year-end clearance

I spent December digesting what I learned from my November, my mini-NaNoWriMo. In that month, I wrote around 25,000 words, which is only half of the true NaNo goal, but that was fine because I said, quite truthfully, it wasn't my aim to get the full fifty. But I plugged away, and with a correct sort of dedication, and I thought I was really getting somewhere.

In true keeping with my process, what I understood at the month's end was that I'd written most of that chunk simply in order to find the starting place I really needed. From what I'd done in November, I kept some broad strokes—conceptual, plot-based things—and bundled the rest safely into a holding pen with the rest of the false starts.

I've spent this second half of December restarting, again. I want to say that this, this is the correct starting point, but that will only jinx me.

***

At the end of November and into the beginning of December, just as the semester's end was approaching in its whirlwind wind-up-cool-down push-pull that it always is, I read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries and was saved, as I have been before, by reading the exact right book at the exact right time. I set one of those reading goals on Goodreads last year, a target number of books to read, and I didn't make it. I don't know if I'll set a target number this year, but I think I will finally settle back down with The Greenlanders because Catton gave me back that thirst for good, big books.

***

I will probably end up making some manner of resolutions post sooner rather than later, because I like that kind of thing, even when it's predictably ineffective. The hope is sustaining, for a little while, and I've learned that I can talk myself into recreating it again, usually in mid-February, and again toward the end of April, and so on. It's cyclical in my life, the energy for positive change, and I'm starting to recognize that wheel better. (It's a bit ironic that it's taken me this long, being a medievalist and being well-acquainted with Fortune's Wheel and all that, but, well, forests, trees, visually obstructive noses, and so forth.) 

Some of the upswing is mandatory: the spring semester begins in slightly less than two weeks, and there's much to be done between now and then. The resolution game, the cycle, is also part of a scheme to use well the time that I have. My spring usually includes two conferences, the all-absorbing AWP and the smaller, quieter CEA, both of which give me opportunities to present my creative and pedagogical work, to test things out with an audience of comfortable peers. Due to an overabundance of enthusiasm in the fall, I'm also adding NeMLA and the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress to present some new Anglo-Saxon scholarship. All four of these events take place in a six-week span, which overlaps with the last five weeks of the spring semester. The timing isn't exactly ideal, but it's exciting (and a little terrifying) and I will start the rituals for good weather then right now.

***

Tonight, we're celebrating the turn of the New Year pretty quietly at home, though I am going to make lamb chops for the first time, and individual chocolate cakes with dulce de leche because David Lebovitz has never steered me wrong.

"such is the bread of an everyday life, from morning till noon, to the shadowless night"

In having an actual commute again, I'm listening to more music than I've done in a long time. My general inability to read or write while listening to music is something I may have mentioned here before, so I tend not to listen to much of anything except while driving or working out and sometimes while cleaning or cooking. Now, I have at least an hour each day to listen, which means mostly that I put my entire collection of music (which is not very large, admittedly, only something like two thousand songs) on shuffle and let it go. Most days it means a pleasingly varied bump from Dvořák to The Dreadnoughts, Mediæval Bæbes to Melody Gardot. Sometimes, my iPod seems to want to make a point, slipping from the random algorithm to something that feels suspiciously like surreptitious DJing, playing two or three songs from a single artist in a row, settling in on a genre for most of the drive. Friday morning was one such morning, when the device settled in on Flogging Molly for a bit, and I kept coming back to this track, "Rebels of the Sacred Heart."

It's been a long time since I listened to Flogging Molly with any singular verve. I thank them for being my introduction to something kind of like Celt-punk, which I continue to love, for being the first live show I attended with a mosh pit, for being a band that traveled in my ears when I went to Edinburgh by myself more than a decade ago. I don't even have their newest album, though I might have to get it after this post, which has made me miss them. 

"Rebels" isn't even one of my favorite tracks, but on Friday morning, Dave King's blunt imprecision charmed me. Most of the words have a broad finial of -ah, perhaps best heard in the opening lines, no matter whether it seems to make sense, and there's not a clean th- to be heard, all of them rounded into d-. Even after the playlist carried on, my mind repeated, ah well—such iz da bread uff an evryday life, with the kind of obsessive return that I couldn't help but think of Anders in Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain." The sounds were wonderful and almost silly and from so far away in memory and experience, from a much younger and more naive self, albeit one who was a little more attuned to popular music, who bought albums on their release dates (not the me who missed the last two albums from this band entirely). And those sounds were from right then, that second, when I was also literally thinking of bread, thick, good, brown bread, full of a dozen kinds of seeds and grains, which I'd had for breakfast, which I would also have for lunch. And I was thinking of the expectations of whatever one's everyday life might be. 

