Anti-Social Media

So recently I upped my involvement with Twitter, and it was fantastic, and then it was an absolute disaster.  Read on, and learn from my mistakes.

First of all, like a lot of folks, I have been a long-time user of facebook, and I have a really good community there - lots of ongoing conversations across the spectrum of opinions and politics.  I pop on for an hour, here and there, and maintain ties to this community with ease.

Twitter ain't like facebook.

Or rather, it is and it isn't.  And learning the similarities and differences has been a painful process.

First of all, I should point out that I am not tweeting as an individual, but instead on behalf of my radio show, Things Not Seen: Conversations about Culture and Faith.  This led me to think about numbers, numbers, numbers instead of people.

I was going a little nuts, sending out blasts of tweets about various podcast episodes and adding hashtags galore.  For a few days, the response was incredible.  The downloads jumped from a couple dozen to hundreds a day.  It was addictive - the higher the numbers grew, the higher I wanted them to go.  So I tweeted, and retweeted my own tweets, blasting bigger and bigger each time.

Two days ago, the numbers stopped rising.  In fact, they dropped off entirely.

What happened?  Well, Twitter throttled me.  And with good reason.  I was acting like an ass.

You know that guy who shows up at a party, or a funeral, and starts handing out business cards?  You know that "long lost friend" who reconnects out of the blue, only to start trying to sell you on some multi-level marketing scheme?  Yeah.  On Twitter, I now realize I was That Guy.

I never had difficulty understanding how facebook is social media.  To be honest, though, at first Twitter just seemed to me to be a big free for all, a meet market where you threw 140 characters out again and again because, after all, they would blast through the feed and disappear in the noise if you didn't.

The problem, I discovered, was not trying to cut through the noise.  The problem was I had become the noise that needed to be cut through.

So, gentle readers, I am offering this public apology.  I didn't do Twitter right.  I treated readers like numbers, and not like people.  I added to the noise.  I am sorry, and I will not do it again.

I stayed up pretty late last night, thinking about all this.  Lots of friends on facebook gave me some great advice and pointers, too.  I went to bed feeling just like I would have felt if I had been an ass at a party.  Because, in a lot of ways, I was.

What have I learned?  Well, first, that short term explosive growth is exactly that: short term.  It comes at the expense of what really makes social media work, namely relationships and trust.  I learned that just showing up on Twitter and blasting and then disappearing is about the equivalent of drinking too much and insisting folks listen to you sound off about politics loudly in the kitchen.  Folks may listen politely for a while, but eventually the host is going to shut that crap down.

So, this morning, I opened up Twitter, and instead of sounding off about the show, like all last week, I read what other people were saying.  I spent more time listening than I did talking.  I thanked people for the tweets that made me laugh or think, and I found good things to pass along that had nothing to do with promoting me or my radio show.

After a day of doing this, I am beginning to feel better about my relationship to Twitter, and to the followers who trusted me not to ruin their party.  Still a ways to go, but I will say today, Twitter has made more sense to me, and started to feel a little more like the community I value so much on facebook.

There's still a long way to go to make amends for acting like "That Guy," but this feels like a good start.

Thanks for reading.

Forward in all directions

It's a hundred-plus degrees outside. Kira is waiting to go into labor with our second child at any moment. It's the tail end of the second week of school. And I just got inside from a bout of pruning the rose bushes.

How's that again?

By "pruning," I should instead say, "butchering." There is a gnarled pile of brambled branches by our curb now, and the rose bushes look markedly worse, not better, for my efforts. Did I mention that I am also a sweaty mess? Sweaty and stinky, and punctured and itchy and a little bloodied from gargantuan thorns? I am.

This is my life right now.

My entire life is that thorny bramble of tangled and knotted branches, overgrown and without order. At least, that is how it has felt for the past few months. It's been frustrating.

So I decided, this afternoon, and with things I should probably be doing (like writing or organizing papers or getting through the overfull email inbox) to take a few minutes and hack away at the lowest-priority problem on the planet at the moment, that problem being the cosmetic state of our front yard.

And yet. There I was. And it was just nonsense, I tell you. The rose bushes have become over-overgrown, with branches heading in all directions and braiding around each other. So I just started hacking and snipping, with no plan or direction other than to reduce the total amount of thick overgrowth.

The result? A four foot pile of nettled branches, large and small. And now I can see the underside of the bush, and how bad the whole job is going to be. There's a lot more to do to get these bushes back in order. It will be a multiple-attempt undertaking.

