When I was a kid, Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite book. It was also my mother’s favorite book to read to my brother and me. My niece Anya, now three, has loved it since she was old enough to understand narratives. Last I checked, it was her favorite book, too. Every time it comes up in conversation with anyone close to my age — 36 — there seems to be universal agreement that it was the best children’s book of our generation, and possibly of all time.

When Maurice Sendak died yesterday, I did not feel pangs of loss. He was 83 and had the privilege of living independently up until the end. He had a long life, and through that book alone, made an indelible mark on this world.

But it did make me think back on that book and why I loved it so much, and why I still love it now when I read it to Anya. I especially loved Spike Jonze’s 2009 adaptation of the book as a feature-length film, and not because it was faithful to Sendak’s original text. I loved it precisely because he departed from the text, took artistic license, and made it something entirely new — something more for adults who’d grown up with the book than for children. After all, how do you turn a book with only 10 sentences into a 104-minute movie without adding to it?

Why did this book, as warm and fuzzy as it is violent and terrifying, resonate with us so much? Why does it continue to feed our imaginations, and remind us of the best parts of childhood, despite its horrors? Why, in short, is it still the best?

NPR ran a story last week suggesting that contrary to popular belief, millennials — those early 20-somethings who can send a text faster than you can speed-dial your best friend from a cordless phone — actually read newspapers. Not “newspapers” in digital format; newspapers — on paper. Of course, the number isn’t high enough to convince me that we’re not doomed as a civilization, but it’s a lot higher than I’d have thought. And I teach journalism to millennials. I learn what they know about the world, and what they don’t — and how they get their information — every day.

The numbers come from a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, published online under the ambitiously sweeping title The State of the News Media 2012. It seems to be justified — it is a sweeping, ambitious report. Still, I have to wonder: should we feel comforted knowing that 22% of Americans ages 18-24 are reading a newspaper every day? These days, “newspaper” could mean AM New York or Metro, slim rags they literally can’t give away in New York City’s subway stations.

Then there’s USA Today, the most-circulated newspaper in the country with more than 1.8 million subscribers as of March 2011, featuring such hard-hitting stories as “USA is 25th best nation to be a mother.”

Nevertheless, according to the study, young people who read newspapers are more likely to hold graduate degrees and engage in civic life, through activities like writing letters to elected officials, running for office themselves, or simply attending a public meeting. And I have to wonder: what does that reflect? Put another way, is reading the newspaper a symptom or a cause of a conscientious life?

 “The Art of Fielding”
by Chad Harbach
Back Bay Books, 2012

Henry Skrimshander is a fairly unremarkable young man in most aspects– arriving at his first day of college he is undeniably scrawny, has brought with him only one book, and possesses neither the intelligence nor the charm necessary to earn the attention of his peers – except for one important exception: he is an incredible, virtuoso shortstop.  And in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, baseball is king.

The author’s freshperson debut (to use his favored, if awkward, appellation) centers on the Harpooners of Westish College, a small school in the “crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin.” The team has been a beacon of mediocrity for many years, but Skrimshander’s arrival ushers in a new era of success.  About to break the NCAA record for most consecutive errorless games, however, Henry makes an errant throw that clocks his roommate on the cheekbone, sending Owen to the hospital and Henry on a downward spiral of self-doubt and ever shakier plays.

The book, released today in paperback format, was published in hardcover in September – a hospitable time for the subject matter, coinciding as it did with the cinematic release of Moneyball, the Oscar-nominated film about underdog baseball team Oakland Athletics’ unlikely successes, and arriving hot on the heels of the final season of NBC’s critically acclaimed series Friday Night Lights, a sentimental tale of the trials and triumphs of a small-town football team.

While Harbach’s depiction of the cult-like world of athletics is without a doubt an eminently readable one, the near total lack of strong female characters is a nagging annoyance throughout. This makes sense to some extent, given the choice of milieu, but as Harbach is undoubtedly aware, the canon is hardly lacking in tomes devoted to male bonding. With The Art of Fielding, he is writing himself into a frustrating tradition of female invisibility, briefly acknowledged by Pella, the daughter of the school’s president, who condemns the one-dimensional portrayal of women in stories, “as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.”

Despite this unfortunate shortcoming, the novel is a cozy read for an English major, as well as, I would imagine, a die-hard baseball fan. Harbach gives his reader plenty of meaty literary allusions to chew on, from the overt (Herman Melville’s statue holds court in the Westish courtyard and echoes of Moby Dick are never more than a few pages away) to the implicit (the title, ostensibly inspired by fictional shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez’s seminal baseball guidebook, also summons to mind eighteenth century satirist Henry Fielding). Lines like “literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching graduate school seminars” offer a knowing wink to the like-minded audience the author surely cultivated as co-founder and editor of the literary magazine n+1.

In a piece for what is now a rather less cerebral magazine, Hemingway claimed that he would forgo a guaranteed income of a million dollars a year in favor of the chance to read again for the first time some of his favorite novels (quite a hefty sum in 1935, when Esquire published the essay). As a recession-era college grad, and one less prone to hyperbole than the late, great bullfighter, I am disinclined to make so strong a statement, however as I turned the final page of The Art of Fielding, I did find myself longing to pick it up again and experience afresh the satisfaction of a compassionate, exuberant, and engaging read.

Hilary George-Parkin is a writer and editor living in New York City.

Photo by Eric F Savage via flickr

The day my short story collection Surrounded by Water became available for pre-order, I saw an unusual body along the highway.

Not banded like a raccoon or delicate like a cat. This was large, like a dog, but with feetish black things, and an eye-catching chocolate brown coat. I had to u-turn around to look again. There, along the highway, high above the water and far from the river, was a dead otter. With thick beautiful fur, he was almost as large as my dog, and must have just been killed.

River otters are adorable, with curious little faces I’ve seen take quick peeks at me while kayaking. They’re extremely shy and rarely seen. To get to the highway, to be hit by a car, this fellow had to travel over a half mile – I tested it by car – and through a vineyard. What was he doing, going so far from home, surrounded not by water, but by land, troubled me.

“Lust” was my vet’s answer. “Spring. Kicked out of the nest and was looking for a girlfriend.” The otter may have traveled via seasonal swollen creeks, dry as dust in summer, damp and swampy in winter.   The vet also warned me that their cuteness is deceiving. “Try to hug one and it would be like hugging a chainsaw.”

I found it sad, interesting, unique and timely that I noticed him, a displaced river creature, the day of my book’s official “birth”. Surounded by Water is named from “While Surrounded by Water” a story inspired by flooding events along the Russian River  - I’m still shocked and thrilled to mention, won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Award.

Naively, I hoped the county would remove the otter immediately, his glorious fur intact and somehow give him a proper burial. Instead, several times a day for the next week or so I drove past his bloated body, one leg jutting in the air. Curiously, birds didn’t seem to be tearing him apart. I looked for him when I went past, hoping to see him gone, yet, oddly relieved when he was still there, associating him with the elation brought on by that first day of my book.

Having sent my own “baby” out of its nest, the excitement also brought along an avalanche of apprehension; will the world like my stories? As I reveal my own soft underbelly, I questioned, will Surrounded by Water find favor with reviewers? Will the poor thing, enamored with spring and enthused to greet the world, cross the highway, far from home only to have one daily admirer, morbidly driving by, checking on its progress?

Or, better yet, my little collection of stories, newly released to the planet, would it bob up now and then to surprise a solitary traveler? Here’s hoping.

Stefanie Freele is the author of “At the Foot of the Mountain, the Inexorable” in the Spring 2007 issue of Contrary. Her collection, “Surrounded by Water,” is just out.

Here is a truth about ghostwriting that I never knew until now: You can write about practically anything in the first-person — except death.

One week ago today, an old friend died after fighting cancer for three and a half years. He was just 51, had a wife, two young children, and countless friends scattered all over the world. He was famous enough for his obituary to be featured in Saturday’s New York Times. And he was the only other person in the world, besides myself, whose life, ideas, and work I have discussed using the word “I.”

He was Hillman Curtis, a web designer-cum-filmmaker, and I was his ghostwriter.

We had become estranged in recent years, but I knew he was sick. In 2010, five years after our last book project together, he confided in me over email that he “had a bad case of cancer.” It was meant as a joke, an allusion to one of his favorite films, The Royal Tennenbaums. Hillman liked to lighten the mood whenever possible, but I didn’t catch it. I was too much in shock. He had reached out to me much like he always had: seemingly on a whim, with an idea for a project that he wanted my help with. That’s how Hillman worked with everyone.

Only this time, the project didn’t involve a book — we wrote two together, one in 2001 and another in 2005 — but I’ll come back to that. The first time he emailed me, in May 2001, it was simply to ask if I might have time to help him structure his thoughts for a book on new media design he was writing. I had interviewed him a few months earlier for a magazine article about broadcast design, and apparently we’d hit it off. I was only 25. I jumped at the opportunity.

Thus began a unique kind of partnership. When he had time, he would write a mess of ideas — stream of consciousness, really — and then I’d turn the draft into a chapter. Other times, we’d simply sit and talk, and I’d record the conversation. Later, I would transcribe the conversation and write a chapter from that. I got to know him very, very well during this process. I internalized his voice, started using his expressions, and even went against my own literary judgement and ended a lot of sentences with ellipses (as he liked to do…)

The book was a success, and we worked on many other projects over the years. He would call me up, or email me, and say he needed my “special touch” on a piece of writing — usually copy for a website, a chapter for another author’s book about design, or a speech. Payment varied — once, when I was very broke, he paid my month’s rent, in addition to the fee we had already established. In 2005, we wrote a second book, about digital filmmaking, a field he waded into and then immersed himself in during his last decade of life, ultimately replacing his web design work with artist documentaries, commercials, and short narrative films. He was a self-described “serial self-reinventor.” And he was successful at practically everything he put his mind to.

Except for the last project he tapped me for, in 2010. He wanted me to train him for a half-marathon. He had begun chemo, he explained, and he was often very tired. He needed something to focus on, and someone to “kick his ass,” as he put it. He even offered to pay me.

I never said no to Hillman, and not because I was afraid to say no. When he asked someone to do something for him, it was usually a tremendous opportunity. “Do you have time to help me write a book?” Of course. “I just got this new film equipment; will you help me make a documentary about David Byrne?” Are you kidding? Yes. “Will you give me something to look forward to three months down the road, and an excuse to get out every day and breathe fresh air, talk about life, and simply enjoy being alive?” Absolutely.

But this time, Hillman didn’t follow through. We exchanged many emails about running. I advised him, developed a modest schedule for him, and encouraged him every time he reported back about a run he had completed. But we never met to go running in Prospect Park, as we’d planned on doing twice weekly, nor did he ever run a half-marathon.

I never pressured Hillman. When he was reluctant to begin our second book together because he didn’t quite know what kind of book he wanted to write, I waited — for two years, and through many false starts in the meantime. And so, when he faltered on the running, I didn’t “kick his ass,” as he’d asked. After all, he was dealing with a bad case of cancer.

Maybe I let him down. Maybe he wanted me to be Mickey to his Rocky, never backing down, showing tough love from the side of the road, stop-watch in hand as I shouted his quarter-mile splits. But I just didn’t have the heart for that.

A lot of people knew Hillman, and many more respected him. He revolutionized the web. He helped untold numbers of young designers find their way. And he gave a few of us, those lucky enough to have worked closely with him, opportunities of a lifetime.

I wish that I could ghostwrite a goodbye from Hillman, channel his voice one last time. But I can’t. Even so, if I were able to suggest the idea, I think I know exactly what he’d say: “Right on.”

I’ve come around. No longer do I wish to disparage apps and technology in favor of books and reading by kerosene. To be fair, I’ve never done the latter, but I do own a lot of books and I don’t plan on getting rid of them. One thing I don’t own, still, is an iPad (or a Kindle, a Nook, or a phone large enough to read books on).

But if others want to read their books and magazines on a small, glowing device, who am I to say they shouldn’t? Nevertheless, the debate wears on. Tediously, ploddingly, pointlessly.

This week, the British television personality and journalist Dan Snow, born in 1978, added to that debate in a piece for the Telegraph, titled, ”I hate to say this, but apps do beat books.”

A truly literary title. Intriguing, subtle, ripe for interpretation. (Or not.)

His arguments are as simplistic as his headline. He concludes that apps allow for a more immersive experience, allowing the “reader” to click through and delve as deeply into an aspect of a “story” or field of study as he likes, and skip over the parts he finds less interesting. Apparently, books, with their dogmatic structure — all those “pages” and “chapters” — don’t allow the same control.

And then there’s his writing. In the second sentence — the second sentence! — Snow writes that he’s fallen “head over heals for apps” (italics mine). As my father pointed out to me in an email, “Books are permanent. They’re there forever. You can’t just update the file server.”

But whatever. Apps are here to stay. E-readers are becoming the norm. And I’m done fighting it.

So, to Dan Snow I offer my final rebuttal: Apps are not better than books, and books are not, necessarily, better than apps. To say otherwise is like calling the Internet “better” than the library. It’s not; it’s just newer. Civilization got pretty damn far along with those antiquated, backwards things that you’ve denounced in favor of your iPad.

Still, maybe you’re right, that apps do provide a unique learning experience, one those dumb old reams of paper, bound together with glue and string and filled with nothing but words, can’t match. But seriously, what’s the point in saying they’re “better”? Besides, I can tell you one “app” that will never be available for the iPad, Kindle, or Nook: Losing track of time in the stacks of a library, which you entered to get a particular book only to find yourself, hours later, reading a different one — and finding it fascinating.

"tangazo la kifo" -- death notice for Zanzibari teenager who jumped from school window, photo by Pernille Baerendsten

Last month, a Zanzibari teenage girl jumped from the second floor of her school building to her death. It happened on a Thursday in the Hurumzi neighbourhood of Stone Town, Zanzibar. Some say she was the victim of mashetani – spirits – who had descended upon the school building, sparking mass hysteria on Tuesday and Wednesday, a school of fits and shouts, and ultimately claiming a single life on Thursday afternoon.

Amejirusha. She herself jumped, literally.

I didn’t want to write about suicide, not from Zanzibar, not from anywhere. Who wants to talk about suicide? I’d be accused of being morbid or depressing, indulging the dark side, writing about something personal that was none of my business. After all, I’m on an island. I could easily fixate on the shimmering beaches.

But there it was, this startling event staring straight into the collective eye, and it wasn’t a quiet death behind closed doors, it was very much public, this girl having fallen to her death in mid-daylight, for all who were in close proximity to hear – and see.

Rumors flew about the cause(s) of this girl’s death. Some couldn’t even call it a suicide. A suicide is the ultimate sin against God. It’s not a suicide if you don’t decide. Rather, she was possessed.

How did they know? People say an older woman had entered the school building on Tuesday morning and mysteriously never came out or was seen from again. Guards had closed all possible exits but could not track her. The school became convinced that she was a spirit who had entered the bathroom and was now causing uncontrollable disturbances in classrooms. Students were afraid to use that bathroom and on Thursday, when the teenager in question had gone to the bathroom, she reportedly ran screaming and immediately jumped to her death, splitting her head open on the ground.

Amejirusha.

Most people I spoke with, including her neighbors and friends, believed wholeheartedly spirits had caused the teenager’s death. The spirit world in Zanzibar is pressed up against the living in all aspects of life. Spirits, both within the Islamic cosmos and those who fall outside Islamic realm, play a major role in daily life – as an explanation for strangeness, crisis, illness, depression, bad luck, and pain.

Spirit possession can be an expression of grief, as well. At a Swahili funeral, it’s not uncommon to witness women’s fits of sorrow where, one by one, each starts wailing, reaching arched-back into states of rage, tears, and undulation — grief embodied. Mass hysteria in schools is also not such a rare phenomenon. When trying to make sense of all of this, a friend and avid journalist reminded me of giggling fits of hysteria that had taken over one Tanzanian school in the 1960′s.

But this was a girl who had also threatened suicide in the past. A year ago she’d allegedly taken pills after heartbreak led to suicidal tendencies. The parents had consulted with the school, the teachers had consulted with her parents, but no one knew quite how to approach this young girl’s increasing wasiwasi (anxiety).

Her name was Camerina, an unusual for a Swahili girl. She’s remembered as a kind fifteen-year-old who often called out from her rooftop in the Hurumzi neighborhood, down to the streets below. Her death announcement, written in chalk on the community black board, invited all in the neighborhood to attend her funeral and show support for her grief-stricken family. Two nights after she died, several ladies on the baraza with whom I spoke about the tragedy said emphatically: tumeshapoa — we’ve already recovered.

But I hadn’t. The girl’s death pinched a nerve with me – not because I am unwilling to believe in mashetani as the reason for her death, but because there was no question about it. It occurred on school grounds, in broad daylight, with public adults in her midst. She had expressed the desire to kill herself once before. What was she thinking in the seconds before she jumped? Could her death have been prevented?

Her death also disturbed me because suicide seems to be all over the news lately. From Morocco to China, Lebanon to Ethiopia, Greece to Ireland, people seem to be killing themselves. It reminds me of Wordsworth’s haunting turn-of-the-century caution: the world is too much with us.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

1. In the same month as Camerina’s death by jumping in Zanzibar, CNN released a story about Alem Dechasa, an Ethiopian domestic worker in Beirut, Lebanon who’d been repeatedly abused by her employer. She was ultimately beaten in the streets and shoved into a car after she reportedly “acted out.” This attack was captured on film and broadcast online, which sparked outcries of dismay and protest. Soon after this horrific attack, the 33-year-old mother of two was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment and later hung herself at dawn using hospital bed sheets.

Urged by the U.N. to investigate Dechasa’s suicide, Lebanese and international news sources both confirmed that currently at least one suicide occurs PER WEEK in Lebanon, committed mostly by female domestic workers from Ethiopia as well as other countries. As a result, Ethiopia has recently put a ban on all travel to Lebanon until they can adequately address this injustice. http://ethiopiansuicides.blogspot.com/

2. Around that same time, another suicide story hit the news — this time, Amina Filali, a 16-year-old Moroccan girl who was forced to marry her rapist so that he could escape punishment. According to Moroccan law, Article 475 of the penal code protects the rapist from criminal charges if marries his victim. In this case, family pressure to defend the girl’s honor led to a humiliating marriage. Amina simply could not stand her fate and willfully ate rat poison. I can’t accept that she was possessed by spirits or that her fate had been written by God. The world — her world — was too much with her. In fact, it was closing in on her. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/03/moroccan-girl-suicide-marry-rapist.html

3. In January of 2012, reports on the Foxconn Apple factory suicides in China surfaced. Under extreme duress, factory workers were reportedly jumping from factory rooftops. Factories began asking their employees to sign “suicide pledges,” promising not to kill themselves on work premises. After eighteen attempted suicides, nets were installed in some factories to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths. Still, workers planned a mass suicide to protest unbearable working conditions.  Unbearable conditions  had forced them to lay waste their powers.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html

There are those who will say that suicide is a social fact, not news. Desperate people take desperate measures to relieve themselves of the insane pain of the material world. Farmers living with drought. The impoverished living with debt. Widows living without husbands. But, how many individual reports of suicides does it take to sound off the alarm of a growing global trend?

Consider the revival of a different kind of suicide – death by economic crisis.

4. A Greek pharmacist recently shot himself in central Athens near the Greek Parliament, having written a note stating that austerity measures had ripped away his pension and left him rummaging through trash, making him a burden to his children. Greece now has the most rapidly increasing rates of suicide in Europe, currently at 40% higher than the year before. The Greeks are self-immolating and shooting themselves out of desperation with a life that feels impossible. Death is the only way out, or so it feels.

In Ireland, citizens can now sign up for church seminars like, “Suicide in Recessionary Times,” hopefully offering tips on how not to take one’s life. The opposite would be too much like a futuristic horror film, a Doris Lessing novel turned into reality. http://www.alternet.org/economy/155012/crisis_to_suicide:_how_many_have_to_die_before_we_kill_the_false_religion_of_austerity

Where else, then, are people so desperate that they are taking their own lives? Where else is life so unbearable that it cannot go on? How do we explain a suicide if not by mashetani?

If we consider other reasons for wanting to end one’s life, it would mean facing the debilitating failure of our days. It would require us to confront a collective responsibility to feel, think, and respond in a way that stimulates our brain waves to produce hope, perceive love.

It would mean major conversations on systemic accountability. Legitimate proposals for social change. The radical belief that each person has the power to shift the direction of a horrible day and it can be written so. It would mean a massive re-distribution of sustenance. It would mean we respond to the desperate if sometimes dramatic signs of teenage despair. It would mean the extreme halt of intolerable working conditions. A listening revolution.

It would mean lighting fires in the great darkness that is our (fallible) conscience.

Here in Zanzibar, it’s spirit possession. There, it’s austerity. Chemical imbalance. Forced marriage. Impossible laws. Patriarchy. Drought. No way out. It’s the feeling of meaning slipping out of your being like breath itself. Either way a life is lost. Sometimes mourned. Sometimes featured on major news programs. Most times, not.

Suicide makes for awful dinner conversation, to say the least. It’s not a charming topic. I’m not writing this for likes or shares. Actually, I’ve been trying hard over the last few weeks to write about this in a way that wouldn’t offend anyone. Categorically, suicide is like a slithering snake. It’s a gender issue. Blame it on patriarchy. It’s a poverty thing. A class thing. A labor issue. Blame is on capitalism. It’s a spirit thing. Blame it on possession. It’s a loss of faith. Blame it on God.

I guess I’m haunted by the fact that everyone who takes their own life has those many alive-days leading up to their deaths – which are rarely lived in isolation. We come home to each other. We greet each other on the streets, at work, in the classroom, in the factory. In this way, we’re all implicated – interrelated – involved.

I grew up believing that life is sacred, that it should be defended and respected no matter what. It’s eerie though, how people can create the unbearable social and emotional conditions that lead to suicide, and then find ways to make excuses for it, mourn, and move on. Honestly, existentialism is sometimes the only comfort.

Tumeshepoa. We’ve already recovered. Okay, then. So, how does recovery lead to discovery?

A single suicide story is a local tragedy. A quiet grief.  But five separate mentions of suicide around the world in the last three months make this an outcry too loud to shrug off as coincidence.

Is the world really too much with us? It was already too much.

A moment of silence, please.

.

Dusty Lee is fixated on the lawn, her head tilting and untilting, gun metal ears receiving sounds her eyes and nose can’t quite track down. It is barely night, so the light is artificial in our front yard and the blades lie between green and gleam. I stoop beside her and listen. There is a choir in there somewhere, singing a shrill song where they’ve dug down to eat the roots that feed the grass. Mole crickets.  For them, Dusty Lee will drill and paw-shovel the front lawn into a poor man’s golf course.

One evening a gift comes. Dusty Lee jumps, rests her paws on the wrought iron gate, because a friend on the other side is unwrapping the mosaic frog she picked up in Barcelona. “In the style of Gaudi,” she adds.  I shrug and she says in disbelief, “The Sagrada Familia?” My face, the blank wall… “Look him up. G-A-U-D-I.”

Thank God cluelessness is also possibility, because the next day I Google Gaudi (doesn’t Google sound froggy?) and come undone by a fraction of what he’d created. It’s the same feeling I get in this valley, always looking up, looking beyond. You’re never more aware of scale than when you live low or when you feel you’re at the feet of what can’t be possible. The magnitude and the miniscule so fundamental to nature. His spires and shape-shifting columns, vegetables on walls, tiled lizards, stars cut from ceiling, the scaffolding still standing in his masterpiece the church.  The genius of how he saw the natural world and how deeply he’d learned it, so that the ways of nature seemed his own. How he made abundance organic by merging structure with aesthetic.  His seamless synthesis comes to mind when I think about language, my desire to eat any space between the words and what they mean to say and do.

On my rounds in the garden are surprised orchids, their faces in pockets of bright and shadow, their mouths saying O, the O saying Wow. And sometimes I peer into their mischief–their tongues stained and stuck way out. There are littered leaves, one side milk-green, but flipped they sting like red chilies. All patent leather. Pepper. A breeze might suggest something’s in the trees, and on occasion something is. Lizards mimicking the mossed, mottled limbs of the mango tree, their slight heads and streamed bodies, inside of which I half expect a pulsing or the mercury receding down an old thermometer.

I think about Gaudi, a boy with an arthritic body who left behind such miraculous structures. I think about myself learning somewhere sometime to not express what pressed against inside. And I think about me writing…

Kathryn Martins is the author of “There” in the Spring 2012 issue of Contrary.

Photo by spencer77 Spencer Wright via flickr

It’s the season of planting, and “Need Somebody to Love,” by our Spring 2012 featured poet, Ronda Broatch, begins under the skin:

I’ve picked each fruit under strawberry leaves

planted my Queen of the Night
and now this sliver of bark won’t budge

for love, nor money, nor squeeze
of tweezers, like the stinger left

after the death of the bee….

“There” in Trinidad, Kathryn Martins tells us, “You know the smell of jasmine when you smell it. It is feeble to call it fragrant. It is feeble to call it sweet….”

And in Lia Skalkos’s “Encyclopedia Floridiana,” Frank finds a Jesus Lizard:

Frank holds it with one hand, its tail protruding pornographically from between his fingers. I wonder if its heart is pounding. If it is, the lizard shows no sign of it. All those years of evolution and it is holding still in a hand that could crush it. I wonder: how does the lizard know when to stay still and when to run? How does it negotiate the balance between coming and going? Between stasis and instinct?

“Come see this,” Frank says, still clutching it….

Spring through poetry, fiction, and commentary by these writers and others, including new poems by Jaime Garcia and Kevin McLellan, new stories by Matthew Dexter and our-man-in-Cork Edward Mc Whinney, and reviews of books by Michel Houellebecq, Greil Marcus, Pamela Uschuk, Jeremy Grimshaw and Michael Downs.

If you’d like your work to appear in our next issue, the deadline for summer is June 1. Contrary accepts submissions only through this form.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

London’s Alternatives is the city’s most popular venue for New Age workshops, teaching classes in areas surrounding spirituality, creativity, wellbeing and self-development. “All our events”, their website boasts, “are offered in the spirit of love, joy and service.”

With that in mind, I chose “Master the Law of Attraction” as my first dip of the toe in Alternative’s loving and joyful waters. Taught by the American personal-performance coach Joseph McClendon III, the brochure promised …”the sky is the limit with miraculous positive thoughts.”

The venue was London’s large meeting-house at Euston. Once there, I had to fight my way past hundreds of Marxists as the Socialist Workers convention, Marxism Now, was taking place next door. Wearing t-shirts emblazoned with an upraised fist, communists of all ages poured in for the opening rally. Marxism Now made an interesting juxtaposition to Joseph’s fledgling Masters of Attraction. Someone in the meeting house scheduling department has a wicked sense of humor.

Joseph McClendon III has had several careers, from university professor to the Director of Herbalife to the founder of the snappily-titled Succeleration Research Group. But nearly everything he has done has touched upon the areas of personal growth and development, from his book “Change Your Breakfast, Change Your Life” to his hip hop recording, “Live Like It’s Never Going To End – Positive Thinking.”

But Joseph’s claim to fame is through his association with the guru of self-help, Anthony Robbins. They met in 1986, and he went on to co-write two of Robbins’ bestselling books. He is now the heir apparent, serving as Senior Head Trainer and Instructor at Robbins’ grandly-titled Mastery University.

As Joseph bounded onto the stage, his energy was palpable. I wondered what he did eat for breakfast? His appearance was met with idolatrous applause, many stood. He told us a bit about himself. His net worth, he boasted, was over $50 million. He spoke of his reputation as the “Specialist to the Stars” in terms of performance coaching. His clients include actors, politicians, and sports-heroes. “This,” he said, “is the crowd I run with.”

Duly impressed, we moved on to the rules. Whenever Joseph cued, we were to jump up, thrust an arm into the air and say, “YES!” with as much enthusiasm as we could possibly muster. We had to practice several times until Joseph felt we were suitably enthusiastic.

And enthusiasm was the crux of Joseph’s message. He encouraged us to get the most out of life all the time. “Have fun,” he said, “constantly engage with your life!”

“Yes!” we responded, fists pounding into the air.

“Play full out!” he continued.

“Yes!”

We closed our eyes as someone strummed a guitar. Joseph directed us to our earliest memories, encouraging us to smile with love. “Tell your younger self,” he said, “that the heavens will provide for you when you need it.”

The mood was quiet. We swayed gently to the guitar and the faint music of our memories. Some wept. Seriously.

Suddenly, the Marxists next door burst into a round of thunderous applause. Joseph seemed surprised but he laughed those Marxists off as he brought us back to our inner conversation. Afterward, we had to hug one another.

The Law of Attraction basically posits that one brings into one’s life that which one focuses on. Or, as Joseph explained, you create magic through the power of your thoughts. “Think about what it is you want,” he advised. “Is it out there?”

“Yes!” we responded enthusiastically.

“Smile at it.” So we thought about our goals and smiled. Next door, the Marxists cheered.

Joseph explained, “You must create your own opportunities, and when one shows up you must take it.”

“As you seek so shall it find you. Your goal is out there looking for you.”

“Yes!” We said loud enough for our wayward goals would find us.

“The trick is to control your fears. You can’t erase your fears, but you can control them. Fear that what you want is too expensive is what stops many from even trying. But it’s not the money. Procrastination and hesitation, these are your enemies.”

“Yes!” I started to shout, fist raised. But I had jumped the gun. I quickly sat down.

“Try attracting people. Energy attracts energy, it’s your energy that is your emotion. Everyone you meet is a beacon for you. Show them that you care. Give them your energy. Energy is everything.”

“Have you got it?” He asked.

“Yes!” we shouted.

Then it was time for The Next Step. The raison d’etre of the evening, it’s the two-day workshop Joseph would be teaching at Alternatives in a few weeks. He gave us beautifully embossed certificates proclaiming that we were each being awarded with €500 off the price of the workshop. Everyone looked momentarily puzzled. This was England, where we deal in pounds, not euros. It was like someone giving an American audience a discount in pesos. For a man with so much money, Joseph didn’t understand currency.

“This room is full of dabblers and starters,” he charged, “And you cannot win the race unless you finish the race.” Joseph was closing the sale now. “Excuses are like butts, everyone has one and they stink!”

The Marxists started to raise up their own stink as the walls literally shook from their cheers. Joseph’s façade cracked, but just for a moment, as he threw an angry glance toward the Commies next door.

He returned to us, sharing the story of how he was once homeless, reminding us of how much money he has now, confiding that he made his first million after taking a $2000 course on getting rich even though he could ill-afford the $2000 at the time.

“You’ve got to be willing to invest your time, energy and money.”

Now, the Marxists stomped on the floor, desperately enthusiastic about ending capitalism. I really really hoped that they didn’t know what was happening in this room.

Joseph wrote his fees in big letters so that we could see them. For personal-performance coaching, he charges $250,000 per year. For two days with him, you have to pony up $25,000. His weekend group workshops cost €1000. We all converted madly in our heads. With your certificates, he reminded us, it’s only €500! I’d only paid 15 pounds for the evening, so I was feeling rather smug.

People were starting to get up and leave even though Joseph was still on the shill. I was mortified for their rudeness. Until I realized that they were running. Running to sign up!

He raised the ante and the hysteria grew. “If you enrol tonight, it’s two for one! Find a friend! Sign up together! Now it’s only €250!”

The room dissolved into chaos.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for Mastering the Laws of Attraction. I had sipped the kool-aid and was positively tipsy on the positivity. But I thought it funny how we had raised our fists up in the air throughout the night and how a raised fist was the very emblem of the Marxists’ gathering, even though the values were so incongruous. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you are a capitalist pig or a bleeding heart idealist, we are all just searching for something to put a fist in the air and cheer about.

About ten years ago, during the keynote lunch at the San Diego State Writers’ Conference, we were supposed to sit at the table whose center placard best described what we wrote. The choices were Memoir, Sci-Fi, Thrillers, Mysteries, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women’s Fiction, and more. But not Men’s Fiction.

I didn’t know whether to sit at the table for Literary Fiction (what I hoped I was learning how to write) or at the table for Women’s Fiction (what was that exactly?).

People often ask me what kind of books I write. And, darn it, why is that such a difficult question? Sometimes they give me multiple choices, again like the table placards. A) Mysteries, B) Love Stories, C) Sci-Fi?

Literary Fiction, by the way, is never an option. The people who ask me want to know, and understandably so, about content. What are your novels about? Another hard question. “I write about relationships,” I say. “Oh, love stories,” they say. And I say, “Sometimes. And sometimes not.”

In the April 1st NYT Sunday Book Review, in an essay entitled  ”The Second Shelf” Meg Wolitzer answers this question regarding her own books:

“You know, contemporary, I guess,” I said. “Sometimes they’re about marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children.”

In her essay, Meg discusses the big issue of “women’s fiction”:

When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women.

Of course it would be absurd to divide book stores into women’s fiction and men’s fiction. Hopefully that’s not answering anyone’s question. And certainly in 2012, we’re not going to say “relationships” or “marriage” are topics only women are interested in, or that “the wilderness” or “sports” are only men’s topics. My husband reads almost everything I read. And I would read more of what he reads if I had more time to read.

Meg concludes her essay with these sentences:

And will “Women’s Fiction” become such an absurd category it’s phased out entirely? Maybe, in a more just world.

I vote we phase out the label “women’s fiction” now in an attempt to create a more just world.

Cross-posted at Catching Days

Photo by Crista Cloutier

It was with nervous anticipation that I first approached London’s Spiritualist Mission on that cold Wednesday evening. Perhaps I might receive a message from beyond?

The church, built in 1912, was beautiful and warm. Music played softly. I relaxed. It’s not often one hears show-tunes in church.

It was a decent sized crowd for a Wednesday; the congregation an eclectic mix. But the prestigious (in these circles) London Spiritualist Mission is always well attended. In addition to the many curious attendees, they have about 250 members from around the world.

The service itself was Christian in nature. We began like most other churches in Great Britain, with an Anglican hymn from the Book of Common Prayer. One would think that a congregation that plays show-tunes and invites the dead to speak would tackle more contemporary music.

The service was led by Eva, a happy medium, who spoke in a sweet Cockney accent. She began each communication by pointing someone out in the pews. Once called upon, they were to respond, “Bless you,” though no one had sneezed.

The Man in the Green Jacket. “Bless you.”

Eva asked if he had any doubts when he bought a jacket that color. No. “Really?” she asked, her eyes narrowed knowingly. No. “Do you know a David?” No. She turned to the rest of us. “Does anyone here have something that they bought but wish they hadn’t, or know a David?” We all just smiled politely.

She turned back to The Man in the Green Jacket. “I think you will be taking a trip. To Germany.” It turns out, The Man in the Green Jacket had just bought a ticket to Germany that very day! Things suddenly started to pick up.

On a roll now, Eva turned to another attendee about a spirit named George. “Yes,” he affirmed, after the customary blessing, “George was my father.” He had a thing about shoes, she told him. “Yes, he was a shoemaker.”

She turned to a lady in the front row and predicted. “You’ll be doing karaoke soon.” The poor woman looked mortified.

She told another woman that she had a new toaster coming her way. Eva then digressed into a story about her own new toaster and how, upon the recent discovery of a mouse in her flat, she won’t use the toaster – lest the mouse accidentally fall in.

We listened politely as Eva’s spirits connected with attendees, giving out practical advice about how to live, getting out more, visiting the dentist and other bits of homespun wisdom. “You’re a different lady now to what you was.” Eva told one woman, “And spirit says you should eat more jelly.”

I spoke with Eva privately after the service and she predicted that I would be going to America soon. “Well, I am American,” I said.

We talked about the service, and Eva explained, “It’s not too religious, but when you can communicate with your loved ones it’s great.”

Spiritualists have no fixed creeds, instead adhering to a list of agreed-upon principles. Their main concern is proving the survival of the soul. Each service is unique because the church maintains a rota of mediums and healers, apparently there is a Spiritualist circuit. But there’s no hocus-pocus, there are no trances, no babies being sacrificed – just deceased spirits coming back to speak to the living through a medium.

And for God’s sake, do not call them readings, they are communications. “Readings are for psychics,” sniffed Larry, the church’s secretary.

I returned again the following Sunday, because Spiritualist meetings can be strangely addictive.

This time the medium was Carol, a woman with a quiet singsong voice. She began by describing a spirit-lady of medium height and build, with pale skin and glasses. Then Carol pointed to me!

“Do you know this spirit?” No.

“She knit and gave you sweets. She was a neighbor, on a wide street in America, and had a white fence.” Blank.

Carol was getting impatient. “She had a small dog.” Nope, not ringing any bells. Everybody was now impatient, they all wanted their own turn. But I simply didn’t recognize her. Finally, we both admitted defeat. (Though later, I would remember a kind lady who lived close by and fit this description. I’ve just recently heard that she passed away.

Carol’s next communication also began badly until they finally ascertained that it was a grandfather. Once recognized, his message was simply, “I am behind you every step of the way.” I found that kind of eerie.

Another lady-spirit arrived. She was described as tall, well dressed, and educated. Carol pointed to a man in the crowd but he said he didn’t know her. She persevered. Go back to when you were a boy. A teacher? No. This spirit says that your mother has two sisters. Yes! She says you like jelly. Yes! (what is with the spiritual preoccupation with jelly?) And you used to come to her house by train. His face lit up as he remembered.

“It hasn’t always been easy for you,” the tall, well-dressed, and educated spirit lady said through Carol, “but your mother instilled good values. Don’t get knocked off your trolley.”

After the service, my own spirits lifted when Larry, who is a medium in his own right as well as church secretary, approached me and asked, “Who were the three brothers?”

My father came from a family of three brothers.

Larry began to describe him. “His death was expected yet unexpected. He was his own worst enemy.” This sounded like a match.

Larry said that my father was proud of me for “kicking that Mexican bastard out the door.” Ah, that would refer to Previous Boyfriend. Leave it to Dad to come all the way back from the grave to tell me that.

Then Larry and I had a conversation about my father that was eerily accurate. Yet I found it surprisingly unsatisfying to speak to my father again. He had been gone for so long, there was so much that I needed him to say, but instead he spoke of other things. Not jelly, thank God, but little things. Thing that didn’t matter. Just like in life, I supposed. “The spirits don’t change just because they are dead,” Larry advised.

In regard to the Spiritualists, most ask, “Is it true?” Many try to guess at how the mediums can ascertain personal information, and why adherents adhere.

But in the search for truth, do some things have to be false? And is truth even the best criteria? We don’t put other religions to such tough truth standards. No one puts the communion wafer to test whether it really is transformed into the body of Christ. We all want to know what is going to happen to us after we die. It is a universal obsession and has been since the beginning of time. The fact is that Spiritualism gives comfort and direction to people who follow it. Isn’t that the most that any religion can aspire to?

It’s been 70 years since Henry Miller wrote his scathing critique of American life, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. After more than a decade in Paris, Miller returned home to the United States and traveled across the American south towards California. He was largely appalled by what he saw.

But you could argue that Miller’s life as an expat began long before he ever left America. As a Brooklyn-born writer during a time when working-class New Yorkers rarely ventured beyond the five boroughs, and almost never relocated, Miller was never exactly of America. Even today, New York City feels like an island off the coast of America — the recent influx of Targets, Home Depots, and Olive Gardens notwithstanding.

I read The Air-Conditioned Nightmare when I was 17, on a cruise in the Caribbean. I didn’t want to go — so bourgeois! — but my parents offered and I reluctantly said yes. My father, a former Navy officer, loved cruises because they afforded him the chance to again contemplate the open sea at dawn, puffing at his pipe and breathing the fresh, salty air. My mother enjoyed cruises because of the ports — exotic Caribbean locales where she could speak French and buy batik scarves.

I assented only because I wanted to see Jamaica, which I thought would be “interesting.” But I was a rebel, and had no time for the cruise-ship indulgences, so I sat in our cabin and read Miller’s book, only occasionally venturing outside to the decks, where I witnessed Miller’s account in full force: conspicuous consumption, indeed.

When we docked in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, I promptly left the part of town that had been carefully designed for tourists. I was there to see the real Jamaica. Four hours later, I returned to the boat, having been held hostage, robbed, and threatened by drug dealers in a small shack alongside a thick jungle. That’s what my curiosity, my desire to have a Henry Miller experience, got me.

I was shaken, but I don’t regret my decision, naive as it was, to wander into the seedy, working side of Ocho Rios. I’ve seen a part of Jamaica that most tourists never will, and I’ll never forget it.

Today, I will board a plane to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, for a wedding. We will stay in a 16th Century villa in the heart of the city, 45 minutes from the beach. I have only  a vague notion of what to expect of Santo Domingo, but I already know it will be a big, dirty city. And I’d have it no other way.

I’m almost 20 years older than when I first read Miller’s travelogue, and I’ve matured a lot since then. But I haven’t changed my attitudes about travel, at least not fundamentally. If you want a resort, you can go to South Carolina, or Florida, or Virginia. When you leave the country, why not leave the country?

Belmont & Elston today

Sometime around 1998, when I was making my first tentative steps toward writing fiction, I began mentally formulating a novel named Sense of Place. The story was set on the northwest side of Chicago, around the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Elston Avenue, just west of the Chicago River. I lived just east of the area for several years, and often drove through the intersection on my way to the expressway and my office in the suburbs. As I drove through, several features of the neighborhood caught my attention – the old Henry Grebe boatyard on the river, the Lutheran church whose sign announced that services were still conducted in German and, most obscurely, a corner tavern whose cupola was topped by a weathervane in the shape of a whale.

