Forbidden blog

January 25th

Last night I finished Forbidden Notebook by Cuban-Italian writer Alba de Céspedes. Yes, I steal time for pleasure reading even on school nights, when I can. This novel was a Christmas gift from a good friend, and knowing zero about the writer (or translator Ann Goldstein), I had no sense of the world I’d be entering. The main character, a forty-three-year-old woman in post-World War II Italy, lives with her husband and two adult children in a cramped apartment, cooking them three meals a day and doing all of life’s grunt work while also holding down an office job. She defines herself through her family members, as the caretaker enabling their small adventures, although just like them, she’s frustrated by the lack of room and opportunity. On a whim, she buys herself a black market notebook despite paper shortages and a desperately tight family budget. Writing in this diary changes her life. Its existence is a secret she’s suddenly keeping from intimates: she writes late at night, in fear of getting caught, tiring herself further, and she keeps switching the notebook’s hiding place, constantly worried about detection. The mere act of reflection, though, seems to open up possibilities. She realizes that she’s dissatisfied with her life and begins imagining an affair with her boss, who clearly does not consider her old and washed-up (unlike her embittered husband, who calls her “mamma”). She tortures herself with doubt about how her daughter, Mirella, is staking out a different kind of life for herself–more free and much less respectable. Their relationship is especially interesting. Familiar parent-child power struggles shape it, certainly, but it takes unpredictable and moving turns.

I’m reflecting on this book on a Thursday morning in my pajamas. I should be marking student poems or changing into professor clothes: time to shoulder the ordinary. The new kitten, Eddie St. Vincent Millay, is chasing a binder clip across the floor.

during office hours

Why, when I kept a private diary from middle school into my early twenties, did I stop? I was twenty-nine when my daughter was born and my husband and I started keeping a joint “baby log”; maybe there was too little time. Also, as I began to publish more, I think I lost the drive to write anything I didn’t intend to find an audience for. Of course, many people journal then use that material for future poems and essays. I do keep a small notebook for ideas, lecture notes, etc., sort of a commonplace book. But, weirdly, journaling makes me more self-conscious than blogging does, or drafting a poem or story that I know may never see the light of day. Surely diary-writing shouldn’t seem more pointless or affected than poetry!

January 26

Natasha Trethewey’s “Southern History” was on the syllabus today. In previous classes, students assumed the history teacher she describes, the one who frames Gone With the Wind as the truth about slavery, is really that ignorant and racist. Some in my class today assumed that the history teacher really knew better but had to stick to the mandated racist curriculum or get in trouble with someone like Ron DeSantis.

It’s hard, some days, to think of anything EXCEPT teaching. I’m always reflecting on the class I just taught and prepping for the next.

January 28

Yesterday, Saturday, I went to an acupuncture appointment in a town 45 minutes away while my husband worked in a coffee shop. We then went to lunch and took a walk in nearby Shenandoah National Park, to which we bought a yearlong pass, since that’s less than double the daily admission fee and we mean to come more often. It’s one of the few areas within an hour’s drive we haven’t explored thoroughly in the years since the pandemic required us to spend Saturdays unsocially, outdoors. I, of course, twisted my ankle a bit, and it’s touchy this morning. My spouse says my body is a house with gremlins–rid one bodily room of injury and pain just migrates, shows up in another bit of duct work. I repeated this to the Needle Witch and she said it’s called “windy pain.” My yang is untethered. Sounds about right.

This blog constitutes a partial record of what I’m doing, thinking, and feeling, like a journal. It’s definitely been a resource for later writing. I launch trial balloons here for what later, occasionally, become full essays. It’s maybe halfway between a diary, though, and a long correspondence with multiple and shifting addressees. I really like the form: intimate and public, shaped by associative logic, like poetry. I do revise before hitting “publish,” but lightly. These are snapshots, imperfect.

Blogging is Not In My Job Description. I feel guilty for spending time here, sometimes, not because I’m neglecting my students or committees–they get PLENTY of attention–but because I fear I blog in avoidance of other, harder projects. There’s writing I want to finish and one day place in curated spaces (journals, presses). During the teaching year, it’s difficult to find time for them, but I do get a blog post written every couple of weeks, maybe because I feel no stress about writing them. I guess defining it as Not Work has advantages.

I think it may be three weeks before the next, though. Next weekend I’ll have the first stack of papers to grade; after that I’m off to Norfolk to participate in a reading for Dear Human at the Edge of Time. Skipping AWP for the first time in a good while–phew! Now to prep for the morning’s class: Lowell, Plath, and all their public intimacies.