Today I really loved my job. In the morning I taught Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which takes place in the summer of 1985, when the narrator is 15. (The book’s climax, if it can be called that, is the day that Lisa Lisa—and Cult Jam!—come into the ice cream shop where the narrator works and order waffle cones.) The class was a freshman seminar. The students were born in 1993. They want to know: Did we really rollerskate that much? What did New Coke taste like, and why was it such a big deal? Why were arcade games so fascinating?

1985. Reader, it made me proud that the first record I ever bought with my own money was Purple Rain, and that I saw The Goonies in the movie theater several times that summer.

In the afternoon I taught Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. (The goon in question, if you’re wondering, is Time. The destroyer.) The novel won the Pulitzer last year and, if you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to do so right away. It begins in the punk scene of the 1970s and goes several years into the future. Kind of a Gen-X Remembrance of Things Past. Makes you wonder where we’ll be ten years from now, and what popular music we’ll be digging by then.

In between, at lunchtime, I thought a lot about how this year’s mix was shaping up and how ambivalent I feel about the synthetic eighties production drenching most of the tracks. Were the eighties really that great? Post-punk and new wave, sure. But this year’s music doesn’t ape Joy Division or even The Cars. (That’s so five years ago!) No, we’re talking unabashed Top-40 plundering, Billy Ocean and Belinda Carlisle-type shit. Can’t we just let those sounds rest in peace? And does it sound so unwelcome to my ears because it was bad the first time around, or merely because it was the soundtrack to my most awkward years? (Also: does pop always get more sugary the worse the economy becomes?)

My students love this music fervently, nostalgic for a time that never really was. Then again, The Breakfast Club is their Citizen Kane. (Doesn’t it make you happy for Molly Ringwald, that she grew up just fine and moved to France? And glad for all of us, that we grew up, too?)

Listen here. (p.s. Some of the tracks are from 2010. It’s hard to keep up. “Time is a goon.”)

1. The Fight—Sia
2. Junk Of The Heart (Happy)—The Kooks
3. Fair Game—The Like
4. Little Numbers—Boy
5. Amor Fati—Washed Out
6. Paradisco—Charlotte Gainsbourg
7. When We’re Dancing—Twin Shadow
8. Paradise Engineering—Yacht
9. Hoop of Love—Dominant Legs
10. Bicycle—Unknown Mortal Orchestra
11. Romance—Wild Flag
12. Lazy Bones—Wooden Shjips
13. Last Legs—Army Navy
14. Jesus Fever—Kurt Vile
15. Boxer—Lovers
16. Who Am I to Feel So Free—MEN
17. Sutphin Boulevard—Blood Orange
18. Lose It—Austra
19. Book Of Revelation—The Drums

Once upon a time, I wanted to get my clinical license so I could be a shrink. Odd to think about now, but I was hell bent on it. I was working in a setting without the kind of supervision I needed, so I hired my own supervisor and stayed with her for two years. We’re friends now, which is a difference between supervision and therapy: you can be friends afterward. That said, in retrospect, she was basically my therapist.

One afternoon we were discussing a client who was trying to get disability* and about whose claim to same I was skeptical. Honesty about your own lousy motivations is important in clinical supervision as it is in therapy. I admitted that an ugly fantasy of mine sometimes is to use what I know about mental illness to get disability so I could drop out and never do anything again. Fantasies work how they work; I can easily see all the problems with this, but once in a while it gives me solace from that locked-in feeling life sometimes gives me.

My supervisor admitted her own version, which I think is sort of not mine to share here, though it was bizarre and compelling. Never one to quit while I’m ahead, I piled one more log on the bonfire of crazy and admitted my other escape fantasy: being the last person on earth. She looked genuinely puzzled and asked what the good part of being the last person on earth was, and I said (of course) that nobody could ever tell me what to do again.

David Markson may be largely to blame. He wrote a riveting or maybe stultifying experimental novel called Wittgenstein’s Mistress composed of fragmented observations made by a narrator you come to understand either is or believes herself to be the last person on earth. Here is a sentence chosen haphazardly to give you the flavor of her musings:

“Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell Ludwig Wittgenstein how fond I am of his sentence.”

It’s oddly matter-of-fact and occasionally funny but mostly it’s suffused with terrible loneliness…and she’s most likely just nuts, but meanwhile, she lives in the Louvre for a while, and in an abandoned house on the beach for a while, and so forth. She crosses the Bering Strait in a motor boat (the sick fantasy of any non-flyer.)

So, sometimes, as a DSM-worthy form of self-soothing, I do this, though really it just comes over me. I think about where I’d live if it were just a matter of breaking in, knowing there was no one left to stop me. Or I bring The World Without Us into the bibliography of my little nervous breakdown and try to remember how long it would be until I could drink from the Hudson. Or I think about the practicalities of keeping warm or fed. Or sometimes I just imagine the quiet, which is the very best part.

*either that or we weren’t and it came up completely some other way. Si non e vero, e ben trovato.

