pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE BLUE WHEELCHAIR (Friday) The blue wheelchair sat abandoned by the lake.... I was at the gardens tonight till dark. Stopped by Whole Foods after work and bought heirloom tomato, parsley, and chive plants, a lime tart, and some Saint Nectaire (which disappointed me. It lacks the complexity of Saint Andre, which was Whole Foods' comparison cheese and which must have been bought up for this weekend s graduation parties. Wish I had gotten chevré instead). Poured some pinot noir into a flask, grabbed some crackers, and took my food, wine, The Art Lover,by Carole Maso, and myself to a little creek that runs between two grassy knolls at the gardens, where a beautiful, heavy-branched willow sits close to the water and a rough stone bench sits by irises emerging from boulders that line the creek. Ducks swam by me for most of the evening, creating happy wakes and, really, it was the perfect spot for my Friday evening reading picnic. My poet e-pal sent a nice message early this morning, saying how excited she is about us meeting tomorrow. (Me too.) She is so sad about her father, just distraught and swimming in grief, as she put it. I hope he is holding steady, that they have some good, healing time together this weekend. We are meeting for coffee and I feel confident that we will have lots to say to each other, given our email exchanges. • There is a whole chunk of time when I was in graduate school when I missed new movies and books. Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson were the rage then, but I had no time or money to enjoy such extravagances. Maso's Art Lover came out in this period. I missed it in 1990 but, boy, what a find now! It was the perfect book for me to read tonight. Haunting, beautiful, and raw. Maso's narrative approach is intimate and disarmingly heart wrenching, brimming over with insights and observations and tender quirky moments that leave your entire nervous system exposed and twitching. I don't know how anyone in the midst of losing a father could bear to read this book, but how wonderful it must be if you find a way to acknowledge that connection as you read it. My father has been dead for six years now and we had a horribly complex relationship—one that I still can't describe accurately. All that complexity and I could still barely read this book. And the declarative sketches of her sad, suicidal mother nearly took my breath away Here's an excerpt from her opening page:
So, as I was saying, someone abandoned a blue wheelchair by the lake. I had read several Maso chapters by the time I saw the thing and it was getting dark (that whole cone, rod thing again). The heady scent of honeysuckle was intoxicating and the ducks were splashing down around me, making lots of noise. I jumped from rock to rock across the creek when it became too dark to read, then hiked up the knoll to the lake—and there it was, a blue wheelchair, sitting maybe two feet from the water. Maybe it's the curse of living through a loved one's suicide attempts but, when I saw it, I immediately worried that a dying patient had rolled herself—and it was a her in my mind: Ophelia, Virginia Woolf, my cancer-ridden mother-out-law, and my sad suicidal mother all rolled into one dying patient—down the steep path that stretches between the hospital and the gardens into this lush, late-spring paradise swollen taut with beauty. And I stopped in my tracks to stare at the thing, convinced, for a moment, that a dying patient had taken in all this beauty, then thrown herself into the lake. (Lawsie. I wonder how a person who does not have a personal relationship with suicide would translate such a scene.) Today's eight-hour work retreat was taxing for this introvert, but healing. I have been so disillusioned about work this week, about my ability to fix lingering problems there, but the retreat at least made me feel a little excited again about how we can make our already-impressive mission, our daily work, even better. And it matters to me that I feel that I'm making at least a little bit of difference in the world. The dean asked a handful of us to comprise his IT Vision Committee and said that we are the people with a clear vision for what IT can allow us to do, with the enthusiasm and ideas to give this vision form. And even though I've taken enough management seminars and training courses to know that he was strategically empowering us to do the work he'd like to see done—despite our scant resources and the constant demand to cobble together something creatively because we have little more than our creative problem-solving skills with which to work—somewhere in the course of the day, as we talked about where we want to be in five years and how far we have come in the past five years, I started to believe again that what we do matters enough to be worth the near-constant bullshit and complaining. This was especially prescient since the author who complained about our work was at the retreat, where she complained again that the traditional publications process is too slow. And I was able to listen without being defensive, to hear her points—that she has knowledge about a particular topics that people need to access and so sees the editing and quality-control steps that are part and parcel of good academic publishing as impediments to vital information dissemination. And, even though I could feel my face turning bright red (as it does whenever I have to speak in public), I was able to say that I too want to disseminate vital information as quickly as possible and in as many formats as our clients can use, but that I see the manuscripts before they're edited and know the errors that will reach the hands of our clients if we skip these steps. And I reminded the group that our reputation depends on the accuracy with which we share our knowledge, whether it's in paper or electronic format. And I said all this with minimal stuttering. I also reminded the group that our reputation depends on the accuracy of our publications. And I said all this with minimal stuttering. I used examples from the author's recent publication (without naming names) to explain what slows the publishing process and how these delays can be avoided—outlined the coding and template designs that come close to automating the layout process while noting that many authors insist on creating unique styles that supersede our house style (as she did) and thus introduce added costs and time delays that create a ripple effect and force us to, more often than not, work in triage mode. At this point the dean and several other faculty members interjected and said "Tell them no! I don't want my book slowed down because another author won't conform to house style"—which is bullshit because the dean always takes the side of faculty, but which she clearly heard. The vision guys from a large software company also said that all of our computer systems combined won't do us any good until we—and by 'we' I mean the School, which consistently says one thing and then fails to back me up—insist that faculty members conform to the minimum standards that are required to employ these standards. Now really, no one can top me when it comes to recognizing the crying need for individuality—and gawd knows I'm as hardheaded as any other author when it comes to my own publications and what I want (and possibly moreso, since I am also a book designer and typesetter)—but authors do not need to stick their noses into meta-tagging and file nomenclature processes, which they know nothing about. I guess it's an ego thing, but so many of them are convinced that they are experts in every field they encounter, including the publishing process that they know squat about, Bucko. I noted with sadness that the Webmaster and IT manager barely said a word the entire day. They have given up believing that anyone values their expertise and continue to tell me that I am wasting good years of my life believing that I can change School culture or be valued for what I know, but I guess I haven't been there as long as they have and so still have spurts of faith that the knowledge experts can actually manage to produce some positive change in a profoundly screwed-up place despite the equally dysfunctional administration. Couldn't check email till five, but had a great random spam message this afternoon: clytemnestra portraiture. Perhaps Agamemnon Spam sacrificed his daughter Clytemnestra Spam in an effort to make it through a challenging editorial meeting and then Clytemnestra got revenge in a scene that was captured by a portraitist? Now that's obscure. 10:15 p.m. - 2005-05-03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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