Author Archives: Gina Barreca
February 21, 2012, 3:21 pm
By Gina Barreca
Fully two-thirds of my students are writing screenplays. I bet yours are, too. (Really, just ask for a show of hands. If two-thirds of them don’t have their hands up, it’s because those who are writing screenplays at that moment haven’t yet heard your question.)
Yet the only thing they know about movie history is that The Lion King is really cool and that Pacino’s Scarface contains the line, “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend.”
And even the ones who are not currently writing screenplays consider themselves film buffs although–since “buff” is not a word a lot of them use except when discussing the male physique–they often just say, “I really, really like films. I know quite a bit about them, actually.”
What that means, as it turns out, is that they all saw Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, Babe, The Notebook, Titanic and Pretty Woman, but pretty much nothing …
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February 16, 2012, 6:09 pm
By Gina Barreca
Official logo for Global Orgasm Day
Hi there! I thought I’d introduce myself. You probably weren’t expecting me–so few do–and yet since I’ve been so often on your tongue in “Brainstorm” these past few days, I thought I’d just pop in.
I’m not a mystery once you get to know me–and I certainly hope you will.
Why am I here? I like a good time. When I know people are relaxing, having intimate conversations, really enjoying themselves both cheerfully and intensely, you’ll find that I’m drawn to the moment.
I don’t need a big party, a lot of decorations, too much to drink, or a whole lot of fuss; I don’t need a red carpet, so to speak, because I carry my own with me, all rolled up and tucked into place. I don’t need a big limo, either, or a Hummer. If I need to, I can walk and get to where I’m…
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February 12, 2012, 4:01 pm
By Gina Barreca
Here’s my new goal: I want to write a tell-all book and be widely celebrated for how well I keep secrets.
That’s a trick I’d really love to a master, like sawing the last thin remnants of a reputation in half and having it appear whole.
Yes, of course, I’m talking about Screaming Mimi, the JFK intern who decided to wait until everybody was dead (guess daughters don’t count, huh, Mimi?) and write a book with information nobody can prove but that fascinates us all. It doesn’t say much for her, and, I suppose, it says even less about us.
Here’s an excerpt from The Daily Mail, one of the places to which she sold the rights.
Okay, okay, it says less about me—I’ve been watching the whole thing with open-mouthed horror and fascination, but not as open-mouthed as Mimi was when she was in D.C., apparently.
What’s getting to me is that otherwise sensible people are…
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February 7, 2012, 2:35 pm
By Gina Barreca
Life isn’t always the kind of thing you can celebrate with greeting cards. Valentine’s Day, especially, often evades responsibility for the kinds of events crying out for attention on February 14th especially if they don’t include candy, balloons, and something with sparkles.
Even doggerel should have its day, and we believe its day is February 14th.
For example, one of my brother’s best friends in the world is having surgery on Valentine’s Day. There’s no card for that. There’s nothing you can get where, let’s say, a unicorn is removing somebody’s gallbladder or a teddy-bear is inserting drug-releasing stents below the knee; there’s really nothing for that particular occasion, not even in your fancier stationary stores. So, being the poet he’s always been (under that JD and MBA), he wrote a series of what I believe to be well-crafted poems in celebration of his friend’s…
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February 2, 2012, 6:45 pm
By Gina Barreca
(Photo by Jessica Tam at Flickr/CC)
Kelly Egger’s WSJ piece titled “Best Networking Tips” is precisely the kind of article I can imagine being dismissed by most readers of The Chronicle.
“It’s not like this in the academy,” they might say, if they were the types who say “academy.”
Or they might say, “This is exactly the kind of shallow, hyper-competitive neo-conservative capitalistic garbage that made me leave my well-paid position at UBS for film school at NYU,” although they might not say it quite that way to producers with whom they one day hope to collaborate–not unless they were really, really cute.
And while it’s true that graduate students looking for jobs might not have to take workshops on handshaking (“Weak handshakes turn people off, so practice yours with a friend to make sure it’s neither…
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January 30, 2012, 5:26 pm
By Gina Barreca
English Department, University of Connecticut, circa 1987 (No, not really. Click on the pic for the real info.)
Let me rephrase that: When you see them, do you greet your colleagues at all? I would like to think that there are charming colleges where faculty members not only brighten up and smile when they see each other, but actually stop to shake hands, chat and exchange pleasantries.
But I also like the idea that there are still houses with thatched roofs.
I know that it’s simply not practical in this contemporary, hectic and increasingly impersonal world. Thatch isn’t very practical. Pleasantries don’t advance your career. But somehow knowing that both of these once existed makes me slightly nostalgic for the past—even if my idea of that past might resemble a fairy tale world that never really…
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January 25, 2012, 5:31 pm
By Gina Barreca
Where’s your diploma?
Is it magisterially framed and displayed with due pride and ceremony on your office wall? Is it part of a row of impressive documents in your home, standing square-shouldered next to your partner’s diploma, as if in a family portrait? Is it still stuck inside the blue cardboard folder it came in somewhere under a book in your parents’ library? Is it hanging in your bathroom, behind a door, so that nobody ever sees it but you—and even when you see it, you’re not exactly at your best?
