Someone With a Pen: Richard Grayson’s Diary

Monday, March 15, 1999

6 PM. I didn’t get quite enough rest last night although my sleep was peaceful. Up at 5:45 AM, I exercised, had breakfast, marked the one paper I had left for today, and went to school at 7:30 AM.

The class had another writing workshop, with me doing too much of the talking, but we arranged ourselves in a circle and I felt it was a worthwhile exercise.

Ben asked me to keep afternoons free this week because the Legal Studies faculty wanted to discuss the program and my possible appointment as a visiting professor – probably this will be on Friday.

I went on the Web and got as much information as I could about Lester Lindley, Steven Levitt and Charles Zelden, who seem to be the other professors. I also was given a list of Les’s schedule for this term and the open Legal Studies courses for the fall semester. Naturally, I want to be prepared.

Ironically, I got a note from the University of Maryland Graduate Halls/Gardens that I’ll be at the top of the waiting list for an efficiency for May. I’m obviously going to need to get my plans in place in the next couple of weeks.

I have mixed feelings about coming back to Nova and South Florida, but I can’t pass up this opportunity. If I can spend the summer in D.C. and take 12 to 15 credits at Maryland, it’s sort of have like having the best of both worlds.

Although I’ll miss out on the continuity of going to journalism school next year, I will have gotten one-third of the credits for the M.A. and I still have four years to complete the degree. I could have my semester at the Capital News Service in spring 2001 when a new president and Congress would be coming in, so that would be exciting. (Right now I bet it will be George W. Bush with a GOP Senate and a Democratic House.)

Alice emailed what I knew was bad news when I saw the subject “Re: Andreas.” He’s got prostate cancer. He’s had it for five years and has had all kinds of treatment, but it’s still spreading.

Alice is very upset, of course, and characteristically she said she wished Andreas had not told her. Alice is very fragile about certain things and has a hard time dealing with change.

Andreas has been a constant in her life for thirty years, and they speak on the phone every day, so if he does die, Alice will be bereft.

I emailed what’s probably a lame response: that I hoped she’d be strong for Andreas’s sake and that perhaps the prognosis isn’t so dire.

Leaving Nova at 10 AM with the whole day before me, I felt free. I went to the Barnes & Noble at Oakwood Plaza for iced tea and a look at the day’s paper.

A front-page story about decline of the paperback revolution noted that sales of mass-market paperbacks have been hurt by hardcover discounts, videos, the Web and magazines, as well as the rise of the superstore and dwindling number of distributors.

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review had an insightful article by the conservative Michael Lind suggesting that the modernist ideas of the artist as rebel, social critic, political force and genius is dated.

He said that 1999 is closer than 1699 than it is to 1899 or 1799 because, like the Augustans, we live in an era of political pamphleteers, popular drama and coffeehouses.

Lind welcomes the death of “the religion of art” and says “the capital-letter Novelist and Poet, like the Composer and the Painter, may already be as much figures of the past as the Cavalryman and the Belle and the Vaudevillian.”

I agree that the idea of a full-time fiction writer has been an anomaly of the past 130 years or so. In any case, I don’t have anything to lose.

The Human Rights Council of North Central Florida sent me the new Guardian newsletter with endorsements in the Gainesville city elections (Pegeen Hanrahan is running for reelection; I can hardly believe she was first elected just in 1996) and a “Report from Miami-Dade” written by Javier, about the gay rights ordinance and the probable referendum on repeal.

If I am in South Florida for that, I’ll work as hard as I did in 1994 in Alachua County, with only a bit less pessimism this time.

I’m tired, but I think I’ll go out to a café and finish today’s New York Times.

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Friday, March 19, 1999

7 PM. My toothache grew worse yesterday, but the pain has come and gone. I’ve got a very irritated section of my gum that is cold-sensitive, so I don’t know if I’ve got a problem that requires a root canal or what.

I was able to ignore the pain in my Fiction Writing class last evening at Nova. Although I had only six students, we had a good workshop using “One Life to Live,” that really bad story that Crad wrote for his Worst Canadian Stories anthology.

