Anne Trubek in Notes from a Small Press, on her abandoned career in academia:

Eighteen years later, at a department meeting, she told me I had always been difficult. I had started off that way. Remember, she said, I demanded an office with a window as a condition of accepting the job, forcing her into the storage closet. Nothing had been said about this in the intervening years—during which another colleague had moved to an office out of the suite, because the dysfunction amongst the four of us was so high she could not bear it.

As someone who myself spent years dreaming of becoming an academic—and didn’t—but did marry one—this whole piece captures so well the romance and claustrophobia and insane competition of that world. The best evocation of it I’ve encountered since the vivid (and weirdly similar) Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.

A poem:

A friend sent this over, after a conversation about Stevens. I love the opening line, “One must have a mind of winter” and how it states as fact the way our minds change over seasons. It reminds me of the poem I was recommending to my friend, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," which is so full of rabbit consciousness, the state of mind of being a rabbit at the end of the day, eventually leading to the great lines, “The trees around are for you, / The whole of the wideness of night is for you, / A self that touches all edges, // You become a self that fills the four corners of night.”

A poem:

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (tr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

How much we love to classify, to tease apart. But: “If you know when to stop / you’re in no danger.” Yes, precisely this.

A passage:

– Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I’m currently profiling Jean Kayira, who is faculty and Program Director of Antioch’s PhD in Environmental Studies. She grew up in Malawi, and she says that Freire’s explanation of this concept of education really captured the system and attitudes under which she was taught.

Myself, I grew up in Northern California, but I don’t think my education was always so different from this, either. And when I found myself in college, certain teachers presented themselves as real J.P. Morgans, deigning to share some crumbs with me, the pauper.

Why do some of us accept this and even embrace it as an educational model?

The representative aspect of fiction is entirely valid, but there’s still the transgressive impulse. What if I want to be somebody else? What if I want to be a dog or an alien? What if I’m young, and I want to be old? For me, these voyeuristic, playful, self-transcending strands of human imagination are a huge part of what fiction is about.

— Mohsin Hamid, BOMB interview

This whole part of the interview takes on the conceit that autofiction—writing about one’s own experience—is the only ethically sound type of fiction. My own wrestling matches with this question have been interesting, though inconclusive. I continue to wrestle. And I appreciate Hamid’s own novels, the different examples he sets for how to write playfully, transgressively, ultimately creating real art. That said, I don’t know that anyone is arguing against writing as a dog or alien. Rather, I think people are explicitly saying don’t appropriate the experiences of people with less power than you. For me the bigger question might be, what does it mean to appropriate? Is “don’t appropriate this subject position” the same as “don’t write characters from this subject position”? I of course want and love transgressive fiction, but I don’t want it to transgress against people, and especially not against oppressed people. Hmm. It’s all food for thought. I like to believe these tensions and moral quandaries are productive and challenge us to write better, less lazily, more imaginatively, more ethically and experimentally.

Anyways the whole interview is jammed with rich and nutritious food for thought.