Going Off-Script: On Hilary Plum’s “Hole Studies”
Hilary Plum | Hole Studies | Fonograf Editions | 2022 | 168 Pages
“If we joyfully violate the language contract, might that not make us braver, stronger, more capable of breaking other oppressive contracts?”
—Carole Maso, Break Every Rule
The best language gets stuck in my mind like a song. I keep wanting to say that it gets stuck in my throat, because I (increasingly rarely) go through periods of literary intoxication upon introduction to a new writer, where they have enormous influence over the way I think and write. That makes it sound like they disrupt or interfere with my own voice, barge into my house and put their feet up on the coffee table. They don’t. They inspire me to think and write in new ways, to not write inside of familiar forms when both I and a future worth building clearly exist outside of them. Their prosody resounds in my psyche; the particular angle to their lines of thought, the specific shapes they make on the page or in my ear. Like Hilary Plum when she leaves classroom discussion up to what students are thinking in order to discover where it takes them together: “I hope to follow where it leads.”
It’s like when you meet a new person and you start using phrases they use that you’ve never heard previously, or maybe their subtle accent rubs off on you a little bit. You start doing something you’ve never thought to do before, because now you’ve seen or heard them do it; something about the way they perceive the world and react to it is beginning to inform your world and mutate within your own consciousness. The writers who have possessed me in this way always meet me on the page like we are here in the world together and we should do something about it. The world of the page: a world of possible worlds.
They know that writing is an opening.
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Hole Studies is described by its publisher as “a book about care and the forms it may take,” but it’s also fundamentally about the creation of new forms. It’s endlessly generative; the whole idea of “hole studies” is the opening, the moment of rupture, what might be brought into existence through tears in the fabric of our accepted reality. I’m driven to share it with anyone I’ve ever been passionate about thinking and writing with.
It’s also a book about labor and activism, and a book about intimacy, interiority, encounter, communication, and correspondence. You can’t read Plum without being pulled into dialogue with her. She just wants to “make a nice space” for us, and there you are, on the page of possible worlds, called to respond: “So, how do we try?” Plum asks. “What does this space hope and work for?" What happens when we do Real Talk™; what happens when we really listen?
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Plum writes inside the academy, presently teaching at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, but much of her documented experience comes from outside of it. Labor issues within higher education are put into stark relief: Plum details her time working in an adjunct capacity, how adjuncts are “often called the fast food workers of the academic world.” She writes about working at Dairy Queen as a teenager. She writes about how her “mind was rarely occupied” working a very academic job for a highly respected journal, where the work of women was rarely treated as meaningful, where she was still doing dishes like she did at Dairy Queen, except for senior editors instead of shift managers. She writes about working on a social justice-themed correspondence course for incarcerated people in maximum security prisons who had no other way to communicate with one another. Perhaps the best thing about Plum’s writing is the way that it values the intelligence and the care possible in each person at any moment. When she writes about her husband’s battle with cancer, she describes the rage which now possesses her anytime she feels someone is wasting his time:
If someone on the management level wastes his time, they’re wasting the time of every doctor and nurse and visiting friend whose experience and labor and care made it possible for him to be, today, alive and working. Each hour of his work bears in it these other hours. But then, I think—furiously, I think—this is true of every one of us. Our labor isn’t ours; it bears within it others’ work, others’ time, their years of frustration, boredom, achievement. And our work radiates through the living hours of those we in no other way know. You may feel what I’m trying to mean.
Personal frustration becomes an opening into a deeper collective frustration and empathy. Plum trusts that we may understand her meaning only through how her words tear into the surface of our own experiences. She points to a threshold beyond the page. She invites us into the investigation.
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Today I was in a very bad mood. All I wanted to do was re-read Hole Studies and write this review. My primary work, which enables me to survive economically, felt like a waste of my time in comparison. The dogs, at the very least, still needed to go outside. I felt stupid and guilty, because the whole point of Hole Studies is encounter, and I spent the whole day feeling enormously hostile toward the present moment in which I could not be in and on the pages with Hilary Plum. Unconsciously, I thought: “I should be warm, in my bed, with my own dog; practicing my special talent, plotting out my Great Response, my evidence I am a Serious Author.” It’s also strange, because I spend a considerable amount of time defending my profession of walking dogs from people who think it is not a respectable job—that it is a waste of my time and talent, the years spent honing skills that have not magically yielded a salaried position with benefits, a house, a spouse, a savings account—but before I started walking dogs, studying English and education full time while working full time and then teaching in underfunded city schools had thoroughly drained my love for reading and writing and possibly also my belief that anything truly mattered. I only returned to this work many years later, when I started walking dogs for a living.
Tomorrow, I will thank the dogs for that opening into Hole Studies, and try to say hello to other workers I may encounter on the porches and sidewalks rather than feel that they are interrupting my work, that I should be somewhere else, doing something more important.
What does the courier do if not convey messages?
(I’ve been a courier, too.)
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In the section titled “I’m Sorry,” Plum discusses how the pandemic was a hole. How here, in our late capitalist American culture, in which we have close to zero systems of meaningful social support in place for such a catastrophe, suddenly everyone became vulnerable. The majority of Americans were at risk and so much more felt possible. People were organizing rent strikes and mutual aid networks, tearing down monuments to racists and colonizers—in many ways, it made clear both what we could accomplish if we weren’t constantly working so hard just to survive and what we could accomplish if there was simply nothing to lose: if everything collapsed, if nothing was determinate anymore, if everyone was at risk. Plum points out how “American institutions began to publicly speak the language of illness, of disability—a language usually marginalized,” describing how people would receive notes about being sick “with warmth and sympathy… with accommodation, even solidarity.” She writes about how people predicted this expression of vulnerability would be covered up swiftly. How we would try to forget this time in which we needed each other.
