On Reading

I read Requiem for a Dream during my last winter break. In my opinion, Selby is an author that should be pulled into the canon of American Literature. The text’s focal point is a bastardization of what we consider to be ‘The American Dream.’ There’s something intellectually masochistic to the downfall of the characters. Given the nature of Henry Rollin’s work and his perpetual cynicism, I can picture him identifying with Selby’s writing. In the video above, Rollins talks about suffering from writer’s block. While we all don’t have the ability to look for our favorite writers in the phone book, I think it could do a writer justice to remember where they’re coming from as readers. Maybe revisiting their work is just the best we can do.

One of my professors once told me that he identifies first and foremost as a reader before either a teacher or a writer. Reading through all of this theory and criticism this summer, I’m really starting to reshape what I consider the role of the reader to be. ‘Reader,’ when you lift the lenses back, is synonymous with self. I don’t think the reader is actually a role, but the text is an experience of the reader. It’s a definition I want to play around with some more.

Last week, I finished reading McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Captain Jack, who is an Irish lit enthusiast, had been prodding me to finish it for a bit. While the Captain and I could probably be categorized in a similar niche, we both read this book completely differently. Both of us have rejected our catholic heritage, but I was generally more pessimistic and made extremely rude comments on the role of religion and pride in the novel. I complained about his final confession to St. Francis—probably one of the most pinnacle moments in the novel in terms of Frank’s development, but I didn’t like that religion was still being curtailed into his life and that it ultimately followed him on his way to America. Jack asked me what I thought the ashes were. I argued for shame, but he thought it was Angela’s solace. For either of us, it wasn’t the same experience. Somebody once said that English majors just read a bunch of books and talk about their feelings. Is there any truth to that? I think one of our responsibilities is creating somewhat of a textual collage of experiences. Which will inevitably help us understand ‘the experience’ or something.

I’ll get to ‘Tis at some point, maybe even by the end of the summer. Right now I’m reading through Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express. I’ve been trying to get my hands on Calvino’s stuff for a while and my girlfriend gave me Vonnegut’s book for my birthday. Both of which are very optimistic, despite the two styles of desperation the works are showing. I’d like to write about both.

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granny smith apples are okay I guess

The bathroom at store smells like granny smith apples. If there is one stable aspect of working here, it’s that the bathrooms will always smell like apples. One of my coworkers is utilizing one of the stalls. He’s telling me what he’s doing. I really don’t want to know he’s doing. But I can’t leave while I’m washing my hands. The soap even smells like apples. The mist from the diffusers not only clings to the surface of the black tiles and cardboard-thin walls, but somehow sinks in to everything, fading.

He asks me if I remember a time when he had long, black hair. I do. I ask him if he’s ever going to grow it back out again and dye it, because the blonde-going-on-gray is something I’m not used to from him. But he says no and explains to me that it’s too much maintenance. He continues on to tell me about his scalp. I don’t want to talk about his scalp, but he brought up an interesting point of beauty and I push the conversation a little more. Talking into the empty apple-scented room, I mention Darwinism, how hair maintenance equates to survival and survival ultimately equates to beauty. But he doesn’t want to hear about survival, especially not in the grocery store bathroom while we’re killing our lunch break, not even looking at each other. He just wants to talk about his scalp. Which is cool. At least we found some middle ground. Maybe this moment is something I could blog about later.

Blogging, as of right now, is the only writing that I’m currently sharing and exposing others too. I’m not in a workshop environment, I haven’t submitted anything serious in a while, and I don’t really pass around my stories (although, Captain Jack has been asking to see some work from me). So to give these little moments significance outside of myself, I turn to saving the anecdotes amongst my list of how many bananas the produce floor needs (which is always between two and four).

What do I blog about and why? Aside from obscurities, I can see three major topics that I subject any reader to. These include my employment at the grocery store, my role as a student enrolled in my current program, and major life issues articulated through the lens of either of the first two. I wonder if all of my writing consists of trying to settle internal conflicts through these pseudo-sociological roles.

