Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Sunday
Last week I reported on a talk given by Sewanee’s Jennifer Michael about finding God in the silences between words. At one point, she handed out a number of poems and had us discuss them in groups, including this tender poem about the Last Supper by Mark Jarman.
In “No One Understood the Final Meal,” Jarman points out that the disciplies could (of course) only grasp its significance upon looking back. After all, at the time it resembled other meals they had had with Jesus. “What was the order,” he asks at one point, only to respond, “But who can remember dinner yesterday?”
After the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, however, they sounght to repeat the meal—as best they could—in order to bring everything back. If they can recrate the details of that last supper, maybe they can bring back their friend.
It’s a very personal way of capturing the meaning of the eucharist. In eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood, we enter into an intimate relationship with him. This miraculous transformation originates in a simple meal.
No One Understood the Final Meal By Mark Jarman
No one understood the final meal, that it was final, each part with a meaning. No one understood as it was served— each portion of the body doled, poured out.
Strange flesh. Strange drink. Each portion of his body. And as they ate and drank, he talked, even had a private conversation.
All they remembered was eating with their friend, a meal they’d had so many times and known the order of. What was the order? But who can remember dinner yesterday?
Forgiven for a crime not yet committed, enjoined to remember someone not yet lost, they tried to bring them back— the taste and texture, somehow, the meal, him.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Friday
One of the benefits of being retired teacher is that I don’t have to grapple with the problems posed by ChatGPT, which is currently the worry of professors everywhere. An artificial intelligence program that can spit out custom-made essays takes plagiarism to a whole new level.
According to Wikipedia, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer“enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.” A philosophy colleague at Messiah University informs me that it is scaringly effective at mimicking the kinds of essays professors assign. One can even set the level, from kindergarten to graduate study. Sometimes he has had to check footnoted references—which appear to be actual references but are in fact bogus—to realize the essay is machine produced.
In other words, this Shel Silverstein poem does not do justice to such machines. Nevertheless, I share it to bring a little humor into the conversation. My professor son Tobias Wilson-Bates, to whom I used to read Silverstein’s poems, reminded me of it:
The Homework Machine By Shel Silverstein
The Homework Machine, Oh, the Homework Machine, Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen. Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime, Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time, Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be. Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’ Three? Oh me . . . I guess it’s not as perfect As I thought it would be.
Toby once joked that it seems like a tremendous waste of money and effort to create a machine designed to generate first-year-student essays. But of course, it can do a lot more.
From my pedagogical perspective, the problem with ChatGPT is that tremendous learning and brain growth come from grappling with the different stages of writing an essay, from the “shitty rough draft” (Anne Lamott’s phrase) to the polished final product. Putting aside the ethical issue of passing along someone else’s work—or something else’s work—as your own, the whole purpose of education is undermined when all you have to do is push a button. It’s like watching an exercise video in lieu of doing the actual exercises. The discovery process that comes from interpreting a work of lit is circumvented.
In my own teaching, because I insisted that the students had to have something at stake in their essays, I encouraged them to find personal application in the works they chose. Often they responded with remarkable insights, both into the works and into their lives. I am told, however, the Chat GPT can fabricate seemingly authentic encounters with poems. I think of the George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Toby, who teaches many non-traditional students at Georgia Gwinnett College, has his students do a lot of writing in class, which is one way of addressing the issue. My Messiah colleague takes it on more directly, having the students analyze ChatGPT responses. In other words, the new challenges posted by AI are prompting teachers to become more creative.
The days of such machines messing up the answer to “nine plus four,” however, are long gone.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Thursday
Increasingly I’m hearing Donald Trump described as a “stochastic terrorist,” which is someone who demonizes his or her enemies so that they stand a chance of becoming targets of violence. We saw him behaving as such, of course, when he got his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and now it appears that the former president is employing stochastic terrorism as a way to keep from going to jail. If he can use threats of retribution to intimidate his foes, perhaps he may once again escape accountability.
While this might strike us as un-American, we have seen instances of stochastic terrorism throughout our history. Violence has always been latent, awaiting individuals or events to trigger it. An author like Cormac McCarthy understands this well, as do William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), James Dickey, Toni Morrison, and others. I focus here on McCarthy because, as a contemporary, he sensed where we are now. This essay draws on two past posts as it applies Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the Westto the dangers of Trumpian violence.
According to the recent Mitt Romney biography, Trump’s stochastic terrorism swayed votes during his impeachment hearings. Asthe Washington Post reports,
“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins writes. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?