So this was a first step - wild, no plan, just jumping in and going as long as I can. Then stopping, toweling off, and going back inside, until I build up the gumption in a few days to do it again.

This is my life. These rose bushes are my life, at least for right now. Everything - school, parenting, finances, the future - is a thorny, overgrown thickness, tangled and braided from my neglect. It's a bit daunting.

But I learned something today, with those bushes. Jumping in without a plan is not a recipe for disaster (as I initially suspected). Instead, it actually allowed me to get my bearings, and to figure out the real extent of the problem. It got me started, and that's good.

I think I need to apply that approach to the rest of these thorny parts of my life right now. Dive in, hack away, towel off, do it again in a few days. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

I have been avoiding all action, largely because I am afraid, and I don't have a good plan for anything right now. But what I just learned from the roses is that if I can at least hack at it a bit, there might be hope. For everything.

My wife jokingly calls this approach "forward in all directions." I used to be good at it. I lived the whole of my twenties that way. But of late I have been timid. Writers block and being the father of an infant has made me a bit cautious. Or maybe it gave me too much excuse to be too cautious.

Time for a bit of hacking away at things. Time for a bit of gumption.

Forward. In all directions. Towel off. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

2009 Update and Holiday Letter

Advent 2009 and New Years 2010

Dear Friends,

To say that this was a crazy year would be an understatement. So much has happened since our last holiday letter it seems impossible to fit it all onto only a couple of pages. We'll do our best to fill you in on the highlights, at least.

In January of this year we were still in Nashville. Kira had graduated from Vanderbilt with her master’s degree in December, and at the start of the New Year 2009 she was a few months in to her chaplaincy internship at Baptist Hospital. David had defended his dissertation in December, and was hard at work getting the rewrites done and last pieces in place to turn it in and be finished. We were both very involved in teaching at our parish, Christ the King, though the constant schedule of mentoring, on top of worship, was starting to wear on us a bit. David was also hard at work with a new semester of teaching at American Baptist College, and was working slowly but surely on his book for Yale University Press.

Winter took a sad turn in mid-February, as we learned of the passing of David's mother from lung disease. Kira and David traveled to Columbus, Georgia (David's home town) to see to her affairs and arrangements. They were well supported during this time by family and friends; thought the sense of loss has not yet fully passed.

March brought some distraction, due to a very hectic travel schedule for David. During the month he presented papers at conferences in Durham, North Carolina, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and in Manhattan. In addition to this, he was invited to come to the University of Virginia for several days to present some of his research to the doctoral students in the religious studies program there. During these travels Kira and David became experts at using Skype, a computer program that allows you to talk for free with your laptops. This was a welcome blessing of the Internet age.

As spring progressed we were winding up our long association with Vanderbilt University, and April was full of wonder as to what would happen next. Though David had sent out many job applications in the previous months, the bleak economy had diminished our hopes for a firm offer for the following year for teaching, so April was a month of waiting and hoping. Little did we know.

In late April we were surprised and overjoyed to discover that Kira was pregnant, and that we were going to be parents. We were excited and scared at the news, given the uncertainty of our income for the following year. God was gracious with His timing, however. On the evening of the day we found out Kira was expecting, David got a call from an old graduate school colleague informing him of an opening for the following fall at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. It was a last-minute position, filling a vacancy that had come too late in the year for a normal search. Would David be interested in applying?

Needless to say, David was interested. So he sent in his application and waited on pins and needles as the process took its course over the next couple months. In the meantime, David had the opportunity to receive his doctoral gown and hood at graduation. Both Kira's parents and David's father, brother and step-mom traveled to Memphis for the event, which gave Kira and David the opportunity to give them the good news in person about Kira's "delicate condition." The next weekend, Kira and David were off to Gambier, Ohio for her brother's graduation from Kenyon College.

In June David traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia for several days to present a paper at the Catholic Theological Society of America conference. When he returned he was happy to learn that he had made the list of candidates to be interviewed for the Christian Brothers' position. The telephone interview went well and David was guardedly hopeful that there might be a job for him in the fall. Kira had her first ultrasound, and we were elated to see an image of our tiny baby, and to learn that mama and Kritter (as we've begun calling the child) were both were healthy and fine.

