January 28, 2020

It began with a simple longing, born in the humid 105 degree Austin summer: I just want to wear clothes that do not touch my body. Like most desires, it was transgressive. I had been watching a lot of Project Runway in the afternoons, when my dissertation writing abilities abandoned me to the air conditioned dim. The designers and judges were all about “showcasing a woman’s figure,” or “showing off her curves,” which were usually close to nonexistent. These were the hallmarks of good clothing design for women in the early 2000s and 2010s, and for the most part they still are. I wanted the exact opposite: a large simple shape to swim around in. Something that could catch a gust of air beneath it like a personal parachute. Something that breathed for me when I couldn’t catch my breath.

I was by no means the only writer, nor the only grad student, to be soothed by the show. Its emphasis on criticism was cathartic, sequestered as I was in literary criticism, in the critiques of my advisers—my own panel of judges. And I was trying to figure out my own writing apart from grad school, essays and research that didn’t fit the pattern of the academic article. Tim Gunn’s presence in my life that year was a godsend. He wasn’t my mentor, he was my guardian angel.

Procrastination Confessional

Joining the PTA As Writerly Self-Sabotage

By Minna Zallman Proctor

In his masterful book Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer writes at great length about not being able to write a book about D. H. Lawrence and, in the process, writes a book about D. H. Lawrence and about himself. There’s a bit of a novel thrown in there, too. It’s the holy grail of procrastination. All of this not-writing piles up, and miraculously a book emerges. Even more miraculously, Dyer gets to not-write on a beach on a Greek island.

I do my not-writing in a coffee shop in Park Slope for the hour and a half between dropping the kids off at school and starting my actual job. I do my not-writing at five in the morning, before everyone gets up and starts eating cereal, and looking for socks in my office, which is the living room and the dining room, too. Sometimes, in a desperate pinch, I do my not-writing on Saturday morning, hunching guiltily in the corner pretending that I’m not not-helping clean the apartment. Though I also have the gall on those occasions to bark furiously at anyone who has the temerity to approach my desk about borrowing scissors.

Procrastination Confessional

Rearranging the House at Night

By Ann Beattie

In our new series, Procrastination Confessional, writers share the strange things they do to avoid writing.

Ann Beattie’s procrastination still life.

It has long been my assertion that writers will do anything in order to avoid writing. Ask any of my former students. Teaching used to be the perfect way to avoid writing, as seminars and private conferences took up a lot of time, along with written comments. Have you heard that writers are a bunch of narcissistic alcoholics? (Probably Trump could not be so eloquent, but don’t we suspect that’s what he thinks?) Narcissism, itself, is time consuming—and drinking may be more alluring to some than dyeing all their white shirts black (yes, that was one writer friend’s method of avoidance) or midnight gardening wearing an LED visor (why start writing so late?). I happen to be a night owl. To avoid writing, I might Google this, tap my dictionary icon—etymology, another way to drive away serious thought—or look at some of my husband’s paintings and ask why he’s painted so few birds (a guaranteed rousing discussion).

But now I’ve avoided writing this piece long enough, so let me confess: At night, feeling I should be quiet because of aforementioned husband, I try to avoid writing in my favorite time period by assembling—is there any way I can make this sound more dignified?—tableaux of found objects from within my own house, so that something funny will await the unsuspecting. (We have guests, too—my life is not just a prolonged prank pulled on my husband.) Imagine my delight, muffling a chuckle [professorial interjection: Exactly what would this sound like?], as I realize that the eBay hat with foxtails (go on, trolls, hate me—that will provide me with diversion) might be put atop my husband’s sculpted bust of me, with the faux-fur (I’ve got some shame) “stole” looped around my neck to dangle in a casual way. Alongside this, one of my favorite gifts, ever, from another writer who shall be known only as “E.” A turkey with a leather nose, so lifelike that the night I received it, I laughed and laughed, then placed it, inadvertently, below an air vent, so that when I saw it in the middle of the night, feathers ruffling in the breeze, I almost had a heart attack. Back to the assemblage: Why not add, oh, the jester’s hat bought in Prague? (One time, when another writer came to dinner, my husband and I, in a major miscalculation, put on our hats, only to be told we’d worn them TWO YEARS IN A ROW) … Anyway, with so much tabletop to spare, good to add the tiger mother with cubs that bob at the flick of a finger, and, in a moment of inspiration, drop the Edgar Allan Poe mask (a gift from a journalist friend who also avoided writing by wrapping and mailing, a really serious method of avoidance) on the bust, then replace the jester’s hat and see if the shark fin could be added atop the hat like a cherry on the perfectly demented sundae. Add the lion hand puppet with the kindly face and rearrange with politically incorrect fur tails, and voilà. All that’s needed is the white mouse to bring up the rear with Lioness, and to step back.