Slowly, a story began to materialize in my mind: a young man named Ralph Muller who lives in the neighborhood but rarely ventures outside of it; a brief fling with a young woman at Riverview Park; a meandering life that fortunately leads to a decades-long job at the boatyard; and, unknown to Ralph, a boy born of that fling who will ultimately and unwittingly take away Ralph’s house, the only thing of value that the older man ever possessed. On the plus side, I had a clear image of Ralph and the arc of his life, a good opening and a decent (if mildly melodramatic) conclusion; but, as an even bigger negative, I had relatively little to fill up the middle of the story. Because of that glaring deficiency, and because I really didn’t know how to write back then, the novel was never written, with the only thing salvaged being the first chapter, which was published as the short story “Ralph’s Last Call” in the online journal The Angler, in 2006.

Though I’m a much better writer now, the inspiration, setting and mood of the story have become so distant from the person I have become that the narrative no longer interests me like it once did, and it’s highly doubtful that the novel will ever be revisited. And I’m fine with that – it’s not as if I have any shortage of other fiction concepts to work on.

One key aspect of the narrative was the idea that the neighborhood was forgotten and forlorn, overlooked by real estate developers and not even gaining a catchy name (like “Wrigleyville”) to make it marketable. And Ralph, by his strong identification with the neighborhood, was similarly forgotten and forlorn. Such a premise made sense back in the 1990s, when the area was well past its prime and had not even a hint of the gentrification that had already tranformed so much of the city’s north and northwest sides. In telling Ralph’s story, I hoped to shine something of a spotlight on this quiet and overlooked area.

Imagine my surprise, then, when my first public reading as a newly emerging fiction writer, in 2007, took place at a coffeehouse right in the middle of that neighborhood, on Belmont just west of Elston. Though now defunct, it was the sort of self-consciously hip and funky place that never would have existed in Ralph’s world. Nearby there remain both a gourmet bakery and art gallery, two other establishments that would have been foreign to Ralph. The neighborhood, it seems, is slowly on its way to being trendy, something I never would have imagined back in the nineties.

But the biggest surprise of all was that the corner tavern where I imagined the middle-aged Ralph doing his nightly drinking – nicknamed “the Whale” for that weathervane, a no-frills, old-man’s bar with Roger Miller and George Jones on the jukebox, a mangy dog, a menu limited to Tombstone pizza and snack-sized bags of Jay’s potato chips, and no more than six or seven regulars on a good night – is now the real-life site of Kuma’s Corner, a hipster joint with heavy metal played at deafening levels, gourmet burgers and often an hours-long waiting line that trails out the door and down the sidewalk.

I can only imagine what Ralph would have thought about what became of his old hangout. He would have been bewildered and distraught, losing one of the last familiar places that made him feel safe and secure, and making the later loss of his house even more devastating. In my conception of the story Ralph passes away at the ending, which would have been several years before Kuma’s arrived. Had I ever finished writing that novel, I would have been greatly relieved that Ralph didn’t live to see what his beloved Whale had become.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

The Religious Society of Friends (RSOF), aka “Quakers,” was founded in England in 1652. Though there are still about 300,000 Quakers in the world today, when I mention the religion in polite company I often get puzzled looks, “Quakers? Aren’t they mythical, like fairies?” and “How do they get by without using electricity or driving cars?”

Clearly, there is need for a little education here.

I believe this confusion can be blamed on the Quaker Oats Man. We’ve all seen him on those boxes of oatmeal, wearing his old-fashioned clothing and that red-cheeked superior smirk. He gives Quakers a bad name, I tell you.

The Religious Society of Friends, also known simply as “Friends,” is not church as we know it. Though the religion has been around since the 17th century, it is still as unconventional today as it was seen to be then. Their services are called “meetings,” and their building is referred to as the “meeting house.” There is no clergy, in fact, nobody is in charge. They hold no creeds, no dogma; they tell no myths, have no rituals, no symbolism. Zilch. I had always thought of Quakerism as the Seinfeld of religion. It is a religion about nothing.

But Friends do hold principles. They believe in simplicity. Not in the “no cars, no electricity” way but rather, in more of a “green, socially responsible, and try not to wear a lot of designer labels” manner.

Quakers are perhaps best known for their staunch commitment to peace. In fact, the RSOF won the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize. They have always refused military service and, during times of war, are often granted conscientious objector status, though many have been jailed for their pacifism throughout the years. Some Quakers go so far as to be unwilling to allow their taxes to go toward military spending and they establish separate measures with the government for the allocation of this portion of their taxes.

Their own literature explains more of who they are and the RSOF do like their literature. Many meeting houses boast their own library and all carry plenty of pamphlets, leaflets, and publications that explore common interests such as climate change, the progress of volunteer peace workers around the world, political and social issues, and always, always, Quaker poetry.

It is a world-wide religion, practiced in nearly every country, though their numbers are dwindling. Again, I blame the Quaker Oats man. But they too are somewhat responsible for their own diminishing membership. They don’t advertise, baptize, chastise, nor proselytize. It hardly seems like a religion at all. It is easy to understand why so few would venture into a meeting house uninvited.

Though they have a reputation for being puritanical, which really isn’t fair given how poorly the Puritans treated them back in the day, they are actually a very liberal group. They stress moderation in all things but they drink, they dance, and they can sin with the best of us. They do, however, frown on gambling and other than staunch pacifism, this is the only line in the sand that Quakers have drawn as far as I can see.

They refuse to swear legal oaths, with the explanation that they recognize only one standard of truth. A Friend never lies.

The RSOF developed as a nonconformist movement in reaction to materialism. George Fox, one of the early founders of the religion, urged his followers to follow a more simple path of Christianity, one that they felt was based on early Christian communities. And, like the early Christians, the first Quakers were also beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes killed.

In fact, the term “Quaker” was initially used derisively. During a trial an early Friend faced his accusers and “bid them tremble at the word of God,” and then those nasty Puritans turned it all around and gave them the cruel epithet “Quakers.” But Friends simply appropriated the name, thus stripping it of its insult in a very Friend sort of way.

Quakers were radical in their time, and still are to some extent, in that they believe that each person can experience a direct relationship with God. This is why they have no clergy or anything else that might possibly be construed as an intermediary. They do not give authority to the Bible but use it instead for guidance and inspiration.

To investigate British Quakers I decided to visit the Seven Oaks Meeting House. It was once a large thriving meeting but now is down to the last determined dozen or so members. I arrived to a warm, if not somewhat surprised, welcome. The meeting room itself was nice enough and the doors of the room opened onto a beautiful garden.

They explained to me that I could sit anywhere and that the chairs in a Quaker service are usually arranged in a circle, underlining their commitment to egalitarianism.

There seemed to be an awful lot of women in attendance, which single men should take note of.

Before we began, they asked me, very nicely I might add, not to take notes during the meeting. I was a bit taken aback. No notes? They thought it might disturb the silence. I huffed and puffed a bit. My mind is like a sieve so I rely on my notes.

But as it was, not that much happened. They refer to the meetings as “a space of gathered stillness.” Actually, they sit in collective silence – for an hour.

As a child, a Quaker friend of mine, a Friend friend if you will, attended meetings with his grandmother. He said that each time they entered the meeting room she would direct him to “Go in and greet the light.” The “light” is a metaphor to Quakers for one’s relationship with God.

So I sat in silence and looked for the light. For an hour.

There are many forms of silence. There is the popular “silent treatment,” prized by angry couples worldwide, the spiritual “vow of silence,” the evocative “moment of silence,” Simon and Garfunklel’s famous “Sound of Silence,” a parent’s desperate plea for “a little bit of silence, please!” and the cruel silence of censorship. My mind was wandering.

I looked around the room and noticed that everyone, save the man with special orthopedic shoes, was wearing sandals. That says something about a religion, I thought. I was not sure what, exactly. And I was the only one with a pedicure. Though I couldn’t vouch for the woman wearing striped socks under her sandals, I’d be willing to bet that she didn’t have painted toenails.

I wished that I could take out my notebook. I didn’t think that pencil against paper would really be that disruptive. What about the woman next to me with the dodgy stomach? That wasn’t distracting? It positively screamed. And the woman who kept flipping maniacally through the pages of the Bible. What was she looking for?

I closed my eyes and tried to enter the silence, or the light, or whatever. My mind followed the sounds of a dog barking down the street, birds singing, distant traffic sounds, there goes that stomach again. What could she have eaten? And then the neighbor next door began to play the piano. Loudly, with the windows open. What Kind of Fool am I. Anthony Newly. I recognized it right away, having appeared in the play in high school. I could still remember the words as it turned out.

I started to relax. To sit in silence for an hour is actually not as boring as one might think. Parents would probably find a Quaker meeting heaven.

The silence of a meeting can be broken should someone be “moved by the spirit” to speak. Early Quakers were considered radical in that women had the same right to speak during meetings as men, something that might still be considered alarming in many churches.

During the Seven Oaks meeting, a few people were moved to speak. One mentioned the recent death of a friend, and she asked us to “hold his family in the light.” Another spoke of her response to a work of art that she had recently seen, and the third read a very moving passage from a an essay written by that most famous of American Quakers, William Penn. It was something beautifully profound about how Quakers view death. But I can’t quote it here because I was not allowed to take notes.

It did take a lot of work to sit in silence for an hour. You couldn’t just nod off. Though I have heard that people do fall asleep. And sometimes, yes, they snore. The rule of thumb is to simply ignore them, unless they are accompanied by a spouse, who usually takes care of the problem in their own private way.

The end of the hour was signified by the assigned leader (not a priest) taking her neighbor’s hand. And then everyone joined hands for a silent moment of camaraderie.

I wondered how Quakers worked as a group without a priest? Who makes the decisions? It turns out that everything is run by committee. If you have ever been on a committee or needed anything from a committee, you can appreciate just how alarmed I was. And it got worse.

Business is conducted with silence. An appointed clerk records the “sense of the meeting.” Can you imagine? They don’t vote. They simply have quiet time and get a sense of what is right. So there is no debate, no arguments, no threats. Do these people really understand the meaning of the word “meeting?”

When asked if they agree with a point, the positive Friend response is “I hope so” as opposed to a simple “yes,” and this is shorthand for “I hope that this is God’s will.”

A decision is made when everyone in the meeting hopes that a “way forward” or “coming to unity” has occurred. If someone at the meeting disagrees the issue will not be considered resolved and they will return to silence. They maintain that every decision is determined by God’s will and, if everyone is listening to God, then the correct decision will eventually become evident.

I questioned whether those who thought that Quakers belonged to another time weren’t right after all. This seemed no way to run a religion. Where did they find the time to do all of their charity service? What does the Quaker Oats man know that we don’t?

The American artist James Turrell is a Friend friend. He once told me about being at an exhibition where an Italian gallerist approached him and coolly asked, “So, eez eet true that zou are a Quacker?” He never did correct him.

Some other famous folk who you probably wouldn’t have guessed were Friends include singer Bonnie Raitt, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ben Kingsley, author A.S. Byatt, singer Dave Matthews, model Cheryl Tiegs, and, much to the shame of Quakers everywhere, former American President Richard M. Nixon, who really was much more of a Quacker.

I first learned about Adrienne Rich, who died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, CA, at the age of 82, in college almost 20 years ago. I was 18, and many of my professors adored Rich. They taught entire courses about her, or at least included her poems on their syllabi, and by sophomore year, I understood that in the pantheon of Important Writers to Know About, Rich ranked pretty high.

And yet, I never read her — or at least not that I can remember. Why not?

In her memoir, But Enough About Me, What do You Think of My Memoir?, Nancy K. Miller describes reading as an autobiographical act. Everything we read says something about who we are, and we define ourselves through the process of reading. She’d say that there’s a simple reason that I loved Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, and Tim O’Brien: I found myself in their words. They still define me today, along with everything I’ve read since college.

Adrienne Rich never appealed to my sense of self as an undergraduate, and it wasn’t because she was a lesbian, a feminist, or a Jew. I read other feminist authors, and liked some of them. I even took women’s studies courses. I simply didn’t care to read her work. But now that she’s gone, I find myself thinking about her again for the first time since the early 1990s, wondering why I never gave her a chance.

Maybe it’s because she was a poet, and the only poet I can remember liking at that age was Gary Snyder. Or maybe it’s because, at that age, we tend to develop our identities around our tastes, and in opposition to that of others. I was a Kundera fan; meanwhile, Patrick liked Adrienne Rich.

It seems so juvenile now, so limiting. But that’s how it is, and frankly, if I didn’t give Rich a try in college, why would I after graduation?

So I’m left with nothing but a vague sense of Adrienne Rich’s significance in American literature, and a few fuzzy memories of college that are associated with her name.

And so, I ask for your thoughts. Help me understand what I was missing.

Because I am weird this way, I crashed the Annual Conference of the Church of England Guild of Vergers at the All Saints Pastoral Centre in the English town of London Colnay.

The Guild is not a trade union, not a club, nor is it some sort of sect, instead it is a professional association that promotes fellowship and spiritual guidance amongst the vergers of the Anglican Church.

Vergers care for nearly every aspect of the church building and grounds. A verger’s duties are manyfold. He or she has an important ceremonial position during the church service but it is management responsibilities that take the majority of their time. They prepare for each service as well as weddings and funerals. They clean and starch, look after equipment and supplies. They welcome visitors and give information. As an American verger once said to me so eloquently, “Vergers are the traffic cops of the church.”

An unwritten role of the verger is often that of sympathetic ear. Many of us choose to visit a church when troubled. But often, people, particularly the British, suffer from anxiety when in the presence of authority figures, intimidated by the “dog collars” worn by priests, and feel more comfortable speaking to the person who is holding a broom. “I am not a counselor,” one verger explained. “But I am a listener.”

I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at the conference to find vergers to be open and generous folk, having a preconceived notion of something quite different. And each verger had a surprisingly firm handshake. You know you’re in good stead when every person you meet gives your hand a solid grasp and pump while looking you straight in the eye. Actually, it was little unnerving. I’ve never seen so many confident people. And that was what I learned about vergers; they may have the background jobs but they are proud of what they do, positive in outlook, and often downright cheeky. And vergers come in all styles; I saw vergers wearing everything from sandals to high heels, orthopedics to running shoes, one was even sporting a pair of gold lamé Converse.

I was given a conference packet with the itinerary and agendas for the week. Sadly, I was only able to join them for the day. I realized the laughs I would be missing when I found the Verger Quiz in the back of the folder. It was full of fun brain teasers such as “What is the Liturgical colour for Lataure and Gaudate Sundays?”

The Annual General Meeting began, naturally, with a prayer. Those vergers literally thundered, as they prayed with a might that threatened to shake down the very walls. I knew then that I was in the company of professionals. Prayers complete, we turned to the business at hand. “The smoke detectors are very touchy,” we were warned, “they will set off easily. Therefore, you are advised to use utmost care when burning your incense.”

We went through the week’s planned activities. Thursday would be Movie Night. And on Friday there would be a raffle. And if anyone has anything that we might offer for the raffle, please let us know.

We went through the usual minutes and business stuff, all nodding off a bit toward the end. And it wasn’t just me. The meeting was adjourned, another prayer, then it was time for lunch.

There was plenty of good-spirited banter during the meal. And I took note when they all sighed collectively over the problem of family readers at weddings and funerals. “When will they learn to slow down and enunciate their d’s and their t’s?”

After lunch, I took the opportunity to learn more about these vergers. They came from all over Great Britain, and a few from abroad. Their ages varied from Louis Huband, in his eighties to Paul Russell, the World’s Youngest Verger aged fourteen.

They had several things in common however. They all viewed verging as more than a job, but a calling. In fact, several of them verged voluntarily, taking on the rather substantial financial obligations of purchasing their own robes and cassocks. But they loved the work. Verger Marcus Smith said it simply, “It is who I am.”

The vergers spoke to me earnestly about their work. “From church door to church door everything has got to go smoothly.”

They each took immense pride in their accomplishments, posts held, roles played. They had a deep sense of tradition and respected their own place in the church’s history. Yet they work with a quiet dignity. “A good verger isn’t noticed,” I was told.

When I asked Paul Russell, the World’s Youngest Verger, how he felt about the job he replied neatly, “It’s got its perks.”
What’s the best part of the job? “Cleaning candles is actually quite interesting.” Not an answer one would expect from a fourteen-year old boy. Who were these people?

Some were lifers, had always been vergers and always would be. But most arrived at verging from other occupations, “I was in the milk industry.” (He was a milkman.) There were those who had been “in the pub industry,” (bartenders), engineers, choir directors, and even a head pastry chef. “I had a real gift for sugar,” admitted Stephen Haude modestly. After winning six gold medals for his confectionary cathedrals, he decided that he hated the business and left to drive a bus (the transportation industry). It was only after he retired that Stephen found his true calling as a voluntary verger.

But it is not an easy job. Once again I turned to young Paul, (which wasn’t really fair because he had only been a verger for a few weeks) “What is the hardest part of verging?” I asked.

“Counting people.” As he is responsible for setting out the communion wafers he has to know how many there are. According to Paul, it is not the counting itself that is difficult but the task is complicated by the fact that people “tend to sway.”

After break everyone left to change clothes for Eucharist. I waited in the church. It was a most impressive sight as they entered and took their seats. They wore their most formal ceremonial robes, making a handsome and impressive group. And if you have never been the only person in a chapel who is not wearing ceremonial robes you might not understand how very odd it is. I regretted my wardrobe choice. But the vergers paid no heed to my awkwardness and made me feel as if I was one of them, even after I stepped on someone’s robe, nearly tripping him.

We sat down to a proper church service. A busman’s holiday, I protested, but the vergers disagreed. “As long as we don’t have to do anything, it is heaven to simply enjoy the service.”

It was a long service, but never have I seen so much heartfelt worshipping. The responses to the Vicar were loud and forceful, but then this is what they do. These people really love Eucharist.

I am no fan of Church of England hymns, I find them outdated and dull. But the vergers let go like they were singing alone in the car to the radio.

The one thing that I did take issue with was the overuse of the incense. Holy Smoke! My eyes watered, my throat burned, and I was certain I would sneeze. Where were those smoke alarms? I watched the verger with the incense circle the chapel as smoke billowed and filled the room. Then he stood by the door, our lone chance for fresh air, and continued to aim smoke at us incessantly. It was like being gassed, only by God. Someone kindly advised me “Don’t breathe through your mouth,” but I couldn’t see who it was.

After the service we spilled into the garden for a group photograph and drank in the fresh air. Someone put a glass of wine in my hand and suddenly it was cocktail hour.

The first night of the conference typically ends with a Gala Dinner and they had kindly invited me to stay. But it was announced that due to budget cutbacks not only would there be no dessert, but also no waiters, so we must serve each other.

No matter. The vergers took it all in stride. So, come dinnertime, I lined up with gorgeous tuxedo and evening-gown clad vergers to serve platefuls of lamb shank. We laughed and joked as we queued. Not one person complained about the reversal of fortune.When it was time to go I realized how sad I was to leave their world and return to the real one. The world where people would be outraged to serve each other while dressed in evening clothes, where people don’t take pride in their work, or enjoy their colleagues, or accept outsiders as one of their own. Where people often shake hands as limply as they live their lives.

“The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response.” – Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” NYT 3.18.12

Perhaps it is presumptuous to agree with the eloquent words of Jhumpa Lahiri. But for me, it’s true—this desire to put lived experience into words, and to arrange those words in not only a grammatical but also a structurally sensible kind of way—this is the primary machination in my mind.

But this—the actual acting out of the urge—seldom happens. And that sentence, albeit in the active voice, assumes the sly irresponsibility of the passive, rendering me—the subject—a passive participant, and even—if you, my reader, allow me to cross into melodrama—a victim of the sour brevity of time, of the same twenty-four hour day that everyone else on the planet is allotted. I have little time to write. There are many constraints on my time. My scattered and confused, often illogical, and eclectic emotions exert sovereignty over “my” time: I do what my mind determines most urgent at the moment.

A note on time: The phenomenon of owning time, I believe, is relatively new; not until societies elevated the individual above the collective could people fathom that their time was their own. Regardless of whether you or I consider ourselves the sole possessors of the most intangible of intangibles—time—we do have some choice when it comes to how we “spend” it. The metaphor of time as commodity—another blight on our society, one which already lacks a collective spirit and values the individual above all else.

I am not one to follow the task-sorting habits as espoused by the writers of The Highly Effective Fill in the Blank books. Those books reduce experiences to tasks, considering each item on a “to do” list something to be accomplished and promptly crossed off. Their philosophy dictates that followers assign tasks to one of four boxes according to its urgency and importance. But I digress. I’m on a tangent, holding my right arm over my hand in a tangent-like line to indicate I’ve lost track of where I’m supposed to me. The tangent metaphor, although relying on mathematical concepts which I cannot grasp, is an effective one. My AP Calculus teacher in high school would hoist her hand over her head when my class, comprising rowdy boys, would try to get her off track; she’d direct us back to math with this clever mathematical metaphor.

But my excuses for not acting on the urge that Lahiri expresses—other than the reason that I know my writing will not reach such heights as hers—lie somewhere in the mangled web of too much to do and too much anxiety to do it. Like everyone else, I am too busy. Like some, I grow anxious. Like few, I doubt. Like very few, I am very limited in what I can write, at least publicly. Who am I?

A highly-introverted public school teacher of literature, reading, and writing; a frequent caller to parents whose children are underperforming; a friendly face; a conflicted authority figure; a mentor; a reader; an internal processor and hopeful writer, wary of too much stimulation and limited by the emotional and physical demands of my day job, my responsibilities to my students and my school, and my need for rest, silence, friendship, love, and black tea.

Let me illustrate this conundrum with a blue day. At my school, we have block scheduling, meaning that I see my classes every other day, on a red day or on a blue day, with the exception of my first period class, which I see every day for a short period of time. My red day schedule is manageable: first period, followed by third period, followed by a department meeting, followed by planning time and supporting kids after school. When a red day ends, I have that day-after-Christmas feeling: the fun is over, until next time.

For blue days, I set three alarms. The alarm on my night stand is my “oh good grief it is morning again” clock; it rouses me from deep slumber and only requires a decent fling of an arm to silence. I also set the alarm on my smart but dysfunctional phone for a little bit later, though this alarm does work most of the time. I set a third alarm on another device for the latest possible time at which I can rise, get ready for school, and arrive at school in time to procure hot water for my tea, make copies, set up my room, talk to students, write the agenda for first period on the white board, set up the projector, and breathe for a few minutes.

On most mornings, all of these things happen. I find clothes and shoes to wear, I make breakfast and pack a lunch, and I leave my apartment a few minutes after 7AM. I navigate the parking garage; its spaces are too narrow, and its turning areas far too small, to be considered safe. Add hapless tourists and harried, SUV-driving commuters into the mix, and this garage becomes a veritable disaster area. For the first few months living here, my blood pressure would rise as the elevator descended to P3. Now, on the way down, my mind races through all the things I need to do before the first bell rings, at which point I stand in the hallway outside my room so that I can urge students to get to class on time.

I teach my first period, an “on-level” English class with ELL students, alongside my co-teacher. There is little more I can share without breaching their privacy. I imagine I can share the fact that I often repeat instructions many times and that I find myself emotionally drained after only fifty minutes.

In a typical week, I work as many or more hours than my lawyer fiancé works. Perhaps this is because this is my first year teaching in a public high school, though it is the fifth year in which I have held a teaching role. There is always more to grade, more planning to do, more differentiating to plan, more parents and grandparents and guardians to call. The work consumes me. From the advice of veteran teachers, I have determined that any teacher’s first year is going to fall somewhere, on the spectrum of pleasure, between the horrible and the hellish. Quite the prospect.

I have second period “off.” I attend meetings, make more copies, prepare for periods four and six, and eat lunch. I clean up my classroom. I hope that my fourth period class will remember their assigned seats, a mental task which has proven surprisingly and increasingly difficult as the year has progressed. If I have time left over, I wonder whether someone in my sixth period will stick a pencil into the celling today.

I puzzle over the prospect and execution of differentiation, an education buzzword that means providing different types or methods of instruction for different students. It’s more like a Platonic ideal, the capital D on Differentiation testifying to both its importance and the impossibility of achieving it perfectly in our real and fallen world.

Fourth period begins at 11:30. My hall has “A” lunch, which means that my students eat lunch in the first of four lunch rotations and then come to class for 105 minutes. There is much angst, there is often confusion, and they inevitably induce tangents. Thankfully, they have not figured out how to stick pencils into the ceiling. Then “TA,” short for “Team Advisory,” arrives, and I try to remain sane with a classroom full of children I don’t teach and occasional visits from those I do. Sixth period is the last period of the day, a fact which I consider the cause of the overwhelming energy of the room. There is often a crisis, though I can’t elaborate on the who, the what, the why, or the how. There is sometimes panic. On most days, there is laughter.

The bell rings at 3:15, denoting the end of structure and rules and authority for some, and marking, for others, the beginning of a slew of extracurricular activities. I pick up trash off the floor, offer assistance to students, and try to grade a few things. I kill some ants. I straighten papers and move desks back to their rightful places. I close the windows. When the final bell rings at 4:15, I write bus passes and say farewell. I erase the dry erase board, hoping that what I just spent my day doing doesn’t vanish quite so easily. Is this a reverse metaphor? I am too tired to tell. I pack my things, collecting students’ essays, their revised essays, their exit slips, and their late work, and I turn off the lights.

Now that it’s spring, it’s light outside when I leave the building. I drive home as the sun falls, listening to the news, processing what has befallen the world today. I navigate the city traffic as my mind prioritizes the evening’s work. The urge—to transform experience into words—remains; though tattered, it persists.

When Greg Smith resigned from his position as an executive director in the London office of Goldman Sachs on Wednesday, most people didn’t know who he was. He was a midlevel investment banker at one of the largest investment banks in the world, with more than 30,000 employees. Apparently, in the I-banking world, “executive directors” are “midlevel” — the term was used in a New York Times article about Smith’s resignation — and there are scads of them — 12,000 according to the Times.

The Times further indicated that Smith was considered “midlevel” because he didn’t make that much money “by Wall Street standards.” His salary as of Wednesday was around $500,000 a year. There’s even speculation among some in the financial industry, including at Goldman, that Smith only resigned because he was bitter about not being named managing director, a counter-intuitively more prestigious position. (In most industries that I’m aware of, “executive” trumps “managing.”) There are only 2,500 managing directors, and presumably, they make a lot more than half a million per year.

In case you don’t follow financial news, Greg Smith quit via email at 6:40 a.m. London time on Wednesday, 15 minutes before an Op/Ed he’d written about why he was quitting would be published in the New York Times. In that article, he publicly criticized his bosses, by name, and called Goldman Sachs out for its shark-like business methods. By Wednesday morning, Smith’s name was being thrown around throughout the financial industry and beyond. I heard about him on NPR. Other media outlets soon picked up the story, and by Thursday morning, his article, titled “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” was the topic of a front-page story in the Times.

Smith quit because he could no longer look people in the eye and tell them that Goldman Sachs was a good company to work for. He wrote in his letter that he’d grown tired of the hypocrisy and greed at the company, where the only priority is making money for Goldman, clients be damned — despite Goldman’s outward message of being “client driven.”

Goldman’s stocks plummeted 3.5 points on Wednesday as a result of Smith’s letter. The entire company is scrambling to save its public image, assure clients of its loyalty and dedication to their money, and generally put a dam on the tidal wave of criticism that Smith levied against his former employer.

Will it work? Will Goldman have to answer to Smith’s allegations? Perhaps. But perhaps no one will care, and by this time next week, Smith’s 15 minutes of fame will have been just that: 15 minutes.

Here’s my wish: More Greg Smiths to take a stand against corporate hypocrisy and greed, even if it means ruining their careers in the process. Only then will change — real change — occur. And maybe — nay, probably — once the dust has settled, those who “threw their careers away” on principle alone will be hailed as champions. They’ll be the ones who brought down a system that was keeping a few extraordinarily rich at the expense of the many.

But please don’t mistake this for another Occupy Wall Street-style rant. I know it’s easier said than done, that it’s hard to walk away from a job, and that no one wants to commit “career suicide,” to borrow a term used by some to describe Smith’s actions. But major cultural change has never come easily. And besides, despite what I-bankers and hedge-fund managers might think, you don’t need that much money.

Most of us are living proof.

Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s

You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. Martin’s

When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.

When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney

I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow

Here comes a candle to light you to bed
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

Whoever imagined that this charming, yet somewhat macabre, nursery rhyme would someday find itself the center of a religious controversy? For though London’s St. Clement Danes claims to be the noted church of this well-known song, the same city’s St. Clement Eastcheap also stubbornly advertises it as their own.

“However,” notes the verger of St. Clement Danes rather smugly, “We got in first.” He is referring to the fact that in 1920, the church’s Vicar put the famous carol in the belltower so that St. Clement Danes would forever be known as “The Oranges and Lemons” church. “Though, it could literally be either church,” he admits under my intense questioning. “I’d like to think it is here because I work here.” Cleverly cementing the association in the minds of future generations, it is tradition for the students of St Clement Danes Primary School to be given an orange and a lemon after each year’s annual service.
The bells play the tune 3 or 4 times a day, which would drive me nuts, but apparently the church’s staff has grown accustomed, if not downright fond, of it and takes great pride in their association with the carol.

The Keys of St Clement Danes by Crista Cloutier

My initial experience with the bells of St. Clement Danes was as I first approached the building one rainy Sunday morning to attend Eucharist. The sheer force of the bells nearly knocked me off my feet. The word “peal” took on an entirely new meaning as I almost had to peel myself off of the sidewalk. The hearty hellos and cheery good mornings that greeted me as I entered the building led me to erroneously expect that this would be a boisterous congregation. Instead, I was disappointed to find a brave few scattered throughout the quiet pews. There were not many young people in attendance and no children in sight. But the church itself was gorgeous, with an immaculate interior that allowed for plenty of light. In fact, though it was a cold dreary day one quickly forgot that whilst bathing in the warm glow found inside of St. Clement Danes.

The Vicar was jovial and heartfelt. The day’s sermon was on love, specifically on Jesus’ command to love. The Pastor noted at the beginning of his talk that we’ve all heard this sermon before and might be tempted to indulge in a bored yawn. He was correct.

The congregation listened politely. We duly stood and sat as directed by our programs, repeated our line “Lord Hear Our Prayer” when prompted and recited the “Our Father” in a collective voice that was both tepid and uncertain. Communion was taken on our knees, which was a new experience for me as I have always stood. First came the wafer and then the wine, which was, I must admit, delicious. A dry amber that sparkled on the tongue in a way that was completely unexpected. Of course, most American churches now eschew the wine in favor of fruit juice so I may be easily impressed. We all drank out of the same chalice. Swine flu be damned.

Though the message of St. Clement Danes was steeped in generalizations, the music was divine. The church boasts one of most spectacular organs in London. It was a gift from the United States Air Force when the church was re-opened in 1956 and dazzles both the eye and the ear. Luckily, the organist was worthy of such an instrument. The church’s choir was comprised of eight singers, each professional, and together they sounded like three times as many. They really packed a wallop and their collective voice was stunning. In turn operatic, emotional, and dramatic, I sometimes felt as if I was in a film score. They deserved much better than the material they were given to work with however, as the hymns were both outdated and uninspiring. When, in our program, it was printed next to Hymn number 349 “Come, let us join our cheerful songs,” I thought with relief that this was instruction and that now we might start singing some cheerful songs, but alas, it was simply the title of the next dreary hymn. But the choir soared and the organist rocked the house and there were the occasional moments when I resisted the urge to sway along and hold up a lighter.

The congregation’s voice paled sadly in comparison. Though there was one member who stood well above. In fact, he carried the rest of us. His name was Mr. Ken Jones and I was not surprised to learn that he was once a member of the choir himself. In fact, it is rumored that he once sang for Lord Mountbatten in India. A loyal parishioner, Mr. Jones has been a member of the congregation since its second service; its first being on October 15, 1956. You do the math.

After the service, I was dismayed to find that no fellowship snacks were being offered. No biscuits and tea, no doughnuts and coffee, no oranges and lemons, nothing. We simply went home. I find church without fellowship to be lacking and anti-climactic. Worship as a member of a congregation is a communal affair and should not feel solitary. After all, what is the point of dressing up and dragging oneself out on a Sunday morning if not to mingle with like-minded souls?

In spite of the church’s name, I didn’t see any Danes amongst the congregation. I was later told that the designation refers a time when King Alfred (871-901) expelled the Danes from the City of London yet permitted those with English wives to settle just outside the city walls. It was this settlement that brought about the building of a church known ever since as St Clement Danes. St. Clement was the patron saint of mariners and his symbol, an anchor, can be found throughout the building – in spite of the fact that the church is sponsored by the Royal Air Force. Clement was reportedly an early Bishop who continued to lead a ministry even after being imprisoned by those Romans. As punishment, he was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea. It’s still unclear to me why mariners would adopt him as a patron saint as this seems to be his sole connection to sailing.

There are also endless eagles. These must represent the Royal Air Force. St. Clement Danes is the central church of the RAF, so the eagles do make sense. Though the sheer number of gold eagles gives the church less of a religious feel and slightly more of a military or nationalistic hue.

In 1666, the Great Fire of London broke out, devastating the city and destroying 87 churches. St. Clement Danes escaped the fire yet still won a commission to be rebuilt in what must have been an interesting political maneuver. Sir Christopher Wren, that 17th century tart of London church architecture, won the commission. In what smacks of croynism, Wren, who was a childhood friend and playmate of the then current King Charles II, was hired to design 55 out of the 87 churches that were destroyed in the Great Fire of London. To be fair, Wren’s design for St. Clement Danes was spectacular. He gave the building its wide aisles and majestic sense of space that still continues to impress all who visit.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who recently celebrated his 300th birthday, was one of the more illustrious members of the church’s congregation, though there have been many. Legend has it that he would tap his cane in disapproval during the service should the sermon not be to his liking. Nevertheless, the church built a statue in his honor, which can still be found in the back of the building.

During the Blitz, St. Clement Danes fell victim to German bombs and was destroyed. It sat dormant, home only to trees and birds until a plan was made to rebuild in 1953. The Royal Air Force made the appeal to restore St. Clement Danes as their central church and a shrine of RAF remembrance. It was decided to follow Christopher Wren’s original designs and faithfully reproduce it. Though the church is really only 50 years old, should Christopher Wren return today, he would still recognize it as his.
Other than the towering organ and the plethora of eagles, the only other notable difference from Wren’s church are the RAF books. These contain the names of all who have died in the service of Great Britain. Book I is comprised of those who passed before the RAF was an official entity. Books II through IX are the names of those members of the Air Force who died in service during World War II. Names continue to be added as wars continue to wage, though the sheer number of names of WWII books is sobering. There is also a book for the American Air Force listing the names of those men and women who were killed after the United States entered the conflict. The names of Americans who flew for Great Britain before America’s entry into the war can be found with honor in the RAF books II through IX.

The presence of these books in the church give the space a somber tone. It connects the church with the human aspect of war and makes it a pilgrimage destination as well as a place for remembrance. The books give St. Clement Danes an additional responsibility and the church’s verger said, “We feel lucky, in a way, to have this duty.”

The Keys of St Clement Danes by Crista Cloutier

In spite of the beauty, the history, and the music, St. Clement Danes only has a small handful of members. They would like more, the verger admitted, but people cannot be forced to come to church. It is simply a fact that congregation sizes are falling. “How do you get more people in the door?” he asked wistfully. I suggested fellowship snacks.

I should have seen it coming – every time I fly from Zanzibar to the United States, a wild range of cravings start roaming my mind and body, eventually holding me hostage with desire. Thoughts of various kinds of cheese keep me up at night. I spend my afternoons on Google researching varieties of maple syrup. I type ‘sour cream’ into the search bar. I want every kind of chocolate, a dairy gorge on the bacon range.

These cravings become more intense the closer I get to my departure date, and somehow, those around me start to sense that they, too, might get to dip into that enormous American pool of unnecessary desires, and start asking for stuff. I tend to keep my travel plans a secret, but true to the saying, there are really no secrets on Zanzibar.

This time, in the week before departure, I got three humble requests. When you’re in America, get me Shea butter, a vegetable slicer set, and stacks of Ebony, Vogue, and the New Yorker, they said respectively. Fair enough. I’d gotten other requests for Cheese Nips, Snickers, and Trident in the past, and always came through.  I’d certainly do my best.

I am not a huge shopper, nor the most hip, informed, or savvy among them. I tend to pinch and thrift, I enjoy a good bargain, and I’m not one to binge on best buys. And usually I’m pretty good at taming the shopping tiger within. I want, but not too much or enough. I try to think about what I need and the best price out there for it. This time, though, I was hit hard by a kind of heart-pounding inner roil to round up of all the things I’d ever never wanted from this great big super mall of a country.

America’s the land of a tanking economy, but people, there are still at least nine different kinds of teriyaki sauce, and fourteen more honey styles, canned olive tapenades, savoury biscuit mixes, BBQ sauce promises, wheat and glutton-free to be you and me songs to be sung in an hour’s stride through the markets. For all our wailing at the financial wall, America sure is still the land o plenty.

And this kind of shopping we do in America is a lonely affair.

I’ve been here less than two weeks and I’m afraid I will have spent more time getting in and out of my rental car, undressing and dressing in Target dressing rooms, and wandering grocery aisles in a wide-eyed stupor alone, than with friends and family and having real conversations. It’s not entirely my fault – friends and family are mostly working a good portion of the day, and if not working, then caring for children and their busy schedules, coordinating zigzags to school, home, parks, and indoor pools.  It’s also been hard to make fixed, definitive plans due to traffic jams, city distance, double bookings. That, plus taxes and paps make scheduling a real bitch.

But it’s time for a confession:  I have been obsessively drawn to wander the florescent-lit halls of Target, Best Buy, Micro Centre, Whole Foods, Staples, Trader Joe’s, Walgreens, T.J. Maxx, and Marshall’s, because it just feels so good to shop alone, without any harassment, price negotiations, class judgement overtures, or gender aggression. And it’s also fun to shop alone because then I can really take my time marvelling, obsessing, and in general just freaking out about the sheer amount of unnecessary stuff made available to Americans on a daily basis.

I want it all, now. And at the same time, I am absolutely repulsed. I end up, then, feeling like a rookie, a novice shopper making impulsive, spazzy decisions, that also involve belaboured and bulky movements like attempting to enter the driver’s seat with six bags of stuff in right hand while trying to talk on the cell phone with said hand, shut the door with left hand, and start the ignition with right hand, cell phone squeezed to ear.

This — what do you call it — shopping choreography– my body and mind are not used to it. What’s mindless to some has become very clumsy to me. I feel like I am child learning to hold a shopping pen in her hand in her hand for the first time, practicing my capitalist script. I know all my letters, but not well enough.  I end up feeling like an obsessive klutz with a collection of plastic bags piling up in the passenger seat every time I screech out of another jammed parking lot. Um, what’s in those bags, anyway?

I’ll spare everyone the personal details. It’d be too much like opening the proverbial medicine cabinet. But let’s just say that half the things I convinced myself I needed because they are not available in Zanzibar are not available mostly because they are not necessary. I can live without dark cherry chocolate bars, I just don’t want to these days. And I can live without tiny little journals, but I don’t want to do that either. Never mind that meanwhile, so much of my crap still remains in my parent’s skunk-ridden bachelor pad of a garage.

In between delightful moments with the hilarious, energetic nephews, beautiful sisters, loving parents, and gorgeous community of friends, including dips into dive bars, chats on peaceful park benches, long work stretches at favourite local cafes, I continued to hover nearby or inside those irritating consumer hovels.

The inner shopping tornado touched down on a totally uninteresting debate between buying the Kindle Fire and an actual smart phone with SIM card capacity. Again, I’ll spare you the views or reviews, but the point is that this dilemma actually started to make me feel sick.

One, because it created a false sense of deprivation and threw me into a panic about those impossible questions that attempt to link technology with monetary value. (It’s such a trap, what’s awesome in the tech world today is kind of just a burden tomorrow). And two, I know from experience that any anxiety centred around whether to purchase an object or not is hardly ever about the objects themselves, but rather a convenient holding place for bigger, more existential moving parts that we attempt to contain behind the soul’s curtain.

I know the suspense is probably (not) killing you right now – I purchased the Kindle Fire. I returned it the next day. I purchased a smart phone. I returned it two hours later. The next day, I went back to purchase it again. Do you see what I’m saying? Crazy-making, I tell you. Am I the only one? I doubt it, though Josh, the guy who works at Target, told me flat out that he’d never seen anyone think so hard about a decision. What’s the big deal, he seemed to ask with his quizzical hipster eyebrows. Josh, go easy on me, man!

You know you’re in a really bad situation when you’re in Target for more than three hours, have taken off your winter coat, and now have your hand plunged deep into a bag of BBQ Lay’s potato chips, munching with so much confidence that you forgot that you haven’t paid for it yet, let alone anything else in your heaping cart.

That happened to me last time I was home, and I had to phone a friend to come rescue me from the madness. I literally had combed through each aisle convincing myself I needed sheets, hooks, pills, jeans, bras, socks, hair clips, sunglasses, pens, grapes, eyeliner, lotion, soy sauce, vitamins, and tampons. MP3 players, cameras, laptops, headphones. Luckily I’m really good at filling up a cart and abandoning it (sorry, Target staff). I can talk myself back from the ledge. I can walk away. But what about so many people here who can’t – because they really, really think that for the moment, all those things in the cart will perhaps make their life a little better, a little easier?

