Three Dead Women
Dear Friends:
Greetings from NYC, where N & I are vacation-working during my school’s Fall Break. We got here last weekend and first thing in the morning went to Zabar’s to stock up on coffee and bagels, because we like when we stay here to feel like real New Yorkers. (Cue the eye-rolling of real New Yorkers at our thinking that tourists don’t go to Zabar’s.)
As much as I hate airbnb for what it’s done to the housing stock in SF and other cities, this feeling is likely what’s made it such a success: hotels are for tourists, homes are for locals. We’re not in an airbnb, but we are staying (once again) in an apartment. When I was 17, I applied to NYU, early admission, and got in (but not enough funding to make it work). That kid had a dream of living in New York the adult he became never realized. This week I’m (almost) living it.
Also: it’s a Halloween Shenny this week.
Yours:
Dave
Endorsements: Scary Movie Edition
1. Sleepaway Camp (1983)
Classic premise here: teens go to summer camp where someone is killing everyone, mostly the bullies and the kids who have sex. Our star is Angela, a quiet, somewhat horsey girl who falls for a thin little blond named Paul. Perhaps because he’s the only kid there who doesn’t make fun of her—he and Ricky, that is, Angela’s cousin, a tough little scamp who defends her with his cool fearlessness:
You’ll note the straight dudes are dressed in ways that will soon inform gay men’s macho posturing (my adolescent Geno fantasies were manifold), which is apt because Sleepaway Camp is the queerest horror film I’ve ever seen. My sister brought this tape home from Erol’s one night in the late 80s, and its final shot terrified me and confused me and in a blink upended so much of what I thought I knew about the world. I won’t spoil it for you. It’s a true original, another thing I love I owe to my sisters.
2. Witch’s Night Out (1978)
Thanks to Beth Sullivan for turning me on to this old TV special last weekend. When the grownups in town (who have names like Nicely and Goodly and Malicious and Rotten) decide to make Halloween a holiday not just for kids (who have names like Tender and Small; it’s all very subtle), they throw a party in the abandoned house at the top of the hill, where a witch lives depressed that nobody takes Halloween seriously anymore. What makes this one so good is the animation: disco-pyschedelic, hyperanimated, really, as though the characters were trapped in wind tunnels and the animators did their (stoned) best to slow their limbs enough. I mean behold just the face of the witch (voiced by Gilda Radner):
Catherine O’Hara plays Malicious, who walks around with these enormous green tits (but is somehow not also a witch), and Nicely looks like a loofah:
Both YouTube copies I found were rough VHS transfers. Would love to see a restored edition nobody would ever buy for their kids.
Three Dead Women
At the heart of Halloween, glowing like a tea candle in the belly of a cut up pumpkin, is a contradiction: this is a season we celebrate evil and face the fears that grip us, and this is a season we don’t just raise the dead, we put them on high, in liturgies, on ofrendas. I mean the personal dead, who were, if we’re choosing to remember them, anything but evil to us.
Louise
The Nobel Laureate Louise Glück died last week, you likely heard. I met her twice when my MFA program invited her to give a reading. Once was on the phone, when she called me the night before her reading to cancel, citing illness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and she said it like a dare. We rescheduled, and I met her in person at our campus building, which a car service had delivered her to. This time, I was the one to apologize, for the metallic walls of the elevator we rode that are abraded and hard to visually focus on, and with a wrong-answer gameshow buzzer that beeps at each half-story.
It wasn’t my elevator. I wasn’t responsible, but all the same: ‘Sorry about this.’
Louise was both slight and severe, with light-grey hair cut to the perfect, perfect length to frame her face, which was beautiful, like seeing in 3D a face I’d loved on-screen. Something about her eyes made me like watching her as she watched the world. At dinner before her reading, Louise read aloud from the menu, ‘Chunks of meat’, in a tone I’ll remember to my dying day. Disaffected is the word for it: ‘dissatisfied with those in authority and no longer willing to support them.’ She was neither kind nor unkind, but she was impolite, and having recently moved to SF from the South, where everyone was polite to your face but often unkind in their hearts, Louise’s impoliteness was a pleasure to behold. It very clearly wasn’t about me.
In those years, I was still a people-pleaser, even more insecure than I am now. The Nobel wasn’t in her hands yet, but Louise was propped up by a five-decade career of renown and esteem. Still, even without her success I felt she’d move through the world the same way. Conviction? Is that what I witnessed, or what I love in her poems?
Likely I have a longer Shenny to write about the rare gift of impolite people. Louise Glück is gone from the world, and I’ll always be glad for the few hours I got to be with her in it.
Ms. D
Her name was JoAnn DeMaria, and she was my sixth-grade teacher, and she was the finest teacher I’ve ever known. (And I know mostly teachers.) What made her so great? I could point to the individual spelling and vocabulary lists she created for each of her 20+ students, based on the errors she’d been seeing in their writing. Or I could point to the first day of class, when she’d asked us what qualities we believed made a good student. We raised our hands and suggested some, she wrote them down on a large sheet of posterboard, and had each of us sign underneath. Then we collectively made a list of what made a good teacher, and she signed that list.
