Grinnell

We were having a conversation about the precise definition of “hipster” at the cross country table the other day, and I started to make the point that, by definition, no one at Grinnell was really a hipster, since what could be less hipstery than living in the middle of Iowa? But I cut that idea off mid-sentence when I realized that going to Grinnell might just be the most hipstery thing one can do. I’m sure students at other schools ask each other “So why did you decide to come here?” but I really doubt that anyone but Grinnellians say it as “So why did you decide to come here?” As if they’d made it to the pearly gates, been offered a prime spot in heaven by St. Peter, and said, “Nah, I think hell is a better fit for me, you know?”

And Grinnell matches my idea of hell a little better than I’d like to admit. It has nearly the same bitter cold of Minnesota without the picturesque snow, and the wind gets vicious once you get outside of town. Sometimes everything smells like manure for days on end. The train cutting through campus is pretty cool, I guess, until you hear the wheels grinding and the whistle blowing outside your dorm at three in the morning. And, even if everything in Grinnell were absolutely perfect, you can’t deny that there really isn’t all that much to it. From three years as a cross country runner, I know all too well that you can’t go more than ten minutes in any direction before you’re looking at an endless straight road with rows of corn on either side.

So yes, Grinnell totally seems like the kind of place that a hard-core hipster would go to college ironically. But I think the connection between Grinnell and hipsters is wrong, because every supposedly sarcastic enjoyment that defines that outdated cliché is ultimately shallow: no one gets unnecessary surgery for ironic enjoyment or joins a cult because religious deviance isn’t mainstream. No one can live four years in a place that they really hate, and I think, under all that sarcasm, everyone here really finds something meaningful about living in this tiny, smelly, rusting town.

I thought I had a non-ironic reason for going to Grinnell when I came here. At that time I had about as many theories about how the world works as you’d expect from a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer, and none of which were particularly accurate. I’d read The Great Gatsby the year before, claimed to love it because it’s the sort of book that an aspiring writer is supposed to love, and found a common thread through the text (or, actually, through my mom’s old notes in the margins) that portrayed New York as an ethically blighted place, while the Midwest still held some sort of moral purity. Being a guy from Minnesota and Texas, I’d take any snobbery over the coastal states that I could get, but I took an extra strong hold on that theory when every East Coast school I applied to turned me down. Since the Midwest was the only place left to go, I doubled down and went to the most Midwestern school I could think of in hopes that I was making it seem like some kind of big plan.

The town and school were charming at first, but it was charming in the way that a joke is funny: spend long having it repeated over and over and over again, and any enjoyment you used to get from it drains away. Living my life on the one square mile patch of campus got old quick, and before long I’d seen all I thought there was to see in the rest of the town from wandering aimless running and wandering. Within my first few months, I’m pretty sure I had gone down every street the town had to offer, and couldn’t find very much worth looking at in any of it.

There was never a single moment when some light switched on in my head and Grinnell started looking brighter. But, even if I don’t know why or how, it looked brighter all the same. The way the rooms inside a house seem to expand once you’ve lived in them for a while, little scraps of the town that I hadn’t noticed before emerged from the blurred landscape. In the second semester of my first year I discovered a tiny game store in the basement of a law firm. A little while later I found out that a building I’d taken as just another old house was actually the Grinnell History Museum. Not everything I discovered was quite so positive: despite all the clean, new, college subsidized buildings, it doesn’t take much searching to find real poverty in Grinnell. In a town this small, you can’t shuffle it off into another neighborhood.

Yesterday, my art history class took a minor field trip to the town bank. I’d noticed the unusually elaborate front facade before, but until then I’d never really paid much attention to it or even acknowledge its beauty. Smooth, vegetal patterns weave together into the town’s logo of interlocking squares, centering on a green-yellow stained glass window that makes the shades of corn into a celestial glow. It was designed by Louis Sullivan, the first architect who tried to make skyscrapers into something of unique aesthetic virtue. After his style went out of fashion in the big cities he bummed around small towns for the rest of his life, making little jewel box banks like these. I wonder if he pretended like he was retreating from the corrupt costal elites into the land of unspoiled virtue. I wonder if he thought of himself as something of a hipster.

