anti:freeze

Sorry for the silence. I am deep into work on an essay, recovering from an illness, and busy reading friends' manuscripts. I also landed a freelance gig that consumes far more than its fair share of time (and of course, pays far less than its fair share at the same time.) I will post some writing soon.

Iowa City without Frank Conroy.

This, I cannot imagine.

As a young, undergraduate writer at the University of Iowa, I skittered away from Frank Conroy in the hallway. I skittered away from just about everyone I respected back then, unsure how to speak or act.

Five years and one MFA in Creative Writing later: no more fear.

Frank was like the Sears Tower of Iowa City. Everywhere I looked, I saw him. Not the literal him, but the mark he left: workshops at the local cafes aspired to his toughness; the aesthetic of the Iowa Workshop suited his tastes. But just like the tower, Frank - the man, the teacher - always seemed just beyond reachable distance.

When I left Iowa City, I needed that distance. I needed to explore other aesthetics and map out my own territory. Lately, I find myself wanting to return for the summer workshops and see how it all looks from the outside.

Iowa City without Frank Conroy.

In my mind, I always equated the place with the man: Iowa City was Frank Conroy; Frank Conroy was Iowa City. (Iowa City = Iowa Workshop = Frank Conroy) When I first read of his death, I imagined the city erased from Iowa maps. Not the literal place, but the place as I knew it, the city I left behind.

Do you pause at the staircase to decide? Do you trust the bridge to remain stable beneath your feet?

If I added up all the minutes I have stood here, sweaty-palmed and short of breath, listening as car tires pop and hiss over the exit ramps, what would I have? An afternoon? A rainy morning? One extra paragraph in an essay?

Or maybe the opposite.

Without the pause, I lose time - like a clock forced forward for daylight savings.

In the liminal, the clocks stop ticking. The narrative flattens out. The story stops.

I spent a good portion of 7th - 12th grade in clinics and hospitals, teaching myself advanced algebra and trigonometry, reading Shakespeare, and writing research papers while tucked between starched white sheets, waiting in lobbies, or curled up on examination tables.

9th grade was probably the worst. I missed almost the entire year. If I had not scored As and Bs on papers and tests, I probably would have been held back for poor attendance, medical excuses aside.

Doctors sizzled my joints with electricity, glued electrodes to my scalp, watched as I walked down the hallway, listened to the distinct patter of my feet (expecting to find a Parkinsonian shuffle). They slid me into an MRI machine, recorded my sleep in a lab, made me drink tall glasses of barium so they could see inside my guts, experimented with medication, and sent me to psychiatric wards, all to find answers to the old, tired riddles of my life: How come Karrie flops like a fish? Are these seizures for real? What causes the tremors in her right arm? Why don't the drugs stop her migraines? What causes her ice-pick-in-the-eye headaches? Why do her leg muscles sometimes collapse right beneath her? Why do her intestines burn and stab and swell almost every day? What is the rash that heals and returns on a mysterious cycle? Does she have PTSD? What is wrong with this kid?

Meanwhile, boyfriends dumped me like a body in a ditch. Literally. They left me convulsing in dark corners of the school hallway, hoping nobody saw them with the freak girl. Track coaches told me I shamed the entire team when I collapsed in seizure at a meet.

Later, when I ordered my medical charts and read them front to back, back to front, I learned that my parents were in on the joke. They thought I was nuts. They thought the seizures were a phase, one long, horrifically expensive fit. They conceded the headaches: pain made sense to them; seizures did not.

Over the years, I learned to fight against doctors who sought to poke, prod, invade. I have shoved paramedics away. I have demanded full disclosure. When necessary, I have refused to provide my name. But I also know when to lie still and clench my jaw.

When a doctor snipped chunks of flesh from inside me a few years ago - no anesthetic to stop the sharp vagus-nerve reactions - I never forgave her (even though she was right; it turned out I needed surgery.) The problem was not the pain.

So I admire the author Bee Lavender. I relate to her book, lessons in taxidermy, even as I sit in awe of her strength and wisdom. Her medical horror story is infinitely more brutal than any I have ever seen. A list of her ailments (from memory): thyroid cancer, malformed teeth, jaw surgery & subsequent wiring shut of her mouth, surgery for double vision, skin cancer, appendicitis, a genetic disorder, a violent car crash, and lupus.

And yet, she writes without self-pity. Her story is both intensely personal and intently human. Those of us who suffer different (and likely, lesser) medical horrors will nod in recognition.

She, too, has acquired a pugilist posture. She fights and fights for autonomy over her own body.

I am so grateful to have found this book. Everyone should read it.

