Writer's Block in a Glass Bubble

Here are the first two entries in the "Kaleidoscope" train of thought:

Glass Bubble

For a while, earlier this year, Kirk, Simon, Nelly and Josiah and I were playing an online game called Legends of Elveron. As happens when geeks gather in one place, we got to storytelling about old D&D campaigns. In telling the story of my favorite gaming character, Max Forger, I started talking about living in Seattle at the turn of the millennium. This is what I wrote:

I've promised myself that if I ever manage to teach myself to write again and graduate, I'm going to write an Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush. I owe him and his men so much of what I learned about the limits of democracy, rationality and, indeed, how under the right circumstances how an adroit politician may shape, no—virtually sculpt public opinion like so much clay. There was so much to talk about then. We were not yet desensitized to horror, as we are now. Truly these were the last days of my youth.

We drank a good deal together and had a lot of fun. One of the greatest blessings in my life was that Simon lived very close to me. He and his girlfriend Nelly, with whom I also became very good friends, hardly passed a day when we didn't bump into one another, if we hadn't planned on meeting. While I've never smoked tobacco, Nelly and Simon did, and we all drank coffee in the upstairs room at Cafe Allegro. We'd drink coffee and play cards and philosophize. We played this delightful Russian card game Nelly taught us called Durak, which Simon dubbed "Russian Ratfuck." It's the perfect salon game. As it was the game of nobility, Nelly and I decided that everyone should have a title. As Nelly was my courtly lover, we ripped off Les Liasons Dangereuses and she became the Marquise and I became the Vicomte. Simon became the Duke. I forget what title we gave Peter Hovde. Ru became the Pirate King (despite the fact that in my mind, Simon has always been the Pirate King). We talked and talked and talked. We lived in a glass bubble in the storm that engulfed the nation. Outside, the storm raged on and we were hardly senseless to it, after all, the bubble was made of glass. But I never realized until now how safe the bubble was and how beautiful. I was too stupid to realize it at the time, but it was one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Nelly and Simon were here over the past view days. We had such a good time just talking. I miss them both so dearly. Seattle lost much of its charm for me when they left. But whether or not they were here to lend it charm, Seattle has been a safe, glass bubble for me. There is virtually no place else in America in which it is easier to be an out queer than Seattle. This town has been good to me.

We’ve had a heat wave in Seattle (90+ degrees for several days—we aren’t designed to weather this sort of thing here). Nelly needed to buy a summer dress, as she had no idea that she’d need one here. So Simon and I left her to shop at Alderwood mall and we browsed through different geek-oriented stores. We came to a knife shop and Simon wanted to go in, so we did. I saw a particularly lethal looking knife blade there. This is the closest image I could find, but it’s a good deal scarier that this one:

Looking at this knife in the store’s cut-up, a thought that has been growing in my mind began to crystallize. I’m not going to live in a glass bubble forever. Looking at the knife, so clearly designed to disembowel upon exit, I could see human hatred. It takes a certain mind to objectify a person enough to create a knife like that. That person is out there. Odds are that person hates queers. Well, I’m a loudmouth queer. And I’m not going shut up either. I need to learn to defend myself and my partner. I can’t live in a glass bubble for the rest of my life. I’m going to graduate and probably have to leave Seattle. I need to start getting real. I believe in democratic political order, but there are plenty of people involved in creating democratic political order who don’t believe in me or mine.

I think I want to take a karate class when Craig and I get back from Tel Aviv.

Writer’s Block

In a recent e-mail, one of you guys asked:

It's curious in your blog you talk about how you have difficulty writing but then you write these very long thoughtful emails to me.

I could say that it’s a very different type of writing. That is technically true. It is totally different to spew at someone in a conversation (hockey again) then to write an intellectual argumentative essay (football). The differences between the structural demands of both types of writing couldn’t be more stark. The difficulty with that claim is that it is emotionally dishonest. I think I have, after many years now, figured out how to break the job into parts and conquer it. There remain technical challenges, of course, but I know that this is something I can handle. Something else is wrong.

