. (See Dear Sugar and Elissa Bassist for more on this.)

Pretty much every time I've not gotten a job or gone through a breakup or had a fight with a friend or was in some other way miserable, I've been told by someone that "at least it's good for your writing." And every single time I've found it profoundly offensive. Why should suffering and writing--one of the most redeeming, life-affirming, challenging, and terrifyingly real acts I know--be wed together in such hideous matrimony? I don't want people wishing unhappiness on me as some backhanded means of pushing me toward success. What an awful way to live. What an awful way to be treated.

So even though Gilbert doesn't mention gender in her talk, it has sparked in me a belief that pursuing mental health as a female writer is a feminist act. And I truly appreciate Gilbert's thinking on this topic, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with her solution of the happy and distinct genius.