In early July word came that David had been chosen for the Christian Brothers position, and we began some frantic planning and packing to prepare to move. This was complicated by two major trips that occurred during the month. First, David had been invited to spend another week at UVA, this time meeting with biblical scholars from around the globe who work on an interfaith dialogue project known as Scriptural Reasoning. Then, at the end of the month, Kira and David traveled for a week to Oak Island, North Carolina, for a vacation with Kira's parents at the beach. In between, we made a whirlwind trip to Memphis and hunted down a house to rent that was somewhat affordable and near enough to school for David to be able to walk to work, and made plans to move the first week of August.

All this time, Kira was continuing very successfully in her residency as a chaplain, and was highly praised by her supervisors and co-workers for her skills and poise with patients and their families.

In August David moved to Memphis with the boxes of books and furniture, and Kira moved into the home of her friend and co-worker, Kim Sheehan, in order to finish out the final weeks of her residency. During this time we again got very good at using Skype. David traveled back to Nashville on the 18th for our two-year anniversary, an occasion that was made all the sweeter with another healthy prenatal visit, this time with the first chance for us to hear Kritter's heartbeat and see some amazingly detailed sonogram images (though we elected not to learn whether it was a girl or a boy).

In the first week of September Kira finished her residency and said goodbye to Nashville. David had already been teaching at Christian Brothers for several days by the time she joined him in Memphis, and they set to work finishing the unpacking of the boxes and beginning the arranging of the house.

While David was happy to be employed, it was unclear what was in store for Kira, particularly since she was arriving in the city already quite well along in her pregnancy. A good friend (in fact the wife of the Vanderbilt colleague who had called David about the CBU position in the first place) put Kira in touch with the Church Health Center, a local nonprofit focused on faith and wellness. At Kira's first meeting with them, she signed a contract with them as a freelance writer, and began working thirty hours a week from home on various projects for the center.

In October David took a trip to Montreal for the American Academy of Religion conference, where he had some job interviews and started to work on some advance publicity for his book. He also had an interview at Christian Brothers for the permanent position of the job he now holds (he was hired as a visiting professor for this year). We were also paid a visit by David's dad and step-mom, who were passing through on the way home from visiting his brother in St. Louis.

Kira and David traveled to Washington, Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving and spent the weekend with Kira's parents and extended family. This was the last big trip we would take this year.

Now we have a new perspective on Advent. Kira and the baby are both very healthy, and she is very pregnant. We are counting the days until her projected due date (early January!), and anxiously awaiting the arrival of our new family member.

Meanwhile, we both keep writing, keep unpacking, keep organizing, and keep praying. Our prayers are for you and yours, this holiday season, for your health and happiness, and for a blessed New Year. Merry Christmas, and know that you are remembered and loved,

Fondest regards,

Kira and David

Charon & Me

"What do you think we do? We take them over a river of despair, until they can see a glimmer of hope, and then we push them out."

# # #

In August, I had one of those abrupt, life changing moments that come unexpectedly now and then. Perhaps to you it will seem a little thing. And perhaps it is just a little thing. For me, however, it was a seed crystal. You know about seed crystals - in a super-saturated solution in a chemistry lab, for example, a seed crystal is what can suddenly transform a beaker full of liquid into a solid lump. Or, though of another way, a seed crystal (say, a grain of sand) when paired with an oyster, is what gets you a pearl. For me, though, on this day, the crystallization was very rapid. And the pearl was priceless.

I was sitting in one of the far booths at Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, eating breakfast (best breakfast in Memphis, and don't you forget). I was eating there most mornings because Kira was still in Nashville, finishing an internship. I had just gotten the first issue of a new magazine called AFAR. It's sort of an existential take on the old travel magazine model. Lots of interesting articles, but most of them are pretty pedestrian in terms of, you know, life impact.

There was a one-page feature, though, under the heading "NOMAD." A brief piece, intended to focus on someone in medias res, with a snapshot of their life on the road. The nomad featured in this first issue was web designer Mark Salvatore. One page of interview was on the right, and on the left was a picture of Mark. He is sitting on a table, somewhere in an apartment he rented down in Mexico. He's sitting cross legged, and to his left and right are several pairs of pants and some shirts, folded and piled. There's a camera, a laptop, some computer accessories, a flashlight, and a couple extra pairs of eyeglasses. On the floor in front of him are three pairs of shoes, two bags, and a tripod.

The caption to the photo reads, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

# # #

Let me back up a minute.

