The D stands for Dick

A Writer's Journey

I experienced my first true case of writer’s block. I’ve written a novella, poetry, and many things resembling essays since I started covering the Glenn Show. I never truly stopped writing; there was many an email, and heated comment section debate. The poetry never stopped of course. However, true criticism of the Glenn Show had ceased. Loury and McWhorter don’t know me from Adam as Professor Loury has commented in our correspondence. The chaotic nature of the internet dissolves the self through the howling winds of the waste land.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Maci Branch. I’m from Arkansas, I graduated from Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, while living in Kansas City Missouri, and before that I went to a fancy high school outside Paris…Arkansas that is. I’ve always been smart and very literate. I’ve done stand up, filmmaking, and activism with mixed results. My favorite hobby is skating half pipe. I love talking music, film, and culture. Politics are ok in certain company which is becoming more and more rare these days. I’ve lived in Kansas City for the past ten years, and I’ve been married to a woman named Jessica for about three years. We’ve been together for about six years. Jessica has a job in IT, and I’m a student as a secret identity to my poetic career. Being a student is sort of like a real job, with none of the responsibility, but good luck explaining that to me ten years ago, then I just hated school.

I covered the Glenn show for about a year and a half. I just liked it. It beat identity politics at its own game, and that was reason enough to tune in. That it did so eloquently, and with intelligence kept me coming back. It wasn’t long before I had to contribute with work of my own. That is the artist’s nature. There was also a broken heart involved.

My wife and I are an experimental queer couple of the 21st century. Some may see it as a threat to society, but we just think of it as a normal sort of crazy. We were dating a nonbinary person. One of those they/them motherfuckers. Their name was Jan. Jan majored in philosophy, and I was looking for people to talk about existentialism that would lead into an affair to remember. Jan fit the bill. My wife even liked them too, and the sex was great. It didn’t work out long term though I did love them very much.

Jan insisted on going to the protest during the Summer of 2020. I was critical of woke politics even at this point, but the pandemic made this position urgent. My wife Jessica has an immune disorder, and this was before the vaccine. Jan was putting the protests before our relationship. I was angry and was voicing some opinions on Facebook. Jan got word and called me a white supremacist for watching McWhorter and Loury have a go at the woke on Blogging Heads at the time. I broke up with Jan right then and there. I also quit Facebook and went to Substack.

The fun part about covering the Glenn show, is that Loury and McWhorter can respond directly to criticism. The communal nature of the internet is easy to overlook. That strangers can find and learn from each other at the click of a button is an awesome power. The implications are revolutionary and frightening. Yet there is reassurance that great minds can find each other and think alike in a space that is able to exist across a continent.

This semester, Loury and McWhorter started talking about a student. They named her Simone. Loury said it was a student in his class, a woman of color, but he also said it was fictionalized so all the details become suspect. Loury is the man who jokes he is voting for Biden, but you shouldn’t believe him. My job as a poet is to make mountains out of mole hills. The imagination was sparked to say the least.

The truth is I wanted to be Simone because I desperately wanted an audience for my creative input. I wanted my work to have mattered to someone. I reached out to Loury to discuss something near to my heart, transgender issues. He responded. This is where the writer’s block came from. Senpai noticed me, to coin the phrase. The problem is that my behavior and manner of writing completely changed when this happened. I began to flood poor Professor Loury with emails. I suppose I thought I was preparing him, coaching him up for a friendly discussion about the issues. I had some anxiety that I was annoying, but I also wanted his attention. This was when I stopped criticizing the Glenn Show directly.

There was another side to this. I had enrolled in a poetry class. I wanted something that would be like Black Studies but poetry, so I enrolled in this class. I wanted to see if I could find the behavior Woke Racism describes in the academy for myself, and if it would really be as unsporting as McWhorter claims it is. I certainly have had that experience on the internet, and in my friend groups. I never expected that school, the boring old place where I struggled to pay attention, was the source of all the trouble. This triggered my inner Daffy Duck when I read this, of you know this means war.

I prepared for this war by reading every poet mentioned in the class, even the ones that were not required reading. This included workshopping the other classmate’s work. I successfully completed a poem I had been working on for about two years. The challenge was to write about woke politics and my own life like Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This was around the time of the Trump presidency, and the fascism seemed kitsch enough to make something with. I developed a bit of a crush on Ezra if I’m allowed to crush on poets who have been dead since the 70s. I like the chaotic nature of his work, I’m a sucker for Homeric epics, and he’s a bad boy to boot. It is fortunate that the first poet I read is named Jericho Brown, also writes about Homer, and his name happens to rhyme with Ezra Pound. Some things are a gift.

