No, no last words, just, Be Good

Only that fear, that I would mess it up, or that hope, which consists in keeping something more that you are holding back, something prevented me from trying to be like Michel. Maybe it was only habit. Maybe it is just easier to keep failing, sometimes a little better, sometimes a good deal worse, with the comfortable old externalities--worksheet, smartboard, homework, assessment--than it would be to start fresh. So we didn't have any goodbye party other than reading about Don Quijote in the textbook and watching a little clip from the musical.

Maybe the end it aims at is simply not truth, as the philosopher-bill collector admits? argues? in Lucian, but is keeping the students at least somewhat occupied, so that they have that much less time and attention to get up to really dastardly shenanigans. An argument similar in content to Emile’s early education, but applied very differently. Chiefly in that there are classrooms full, and not a single kid to tutor.

And maybe something like this is the best that can be accomplished with middle-school-aged kids, a kind of consolidation of their early life, a last chance to play and run around as much as possible, and to mill freely in great herds and packs through school hallways, before the intellectual work of learning, not just its experiential phase, takes hold, and they become individuals capable of thought reflective upon and within themselves. It is the social anger and disrespect that happens at this age that comes as the greatest shock to those charged with care or attempted teaching of these not-much-longer-children. The only halfway helpful approach that seems to be available to treat these outbursts and prevent them manifesting is in isolation, putting the student away from others to perform for or to pursue, though even then conversation of reflection can be impeded by all sorts of deeper factors that prevent trust or interest in the process of one’s own inner development, so boring, after all, compared to the mayhem and ruckus that keep breaking out with one’s peers, accompanied by the ineffectual but gratifying annoyance and frustration of the thereby discredited authorities. The very same who then might attempt some halfhearted reconciliation.

Problems that are big enough are brought to the attention of parents, guardians, or the state, however, and these parties might be less lightly dismissed, mocked, and manipulated. That they care is shown less in words, even wholehearted ones, and in attempts to reason and to awaken the unpracticed reason of the sullen interlocutor. Instead they bring to bear who knows what fists and belts, curses and consequences, loss of freedom, loss of opportunity, and suddenly what was fun, or automatic response to provocation, not really in one’s control and certainly beyond one’s comprehension, but in a fun way, produces long-term effects that one can only recognize in the dimmest immediate ways--as bruises on the skin, as the lack of love, as a phone taken away or broken, as the promise that life will become even harder, or as it becomes harder to see oneself as somebody with an intrinsic value, rather than the problem, the failure, that you are in all interactions. Attempts to assert your own personhood, after all, are so irrational that they come out as defiance, as disrespect, as inappropriate, when compliance, respect, and what is needed and right have seldom or never been shown to you in any way that you can recognize.

Even saying all this means nothing, since it is said in words you cannot understand, and your language is mostly one of actions, experience still, and not the luxury of reflective thought. Leadership, in this arena, cannot be quiet, patient words and listening, until it is proven first and probably also consistently over a good while in the act.

All this is of course based on the modern notion of personhood, which though it might appeal to innate rights and responsibilities, really acts as though we are formed from the outside in. That a soul or an identity is not primarily the room of the spirit, between us and God, but a foundation for action in this world, without reference to any other kind of life than what we can access with our senses or appreciate with our reason. A very different kind of outlook is still possible, still dominant even if unanalyzed, among more conservative people, religious, righteous, indignant at times at being ignored, at times because aggressively trying to recover lost ground or to re-indoctrinate a lost world with cast-off dogmas, but also at times and in some godly people shining out with that happiness, beatitude, merriment, that is at once so appealing, convincing, and also unsettling or even repulsive, jealousy-inducing, holier-than-thou while seeming unconcerned that it is attached to ideologies antithetical to peace and diversity, all the values that make modern life possible at all, on the strength of some indemonstrable knowledge or faith, never liable to be pinned down, about some better life elsewhere. And with that certainty that life in this world has been better in the past than it will ever get in the present, with only justified fear and self-fulfilling prophecies of the future, they can repose in the smug superiority of that lost golden age and that pie in the sky whose coming or not is not in their power, after all, to perform.

In this context no other knowledge really matters, no one has any further responsibility to become an individual or to promote any social cause, and so as a teacher the true believer’s only job is to call the lost sheep back to that one truth, to reorient their vision, as it may be 180 degrees, to see the world as a sojourn and their destination elsewhere, their home and hope of redemption in nothing but the old mysteries obscured by these newer dogmas of science and psychology.

If either of these two attitudes in genuine, it probably can make the work meaningful. But so much of hidden self-interest can be bound up in them, so much appropriation and exploitation can take place under the guise of either the technocratic or theocratic paradigms, that the only thing would seem to be to read their sources critically, the moderns and the ancients, so as to be able to make up one’s own mind as to how to chart one’s actions in this world and how to orient oneself to the possibility of those unknown realities elsewhere.

It is a shame then that one of the first things that seems to be placed out of bounds by both paradigms is this ground of reading and interpretation by which they might be understood. The Bible is appropriated by the churches, whether read or unread by their adherents, and the modern philosophy and literature underlying the presuppositions of the secular state are if possible even more unleaved-through, except by scholars who’ve bound up their own identities with some narrow expertise about some handful of authors or works, unread except by other scholars.

Which I would be only too glad to be proved wrong about, but this is my perception: that the population who reads is vanishingly small, and even now is vanishing. That as has happened with the Bible, so will happen with the foundational works of the modern mindset: increasingly unread, certain canons of interpretation will be handed down about them as authoritative, so that what is intended to free the development of personality and society will end up becoming so many hollow creeds in the service of an authority as pervasive as the medieval church, only considerably more concerned with utility rather than beauty, and considerably more powerful because of its advanced technology. That the prospects for freedom in the space between either of these great educational influences will be in the pages of those books, religious and secular, ancient and modern, as long as there are still libraries and readers, but their sphere of action in the world will only dwindle unless their own numbers somehow miraculously or by uncanny organizing should grow.

The work of the friends of the library seems very important, their all-city reads and their generous book sales, and their speaker this year, Anthony Marra, in Spokane gave a fantastic, humorous address concluding with his belief that whatever else reading good books together might or might not be able to accomplish, it does make people better neighbors. Words very close to my heart.

