January 25, 2002 For some reason, known only to God and bureaucrats, the degree I am studying for at University A is an MA instead of an MFA. While I was applying to University A, it never occurred to me to wonder if the absence of one little letter in my degree's initials would make a difference in my grad school experience. Although, to tell you the truth, even if it did occur to me to wonder about this, it wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway. Holden and I had decided that I would go to school in either New York or Philly (the only two places we were interested in living) and since there was no way we were going to afford to live in New York unless I sold a kidney or lung or some other vital organ every few months, my choices were rather limited to say the least. Particularly when you consider that University A is one of only two universities in Philadelphia to offer a Master's in creative writing and the other university is a Catholic school that seems to believe science fiction is a tool of the Devil. Not that I love science fiction all that much myself -- sometimes, slogging through this incomprehensible cyperpunk that a few of my colleagues write, where everything is set in "Little Tokyo" and people have all sorts of hardware implanted into their bodies, I can see the other university's point: I mean, it's never anything good when an author's response to your comment that you can't understand anything in the story is "Well, you need to have read William Gibson's Neuromancer because all cyberpunk is based on the world Gibson created in that novel." Ohhhhh, okay, I didn't realize that I had to do supplemental reading for your story. In that case, maybe before you read mine, you might want to check out Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, not that comprehension of my work rests on your familiarity with Twain's novel, but it's one of my favorites and I'm sure I've been influenced by it, so well, it couldn't hurt. Even better are the pieces where every, single thing has a different name because, well you know, it's not Earth, or at least it's not OUR Earth, and so a pencil cannot be a pencil it must be a "wirt" and people cannot eat pancakes and eggs for breakfast, they must eat staplebuns and ovules, and women aren't women, they are sherals and men aren't men, but unsherals, and God forbid these strange beings (who oddly enough, look, breathe and act just like humans, they just don't speak the same language) should operate on the standard 12-month calendar system, oh no, this story takes place in the month of Apple, in the Year of the Citrone. Yup, I never need about two dozen extra-strength Exedrin after reading one of those stories. Or at least a nice big Mindalternitonic. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean an alcholic beverage for those of you who aren't familiar with MY alternate universe. Still, while the temptation of not having to read poorly crafted science fiction was quite strong (because believe me most graduate creative writing students are NOT William Gibson or Anthony Burgess), I figured that pursuing a creative degree at a school that would limit a student's choice of genre might not be the best idea. After all, after science fiction, they might ban all "Generation-X-slacker-angsty-relationship-fiction" and then where would I be? So that left University A's MA program for Creative Writing. And for the most part, the fact that my degree is missing the "F" in its name hasn't affected my life all that much. True, if the "F" was in there, I'd be spending much less time pretending I'm not sleeping through literature classes while the Ph.D. track students fall all over themselves to make the professor believe they're the most brilliant stars in the academic universe ("Well, you see Dr. X, if we accept the concept that The Waste Land is not actually a coherent narrative, but rather Eliot's purposeful attempt to create an indecipherable system of signs and signifiers, then really doesn't the final 'Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.' take on a meaning of unmeaning?"). Really, what person with a shred of a sense of humor wouldn't appreciate such an experience? I also suppose that if my degree was an MFA rather than an MA, I would be spending more time "working on my craft," but since working on my craft has always consisted of staying up for forty-eight to seventy-two hours straight to churn out a first draft right before it's due in workshop, I don't think I've missed the "F" much in the year and a half I've been at University A. Except that the absence of the F created a void in my academic program. A void that University A fills with THE EXAM OF DOOM. (Insert the sound of Charles, the director of the grad creative writing program, laughing maniacally). See, since I'm in an MA program, since I don't have the "F," that means that I am mastering the ARTS not the FINE ARTS and when you are mastering the arts (not the fine arts) in a creative field like fiction writing, that means you can't just say "I'm an artist. Who cares about the Modernists? They were all drunken apathetic jerks who couldn't get it up. I am going to concentrate on my craft" and go blithely off to your twelve hours of workshops and tutorials