Or was it lost in a move, burnt by an ex, peed on by your dog?
Know those ads saying “It’s 10 o’clock: do you know where your children are?” Well, it’s 2012: do you know where your diploma is?
Do you care?
The only diploma I have framed is the honorary doctor of humane letters degree I received from Shepherd College in 2000. It never occurred to me not …
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January 23, 2012, 2:01 pm
By Gina Barreca
Were you to ask to ask me to describe myself, which you would never do, of course, being too well-bred, and were I to answer, which I would never do, I would perhaps say (rather modestly) that I fancied myself as terribly, terribly loyal.
And you’ll have noticed, from the rather odd diction of that appallingly ridiculous first line, that I’m also being terribly, terribly influenced at the moment by my recent watching of television programs heavily laden with the British sauce, don’t you know.
You see, darling, I wasn’t sure quite sure whether or not I was really permitted to like Downton Abbey because, after all, it seemed so thoroughly and entirely based on Upstairs Downstairs that one could hardly turn a corner in the drawing room, open a door in the pantry, or sneak into the mistress’s dressing room in the Abbey without entering Eaton Place first.
You recall Eaton Place…
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January 18, 2012, 12:39 pm
By Gina Barreca
I asked my undergraduate assistant Sam to find out some information about terrariums (hey, I’m paying him out-of-pocket and besides, it’s for my next Hartford Courant column).
In an almost immediate response, Sam’s plaintive voice cried from across the room, “Have you seen this weird ad on Wikipedia?”
Wikipedia is blocking access to its English language version in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act which, the Wiki folks argue, will lead to “Internet censorship” and “will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions.”
Proponents of the bill argue that it will protect copyright, guard against the theft of intellectual property, and provide greater measures of integrity when it comes to the use and management of media on the Internet.
The Chronicle addressed the issue a couple of months ago, while The Onion addressed it more recently…
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January 13, 2012, 6:23 pm
By Gina Barreca
On Tottenham Court Road, 1977
From Act II, Scene I of Congreve’s The Way of the World: “To Pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. Youth may wear and waste but it shall never rust in my possession.”
I wrote that line in my journal on Friday the 13th of January, 1978, the day before I turned 21. I was superstitious. I was afraid I would never be as happy again. I was defiant against my older self, arguing with the woman I would become, jealously guarding my right pleasure, defending myself against my unseen enemy: my older self.
Happy I most certainly was: I was in London, reading novels by Hardy, Gissing, Orwell, and Webb under the tutelage of Dr. Lillian…
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January 9, 2012, 10:04 am
By Gina Barreca
- No more late-night movies or TV. Forget the fact that you’re telling everybody else in your household that you’re up working late, because we know the truth: no more half-movies once remembered being watched when you are supposed to be doing other things. The semester is starting and you need to get back to your regularly scheduled programming, literally and figuratively. Get your DVR ready, or TIVO, and do it now. If you’re teaching at 8 a.m. or even 9 and do not have the privilege of being air-dropped directly onto your campus in a net bag, you need at least an hour to negotiate either public transport or to find parking. Doing the sleepy-time math, this means you need to get to sleep before midnight. If you’re under 40, maybe you can get away with staying up until 1 a.m., but no later. Of course, if you are over…
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January 2, 2012, 10:47 pm
By Gina Barreca
It’s not only the long flight, with its warning that
when reaching the ground, I must move away
as quickly as possible,
But the fear that when a former colleague
appears at the end of a hotel corridor
or waiting for the elevator that never comes,
I will be desperate to do the same:
Leave my belongings behind and bolt.
Because they contain intimacies as complex as love or anger,
I no longer want to attend panels of people I knew in grad
school; either they will have surpassed me,
leaving me with a lap full of resentment,
as uncontrollable as teething baby ferrets
Or they will be resentful, smoke curling around their graying heads
from the bridges they’ve burned
and I will be embarrassed because
we once cheered each other on
with coffees and cheap wine
which would now wreck our sleep
and give us bad dreams.
…
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December 29, 2011, 1:54 pm
By Gina Barreca
Roxanne Coady, owner of one of the world’s best independent bookstores, R.J. Julia’s, and a dynamic, brilliant woman who makes it her personal responsibility to get people reading (www.justtherightbook.com), e-mailed me the following question: “Every year I send out a NY poem—one that’s smart or witty and inspiring without being sappy. After years of having no problem discovering exactly the right piece, I’m having trouble finding one. Any ideas?”
Roxanne is not the kind of woman you want to let down.
I spent part of yesterday morning looking for my favorite New York poems. Yes, I am that much of a genius. That’s why people rely on me. The fact that my friend told me she sent out poems once a year on December 31st did not clue me into the fact that “NY” could represent anything except the Empire State.
I went so far as to send her a link to Mark Doty’s poem “Broadway,” with it…
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December 27, 2011, 4:48 pm
By Gina Barreca
I grew up in a three-story house.