I thought it’d be better this time. But the whole ‘’returns” option turned out to be kind of evil – a time stealer – a bitter chore – tedious distraction. Every time I returned something, I became a victim, bystander, and perpetrator of the American Dream. Had to keep track of all those receipts. I waited in those lines. I smiled and chatted with cashiers, strangers who were now taking up more of my solo days than I would have liked. Why was I talking to annoying Josh again when I could be cuddling with my baby nephew! Bah! I was getting this all wrong.

Days passed. This is the kind of state of mind where you risk losing your keys and phone. Where, if you had a baby, you just might forget her in her car seat on the roof of your car. Um, yeah. This is serious mental mind jelly. High frequency anxiety meets blazing trail of denial.

Tonight, when I look at my loot over there in the corner of the room, I realize I didn’t end up buying that much. Some are presents for folks back in Zanzibar, I tell myself. And I did try to reel it in and put stuff back on their shelves. It was really hard though – and the worst part is that even in writing this I know that I am trapped in the ultimate consumer jam –from a place and of a place — even when uprooted and living away from it for extended periods of reprieve.

This time, I was the Pavlovian dog conditioned to salivate over the unnecessary object, and the bell rang from within. America had preyed heavily on feelings of belonging, desire, comfort, status, and purpose. Sifting, sorting, hording, foraging, finding, keeping, losing, weeping.

Oh, let me just stop off really quickly at the thrift store. Note to self: there’s no such thing as a quick trip to the Salvation Army or Village Thrift, people!

I could say I really just like parmesan cheese, florescent lights, and skinny jeans, but next time I do, don’t believe me. Just come meet me at Target and we’ll sip on some coffee in the parking lot instead. Whatever you do, don’t let me go in there again. It’s enough already.

I have enough.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

The gallery is small but not the crowd for the “Private View” of exhibition Dandy in the Underworld: Portraits of Adam Ant. He really was beautiful.

Chrissie Hynde is here! Walking around as if she were a mere mortal. And there are rows of mohawks, as the punks have come out too.

Companion tells me that, in the heady early days of London underground punk, it was customary to spit a big gob at the performer as a show of respect for their work. We wax nostalgic as we wait for Adam to take the gallery’s makeshift stage and perform. I gird myself with free beer, expecting the worst.

Apparently, I am not the only American to take advantage of a bargain. Chrissie Hynde jumps on stage, sloppy drunk, and hurls incomprehensive insults at the audience until finally she is escorted away.

My feet hurt in these shoes and I want to go home.

Finally, Adam comes out and begins playing a stripped down set that rocks. My body moves but I swallow hard. Because Adam Ant is so damn good that I could just spit.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

First in a series of Worship Reviews

I usually win on the horses. I have an instinct. But I should have known better than to follow the “hot tip” I received at church that morning. My horse came in third.

Turf Paradise Race Track on a warm Arizona afternoon is the place to be. But on Sunday mornings, leave the glamour and slip into the “backside” where the stables stand, and you’ll find all the action is in the Track Chapel.

Seventy racetracks in the U.S. have chapels on their backside, run by the Trans-denominational Race Track Chaplaincy of America. They serve the community that works, and often lives, at the track: those who ride, train, feed, and exercise the horses.

Turf Paradise’s spiritual needs are cared for by Chaplain John Shumaker and wife Amy, who began their careers as a horse-shoer and exercise rider respectively, before John received his calling ten years previous.

Services are held in a large trailer originally used as a portable schoolroom. Their previous chapel was condemned two years ago. Understanding the itinerancy of track life, Chaplain John and Amy opted for the temporary nature of the new building. And it was homey in spite of the simplicity of the folding chairs, carpet, and fluorescent-lighting.

The service began as the Shumaker’s young son blew a shofar -horn loudly. A special ram’s horn, John boasted, the shofar was the Biblical trumpet of the Old Testament.

We duly took our seats. There was no altar but a podium, a few music-stands and a small sound-system. Chaplain John picked up his guitar. Amy and another woman stepped in front of the mikes as another guitar player joined them. John led off with “Blessed Be the Name of the Lord” and the ladies sang backup. The rest of us following the words displayed on the wall by an old overhead projector as a young girl diligently moved the transparencies.

The small congregation sang along, cowboy-boots a’tappin, cups of coffee in hand. There was a lot of denim in that room. I even saw a pair of chaps.

Attendance can range from 15 to 50 depending upon the racing schedule. People snuck in and out throughout the service. A few cell phones rang but nobody tutted. It’s a working church in a place where the work never stops. Amy explained, “If this wasn’t here, they wouldn’t be able to worship.”

The first song ended and we applauded ourselves enthusiastically, there were even some whoops. Warmed up, we dove into “How Great is Our God.” Amy and partner sang with their eyes closed, arms waving in the air as they rocked to John’s strumming guitar. When the song ended, Amy spontaneously called out, “He IS a great God!”

“People paint the track as a nasty, dirty, rotten, filthy place, and it saddens my heart,” Amy told me.

“Well, it IS dirty,” she admitted looking at the floors. “Everyone trots in here full of shavings and manure. But it’s just like anywhere. Drugs, poverty, alcoholism, we have it all. The difference is that we live inside fences. So everything is condensed.”

When at last we were seated, Chaplain John began by announcing that Clint had been kicked in the arm that morning. And then others hollered out their news. We learned that Sean was in the hospital with pneumonia, which was really bad because he had that lung transplant. And Lee just had his fourth heart attack.

Then we all raised a hand and closed our eyes as Chaplain John raised his, detailed each issue, and thanked the Lord for healing. He spoke with so much conviction that I half-expected Clint to bound through that door. This was the “Laying of the Hands” and several people participated with an unprompted “Amen!” or a loud “Yes!”

Then Chaplain John turned to his Bible and started preaching. He led with a sermon on giving. This is where most roll their eyes, and I am not a big fan of the tithe-pitch myself, but looking around that simple room I knew there was no scam here.

It’s a hard life, beginning every morning at 8:15 when John ministers to the backside on the loudspeaker. “Many stop their work to listen,” John said, “even the horses, I’m told.

Then he “walks the barns,” ready to listen to anyone who might need an ear. Thirty minutes before the first race he leads a prayer with the jockeys. Tuesday is Bible study. He maintains clothing and food for the most needy and visits those in the hospital. These are people who support their own.
When Chaplain John finished speaking, he picked up one of the baskets himself and collected from the room. Even Amy gave.

He returned to his Bible, preaching passionately as he walked around the room. “This Bible isn’t a fairy-tale book, it’s a life manual!”

He spoke about faith, telling a riveting story about a baby involved in an accident only to recover miraculously after being prayed over. Even her Buddhist doctor was converted. “Because Buddha ain’t never cured nobody,” John said.

He recalled how his own faith recently helped him to win an iPod at the West Coast Believers Conference. “With God,” he said, “All things are possible.” He repeated it several times and many repeated it with him. And we all amen-ed.

Then everyone moved slowly to the next room for donuts and coffee. Many walked with limps and wore faces lined from years of sun and rough living. These tough men and women are fierce competitors on the track; their pay depends upon winning. But on the backside the reality of life is that few can afford or even attain health insurance – though injuries are commonplace. Nevertheless, when someone is in need the community comes together. Chaplain John maintains a Chaplain’s Benevolent Fund to augment the tithes and offerings. He said, “Lots of these folks have money or health problems themselves, but they’ll put aside their own difficulties to help someone else. They give what they can and then some. It touches me.”

We don’t see the poverty or pain from the frontside. The horses race in their pretty colors as we dream about getting lucky and winning big. But back here life takes a different tack. For the congregation of the Track Chapel there’s nothing to bet on but God and each other.

If it can be digitized, it will. And once it’s digitized, what good are copies?

Look at Google Books, which has already scanned some 15 million books and intends to digitize every volume in the world by the end of the decade — 130 million unique texts. Once a book’s on Google, you can chuck that cumbersome tome right into the furnace, right?

It would certainly lighten our load. Recently, I was with a friend and we walked past a box full of DVDs, VHS tapes, and books in front of a building on my block. We rummaged through the box and found a number of things I wouldn’t mind seeing. I picked up a DVD of The Office, Season One, and asked my friend, “Should I take this?” “If you want to own it, sure,” he replied, stressing the absurdity of the word “own.” He was right: the first seven seasons are available on Netflix Watch Instantly.

Still, I love collections: books, movies, even magazines. I like having a library, a physical reminder of my evolving interests, phases, professional development, and so on. I have a few dozen film-anyalsis and history books, for example, that I amassed during a time when I studied and then taught film courses. It’s been more than three years since I taught film, but my books are always there, reminding me of who I was.

It’s that physicality — that aura, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin — that has inspired the Internet Archive, a nonprofit just north of San Francisco that has been acquiring and digitizing books since 1996. But unlike Google, the Internet Archive is also keeping a physical copy of the text itself, presumably for all eternity.

And that’s great. But then there are those unexpected treasures that exist in libraries everywhere, many of which will be thrown out without a thought in the coming years. Late last month, a copy of Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto, her 1968 proto-feminist rant against the Man, was discovered at the New York City Public Library — extensively marked up by Solanas herself. It seems she hated how the book was edited, and wanted to divorce herself from it entirely. “Lies! Lies!” she scrawled on the back page.

This is a treasure, and it’s not under lock and key at the Internet Archive. Who will protect it, not to mention all the other treasures, buried in the stacks, we have yet to discover?

I am a high school English teacher. I have missed over a week of school due to jury duty at the DC Superior Court. What follows is an open letter to my ninth-grade world literature students. 

Dear students,

I have missed you. While you have begun to consider issues of crime and punishment, and those of fate and free will, I, along with eleven others, have been tasked with determining the fate of one man.

You may have heard about the Chris Brown and Rihanna episode. If not, you can read about it here. If you are not familiar with the music world, you can find out more about their history here. Do you think Chris Brown was appropriately reprimanded for his crime? Some men—and, more shockingly—some women, blame Rihanna. They think it is her fault, that she somehow deserved to be assaulted by an intimate relation. Do you know about the Yeardley Love case? The man who hurt her so much that she died was, just this week, convicted of second-degree murder. He will spend the next twenty-six years of his life in jail.

In a New Yorker article about the above situation, Amy Davidson points out the disparity in the treatment of these men. This discrepancy in their punishments, she writes, seems to stem mostly from the degree to which the woman in question was hurt. Upon what criteria should a judge or a society use to determine first the guilt and then the potential punishment of an abuser? How much does intent count? How can anyone thoroughly prove intent? Does the level of bodily harm or length of hospitalization matter? But here’s the loaded question—how much, if at all, do and should a woman’s immediate reaction and later response matter?

I arrived at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia on February 15, 2012. I checked in and sat for a while. I listened to instructions that I had already read. I waited some more. Then, along with about sixty other people, I was called to be on a potential jury panel. We walked downstairs together, lined up in three rows, so as not to clog the hallway, and waited. Then the clerk of the court had us rearrange ourselves in a particular order that was not numerical. I was third in line. I was to remain in the third position for the entirety of the afternoon.

We proceeded into the courtroom, taking our seats according to the clerk’s instructions. The judge presented us with a topic list, a potential catalogue of objections we might have to any aspect of the case at hand. If you don’t know, some people’s close ties with law enforcement may prevent them from serving on a jury. Other people may be familiar with the area where the alleged crime occurred, and others may feel biased about the case for any number of reasons. After elaborating on each item on the topic list, the judge called us up to the bench, one by one. The stenographer turned on the screeching “white” noise to insure the privacy of the parties at the bench. One by one, the judge called us up to discuss the answers in our topic list. This lasted for several hours. Once everyone had spoken to the judge, the attorneys had their turn. They could use what is called a peremptory strike—a veto—to strike jurors who, they thought, might be predisposed to take the opposition’s side. Eventually, fourteen jurors remained. I was still in seat three, part of jury otherwise composed by men. Two jurors were alternates, though their identities were not revealed until the end of the presentation of the evidence.

The attorneys presented their evidence and called witnesses to the stand. We heard from the allegedly abused woman, who responded to the majority of the questions about the incident with the phrase, “I don’t recall,” even though she had, when the incident happened, called 911, spoken with the police, gone to the hospital in an ambulance, and broken her nose. She had also obtained a temporary restraining order and had testified in front of a grand jury. Her testimony, particularly her feigned inability to recall the events, smacked of perjury. After hearing the first part of her testimony I was resentful; why would she make up such an elaborate story that would consume so much of so many people’s time just to exact revenge on a boyfriend who was breaking up with her?

Later, as we heard more of her testimony, saw images of a bloody face and a bloody house, heard from medical experts and reviewed medical records, it was clear that a serious incident had occurred. She had broken her nose. I have broken my nose before. Granted, it was a different situation—I was kicked in the nose while playing soccer and knocked unconscious—but I know how painful it is. Even though more than fifteen years have passed, I recoil at the thought of that moment and all the ensuing pain. My nose is not the same as it was. Nothing short of amnesia can make me forget it. I have studied trauma, and I have read extensively about literary representations of trauma. Trauma does not disappear, nor is it impossible to recall; rather, trauma alters the way the brain processes incoming information and is something that is never forgotten.

Once the defendant testified, and once an attorney elicited information about his past, one riddled with drugs, abuse, and convictions, he lost all credibility in my mind. Despite his contentions that he has “changed his ways” and learned from the past, his testimony not only aligned with hers in such a way as to reveal collusion between them, but it revealed his angst, his physical strength, and his irascible nature.  He referred to the complainant as a “troublemaker,” saying that she would do things that he had not allowed her to do. This was perhaps a man who had learned from his past actions, but it was not a man who regretted them.  Instead, it was a man who was unable to conceive of a romantic partner as anyone near his equal.

Our jury deliberations lasted approximately eleven hours. Eleven hours sitting in an enclosed space, without windows. Eleven hours of knowing that we had to come decide, unanimously, on a verdict, before we could leave and resume our daily lives. The unanimity requirement represents a considerable burden on each of the jury members. Not only does each juror have to arrive at a conclusion, but also each juror must agree with every other juror regarding the charges. I sat quietly in this room, one woman among eleven men, for a while, recalling the charges, the evidence, and the lack of credibility of both witnesses. When I suggested that the woman’s seemingly fabricated testimony was likely a result of a victim complex, at first some of the men were hesitant. When the only doctor in the room corroborated my assertions about domestic abuse—how women who are abused continue to return to their abusers, defying all logic—the tenor changed. As the day went on, we discussed the meaning of the law, the multiple interpretations of the of the criteria for assault with significant bodily injury. I became the grammarian in the room, bringing my expertise, literally speaking, to the table, alongside that of a four-time juror, a doctor, and a lawyer.

Some jurors were more able to articulate their views than others. Some were loud, some mumbled. Others appeared indifferent. When one man suggested that the complainant was fabricating the 911 call out of vindictiveness—“women can be vindictive,” he said—I assumed the role of the female apologist, defending all women, even this one, this one whose lack of respect for herself and the law I found repulsive, against the charge of vindictiveness.

Eventually, almost everyone agreed on the verdict. I feared, for a while, that the one reluctant juror was going to hang the jury, rendering the trial null and possibly enabling repeat offender to return to destructive patterns. Imagining all the other cases like this one, I feared that so many men are set free due to a lack of evidence, the inability of the victim to express the truth, and reasonable doubt among any one juror on a case. After all, the jury is tasked with determining, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the defendant is guilty of the charges against him. In this case, the charge was assault with significant bodily injury. We almost arrived at a resolution after the end of the first day of debating. One juror remained resolute.

The next day, after several more hours of heated deliberation, the final juror conceded. We submitted the verdict to the judge, lined up in order and walked back into the courtroom one last time to deliver the verdict. In front of the whole court, we each affirmed the verdict individually. Guilty.

There is not a clear moral to this story, and, as a friend would say, there’s no bow to tie it all up nicely. You can’t tie this one up in a bow. It’s a murky mess, one muddled not quite enough by the defense counsel. We learned that it is the job of the defense attorney to create as much confusion as possible, for a jury can only find a defendant guilty if they are certain beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus the defense strategy: cast doubt on all aspects of the case.

It is unfortunate: his fate, her fate, his ex-wife’s fate. But this jury idea, it’s radical. It’s twelve people, stuck in a small room, deciding the fate of another. Many countries do not have justice like this. We were very careful. We respected each other. We were judicious and calm.

It’s true that I have missed you, that your various substitutes did not tell you exactly what I had in mind or pass out exactly what I gave them, and you may be disappointed. I understand. I’m disappointed. too. But I hope you learn about justice and about civic duty. I spent a week away from work, but it was week in which I believe eleven men and I changed the world, just a little bit, for the better. What if the jury members had been different? Would that have changed the outcome? Maybe? We will never know. But as you read Oedipus Rex, ponder this crazy idea of fate. What is it? Are we stuck? Or are we pleased by what has happened?

I believe that we are all emotionally drained. Although we had no choice but to serve on the jury, I believe we did our job well. I believe we were a good jury. Beyond a reasonable doubt, I believe we reached, to the best of our abilities, justice.

Something strange is happening to me. When I read books now, I find myself getting annoyed with them about halfway through. This is an entirely unscientific observation, anecdotal at best, and sporadic in actual occurrences. But it’s happened a few notable times in the past year, and I’ve come to a conclusion that seems to contradict my entire education: When we read, it’s okay to be impatient.

Here are two examples: Last fall, I was reading Thomas de Zengotita’s 2004 book Mediated, and I plowed through the first 2/3 with rapt attention. I was engrossed in his analysis, albeit outdated at this point, of how media shape not just our lives, but our identities. It’s a book full of fresh insights, unexpected connections, and writerly sentences that make it both interesting and pleasant to read.

And then I got really, really sick of it.

De Zengotita seemed to be repeating himself after a while. Where he started out instructive and engaging, by midway through the book he seemed pedantic and long-winded. It seemed as if he considered it his imperative to illuminate for his poor, media-defined, media-saturated readers just how defined and saturated by media they are. In short, I started to feel lectured at, condescended to, and generally irritated with each page.

A few months later, I began reading Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, a new book about the 1970s music scene in New York City by the music critic Will Hermes. I’ve been interested in that era of New York life, music, and culture ever since I was an adolescent, so the subject was perfect for a winter’s read.

For the first 100 or so pages, I found myself recommending it to every musician and New York enthusiast I know. It’s rife with quirky anecdotes about bands like Talking Heads, Television, and the Ramones; explains the unexpected creative synergy between the bourgeoning punk movement and avant garde composers like Philip Glass and Steven Reich; and paints a picture of Lower Manhattan that would appeal to any New York nostalgist.

But it’s also incredibly simplistic. The implication of fate, of these artists and their humble beginnings (because in Hermes’s rendering, almost all of them are humble) leading inevitably to fame and glory, runs through his narrative like a steel cable. He writes history like it simply had to be thus. It’s full of tautologies. Patti Smith is an icon today because, well, she’s iconic, and has been practically since she got off the bus from New Jersey as a scraggly, pregnant 18-year-old. Soon she was rooming with Robert Mapplethorpe, hanging out with Andy Warhol, and gigging with Bob Dylan. C’mon — was it really that easy? What about all the scraggly, pregnant (or non) 18-year-olds who didn’t make it?

Then there’s the prose. Try reading a passage like this without rolling your eyes: “Hilly Kristal liked Talking Heads, and invited the band to play all three nights the next weekend. Paired with the Ramones on double bills, they were the hyperanxious Manhattan yin to their roaring-id Queens yang.”

Or this, about the Queens neighborhood where the Ramones originated: “The manicured lawns and faux-English village vibe of its core, Forrest Hills Gardens, were hemmed between tightly packed apartment blocks, like the basket of a catapult pointed toward Manhattan.”

I got to page 163 and stopped. I decided there’s too much to read, and not enough time to read it all. But quitting books midway feels bad, and not only because we’re taught from childhood to stick with difficult texts. It feels bad because there’s still information in those pages that I’d like to know. In that sense, at least in this case, Hermes has done his subject a grave disservice.

Because if the writing’s rotten, who cares?

Charlie Newton and Jonathan Eig conducting one of their writing workshops for the Chicago Police Department. Photo: Peter Hoffman for the New York Times

When I was in high school, the only two writing teachers I had were guys who taught so they could coach sports. Nothing against athletics, but these guys were dimwits. Their hearts were clearly in the gymnasium, not the classroom or at an austere table someplace with a small desk lamp, polishing prose and contemplating life.

In college, writing teachers seemed to have taken on a new look: they were often female and wore their wavy, elegantly graying hair very long. They liked colorful silk scarves and dresses that flowed down to their ankles. They loved Southern Women Writers and Black Women Writers, and other voices of disenfranchisement. I respected these teachers more than I did the aged jocks I had in high school, but I related to them about as much, which is to say, I didn’t. When I met my faculty advisor for the first time freshman year, a woman exactly like I describe above, she asked me which writers I liked. I told her I liked Henry Miller, Franz Kafka, and D.H Lawrence — not bad for an 18-year-old, I thought. “Oh, you like male writers,” she said with a snarl. I soon changed advisors.

I started wondering if all writing teachers were either idiots in polyester shorts and polo shirts or self-righteous, PC-obsessed women with a collective ax to grind against the White Man. Either way, I wondered if writing, quite simply, wasn’t for me. After all, I couldn’t relate to my teachers.

Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a piece on a series of writing workshops being offered to the Chicago Police Department. The men and women who take the workshop have seen more blood, guts, and drama than most of us ever will, and they’re hoping to learn how to express their stories in prose.

What struck me most about the story, though, was the teachers themselves. They’re tough-looking guys, not unlike cops themselves. They teach the cops to never sugarcoat, to tell it like it is, no matter how ugly or offensive. I wonder if my high school or college teachers would have said the same, and even if they had, whether the writer-cops would have listened to them.

Moreover, the picture of these two guys made me reflect on my own writing teachers, and then on myself as a writing teacher. Do my students with radically different backgrounds than mine even listen to me? Do they respect me? Should they?

In the end, I was left with one question: To learn writing from someone else, just how important is relatability?

As a young woman, the great social reformer Jane Addams despaired over having too much academic learning, instead of real-world experience. She saw a clear dichotomy between the abstract world of books and contemplation, and the often gritty lives of real people in the everyday world.

Prior to founding Hull-House, the pioneering social reform project in Chicago, Addams toured Europe in part to review social conditions there. As she recounts in her 1910 memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House, she was horrified by the slums of East London, most memorably the sight of poor and hungry people aggressively bidding with street vendors for rotting vegetables; this would take place late on Saturday nights, as the vendors were not allowed to sell on Sundays and knew their decaying wares would be completely unsellable by Monday morning. Despite the shoddiness of the food and the vendors being highly motivated sellers, the poor were still desperate to buy whatever they could:

They were bidding their farthings and ha’pennies for a vegetable held up by the auctioneer, which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for its cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary pause only one man detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in a cabbage, and when it struck his hand, he instantly sat down on the curb, tore it with his teeth, and hastily devoured it, unwashed and uncooked as it was.

But even as she witnesses such deplorable conditions, she can’t help viewing her surrounding through the abstract prism of literature. Looking down an East London street from a bus, she suddenly remembers Thomas De Quincey’s “The Vision of Sudden Death” in which that writer recounts riding through rural England on a mail coach, which in its hellbent pace nearly runs over a pair of young lovers. Although he saw the couple in time to warn the driver, De Quincey is unable to shout out, as his mind was absorbed in trying to recall lines from The Iliad which described Achilles’ warning cry. Addams recognizes De Quincey’s paralyzed inability to boldly act to help others (“when suddenly called upon for a quick decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only through a literary suggestion”) and immediately sees bitter irony in the fact that her first response to the degradation of East London was not to take action, but instead to remember De Quincey’s written account of his own intellect-induced paralysis.

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes…In my disgust it all appeared a hateful, vicious circle which even the apostles of culture themselves admitted, for had not one of the greatest among the moderns plainly said that “conduct, and not culture is three fourths of human life.”

Later in Germany, from her hotel Addams witnesses women brewery workers carrying tanks of hot brew on their backs, like pack mules, across the town square. Indignant over their plight, she marches across the square to confront the brewery owner, whose bland indifference sends her, exasperated, back to the hotel.

I went back to a breakfast for which I had lost my appetite, as I had for Gray’s “Life of Prince Albert” and his wonderful tutor, Baron Stockmar, which I had been reading late the night before. The book had lost its fascination; how could a good man, feeling so keenly his obligation “to make princely the mind of his prince,” ignore such conditions of life for the multitude of humble, hard-working folk.

Again and again the young Addams questions the value of pursuing abstract learning, at the expense of tangible, useful work. Quoting Tolstoy, she cites “the snare of preparation,” the practice of subjecting young people to extended academic preparation at the critical point in their lives when they are energized and eager to venture out into the world.

It’s a timeless concern, something that many people still face today. And while Addams focused on the education-versus-action question, even within the education camp – those who pursue the intellectual life – there often seems to be a further distinction between those who read fiction (often denigrated as made-up fantasy) instead of the tangible, real-world realm of nonfiction. Fiction is often seen as folly, while nonfiction is vital. One can easily imagine Addams becoming even more distraught over a passion for reading novels, instead of helping the poor and neglected.

Yet it’s interesting to note that during the early days of Hull-House, some of the most popular programs involved literature: a discussion group for George Eliot’s Romola, which not only inspired animated talks but also brought in outside guests, who then stayed for dinner and even helped to wash dishes afterward; and a series of readings from the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, given by an older woman who once knew the great novelist personally. As Addams concludes:

We thus early found the type of class which through all the years has remained most popular – a combination of a social atmosphere with serious study.

Thus, instead of being a hindrance to Hull-House’s social mission, the study of literature – and fiction in particular – was beneficial in bringing the residents in closer contact with outsiders, with the goodwill generated undoubtedly aiding Hull-House’s acceptance within the greater community which Addams and her colleagues had so avidly pledged to serve.

That’s a lesson all of us can learn from. Instead of mere escape, literature can be an effective way of engaging with the world. It exposes us to a vast array of people and places that we probably wouldn’t otherwise experience, helps us understand and interpret unfamiliar situations, and reach outside of ourselves. Only with a better understanding of other people are we able to lend a hand. Literature helped Hull-House reach outward a hundred years ago, just as it helps us do so today.

When is the last time you remembered a dream? Saw images in your mind as palpable points of light, saw roadmaps and systems, heard the word of god?

I barely remember my dreams let alone follow any distinguishable directions given by friends, presidents, or gods there within. I find it nearly impossible to remember my dreams lately as nothing but flash mobs of feeling. I wake with a vague recollection of a good or bad feeling about the night before, and carry on with daily life as if divorced from tentative night-marriages to the other world.

I was moved, then, to meet a man somewhere on the road between Addis Ababa and Awassa, Ethiopia, who received a dream from Allah and listened. Thirty-three years ago, he was visited by Allah in a series of ten dreams in which he was ultimately directed to create underground wedding chapel caves deep below the earth of his private wilderness – a stretch of dry lands punctuated by cacti, distant rift hills, mild cracks and hesitant valleys in Southern Ethiopia.

I don’t know exactly how I’d even found myself in Ethiopia last week, but a confluence of events led me to this part of the world, on this particular day, on a private mini-bus careening down the newly paved road from Awassa to Addis, with a gang of new and old friends eager to have a day out. It was a Sunday, after all, we were ready to experience everything– Lake Langano, Rastafarian roots in Shashemene, and the legendary Dunabar Caves – wedding chapels beneath the earth.

Who listens anymore to the God who appears in dreams? We are living far from the days of Morpheus, gates of ivory or horn through which false or prophetic dreams pass, respectively. Here, though, was a man who saw clearly his entire life’s purpose unfolding in a book of dreams. With ample consultation with village elders and spiritual leaders, he laid himself prostrate to the divine (arduous) work at hand.

It goes something like this: thirty-three years ago, Mohammed Yiso Banatah had his first dream in which he saw clearly a church that also resembled a mosque. Allah spoke to him through this dream and told him to build this particular prayer structure underground. Mohammed was confused and did not know exactly what to do. Allah came to him again in a second dream, this time detailing more clearly the architecture of this prayer space, confirming that it would resemble both a church and a mosque. A third dream burned its blueprint into consciousness. As he contemplated ways in which to carve into his destiny, he had a fourth dream in which Allah told him to start planting trees, and did so promptly.

In dreams five through eight, Mohammed was tempted several times by the lure of excessive wealth. Each time he was offered thousands of Birr, he chose heaven instead. By his eighth dream about money, he was taken forcefully to a bank and shown safes full of gold. He was told that he could take all the money and gold he saw. A group of white people in his dream appeared and encouraged him to accept this lucky bounty, but he continued to refuse. They said it’s all yours, Mohammed but he still refused.

By dream nine, Allah was proud of him and convinced him that his life’s work was to build an underground series of wedding chapels and prayer spaces that would one day be revered as a national heritage site – a treasured work of creation for all who passed by to marvel and to marry. In the meantime, he was told to plant lots of flowers on his land. He did so obediently, with joy.

In his final dream, the tenth one in a series back in 1979, a man appeared in his dream who took Mohammed to a small tree on his property and pointed to its roots. The man showed him exactly where to start digging and told him that his life would depend on it. At midnight, he saw visions of gold. Surroundings up close appeared far away and objects farthest away were pulled up close to him. He was told where, when, and how to begin digging and the next day, when he woke up, he began to dig into the earth with his bare hands.

A work that began in 1979 is still the life obsession of Mohammed, who has twenty-one children, thirteen of whom are still alive, along with two wives, Balabiti Sambati and Aminah Mutumah. A new baby is on the way.

A walk through the underground chapels is a cool dip into the soul-pool dream space of a man who heard the word of god ten times over. The architectural genius of these spaces reveals the finery and steadiness of Mohammed’s hand – he’s spent careful hours carving, smoothing, cutting, digging, and designing an intricate series of archways, cosy nooks and hidden rooms within rooms, some that have been furnished with soft mattresses and simple earth-slab shelves, while others are stark and cool with tiny, rounded windows flooding through with secret rays of sunlight appearing out of nowhere.

When asked if he has had any help building these sacred tunnels, he replied, “no, I was alone, but I was with Allah.”

At present these sacred structures exist four meters below the earth, but his dreams tell him that they will eventually be eleven meters deep and after thirty-three years of solo digging, he’s on his way. So far, it’s cost him and his family near 120,000 Birr in local materials and tools (about $7,060.00 USD) and he has relied on modest contributions from tourists, bridal parties, travelers, and locally curious folk who pass by to marvel his devotion, artistic genius, and self-possessed relationship with the divine world.

Under the shade of a tree, we sat in a circle with Mohammed as he explained his dreams and visions to us. Four of his children leaned in a cluster against the tree trunk, shyly biting their fingernails and looking down at their feet every time we even slightly made eye contact, just a twinkle of hello before a rush of shyness took over.

Mohammed, who wore a long, electric purple rain coat and a baseball cap, explained to our group that through his dreams, he can see very clearly how each of the rooms will eventually be used, mostly for sacred marriage ceremonies and bridal parties, and that he has been ordered by Allah to finish this project before he passes onto the next world. In his seventies now, the work is said to be 80% complete. The vision is to dig tunnels that will lead all the way to Wondo Genet, meaning “Heaven” – a village located fifteen miles away, which was once the site of Emperor Haile Salasie’s summer palace. It’s also a village known for its hot springs, primary forests, and an Essential Oils Research Centre, where spices, aromatic herbs, and medicinal plants are conserved and researched. Selasie had declared this village a paradise on earth — and maybe he wasn’t so far off, since Allah too had convinced Mohammed to dig his tunnels all the way to Heaven.

Visiting Mohammed’s dream caves felt like a dream in and of itself. As we spoke to him through the brilliant translation of our friend Sinteyehu, a bridal party had arrived with their priest to enter the caves with one of Mohammed’s sons, who wore a bright yellow coat that read Dunabar Caves on the back. His son shows guests through the caves these days, reciting an addictive catchphrase which sound like, “Come on, Come on, bring someone” but actually are Amaharic words that mean something similar to that. As we meandered the narrow, dark passageways, his son had repeated this catchphrase as he flashed his torch into room after room below the earth, making us all laugh as we marvelled the deep darkness and utter peace within the soft curves of this man’s dream world.

When we waved goodbye to Mohammed that Sunday afternoon, I realized that dreams had become a major thread woven through the strange story that was my time in Ethiopia. I’d been invite there by a long time friend and former boss in Chicago, David Schein, a solo performer who’d in turn been involved in the slow-build and beautiful legacy of One Love Theatre — an HIV/AIDS education circus linked to a youth campus located in Awassa, Ethiopia.

I’d flown there from Zanzibar with David and my friend Clare who, throughout our short week in Awassa, helped me lead a series of creative writing workshops with the young women who either perform in the circus and/or who attend special classes and workshops at the the center.

Even before we’d met Mohammed and his caves, we’d engaged the dreams of the girls in our writing workshops through a classic theatre game in which everyone had to imagine a box in the centre of circle in which anything and everything in our dreams existed. The girls were asked to reach into the box and grab hold of something that had existed previously only in the dream world. By picking up the object, they had to actually be able to see (meaning feel, smell, hear, touch, and taste) the full weight and presence of this object, and then describe it out loud to other workshop participants.

In just under an hour, we’d bombarded each other with the presence of snakes and cars, cell phones and graduation hats, birds and fashion gowns, babies and disco balls. Together, we suspended reality to play with the objects of our dreams, holding each other to the truth of these objects and what they might represent.

I’d been trained all my life to believe that dreams were the stuff of Freudian analysis. As a teenager, I gobbled up dream dictionaries that helped me categorize and interpret dream visions. What does it mean if you dream of your teeth falling out? Imminent death. What does it mean if you dream of falling? Neglect. Loss of control. In my mostly secular upbringing in the West, I was rarely encouraged to believe that my dreams were gifts (or punishments) from God, or that whatever I might see might actually be my life’s work to make true. In fact, if someone had referenced god or dreams to explain a life’s work, I probably would have thought, for a time, that he or she might be crazy.

Almost every prophet, though, except for Moses, has relied on dreams to speak with God, so it seems odd now to think that I could have spent my entire childhood and most of my adult life dismissing the potential power of dreams, or at the very least failing to consider the ways in which dreams could be gateways to the divine. Like touching the shoulder of the dream of your best self.

In our workshops, the girls wrote dream stories that wove together all the dream images we’d conjured as a group. We wrote from our own dream visions but felt free to borrow images from the others and through telling these dreams, all we’d imagined became more clear to each of us. And while some dreams were the stuff of the absurd, causing much laughter and giggles (the snake slithering inside a friend’s bag caused much upheaval and squealing), other dreams were as palpable as a handshake with the present moment.

Abatali, a young woman in our group, dreamed of a graduation cap with tassel which she received after completing her law degree, her aim being to spark a revolution of justice for the people of Ethiopia. She saw this hat so clearly that writing about it became just a matter of reporting what it was that her mind had revealed to her through the telling of it – that she woke and slept with this graduation cap on her head, that she wore it proudly even in the toilet, that the graduation cap made her parents glow with pride, that this hat – in her quietest moments – actually spoke to her, giving her encouragement, justice being her ultimate obsession.

According to Hisda, a Babylonian of the third century, a dream not interpreted is like a letter unread. Opening a dream is about diving into possible meaning – and potential communication with the divine. A missed connection is probable if we continue to dismiss our dreams simply as Freudian undercurrents of the subconscious. I’ve lived for decades assuming that dreams could be opened or not, dismissed or not depending on the clarity and depth of feeling it conjured.

A week in Ethiopia reminded me of the power of dreams and visions – where they lead and what they manifest – should we listen to the divine that shines through the daily currents of who we are and what we are meant to do with our relatively short days spent here on this earth.

Think of how much potential beauty gets buried under the weight of our doubts when it comes to dreams and visions.

What could you build with your hands – with your mind – should you allow yourself to see clearly your dream life unfolding before your unassuming eyes — should you hear a voice from God — and listen?

Much of education is aesthetic: The architecture, the “look” of the student body, the general vibe of a university. Such considerations may be superficial, but they aren’t trite.

The feel of a school has a huge influence on one’s experience of it. There’s something about strolling through a centuries-old campus that compels you to excellence. I have vivid memories from both college and grad school of walking past the music building, which at both schools was a neo-Gothic stone structure covered with ivy, and hearing an invisible pianist practicing Mozart or Brahms. It was always inspiring.

So with that, consider this:

Last Fall, a computer-science professor at Stanford University became rock-star famous when he taught an artificial-intelligence course online that attracted students worldwide — as many as 160,000, according to recent estimates. The course was free, students could log in at their leisure, absorb the material on their own time, and review anything they might have missed.

One of the top researchers in his field, the professor, Sebastian Thrun, also developed the “driverless” car for Google this fall, unveiling his Jetsons-worthy creation at the 2011 TED Conference in December.

In other words, he’s a pretty big deal. So it came as a shock when he announced that he was leaving his tenured teaching position at Stanford to start a new university, one without quads, reading rooms, or lecture halls. Indeed, it’s precisely the latter feature of traditional universities that Thrun now eschews.

Udacity, his new venture, will exist virtually. Students may apply, enroll, and attend from anywhere, anytime, via their laptops.

Thrun says that once he got a taste for online teaching last fall, he was hooked. Universities today function more or less like they did 1,000 years ago, and Thrun believes it’s time for a change.

When you think of it that way, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Why should higher education remain stubbornly fixed in the Old World when practically every other aspect of our lives has catapulted into the New?

Perhaps because we haven’t yet figured out a reliable alternative. Online education is the future, yes, but it’s hit-or-miss. The Internet may level the playing field, but that doesn’t mean all the players are equal: there’s NYU’s online curricula, and then there’s the University of Phoenix. Of course, you could say the same thing about traditional pedagogic environments — there will always be students who fall through the cracks, regardless of how much personal attention they receive. As a professor, I can personally attest to this. But online education is so new, and so experimental, that we’ll need to see it done really well, consistently, before we can collectively get onboard — excuse me, online — with it.

Thrun might be the guy to show us. So let’s flash-forward 100 years, to an age when universities exist primarily in cyberspace, and ask ourselves: What did we gain, and what did we lose?

I want to slow things down. I was planning on writing a post on several stories in Alan Heathcock‘s debut collection, Volt, but I think I’ll just look at the first story.

“The Staying Freight”–I love the title–was first published in the Harvard Review. At 36 pages, it’s a long story. And it’s divided into 20 sections. But I really want to slow things down. I think I’ll just look at the first section.

The first section is 4 paragraphs. The first sentence is 17 words:

Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller discs set a fog over the field.

The first sentence sets the scene in a lyrical, poetic way–dust and dusk, burned and churned, fog and field. The camera angle is wide–looking at the ridgeline and the field.

Followed by:

He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he’d reserved for the sowing of winter wheat and so much was yet to be done.

With the second sentence, character and a very small action (blinking) enter the picture. Why “he” instead of a name? I think because of the two sentences that end this first paragraph:

Thirty-eight and well respected, always brought dry grain to store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles.

The writing creates a picture for us–the field, the man in the field, a good man, and then the final flourish, his name. Instead of simply giving us the man, Heathcock is drawing our attention to the man.

Here’s the second paragraph all in one go because, even as I didn’t want to read the next word that I was afraid would be there, I just couldn’t lift my eyes from the words:

Winslow simply didn’t see his boy running across the field. He didn’t see Rodney climb onto the back of the tractor, hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Didn’t see Rodney’s boot slide off the hitch.

Note the repetition: didn’t see, didn’t see, didn’t see. There were so many chances. Note the details that grab at your heart: the meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Note the simply: I imagine the sentence without it, and it’s harsher. The simply tells me it was just one of those things, just bad luck. The simply tells me Winslow wasn’t doing anything wrong. And the simply tells me the narrator is kind.

The third paragraph:

Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. The tiller discs hopped. He whirled to see what he’d plowed, and back there lay a boy like something fallen from the sky.

Second by second. Dabbed, hopped, whirled. That’s how fast it happened.  A boy like something fallen from the sky. That’s how to create emotion. Verbs + a simile.

The fourth and final paragraph of the first section:

Winslow leapt from the tractor, ran to his son. With his belt, he cinched a gash in the boy’s leg. He pressed his palm to Rodney’s neck. Blood purled between his fingers. Winslow cradled his son in his lap and watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading arc of dust toward the freight rail tracks that marked the northern end of all that was his.

No time for conjunctions. Short sentences and details. Leapt, cinched, pressed, purled. Until the final long sentence that contains the beginning but with everything now changed. 34 words that create a picture. A man crouched in a field, cradling his son, with the tractor rolling on.

34 words that slow us down.
.
.

*For more on Volt, read Jodi Paloni’s review in Contrary Magazine
**Cross-posted at Catching Days

If you went to a liberal arts college in the United States, it’s very likely that you turned twenty-one in a foreign (to you) city, trying to find yourself and meanwhile getting lost in a new language.

I turned twenty-one in Nairobi, Kenya – and not the one we think of today, packed with coffee chains, internet cafes, art galleries and thriving businesses. No, I turned twenty-one in a pre-Y2K Nairobi, sans cell phone, internet, espresso, or television. My classmates and I cranked tunes from old boom boxes on the roof of our dormitory, watched strange birds fly over head, peered down at family life transpiring in the slums below, tucked away behind Mamlaka Road.

What was it that led me to Kenya in 1996? It was probably my naive wanderlust and map-panting. Going to Kenya would be my Midwestern dream come true, a release from the soporific splendour that was my suburban life. By following my older sister’s Zimbabwe-bound footsteps, I knew that leaving home could mean an eventual return to a greater version of my future self. And the idea at the time was any place is better than here.

Just a few months into my semester in Nairobi clued me into the chilling contradictions of the developing world and its tangled relationship with those deemed more developed. Most of that semester I spent eating grilled sweet potatoes, wandering through a gigantic park frequented by naked madmen, waiting for actual classes to begin, and befriending a girl named Irene who thought God loved wazungu more than Africans.