“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”
Since his numerous indictments, Trump’s threats have only escalated. After one set of rulings, he sent out word, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you.” Pundit David Corn has other instances, including one that brings to mind the 2018 attack on a Pittsburg synagogue, in which 11 died. Corn points out,
In a Rosh Hashanah message posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”
Trump has also called Army General Mike Miller, whom the former president hates for standing up to him, “treasonous” and worthy of death. (Texas congressman Paul Gosar followed this up with his own instance of stochastic terrorism, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”)
And then there are Trump’s attacks on NBC News, MSNBC and Comcast for committing “Country Threatening Treason.” As New York University’s expert on terrorism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently pointed out,
it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer… [N]ow his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward.
She writes that Trump’s visit yesterday to a gun shop to admire a customized “Trump 45” Glock “was inevitable.”
African Americans have long known that White elites turn to authoritarian violence to control them. Women, American Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and others have encountered their own versions of such coercion. What’s new, perhaps, is that (1) many of us thought America had left such violence behind and (2) now it is also straight White males who are being threatened. Whereas once White liberals such as myself had to take an imaginative leap into another perspective—that’s why novels by authors from diverse backgrounds are so important—now we are seeing up close what these others groups saw. On January 6, it was White members of Congress and White cops who were included in the targets. And it’s judges, lawyers, jury members, FBI agents, military personnel, journalists, and others who find themselves on hate lists.
I said I’d look back at American history before turning to Cormac McCarthy, and for this I draw on Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—it has had a distinctive way of framing the drama. For America, the myth involves subduing a recalcitrant wilderness. “Regeneration through violence,” Slotkin says, is the American myth.
Throughout American history, he notes, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing “the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure” to
Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.
Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model—think of Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears—but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth
represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.
When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or when he has pardoned the court-martialed Navy Seal and psycho killer Eddie Gallagher, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. “Trump is crude,” they would say, “but maybe it takes someone like him to shake things up.”
It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915), one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.
One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the unregulated violence necessary to restore civilization.
Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Along with Blood Meridian, which I’ll turn to in a moment, there’s Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novelmourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).
In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.
While McMurtry may think we have reached an end of the violence so that rangers are no longer necessary, however, McCarthy is another story. Forget about regeneration, I hear him saying as his murderous Judge Holden rampages through the 19th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, Holden by the end is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can ever find stability, McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence is perpetual and social order hangs by a thread.
The novel is based on the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War (1846-48). We first encounter Holden when, as if on a whim, he enters a revival meeting and fabricates a charge that turns the audience against the preacher. He’s a stochastic terrorist in this scene, behaving as Trump did on January 6:
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God…
Let’s hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistole from his boot he leveled it and fired.
More shots are fired, someone seams the tent, and there follows a mass exodus, with people “pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.”
When the Judge later admits to having fabricated the charge, like Trump he is appreciated for his entertainment value. At that point, his auditors become complicit in his action. Maybe they, like Trump supporters, get a thrill from the judge’s sheer audacity, and also from his sadism:
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him? You mean the Reverend Green? Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here. I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was. They looked from one to the other. Well where was it you run up on him? I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him. He raised his glass and drank. There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.
I want to caution against pushing comparisons between Trump and the Judge, since Holden is a sophisticated, learned, and refined psychopath whereas Trump (in the words of Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien) is driven by nothing more complicated than “self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.” The former president, O’Brien observes, “thinks about money, food, sex, and revenge. Very little else. Maybe sports.” Both men, however, act with impunity.
What we get in the revival meeting is only a taste of what is to come as the Judge joins with the Glanton gang on their murder spree. The narrative sucks us in somewhat since, at first, they are battling “bad” Indians (bloodthirsty Comanches and Apaches). Then, however, we see them attacking peaceful Pueblo villages and Mexican townspeople. As an extra flourish, sometimes the Judge will casually break the neck of a child or drop a gift of puppies into a river.
By the end of the novel, the Judge is orchestrating a dance, which becomes a metaphor for the great human drama. Only the truly barbaric man, he tells the protagonist, can really dance this dance:
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance…
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.
At the end, McCarthy reflects on the Judge and his dance:
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
I have sometimes wondered what drives a writer to imagine worlds that lack any sympathetic characters. Why doesn’t McCarthy write more novels like All the Pretty Horses, which features a protagonist of unimpeachable integrity who stands up against the forces of darkness? Why Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, with its cold-blooded and seemingly invincible killer Anton Chiguhr?
