Maybe, like the Pulitzer people, I’ve let fiction down. (Sorry, low dig, but I’ll get to that.)

Digression: in a culture fueled by celebrity, the literary world isn’t immune to the virus of building up and then tearing down its own superstars. So it’s no wonder that a book like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding would emerge as an instant classic – or that B.R. Myers would take issue with the hit novel.  In this month’s Atlantic magazine,  Myers argues that Fielding is mediocre at best, and that it became last year’s must-read because the public needed an “it” book to knit them closer together. Is he right? Do readers need a popularity grid so everyone can feel they’re on the same literati playing field? #nopunintended.

For me, the answer is yes, which is in part why I haven’t read a classic in awhile. In recent years I’ve found myself straying from great books and gravitating toward the new-fangled top hits. Maybe it’s an ego thing or a need to fit into some imagined literary caste, but I love feeling like I’m on the grid. That’s why it pains me that I haven’t read Fielding. Not because I have a particular interest in the book, but because I hate being out of the loop. But wait. When did that start to matter? Didn’t I at one point want to read everything ever written by Gertrude Stein and Proust and anyone with a long Russian name? Then again, is it so terrible that The Hunger Games and that Fifty Shades of Grey smut have taken precedence?

While the real issue may be the simple fact that no matter how many books I read I’ll never have read enough, I feel increasingly torn about just how to go about picking books. Generally, I’m way too into the loop, and I worry that’s a problem. 1Q84. Pulphead. The Marriage Plot. All great books, but did I need to read them immediately after they came out? Well, yes. I hopped on the Bolano train. And the Hot Pink Adam Levin train. Now I’m at the station and I have a book on kindle (Wild by Cheryl Strayed) and one on my nightstand (Zazen by Vanessa Veselka) that I must read. Now. Why?

It’s certainly not a bad thing to eagerly gobble up new literature. But it seems that classic’s true test of time isn’t something I have the patience for these days, and that feels like a betrayal of my craft: how dare I trade in those tried and true reliable old favorites for flashy new models that may or may not get the same milege? It may not be the official reason, but I can’t help but wonder if the notion of reading on the grid had an impact on the decision not to award a Pulitzer for fiction this year. Are a book’s Pulitzer odds automatically decreased when it achieves mainstream popularity, precisely because of the hype?  Are judges fearful of choosing – or being perceived as having chosen – something not worthy of the award, thereby elevating to classic status what should’ve remained a flavor of the month? Does it have anything to do musings from the peanut gallery that last year’s winner, Jennifer Egan’s  A Visit From the Goon Squad, was overrated?  

 I’m among those who are slightly peeved that the Pulitzer folks didn’t chose a winner for fiction, but if they couldn’t agree on a worthy winner, I suppose it was the right thing to do. Maybe it comes down to the fact that commerical scucess and critical success have always remained separate, and perhaps for good reason. In a sense, they are manufacturing classics. They are putting a book on the grid for all time – and that’s not something that should be done without consensus.

This NYT article speaks to the ongoing obsession with The Hunger Games, specifically with the character of Katniss. A conversation with A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis about the film went down a cinematic road, but wound up in a literary cul-de-sac: for a female character to be a warrior in body and spirit, must she exist in an alternate reality?

First, an aside: Katniss’s predecessors are many, and while she certainly takes the no-nonsense female ingenue to a new and deadly level, young adult and children’s novels have long traded on the tough girl trope. Island of the Blue Dolphins, Number the Stars and Esperanza Rising all hinge on the strength, smarts and ingenuity of their female leads. These characters survive on their own in the wild, escape from Nazis, toil as migrant workers, and experience death and destruction. Yes, there’s lots of adrenaline-pumping action, but where these stories really come alive is in the jumbled inner world of young women, which is precisely what made Hunger Games a treat for the imagination long before Wes Bentley grew those mind-bending sideburns.  Katniss, for all her courage and kick-assness, makes readers privy to her self-doubt, fear and anger throughout the journey. This gets lost somewhat onscreen, but in a world  of primped and polished female ‘perfection,’ cinema Katniss still comes across as far more interesting and real.