That semester, when a student activist was set on fire in his dorm room because of his allegedly scandalous leadership in the student opposition party on campus, I learned about tear gas and terror. I learned about hiding and expulsion. I learned how it might feel for a life to unravel.

The boy had been set on fire in his dorm room but it had been announced as a headline in the daily paper as an “accidental fire.” A family request for autopsy was refused. And then I learned about irrational beatings and student protests resorting to chains and fire. I learned about a government’s resp onse to protest, a rush of men with guns on horses that trotted through our leafy campus looking for students who dared defy them.

I was afraid. I smoked Marlboros in my tiny dorm room, occasionally walking upstairs to peer out from the rooftop down below at a student exodus, classmates carrying overstuffed suitcases on their heads, following a decree from the university to leave or else face fatal consequence.

This was under Moi’s regime, well before Kenya’s groundbreaking constitutional reforms or the election violence that followed. The mood in Nairobi was wiry and tense in those days. We saw policemen beating elders selling fruit and fried fish on the street. They tear gassed the YWCA across the road from us.

During this time, most of our Kenyan classmates returned to their farms and villages, but all the foreign students remained behind in dormitory – Dutch, Americans, Koreans, Rwandans, and others with no place to go.  Those days, we whispered, called home from chunky, grimy payphones outside, and ate ugali in the cafeteria with a feeling of emptiness.

Of course, life did go on. School resumed, we attended classes in cavernous lecture halls with insecure but fierce professors. I was a student at the University of Nairobi in their Sociology Department but the most powerful lessons happened on rooftops and in backyards, dorm hallways and dimly lit shops.  I left Nairobi in the Spring of 1997 with the certainty that I would never be the same, and that leaving home would always be an essential part of being (defining) home.

And maybe that’s why, after years in the fields of arts and education, I decided to accept a position as the resident director of a study abroad program for Swahili language students in Zanzibar. Something about coming full circle, having the chance to lead in a context where I once sought leaders and mentors who could help me understand cultural dissonance.

Last month, I said goodbye to twenty-six ambitious Americans who had been awarded by the United States government to study Kiswahili in Zanzibar at the State University of Zanzibar. I was their resident director, perhaps otherwise known as therapist, dean, mama, guide, adviser and on the rare occasion, disciplinarian. For the last four months, my job had basically been to make sure that everyone stayed out of trouble, sharpened their Swahili chops, and left without accident or injury.

On that level, I think we all did pretty well. We managed to navigate a tiny, shared office space, a challenging academic culture, and, as a large group of impassioned, competitive individuals, our own intense dynamics. The students left with impressive Swahili test scores and the satisfaction of having navigated a culture quite different than their own not just by dress and food but values and beliefs.

The most amazing part of this work is watching others grow in the short time I get to spend time with them, and in turn, watching myself grow, too. It’s not easy crossing cultural borders, let alone immersing yourself in that other world once you’re there. Striving for a deeper experience means calling on all of one’s inner resources to cope with the unexpected triggers of living within a culture that is not your own.

I’m still left with questions, though, about the kind of impact these programs make on culture and identity, nation-building and peace-keeping.  Who benefits from these exchanges? Can we even call it an exchange? What kind of cultural imprint do we make on a tiny town already saturated with students from around the world? And how do we as individuals wrangle ourselves away from stereotypes that hunt us down and hold us hostage to behaviours we wish we could deny?

Now that the dust has cleared, I’m also wondering how Americans (or any nationality, really) leave and return gracefully to cultures and places that are not their own, especially when that potential grace gets spoiled by inadvertent isms?

There’s a really fine (dotted) line between volunteers, missionaries, students, researchers, and the average backpacker or tourist wandering the streets of foreign cities. Travelling by choice is the measured gesture of the privileged, no matter what the intention.

If backpackers and tourists care a little less about making strong connections with local people – it might be their lack of interest, time, or awareness that keeps them from crossing (straddling) cultural fences. But there is a kind of traveller who knows the potential benefits of meeting at the edges of a cultural encounter, and usually it’s that student who doesn’t want to be categorized as a traveller but more so a temporary resident.

And despite these nuances that only the travellers themselves are willing to define or debate, there’s a booming industry eager to accommodate every kind of traveller. Those who want to participate in local culture rather than simply photograph or marvel it from a distance can now do so with ease. The concept of the “culture safari”” or “human safari” is one gaining traction in the developing world, as more and more travellers express a willingness to pay (dare I say, purchase) a cultural experience (or should we call it a performance).

We can’t ignore questions of power here – and agency. Who is buying and what exactly is being sold? People mostly coming from the “first” or “developed” world seek out opportunities to engage in the “third” or “developing” world (written in quotes because these labels are, of course, problematic). Often these travellers pay to volunteer, study the language, take a local cooking class, learn to fish and farm, are healed by traditional doctors, and beat on traditional drums.

Whether you’re a student, a “voluntourist,” a missionary, student, or emboldened researcher, everyone seems to come to Zanzibar wanting something relatively harmless from the experience – to grow, discover, learn, to make meaningful relationships, to be meaningful.

Yet, so many contradictions exist in that bracketed volunteer-student-researcher space. I can’t begin to dole out any judgements on anyone’s behaviour, or think even for a moment that I might be categorically different as someone who lives an “expat” life here on the island. If you’re wearing a bikini on the weekends and a buibui to work during the week, so be it.

As far as I can tell, anyone from another place who attempts to live here must also confront daily the challenges of cultural dissonance and questions of belonging. It’s an island after all. The borders have been naturally defined (and debated) and redefined. We can only run so far. Kindness matters. Respect counts.

As I’ve said on repeat to my students, I’m not an expert on these matters, but I’ve come to realize in the last few years that there’s a way to travel and a kind of study abroad student, who, at his or her best, can work to hold all these contradictions and still manage to make meaningful connections with the world around us by becoming more conscious of the relationships, questions, perceived fears, and ultimate norms of a place.

And if we’re willing to go there – to be critical and self-aware of all the contradictions  — then we are also willing to be humbled, admit when we are wrong, apologize for our transgressions, and work to be ourselves in context.

So, I’m ending this little essay with ten things I say to myself and my students every time things get a little insane or difficult as a student traveller. Half the time we’re talking about stuff like this after the fact, while sorting out some challenging cultural conundrum. But, if we talk about it enough, it becomes a daily practice, and we remember where we are, and who we want to be in the world, at home or far away.

1. Turn every challenge into a question. No matter where you are, it’s likely that there are people, ideas, behaviours, and laws that annoy or offend you. Extract one, as an example, and see if you can translate it into a research question. Spend the next few months (or years) tracking down the various iterations of your findings. Seek data. When we turn frustrations into questions we are led some amazing cultural treks through a wide expanse of diverse values and beliefs.

2. Before you complain, ask yourself if you can imagine a possible solution. This is a shout out to any of us who have been conditioned to believe that complaining will actually achieve favorable results. Complaining as in whining. The newsflash is that in most parts of the world, complaining is really ineffective and a major turn off to anyone who would otherwise be willing to assist us. Stop complaining and approach each challenge with the expectation that there are solutions. Complaining is just a fancy or immature way to show off your perceived sense of power over others.

3. Give everyone around you the benefit of the doubt—including yourself, especially when it comes to language, communication, and cultural differences.  Resist that initial impulse to judge yourself or someone else for the unwieldy range of feelings unleashed by bad communication or just – simply – a difference in approach or command.

4. You don’t have to love everything about a culture, but you can still respect, appreciate, and attempt to understand it. You’re not coming from a better place; you’re coming from a different place. Again, it’s about holding contradiction, not about taking a spatula to the cultural landscape and attempting to even things out.

5. If you’re not uncomfortable at some point, you’re probably not growing. This is true enough even if you never leave home. But, really –why leave one country for another if we want to live exactly as we did at home? If you’re not challenged at all during your time in another country, it probably means you’re doing little to grow as a person.

6. For every cultural judgement you make, hold up a mirror to your own cultural behaviours. It’s always easier to judge someone else’s behaviour more than your own, but usually when we’re hyper critical of a particular cultural pattern or value, it’s usually because it has the potential to bring us closer to critical questions about our own lives and perceptions.

7. Expect the unexpected. The verb of life triggers the reality of it. Very rarely is something truly as it seems, especially living between two or more cultural ideas about time, money, values, work, quality, and fairness. Listen, bring a book. Be prepared to wait, laugh and be kind. Things might not be as they seem, but sometimes reality is so much better than the dream.  Even if you’re roadside with a flat tire.

8. Be humbled by what you don’t know. Sometimes students on study abroad programs tend to get angry or frustrated with what they don’t know. They may get competitive, self-absorbed, or controlling about the facts and feelings of a place. Without a doubt you’ll know some things and not others. Let this be a real exchange. When you don’t know something, lean into that vulnerability. Pick up a book or map, ask a question, and do more to learn more. There is so much you don’t know, and that’s exciting.

9. Stop comparing yourself. How good you are at the local language, how well you can bargain at the market, how often you’ve been here or there, how many princes and bandits you’ve had drinks with at the lobby of the fancy hotel. Um, yeah. Get over that. Be where you are, be who you are in context, and those stories will come to you, too, however tightly wound or lose and unbounded, depending on your disposition.

10. Travel with the disposition to be pleased. My mentor and friend Cynthia Weiss taught me about the “disposition to be pleased”” — to travel, however far or near, with the assumption that the world will not disappoint you. Beloved astrologist Rob Brezney calls it a kind of “pronoia” – believing wholeheartedly that the world is conspiring in all our favour around the basic principle of good. I’ve often referenced this phrase as a kind of roadmap to good teaching and learning, and its message extends to all of us who, as poet Antonio Machado wrote, “make the road by walking.”

Do I sound preachy? Maybe. Have I countless times failed to take my own advice? Yes. Is study abroad laced and loaded with post-colonial overtones and diplomatic legacies that are a world away from the innocence of a language proficiency test? Probably. Like I said, I’m not an expert but I know that living any other way abroad makes the whole experience kind of grim, and really frustrating. I’d much rather try and fail to be a mindful traveller than to sip my chai (or beer) seaside somewhere, totally oblivious to the beauty that comes with the clank and disaffection of travel beyond one’s personal comforts.

At the annual MLA convention in Seattle last week, humanities professors and university presidents gathered to discuss something they know all too well: dissertations. It’s safe to say that everyone there had written one, holed up for years in the process of jumping through that final, enormous hoop towards the ultimate prize: a PhD.

But they were not there to reminisce about their time as impoverished grad students or discuss ways of keeping the tradition alive. They were there to say enough of all that.

The average PhD in English takes nine years to complete. Nine years! In this day and age, that’s long enough for seismic shifts in the culture to have taken place from matriculation to graduation. And in a field that privileges cutting-edge, timely research, to call choosing an angle within your field a crapshoot would be a gross understatement. And then there’s the problem of that final hoop: dissertations average between 150 and 500 pages, offering laser-beam scrutiny of a highly specific, often obscure aspect of the field. What’s more, no one will ever read these tomes, aside from the committee members who have to, and the skills they require to complete are becoming ever more obsolete in an increasingly digital academia.

So these (successful) academics got together to discuss how to make their charges successful too, upon graduation, and decided that the PhD needs to be updated for the 21st Century.

This could mean less time to earn the degree and, most important, a revised standard for dissertations. But who will be first? Some have argued that elite universities need to be at the vanguard, because if they endorse nontraditional dissertations, then other universities will feel better about following suit.

As Sidonie Smith, an English professor at the University of Michigan and a former MLA president, put it: “We have to change the academy.”

This news is sort of last-week, but it’s been on my mind. Charlie Trotter, the famed Chicago restaurateur who helped ween that city off its diet of hot dogs and milkshakes, introducing farm-fresh vegetables and elegant presentations at his posh restaurant on West Armitage Street, has decided to shut it down this August. His reason, says the 52-year-old chef, is to focus on things he has neglected up to now: travel and… wait for it… academia.

Specifically, he wants to earn his master’s degree in philosophy and political theory. (I suspect he’s at least looking at the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.)

When I first read this news last Monday, I had to read it again to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood something. I hadn’t. He really is going back to school to study philosophy and political theory. And good for him. I’d like to do the same thing.

Which leads to my point: I know a lot of people who’ d love to go back to school an d study film theory, English literature, creative writing, and, yes, philosophy and political theory too. But they can’t. It’s expensive and impractical, and in this economy (!!) who can afford such flights of fancy?

Yet many of us have done just what Charlie Trotter is doing in the past, and many continue to do so even today, despite the grim job prospects for people with advanced degrees in the humanities. So what makes him doing it any differen t?

For starters, Trotter is firmly planted in the culinary 1%, the rare kind of chef who’s actually gotten rich from cooking. He might even be in the overall 1% for all I know. He can afford to quit working and play around in the quads for a while.

He also doesn’t have to worry about building a career out of it. That part of his life is behind him now, at the ripe old age of 52, and he can do whatever the hell he wants. And frankly, I’m beyond impressed that he’d choose to study philosophy and political theory over hunkering down in some gated community on Hilton Head Island, whiling his days away with golf and mint juleps.

But the news also made me consider my own youthful naivete when I went back to school, at age 27, to get a master’s degree in English and cinema studies. Was I driven? Definitely. Did I take my work seriously? Yes. Was I delusiona l? A little bit.

So, a question to all of those who are not wealthy, hugely accomplished, and firmly established in the world: Do you regret your studies, and wish that maybe, just maybe, you’d taken a circuitous, Trotteresque route to the ivory tower?

Like many other readers, during 2010 I was drawn into the hype surrounding the publication of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 by University of California Press. As the story goes, Twain decreed that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death, primarily to allow those individuals that he excoriated or potentially offended in its pages to be safely deceased. This decree wasn’t strictly followed, as three different editors published portions of the autobiography over the years, but the big selling point of the UC Press edition was that it would be the first complete, unexpurgated version of Twain’s text.

Though the book interested me gre atly, I r arely buy new books and thought this one in particular was a luxury item that I would probably never buy for myself. But I’m also notoriously difficult to shop for, so when my mother-in-law asked what I wanted for Christmas that year, I suggested Twain. The book’s success greatly exceeded the publisher’s expectations, and with the first print run rapidly running out, even Amazon was out of stock, so she had to buy it on back order and it didn’t arrive until the first week of January.

From reading reviews I knew the autobiography was a massive doorstop of a book, but not until it arrived did I truly appreciate what an overwhelming physical object it is. The book measures 10″x7″ (2.5″ thick) and weighs a hefty 4 pounds, and I immediately realized that it would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to lug it with me on the train where I do most of my reading, and also that at 760 pages with a small typeface it was a book that I would never read cover to cover. I’m a fairly slow reader, and the book would take me months to read even if I did nothing else with my spare time, and still longer if I couldn’t read it on the train.

Fortunately, during the past few years I’ve read two other longer nonfiction books – Studs Terkel’s Working (750 pages) and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (454 pages) – on what I’ll call the installment plan: reading short passages of 5-10 pages periodically, whenever I had half an hour to spare. I also blogged both books as I went, publishing excerpts along with my own commentary.

I’m trying the same approach with Twain’s autobiography, which I finally started last week. It’s been slow going so far, but quite interesting. In the early passages he writes at length about Ulysses S. Grant, and in particular his efforts at publishing Grant’s memoirs despite what Twain considered the exploitative efforts of Century Magazine, which first published Grant’s rememberances in article form. But not knowing anything of the Grant-Century situation other than Twain’s version, I’m not sure yet how objectively he’s stating his position, in which he expectedly (if quietly) casts himself in valorous and honorable terms as protector of the dying Grant. After I’m done with the Grant pieces I’ll check the editors’ commentary to see what they have to say on the subject.

It may not happen this year, but I’m sure I’ll finish Twain eventually. The periodic blogging will also help keep me focused and moving forward. And at the very least, I know that wrestling this tome will keep me deep in potential editorial material for the Contrary blog for quite some time.

Anti-union Governor Scott Walker.

While the rest of the nation is focused on the Republican presidential primary, here in Wisconsin, we are thinking about another looming election: the recall election of Governor Scott Walker.

You probably remember Governor Walker from early 2011, when he pushed through legislation stripping public employees of their union rights, causing several Democrat state senators to flee to Illinois in an effort to stall a premature vote, and as many as 100,000 protesters to congregate and camp out in the state capitol. Ultimately, Walker prevailed. His legislation passed, and public employees, including teachers and police officers, lost their union rights.

If Governor Walker thought the people of Wisconsin would take this blow to workers’ rights lying down, he was sorely mistaken. When I moved back to Wisconsin after living in Florida for five years this August, recall elections were already underway for state senators, both those who voted for and against the union-busting legislation (in my district, the anti-union Republican was ousted). Now recall workers are collecting signatures to recall both Governor Walker and Lt. Governor Kleefisch.

At th is point, the recall is inevitable. While the recall movement has yet to file their signatures, estimates have them clocking in around 600,000 signatures, well over the required number for a recall election.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the inevitability of the recall election, however, is the ads the Scott Walker campaign has already begun running. In an ad that aired shortly before Christmas, Walker and his wife implored citizens to think about the Christmas spirit and put differences aside (and keep an anti-union Governor?). In an ad that aired at the beginning of the recall, a “teacher” sits before a black backdrop, dressed in black, and says (in the heaviest Wisconsin accent she can muster—regional appeal!) she thinks the recall is just “sour grapes.”

Walker’s most recent ad is both deceptive and revisionist. In the ad, Walker claims to have saved “thousands” of public jobs. As he speaks, the words “saved thousands of union jobs” hover next to him. Of course, this is a grand fallacy. You can’t simultaneously dismantle unions, and then claim to have saved thousands of union jobs; by definition, those jobs are no longer union jobs.

Ultimately, Scott Walker can, and will, air as many ads as he likes, but it won’t make a difference. The people of Wisconsin will have their recall, and, much like the people of Ohio, who in November overturned anti-union legislation passed by their gung-ho Republican governor, they will overturn Walker’s anti-union law by voting him out of office, and voting in a candidate who better represents an historically pro-union state.

Last winter, when the founding editor of Contrary magazine, Jeff McMahon, asked me to anchor the site’s blog, I was flattered, of course, but also a bit intimidated. The magazine had already established itself as a literary gem in a field that can seem either overcrowded or woefully empty depending on how you look at it. There’s no lack of attempts at literary work out there, but they’re often just that: attempts. Contrary, meanwhile, publishes high-quality poetry and prose — and I’m not just saying that.

Perhaps this owes to Jeff’s decision to publish the magazine only four times per year, with the seasons, like any quarterly journal in the days of Old Media would have done. (Indeed, some still exist, god bless them.) He could, of course, publish as much as he wanted — it’s the Internet! — at virtually no extra cost or trouble. His decision to keep it on a schedule, and to adhere to that schedule, gives the magazine a certain weight, a kind of Old Media value system in a New Media world. It works.

But it owes equally to the quality of writing that Jeff and the team at Contrary select for each issue of the magazine, a process as painstaking as any staff’s at any print literary magazine worth its ink in the old paradigm. They just posted the Winter issue, and it’s as solid as any other.

So why was I intimidated? Because blogging is a daily activity. It’s often knee-jerk, reactionary, spontaneous. It’s doesn’t allow for craft, turning sentences around and finding their perfect jingle, developing an idea beyond the germ that inspired a given post. In short, it’s not like magazine writing, least of all a literary magazine.

I’d blogged before, though. For two and a half years, I was the chief blogger for a site that Kenneth Cole launched in early 2008, covering politics, social issues, the environment, and health. Its breadth was liberating. If ever I felt at a loss for topics, I simply opened the paper or clicked through a few online magazines for ideas. I got pretty good at crafting tight little pieces about all sorts of things in the space of 30-40 minutes.

Blogging for Contrary seemed different. This is a magazine first, a blog second. It’s got history as a magazine, its content is curated and edited, and the blog was introduced well into the magazine’s adolescence. Co uld it catch up?

Over the course of 2011, the Contrary blog published nearly 200 posts by dozens of contributors, drew more than 1,500 comments, and became a forum for a small but growing community throughout the world. Not every post has been great, or even elicited any apparent reaction, but some have gone viral. This is the nature of blogs: you put it out there and hope for reactions, and oftentimes you’re ignored. But sometimes you hit a nerve.

It’s the same with any blog, be it the Kenneth Cole blog, Daily Kos, or even Perez Hilton. Not every post is a home-run, but that’s not the point. The idea is to simply keep discussion alive.

I think that the Contrary blog has done that very well. And I, for one, am looking forward to seeing where the conversation goes in 2012.

Thank you, Contrary, for giving us the space to have this conversation. And thank you, too, my fellow Contrarians, for taking part.

You can call it narcissistic, but sometimes I Google myself. Who doesn’t? If you’ve done anything in the public eye — writing, especially — you’re bound to show up in unexpected places on the Web. When I Google my own name, it’s simply to find those places.

And each time I do this, I find articles I’ve written, or links to articles displayed with thumbnails and even paragraphs of my own text, on other content Websites. It’s been this way for years. I’ll write a piece for one magazine, and then find the same article, or portion thereof, on another magazine’s Website within months, weeks, or even days.

In most respects, this has been very helpful. In addition to raising my profile, these bandit sites make it much easier for me to find my own work. Some of them have republished articles I wrote for print magazines that didn’t even have Websites. How generous!

But the last time I did this, I had a different reaction. I suddenly recalled my first magazine job, as an editorial intern at the Utne Reader in Minneapolis. One day I was perusing one magazine or another in the office’s extensive magazine library (this was 1999) and I came across an article that one of the staff editors had written earlier that year for Utne. I took it to him and he was visibly perturbed. The other magazine never contacted him to ask his permission. “I’m supposed to be paid for things like this,” he said.

Oh, how quaint a time that was. When writers — or at least the magazines they wrote for — owned their work. When republishing a piece without consent was, indisputably, stealing. When you could actually do something about it.

So now, when I Google my name to find out where my articles might have reappeared in cyberspace, I do it with two minds: the one that feels flattered by the approval of some unknown editor or blogger out there who liked my work well enough to take it, and the one that recognizes this as yet another death knell for professional journalism.

Journalists have never been paid well, but at least they were paid.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

Hanging out with William Wegman and his dogs in NYC. I am there to interview him for my forthcoming Working Artist video.

Up until a few years ago, I worked in the art business and Wegman w as one of my artists.

In my office I had the last photograph he ever took of his first dog, his muse, Man Ray, taken right before Man’s death. It was a haunting image of the dog looking at his own reflection in a puddle. Wegman could not bear to look at it so we never published it.

He’s had many dogs since Man Ray and he obviously adores each of them, talking about them like they are his kids. As the dogs bicker amongst themselves, he describes each one’s idiosyncrasies; Bobbin’s chronic diarrhea, Flo’s bossiness, Candy was a horrible puppy but has turned into a docile old lady, and Penny is suffering from lymphoma, undergoing chemo and so she gets special treatment.

I tell him a theory I have heard that each of us has one pet, if we are lucky, who is a part of our very soul. Wegman disagrees and he begins to speak of each of the dogs he has had with tremendous affection before his voice lowers and he says softly, “And then there was Man.”

I think I found his soul.

A gather ing at George Plimpton's apartment in 1963. We might not be famous like they were, but at least we're here.

I had no idea what to expect. A holiday party for ghostwriters sounds like scene in a Woody Allen movie from the late 80s. A bunch of disgruntled, hyper-cerebral guys in well-worn corduroy jackets sipping G&Ts and swapping stories about dropping acid with Cary Grant or Henry Kissinger’ s bathroom habit s. So as I made my way to the Gotham Ghostwriters holiday party last night, I braced myself for the unexpected.

I also wondered what kind of literary life might still exist in the shadows of New York City, which has rapidly become so transformed by high finance that it bears almost no resemblance to the grimy artistic mecca that provided the foundation for Woody Allen’s fictions. Had the shabby-chic literati of yesteryear been expelled from Manhattan along with the independent bookstores and cafes?

From what I saw last night, no. They’re still here, still writing, still swapping stories, and still wearing corduroy jackets. (At least some of them are.) There are women, too, of course, and they don’t all look like Susan Sontag — that is, severe, intense, poised to challenge your every word.

And they’re still lively, cerebral, and full of self-deprecating wit. I spoke with a man who’s ghosted 43 titles, including a memoir about the Rwandan genocide, and who began his literary career as a songwriter. I spoke with a man who’d spent years reporting for American newspapers in Cambodia and Thailand. I spoke with a young guy from London who used to write about foreign policy for the Wall Street Journal. Everyone, in his or her own way, was fascinating.

Ghostwriting is solitary, often thankless work. You can toil away for months to capture a client’s “voice.” In the end, you might get a decent paycheck, but more likely you’ll make a piddling sum compared to what your client earns for your efforts. And rarely do you ever meet other “ghosts.” I have ghostwritten only two books, for the same client, and in the 10 years since I wrote the first one I have never met another ghostwriter. You put a few dozen of us in a room together, and it’s instant community. Indeed, last night felt like a reunion, though everyone there was a stranger.

So, as yet another corner coffee shop is replaced with a Starbucks, another East Village walk-up is gut-renovated and parceled out in $2-million pieces, and another glass-and-steel monstrosity rises along the West Side Highway, it’s nice to know that people are still gathering in little bars to talk about writing. Even if no one will ever know our names.

Raphael Torch

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”

“Because education played an integral role in Rafael’s life, preferred form of remembrance may be directed to a scholarship fund for his son, Rocco James Torch.”  Rocco’s scholarship fund is set up through The First Midwest Bank. Checks to be made payable to Rocco James Torch and mailed to:

First Midwest Bank
FBO Rocco James Torch
220 W Main Street
Morris, IL 60450

Rafael’s work in Contrary:

Paging Stevie Cavallero

Rafael’s Contrary Blog Archive

Rafael’s obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times.

She was ensnared in a draconian justice system for more than four years. She endured a humiliating trial and conviction for murder, and was then locked in an Italian prison while legal experts, journalists, and countless others rallied either to defend or condemn her.

When Amanda Knox was finally exonerated for the murder of her 21-year-old roommate in Perugia, Italy, she quietly returned home to Seattle. In her own words, she was “walking on air.”

Now she’s ready to share her story. And thus, Amanda Knox is reborn as a writer.

I first learned of the book deal from a woman I know who is the same age as Knox and attended the University of Washington with her before the nightmare in Italy began. While they never met, they had friends in common. The woman I know has been abreast of the Knox saga since the beginning, following its every surreal twist and turn since 2007.

And yet, she was surprised to learn that Knox would be writing a memoir. She perceived it as yet another sign that “anyone can write a book these days.” Proof that the publishing world is a corrupt, commercial scam.

I argued that Knox is hardly “anyone,” and that after such an ordeal, of course she’ d want to tell her story. That’s why people like Jaycee Dugard, Keith Richards, and George W. bush get book deals. Some stories deserve to be told, and by the people who lived them.

As a writer, yes, it’s frustrating to know that I’d have a very difficult time selling a book idea with my byline attached, despite having built a career in magazines and online journalism. Indeed, I have written two books, but they each carry the byline of someone else (though I am featured on the back covers and my contributions are plainly stated in the acknowledgements). Does this bother me ? Not at all. I accept that people want to read what certain people have to say, even if those people are not, per se, writers.

To me, this seems obvious, and I have something at stake in the matter. Writing is, after all, one of my professions.

So why would anyone else, let alone a non-writer, think otherwise?

Let me state right up front that I don’ t like musicals. I don’t even like much theater, for that matter. But I have a unique distaste for musicals, which typically lack the compositional sophistication of opera and by definition are not carried by the stuff of a traditional play: namely, acting and dialog.

To me, musicals are alien, often pointless flights of fancy. Just when I’ve begun to follow the story, — that is, just when I’ve almost forgotten that I’m in a overly warm theater on a narrow seat with nowhere to place my arms — the actors break out in song. And the songs they sing are so bad that if I heard them on my clock radio, I’d give the “snooze” button an especially hard whack.

So that’s where I’m coming from. Still, I’d like to know by what rationale Broadway producers select their latest projects. I get that certain musicals have their die-hard fans: Sweeney Todd, Rent, Hair, to name a few that I actually know about. But I’m not talking about those musicals. I want to know why anyone made a musical of Gray Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ direct-cinema documentary about Big and Little Edith Beale, relatives of Jackie O and bona fide crackpots. Why did anyone make a musical of Toxic Avenger, The Lord of the Rings, or Grumpy Old Men?

For the 2011 holiday season, one of my favorite childhood movies will be revived in song on a Broadway stage: A Christmas Story. Th at film, about a young boy in 1950s small-town America who wants nothing more than a BB gun for Christmas, was an instant classic when it came out in 1983. I saw it in the theater and couldn’t wait to see it again, which I did only two years later when it was finally released on VHS.

Why not leave well-enough alone? Doesn’t remaking a cherished work of cinema, or a comic book, or a novel, into something so absurd as a musical — because let’s face it, even if you love musicals, you have to admit that they’re absurd — seem, at best, unnecessary?

Besides, where does it stop ? Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization? My Dinner with Andre? Sophie’s Choice?

Vik Muniz

I brought no Italian with me to Rome. At the Brazilian Embassy, I tell the guard that I am to there to see visiting artist Vik Muniz. He speaks no English.

My best mime only warrants a raised eyebrow.

In desperation, I plead, “Parlez francais?” though I do not. A call is placed and I gather that I have been mistaken for a french journalist of great repute. “French” because everyone now speaks to me in french, though my only reply is my customary Gallic shrug. “Journalist of repute” because I was granted the sole private interview with the artist so they assume I must be somebody.

The red carpet is rolled out as a diplomat whisks me upstairs to Vik. Introductions are made, in french, to Vik as he looks at me, baffled, then points and exclaims. “It’s you!” We embrace as I explain how I have been chasing him, that I want to film an interview him for my project on artist’s careers, and how I connived to arrange this meeting. He looks at me as if I am insane. They give us an ornate room to talk in private. Vik helps me set up and, as I struggle with my equipment, he patiently teaches me how to use my tripod. Oh God, I repeat to myself nervously. The Ambassador drops in to say hello. Oh God. A white-gloved man in uniform silently serves us espresso. I am shaking with caffeinated nerves.

But he was the same Vik Muniz he has always been, generous, brilliant, hilarious, insightful, and gorgeous. And in the end, I got an amazing interview.

Crista Cloutier’s interview with Vik Muniz will appear with other artist interviews in a forthcoming compilation. We’ll keep you posted.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, in New York is not known for a lot of things: reliability, friendly service, cleanliness, reasonable pricing… It’s a sprawling, filthy system that’s made many a New Yorker scream in disbelief every time the fares go up. How dare they cut service, close stations, and charge more to ride on train cars that smell like urine baking on an old radiator?

Ironically, given all that, it is known for its signage. Not the signs that explain service changes, because those are as infuriating and incomprehensible as the service itself, but the signs that advertise new services, offer poetry and prose on subway cars, and celebrate the system that millions of people truly love to hate.

The New York Times once ran an entire article praising the use of a semicolon in an MTA sign.

Which leads me to the point of this post: New York’s latest street signs, 12 in total and placed in 144 in locations throughout the city, which use haikus to advocate safety.

Produced through a collaboration between the Department of Transportation and the Safe Streets Fund, the signs are both clever and graphically brilliant. The only downside, of course, is that they take a bit longer to comprehend than their forebears. And that might prove to be a (fatal) problem.

But leaving practicality aside for the moment — we are, after all, talking about literature, right? — it’s encouraging to see the DOT join the MTA in a stealth effort to keep literacy alive and relevant in the age of iPods and portable video games. Even if people don’t realize it, they’re getting tiny lessons in grammar, punctuation, and the magic of language every time they leave their homes.

In a way, it’s not so different from New York City adding fluoride to its drinking water, banning trans-fats from restaurants, and posting calorie counts on chain-restaurant menus. If New Yorkers aren’ t inclined to take care of themselves, or educate themselves, then by God, City Hall will do it for them.

And if this is what people complain about when they complain about “nanny states,” I say bring on the nannies. We might all learn a few things we should have learned when we really were children.

Writers pride themselves on understanding — and caring deeply about — the minutiae of their craft. I once met a writer who had a semicolon tattooed on her forearm. When I asked her why she had such a tattoo, she plainly said, “Because I’m an elitist.”

I got what she meant, and somehow calling herself an elitist magically negated the claim. No one that self-aware could be that much of a jerk, I thought, and even if she was, who cares? I appreciated her passion for the semicolon, a woefully misused and misunderstood little fellow. (I have no reason to think the semicolon is male, but I do.)

We like to think of ourselves as the guardians of such minutiae, which most people don’t think twice about.

So what about mixed metaphors ?

Usually, they’re a sign of sloppy writing, and what’s more, sloppy thinking. Because writing is thinking, and vice versa. But what happens when you mix your metaphors, or commit some other sin against your craft ?

I ask this because I recently wrote an article for a major magazine in which I unwittingly crammed three distinct metaphors into a single, short paragraph. I have yet to submit the article, and I may revise the graph to make it more logically sound. But is this necessary ?

The writing scholar Peter Elbow has defended the use of mixed metaphors on the grounds that if language is meant to communicate, and a piece of writing does just that, it makes no difference if the constituent parts don’t make sense as constituent parts. In other words, if a piece of writing works, it works. No sweat.

But I’m not convinced. In my own problem graph, I invoke the concepts of “tweaking” an emotional trigger, a “homegrown” business, and a cake’s “icing” to make a single point. Did I say paragraph? It was actually one sentence. That sentence, with its three incompatible concepts, sat there on my computer screen for days, and countless read-throughs, before I realized how problematic it was.

I realized the problem during a 10-mile run, and proceeded to obsess about it for the next few miles, wondering how I could write such schlock. Me, a teacher of writing who begins each semester by scrawling my favorite tenet on the dry-erase board: “Beware the unexamined thought.”

Which makes me wonder: Am I overthinking it? Would Peter Elbow say it’s okay? Or perhaps of more direct importance, would an editor strike the sentence and insert a new one that I did not write?

I’m inclined to think that neither Elbow nor an editor would find fault with it, and may not even notice it.

So what does that make me — a craftsman of the highest order, or merely neurotic? 

I kept thinking about home on the way to a sea turtle conservation center located at the northern most tip of Zanzibar, in the village of Nungwi. It was an early, rain-soaked Saturday morning, and as we wound up Zanzibar’s roads lined with lush green banana leaves and bursting coconut palms, I was thinking a lot about how we end up anywhere, circumstance or crisis, birth or burden.

I was on a bus full of scholars and fellows from America, on a bus full of young people with expansive futures, plugged into I-pod sounds and twitter feeds that fill them with promise. Here we were together on a class trip, off to the see the sea turtles who lived, protected, in the small aquarium built as a joint partnership between Zanzibar and other nations.

Under a drizzly, overcast sky, our guide introduced us to these marbled creatures with flippers, floating in the murky, dark green pool. Standing there with our shiny pink and green umbrellas, we watched as our guide threw vitamin-rich fists of green into the water, drawing nearly fifteen sea turtles to the edge of the wooden boardwalk where we all stood in a huddle, marvelling their ancient shelled bodies.

There, in the rain, we learned that sea turtles are incredible travelers with an innate compass tilted toward home.  Their entire life cycles are defined by being homeward bound, with great distances traveled across the seas – hundreds if not thousands of miles away from home — all the while knowing instinctively that one day they’ll return to the place where they were born.

From those earliest hours, their be ings are bound by the sand in which they were hatched. The sex of a turtle is determined by its temperature — the hotter sand, the more female the egg. Some say the mama secretes salty tears and enters a nesting trance when burrowing her eggs in the sand. A single mama can lay one hundred eggs, and once firmly buried, she leaves those hatchlings to emerge on their own, usually at night, during a rainstorm, while she is already far from the shore, on her way to a new or familiar feeding spot.

That’s the most extraordinary thing about sea turtles — they swim far, far away from their nesting grounds where they hang out and mingle with other sea turtles that have also travelled perplexingly far distances from their homes. There, sea turtles stay for varying lengths of time in the great Diaspora of Sea Turtles, until, that is, it’s time to nest.

When it comes time to lay eggs, the female turtle will always return to the place where she herself emerged on the nesting shore and made her way to swim or sink at sea.  She can be gone for years, but when it comes time to hatch her eggs, she knows instinctively to head back to where she came from, no matter the distance or the struggle to get there.

Our guide told us that a sea turtle’s poor eyesight actually makes it quite a struggle for them to return home, and yet, according to some marine biologists, it’s a sea turtle’s innate sense of the earth’s magnetic fields that leads a sea turtle home to nest again. They can barely see the road they make by swimming. They feel their way home. They are pulled toward it. Yes, they struggle, but they are bound by the pull itself to return.

In the drizzling rain, I sat under the thatched roof of a little shelter facing the sea, and kept wondering if human females are anything like the sea turtle ladies. Is there some part of us that will always be pulled home again? No matter how far we travel will our bodies lead us homeward bound?

I can’t help but thinking it’s a certain kind of blindness that leads away from our nesting grounds, too. We want to see what’s over there. We want our eyes to see otherwise. We want to sing that naive melody that lulls us into building and taking down our many temporary nests in places far from home. What makes any of us travel, leave home, take jobs, follow loves, sign up for conferences and cohorts in other cities and spaces?

I’m talking here about the ultimate privilege of moving – of agency – of desire and power that allows us to begin and end multiple lives in multiple places without much consequence, except, hopefully, the good kind – love, good fortune, joy, beauty, friendship. I’m definitely not talking about those who are forced or running from homes. And I guess it’s not even fair to say that home should in any way be defined by some sort of assumed comfort.

Arts collaborator and dear friend Rachel McIntire considers nesting one of life’s essential practices – one’s aesthetic, one’s way of being in the world, creating beautiful, functional, safe spaces, no matter how far from our original homes, the womb, and all that comes with it. Can every place be home if we make it so ?

I want to say yes – home is where we make it. Home is not a place, it’s a feeling. But there’s something really powerful about place and the feelings it stirs. And that feeling is about magnetism, far-flung from any sort of logic. I also gather it’s rooted in the senses and familial sense as well. If we’re anything at all like sea turtles, there’s only one home and we’re bound to return there if possible at some point, barring obstacles that would keep us from our return.

I am not certain that home is where I was born, or that Skokie, IL is my nesting ground, but those sweet little Zanzibar sea turtles got me thinking about how far we’re all willing to boomerang out into the universe before we find ourselves flung back in time to the place where we “belong.” You’re a stranger even to paradise if you weren’t born there.

Maybe home is anywhere that makes us feel this must be the place.

And so I end this essay lip-syncing one of my favourite songs for you. And I’m lip-syncing these Byrne lyrics with fervour. Opening my mouth wide open. Squeezing my eyes shut. Singing out loud. Because maybe I can sing my way home and, like sea turtles, I don’t have to look too hard for a certain way back. I don’t even have to see. I can just be pulled back through those magnetic fields, spiral back to move forward.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground, head in the sky
It’s okay, I know nothing’s wrong, nothing

Hey, I got plenty of time
Hey, you got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
Out of the passing of time
Never for money, always for love
Cover up and say goodnight, say goodnight

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place
I can’t tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me ?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where I’ll be, where I’ll be

Hey, we drift in and out
Hey, sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you’ll love me ’til my heart stops
Love me ’til I’m dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head
Ah ooh

Lately I’ve been working my way through Selected Stories by Sholom Aleichem, whom I’ve never read before but am greatly enjoying. In his story “You Musn’t Weep – It’s Yom-Tev”, a young boy struggles to maintain the innocence of childhood while his father is slowly dying from an unnamed disease (probably pneumonia) and his mother and older brother desperately strive to keep the impoverished household together. In this vivid domestic scene, the father’s holy books are sold off to (I think) a peddler.

The books were sold to Michal, the baggage-man, a man with a thin beard which he was constantly scratching. My poor brot her had to go with him three times before he brought him to the house. My mother, relieved and happy to see him at last, put her finger across her lips to show him that he must speak softly so my father shouldn’t hear. Michal understood, raised his eyes to the shelf, scratched his beard and said to her, “Well, show us, what have you got up there.”

My mother beckoned me to climb up on the table and take down the books. I didn’t have to be told twice. I jumped up so eagerly that I sprawled over the table and my brother, snapping at me to stop jumping like a crazy fool, pushed me aside. He climbed up on the table himself and handed the books down to Michal who scratched his beard with one hand, while with the other he leafed through the books and found fault with each one. This one had a poor binding, that one had a worn back, another was simply worthless. And after he had looked through half of them, examined all the bindings, felt all the backs, he scratched his beard again:

“If it was a complete set of Mishnayos, I might consider buying it…”

My mother turned pale, and my brother on the contrary became red as fire. He leaped angrily at the baggage-man, “Why didn’t you tell us in the beginning that all you wanted to buy Mishnayos? What did you have to come here and take up our time for?”

“Be quiet!” my mother begged him, and a hoarse voice was heard from the next room where my father lay.

“Who is there?”

“Nobody,” my mother said and pushing my brother Elihu into my father’s room, began to bargin with Michal herself and finally sold him the books, apparently for very little, because when my brother came back again and asked her how much, she pushed him aside, saying, “It’s none of your business.” And Michal snatched up the books quickly, shoved them into his bag and disappeared.

The story is simply heartbreaking, yet in a quiet and understated way which never resorts to melodrama. As his family crumbles, the boy poignantly hides behind childish facades (playing with the neighbor’s calf, pretending that a pile of logs is a palace and himself a prince) to avoid harsh reality. Even his closing admonition to his mother – that she shouldn’t weep over her dead husband, because one must be joyous during yom-tev (a religious holiday; here, specifically Shevuos or Pentecost) – is itself a form of denial. The story is really a standout of this collection, and is much more serious and powerful than Aleichem’s generally lighter and humorous tales, which are also greatly rewarding in their own way. Highly recommended.