But if the world is truly becoming a place where stochastic terrorists such as Trump can thumb their noses at judges—if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe McCarthy is using the lawless and violent west to get at a vital truth. Perhaps he sees us as further gone than we realize.
At the very least, McCarthy’s vision tests those of us who like to think that civilization will triumph over barbarism in the great American democratic experiment.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
Two weeks ago I puzzled over why certain college-educated people, including economics professor Peter Navarro, fall for Donald Trump’s con. I speculated that the thrill of acting with complete impunity, like H.G. Wells’s invisible man, was such a drug that it overrode the brain’s capacity for reason.
But while this may explain some of the behavior of the Trump cult, it doesn’t explain all of it. After all, I’ve met other supposedly intelligent people who, with no power payoff, embrace wild theories about about vaccines, JFK’s assassination, 9-11, and other things. Therefore, I took notice when the novel I reported on yesterday—Richard Powers’s The Overstory—has a character studying why smart people believe stupid stuff. And that in turn was bolstered by a blog essay that also took the subject up, posted by legal expert Jay Kuo at Status Kuo.
Adam Appich, a psychology grad student in an Affect and Cognition class, is intrigued when a professor explains why teaching psychology is “a waste of time.” He points out that, despite all the students have learned about hidden biases, they are just as susceptible to hidden biases as other people:
Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cuing—all the biases you’ve learned bout in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.”
Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision, and independent thought.
The professor than lists a number of myths that his students believe:
Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightning, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.
The fault lies not in the stars but, he says, in our psyche:
The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.
We then see the teacher’s point made dramatically. Suddenly he staggers, flails, and rushes out of the room. No one moves, even though it turns out that he’s having a heart attack and dies in the hallway.
Adam thinks the professor is acting to make a point about the famous Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” where no one acts because no one else is acting. In this case, however, his death is actual.
To further study group behavior, Adam decides to write his thesis about climate activists trying to protect the redwoods. Perhaps, through psychological science, he can understand the forces that drive them. They proceed to turn the tables on him, however. It is everyone else, they say, who is in the grip of bystander effect, doing nothing as the world is destroyed around them:
“It’s so simple,” [Maidenhair] says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity….”Is the house on fire?”
A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”
“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”
Adam at this point mentions his professor and the bystander effect, saying, “The larger the group…,” to which Maidenhair responds,
“…the harder it is to cry, Fire?” “Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—” “—lots of people would already have—” “—with six billion other—” “Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”
At this point, Adam starts rethinking his dissertation, which begins to seem like a distraction. “He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize,” he concludes.
Now to Jay Kuo’s thoughts on the Trump cult and their belief in conspiracies. Citing a Duke cognitive psychologist and a Harvard cognitive scientist (Elizabeth Marsh and Nadia Brashier), he says that our brains judge the truth or falsity of a piece of information in multiple ways. In addition to relying on what we see with our own eyes, we also
develop strong emotional attachments to certain narratives because they help shape our identities. Social emotions, such as anger, gratitude, and grief, guide how we view our own personal welfare versus that of others. We defend these constructed identities vigorously, even when wrong, because our self-worth is tied up with being members of a group.
Along with emotional attachment, we
tend to judge the truth of something by its consistency, meaning that the more our brains encounter the same thing, the more likely we are to believe it to be true. Repetition within modern informational echo chambers has increased the power of conspiracies manyfold as we hear the same stories repeated by “trusted” members of our social networks. And media propaganda such as we see on the Fox network works so effectively precisely because it is drilled into viewers again and again, and the messaging is consistent across multiple outlets and channels.
Kuo is particularly interested in the three big conspiracies driving the MAGA right at the moment: that the election was stolen, that President Biden presides over a crime family, and that federal and state prosecutors are coordinating their efforts to interfere with the 2024 election. For our purposes today, we could add fourth: That human-caused climate change is a hoax, perpetuated by Democrats and the entire scientific community. “Once our brains are ready to accept a false idea as true,” Kuo says, “we are primed to accept a bigger falsehood.”
And how do we get people believing such immense conspiracies? Kuo cites Robert Brotherton of Barnard College, author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories, who says that the bigger an idea is, the bigger an explanation we expect to hear. In other words, the bigger the falsehood, the bigger the conspiracy. Once the falsehood is planted, we obsessively look for other things that will prop it up, including unseen others.