Whatever his story was, I’m glad he came here, and I’m glad I did too. Maybe if I’d gone to school in New York or Chicago I could’ve found pieces of art and history around every corner. But I’d probably never have had the time to pay them any attention. After all, it took me three years to give Grinnell its due.

I, The Person (An Abandoned Novel)

Looking for an archival post for this week, I found an old document in my Google Drive that looks like the start of a novel, though I have no idea where I was going with it (aside from everything that the very on-the-nose foreshadowing in the prologue implies). For me, it’s a fascinating look back at my writing style a few years ago, back when I started a lot of novels and abandoned them after less that 1,000 words (as opposed to now, when I write at least 100,000 words before abandoning them) and was more open to crazy ideas like starting a novel at the inception of the universe.

Prolouge

For most of its life, nothing very important ever happened to fifteen uninhabited square miles out in the middle of Texas. If it has a consciousness, it probably spent its billion-year lifespan complaining about its mind-numbingly boring.

It, like most land on earth, had been created during the formation of the sun. It was molten magma for awhile, then cooled down. Awhile after than, it was part of the ocean. Then, for reasons that were never entirely clear for that little scrap of land, water covered it and there were a lot of fish. A little while later the water drained away, the fish left, and trees and grass started growing.

Native Americans crossed it a couple of times, then some Mexicans, then some white settlers, then a couple of guys got shot there. Those murders were probably the most interesting thing that happened to those fifteen square miles, and even they weren’t all that interesting. Most of the rest of the land, especially the land in Texas, has much more interesting slaughter stories.

Someone built a house, a wacked out writer who tried to retreat from society to become one with nature and become their true, uncorrupted self. It didn’t work out, though, and she left almost immediately.

A highway cut through it, filling the big, hollow Texas nights with the yellowish glow headlights and the sound of tires tearing across pavement, trying to get somewhere more interesting than this bland bit of land.

There was one interesting thing that happened to it, though.

It lasted just one year. Really just a moment, a flash, a microsecond for a piece of land that had already been around for billions of years and had another couple billion to go until the sun exploded. It seemed like it was over as soon as it had begun.

For that year, the only thing people seemed to talk about was that piece of land. Not just people in central Texas, people all over the country, all over the world. Every few days another a news crew came to do a story on the piece of land that no one had ever given a rat’s patoot about. The trees were cut down and houses were built and cars drove about and people flocked from miles around to take pictures on their phones and post them to social media and get into spirited debates in the comments about the nature of freedom and law and nationality and all sorts of other things that the land represented.

And then it was over. The land was scarred and gorged and littered with trash and dea and, ultimately, forgotten. Every once in awhile someone would bring it up casually in conversation, but never more than a passing mention. It got a brief notice in some history books, a footnote of a footnote.

But that didn’t matter. The land got more than it ever could have hoped for, a sudden flurry of attention that all began with a 911 call.

“Hello, this is 911, what’s your emergency?”

“Am I on the phone with the government?”

“Sir, are you or anyone around you in immediate danger?”

“Answer the question, dammit! Am I on the line with someone from the government?”

A deep sigh. “Yes, I am on the government payroll, if you insist. Now, if you please, are you or anyone-”

“Well listen up, government! I’ve got fifteen square miles of undeveloped land out by Interstate 35 and me and it are seceding from this socialist hellhole of a nation. Pass it on.”

“Sir, please, are-”

There was a click as the man on the other end hung up the phone.

Thus, a nation was born.

And fifteen square miles of land got its story to tell.

Chapter 1

Sarah Hartley got home after a long, depressing day answering 911 calls. There had been a woman who had called right after being robbed and attacked. A child who had misdirected two fire engines and an ambulance to a nonexistent fire as a prank, and a man who had just cried into the receiver for awhile, then hung up.

In the midst of it all, she almost forgot about the man who claimed to have seceded.