where the only thing you do is work on your craft. Noooo, it would seem that without the "fine" in the title, you must not only work on your craft but you must also actually learn something about literature. In other words, you have to care about the Modernists. And why must you care about the Modernists? Aside from the fact that because you are in an MA program, you are required to take literature courses in addition to your writing workshops and tutorials? Well, kids, you must care about the Modernists and the Post-Modernists (although I still don't know who the hell they are) and the Magical Realists and the Naturalists and all those other literary movements because halfway through your second year in the MA program, University A is going to expect you to take THE EXAM OF DOOM and apparently, they expect you to be able to write intelligently (or at least coherently) about all of these jokers. And what happens if you can't? What happens if you've got no clue in hell why Don Quixote is ironic or why Middlemarch is an excellent example of literary realism? What happens if you don't know your Gabriel Garcia Marquez from your Arturo Perez-Reverte and you confuse both of them with Alexander Dumas, either per or fils? What happens if you actually like Alexander Dumas, either per or fils? What happens if you don't know why Hemingway didn't use adverbs and why Dickens used too many words, period? Why, then you don't get your degree, that's what happens. You fail THE EXAM OF DOOM and you can kiss that "M" and "A" (minus the "F," of course) goodbye. THE EXAM OF DOOM is more commonly known around University A as the Comprehensive Exam, although I personally think THE EXAM OF DOOM is a much more dynamic, and accurate, moniker. I suppose that University A would argue that "Comprehensive Exam" has a certain je ne sais quoi and does a fine job of letting the student know exactly what the exam is about: A COMPREHENSIVE examination on the craft of fiction from the beginning of time to the present day. Thrill of a lifetime, let me tell you people. Made even more thrilling by the simple fact that I might know maybe, oh what?, three percent of the history of fiction, a dearth of knowledge that was not remedied in the least by the previous year and a half that I spent studying at University A. Two weeks before I started my work at University A, I attended an orientation session. At this session, Charles distributed a two page list of something close to three hundred novels beginning with Don Quixote, Part I of which was published in 1605, and continuing all the way up to contemporary novels like Ondaatje's The English Patient (and I haven't even seen the movie). This list, according to Charles, was a list of the material we should read in preparation for the Comprehensive Exam (better known here as, you guessed it, THE EXAM OF DOOM). By no means were we supposed to read all three hundred books, however. We were simply supposed to choose novels that represented each of the major time periods in the development of fiction. And, really, according to Charles, this shouldn't be a problem because this is what the literature classes we had to take were for. After all, University A would never do something as pointless as force us to take literature classes that would have no effect whatsoever on our work as fledgling writers. No, those literature classes were going to give us a sound foundation in the history of fiction and in them, we were going to read all the novels we would need to prepare for the exam, plus learn essential information about the books and the literary movements that produced them so we could actually write about them on the exam. All we had to do was take the courses that concentrated on fiction and we would have no problems. Ah, I look back now and marvel at how naive I was. In the three semesters since that orientation day, I took four of these miracle literature classes: The Victorian Novel, American Modernism: 1910-1945, Theoretical Approaches to Fiction, and Strange Bedfellows: Unlikely Pairings of Poetry and Prose. (I took the last one because last semester there were no courses that concentrated on only fiction and Victor was teaching Strange Bedfellows and he makes up questions for the EOD). I also took three fiction workshops, two of which also required me to read several well known works of fiction. These courses were so helpful that while discussing the upcoming exam with Gayle, I was compelled to tell her, "I might as well bring a crayon to the exam and draw for the entire six hours, that's how much these classes prepared me for this test." Take the courses that concentrated on fiction and I'll have no problems, my ass. I took The Victorian novel. We did read Middlemarch and Bleak House, two of the books on the list, but we spent more time listening to each other give oral reports on what type of clothing middle class women wore in London than discussing realism in Victorian literature. I don't think we ever got to examining point of view because we were too busy discussing child labor and how Dickens was against it. As for American Modernism, we did read The Great Gatsby, another list book but that was one list book out of ten works covered and we spent more time discussing Fitzgerald's