When I’m writing a post, especially in the last few months, I try to consider things like merit, patterns, and focus. Earlier, I flipped through a folder I have on my computer’s desktop and looked at a bunch of unfinished blog posts. With my writing and most overlying issues in my life I tend to get overwhelmed with what I jump into and quit. Easily. I get apprehensive, and it’s not good for what Annie Dillard considers, ‘the flow.’ Polished writing will have its place. Maybe one of these days I’ll even finish this short story I started a month ago. Or maybe not. It’s not indifference, maybe it is a bit of me lacking discipline, but it’s more so me being okay with being the jeans-and-t-shirt-Andrew, the one who wrote blog posts before short stories and unfinished novels.

So as I sit here, drinking Guinness out of a New England Patriots mug that my uncle gave me as a birthday gift, I can look at this writer’s block and shrug. I can take a sip, pretending to be a Patriots fan, and give these patterns and moments of literary potential a mildly interested glance and say, “Whatev.”

I’m going to blog about stupid shit and enjoy it.

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This American… Discursive Structure

Ray Bradbury once said in an interview that if you stop writing for a single day, the only person who feels it is the writer themselves. He went on to say that if the writing ceases for a second, the editor begins to notice; in the midst of the third day, the reader begins to get the hint. I think that we can draw this into something deeper than just writing. Or maybe it’s just that writing is something deep in itself. It’s all theory. Theory is dangerous. Political.

One of my coworkers, the self-proclaimed ‘Captain Jack,’ was telling me some stories yesterday about his life. The two of us have very little in common. He’s over fifty, married and experienced the children thing, and is a very extroverted individual. I’m twenty and creep around the department with my head in the clouds. However, Jack talks about having left a path he was once on toward law school to pursue his life as a painter. A few times over the citrus display he’s told me about how his years have echoed that of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. He’s got a thing for Joyce. While we disagree on just about everything, I love his appreciation for the humanities. And one way or another, all of his stories seem to weave back into his painting, back into his art. Last week he handed me a small packet of poems that he’s put together throughout the last two decades. In them I saw some things I enjoyed. In other areas, not so much. But it felt good to be talking to somebody outside of the college environment about the writing process on a personal level. In the negotiation of response and intent, something almost intimate exists. Maybe getting a glimpse into another’s creative spark is a reminder that you might just have one of your own.

I’m flipping through some documents to find some work to share with him. Everything is scattered throughout my hard drive. I can’t even find a final copy of Trash Picker’s Requiem, a piece that I’m mildly confident in. Despite living on the computer, I don’t have an organized writing folder. I once defended this to a professor, saying that the Zen Buddhists draw amazing pictures in the sand only to erase them quickly once they’re completed, usually unseen. He shook his head and replied with something along the lines of, “Dude, save your shit.”

I tried writing after my shift this afternoon. It’s the second time this week I’ve attempted to dip back into it. After 200 clunky words, I closed the document and went for a long walk. There are many things that haunt my process, but I’ve never actually accepted the idea of ‘writer’s block’. I’ve always just settled with the conclusion that I am indeed lazy and any lack of progress in my writing is a result of disinterest, glamorized fatigue, or seductive distractions.

At the end of the semester my professor pulled me aside for a serious conversation about my writing and performance as a student over the past year. I’ll spare the mess, but it became a montage of life gets in the way and this isn’t who you really are. But who am I really? While one of the issues thrown around in the office was my obsession with postmodern thought, I wasn’t ready to defend it in the way that I needed to. I wasn’t ready to defend myself. This ‘postmodern’ thing. I know what it is. I know where it comes from. While the modernists lament the death of a master narrative, I will always be there to spit on its grave. I find beauty in the fragments. Little bits of story. Different stories. Center or no center. Idiosyncrasy. Our stories aren’t puzzle pieces. We aren’t preconditioned to fit a role. The world as an anthology of the human race is a reaction to what and who we are, not any other way around. I think I’m ready to defend that, and yes, this is where writing and theory gets political. But I’m not afraid of that word any more.

I still have the portfolio from the class I wrote Trash Picker’s Requiem in. I reread my introduction and some reflections I wrote on the nature of writing and editing. It’s foreign, or at least distant, like musings that a real writer might have woven together. Maybe that semester was my ‘Portrait of an Artist Moment,’ the one Jack describes. I remember being pulled aside by one of my professors. I was compared to another writer in the program, one that I really admired. She used the word ‘cerebral.’ I had to check the definition of it in the dictionary. I’m not ashamed to admit that.