She was young, just out of college, and already back to living with her parents. At first she’d tried to maintain some level of independence by renting her own apartment. The building burnt to the ground a few weeks before after her roommate had been smoking in bed, however.

It was sort of ironic that, when she called 911, she personally knew the receiver.

Sam was gone for hours and

The Nation Novel Writing Month

You don’t dedicate your life to something without becoming a bit of a snob about it. Regardless of my actual skill as a writer, I’ve generated enough written pages to equal my own body weight, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve committed enough time and effort to the practice to get the privilege of a little snobbery. So I’m not too afraid to come write out and say that I don’t get the Nation Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’m not exactly opposed to it, at least not as much as my brother (who actually finished the challenge and wrote an entire novel just to make fun of it, which seems like stretching meta-irony so far that it’s not really irony anymore), but I can’t help but feel a little alienated when my Facebook feed fills up with NaNoWriMo-related content.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a monthly challenge that has gotten pretty popular over the past couple of years, netting 400,000 participants last year. The idea is that aspiring writers all come together for the month of November and each try to write a full novel (defined as 50,000 words). 

Given how much I claim to love writing and the writing community, it seems like NaNoWriMo would be the kind of thing I’d love. That’s what I thought when I first found out about it in high school. It felt great when I started writing a novel of my own, at least at first. The heavy demands of the daily word count forced me to take an idea I’d been considering for a while and put it to paper. Something about the structure of the project made my writing feel more substantial, like instead of just generating words by myself I was channeling the energy of the thousands of people working beside me. The setting felt more real than anything I’d ever written before, the characters seemed to have authentic voices for the first time, the plot felt less like something I was making up as I went along and more like something that had happened a long time ago, something I’d forgotten for almost all my life and was only just now remembering.

And then it all blew up. Suddenly I was spending three pages describing someone’s left shoe because I didn’t know how to move the story forward but still had to meet the day’s writing quota. A couple days like this in a row and I found myself with 40,000 words of a story that was only moving further from a real conclusion as it got closer to the end. And yeah, of course it would turn out like that, it was only the second novel I’d ever written. Even so, the failure felt like something more important than just a writing project that didn’t take off. It was a novel that was part of an institution, so my failure wasn’t my own to bear, but something to judge against people who had succeeded. 

So, like so many other disaffected youngsters, I got bitter and turned against the system. I found out that, of the thousands of novels written over NaNoWriMo, only six have been published and gone on to any kind of acclaim. I read one of the few popular products of NaNoWriMo for school, The Night Circus, and felt vindicated that this stupid challenge was full of wannabe writers who churned out 50,000 words of fluff without ever saying something of value. Real writers, meanwhile, were the folks who suffered for their work, the sort who didn’t need pretty little online wordcount calculators to know that they were making literature, the kind who weren’t afraid to go outside and live! Not that that’s anything close to what I was then, or am now, but I was a storyteller, it was only natural that I would make up a story about myself.

The story I made about myself was ultimately just a way to cover up my overwhelming fear. My first NaNoWriMo was when I realized how big the writing world was, and how little I mattered in all of it. There’s a quote in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar that sums it all up perfectly: “Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing. Say someone or other finished a manuscript in every minute; in five minutes that would be five manuscripts stacked on the Fiction Editor’s desk. With the hour there would be sixty, crowding each other out on the floor. And in a year…”

If I had to read all the manuscripts that showed up at her desk in a year, or that people made for NaNoWriMo in a month, then I’d probably be so braindead from all the words that I wouldn’t even recognize my own when I finally found it. So what are the odds that it will stand out to anyone else?

There are legitimate reasons why I don’t do NaNoWriMo. I strive to write 2,000 words a day whenever I’m not editing (and even then that’s the goal, it’s just harder to quantify), so marking November as special really doesn’t work for me. And I know from experience that having a word limit for first drafts is a terrible idea, they inevitably feel stretched too thin or cut off too soon. But, at the heart of it, it’s all about how the sheer size of the NaNoWriMo community makes the world of writers seem so large, and makes me feel so small in comparison.