Besides being funny for the few readers sophisticated enough to know it’s a joke – not most of my students – its major virtue is its use as a teaching tool to show what makes it an example of a horribly written piece of fiction.

Before our classes, Steven Levitt talked to me. He told me that he was very upset about Lester’s retirement. I think Steven is a bit pretentious, but in an endearing way, and he’s definitely a good source of information about the Legal Studies Program.

Getting home at 9:30 PM, I returned a call from Mark Bernstein, who wanted to see me today. But he had to do his presentation in Fort Lauderdale (Dania, actually, at the Airport Hilton) at 9:30 AM and then had a noon meeting at FAU, so we couldn’t arrange it.

Drifting off to sleep around 11 PM, I awoke in pain an hour later, but I was up only another hour and I slept okay the rest of the night.

On campus at 7 AM, I checked out the University of Maryland website. The tuition is $415 a credit for out-of-state grad students, and if you don’t begin the program the term you were admitted for, you’ll have to apply to grad school again.

I had a decent Language 1500 class this morning and then came home to read. The only new email was from a webzine editor who asked me to resubmit “Mysteries of Range Management” because it came through garbled.

But when the real mail came, I found I’d gotten an acceptance notice – what a shock! – for the story from the literary magazine Argestes in Washington State for their Fall 1999 issue.

It seems as if I’ve been signing a lot of papers like the one I sent them off, giving a magazine first rights to my story, only to have the magazine fold. That happened about four times when I lived in Gainesville.

So I wish it were being published sooner than next fall. But maybe this means that despite my doubts, the story is good after all.

After lunch I went back to Nova, dressed in black pants and shoes and a long-sleeved dress shirt. I’m glad I didn’t dress up more because nobody else at the meeting was dressed up.

Getting on campus early at 1 PM gave me a chance to talk with Jennifer, who’s been at Nova for this eight-week term while she’s also teaching seven (!) other courses for FAU, FIU, BCC and MDCC. What a schedule! She was a good person to chat with about the adjunct life.

After Jennifer left, I looked online and found that my column about the Battle of Boca Raton in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan was in today’s Boca Raton News.

My meeting with Ben and the Legal Studies faculty – Les, Charles Zelden, Steven Levitt and Steve Alford (who teaches in the program without a J.D.) – took place in a seminar room.

They told me about the Legal Studies Program and I told them about my background and orientation, and it was a good session although I probably should have kept quiet more.

Afterwards, Ben and I went to his office and he told me that the current visiting professor he’s got makes $33,000, but he’ll try to get more for me.

Well, $33,000 was what I last made at the University of Florida, and really, this is for 32 weeks of teaching, not for the whole calendar year.

My fall schedule is one day class and one night class for each of the eight-week sessions. First I’ll teach two sections of Political and Civil Liberties; then in October, I’ll be teaching Constitutional History I at night and a Core Studies class – Other Voices, Other Visions: Multicultural Perspectives – during the day.

I have to get three job-specific references to Ben, and also my official transcripts, unless the university already has them.

Next week Ben will start the wheels in motion. Les may return to adjunct in the winter, so we can figure out the schedule for that term later.

But the point is, this job is real and it’s not going to go away although Ben said that I might not get an official letter from the NSU president until summer.

I’ll have a full-time professor’s office to myself. The department also wants me to mentor the 100 or so Legal Studies majors at the college, something I look forward to doing.

After shaking Ben’s hand and thanking him for everything, I drove up the Turnpike to Boca to fetch the paper and came home at 4:30 PM.

I’ve been a little stunned ever since. I can’t deal with future plans tonight.

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Saturday, March 20, 1999

1 PM. I’m still digesting what it means that I’m going to be a full-time Professor of Legal Studies next year. Okay, it’s actually Liberal Arts, not Legal Studies.

Last night I did manage to sleep well although I woke up at 5:30 AM. But since I fell asleep at 10 AM, that isn’t so bad.

While I feel relieved that I know what I’m doing next year, there’s also some disappointment that I won’t be in D.C. studying journalism with some really good people.