And then these girls get a little older, go to college and develop eating disorders. No, really. Being tough and earnest isn’t nearly as being cool, aloof and ironic, just like the ennui-filled ladies in the The Bell Jar and The Virgin Suicides.

Once they grow up, girls can’t be plucky pre-adolescent tough. Women must be tough and have sex appeal, just like She-ra. Even on reality shows like Survivor, the sporty female contestants often take on the role of love interest or second in command to their male counterparts.  As Patsy reminds us, stand by your man, even on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere.

It seems that the only place in literature where female characters can safely demonstrate masculine qualities without flaunting their sexiness is in alternative realities. In Katniss’s case, it’s the dystopic Panem. Perhaps a dramatic change of scenery gives license to authors to create female characters who break the mold. Even feminist author Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Gut Symmetries are set outside the bounds of the time/space continuum.

While Katniss has more quivers in her bow – it’s she who takes the less capable Peeta under her win, and it’s a man who waits for her to return home from battle – the film highlights a very traditional and masculine concept of strength. It’s not as easy to spot a strong female character when she’s not toting around a quiver of arrows and fighting for her life.

So what’s next for Katniss, and what kind of power will be demonstrated? The She-ra, princess of power kind, a tough but coquettish Katniss? Whoever takes Gary Ross’ place will just have to figure it out.

I love being a member of the co-op for its reasonable prices, fresh produce and the variety of ethnic foods it strives to make available. For all the diversity that New York offers, there aren’t many spaces where people from all walks of life can collaborate and interact without a dominant voice drowning out the others. From what I’ve observed in my short time as a member, the co-op has the unique distinction of bringing people together on common ground over a specific tasks – our required work shifts – and a human need – food. Obviously, it’s not perfect, but at least it tries.

I enthusiastically joined the co-op upon moving to Park Slope for various reasons, but mostly because I’ve had a complicated and oftentimes unhealthy relationship with food. Perhaps it’s idealistic, but I welcomed a place that fostered a connection with the stuff I put into my body. Working for my right to be a member makes me appreciate my purchases and the meals I make with them. I’m not trying to compare my 3 hours/month shift tallying the co-op’s inventory to the manual labor of people who slave away in the fields for less than minimum wage, but on some level I feel more connected to my food at the co-op. It helps me make food about sustenance and quality, not starvation and control. The disconnect between food and our bodies is partially responsible for the proliferation of diet-related health problems and disordered eating, and it’s precisely why I wanted to be part of a place that forced me to be conscious of my food as fuel, not a medium for maschoism, as it as often been for me. The co-op wouldn’t have 16,000 members if many, many people didn’t feel the same way.

In all the controversy surrounding the Israeli products vote, perhaps we’ve forgotten just how political it is to buy fresh, natural food in freeze-dried world. Some members suggested that the co-op should have a vote on BDS because it’s always been a political organization, but here it’s important to distinguish between a political organization and an organization comprised of political people.  For many, joining a food co-op is a political act – but they don’t want their politics to enter into their groceries beyond that. It’s a conscious choice to support local farmers and producers of non-gmo foods. While these type of food values often go together with progressive ideals, assuming that just because we all love kale means we’re on the same page on foreign policy issues isn’t necessarily the case.

I don’t consider myself a part of Park Slope in the same way as people who raise their families here, but I want to feel connected to my community all the same. I once ended a years-long vegetarian streak while spending a semester in Central America because the chickens we’d soon eat were waddling along the road. Strange, yes, but knowing where food comes from, who handles it and how it’s distributed and shared helps me give myself permission not just to eat, but to enjoy.

So as we enter that time of year defined by redemption, exodus, saltwater and shank bones, I’m trying to put all the pieces together. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue to untangle issues of human rights, anti-Semitism and the politics of food, but that what we put in our bodies – and as a result, how those bodies appear to the world – is a very political act.

I dreaded class. Judith was indeed a harsh critic. Each week I painstakingly obsessed over each word, every comma, even the way I slugged my page. It all felt very old school, back when teachers would ask you to pull out three-hole punched loose leaf and use only Pink Pearl erasers because they didn’t leave a mark. Once Judith even wrote “You Failed” in bright red ink on the top a critique of New York magazine I’d written. I’d never gotten less than a C in my entire academic career, much less a scathing stamp of failure.