Stress on the Penult

In my dream, I had a room like a grove, kids here and there stretched out in repose of creative activity its nymphs and friendly fauns. The phrase that meant so much was passionate moderation--either we were discussing this or listening to a recording of voices to that effect, and evoking images of the disaster that ensued from passions unconnected with the aim of a virtuous temperament, while for ourselves we had the reality of pastoral peace all around us. A girl lying full length like one of Cezanne’s bathers wrote in a journal, boys play-acted and squabbled like the fairies and mechanicals. But all these dreams are the surest way to make people stop listening, actively and with looks of affronted patience, or diss and dissect with psychoanalysis whatever they did hear.

Yesterday it came to pasting words into the Annotations from the talk on nouns, since at some point we’ll want to see what some of them are writing anyway, and I had nothing new written as we spent all day down in the yard picking, slicing, mashing and containing apples. Miserable rides in the car before daybreak and after sunset, with constant talk of the sisters or repetitive music assaulting all attempts at rest or thought, too dark to read or write or look out the window.

So this is the alternative to such havens of quiet, for most kids their only reality, a loud darkness hurtling fast along.

So this morning, trying to flush the aural parasites with Sufjan’s planetarium and make up for lost time with words, quiet, stillness, that moderation we must be passionate towards or it will go out like a light, a dreamed place. An easy week this time, the penult, and diligent nanowriming up until last night, when I was too full of sleep and depression to try to come up with more words for my convoluted immobile plot. The dream that followed was a combination of worrying I have lost touch with good friends, because Jess was there, and that I’ve missed my chance to enter into communities of intellect, art, and leadership I might have done, as the rest of the group was vaguely important, confident, the doers of meaningful work and enjoyers of life’s deeper pleasures. We were around a table awhile, or they were, while I was off to the side, serving or simply lurking there trying to catch a word, a reference dropped. This owed something to the poetry workshop they held at Spark yesterday, which I could overhear but not participate in, not having signed up and paid, only volunteering my time by chance at the same time as it on my new day. It sounded like they had lines borrowed from other books and their own unfinished work and were trying to connect the pieces into something. I caught the question about word-hoards, personal vocabularies, and couldn’t show off that I knew something about where that treasure was buried in the English language.

The place where we were was also like a hostel or a rented house, which connects it to my more immediate anxieties about teaching Spanish, or only training in how to behave in a classroom. It seems that this latter training has been pushed to its extreme and any further going down that road would be in absurdity at this point, when the respect for authority at the very highest levels is a betrayal of anything good or true. And so I can agree with Mr Farzana that my teaching methods are boring and ineffective, that I am failing and as a result smart kids are getting subpar grades, feeding them into that cycle little by little by which they’ll be spit out of the schools to do their learning elsewhere, on streets or cellblocks. It will be a time to tell them so without mincing words, but without undermining the curriculum or school as such, only rending away my own poor effort to stand in for them, and in their place to try a Michel Thomas lesson. There is nothing to lose at this point, and plenty that might be gained.

I had the transcript all written out in abbreviated form, and below it I mused, sitting in the sun, until kids in the cafeteria knocked on the windows at me, or was that a different time?: Not will this work, but how to present this? Watch the documentary first? Say something about my learning trajectory? About his life? With a couple of students at a time? And is the danger simply that it undermines the respect for school as a whole, or is it the more personal fear of having wasted so much time, fought so many unnecessary battles and caused so much needless antipathy, that you are too invested in the old ways to give them up without losing your identity? What would the corresponding method look like in other classes, of building more and more complex structures of logical connection? Or is it enough to know that it happens best when students learn face to face with a teacher, not as passive listeners to a slow disintegration of small ideas in the soft hands and mumbling mouths of small minds? Should they each just listen to the audio recording, or watch Khan academy videos, or read with the guidance of the computer station?

In passing, what else I’ve been doing in free time at Glover: besides transcribing Michel Thomas and agonizing about implementing it with the 7th and 8th graders: translating Old English poems laboriously with glossaries in the back of the book; watching lots of Signum Seminars and the webathon, though for some reason the part on Stranger Things is blocked by the restricted mode filter; reading Teach Like a Champion and gradually forgetting everything which would have been good to have done. While working on planning, grading, eating lunch or watching kids during detention I’ve listened over and over to Taverner’s Funeral Canticle, watched a video essay by Bernstein on teaching, some interesting Feldman chamber music, etc. Then I check in the intervention room every so often, or they call me to cover classes for which no subs have been contracted that day--or string of days. And I doubt it is legal to post any reproduction of the Michel Thomas Spanish CD, so I’ll not do that with my transcription. Particularly since my students have googled me and found my youtube videos and were apparently listening when I mentioned I write this blog, I had better be a good role model.

Religion and Politics and Fire

What can I say? Slightly fictionalized for inclusion in nanowrimo:

This morning the janitor invited me over to the woodshop for their morning group for Christian fellowship. A few of the teachers would meet to watch a few minutes of a video recording of an old pastor of theirs who had passed away. The talk seemed to be a discipleship class, with other members around the table, but the camera was fixed on the old man. The others would talk from time to time, but when the old man spoke, you could also see their hands moving pens over the papers in front of them, treasuring his words. And what did he say?

It was interspersed with jokes and badinage from the living souls who gathered there to watch the video, and short stories that had to be told. One comes in a few minutes late with a bagel sandwich, apologizing that he’s eating in front of everyone, but his wife has had too much time on her hands since the kids moved out and keeps packing him too much food, food enough each day to last for three days, so that their fridge is overflowing with his leftovers. Another, the science teacher, tells how a student kept drawing on tables and so he gave him community service to help with the murals the art club has been doing in the middle school classrooms. I’ll trump yours with this story, says another one, and they excel one another in wincing laughter at the political pun introducing it, so already you know the sort of thing you’re in store for, but it turns out you’re not quite right. This student keeps asking him to help out with something, not as extra credit, just because he admires the teacher and wants to help. He doesn’t need help, of course, but not wanting to quash that enthusiasm, either, he took the student up on a couple of little projects, washing out beakers after the lab and sweeping up the hallways, which always seem to get cluttered with more odds and ends than the janitor knows how to keep up with, and as they were walking down the hall the kid said to him, “How come you haven’t grown up?” He didn’t know what he meant at first, but it seemed that kid’s dad had a beard, and since he didn’t, he was wondering if he wasn’t grown up. He didn’t seem to understand that not everyone had a beard, and was awaiting the day he would have his. And then he asked, “Are you sad?” He said something noncommittal, no, I’m all right, something like that, but the student said, “You’re really sad. I can tell.” He didn’t elaborate, but he said when he took him back to his English teacher he praised how perceptive the kid was and how emotionally intelligent, whatever his disabilities might be in other regards. He asked her about it and she said, yep, that’s him all right. Attuned to other people’s feelings in a special way.