fear of Hemingway and Modernism's attempt to create a usable literary past than we did enumerating the actual writing techniques and methods they used. Theoretical Approaches to Fiction was a wash. The only actual fiction we read was Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (and that wasn't on the list); we spent the rest of the time reading critical commentary on top of critical commentary about works we had never even heard of, let alone saw included on the Comp list. (Besides, I was lucky if I understood anything more than "Good afternoon" when the professor started speaking. I was so lost that for my final response paper I actually wrote on a critical essay by Malcolm MacLauren, the founder of the Sex Pistols, because his piece was the only one in the entire anthology I understood.) As for Strange Bedfellows, not a single book for that course was on the Comp list and Victor spent more time turning everything into a Queer Studies issue. Don't even ask about the fiction workshops. There's not much you can do when you're spending most of your time trying to figure out how to politely tell someone his story sucks and you're not quite sure how he got into the program. So I finished last semester spectacularly unprepared for the EOD. I attended yet another meeting, this time about the exam itself, just before the semester ended. I asked, "What happens if you fail?" Everyone looked shocked. There were so many huge intakes of breath following my question that I thought the room was going to run out of oxygen. Gayle smiled nervously and said, "Oh, we don't talk about that." Okay, thanks. That's helpful. You don't talk about what happens and so now I'm going to fail this thing without a clue as to what happens after I do. Great. Thanks so much. That was about as helpful as Charles' advice to just take the lit clases. So I went into winter break with the knowledge that I had less than a month to prepare for an exam that I had no idea how to prepare for. All I knew was that I had to report on January 18th to spend six hours in the computer lab writing my little heart out. I also knew that Gayle recommended we also read a few books on the history of the novel and the development of fiction through the ages in addition to the actual novels on the list. Oh, yeah, sure, I'll get right on that. Right after I read the THREE HUNDRED BOOKS ON YOUR LIST. Oh, and no matter what, we were supposed to read Don Quixote. Yup, ol' DQ was the big gun on this exam. I had been trying to read Don Quixote since last summer. In fact, I think it was listed as the "Book" several times in this very journal's sidebar. However, regardless of how often I SAID I was reading it, the truth is that I read maybe 150 pages and then it got thrown under my bed. I dug it out the day after I turned in my grades -- December 15th. I finished it on January 16th. Yup, it took me the entire month to read Don Quixote. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Don Quixote is 1,050 pages long. Or perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Don Quixote quite possibly may be the MOST BORING BOOK ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH. If you want to get literary, Don Quixote is an ironic novel that supposedly shows up the out-dated institution of knight errantry. In it, Cervantes also delivers scathing meta-commentary on his comtemporaries in Spanish fiction and drama. It is a picaresque novel, with each chapter being a separate incident unto itself. Unfortunately, all of these picaresque incidents concerned either Don Quixote imagining he was a knight errant and Cervantes illustrating the madness of knight errantry through things like old DQ's thinking windmills were giants or inn keepers were governers of castles or they were these long, rambling accounts by other characters of their love relationships. And these long, rambling accounts always followed the same basic framework: Ravishingly beautiful girl falls in love with neighboring boy of equal beauty and they promise themselves to each other in marriage without the knowledge of their parents. This promise then allows them to have sex (of couse, not stated so plainly by Cervantes) and then either the boy runs away or there is some misunderstanding which causes one of the couple to teeter on the brink of marrying another (who is just as attractive as the couple and usually already secretly promised to someone else) and so the jilted lover takes to wandering the countryside mourning his or her loss because he or she really thinks that the beloved is going to go through with the marriage, until, quite unexpectedly (yeah, right -- maybe the first time, but not the tenth) the beloved, usually disguised as a shepherd, turns up at the inn where the grief-stricken lover is telling Don Quixote this heart-rending tale and the misunderstanding is cleared up and everyone is happy and spends a few chapters playing tricks on Don Quixote and having a laugh at his expense. In between, Sancho Panza talks about Don Quixote making him governor of an island and everyone laughs and Don Quixote pines over Dulcinea and everyone whispers about how she's really some farmer's daughter and then they all laugh again. Cervantes spends a lot of the second book complaining