Adam leaves us with one other insight. Asked, as a psychologist, “How do we convince people that we’re right,” he responds, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Conspiracy theories are, in the minds of some, good stories, although ultimately they’re one dimensional, repetitive and fairly boring. By contrast trees, as Richard Power convinces us through his compelling novel, have a much more interesting story to tell. As his tree scientist Patricia Westerford says in the passage I quoted yesterday,
Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.
If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored.
Art, including novels like Overstory, has a major role to play in getting us to hear and pass on these stories. Our existence as a species is at stake.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
Several years ago Dan Bloom coined the generic label “cli-fi” for fiction that features climate change. Classic works in the genre included Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. I’ve just discovered and finished reading two more that can be added to the list, Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory (2018) and Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021). I include them in the genre because they both feature sensitive characters who are so upset at what humans are doing to the environment that they engage in acts of eco-terrorism.
We’ll know that we’re in real trouble when extreme weather events appear the norm, functioning as mere backdrop in our stories. The cli-fi genre will endure for only so long as authors and their characters rage against the dying of the planet.
In both Overstory and Cuckoo Land, we encounter outrage at how capitalism and human greed continue felling our trees and warming the earth. Powers emerges, I suppose, as the more optimistic of the two since he observes that trees are fantastic problem solvers. As his character Patricia Westerford, a tree scientists, puts it,
Trees are doing science. Running a billion field tests. They make their conjectures, and the living world tells them what works. Life is speculation, and speculation is life. What a marvelous word! It means to guess. It also means to mirror.
Westerford’s observations come to us in the form of a conference lecture she is giving on “Home Repair for the Earth.” Trees, she says, are trying to teach us how to fix what we are damaging:
Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics. Tagore said trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven. But people—oh, my word—people! People could be the heaven that the Earth is trying to speak to.
If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get. If we could see what green was doing, we’d never be lonely or bored. If we could understand green, we’d learn how to grow all the food we need in layers three deep, on a third of the ground we need right now, with plants that protected one another from pests and stress. If we knew what green wanted, we wouldn’t have to choose between the Earth’s interests and ours. They’d be one and the same.
In Doerr’s novel, meanwhile, we see one hypersensitive child devastated when a new housing development destroys the habitat of an owl he has bonded with and another (this set in the future) whose family has left Earth in a spaceship because their home in Australia has no more water.
If I were to look for hope in the two books, I’d have to say that Powers’ novel is slightly more optimistic in that it points out to us that life, through trees, has always found a way to keep going and so may succeed again. I think of the Dylan Thomas line—“the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”—and Powers sees that force at work even in innovative computer games that imagine innovative ways to exist. In this instance, a computer genius, after hearing Westerford’s talk, figures he needs to move beyond a wildly popular computer game that involves acquiring new territory—he concludes it has a “Midas problem” (always wanting more)—to one where players imagine sustainable ways to keep us going. So even though Overstory treats us to accounts of ancient redwoods cut down to satisfy our insatiable need for wood and other tragic tree stories, he also reassures us that life finds a way.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, which also gives us grim images of environmental devastation, focuses more on individuals surviving catastrophic horror. Undergirding the novel is an ancient Latin text, a picaresque account of a man longing to become a bird so that he can fly off to Cloud Cuckoo Land, a country in the clouds that knows no suffering. On his journey, he is transformed at different points to a donkey, a fish, and a “humble crow,” and the various characters find solace–often at dark moments–in his crazy adventures. The power of stories to buoy us up when all hope seems lost, in other words, is a major theme of the book.
Another theme is human resilience, and the novel ends with a character in the future using preserved seeds to start a new garden in a warming Greenland. In other words Doerr, like Powers, is telling us not to write off the future just yet.
Dr. Tobias Wilson-Bates, English, Georgia Gwinnett College
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share it with anyone else.
Monday
A couple of times in the past I’ve shared some of the best tweets of my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, an English professor and 19th century British Lit scholar at Georgia Gwinnett College. Sadly, with Twitter—or X—currently circling the drain, there may not be many more. As Toby himself tweeted—or Xed–, “Twitter quickly going from feeling like a half abandoned mall to a half abandoned mall where someone will steal your wallet to buy crypto.”
Elon Musk, incidentally, reminds me of Bob Dylan’s Big Jim in “Jack of Hearts,” as presented in the third stanza. Well, except for the part about big Jim’s dandy appearance, Musk having no fashion sense:
Big Jim was no one’s fool, he owned the town’s only diamond mine He made his usual entrance lookin’ so dandy and so fine With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste But his bodyguards and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts.