In a recent series of opinion articles on The New York Times website, various thinkers ponder the wisdom and efficacy of the changes to student loan debt repayment proposed by Obama: that borrowers be able to consolidate loans at a slightly lower rate, that Income Based Repayment plans be made more accessible, and that loan forgiveness under such plans be moved down from 25 years to 20 years.

Many of the writers offer the opinion that this is either a step in the wrong direction, or that this is a small step in the right direction, but not a large enough step. The writers bring up some good points. Would making student loan debt more forgivable lead to reckless borrowing, or to the notion that some people are getting something for nothing while others work hard to pay their way through school ? The fact remains, however, that student loan debt is paralyzing the youngest generation of college graduates.

What is the solution to this problem? Many comment threads on the articles cite that personal responsibility is key, and that students should not take out loans they can’t pay for. This attitude, however, only enforces the class striation of our country. Under this model, only those who can afford education because they have affluent parents will have the opportunities to pursue a college, or a professional degree. As class becomes more and more reified in our country, it seems that access to education, the key to class mobility, should be broadened, not truncated.

Perhaps the authors of these op-ed pages, many of whom went to college in an era when state funding for public schools covered a majority of college tuition, should consider ways in which Millennial Generation students are trapped in a bind between expensive tuition, and lack of opportunities without a college diploma.

My personal opinion is that college funding should be merit based. Perhaps by rewarding our brightest students with increased scholarship money from the federal government, we could offer opportunity to all Americans, regardless of their parents’ income bracket, and simultaneously encourage academic achievement to make our nation more competitive globally.

On Friday, I woke up early, around 5:15 a.m. and checked my email. There, amid the junk mail, was a subject line that left me stunned. It informed me that a student I’d had for two courses at Hunter College, in 2007 and 2008, had been killed. Walking down a road on Long Island last Wednesday at 9:05 p.m., she stepped off the curb and was hit by an oncoming SUV. The driver, it turns out, was an EMT and did everything he could to save her. She was only 26.

I couldn’t fathom the news. She was a wonderful student, bright and creative, and a talented filmmaker with a passion for environmental issues. She even worked on a short film th at was shown on PBS. She taught yoga. And from her Facebook page, it is clear that she was loved by many, many people. Her exuberance for life was boundless, and totally infectious.

I spent the weekend trying to understand why her death was affecting me so deeply — more, I’ll admit, than the deaths of acquaintances or even relatives in the past several years. The relatives part is easy: I’ve never had an immediate family member die, and most of my dead relatives were quite old when they passed. That’s what old people do, I always said. The friends’ deaths were tough to deal with, but I could almost accept them because they weren’t that different from me, and however morbid it might sound, I can fathom my own death. Sad, yes. But not inconceivable.

A student’s death is different, I now know. As a teacher, you come to love your students. They look up to you (sometimes), and you dedicate yourself to them. Not only to their intellectual development, but to their development as human beings. Just think of your own college experience: the men and women charged with teaching you philosophy or English, film or religion, art or psychology were, in fact, teaching you much more. And you were teaching them. This is especially true, I think, when you’re a young teacher, as I was when this woman was my student. You inhabit a peculiar position. You’re neither the s age, old profe ssor nor a peer, but something in between. And in that middle ground, a unique kind of relationship can grow.

In the years since she was my student, we kept in touch on Facebook, and I always enjoyed seeing what she was up to.

Sometimes events seem to conspire in a way that forces us to think about their deeper significance, often in ways we don’t anticipate. As I thought about this tragic death, I soon began to think about the way her friends were using Facebook to mourn her loss. I struggled with whether or not I should write something on her wall, and thought about it for two days before I decided that, yes, I should. I wondered if I should write this blog post, and clearly I decided, again, that I should. But these were not easy choices to make.

These forms of communication mediate experience, and they turn reality into something else. Something mediated.

Coincidentally, I also spent the weekend reading Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated, which addresses precisely that problem with modern life. In our hyper-mediated world, he explains, we are constantly shifting from one form of mediation to another, and the result is that we have a tremendously difficult — indeed, often impossible — time  discerning reality from its numerous permutations: real real, observed real, edited real real, edited observed real, staged real, staged observed real unique, staged observed real repeated, staged hyperreal, overtly unreal realistic, covertly unreal realistic, real unreal, unreal real… You get the idea.

I wanted to write about this, to think through the effect it has had on me, but not if doing so would trivialize it, or add to the mediated distance and confusion that de Zengotita writes so powerfully about in his book.

What made me finally decide to write this post, and to publish it on a blog that is competing for your attention with all the other distractions and mediations that define the Internet in 2011?

I simply wanted to share my memories of Jenni, and my heartache — because that is real.

When the topic of running comes up, I have a favorite line I like to tell people: “I run because it gives me the illusion that I’m getting somewhere.” They usually laugh, and I laugh with them. Except it’s not entirely a joke. I’ve chronicled many grievances on these pixilated pages: academic, professional, technological. But I’ve been scant on things that bring joy, that offer a sense of victory. Running is such a thing.

Your career may have plateaued, your marriage bottomed out, your youth embalmed in a shoebox of old photographs that, eerily, don’t seem that old. Or maybe your career has taken off, your marriage is fresh (or you’ve happily chosen not to get married), and you haven’t got a nostalgic bone in your body. It doesn’t matter. Running offers something you won’t get at the office, from your spouse or children, or from remembering yourself at an earlier stage in life.

It offers an utterly in-the-moment experience. A religious person might even call it ecstatic, and I wouldn’t disagree.

But where is it taking you? Nowhere, really. And that may be the whole point.

Ours is a goal-oriented culture. We seek degrees, attain them, and move on to careers. We get promotions, move on, and build lives. Once a goal is met, we focus on new goals, until we reach the ultimate goal: retirement with enough money in the bank that we can sit back and enjoy our spoils. Such a fatalistic way to live, when you stop to think about it. No wonder depression and anxiety, and all their attendant symptoms, are epidemics today.

I’ve known hundreds of runners over the years, and the one thing they all share is a desire to be faster, to become more efficient, to hit benchmark times, whether it’s a sub-4:00 or sub-2:30 marathon; a sub-30, sub-40, or sub-1-hour 10K; a sub-30, sub-20, or sub-16 5K. The goals are different for every runner, but the drive is the same. And once a benchmark is hit, a new one takes its place. And thus, the Quixotic pursuit of some intangible, ever-elusive goal persists. Because to reach an end point, an ultimate goal, would be to say, “I’m done.”

The point of running, unlike so much in life, is to never say, “I’m done.” It is to be in constant motion, both physically and mentally, towards a goal that never really existed in the first place. Or rather, it’s a moving goal, one whose value exists not in its attainment, but its chase.

So it’s not without irony that I tell people that I run because it gives me the illusion that I’m getting somewhere, but it’s not a joke either. Because the moment I reach a goal, the goal has changed. And in an odd, counter-intuitive, utterly addictive kind of way, it’s a thrill.

When Salman Rushdie is an earlier adopter than me, I know I’m out of step with technology. But so it is.

Using Twitter to weigh in on Kim Kardashian’s divorce from Kris Humphries (two people I frankly know absolutely nothing about) after just 72 days of marriage, Rushdie proved that he could be at once brilliant and trite in fewer than 320 characters.

In just three tweets, which he dash(ian?)ed off on Wednesday, Rushdie told the whole pointless story. Why would he bothe r?

My theory: to save us from reading actual articles on the subject. And here’s a suggestion to the entire entertainment- and celebrity press: Hire Salman Rushdie to report your non-news so that we have time for things that actually matter.

1. The marriage of poor #kardashian was krushed like a kar in a krashian

2. Her kris kried, Not fair! why kan’t I keep my shar e?

3. But kardashian fell klean outa fashian.

Last week I received an email from a former student asking for a letter of recommendation for graduate school, and I had no problem saying yes. He had taken three courses with me in three years, and been one of the best students I’ve had in my eight years of teaching. He is a gifted writer and a naturally curious young man with what some call an “excellence reflex.” He wants to do well and he does, by virtue of wanting to.

But when I saw the program he’s applying to, I bristled slightly: an interdisciplinary program in the humanities at a world-renowned university. The name of the school is irrelevant, as many prestigious universities are now offering such programs. What matters is that it reminded me of the program I received my own Master’s degree from, at the University of Chicago. I loved the program, learned a lot, developed the critical thinking skills I hoped I’d develop, and graduated with a great sense of pride in my accomplishment.

And then I spent nearly a year applying for jobs. I was 28, with numerous magazine credentials and a ghostwritten book to my name. I was also a newly minted Master — and that proved to be the biggest obstacle. Some weeks, I applied for more than a dozen jobs, many in grant writing or any other kind of editorial work for which I was a fit. I met each of these jobs’ desired qualifications, and often exceeded them.

Yet I never got an interview. I went broke applying for those jobs. And I sank into a deep depression. Occasionally I’d contact an organization and ask why I hadn’t been considered, and rarely did I get a response. When I did, these were the two most common answers: “We can’t pay you enough money.” And: “We didn’t think this job would be academic enough for you.”

First of all, who were they to tell me what was “enough money”? I needed work, and would have been thrilled with a $20,000 per year job at a nonprofit. To the second excuse, with just an MA, you can’t get a job that would be “academic enough.” This leaves people with MAs in the humanities (or liberal studies, or whatever) between a rock and a hard place. You have a big, fancy name on your resume, and it’s practically worthless. Worse, it can be a liability.

But it’s far from priceless. Most of these programs will run a student more than $50,000.

This isn’t to say they’re not worth it. As I said, my time at Chicago was one of the most worthwhile pursuits of my life. But — and this is a very big but — it took a long time after finishing the program for me to see any returns on my investment. Even today, more than eight years later, I have yet to repay my loans, in part because the only work my MA has helped me get is adjunct teaching, which doesn’t pay much. And I got my teaching work largely because of my journalism experience, not my MA. Ultimately, my degree’s value doesn’t hold a candle to the value of the experience.

That is, I cherish what the education gave me, but the degree itself reminds me of that old saw from Gloria Steinem: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Just swap in the words “intellectual” and “Master’s degree in the humanities,” and you get my point.

I would love to help my best students continue their studies in programs like the one I chose, which shaped me into the person I am today, but I have to pause. Should I also wish upon them the same struggles?

Then again, maybe those struggles are all part of the deal. No one ever said graduate school would be easy.

I should be working right now. But I am preoccupied by the occupations. All around the world, from New York City to Rome, Boston to Barcelona, Miami to Moscow, every day citizens have organized to occupy the centres of financial power that have for decades caused and perpetuated gaps between rich and poor.

There’s been a wave of new activism, with unions throwing a wrench in the notion that this kind of activism is just for urban hipsters and disgruntled students. Across the world, it’s the librarian, policeman, nurse, and bus driver, the 99 percent of us who have nothing much else to lose but our dignity, lest we fight for a paradigm shift, for what poet Seamus Heaney calls that  “great sea change on the far side of revenge.”

I’m watching the beat downs and the shut-downs. The sign-makers and the heart-breakers. Children on the shoulders of adults, watching the world wrestle with its legacies.

And I’m watching this occupation unfold with awe from my island perch, wondering how these global pulses will grip local realities. I wish I could say that the people of Zanzibar have been seized by this same spirit of activism to question power and fight for equality, but all’s relatively quiet on that front over here, at least on the surface of things.

Occupy Stone Town? I am not sure where our financial nexus might be or what it would like for local people to occupy, say, the State House. Perhaps it’d be more like an occupation of the grandest hotels, the cleanest, most posh renovations currently housing expats and the wealthy, connected folk at the crème.

Or maybe it’s Occupy the Mosque. Occupy the University. Occupy Livingstone’s. Occupy the United Nations. Occupy the World Bank. Occupy the Embassies. Occupy First-Class on the Kilimanjaro III. Occupy the Ruins. Occupy the Serena Hotel. Occupy the Coral Reefs. Occupy Prison Island. Occupy all the private islands once public, untouched. Occupy the Sand-Bank. Occupy the banks (can’t mention a particular bank, or I might face unwanted consequences). Occupy the Big Jeeps. Occupy Gelato Shops. (Yum).

Seriously, though. I am really moved by all the people around the world who are responding to global crisis with local action. One of the most irritating things about grad school was the theory loop, that fascinating merry-go-round of passion that spun out in rusted intellectual splendour because we couldn’t take those gallant plastic theoretical horses and ride them out into the great beyond of the real world. So to see people across the globe drag their sleeping bags onto the political lawn is at least a start.

And the fact that I’m directing a language program paid for by federal dollars, a program that entitles its young scholars and fellows to believe they actually earned their right to study abroad, makes me ache even more to go home some days, wondering if I wasn’t sort of left behind in the world’s collective attempt to actually topple the inequalities that have plagued societies all over the world. I wish I was home making posters and calls. I wish I was home figuring out a way to actually be home in a new, fairer home.

I also wish it was just that easy to strike the protest match here, that my enthusiasm for change in general would somehow catch fire on this tiny island, as it has in so many other places around the world. So why hasn’t it?

In many ways, the act of occupying any space is in itself a luxury. Most people here are occupied by the daily reality of having to meet basic needs. Yes, the 1% are living large in air-conditioned mansions by the sea run by a staff of servants, but the other 99% might not be able to afford time off from their lives, even if they were swept up by the tidal wave of justice rolling through the world. But perhaps that begs the eternal question: can revolutions really be the bread that feeds the soul ?

When the “Arab Spring” was sprung on Zanzibar televisions, most watched from a distance, marveling the changes but not necessarily embodying them. It was happening “over there.”

And when Gaddafi’s government began to stumble, and then fall, it was the opinion of many in Zanzibar that the Libyans really had nothing much to complain about – after all, a majority were being fed, clothed, educated, and sheltered without much individual effort. Newlyweds were given $50,000 dollar grants to purchase and furnish their nesting apartments. Young Libyans were being sent around the world to study and learn at world-class universities. Gaddafi himself was the revolution, embodied. He was the collective fist waved against the imperial west.

Many people in Zanzibar argued that life was not that bad under the revolutionary leader, and so what’s the point of a bloody, NATO-pocked revolution?

Instead, throughout those January days in Tunisia and Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East, Zanzibari people puzzled over their own ongoing (albeit insular) questions regarding a new constitution that would reconfigure the politics that have led to the gross victimization experienced by most on the island. As leader after leader either tumbled or stepped down, it did not seem as though a similar match might be lit here on the ground.

And at least in the last two months, Zanzibar seems to have been preoccupied by another kind of occupation: the presence of violent crime that has been escalating in scope and intensity.

Zanzibar is no stranger to violence, having experienced political clashes that still lurk in the minds of local residents as periods of fear and horror. But still, there’s been a pride associated with the relative peace that’s reigned on the island for quite some time, and the fact that there has now been a rash of armed robberies and even a rape in the not so distant past is causing alarm amongst residents and travellers alike.

With each criminal act on the tiny island, there’s been increasing fear, rage, and blame all around, a panic to find the source and reason for such devastating change in the overall sense of peace and security here. A petition of solidarity was started to protest the violence, but there’s been a jagged reaction to who’s signing the online document and what’s at stake by actually standing up and standing out.

Inevitably, xenophobia h as served as a catchall for all the social stresses plaguing Stone Town and the rest of the island. For every violent crime, Stone Town residents are quick to assure you that it wasn’t a Zanzibari person who committed the crime – it was someone from bara (mainland). And whether that is always true or not is hard to trace, since few of these crimes are ever fully reported or if reported, tried in court.

Zanzibar’s tumultuous relationship with bara has been fuelled by the politics of a fragile union between two governments, a conflict dating back to the revolution. The tension seems fair enough, but continually pinning every crime on “other” is a convenient way to distract from questioning what can be done here and now to stand for peace, no matter the victim or perpetrator’s roots.

I am clearly outsider – bara of the bara of the bara. Yet, I wonder why consensus-building around an issue as cross-cutting as violent crime isn’t easier to rally around among local residents. Just under one hundred people have signed this petition, yet there’s been no real consensus around organizing for change. And no real leadership has emerged, no guidelines for occupying, say, the police station, or the streets, even, in the name of peace.

Is it because the whole Occupy movement is an inherently Western concept? I’d say yes except that we just watched revolutions sweep across some of the most conservative, non-Western governments in the world. Is it because there are simply inherent tensions on an isl and between local and non-local, so much so that consensus is a contrarian construct?

In the two years I’ve lived in Zanzibar, I’ve seen a huge spike in a kind of right-wing rhetoric that glorifies Swahili culture and identity as a kind of response to the evils perceived as infiltrating the island from the outside. A way of protecting, preserving, resisting, recasting.

I respect and sympathize with the island’s feeling of vulnerability and lack of power against forces greater than itself. It’s true that not all foreigners who come to Zanzibar have the best interests of local people in mind. People are struggling here. Maisha maguma (difficult life) is the reality for most.

Is it possible, though, to stand up against crime and violence without shutting out the shores? Is it possible to stand up against corruption and political heartbreak without blaming everything on the abstracted “other”?

Occupy Schools. Occupy the Sea. Occupy the Boats. Occupy the Water. Occupy the Sand. Occupy the Future. Occupy History. Occupy the Present Moment. Occupy Personal Responsibility. Occupy Potential. Occupy Libraries. Occupy Poetry. Occupy Love. Occupy the Political Process. Occupy the Occupation.

I suppose not all occupations translate in the same way. Occupying Stone Town would have to reckon with two thousand years of occupation. Technically, Zanzibar’s been “occupied” plenty of times — the Persians, the Portuguese, the Germans, the British, the Sultans of Oman, even the Americans. And today, Stone Town already feels taken over, occupied by forces and fears not inherently Zanzibari in scope or consequence. Any kind of protest here: Kusimama (to stand) Kusema (to speak) Kupiga kelele (to yell) could be fast and fatal.

So, what’s keeping Zanzibar off the global occupy map ? A recent attempt at even a protest in Dar es Salaam was supposedly canceled due to fears of police backlash: http://thecitizen.co.tz/news/4-national-news/16568-ngos-bow-to-police-call-off-demo.

Is it possible to rally for a better, more egalitarian, inclusive, and ultimately peaceful Zanzibar, with Zanzibar voices at the helm?

Last week the New York Times ran an article about an Indiana school district that has dispensed with textbooks, pencils, and the o ther antiquated tools of primary education. Instead, each desk features a laptop computer. The logic is that, being the 21st Century and all, kids need to learn how to use technology.

A few days later, the same newspaper published another article with a very different message, describing one school in California that eschews technology in favor of manilla paper, crayons, and paperbacks. In other words, the stuff you and I learned with growing up.

Only this isn’t just any old school, nor is it in any old part of California. It’s the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, in Los Altos, aka the Belly of the Beast, aka Silicon Valley. And its students’ parents are no luddites; they’re the people creating the technology we can no longer live without.

The contrast between the two stories is striking, yet both present compelling arguments for how to best educate children in the Information Age. Yes, children will need to know how to navigate the Web and “multi-task” on numerous browser windows at once. But the CEOs and engineers at the very companies that are defining this new way of life didn’t grow up in the world they have created. They grew up with Little House on the Prairie, the Bookmobile, and hand-cranked pencil sharpeners.

They’re sending their kids to Waldorf because they prize the values and skills such a low-tech education instills. They want their kids to know how to sit with a book and read for an hour, to work with others on solving a problem, to write without the aid of spell- and grammar-checkers. In short, to develop intellectual capacities that won’t need an update with every new app, gadget, or software development.

But here’s the problem: the Waldorf is an elite private school, charging $5,000 for nursery school, $18,500 for elementary, and close to $30,000 for grades 9-12. You have to be a mogul to afford that kind of tuition. What are the rest of us to do?

As a New Yorker and professor in the public-university system here, I am well aware of the disparity between private and public schools. Some of my students could survive in any academic environment, while others reach college woefully unprepared to do the work. And though I do not have children, I have not ruled out the possibility. One of the things holding me back, however, is the question of where they will go to school. I found myself nodding vigorously while reading about the Waldorf philosophy, but then shaking my head even more when I saw the price tag.

This morning my commuter train was momentarily delayed in Justice, a small town just beyond the southwest side of Chicago. The train was stopped next to a subdivision, at the end of a cul de sac. From where I sat, the near view was wide and I could clearly see the first few houses on each side of the street, but further beyond the view narrowed as the trees lining each side of the street obstructed much of the landscape.

As I looked on, a battered pickup truck entered the cul de sac at the far end, steadily came closer and then wound around the circle before driving away again. The truck slowed to drive through a puddle, as if the driver was wary of a damaging pothole. As the truck disappeared I finally noticed the garbage cans which stood at the end of each driveway, and realized it was garbage pickup day and that the driver must have been a scavenger looking for promising discards to be taken and resold. But since he never stopped, I assume he saw nothing of interest, and moved on to the next street.

A slight motion on the left side of the street then drew my attention, and I saw an arm extend from a garage, turn over some sort of container, and pour liquid onto the ground. At first I imagined someone standing outside for their morning smoke, with a cup of coffee, before leaving for work. I pictured the quiet, pensive stance as the person reflected on the night before or looked ahead to their workday. But then I realized that enough liquid had been poured that it couldn’t have been the dregs from a cup of coffee, which ruled out my morning-respite scenario. Instead I decided that the person was dumping a cup that was left overnight in the car. The car backed out of the garage and into the street, but stopped almost immediately, as if the driver was searching the car for something she had forgotten. The car rolled slowly down street, at no more than five miles per hour, before stopping again near the end of the block. After ano ther minute the car started up again, turned the corner and was gone.

While I watched the car progress I also noticed another house across the street, where an SUV was parked in the driveway, its rear bumper overhanging the sidewalk. Which, to me, meant the house had so many cars – with several older teens or young adults living at home – that they could barely fit in the driveway. A crowded house, with noise and laughter and arguments and more than a few frayed nerves.

After a few minutes of observation the train started again, and the neighborhood disappeared from view. But not before inspiring quite a few stories in my mind.

Imagine taking a class on n on-Euclidian geometry. Now imagine that your professor doesn’t know anything about geometry at all, let alone an obscure, archaic branch of it. Inste ad, she h as a PhD in art history. But imagine, too, that this is an extremely rigorous class, at one of the oldest colleges in the country, famous for its emphasis on the Great Books.

If you know your American liberal-arts colleges, you know the school is St. John’s, in Annapolis, MD, and that the professor is probably do ing a pretty damn good job of teaching non-Euclidian geometry, despite her lack of knowledge or training in mathematics. If you don’t know St. John’s, you’re probably wondering how in the hell someone without any background in a subject can be qualified to teach it, especially at a prestigious college more than 300 years old.

In today’s New York Times, an article about St. John’s explains how: by relying on the students as much as the teachers. In classes at St. John’s, professors act as facilitators, and the students, who take the same 16 courses over the course of their four years at St. John’s, learn from one another as much as from their textbooks and teachers. It’s a community of schol ars, in which knowledge is born of ignorance. The “sage-on-the-stage” model of most academic environments is replaced with the “guide on the side.”

I first learned of St. John’s when I was college freshman doing a tutorial on Franz Kafka with a philosophy professor who had received his B.A. there. That professor set the tone for my college career. He was brilliant, inquisitive, and almost childlike in his love of ideas. Though his expertise was in Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, he was the perfect guide with whom to read Kafka and related thinkers. He was my first truly great teacher.

He ended up marrying a math professor at the same college, and I remember one night, early in their courtship, seeing them engrossed in a lengthy conversation about triangles.

With all the recent talk of education becoming too focused on the credential, and not enough on hard-to-quantify intellectual skills, the St. John’s model stands as a beacon of hope. The real test, of course, comes when its graduates enter the job market.

Does the world still have a place for people who have studied, essentially, how to think ?

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about poems. My first book of poems is about to come out (obligatory self endorsement), I’ve been teaching poetry in all three of my classes (one a creative writing class, one a composition class, one a glorious class on contemporary poets in which I get to teach all my favorites), and I’ve been trying to find some time, somewhere, to actually work on writing new poems myself.

Beyond my solipsistic connections with poetry, I’ve been thinking about the task or job of poetry. Yes, poetry is word magic, we can all agree on that. Is there more reward in reading a poem than the wonder of witnessing language worked and reworked in new and surprising ways ? But what else can poetry do ? This year’s U.S. Poet Laureate, Phil Levine, seemed to me to be particularly well chosen given the current economic crisis. What poet could better represent a downtrodden and disheartened American people than the author of What Work Is, a collection of poems that probes the very ideas of hard American work, of class difference, of economic peril.

In the title poem of that collection, the speaker, in line for possible work at an auto plant, reminisces about his bro ther, who works night shifts at Cadillac so he can study and sing German opera during the day. The speaker wonders when the last time he embraced his brother was, and realizes he’s never done “something so simple” because he doesn’t know what work is. The definition of work in the poem slides from physical labor, to the study and love of art, to the work of human intimacy.

I’ve been trying to think of some poems that might speak to the Occupy Wall Street movement currently underway in New York, and in cities and towns across the country (the 50,000 person town where I live in Wisconsin had its own Occupy rally yesterday). The protestors, including students who can’t find work and are burdened with sickeningly large student loan debts, the unemployed, retired persons facing benefit cuts, veterans, union members, and political activists, are expressing a sentiment that I think runs deep in America right now: frustration—frustration with a banking system that bankrupted our economy, frustration with executives making gobs of money while ordinary people face eviction from their homes and increases in utility and grocery bills they can’t afford, frustration with a regulatory system that has failed to regulate and failed to punish those whose actions directly contributed to the economic crash, frustration with the lack of adequate taxes on the wealthiest 1%.

And what can poetry do in response to or support of these protests ? A common criticism of American poetry is that it is apolitical. Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement can spark some poetry that, like Phil Levine’s What Work Is, proves this assumption wrong.

The University of Texas at Austin announced this week that its Ransom Center will acquire the archives of South African novelist J.M. Coetzee.

Coetzee received his PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages at Austin, where he wrote his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett, in 1969.

The 71-year-old author has lived in Australia for the past several years, following a stretch in Chicago, where he taught at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. It was there that I first encountered Coetzee, both as a novelist and as a person, when he gave a reading of his forthcoming novel Elizabeth Costello for the humanities M.A. program. Impressed, I read his critically acclaimed 1997 novel, Disgrace, and then everything else I could get my hands on.

Coetzee is a rare kind of writer, producing prose at once spare and rich with meaning. He creates a psychological space in which myriad effects happen simultaneously: disgust, terror, contemplation, insight. He never tries to dazzle, but if you are open to his subtlety, his words will arrest you. He is brilliant, with a vast intellect, but he possesses incredible self-control. Of how many of today’s writers can that be sai d?

Few novelists have affected me like Coetzee did back in 2002, and this news of UT acquiring his archives comes as both welcome and sad news. It’s wonderful, of course, that the author’s alma mater has secured his work and will preserve it. It’s also wonderful that Coetzee himself has authorized and endorsed the contract with UT. But it signals the eventual end of Coetzee’s writing career, whether sooner or later, and that’s not something I care to think about.

Obviously no one lives — let al one writes — forever. And Coetzee may still have many productive years ahead. But with each passing year, the aging author draws closer to the day when he will write his last story, his final essay, his ultimate novel. And then we will have only his archives, his back catalog.

He will join the rest of history’s great writers, his pen forever lain to rest, his body of work complete. But let’s not rush it; let’s not fossilize Coetzee just yet.

I, for one, am not sure there will be anyone to replace him.

I learned of Steve Jobs’s death the way millions of people probably did: by turning on my MacBook. There, on the Apple homepage, was a photo of Jobs and the years 1955-2011. I was shocked, but not terribly so. His cancer and departure from Apple in August were never secret, and everyone following the situation knew why he left.

Jobs knew how to run a company, and w hen he felt he couldn’t run it effectively anymore, he took his leave. It takes a lot of courage to do that.

Jobs also changed the world, and introduced us to our future when he rolled out the Macintosh 27 years ago. He then crafted and delivered that future, with iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iTunes, iPads… The company didn’t dub its suite of programs “iLife” for nothing.

But w as Jobs a saint? Was he a person of great holiness, virtue, or benevolence? Did he truly deliver unto the world a better way of life that has facilitated peace and global understanding ?

The way we communicate now is inseparable from the products and technologies that Jobs helped create. Everything from design and filmmaking to keeping in touch with our friends has been affected by Apple products, and the industry had to keep pace with Apple’s extraordinary R&D team to stay competitive. And the products rock. I write this on a four-and-a-half-year-old MacBook Pro, and it still runs like a dream. (Sorry Bill Gates, you never treated me this good.)

But back to the saint question: On Facebook, scores of people weighed in yesterday with thoughts on Jobs that downright deify the man. No one mentioned that he was a billionaire who didn’t believe in philanthropy, or that his searing temper often inspired more fear than awe in his employees. Lots of people mentioned that he dated Joan Baez (good for Jobs’s post-hippie persona), but no one mentioned that he allegedly did so because she’d once been Bob Dylan’s lover, with whom Jobs had long been enthralled (not just bad for his image, but a bit creepy, too).

I grew up with Apple products and I like them a lot. I’ll also go on record saying that Steve Jobs did a great deal to improve our lives. Somebody was going to dominate the world of personal computing and high-tech gadgetry, and I’m glad it was him. But maybe we should all take a step back from the hero worship and ask ourselves, just who was this guy?

Bec ause he w as not, in the end, a god.

In early 2008, I read a disturbing story of young lust and murderous rage, fueled by alcohol one late night, that left a 21-year-old woman dead in Perugia, Italy. I read about the murderers: an attractive couple in their early 20s, who looked like any clean-cut college students you’d see on any campus in the U.S. The evidence, as it was reported, was damning: Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, had brutally stabbed Meredith Kercher in a sex game gone bad.

For almost four years, I have followed the Amanda Knox story. Not because I love stories of murder, but because not long after I read that initial report, I read another one that gave an entirely different gloss on the whole situation. In that article, Knox was the victim of a barbaric legal system that refused to admit fault, despite nearly irrefutable evidence that she was not the killer at all, but a sweet and spirited college student. The real killer, allegedly, was an African drifter named Rudy Guede.

Both articles appeared in the same newspaper, the New York Times, written by American journalists.

Presented with such radically opposed treatments of the story, I was hooked on the case — not just because I became convinced of Knox’s innocence, but because I wanted to see how coverage of the story changed and evolved over time.

Before long, the American media settled on a position of “Amanda Knox, wrongfully imprisoned, victim of Italian injustice,” while the Italian media was far less charitable. But I never forgot that initial article in the Times, and I wondered if anyone else following the story had experienced the same flip of conviction that I had.

It’s largely because the American media would not leave the story alone that Knox received as much support as she did. Indeed, her acquittal on Monday would likely never have happened if c overage had been different over the past four years, or worse, nonexistent. Which leads me to a question about the media: was it irresponsible of the Times to lead readers down a path from which the paper would ultimately retreat? Or was the Times merely reporting what seemed true at the moment ?

The answers to those questions are “no” and “yes,” respectively. And that’s okay. But as the Knox story shows, we must be skeptical in reading the news, but we must read, and we must continue to read as stories develop. Truth changes. Things are rarely as they seem.

When I started college, in 1993, there was a notion going around that education was subversive. It allowed those of us lucky enough to be studying the liberal arts to engage with serio us texts, ask serious questions, and develop critical perspectives on the world. It allowed us to exist, mentally at least, outside the structures that would exert control over us throughout life: economics, politics, religion, and yes, even education.

We couldn’t change the world, or its prevailing ideologies, but we could understand it. And by understanding it, we were liberated. They’re not called the liberal arts for nothing.

There was another noti on, borrowed from Mark Twain, that all you needed for such radical thinking to take place was a professor, a student, and a log to sit on. No ivy, Gothic architecture, grand reading rooms, or bucolic quads required. That my college had all those things, too, was simply an aesthetic plus.

Flash forward almost 20 years. Today, for-profit institutions are everywhere, doing more harm than good, and the digital classroom has become de rigueur for just about any college wishing to remain in the education racket. In an opinion piece for today’s New York Times, the former editor of that newspaper, Bill Keller, writes about the efforts of one elite university to expand its reach, with the dubious goal of educating as many people as possible through online teaching. Why dubious? Because it’s not clear that, as the numbers rise, anyone is learning anything.

I’m nostalgic for my own college days, I admit. Meeting a professor for coffee to discuss the week’s reading was a privileged path to the B.A., no question. But I don’t think it’s mere nostalgia that sounds an alarm when I read about the latest technological “advances” in education. How are the students of th is hyper-connected, virtually present, bottom-line-driven world to ever make sense of it when education itself is hyper-connected, virtual, and driven by the bottom line?

Global learning does not lead to global understanding. Of course, most people are not able to step outside of life long enough to gain some perspective on it, but if colleges and universities don’t do something to combat this trend, education will cease to mean what it once did.

It’s been said that Bob Dylan, like Levi’s, is an American original. Only he might not be as original as he once was, if he was ever as original as people thought. The iconic troubadour isn’t talking, but to look at the evidence, it seems that Dylan has become a copyist of not inconsiderable talent: Several of the 70-year-old’s recent paintings (playing the guitar gets boring, even for rock legends) bear an uncanny resemblance to semi-famous photographs and film stills.

The works in question, from his “Asia Series,” are still very good paintings, in a sort of post-Fauvist/early Picasso sort of way. But Dylan has always maintained that he paints from real life: people he meets on his world tours, street scenes in exotic locales. Even in his golden years, Bob Dylan maintains the image of a scrappy box-car vagabond, traversing land and sea as a student of the human condition. To learn that he has more likely been lounging poolside at his mansion in Los Angeles, aping decades-old photographs, is, well, dispiriting.

But it’ s al so perfectly understandable. He is, after all, 70 years old. What do you want from the guy?

Or maybe he’s just doing what he’s always done: fucking with us.

More upsetting, I think, is the allegation in 2006 that he plagiarized songs from the Civil War-era poet Henry Timrod on his chart-topping album Modern Times. That evidence is pretty hard to ignore: in one song, “When the Deal Goes Down,” Dylan sings, “Where wisdom grows up in strife”; meanwhile, Timrod’s poem “Retirement” reads: “There is a wisdom that grows up in strife.”

Sure, this could be a case of the old “monkeys in a room full of typewriters” theory, that any given set of words will eventually and inevitably be replicated, but it seems a lot more likely that Dylan copied the poetry.

Then again, who care s? Folk singers have always borrowed from other sources; that’s what folk music — and by extension, rock music — is all about. Still, it would probably behoove someone of Dylan’s stature to be up front about it, lest some nosy haters go mining through the Library of Congress in search of any evidence at all that the guy isn’t actually a fountain of eternal creativity, but rather, and merely, a human being.

One of the arguments against e-readers is that you can’ t see wha t other people are reading anymore. It used to be that you’d spot an interesting-looking person on the train, or at a cafe, or wherever, and take a minute to check out the cover of their book of choice. Now, all you see are people with ever-thinner slabs of plastic, their faces illuminated by LCD screens like the bluish-white water of a hotel swimming pool at night. A light of loneliness.

We are losing something, and we will never get it back: impromptu conversations with strangers. Last May, on a trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to New York, I saw that the elderly gentleman beside me was reading Nemesis, Philip Roth’s latest novel about the polio epidemic of the mid-1940s. I could see he was nearing the end, so I asked him to share his thoughts with me once he’d finished. I was as eager to know his thoughts about the book as I was to hear about his own experience living through the period it portrays.

An hour or so later, he tapped my arm, and thus began a four-hour conversation about the novel, which we agreed was both great and deeply flawed, life in New York, his work as a composer of music for Broadway plays, and many, many other topics. We kept each other company and turned what might have been just another long, uncomfortable flight into a civilized afternoon 30,000 feet aloft.

Another time some months b ack, aboard a horribly crowded subway car, pressed between a metal pole and a gaggle of pre-teens, a man in his mid-50s commented that we were reading books by the same author. Once again, an experience worthy of Dante’s Inferno was momentarily suspended with talk of literature.

What does it say that in both of these cases, my serendipitous new friend was a man born well before the personal computer became a household appliance, each more likely to own a record player than an iPod?

Will I ever have an excuse to talk to anyone my own age?

It’s fascinating, the difference in reading a novel as an adult that you loved at fifteen. There’s both a deepening and defrauding.

In search of an easy reread, I recently took up Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady during an eight-hour international flight. I was shocked by how the novel had changed in my absence.

I first read The Portrait of a Lady for an English project. Given a list of novels, I chose it because it was the only one featuring a female protagonist. This represented a life-changing leap into the arms of the expatriates and resulted in a 20-page research paper tricked out in the florid prose typically prompted by a first romance.

From Isabel’s first steps of moving to Europe and meeting men, The Portrait charted out what seemed to me an infallible route toward ultimate female independence. I wanted to be an adventurer. Isabel Archer was an adventurer! As I made my way through the novel, I wondered: How does Henry James know the secrets of my heart?

But there was only so much my heart knew at that point. I had grown-up in the Deep South and my definition of independence was severely skewed. For example, Isabel’s only means of exercising self-reliance is through her pick of husband. When she rejects the marriage proposals of Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood (whose very name testifies to his suitability) and instead accepts the diabolical Gilbert Osmond, she considers this a conscientious exercise in independent thought.

At fifteen, I ascribed to that view and praised the bold non-conformity of her choice. At thirty, I was stunned to see that Isabel wasn’t a bold adventurer but a victim, tricked in to marriage by Osmond and the vile temptress Madame Mearle so as to provide for their bastard child.

And so, a novel that was once a free-spirited celebration of female independence has become a gothic rumination on deceit and the power of choices—more specifically, Isabel Archer’s ability to make very, very bad ones.

It’s a frustrating change, but I wonder if it’s inevitable. Because, while we age, the characters in the books we love do not. We outgrow them and, consequently, the books that shaped who we became no longer represent who we are.

Oline Eaton is the author of “My Father Had This Girlfriend” in the Autumn 2011 issue of Contrary.

I had an interesting sensation this morning as I left my commuter train and made the six-block walk to my office. During the commute I started reading Volt, the debut short story collection by Chicago native Alan Heathcock. The first story, “The Staying Freight”, is set (as apparently are all of the others in the book) in the rural American West, and right away I was drawn in by the protagonist’s domestic tragedy and his sudden and not-quite-explained departure from home. He walks on and on, first through remote yet cultivated farms and finally to wilderness, growing ever more feral and savage along the way. By t he time my train arrived and I had to stop reading, a chance encounter has thrust him partly back to civilization as he takes a job at a turkey farm.

Though I was fully aware of my surroundings as I read – a packed train car chugging through dilapidated city neighborhoods – I was still so immersed in the story that when I got off the train, it felt disorienting to be walking city sidewalks, obeying stoplights and surrounded by honking cars and office workers scurrying toward their desk jobs. Heathcock totally immersed me in his rural physical setting, and though the story is gritty and not terribly pleasant, I almost found myself longing to be there instead of having another ordinary day at the office. The story feels palpably real.

This feeling contrasts sharply with the last two books I’ve read, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Charles Dickens’ Great Expecations, which I labored through from June through mid-September during my annual Summer of Classics. Though I enjoyed both books (Hardy much more than Dickens), reading them felt more like observing relics in a museum than experiencing the vivid reality of “The Staying Freight.” And I don’t feel like my Hardy/Dickens distance problem is simply something that’s inherent to all classics of bygone eras – one of the best classics I’ve read during these past summers is O.E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927), a Norwegian pioneer epic set in South Dakota that is as far removed from my personal experience as the lives of Hardy’s Jude and Dickens’ Pip, and just as densely written. Yet I enjoyed Rölvaag much more than either Hardy or Dickens, because it felt real to me. Just as real as Heathcock’s story.

President Obama's proposed tax hike on the rich will raise taxe rates on milli onaires so that they are on par with those paid by middle class Americans.

Today’s New York Times reported, in a front page article, that President Obama plans to push a tax plan which will tax any Americans making over a million dollars a year at the same rate at which middle-class Americans are taxed. This new tax system would replace or revamp the alternative minimum tax, and has the backing of prominent investor Warren Buffet, and former President Clinton.

As spokesperson of the Robin Hood Party, a party that I created within the Democratic party (a la the Tea Party but with cooler costumes and rational viewpoints) that advocates for higher taxes on the rich to fund programs for all Americans and reduce our national debt/deficit, I heartily endorse this proposed new tax plan.

It’s about time that this country’s wealthiest citizens shared in the burden of getting us out of this recession. Middle and working class Americans have already sacrificed public services, which have been cut by austerity-minded states, jobs, and retirement funds. The recession, caused in large part by the reckless behavior of our wealthiest citizens on Wall Street, has cut household incomes for middle and working class Americans, increased unemployment, and caused the job market to stagnate. Why shouldn’t America’s wealthiest citizens share the economic burden of getting this country out of the hole ?

Republicans have of course fired back that taxing millionaires at a higher rate will stagnate job growth. Blah, blah, blah. We’ve heard it before. But, when the tax rates on millionaires were higher during the Clinton administration, the American economy was booming.

President Obama, the Robin Hood Party heartily endorses your proposed tax hike on millionaires. Let’s just hope it makes it past all the partisan huffing and puffing, and actually passes in time to do some good.

Searching, Waiting Photo taken by Emmanuel Kwitema 2011.