I will be posting a review of lessons in taxidermy on the reviews, commentary & interviews page of Invisible Insurrection later today. Check it out.

From Susie Bright: the most textured, nuanced, and interesting reflection on the death of Andrea Dworkin I have seen yet. Check it out.

When I worked at the State Health Registry of Iowa, filing tumor reports and death certificates, I looked forward to the hard crunch of the time clock. I loved how it gnawed down on my timecard and bit - how I had to yank the card back from its jaws if I wanted a paycheck.

The machine punctuated moments. On arrival, it was cruel as a colon, open-ended and logical: a long list of tasks to follow. At the end of a shift, my sentence ended.

Crunch. Five hours editing tumor reports. Crunch. Eight hours crouched down beneath towering file cabinets, scanning terminal digits, sliding death certificates into musty folders. The timecard was accomplishment made physical - the next best thing to holding my check.

With all the technology of University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics behind it, the State Health Registry never went paperless, at least while I was there.

So when I saw the JobClock, I wondered how it would feel.

Sure, I have had jobs without punchcards - jobs where I used computers to log in or wrote down my hours on a timesheet. But even still, I had to use my fingers to press buttons or scribble ink. And I had the chance to see my hours add up, to calculate the running total of a paycheck. With the JobClock, workers simply hold a special key in front of the sensor - a green key for punching in, a red one for punching out. No touch. No pressure. No punctuated moment. No next best thing to holding the paycheck.

Managers download the timesheets in a PDA and transfer them to a hard drive for analysis, check-cutting, and cost-tracking. Unlike with the physical punchcard, only higher-ups can see a worker's patterns for the week or month.

While the JobClock helps solve problems like timeclock fraud, lost punchcards, and difficulty in tracking labor expenses, it also creates something new: a sense of secrecy around hours. And of course, it snatches time right out of the workers' hands - literally. Time is no longer physical. Time leaves no stamp. Time cannot be held in the hand. With the JobClock, time is an abstraction.

I cannot help but notice that the company developed a lockbox to protect it. The lockbox protects JobClock in case of extreme weather or construction dust, but it also protects from vandals. Do neutral objects spark inspiration for vandals? In my experience, vandals choose targets for maximum effect - lightning rods for anger and frustration. Is there something about the JobClock - its function, perhaps - that attracts lightning? Or do vandals carve into the metal and paint the face, without knowing what it does?

JobClock is not necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder how it feels. And in keeping with some of my earlier notes & ideas about wi-fi & high-tech, I wonder what it does to our sense of touch. (I am still collecting evidence and writing that essay, which always seems - excuse the pun - just slightly out of reach.)

Looking for a good book? Alan and I have two new reviews up at the Reviews, Commentary & Interviews page at Invisible Insurrection.

One is my review of lessons in taxidermy by Bee Lavender, the other is Alan's review of Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollman.

You will also find a reprint of my interview with David L. Ulin.

Keep checking there for more reviews & interviews. I plan to start a series of notebook & pen reviews as well, for all you fetish-y writers out there (like me).

I dug this photo out of a shoebox the other day, when the light outside reminded me of Midwestern storms: golden-green, like a tarnished ring. In Iowa, that light means a tornado could touch down and suck you from the ground.

In Portland, it just makes me nostalgic.

So here I am, a little less than a decade ago, on a bench in Des Moines, Iowa, doing my best to look like the sweet Midwestern girl I was supposed to be.

Ooooh, this taps into so many memories, I can almost smell the artificial cream filling - so sweet it escapes the sealed plastic wrapper. When I was a kid, I hated cake and loved frosting. I used to peel the Hostess frosting off the top and nibble the little curly-ques, which crunched between my teeth. Then I tore bits of the chocolate and let them dissolve on my tongue. Totally gross, I know. But at the time, pure heaven.

It brings back memories of the day-old & outlet bakery in SE Cedar Rapids, too - how the whole store was as quiet as a snowfall. I used to imagine all the soft, white bread absorbing the clickety-clack of high heels of squeaks from broken cart wheels. I wanted to move in and live there, to sleep soundly among the discount bread loaves and boxes of baked treats.

I posted several boutique children photos before, but when I saw the theme for Photo Friday - soft - I had to post some more.

I received some creepy, wrong-number phone calls and messages this week, but nothing quite like this.

Check out the video. I felt slightly less freaked out after watching - if for no other reason than the knowledge that others have it far, far worse.

Although, after yet another invasive, beligerant phone call this morning, I wonder who the hell Jennifer is, and why telemarketers (collectors? employers? doctors?) believe she lives here. They go so far as to insist my cell number must be new, since they swear it belonged to Jennifer last they checked. (Never mind that I have had the same cell number going on four years now.)