The something else is that I have writer’s block, because I know that I will never again experience writing as euphoria. A while ago, I did a blog entry on a piece I read by Talal Amin (the other Talal in the social sciences, the one whose name some other social scientist might actually recognize). This was the passage that set me off:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

Before I got sick, writing was always that way for me. I’ve always had a powerful imagination. Before the fateful autumn of ’99 when I had the really nasty attack that gave me optic neuritis, my frontal lobes were capable of processing many, many steps at the same time and I could keep up with the flood of images coming into my brain. I loved writing because it was the highest experience of creative power I knew. I loved it even more than singing. That’s why I became a scholar, not a tenor. The reason I have writer’s block is because I know that I will never feel that power again and my heart and soul hates that fact. Like a child, I refuse to accept what is hateful.

When my niece Valerie was very young, she would often refuse to come along with me when the appointed hour for leaving the McDonald’s playland to go home or leaving the television to go to her bath or her sleep. I would look down at her (as my niece at the age of four was much shorter than me) and say, “Niece. You have two options. You can come along with dignity or without dignity. But you’re coming along. So which will it be?”

At this point Valerie would usually stare up at me in resignation and sigh, “Dignity” and come along. On occasion, however, she would clench her jaw, stare up angrily and say, “NO DIGNITY!” This was boundlessly entertaining and I would laugh, scoop her off the floor and carry her to the next exotic port of call.

I am not a four year-old niece. I am a nearly forty year-old uncle. As much as my subconscious has been screaming “NO DIGNITY!” lately, it is not charming or entertaining. It is unacceptable. I must accept that writing will be plodding and not euphoria. This isn’t cooking. I can punt cooking. I have things I want to say, damn it. I can’t punt writing. Damn it, I’m a scholar. Scholars produce scholarship. This is not negotiable.

I need to make tables, lay out tasks, make check marks and I need to do write everyday, just like I work out every day. I need to accept that change will happen slowly, that I’ll never be directly satisfied with a day’s work, that I cannot measure my life in immediately visible results. Writing will never again be ecstasy, because it will never happen quickly enough to overload my senses. Of all the limitations, this hurts the most, for I wrote once with divine inspiration and will not write that way again. But I have to write every day from now on. This won’t work otherwise.

I Dreamed a Dream

I was about to send this as an e-mail to Simon and Nelly. Then I realized it was the most colorful thing I'd written in ages, so I posted it here instead. Please bear in mind that "colorful" does not mean "productive."

* * *

Dear Nelly and Simon,

I've just woken from the strangest dream and I had an overwhelming impulse to write it down and tell the two of you about it. Nelly, because she is an anthropologist who studies new age, and Simon, because he is a gamer who likes vampire games that feature the nephandi. This dream seemed to have a soundtrack, not literally, in the sense there was music, but in the sense that it was permeated by the feeling of a theme that pervaded the dream in the emotional way a soundtrack permeates a scene in a film. The two "songs," if you will, were, on the one hand, the words "Jung" and "archetypes" and an urge to tell Nelly, and the word "nephandi" and an urge to tell Simon.

Please bear in mind that I have no anticipation at all that any of this should mean anything at all to you, other than, I hope, slight bemusement that I've succumb to the purely irrational this early in the morning. I desperately need coffee. And perhaps therapy. Nonetheless, as the urge to write was overwhelming and I thought you might be entertained, I write.

In the dream, I was a student in an Antioch-like learning institution. I've been telling Nelly about my trepidations about teaching an online course at Antioch this summer. To contextualize Simon, I'll just tell him that this institution focuses on the methods that he summed up in a neat category when he told me, many years ago, that he couldn't major in English because "English departments are too fruffy." At any rate, this time, I was a student, not a teacher.

