The absolute worst of it struck right after I had found out that I wasn’t going to be employed in the fall and the job that I felt I deserved and had worked hard paying 3 years of dues for wasn’t going to be mine. It had come down to the wire and they gave it to the other person. I did well in the competition, so I have that to tide me over, but from a personal and financial perspective, that little victory is overshadowed tremendously by the realization that things must now change and plans have to be reworked, abandoned, and reinvented.

Since then, I’ve recovered somewhat and my outright panic has subsided to a general numb feeling of being completely overwhelmed at how much I have to change my goals now. Thus, I’m reminded of this one positive thought which I’ve heard so many times before but most ominously last Sunday (before I got the bad news) when I saw this postcard on Postsecret:

I want to feel liberated. Since I had suspected that this long of a wait to find out whether I was getting the job or not most certainly meant bad news, I had looked at this card as a reminder of having heard the sentiment elsewhere and as a way of mentally girding myself for the bad news. It worked in so far as I didn’t hit rock bottom or do something stupid, but even with that preparation, I felt like I was kicked in the gut. I had a couple other things that I could immediately focus on that were proven distractions, however (scary how much they can distract, but that’s another point. I didn’t and still don’t feel free. I still have these responsibilities that feel pretty meaningless now.

I taught my class, first off. When I teach, I get so lost in the moment that it’s hard to consider much else and that just made it easier to temporarily forget how big a failure I felt. A few minutes of not hating yourself in the midst of crisis can do you a lot of good. It’s important for me to add that I feel completely over with teaching at this point. I just don’t think I have teaching in me anymore, but that might be a temporary thing. This has been a hard semester and the level and degree of exploitation I stupidly let myself get roped into have probably turned me off. But this time, at any rate, it was nice to be in front of students and focusing on them for a while instead of on myself.

Am I feeling liberated yet? Not entirely. More overwhelmed and there are still so many other balls in the air. This morning, during my usual 2:30 am wake up and panic like a motherfucker attack that comes so regularly now you could set your watch and/or explosive device to it, I considered on of those balls, one of the bigger ones, my dissertation.

Should I even bother finishing it now? I have the feeling that I just want out of the academy altogether and the degree itself probably won’t do me a whole lot of good. The odd thing is, though, I feel more motivated this morning than I have ever felt, even since the start of graduate school when I was an idealistic moron and could dream of nothing more glorious in the world than being super-professor. I think it’s precisely because the dissertation itself won’t mean anything to anyone other than me at this point. It’s lost its mystical qualities and is no longer the gateway to my career but rather it has become what it always was, a mundane project. A project for me and my goal is to simply work on it and complete it. No voodoo, magic, prayer, or ritualistic dancing necessary. It’s now just a side-project. God, I love it being just that. It’s nice. I feel free to not love the thing anymore or even more accurately, I feel free to not hate myself for not loving it.

There are other plans to be hatched, too, but that was a big one. For now, though, I’m going to allow myself a few days to recover, drink, wallow, just generally do things that make me happy. I started with a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich.

This morning, though it feels like I slept in, I was up and ready to make something of the day. No writing occurred, but plans are being made. Monday’s a long day and I might not have time to do much, but I’ll make a point of squeezing in 30 minutes somewhere.

Also, having Halloween behind us helps. We had a little party for the kids and as low-key as something like that should be, we still stressed out about it.

Last week, I also met with a professor who reads my work and got a lot of encouragement from her. It’s time to finish this chapter and I’m still very close, but it’s difficult.

Writing – Both casually and professionally, I’m going to try to focus more on it this week. I’d like to make sure I post here at least twice during the week, perhaps three times, though it’s one of those things I do whenever the mood strikes me, because I feel compelled to, not as an additional obligation. Professionally, my goal is to get my early rising habits back in line. Also to make the most of Wednesday, when I’m stuck in the office for several hours. Alone.

Exercise – Every Monday is another attempt to drop the booze and burn more calories than I take in. In other words, I’m in that plateau where I don’t gain weight, but I won’t lose any more until I cut something from my diet. Booze has to be it, which is sad, because I’m a little bit of an addict.