The video was on complete forgiveness, the emphasis that this must be learned with humility and discipline to such a perfection that it is only possible with God. The pastor began telling a story of his dear mother-in-law’s remarriage to a nice Christian man, them both being up in years, and how the pastor would learn about forgiveness by watching her, for whenever the husband would get cranky and say offensive things, she you could have sworn was deaf to them all. The teachers joked that here was the secret to a happy marriage: ignoring your spouse! And about the license plate “My wife says I don’t listen--at least I think that’s what she says,” and then the obligatory Trump joke passed back and forth. The guys think they’re so funny, the wife said, and got things back on track. She took prayer requests and spoke the prayer to close the meeting when everyone else was abashed, looking down at shoes and folded hands to avoid meeting her eyes; prayers for peace and reconciliation after the election results, knowing the kids might be upset, to say nothing of their coworkers who had other views about abortion or the relative merits of being a crook versus a bigot, prayers for safe families, safe, travel, and thanksgiving.

And all of them voted for him--they asked me but I put the question off, saying that’s what the kids have been asking and I don’t know how to respond. I think they must have guessed my answer, but I couldn’t help saying how surprised I was by the result, where they expressed relief, comfort, a kind of righteousness or beatitude. The wife’s reason was that he was pro-life, whereas the Democrats would kill babies up to the last minute; his, that he was the lesser of two evils, brash and crude as opposed to manipulative. I had the same reason for my vote the other way, so I could at least agree to that characterization, but my Socratisms failed me. I listened to the advice of the old white man with bald old skin and wretched red flesh on his thin neck, huge glasses blurring his eyes in their shadowed sockets. Such a godly man, she said. They thanked me for coming as I thanked them for inviting me.

I wouldn’t be here after next week, at least not every day. In a couple of hours, during my Spanish class, a kid walked out saying he was switching classes, and some time later was marched down to the intervention room by a furious gym teacher I had seen laughing and praying that morning, not entirely rationally declaring after him, “You’re done!”

It echoed the way Trump talks, and that phrase of his, too: “You’re fired.” In this election the two sides didn’t seem to inhabit the same reality: on the one hand, disaster, on the other, the abyss. From my perspective, each outcome fearful and absurd. If Clinton had won, the status quo and progress are interchangeable, the words cease to have meaning; with Trump, leadership and vanity turn the same trick. As we tried to rise for the pledge, one angry girl kept yelling at me to say if I was a Trump supporter. I could honestly say I was not, after the pledge to the flag, which I never say aloud, but still stand for and respect.

But maybe that’s what’s at the core of the disaster and the circumference of the abyss: the loss of respect, even more than the loss of meaning in words or attention to think about them or the things they represent: reason’s eclipse in the frenzy of feeling. Clinton loses, and the mobs riot; had Trump lost, the militias would deploy.

What is the most optimistic thing to be said? Now what? The revolt against political establishment has penetrated the Republican party and put their man in power, while their establishment still holds the legislature, so the conflict of interparty strife is turned to intraparty wrangling for priorities? The Democrats must confront themselves in turn as a party whose base is not yet diverse enough geographically to overcome electorally the minority white vote that overspreads the states, and whose vision of progress is not self-evidently persuasive to that base writ large, much less to the whites who continue to oppose it, even flocking to its antithesis--a bigot, a bully, a climate-change denying ostrich, and any other excoriation you like, but it only makes it worse that he beat you in spite of all? Some such elite mumbo jumbo?

The media are even more thoroughly discredited, all their predictions and cheerleading for naught. Half of the country still sat out the vote, for various reasons and lack thereof. Half of those who did vote, and more than half, are led by the option they voted against perhaps still more than they voted for any alternative, and have nothing to do about it but become engaged in some way still more time-consuming than voting and trying to digest the news.

The effort of comprehending the reality that is, and arguing over what it means about oneself and one’s country, and watching to see what will happen next, when the consequences of this decision begin to play themselves out, but may have happened anyway, or something worse, if things had gone differently and we had chosen the other reality--all this is overwhelming for that reason, and no wonder then that feeling carried the day, or some intelligence too subtle and terrible for my poor comprehension.

Then, trying to get class started again after that little outburst, we smelled smoke. Trying to keep the students in the room and calm, I went to the woodshop to see the teacher running with the extinguisher to spray the dumpster outside that was burning. The janitor thinks it might have been arson: the gate was open. By chance, another fire started at North Central, but they say that was from the welding torch on the construction site there.

On the brink of Nanowrimo round 2

And now Ben’s posted Eliot’s Dante-Shakespeare-there is no third: what was that decree that divided the world between Spain and Portugal? Having just skimmed through Bloom’s How to Read and Why, I’m inclined more than ever, though it’s pointless, to protest, Montaigne! The essay is not touched upon there, though it’s a kind of essay in serial he’s writing, and the genius of the latter of Eliot’s duumvirate expands beyond all comprehensibility.

In our talk about Ambedkar, Michael mentioned a remark about the Gita being deeper than Dante, but then he called the Commedia Bible fan-fiction, which I don’t suppose the clerkly TS would countenance.

Walking in the park with the fallen leaves of yellow with their stems like pink coral, thinking of how long I will get to walk around in the rain thinking and looking at the leaves until I finally noticed the rain had let up and I should put away my umbrella, and I was already almost home, long before coming to any conclusions about the merits of not knowing the duration of a life or what Shakespeare might have been doing in those last three years.

I got up early a couple mornings and managed to write or type something of this long last entry in the series about reading-response, but this next month is November, as good an excuse as any to buckle down and write for an hour every day before school, then as much again after it as may be. That morning writing hasn’t happened yet, instead only nighttime writing on the Annotated Book with that darker tone in the palette now, too.

The one kid at the high school where I volunteer once a week keeps showing up, working at gleaning links from wikipedia about the great video game crash of 1983, which is what passes for a research project in US history. And good for him! He doesn’t think he’s smart in reading and writing, but his entire grade is based on things he hasn’t been taught, 10-point reading quizzes on a couple of pages of textbook condensity. Much better off not reading at all than reading like this, surely.

Or what about a book like The Arrival? There is more Australian history in that than I’d ever learned, and not a single word. The hieroglyphic writing spells Shaun’s name at least once or twice, but the storytelling and art style are much more legible signatures. Four years he spent working on this book?! It reminds me of reading those mysterious picture books by the strange genius Van Allsbruck or however it was spelled. We had to write a story from one of the pictures--I think I picked the flying nuns--classic ekphrasis, and later we got to do one in English where the lighthouse postcard let me bring in the wise seagulls and rowdy pirates.