As Jack finished one of his stories, he told me about a method he uses to break through hard times. Beside our display of summer squash, he enlightened me.

“When you’re caught in a rough place. Now this can be anything. Anything at all. Just pull a random book off the shelf and open a random line. It always works 100% of the time.”

I don’t believe in random.

“Well,” he clarified, pulling a bruised eggplant off of the shelf. “Sometimes there’s a variable. There can be variables. 97%. Trust me.”

What could it hurt? I blindly pulled a book out of pile beside my computer. It’s Coupland. Jesus Christ. It would be Coupland. The yellow cover made the black words pop. Generation A. If I need a defining line, the universe would point me to Coupland. I let my hands chose the page, 135, and pointed to a random line of text: I hesitate to say this, but at that point she dragged me over to the bed and straddled me. Really? 135 is a lame number anyways. Coupland, in an interview with QTV, said that random is merely the inability to identify a pattern. I should trust the patterns I know. But Jack’s advice still lingered.

I stood away from the computer and walked over to my bookshelf. I closed my eyes this time. I completely trusted what I couldn’t see. Reaching over an alignment of plastic dinosaurs, I pulled The Lively Art of Writing. Another yellow book? I leaf through to page 65 and read: Obviously, the trouble is not merely with “there” but with “there was.” This was the obvious answer to my writing problem, right? “There was.” No, there wasn’t. I tossed the book into another pile and reach for another with my head turned. It’s a book of poetry by Alexandria Peary. She’s a professor of rhetoric and a poet that visited campus earlier this semester. The book I purchased from her, Lid to the Shadow, echoes a lot of the ideas of Carl Jung in the sense that she toys around with the connection between language and meaning. I opened to a random poem. It’s called “One Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry.” The first line I point to, three stanzas in, reads: People name their children all sorts of things/ these days. They really do, don’t they?

But what does this accomplish? Somebody was straddled. “There was” is bad. And people pick relatively strange names for their children. I don’t believe in some divine driving force in the universe. However, I believe in grace. But something in that word, ‘grace,’ if we deconstruct it far enough, we’ll find something synonymous with ‘deliberate.’ I lived plucking things blindly for too long. I can’t write without intent.

Before the descent, before all of this madness took place (could there ever be a ‘before’ if all patterns lead in and out of each other?), one of my writing professors assigned the book The Grace of Great Things by Robert Grudin. I don’t remember a lot of what it talked about, but I remember appreciating it. I don’t retain a lot of what I read. I’m pulling it off the shelf right now. I see some underlined passages, breadcrumbs left behind to return to a previous thought, a previous value, or something I might not have understood. We don’t grow just waiting for the light to hit us. Even weeds know to reach out in the direction of the sun. The process is the center, or at least one of them. Grudin writes on the idea of creative product without an engagement in the process: The apparently desired goal is served up without a fuss or sweat, but divorced from the labor of attainment, it may seem hollow, almost prostituted. I’ve been afraid to struggle with the ‘writer’s block,’ and as Bradbury suggests, the longer I step away the more apparent it becomes. Maybe admitting to the block would be admitting to the title of writer or some shit. I don’t do titles. I consider writing, as well as all verbs, a reaction to the ‘self.’ And as with every other sentient being I’ve had coffee with, the blocks are inevitable.

I’m ready to take my writing seriously again. Deliberately. And I’ve found my Muse.

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Snowman

It’s snowing. No. Not snow. These are little death-crystals descending from the sky. They exist only to slash up my face. I’m seeking shelter in the health service office with a friend, trying to keep out of the storm.  A few days of sunlight and fair weather perverts the senses. Winter’s grasp is here still—tightening.

 

I take a small pamphlet from the wall beside the transparent bin filled with brightly colored condoms. The pamphlet is smaller than a playing card. Each picture and text box is a light shade of purple. The target audience doesn’t need to be questioned. The title fits clumsily on the purple, stating If someone in your life is hurting you… you are not alone. Buzz phrases like it’s not your fault spark images of a frail female caught in a violent situation. It’s easy to sympathize, but impossible to identify.

