A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early December, 1999

Friday, December 3, 1999

6:30 PM. Apparently it’s Hanukkah now, not that it means anything to me.

I’m glad I went to the reading at FIU last night; inevitably, it made me wonder why I don’t get out more often. As uncomfortable as I can be in social situations, I’m not totally weird enough to raise anyone’s suspicions that I’m insane.

In fact, I mostly just fade into the woodwork. I’m the guy who keeps having to reintroduce himself to people who have already met me – as I did last night with Elisa Albo and others.

David Lehman’s reading took place at the same lecture hall in AC1 where the Writers on the Bay series used to be held. When I got there, the only person I recognized was Andrew, who used to be an adjunct at Nova a year ago. Classically handsome and well-built, he has a girlfriend, Polly, a fellow MFA student with stylish glasses.

Andrew still hasn’t quite finished his MFA. He told me that Campbell McGrath is currently reading his thesis, some kind of hip novel.

One person who did recognize me was Jeffrey Knapp, at least after I went up to him. Jeffrey now has a beard and has gone grey.

He told me that his “little baby” started FIT this fall, and she loves living in the dorm in Manhattan. Arial likes school and plans to run the fashion world, of course. Jeffrey’s stepdaughter is now divorced and “stuck in” what he called “a room on West 89th Street.”

Jeffrey introduced me to Campbell McGrath, who grunted politely when asked, “Do you know Richard Grayson?” That’s the usual reaction.

But somewhat surprisingly, David Lehman remembered me. He looks really good and said he recalled my book Lincoln’s Doctor’s Horse (okay, almost right) and said to his girlfriend, “Remember, I once told you about it.”

David talked about the days when he was teaching at the Brooklyn College MFA program in 1975-1976 and mentioned Jonathan Baumbach (“your mentor”) and my being so prolific back then.

Denise Duhamel recognized me because I’d sent her my photo, and I introduced myself to her husband Nick Carbo, who sat across from me. Apparently Denise is returning to FIU for good after her coming gig at the University of Pittsburgh.

I nodded at Eileen Elliot, who was sitting with Elisa, but I think she probably wasn’t sure who I was – or else she was just unfriendly, even after I again thanked her for recommending Dr. Chusid.

I sat by myself in the row behind David Lehman’s mother and his elderly cousin.

After being introduced by Denise, David read some older poems, but spent most of the night reading the poems he’s been writing every day for the last couple of years.

They were quirky, funny, and allusive. (I’m probably the only person there who knew that in the poem refuting F Scott Fitzgerald’s “no second act in American lives,” the “plagiarist turned producer” with Jacob Epstein – and I couldn’t resist telling David this when I asked him to sign the book that I had bought.)

My mind wandered much less than it usually does at poetry readings. I think I think like David does. He’s obviously a media junkie, reading even news of mergers in the New York Times business section. And it was odd when he referred to Michael Malinowitz’s calling John Ashbery “the Casey Stengel of poetry.”

Weirdly, I had been thinking of Michael’s poem – it was in our Brooklyn College graduate literary magazine, Junction – just the other day.

Apparently David is a big macher in the New York literary scene now: doing an annual “best poetry” anthology, running KGB’s reading series (he got another anthology out of that), judging the Brooklyn Brewery literary contest. (I had read that Denise won; now that makes sense.)

I bought David’s old book (the new one, which I would have liked to buy, wasn’t out quite yet) as a gesture of respect – and of course today I looked up his Ithaca address (he still lives there in the summers, though he’s mostly Manhattan-based) so I can send him stuff about The Silicon Valley Diet.

Before leaving, I said hi to Marzi Kaplan, who got her book signed after I did, and to Lynne Barrett, who smiled at me vaguely.

At literary events like this one, I feel so peripheral, and it gets me wondering what my life would have been like had I gone the familiar route of teaching in an MFA or undergraduate creative writing program.

Still, even though I’m nowhere near that world, I still manage to keep publishing and getting grants and residencies at writers’ colonies.

Probably one reason I’ve never felt comfortable in that AWP world is that I’m a megalomaniac, and I can’t help thinking that my books are the most important in the world, so I don’t want to hang out with lots of people who think their books are the most important in the world.

And watching the MFA students when I first came in, I was struck by their artsy dress and demeanor – you can tell they weren’t law or medical students, or grad students in the sciences or education – and how full of it they are.