Another strange reading lately was the illustrious Dream of the Rood, laboriously translating it word for word with all its hypermetrics and prosopopeias up until the heavenly feast, where I ran out of time. A very old picture book, since some of the lines adorn a stone cross with natural patterns, an ancient Vi Hard doodle with a message of heroic suffering interwoven. A very important lesson is buried in there, about memorization, realization of the oral tradition and the ability to represent it in whatever form, recitation or pictorial art--that telling a story, finding the right words, is almost the opposite of sinning, or of being broken down by Socratic questioning, and that confidence, too, is very important, perhaps primary for so many who initially lack it; before they are forced to rethink, perhaps they could think in full sunlight and get to know what that feels like. For many kids it is the performative action not of the stage but of the playing field, and little wonder that is what they like to do. But they do read it and write it, too, in a manner of speaking, if they can be brought to notice it on their own. Having the right words, the retort, the inside joke, is universally prized. All this is something of the message of that victorious tree and its hero-sufferer.

What else? Steph’s sister was in town, and then the other sister and company for trick-or-treating madness, but not maybe as bad since the weather probably kept some kids at home. We’d gone up to the Green Bluffs barn brewery-pumpkin patch and Steph had her heart set on getting some farmland there, setting up shop, whether beer or produce or grilled cheese off a food-truck, it didn’t seem to matter. Her Pa would build the enclosures, her sisters would all pitch in, and I could keep subbing and writing, as long as we got to all be together--a nice goal, I think, in need of much capital, good fortune. We could have field-trips and retreats out there, campers, air-bnb or woofers. But she did have an interview with the home-schools co-op north of here. There might be something to look into there, how they get away with it, chiefly.

Meanwhile, all this language around here of sparking, igniting creativity, as a way for people who like these sorts of things to find work and out of a genuine desire, no doubt, to help others, but also smacking of that crux, that tyranny of love, which is to say, what do you mean by helping? Is it to make yourself feel good, or really to get down to roots and brass tacks? I had this shoved in my face last week at Spark, when I wanted to banish the little Minecrafters after they had a tussle, and then I was rightly made to eat humble pie for it. And this phrase the tyranny of love actually comes up also in the context of Gandhi’s followers mobbing him wherever he goes, so there is a bottom-up as well as a top-down form of it. Is it really in the power of anyone, however well-intentioned, to generate, to spark in any systematic way the learning, much less the creativity of others, or is this only possible in that realm of terrible mystery, falling in love? A radically improper thing for a teacher to do, even an Abelard, unless a messiah; or even a Gandhi, unless balanced by his Ambedkar, and recalled as such; a Jesus only with the whole tradition, and not only Paul, borne in mind? But it certainly says something about us that we wish so badly to believe it can be so, and not only for all these world-historical figures, but for classroom teachers and shoestring non-profits.

Platero y yo and I

I dreamt furniture here and there on the field, stray like constellations. It might have been that same morning I woke up with my ideas for a short study of Virgil and My Antonia to relate to the I am a Town poetry workshop, which is like what Virgil did for Rome and what Tolkien initially intended doing for England, and also like what I would do with the neighborhood, much as Joyce and Proust and Garcia Marquez have done for theirs--and why are they so lauded and largely unread except by professors, while Tolkien is widely read and derided by supposedly serious scholars? The stuck-up gatekeepers--that same argument Olsen pointed out in the intro to the Fairy Course was employed by the Guardian culture columnist in his dismissal of Pratchett, and probably a good place to start the Discworld course as any. To say a book or a writer is bad in the same breath as saying you haven't bothered to read them. About time to start taking notes, too, even if you won’t make a proper start to recording and all till having read all the books again, if ever! So that’s high on the docket. But I thought this piece on Virgil ought to have some input from James and Matt and Caley, and then for My Antonia of course James and Ed Denny must say their piece again, and maybe Eli or Lea. So then I thought, why not make it all a conversation in recordings? So this goes up there, too, with talking to Elliot and Michael, the monks.

Connected with one or both or all these things, then, is a brief review of Amadeus, another in this series of responses to works well-known in their way but obscure as far as timeliness goes, totally out of the loop. But it does seem like there is something interesting about the portrayal of court composer Salieri and Mozart, the pathos of both, their ridiculousness, their mediocrity (in art and in life) and their sublimity (as musical genius and patron of mediocrity, respectively)--something which captures the weighty mantle the artist comes to bear in the West, which has finally made all greatness suspect, if not quite sunk. But which in turn allows the ridiculous--Sir Terry rises again--to be recognized as wonderful and profound in its own right. And I thought Dr Fimi might have missed this in her dichotomy, with its neat space for Tolkien in the middle way: placing Joyce and Dada on the same pole, way over on art, seemed to ignore how fundamentally playful they were, and not only pretentious. Besides, they are communicating that playfulness itself, something which can only be communicated in just that artful a way, as is the case with all good poetry.

And last for now but not least, this question posed on Ben Tansey’s facebook about the five books you’d recommend someone you considered intelligent yet disagreed with on almost everything, so as to represent your worldview--something like this--and I replied briefly with my five, but would have liked to say much more. I said The Golden Compass (audio, preferably, I think), The Little Prince, Platero and I, Chekhov’s story of Easter Night, and the Winter’s Tale. Or else maybe whatever five books I’d read most recently. And that it was a great question, well-formulated.

A kind of instructive case for thinking about what makes a good question, in fact, with the contextualizing carried within it, the hypothetical meeting up against the actual, the way it requires something limited yet which must be the token of much more behind it, the way it gets at what shapes you and your most generous and judgmental of perceptions, of what accounts for the limits within which and language with which you read the world, your assumptions about intelligence, your interest in disagreement, your desire to be understood and share in someone else’s or many other people’s thoughts on these topics.

