Graduation

I just got the official word today that I have finished my MFA degree with the University of Texas at El Paso. It has been at interesting process, and as with any worthy educational endeavor, it has changed my perspective as well as expanding my knowledge and skills. In many ways, it was similar to my experience in the MA program, in that the quality of the faculty far exceeded the reputation of the program (which ought to say something about the competitive nature of academic jobs in the humanities). Going through the process of writing my thesis, in particular, raised many questions about the effect of the "program" mentality on writing in general and why exactly writers feel the need to be validated in terms of educational credentials as well as publication. (Once you're writing a thesis, it feels too late to really ask such questions seriously; it seems just as easy to finish the degree.) But I am setting aside those questions for now and trying to enjoy the sense of accomplishment in finishing this degree, which is in one sense a "second master's" but in another sense an entirely different kind of degree -- a terminal degree that is perhaps supposed to signify that I am a much better writer than I am. But all writers -- or at least all writers of any worth -- are writers in progress, writers who are constantly working at their art and improving in complex ways. We have often seen the problems faced by famous writers once they accept their greatness; perhaps it is far better, artistically, to accept that one is always learning and striving toward greatness with the acute awareness of the elusiveness of this goal.

Peter Pan and his American cousin, Huck Finn

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Peter and Wendy, the novel by J.M. Barrie based on his earlier stage play (which was not put into text form until after the novel) and the basis of numerous versions of the Peter Pan story to follow. (An annotated version of the novel has been released to mark this anniversary.)

Peter Pan remains the ultimate Victorian-Edwardian fictional tribute to childhood, a story about a boy who won’t grow up and a story that reflects and comments on the very clear demarcation between the innocence and endless optimism of childhood and the serious and rigidly structured state of adulthood. Peter Pan, the mischievous and rebellious boy forever on the cusp of adolescence, embodies the adventurous and imaginative spirit of boyhood.

Yet, in the stage play and musical, the character of Peter Pan is usually played by a girl or woman, and the character of the father and Captain Hook are played by the same actor. Similarly, the Lost Boys and Wendy’s brothers are often played by girls. These kinds of choices, along with the fact that the girl protagonist, Wendy, plays a mother figure, give the story all kinds of strange Freudian undercurrents and a general sense of gender confusion. In the original play and novel (not the Disney film), Wendy and her brothers pay a sad price for the act of putting off childhood. Aside from the idealistic yearnings for a childhood that lasts forever, the story in many ways comments on the special confusion of adolescence and the way in which we grow into our sexual identities.

A few years earlier, in the 1880s, Mark Twain released another book about a boyhood hero, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Unlike Peter, Huck Finn is distinctly male, an adolescent, tough boy hardened by living with an alcoholic father and having to survive on his own. He smokes a pipe and fishes with a bamboo fishing pole on the banks of the Mississippi River. Gender confusion does not figure into this realistically rendered story, although there is a humorous scene in which Huck dresses like a girl. Huck and Peter Pan also share a love of adventure and a fondness for the wilderness. But while Peter has difficult relationships with Wendy and women in general, Huck generally feels a fondness toward women and a shy kind of desire to please them.

A more important difference exists between the English Victorian creation of Peter Pan and the very American boy hero of Huckleberry Finn. While Peter Pan refuses to grow up, and while the story in general hangs on to sentimental notions about childhood, Huckleberry Finn sees himself put in a situation where he has to grow up. He has to learn to consider what is valuable to him and to question the mores of the corrupt society around him. He has to learn to accept the consequences of his actions and to do the right thing to help a friend, even if that means he is doing the wrong thing according to the rest of society. Huck Finn must learn that sometimes being an adult isn’t easy and can be pretty confusing, almost as confusing as being an adolescent.

Of course, in spite of Victorian sentiments to the contrary, we know that childhood is not always an easy time and comes with its own confusing moments. Most Victorians also knew this, and indeed they lived in a society in which child labor and poverty had become side effects of the industrial age. Perhaps Victorians sentimentalized childhood as a way of protecting children in a symbolic sense, to reassure themselves that things were not as bad as they appeared.

