Strobe Genre, Utah!

This is writing at its best, being sincere and without guile and connecting to the reader's nerves and thoughts and questions and balancing in a realm it has created for itself and with that amazing strobe trope, true, false, true, false.

"troubled and ebullient." Those words go so well together. Make me think of a very rich primordial soup!

The flow of syntax in all your works is always as close to perfect as possible. As here. This piece - open & clear. I like. *

Thanks to Matt, I'm beginning to see poems everywhere; but I really think this is one. The poem of the mind in its continuous self-invention.

Writing for writers. Much to learn, from this intriguing piece and from the learned comments. *

Very effective and thought-provoking. I wanted to pick up a favorite line, but they are all so good. ***

"U of MN is looking to fill Instructor Z and B tracks. It reminds me of seat subclasses in coach." That's my favorite line. Great story! I suspect that higher educ. in the Gopher state has gone downhill since I left, not that my leaving had anything to do with it.

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Great to read you again, Ann!
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Interesting meta work.*

Is the form or style or method collage? Here I shored up the few lines I'd decided to write over several weeks or months of talking. My aim in keeping talking has been a different form, a biography of my parents' ideal family, the five of us, three offspring artists of the middle class. Thanks all for commenting. It is valuable to know the arrow.

Agree with other comments - this is well crafted. I like experimentation done with care and serious intent. The change to the more complex syntax in the "Co-polar .." paragraph/stanza is nice.

Great opening sentence Ann:
"I am leaning on a future as on a door that is stuck but ajar."

Good for sentence for a novel, too.

I still have a crease over my right eye from just such a door. The collision changed my life.

"Z and B tracks" sound like an adventure in "creative" education. I teach "zee english" said the Frenchman. I teach bee english, I said fearful of giving A's, C's. D's or F's.
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Manic and depressive. I love the way you continually put yourself out there on the edge and I always enjoy your writing even if I don't always understand it--unusual for me, sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Your erudition makes me think of PhD adjunct instructors living on food stamps in their cars. Goddam deplorable situation. *, of course.

TRIGGER WARNING: information

Technically, my experience of "mania" has been subclinical, so not "mania," but as recently as last year I experienced "hypomania," as it was defined in the doctor's office, a doctor I have visited since 1999. That singular episode responded to short-course (one-week) rather low-dose treatment using a neuroleptic. Writing? I do not know whether that can be subject to psychiatric probing by non-doctors or whether psychiatric "mania" can be represented by style or characterization as in fiction or whether it is in my interest to try to do that. I would more likely wish to attempt to "plot" summarize how hypomania felt or what its imaginative components were that day or week of days last year. I would likely resort to metaphor. The metaphor I used in the doctor's office -- I had called to schedule the appointment and driven there without assistance -- was "head going up in a cold air balloon." And "running a cold fever," that I also meant as metaphor. My basal body temperature was close to normal; 97-something is my norm. There were other factors. I didn't believe that I had actually left my bed while my head started to rise to a disagreeable altitude. In fact, I was able to fall asleep soon after I had reined in or fetched, called in (down or home) my mind from an atmosphere that felt above the cloud line. The night was normal in other respects: I was alone, it was about midnight, and I woke up the next morning about eight. "Mania," if you ask men with bipolar diagnosis, is rapid or very rapid speed in thinking, velocity; for me it had been connection to higher points, a jet plane going over the house that I, terrestrial, had found bodily riveting the night before diagnosis (true) or the distancing idea that I had been like a helium balloon stopped at my living room ceiling that later drifted to the floor (metaphor). That was after writing 300 pages in three months while attending school and teaching. "Hypomania" confirmed last year felt higher and was not due to an outside irritant -- it happened to me unawares. I had tried an outside irritant twice years ago while living in a different city to see if it would inflict "mania," to see, in fact, if I had had "mania" upon first diagnosis (apparently not), because a strong (illegal or regulated milder) stimulant will tend to produce "manic" symptoms (side effects, more accurately) in a person subject to manic-depression; whereas a person subject to ADD or ADHD will experience a calming effect and a normal person euphoria or deniable pleasure.

Thanks, Dan, great full comment.

Very interesting Ann. I felt like I was being stepped through a succession of thoughts, not always knowing where the next step was going or why, but you have a confidence in your writing that makes me want to understand. I really enjoyed this.

Thanks, Jeffrey, glad for your visit to this piece.

Love this, Ann, and the genre issue. These days my essays sound like propaganda, my fiction is apocalyptic, and my poems want to be fiction. Just what is the best delivery system for a bunch of ideas? Can we really know until after we have thoroughly bashed the darned things about the idealized head and shoulders? Enjoyed reading you, as always.
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Thanks, Brenda. Let's ask Utah. Maybe I ought to spell it U-Tah. OE. A book is a vessel for water, but is it a water vessel?