The class was located in a magical classroom space that abutted off of a picturesque scene of Venice, so one simply breezed in, as if walking in from a magical tourist brouchure or a commercial for the Olive Garden (mmm.... the Tour of Italy—a bizarre breakfast choice, I know, but suddenly it sounds delicious). At any rate, a former student of mine from Antioch, whose name completely escapes me at the moment, was teaching a course on tarot. He was from India and was actually quite quiet in class. I shudder to think that my imagination is so orientalist as to foist my penchant for the exotic onto him symbolically, but I fear it may be the truth. Naturally, there were no chairs in this room, but rather a picnic blanket. Could it be that the floor was made of glass and one could see picturesque Venice below us? How odd when I had just entered from street level. But no matter.

It was a total surprise, yet nonetheless a complete delight, that today's course would be on tarot. To be honest, the whole dream felt something like a holiday sponsored by the History Channel. Tomorrow might be Marxist political economy set in London, Berlin and Moscow. For some uneffable reason, I required no logic, no footnotes. Flitting from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to refinishing my antique desk posed no intellectual outrage. If the chianti were chilled, all would be well. I'm not altogether convinced that the reason Venice was in the dream wasn't that my subconscious wanted something picturesque and Venice was the first image associated with the world in my commodified, overly bourgeois imagination. How artless the subconscious can be, yet at the same time, how artistic!

At any rate, Simon will no doubt be entertained to know that placed right before my ex-student stood a stack of tarot cards that clearly contained more than one deck, much as one would see a dealer use in Vegas. Indeed, seeing the stack was what tipped me off as to "the subject of today's class". I don't recall if my instructor had the perfect randomizing machine a Vegas dealer might have, but I had no doubt that the cards were well-shuffled. Indeed, they had to have been, because while all the cards had a mystical, archetypal feel that screamed out "Jung," none of them corresponded to the tarot arcana. I placed the five or so cards that he dealt me on the floor next to the blanket, so I could watch the Venetians gondola by as I examined them.

When I looked at the cards, I realized that they were constructed quite cleverly. It was as if each contained a live background that one viewed on camera. In contrast, the characters that were intended to be archetypal were not live. In fact they were sort of a fusion between photographs of real people and sketches of them. Strangely, however, when you touched the card, the figure would slide off, as if it were embossed on a cellophane film, leaving behind a silhouette of the figure, embossed on the live scene. Strange that as then instructor dealt the cards, this cellophane covering didn't simply slide off. Apparently, it took my rather clumsy touch to disturb this delicate composition. Leave it to me to be the klutz.

At any rate, when I touched the first card, the word "Pisces" resounded in my head. The moving background was simply a wave-churned sea. The figure was a brown-haired man who, after I woke up seemed to remind me of my college friend, Chris Davis (he designed the logo for my pub band). The other cards had a darker, occultish feel. This was where I started thinking of the Nephandi, rather wishing I had a History Channel special on "Who Are the Nephandi, Anyway?" I recall the cards featured backgrounds with "fire and brimstone" related themes. The cards were very clearly differentiated in my dream, but I forgot what they depicted when I woke up.Apparently, I was supposed to select a card. I was about to select one of the more innocuous nehandi cards, when my teacher leaned in to correct me, as if to say, :No, no. You want this one. Pay attention." He directed me to the "Pisces" card. I woke up.

Bizarre, no?

Love,

Talal

Shift in Consciousness

The brain is a fucked-up and funny thing. A couple of weeks ago, I felt I was getting on track. I was even working out again. Then I got sick. A really nasty stomach flu. I spent a lot of time running back and forth to the toilet. Naturally, I got off track. But I’m okay with that. That’s who I am now. I’m not efficient. I’m not a machine. I’m not a force of nature. I’m just a geeky guy with low focus and low energy. The most important part of my life is that I’m married to Craig and that we live each day together. And that’s fine. That’s more than fine. I’m happy. I don’t need to be more.

I’ve been playing an on-line strategy game with Kirk, Simon and Nelly. Josiah is joining in the next round. What’s funny is that it’s making me feel really upbeat. I didn’t realize that it would. I miss teamwork. I miss the common struggle toward a goal, the camaraderie, the humor. I feel so much better about life. It’s strange. It reminds me of the good parts of working at USAID without the evil parts. So strange that something that seems so silly can make me feel so upbeat.