Ten months ago, my mother died.

There's a lot I should add to that sentence. However, if you're human (and, if you're reading this, I suspect you probably are), chances are quite good that you, too have had a complex loss occur in your life. Meaning you will understand me when I simply say that Mom and I had a fair amount of unfinished emotional business between us when she shuffled off this mortal coil. So let me leave it at that, and press on to the most pertinent aspect, for this writing, of her passing. That pertinent aspect would be, of course, a rented house, full from floor to two storeys of ceilings, with stuff.

When Kira and I arrived to deal with funeral home arrangements and such, we had about four days before we both had to be back in Nashville. That meant we had a lot of very hard decisions to make in a very short period of time. Decisions about all these various items, from my mother's artwork and drawings to tchotchkies and knicknacks. Some of these were tied up with my childhood memories. All of this had had some sort of inscrutable significance, for her, in her life. It must have, right? Why else would it all be held on to?

But I couldn't hold on to it. We had one small car - a backseat and a trunk - that was all. The trick was finding the things we had to keep, no matter what. The rest, at the end of the four days, was turned over to an estate company. It had to go.

# # #

Have you ever read Anne Sexton's poem, "All My Pretty Ones"?

Years ago, maybe I was sixteen or a little after, I first read, it, and had the uncanny experience of being moved to tears by words alone. I'll leave others to recite it whole for you. For now, these words will suffice. I was thinking these words throughout those four days, and I have thought them again and often again, after:

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

What saddened me the most, standing as I was beneath that mountain of items in my mother's house, was that I had there, in front of me, all the locks, but no keys. To my mother, these may well have been treasures; to me, they were but ciphers. How to know what is wheat, what is chaff?

The answer, of course, was now dead. My mother held those keys, and took them with her to the next world.

I remember all those bad detective dramas I watched on TV when I was a kid. Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, Quincy. How many times did I watch a variation on the theme of someone murdering someone else so that they could get their things? Here I was, then, in the exact reverse situation. It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little. In fact, the things I kept were the very things I could connect, in some way, to her life, or our life together.

Only in this hoarded span, Sexton wrote, will love persevere.

But what are we to hoard?

# # #

I cried again at words on a page, that morning in August, when I read, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

I don't think my mother ever had the kind of relationship she had wanted with her family. In fact, I know she didn't. I don't think my father ever did, either, though he may still be working to correct that. But because they lacked these essential relationships, they did what many, many people do. They filled the hole with things.

I can make that claim with some authority because, you see, I am my mother's son. Like her, and like many, I also spent a ton of years (and I mean exactly that) collecting, hoarding, holding, and hauling "my stuff." Books. Records. CDs. Posters. Knicknacks. Tschotchkies. Clothes. Shoes. Hell, I even held on to broken and busted items because, well, you know, I might fix them someday.

Or maybe I was holding on to all this stuff because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that one day Someone (who? I'm not sure. But Someone) was going to be coming around to check up on my to make sure I had kept up with all this stuff, had shepherded it and hauled it like a good little boy.

Because. Because, when you don't have actual relationships with human beings to anchor you, that's what you do. In lieu of actual praise, you anticipate the praise that will come on that day, whenever that day comes, when Someone, whomever that is, arrives to check up and sees what a good job of hoarding and hauling you've done. Well done. Well done, thou good and faithful lummox.

Sitting in my mother's house, that scared me. That pile of stuff scared me, because I knew what it meant. Even though I didn't have the stories, the keys, to unlock all the locks, I knew what the whole thing meant.

Mom had died alone, in a town she hated, far from a family she largely no longer talked to, in a big house, surrounded by this mountain of inscrutable stuff.

I did not want that to be me.

# # #

After those four days dealing with Mom's things, Kira and I got back to Nashville and started trying to fit what we had brought home in the back seat and trunk into our apartment. Photos, mostly, and lots of artwork my mother had drawn, and all of her personal writings and correspondence was the bulk of it. I spent some weeks sorting through boxes, organizing it and getting it re-packed into manageable containers that could be stored, and hauled. It took some time, but I got it settled.

Then a new job came up, here in Memphis. Kira and I got ready to move. We tried to pare down and weed out things as we packed. We made a lot of trips to Goodwill, and had a yardsale or two. We got rid of a lot of things. It felt good.