But there is some hope, I think. A few months after my NaNoWriMo failure, I found out that they had something called Camp NaNoWriMo, where some algorithm sorts writers into twelve person private message boards called cabins for them to chat as they work on their stories. In this more laid-back section, you can set your wordcount however you wanted, and I selected a more reasonable 30,000. I didn’t end up hitting that either, but through the chatroom I found someone who asked if anyone wanted to exchange writing after the month was over. I took her up on her offer. She sent me some of her writing and I sent her some of mine and we gave each other encouragement and gentle feedback. The writing world seemed smaller all of a sudden, and much friendlier, and some of my disaffected youthful bitterness started to fade.

Terrible Ways to Give Back

Right next to my dorm there’s this community bulletin board where people are encouraged to write ways to give back to the community. Sounds like a sincere attempt to encourage students to do good, right? So, naturally, my first impulse was to spam it with violent, sarcastic, and bizarre suggestions. Luckily, my fear of being publicly humiliated on Grinnell Thumbs Down* has held me back so far, but I figured readers of my blog are probably desensitized enough by this point to endure my really bad ideas for ways to give back:

• Support the U.S. Postal service by sending all your hate mail the old fashioned way!
• Help out a criminal in need by pleading guilty to a crime you didn’t commit!
• Get back at your annoying neighbor by designating their house as a historical site so they can’t alter it and have to put up with idiots walking all over their lawn to read the plaque!
• Turn away from wrongdoers and follow the path of the righteous, for there shall come a time of burning flesh and gnashing teeth when every offense to the heavens must be answered in human suffering!
• Support the good old U. S. of A by illegally selling weapons to Iran in order to fund right wing Nicaraguan insurgents!
• Post inflammatory statements on Grinnell Thumbs Down so stressed-out students can have an easy target to vent their rage at!
• Vote on November 6th, which probably will only be news to you if this bulletin board is literally your only communication with the outside world!
• Donate too much blood!
• Send in terrible applications to Grinnell under multiple false names so our school can rise in the rankings by being more exclusive!
• Destigmatize spitting at people!

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* For non-Grinnellians, Grinnell Thumbs Down is a Facebook group where students post complaints about the school. Students who have left the group seem to have much healthier outlooks on life than those who remain in, though a much less developed understanding of the recent drama-infernos to hit the Grinnell student body.

I Review a Low-Budget Canadian Horror Movie From the 90s That, Odds Are, No One Really Cares About

Since I’ve set a pretty standard precedent of using Thursday posts for general ponderings, it might seem strange that I’m filling this slot with a movie review. It might seem even stranger that I decided to review Cube, a low-budget 1997 Canadian horror film that was met with poor ticket sales and mixed reception. And yeah, I don’t think anyone would make the argument that Cube is a visual masterpiece. I sure won’t. But it is something distinct from any other movie I’ve ever seen and, when even great stories seem to blend together, something that really stands out is worth talking about. Also, I’m running low on ideas*.

If things get a little messy in this movie as it goes on, you have to admit that the filmmakers have laser-focused accuracy for at least the first scene. It reveals none of the important questions, but tells you everything you need to know for just about the entire movie. People wake up in a harshly-lit, perfectly cubic room. Each wall, the floor, and the ceiling all have little hatches that lead to nearly identical cube-like rooms. Some rooms are safe, and some have traps that kill the people that enter in gruesome and bizarre ways. Aside from a little math and a lot of characterization, that’s all you’ll really learn about the world of the movie, and you have to respect a story that takes a premise you can explain in under a hundred words and spins ninety minutes of drama out of it. The sheer surreality of the premise might at first make it hard to empathize with the characters. If you’ve never been trapped in a life-or-death escape from a gigantic box maze (and I’d guess most people haven’t), it would be hard to link up your own experience with the characters’ struggles. But, strange as it is, there isn’t much to the premise either, so even if you can’t relate at first, you can understand quickly, and that makes it easier to reflect your own feelings of paranoia, claustrophobia, and fear onto the characters.