These contracts were hung over the blackboard for the year, a reminder that we’d all already agreed to what it took to create an effective and equitable classroom.
What Ms. D taught me most (though I didn’t recognize it at the time) was the difference between power and strength. I know from power plays in the classroom: teachers not allowing laptops, for instance, or chewing gum. Teachers standing and getting to write on the board while everyone else sits and writes to themselves. I’ve always been aware at how tenuous this is, in that every teacher is vastly outnumbered, and so any mutiny would be unstoppable. Indeed, the most recurring nightmare I have is finding myself at the head of an unruly classroom of mayhem and rebellion.
Enter strength. Ms. D was the first adult in my life who showed us her guns, so to speak, and then stuck to them. She insisted we say ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah’. She told me, time and again, to use common sense when my brain was overanalyzing an issue. She so clearly cared enough to point out when and how we weren’t living up to our individual promise, and to do that well she had to know and believe in our individual promise.
The effect was that we learned not to disappoint. Which is different from learning not to misbehave. N.B.: When we misbehaved, we always felt that we had disappointed ourselves, not just her.
Ms. D died twenty years ago. As happens with your teachers when you’re young, I know practically nothing of her life outside the classroom. She was unmarried with no children. Her favorite book, she once told me, was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I’m disappointed in myself I’ve never read it.
Sarah
I may not have it in me to write about this one, because I want to give Sarah Skean a book, ten books, and anything I say in a few hundred words is going to feel paltry and cheap. She was a very close friend of N’s who died at age 32 from leukemia. She was another teacher, high school English, who got excited every part of the year it was time to teach Their Eyes Were Watching God, her favorite novel.
Moths circle a porchlight because they seem to use the moon to navigate, keeping it always at one side to go steadily forward. Sarah was our moon that way; we just flocked to her. She had most of the best ideas, threw the party when it was time for parties. ‘Can I smoke in your car?’ was the refrain we all joked about her saying. When I first met her, she wore kneehigh striped socks and had her hair in pigtails, because she’d just come from a roller skating party.
I’m failing at this, as I knew I would, because no brief descriptors and anecdotes can capture what we had together. Sarah was the first chosen-family member who died before her time. (Forgive the phrase.) She was only 32! Nobody should have to die at 32. I wasn’t even there when it happened, off at a writers’ conference having the time of my life, while N and his friends sat in the hospital waiting room, called in one-by-one to her bedside so she could have last conversations with each of them.
I feel guilty I wasn’t there to be with her. I miss Sarah so much. Her obituary is a good one, please go read it. To keep her and her memory close, I still carry this photo in my wallet, from a Halloween party years ago:
I’m dressed as Mr. Roper from Three’s Company—a group costume, where N went as Mrs. Roper, and I think Sarah was dressed as Chrissy (under her coat). It’s not fair that she had to die and so many evil people still live. And it’s not fair that I don’t have anybody to blame for that.
That’s what’s evil about death: it’s a perpetrator-less crime. Death hides for us all. He may be aboard my flight home this weekend, or he may drive the speeding car I fail to see barreling my way, or he may lie in the heart of an angry student who brings a gun to campus. As I’ve written before, on every flight I pray to Jesus as we’re taxiing for takeoff, asking him to watch over everyone on board and keep us safe, because I want to stay aware each time I fly that the plane could crash and kill us, because I know my literature, and my history, and I know how citing the stats that you’re far more likely to die from choking on food than from flying on an airplane is a form of hubris, and death likes to come for those folks best.
Likewise, Halloween’s our day of magical thinking. Invite ghosts, ghouls, and skeletons into our homes so they let us living live in peace another year. Give away freely the candy that causes gums to rot and teeth to decay so that our homes will stay safe from harm.
However you celebrate Halloween this year, I hope it helps keep your dead close.
Now that it’s fall in full, that means in my world it’s MFA application season. Maybe you’re applying to gradschool, or you’re past gradschool and readying to read applications yourselves—either way I’m planning a series of Shennys on what I’ve learned about the process in the 11 years I’ve been teaching in MFA programs—one of them highly ranked and competitive, another one less so:
November 1: Writing Samples
What they are, what they aren’t, how to write one, how to read one.
November 15: Statements of Purpose
Why they matter, and what not to do. Also: why they shouldn’t matter, and what to try instead.
November 29: Letters of Recommendation
The ratio of unuseful to useful LORs is around 8:1. How to ensure you get a good one, and how to write a useful one and save yourself time this app season.
Thoughts on the above? Questions or requests? Drop them in the comments, and I’m happy to address them in November.
This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is this haunted photograph of a haunted little girl:
Loved this one, Dave!