Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

                It is time I make a bold announcement: this volume is being written in 30 days, for the sake of the NaNoWriMo contest.  One of the rules of this contest is that you must complete 50,000 words in one month of entirely new writing.  I am about to cheat a little bit.  I will make my target above 50,000 words by however long this, and ensuing (if any) cut and pasted sections contain.  For example, this is 978 words, so my new target is 50,978 words.  You may think I am just swimming against the current, but one of the most important elements to this story of Los Angeles is introduced herein:

So I’m sitting laying down on my dermatologist’s operating table, waiting somewhere in the range of thirty minutes for her to enter.  She enters.

“Oh, you’re making yourself at home I see!”

“Sorry, it was more comfortable than sitting up.”

“Oh that’s fine, I’m sorry, the 5:00 rush.”

She asks me a few questions about what I am taking (topical Cipro, mixed in an apothecary jar with cleanser, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, SalHydro, applied with a cotton swab at morning and night, Zionen, applied at night, and Dr. Bussel’s—the founder of this medical office—Anti-Bacterial cleanser, washed with at morning and night) and she guesses that the Zionen is causing the dry, chapped abrasions at the lower right side of my lip.  She decides to give me a moisturizer.  Then she says she would like to do some injections. 

She says she hates doing them, and they are extremely annoying, but in a way they are almost like acupuncture.  It is soothing to be through with the pain, afterwards. 

“So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Dr. Goldring asks as she moves the needle up against my right cheek, near the ear.

“I’m going to Boulder, my whole family’s going there,” I say, grabbing my pants at the front waist, on the belt, squeezing. 

Pinch.

“Oh, I hate doing this.”

“It’s okay, that’s why I do the belt thing.”

“I’d hold your hand if I could, but then…”

“It’s okay I would probably squeeze it too hard and hurt you, or your depth perception would get thrown off with your other hand and you would miss your mark.”

“I know!”

I don’t remember how we got onto the subject, who brought it up, but I think it was her.

“So, what do you do again?”

“Well, I’m a temp for an accounts payable department of an investment company, but….”

“But you want to be a wr---“

“A writer, yes, but this weekend I had a horrible experience with this woman telling me that I should just quit because I’m never going to get published.”

“Oh, do tell,” she says, moving the needle down towards my chin.

“Well, I’ve been exchanging e-mails with this woman, we’ve corresponded about ten, or twelve times….”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Like at first she was being pretty nice, but really delicate, and then she said she could be harsh if I wanted her to be, and I said, yes, bring the harshness.”

“Right, constructive criticism.”

“Yeah, so then she starts telling me, a few days ago, that I was either a) lazy, or b) too afraid of failure to really try,”

“Well, that’s,”

“Right, like she knows anything about me, and then she said something like ‘For the love of God don’t say that you’re only twenty-four and you don’t have enough experience, excuses, excuses.’  Then she said  that her writing was at a “higher level” than mine, and then something like, ‘when we agreed to a mentor/protégé relationship, I didn’t expect so much resistance from you’ and I was like, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be having a discussion, or are you just telling me what the only possible truth is,’

“She’s just saying her way is the right way,” Dr. Goldring says, moving the needle to my left cheek.

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“Right, but then she’s making all of these assumptions about me, and I mention something to her about how I was talking to a friend and she asked me if I had finished my MFA applications yet, and I was like, I haven’t even started them yet, and then this woman starts getting on my case about that, saying, ‘How do you possibly expect to get something polished turned in?’

“Oh that’s a bunch of nonsense, I know plenty of people who waited up until the last minute and stayed up the night before turning in their med school applications, some people work better under pressure,” she says, moving the needle near my left cheekbone, towards the ear. 

“She just keeps telling me I need to revise, and I was like, ‘I get the point,’ but she doesn’t stop, she says I have to sit down with 20-30 pages of writing and revise it until it’s as good as it can be, and she doesn’t even respond to my side of things, which is, I finished this novel, and I was asking her if it was worth revising or not, and she never gave me a straight answer on it, and I started a second novel, because I wanted to do something new, I didn’t want to spend another two years revising the first one on top of the two years spent writing it,”

Squeeze.  Pinch.

“So I said I wanted to do something new, and she says I won’t learn anything by doing something new.”

“But don’t you think you get something out of doing that first draft?  It is an achievement in and of itself to finish something of that length.  You learn something by doing that.”

“That’s exactly what I was saying to her, but she wouldn’t say anything about that.’

“I think we’re all done here…How old is she?”

“Early to mid-30’s.”

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have kids?”

“Yes.”

“Well maybe she’s crazy, maybe we can psychoanalyze her!”

We laugh.  Oh, Dr. Goldring…

“I do think she is wrong about a couple of things, I’m going to go and get your moisturizer.”

I sit and wait and think about the errands I need to run tonight: Westwood Farmacy, Rancho Park Branch of the Public Library, Ralph’s at Venice and Overland, and I still won’t make it to Cinefile or Macy's to buy more pairs of socks until another night.  And I still won’t start my grad school application for another night; because It’s already 8:37, and I should probably go to bed in an hour.