This is not a news report on an enormous tragedy. I don’t have all the facts. No one does – yet. This is me in tears writing down the terrifying reality of a capsized cargo ship, the overloaded MV Spice, and its hundreds of passengers, mostly teenagers and children, who all sunk down in the middle of the night on Saturday, September 10, at 1:00 a.m. or so, off the coast of Tanzania.

Earlier that night, hundreds of teenagers, children, babies, and their mamas, along with other travellers Pemba-bound, boarded this cargo ship that had never been approved as a passenger ship, setting sail for an overnight journey.

The rumour is that not only was this ship not a legal passenger ship, it also had serious engine problems but passed inspection due to a slippery 3 million shilling bribe accepted by those responsible for regulating maritime safety and security.

Ironically, a conference on maritime security had taken place in Zanzibar in March of 2011. I can’t help but wonder who was at the table that day. What was discussed ? How were the power points? How was the buffet ?

Over 600 tickets were officially sold for Saturday’s journey, yet everyone I’ve spoken to assure me that up to 1,000 people could have been on the boat that night, for having paid just a few thousand shillings on the down low. This is standard practice. Overloaded ships are a major issue here, and the use of cargo ships for passenger voyages, a common yet illegal practice. Yet some say that before this ship set sail, even passengers who were accustomed to overloaded boats were cramped beyond a reasonable doubt and asked to get off before the ship departed.

Most passengers on board were returning to Pemba, the sister island to Unguja, after a long Eid celebration with family and friends on the island of Unguja.

The journey to Pemba is notoriously rough. No doubt, most passengers throw up at some point on the choppy waves that define this distinct route from one island to the next. It’s a nauseous, grueling journey that many often take because of close family ties between the islands, as well as opportunity on Unguja that do no exist on Pemba.

On Saturday night, due to the overloaded ship combined with roiling sea conditions, the enormous boat holding cargo and people simply turned over on its side and started sinking, not too far from the northern coast, near Nungwi. No one knows the exact cause.

Passengers began calling family and friends from their cell phones with panicked messages. We’re sinking. We think we are going to die. We need help. Please pray for us. No one knew where they were exactly on the sea, but described being five to six hours into the slow over-night journey.

By two a.m. the boat had completely sunk into the sea. Family and friends started receiving calls by four a.m. confirming that the MV spice was lying at the bottom of the ocean with hundreds trapped inside.

The response? Yes, there was an emergency response. Divers were sent out to sea in search of survivors. Private dive companies went out to sea. Local fishermen volunteered their small dhows to search for people who’d managed to swim their way out of the boat, grabbing onto anything they could – mattresses, fridges, tanks – to float their way to safety.

But a lack of resources, leadership, and strategic information made it hard to coordinate efforts. There was a great deal of confusion yesterday as to where to go for information concerning loved ones who might have lost their lives in this terrifying calamity.

Local residents were told to meet in a large field, Miasara, just near the coast to identify dead bodies brought in on large fishing boats by volunteer coast guards and police. As a result, mobs of people gathered in this space, hovering for information that would lead them back to their lost. A small voice on unconvincing bull horn encouraged people to follow instructions that would keep them at least an arms distance from the four tents set up with Red Cross workers and a meagre supply of gray army blankets.

I went to this field at 10 a.m. with my partner, in search of information about his 42 family members who had climbed onto that boat to return to their native Pemba. We stood in the scorching sun waiting for direction, pressing against the meek yellow security tape, trying to crane our necks to see past the crowds and into the empty tents waiting to receive dead bodies.

At some point in the day, it became clear that more bodies and survivors were being brought in to town near the main port on large ships that had gone out to sea on search and rescue missions. We realized that our presence at Miasara wasn’t helping at all, so we went home and turned on Zanzibar television.

I cried watching familiar faces climb down from boats, survivors, having been in the depths of the ocean, and emerging triumphant with looks of shock and relief on their faces. Grown men were crying. Children looked stunned or exhausted. My partner recognized two of his cousins climbing out of rescue boats. We cried together, held hands, relieved.

Call it a miracle, divine intervention, luck of the draw, that so many did survive, that having been under water for so long in a closed space, they were able to emerge, fight for their lives, and find their way back to the surface of things.

By late afternoon, everyone was talking about this tragedy, and, having left work or home, were wandering the streets, stopping in small clusters to swap information and share condolences.  Waves of people walked to and from the field where dead bodies were laid out for identification. In the streets, sirens wailed. Police vans and ambulances raced at highest speeds to and from emergency sites.

Everyone knew someone who had been affected by the events of the last twenty-four hours. Zanzibar is very small – all are interlinked and touched personally by the strange slow-motion pain of enormous loss.

Our local shopkeeper’s wife had been on board this ship, nine months pregnant, heading back to Pemba to give birth to their child. No one has heard news yet of her whereabouts. When I spoke to him, he seemed resigned that he had lost her. His face was slack, his body, quiet.

Zanzibaris are quite stoic about pain – at least in public. In the late afternoon, I passed my neighbours whom I know each had family members on board that ship. When I asked them about it, they shrugged their shoulders, looked up at the heavens, and basically said, tumeshapoa meaning, we have already recovered. They’d heard the news, wailed if so moved behind closed doors, and were now presenting steely exteriors to the outside world, waiting simply for a body to bury, a funeral to execute.

The word is that there will be a national funeral and three days of mourning while authorities continue to uncover the facts of this terrifying event. And yet, Miss Tanzania was aired last night despite all of this, and as of this morning, no official statement from either the Zanzibar or Tanzanian government. Reports from Twitter reveal that the story was barely covered at all on the mainland, while it was reported on international networks like BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC, CBC, CNN, and others.

What gives many great relief (but deeply confuses me) is the belief that all of this has been written by Allah – all of the great tragedies and triumphs of our time have all written already and we are merely actors in the great human drama written and directed by god. I can see how this world view offers powerful solace at times like these – when inexplicable and avoidable events cause tidal waves of sorrow.

But I don’t believe that this was a necessary act in the great human play that is life. This could have been avoided. There is an element of recklessness, a need for accountability on the part of those who thought it was fine to overload a cargo ship with human lives and all their necessary objects.

I am waiting, like others, for more information, for clarity, for the chance to mourn in public and in private with so many who were linked to those who lost their lives. The numbers climb to somewhere around 225. Survivors number over 500 or so, which means that the total of those on board far exceeded the official 500 reported by the government.

Many of us here in Zanzibar are hoping that something like this will unleash discussion on maritime reforms, regarding the safety and security of passengers who board these large ships to set sail on choppy waters. It also makes me think a lot, on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, about the nature of emergency response plans. How does a nation handle a crisis? What plans are in place to assist and inform? What can anyone do to translate their helplessness into action?

I don’ t have answers. There’s a blanket and sheet shortage at local hospitals. There are far too few medical personnel, a general lack of leadership and direction as to where to go for information. But people are trying their best, and I guess with any tragedy like this, it’s the local people – brave, gutsy, fearless people who do everything they can to make a horrible situation a little better, a little less desperate.

There’s a local meeting at 11 a.m. this morning to discuss fundraising ideas.

There are families being reunited with survivors.

Apparently, boat service on regular passenger ships resume this evening to Pemba.

Life goes on.

But none of us, having lived through any of this, can ever be exactly the same.

We grapple with our confusion, we deal with our gods, we console each other, we live with the mystery of having survived.

"Tangazo la Kifo" meaning, "Death Notice" written on a neighborhood wall this morning

Brothers and Sisters of the islands of Unguja and Pemba: This is an announcement of the deaths that took place today there in the ocean because of the sinking of MV Spice — it is already down, nothing more will come out. God bless the dead and give them a good place in heaven. They have already passed, we are going the same way.

I’ve come across an odd phrase in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) that I thought I’d share here. I’m reading the book as part of my Summer of Classics, and though I briefly considered abandoning it as August ended, I’m enjoying it just well enough to keep reading. In this passage, the schoolmaster Phillotson is facing termination by the school council in the town of Shaston, due to the scandal of his having consented to letting his much younger wife leave him to be with her lover, Jude. The respectable people of Shaston – presumably fearing that such a permissive act from Phillotson reflected poorly on his beliefs, and that he thus posed a threat to his pupils’ morality – are unanimous in favor of firing him. But rising to his defense are the “itinerants” of the town (or what Americans call “carnies”), which Hardy memorably describes here:

It has been stated that Shaston was the anchorage of a curious and interesting group of itinerants, who frequented the numerous fairs and markets held up and down Wessex during the summer and autumn months. Although Phillotson had never spoken to one of these gentlemen they now nobly led the forlorn hope in his defence. The body included two cheap Jacks, a shooting-gallery proprietor and the ladies who loaded the guns, a pair of boxing-masters, a steam-roundabout manager, two travelling broom-makers, who called themselves widows, a gingerbread-stall keeper, a swing-boat owner, and a “test-your-strength” man.

Certainly an interesting menagerie of folks. What struck me the most was “two travelling broom-makers, who called themselves widows.” The majority of the other itinerants are described singly, but the broom-makers are described as a pair, suggesting they were regularly together. And Hardy doesn’t say they actually are widows, but that they “called themselves widows.” It probably wasn’t uncommon back then for widows to live together, especially if they were childless, older and beyond prime marrying age, thus sharing living quarters to economize and make the best of their situation.

Reading this, I wonder if Hardy is actually making a veiled reference to them being lesbian lovers. If he simply said they were widows, that would be the end of it. But the addition of the superfluous phrase “who called themselves widows” seems like a sly hint from Hardy that the two merely pretended to be widows, as cover for what would have otherwise been considered (in the rural England of the 1890s) to be a sc andalous lifestyle.

The phrase is only a throwaway, and seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative, so maybe I’m paying too much attention to it, over-analyzing and giving it more significance than it deserves. But for me this is one of the pleasures of reading fiction – puzzling over unusual phrases, and trying to figure out exactly what the author was trying to communicate. Hardy is speaking across the ages (115-plus years), and in moments like these I can’t help feeling some connection with him, despite our considerable distance. If I’m incredibly fortunate, maybe my own writing somehow will similarly connect with readers of the 22nd Century. I can hope, at least.

And you wipe the snow out of your hair and get back into your car and drive off toward an accumulation of the usual daily stuff–there is dinner to be made and laundry to be done and helping the kids with their homework and watching television on the couch with the dog resting her muzzle in your lap and a phone call you owe to your sister in Wisconsin and getting ready for bed, brushing and flossing and a few different pills that help to regulate your blood pressure and thyroid and a facial scrub that you apply and all the rituals that are–you are increasingly aware–units of measurement by which you are parceling out your life. (92)

This passage from Dan Chaon’s 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, reminds me of so many things:

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Mark Strand’s “The Continuous Life”: Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,/That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;”

the Zen saying: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “Laura reads the moment as it passes.  Here it is, she thinks; there it goes.  The page is about to turn.”

that surely there is more than this

and just as surely, no there’s not.

What are the units of measurement by which you are parceling out your life ?

await your reply

~last in a series
~cross-posted at Contrary Blog

From Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, how an image can make words come alive:

Without the image:

Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gathering.

“What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories.

That’s good, right ?

With the image:

Her thoughts were not clearly articulated in her mind, but she could feel them moving swiftly, gat hering.

“What are you thinking about?” George Orson said, and when he spoke, her thoughts scattered, broke up into fragments of memories, the way that the birds separated out of their formation and back into individual birds. (219)

A passage we will remember.
PS:
Dan Chaon’s words recall Toni Morrison’s from Beloved, and not wanting to miss an opportunity to share one of my favorite passages of all times, here it is:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. (272-273)

~4th in a series

~cross-posted at Catching Days

In Await Your Reply, published in 2009, Dan Chaon uses repetition in a very cool way. Instead of bogging down the original scene, he pushes the action forward first, then a bit later, moves in for a close-up or two, adding additional details.

For example, on page 246, Miles wakes up in bed with a woman and gropes for his underwear, which he puts on. So the assumption is they’ ve had sex.

On page 248:

He was standing there in his underwear, still a bit groggy, still a bit dazzled by the fact that he’d had sex for the first time in two years… [new detail bolded]

Then on page 249:

He was standing there in his boxer shorts with their ridiculous hot pepper print… [new detail bolded]

What this technique does is to roll the scene along, allow the reader to move in for a quick close-up, and then continue along with the story.

It keeps things moving. It adds texture. It reinforces image.

~3rd in a series
~Cross-posted at Catching Days

For the past five years my summer reading has been devoted entirely to the classics. No current critical darlings, no edgy new novels from indie presses – just time-tested chestnuts that I should have studied in high school or college. My formal education only flirted at the edges of the humanities – required reading at my public high school was rather undemanding, and while I took more college literature classes than any of my other business school colleagues, I now wish I had taken many more. Because of this, despite being a devoted lover of literature, there are enormous gaps in my reading, a point which I’m reminded of often by my English major wife, who seems to have read just about everything. (After running out of excuses in response to “You’ve never read Orwell?!!”, I finally read 1984 two years ago, and loved it.)

I finally began to rectify my ignorance in June 2007, with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. (Read it, loved it, wondered why it took me so long to get around to it, and will even use it as a model for a story cycle I’m mentally formulating.) Since then my summer reading has been only the classics, consisting of books that are generally considered part of the literary canon and roughly spanning the era between 1830 and 1950 with two more recent exceptions. (And only one by a still-living author.) The entire list is shown below. Over the course of my reading, I’ve learned some important things about classics.

Size Does Matter
I’m a fairly slow reader and my serious reading time is mostly limited to my train ride to and from work, so I don’t finish more than about 25-30 books a year. Because of this, I’m hesitant to take on longer books, figuring the return will not fully compensate for the hours I’ve invested. (That’s the finance guy in me talking.) I’d rather read two or three good novellas than a single 800-page doorstop. I’ve found that my psychological limit is about 400 pages – anything longer than that, and my attention will inevitably drift, I’ll start obsessively glancing at the page numbers and mentally calculating how many pages are left until I’m done, no matter how much I’m enjoying the narrative. And by and large, many classics (especially those from the 19th Century) run well beyond that 400 page barrier, whether due to the laissez-faire attitude of editors back then or a reading public that craved longer books given their comparative lack of entertainment alternatives. So despite my desire to be better-read, I also have a built-in bias against longer books and, thus, against many of the classics. Because of this, a longer classic really has to blow me away to be worth my time – and the only longer one I’ve truly loved is O.E. Rölvaag’s 1927 pioneer epic Giants in the Earth, which clocked in at 560 pages.

Age Is Only a Number
The oldest book I read (excluding Beowulf – Seamus Heaney’s translation has a modern feel) was Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) while the newest was William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). The former was long, plodding and required a thorough knowledge of early 19th Century French politics (which of course I lack) to fully comprehend, while the latter was short, lean, timeless and emotionally powerful. In other words, I hated Stendhal and loved Maxwell. This made me realize that a book being a hundred or more years old does not necessarily confer greatness on it. Which is kind of surprising if you think about it – the vast majority of novels written during the 1800s have either vanished or are barely read today, which might imply that those books which endure and are still read must be truly great. But this was absolutely, positively not the case with me and The Red and the Black, which I couldn’t wait to be finished with. (Yes, I did read it all the way through – I kept thinking it had to get better, but it never did.) So Long, See You Tomorrow, on the other hand, is a marvelous book that I’ll return to again and again.

Not All Classics Are Classics
Just as many of today’s critical darlings mean little to me, neither do many of the age-old perennials which everyone reveres (or professes to revere). The Great Gatsby, despite being considered the Great American Novel, left me completely cold – the characters all felt like archetypes instead of flesh-and-blood people, and I was never engaged by the narrative. Leaves of Grass was repetitive and bombastic – after 100 pages, I finally said, “Okay, Whitman, I get your point – you love the entire world and especially your love-machine self” and set the book aside. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was pretentious and self-important. Simply put, many of these books just didn’t work for me, but though they could be a chore to read I’m still glad I so. Sometimes it’s okay to discover, while seeking what the excitement is all about, that there’s really no excitement at all.

And I guess maybe I should be grateful that my public-school education wasn’t more comprehensive than it was. Had I been required to read more thoroughly back then, the tedious likes of The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary and Billy Budd might have killed off my love of reading forever. Reading such tomes today, with a more mature adult perspective, helps me realize that there are hundreds of other books out there that I know I’ll enjoy. And I’ll probably appreciate those other books even more.

2011
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

2010
O.E. Rölvaag: Giants in the Earth
Seamus Heaney (translator): Beowulf
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Stendhal: The Red and the Black
Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

2009
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
George Orwell: 1984
Henry David Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods

2008
William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow
James Agee and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road
Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor
Nikolai Gogol: The Overcoat

2007
James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology
Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt
Knut Hamsun: Hunger
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio

In the surprisingly interesting Reader’s Guide at the back of Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, Chaon writes:

As a writer, I feel like I’m always in conversation with the books that I’ve read.

Yiyun Li, the author of The Vagrants, feels the same way: “I believe a writer writes to talk to his/her masters and literary heroes.” About William Trevor, she wrote:

I write stories to talk to his stories. And a story can talk to another story in many ways–a line, a character, a few details, or sometimes it is the mood of the story, the pacing and the music of the story…”

I found two of these nods by Chaon as I was reading Await Your Reply. When  I found two, I got such a warm feeling inside. Here they are:

On page 81: “She might’ve been a good mother, Miles thought, if their father had lived.” >>>Flannery O’Connor, from “A Good Man is Hard to Find:” She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” [Here's a very cool link to Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find" at Vanderbilt University in 1959--amazing]

On page 203: “Your jitters are starting to rub off on me. I’ve got the fucking fantods, man.” >>>David Foster Wallace throughout Infinite Jest.

A lovely practice.

~2nd in a series

~cross-posted at Catching Days

From the first page of Dan Chaon’s novel:

On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan’s severed h and is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.

Enough said?

Dan Chaon’s second novel and fourth book, Await Your Reply, which was published in 2009, intertwines 3 seemingly unrelated narrative threads that exude echoes of each other, assuring the reader that they will eventually come together. And they do. But no spoilers here.

3 threads. 324 pages. 3 parts–each one divided into numbered chapters.

Chaon gets each of the threads off the ground in a hurry: the 1st chapter is 2 pages; the 2nd is 5 pages; the 3rd is 3 pages. Bam. In 10 pages, the reader is aware of all 3 plot lines.

The “severed hand” scene comes first and takes place at night in a car. Chapter 2 begins with Lucy and George leaving town in the middle of the night. “Not fugitives–not exactly.” AND “They would make a clean break. A new life.” (Chaon has a sense of humor.) In Chapter 3 again a character is driving a car. And I wish I had time to count how many times the word hand or hands is used in each of the threads.

As I said, because of the repetition of images and details and echoes of themes, the reader knows that these threads are related. So the reader’s mind is fully engaged as she is reading, trying to answer the question of how. It’s like a treasure hunt. We’re looking for clues, reading carefully because we don’t want to miss anything. All of this creates energy and narrative drive.

In July in Vermont, Dan said that with Await Your Reply, he began with 3 images and a story, but that he had no idea how they were connected until the end of the first draft. He said that the second draft is always “super important” to him because he’s looking for iconography, like tarot cards, to signal where the power is–where an image and/or a moment is important.

Each image distinct and capsulized, like tarot cards laid down one by one. (147)

Read it, if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.

~1st in a series

~cross-posted at Catching Days

A view of the Ramadhani moon, shining bright on the verandah.

August 1st was a kissless morning. My love, a Muslim, had decided to abstain from even the smallest smooch. It was the first day of Ramadhan. Twenty-nine more to go. I am a Jew living in Zanzibar, a predominately Muslim island. I accept that I have to figure out ways to get down with the holiest month of the year – embrace its grace, understand its power, respect its presence.

No kisses. No water. No food. No impure thoughts.  Reign in the rage. Be kind. Be patient. Be peaceful.

I like God. I like doubting God. I like the things we do to figure out our relationship to God, all the patterns we make or break, the habits we feign or reveal in the honor of something greater than ourselves. It’s energy made of all energies. It’s light made of all light. It’s sorrow made of our collective will to live.

I am always up for at least the first day of a fasting challenge, especially when it’s about tearing off a piece of God’s bread — faith.

I lasted until about three p.m. that first day, until a spiky bout of bitchiness took over my being and I broke down with a fistful of ginger biscuits in the corner of my office, hiding from my devout colleague, who, while tolerant in my presence, clearly removes herself from even the hint of a crumb in d aylight hours. Fair enough. But I was grouchy, and had not woken up in the wee hours of morning to fill myself, as others had, to ready themselves for the first fast.

That initial week went smoothly enough. Each day I could stretch a bit farther, a bit longer, until my hunger stalked me and I caved. Still, the message was coming through clear — empathy for emptiness. It gnawed at me. I could have a humble peak into the experience of deep craving. It was an honor to try and fail.

But I have to admit, I’d been really down on Ramadhan lately — or perhaps not Ramadhan exactly,  but myself within its folds. It takes immense faith to fast and I just don’t have it, the will to reach sunset for Allah or my Zanzibar compatriots. I realize that radical lessons on patience and spirituality lurk in the twilight hour of hunger.

But I decided not to fast this year beyond that first week, when my feeble attempts at restraint sort of got the best of me. I thought: I’m doing people a favor by not fasting. It’s just — much better this way (I convinced myself).

Even having decided not to fast, though, I end up fasting by default for lack of food and drink availability on the streets. No restaurants are open for a plate of simple food at a fair price. It’s all fancy pizzas and chocolate cakes behind the infidel’s curtain, so it costs quite a lot to defy God this month. ‘

I was also down on Ramadhan because of the higher frequency of robberies and theft on Stone Town streets, some involving knives and verbal threats. Among discussions between both locals and wazungu, it’s either blamed on bara (those from the mainland), the hunger to fulfill a bountiful Eid, or drug addiction. Whatever the reason, I’ve felt uneasy to walk around the darkened city alone, especially between the hours of 6:30 and 9:00, when all who are devout find themselves at nightly iftaris, feasting before the next day’s fast — a Swahili buffet of potatoes, rice, cassava, thambi (sweet spaghetti), and other culinary delights.

At sundown, those who fast can be found at a clip making their way to these feasts, leaving the streets desolate and quiet, and often pitch black during these days of erratic light. In the hours leading up to sundown, the energy quickens in the streets, an edge, a low-grade panic, a slow boil, a cloaked peace, an inner calm that fights against the material world of clay and cup, coffee and craving. The air is pinched with a disciplined spirit, shutters shut on the regular, local joints. The streets feel strange without their simmering kettles of frying kachori and hot plates of chapati.

Castaways from other religious or wayward shores roam those strange streets. The Hindus, the Christians, the Jews, the drug addicts, the unassuming traveler from Sweden with her pink shorts and spaghetti strap tank-top. We’re all there, walking with abandon, abandoned.

I’ve been stumbling through Ramadhan this month, wrestling with those twins of ritual & faith.

But tonight, around midnight, we were startled by the sharp, rhythmic cheer of a troupe of troubadours who, chanting Islamic chants in the darkened streets, just outside our house on Sokomohogo, lit up the streets with their low, sweet drones, trailing behind them a children’s brigade of breath and beauty.

Daku drummers gather street-level just below our open windows.

The neighbors had gathered around this troupe of mostly boys with hand drums, to join in the chant and cheer. To keep the prayer chants going — a roiling, rhythmic, choral frenzy in both Swahili and Arabic –neighbors threw coins from their open windows.

The idea is to wake those who might have dosed off to remind them to eat their daku ((late night meal). So they beat drums, chanting dua (prayers) and dancing in the streets, a festive, raucous affair that might seem sort of at odds with traditional Islam but right at home in East Africa.

So there we were, in flip flops and house clothes, rushing down the rickety wooden steps of our tall Stone Town palace to partake in the cheering and chanting with the daku drummers as they sang  MUSLIMS, WASALAM ALAYKUM! A-LAYKUM SALAM! and the THE FIRST WORD OF THE WORLD IS ALIF. The little ones shook their booties and waved their kangas in the air, spinning round and round in dizzy splendor, yelping and hollering, clapping and cheering at the end of each song.

The base drums kept beating like hearts all through the street, more and more African as the chants wore on, shifting from Islamic prayer to straight up African dance party in the street.

And so I fell asleep that night loving Ramadhan, knowing that the children cheering in the street are cheering for the love of rhythm, which is one of God’s best gifts.

And now each night we wait for the holy troubadours with anticipation. They know to serenade us now. And my love is now accustomed to racing up the steps back to our wide living room, after swaying through a chant or two, to fling open the white shutters of our broken-glassed windows and throw money down below, shouting MORE MORE, tena, tena!

And the children keep gathering like a swelling parade of low chant and high love, hip sway, heart pray, beating rhythms, dancing, clapping, woo-weeing into late evening, into the latest night, drums pushing us farther and farther into the center of things.

Ayyyyy! Ohhhhhh! Salam Alaykum.

Nothing like drums to stave away the hunger and the danger of the streets.

I call for troubadours of peace & holy love to march through the streets nightly!

And throughout the day as well.

Alhamdullilah!

A statue outside of the public library where I would have been elligible to vote before Scott Walker signed the Wisconsin Voter ID Law, lengthening residency requirements, this spring.

When I last lived in Wisconsin in 2006, voting was easy. Wisconsin had a bevy of accommodations which made it easier, rather than more difficult, for people to vote, including same day voter registration, registration without photo-ID, and a ten-day residency requirement. My husband and I moved back to Wisconsin in the end of July so I could take a job as a Visiting Assistant Professor at a local university, and I was excited to vote in the recall election of Republican State Senator Dan Kapanke, who voted for Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting budget this spring.

You can imagine my surprise when I went to my local polling place today to vote and was told that I cannot vote because, although I have a valid Wisconsin driver’s license, have registered my car in Wisconsin, have switched my auto and renter’s insurances to Wisconsin policies, and a have a one-year residential lease in the city where I live, I have only been living in the state for ten days. You see, under the new Voter ID Law that Scott Walker signed in May, the residency requirement for vot ing has been raised to 28 days. Soon, under the same law, Wisconsin voters will be required for the first time ever to show picture-ID when they head to the polls.

These new voting restrictions are accomplishing what Scott Walker hoped. They’re disenfranchising voters: people who do not have the required paperwork to prove residency (for instance, the homeless), people without state issued IDs (the poor, the elderly, those without cars), and people who (like me, or say the tens of thousands of college students in this state) move often. These are people who are already vulnerable to voter disenfranchisement, many of whom (poor people, students) often vote for Democrats. While state officials are expecting a high voter turnout for this election (40%-50%), I can’t help but wonder how high the turnout might be without these new, restrictive poll laws.

And so I say, congratulations Scott Walker: you’ve successful stripped the masses of their voting rights! I can’t wait to help vote you out of office when your recall comes up. And don’t worry, I’ll have been living in Wisconsin for well over 28 days by then.

“Great Grapes: Score another point for resveratrol, the antioxidant found in red grapes and red wine. Basque researchers have shown that, in mice and men, it blocks lipid accumulation …” (48 Psychology Today 7-8/11).

Is this literary ? Something about it struck me. I wondered why readers of Psychology Today would notice and/or find interesting an allusion to John Steinbeck. But mostly, I wondered, does this allusion add anything to a paragraph about the way that grapes affect fat in the human body ?

So to indulge in literariness, if I may … the (yes, they are alliterative) literary devices in the above passage include:

• Alliteration of title (“Great Grapes”)
• Appositive (“the antioxidant …”)
• Alliterative Allusion (“in mice and men”)

Is this “true” liter ariness, if there exists such a thing? In one sense, yes, if I can characterize “literariness” as words that make the reader think about them as more than words. One caveat here: those trained in literary scholarship are trained to interpret  all words as—at once—being more than what they say and at the same time incomplete and insufficient to express “real” meaning. Another way we may think of literariness is “fancy writing,” writing that draws attention to itself as such, writing that is “flowery” (whatever that means), or writing that evokes rather than states, describes rather than tells.

[Spoiler Alert: The picture below shows a rudimentary plot diagram.]

This excerpt from Psychology Today caught my attention because I just finished Nicole Krauss’s Great House. I found it beautiful, but confusing. I would have paid more attention to all the clues early in the book had I known I would need those clues later. I made charts. I googled “Great House + plot.” I listened to Michael Silverblatt admit to Krauss herself that he sometimes didn’t know who was talking.

Then I read reviews. The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent. Still nothing. I’m going to have to read it again. Then I read reader reviews of the book on amazon.com and goodreads.com. Some people felt the same way I did. One person said something to the effect of, “ Get it together, people. I’m not a rocket scientist and I figured it out.” A significant minority of reviewers said they didn’t like the book because it was too elusive, plot-wise, or too literary and pretentious, language-wise.

Where do we draw the arbitrary lin e between literariness and pretention? Is there such a line ? Is it different for each person ? How do you respond to the accusation that that which literary is necessarily pretentious? What, if anything, does literariness have to do with reader response? And, finally, what do you make of Great House?

Ellen Gilchrist’s first book was not published until she was in her forties. In “A Reading Group Guide” at the back of Nora Jane: A Life in Stories, she is asked about this:

“I didn’t begin to write seriously and professionally until I was in my forties because I was busy being alive.”

Now she has been writing for thirty years: stories, novellas, and novels. In these books, she often writes about the same characters. In 1999, Margaret Donovan Bauer published The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist. In it, she wrote:

“Gilchrist’s point of uniqueness is that all of her work is interrelated to the extent that her whole body of work…is part of an organic story cycle, a story cycle that continues to evolve as each new book appears, comparable to the roman-fleuve. It is a story cycle in the full sense of the word: there are no definite endings to the individual books and, distinguishing her work from the roman-fleuve, there is no clear beginning to the cycle.”

In 2005 all the stories Gilchrist had written to that point about Nora Jane Whittington were collected into one volume and organized in chronological order of Nora Jane’s life. I had read these stories before and had copies of them. But to read them all in a row and in the “right” order felt a little like seeing that wick that Mary Gordon referred to…I did find one or two inconsistencies, but those felt more like proof that this wonderful thing–Nora Jane Whittington’s life–was real.

In the same reading guide referred to above, Ellen Gilchrist was also asked if she had planned to write about the same characters over and over again. She said that she planned her writing the same way she planned her life:

“On a day-by-day and obsession-by-obsession basis.”

Obsession-by-obsession. I like that.

[In similar fashion, all the stories about Rhoda Manning were collected in 1995.]

~cross-posted at Catching Days

House Poem by Huang Xiang

Pittsburgh is a city primarily known for its bridges, sports teams and sandwiches made with french fries. However, within the Mexican War streets of the Northside neighborhood, one can expect to find something a tad out of the norm for the Steel City — a narrow alley called Sampsonia Way.

What Sampsonia Way lacks in size, it makes up for creatively, artistically and also socially. Not only is it home to the city’s eccentric Mattress Factory, a contemporary art museum, but it also hosts City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, a place of refuge for persecuted writers from around the world.

In 2004, City of Asylum/Pittsburgh welcomed its first writer-in-residence, an exiled poet from China named Huang Xiang.

Having been imprisoned six different times and forced into hard labor, Huang Xiang gained accolades worldwide for his poetry, and once he made his way to Pittsburgh, he continued writing poetry any way he could – including on the walls of his new home.

“The oldest way to write poetry
Is with a brush
The newest way to write poetry
Is with the body
The most wonderful way to write poetry
Is to stand right on your head
With mind and body as one
And dab ink
On the ground!”

Known as House Poem, Xiang’s home has become a symbol of  City of Asylum’s mission. It is one of several houses on the block available to visiting authors and journalists from around the world.

In 2009, Sampsonia Way Magazine w as formed as an outlet for not only the exiled writers living on the street the magazine was named after, but for oppressed writers all over the world. Working with City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, the online magazine brings awareness to poets, novelists and journalists who face or have faced censorship and persecution for their work and sheds a light on freedom of expression issues worldwide.

The current issue features articles on the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, which centered on creating an atmosphere where women in Afghanistan would feel comfortable enough to write openly and freely.

Previous issues focused on the plight of the Cuban people to gain internet access and express their opinions freely online as well as a feature on the first City of Asylum in Las Vegas, which opened its doors for writers from China, Iran and Sierra Leon back in 2001.

Currently the publication is working with Khet Mar, the current writer-in-residence at COA/P, a writer who fled Burma after facing arrest and torture. She now lives on Sampsonia Way with her two sons and husband. Like Xiang, Mar and her husband decorated the outside of their house by painting a mural incorporating Burmese writing.

As the magazine puts it, “The homes provide shelter for writers; the magazine provides shelter for their work.”

A still from the 2003 Canadian documentary, "The Corporation"

Executives at Deutsche Bank in Germany thought they had a brilliant idea: give two German universities about $17 million over four years, starting in 2007, to fund a program that would really give something back. But not to society, exactly. Back to Deutsche Bank.

The Quantitative Products Laboratory was housed at Humboldt University and the Technical University of Berlin, which the bank partnered with ostensibly to help advance applied mathematics in higher education . Nothing wrong with that, and it’s not unusual for a corporation to give money to a university. But it is unusual for the corporation to stipulate in the deal that it has say over who’s hired to teach, to steer the curriculum towards self-serving ideologies (like free markets and deregulation), and to appoint its own employees as adjunct professors. The bank even reviewed any research produced in the Lab as much as 60 days prior to publication and could withhold its release for up to two years.

This is not just unusual (though, sadly, not unprecedented); it’s ethically unacceptable. If a corporation controls what goes on in the classroom, who’s to say that students are getting real educations? In other words, where is the freedom of thought in a system that preaches the values and agenda of a massive, multi-national bank ?

Fortun ately, the secret got out when Peter Grottian, a professor emeritus from Humboldt, became a shareholder at Deutsche Bank last month. Is the operative word in that sentence “emeritus”? Is it because Grottian comes from an earlier era, one that maintained a sharp distinction between private interest and academic study, that he smelled something rotten in the deal ?

After all, the program had nearly completed its four-year run before it was exposed. Did no one else, in all that time, ever stop and ask, “What the hell is going on here?”

As long as I didn’t yell fire in a crowded theatre, I could pretty much say anything I wanted. That’s the democracy lesson I got when I was in middle school in the Midwest of the United States. Our teacher also assigned somewhat eerie post-colonial exercises like making up our own islands and then conspiring over the best way to rule them.  But that’s beside the point. I was taught that it was my right to express my opinions and feelings as long as it did not threaten or harm anyone.

Years later, how arrogant, I suppose, to assume that I could import this kind of unabashed “freedom” across continents, to East Africa, in Tanzania, where ideas about freedom of speech are very different, and where the consequences for saying what you think can apparently loom larger than you’d imagine. This is especially true in the relatively new world of online/social media, where the rules of engagement are determined with every double click.

This truth flared in my world when I attended a film festival earlier this month in Zanzibar and decided to write a film review for an online magazine based in Zanzibar. The up and coming magazine, founded by two women journalists with strong Zanzibari ties, has been gaining popularity in large part due to its mission to present a more complex, layered view of Zanzibari arts, culture, travel & leisure. That, and they are excellent writers with a potent mix of passion and precision.

Going to the movies is one of the few pleasures that usually can’t be fulfilled here on the island, where once-bustling cinemas have nearly all shut down, except for one, the Majestic, which is not so majestic anymore. So when the film festival rolled around, I made it a point to go nightly, particularly to films featuring Swahili language and culture.

Throughout the weeklong festival, I saw several intriguing films, but one revealed itself as one of the worst films of the festival — in particular because of its narrow-minded treatment of women and power, though there were other reasons, too, that sunk this film way below the quality line. I was shocked by how little this film managed to meet the goals of the festival, which is to promote high quality films of international standard from up and coming filmmakers throughout the region and world.

I left the screen that night brewing with thoughts about how poorly this film was conceived, directed, and produced, and how little it did to promote the image of women in Zanzibar, let alone the culture and traditions here as a whole. I was also offended by how the producer had clearly used the film to promote his own agenda, wallpapering the film with ads for his multifarious endeavours.  That, coupled with the film’s horribly condescending story-line featuring real people portrayed as heroes who must save the main character from herself, made it really hard for me to find anything positive to say about this potentially first-ever Bongo film to come out of Zanzibar.

It was a relief, then, to be able to write a review that critiqued the film on various levels, from its production quality to its (lacking) film aesthetic, its story line to its acting. I pounded out the review that very night, fueled by countless reasons for my disappointment and, frankly, dismay.  The review was fierce but solid, I thought, and fairly backed up with examples from the film.

That night, I previewed my opinions with a quick dash-off of a status update on Facebook stating how the film had done nothing but disappoint and how the producer had really crossed the line in using the film as his own personal billboard. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but this simple status update attracted a whole slew of comments I did not expect, especially those that came in the form of subtle or not so subtle warnings in private messages:

I wouldn’t say that about [the producer] if I were you.

You don’t know what kind of battle you’re starting.

It’s not your battle to fight.

Your words could easily be misconstrued.

Careful what you say, you work for a government university.

All of these messages came from those I respect and have followed in one or the other through various creative pursuits (writers, filmmakers, citizen journalists, bloggers, and teachers). While a few friends and family here and abroad cheered me on to write and publish the full review, others, mostly local and/or regional folks, started warning me in the days that followed that it was probably not a good idea and that it wasn’t worth whatever boomerang consequences I might experience as a result of posting the review online.

Consequences? Like what? What could be so bad about publishing one review? After all, the film had received nothing but RAVE reviews until that point. The film had been even hailed by one Tanzanian blogger as one of the best Bongo films coming out of the region. How could my one review have any power at all?

In the week after viewing, reviewing, and submitting my review, I spoke with several people who started to peel back the layers of paranoia that exist here on the island and in the country of Tanzania as a whole. The bottom line: I could face some serious “blah-blah” – as they say here in Zanzibar. Meaning? Well, people can talk. They can press uncomfortable buttons. Play mind games. Exclude, expel, or expunge one’ s reputation or network s.

A series of comforting but troubling meetings followed with the editors, who I’ve come to regard as cherished friends. I didn’t know what we were stirring but it felt both exciting and a little unbelievable.  We all considered the real possibility that we might catch some serious slack for being a contrary voice in the world of arts and culture here — especially when it had something to do with the film’s producer, the man whom I found out controls several media outlets in the country and holds a monopoly on nearly all public images of Zanzibar. Even those who’d downplayed his over-blown ego, encouraging us to publish the review, still planted some serious doubt as to his potentially sling-shot reactions. The guy has some clout. Or so they say.

He’s friends of friends of friends – on Facebook.

We talked through every possible consequence but still were not sure if our collective worries were seriously worth it. Perhaps this guy was all fluff, perhaps his reputation preceded him, perhaps he’d welcome a bit of challenge. We shuttled between bold courage and strange paranoia of publishing or pulling the piece, until finally we backed off from the whole affair.

Why? Because when we followed this possible thread toward publishing the review at last, advisors told us again through private emails and conversations that it might even be unfair to publish a review of a film that was not perhaps meant to be taken seriously in the first place. It was hailed for its entertainment value and featured at the film festival most likely for politically-charged reasons that extend far beyond my understanding of the nuances here.

Fair enough. I let it go. And I was assured by the editors that there is a real interest in publishing contrary views, but for now, the timing was just off. I completely respected and understood the final choice to back away from the initial fervor of publishing the review. As the days rolled by, though, we moved farther and farther away from the festival energy and more fully flung into the strange energy of the review itself.

The review is still sitting unpublished in a folder on my computer, and I’m left realizing that I care far more about the issues it raised on censorship and freedom of expressi on than for the review itself, or even the film at this point. I am interested in the fine details of social media freedoms, especially in a country and a culture where, as friend observed, views on cultural and artistic expression here are still maturing and clarifying over time.

Technically, there is nothing against the law here about publishing a critical review of a film, but the social power we have over one another to create fear around potential reactions is extensive. The online world is small and getting smaller every day, and the way our words online clang against the daily realities of our encounters in “real” life is profound.

Anonymity is something of a falsity around here. I admit that no matter how exciting it might have been to discover the potential impact of this review’s debut, I realized that I didn’t care enough to risk whatever ounce of peace and privacy I savour and fight for daily here.

And if just the looming threat of publishing a film review could generate so much discussion, I took it as a sign that the Zanzibari arts and cultural realm might be steeped in a serious crisis of freedom that I was not prepared to take on unwittingly.

It’s definitely a thorn in one’s cultural side not to be able to engage freely and openly in a debate on or off line about the things that matter most. But context is the looming lesson here, and this experience alerted me to the footnoted realities we’re living, where our thoughts are asterisk-bound and bent by prevailing attitudes and fears that somehow sway us into treading ever-lighter than we imagined.

Was this a matter of cowardice? The simmer-down approach? Would it have been an act of bravery to publish the review, or just a kind of instigation, knowing the facts? I’m left with questions but they are far more reaching than any question or provocation raised in the review itself.

I am in awe of all the writers and journalists out there who write within the bounds of stifling cultural climates. I know this kind of tension exists everywhere, but it’s clearly heightened here, and inspires an impulse in me to both honor and burst open all the social proprieties and protocols that influence a situation like this.

I think that’s why I’m writing this really vague review of the unpublished review of a not-so important film that became important because I could not freely say that it was just – well – ridiculously bad.

Illinois has dropped writing skills from its standardized testing for high school juniors and will focus only on reading and arithmetic. Officials claim that this will save the state $2.4 million. Writing tests for younger pupils were dropped last year. So now they can type (using their thumbs) “u r 2 dum 2 x-pres urself, dude, LMAO” without even the slightest twinge of disquietude or sense of loss.

The opening lines of this post were written by my father, a professional writer, lifelong resident of Illinois, and a product of its public schools up until he went off to college, at Augustana in Rock Island, where he majored in English. He posted them on my Facebook wall, suggesting that I write a blog post on the topic. Excellent idea, I thought. But I thought I’d do so by way of some family history.