For me, on Friday, my everyday life brought me my morning writing, some student conferences, some scholarly reading, and administering the reader review session for the student papers I'll spend this week grading. I assigned the work to my classes; my only expectation must be that I will also read and comment and return that work. I think also of expectation as it is tinged with hope: that my students will surprise me, again with their care and their insight; that my writing projects will find homes. It is, on the whole, incredibly evryday, incredibly predictable.

I was also thinking about hockey and the expectations therein because on Thursday night, when Pascal Dupuis was struck on the back of the neck by a Kris Letang shot, expectation and fear and all of that came crashing together. Mostly, I was worried. Dupuis was taken off the ice on a stretcher, and no matter his thumbs-up to the crowd on his way out, it was scary. I remember last season when he was taken off the ice with his destroyed knee, and this season how he started, somehow, with every bit of the expected hop in his skates. That made the possible outcomes sadder: how unfair to be injured again after most of a year spent rehabbing another major hurt. Early on Friday morning, though, my concern was mostly about general wellness—there'd been no update at all. Yes, Dupuis had moved his legs. Yes, he lifted his arm. Neither of those things constituted anything like real reassurance.

I don't think players and fans consider injury "expected"—not major injuries, anyway. The little ones, like bloodied mouths and missing teeth and puck bruises and soreness, fall under some other heading. They're inevitable, which is not the same as expected. In some ways, those little things are part of the "everyday bread." Soreness comes of working hard; puck bruises might mean a successfully blocked shot. And those kinds of small hurts are the ones fans celebrate. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, feeling somehow proud of the late October game last season when Dupuis popped two teeth out of his own mouth while sitting on the bench between shifts, and on Saturday night, when Evgeni Malkin laid out to get a stick on the puck carried by a breaking Travis Hamonic. 

Thankfully, by lunchtime on Friday, the news was that Dupuis was skating already, well enough to be under consideration for Saturday night's lineup. On Saturday night, he logged nearly sixteen minutes of solid play against the Islanders. It wasn't a four-point performance like his work against the Ducks in the Penguins' opener, but it was really all right for a player who'd been stretchered off the ice forty-eight hours before. What I'd expected from that image wasn't what I'd received, and I find myself incredibly grateful. More and more, each time I watch a sporting event, I am grateful when nothing catastrophic happens. I willfully forget what I know can happen, so I can celebrate the good that I am seeing: Patric Hornqvist in front of the net, Malkin finding his shot, Pascal Dupuis standing beside Dan Potash between periods on Saturday night, upright, catching his breath, awkwardly accepting well-wishes from his favorite target for jokes. 

On Friday, I put bites of cheddar on small chunks of bread, and I read the updates from practice at Consol Energy Center. I played the song again at my desk, and for a little while, I chewed, and I listened, and I was grateful.

read and recommended: "The Old Ways of Defeat" by Chris Collision

Half of this post is months later than I intended it to be, but I'm not often a timely writer, and when I am, usually the coincidence works against me. But maybe it's timely in a different fashion because this week, word hit the hockey streets that the ECHL's San Francisco Bulls are in some dire financial straits. This makes me incredibly sad because I hate to see any team (anything, really) struggling, but I was really hoping the Bulls were going to thrive. I was rooting for them. I mean, the whole team released a You Can Play video, not just a few token players from a variety of teams put together, but a seemingly unified voice, which is still something of a rarity at the professional level. The team has been playing for two seasons, and they've held two LGBT nights (with these pretty excellent jerseys). A team like that makes me want to love them. Back in August, in Classical Magazine Issue Four, Chris Collision, writer of many fine things, wrote an essay I have to talk about, an essay I've been meaning to talk about since it came out, and two San Francisco Bulls playoff games create one of the essay's hinge points. So, here we are.