about this unauthorized continuation of the novel that appeared a few years before he finished Book II. Whine. Whine. Whine. Blah. Blah. Blah. Cry me a river. There's a whole lot of women disguised as men and then discovering the "beautiful youth" is really a heart-broken maid and there are a whole lot of people running around dressed as shepherds that shouldn't be and at one point, Sancho Panza doesn't want to get off his mule to go to the bathroom so Cervantes spends a couple pages on how he just craps over the side of his animal. Mmmm. Classy. That's why I went into writing. So someday I could describe bowel movements. Okay. What I should have done was quit reading Don Quixote when I figured out that the damn book was a repetition of the same basic story over and over again. But I kept reading, thinking that since everyone and his brother at University A was telling me to read this book for the exam that eventually something was going to actually happen and I'd understand why this book was so necessary for the EOD. As it turns out, it took me a month to finish it and I still haven't figured out why this was THE book that I had to make sure I read. I finished Don Quixote two days before the EOD. I was desperate. There were three hundred books on the list and I had read maybe six of them. Plus, I couldn't tell you what Magical Realism was if you held a magic wand to my head. I had no idea how the novel progressed from Don Quixote Part I to Don Quixote Part II, nevermind how it got from DQ to David Foster Wallace. So I did the only sensible thing I could think of doing: I tried to read Ulysses. Oh, yeah, that was a smart move. Because, you know, there is nothing in the world to boost your confidence in your knowledge of literature than a James Joyce novel. Particularly Ulysses. I spent Thursday afternoon before the exam in tears. I was going into an exam that will determine whether or not the two years I have spent at University A will result in an actual degree, and I had read only six and a half books on the list, and I hadn't understood a scrap of that last half a book except for the fact that Leopold Bloom was married to Molly and he was Jewish and she was some sort of a singer. Obviously I was never a Boy Scout. My only saving grace was "The Twelve Book Rule." We were allowed to use twelve books that were not included on the original Comp list for the exam as long as the books were considered valid works of literary fiction. Unfortunately, University A does not recognize the Harry Potter series as valid literary fiction or I would have had no anxiety about the exam at all. Instead, the night before I found myself standing in front of my bookshelves, trying to compile a list of twelve alternate books. Now I knew how the Modernists felt when trying to create a usable literary past, only no one was threatening to keep them from getting their degrees. Hmmmmm. I don't suppose Jeffrey Deaver's Coffin Dancer is going to cut it. Same for Flowers in the Attic and I might as well really take that crayon into the exam if I even consider using any Stephen King. I'm doomed. I finally decided on James' The Turn of the Screw, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Don DeLillo's Underworld Hemingway's In Our Time, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight and Nabokov's Pale Fire. I also remembered that I had read Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and that was on the list. Plus I had Dickens' Bleak House, The Great Gatsby, The English Patient, and good old, DQ from the list. If I was really stuck, I could resort to remembrances of Mark Twain and some Dorothy Parker short stories -- hell, she was one of the creators of The New Yorker short story, if that isn't literary, I don't know what is. I wore my cat shoes (Docs with pink cat faces on them) to the exam. Everyone wanted to know if they were my lucky shoes. I said I just figured I'd fail in style. My colleagues were bunched in the lobby, hurriedly discussing the development of irony in the fictive frame of the novel. I wished I had remembered that crayon. I don't have a clear memory of the six hours I spent taking the EOD. I used Underworld, Tropic of Cancer and Good Morning, Midnight for a question on setting. The other two questions I answered concerned point of view (one question about third person limited and the other about first) because the other questions were all similar to "Trace the use of irony through three separate literary movements beginning with Don Quixote" and the selection of books I was using was almost exclusively Modernist and I couldn't quite remember my own name let alone the name of another literary movement. I think I did okay, although by the end I started to lose it. I had used In Our Time and The English Patient for the question on third person limited narration and The Turn of the Screw and The Sound and the Fury for the first person narration question; but the first person narration question required three books and I ended up writing about American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, a book whose status as "literary" fiction is debatable to say the least. But at that point, I was convinced that I had written eight pages about Hemingway's In Our Time while