But how could I take it personally? Regardless of how great or awful I thought my work or that of my classmates was on any given week,  she inevitably ripped us all to shreds. We left with our tails between our legs, humbled, yes, but also invigorated to do better next time. She also gave us coffee and Oreos every week, and on occasion I went to her back den, brilliantly wallpapered with yellowed movie posters, where we smoked Virginia Slims on break. On the last day of class, she ordered pizza and let us have free reign of her liquor cabinet.

I thought of Judith quite often while reading Mona Ausubel’s No One Is Here Except For All Of Us. I could say a lot of flattering things about Mona’s book, but for the sake of brevity I’ll focus on language. I’m not the first to comment that her prose is stunning. Each paragraph is a carefully crafted work of art. The sentences read like dwarf bonsai trees; it’s hard to believe so much winding detail is packed into such a concentrated space.

I approached the text with excitement and skepticism: a story about a small Romanian village that decides to create the world from scratch in order to avoid the Nazi terror sweeping throughout Europe is a highly implausible premise – but one also rife with possibility. The story unfurls itself slowly and it works itself up to full blown magic. From page one, however, the language instantly grabs a reader by the eyeballs and drags her into another land entirely: “I felt like a vessel, the container itself meaningless, yet into it people kept pouring ashes, tears, blood, and calling me holy” and “The sky was still blue above her , but it was rusted like a forgotten tool around the edges.” The word transport comes to mind. There’s no need to think about the big picture because the words paint it before our very eyes. To be honest, had the language not carried me away, had the voice lulled not me into this dreamy world were words have the power to ward off unimaginable evil, I likely never would have fallen for a story foundation anchored by the stars.

I also though of Judith when I saw Tarkovsky’s STALKER last weekend. I was intimidated by the film before I even sat down: the obliqueness of the story, the Russian subtitles, the dank iron curtain-ness of it all. I most definitely thought about leaving midway through the four-hour event (the film was interspersed with a panel discussion) but during the break I overheard an old woman speaking in a smoky Russian accent. She noted that in Russian, a stalker is not what we think of in English. A stalker is more of a guide, a person who leads people into nature or unexplored places. It’s closest parallel with the English defintion of stalker is obsession – as in stalking ideas or feelings. The movie was still a mystery, but now I had a clue. After that, each trembling glass of water, every footstep, each obscure was leading me somewhere. I was blindfolded, and I had to trust, which compelled to do something I often fail to do these days: pay attention.

I bring these two up together because they both forced me to relinquish control over what I thought a book or a move should be.  It’s much easier to have cheap flings with Kindle Singles or short YouTube videos  – and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a literary one night stand. The stories that capture our attention are those that move at breakneck speed, tumbling forward to get to a point via speedy dialogue and thrill-a-minute snark. Most stories  are meant to be devoured, not savored. Studies show that we read in an upside down “F” shape, scanning the important parts with just enough attention to leave with a general overview of the content. I zip through nearly everything – including my blog posts – and I worry that I’m not reading – or writing – in a way that will ever allow for something to stick.

It’s no great insight to say that words as virtual, intangible entities has made them seem more disposable. Perhaps that’s the whole point of being unrelentingly precise and nuanced: it’s the only way work can sustain readers/viewers long enough to away in a dream.

At any rate. When I heard that Judith was convalescing after emergency surgery last week, I bought a get well card. I still have it sitting in my purse, afraid to write anything. “Get well soon” seems too pedestrian, but don’t want to get too syrupy either. Here I was, taking time, worried that Judith would judge me. Sometimes it’s good to be forced to indulge in the details.

My intentions for going to AWP were mostly pure. While it would’ve been nice to be “discovered” by an agent or editor, primarily I wanted to learn. Besides, had I experineced a stroke of luck, I’d have to drop my whole self-deprecating schtick, and that might hurt my brand. I went to learn in order to improve my writing so that one day I could find an editor the old-fashioned way: by struggling. Naturally, (I refuse to use “natch”) I gravitated toward panels that pertained to my particular subject matter, and as such, the seminar on writing about the East was perfect.