There was the family made up of my great-grandmother and grandmother. There was the family made up of my grandmother’s sons; my father was her favorite out of all of her eight children. Then, eventually, there was the little family made up of my father, my mother, my brother, and me.
So that my father would live under her roof, my grandmother took in his wife—but only the way a body takes in a foreign disease: as an inoculation against worse.
The war my grandmother could do nothing about; she HAD to let her favorite son go because the government took him. But he returned to her, safe and sound, after bombing the country she had left thirty years earlier. Yet—and this almost killed her—he returned only to leave again. He wouldn’t stay in his one small room, just down the hall from his loving mother, every day, every night, after all he …
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December 21, 2011, 3:52 pm
By Gina Barreca
Alistair Sim as Scrooge; Xmas Morning
I had the great good fortune this year to write for Signet their introduction to the upcoming edition of A Christmas Carol. I’ll admit that I was surprised to learn that the book began life as a polemic nonfiction project: a pamphlet to be titled “Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child,” written to draw attention to The Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission, by social reformer Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith.
According to Fred Guida’s A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations, Dickens was “appalled and infuriated by its descriptions of the horrible conditions in which young children were being forced to work” and initially conceived the idea of a pamphlet as good way of drawing attention to their plight. But soon after, Dickens wrote to Smith with a change of plans,…
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December 17, 2011, 3:09 pm
By Gina Barreca
Ever since I was in elementary school “Mary Worth” has provided a quasi-mystical framework for my day. Were the characters in the strip happy? Good omen. Were they nervous? Me too. Mary’s generically sound advice (“Everyone needs to feel important”) often appeared to address my own specific needs. If I woke up worried—as I often did— because my parents were arguing, or because I was fretting about a friend, or because I wondered whether I’d ever be able to afford college, reading Mary made me breathe easier in the morning.
Unlike others who practice meditation, engage in yoga, or center their lives around the daily consumption of kale, my need to understand the mysterious powers of the universe has always led me to back to the one oracle I do consult on a daily basis: The funnies.
Yes, as others might turn to a crystal orb or a harmonizing fountain, I turn to the…
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December 13, 2011, 8:00 pm
By Gina Barreca
Hard-copy or online: How do you prefer reading your university, departmental, and other officialdom paperwork?
I’m a reading-on-paper-girl myself. (I was briefly a real paper girl, which is why I am fond of the phrase; I delivered newspapers for all of four days before deciding I was too afraid of the large dogs and stray adults in my neighborhood to continue.)
I was recently challenged on my preference, however, and am being asked by my colleagues and department head to reassess my position. I’m curious what others have done when facing similar situations.
Here’s what happened: All the submissions for the English Department’s annual writing awards–of which there are many, and many of which have prizes of thousand of dollars (no kidding)–are, for the first time, being made electronically.
I am a judge for two of these contests, as I have been for several years. It’s one of …
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December 9, 2011, 11:12 am
By Gina Barreca
In the seventh and final installment of the Real Life in Publishing Series, “Kate,” a smart young editor at a small but major publisher—let’s just say that many of you would sell your house and auction off your children to be published by this place—talks honestly about one of the toughest parts of her job (and, happily for her, now the job of her editorial assistants): Tempering and maintaining author expectations, especially when those authors are academics.
“One of the hardest things an editor or an editorial assistant will have to do is figure out a way to tell an author that the only people who will buy his book are himself and his mother. And his mother will buy it on Amazon.com for half-price, which means fewer royalties for the author because we probably only gave him net royalties in the contract.
“The general public is just not reading about commercial…
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December 5, 2011, 8:33 am
By Gina Barreca
“Mr. Shipman” is the alias for a dynamic VP at a publishing house who has also taught courses in writing and publishing. His younger self, however, might not have regarded the path to his current success as unimpeded as it now appears in retrospect: “I’m pretty sure my full-time starting salary in 1985 was an alarmingly low $11,000. (So much for the go-go 1980s). Editorial assistants have always been underpaid (and I was used to regarding a chintzy TA stipend as a ‘salary’) but what the hell? Almost 20 years of education and I was making little more than $5 an hour??? Luckily, my wife, a very smart and hard-working woman, was doing quite well, and within a few years I was earning like an adult, but it’s hard to imagine that I’d have been able to stay in the publishing business (based in expensive cities such as Boston and New York) without such support.
As an E.A.,…
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December 1, 2011, 10:10 am
By Gina Barreca
Niamh Cunningham, a graduate of UConn, a full-time editorial assistant at Yale University Press, and a student in Yale’s graduate program in English literature, was the ideal person to ask about the life in the world of publishing today. You can read more of Niamh’s work in Make Mine a Double, by the way; her essay in the collection is titled “Drink and the Single Girl.”
My authors can write serious volumes on some of the most complicated subjects, but when asked to fill out a 20-question form with questions on THEMSELVES, they freeze. When I send the form, I often get responses like, “I couldn’t possibly fill that out. It’s too complicated. I just don’t know the answers.” Mind you, Question 1 is “Name,” Question 2 is “Address,” and Question 3 is “Please describe your book.” They don’t get much more difficult from there.
Along the same lines,…
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