calling his narrator by the wrong name and I couldn't think of another book written in the first person. Of course, as soon as I handed my exam to the department secretary, I remembered scads of them: Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, Pale Fire, parts of Bleak House. Meanwhile, in the actual exam all I could remember was Patrick Bateman. Maybe I should have just chucked it all and written about Harry Potter. And wouldn't you know it, after a month of slow, tedious torture, I never even mentioned freaking Don Quixote. Ah, well, it's over. For now. I find out in a few weeks if I will have the pleasure of trying to make use of DQ on a make-up EOD. Of course, that may also be the exact moment I use Patrick Bateman as more than just a model for first person narration. Keep your fingers crossed, kids.

7 Deadly Sins and Other, Less Fatal Diversions Pride: I finally silenced the voice in my head that keeps telling me I'm a lousy writer and sent out seven -- count 'em seven -- manuscripts for publication. Sent the same story to seven different magazines. Including The New Yorker. Because I'm so sure John Updike is simply dying to publish some angsty "should-she-or-shouldn't-she" quasi-lesbian story by an unknown, never-before-published author. But, hey, a girl's gotta start somewhere, right? And where better to start than the top? Envy: T.C. Boyle. Aside from being a great writer, I'm pretty sure he doesn't experience anxiety over whether his submissions are going to be accepted for publication. Wrath: Windows Media Player is not my friend. Sloth: I sleep until somewhere betweeen noon and 2 pm every day. Of course, then I also stay up until 4 in the morning, too. Avarice: Honestly, I don't much care who publishes my work, as long as they pay me cold hard cash to do it. Gluttony: Holden bought me a Fry Daddy for my birthday. You would be surprised how many food items can be deep fried. Lust: Can you actually feel lust for a character in a novel? Not a character in a movie or television show or play based on a novel, but a character who only exists on the printed page? If that's possible, and it doesn't make you think I'm totally insane, then ask me about McMahon, the rock star from Chris Petit's Back from the Dead. Book: It's a wonder that my time at University A has not bled me of all enthusiasm for reading. Yet, as soon as I got home from the Exam of Doom, I picked up a book. Just finished it, too. The aforementioned Back from the Dead by Chris Petit. Interesting plot. A more literary twist on the hard-boiled cop novel. Somehow manages to tie Charles Manson, Rosemary's Baby, John Lennon's murder, and 80's hair bands together. Petit seems to be experimenting with shifting points of view and he's mostly successful, but at times his transitions are a bit wonky. He's got interesting characters and some of them exhibit a dark depth that's intriguing, but there are several who could have been fleshed out more -- at their most basic, all of Petit's characters are interesting, fucked up people, but we don't get to see just how fucked up some of them are, or why. Petit also toys with a strong homoerotic undercurrent for about a third of the book and then, to my disappointment, drops it. Like I said before, the plot's good but ultimately, the unfolding wasn't lurid enough for my taste. Then again, I often choose my pleasure reading on the basis of which paperback has the longest, bloodiest knife on the cover. Back from the Dead features some nice writing, particularly in the dead girl's letters. It was worth the three days I spent with it. Plus, the book's dust jacket, featuring a blurry photograph of a young girl's dead-eyed face, totally freaked Erica out -- a plus in my book, any day. Tune: Polka Dots by Kami Lyle: London's not so far away. We could be there in a day. Maybe when your tour is through, We could write a song or two If you've got a wife, we'll fire her. You can put me in The Inquirer. I'll give 'em every word, every verse and a picture of me in your shirt. Yeah, I'll be a dream in black and white polka dots. A song rumored to have been written about Lyle Lovett. And everyone thinks my love for the Belz is strange. Obsession: I am trying to find a ring for my sister. Four or five years ago, Holly and I went to the Guinness Fleadh on Randall's Island and they had these Celtic-themed vendors mixed in with the beer stands and the mud. Holly found a sterling silver band designed to look like a crumbling stone wall. She really liked the ring but ended up not buying it so we would have more money for beer. (Priorities, people, priorities.) They vendor said that the ring wouldn't be hard to find since it was supposedly a common Celtic design. Yeah, right. I go into every Irish-themed store I can find and I've been scouring the web and I still can't find it. I keep looking, though. Task at Hand: Rewriting the last story I wrote. I'm trying to work in a reference to the nightclub, Basin Street East. I'm also regretting the decision to make one of the characters a painter. Everything was fine as long as I could make vague references to "Annabelle's painting," but everyone who's read it told me that I have to actually describe her painting. Um, yeah, because I know anything about painting.