Maybe it’s not right to praise the constraints, because a lot of them seem like cost saving measures. It’s pretty obvious that each room is just the exact same set, reused over and over. The tiny cast seems like an artistic choice to give intimate focus on a small number of characters, but odds are that narrowing the number of paid actors down to seven was more a way to cut expenses than anything else. But having such limited resources is probably the best thing this movie could have done. So often when, storytellers are given an infinite canvas with an empty page or a blank check from a studio, the endless possibilities get scary and the writer ends up sticking to what they’ve seen before. That’s not an option when you’ve got to shoot the whole movie in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room and, for these filmmakers at least, being starved for space to grow the story led to some real creativity.

I realize I’ve gotten pretty deep into this review and have hardly said a word about the writing, characters, plot, and themes, which is odd because usually those are the only things I usually care about. That’s because they were ultimately disappointing, especially the characters. Two in particular seemed like they would be really fascinating at about the halfway mark, but then fell back into simpler characterizations when the writers got antsy to wrap things up. Quentin, the leader of the people trapped in the cube, at first seems like an interesting commentary on how strong personalities can be both necessary and abusive in life-or-death situations, but right when the ambiguity seemed to reach its fever pitch, things get a whole lot more exciting but a whole lot less interesting. It’s rare enough to see people with disabilities in movies, and at first it seems like do it right when they introduced Kazan, a man with severe developmental disabilities, as one of the Cube-dwellers. He repeatedly frustrates the group’s escape attempts, which put them in the awkward position of not wanting to leave him but not having a use for him. I thought the story was getting at a really important and rarely told theme, that all human beings have innate value and are worth saving, no matter what they can or can’t do. But, to avoid going to heavy on the spoilers, all I'll say is that the filmmakers bail out on this potentially interesting idea too.

So, judging from the fact that most of my praise for this movie is in all the things it was unable to do with its limited resources, I think it’s fair to say that this is not a movie that will live on as one of the high water-marks for cinema. And that’s okay, not every movie has to be, or even can be. But it’s also something you see very rarely in movies: a singular vision, never muddled up by studio demands or test screenings. It might not be great, but it’s about all I can hope for in my own writing: something constrained and flawed and honestly kind of stupid, but something that no one has ever seen before and something everyone will remember.

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* Also, I’m scared that Thursday posts are getting a little too formulaic and I don’t want my writing to ever get predictable. So expect more stuff like this.

Maybe I'm Going a little Overboard on the Hellfire Cross Country Speeches

The Midwest Division Three Cross Country Conference Meet was this weekend, and it was sort of a mixed bag. Personally I ran the best race of my life, running a personal record of 26:54 and coming in 18th overall, but the team came in second. Usually second isn’t half bad, but Grinnell Cross Country has high standards, given our near-continuous thirty year winning streak. Maybe part of the blame is on me, since the pre-race speech might have riled people up in the wrong way.

So we’re the underdogs, right? Aren’t we the scrappy band of rebels standing up to the evil empire? We’ve seen these stories so often that it’s practically an instinct to slide ourselves into the roles of the good guys.

But come on! Stop lying to yourselves! WE ARE THE EVIL EMPIRE!

Because what kind of underdogs have thirty years of conference titles in their locker room? Admit it, we’re the entitled brats, the elitist scum, the low-down worthless arrogant bastards, and damnit, we’re proud of it!

Because here’s the thing: the commoners can’t govern themselves. This race is your divine right, so go on, take it, and crush the unlettered masses under the weight of your glory!

We run under a banner of scarlet and black, of darkness and blood, of plague and suffering and pain and death! None shall question our righteous tyranny!

Stress and Release

Roughly 48 hours from when I post this, I will be in terrible pain. People dodge describing it that way when they recount cross country races, but really, the most important part of competitive running is pain management. Even when you don’t have a side stitch or IT band injury or the urgent need to vomit*, there’s always a persistent pain that is less a hurt localized in a part of your body and more a message in your brain saying “This is intolerable” on infinite repeat. Every race is harder, and every race hurts more, and conference, looming just two days away, promises to be the fever pitch of the entire aching season. 