It should’ve been titled “Avoiding Orientalism for Dummies.” Anyone liberal enough to attend AWP probably isn’t going to rewrite Heart of Darkness, but there are many of us who just may use an exotic and foreign land as a foil for our own exploits. Yup! I’m totally that annoying girl who goes abroad and writes a story that goes something like this: girl discovers things about herself thanks to kindly natives, girl is portrayed in a positive light for undergoing something oh-so-challenging and then coming out stronger on the other side, girl feels special. You know, the girl who goes to some impoverished third world nation, and then thinks she knows all there is to know about geopolitics, sustainability and saving the world. These type of stories are worse than The Help, and it’s exactly the type I’m trying to avoid.

Writing about my experiences while living and teaching in Turkey for two years has never been easy, but back to the panel. Good fiction, in my opinion, should always provoke more questions than  answers. One panelist, Jeff Parker, who runs the creative writing program at the University of Tampa, is a Florida native who speaks with a Russian accent, the result of living in Russia for a few years. This automatically made him suspect. Still, he was honest and endearing and voiced the most important statement of the seminar: “The gap between what I don’t know and what I can write about is very small.” That’s really all is there to it. I try to stick to what I can write about- meaning the thing pressing behind the words. It presses precisely because there’s something I don’t know that I need to find out, but I can’t go too far into unknowing or I’ll start getting into crackpot opinion territory.

Here us American writers are presented with quite a quandary: The only way to write about other cultures as an American is to write about yourself and what travel reveals about your own culture. However, by doing so,we run the risk of seeming narcissistic and insular, merely using “the other” as a way of defining oneself. The writer is trapped. I’m trapped! Plus I’m so damn afraid of doing it wrong that I’ve put writing about such things off for years now. Years!

And that, of course, is why one should write in the first place.

Yesterday my entire literary life funneled its way into the narrow slot of a single day.

I heard Nikki Giovanni speak. I’d fallen in love with Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, one of her first poetry collections, when I was in high school. I even joined the forensics team so I could read it aloud (that’s forensics as in oral interpretation, not the dead body kind.) I met people whose books I’ve reviewed, listened to a reading at the Poetry Foundation, and sat in silent awe as Sugar/Cheryl Strayed read her Write Like a Motherfucker column. I’ve adopted the column as my own manifesto as I try to finish what feels like a never ending story.

Do you remember that movie? A NEVERENDING STORY? There’s this scene where the little boy hangs on the back of a mystical winged creature. I remember being carried away by that movie, and how real that imaginary world felt. It’s harder for me travel to those faraway places these days, but I suppose that’s why it’s all the more important I make the trek.

Yesterday was the first day of AWP.  It’s a massive writing conference, and while the writing part is great, it’s just like any other conference in that seminars are held in rooms with ugly carpeting and bad florescent lighting. Still, the Palmer House is beautiful. A few times my dad’s girlfriend took my sister and I to The French Quarter restaurant in the hotel when we were little. The fourth floor ladies lounge contains plush pink chairs, probably from back in the days when people actually lounged in bathrooms, when you could smoke indoors and before there were cell phones. Anyway, I’ve been in that hotel many times but never in the conference rooms. It’s strange to feel like a tourist in your own city.

The other themes of today were fear and shame. Sugar said, “To do something fearlessly means that fear is present.” Another panelist quoted an artist whose name escapes me at the moment: “The artist always feels like a thief after completing a painting.”

She pressed on. “When art is honest, it feels like a crime. Perhaps our crime is simply trying to know.”

Maybe that’s why I like to write – because it always makes me feel a little bit smutty.

Just kidding.

Well, sort of.

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend a screening of Stephen Elliot’s directorial debut, Cherry. I was prepared not to like it. It’s about sex work. I once interviewed a former prostitute for an article I wrote about John’s schools; I really only know the dark side of sex work. But it’s more complicated than that.