"The Old Ways of Defeat" is, for detail junkies like me, a joy. The ambient sounds of the minor league sporting event--perhaps in their most Platonic guise at a hockey game played in a place called the Cow Palace--are everywhere, and sharp, and right. The situation of the team, the league, and the circumstances of these particular games are clear and purposefully placed, rounding out a personal experience with knowledge that is effortlessly conversational--"the ECHL will, for example, teach you things like 'there is an Ontario in California'"--and self-aware in a traditionally (and I mean this as a compliment of the highest order) Montaigne-like fashion.

How easily this essay communicates is one of its strengths and ironies, as the piece starts in a moment of isolation, the alone-in-a-crowd feeling that is so difficult to handle--on the page and in person--as it's eroded here and there by the strange charms of the minor leagues, the fans, the trappings, the unlikely Bulls-versus-Alaska-Aces playoff matchup. In this essay, the erosion is only partial, so much in the way that the verve of these particular games are: highs, lows, no definitive Moment, a point best illustrated in an incredibly brief, mostly elided hockey fight that means essentially nothing in the course of a lopsided game and the Bulls' season's imminent close. The fight gets no glamor on the page, a writerly restraint I admire, and it's also an illustration, I think, of a final separation: "There is watching it, and there is doing it." We're just watching, most of us.

But there's something arresting in that, too, and I have to give you the whole final paragraph because I can't bring myself to carve it into anything but itself:

And then there are these live events—moments shared and unrepeatable, in all these shabby but life-full places that pull a poorer and more diverse crowd. They are not glamorous or even particularly beautiful, and there are whole buried rivers of disappointment running under all of it. But these can all be a step towards a life that's less lonely, less canalized through phones and less inert in front of a screen. It's a fight. But Kris Belan fought B.J. Crum, held him accountable for a smallish transgression in an essentially meaningless AA game. He fought harder for less.

***

My interest in the San Francisco Bulls is bandwagon-y at best, due mostly to "The Old Ways of Defeat" and their work with You Can Play. I can't name a player on the team without going back to Collision's essay or Googling something, and I've never seen them play. I wanted to, and I almost had the chance: in October of 2012, my husband and I made a mad weekend scramble to San Francisco over my fall break so that he could see his beloved 49ers play in Candlestick before they moved on to what will be their new, shiny stadium in Santa Clara. It was not a good trip to San Francisco. The point of being there was only the football game, all of it already an extravagance, so we were staying cheaply, far away from any of the San Francisco I'd seen the year before (the piers, Golden Gate Bridge, great food) while road-tripping with a friend. It didn't feel at all like being any place anyone would want to go--just a chain hotel, chain restaurants, and a sense of rushed alienation: not quite thirty-six hours in the city, all told.

Twenty-four hours after we arrived, it would be clear that the trip was a disappointment in many ways. At the top of the list was the fact that the San Francisco 49ers got shellacked by the Giants. It should have been a good game, in terms of 2012 competitiveness, one the Niners had a good chance to win. The Niners did not win, and the experience itself wasn't pleasant. We got the only tickets we could get: in the endzone, in the very top row, at Candlestick Park, where the giant concrete bowl gathers only the coldest air from the bay and slings it back around the rim. The sheer size of an NFL stadium and the distance from the game--something I'd not experienced before--made me want a ridiculous jumbotron uglying up the place, if only so I could see what was really happening. My reading glasses weren't cutting it. The one-sided game drained all of the live-sports-experience out of it, too; the Bay was quiet. The Niners Noise drum line was basically the only life in the place, and they stood in our endzone far too little. But that would come later.

We arrived in San Francisco on Saturday evening, and the San Francisco Bulls were due to play the second game of their inaugural season against the Bakersfield Condors that night, too. But there was no permutation of flights that would get us from Wyoming to California in time to make the game. The BART train we took from the airport toward our hotel actually passed the Cow Palace, probably sometime early in the first period, and had we not also been toting our suitcases, I would have lobbied that we go, anyway. Then the train ride was long, and we walked a long ways afterward to actually get to where we were staying. Even if we'd simply dropped our bags, turned around, and headed back to Daly City, the game would be over before we arrived. Still, as we ate our burgers from In-N-Out, I ended up following the third period from my phone for no other reason than being more near to that game than anything else familiar, which was one version of being connected, in some small way, to everything happening there.

Here's hoping the San Francisco Bulls can hang on.