I’m still not entirely sure why I even like running. Sure, there are a lot of little good things that come out of races. One is the glory of doing well, another is experiencing little moments of adrenaline-fueled fiasco that seem a lot like war stories without the possibility of dying or killing.**. But even all added up, none of these explain why I really like racing. The only thing that comes close is that sense of relief I get from stumbling across the finish line, knowing that the pain is over and I can sleep for the rest of the day if I want to. No matter how I do in a race, that second when all the stress and hurt and fear streams off me is nothing short of magical.

But that doesn’t work as an explanation either. The relief only lasts for a few minutes at best, and then I’ll be looking forward to six hours of doing homework on the bus while my legs cramp and ache the whole way back. Compared to the weeks I spent worrying about conference and the months I spent training for it, a couple minutes of euphoria seems like a raw deal.

This cycle of stress and release seems like a trap I’ve been falling into so often that I don’t even need to look more than a week back to find another example. Last week I had mid-semester exams, the time of the year Grinnell College students rightly term “hell week.” Over the course of the week I had three papers that ran a combined total of 20 pages to write and a test to study for which I had to know over 500 individual, hyper-specific facts. Even though I’m not much of a procrastinator, plowing through those last few days left me dizzy with the pure volume of work. But the promise of perfect release from responsibilities in the form of fall break pulled me through. But that release only lasted up until the the afternoon of the first day. After that I had to admit to myself that I really getting bored.

My mom’s favorite line in literature comes from the end of Ernest Hemmingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises: “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” There it’s used to describe an impossible longing, but I think it works perfectly well to describe things we actually do achieve. Isn’t it pretty to think that spending a week doing nothing would be fulfilling? Isn’t it pretty to think that finishing conference, or even winning conference, would sustain me for the rest of my life? No matter what I tell myself, that’s inevitably what I expect going into these things, and ultimately what comes up lacking.

But sometimes it gets sort of on my nerves when mom quotes that to me. Yeah, sure, I get that nothing’s perfect, but there must be something truly satisfying out there, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? But as much as I long for it, I can’t help but doubt, having been let down so many times. I think that this is where so much of my worry and doubt from religion comes from. What would heaven even look like? Dante described it as being like a fly trapped in amber, stuck forever eternal pleasure. That’s probably a lovely idea when you’re poor and starving and striving for something to live for, but as an overprivileged young person, I can say that eternity without moving still seems like its own kind of hell. No matter how happy I was, I’d want to stretch my legs after a few thousand years.

Which I think means that I have to loop back to the suffering that started this whole quandary off. Maybe what gives running meaning isn’t the pain in the moment or the relief in the end, but simply the progress through the race, knowing I'm getting closer to the end. That edges dangerously close to the old cliché, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” But I think it goes further than that, because you have to believe in the destination, and really enjoy it at the end, for the journey to mean anything in the first place. It’s the same with my schoolwork. As much stress as it generated, I really did enjoy writing those 20 pages and learning those 500 facts. But I never would have started them if I thought the paper would never reach a conclusion or the flashcards would just keep on coming forever. This cycle of work, completion, and rest seems scary when you think about it in the big picture, everything does when it’s followed by, “And that’s how it goes for the rest of your life.” But I really wouldn’t have it any other way, especially when I’m caught up in the cycle of thrill and relief, my gaze no higher than the next project. So this is one of the rare times when the permanent answer to a serious problem might just be “Don’t think about it, it’ll be fine.”

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* Fun fact: I’ve once gone through a race with all three.

** For example, at a race two weeks ago there were these mud pits so deep and sticky that they regularly claimed racer’s shoes. One guy a couple paces ahead of me got one foot stuck in the mud and the other foot tangled up in a loose string of flags lying by the edge of the course, so when he tried to move forward, neither of his feet would budge. All his forward momentum sent him tumbling head-first into the mud and, since I was right behind him, I had to leap straight over him just to keep moving.