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Good Letters

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I can’t sleep in hotel rooms. The fluorescent lights, the vent’s false breeze, the sealed-off city behind its funeral parlor curtains—all of it triggers a feeling of body-lessness, a sense that every other pulse available to me is inhuman. Lonesome nights on work trips always end with me sprawled across a giant bed, contemplating the spackled ceiling, knowing I won’t fall asleep until the wee hours.

This time, I’ve brought three books to fill the time. But the airless dimensions of the room are so flat that reading makes me melancholy, even more aware that I am shut up inside a chapel designed for one foreign and alluring activity: watching cable TV.

I find Citizen Kane and the Cosbys, then a documentary positing that UFOs were behind the Transfiguration of Christ. Channels flash rhythmically; the remote grows sweaty in my hand. Intermittently, guiltily, I flip to MTV. Even now, a good decade past adolescence, I get a sinking sense of voyeurism when its logo spins onto the screen. During a darkened reality show scene, I catch in the TV screen’s glass the reflection of the bedside lamp and the faint shape of my own idle face: neither sleeping nor awake, but stunned—partly from fatigue, and partly from prudishness. The later it gets, the stranger the shows become.

My cheap childhood included one year of cable TV. Before my parents could cut the subscription, thousands of hours of MTV programming seared into my three-year-old brain: the “Thriller” documentary, Weird Al’s “Eat It,” Cyndi Lauper, and an untraceable video that involved a gigantic worm busting through the center aisle of a festooned church.

To be honest, I haven’t watched much of MTV since then. In high school, this was problematic; I was on the outs regarding a great many fads. But even in my chagrin, I recognized that there was a certain freedom in not-knowing, in not being beholden to those images and expectations, especially regarding sexuality.

Pondering this, I remember the students to whom I taught creative writing in the years before I succumbed to per diems and regular paychecks. One year, I was at an exclusive East Coast university; another, I was at a West Coast Christian college. At both institutions, the students filled their prose with briskly moving scenes. Shots panned, points-of-view jumped; dialogue was brief and interior monologues read as arch voiceovers. It was clear that they were “children of the image,” as I heard one professor laugh ruefully—young adults whose understanding of story was rooted not in a sustained narrative, but in the brief scene.

It was also plain that these students all hovered near a similar level of creative maturity, one at which characters were stock and feelings were sappy. But the kinds of images to which the students returned, the tableaus they chose for the visual heart of their stories, seemed to reveal so much about what the religious and secular students had been seeing.

At the Christian college, I had to help a good many students get to the human issues at the crux of maudlin break-ups and Disney-esque family fights. Family dinners, long vacations in a van, and late night walks formed the scenes against which conflicts played out.

At the East Coast University, I had to convince an equal number of students that surreal violence does not ensure meaning. One moody, talented young man’s final assignment stands out in my mind: a trite story in which young girls were brutally raped, killed, and dumped in a field. Another student submitted a piece in which a drunken beating was played for laughs. Incredulous, I read the beating scene over and over again, trying to convince myself that I was skimming over some thematic nuance. I scribbled and re-scribbled notes in the margins, eventually trimming back my emotional response to offer a logical, teacherly response regarding why the violence “didn’t work” for contemporary fiction.

I am thinking of this as I watch the MTV reality show re-runs—some episodes showcasing violence, others rewarding sexual blackmail—still puzzled, despite my former students, that it is a standard form of entertainment. The clock reads almost 3 a.m. when I flick the TV off. As I turn away from the faintly glowing screen, the room’s flat, false silence is almost a relief.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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