Destruction (Project 25:365, February 16-March 15)
Updates on my part of Project 25:365
I haven’t posted as frequently as I’d like the last few weeks. When I started participating in Project 25:365, my intent was to summarize posts in intervals of roughy 2 weeks, but I also missed the last one of those. There’s been a lot going on, and I’ve been tired. There’s the whole end of democracy thing, as well as some more localized stuff.
It seems to be a period of destruction. Many of my students know I have a bit of an obsession with the concept, having once taught a class about apocalypse and bringing it up an awful lot in writing classes. As a former high school debater and later high school debate coach, I am well practiced in winding a persuasive essay to its ultimate conclusion: annihilation. As teenagers, my friend and teammate and I had a file in our plastic box of debate evidence labeled “nuclear war.” The topic that year was health insurance. In the mid 1990s. Some things don’t change.
Some things, though, go boom. Planes, basic decency, bombs, Federal Constitutions. Lots of things are temporary, and lots of things leave a crater when they leave.
Interim administrators at Hamline University are taking a stab at destruction on their way out the door, attempting to eviscerate one of the school’s most cherished programs. They are coming after the MFA program in creative writing and its renowned literary journal, the Water~Stone Review.
Having been through a program and college closure or two, having watched a whole lot of higher education administrators who are also my bosses make decisions putting my institutions in headlines, either though foolishness, short-sightedness, or straight up malice (I’ve got stories) throughout my career, I’m starting to feel like I need a pale horse.
I’ll undoubtedly have plenty to write about regarding Hamline in the next few months. I’m not a harbinger of doom, though. I’m actually a gnat riding a scratched record. You might recall some clusterfucks like the following:
This latest batch of nonsense has been backed by interim administrators, including one who helped preside over the previous shitshow and one who was brought in because of the previous shitshow.
There’s a point at which it starts to feel intentional.
But, while I seem to live my life amongst explosions, I remain true to my conviction that destruction can only be countered with creation. Among the poetic aspects of the mess this time is that I just enrolled as a student in the program in question precisely because I wanted to learn more ways to create, to build more atop the ruins. Boom.
I’ve been reading (slowly it seems—I guess I’m savoring the incomprehensibility of oblivion) Dorian Lynskey’s Everythjng Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World. It is just fantastic, which feels like a weird thing to say, but as the book clearly illustrates, thinking about Armageddon can be good for one’s sanity. Really.
I was particularly taken by his early discussion of Mary Shelley and the idea of The Last Man, a durable image in apocalyptic writing and the title of an unpopular, later Shelley work that’s not called Frankenstein.
I decided I should start writing my own post-apocalypse. For fun. So, I shifted from my daily Project 25:365 practice of doodling pictures of some angry dude in the morning to writing a fictional memoir of a guy with no friends because no humans exist anymore. I lazily titled it “Last.”
It’s an ongoing project, like all of my projects. I don’t know how it’s going to end (the story, not the world, though I don’t know how that ends either).
A structure might be emerging, so, in an attempt to get back on track, I compiled what I’ve got so far:
Meanwhile, if you think cutting arts programs during an unprecedented autocratic assault on the 1st Amendment is perhaps cowardly, short-sighted, or mind-numbingly tone deaf and stupid, there’s a petition you can sign.