“Took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste” about sums up Twitter’s owner.
Fortunately, Toby has been getting in some final humorous tweets before the whole thing goes belly up. Here are my recent favorites. I start off with one of several on Tolkien, including another end-of-Twitter reference:
FRODO: I’m glad you’re with me Sam, here at the end of all tweets SAM: Rate limit exceeded, Mr. Frodo
Then there’s this one:
Tolkien’s guide to writing: Step 1: spend thirty years creating lore, languages, naming practices, and cultural customs for a fantasy earth precursor to the human world so complex that your appendices have appendices Step 2: call that version of earth, “Middle”
And this one:
New odd couple show about Gandalf and the Balrog becoming unlikely friends and going on adventures together.
And:
Pippin: *wakes the Balrog Gandalf: fuck. fuck, but you know, this is kind of on me for bringing brunch dwarves into a death mountain
There’s some fun satire directed at Dickens:
Dickens writing a hero: a beautiful working-class girl who is downtrodden by her station in life Dickens writing a villain: a beautiful working-class girl who is downtrodden by her station in life but also is French
And:
Editor: love how your work is all about the gentle bliss of domesticity! What happens in this chapter!? Dickens: a man explodes Editor: Dickens: exploded human flesh tastes like burnt pig
Thomas Hardy is always good for laughs—or rather, good for being laughed at:
Props to Thomas Hardy. He had every move an author could ever want. He could destroy a marriage at the beginning of a book, destroy it at the climax, end with a destroyed marriage, destroy the same marriage twice. Guy could do ANYTHING!
One doesn’t have to follow Toby for long to realize that his favorite novel is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Here’s a comment on its famous pedant:
The most relatable thing about Casaubon is that when he finally committed to really get to work his body decided to die instead
And here’s one on another of Eliot’s works:
Editor: really looking forward to reading this! I hope you took my advice and wrote a happy ending! George Eliot: (*smiling as she slides the final chapter of Mill on the Floss across the table)
I won’t spoil the ending for you if you haven’t read it. I’ll just say that, when I got to that final page, I almost threw the novel across the room.
Dorian Gray gets a tweet that sounds a little too on the nose:
New idea for a Dorian Gray-themed social media site where your profile picture stays young and beautiful but your posts become hideously deranged.
And then there are the Romantic poets. Here’s one on Keats and Byron, the first part consisting of an actual quote:
1819 Keats writes to his brother “You speak of Lord Byron and me—There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees—I describe what I imagine—Mine is the hardest task” The petty snark of this group was so impressive that their legacy has spawned 200 years of poetic shit talk
Wordsworth and Coleridge get one:
Sam: hey, Will, could you go ahead and write a quick preface to our lyrical ballads Wordsworth: no problem! Sam: just make sure you don’t take all the credit for yourself and pretend you’re god’s gift to poetry Wordsworth: heh…ya…I would never do that…
Then there’s the problem with taking Wordsworth literally:
Wordsworth: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher Edmund Burke: *writing 240 pages comparing the composition of the Nation State to Nature
The Brontes regularly show up in Toby’s twitter feed:
Editor: so, how were you thinking of wrapping this up? Charlotte Brontë: she tells the reader she married him Editor: oh…like…directly to the reader? Brontë: then she gets to think about how dead St. John Rivers is Editor: umm Brontë: Completely. Dead.
If you know Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, you’ll get this reference to the wonderfully villainous Count Fosco:
Editor: an Italian secret society agent is a perfect villain! Wilkie Collins: (*taking a long drag) and you know what’s really fucked up?? Editor: what?! Wilkie: he trains these fucking mice
Tristram Shandy regularly gets shout-outs—which makes sense since I partially named Toby after Sterne’s Uncle Toby:
My five-year mission: to constantly remind everyone about the section in Tristram Shandy where Sterne uses Aristotle to hypothesize a race of aliens made out of glass to offer a theory of the novel.
Toby alerted me to something that I didn’t know and that he learned just recently:
I’m sorry everybody, I’m still processing that Wile E Coyote is an intentional reference to Don Quixote. I ask for privacy at this time.
Yes, the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons was originally named Don Coyote.
Bram Stoker gets a callout:
Dracula: (*opens door) Renter: I hear you have a room available? Dracula: YES! Do come in for a drink- Renter: of my blood? Dracula: I- Renter: no, it’s fine, $750 for a loft downtown, I figured that’d be the deal
Here’s one for Hamlet:
Yorick: (*drinking) I dunno, guys, I guess it’s an ok job but sometimes it just feels like my boss wants my jests to be infinite, and that’s literally impossible
Plato gets several, including this one:
Plato (*writing in an era of constantly warring city states): I see the problem here—TOO MANY POETS!