Mark Twain also sentimentalized childhood to a point, especially in his first boyhood classic, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But in Huck Finn, Twain became more honest in his assessment of childhood and considered the special pain of adolescence as a time when one wrestles not just with gender identity but with a whole host of other issues central to one’s moral and intellectual identity. With Huck, Twain created the American counterpart to the English romantic heroes beloved by Tom Sawyer. Huck is adventurous, yes, but his adventures are full of real danger and serious consequences, not the stuff of pixie dust and daydreams.

Open Minds Quarterly

I have just had an essay published in the Summer 2011 issue of this journal, which focuses on stories and poems involving the survival of mental illness. Although the essay cannot be read online, I wanted to give the journal and its fine sponsoring organization a plug, anyway.

9/11 Poetry

Recently I was asked to participate in a commemorative ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I began researching poems in hopes of finding something that we could include in the event. While I did not manage to find an appropriate poem, it was interesting reading through a lot of the poems inspired by that day.

Many of the 9/11-inspired poems, especially the most well-known and well regarded poems like "Photograph from September 11 by Wislawa Szymborska, focus on the memory of bodies falling from the sky, those visual images of men and women in business attire jumping from the burning buildings, in a sense "choosing" certain death over the hell of destruction (although it's a mistake to think of it as a choice at all).

I wrote a short story that also touches on these particular images, so I understand why they're compelling and why they linger in the mind. In a very real way, creative writing, and especially poetry, says what we cannot otherwise say. To paraphrase one expert on the subject, poems exist to explain themselves.

These 9/11 poems meditate on the haunting images of falling bodies, because what else besides poetry can really do these memories justice, even if poetry itself remains inadequate? Only poetry can explain the unexplainable, something so grief-inducing and moving as the sight of those people leaping into oblivion. We can never get used to the images of those falling bodies, so all we can really do is write poems that try to capture that bottomless feeling of seeing these people, the sickening grief and boundless compassion that we felt as we saw the images and realized what we were seeing. We would have done anything, but we can do nothing, and so we turn to art and poetry.

Foreign Films

I just finished watching a beautifully eerie Russian movie called The Return, and it got me thinking about why I love foreign movies so much. I generally watch these movies by myself, since most people, even if they like the occasional foreign movie, tend to get a little bit restless at the thought of sitting through some unknown film that involves the tedious task of reading subtitles. Of course, one of the reasons I like foreign movies is because I find the subtitles themselves appealing; I have substandard hearing and have a particularly difficult time with voices. Foreign movies are a very practical alternative for someone with my level of hearing loss.

Yet that remains only a small, superficial aspect of my taste for foreign films. I enjoy the practicality of subtitles, but I also enjoy taking in the subtitles as bits of written language. In that sense, foreign films become mixed-media art forms, combining the visual and auditory images with the printed word as it appears on the screen. To love foreign films, you must also love reading and language; reading the closed captions of an English-language film can involve some of this pleasure, but foreign films transcend the clarity of that experience.

Foreign films take film to a different poetic level, in which the viewer (unless he or she is fluent in the language) hears the words only as pure sound, even while he or she also absorbs the visual, active imagery of the film and the separate level of poetry as represented by the subtitles on the screen. Viewing a foreign film becomes a multifaceted, complex experience, akin to hearing a poem read for the first time, and then reading it again and again for meaning. With a foreign film, however, this experience is compressed, so that we heard sound and see image even as more literal meanings unfold in front of us. Film in any language can approximate this experience, but I believe in foreign film it can be seen in its purest sense.

Of course, I also like foreign films for the more commonly expressed reason that foreign films do not shy away from complex and ambiguous endings in the way that American films do, and for the fact that so many foreign film cultures seem more amenable to meandering plots and poetic expressions of human conflict. I like foreign films because they are different, after all; by exploring and probing difference, we can discover those truths that lie beneath all human experience.