ZCPortal - THIS IS HOW IT STARTS:

It seems either that literature too strongly influences my ideas about life, or that I am able to make no connection at all between its wisdom and my existence.

Ulm is a pleasantly provincial, mildly dull German town on the Danube. It’s the kind of place where people always say you’re only two hours from the Alps, or Switzerland, or Austria, or France. So you start to live your life in anticipated two-hour chunks of commuter time, two-hour escapes from pleasant provinciality and mild boredom, knowing full well that if you lived in Salzburg, or Zürich, or Strasbourg, no one would ever remind you that you’re only two hours from Ulm, Germany.

But you don’t live in Salzburg, or Zürich, or Strasbourg. You live on the top floor of a condominium complex on the former Adolf Hitler Strasse in Ulm, seven thousand miles from the golden shores of California and San Francisco, the city you swore you’d never leave.

Outside the kitchen window there’s a half moon the color of bleached bone rising out of the worn, gray clouds of a winter sky. A German winter sky, cold, low-horizoned, the searchlight sweep of street lights exposing wind-blown tree branches glazed in snow, iced-over cobblestone streets reflecting light like mirrors.

The Münster bell rings out midnight and the spotlights illuminating the cathedral blink off, five- hundred-year-old consecrated stones and the carved cries of time-frozen gargoyles sinking back into darkness. In a few hours the rising sun will blanch the sky the color of sea-worn seashells, blank and featureless.

I’m not quite sure. There must be some totalizing overview, some neat cover story to explain this course. Destiny, perhaps? In his Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.” If Rilke is right, then I projected this destiny from within myself out into the world-at-large. I honestly don’t remember doing this. My projected destiny was a crumbling stone rustico among the vineyards and stars of the Italian countryside.

Perhaps there is a point high enough, even higher than the observation nest cradled at the top of the Münster’s spire, to be able to see the spider-thread connections between events, to focus the anarchy of my experiences into a clear, controlled picture of WHY. If I can locate this place, will I find the answer or will the sum of the parts still only add up to the parts themselves? That is the question I want answered.

Perhaps narrative itself is the privileged space where meaning solidifies and the answers magically appear. Some believe time burnishes memory, others that time erases it. Perhaps it’s a little of both—-or neither. Perhaps time creates memory, singular and unique, in the minds of each and every one of us.

There’s an old Jewish joke about a man in the Berlin ghetto after the Nazis have come to power. He’s walking down the street one day, reading Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda newspaper. Another man walks up to him and says “what are you, crazy? Why are you reading that?” And the first man replies, “well, according to this we’re all millionaires who secretly control the world...”

As a member of the International Jewish conspiracy, I help control the American government, the media, the state of Israel and (in my off-hours) the banking industry. All kidding aside, I’ve never really felt Jewish.[1] Even when I lived in Idaho for three years, among Mormons, political extremists, Christian Identity fanatics, neo-Nazis and militia members who believe in the existence of the ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government that secretly runs America, I still felt American. Even when a few of those fanatics actually burned a cross on the only rabbi in town’s front lawn.

One of the reasons I left for Europe in 1998 was I no longer wanted to feel American. I wanted to feel off-balance, foreign, like my life had a more demanding purpose than deciding which mall to shop at. Even though I spent my time wandering around San Francisco, from Union Square to North Beach, down California Street and through Chinatown to Market Street, from the Mission to the Haight, it was still a life focused on material consumption. Coffee at Starbucks or Peet’s? Lunch at the Pork Store Café or Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Shop? Dinner at the Pasta Pomodoro in the Richmond or North Beach, where the waitresses were cuter? What about that leather jacket marked down from $1200 to only $399.95?[2] Pick up the new James Ellroy novel at Borders on Powell Street (30% off!) or support independent, full-priced City Lights? Grocery shopping at Whole Foods market, in order to maintain that low-fat, low-cholesterol, healthy glow? How about a new pair of $100 running shoes for those 8 mile jogs through Golden Gate Park, down to the breakers and back? All the daily choices of conspicuous consumption taking over and defining the routines of our lives.[3]

At this time, I was high on self-transformation--which, ironically, is the most American of dreams and desires. I no longer wanted to be an English professor, deconstructing the great works of narrative art into chunks of lifeless, jargon-filled discourse. The way I experienced literature was completely disconnected from life; I couldn’t believe the writers I loved had written these books just so a bunch of academic bounty hunters could pursue their “meaning” from the padded, comfortable chairs of the tenured life.