As for the books, if we may move away from the question and its ramifications awhile: maybe no reading experience has had such a profound impact on me as that of picking up Platero y yo, in excerpted form with the Chosen Pages of Juan Ramon, browsing one day in the Miller Library, and reading those first few chapters, first few lines--the way their music enchanted me while much of the meaning escaped, just how Pullman speaks of encountering Paradise Lost in the reading aloud of his wonderful teacher Enid Jones, so that what was imprinted most was a sketchy track toward an irrecoverable mystery on a thread of intelligibility, spurred by desire, and content to wander. Hardly read all the words in this book still, much less deeply analyzed it, yet it remains my dearest treasure for that experience, blending with the travels and perspectives and people it’s led me to since, via the Spanish language. Sparing me from a fate as a mediocre English professor lost in the PhD milieu, or writing very ordinary but markedly pretentious novels, or both. For all that part of me wishes I could have gone that route, too, and had a Dr by my name already and publications which someone, if only the editor of the periodical, had read with a modicum of interest.

The other maybe unlikely choice there, Chekhov’s Easter Eve or however it should be translated, eked out the place over Dubliners for a similar reason, because of how little I really know the story, but how fond I am of regarding it as the promise of a whole world of stories I may or may not ever read, but love all the same. I’d have to study Russian for years, I know, to have any chance--and German, Latin, and Greek still would probably come first, a year or two each, at minimum, intervening, then--a whole possible life again, very plausibly overlapping with the PhD route, also evidently not wholly abandoned yet among my castoff ambitions, aimless pursuits of happiness inherited from others’ imagined worlds. Consider the way the story matches Bede;s account of Caedmon, for instance, or the image of the ferryman juxtaposed with the communal resurrection of Easter light. And how the Folio Society copy is so different from that chance pulling of the tattered Paginas edition off the shelf, and how reading it in your bedroom was placing it squarely within the privileged realm of what you new must be good, and how in your own hours spent writing you strove so consciously to gain admittance there yourself, that what you wrote, things like the video game philosophy, the lego-based video game, the story of old folks in the garden, and the various abortive versions of the beach or the wolf or the penguin, those elaborations of visions complete in themselves, yet longing to give them narrative flesh and bone, or poetic music or plastic form--they couldn’t help but fall flat, woefully short, and yet hope springs eternal--they could still be salvageable all the same! Your open letter to the city workers at Duval Park imitating Tristram Shandy, your imaginary love letters to girls you were too timid to talk to, formed of immature readings of Shakespeare, Joyce, and Proust, in short, reading and agonizing over writing when you were much better off going out. But still a kind of foundation was laid there, perhaps, and you’ll yet have your cakes and ale and eat and drink them, too!

For this optimistic track, then, over Joyce’s ineffable paralysis, I hold up this story, but a word must be said about that compound of activity and potential which Dubliners in turn represents. Like it or not, this has characterized me most of my life: early addicted to the allure of reading, aficionado of its fascinations in adolescence, precocious but not diligent or dedicated enough in college perhaps, and in adulthood still not resigned--because to truly dedicate yourself to reading and writing you’d say is to forego further Spains, further Uruguays, for something like Phoenix--drudgery, however rewarding, in a place that may as well be no place for all you can appreciate it, and on top of that instead of friends, cut-throat competitors visible and unseen, submitting their work, their wicked critiques, withering insights and knife-wielding words--and to commit all to proving you can compete on that grounds--so Annapolis without friends or prospects again. Trying to recapture that total entregment of oneself a child has reading, as Pullman describes, and as you experienced in the The Golden Compass, in its sequels, too, and knowing now what you are going to be missing in so doing. Hence the paralysis; a long-winded word it was.

Instead, you’d want Spokane to be a better Boston, an outgrowth of home, natural and unforced, taking its own time. With a Winter’s Tale choice, there’s quite a lot at stake. The thought process there, after all: have to have something by Shakespeare, only not one of the tragedies, so Antony and Cleopatra is out; well, then which one will be a little more original? so not Twelfth Night of the Tempest or As You Like It--oh yeah, there’s some lines in The Winter’s Tale I loved at first sight! Better be that one. And from that summer when I read everything by Shakespeare except King John and Henry VIII--which I still haven’t got around to yet--these passages of the so-called romance are what stay with me the most now and what most transported me then, before I’d had the full bardolatry treatment from academics, but already knew of him that he was a writer beyond any other, in himself a kind of Bible, a Renaissance Homer, given the Borges story. Normally in questions like this you set Shakespeare and the Bible aside, as if taking it for granted that anyone would already have read or be expecting to read them anyway, but I wonder if instead a favorite play and book from each should be required. For me, it is The Winter’s Tale and the gospel of John. There is that stage direction exit, pursued by Bear, which I think Chekhov remarks upon somewhere; the thief-trickster character; the simile of the wave on the sea; and of course the surprising resurrection: “she’s warm!” Maybe this is how I wish I could write more than anything, with assured realism and miracle, fantastic scoffing at conventional styles, thoughts, inventiveness at the level of characters’ expression while adapting to new purposes old materials. And of course, providing the reader or playgoer with infinite and endless possible readings, the Globe the whole world, and also the world outside it seen anew. This is to paraphrase Montaigne’s “wavelike and diverse”; to acknowledge that with Shakespeare one also accepts the world of scholarship, the intertwinings of the great books and the labors of countless people to make a living by reading them, and occasionally managing to get someone else to listen to their ideas about them: as for me Barzun was so revelatory, pointing out this passage in Montaigne, and all the editors of the Bard, particularly Johnson and Bloom, conspire to make his infiniteness both comprehensible and even more multidimensionally wondrous still by the acumen oozing from their claims.

I wonder if that’s enough said about all this for now, and I should pass to the LIttle Prince. In one of my many efforts at more systematic disciplined study, I started with St-Exupery’s short novels and intended to read everything I could of his and better internalize him so as to be able to really read Terre des Hommes and Le Petit Prince, which occupy a similar place for me, and have a story similar to Platero’s, only in this case I had heard of the author before. His life impinges so much on the book that we are tempted ot give up the distinction between living and reading which has given us so much angst, if only a fully enreadened life could retain the eternal mystery of the word--incarnation. After all, the author was shot down in the war and yet lives on, even once they finally found the wreckage of his plane. In the relationships to his words, he lives on even more surely with us than in the uncertainty of his impossible escape by parachute, or by flock of birds. No more beautiful reading experience exists for me, too, than the internal relationship here between the words and pictures--the possible exceptions crowding fast being the Moomins, or, in a different direction, the Studio Ghibli movies, or Earthbound. His nostalgia for learning to draw, and his theory of right interpretation depending on purity of listening and questioning of the sort manifested in the child in the desert, tell us how to read without telling us what anything means. A picture is a kind of definition, or at least a connotation, giving to the language of the story its internal richness, and again, in this case, an extra feeling for what has been lost, and how far it can be recaptured, and thus also something more that is gained.