The film takes us behind the scenes of the porn industry with Cherry, the protagonist, as our tour guide. We watch her career evolve from vanilla topless pics to raw sex on camera. All this appears on screen. I questioned whether or not it was possible for a film to tackle the subject tastefully. Even if you’re doing it in the name of education and awareness, there are still women undressing onscreen. I was worried the film would glamorize the porn industry and make the job look easy, but it did the opposite. The film took the romance out of it – not that I ever thought there was any romance the first place – but didn’t stick porn into some shameful disgusting corner, either. It’s more complicated than just sexy, whipped cream fun or writing it off as a disgusting, perverse and subjugating profession. Anyway I’ve never thought much about porn, aside from the fact I generally don’t like it. But the film made me think: Can porn be empowering for women? Can they enjoy it? The film made me very uncomfortable. That’s not always a bad thing.

Oh, James Franco was spot on playing a smarmy, coked up attorney. I missed his silly stoned face at the Oscars this year.

Here’s a truth that feels like a crime: many of us like to watch and be watched. Voyeurism is part of the reality of living in a digital age. There’s nothing like seeing your reflection in someone else’s eyes to validate your existence. I like to have a gaze upon me because it makes me feel more visible. Let’s not confuse physical nakedness with baring the soul, but lots of people may look at me, or you, but I’m not sure how many of these people actually see me.

Here’s another one that I should probably be locked up for: I’d like for someone to tell me what the director tells Cherry, and really mean it: “You are a work of art.” Who wouldn’t like to hear that?

How did we get here? This was supposed to be about AWP.

One last thought: stripping is a sort of confession. In a parallel dimension, it would be a revelation, a sort of knowing in the biblical sense.

Don’t get too excited. I have no incriminating photos. No one is going to stuff singles in my g-string anytime soon. My self-exposure, I’m sure, will be a different sort of revelation.

Well, there is Tim O’Brien, and I have a special, tortured relationship with The Things They Carried because I taught it to high school seniors multiple times a day for two years. Not long in the grand scheme of a teacher’s career, but long enough.

I love the book, but it’s a tricky one to teach because it falls outside the bounds of traditional story structure. Also, it undermined my platform at first. There I was, drilling away at the importance of honestly, and all of a sudden I’m teaching about how the closest thing to the truth is quite often a non-truth. Or a non-fact, really. Anyway, I’ll spare you a TTC summary, but my students and I often got sidetracked talking about shooting the water buffalo. That’s the chapter in which the soldiers are shooting a buffalo piece by piece after one of their friends is blown to smithereens. The image of these young men intensely focused on torturing a docile, harmless creature in the middle of a warzone is one of those scenes that made my stomach turn and forced me to put the book down halfway through. It’s eviscerating, but it perfectly captures the sense of grief and anger that follows death in a way that the words “we were heartbroken” don’t come close to touching.

After I assigned the chapter, I always got the inevitable question: “Did they really do that?” The answer, of course, was no. But how to explain that Tim O’Brien had indeed been to Vietnam, likely felt whatever the men he wrote about were feeling, and maybe did something equally messed up as torturing a water buffalo, but not specifically that?

It’s the kind of thing that people understand intuitively: the facts of our lives don’t add up to ourselves. It’s why people keep journals instead of diaries.In a high school classroom, it’s easier to deal with these things in images than words so I assigned my students the tasks of creating movie posters for the book. One created a stunning sketch of a necklace made of tongues, a gruesome image from another story in TTC.  The necklace was only a small detail in the story, but was in fact the emotional core and figured prominently into understanding the character’s psyche. Of course there were exams and papers, but those didn’t tell me whether or not my students really got the book. I wanted to know they they knew the facts of the book, yes, but it’s emotional resonance was of equal importance.

I trust Tim O’Brien to tell a true story. As a writer who flits back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, I’m often straddling the line in my own work, and I don’t always trust myself. In my fiction I’m too concerned with structure and linear sense, in nonfiction I’m so intent on creating meaning maybe I don’t get out of the way to let the facts do their job. Like most writers, truth inspires my fiction and vice versa. I care about the facts and would never so callously disregard them, but the truth is that an instinct for the rhythm of a story largely guides everything I write, and the facts, while I stick to them, sometimes feel secondary. This doesn’t mean a pompous disregard for the what and the how and the why, but it does mean my loyalty lies with a truth beyond the facts of a story.