There were better reasons, too. It just felt like an outmoded tactic, marginalized out of any influence by time and money and, maybe somewhere, cynical or even malevolent volition. The march I remember in DC was deeply dispiriting. It was big, and we were very certain we were right, and it was in and out of the papers in a day. Nobody cared except us and possibly Anne Fucking Coulter.

Maybe Occupy Wall Street will vanish, too. It’s cold out there, and momentum is not an easy thing to regain. But already this is very different. NY1 is talking about it right now as I type, and the guy is saying it’s two months already it’s in the news. Fait accompli, as much noted: a substantive, non-negligible redirecting of public discourse, an energizing of some dormant leftist impulse, the wide dissemination of things about class you and I and all our friends knew and considered important, and the grudging attention of the ever centripetal leftish establishment.

Making a demand is a very short process if it’s denied. This is process that resists resolution for the moment, and that’s almost entirely good. Favorite concepts of mine like “negative capability” and “sitting with the question” are in operation here, and that means we’re already off the script, off the chute from gratification to impotence.

I’ve gone a couple of times. I’ve gone to show support for something that my gut says is right despite some misgivings, and to sort out my own feelings about the whole thing. I went with a friend with whom I’d never had a political conversation, and we had one. I’ve talked to strangers, which is easy to do there, and been alienated by a few zealots, and wondered how much I will participate and what I should do.

Your fellow Whatsiteer and I went down on Saturday. We stood near the southeastern corner of Zuccotti Park and watched a charismatic young woman facilitate a basically uninteresting General Assembly that, while we were there, was focused on whether fifteen people marching to DC could and should use the name “Occupy Wall Street.” Two months in, the crowd was orderly, attentive to established process, ruly when prodded to be more attentive, and I think it’s fair to say, alive with purpose and good will.

We participated in the human microphone, the technique I’m told was devised by farm workers, and here used to sidestep the problems of amplification. The speaker’s words are echoed by the crowd, outward in enough waves to reach the edge. It is a speech act not unrelated to the lamentable three-word chant, except it’s engaging and utile. It accomplishes a number of things at once including, I daresay, shunting that need to speak that causes people to tell their life stories in the form of questions into a focusing activity rather than a diffusing one.

Repeating words that have just been thought up sidesteps the numbness that comes from what is more properly termed chanting. It didn’t feel like Yom Kippur is what I’m trying to say.

*My favorite of these is my friend S’s unintended manifesto “The history of me working for other people can be summed up in the question ‘who the hell are you to tell me what to do?’”

Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in that I don’t think my job is to pat talented students on the head and tell the rest they’ll never make it. I want everyone to develop their writing and thinking.

The problem is that, when we develop our thinking, making really big strides in our ideas, our writing is now insufficient. High-school thinking is not particularly hard, so good students get by with essays easily composed around a thesis like “Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is about a young man who develops socially, physically, and emotionally,” and then there is a paragraph about social development, one about physical development, and one about emotional development. I’d rather eat a dirty shoe than read it, but if everything is spelled correctly, it won’t get a terrible grade. In college, we’re asking disciplinary questions in English, like why do writers describe the things they choose to describe, and in what terms, and what are the stakes of making those decisions in the composition of prose narrative? What are the political or ethical stakes of these decisions, and how does the text, as a work of prose, function, if it does, and to what extent is it coherent or not, and, if not, why not? Once we’re thinking in these disciplinary ways, the thinking gets much harder, but it’s possible. The writing, on the other hand, is going to take more work.

Whenever we make huge leaps in thinking, our writing sucks. I tell my students about the five years I spent writing my dissertation, because I had to invent a way of writing that was a clear way to express the idea I had. I wrote a lot of crap before it got better. Or I give the example of major philosophers, who, after conceiving of world-changing ideas, produced first books that are practically unreadable—dense, vague, jargony, neologistic messes—before they found a way to write what they wanted to say in a way that can be read and understood by others.

I tell them this because I know that when their papers seem a little crazy (sentences trailing off into, literally, “blah blah blah,” or repetition in sentence after sentence of some insane generalization about what “we, as humans, throughout time” have felt), it’s usually because they’re trying to think about something new in a new way and their writing hasn’t caught up with their ideas. My students aren’t lazy or dumb. I honestly would not say that about any student I’ve ever had. They’re just wrestling with concepts they haven’t had sufficient time to think through, discuss, analyze, evaluate, and articulate. So they panic and their writing drifts into outer space.

Some of them know this, and they say so when they turn in their papers. “I know this really isn’t there yet, but I really want to make an argument for something that is a kind of new idea for me.” Great. Others hold the paper at arm’s length as they hand it in, never having so much as glanced at it after typing the words in it, hoping for a miraculous A. Either way, a revision is probably in the cards.

I don’t assign a ton of writing, in part because I want them to have the time and space to think through their arguments if they want to. I’m not going to force them to do great work, but I will reward it if they’re willing to do it. The problem is that revision means seeing their work again, when some of them didn’t want to look at it in the first place. When they look at their work, and read it, and ask themselves what the point they were trying to make was, they can’t even figure out what they meant by it in the first place.