I really want to write. I miss writing. I was good at it before and I want to be good at it again. I know I won’t be what I intended to be—a publishing machine. That’s okay. But I want to write again, anyway. I’ve learned how to be a good teacher with this illness. Now I want to learn about how to be a good writer.

Little things change. I’ve changed. I can quite put a finger on it. But I feel a little excited.

All the Latest

Sorry to be such a lousy blogger. My focus has been really shitty. I’ve been handling a lot of bureaucratic shit and that puts me in a bad frame of mind for writing. Plus, I’ve got some other stuff banging around up in my head. Just garbage. Here’s all the latest

I got an application off

I am now an applicant for the United States Institute for Peace Dissertation grant. Who knows if I get it, but the important thing is that I’ve now sent out one application. The next, if the Graduate School offers has another “Dissertation Fellowship Competition in the Humanities, Social Sciences & Social Professions” as it did last year requires a four-page proposal! If they’re announcing one this year, the deadline is likely to be in February. Following that, the SSRC’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship is due on March 1 and the Palestinian American Research Center Fellowship is due on March 15. I need to get cracking.

The Packers are in the NFC Championship Game

—and against the Giants, no less, who wiped the Cowboys off the map last week. Apparently Tony Romo spent the whole week before drinking margaritas and banging Jessica Simpson and has taken, in my brother Rashid’s view, a disproportionate share of the blame for the loss. While Rashid’s response was, well, more controlled, his opinion is clearly shared by Terrell Owens:

Indeed, the Cowboys are apparently the most sensitive in the NFL, if we are to believe Tony Romo’s own heartfelt response to TO’s comments:

I need to e-mail my buddy Brian McGrath, the Giants fan, to let him know that his team is going down this Sunday. Kirk, however, has sent me this reminder:

I am excited about the possibility of a Pack-Pats Super Bowl, but I've been excited about that since Thanksgiving. I was hoping even more for a Cowboys-Pats Super Bowl but obviously that won't happen now. Don't get too cocky about the Giants though, because they have been playing better than just about anybody in December and January. They opened my eyes with how they almost beat the Patriots in week 17 and come to find out they were really, really good at the end of the season. It's not surprising they took out the Cowboys, who played like they had their thumb up their ass at the end of the year and kind of stumbled into the playoffs. Sure, the Cowboys were 13-3 but they sure seemed pretty bad in December, a time when you normally want to start peaking. The Giants are definitely peaking while the Cowboys seemed to fall asleep and deservedly lost yesterday. I definitely think the Packers will beat the Giants but it won't be easy. I also think the Pats will beat San Diego but I also think that one won't be easy either.

But I’m going to razz Brian, anyway. He’s in Yemen and could probably give a shit anyway. He can take it.

Craig and I have been working out

Craig and I have joined Bally’s gym, some fifteen minutes walk from our house. Craig let me have all the trainer sessions. Kevin, my trainer, has a really great gay vibe. He smiles a lot, starts out with very basic exercises and quickly becomes a sadist. He especially loves making you lift light weights and do push-ups on pillates balls that throw you off balance and engage more muscles as a result. I’m sore all over, but have been to the gym four times this week. You can’t beat the convenience, but there aren’t nearly as many cute, muscled guys hanging out here as at school and, of course, no gang showers. I love gang showers. If I ever get to build my own house, I’ll have one. I’ll also have urinals in the bathroom and a toilet with enough pressure to flush properly.

We got Craig an mp3 player. It took me a lot of work to find out how to buy tracks without getting some stupid monthly subscription, but I did it. Craig is excited about his new workout collection.

Craig and I got Direct TV

Craig surfs continuously and, after nearly a week has said, “You’re right. It really is two-hundred channels of shit instead of five. There’s nothing to watch.” I laughed and laughed. But we can at least watch the same twenty re-runs of Sex and the City with clear reception and will actually be able to watch Desperate Housewives again.