Toby set off an interesting twitter thread with this reference to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
What is the food you first encountered in a book that made you desperate to eat it and why was it Turkish Delight?
To which someone responded with a Ralph Ellison allusion. It’s Invisible Man’s “favorite dessert,” eaten as he listens to Louis Armstrong:
Invisible Man’s vanilla ice cream topped with sloe gin (we literally tried this in grad school)
Here’s a tweet that’s a little more serious:
One of the uniquely cool things about texts that have been in the canon for centuries is that you can spend time reviewing the historical layers of the same text getting used for various nationalist projects over time. Shakespeare and Milton have been used to mean essentially every political project a text could ever possibly mean
This one, meanwhile, every English teacher should read and reflect upon:
Many of my writing students come in saying they hate grammar, but what they actually hate are systems of assessment that penalize them for grammatical mistakes without ever incentivizing grammatical curiosity or exploration.
Back to humor:
Academics aren’t trying to indoctrinate your kids into radical left-wing politics. We’re trying to indoctrinate them into appreciating our dated pop culture references.
And then there’s a tweet by one Jon Piccini and retweeted by Toby that’s too good to pass up:
Defend my PhD thesis? After all it did to me??
I conclude with one of Toby’s thread-generating questions, this one about the “great last name wars in academe? Like, when I say ‘Burke,” one group will think I mean Edmund and another Kenneth.’ He followed this up with other examples and invited his readers to send in more:
George vs. T.S. for “Eliot” may be the pinnacle.
And then there are all the family conflicts:
Thomas vs Matthew Arnold, Frances vs Anthony Trollope, Mary vs Charles Kingsley, the Great Shelley conflict, the Rossetti’s, the Brownings
Toby didn’t mention the Brontes, perhaps because he’s had many tweets on Bronte competition in the past. For the record, his favorite Bronte is Anne. Mine, for what it’s worth, is Charlotte.
It remains to be seen whether Toby will transition to Spoutible, Mastodon, or someplace else. If he does, Musk will have only himself to blame. The Tesla head took a medium that has, along with its toxic misinformation and fascistic rhetoric, generated a lot of creative content, and then elevated the former over the latter. Or as Bob Dylan would say, laid it all to waste.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share it with anyone else.
Sunday
Poet and Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael talked about “The Word Beyond the Words: Finding God in Poetry” for our church’s Adult Forum this past Sunday. She generously shared her notes with me for today’s column.
To establish both the theme and tenor of her talk, Jennifer read us Wendell Berry’s “I Go among the Trees,” which she followed with a minute of silence:
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.
She then clarified how she would be discussing poetry:
We’re not going to be spending much time on the mechanics of poetry or an intellectual analysis of it. If such matters as rhyme, meter, metaphor, or symbol come up, that’s fine, but we’ll let it happen organically. I find that many adults, as well as college students, view poetry as mysterious, a foreign language or a code that only the teacher knows. I try to get them to listen to the poem, to let it tell them what they need to know. There’s a place for analysis, for the technical language, but none of it matters if you don’t connect to the poem in a spiritual way.
Her starting premise, she told us, is that “poetry participates in the divine act of creation,” after which she associated poetry with the creation story:
In Genesis, God creates with the words “Let there be,” and he calls each thing by name. In John’s gospel (which is a poem itself), there is the Word, the Logos. Our word “poet” comes from a Greek word meaning “maker,” so that in the Creed, God is actually “Poet of Heaven and Earth.”
She then turned to the British Romantics, her own scholarly focus:
According to Coleridge, we all recreate the world as we perceive it, whether we are poets or not, through the primary imagination. To truly look at the world around us is not merely to gather data through our senses, but as Wordsworth put it, “to see into the life of things.” I suggest that all poets are to some extent aware of this this creative power that I’m calling the divine logos, whether they are religious or not. The poets I’m drawn to, both past and contemporary, have the tendency to see the divine in all things: in nature and in humanity—not to see such a sharp divide between creator and creation.
This has led her to conclude that
God can speak to us through poems, regardless of the writer’s specific intention. The writer isn’t here, but the poem is, and we are. Make the poem your own, and at the same time, hold it loosely: be open to what it might say to you.