Well, I was a young MFA student once, and being full of it is something you have to do at that stage of your life.

I stopped off at the Borders on U.S. 1 for a little iced tea before I turned onto Ives Dairy Road into I-95. With no traffic, I actually managed to get home within 20 minutes.

Of course, I was too keyed up to get to sleep right away.

This morning I got to Barnes & Noble at 9:15 AM and graded about 14 of the Core Studies papers, which is about half of them. What stopped me cold was reading a paper on Drown that was the exact paper I’d already given someone else an A on.

Wow, two girls in my class handed in the same paper! I gave them both F’s, and of course I could fail them for the course, but I’m too kind or too timid to do that.

However this made me wonder about how many of the really good papers are also plagiarized, and it just put a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.

Getting a second cup of iced tea, I took down names of reviewers from Utne Reader and Book, a magazine I hadn’t seen before. In my office, I went on Lexis and Yahoo’s People Search and got the addresses of some of them.

Igor said he’s busy with out-of-town friends and editing a poetry anthology of the Rush-Ins and couldn’t attend either last night’s reading or tomorrow’s at Nova.

I looked over the latest sex fantasy that Lynn emailed me, and this time, instead of turning me on, it just seemed tacky. I’m a prude, of course. I’ll probably just write Lynn a newsy reply and not mention his last email except in a brief thanks.

Kevin says that last night he met a Latino guy in real life (“IRL”) that he first encountered online and they had “a kissing session that lasted until 4 AM.”

I suppose that like Kevin, I should be more interested in finding relationships IRL. Oh well.

After lunch, I went back to the office for 45 minutes and then I shopped at Publix, read the paper, and planned my weekend.


Sunday, December 5, 1999

8 PM. Looking back at my entry for yesterday, I noticed that I can barely decipher much of it. I need to write more painstakingly.

Back in the 1970s, I had an extremely neat, precise handwriting. In grade school I was always praised for my penmanship.

But it’s hard to write slowly and conscientiously at this point in my life. My thoughts are accustomed to becoming words at the speed with which I type – or “keyboard.”

When I was in college, I wrote by hand everything but research papers: not only tests and essays written in class, but also just about all the essays I wrote outside of class.

Oh well. It’s the writing, not the deciphering, that’s important, and let’s hope that my degenerating handwriting is not a sign of brain disease.

I did have to throw a sweet potato in the garbage today after I sprinkled it with garlic powder instead of ground ginger, but I can always blame that on my mind being over-occupied.

Last night’s reading by Nick Carbo at the Flight Deck was enjoyable, but he’s not as good a poet as Denise is – or as good as David Lehman.

In one of his poems about the Philippines, Nick said that Taft used the phrase “little brown brothers” – but I thought that it was McKinley, though Taft was the territorial governor.

Lenny Della Rocca and Richard Whatshisname from the Hannah Kahn Poetry Institute ran the show, as they did last spring’s reading with John Childrey and Barbara Nightingale.

Lenny told Patrick and me that a few years ago, he met Denise via email and last year she co-sponsored his reading at FIU.

He mentioned that Denise was good friends with Lynne Barrett, which is probably what led to Denise’s visiting poet gig at FIU and becoming a tenure track professor as of next fall. Denise said they haven’t given her a contract yet, but it’s all but certain.

The only Nova faculty member I saw at the reading was Linda Gordon from the Liberal Arts Division. Since I always mix her up with the other women in the department, I had to check her photo today on the Web.

Bit last night I just went over by myself to say hi to her because I was afraid I’d have to introduce her to another person.

Patrick and I chatted by the bar where we sat; my evening student, Scot Roseman, was our bartender.

Two of my Core Studies students showed up, including one of the ones who handed in the copycat paper.

Seeing her made me dread any confrontation. Both the papers were rewrites, so I could pretend I never got them, and if the students ask for them back, I’ll tell them I knew they plagiarized and that it would be best if we pretended that the papers had never been handed in.

This is solid proof that I am an irresponsible professor. Clearly I’m not doing my duty, but I hate confrontations and I feel sorry for the miscreants.

I’ll struggle with my conscience for another couple of days, but the easy way out is just to avoid hassles. To me, Nova is just a temporary job.

For over an hour this afternoon, I couldn’t get Steven out of my office because he kept going on and on about how they are not following procedure in the search to fill Lester’s position. I know the fix is in for one of Charles’s mentor’s other protégés to get the job.