Thompson, the professor, did not see it that way. He saw an arrogant white person explaining Ezra Pound to someone who had never heard of him before. I see this problem often with people of color. A white person has heard of some obscure Provencal poet that nobody in their right mind would care about and meets some poor unsuspecting Omar at school and offers an informational assault on the senses. It’s called whitesplaining in some circles. I prefer to think of it as autistic bee bop. This keeps the blacks who do it from having a crisis about authenticity, and the whites who do it can finally feel cool.

Loury responded to more emails than Thompson did. I had some very strong opinions about this. I told him “the F can stand for fuck you Thompson,” in his classroom to his face. Thompson called me sir at a poetry reading once. There is more to this story than this mere micro aggression. To say the least I told him he shouldn’t do that. I also didn’t follow the syllabus very closely, I was off doing my own thing, my poetry matters more to me than some dumb grade. I’m challenging his failing grade for me, because I think this is the way art should be. Spontaneous, and beholden to no one but an audience’s approval. Perhaps it is foolish of me to expect a place like school to ever take these matters with the seriousness that they deserve. That said, I shouldn’t be surprised that my grade is as poor as it is.

Thompson’s first at length reply was to tell me he was failing my final assignment, and to tell me that he didn’t call me sir. He did this in a chain email with an administrator. This was after I told him about my involvement on the Glenn Show. He didn’t comment at all on that. I told the administrator he did so call me sir, and that his lack of communication felt like emotional abuse. You can take the girl out of the SJW but you can’t take the SJW out of the girl. Now I have been presented with the option to file a formal complaint. I feel conflicted about this. Loury and McWhorter have been criticizing such practices as long as I have been following them. My behavior was not exactly exemplary, and I am curious what they would make of this.

When I heard straight from the horse’s mouth that I wasn’t Simone, I was mad as hell. I went after Loury, who had been using the word Orwellian all year to describe the practices of the woke. I pulled out Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and tore into the prose of his book Anatomy of Racial Inequality. I admit it, I didn’t read all of it, but Loury didn’t read all of Kendi’s Antiracist which I did believe it or not, so I consider it fair. We were both talking a lot of shit.

The truth is my use of idiom as comedy is directly in contrast to the advice Orwell gives writers in Politics and the English Language. Even Orwell himself admits he makes these mistakes. This only illustrates the difficulty of mastery over the personal craft of writing. I take it for granted that I am a good writer. I would like to think this is a talent if I may be so bold.

Reactionary is a ten-dollar word that Marxists use to talk about sell outs. As someone who used to hang with that crowd it was always a concept that I felt a vulnerability towards. No way am I a reactionary Jack, I know for a fact that there are Maoists in our midst. It’s not hard to see how this becomes a trap for the ego.

I was home for the holidays and Santa Clause had brought me some psilocybin for being a good girl this year. Young Frankenstein was playing on TCM, and I had an unlimited supply of grass. I was going to make the Black Guys at Blogging Heads say my motherfucking name. Gene Wilder crying out, “my grandfather’s work was doodoo!” chipped away at my damaged ego. I had a monster to build, and this one was Radical with a capital R.

Somewhere around Marty Feldman commenting on Frank’s “quiet dignity and grace” the ego evaporated completely. I had written a screed, a diss track, and a punk rock anthem all in one. This was the bomb that would blow up the school. Of course I was posting it to the comments section that very minute, as well as emailing Loury.

Of course, Loury responded. I made a crack about the Kinks song Lola. I really hate this stereotype that people like me are coddled and sensitive. It’s probably because I am a bit coddled and sensitive. Anyway, the Kinks wrote a damn funny song. Loury says I have his attention. I want to ask about intersectional feminism, and ways to synthesize that to his arguments about social capital. This is a conversation where snark, and humor will not help me at the risk of sounding like Nannette. Perhaps this is all much ado about nothing, but all the world’s a stage as you like it.

What did I learn from this? I changed my behavior based on whether or not senpai noticed me. This is the writer’s block I had mentioned. I became less snarky, more polite, more eager to please. This is what any amount of success can do to a person. I was no longer Simone, if I ever was, because I had officially joined a side.

Is joining a side a good thing? That isn’t for me to say. I am uncomfortable at how elastic my behavior has become as a result of this work. I feel like it is inappropriate. Most of my favorite art would also be considered inappropriate so there is some consolation in this fact. Better to reign in hell than to serve the Elect’s heaven.