for love or money

Reading, during graduate school, was about mastering a canon, attaining fluency in literary history and tradition, becoming conversant in the language of theory and criticism. It was often about proving oneself as a scholar and also, sometimes, about marking territory. Rarely did I read something without an eye as to what sort of use it could be put, whether as the foundation of an article, supplementary evidence for another project, or another milestone in the ongoing process of acquiring cultural capital.

Much of this is well and good and a perfectly normal part of the process by which academia replicates itself: of the many things I regret about grad school, the ability to have an intelligent conversation about most major periods of Spanish and Spanish American literature is not one of them.

Now that I’ve opted out of that world, though, my reading habits operate in an entirely different economy. If reading for graduate school was a primarily utilitarian activity, reading--particularly reading fiction--is for me now a more private, less commercial undertaking. Oh, sure, I still read to stay current in my field and to fill in gaps in my personal catalogue of Books That Must Be Read. And it’s hard to turn off the close reading habits acquired through such an intense engagement with literary study; I’m forever tracking narrative voices in my head and paying attention to plot structure and literary conventions and language as I move through a novel.

But I’ve regained that inimitable pleasure of sinking into another’s world through fiction, and I can once again do it merely because I love it. This is why, in part, I think the role of literary scholar never quite fit: I wanted literature to feed my soul, when the structure of academia insisted that I use it to make a living.

And although we do well to give commerce its due, it is good, also, to carve out a bit of space for the things we do first for love.

un recordatorio, tal vez un recuerdo

A former student, now a friend, asked me recently whether speaking Spanish feels too much like work when I’m out of the classroom and off the clock. Yes, it often does, a fact that saddens me. 

Despite that, Enrique Morente’s version of Federico García Lorca’s “La Aurora de Nueva York” breaks my heart and then heals it in all the right ways, reminding me of why I loved Spanish so much in the first place.

la peor de todas

A su retrato
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Éste que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;

éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento dedicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco, y bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

Always, in previous encounters with this poem, I admired Sor Juana's criticism of the role of women in art, principally their reduction to the state of muse.

Here, her sonnet echoes Luis de Góngora's plea to celebrate youthful beauty before it yields inexorably to the skull beneath the skin. Rather than write about the ephemeral nature of female beauty, however, Sor Juana addresses the artist who would preserve that elusive glory by way of paint on canvas. This "vain artifice" fools the senses temporarily, yet results only in an untrustworthy imitation of life itself. Unlike the final tercet of Góngora's sonnet, in which it is female beauty that becomes "tierra, [...] humo, [...] polvo, [...] sombra, [...] nada," in Sor Juana's poem, it is the representation itself that is but a cadaver, a shadow, nothing.

Part of the appeal of Sor Juana as a historical figure is the literary quality of her life: a woman so talented and intelligent, so beyond all expectations for her gender in that time and place, forced to submit to patriarchy and renounce all intellectual activity. It galls, even now.

In the context of her life, neither art nor science could save her, and maybe the unflinching observation of reality offered a cruel sort of solace. And yet, upon re-reading the poem, I want to believe that art does indeed offer a brief respite from the horrors of time. For a poet of Sor Juana's talent to describe art as nothing is disingenuous, to say the least. Perhaps, then, it is the nature of representation that we should take issue with. Religious orthodoxy is one sort of representation, as is an artistic tradition that relegates women to passive observers. At its best, though, art can do so much more than that.

looking north

A view from Sumas Mountain, the pronunciation of which marks how long you've been in Whatcom County. This isn't the iconic image of the lush, dense forests of the Pacific Northwest, but it is in many ways a more honest representation of recent human history here. Lowland farms in the distance, clear cuts in the foreground. Abandoned mines tucked away in stands of old-growth Douglas Fir on slopes too steep to log; shotgun shells, beer cans, and the detritus of target practice. Expansive views of the Canadian peaks, of the San Juans, of Mt. Baker, of the patchwork of logging and regrowth rolling over the distant hills.

Unlike the Chuckanuts or the trails of the Baker wilderness areas, Sumas isn't on the radar of most hikers here. It is a lonelier and perhaps wilder place, lacking the signed trails and clear land-use ethos of those areas taken out of intensive production and given over to recreational uses. For better or for worse, this is a working landscape, one that shows the price our living extracts from the land.

chick lit

A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2010)

Oh, how I wanted to like this book. Love it, even. I first ran across Egan’s name in the context of the dust-up over her comments about the genre known as “chick lit” after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. As Deena Drewis pointed out in her article, Egan’s comments about the “banal and derivative” nature of a lot of so-called chick lit were honest, if a bit ungracious. Drewis ends her analysis by suggesting that Egan’s advice to emerging female writers to “shoot high and don’t cower” is exactly the sort of thing needed to reverse substantial gender inequities in the publishing world.

Much to my disappointment, I hated the novel itself. The characters were leaden, the plot conventional, the narrative techniques stale. I get that the intended effect of the multiple narrative voices and loosely interconnected characters is a comment on the simultaneously alienated and eerily interconnected nature of life in the postmodern, socially mediated era, but come on. This trick’s been done and to much better effect, in my opinion. There were moments when I found myself rooting for the characters--and for the story that was in there somewhere--but mostly I felt like I was reading someone’s rough draft for what could someday be a compelling novel.