Philip Pullman also has made drawings for his books, and probably for the plays he wrote for the schools where he worked. It would be interesting if he ever recorded his recitations of the myths or any of his lecture material from the college where he taught, or said more about workshop practices with his writing students, but there are some indications there, anyhow, of what his apprenticeship consisted in. As the pilot has the Prince to talk to, as Lyra has Pan, so we have our stories to write to: imaginary friends who are nevertheless real. This is reduplicated again in the Prince’s story of the Rose and the Fox. Surely there is some shiny bit of story there to incorporate? The brittle and ostentatious Rose is also Dante’s celestial Rose, after all, in the way that religion is made trite, and even evil in Pullman’s world, but its beauty and its protectiveness of love and of its thorns, too, to the point of worshipping it, reifying it or personifying it, is indisputably there in the background of all these books. The flights we contrive for ourselves by our science and technology are apt to fail at any time and throw us back on this older humanism--we are continually relearning the same old stories, (do the Redoubt need teachers, or shoot us on sight?)  making of ourselves meaning, as the fox among foxes and the child among mankind and the Rose among the gardens.

Then there is the Golden Compass: it’s fall again, so the time is right to revisit, reread or relisten to some of it. What better book to take for emulation during nanowrimo? It taught me to love stories for more than the contentment of being absorbed in them, that delight in exploring worlds and internalizing them that video games also offered in their visceral way. It gave me the sense for the story’s transmission of some truth too embodied to be communicated in any other way--a sense of the poetry of stories, of their mythic quality, and the great significance for real life of questioning and investigating these truths that were embodied all around and I hadn’t known it. In the process, I was drawn to the craft of telling stories in a more conscious way, and set about all these projects in earnest which occupy me to this day. Some of them, no doubt, could reasonably be converted to short children’s fictions or plays for voices, stubs of games and sketches of comics on the chalkboard with the narration and accompanying music read over the drawings. The dream of total art, the incorporation of more sorts of concealing and revealing clothing for more sorts of truths of innocence and experience, the desire to be a renaissance man of music and drawing, as well as a poet and storyteller and memoirist whose life would be worth telling about, as well as a scholar of recondite sources in von Kleist and Blake and the King James Bible--in short, the dream of total life, the stakes of which were coming clearer, the cost of failing in attempting some of all this and the intimations of the way to recovery in continual practice with words--I had the feeling all this belonged to me.

Now, because Pullman is so adamant about the storyteller not telling anyone how the book is supposed to be read, I was seduced by any statements which he did divulge, and by his polemical arguments, but never so much that i ignored the hints laid down in the stories themselves pointing to how they would like to be read. For all that Pullman professed his democratic agnosticism once the book was in readers’ hands, he maintained his right to be a tyrant in the shed in the yard where he wrote, religiously, his three pages a day. The virtues of lying and pride, of passion and intelligence, are painted in the story as vividly as Northern Lights, but the particles of Dust that manifest in this way are still loyalty, friendship, courage, love, and the yearning for truth is haunted by theology, made beautiful and terrible by the old paradox: the truth incarnate, the word.

Response to Between the World and Me

Some days without reading in the afternoons, and then yesterday with the afternoon off reading practically all of Between the World and Me in one sitting. It would be good to talk it over with Anthony and Joe, to imitate it or respond to it on the part of the Dreamers laid so low throughout, to look up the context of Toni Morrison’s high praise, the voting proceedings of the National Book Award critic-judges, and certainly to compare it to Gilead’s fictional letter to a son from a father.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is its insistence on the body being all there is, and the struggle for it the only certain meaning. Such has been the author’s experience, bereft of God and peace or trust outside a narrow Mecca, and the materialist worldview underlies the unstinting refining of the question of the purpose of the struggle whose answer consistently comes back in those same terms. Call and response. In turn, as a positive tenet, the beautiful vulnerability of the body fuels Coates’ unquiet critique of nonviolent heroes and scorn for the idolized Dream.

Perhaps the only thing subjected to harsher treatment still is the apparatus of the state itself, the aims of the police and the schools, the pitiful resistance of the street, in all of which the body is already forfeit, and with it, of course, any personal responsibility, subsumed under the unstoppable historic process of plunder.

The book ends with a brief interview with the mother of a friend killed by police and prophetic warnings that even her strength and forgiveness, the whole tradition of black personhood she represents, is fast dying out, and that it would be powerless, anyhow, in the face of the self-destructive arc towards chaotic possessiveness that is the truth at the core of the Dream she and her heroes kept believing in, even if it was only enjoyed elsewhere, through the impermeable media of screens, by ignorant actors with white skins. The final image is the forceful embodiment of wasted potential, South Side projects rising through the rain, but also a possible ark in the swelling flood of environmental catastrophe brought on by a lifestyle in pursuit of an impossible Dream.

How this incontestably gloomy vision is supposed to coexist with the joy shining out in the depths of that ark, leaping up in moments of study in the Howard library, or on the green, or with the trips to Paris, full of unforeseen new vistas on life--all this is evidently reducible to the body, too. It does look suspiciously like the intimations of some vaster and more mysterious spirit; it comes close to collapsing the mental walls around the Dream as tinted by the television box, if we just take that further logical step of conceding that those conjugations in French class did have some purpose outside the confines of the present struggle, and that it wasn’t simply to constrain young curiosity. It would require supposing that the joy Coates felt in France, free from the crushing oppression of history and fear for his life, is just the same as the uninhibited joys of people anywhere who can forget for awhile to feel that weight and that danger--including the worshipers in any church, or the sleepwalkers or Skywalkers in any suburb. It would demand the acknowledgement of the West as being full of Tolstoys of all backgrounds, languages, and outlooks; insofar as the West means anything at all, it means that Tolstoy is as manifold as his readers; and there may be something to struggle for to preserve that freedom and security to read from attacks from outside the West as well as from within its precinct houses and illiterate classrooms, and the two threats might well be quite different in kind, so that to conflate them under the catchall Terrorism is quite mendacious, or at least shortsighted.

That there is something other than a body and greater than anybody because more enduring and life-giving than a body, namely the word, but that it means something precisely because it is embodied. Otherwise we’re just neglecting the water for the vessel, solipsists and egoists, in prison-houses of our own making, waiting empty on a shelf. But long may this vessel be full! Long may this book be taken down and read!