Of course, Steven keeps telling me highly flattering things that students have told him about my classes, so he clearly would like me to stay on.

According to Steven, the ad for the permanent position turned up only 14 applications, and some of them have both a law degree and a history Ph.D.

There’s no reason to expect that they won’t get someone decent, but Steven just kept kvetching and ruminating. Even when I kept looking at my computer screen at the Amazon email addresses of book reviewers of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and then writing them down on a pad, Steven did not take the hint and kept talking.

He needs to get a life apart from his job. He also should learn how to deal with change. It’s as if he yet hasn’t gotten over Les’s retirement. “I counted on his staying until he was 65,” Steven said. What?

He’s a nutjob, but I have to feign interest and sympathy for now.

Anyway, back to the poetry reading: Nick is not a bad poet, but he’s a diffident, hesitant reader without stage presence, and he doesn’t do his poems justice.

Afterwards they were all going to the Waffle House on Davie Road, and I couldn’t persuade Patrick to come along as a person I could hang out with.

So of course instead of sitting near Denise, Nick, Lenny and Richard, I ended up at the counter with some older people from Coral Springs who I first thought actually had some relationship to Lenny. But the woman next to me was just an obnoxious artsy-crafty wannabe writer type whose work must be absolutely execrable.

I nibbled a quarter of a plain waffle, tipped the waitress generously, and made sure I got to talk with Denise for a few minutes before I went home at 10:30 PM.

Today spent the morning at the Hollywood Barnes & Noble reading the main news and Week in Review sections of the New York Times and graded the Constitutional History papers at home.

The anti-WTO (World Trade Organization) “Battle of Seattle” seems to hearken back to the protests of the 1960s. Also, old anti-Vietnam War types like McGovern and Galbraith are now reassessing LBJ, seeing him as one of our great presidents.

Maybe this reappraisal of the Great Society is happening now because we are slowly moving to a more liberal, activist-government era.

I know the high-tech sector of the stock market has become an enormous bubble when Dad – who has never used a computer or looked at the Internet – told me he would like to start a business called http://www.tuxshirts.com that would sell tuxedo shirts on the Web.

Like the apocryphal story about the shoeshine man giving stock tips just before the 1929 crash, that shows that everything’s about to burst.


Tuesday, December 7, 1999

7 PM. I already feel like getting into bed. Though I know I didn’t get enough sleep last night, I’m not sure why I feel so tired now.

Last evening I had a decent class on the Civil War and the Constitution, and although some students didn’t show up, they nevertheless handed in their papers by email or fax and I’ll get the rest next Monday.

This afternoon’s Core Studies class also went all right, with my reading aloud a few of the best papers on Edwidge Danticat, a lively discussion on ethnic slurs and ethnic prejudice, and my showing them a clip from Italians in America.

Both classes did teacher evaluations, and as I told them, bad evaluations won’t hurt anything more than my feelings because I’m leaving Nova in May no matter what.

I think what made today weird was the Liberal Arts Division Christmas party, which I could have done without. But I know it’s a big deal for Santa, Maria, Charmaine and the support staff, and probably for some faculty as well.

For me, it meant going into the office at 9:30 AM, when I would have liked to rest at home, and coming back to eat lunch early at 11 AM so that I could return to campus at noon.

Of course, they had tons of fattening food. I tried to look inconspicuous as I stuck with club soda and a plate of fruit.

I chatted with WT, Charles, Ed and a few others. Charles is really excited by the credentials of “hungry legal historians” applying for the permanent position. It seems that quite a few are older people who first practiced law before getting their Ph.D. in history.

I’m hoping that Steven will stop complaining and they’ll pick someone really good. Of course, this means that I’m definitely not going to be coming back to Nova for another year, but I’ve been pretty sure for a while that I’m leaving South Florida after the spring semester.

Perhaps the weariness I’m feeling now has to do with that specific realization: Although I expected this to happen, the prospect of another change in my life is wrenching.

Still, I look on it as a stroke of good fortune which will lead me to my next adventure.

Remember, I expected that leaving CGR and Gainesville would be psychologically wrenching for me, but in reality I had an easy time of it.

And now, wherever I end up and whatever stress results from this, I know that I will be better off for it.

Far worse for someone like me is the alternative of ending up like so many people who live out their lives in a rut because they’re afraid of change.

Of course, I don’t expect the next five months of preparing for my next role in life to be easy, nor do I expect – cliché alert – smooth sailing after I leave here.