I guess it sounds as if I’ve decided not to start the program this summer, huh? That’s the first time I’ve articulated that to myself, but it’s probably true.

At 9 AM, I went to the public library to check my email, but there was none, so I wrote to Alice, Teresa and Sat Darshan to tell them my news. With Teresa I broached the subject of staying longer this summer, either in Locust Valley or at her parents’ house in Brooklyn.

If I can’t stay in New York, I might go to D.C. after all. And if I do stay in New York, I could also visit Ronna and Matthew in Philadelphia and maybe other friends if I can get cheap Web plane fares.

I could go to Phoenix or maybe Los Angeles or New Orleans if my friends give the okay. I’d really like to go back to the Bay Area, but I don’t really feel comfortable staying there with anyone – which is to say that I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who’d invite me.

I also have been thinking about the books I want to use in my classes this fall, and last evening at Nova’s MicroLab, I printed out the webpages with Scott Stoddart’s textbook list and Dr. Gordon’s syllabus of Dr. Gordon for the multicultural studies course of Scott Stoddart.

They use very different books and perspectives for Other Voices, Other Visions, so I feel free to pick my own texts and orientation.

Another thing I’ve been thinking – yes, this is how my sick mind works – is that when the academic year ends in April 2000, I could apply to artists colonies. I’d love to go back to Villa Montalvo or Ragdale again, as well as to other places. (I can’t go back to Ucross for three years.)

After a year as a visiting professor, assuming my contract is not renewed – which I don’t expect it to be, as they are looking for a J.D. with a Ph.D. in history like Les for the permanent position – I should be able to collect unemployment.

Yes, I know that my mind races ahead of me a lot.

Mark Bernstein called while I was at Nova last night, and I’ll probably see him today although I don’t want to drive all the way to South Beach on a Saturday evening.

His presentation yesterday went well although there were only a half a dozen people in the audience. Later, when he got up to FAU, he discovered that his lunch date had stood him up for a dental appointment.

My anger has cooled off about Mark’s right-wing letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education and I decided it would be better not to mention it to him.

I’m learning how to control my reptilian brain, the way I did when I finally came to the conclusion not to respond to Dr. Gibson’s letter about all my A grades in Organizational Communication.

I’m feeling kind of hyper today. I have ten Language 1500 papers to grade, another 35 papers from American Lit as well as other preparation for my classes, but I can’t deal with any of that today.

I wish I could live more in the present and not be so future-oriented.

*

11 PM. I’ve been reading the Sunday Times much of the evening.

When Mark didn’t phone by 5 PM, I went out and drove up to Coral Springs, where I got tomorrow’s big paper (it has two special sections, Men’s Fashion and Retirement) and began looking through it.

Tomorrow I’m going to meet Mark at 10:30 AM in the lobby of the Airport Hilton. We can go to Las Olas Boulevard or somewhere for coffee or whatever.

This afternoon I went to the adjunct office to get online for a while. An email message, “Congratulations from Wired Hearts,” told me that “Mysteries of Range Management” was accepted by the webzine for its April issue.

Wow: two submissions, two acceptances.

I’m going to let them put it up, of course, and hope that the literary magazine will never see the website.

The great thing about webzines is that publication time is fast. Wired Hearts is a monthly, and now I know it will be on the Internet in just a few weeks after I wrote it and not a year from now.

Writing the last story and its quick acceptances has given me renewed confidence that I’m a decent fiction writer. I should try to get that slimmed-down come “gay” version of my book manuscript together.

I need to contact Kate Gale again to see if Red Hen Press would be interested. When I wrote her seven months ago, she said they were currently booked up.

What if I were to subsidize the book’s publication? If I invest money in that, it might be worth it.

The story I need to finish is “The Silicon Valley Diet.” That would make a better book title for the collection than “Spaghetti Language.”

But so far I haven’t been able to figure out how to fictionalize my time in San Jose or my friendship with Thieu in an engaging narrative. I’ll just keep trying, I guess.