In a related vein, there was the training in the morning, dealing with restorative dialogue with students and coherence of instruction around critical reading skills--a roomful of white teachers, paid by the state to teach the whole range of children living in some of the poorest zip codes in it. So is it true, as Coates maintains, that the intention of the teacher means nothing, and all that counts is the difference of bodies and perceptions, or does some spark pass through the words spoken and the unspoken spirit of love, trust, and desire for freedom, through learning, from one person to another, perhaps outside of the control of either, but manifest in both results and intentions? It seems like an open question, but answering it one way permits us to keep on working, while the other is a form of the dilemma that accounts for so many suicides, senseless rampages, and other nihilistic acts among precisely the privileged, or the ignorant majority, at least.

It is too easy to suppose that only the disadvantaged or minority has access to deep thinking about some state of affairs that affects everyone, thanks to their conscious, pervasive experience of the struggle giving their embattled lives meaning. To me it has always seemed obvious that there would be something so desirable about that kind of life as to make up for any amount of hardship, to have access to those truths firsthand, and not only ever reading about them, not unlike wishing to fall in love though knowing in a sense that it would bring some pains with it. So rather than Aragorns I would say we are Raskolnikovs, this generation of hipsters and readers, seeking something that we know and don’t know, and that that pain of dissonance and seeking for meaning is real, and that it does also provide some meaning of its own, insofar as any struggle in itself does.

I don’t think this is hairsplitting too much, but that in going to work in Boston I was doing something analogous to what Coates does in travelling to Paris: seeing things from the other side. And it is what reading and learning helps to transmit, this desire for authentic experience of whatever kind. That this is embodied, for us, yet transcends the body. That we know it as a kind of experience and relationship, but what it is in itself, who’s to say? And who is to circumscribe the limits of the kinds of bodies who have access to it? That is simply dogma via ressentiment, cutting against Coates’ own professed and seemingly sincere devotion to open inquiry.

Now these workshops on restorative dialogue open up one other chasm that needs crossing, which is what the kids for whom it does not work fall into. What is going on with them, with our relationship to them? Isn’t force still the thinly veiled recourse then, if respect is not possible to piece together--the old promise, the old authority, still in effect at bottom, for all our efforts to cobble together some new contract, some more aspirational promise? And is it doing these kids, the ones who have not learned to trust words and refuse to, any favors to lead them by degrees to their shock of encounter with the force majeure?

There is something insidious about the authority pretending, agreeing to pretend, that it is not, that there is some parity, until it no longer suits it to dissemble, at which point the truncheon comes out. And yet how could we deal with these kids, these people, in the hard-and-fast rules’ absence, so as to preserve the modicum of kindness and security necessary to have the time and quiet to read, to study, to learn to be human, unless by exiling them to the side of things where consequences are enforced rather than negotiated?

Unless it is only when that whole apparatus is dismantled that the true conditions for trust are re-established; what force and exile could not accomplish, forgiveness does?

Stranger Things spoilers and ripeners

And anyhow at the end of it (the Four Years in the Desert), starting a new stage by reflecting on it, rededicating it to these friends short of making it just an account of sketches of them--a day of overwhelming housekeeping, hoping I’ve kept track of everything in the move, more or less, and in the midst of sorting through to arrange the writing docket, that word housekeeping reminds me of Dr Robinson, her Housekeeping and her Gilead, and whether the library would consider doing it for a Big Read? (In fact they are reading The Tsar of Love and Techno)

As foreseen, as with the neighborhood and jobs so far--everything in Spokane, except the pawn shops and police sirens poking through to remind you of the Upside Down--Gilead is an amazing book, well worth a city reading together. The pine-shrouded mansion next door emitted the sound of an organ the other evening, the neighbors on the other side are constructing a vine arbor. Their black dog howls along with the sirens. Their lawn was being redone by a company called Living Waters, and the farmers’ market for Emerson-Garfield,  hosted in the parking lot of the Extended Learning Dept of the community college there at Lincoln and Carlisle, had a booth called The Father’s Table with vegetables, and all sorts of programs for diet and lifestyle being peddled across from it. So good that you keep looking around wondering, what’s the catch?

In the case of the show Stranger Things, which has been a sleeper sensation--Steph found that picture of the lady who dressed her sleeping baby as El with her eggos--something that sticks in my craw is the final confrontation with the monster in the science classroom, when she is drained from mental violence and Mike promises her they’ll go to the dance together and everything will be OK: Is this the prerogative of love and faith, to demand and to make promises beyond our power to keep--going down slingshotting, David and Goliath--which then triggers the sacrifice, necessitates the separation and the salvation, or is it the weakness and the lie at the moment of the promise that makes her say goodbye? Then the Judas, or Lando, still believes and perhaps even keeps in contact with her, while the saved boy hawks up corruption and conceals it still.

Great show, borrowing wholesale from a whole culture and repackaging it all in a compelling new arrangement, very close to its sources in EarthBound, Stephen King, and Spielberg, but moving the flame ahead in some tangible way, revindicating belief in the mystery: the X-Men, the X-Files, digested and acted upon, so that they’ll be reinterpreted anew--deepening the culture, fertilizing the earth, the spiritual topsoil. So with Robinson, moving the art a step further...

Rough of A Making: Terkel, Robinson, and Obama on the Art of Democracy

To preface: this is one I want to put in shape for someone to publish who might pay me for it or at least get it a broader readership, but I got a little sidetracked and am not sure now how to proceed. Any comments or suggestions at this stage would be appreciated!

A Making: Terkel, Robinson, and Obama on the Art of Democracy

There has been perhaps no greater American storyteller of the 20th century than Studs Terkel, who gave life to the stories of other people by listening to them, asking them questions, and recording what they said. In every one of his many books comprising these oral histories, the reader finds solace, fire, inspiration, and reason, the habits and neighborhoods of ordinary days transformed by a great and playful respect. The history of a nation which can seem trite and pompous in the textbooks is threaded through with a beautiful tracery of individual lives, comprehended in a chain of living characters who speak to us in their own words.

In the early 21st century, perhaps no story has been so heralded as the fulfilment of the promise of America as the election of Barack Obama to the office of the Presidency of the United States. Perhaps no one figure is so at risk of being lost sight of as a human being like any other, overshadowed by the burdensome magnitude of his symbolic significance. His campaign gave the words grassroots, hope, and change new cachet in the lexicon of television news and kept him a step ahead of his competitors’ and detractors’ use of the new media. In winning the race, he effectively won the Nobel Prize as well on the strength of those same promises, those echoed from his speeches and those etched in his skin color and the bones of his face.

