How I am feeling today:

I have this pipe, I have lots of pipes actually, but there’s one I want to tell you about. Did you know that I smoke pipes from time to time? It’s a habit I picked up from my father. I’m sure that it fits with the intellectual disguise, English teacher with beard in camel hair coat and all that, but I rarely do it in public – and I shaved the beard off months ago.

Anyway, I have this pipe that is made from meerschaum, which is a rare form of fossilized sea foam that is only found in Turkey and some parts of Africa. My pipe is Turkish. Meerschaum is prized because it allows for a cooler creamier smoke than briarwood. The mineral is porous and the oils of your tobacco seep slowly into it over years changing it from soft white to a golden tan. The longer it’s been smoked, the darker its color and the greater its value. It’s one of those rare items that increase in value with use. It’s also fragile and will shatter if you drop it.

The bowl of the pipe is generally decoratively carved, mine is carved appropriately enough into the face of Dionysus/Bacchus, or the green man if you prefer, Tammuz if we want to go back to the Sumerians – god of the vine and mythic precursor to the right of Christian communion. It’s the Osiris slot for the Egyptologists in the room, the agricultural god who follows the planting cycle, born in spring – laid in summer – burned in fall – penis goes missing until the spring when he’s set to start all over with a fresh mug of beer and a glint in his eye.

So we’ve established the pipe in your consciousness and you’ve linked it to me both as a possession and metaphorically because you’ve come to understand that I am a Bacchanal kind of guy. Now we can start throwing curve balls. The pipe reminds me of my relationship to literary criticism and academic life in general. It’s a thing I sometimes smoke and the purpose is pleasure and affectation. It’s something to do since you have to do something.

The pipe is a fine and useless thing. Don’t get me wrong – I think there is great pragmatic utility and avenues for empowerment and change through education – but there are also these textual readings that we English types generate as part of the business of being academics and they are like meerschaum pipes. They are carvings made from the fossilized foam of ancient waves. They are handholds in the ascent of a climb wall, anchors of temporary utility. They are sand castles no different from the worlds I made as a child. I just can’t see the value for me in trying to give voice to my reading of novel.

I was just reading a bit of criticism about Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive and it was good crit unpacking patriarchal and cultural currents in the work reflecting both Gibson’s biases and those of the critic. I could write criticism of the critic in which I could use their reading to map out what classes they had taken in grad school. Someone else could crit my crit in subsequent nexts – a thousand Citizen Kanes stretching to infinity in the doubled mirrors. The only why of it I can figure is aesthetic, its why-ness in part its why-not-ness.

To summarize like a good Sumerian, I think I am making the decision that, flawed as my efforts may be, I would rather write fiction than critique it in my future incarnations.