Illiteracy of a different kind.

I can't seem to dig myself out of my token deaf student mentality here at Goddard.  Found out one of my schoolmates didn't bother going to workshops, choosing instead to spend her day revising her work and her night attending faculty and student readings.

Readings?  Yeah, readings.  As in the THING to DO around here where people get up in front of the mic, stare down at their papers and "perform" their writing.  Everyone else sits back in the shadows and listens in rapture and lavishes everyone else with literary praise or criticism.  

It’s constructive, connecting, networking, trying out your work on other writers, a vital part of the process.   I avoid it as much as I can.

I could dust off my voice like the deaf student who came through the program before me.  Every time I consider doing that, though, it feels like a violation. It feels like capitulating to the pressures that have marginalized me since I arrived, letting the status quo dominate me.

I can attend readings.  I have attended readings -- I get print copies and just follow along with my hearing aid.  Which is okay, but redundant as I read the text.

The big events, the big draws, this week are the visiting writers.  We’ve got some cool people coming: Shelley Jackson, Christian Peet, Erik Davis.  And what do they do when they get here? Yep.  Readings. 

Graduating students do a special reading during their last week here.  Makes me very glad I haven't gotten to that stage yet.  I get into such a schizophrenic political snit anytime I forget I forbade myself to think about it the first week I came.

I have this fantasy about doing my graduate reading differently:

I convert my thesis into video, presenting in visual situ.  Their readings drone across sound waves; mine will sear into their corneas.  I'll recruit signing actors, superimpose text, emblazon images on a wall. 

I'll show them what they've been missing, stuck behind their podiums and chained to the mic, enslaved by the public address system in the theater.

They'll fall to their knees, their minds blown.  And they'll forget about their strictly larynx-and-eardrum readings.

Then I remember I am just one student out of many. A freak fighting the machine.  And the only battle plan (desperate tactics for a war I didn't choose) I can think of is to present myself not as a writer, but as an ersatz filmmaker.

Sigh.

Comments

[Jon]

I'm not seeing the difference between a visual medium and an aural one. Are they writers or ersatz radio jockeys?

[QueenAlpo]

Ha. Kinda my irritation with the whole "reading" phenomenon right there. There isn't much of a difference, really.

But thanks: Next time I get all angsty, I'll just think the phrase "ersatz radio jockey" in my head.