You can get Classical Magazine at iTunes and in PDF/epub/mobi format as a monthly subscription or by the individual issue.

now what?: on writing I don't know how to share

On Wednesday, October 30, at 10:15 a.m., I received the new issue of The Classical Magazine (issue six) in my inbox (as a PDF because the only iDevice I own is an iPod so old that it can sing along with most of the music on it). The premise of this issue is econo, short pieces of prose and poetry and the things between, and it is full of work by writers I enjoy and admire. But I haven't read any of it yet.

I have work in this issue, too, a short nonfiction piece called "First Star," my first published hockey-writing, a piece woven around Sidney Crosby's broken jaw, a Predators-Avalanche game I went to last season, and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. A piece hinging, in many ways, on Semyon Varlamov and his play with both Colorado and Yaroslavl. I wrote the piece in the first third of October, about events from last season.

On Wednesday night, I was having a Twitter conversation about Varlamov, his kickass season so far, his apparently affable nature. Half an hour after that, the news broke that Varlamov had turned himself in to Denver police and was arrested on domestic violence and kidnapping charges. I turned my attention to the Penguins' game in-progress, I circled social media warily, I tried to focus on new writing tasks. Mostly, I felt sick to my stomach. Mostly, I didn't want to read anything, anywhere, at all.

***

It's been a few days since then. I don't want to think he's guilty, but I also refuse to assume he's not because already the crows are calling the alleged victim a liar. (Women are just like that, lying about terrifying and humiliating things for money and attention.) Already the heads are shaking and saying that it's just not possible that Varlamov could do such a thing. (Everyone knows nice guys don't do bad things.) Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy gave Varlamov the start last night in Dallas because he didn't see any reason not to. Varlamov has yet to be officially charged with any crime; he posted his bail; he is, legally, quite free to play. The slow unfurling of legal procedures proceeds apace, and it's unfair of me to assume guilt or innocence in any direction until that process is completed if I believe in this legal system.

I do. And I don't.

As someone who wants everyone, under all circumstances, to have the right to real due process, not just torches and pitchforks, I must believe in this legal system. As a general optimist and person who attaches affection easily to people, places, and things, I cling to that benefit of the doubt. I want this goalie whose play I appreciate and whose career took a path I found conveniently symbolic to be innocent. And I mean squeaky-clean, photographic-and-eye-witness-evidence-plus-retinal-scan-that-the-accused-was-instead-volunteering-at-a-trick-or-treating-event-for-at-risk-youth-at-the-time-of-the-events, evil-impostor-committing-crimes-in-my-stead innocent. Except not exactly that either because I also do not want, at any time, for anyone to be guilty of domestic violence. Of violent crime of any kind. Because I don't want people to commit acts of violence. Ever.

I want desperately for the system to work, too. If he's guilty, I want every possible book thrown at him, preferably by Aroldis Chapman (metaphorically, of course: the weight of guilt should feel like that fastball in the unprotected ribs).

As a human being who's walking around this world with eyes open, too, I know that the system often doesn't work. I know that many cases like this (domestic violence cases, cases involving high-profile, wealthy persons) don't reach trial stage. They can be settled out of court, charges can be dropped (and not because they were invented but because of a host of larger, frightening reasons), and the very idea of the system can be collapsed before one even gets to the part I think of as that proper due process. I know that due process doesn't necessarily lead to justice, either, and that more people want to believe that the victim is lying than to deal with the wages of a culture that excuses and masks violence.

I want an impossibility: I want Semyon Varlamov to be innocent and I want Evgenia Vavinyuk to be telling the truth.

***

This post was never anything I ever wanted to write, but I also couldn't say nothing, even if no one even noticed the connection: "Hey, you wrote that thing praising that guy who might have assaulted his girlfriend." It's most of what I've been thinking about since Wednesday, and even as it strikes me as egotistical that I am in fact thinking what about my writing? in this context, we are inextricably tied to our work. Better to acknowledge that than not.

I loved writing "First Star." I loved that Predators/Avalanche game I went to. How I feel about that piece of writing now--I don't know. Rereading it doesn't make it more clear. What is clear is this: I don't know how the rest of this story plays out, and I know that it will absolutely matter to me when it does. I also don't know how to compartmentalize--hockey here, humanity there. There are enough talented and skillful people in this world that I don't think it's too much to ask that we be good at what we do and also simply good. Decent.