It’s at this point, the post-cover up, that we sit, wondering how the pandemic continues to twist and evolve when the prevailing dominant cultural response has been to force an end to it by pretending it’s not happening. Though for a brief moment in time, it felt like anything could happen next.
Where did the possibilities of the ruptures of 2020 go? Plum invites us back to examine how and why we stopped caring, how we might begin again; how and why we seek to hide our vulnerability and suffering from one another rather than respond to it.
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In the collection’s titular essay, Plum investigates instances of pop speech going off-script: Sinead O’Connor ripping up her abusive mother’s picture of the Pope live on SNL in 1992; the [Dixie] Chicks expressing anti-war sentiment in their stage banter in an increasingly conservative genre in 2003; Kanye West pointing out that George W. Bush “doesn’t care about Black people” during a telethon to raise relief funds for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Courtney Love, in the same year, was asked on a red carpet if she had any advice for a young girl moving to Hollywood. “Ummm, I’ll get libeled if I say it,” she said. “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go.”
History, we now know, proved the worth of Love’s off-the-cuff offering, but at the time her statement was dismissed. Plum explains Hollywood’s ambivalent response, even though they knew what she said to be true:
Love was not an authoritative speaker. In general—and especially when she suddenly broadcast this insider knowledge, ugly on a red carpet—she didn’t meet professional expectations. I don’t know if anyone ever took her good advice. Her accusation, not explicit but clear, had no effect on Weinstein’s status. It didn’t seem to inspire much curiosity or follow-up in journalism or among industry professionals—other than, like [Creative Artists Agency], to punish the speaker, since twelve years and much more violence occurred before, from a more respectable realm of media, the story broke, or broke again, this time with the necessary authority.
Plum points out that going off-script is read as crazy, unprofessional—easy to chastise, refute, disregard. Yet all of these ruptures were truths hiding in plain sight. In so many ways, our ability to maintain our way of living relies on our ability to ignore information and tell lies to one another, and especially to ourselves. Ruptures reveal cracks in the surface of our collective agreements.
She writes: “In one act of saying, common knowledge can get empowered. But this requires new listening. This instance of speech is commonplace in content, yet exceptional in form and in context, and therein lies its courage.”
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Perhaps the most important thing I learned from teaching is that the human brain is programmed to disregard what doesn’t align with what it already thinks. It takes enormous effort to change people’s minds; you’re constantly thrashing your head against some lizard-brain mechanism evolved before we developed thumbs or whatever to prevent the mind from being distracted from hunting and gathering and awareness of potential predators.
The mind is happy to be free of confrontation, encounter, rupture. So it’s easy to dismiss those who insist on going off-script as being “sick in the head,” to dispose of novelty swiftly, to find a reason to disregard it. Add in centuries of oppression, generations of unaddressed trauma, and an economic system in which the vast majority of people literally don’t have the time or the energy to consider alternatives or even grapple with the reality of their own lives much less the lives of others, and you start to understand why we are where we are. Why so little ever seems to result in anything. Why the ruptures of Covid didn’t stick.
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Plum wants to know what happens if we really listen, if we really attend. If we show up. If we go offline and find each other in the streets. If we open texts and find each other on the page. “Maybe we listen best when we feel someone has trusted us—us especially—to listen,” she considers, inviting us to consider.
The world was quiet today. It felt like the universe was creating a container for thinking and writing. For turning everything else off, and going in. Or maybe it was just Plum in the pages, trusting me to pay attention, reaching out beyond all the totally valid reasons to disconnect, writing open a space of consideration and correspondence.
Tonight is so quiet. During these hours of dedicated thinking and writing, social media seems to be dead. No updates, no distractions. I’m excited about it. I’m thinking about all the things I could accomplish if prose was always this much more alive, this much more compelling than the internet. All the books and zines I could have written in the last ten or twenty years; all the content I wrote for Facebook and Twitter and Instagram for free, because it felt important to have an immediate audience, to get an immediate response; all the time and energy lost to the void of endless scrolling, to the pernicious tactics tech developers have employed to program our brains to become addicted to the quick hits they provide. How increasing a follower count has replaced doing anything of actual value. All the thoughts I deleted because no one “liked” them quickly enough. All the content graveyards of the increasingly monetized internet. All my young friends who are already dead due to the fundamental loneliness of this landscape. All the dying forms and the holes they leave.
Plum:
I still want to know how work that’s marginal matters, how publishing a book almost no one reads can be a meaningful act. The question is basic, embarrassing. When students ask it of me, I just nod. I just mean that I have the same question.
No, I mean that I trust them with the question. Our equality in asking it means there’s a threshold beyond which they may learn what I don’t know.
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When I left the classroom, I struggled with the idea of not doing “meaningful work” anymore. And then, while I struggled to find any kind of work anywhere, working in many different industries, I realized that the idea of “meaningful work” is a lie of advertising, a lie of the perpetual teacher shortage, a lie of the predatory student loan industry, a lie of the college-industrial complex, a lie of classism. The only thing that makes anything meaningful is what you bring to the encounter, what you make from it and of it. Every moment: an opening.
The hope of this particular space is that Hilary Plum knows I am listening. That her trust that I might—her insistence on meaning beyond all totally justifiable doubt—is why I am here writing again, singing into the void, into the holes she left for us. It is a hope that you will find Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies and read it, as soon as possible.