I’m sure if I told you the facts of my life — that I was probably a shitty teacher, always more concerned with my own writing and the world of the book than the students themselves, and maybe I’m just writing this because I feel guilty drinking a latte and watching runners go by and needed to something to justify my existence — you would probably think differently too.

From the NYT's Cityroom blog

From my window, I could see about a dozen cops in riot gear on the patio below. Off to their left, a few men stood in the cold without jackets, smoking and looking smugly in the direction of the main attraction: Occupy Wall Street protesters. I thought of the day in March 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I’d rode around Los Angeles with an activist art collective and wheatpasted  “It’s a Globe, Not an Empire,” signs on bus stops and mailboxes.  I thought of marching down Hollywood Boulevard in protest of the war, and of going door to door to encourage people to register to vote and vote democrat, vote for John Kerry. (I only lasted one day on the job.) I thought about why I became a teacher, and then a journalist. And then I thought about how I ended up here, on the 15th floor of the World Financial Center, looking down on the protesters.

The presence of OWS protesters was of little surprise. In recent weeks, they’d protested nearby in front of Goldman Sachs in conjunction with West coast ports owned by the financial services behemoth. I’d gone down to Zuccotti Park numerous times after work, just a stone’s throw from my office, to see for myself what the mainstream media had a hard time conveying. Each time, I sheepishly loitered on the edge of the park, half talking to people, half trying to avoid being noticed. I worried I looked boring. Corporate. Obviously not in solidarity with the movement. But in fact I was. Would they heckle me, knowing I came straight from work at an office nearby? I felt like a traitor, but to whom?

A few weeks after Occupy Wall Street protesters got evicted from their makeshift home in Zuccotti Park, they infiltrated  the indoor garden at the World Financial Center, a vast atrium populated by tourists and fake palm trees in addition to WFC employees passing from office to coffee shops and back. On the east side of the atrium, floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto Ground Zero, the 9/11 Memorial and the rapidly rising Freedom Tower, the Hudson River and the state of New Jersey to the west. The WFC is owned by Brookfield Properties, the same company that owns Zuccotti Park, and the same company that requested the swift removal of the protesters.

Though I’d been following the movement, I was unaware that OWS had reason to show up at my door that morning. In fact, I didn’t even realize anything had gone down until after it was already in progress. Apparently, the protesters had entered the building en mass, dancing and chanting around the atrium before being ushered outside by police. By the time I looked out my window, the protest was dying down. Police were lined up against the windows in identical poses, elbows nearly touching, like paper dolls in riot gear. Protesters were huddled in small groups, quiet but intense. An occasional chant or cheer would flare up and then simmer down. I thought for minute, and then I hurriedly left the office and went downstairs.

I’m in no way unique when I say it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to with my life. But I knew very well what I didn’t want: to sit in front of a desk in a labyrinth-like office building working for a big corporation. I knew I didn’t want to feel disposable. I knew I wanted to use words in some powerful way. I wanted – and I say this with both earnestness and irony – to feel like I was making a difference. I say this only to clarify my intentions, but then again, we all know what they say about good intentions.

I liked going to Zuccotti not because I was for or against anything in particular. In fact, the more I learned about finance and big banks in my job, the more I became convinced that most protesters – most people – didn’t really have a clue what went down in 2008. If they did they’d be furious. I went because there was an energy, and something real was happening, even if nothing tangible could be laid out in clear succinct bullets or demands. I knew that that kind of energy was where life and art happened, not at my desk.

As I walked downstairs, I worried vaguely about losing my job. More than that, I worried about my own sense of judgment. Sure, I’m not the 1 percent. Maybe I didn’t benefit from a broken banking system, but was I just as responsible for maintain the status quo by working for firm that was at fault? I wasn’t revolutionary. I wasn’t willing to take a stand. But here was my chance! I was walking out of my own office! Here I went to take a stand! But if I did – I mean, if the beetle-cops rounded me up — what would happen to my job? Who would pay my rent? On many levels, perhaps I couldn’t afford to protest. Or perhaps I just wasn’t badass enough. I knew that they weren’t really protesting me, per se, but I also couldn’t deny my complicity in helping to perpetuate big banks. But a big bank was hiring, and I needed a job. But what if everyone protested corporate structure? I kept seesawing back and forth.