Anyway, maybe I’m tired because it was just a long day. Except for half an hour’s lunch at home, I was at school from 9:30 AM until 4 PM – and that’s after teaching last evening and a poor night’s sleep.

Thankfully, there was little email that needed to be answered – just a quick note to Igor – and no phone messages or anything but junk postal mail.

Perhaps I’ve just got the end-of-semester burnout. Many of my students struggling with finals and term papers have the same problem.

Well, I’ve got papers to grade and two classes to teach and final grades, but by next Tuesday afternoon I’ll be finished. And a week from tonight, assuming I’m not sick, I’ll be getting ready for a 7:30 AM flight to Phoenix the following morning.

Maybe I can avoid going to the office tomorrow.


Thursday, December 9, 1999

8 PM. Our last Core Studies class had a fairly lively discussion of Mukherjee’s Jasmine. If nothing else, the students have become more adept at criticizing works of fiction.

I shared with them my letter in the new issue of City Link, responding to a letter writer who had a fit after seeing a bumper sticker that said, “Mi amor es Puerto Rico.”

My letter was a good one, if I do say so myself. I used logic and ridicule to point out the writer’s anti-Latino bias, ending my letter with “Viva Wyoming!”

This reminded me of my outrage at Spencer Gifts’ horrible Halloween anti-Arab mask a decade ago and the letter I had in the Sun-Tattler about it. For some reason, ethnic prejudice bothers me a lot.

On that listserv for GLB People of Color that I joined, lots of people were ridiculing a white guy who complained about being turned away from a National Gay & Lesbian Task Force workshop on Combating Racism in San Francisco.

I usually assume that white people who complain that they’re being discriminated against by black people of having a conservative political agenda, but this guy seemed sincere, and nobody seemed to be able to comprehend how he must have felt when he was told that he had to leave.

Maybe the idea was that excluding white people would make them understand the feelings of rejection faced by people of color. But they should have advertised the meeting as “for people of color only” so that whites didn’t show up.

Of course, such a notice might be illegal. Certainly it would be strange to see that in print, even if NGLTF is a private organization.

I can understand nonwhites wanting a “safe place” to talk among themselves, just as women’s groups would. I don’t know. I guess I’m a simpleton because I don’t want anyone to feel bad about herself.

Anyway, all this wool-gathering sort of sidetracked me.

So it’s the end of the term. I have all the new and revised papers from my Core Studies students and the dreadful (I can tell already) Constitutional History papers to grade over the three-day (counting tomorrow) weekend.

On Monday night I’ll try to be brief in my lecture on the constitutional changes in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Aldo Alvarez emailed me with the website address for “The Silicon Valley Diet” in the next issue of Blithe House Quarterly so I could proofread it.

At work, I printed out the 22-page story, and I found only four repeated periods that needed to be fixed.

While the story looked all right, I didn’t read it with the enjoyment I once did. Its flaws are becoming more apparent to me, and all of a sudden I feel foolish about the many hours I’ve spent collecting people’s addresses in what I thought would be a good way to promote my book.

But who, after all, is going to be interested in my little short story collection? Most gay people couldn’t care less, and how many straight people will have the slightest interest?

Once I figured out Aldo’s code, I read some of the other stories in the new BHQ, and they’re all much more sexually graphic or at least more realistic. Silicon Valley types are going to see that my narrator isn’t a real geek; it will ring false to any high tech worker.

Of course, I can argue artistic license or that the story is a fantasy. But I also see how, outside of dialogue, my prose is pretty clunky. And do I really expect that people going to read the italicized diet stuff in the story?

Suddenly I have – cliché coming up to prove what a dim bulb I am – cold feet about the book. I know Tom hated it, and he’s someone whose opinion I respect.

On the other hand, I think my stories have heart – I know that’s a poor word to describe a quality I don’t know how to express in a better way – and for all his grace and style, Tom doesn’t have heart.

Tom wonders how John Biguenet could have sold his short story collection when John’s stories are so weak – but I suspect that John’s fiction touches people in a way that Tom’s fiction does not.

Wow, this whole diary entry has turned into a conversation with myself.

I got up in the middle of last night and couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I have to do – not before I go to Arizona next week but before I leave the apartment in May.

It’s really Mom’s – and Grandma Ethel’s – obsessive voice I’m hearing in my head.

All in good time, I need to tell myself.