I actually like the NFL channel, as they show all of last week’s games over and over again. It’s soothing. Plus, it’s a great way to catch up on what you inevitably missed. Plus, I’m trying to watch the news again. I was thinking about ordering the NFL Sunday ticket, but our friend Bill, the manager down at Billy McHale’s, suggested that it might be cheaper to order just the Packers games every week in the weeks they aren’t broadcast locally. I’ll have to look into it.

I’ve been Teaching Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict

We’re just finishing up the Robbers Cave Experiment and will be getting into the dawn of nationalism. I’m having all sorts of fun reading about French absolutism and the court culture of Versailles, under which the nobility of France became a sort of exotic pet. In their powerless indolence, they apparently had nothing to do but fuck themselves silly, a la Les Liaisons Dangerouses. I don’t know why it fascinates me. I even have friends with differing views on the subject. Sean, who is a member of the House of Savoy, might look at this alternately as golden age, where rich young nobles did nothing but kiss the king’s ass and fuck around in vengeance for being forced to marry the king’s bastard children. He might alternately resent the powerlessness and pointlessness of their lives. Who knows? Simon, in distinction, had no ambiguity whatsoever in his appraisal of the subject. He pissed on one of the many exterior walls of the famous châteaux to express his contempt.

What drives my interest? It may well be the cake. I adore cake.

I need to start writing again

So what else is new?

I’m still trying to sort out Civ 4

I have won three times at the warlord level and these are purely high score wins. To get a feel for the game, I’m having all the civs (including my own) and terrains assigned randomly. At this point, I’m pretty sure that there is no dominant strategy, in the sense that there is one strategy that can generate a win in most situations. I had a dominant strategy for Civ 3 that worked in most (but admittedly not all) situations. I don’t think that’s possible in Civ 4. Civ 4 is ultimately terrain driven and different terrains require very different strategies. Moreover, as far as I can see, the different gamer geeks who write on the subject are right. You need to commit to a clear strategy that delivers you to a victory type that is selected in the opening game. Everything, therefore, seems to hinge on figuring out the type of planet on which you’re living at the earliest possible juncture. In Civ 3, I never really gave a shit so long as I started on a continent and not an island. Figuring out the planet type so you can commit to an early strategy is essential.

Why is world size so pivotal in Civ 4, you ask? It’s tied to the way the AI makes war decisions. My theory is that in Civ 4, AI war decisions are driven by terrain pressures. The various AIs do not seem interested in vast empires and, instead, tend to want to become nation states of somewhere between six to nine cities. As a result, they tend to become more bellicose when they can’t expand to their ideal or when they are losing territory to foreign cultural expansion. In the absence of those pressures, only the AIs with very warlike personalities (e.g. Shaka, Montezuma) seem bellicose.

Small planets, particularly small pangaeas, are very warlike, because the AI has trouble getting to its six to nine city ideal. In contrast, large planets are very peaceful. I find that, on a large planet I can, by and large, avoid war until the 20^th century at warlord level. In contrast, in my small Pangaea game a few iterations ago, I fought at least ten consecutive wars with less than five or six turns of peace between them. I’ve kept from losing much territory, but the wars have all been largely defensive and they showed no sign of stopping. I never actually declared a war in that game, but I bet I’ve fought more wars than any of the other civs have, this iteration. I punted it in frustration and started a new iteration.

I’m frustrated in my inability to find a satisfying game pattern. I know I need a better understanding of the AI worldview. The AI is difficult to buy off. The diplomatic model requires more work on my part. I don’t know how to manipulate the AI well enough to be safe from it.

Lebanon still hasn’t elected a president

So what else is new?

Nelly and Simon are getting married!

By far the best news I’ve had in a very long time—Nelly and Simon are getting married in May in Las Vegas. It looks like I will make my second trip to Vegas in as many years to dance at their wedding!