But on moving day, I was chagrined to find that I was still not done packing all the stuff. Our plan had been to have everything ready to go, and I was not ready. Like so many times before, little things were getting shoved in boxes without good labeling or organization. Every time I looked up from the latest sealed box, I saw the pile of what was still to be packed. It seemed huge.

(Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.)

Then there was the move itself. We had budgeted for eight hours. It took closer to twelve, and that was only because I stopped caring whether the movers put things in the right place, and just told them to get the stuff off the truck as fast as they could. I helped. Neighbors and Memphis friends helped. But there was still so much stuff. So much to move. So many things.

# # #

On Christmas Eve Kira and I went to see the new George Clooney movie, Up in the Air.

I'm not going to spoil it for you, because I think you should go and see it for yourself. Because I think it's worth seeing. So I'm not going to spoil it. But I will tell you this. Part of the way through the movie, George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, makes a speech about a backpack.

You can get the gist of it here.

Suffice it to say that I was with Bingham through the first half of the speech. In the movie version, after he talks about putting the sofa and the furniture into the backpack, he pauses, and then asks the audience to imagine setting the pack on fire. Liberating, isn't it? Yes, it is.

Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. I have imagined that. And more than waking up to it, I have dreamed it. Longed for it. Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions. Yes.

But then the next part of the speech (you hear them blended together in the video): put all the relationships in the backpack. Feel the weight.

Bingham's answer, get rid of it all, may or may not ultimately work for him (that's the crux of the movie; I told you I'm not going to spoil it for you. Go see it). Regardless, sitting there in the dark of the theater, I had to ask myself, just what do you want out of all this paring down anyway, Dault?

Is it to get away from everything complicated, including and especially the relationships in my life?

Maybe one day, maybe in my twenties, I would have answered yes. Not now.

# # #

The other quotation from Mark Salvatore's interview, that kept me crying there at breakfast, was when he said (look - see - I have it written down here on a notecard. I carry it with me now, in my left pocket):

"I consciously decided to lower my expenses to have a higher quality of life."

# # #

Here's what I want you to do. The next time you're at a football game, or out at the big box bookstore, or shopping for groceries, or anywhere there's a crowd, I want you to pause for a moment.

Now this is going to be a little difficult, so stay with me.

When you pause, wherever you are, for that moment, I want you - just for that moment - to imagine to yourself the death of each and every one of those people you see. Not in some ghastly way, not in an accident or a massive explosion. Just imagine the reality of them, in graves and urns, all at once. Gone. Passed. Buried.

Don't linger on it too long. Being morbid is not the point here. The point is the brute fact of it all. Each person enjoying the football game, every soccer mom buying beets in the produce aisle, every bespectacled teenager waiting for the new Harry Potter book - each of them - they are going to someday be dead and gone.

And you. And me, too.

Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? That sound is... inevitability.

# # #

It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little.

What does it mean, at the end of it all, to have had a "quality of life"? I may never get to the point where all my earthly possessions will fit around me, crosslegged on the table. That is not the point. And I hope I am never so buried by my possessions that they are, at that last breath, all that I am left with on this earth. That also, emphatically, is not the point - at least not for me.

Too much is not the point, and too little is not the point.

You are the point. You, and my mother, and my wife, and my soon-arriving child. My friends. My lovers, past and imagined. My brother. My father. My step-mother and my in laws. My cousins - even the ones I don't talk to anymore for reasons that are probably locked up somewhere in those things of my mother's that I either kept or let go. My colleagues. My students. Hell, even the folks I need to say "I'm sorry" to - even them.

The point is, in that fleeting moment of seeing where we're all headed, really and truly and inevitably, to allow yourself - just for an instant - to imagine your own death. What kind of death do you want? What, in that final breath, will be acceptable - to you - as a "quality of life"?

We're all part of that grocery store crowd. I know that. We're all goners. We're all lost. We're all going to leave such big, big holes when we go. I know that. I don't care.

You are what matters. To me. To each other. Don't forget.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

I just came across this article about my old friend, high school dance commander comrade, and band mate Bryan Poole in the Athens, GA Flagpole Magazine. He mostly plays with Of Montreal these days, but this article is about his solo projects. I'm especially psyched to link the picture. Read, listen, enjoy.

Features: The Resurrection of the The Late BP Helium - Flagpole Magazine: Colorbearer of Athens, GA

Also, I just found this video interview. Fun stuff.