I’m OK with not grasping the magic of this particular novel. I realize that it’s hard for a woman to speak critically--especially about other women--without sounding like a bitch. And that to create art you need seriousness of intent. But it’s bothersome when taking yourself too seriously gets in the way of creating meaningful art.

tree love

A few years ago, in the early days of our adventures on the road, Kendall and I drove the California coast from Pismo Beach up Highway One to the Bay Area. The drive with its coastal views was spectacular, as expected, but I’d been promised redwoods.

When they finally came into view, it was love at first sight. I’d seen trees before, obviously, but nothing like these trees. From a distance, their lines are nearly vertical, drawing the eye always up and up and up, their boles slender only because each tree’s height so greatly exceeds its horizontal reach. The trees appear graceful, elegant, composed, as balanced in structural composition as in palette. Up close, their bark is furrowed, mottled with moisture and often with indications of fire; their trunks bear the remarkable iterations of their long lives. Since moving to Washington State, I’ve continued my arboreal love affair: the graceful boughs and gnarled trunks of the western redcedar; the notched cones and sprawling branches of the Douglas-fir; the drooping, delicate tops of the hemlock, so at odds with its sturdy, straight trunk; the tenacious Sitka spruce; the pleasant march of subalpine fir across a mountain slope. These are the familiar companions that hint at altitude, microclimate, and forest age, but redwoods have remained my first love and my biggest obsession.

And so this past spring break, we loaded up the Civic with the dogs and a cooler and sufficient reading material for a 10-day trip and headed south. We followed Highway 101 across the Olympic Peninsula and down the Oregon coast until we reached Prairie Creek State Park, Redwood National Park, and—still farther south—Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Before we left, a friend had described these redwood forests as beyond exaggeration. And they were everything I’d previously loved about redwoods as trees, but compounded by the scale of the forest: bigger, taller, statelier. Moisture from the morning’s rain gave lie to the blue sky faintly visible through the canopy; drops fell 300 hundred feet to the forest floor, waylaid briefly on their journey from sky to earth. Sunlight entered the forest with similar reticence, as if with deference to the world that these trees create unto themselves. We spoke in hushed tones or not at all, and even the dogs seemed moved by the scale of the trees and the space of the forest.

It is perhaps this quality of the coastal redwood forests that inspires both devotion and destruction. Vulnerable though they are to human actions, these forests exist in a temporal scale beyond our ken. Like the cathedrals to which they are so often compared, redwood forests remind us that we are small and impermanent, a state that seems to invite dogma and ambition at least as often as it does reflection.

Just as we were leaving, the sun broke through a gap in the canopy and backlit the falling raindrops; the world seemed suspended, however briefly, in a golden present. Then, as if on cue, a cloud blocked the sun and we loaded into the car and drove on. The beauty of this particular moment is, for me, precisely that although we were beside the point, we got to share in the experience of it.

west by east

Bellingham is, geographically speaking, about as far west as you can go and still be in the continental United States. But to get to the West, to the imaginary land of cowboys and Indians, of ranches and coyotes, of boom and bust and arid mountain landscapes, requires going east. Standing at an old fire lookout just east of Mt. Rainier, the difference was clear. To the west were the clouds we’d driven through on our way around Seattle, grumbling all the while about the rainy Northwest send-off. To the east, the skies were open and blue, marked only by the high clouds that bring neither shade nor rain. We were headed east, to Texas to visit my grandma, and to Kansas, to visit friends and to judge barbecue. We had a couple of specific destinations in mind and a vague time frame for getting there; we carried sleeping bags, a tent, food for the road, and a couple of bags full of books.

In Sunnyside, Washington, we met two Mexican cattlemen at a taco truck. Over tortas, they told us the winding story of how they’d come to be in eastern Washington, and then they asked us what we were doing there. We told them, more or less, our general plan, insofar as we ourselves had worked it out: to camp, to drive small highways, to visit friends and family. The more business-like of the two, the man we assumed was the boss, looked at us curiously and asked, as if rhetorically, “But won’t that waste a lot of time?” His companion rejoined, “Don’t you see? That’s what they want, to waste time.”

Of course what he actually said was, in Spanish, “lo que quieren es perder tiempo,” which translates literally as to lose time. Not spending time unwisely, as the English suggests, but misplacing it, losing track of it, using time, perhaps, as something other than as a measure of progress. To give yet another economic metaphor for the passage of hours, it is a luxury, certainly, to spend time this way. Given my druthers, I would, like most people, choose time over money, although the real grace lies in keeping both in perspective. A trip of this sort, though, offers little with which to bluff the passage of time; absent the busyness of workaday life, time must instead be fit to the immediate needs of the day.

As we drove through the landscapes that have served as backdrop to so much American self-invention, time weighed heavy upon me. It was present in the form of geologic time, as traced out by the canyons and gorges through which we crossed, and in the splay of social history that leads refugees from Laos and Somalia to the Texas panhandle, that creates the oil- and gas-fueled boomtowns of modern Wyoming, that finds a market for the corn from acre after acre of irrigated fields in Nebraska. It jarred a bit, as in the odd mix of military bravado and family vacation levity at the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument. It was there in family history, which is time’s way of sinking memory into flesh, as well as in the more personal past, as I measured the present of a town I’d loved against the images of it that I’d carried away so dearly.

I came away a little shaken, honestly, unsure of how best to rejoin time, having once lost it.