Reading – I’m close to finishing 2 novels (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Wicked), so I hope to have one if not both done this week, which will mean a trip to the library to pick the next two reads. Looking forward to that, actually.

So, off I go now to work and I’ve got a good attitude, a movie to show, some materials to hand out and a bag full of leftover Halloween candy for my students. Rock on, world.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I do want to blog anonymously for the obvious reason that you never know who is going to care what you write about. I say things that I feel should have no bearing on my professional life and I make a point of it never to say bad things about the company I work for or gripe about my boss or what have you. Strange things happen on the intarwebz, though. In the short time I’ve been a teacher, I’ve seen people persecuted for their political thoughts all based on a sentence here or there. I’ve seen sites crop up where a person can go and slander a teacher to their heart’s content and never give their name or offer anything to substantiate it. I can imagine a future employer seeing something about the stressed out, depressing thoughts and sheer insanity that is sometimes my life and thinking, “well, we better stay away from that guy”.  And, ironically, when I talk about my politics, my hobbies, my personal things, it gives me a little comfort to make them less personal and do it under my online name. I’m probably crazy and paranoid, but I’d mostly just rather avoid the whole mess and still be able to write.

Yet, there’s a part of me that wants to be public, too. I certainly think most of my book posts are fine. I can imagine also that if I posted something about working out, that’d be okay as well (though personally, I’d think it was completely boring to read so I’ll no doubt spare my small readership.)

So, I’m going to branch out to 2 blogs for a while and see how that goes. Here will remain deeper, darker, ragier, more dramatic posts wherein I hate on teabaggers. I keep gaming out of my professional world, so if I post on that, it’ll probably be here. Elsewhere, I’ll blog more about books, Germany, cooking, parenting, reading, and maybe writing, but the emotional side of writing will probably be here. If you’re interested and you’re one of the like .25 people who read this in any given week, email me at zerrissen 2 at gmail and I’ll let you know where I am.

What he says at one point in the middle (scroll down to “Will the Kindle Save the Novel?” section) is that he believes that novels really only have 25 years left in them, and that’s what he claims is his optimistic prediction. There are, he states, simply too many screens out there for novels to compete with: movies, television, computers, etc. It’s a pretty depressing thought when you get to it.

I don’t think people will stop writing anymore than they’ll stop screwing each other. I think there’s very near a biological impulse towards storytelling. But it is worrisome, since I do maintain that the novel is the highest form of storytelling and is already the least consumed that there might not be a market for them. It’s fair that people might be writing, but will there be enough readers to make it worthwhile? Like Roth says, it’s not going to disappear entirely and he imagines that there’ll be more people reading novels than those who read, say, poetry in Latin, but they’ll seem equally rare to the mainstream, computer-movie-tv screen audience.

And that’s a pretty depressing way to start the day.

On the upside, though a lot goes into writing a novel, it is a solo endeavor (unless you’re someone like James Patterson, who owns a writing factory). They can be produced, if you don’t count promotion as a production cost, far cheaper than a movie or television program (though it hardly matters if no one will read it anyway). And there’s always the Internet, which one could argue is where all books are headed anyway. Naturally, that has its own issues: What happens to the editorial aspect of publishing houses, whose job it is to pick the best of the best?  How does one find or promote good fiction in an era of ubiquitous self-publishing? How does new, good fiction get to the front (don’t be naïve – in a sea of noise, there’s no inherent power to good fiction that makes it stand out; on the contrary, the mainstream’s reading tastes are kind of crap)?

Finally, though, a thought: The novel’s been proclaimed dead before many times and even if it did die, it’s still a young form in the grand picture. If and when it goes into its true death throes, who is to say a new, hybrid form of storytelling won’t come out of it?

Personally, I think it all looks really good, aside from a few, but I’ll confess that the photos in some cases might have something to do with that. Rob Stark, in particular, strikes me more of a 90210 kid rather than a young man cast into an overwhelming role with some really, really big shoes to fill. Mark Addy as Robert Baratheon is genius. Jennifer Ehle’s photo makes her look a little too sweet for Catelyn, who is matronly but also strikes me as a stark pragmatist. My wife remarked that the casting of Jaime is just fail.