I wanted to become a novelist. I wanted to write; not the baby formula of academic prose, but about the risk-filled, real-life experiences of the romantic artist.[4] That semester I taught Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to my senior literature students at Claremont McKenna College, and I knew, in ways I had never known anything in my life, that I had to quit, I had to leave my life behind. Miller showed me that in many ways to leave America is the most American thing an American can do. I didn’t know how to do this, but I did know that a life of tenured security does not produce art. Look at what happened to John Irving.

There was a difference between the people who wrote books and the people who wrote books about books. Miller captured the essence of what separates a writer from an academic (or a writer in academia) in Sexus:

that your present life is not suited to you. You were meant to lead a dangerous life; you can take

If there is any less dangerous of a life than the protected, intellectual game preserve of a university campus, I’d be hard pressed to come up with one. As Byron once chided the critic Francis Palgrave:

Did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer to the great shame of his nankeen breeches?—-did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head—-which all the foam of ocean could not cool? did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water damning his eyes & his valet's? did he never inject for a Gonorrhea?—-or make water through an ulcerated Urethra?—was he ever in a Turkish bath-—that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy?—-was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil like St. John?

Sexually transmitted diseases, Turkish baths and cauldrons of boiling oil aside, I found myself craving real, hardscrabble experience.[5]

I graduated from the University of Arizona in 1992, with a Ph.D. in English, one of only two members of my entering class to do so. The other, Sue Gomberg, a driven, red-haired woman in her thirties, was the only member of my entering class to leave with a job as well. Two weeks later she and her fiancé were killed in a car accident in Rhode Island. This did not bode well for my own sense of future accomplishment in the arena of academia. What I’ve since come to call the Malicious Gods had issued a warning, but a warning that I chose to ignore.

I had to wait nearly two years before landing my first job in academe, a “visiting” assistant professorship at Idaho State University in Pocatello. I would be visiting because there would be absolutely no way I would be considered for a tenured position at the school. In the bizarre, byzantine employment structure of universities in America, a tenure-track position is the Holy Grail, one held out as a bright, shimmering possibility to all newly minted Ph.D’s. In reality, most of us wind up working as temporary laborers, at salaries often half or even a third of those of our tenured “colleagues,” shackled to the good liberal’s version of the Indian caste system.[6]

I had already had my doubts about the value of becoming an academic. When I left for Arizona in 1985 in a 14 foot moving van containing my middle-class life, I thought that university professors should be offered the same reverence that people in Calcutta reserve for those cows standing lazily on dusty streets. When I left Arizona six long years later, alone, except for a few boxes of books stuffed in my car, I thought most university professors should be lined up against a wall and shot. I was more than willing to pull the trigger.

At Arizona I had been surrounded by novelists as well as professors: Ed Abbey, Scott Momaday, Richard Ford, Terry McMillan, Robert Bosworth, Antonya Nelson, Francine Prose and yes, David Foster Wallace, who spent one year in the MFA program while getting his first novel published (thanks, largely, to Robert Bosworth). Wallace’s parting gesture was to produce a parody of the English department newsletter—-and blame it on me. A real mensch.

At the time, though, I was a disciple of deconstruction, a fugitive from the fictional muse. I actually enjoyed reading Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Barthes. Give me a Gordian knot of discourse like this one from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy and I was happy:

Yet one more step: when immanence becomes immanent “to” a transcendental subjectivity, it is at the heart of its own field that the hallmark or figure [chiffre] of a transcendence must appear as action now referring to another self, to another consciousness (communication).

Those were the heady days of theoretical discourse, when secondary sources displaced primary sources as primary sources in literary studies. For example, I had a course in the novels of William Faulkner in which we never got around to reading any of the novels of William Faulkner, but spent weeks discussing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection or Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. There was no need to get to know the novelists in the department, or even to think about writing novels, because the Future Belonged To Theory.

But not to me. Even though I was good at this stuff, I had pretty much alienated everyone in the English department with my antics, mini-rebellions against the entrenched, solidified power structures of fossilized academia. I spent six days a week in the weight room, working out with the athletes most academics so despise, seven days a week by the pool, working on my tan,[7] and every night of the week at bars, sleeping with as many of my students as I could. I had spent my twenties actually working for a living, fifty, sixty hours a week in drudgery and boredom, shackled to spouse and family, so taking a couple of classes and teaching another class or two each semester was easy. And I managed to get A’s on every paper and in every class. Oh yes, I was un très mauvais suject. No wonder everyone hated me.[8]