Studs passed away a few days before Obama’s election in 2008, but by an unexpected reversal, the President has, over the past couple of years, played his old role of the listener with some of the people he most admires. And to gain some insight into how Obama has sought to understand the country that elected him and attempted to shape his legacy, as the soaring rhetoric of his speeches came up against the steady inaction of Washington leadership, perhaps the place to begin is by listening in to a conversation, rather than a speech, in which Obama interviews one of the country’s greatest living writers, Marilynne Robinson.

For the full text and audio of the conversation, see these New York Times pages: part one and two. (The liberal UK Guardian offers a summary.) Read it all if you can make the time! You’ll see a link, too, if you care to follow mine, to Robinson’s essay Fear, which in turn might be put in an illuminating conversation with this other Fear by another master of form, Lydia Davis, in her case the flash-quick short story. Surely you have time to read those! To think wistfully of Kierkegaard’s work that begins in Fear and Trembling...but that really is another story... And then read Robinson’s novels: Housekeeping... Gilead… Home, which I’m still working on, and Lila, which I’m glad I still have to look forward to, and whatever else she may have written since then, by the time you, whoever you are, read this…

Only once you’ve read at least that much would I venture to say you should bother to listen any more to what I have to say about it. Now, I should say for the record, as if it weren’t already plain, I am a huge admirer of all these three I’m trying to write about, Studs Terkel, Barack Obama, and Marilynne Robinson, and it would be hard for me to pretend to be unbiased, even if I were more inclined to it, methodologically. I write about them in some way out of the desire to be part of the conversation, too. Somewhere, and I’ll look it up when I feel like procrastinating some more, my other writer role model Philip Pullman speaks on his sense of the parity he felt drawing him to language as his material for art, the encouraging and a little daunting knowledge that given the gift of speech and having pen and paper he was having all the tools before him that any writer he looked up to ever had. In putting pen to paper, I am in the conversation, as much as they are in conversation with one another by touching on the same themes, and in putting it somewhere you can read it, I hope to have drawn you into the conversation as well.

Now, there is something concrete about Obama and Robinson’s actually meeting and speaking to one another, of course. It becomes more impossible to overlook the importance of real meetings like this the more our meetings are mediated and fragmented. From the vantage of a mediated world, though, we can see that every meeting, to say nothing of talking to a president, is a careful arrangement. The more Obama says how glad he is just to have a conversation, the more evident the artfulness of his measuredness, and the more the reader is alert to the intention it bespeaks: to value real conversation, to get to define what that is.

So with Robinson, moving the art a step further: the meditative epistolary second person steeped in love and imagination, eschewing mawkishness head-on with the consideration of anger, irritation, disappointment, false humility--mosquitoes and poison ivy in the garden of the world--and elaborating an immersive inner suspense with slight but insistent hinting at graver specific troubles to be thought through or lightly touched upon: John Brown, segregation, talking with the Lord. In her conversation with the President when he interviewed her in October 2015, none of this is directly confronted in specifics from the book, but rather in general terms there is a seeking of common ground and then investigation of the points of contention, amounting to differences of interpretation, differing emphases. The notion of civic virtue, a belief in the human beings around you and, in a large country, also distant from you; the relation of this belief and these habits of virtue to time and care given to reading and writing, cultivating the inner life, as opposed to the frenetic and unforgiving media demanding consumption, presumably to be discussed with others or through social media, as an important badge on the self as presented to others; the bearing this has on hope for the democracy, for the sense of history, of this place as an amazing experiment, not a given, an empire. In this connection, the President rightly pointed out the galvanizing effect of the mistrust of people in government deeply rooted in the Revolutionary phase of our making, in our founding documents, and rightly or not, he ascribed the expansion of this fear in this moment to the pace of change in technology and economy, the demand for a global vision when there is a sense of precariousness close to home; Marilynne Robinson’s essay or lecture--this was her first distinction--on fear was his point of entry to the conversation, setting up his preferred trajectory of arcing towards justice.

Looking at how much he says in the transcript, including about his own intentions and those of his team in doing the interview, there seems to be an ars poetica democratic at play in the piece, a partial swansong by this lame duck who has always been a virtuoso of this art of democracy. He reflects fondly on his good fortune campaigning as an unknown in Iowa, finding comfort in the older generation’s values that reminded him of his maternal grandparents, encountering Robinson’s books and establishing their ongoing conversations, and he clearly understands that his audience for this piece will be small and self-selecting in all likelihood--teachers, older people, religious liberals--to whom he appeals indirectly for trust in the Democratic establishment, not just democracy in the abstract, and perhaps even outlines a project or two for his post-presidential existence, revolving around their shared concern for the effects of the inundation of politicized media and the need for other kinds of reading and conversation conducive to virtue, and the faith in one’s neighbors, and the judicious disagreement with people in power.

A little inconsistency here was evident--the President rues the fragmentation of the national audience on the one hand, yet he is more adept than anyone at playing to the grassroots in a multiplicity of ways, and he does seem to acknowledge that it is due to his expertise in getting his message through deviously, and thanks to the fear-mongering media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton, previously, that he was elected in the first place.

On Robinson’s side, as much as she wants to stress the importance of goodwill towards men, she runs the risk of ignoring the crucial role distrust of government has always played, on the one hand, and the foundational doctrine of sin, of a fallen mankind, she seems to have come to terms with somehow, on the other. Her astonishing attention to the media, reading the press for a couple of hours every morning, alongside theological writings of Calvin and Edwards, must somehow account for this considerable eccentricity in her views. There was also the mysterious bracketing of Coeur d’Alene in the transcript--I’ll have to listen to the audio to see if she said Sandpoint originally.

In passing, I read another interesting interview while waiting for Steph to get done her tutoring session and have dinner the other night, this one in the Believer, wonderful magazine, with Miranda July. She praised Lydia Davis, spoke of her start with audio recordings and spoken word alongside her punk rock group, with whom she’d had a break-up, her work in film which has garnered her mainstream fame, and her husband and child, surprising to hear about given the queer world he inhabits so joyfully in the stories Keri gave me to read of hers--and here is the important thing, she speaks of a boss and a worker voice within her, and how by starting multiple projects concurrently, she can feel rebellious working on one and not on the other, yet still be extremely productive all along, thwarting herself and yet fulfilling her pursuit of freedom. Something like this. I sent Keri the article.

Robinson, for her part, wrote the first sentence in Gilead waiting for her sons for a meal one Christmastime, surprised by the character who spoke through her and yet allowing him to determine the whole rest of the book by who he was--an old pastor with a young son.