Books that changed my life: Biodegradable Man: Selected Essays, by Milton Mayer

When folks ask - and sometimes they do - I describe myself, vocationally and ideologically, as an "ex-newspaperman." My history, my context, my weapon of choice, is the long narrative, the nonfiction essay. The biting phrase, lemon-peppered with political bent and righteous indignation, is my mother-tongue. Mencken, Lardner, Trilling - these are my kin. Hell, even ol' Uncle Karl, the salty Marx himself, was a foreign correspondent before the long years of the British Museum and Das Kapital. In my mind's eye, I sweat ink. Young men, as the old Latin teacher once hissed, standing atop the writing desk, throaty and Brooklyn-born, I love woids!

But of all those many woids I love, by far the woids I love the most are those of Milton Mayer.

At the end of 1990, I was in my second year of college. War (the first one of ours in the Persian Gulf) was either well underway or heating up, depending upon how you mark the particulars. I was working at the campus bookstore for my work study.

One of my weekly tasks was shelving books after they came in from deliveries and were processed. The week we started back to school after Christmas break was in mid-January. It also happened to be the week of my birthday, and I made a spur of the moment decision: I was going to pick one of the books I was shelving and buy it for myself as a birthday present.

When I came across Biodegradable Man in the bin, I am not sure what first drew me to take a second look. Perhaps it was the title. More likely it was the "Selected Essays" bit. In any case, something about the book prompted me, as I was carrying it to the shelf, to flip it over and read the back. There I found the following (quoted from one of Mayer's essays inside):

If we reject Karl Marx, it has got to be because Marx too man first and last for an economic animal, moved to every other end by his economic considerations. A Calvin Coolidge who says, "The business of thei country is business," has no quarrel with Marx except on the technical nicety of the management of the enterprise. The business of this country, and every country, is liberation, liberation from political and economic servitude and from the subtler but more devastating servitudes of ignorance, bigotry and boredom. Man is a thinking as well as a feeling animal whose self-realization, unlike that of the barnyard critters, requires the life-long activity of a persistently inquiring intellect and a persistently discriminating taste. These are the objectives that the liberal arts serve, and liberal education is nothing but the beginning of their habituation. It is a platitude (but none the less valid for that) that the masterpieces of the liberal arts do not teach us what to think and feel, but how. There abides the great Latin pun - Facio liberos ex liberis libras libraque - "I make free men out of boys by means of books and balances."

If Mayer didn't have me in rallying common cause with me against ignorance, bigotry and boredom (though he did), I would not have been able to resist the grand gesture toward the benefits of the liberal arts (a muse with which I was just then becoming smitten) and the Latin. On the strength of the back cover alone, I bought the book.

It is important to let you know a bit of where my mind was at this point in my life. I had been raised, by my Mom, mostly, on conspiracy-theory laden skepticism and hyper-conservative Libertarianism. Mid-way through high school, however, the former went to work on the latter in my psyche, right around the time I was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx. What emerged from that brackish bouillabaisse of competing claims was a new me; a nascent leftist with a strong pacifist streak and a healthy wariness of what passes for both conservatism and liberalism in our current political sphere. I was angry and over-educated - precociously and verbosely ferocious - and Mayer, God bless him, seemed to be speaking my language.

Evenings for the next few weeks I spent reading from essay to essay, in sequence. I was please to no end with my purchase. The first section, America the Beautiful, was a series of six essays of cultural commentary, where Mayer examined (and skewered) and America both present and vanishing, whether the demise of hitch-hiking culture and the commuter train, or the rise of bourgeois refuges like the gated community and the country club. The middle essay, "In the Tomb," is an extended meditation on the limited comfort the art of interior design can offer to the owner of a backyard fallout shelter whom Mayer, with measured cudgels of sympathy and irony, interviews.

I loved the language, the style, and the wit of this man from the outset. His voice was a voice I both esteemed and envied. I, too, saw things in my community that I thought were absurd, and I, too, had a desire to write of them with this practiced ire.

It turns out, however, that this first section - enjoyable though it was - simply was an appetizer for all that followed. As good as Mayer was at social commentary (and he was very, very good), his real talent lay in political commentary. His was the engaged discourse of the populists of a long-lost generation, and he walked the talk.