I wish I had a more dramatic protest story, one that includes pepper spray, asshole bankers and profound revelations. I’ve come to realize that the movement, at least for me, was (is) more about the dissolution of American mythology than asking for particulars. If you work hard, try hard, and believe even harder, the success, money and two-car garage will follow. It may sound naive, true. But it’s also the narrative that drives people to our shores from all over the world. It’s the stuff that American dreams are made of, and the loss of the the ability to dream is far more heartbreaking than the loss of a job.

I suppose that’s why the movement never gained traction with people for whom this myth has never proved a reality.  It was never true, not really, but now it’s true for even fewer.

When I got outside I surveyed the protesters dressed in normal urban uniforms: jeans, hoodies, messenger bags, Chuck Taylors. I found myself wanting to talk to them: I’m a casualty of Wall Street, too. I wanted to do something meaningful that fulfilled me, but now I’m just doing something to get by. I really wanted them to know that there were probably others like me, legions who had to compromise on their job for the sake of their career. Of course, none of that was verbalized. I spoke with one woman, an aspiring teacher, who had formerly worked in HR and grown tired of writing layoff letters to hundreds of people who needed their jobs to feed their families. She was wearing jeans and makeup, and looked neither radical or in the dirty hippie vein. I guess the point was simply to show up, and that I did.

After I went back up to my office, intermittently watched the scene from above. Eventually I saw an A NYPD van pull up. I saw the crowd disperse and a few protesters being led away in handcuffs. Then I went back to my desk.

I had every intention of writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, but then I thought the better of preaching to the choir. The New York Times and Bookforum already butchered it, and honestly, I couldn’t get past the Kindle sample. Besides, it’s not really fair to knock a book because my views differ from those of the author. Flanagan did bring up this fabulous little Mystery Date game that looks like the predecessor to my beloved Girl Talk and that’s about all you need to know.

I really bring up Flanagan because I want to talk about Joan Didion again. Flanagan skewered Didion the Atlantic in such a way that felt very pointed, and frankly, not in the fairy dust and unicorns spirit of Girl Land, from what I can gather. And I only bring this up because of this brief snippet of an interview with Didion in the Believer.

In it, Didion talks about writing as performance. I often credit my early acting experiences with instigating my writing career, and so her words rang clear as a bell. No, I never wanted to be a move star. I just wanted to be myself. What I mean is that I was painfully, shamefully shy, and felt most comfortable – or more accurately, most myself – when I was someone else. So if the page is now my stage, then does each measured phrase becomes part of the character who loves to fool you all into thinking I’m more confident and witty and thoughtful than I am? If anything, perhaps feeling uneasy in your own voice makes it easier to slip into someone else’s. No, that’s not it at all. Eventually I discovered Uta Hagan and the irony of acting: the more I “became” someone else, the more I became myself. All along, I was only trying to like my cringeworthy voice.

So in many ways, this blog is a performance. Calling myself a writer is a performance. Every time – every single time – I sit down to write I feel like a fraud, and then sometimes, somehow, I tap into something so honest and real I know it can’t be coming from my phony self. I suppose, in some roundabout way, that’s why I was drawn to acting. It’s easier to express myself while stripped of my own circumstances and safer to channel emotion through fictional scenarios rather than my real life situations. Sitting down to write requires a similar process: as with acting, you rehearse a ton, but when it comes time to perform all the rules go out the window. I stop thinking and simply let myself be. Briefly.

But back to Didion. There was a line from Pluphead that sticks with me about all talent being about subtlety, and I think it’s probably true, especially in Didion’s case. Yes, Ms. Flanagan, Didion’s stance was a pose, and yes, it hinged on Didion’s youth and innocence. But the pose was just a means to an end. The pose is the story, and the story is the conduit for what’s real, which is why writing with blunt force fails to capture slippery truth.