I’m enormously excited about this show, though. So much so, that I’ll even consider subscribing to HBO for it. After I finish off a couple more things, A Storm of Swords is just waiting to be read – I loved the first two books, both of which I read this past summer and very highly recommend to anyone who might appreciate a more medieval, low-magic fantasy epic that really plays out a lot like a soap opera, but with a lot more killing.

I also found a new blog to follow: Winter Is Coming.

[h/t A Dribble of Ink & The Live Feed]

I didn’t wake up on time and I didn’t accomplish quite as much as I wanted to, but I was hopeful and I did manage to start off with a mindset that was set for productivity. I made a to-do list and I crossed things off. More importantly, part of my to-do list and one of the things that I crossed off was to make a to-do list for tomorrow as well. So, there you have it, I’m productive as all get out.

Writing: The spirit of the morning really helped a great deal when it came to this, as I’ve been stuck at a specific point for so long and I managed to break through it. It turned out to be much easier than I thought it was, but that’s the problem with the dissertation in a nutshell, isn’t it? It always looks harder than it is. Like the to-do list, I’ve set a precedent for outlining ahead of time what to do the next day. It should be even easier to hit the ground running. The only thing I didn’t do today work-wise was read very much (I have notes of most everything I need at this point, anyway) and I didn’t get any grading done, well, because I hate it.

Reading: For fun, I read a bit during my workout today and I’m back on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s such an enjoyable read and if my wife isn’t using the Kindle tonight, I might sit around, sip some wine and get a bit further with it. Or I might sit and read Fahrenheit 451, which I picked up from the library the other day. You know, just for kicks and to eliminate something I’ve long regarded as a deficiency.

Gaming: I broke down and bought Left 4 Dead. Jesus, who knew shooting zombies could be such a good time. It’s really a trip to play this game. The community, however, from what I can see kind of stinks. They’re rude, they kick people, etc. I suppose that’s okay for them and you can’t take that sort of thing too seriously. I haven’t been kicked yet, though, and I royally suck. I got yelled at once, but then the guy ragequit, so I think it’s his own problem. Because of the game, though, I reached out to friends whom I’ve not spoken to much since I quit playing WoW to see if any were interested in joining me. A couple may come try it out and we should have a good time together at least.

Exercise: I feel like I’m rebuilding. Last week, I trained legs for the first time in over a month and it hurt. Bad. I spent most of the rest of the week limping (I’m not kidding) and did no cardio whatsoever. I trained legs again last Sunday and it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad and I did do some cardio today, but I felt, I don’t know, drained by the whole thing. I’m not sure if I’m just tired or bored with it. It may end up being something that I just have to work through.

So, that’s where we are. This week might be a bit abbreviated, as my wife is leaving me with the kids while she goes to visit her family. It’ll be the first time she’s gone away by herself and the longest separation she’s had with our son (I once took our daughter to a funeral for 3 days and my wife stayed behind). I’m sure it’ll be interesting (and emotionally and physically draining). But, abbreviated or no, at least it starts off the right way.

“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” said David Gernert, Mr. Grisham’s literary agent. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s ‘Ford County’ for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”

I mean, it’s true that James Patterson’s statement is a bit overstated:

“Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week’s new movies for $5,” Mr. Patterson said. “You wouldn’t be able to make movies.” He added, “I can guarantee you that the movie studios would not take this kind of thing sitting down.”

The movie industry and the music industry in recent years both had to deal with issues of people not just getting things on the cheap, but getting infinitely reproducible works for free in an era of internet privacy and digitalization. So far, piracy doesn’t strike me as having been nearly as much of a problem for book publishers, though it certainly does exist. But at the end of the day, I worry about 2 conflicting things with books getting published:

1) That we’ll move full on digital and the market will be oversaturated with cheap/damn near free books written by crappy writers. This might be a post for a later day, because right now the worry is more about

2) That margins will become so thin for publishing houses that they’ll be forced more and more to go for the sure thing and less willing to take chances on someone new, and also be so stingy that new authors will become discouraged or even unable to produce.