Reading poetry, Jennifer observed, differs from other kinds of reading, such as
when we read a newspaper for information, when we read the instructions to program our smart TV, when we read a light mystery for entertainment and escape. Indeed, it is more like reading scripture. We have to slow down, quiet ourselves, and enter its confined space, much as we go into our “closet” to pray.
With the mention of newspaper, she cited the well-known passage from William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:
It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
In past Sunday Forums, Jennifer noted, she has given talks on George Herbert, T.S. Eliot, and the Romantic poets. For her current talk, she said, she was turning to contemporary poets, including some not from the Christian tradition, because they all “use poetry both to find and to communicate their sense of the sacred.” All of them “share a general sense of the sacredness both of speaking and of listening.”
Reflecting back on Wendell Berry, she noted that, while his writings on agriculture and sustainable living “are polemical and sometimes controversial,” his Sabbath poems are “about the importance of finding a rhythm between work and rest”—a particular challenge in our 24/7 world. (“Wasn’t technology supposed to give us more free time?” she asked. “Now it often means we are always at work.”)
While Berry “doesn’t often talk explicitly about God in his poems,” Jennifer continued, “it’s clear that he sees us all as part of a created order that we continue to create.” She observed,
The Sabbath poems come out of his Sunday morning visits to the woods, which he sees as a Sabbath place, as opposed to the cleared field which is productive farmland. You need one to have the other.
And she read Berry’s “Whatever Is Foreseen in Joy”:
Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day. Vision held open in the dark By our ten thousand days of work. Harvest will fill the barn; for that The hand must ache, the face must sweat. And yet no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap, Great work is done while we’re asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.
Following a collective discussion of the poem, she looked at Mary Oliver’s “Praying,” which we also discussed:
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Jennifer pointed out that Oliver isn’t slighting blue irises here, given that she has written several poems on the flower. She just wants to acknowledge weeds as well, and I thought of the poet’s reference to “the reckless blossoms of weeds” (in “The Kitten”) and “What blazes the trail isn’t necessarily pretty” (“Skunk Cabbage”). I thought also of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation in his essay Nature, “Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight…”
To summarize her approach to nature, Jennfer quoted from Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”:
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
While time constraints didn’t allow Jennifer to share and discuss Jane Hirshfield’s “The Door,” I include her comments here. Jennifer writes that the poem
similarly treats listening as a doorway not just to knowledge of this world but to something transcendent. Hirshfield is not Christian but Buddhist in her orientation. She’s urging us to pay attention not only to things but to silences, to absences, to spaces”:
Here’s Hirshfield’s poem:
A note waterfalls steadily through us, just below hearing.
Or this early light streaming through dusty glass: what enters, enters like that, unstoppable gift.
And yet there is also the other, the breath-space held between any call and its answer––
In the querying first scuff of footstep, the wood owls’ repeating, the two-counting heart:
A little sabbath, minnow whose brightness silvers past time.
The rest-note, unwritten, hinged between worlds, that precedes change and allows it.
Jennifer is currently writing a book on poetic silences, in which she is exploring how poetry “speaks, and then it falls silent, and out of that silence it speaks again.”
Jennifer concluded the Forum by breaking us into groups to discuss poems that “help us imagine ourselves into the Scriptures.” The poems, which I’ll be sharing in future Sunday posts, were Mark Jarman’s “No One Understood the Final Meal” and “Cause Me To Hear”; Mary Karr’s “Descending Theology: The Resurrection” and “Meditatio”; and W. S. Merwin’s “Finding a Teacher.”
Following the talk, we adjourned to the church service, where we had the opportunity to listen to both the gorgeous poetry of the Episcopal liturgy and the silences between the words.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share it with anyone else.
Friday
I recently came across a reference to “Chekhov’s gun” in an article reporting on the threatened government shutdown—which appears increasingly likely as MAGA House Republicans renege on a previous budget agreement, squabble with other Republicans, and refuse to let anything go forward. The allusion gives me a chance to revisit the Russian’s author’s first play, The Seagull, which features the gun he may have been thinking of.
To be sure, there are ways to work around Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the other 14 or so MAGA extremists, but any compromise could set off Chekhov’s gun. MSNBC’s Hayes Brown uses the image to explain why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can’t simply put together a coalition of Democrats and less extreme Republicans and pass the budget both parties agreed to last spring:
But even that strategy would require more political courage than McCarthy has displayed to date. Keeping the government open with Democratic votes would likely trigger the Chekhov’s gun that’s been sitting on the House dais since he first won the speaker’s gavel: a motion to vacate the chair, aka a vote on whether to remove McCarthy from the speakership.