Maybe it would be more kind to assign a paper a week, and give them better grades as the semester goes on and they learn how to do what they want to do. But all I’m asking is for them to read their own work if and only if they’re dissatisfied with the results, and to do something they can be proud of, that they’re willing to defend. And doing that makes them sad.

Oh, they’re so sad. They asked, before handing their papers in, “So you mean we can just revise our papers if we don’t like the grade?” Yes. “And we can get a few points for extra credit if we revise?” No, I regrade it, completely. “Wow, that’s awesome.” It’s hard for me to communicate how painful revision is.

Revision is brutal. I hate it. It’s humiliating, and not just because someone else has told you your work doesn’t make sense. It’s humiliating because you are forced to confront your own limitations, and see yourself as the world might see you. When you revise your work, you don’t get to give yourself a pass, or play the role of your own infinitely loving parents, or make excuses because you were really tired when you wrote it. You realize that you don’t sound as smart as you think you are. You realize that sometimes you don’t make sense.

I don’t want to cause sadness. Bad feelings are not something I enjoy creating in other people. I don’t even think they’re necessary for learning, and they aren’t if you know what you’re capable of and what your limitations are. But college is where you start figuring out what kind of a figure you really might cut in the world if you were turned loose right now. And I see their sadness and say, but I do think you’re special and smart and that you deserve happiness. I just want you to be able to show that to someone else.

The conference date was approaching, and my paper wasn’t finished. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly started.

Months before, I had drafted an irresistible abstract. I reread the two major texts I promised to discuss. As the weeks ticked by, some critical articles arrived via interlibrary loan. Some online research got done in the wee hours. A Word file optimistically titled “Ideas,” containing quotes, questions, and the occasional fully-drafted paragraph, swelled to unmanageable proportions. In the back of a notebook, I sketched out a number of possible outlines for the argument. But still no paper, nothing I could sit down at a conference table and present to a full room.

For several nights before my departure date, I stayed up late and tried to write, staggering into my office the next morning to prep for classes, which I then sleepwalked through, distracted. One of my colleagues caught the fatigue in my step and said, “Aha, the Conference Shuffle. We all do it.”

Boarded the flight with a laptop and big plans.

The hotel situation was less than ideal. It was a gorgeous room, comfortable, with a real desk. But (unusually for academic conferences, which usually take place near the coasts) the hotel was in the Rocky Mountains, at a seriously high altitude—so high that I was actually sick. It was like being stoned in the back seat of a car hurtling down a winding road. After doing a hundred jumping jacks. It was like that the whole time. Still, really under the gun now, I hunkered down to write.

At the last minute, with no time to spare, few distractions, and the dubious advantage of oxygen deprivation to up the ante, I wrote the hell out of that paper. Time ceased to exist. It was all pure flow. At the end of the day before my panel, I had thirteen strong pages, the distillation of who knows how many hours of thinking and planning. The outline for an article three times that length crystallized, finally, while I wrote. The presentation itself? Fine. Superfine. Powdered sugar fine.

I’m no Aaron Sorkin, but I do relate to his rituals. Back in the early days of The West Wing, when he was writing every word of every episode, Sorkin was known to check into the Four Seasons in Vegas with a duffel bag of crack, mushrooms, and pot, where he’d spend the next six weeks banging out an entire season of scripts. The only way the man knew how to write was on a bender.

No crack here at Casa Berkowitz, of course, but were it not for alternating infusions of coffee and beer, five-pound jars of Jelly Bellys from Costco, and catnaps during weekly all-nighters, my dissertation would never have been completed. I’m not proud of it. Everyone I know has some fucked-up ritual, though. One friend went days without showering, feeling she didn’t “deserve” it unless her chapter was finished. Another wrote the entire thing in a squatting crouch, naked. Another swore by the practice of stopping every two hours to masturbate, claiming it “cleared her head.” I used to smoke and drink like a demon when under a deadline. What the hell is wrong with all of us?

Put another way: why is it so painful to get to that creative place? Why do we fight so hard against it when we know it feels so good to get there? What’s with all the self-punishment?

Lots of people work under pressure, and lots of people have discipline. They will tell you that if you put in a fair amount of time every day—let’s say three hours, to be magnanimous—the work will get done. Do three hours of daily butt-in-chair concentration, writing whether or not you feel you have something to say, and the “flow” will happen eventually.

(Picasso very famously said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” In other words, work to get inspired, not the other way around.)

For those of you who get to “that place” without much drama, what is your routine? How do you move to and from it and the real world?

For those of you who agonize over your writing (or playing, or painting, or whatever), circling the pool endlessly before finally diving in, how do you cut through the inertia and anxiety?

For those of you who enjoy creative pursuits without tears, experiencing only the joyful communion of self-expression…what do you think you are, a unicorn or something?