 

I flip through the first few pages, watching it break down abuse into three categories: Physical, Emotional, and Sexual. Can you break a person or a relationship into three categories? They’re too vague. Is there no physical or emotional investment in sexuality? Are there no physical or sexual stimuli to somebody’s emotional condition? And are there no emotional or sexual catalysts that determine our physical actions? They’re more like three primary colors of a relationship, not categories. Or maybe I just don’t get it, or can’t get it. I’m a man, I think, and this pamphlet isn’t for me. The affiliates tell all: WomanSafe, Woman Helping Battered Women, and Woman’s Crisis Center. Each one gives me a different story, a different horror that I’ll never know and understand.

 

I’m drinking a cup of Blueberry Coffee. It’s delicious, but I could get away with dumping some more sugar in. I pocket the pamphlet, taking it back to my room to dissect. I consider how much information I’ve already gone public with. I’m not out to ruin anyone’s character or compromise secrets. I save those in folders scattered throughout my computer

 

When the sun sets I turn back to the pamphlet when I should be taking notes on the final acts of Hamlet. I think I’m looking for an answer or something, but it isn’t here. Like literary theory, it only proposes questions, not answers.

 

Has your partner been physically abusive?

I take a black pen from my pocket and start circling different bullet points. Patterns. I enjoy patterns in books, patterns in writing, and patterns in art. Not life. I can sit in class and argue about Hamlet’s mother and how through her patterns of speech, we can see is being manipulated by Claudius. Claudius speaks through her the way Polonius speaks through Ophelia. These aren’t only fictional characters, but they’re not males. No, the role of the male in this pattern is the abuser—the disruption of harmony in their partner’s quest for self-actualization.

 

Has your partner been emotionally abusive?

 

I remember sitting on one of the flimsy tables in one of the classrooms, whispering secret screams. Guilt, maybe shame, held my words back.

“Society,” my listener responded. “Makes it more challenging for a male to identify an abusive situation.”

But that’s part of Masculine identity, right? The challenge—the conquest?

“We need to talk somewhere you feel comfortable crying.”

Crying. Cry. CRY. cry C-R-Y c. r. y.

Three letters that form a symbol. A pattern is a measurement, maybe an attempt, to comprehend the reaction of these symbols.

Cry: verb (used without object)

1. to utter inarticulate sounds, especially of lamentation, grief,or suffering, usually with tears

Where is cry in the pattern? Recurring.

“Man up,” she said. “Stop Crying.” Cry = An absence of Manhood?

Man doesn’t inherit the role of the tear-bearer. It challenges masculine identity.

Has your partner been sexually abusive?

 

I still continue to type out (maybe obsess over) the patterns. This, I considered, is writing for self. Nobody has to read what I have to say.  I isolate moments in the pattern, kissing them with the bitter twist of memoir.

“If you can’t give me what I want, I’ll get it somewhere else.” And she did.

What is the role of the insufficient man?

 

Man: –noun

1. an adult male person, as distinguished from a boy or a woman.

Oedipus provides the sphinx’s riddle with the answer ‘man.’ That which what he embodies becomes the answer. Can we solve our problems with who we are?

In Symphony of the Night, Count Dracula proposes the question of what is a ‘man?’ This prompts the protagonist to consider an answer that doesn’t humanize that which he sets out to destroy.

 

But the pattern writes back. I lie through my teeth. I haven’t been too busy to drink—too busy to think. No, this is writing against self. In the safety of public, I can write these musings on the pattern. But in the documents I find little messages from one self to another, reminding me that this descent is my fault.

 

If each of these categories is part of the same origin, somewhere in the muted pits of self, then when they’re damaged they probably each retract there. You can’t heal one by trying to satisfy the other. The answer, had there been one, is at the core.

 

 

I’ve told friends that abusive situations are more about the individual wrestling with themselves more so than the partner. With this, I’ve also stapled phrases about trusting each other with ourselves. If you try to wrestle your insecurities alone they will consume you. Our insecurities are many, in all of us, like white blood cells trying to protect the body from a risky contaminant. We need them, but we have to understand them. Or something.

 

Grace. Reconciliation. Peace. I won’t find these in a bottle of rum.

 

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I Found the Real World

The real world only exists at one in the morning. And it only happens in the McDonalds parking lot. If not, then you miss the vans pulling in and out of vacant parking spots.

