Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
It’s a short poem, attributed to someone named “Troy Loudermilk.” It reads:
The CNN Blues (Persona Poem)
Watching CNN in the bar gets me down.
You realize how stagnant humanity is.
Extraterrestrial radio signals are wound
On the same spool as Oscar dress choices.
Watching CNN in the bar just gets me down.
It makes me wish for a dictator.
Citizens are supposed to act as the neurons
In a massive cognitive web of terror.
Watching CNN in the bar truly gets me down.
Democracy now does seem so baseless.
I’m a stupid fear-based monkey man
And celebrities turn me genocidistic.
We’re chitchatting ourselves into oblivion.
Watching CNN in the bar gets me down.
Forty-One. Worlds
Forty-One
Worlds
Lizzie is the tiniest bit nostalgic. The mood usually comes on when she ponders the fact that in a matter of years—one year, to be precise—she will be exiting this absurd Podunk, never to return. Often the feeling arrives in late afternoon, when she is wandering her parents’ sizable house. No one else is home; it’s just Lizzie, plus whatever ghosts of her parents’ codependent misery happen to be available.
Lizzie is in Marta’s closet. This isn’t the closet in the master bedroom. Rather, it’s the closet in Marta’s study, where Marta stores her version of the Seminars’ institutional memory, along with the institutional memory of her marriage. Lizzie is, if not exactly equivalent to the poems written by Marta’s students, then pretty much analogous. Which is why, Lizzie believes, Marta stacks and sorts and stows all the packets from her workshops next to her library of family photo albums, filled with images of various Lizzies. It’s all of a piece, as far as Marta is concerned, no difference between the job and the home, the people she teaches and someone she might have given birth to, the stress of marriage, and striving after academic success. Marta has it all, and here is the proof.
Lizzie’s hunting for evidence of her own juvenilia, the time in the first grade she composed a poem for a school-wide writing contest and—as a semi-illiterate and thus extreme underdog—won. The poem rhymes and it somehow means something to Lizzie. It indicates Lizzie’s sophistication, even previous to schooling, previous to actual human culture, and proves that Lizzie’s life will be confined neither to Crete nor to the vicissitudes of her parents’ alliance. In photos, a diminutive Lizzie accepts a bouquet. She is a very young artist.
Lizzie wonders if maybe this event could become the basis of a college application essay. It could be a preview of her current efforts.