Here’s some background: In January McCarthy agreed, in exchange for the MAGA votes he needed to become Speaker, that they could vote at any time to have him removed. His agreement was unprecedented, leaving him vulnerable as no previous speaker has been. Chekhov, meanwhile, once wrote to a colleague that one “must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” He elaborated further in another letter:
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
If the current GOP imbroglio were a Chekhov play, the “motion to vacate” would be introduced in the first act of McCarthy’s speakership and eventually get fired in the last. And even if it never got fired, spectators would always be aware that it could be fired, which would add to the drama.
Maybe “sword of Damocles” would be a more apt allusion in McCarthy’s case. To communicate to his courtier Damocles what it was really like to be king, Dionysius I of Syracuse (so the legend goes) suspended a sword a single horse’s hair, point down, above the throne and invited Damocles to sit there. Forget the glory and the luxuries that go with being king, in other words. This is what it’s really like.
But such a sword works just as well as a gun in Chekhov’s scenario. A playwright should not put it in the play unless it is going to play some kind of role.
In his MSNBC article, Brown notes that McCarthy has “all but dared” Gaetz to “file the freaking motion” if he’s serious about it—in other words, to fire the gun—but doesn’t think the Speaker’s “newfound bravado will hold up for long.” In any event, having been introduced, the motion to vacate is now an integral part of the ongoing action.
Chekhov’s most famous use of his principle occurs in The Seagull. There we see aspiring writer Constantine Treplieff, in Act II, enter with a rifle, which he has just used to shoot a gull. Treplieff is in love with Nina, who is in love with a writer Treplieff regards as a rival. By shooting the gull, Treplieff shows how he himself feels shot down.
As it turns out, he is not the only rejected “gull” as there are three others, but Chekov’s rule decrees that we will see Treplieff’s gun again. In fact, by the beginning of Act III we learn that he has used it in a suicide attempt, and by the end of the final act we hear the shot as he succeeds.
The difference between those frustrated lovers and Speaker McCarthy is that they are governed by tragic longings. As George Saunders writes of Chekhov and other Russian masters (I wrote about this yesterday), they show that “every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.”
Chekov’s greatness is such that he probably could find complexity even in McCarthy. Without such artistic treatment, however, the Speaker seems little more than a power-obsessed but straw-filled puppet who dances reflexively to whatever MAGA tune is playing.
Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share it with anyone else.
Thursday
I just stumbled across George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life (2021). Since (as you well know) I’m a sucker for those who write about literature’s life lessons, I just had to hear what the Booker-winning novelist’s had to say on what Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol can teach us.
Swim in a Pond is itself a master class, based on a course that Saunders teaches to aspiring writers. As such, it functions as a “workbook” (Saunders’ description), and the author regularly interrupts the stories he’s anthologized with questions about how we are responding.
He observes that those stories, while quiet, domestic, and apolitical, can at the same time be regarded as “resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer’s politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution.” The resistance in the stories, he explains, is
quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
To offer a personal example of how such works can impact a life, he recounts his experience with (not so apolitical) Grapes of Wrath, which he read while holding down a brutal summer job in a Texas oil field as a “jug hustler”:
As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.
Saunders said that the Russian authors, when he encountered them a few years later, worked on him in the same way:
They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
At a time when various universities, regarding literature as “something decorative,” are reducing or even eliminating their humanities departments, Saunders shows us the colossal error of their ways. The aim of art, he says, is
to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?
To which he adds, with a parenthetical wry smile,
(You know, those cheerful Russian kinds of big questions.)
To engage his students, Saunders teaches very much as I do in that he wants them to report on their interactions with the work. He makes clear there is no wrong answer (except, I suppose, claiming a reading experience you didn’t in fact have):
The basic drill I’m proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you’ve just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trouper of a reader) felt it, it’s valid. If it confounded you, that’s worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off: valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of “theme” or “plot” or “character development” or any of that.
If we study the way we read, he explains, we will become alert to how we process reality. Or as he puts it:
To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading). Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.
Saunders also provides a reassuring observation for those concerned about all the assaults on books, libraries, and the humanities in general:
Over the past ten years I’ve had a chance to give readings and talks all over the world and meet thousands of dedicated readers. Their passion for literature (evident in their questions from the floor, our talks at the signing table, the conversations I’ve had with book clubs) has convinced me that there’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world—a web of people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.
