Earlier this week, I wrote to a friend (in response to a listserv forward that revealed the original writer’s neurosis and pedagogical inability): I am so bored with the project of first year writing.

We - the Campus Writing Program at Mizzou - work in an old home once owned by a 19th century dry goods merchant named Conley. The current building manager decided, at some point, to have all the windows sealed shut. This was due, most likely, to security. Academics often leave their windows open (in Detroit, a window left open in the winter meant pipes bursting; here, I’ve heard of a computer overrun by bird shit as pigeons made a home in the faculty member on leave’s office). Still, our office-house is warm, even on a nice November day. It is stuffy. Uncomfortable.  I’d like to break the window and get some air.

I wonder where they stored the food. Was it in my office? Were there shelves here? Surplus from the store? Bags of rice? Am I named? Was this a comfortable home? The kitchen is gone. I refuse to drink coffee made here because the pot is washed in the bathroom. The house is big. The owners likely never went hungry.

The starving artist is a popular metaphor for the arts, which might include creative writing. First year writing seems to always be hungry. Hungry for practice. For ideas. For more money. For more respect. For smaller classrooms. For students who do what they are told. For…for….for…First year writing airs its grievances as hunger. We need a UNICEF for first year writing programs. “A dollar a day may keep this program’s belly full.” If Conley was still alive, I’d ask him to be first year writing’s Sally Struthers.

Swift wanted to eat the children. My child and I have spent the last few days together while my wife was out of town. We eat together. The first night we ate pasta with eggplant/tomato sauce with baked trout. The second night she ate hot dogs and blue berries, and I ate a salad made from odds and ends (and leftover trout). My parental pedagogy revolves around food. What can I get her to eat? I beam with pride when I mention that she once ate sweetbreads. She likes blue cheese. Olives. The pickles I make. She has a desire for strong flavors.

How did I get so bored with first year writing? Its hunger repels me the way a UNICEF ad is not supposed to. I am uncomfortable with first year writing’s stuffiness, its lack of air. Air is the quality Roland Barthes attributed to the punctum. The sense of the fleeting meaning that remains powerful. If there is what Barthes calls the second punctum (air), here it is the need to feed first year writing.  “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” Kafka’s Hunger Artist says. But he doesn’t really want to be admired. “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Does first year writing want to eat? A few weeks ago, in the graduate seminar on new media that I am teaching, I made an allusion to the Allman Brothers Eat a Peach. Admire my inertextuality, I seem to suggest when I make such allusions. I sometimes can’t find the food I like either. As an administrator, I eat in my office. “What will I make for lunch today,” I ask myself each morning. Cheese sandwich? Potato and cheese sandwich? I suddenly feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to be hungry at noon, I think. “Vered,” I ask my daughter, “what would you like to eat?”

“Poop,” she says and laughs. “I eat poop.”

The question and answer hang in the air.