My father’s childhood was spent in the small town of Kewanee, on the western side of the state just south of Rock Island, where he and my mother have lived for the past 33 years. My mother was born and raised in a Chicago suburb, and attended public schools there until she went to Augustana to study French and German. She’s also quite fluent in English. I was raised in Rock Island and attended public schools there until I was 14, when I escaped to the greener pastures of the Iowa public school system, just across the Mississippi River. I’d grown weary of the overcrowded classrooms, drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors in every doorway, and getting mugged in the bathroom by wannabe gangbangers. My parents, like me, could tell that I was not receiving a decent education at Rock Island High School, and that I might even drop out merely to spare myself the constant headache of being there.

And that was more than 20 years ago. I can only imagine that the quality of my first high school has declined even further. Now, with the state deciding to save money by cutting writing skills from its list of requirements, how much worse will it get ?

If you ask my father, whose entire career has been built upon his superlative grasp of the English language — as a teacher, a journalist, a speechwriter for John Deere, and for the last 12 years of his career, the editor of a magazine with international distribution — I suspect that he’d tell you that this won’ t save Illinois money. To the contrary, it will cost the state, and the nation, billions. What’s more, neither he nor my mother would ever grow into the people they became if they were going through Illinois public schools today.

Nor, for that matter, would have Abraham Lincoln.

Generations yet unborn being allowed to pass through the system without grasping basic language skills can only signal the demise of civilization. And if you think I’m being extreme, show me one illiterate society that has prospered. Or just go watch Mike Judge’s prescient, and hilarious, film, Idiocracy.

Thanks, Illinois.

Schrooge McDuck has enough money to pay poetry contest reading fees, but many young poets do not.

Anyone in the United States who has tried to publish a first book of poetry has run into the bind of the contest reading system. One of the only ways to publish a first book (and increasingly, a second or even third book) is to enter it into one of a rapidly proliferating number of contests, all of which charge “reading fees.” These fees, which can range in cost from $10-$30, are in theory supposed to cover costs on the presses’ ends for paying readers, printing, sorting, filing, etc.

For a writer in the early stages of her career, they can really rack up. I had been sending my manuscript out to contests for three years before it won a prize (and publication), and was probably averaging five contests a month. I’ve never done the math to figure out how much I spent on reading fees in total, and I don’t want to now. It’s a figure I’d rather not spend too much time thinking about.

Many people complain about these fees. They’re expensive, and writers who don’t have books yet are often the least able to afford them. In my case, it took getting a book to get an academic job that will pay enough for me to spend upwards of a hundred dollars a month on “reading fees.” Now that the book is under contract, however, I don’t need to spend money on fees anymore.

On the other side of the reading fee business equation are the presses who charge them. However, the contests don’t necessarily seem to be a winning proposition for them either. I’ve heard several editors say that the fees they collect barely cover the costs of doing contest business. One editor I heard speak recently said that the process of running a contest was so  labor intensive that even with the money from reading fees his press decided to stop running them.

It seems to me that the world of poetry would be a better place if contests stopped existing and presses simply selected manuscripts that they thought were worthy of publication. I’d hazard to guess that many poets and editors out there agree with me. The cost of these contests keeps talented but broke poets from sending their work out, and the zero-sum, winner-take-all model of publication seems reductive, and puts in place a system that sometimes rewards the fashionable over the innovative. Having said that, I’m not sure how the business of poetry can escape the contest model now that it’s so firmly entrenched. How do you go back from a broken system if it functions just well enough to maintain forward momentum (in this case, just well enough to keep books coming out, and to keep would-be authors strung along on the hope that their book will get taken if they write just one more check)?

Benjamin Peret

Tomorrow’s the book launch for my new book of translations, “The Big Game” (Le grand jeu), by the surrealist Benjamin Péret. It’s the first time this volume will appear in its entirety in English; the pub is Black Widow Press. This is a big deal for me–I have been rehearsing, arranging for surrealist happenings and surprises, buying Bordeaux wine for the event, cheeses and chocolates. Recording French music.

The launch coincides with the launch of a new poetry series at our local independent bookstore in Knoxville, Union Avenue Books. Two distinguished colleagues will read with me. We each have 15 minutes and I pray to God my co-readers keep to their sched. One of my great phobias in life is readers who go overtime. I’ve come by this fear honestly, having directed the creative writing program at UT for many years. One of our featured authors at UT, a famous poet, read for over two hours and the cafeteria workers had to go home so they took away the food we had ordered for 400 people. That’s not the only time a professi onal author has droned on too long.

The funeral for one of Lou’s colleagues is also being held tomorrow. He asked me, “Should I go to the funeral or to your reading?” Now Lou is the best sound engineer in town, and I’d love to have him there; he’d have my back, sound-wise. But I said, “What do you think you should do?”

And he said, “If it was only you reading, I’d come, but the others may go long, and I can’t bear it.”

I’m hoping for the best. There will be wine! And my new book is gorgeous gorgeous. It’s a like a new baby that comes shrink-wrapped; it speaks French and is very witty. Big ears.

M aybe I should bring a buzzer or a whip ?

By now you’ve likely heard about the ghastly murder of an 8-year-old boy in Brooklyn earlier this week.

Walking home from day camp, Leiby Kletzky got lost and simply asked the wrong stranger for help. He was suffocated, dismembered, and distributed to various places near the neighborhood in which he lived. It was a horrible crime that has left an entire community reeling — the murderer, like his victim, was an Orthodox Jew, and they both lived among their own in a tidy, middle-class neighborhood near Prospect Park.

When news broke Tuesday morning of the boy’s disappearance, I was not aware that it happened so close to where I live. I was appalled by the story, of course, but when you live in New York you become a bit numb to stories of murder and violence. It’s inevitable. It wasn’t until yesterday that I learned that parts of Leiby Kletzky were found inside a red suitcase placed in a dumpster just seven short blocks from my home. Suddenly my heart sank into my stomach.

Maybe it’s because I know exactly what I was doing at the time of Leiby’s disappearance, and while I didn’t see Levi Aron, the suitcase, or any other part of the crime, just knowing that I could have seen something, had I simply taken a walk that way, left me feeling hollow and sick.

Last night, at the start of an evening run, I decided to go a few blocks out of my way to run down 20th Street, where the suitcase had been found, to see if I could see the dumpster. I felt ambivalent about doing this. I wondered why I wanted to see it. And yet I couldn’t resist.

I saw a dumpster, though I can’t confirm that it was the dumpster. It doesn’t matter. I was on the block, looking at the same buildings, the same fire hydrants, the same neighbors sitting on their front stoops that Levi Aron saw just a few days earlier as he tried, sloppily, eerily, to erase what he’d done. It was enough.

I felt sick for the rest of my run, but not just for the heinous crime against an innocent boy, his family, or all the other parents in Brooklyn who must be shaken to their cores right now. I felt sick because I didn’t know what compelled me to run down that block, looking for that dumpster.

I made my way to Prospect Park, a bucolic oasis of trees and dirt trails in the middle of a concrete jungle where I run every day, and failed to see any of the beauty. All I saw was 20th Street between 4th and 5th Avenues, the dumpster that may have been the one, the images from the news of Levi Aron and Leiby Kletzky.

And I never found an answer to my own question: Why, when tragedy strikes, do we feel it more acutely when it happens in our own backyards ?

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

I was first drawn to the novel Lolita, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, not f or its literary merit, nor even for its salacious reputation. Quite simply, I had read somewhere that its author was, like me, a grapheme-color synesthete: someone who perceives letters and numbers as being inherently colored. I had possessed this trait for as long as I could remember (as a child, my favorite color was yellow, because the first letter of my name was); only recently, however, had I learned that it was something out of the ordinary.

Five years later, I am yet to find a writer whose words appeal to my senses as intensely and as accurately as Vladimir Nabokov’s. His attention to detail, particularly chromatic, is paired with a fluency that allows him to cross the boundaries between the senses as the mood takes him. Synesthesia is often associated with visual thinking, and a heightened memory for sensory perceptions: qualities that are undeniably of use during the writing process.

The experience of synesthesia was frequently idealized by French Symbolist poets such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Rimbaud himself considered the aim of the poet to be “to arrive at the unknown by a disordering of all the senses”, something that may be achieved, in part, through synesthetic devices. In his epic prose poem, A Season in Hell, Rimbaud explicitly evokes the experience of grapheme-color synesthesia:

I invented colours for the vowels! —A black, E white, I red,
O blue, U green.

(In my case, it would be: A green, E bluish-gray, I white, O orange, U a sort of washed-out pink.)

Whether or not one is actually a synesthete, I believe that most writers are, on some level, concerned with the overlap between the senses; the endless associations that can be made between colors, shapes, smells, feelings, and so on. Likewise, writers – and poets, in particular – tend to be extremely sensitive to the beauty or ugliness of different words, and the ways in which these words can be combined and laid out on paper. I am therefore inclined to think of my synesthesia as an extension of the typical writer’s overinvestment in words: an extension th at involves the perception of colors, and hence turns writing into a more painterly process than it might otherwise be.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of “Vaucluse” in the summer 2011 issue of Contrary.

Rusty Morrison’s second collection of poems, the true keeps calm biding its story, is one of the most exciting collections of poems I’ve recently come across. On entering the collection one feels submerged in an immense, ineffable loss. The poet takes the loss on like a master, utilizing the structure of the telegram to send her messages into loss and memory. Morrison takes hold of the tragic, and like a boundless wave she smooths the rough edges away by her fierce attention to the experience—that is, coming to terms with the loss of her father.

The effect of the true keeps calm biding its story, often reminded me of Tennyson’s, In Memoriam in its constant need to re-examine a loss and shape it into something that imparts some clarity. Time and time again we’ve seen how language fails us when dealing with such a great loss. But for Morrison, to inhabit, is to get closer to comprehension. Morrison seems to be s atelliting around the loss, trying to capture as many frames as she can in order to see an absence from a thousand different vantage points. The result is a borderless body of poetry that ebbs and flows in and out of itself. The collection is largely plotless and proceeds without a clear beginning or end, but this approach enhances the content: anyone who has experienced such a loss knows what Morrison knows— “death stays demanding to be reabsorbed.”

The collection is divided into nine sections and each poem bears the exact same title, “please advise stop.” The collection is remarkable for its unwavering journey into a great loss and the intelligent ways it uses persistent disjunction to craft a cohesive body of work that is unified in its mission to plumb the depths of such emotional complexity. But what makes this collection so memorable are the deeply poignant, aphoristic lines. Take for example:

My father’s dying makes stairs of every line of text seeming neither to go up or down stop
That I make the nodding motion to help myself feel I understand stop
In common with his bafflements I find comprehension alone will not suffice stop

Morrison’s is not a journey to a destination, but to a familiar, wide, wintry clearing. The experience of loss is fully realized—there is not even a hint of closure. By the last poem in the collection we come to see that Morrison is right— what’ s needed i s a retention not reducible to memory. Language is never more unwieldy and unsatisfactory than when it grapples with loss, but, like John Berger once said, “Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.”  Likewise, Morrison’s collection performs a deftly crafted system of recovery. Perhaps what is retained is more like a floodlit wakefulness that never puts a life to death at all, but finds a way to bring the dead to life and a life to a simmering, localized present.

Further book info:

the true keeps calm biding its story by Rusty Morrison

Publisher: Ahsahta Press

ISBN: 978-0-916272-98-2

72 pps.

$17.50

Link to Purchase: http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/morrison/morrison.htm

Florida Governor and Job Destroyer Rick Scott, also known by Floridians as "Skeletor," or "the lizard Governor"

Right now, our representatives and senators and president are engaged in talks over the debt ceiling, the national budget, and how to end the pernicious recession that has lingered over a sizeable chunk of this writer’ s adult life. People are out of work, and the economy is in the toilet. Is this the way it’s always going to be?

When Obama was elected in 2008, I, like many liberals, was ecstatic. I thought he would institute a program of public works a la FDR that would get people employed, restart the economy, and end the dire economic situation of our country. I’m not going to say he didn’t try. For example, he provided massive funding for increased train transportation, which would have provided who knows how many jobs (building train tracks, building train cars—there’s an empty passenger train factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin waiting to start production), and decreased our dependency on foreign oil, and on oil period (remember global warming?). Many states, including Wisconsin, where I grew up and where I will be returning to live in a few weeks, and Florida, where I’ve lived for the past five years, have Republican governors who rejected those funds, thus rejecting job creation and advancing job destruction.

Republican governors have also slashed public sector jobs that already existed. Some estimates say public sector jobs cuts in 2011 are nearing 200,000. I’ll repeat: nearly 200,000 public sector jobs lost. In Minnesota, Republican state senators have shut down the state’s government because they refuse to pass a budget that raises taxes on Minnesotan millionaires. All of these Republicans make and propose cuts to public sector jobs, paired with tax cuts for already wealthy-beyond-imagination Americans as a way to provide incentive for so-called “job creators.” Let’s bring Job Creators to Florida! Let’s give incentives for Job Creators to come Create Jobs!

In reality, the holy grail of private sector job growth is stagnating under a stunted economy and broken tax code (broken in that it fails to adequately tax the wealthy). And instead of creating jobs, Governors like Rick Scott of Florida and Scott Walker of Wisconsin are destroying them. They are Job Destroyers. They lay off thousands and public sector employees, make cuts to education, and generally make what is already a bad situation worse. We can’t grow this economy by slashing public sector jobs.

As sole chairwoman of the Robin Hood Party, I say shame on you Job Destroyer Rick Scott, and shame on you too Job Destroyer Scott Walker. My party-within-a-party, the Robin Hood Party, has remained silent for the last three months, but, given the recent deadlock over raising the debt ceiling, and the cutting of even more public sector jobs, I feel the need to speak out, and to remind Americans that the patriotic Robin Hood Party’s platform of raising taxes on wealthy Americans to create public sector jobs, fund public schools, universities, libraries, parks, and arts programs, would not only create jobs, but also create Americans who are happier, better educations, less afraid of economic collapse on a personal and national level, and better equipped to be global citizens in a new millennium. And, we’ d also be able to pay our national debts with our increased tax revenue.

In the great applauseless, 3 a.m., early gray of suburban Maryland, there’s just the steady drone of the streetlights outside my hotel window. I’m only an hour ahead in time zone but I feel miles and hours away from home and Emily, who has stayed behind because she can’t fly because the baby will be here soon. A weird disconnect crawls across my body and gives me a chill. I shiver in the gray light, my bald head cold. I’m just awake. It was sudden and there was nothing to do about it. Eyes open. Body ready. “Fuck,” I told myself. I looked at my phone to see the time, and I asked, “Seriously?” to whoever was listening.

From my tenth floor window I see a small BP station going full glare and an ugly row of strip mall that rises three levels and cancels out, just barely, the pretty little white houses just beyond it. The strip mall is all ai r-conditioning units on its roofs from my position, but I can see parts of the doors where the white lettering of what each place does or sells, for example: “Wigs,” “Nails,” or “Tan.” Out in the distance the horizon blooms, like smoke furrowing up out of a volcano, because of what seems like a rolling explosion of hundreds of green trees. Sometimes between them one can see the steeples of churches or the tallest peaks of large homes somewhere in the gloaming. I think about pulling the shades open but cannot for some reason, so I stand there in my underwear, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders staring through the crack in the shades I’ve made, just enough for my face.

The air-conditioning unit at my knees hums. It’s very cold, blowing cold air up my crotch and dripping onto the carpet, the floor damp at my feet.

There are very few cars on the street, cabbies working late shifts, driving aimlessly through Bethesda to D.C., on Wisconsin Ave and back again, waiting for the sun to come up in their forlorn cars, windows rolled down because the place is like a swamp with the humidity already, even at 3 a.m. I can feel it at the window. Other than the drone of the streetlights, it’s a vast nothing. Like before the world came into being, some sense I have of otherworldliness that keeps me there watching and waiting. The room behind me is black. Like if I were to close the shades in front of me I’d be made dumb by dark; and so I wait like this. I think I’ll wait out the sun, which will come up on the other side of the building and send wonderful rays of pink light all across the early morning gray and then the sun will do its job and burn off the dopey gray that sits on us. I know I won’t make it because it’ll be at least another hour or more, and so I close the blinds and let myself fall back into what I perceive to be total darkness.

The day before I had tests all day at the National Institutes of Health. I had a 7:00 a.m. flight to Reagan National delayed out of O’Hare, and so I had to catch the very next flight out to make my appointments on time. When I finally found a cab at Reagan, I found myself with a cabbie who proceeded, after he asked me what my business in town was, to tell me every one of his family members who had cancer. It was a very long list — they were an unlucky lot — but there it was, everyone he’d known with too many cancer cells. He told me, “These were all very strong men, you see. Bulls, you must know. Bulls. All of them.”

I couldn’t totally understand him because his accent was thick — a still uneasy mix of American English and Arabic. At times his language was hard and others it was free and flowed like a great river. He was from some war-torn African country and had come here as a 19 year-old, I’d found out without asking, six years ago and had never left the area. He’d found a very good living driving cabs. “All of us. My uncle, My great uncle, my cousins. We make modest living,” he told me.

Anyway, he went on about cancer, “These men went through — how you say — chemotherapy?”

“Yes,” I told him. “You’re right. Chemotherapy.”

“Yes. Yes. These men lost all of their hair,” he told me as he re-adjusted his rearview mirror so that his line of sight was just me and not the road behind us. Occasionally he looked at the road, but it was mostly he and I. All the windows of the cab were rolled down to the max and he was yelling. The Potomac passed smoothly to the right as we rode up the George Washington Memorial Parkway and through what felt like a swamp land northwest of National Airport. I saw Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln’s memorials.

“So, all of them,” he yelled. “They lose their hair.”

I shook my head. I raised my hat to show him my baldness.

“Yes. Yes,” he yelled and pointed at my head. Then, “They get very sick, but they come out of it and live.”

“That’s great,” I told him, terrified to go through more rounds of tests, terrified there’d be new cancer everywhere. Like right then I was a dead man talking.

“What?” The wind whipped through the whole cab, shaking the car nearly out of our lane.

Louder, “Great. Great they lived. Good for them.”

“You know how this happened, yes?” He looked at me in the mirror. He had turned very serious. The whole mood in the car had changed all of a sudden.

“The medicine?”

He waved his hand away like my answer was a mosquito. He grew very animated. He turned around to tell me, “Ok. Three things. Eat well. Right action. Prayer. This is how they beat the cancer. It is the three things. It is so very easy to get caught up in what doctor’s say, their — how do you say? — I don’t know — what they tell you you have, how many months you have to live and on and on. But who are these men? Where do they come from, and how did they get here to you with such news? Who has sent them? They are not God.” He checked his mirrors and looked through the windshield then turned to me.

“I know it. I hear you,” I yelled. “They are not God.” I shook my head yes.

As we rolled on, in what seemed like a great easterly curve up and down hills, and deeper into what seemed like a jungle, the humidity choked me. I took off my sweatshirt that I wore on the plane to avoid the air-conditioning.

“You want air? I put on air.”

“No. No. This is fabulous.”

Out of nowhere, “So, you are Christian, right?”

“What?”

“Christian, yes?”

“I suppose.”

“Catholic?”

“Long story.”

“What?” he yelled at me.

“Baptized Catholic. But not Catholic anymore. Disagree. Long story.”

He looked at me sadly. “Then what? What are you? What do you pray?”

I tell him, “Listen, man. My wife, she’s Presbyterian. I do what she does. I like that church. It’s more liberal. It makes more sense to me.”

“Sense? What does this mean? What does this mean, liberal?”

The gray was being pushed out, and the sun was coming out. It was getting very hot. He was barely driving the car now. Somehow we were in and out of turns and moving forward. We were in the far right lane, maybe doing 50 miles an hour. Cars passed us and honked. Someone gave us the finger.

“I’m a little late for some tests,” I told him. “We need to go faster.”

“Traffic.” He waved his hand in the air.

“I don’t see any traffic.” The road was clear. At times we were the only ones on the road.

“What do you mean, liberal?” He asked again.

Fuck me. In an hour I’ll be sitting in some phlebotomist’s office getting massive amounts of blood drawn. A half-hour later I’ll be drinking a bitter, salty contrast drink for a CT scan, which, if you don’t know, is a test where they put you half naked on a board and then run you through what is essentially a large mechanical donut hole that takes radioactive pictures of your insides. They’ll shoot me up with IV iodine about halfway through the test, which will make me feel like I’ve pissed my pants and make my mouth feel like I’ve got a sack full of nickels in it. After that I’ve got to get a brain MRI, which is the real hell. They’ll lay me down again on some board and give me ear plugs. Then they put on those noise reduction headphones that airport workers wear to guard against the jet engines. They lay me back and then slide a steel mask over my face like we’re in the 11th century and I’m a heretic and some kind of imaginative torture is going to punish me and cleanse me of my sin. They push me into a deep tube, only about as big as the circumference of my own body. That’s when the pounding sounds and the high-pitched noises, like feedback from a Jimi Hendrix song, begin. It’s almost so intense in the forty-five minutes I’m forced to endure that I want to scream, “Get me the fuck out of here you masochistic bastards!” It’s enough to try, in those first forty-five minutes, to wiggle out and find the tech and kick his ass up and down the hallway screaming the whole time, changing pitch and tone, some feral scream, as I beat his brains in looking for some kind of impact, some kind of containment for the craziness that’s taking hold quickly. This all happens just as you hear a very far away but nonetheless sane static, which sounds like a human voice say, “ Only ten more minutes, Mr. Torch. You’re looking good. We’re headed home.” You laugh. You close your eyes to get through the rest.

And now I had a cabbie who wanted to go theological with me. I told him finally because he wouldn’t let up, “Like, for example, I’m not a fan of the ban on gay marriage or their views on homosexuality. It’s bigger than that, but let’s count that as one reason. How’s that?”

I’ll spare you the details, but he ran me through the logic of the Old Testament, God’s Law (“man should not kill other men and lay with another man’s woman, yes?”) and Jesus as Messiah, and how the Bible forbids man sleeping with man (“It says it. The Bible is Law. If you believe God you must follow God’s Law and God’s Law is the Bible, yes?”).

“Fuck me,” I think. “Seriously? Now?” The heavens open up outside the windows of the cab and suddenly we are cloudless.

Finally, as we near NIH, I told him, yelling, but not because of the highway, since we’re off of it, but because a whole day of tests is dawning on me, and I’m late, and I’ve got some strange cancer, and I want to kill someone most of the time these last few days, and I don’t want to know the results of the goddamned results, I told the Muslim-born now Born-Again-Catholic, the son of decades of colonial war,  as he circles around looking for the entrance because the place is Federal and so heavily fortified, post 9/11, it seems they’ve hidden the entrance or made it seem like their deal is “We don’t want outsiders here,” I tell him, “Listen, man, and this is just my opinion, but here me out: I find that there’s no fucking moral equivalence between killing someone, like, you know, ‘thou shalt not kill,’ and some guy wanting to marry another man out of Love. That makes no fucking sense, and it goes against everything I think Jesus probably taught. But I’m no fucking expert.” My guy basically wasn’t driving anymore, and we were in a stare down as the car slowed to some bright orange cones that were blocking our path to the campus. A man with a clipboard and high impact glasses approached our car writing down the cab’s license number. “You know what I mean? We’re going to have to disagree on this one. You got me, captain?”

He stared at me in the mirror.

In a matter of minutes his whole cab was being searched. Dogs, teams of guys with guns and badges. Very serious men with poles that had mirrors attached to the bottom of them that were being used to look under the car for contraband or bombs or both. My guy had to go inside with a black bag they found in the trunk of his car, and I was like, “Motherfucker.”

I threw my hands up.  I got out of the car and walked up to one of the search party’s members, a small black guy who was maybe 5’3” with the right pair of sneakers, wearing a bright yellow vest and a dark, foreboding black Federal outfit underneath. He was very wary of me as I walked to him. I had my hands up for some reason like I thought he’d think I was coming heavy, and I told him, “Listen, man, I usually don’t throw this card, but I’m a cancer patient here.” I raised my hat for proof — the bald head again. He looked, made a look, like despair (a family member? A passed friend?). He was deeply uneasy. I told him, hands still up in the air, “I’ve got appointments. I’m late for them now.” I pointed to the window of the room they got my guy in.

“And you want your cabbie. You need him now. You need to get to building ten stat. This is what you’re saying.”

“You got it.”

“Let me see what I can do.” He turned to go into the building.

Moments later my cabbie walked buoyantly out of the room wearing an ear-to ear grin like they had told him the secret of the world in the little, cramped place and the secret is just too chowderheaded not to grin.

We began our descent and out ultimate ascent to Building Ten where all the machines and the needles and the intensive care units and the cancer wards are.

“I’m sorry about all that,” I told him. “I didn’t know.”

“None of us know anything, yes? No worries, brother. This is the life.” He moved his hand across his cab but meant everything outside of it. He moved it slowly to really draw out hi point. It was both an epic and sweeping gesture. Every tree, every rock, every person, every park bench, the sun, the powder blue sky. He was blissful. I was confused. Ten minutes earlier we were in full theological debate. I looked at him in the mirror and he looked at me and then back at the road and smiled.  Yes, that’s it, he was full of bliss. I smiled back.

Together we looked for the signs that said, “Building Ten.” We pointed this way and that. We were traveling evangelists or something. I was leaning forward, having broached the line between the front and back seat. If someone saw us they’d think I was telling him the oracle, I was so close to his ear and he intent on my vision, he blinking and smiling in the pale blue light. We found it together. Building Ten. We saw it high up at the top of the campus.

When we pulled up to the front entrance, he told me, as he ran my credit card, “You remember now. Eat well. Right Action. Prayer. God is All.” He handed me my receipt.

I nodded, tipped my hat like guys in westerns do, grabbed my bags, turned, and walked into the massive revolving door into the innards of NIH, as if sucked in by some Higher Power. It was a day of tests to see what the hell my cancer was doing 28 days to the day after a team of doctors gave me back my modified white blood cells, T-cells made crusaders.

to be continued …

This isn’t timely, nor is it apropos of something else. It’s just a fascinating conversation between two of cinema’s greatest artists, Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen.

I happened upon it after a friend shared a 1970s or 80s commercial for Schick aftershave directed by Godard (yes, really — tres chic, tres Schick), which led me to the website Open Culture, where the film was posted. Godard made Meeting WA in 1986, shortly after Allen released Hannah and Her Sisters, and at 25 minutes, it’s shorter than your average sit-com. In other words, it’s worth your time — assuming you give a rat’ s a ss about either director, cinema, or even just the 1980s.

Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen.

Robert Frost, who went for a walk one day and took one path, but then spent some time thinking about a different path he kind of thought about taking but didn't.

Poetry is a genre of writing whose audience is generally limited to its practitioners. That is, the largest population of readers for most practicing poets is other practicing poets. Poets like to get together and bitch about this, bemoaning a lack of education about poetry in elementary and high schools, or the over-intellectualization of poetry, or the under-intellectualization of poetry, or the entering of creative writing programs in academia, or the dumbing down of the American public via TV/the internet/smart phones, or any other number of straw men. Why aren’t more people reading poetry? This question is similar to questions like, “Why don’t more people go to the ballet,” or “Why don’t more people listen to opera?” Is it simply that we are failing to educate young people about arts and culture?

I think a lot of people have bad experiences with poetry at a young age. When I w as in the eighth gr ade, I had a terrible English teacher. Although he did teach me to a diagram a sentence (a skill I think would benefit all school children), he was also mean. My middle school was housed in a run-down former high school in a rural school district. The 1930s building was literally crumbling around us. The classroom where this teacher taught had a hole in the sheetrock of one of its walls wall and one day in class he slammed a student who was picking at the hole forward in his desk so hard that the desk rocked over. To provide a little context, this occurred at a public school in the early nineties, long after corporal punishment had been prohibited in public schools.

This teacher was also prone to assigning “journal” topics that all students were required to write about. These journal topics were really just restatements of his own opinions. If you didn’t agree with him, you got a bad grade on your journal. One that I remember in particular was the adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” We all had to write a one-page journal in which we agreed with this statement. I was old enough to recognize the nincompoopery of that platitude and disagreed. I got a bad grade.

One week this teacher came in to class and had us read Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It was clear that he fancied himself similar to the speaker of the poem. His interpretation of it was narrow, and, I would now say, incorrect: that taking the road less traveled leads to a more fulfilling life. So often Frost’s poems are misinterpreted down to simplistic morals, as though they were Aesop’s fables. Whenever I teach “Mending Wall,” I have students insist to me that the message of the poem is that good fences make good neighbors, despite the fact that the speaker of that poem openly mocks that sentiment. This bad teacher no doubt assigned a journal on “The Road Not Taken;” I’m sure I got a bad grade.

My point is, this bad experience was enough to turn me, a person who was inclined to reading and loving poetry, and who started reading Emily Dickinson independently at fourteen, off from Frost for nearly ten years. It wasn’t until I was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and took a class with James Galvin in which we really read and considered Frost’s more complex poems like “Home Burial” that I realized Frost’s poetic genius.

In another class at Iowa, I remember Bob Hass telling the students that he’d recently read that the most hated poem in America was “The Red Wheelbarrow,” because so many high school students were asked to read and “interpret” it in English classes. Presumably, many of them were told their interpretations were wrong, or many were frustrated at the task of interpreting a sixteen-word poem that mostly consists of a single image. I usually teach Williams’ “This is Just to Say” in Intro to Creative Writing, a poem with a little more meat on its bones than “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I’m surprised, though, at how many students have horror stories about “The Red Wheelbarrow” that they feel the need to confess during our discussion of “This is Just to Say.” One student I had a couple years ago told me that her English teacher insisted the poem was about Communism, and that she had to write a paper to that effect. Communism? I guess because the wheelbarrow is red?

All of this has left me wondering what other poems are being ruined by bad teachers, at both the high school and college level, who insist on monolithic, limiting interpretations of poems, and, in the process, reinforce the idea that poems are confusing riddles that only certified experts can decode. Perhaps this is part of the reason why so many Americans don’t read poetry. Of course, if there really were only one interpretation of a poem, it would be easier format the acquisition of poetic knowledge to a scan-tron and slap it on to one of the many zero-sum standardized tests we subject school children to.

Unreliability Across Oceans: Miroslav Penkov’s debut story collection, East of the West

Generally speaking, unreliable narrators tend to stump student readers, naïve and experienced alike. While bookworms notice implicit characterization, ponder subtle themes, and discern the meaning of motifs, they often believe they can trust a story’s narrator. In the two times that I have taught Miroslav Penkov’s story, “Buying Lenin,” not one student has second-guessed, or at least done so aloud, the reliability of Penkov’s first-person, college-aged narrator.

Penkov’s newly released story collection, East of the West, abounds with inexperienced, confused, distraught, and aging narrators—in short, narrators who lack access to truth, and who, in their perplexed musings, threaten the very idea of a singular truth. Yet Penkov doesn’t explicitly portray his unreliable narrators as undependable; unlike William Faulkner’s notoriously biased, unwell, and volatile narrators, as exemplified in The Sound and the Fury, Penkov’s offer the illusion of stability, as they bestow wisdom on their fellow characters and conceive of marvelous plans. It is only in focusing on Penkov’s representations of his narrator’s consciences that a reader realizes she cannot trust the “I” who narrates. By making us privy to his narrator’s most intimate thoughts, Penkov not only shrinks the psychic distance between character and reader, but also endears the reader to his precious and precocious storytellers.

“Buying Lenin,” a story that Penkov altered drastically since its publication in the 2008 edition of The Best American Short Stories, funnels dichotomies, West versus East and capitalism versus communism, into two main characters, the narrator and his grandfather. A tale of ideals found and lost, “Buying Lenin” captivates the reader with nostalgic flashbacks, astute detail, and telling allusions to the volumes of Lenin as well as to his bodily remains.

I did not expect to stumble upon an auction for Lenin’s corpse.  CCCP Creator Lenin. Mint Condition, it said. You are bidding for the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The body is in excellent condition and comes with a refrigerated coffin that works on both American and European current. The Buy It Now button indicated a price of five dollars flat. (72)

The title story, “East of the West,” which begins with the chronological conclusion of the series of events, reverberates all the more powerfully for doing so.  Again, Penkov creates doubles: a river divides Serbia from Bulgaria, West from East, and lover from lover. While other stories juxtapose the East and the West, this one centers not on one side or the other, but on the very fact of their division. The grass, we learn, is always greener on the other side, as the Serbians long for a lost heritage and the Bulgarians for denim jeans.

Although the traditional bildungsroman assumes the form of the novel rather than the short story, East of the West appears bildungsromanesque. One gets the sense that the characters who populate these stories represent a composite character, of sorts, who grows up and tries to find his (or her) way in a world of splintered hemispheres. Penkov’s stories offer upsetting and beautiful vignettes of life stages, including growing up, losing family members, caring for disabled siblings, adjusting to a culture other than one’s own, falling in love, having children, and losing love. At once distressing and startling, intricately crafted and gracefully written, Penkov’s collection itself serves as a guiding narrator, a means of safe transport into and across a fractured world.

[capti on id="attachment_2694" align="alignright" width="300" caption="By fox_kiyo via flickr"][/caption]

When we published the summer issue of Contrary two days ago, we had less than $2 in the bank. We’ve been scraping by since the recession hit, but this marked the first time we had published an issue without knowing how we’d pay for it.

Scary, so we just closed our eyes and pressed “Publish.”

Two days later, not only is the summer issue paid for, but autumn and winter are too—thanks to you, generous readers, and we really do thank you.

Before the recession submerged the world, we had no trouble raising the $800 per year we need to pay our creative writers. Occasionally, we exceeded that initial fundraising goal and had a l ittle more to pay our book reviewers. We didn’t have bloggers in those plush days, but if we did, we would have paid them too.

Contrary‘s editors volunteer, and we cover the magazine’s expenses–server space, transaction fees, legal necessities–out of pocket. Contrary is a labor of love and an opportunity for service to writers and writing.

But we think it’s important to pay writers, especially poets, who almost never get paid.

Despite the danger of commodification, the hazard of inappropriate valuation, the impossibility of adequate compensation, many writers view payment as an essential part of their emergence.

Occasionally someone who’s launching a publication asks for advice about fundraising, payment, salaries, and I always say, “Pay your writers but not yourselves. Keep your overhead low and your karma high.”

I don’t think that advice has ever been followed—too contrary? And I don’t think any of those journals are still around. One defunct publication burned through a grant (blowing it on editor’s salaries and office space) that would have paid our writers for 350 years.

But our consideration to writers has always depended upon the kindness of readers, and donations became scarce when the economy collapsed.

We don’t want to lower the payment amount–although it’s token, it will get you just about anything in the world. So we hold on. Like the barnacle, we cling to our place on the rock and wait for the tide to rise again.

Meanwhile you, dear readers, sustain us with your eyes by the thousands every day, and that would be enough—but whenever we reach the impassable, you pick us up and carry us on.

In Other Generosities

Contrary received a five-star review from Web Del Sol’s review of journals, Portal Del Sol:

Though the word contrary usually comes with negative connotations, there is nothing negative to be said about the high-quality fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and hybrid forms offered by this magazine. With an attractive home page and loads of literature in the archives by masters of the craft like Sherman Alexie, this is not a website to simply browse: it is one to enter and stay in awhile. The work may teeter on the tightrope between accessible and experimental, but the magazine holds a secure place as one of the best around.

~ Jacqueline Vogtman

“Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over,” said Drenka Balich to her lover, Mickey Sabbath, at the start of Philip Roth’s 1995 book, Sabbath’s Theater. That book began a streak of award-winning novels for the author, earning him every major literary prize in the world of literary prizes. In the p ast 50 ye ars, Roth has done more to keep literature alive than just about any other living writer, and he himself has remained a champion of the sort of fiction that inspired him to become an author in the first place.

When Saul Bellow, one of Roth’s mentors dating back to when they met in the 1950s at the University of Chicago, died in 2004, Roth wrote a eulogy for the New Yorker, in which he asserted that every young man should have a male figure in his life, other than his own father, to serve as a kind of intellectual role model. For Roth, that man was Saul Bellow. Bellow taught him that he really could use his own life as a Jewish kid from blue-collar Newark for literary inspiration, and turn what might seem prosaic and dull into the basis of serious fiction.

In his book of essays, Reading Myself and Others, Roth offers not only poignant analyses of writers like Bellow and Milan Kundera, but insight into his own writing process. In so doing, he presents a compelling defense of literature.

But this week, the 78-year-old author of 52 books admitted that he no longer reads fiction. ”I don’t read it at all,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”

Nope, he hasn’t even read Freedom or Visit From the Goon Squad, and he doesn’t plan to.

Granted, just a few years ago he prophesized that in 20 years, no one would be reading fiction anymore, but that such a bleak prognosis would not stop him from producing it. After all, Roth is th at rare breed of human who seems incapable of quitting, producing almost a novel a year for the past several years. He’s never been lacking a readership, either, and his fans — myself included — anxiously await each new book even if the previous one fell a bit flat (cf: The Humbling). And presumably he still writes standing up.

But I can’t help finding some resonance between Drenka’s ultimatum to Mickey and Roth’s own declaration about fiction. I don’t think Roth or his readers want the affair to end, but what of our relationships with others ? Surely he wouldn’t prescribe a no-fiction diet to everyone else, or would he ? More importantly, why would a man who has made a career of literature — both as a teacher (at the University of Chicago, Hunter College, and the University of Pennsylvania) and as a writer — foreswear his own dalliances with his compatriots in the fight to keep fiction alive?

Or maybe, Roth is just being Roth. Which is to say, contrary.

By Kenna Takahashi, Perfecto via flickr

The Summer Contrary is published and we have an early deadline for Autumn. The details:

“Vaucluse” by Laura Elizabeth Woollett is one of the finest pieces of very short fiction we’ve ever received. Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an undergraduate student and writer from Melbourne, Australia. Set your sidereal drive on her now and watch her star rise. Like this:

We first published Karina Borowicz long ago when Contrary was young and Karina was just beginning to discover her talent for poetry. Then we took separate paths, poet and journal, and in the gap of years, Karina became a prize-winning poet with a forthcoming book, and we sustained a bit of growth of our own. This summer, we grow together again, with Two New Poems by Karina Borowicz.

We also have:

• lyrical commentary—which you know is just our term for what others call creative non-fiction—on a family’s haunting by a father’s old girlfriend, from Oline Eaton,
• excellent stories by Matthew Burnside and Contrary regular Edward Mc Whinney,
• brilliant new poetry from another Contrary regular, Amy Groshek, from her “Single Life” series,
• poetic evocation of the Virgin Mary from Kate Douglas.
• Reviews of books by Rebecca Rasmussen, Geoff Dyer, Helen Phillips, Seth Abramson, Siobhan Fallon, and Eavan Boland.

Our Autumn deadline is Aug 1. Contrary Magazine accepts submissions only through this form. Let’ s read each other.

Burning is learning. That’s what our guide at Varanasi’s burning ghats told me and my sister as we stood along the Ganges River, inhaling the smoke and dreams of the formerly alive. I was twenty-eight years old. I thought that life would get easier as I got older. That love would be as natural as breathing. Death itself was a fabulous abstraction, a poem projected in 3-D against the backdrop of the scholarly, angst-ridden film that was my mind’s eye.

I felt elegant and existential along the ghats. Time quick-sanded. My hands were larger than usual. I was too aware of my heart as a kind of wet, red kite tied down by four arterial strings. I cracked clay cups on the ground. Watched the boys in blue slacks fly their red kites, tugging hard on thin strings that seemed the only thing holding down their skinny bodies to the surface of the earth. I horded images of holy men, sadus, swathed in sheets of white and gold.

There, in the chaotic timelessness of Varanasi, we watched people come to die along the Ganges, and having died, be burned, their ashes embraced by the holy river. We walked among the ghats near the pyres. Two brown stumps of a pair of legs. The hand detached from its body, reaching out to farther shores. Bone and teeth, a love letter to the living. I felt sick, sad, and selfish. I wanted more and more, to live and live.

Americans don’t touch our dead. Not in a long while. We’ve licensed people to say our goodbyes for us. We’ve given them God’s notes, according to religion and book, but very few of us are still in the room and stay there till the body’s burned or buried. We’ve moved far away from bathing and whispering, swaddling and praying. But those gestures are still there, impulses roaming the modern body.

And in many places around the world, including here in Zanzibar, people remain close to their dying, their dead, the responsibility and desire falling mostly on the shoulders of family members and friends to prepare the body themselves, without the interference of state or law. When it comes to death, it begins and ends with scripture. It’s a raw affair, up close, and personal. Around the time of the total lunar eclipse, I saw three different bodies on three different days wrapped and carried through the streets, on flat-bed trucks or overhead in mourners’ strong hands. A kind of casualness prevails, a peace.

The Zanzibari Hindus burn the body of their deceased at the only Hindu crematorium on the island, believing that it is the ultimate act of freedom to release the once-bound soul from the body.

I was surprised, then, to realize that this same holy place where bodies are burned is also the favourite local body-building spot for young men. I’d been asking local friends, on behalf of my American students, to recommend good exercise places in town. Over and over again, people kept telling me to go check out ngazi mia, meaning, “one hundred steps.” It’s where everyone goes to exercise, stretch, jog, lift weights, and practice karate and kick-boxing, along the Indian Ocean coast.

I had no idea until I finally visited that these one hundred steps are located within the gates of the Zanzibar’s Hindu crematorium, and that to some, a climb down these steps is a descent of no return. Stone Town’s favourite outdoor gym is literally on the site of an active crematorium, where in the morning the deceased are washed on a clean slab of cement and then carried down those one hundred steps and placed on a large grill-bed to be charred, ashes then tossed into the ocean, waves lapping at the shore.