It’s because at this point we can’t even see the flashy yellow ‘M’ concealed by the roof of my cousin’s car. All we have is the fog on the windows, with which I took the liberty in inscribing the symbol of Satan beside the phrase love yourself. I blow fog on the star, remembering that the last time I drew it on a chilled window, my school’s Registrar walked in, looking both confused and disinterested. But the real world isn’t there. I think I’m trying to mark one world too many.

It’s here because we arrived an hour too late. They’ve stopped carrying Big Macs at midnight, and we weren’t about to wait until 10. Otherwise, the three of us wouldn’t have been frustrated with the junk that we did leave the window with. Instead we settled for three number twos, its own meal but to us a parody of what we made the drive for.  At the end of the order, my cousin tacked on an order of nuggets, and this is how you know it’s the real world. Otherwise, would we have needed the twenty McNuggets?

It’s here because the three of us are having one of those awkward conversations the ancient philosophers call guy talk. I try to push the conversation away from my insecurities, asking vague questions like what they would do with two wishes. Nobody considers giving the wishes away, but we can’t think of things we would change about our lives without changing ourselves.

The real world isn’t me blogging at 11, my parent’s cat fighting arduously for room on my lap. It isn’t here because I have too many tabs open to see it. The semester’s grades are a distraction—little A’s without comment that will never know when I threw the towel in. But how could they? They’re the same sprite that Microsoft used as a spaceship for their Asteroids game. Nothing more.

In the real world we shouldn’t have an agenda for wishes, because they stop serving them at midnight.

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The Memoir Revision

Last night I read an abbreviated chunk of a memoir piece I wrote this semester. With my workload and tendencies to procrastinate, I found myself with just under three days to completely rewrite the piece, develop some different themes and ideas, and then revise and practice. Coping with death is probably one of the most cliché topics a writer can tackle in terms of personal memoir, but I really wasn’t interested in reading any of my essays. This particular piece, dubbed “A Man of Light and Stone,” was written while I was plunging into the grieving process. The original intent of the piece was criticizing how my family was attempting to define my grandfather’s life with kitchen-table metaphors. What I didn’t realize is that was exactly what I was trying to accomplish myself by writing the memoir in third person and by removing names and myself completely from the piece. I had somewhat of an awakening towards my own intent with the piece, and now the draft I’ve read and am working with has been shifted into first person, and pages of needless detail have been stripped. The chunk I read last night contained only two real themes: identify writing as a coping mechanism and issues with parental figures. The seven pages I did read were covered in black pen, trying to smooth the piece out before the reading.
I’m not very pleased with my performance, but I think that the revision itself is heading in a good direction. Right now, I feel that I need that more than keeping track of my eye contact with the audience.
It’s been a rough semester.

 

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Williams College: The Postmodern Hotel California

Mistaken both as a scholarly student and somebody who had an interest in how gun control affects law enforcement, my criminal justice professor asked me if I would have liked to participate in a panel that was going to stretch across four local colleges in the area. Lost in the temporary ecstasy of having been chosen for something other than designated driver, I agreed. He then emailed me hundred page court cases which left me knowing less about guns in American than before. The other student chosen from our school was a freshmen history and politics major, whom talked circles around me with the professor. Our job was to develop topics for the panel of law enforcement officials to discuss in terms of gun control and law enforcement.

Thankfully, our professor asked the two of us to meet with him a few times before we left to Williams College for the initial discussion. He was very passionate about constitutional history, and taught me what an originalist is, which we came to an agreement was somewhat of a self-contradiction. I wanted to jump into some postmodern subjectivity when we discussed Justice Scalia’s not-so-liberal view of constitutional history, but for most of our discussions I did a lot of listening.

When the night of the four college’s preliminary discussion, the other student bailed on getting a ride with out professor, insisting that she had to stop by her aunt’s on the way back. The car ride was nothing short of awkward, and I feel like I was trying to hard to come up with things to talk about. There was talk of law schools and the occasional sharing of cafeteria stories, but for most of the ride we kept our eyes out of the window in silence.

Parking at the Williams campus was tricky, but not as difficult as an attempt to find our designated building. It began with a “Sch” and from what the students were telling us, it hadn’t gone by that name in years. Like mice running through a maze, we followed the campus’ directory only to find that the name really wasn’t on there either. After some very aggravated minutes of searching, a student finally directed us to the building, which we were left to learn that another meeting was scheduled before our event and that our early arrival gave us some time to wander the campus even more. Hurray.