On this point, yes, yes, I know some people will write anyway, but let’s face it, not everyone is going to be the marketing sensation that is Stephen King and yet they still might deserve to enjoy a living, if not one as extravagant as even the crappiest mass-produced Disney channel tween singing spectacle. No, at least they didn’t have to contend with piracy to the degree that movies and music have had to, but your average novelist isn’t enjoying the lifestyle that the average actor, director, or musician does (or major league athlete, for that matter, but that’s another discussion).

At least in the piracy discussion, it was producers of works fighting against their own consumers. That’s a crappy situation, but it was more about negotiating a fair price and fairer system. I don’t think the consumers ever really got it, but things did get better once the RIAA decided that they could both provide an avenue for digital music and the Rhapsody and iTunes started showing up. Now if I want to hear a song, it’s just so damn convenient to shell out my $1.29 or whatever and get it instantly than it would be to hunt down through pirating channels. There’s your market.

In this negotiation, however, neither the publishers nor the consumers are the main movers and shakers. It’s not even the publishing houses, but the middlemen. The ones who have the least to do with the work itself, the very moneychangers in the temple, the retailers. Especially Amazon. I understand that Amazon is paying out the wazoo and losing money on every new book they put out for the Kindle at that $9.99 price point and that most (if not every) attempt to go over that meets with rebellion by their consumer base. Amazon is trying to make sure that they’re able to sell their device (and have already had to cut the price on that as well). But what they’re aiming for is nothing less than a solid, commanding share of the e-book market in perpetuity, so it’s a noteworthy investment for them. Still, I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen the day that Amazon gets that share, turns around to the publisher and starts dictating prices to them. They already have that kind of muscle to a degree. But when Amazon does win this e-book reader thing, and while that debate is likely to still be open a year from now, they really could walk away with the whole thing, what’s going to happen?

If Amazon and Walmart can also do the same for hardback new releases, then I think we’re in a heap of trouble. The ebook market might be growing rapidly, but it’s still just a share. And I don’t mean to sound entirely hypocritical – I can’t really afford $25-$30 new releases myself, that’s why I don’t buy them (normally). But at the same time, I don’t think it’s because publishing houses are in a position to really gouge much (and I don’t mean to sound naive, but the RIAA really acted like dicks there for a long while in comparison): there aren’t enough readers out there anyway.

I fear that it’ll be really bad, that it’ll mean a lot fewer books, a lot fewer new authors, a lot of authors writing surefire winners according to formula rather than being innovative and creative. And what makes it really yucky is that it all boils down to cheap new releases.

Need to report on the story? Go for it. I’m sure that a 30 second spot every hour would do this one justice. I don’t think we need to go on full media alert over it anymore.

It didn’t last long. I ran short on time once I had children and there’s always been work to do and most of the reading I was doing was dull enough to interest nobody other than myself most of the time, so I spared myself the trouble and my non-existent readership the pain of my thoughts on the whole affair.

As I went on in my studies, my pleasure reading – the reading I did purely for myself – virtually disappeared. I found it very hard to enjoy most light reading and felt that reading other things would be like cheating on my profession. I didn’t feel free to just read what I felt like in the moment. I had to read with purpose.

And those few times that I would just read for fun, I made it an positively hideous, un-fun activity. Here I am trained in literary study and considering myself pretty well read, I became incapable of shutting down (or lightening up) the critical eye. Frankly, it’s not fair to hold everything written to that kind of standard and hack everything to bits – as Wordsworth wrote, “we murder to dissect,” I ruined my own enjoyment of perfectly good works by not being able to pigeon-hole them into my, fairly insular and not very interesting, area of expertise. What a lame way to go about reading a book.

I read for my work, I saw reading as my job, a job that had ruined me on books for several years. I only occasionally had success reading something not directly related to my studies. I have friends who managed it quite differently, but not me. I was and am a recovering graduate student in that respect, though I don’t feel I’ve really been properly a student for a long time now.

Recently – and I can only assume that this is some part of the larger whole of my transformation, my mini-early-midlife crisis, my becoming a better person – I found books again and I’m once again fully addicted to it. Since this summer began, especially, when I had more time to do so, I’ve found ways to squeeze books into my life again (all the while keeping up with work) and having stopped gaming so much has left me with even more time to do so. At any given time, I’ve found myself reading at least 3 books at a time: one on the nightstand checked out from the library, a book on tape for the car, a book on the kindle that I read on the cardio machines at the gym or sometimes at home when my wife isn’t using it. I’m at a weird point right this second where I’m close to finishing another 2 books, so there should be another couple reviews here in the next week. It’s doubly exciting because I get to start more.