The summer after I finally graduated I received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the University of Washington, to spend the summer studying German philosophy and deconstruction. Four thousand tax-free dollars to spend in the coffee-and-grunge capital of America, courtesy of Lynn Cheney.[9] A summer sublet on Capital Hill, my own office, an obligation to attend two three-hour seminars per week, as well as a moral obligation to spend as much of the rest of the time off-campus and in the bars and clubs of Seattle as possible—-bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden were still playing in clubs like Rock Candy at this time, and Prince’s “Sexy Muthafucka” was the late-night disco theme du jour--no wonder the life of an academic appealed so much to me. What I didn’t understand at the time, or what I understood but more likely wanted to ignore, was the incredible sense of complacency this kind of caged atmosphere breeds in human beings.[10]

But three short months later, Arcadia on Lake Washington was past and I arrived in Pocatello, Idaho, to begin my teaching career.

[1] I can already imagine a member of some neo-Nazi organization, extremist militia group or the 88 movement in Deutschland (German neo-Nazis can’t call themselves neo-Nazis because of the harsh anti-Nazi laws in place, so they refer to themselves with the symbol 88, H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Thus 88 equals HH equals “Heil Hitler”) taking this sentence out of context and claiming “see, the Jew admitted it! The ZOG really does exist!”

[2] I did buy the leather jacket. Three years later it was stolen in a tapas bar off the Plaza Mayor in Madrid.

[3] “The trouble with the U.S.,” said Ezra Pound, “is they resent finding any other values than money.” Pound, of course, being thoroughly American, became obsessed with money as the supreme societal value, going off the deep end over such crazed economic theories as social credit and political frauds like Mussolini. You can take the poet out of America, but you can’t take America out of the poet, a lesson I was to learn in my own time.

[4] Without, it hardly goes without saying, the requisite early death from alcohol, drugs, perverse sex or idealized commitment to liberating some land of Western Tradition fallen to the Turks. Remember, I was 42 at the time. Most of my illusions were gone--or so I thought.

[5] D.H. Lawrence wrote to John Middleton Murray: “Either you go on wheeling a wheel barrow and lecturing at Cambridge and going softer and softer inside, or you make a hard fight with yourself, pull yourself up, harden yourself, throw your feeling down the drain and face the world as a fighter—you won’t though.” I wanted to make that hard fight with myself, but at the time I had no idea how hard that fight could (or would) be.

[6] I find it astonishing that most left-leaning professors, while championing the rights of oppressed groups such as single mothers, Palestinians, Africans, child laborers and Asian sex slaves, will condone the use of graduate students and adjuncts as slave labor in their own institutions. While the average university professor earns over $50,000 a year for teaching just three classes a semester, the average grad student or adjunct earns between $10-26,000 per year, teaching four to six classes a semester, without benefits or health insurance. There is a caste/class system on every campus in America, one that good feminists and liberals would protest against mightily in the real world, but remain strangely silent about in their world, because the academic system of privilege and power would collapse if they had to treat their “untouchables” with the equality they so much want to extend to other trendy groups of the oppressed. As Ron Rosenbaum has written, “the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth. If they really believe in serving the cause of liberation, why don’t they quit their evil-capitalist-subsidized jobs and go teach literacy in a Third World starved for the insights of Foucault?”

[7] The Department Head actually called me into his office once to instruct me to stop working on my tan and spend more time studying in the library. “I read by the pool,” I told him. “Not anymore,” he replied, “we prefer our grad students to be pasty white.” The following year, he had a nervous breakdown, brought on in part by a divorce, and wound up an inmate of the Palo Verde mental hospital, merely swapping one institution for another.

[8] I hesitate to write any more about the circus antics of my time in Tucson because a) my first novel incorporated many of those episodes and b) the events I didn’t write about still seem to be the stuff of bad soap opera. For example, the poet Joe Bolton blowing his head off in the kitchen in front of his girlfriend the night after a party, Annette Kolodny’s Lenin-like takeover of the department (Dean Kolodny has written her own memoir of that time, Failing The Future, and boy did she ever), Jennifer, my bisexual, ex-model girlfriend telling me she was pregnant the morning of my dissertation defense, most of my committee drunk at my dissertation defense, those surreal nights in the Duty Hut of the legendary bar, Someplace Else. I could go on and on.

[9] I paid my debt to Mrs. Cheney in 2000, as one of the absentee overseas Florida voters who helped propel the Bush/Cheney ticket into the White House.

[10] Paul Auster, who himself went to incredible lengths to avoid teaching in a university (see his memoir in the collection Hand To Mouth) has written that “for a writer to surround himself with likeminded individuals in a university is to risk complacency—and complacency is the death of a writer.”