Having been here once before to work on a research paper, I led them to the library, where our professor told us about his previous job experience working with the libraries’ periodicals. He explained that he had been the go-to guy for news, because he’d get the papers in the morning before anybody else did. But like all good jobs, he said with a sigh, all good jobs must come to an end.

We walked back into the Schsomething building to find out that the doors had been locked on us, and we then had to wait for a student to kindly let us inside. The “Get Political” pizza party that was going on inside of our room was just winding down, and one of the advisers of the meeting approached us.

Introductions were brief, but then he asked me what I did at SVC. I told him about the creative writing thing and how I just recently decided that I wanted to write memoir and fiction instead of essay, and he gave me a lecture about why the are of the essay is critical to America. I contemplated kicking him. He asked me what authors influenced me, to which I immediately froze. Then he took the liberty to answer for me, recommending a book that had absolutely nothing to do with anything that came out of our mouths. No, I will not read a book about how Jimi Hendrix influenced Vietnam. It’s not my cup of coffee.

The discussion itself was long, but very intriguing. There were no students from MCLA, but the horde coming off of the Bennington College bus more than made up for their loss. There were even two students from Williams colleges, a psychology and political science major. As we all introduced ourselves, I realized that I was the only one whose taken a humanities discipline among the group. Again, most of what I did was listen, but I said one thing (which may have actually deterred the conversation away from its focus, but I was proud nonetheless). There was a lot of back and forth about social science studies in which I had no idea existed, and there were some very diverse opinions in regards to gun control.

When the discussion ended, I noticed that my chair had actually backed out of the circle, as if I were trying to remove myself or something. My professor was eager to talk with the Bennington College students, probably because they were the most active in the discussion. There were some topics written on the board, which I immediately forgot, but what I did retain was a lot of the personal stories people tried to wiggle into their arguments. I wouldn’t mind sitting in that circle again if got the chance to hear and listen to who all of them really were.

During the drive out, we actually got lost trying to leave the campus. Ironically, we both agreed that it would be best to transgress and sneak onto that one-way street, but we were unable to find it again. We got lost in the deep woods behind the college, accidently driving into an athletic field. At one point my professor turned me and said, “This is dumb. I feel like I’m a the Hotel California.” My life couldn’t agree more.

 

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Writing Desk

This is Keanu Reeves. He guards my books.

What do you guys keep on your writing desks that people might think to be odd? I feel these little trinkets can tell a lot about a person.

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What determines ‘best?’

In my Creative Writing class we’re being asked to complete an essay this week on what determines a piece to be successful and effective based on the Best American series. I’ve seen publishers before mention that “If you want to know what we’re looking for read Best American (insert genre).” I’ve never actually opened one of these anthologies until now, but I feel like this is a critical assignment that most writers don’t consider. We’ve been assigned the 2009 copies, because ’10 would be more expensive, but the way in which we’re approaching it is taking it piece by piece, determining what makes the individual works to be classic works that best represent American writing for that year. Because I’m doing nonfiction, I’m reading Best American Essays. From my analysis, I have determined for a work to be considered ‘best,’ it must:

…actually, I’m still not so sure.

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Submissions and Reading

I’ve been working on a couple of different nanofiction pieces for Trapeze’s Halloween contest. The hardest part of it for me is maintaining a focus within the speculative subgenre. The ones that I don’t submit I’ll probably post on here for anybody to see. For anybody whose interested, their contest rules can be found here. Also, I’m trying to prepare a piece of nonfiction I wrote last semester to be sent out to this undergraduate journal. It’s their inaugural issue, so it would be really awesome if they could mistake my piece for something good. The journal is called, “Catfish Creek” and is run by some faculty and students over at Loras College. Also, catfish is delicious… that might have been an incentive to submit the piece here. The publication was actually sent to my workshop class by our professor, so it wasn’t something that I’ve dug out of the Writer’s Market. I still don’t have the 2011 edition yet. =[

I just spent the last ten minutes looking through my books to find something short and rewarding that I can tackle this week. Between my classes, I have three books that need to be read for class, but I want some independent satisfaction that I started and finished something on my own. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I’m assigned to read, but I don’t want my mind to only associate this critical analysis stuff only with assignments. I think now that I’m in the literary theory frame of mind that it’s the best time to exercise it.

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