I remember once, probably as a junior, back in 2006 or 2007, complaining to a friend that I didn’t have opinions or feelings, just clammy analytical observations. The remark embarrasses me now. It’s too obviously aimed at the implicit expectation of my own English degree flakery. It’s also demonstrably untrue; I had, then as now, altogether too many opinions. If the comment named anything real at all, it was my anxiety about genre. We’d been asked to write a “reading response” in a poetry class. University doesn’t teach you how to write about yourself.
That principle in mind, I’ve ransacked other articles in this category, looking for a place to start. The thing that keeps coming up is coffee. Appropriately enough, my habit first became serious as a freshman at McGill, where the residence cafeteria had stinky urns of it, all hours of the day, caffeinating the atmosphere. Beyond its obviously attractive chemical properties, coffee was common culture. It followed me out of rez, and now, to a different city in a different country.
New York has a much more utilitarian stimulant culture. The black stuff isn’t the the solvent against social silences that it was for me in college. Nevertheless, it has a place in my every morning. On a good day, I buy it at 10 a.m. somewhere on the east side of Broadway between 110th and 116th Street, between my apartment and a campus half-reminiscent of the one I left in 2008, without the ill-advised brutalist architecture, but also without a mountain.
The coffee follows me into Low Library, named in a poem by Louis Zukofsky, the poet on whom I wrote my honours thesis at McGill, the poet I proposed to study when I applied here. Zukofsky was an undergrad at Columbia. He worked and wrote in this building. But it’s no longer an operating library, just as I no longer have anything to say about Louis Zukofsky. I’m here to replace a student card that has stopped swiping.
The coffee, at least, remains constant. Now I bring it to a building, which is actually a library, where I check emails, mostly from students but including the one which prompts me later to write this. There will be a meeting with doctoral advisors next week. One student wants me to read his paper before he turns it in. I carry the coffee to my office hours. Nobody comes (nobody ever comes), so I read, a ceremonial preparation for the distant, rumbling, apocalyptic examination that stands between me and writing my doctoral dissertation. Office hours end far too quickly. By now I’ve finished my coffee.
I eat lunch. An apologetic salad (again, this is a good day) and more coffee. I go over my notes before class, making sure I’m capable myself of doing the exercise I wrote the night before for my students. I photocopy the exercise. Learning to work the photocopier was a major and hard-won victory. I climb stairs to the room where I teach. Some students are there, others still to arrive. I sit on an awkward precipice between engagement and non-engagement, between chatting with these freshmen as though I were one of them, and avoiding “going over my materials.” I remember with acetic clarity how well, or how poorly, every discussion leader managed this time at McGill. Somebody calls me professor. I’m secretly gratified, but I demur identification. I’m an instructor, this is my class, but I’m not a professor.
Then class starts. A class in which I teach students how not to write about themselves. University writing isn’t about that, I tell them. And if you’re like me, you’re never going to leave.
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