By late afternoon though, Zanzibar’s body-builders, joggers, karate-choppers, and all around “men of sport” ascend upon this holy site to get their bodies pumping, and they do so in full force, making speedy rounds around the curving foot path that starts at street level and then winds to the base of those one hundred steps, dressed in Adidas running shorts and shirts. There’s all kind of stretching, kicking, twisting, knee-lifting and heavy puff-breathing along the path. When they reach the bottom, there’s a covered cement room with no walls, where lies the rusted bed used to burn the bodies.

Young, muscular men, glistening with sweat, actually use this rusted bed as a base for push-ups, twists, and sit-ups, fresh charcoal still strewn underneath, exposed. Some show off their push ups with one arm, the other arm reaching skyward in perfect form. Other guys lift a foot up on the low-lying bed, chatting with each other until enough space clears for their turn to pump it up in style.

I asked a few guys if it bothered them that a body had just been cremated there in the morning. They looked at me, somewhat puzzled. Like they hadn’t considered it. A silence lingered. And then, one finally answered. No. Why would it? The soul’s already gone far away. This is a good place to exercise.

So these guys pump it up at sea-level by the cremation bed, while other guys just keep running up, around, and down the one hundred steps. Along the way there’s a broke-down cement square-shaped veranda that juts out over the ocean. It has a formerly glorious charm, though now it’s sea-stained and tired. If you feel like taking a rest, you can sit out on the veranda along its stone benches, looking out at the great big sea. Just a few feet below on a wide ledge, young guys perfect their karate-chops, their fighting stances, tucked into low-lying, lush green branches of ancient trees.

Those one hundred steps are steep. Some do hand or head stands, testing their strength. I saw one guy take all one hundred steps up using his arm strength alone, his legs titled just over his head the whole, wobbly way.

At sea level, children, mostly young, shirtless boys, frolic in the waves, bodies glowing, late afternoon sun drenching them with light. They are loud and playful, screeching as if in conversation with the crows, who perch at death’s cliff, watching with discerned detachment.

The crows will die too one day, without ceremony.

This place made me think about how death sets us free from the desire to be strong.

My mother told me just this morning (Friday, June 17, 2011) that I should write something about how my affliction with cancer is really an affliction that the whole family has in some way. I believe her. I believe it. She says, “You should write that because we’re all affected. Maybe I’ll try my hand at it. Maybe I’ll do it.” She laughed because I don’t think she even believed she would try to write it, and if she did she wouldn’t show it to me. I don’t need the story written from my mom, I know it’s true. She’s taken to itching her arms for worry over me. She’s taken to a barrage of questions daily about my health and whether or not I’m following doctors’ orders. She’s taken to saying, “This is the one. This is the treatment.” Even if I tell her not to say this, rather harshly at times (my own superstitions), she still tells it. She’s always been a beacon of hope. But, being my mother, she’s afflicted. She might not have what I have. But she’s got the thing. We all got it.

I told her, “Do it. I don’t doubt it. Write it.” It’s true, I don’t doubt that everyone closest to me is “sick” (from my best of friends to my closest colleagues to my farthest acquaintances) and in some way has been made to feel the bizarre suffering I’ve had to endure, but no one as much as my wife, Emily, as she is closest to me everyday. She wakes to it and she’s also carrying our baby, due in one month. We will keep it from him/her as long as possible, but no doubt, he’ll be caught up in the mix. You can imagine the stupid guilt I have in all this. What stupid guilt, I know. Throw it away, people tell me.

I met my wife Emily about three years ago this past April. I met her online only a few months after my first round with cancer. I met her six months after the doctors told me I had four months to live. They told me one night, October 5, 2007, in Houston, at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Robert Benjamin gave me the news after we waited in a small, very cramped room populated by cotton balls, heart rate monitors, various kinds of scopes, medical machinery of noises mostly. We must have waited in that room for four hours at the very least, but it all depends on who you talk to. The more the time passed the more likely, now that I think about it, my fate was sealed. He must have been trying to clear the floor of other patients so that he could give me all the time in the world to ask questions, even if questions were the last thing on my mind. Unless he could answer for me what it meant this turn of phrase “four months to live.” Unless he could answer for me what it meant to “get one’s life in order.” Unless he could answer for me, “Where do we go when we die?” Unless he could excuse for me the feeling I had that I had done very little with my life and nothing really to show for it (but who does at 31?). I wanted him to be God. But he couldn’t be. He was just an oncologist, and with the news he brought me, all the way from God knows where, we thought he was some kind of evil thing. He was bald and short and his lips were wet and red and saliva bunched up white and stringy at the corners of his mouth when he talked. He seemed to be wearing a perpetual frown. He was very white and it looked like he was wearing powder or some sort of base make-up. I don’t know what you call it. He also wore a white doctor’s jacket that went all the way down to his feet, he was so short; and the jacket was covered with various kinds of flair, buttons that said things like “F@#!% Cancer” or “Live Each Day Like It’s The Last” or “Glory in Today” or “Cancer Sucks.” It was all over his jacket. It was like a big joke he was playing on me given the news he just handed me. He definitely was out of this world.

We sat there. When I say “we” I mean my mom and my first wife, a relationship I’ve refused to write about until now. I cried and I remember my mom telling me how “we’re going to beat this thing.” She had cancer then too. I believe it. She’d been diagnosed. Everyone close to us had been diagnosed. She was leaning against the medical bed if I remember right, as close to me as possible given the smallness of the room; and I remember just saying, “What? What? What does this mean?” I remember saying it over and over again. Then I remember gagging like I was going to throw up.

My mom had great concern. She didn’t cry though. I remember that. She was the strongest I’ve ever seen her in my entire life that night. It was like she was waiting her whole life for that moment. She would argue with me now having written that and shared it with you, like it was a terrible fate to be waiting for a doctor tell her only son that he has cancer and may not survive, but my mom’s reaction was so steady and so sturdy that it was like she knew it in her heart, could feel the cancer in me and knew it was in her by then and she was like a CO at war with men and she just stared at me I remember. Stared at me hard like she was telling me somehow that I’d have to be strong now. Like I’d not known what strong was and she going to teach me and she just stared at me and kept telling me that this was nothing. “We’re going to beat this, Rafa.” She kept saying it. It was a mantra, a code. She knew it her whole life. (Oh, this makes me want to weep writing this. Oh, boy, makes me want to just lay down and die, the fury of a mother, the sadness, the knowing that must happen, have to happen — this feeling budding in me as I await the birth of my first child with Emily). She was ready for war. Staring, leaning into the bed. “We’re going to walk out of here and beat this thing, Rafa.” She may have even called me “Rafael,” which she never does unless I’m in trouble or she wants to tell me something important. It may have been, “Rafael. Listen to me. Rafael, we’re going to get through this. You’re going to win.” She kept saying it. She knew this was going to happen. If she didn’t she hid it well.

Dr. Benjamin’s nurse was frowning. It was very late. She looked tired, but she was taking notes. Dr. Benjamin turned to my mother when she said those things to me, and he told her she couldn’t speak to me in such a way anymore, that the words we used and the language we employed now for the coming fight had to change. I thought my mom was going to kill him. I think I would have tried to kill him if it was my son sitting where I was and some doctor told me I couldn’t tell my son he had to have hope. Yes, I would’ve, in all my rage, I would’ve tried to kill the doctor. My mom somehow kept her cool. Maybe because she knew she’d have to help me later once things sunk in.

At that moment I had the very distinct feeling of being in a Camus novel. I’d taught him enough and taught Sartre too, but it wasn’t until the doctor said “four months,” I’d not really understood the feeling of being faced with my own mortality. I would wax on for hours with my high school students, but I knew nothing. Looking back it’s funny how little I knew about anything. It’s funny how little we know about anything anywhere. How much we talk. It’s funny all the jibber jabber, the excited, racy, vapid nothing talk of the world.

And then there was my X. She sat there next to me bawling. She was what they call “emo” — she wore some sad affect, in love with photographs of vacant warehouses or something or would get caught up in suicides or empty motels along the highway, as if they had some key into the the heart of the universe. She was the lead singer in a band that was sort of close to making it, and that night she wore a yellow t-shirt with some kind of band name or some sort of ironic saying on it, like, “The A-Team.” Or something like that. She wore tight Diesel jeans and Saucony shoes. She was very conscious of a look and was true to it. I don’t know now what I was doing then with her, but I had been doing it, following along sort of, playing a game I knew, even before cancer, I couldn’t keep playing. Now, it seemed cancer would call out the marriage for what it was, which was basically empty and nothing. She would agree with me if you asked her now, I’m sure of it. It was all wrong. We’d been caught. We’d been found out. Here we were.

Nonetheless, it was like a fountain had been turned on inside her and all the water of the world had been jammed up and now was coming out now full-force. The look and feeling of despair could be cut with a knife. The room got that much smaller as we were flooded with her emotion and despair. I felt like I couldn’t match it. I don’t remember, even now, if I heard the doctor right, but listening to her go on I was forced to reckon the bad news, which I was still trying to understand. The way X was crying it seemed like I was already dead and buried. Later I’d come to understand the tears and the fear and despair. It had nothing to do with me, but it had everything to do with guilt, for later I’d find out she was cheating on me with, of course, the guitarist in her band (funny, right? It’s always the tattooed guitarist named “Jay” or the little secretary named “Rose” or something like that). The place shook with her cries, which couldn’t be stopped. I didn’t know what to do, and I tried to hold her hand and rub her shoulders, but then I thought it was me that had the death sentence. It was me that’d been told I had terminal cancer. My mother was now trying to see if there was anything else we needed to do so she could get us two kids out of the room before the whole place came down in rage and sadness and despair. I was only 31 and my ex-wife, much younger than I, she was maybe 25. It was after 9:00 p.m. on October 5, 2007. It was dark out. The night was thick with darkness. Stars here and there, but you couldn’t see them hardly because all of Houston was lit up in the distance wherever you looked. Like wildness. Like terrible hanging sadness, the yellow lights of Houston, I remember.

(Everyone had cancer. Everyone’s got it. My mom’s right. So, here you go, mom)

Where were we? What were we doing ? What roads had we taken to get here?

In the end, after all the terror of those early months with cancer,  it was like my ship had been righted. Like, the only way for me to get on with it, my life, was to get cancer. To keep getting cancer, a constant reminder to Life. A terrible way to go, yes, a terrible row for my whole family, but, nonetheless, a lesson — a necessary season, an endless season maybe, but unavoidable — potentially windy, too hot, too cold, a season of extremes, yes. But the Real.

L ater, back at the hotel, my mom, like a good Italian mother, made us eat food. I remember eating bruschetta. Wolfing it down like it was the last thing I would ever eat. I remember laughing very much at dinner, cracking jokes and being snide, making vulgar asides that revealed a great anger that I think had always been in me, but now had been made real, brought out center-stage by cancer’s minions — fear and sadness. It was all so off-kilter. Like we were a boat askance in the middle of the Atlantic. Something adrift.

We were staying in the Hilton. It was under construction.

My X began her long, damaged love affair with food and sleep that night. Her standard operating procedure became “anything but this.” She would sleep for hours, for days. She would stay up all night and finally go to bed when I would wake. Except for the strange dreamy nights when she’d barge in on my pharmaceutical-induced sleep begging me not to die. Weeping, she tell me, holding my head up, my eyes barely open because the drugs I took left me damaged and wasted, she’d tell me, I remember from the fog, “Rafa, please don’t die. Don’t die. Please don’t die. You can’t die.” I’d tell her, laughing maybe at the absurdity, “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here forever. I ain’t dying. Now let a man sleep.” “Rafa,” she’d whisper. “Please don’t die.” “Ok,” I’d tell her and then she’d be gone. Like a ghost of my imagination because it was the only time I ever got her close to me. I would fall back asleep wondering why she didn’t want me to die. It shouldn’t be that way. But it’s how my nights went then before Emily came into my life and loved me and I loved her.

X’d eat and eat. I don’t say these things out of spite or anger because I don’t have those feelings anymore, but I remember being very alone in that time. I remember that if it wasn’t for my mother (or even my mother-in-law, a cancer survivor herself) being there with me in those months, when I first experienced chemotherapy, I would have been very alone indeed. Certainly friends and neighbors came by often to offer their support and love, but I slept alone most nights and really had no energy to understand nor care where X was spending her time. It was all about the band. I didn’t want to be a burden (the default position of any cancer patient), and so I told her to do whatever it took to keep her sane. She played shows, went to band practices, cavorted with whoever, played groupie. Her band was loud and crass. They opened, ironically, for bands like Rise Against. I often wondered if she caught the reference, this rising against. I often wondered what she was rising against. She was angry and sad. Sometimes in all our lives we are sad and angry. There’s no known antidote, and it can be worse than cancer.

My mom cooked, cleaned, and kept my house. We were sick together. I didn’t know where X was. I don’t know if X knew where she was. With cancer, nobody knows anything with any kind of certainty. There’s lots of knocking on wood and praying and keeping fingers crossed. There’s taking your vitamins and eating your vegetables. There’s aimlessness and pill-popping and driving angry on Lake Shore Drive, suicide missions if you will. There’s silence and nothingness all over the place. It’s just the way it is in the beginning, I think. I’m not speaking to any new problem. Ask your local cancer patient. They’d agree. If they were honest. Ask the mother or the wife of the cancer patient. They’d tell you the same. They’re sick too. That’s what my mom posits. And I believe it. I don’t doubt her on this one.

My mother wanted to me to deal with the problem of my marriage then. But I told her I could not. In the back of my mind I made a pact with God that if I could just get through this I would leave X as soon as I could, part of a starting over. X and I had many problems (and I was not innocent — I did my fair share) before cancer, but the cancer made things more strained, rude, and acute. She was thrust into the role of caregiver, and she wasn’t able to be that and I understand that now.

Miraculously, after two rounds of chemo, I had a surgery that took my cancer away for almost two years. That was in December of 2007. By the end of February 2008 I found out that X had been cheating, even before the cancer. It was like she wanted to be found out, wanted to whole jig to be up, and, well, it did come up.

It was a text message. Something so simple. A text message at dawn. I was about to walk the dog, and my whole life changed again. The dog had to piss and I couldn’t stop staring at the love message from “Jay,” something about her being a “pumpkin head sugar pie.” I stared at the lousy love message. The dog pissed on the floor. Funny, now, when I think about it. I said it  out loud even. The dog looked at me and turned his head sideways like I’d said, “Bone,” or something. My whole life was headed to “pumpkin head sugar pie.”

Isn’t that funny?

So, I left her. I had a renewed lease on life. Things were sunny. Life was good.

I met Emily a couple of months later. Like I said earlier, we met on eHarmony. When we met I was still sort of recuperating, but I had begun the long process of putting my body back together after such sickness. I met her at the Green Zebra Restaurant on April 24, 2008. I remember waiting by the bar for her and being very nervous because she was very beautiful from what I could gather in the photos she had put online. I didn’t know yet how tall she was, but she was blonde and breathless and, from our brief correspondence, a woman who had traveled well (been to Africa, alone, to build homes with Habitat for Humanity) and wanted to see more of the world.

When she walked in I was drinking a tonic water or something ridiculous and she asked someone who worked there about me. I don’t know what she said, but by then things, as I remember them now, went into a slow motion. She was talking to him, and, as it always goes with her, men sort of trying to put the moves on her, the man working there said something slick to her and she laughed a little out of politeness but she was already ignoring him and looking over the whole joint and I was standing there in the wide open. I had put some photos online, but I was embarrassed by them because they were all fairly recent and I was still bald from the chemotherapy and still sort of skinny and I remember thinking, “Why don’t I have any other photos?” It was like I had come out of nowhere. “Where was the old me?” I asked my iPhoto program? I had come out of nowhere, and I thought, standing there watching her look for me, she’s looking for a man from nowhere. “She’ll never see me.” I stood there nervously.

The man was still talking to her and she finally saw me standing by the bar. I let her look and look and I might have let her look on and on if I could just look at her like that forever. “Oh, boy” is what I thought. “Oh, man,” is what I said to myself. I may have even said it out loud, shifting the weight from one leg to another. That’s what I felt like at that time. I would have let her look and look and stand there and look and me just look at her and I know it sounds strange but I felt my stomach turn and I watched her looking for me and the little man in the restaurant making slick comments or something and she towered over the place, boy. I don’t know if I fell in love with her then, it might have been some point right after, but it began there. But I think I did fall in love with her then. But I’m always so wary of such things. But no matter anymore. I fall in love with her again every time I see her in the morning. It’s just the way it is. It’s just the way the world works. This great world sometimes freakishly brutal but somehow sometimes brutishly simple and good.

She saw me finally and smiled. And I’ll never forget it. A sort of relief in her face and she nodded in my direction and walked towards me with her long legs and long stride and she was clutching her black bag, maybe out of nervousness, I don’t know, but it was so lovely. She was walking up the short ramp to the bar to meet me. She was clutching her bag and she was wearing a knit black shirt that hung loosely over her shoulders and it would be a lie to say that I didn’t notice just how beautiful her neck was and how wonderful it was to see her earrings move breathlessly across, almost tickling, the tops of her shoulders. Her hair, blonde, she kept pushing back behind her ears. Her mouth, a kind of sadness there, but that smile like breathless sunsets that seem to hang right there on the horizon forever, sunsets I used to experience living in Los Angeles when I was much too young to understand that somewhere later in my life I’d see the same thing in the smile of a woman I’d fall madly in love with, that I was really looking into Emily’s smile. It all moved in such slow motion. I may have fell in love with her then. I don’t know. It sure sounds like it, huh?

As she nodded, I gave her some little ridiculous wave of the hand. It was stupid. She laughed a little, and when we met she put out her hand and told me her name was “Emily.” I told her my name and we stood there shaking hands in a slight silence while I gathered myself because it was like I was just coming out of some long dream that I’d been in for my whole life, like being anesthetized for 32 years. I didn’t know she’d be my wife then. We didn’t know any of what was to come then, but we stood in the awkward silence before the maitre’d came by and sat us down. I moved nervously from foot to foot like I was shadow boxing and she kept doing the thing with her hair, pushing it behind her ears and pulling her bag up on her shoulder. I don’t think we ever experienced that kind of silence again. That night I told her about cancer and my past as an alcoholic, which I rarely did, and she told me about her dad, who had killed himself a couple of years earlier. At one point in the story, she said, “I don’t even know why I’m telling you about this. I don’t tell anyone.”

I shrugged my shoulders. She went on.

We closed the restaurant that night. And we closed many restaurants down other nights too. By Thanksgiving she was my fiance. By June she was my wife. The following month we were living in Las Vegas, trying our hand out west (following some kind of American dream but wide awake to the potential failure of it and then, being awake, realizing our lives were in Chicago). The month after we moved to Las Vegas, August, we found out my cancer had recurred. And here we are. Five recurrences later. Surgeries, chemotherapies, and now, experimental treatments by the United States Government.

I’ve hit the big time.

Thank God for cancer. Some days, I thank God for this disease which seems to take so much from me physically, but has given so much to my heart that it makes me want to just lay down and cry about how beautiful the world is and how the road we think we’re on isn’t the road at all maybe, how stupid we could be on these roads we think are the right roads even when all the signs are saying, “Road Closed,” how hard-hearted we can be, how stubborn we are even when the signs are saying, “Detour,” we keep heading down the road, even if it’s saying, “No Outlet.” But there we go. If it wasn’t for cancer I’d have already driven off the road. Falling, falling, falling. Falling away into nothing. I was that close. Put your index finger out in front of your face and put an inch between it and your thumb and that’s how close I was to nothing.

At night, before bed, when I was just a little boy, my mom would tuck me in at night and I remember asking her if she loved me. She would laugh very hard and I could sense a sort of pain in her heart, even when I was little, like the question suggested I thought maybe she did not love me even a little. My mom would lean in close, and I remember the way she smelled in the dark, a perfume I’ve now long since forgotten, maybe something called “Poison” that she bought at Saks, but it is of no matter. I remember her leaning in and bringing the covers up tight to make me feel warm and safe, and she’d tell me that she loved me like all the stars in the sky. She used to say very quietly, framed by the yellow light coming in from the bathroom of our little apartment at 1597-5 Hawthorne Dr in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, so much so that I can’t always make out her face in the dark, but it was her, and she’d say, “I love you more than anything, Rafael. Like every star big and little in the whole universe. Do you know how much that is? Do you know how many little stars there are ? Do you know how many big stars there are?

And here I’d smile and I’d put my hands and arms out as far as I could stretch them and she’d laugh and say, “Yes, honey, that’s it. And you don’t forget it. That’s how much I love you.” When she’d go away and close the door a little, enough for some of the light to come in my room, a certain slant of light, I remember trying to think about her brand of infinity, I’d stare out the window or hard into the wall of my room and let my gaze go slack trying to see the universe in such a way, such infinite love.

Now, I have the distinct knowledge of how far away I am from nothing. Little did my mom know that when she was telling me that when I was such a young boy that she was really telling me how far I was from nothing, how far we all are if we just pay attention to the dumb thing we’re in called Life. So, yes, my mom’s right. We all have cancer. But the cancer I got, the cancer I’m talking about, let it grow, let it metastasize. Let it grow all over us as a family. Let it grow, father. Let it come, mother. Let it sing, sister. Let it feed, wife, and grow and eat, friends, and let it grow fat, child. So shall I. So shall I. It’ll be enough love to eat for a hundred thousand years of suffering. A million trillion. Arms wide open.

As Contrary Blog’s resident Joycean, I’d been planning to be first out of the box today with a post about Bloomsday. Logging into Facebook, however, I found that no less than five of my 333 friends have already wished the world a “Happy Bloomsday.” This, I presume, triggered the following targeted ad in my Facebook account:

With the entire novel now being Tweeted, it appears that Joyce’s Odyssean Irish Jew has penetrated our collective consciousness more than I thought. So, if you aren’t already suffering from Bloomsday overload, I hereby bring to your attention to an invaluable online resource for scholars and novices alike: The James Joyce Scholars’ Collection, a free, digital trove of out-of-print classics of Joyce scholarship, compiled by David Hayman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The crown jewel of this collection is undoubtedly Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’:

image source: librarything.com

In 1918, Frank Budgen was a British painter living in Zürich. When we meet him in James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, he seems to be last person in Zürich’s artistic circles to hear of the Irishman and the forthcoming Irish epic that will change literature.  When they meet, it’s perhaps for that very reason Joyce chooses Budgen as his sounding board while working on Ulysses. As Joyce claims, “[Budgen] has the advantage of me. He can understand and talk about my book, but I don’t understand and can’t talk about painting” (a statement I cannot help but find laughable–the author of Dubliners and Ulysses lacks a painterly eye!).

Budgen, who becomes a kind of Boswell to Joyce’s Dr. Johnson, brings a non-literature specialist’s perspective to Joyce’s work, and for that reason, his is still my favorite introduction to Ulysses. Thanks to Budgen, we know something of Joyce’s painstakingly slow process of composition (“Two sentences” after “working hard on it all day,” at one point).

image source: de.wikipedia.org

We also get a glimpse into the great author’s home life ( “Who’s he when he’s at home?” as Molly Bloom would ask). One of the most startling moments is when we meet Joyce’s wife, Nora, so famously dismissive of her husband’ s literary endeavor s. She turns to Budgen and asks, point-blank:

“What do you think, Mr. Budgen, of a book with a big, fat, horrible married woman as the heroine? Mollie Bloom!”

Something in this statement–whether it be Budgen’s idiosyncratic spelling of Molly,  or simply Nora’s directness–never fails to startle and unsettle me.  It’s as startling and unsettling, in many ways, as Molly Bloom herself. It’s Molly, after all, who de-lionizes our hero, not only by making him a cuckold, but even in calling him “Poldy” (i.e. taking the “Leo” out of his name). “Her judgments of men and things were swift and forthright and proceeded from a scale of values entirely personal, unimitated, unmodified.” Budgen’s description of Nora Joyce sounds like it was intended for Molly instead.

As it happens, Budgen meets Nora with a calm reply: “I thought there was nothing wrong with being fat and married. Anyway a fat, married woman is a change from the sylph-like sweethearts we usually read about.” So true, and still true after all these Bloomsdays. So, happy Bloomsday, happy reading–or happy Tweeting, as the case may be.  (Hey, Molly Bloom’s maiden name–Tweedy! OK, I promise I’ll stop.)

I was telling someone that my current experimental treatment was like the experience of being in a car crash. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes I think it’s not even the crash itself but the treatment I just had was like the moment right after collision and right before the crash stops — all that time in between. It’s much easier to say, “It felt like a car crash.” Moreover, it’s not even the violent part of the car crash, but some potentially dreamy core, some highly intense and traumatic middle place.

That’s how my memory is processing it, how things are coming back to me after being forcibly sick for 13 or 14 days. I know the major events of the experience: the chemotherapy to rid my body of the old, worthless white cells I’d been born with, then the actual treatment, getting back millions of white cells that they’d taken from me only weeks earlier and then modified and made bionic in the lab according to the cancer my body has harbored, and then, to spurn on my immune system, to make the whole thing go, the IL2 (Interleukin) treatments. I remember the four doses of IL2 even though I was stung by severe rigors, violent, strange chills that left me like a Mexican jumping bean for twenty minutes — maybe more —  depending on how the Demerol worked on my system.

I remember the hallucinations that made the whole treatment come to a screeching halt two Saturday’s ago now. The doctor was nervous about continuing because they couldn’t stop madness ultimately, couldn’t predict when it would end the way they could my flu-like symptoms or the way they could yield a ventilator to stop the experience of shortness of breath.

I knew it once it was happening, me sitting in the bathroom, looking at smudges on a stainless steel shelf just in front of me. The whole time I’m thinking I’m hallucinating. I knew what I was looking at wasn’t real, but there it was, the movement of the smudge, what looked like, very briefly, a congo drum player, dressed like a conquistador or some sort of pre-American borderless wanderer, playing the music of nowhere. This was the weirdo narrative I had been building in my head as I took a crap looking at the smudge on the stainless steel shelf.

I said to myself, “It’s not really happening. You know this. You know that this is the Il2. They warned you. They said there could be madness.” Nonetheless, you did your business with the toilet, cleaned up, and then yelled, “Emily! Emily! Get in here. You got to see this.” Like you and her were going to dig the little musical show on the stainless steel shelves where, in your head, some weird musician was doing his thing. You couldn’t quite place it, the music. You figured he’d had to learn it all somewhere else too because the drum was African. He’d brought it with him, here, to this place where Hell was breaking out for all parties involved, a whole place being born, an Eden destroyed and, yet, a whole new peoples coming of age. Sitting in your bathroom you felt like you were at the edge of history.

You said, “Il2 treatments.”

You yelled out, “Em! Come see this shit. Not, like, shit shit. But, like, the shit. On the wall.” You realized the whole thing sounded mad. You. The music. The congo guy. All of it. Things were unraveling. “I’m hallucinating,” you said. But you wanted to be sure. You yelled again for Emily.

She opened the door and looked at me looking at the wall, and I said, “You see this, right? Or, I mean, you don’t see this, right? Well, I don’t know. Whatever. I think you know what I mean. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

Wow. How crazy you were.

She sighed. Looked at me sitting there, looked at my IV pole like it was a strange intruder, just standing there, like it’d been caught, a silent partner to madness and hallucinations. Like it’d been egging me on, pumping me full of drugs. My go-to-guy. Who Lou Reed had been waiting for with $26 dollars in his hand. My IV pole. Dressed in black. As she’s looking at the walls, I’m singing in my head, “Up to Lexington 125/Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive/I’m waiting for my man.”

“What you looking at, hon?” she asked me as delicately as possible.

“It’s no biggie. I’m seeing things. I’m just making sure. You don’t see this guy here playing the drums? Like a conquistador. Playing the congo’s?” I pointed over to the thing. I circled it with my index finger, fingered the area where I saw it happen.

“No,” she said. Then looking, and after some silence, “Yeah. No. Not sure I do.” She looked hard at the stains on the shelving. She really wanted to see it for my sake, I think. I don’t know if she thought I was losing my shit. I wasn’t, I thought, because I knew I was hallucinating. Does knowledge of hallucination make one less mad? But she didn’t know. I couldn’t ask her all that. She said, “It’s just dirt. I think you’re seeing into it.”

“Oh, I know it. I’m seeing into everything.”

“Honey, why don’t you pull your pants up and come on out and get into bed? You should just come on out and rest.”

“Yeah. Ok. Good idea.” So I pulled my underwear up and grabbed my IV pole and we wheeled out into the room and I got back into bed. I wanted to be confident in my madness. I just didn’t want to be making this shit up. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t seeing anything at all, that the whole thing was a hallucination in and of itself, like thinking about it to such a degree was itself a sort of madness. I then got lost in my thinking.

I looked around the room and things had a sheen to it. I remember thinking, “The room has a sheen to it.” That was the word. “Sheen.” “The room shined softly” is what I kept telling myself. I wondered if others saw it. It wasn’t malicious. It was blue, a light blue around all things. Things vibrated slightly. I knew it was all over for me. They were going to stop the treatments.

When the doctor came in he asked me how I was doing. I told him. He asked me how I felt, I told him that it really had nothing to do with “feeling.” I went on. I told him about the conquistador. Yeah, it was all over for me. I think I got him on the conquistador. I think that’s what did it for him, when I told him about the stuff in great detail, even the narrative I’d built about the conquistador — you know, “being at the edge of history” and all.

He put his hand up to stop me from talking, adjusted his glasses on his face, looked at me, said, “Wait, I’m sort of confused now.” He paused to catch his breath. I knew it. My narrative was breathless. I mean, the music, the conquering, the indians, the terror, the melding of peoples. It was a little overwhelming. He asked, “How are you being so lucid about hallucinations? You’re making me confused.”

I told him that my undergraduate experience afforded me opportunities to explore various modes of consciousness. I smiled.

My wife laughed, like “Oh my god. Here we go.”

He smiled uncomfortably, shifted his weight from one leg to another. He was in blue surgery scrubs, a white jacket over them, a patch on it that had a man slaying a huge crab. The doctor wiped his brow. He was sweating. “Ok, then,” he said. He proceeded to ask me a series of questions, as if this was going to prove anything at all, he asked, “What’s 100 minus seven?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “100 minus seven?”

“Uh. 93?”

“Minus seven?”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Like 85. Maybe 86.” I was counting on my hands. I was laughing.

“And minus seven.”

“No. I’m not doing this.”

“You have to.”

“No, I don’t.”

I told him to look at the clock, and I told him to look around at the blue sheen of things, and he did and didn’t. He was a very by-the-book kind of man, and I think he just thought I was seeing things and that there wasn’t any more to seeing things than seeing them, like there was nothing else to it, like no story to it, no MEANING. But I think there were other things happening, but he didn’t want go there with me. He didn’t have the time. He was on call. He’d been there all night already and didn’t need to do the whole Carlos Casteneda journey with a 35-year-old cancer patient whose got four spots in his lungs and a bigger mass along his psoas muscle. He didn’t want to do the Tim Leary thing with me even though I was all (always have been) like “Fuck Tim Leary.” I just wanted him to see what I was seeing, what I’d been seeing, but I knew that was probably impossible. He had his own research to do, his own kind of seeing to do.

He just said, “Well, I think we’re going to stop. You made it to four. That’s good. It’s clear the treatment is working. You’ve got the shine.”

I nodded sagely, I told him, “ Yeah, man. Everything’s got the shine. That’s my point. Been my point the whole time, man.”

Emily smiled. Shrugged her shoulders. Like, this is my man.

He smiled meekly and said, “Ok then. Well, I’ll check in later, Mr. Torch.” He threw me a little wave of the hand.

“Ok, Doc. See you later then.”

I think when he left then we were both a little confused because we were both witnessing some kind of shine. He just didn’t believe in mine as I was to believe in his. Later, my wife told me that my skin had a sort of flush to it that made it look shiny. It looked like I’d been in the sun for a few days and I had been sun-kissed. It’s what the doctor’s call the “IL2 glow.” Their “glow” was more “real,” I guess, than the “glow” I was just getting into and they pulled the plug on. This was part of what made this whole thing like being in a car crash — a beautiful car crash, a car crash that wakens you to the minute details of everything happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a car crash and it’s still sort of happening, the long smashing of glass, the noise of the crack-up, the way the light glitters off all that broken glass, the holy terror of it, the breathlessness of it, the speed or no speed of the whole thing. Everything sort of weightless and you’re left wondering when it will stop — things just suspended, there to see and witness.

* * *

Maybe it was two days ago, before I left, that I looked in the mirror at myself and had the brief sensation of being someone else. It was only a moment but one that seemed to last an eternity. Like I’m still looking into the mirror. I said, “You’re you. Stop being so dramatic.” I looked and tried to capture me and my heart got heavy and I thought I’d cry a little but then I didn’t.

I’ve lost a lot of weight these last three weeks. My cheek bones are sharp and my skin sort of falls near my chin or, better, it makes a slight dimple at either side of my lower jaw. I broke my nose when I was in my early twenties in some ridiculously wonderful and absurd bar fight and the broken bone now sort of stands prominently out at the top, where my glasses sit. My hair has been falling out and, also, a first, my eyelashes and eyebrows a little. So when I looked into the mirror I was experiencing something else. Someone I didn’t know. I wanted to put my hand out and shake his hand. My eyes have always been big, but they bulge a little now because of the severe angularity of my face without the weight I’ll gain back very quickly I’m sure. My eyes, they’re ridiculous. But there you have it.

I was talking to myself in the mirror, and I suppose everyone has these moments, moments we think for a few seconds that the person staring back at us, that this person, this can hardly be us. We hardly believe it. The years and the tensions and the joys and the hardships and the wonder and the pessimism and the strange skepticism and the terrible optimism and all of it, the madness and hatred and silliness and humanness of being alive all gangs up on you. I guess that’s what it was, I was looking at all of it at once. I wonder if you have before. I wasn’t hallucinating. It was me. But it wasn’t me, or, better, I didn’t want to think it was me because I didn’t want to believe, maybe like you, I didn’t want to believe that at my age, 35, I was privy to such things yet. When is the right age, I guess? There’s no right age. But I wondered, looking at me in the mirror, staring at the foreigner, I wondered what he was doing there. I wanted him to go away even as I leaned in to get a better view: the eye-sockets perfect in their form, but scary because it seemed like one good punch would do some serious damage; there was the seriousness of mouth and the slight hanging at the corners of my mouth, like I was frowning, but I wasn’t.

“This can hardly be us,” we say. We stare. We inspect. We can hardly believe it. Life all of a sudden. Yes. That’s it. Life all of a sudden. Like a heap on you. Like it fell out of the sky, out of nowhere. The passage of time. The complete wonder of it all. And it reads on your face now is all. When your hair does grow now there’s the little bits of gray hair. There’s the signs of history. You are at the edge of history. You weren’t bullshitting him. You weren’t hallucinating. It’s here.

And you’re like, “No way.”

But, “Yes, yes way.”

There it is. Look.

Nonetheless, even with this knowledge, you stand there, and you say, “Nope. Not you. Who are you? Get. Go on now. Get.” There’s a slight terror, but also a feeling like it’s always been this way. You were always right there. But what were we looking at before? What the fuck have we been looking at?

The hair product.  The shaving. The lotions. All of it. The preening. The time in front of the mirror and really, well, where were you? Excuse me. Where was I? Where’ve I been? This is what I’ve been thinking about.

It’s like being in a car crash. Life flashes before your eyes. Moments of clarity. Illuminations. The pleasure of reality. Seeing and not seeing. Hearing and not. There you are and there you go. Gone.

And that’ s the experience I ju st had. As best as I can put it. So when I say something like, “It was like a car crash,” I guess I mean that it wasn’t just being treated for cancer, because, you know, fuck cancer, but it’s the experience of not being me. Or not believing me when me faces me with me. Like the image of me is hard to believe. But, there it is. Now, when I look in the mirror, there I am, man. A severe, sometimes terrified man. Yet a man who has experienced wonder, a guy with the shine. And he keeps experiencing it and keeps experiencing it, has bouts with much darker things, but this wonder, well, this wonder makes him want to go figure it out now that he’s back in the streets of his Chicago again after that long car crash.

In his critique of higher education — how it began in this country versus what it’s become — for last week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand makes clear a few unfortunate facts of college today. Namely, that too many people go, and that many of them aren’t ready to be there.

Thus, it’s incumbent on their teachers to either weed them out, or, more likely, continue passing them through the system because of forces beyond their control. Such forces include a system that prizes student evaluations to the point where professors become like waiters at an Applebee’s restaurant, the students are their customers, and those end-of-semester evaluations are the comment cards attached to the check.

What do you think the professor’ s mo st likely to do? Remain tough, rigorous, and uncompromising in his st andards? Call it tough love. Or play the good guy, currying favor with his students with daily doses of positive reinforcement, affirmation that everyone is smart, and assurances that yes, you really are a great writer! Waiters may hate their customers, but they don’t let on if they want to keep their jobs.

I’m not saying that professors should hate their students. Far from it. I think professors should love their students, and in loving them, help them discover their potential by holding them to high standards. This is what ostensibly happens at “good” schools — why can’t it be just as common at all the others? In other words, why aren’t they all “good” schools?

Menand’s essay covers much more ground than evaluations, of course, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. Data released this week shows that only 37% of high school graduates in New York State are prepared for college, and in parts of New York City, the percentage dips below 10. If the kids are not all right, to borrow a phrase from Pete Townsend, maybe it’s their teachers’ fault. Because if students aren’t mastering the skills they require to succeed, but are passing through the educational system regardless, something has to change.

But change is unlikely as long as more and more professors work on a contingency basis. Currently, only one third of the people teaching in American colleges and universities are tenured or tenure-track; the rest are adjuncts, part-time lecturers, and short-term contracted educators. Their jobs no more secure than a server’s at Applebee’s.

As a lyric poet, I think a lot about the limits of silence.  And I try to keep a sense of humor about the problem of those who are stingy with speech.  This is a pantoum I wrote a couple summers ago in Auvillar,  about the irritation I felt with “Bubba,” the silent type.   It’s a riff on a poem by Gérard de Nerval.

As If You Are Dead

Tout vit, tout agît, et tout se correspond.

(Gérard de Nerval)

All lives, all dances, everything connects.

Except you.

You don’t correspond.  No word,

no email.  That would be unmanly.

You hold back.

The rest of the world jigs and interacts.

Not you.  Men and gods parcel out love

in silent packages .  No kisses, no loud stamps.

The rest of the world halloos!

Not you.  You swallow your voice.

You’ re one silent package.

Dead, or Mount Rushmor e?

No word, nada.  You don’t correspond.

All lives, all dances & all connects.  Not you.  Not Bubba.

According to a groundbreaking new study into the mysterious workings of the human mind, and reported by the New York Times, our species developed its well-honed capacity for reason and argument not to seek out truth, however nuanced or elusive it may be, but rather for a decidedly more selfish purpose: to win.

Lest my sarcasm escape detection, I meant the preceding sentence as a joke. Why should this be such a revelatio n? It strikes me as obvious as saying that men start wars to impress women, or that the 21st Century workforce is getting fatter because people spend so much time in front of computers. (The first example can’t be proven, per se, but the second was also reported recently by the New York Times, whose motto, of course, is “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”)

I get that the Times has an obligation to print relevant news of all stripes, and revolutionary insights into human behavior should certainly get their share of precious ink — or less-precious pixels — but surely someone’s done a study, somewhere, that might actually change the way we think about the world, our place in it, or even just the way we debate with our domestic partners over which kind of toothpaste to buy.

The study’s findings aren’ t en tirely mundane, of course. I found it interesting that people respond more to certitude than logic, for example, explaining perhaps how the Tea Party developed such a fanatical following. I also found it interesting that people tend to remember things that confirm their beliefs over things that don’t, which also explains a lot about the political quagmire we’ re in today.

Beyond politics, perhaps this study could help us navigate our personal lives as well, or at least better understand what we’re doing when we get into it w ith a co-worker over whose turn it is to change the water cooler jug, or with the lady in line who insists she was there first.

Then again, I always knew in such situations that I was arguing to win.

Photo by Crista Cloutier

It was a hot day so I opened the big doors and settled down for an undeserved siesta. When I woke, it seemed that all of nature had moved in. Ants covered the floor. A bird perched on the shelf. A lizard slithered toward the fireplace. And somehow a bee got inside my shirt. Now, I’ve had a bee in my bonnet before, figuratively speaking, and a boy in my pants, but never a bee in my shirt. It, the bee —not the boy— elicited a scream and a wrathful display of outrage. I threw off my clothes and — still talking about the bee here — it stung me twice before dying a horrible death. I’ve always thought I was allergic to bees so I prepared for my own death as I don’t know how to call an ambul ance, nor say the French word for bee, or even my address. It all seemed too much, so I opened a bottle of champagne and dug out some caviar.

“This,” I thought, “is a good way to die.”

When

When the low heavy sky hangs down like a cover, you’re in Auvillar

Without your spouse.  Dante’s on his way.

Ladies of a certain age compete for the clothes line.

Show off gleaming copper pots.

Tea and flan, wet wash.  Dante’ s

not your concern.

Beatrice tends him,

pats dry.

Push past your fears, Francesca!

Seize the line while Madame snores.

Twist your fingers through Dante’s damp curls.

He’ll know what hit him.

Then run run run under grey skies.

You have feet, orthotics.

Sadness that rivals rain.

Blue clothespins

Can’t clasp your tidy life

If you’re in the wind

With him.

The Chronology of Water< /em> by Lidia Yuknavitch. Wow. Some book. One reviewer admits to considering throwing it across the room.