Another change, one that I never really experienced before this recent resurgence: I’m allowing myself to toss a book aside to the “what a piece of crap, no way I’m wasting my time reading that junk” pile. Before, even as a kid, I saw opening a book almost like a contract with myself. Once started, a book had to be finished, or at least not put aside simply because I didn’t like it – if I lost it or ran out of time and had to work on something else, that was a different story. It was a little obsessive, but I felt like I wasn’t giving a book it’s full fair shake unless I saw it through to the end. I wasted a lot of time because of that with books that I never liked. There are a lot of books I wanted to read and never started because I was dragging my heels through finishing a book I didn’t enjoy. This time, I’ve been giving myself permission to kick anything I don’t like to the curb. If I found Brian Keene’s The Risen impossible to read without shaking my head after the first 50 or so pages, well, to hell with it. I’ll read something else.

Last Tuesday, because the Johannes Cabal book was due back, I quit working a little early to finish reading it. Yes, so, well, I shirked my responsibilities in a way that I occasionally did for gaming, blowing off work to have some fun. I’m not too down on myself for it, but I really can’t make a habit of that.

It’s because these habits, though, I’ve grown to appreciate the local library more now than ever before. We’re not in a financial situation where we could afford to buy new (or even used books) at the rate my wife and I go through them, not to mention the other young reader in our house (who one second loves to read and the next can’t stand it, but her appetite for buying books is insatiable). Secondly, though we do own a Kindle, I find that I still prefer an actual paper book most of the time, except when I’m at the gym or have some other reason that I need to turn pages with the push of a button. I like walking through the stacks and picking things out that interest me. That kind of discovery is half the fun.

That’s to say I won’t buy a book here and there too, even on the Kindle. On the contrary, if anything is new and/or popular, it’s virtually impossible to get it from the library. There’s just no way. Most books we’ve bought recently have gone straight to the Kindle instead of paper, mostly because they’re cheaper and, well, we own the damn thing, might as well use it. Still, I wish there was a way to share books with other people, resell a book when you’re done, or check a book out. I think it’s pretty easy to understand why you can’t, though. Still, I hope someday we look at the market a little differently.

I’m also hoping to focus more and more on the act of reading and writing on this blog. I hope that if someone reads this, they’ll bear with me. I sometimes just won’t have the time to read much, working on my project as I should be. Because I read bits at a time out of 3-4 things at a time, there can sometimes be a bit of a dip in how many things I actually finish. Some days, I’m just too tired to read much more than 3-4 pages before I pass out. Some days, I’d rather shoot things on the computer. And some days, I drink heavily. I don’t stay on topic well, either: I’ll read a history, followed by several works of fiction, then a biography, maybe then a self-help book, then perhaps a fantasy novel, then a science book, then back to fiction again. I go where the wind blows me. But that doesn’t change the fact that writing and reading have been a part of me for most of my life. I’m happy to have rediscovered them in a way.

The worst part is, that it takes place right in front of everyone’s eyes. It’s all too apparent. I even saw, the other day, how certain life insurance policies are being bundled together, securitized and traded, just as the mortgage derivatives were a year ago that got us into this mess in the first place. Shame? There’s no shame. I’ve not even seen Moore’s film and I don’t really think I need to anytime soon. I’ve been saying and thinking much of what he’s probably said in the film for a long time already.Look, Capitalism as a system (as Ratigan sort of suggests in the clip below) has a productive side, but this isn’t it.

If you watch one interview today, watch this one. I just wish they had mentioned, in addition to regulations on the system, that campaign finance reform and lobbyist reform needs to be part of the equation as well. As long as political influence is traded like a commodity, we will not be able to compete. Oh sure, we have the vote, but we carry the burden of reified consciousness – and I tell ya, baby, that’s realer than Santa Claus, for why else would someone who makes under $100,000 a year be a teabagger?

(I tried to embed the video from MSNBC’s site this morning, but it was a no-go. I always have problems with that one. Sorry.)