And if I'm feeling uncomfortable about my own work in the new issue, there's no reason that I should feel that way about the rest of Issue Six. So I'm going to go read that, and enjoy it, and wait.

confessional mode: fear

Today was the first day of the new semester, the first day of my new year. (I have no truck with January. Mid-winter isn't a good time for me to start anything.)

Maybe it's because of that newness, the ripple of uncertainty over and under everything--and today was so very much that--but today feels like a good--not good, but fitting--day to face front. So I'm turning this, which was, until five minutes ago, an e-mail to a very close friend, into a post, for better or worse.

What am I afraid of, right now? 

In ways that have nothing to do with my usual pile of writerly insecurities, I am afraid of when the media finally gets to Evgeni Malkin and asks him about what he thinks about the Russian anti-gay propaganda law that's turned the run-up to the Olympics into even more of a gut-twisting spectacle than before (before the inevitable human rights violations had a name and number and legal code). After Ilya Kovalchuk's response today, I tread the internet carefully, but today's news about Evgeni Malkin is this marvelously affable spectacle. Still, so far, 2/3 of the Russian stars asked what they thought have said they're in favor of the statute, to one degree or another. The third, Alexander Ovechkin, chose the only other option, which is to say "I'd rather talk about hockey" and evade the matter altogether. (Several good reads on the general subject are here, here, here, and here, and many, many more, of course, are out there.)

I understand that there's no particularly good option for the players on the Russian national team who might actually stand with GLBTQ rights or at least with the stance of the NHL/NHLPA/You Can Play partnership. Under the dictates of the law, actually saying anything other than the above two options could be found in violation of said law. I also know that Russian culture is what it is, and we're all products of our culture to some degree. The law is popular in Russia. I should have no expectations that my favorite hockey player should be any different than the significant majority of his country. 

But I do. Maybe I blame American exceptionalism--even my chosen-favorite-beloved-wearer-of-a-coordinated-shirt-and-shorts ensemble should be different, superlative, heroic against overwhelming odds. Maybe I blame escapism: if I dealt better with the actual world, sports and the people who play them wouldn't mean so much to me. Maybe I blame my own selfish worry: what if my favorite player says, "No, I don't think you are deserving of the same freedoms and rights of expression everyone else has"? It's personal. The personal is political is personal. I don't have to have met someone for that to be true because ideology and philosophy have very real, very tangible effects. (This is news to no one.)

Other fans have already had to deal with this--not just in this particular historical moment, but every time a public figure falls from grace and we have to make the decision: stay or go? That's not a choice I want to make, but I know what I'd choose, and there's that selfishness again: I'm broken up over what it would cost me. My fandom, my laundry, my favorite too-expensive, named-and-numbered sweater. But I'd always rather give up pleasure than self-respect, which includes voting with my esteem, my attention, and ultimately my money. Even if no one else notices or cares, I do. 

I'm a wreck over hypotheticals. That's not fair to some professional athlete whose real job is to be good at hockey. And I'm an optimistic person--I want to believe the best about people, particularly about those I admire, no matter the reason. I want to think, however Pollyannaish it may be, that human beings will default to being generous with each other. I think, also, though, of Sherlock Holmes: if I've painted over things with too rosy a brush, I've set up my own disappointment, and I have no right to expect otherwise. 

A ray of hope I have is a tweet from the You Can Play Project which says they've had support from some Russian NHLers who have not been able to support the initiative publicly for a variety of reasons (their own legal protection and consideration for their families likely included, which are good reasons). It saddens me to think that what I'm hoping for most (in an attempt to actually be realistic) is silence, no comment, let's talk about hockey, from a whole slew of Russian players and athletes. It troubles me to think what kind of meaning I'd imbue that with, too, but this is hope against hope. This is back to wishing, always, for what is kindest, and expecting that, even to the point of seeing it where it isn't. It's a disservice to everyone.

***

I'm not entirely sure what I hoped to achieve with this post. Usually I have some idea. Tonight, all I can think is that if I name the fear and whatever reasons I have for it, it will go away. I know, however, that's never actually true for me. Saying it out loud doesn't help. There aren't many cases where I feel better for having shared. But maybe someone else is having the same worry, and at least we can feel fearful and ridiculous together.

I don't know.