Indeed, I quickly came to learn, Milton Mayer was that Mayer, the Mayer of Mayer vs. Rusk, a Supreme Court case I had been taught in my high school American History and Government class during my overeducated youth. Mayer had taken on the McCarthy-tinged torpor of his times, challenging the American government to a battle of quills when he was denied a passport for refusing to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath (or, indeed, any oath, Quaker that he was - but I am getting ahead of myself). He took on the government and he won, and what's more, he wrote about it, in a remarkable essay, "A Man with a Country":

It would be much more useful if a senator of a congressman - or a President who vetoes it - would resist a bad law like the Internal Securities Act [under which Mayer first went to court] or a bad regulation like the State Department's; but they will not. They will say, "It's the law. We may not like it, but it's the law." But we hanged the Nazi leaders at Nurnberg for saying that, and properly; a man who will obey the law, whatever the law, wants a form of government in which man exists for the state and not the state for man.

In this day and age, with language like that, you might mistake Mayer's rhetorical cant for those of cultural commentators on the right, those of a much less intelligent stripe - those who would resist government encroachment for more partisan, less principled reasons. But Mayer - God bless him - would have stood his ground as well against our current bumper-crop of pinheads. The Glenn Becks and the Ann Coulters of Mayer's day were eviscerated (and rightly so) in the wake of his mighty pen. "Veepings," he called the lot of 'em, naming them for the toadies they were (and remain).

So after a couple sessions of reading, I was pretty pleased with my purchase, to say the least. The best, however, was yet to come.

A little over half-way through the book is a quiet little essay, an essay entitled "Sit Down and Shut Up." This essay was a description of Mayer's first encounter with the Religious Society of Friends - the Quakers, as they are more popularly known. This little essay, to say the least, has had a profound effect on my life.

You see, up to that point, I had little truck with organized religion. I had been raised an atheist, as I mentioned. In high school I had dabbled with some eastern mysticism, reading the Tao te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita and the like. I had been to an Episcopal church a few times with my friend Robert, and Sewanee was an Episcopal school, but in 1991 I would have told you I was a long, long way from Western religion, let alone Christianity.

But God is not without a sense of humor, and moreover is patient (and kind). Mayer's little essay is no more than four pages long. Midway between the third and the fourth pages I read this:

What do I know about the Quakers? I know that they were persecuted, not merely as dissenters, but for many of their positive tenets, such as their denial of special priesthood; their indifference to sacrament, including their refusal to take oaths; their complete democracy of organization, down to the point of determining action on any issue by the "sense" of the Meeting and not by vote; their historic opposition to war, though in this, as in all temporal issues, they refuse to bind individual conscience; and their recognition, as original as their opposition to slavery, of the complete equality of women with men.

Having read that for the first time, I went back and read the essay again. And then a third time. At that point I think I must have said, "If there were still Christians like that, I shouldn't so much mind being a Christian."

Thanks to Mayer, I idealized the Quakers. I idealize them still, having spent twelve years of my life being one, starting that next fall, in 1991. I idealize them even though contemporary Quakers are, by and large, a long way from the enemy-less pacifism of which Mayer wrote (most of them, myself included, discovered over time that when they weren't being partisanly aggressive, they were still itchingly passive aggressive). I idealize them even though most Southern Quakers, reacting to the fundamentalisms of the Bible belt, are a long way from Jesus as well. No matter what they are, I love and always will love the Quakers of that page, the page Mayer wrote. That page gave me a hope, a direction, a fervor, and - God help me - a religion, for the first time in my life.

How can I estimate the effect that essay had upon me? The effect is incalculable. My career, such as it is, and all my schooling, from bachelor to master and beyond, has been shaped by the glimpse of the Kingdom that paragraph held for me. That essay helped me get right with Jesus, though it took a long, long time for me to realize that truth.

Those who knew me in my twenties are better equipped than I to decide whether I was too bad, or too good, a Quaker to remain one. Like Mayer, I love the Society of Friends despite the problems and shortcomings I see in them. Unlike Mayer, who remained a fellow traveler of the Friends throughout his adult life, I eventually made my break with them. Though I admit I delayed the formal severance until long, long after I had stopped attending Meetings for Worship with the Friends. I delayed, in fact, until the last, the absolute last, possible moment.

My journey continues, the journey begun in that essay, in this book. Though I am now, and shall remain, a Catholic (and I leave it to those who know me now to decide whether too bad or too good of one), I am deeply thankful for that mystic stillness I learned as a Friend. I am terrified by many things in this world, but not by silence. Silence, the Living Silence, is a friend to me.

I carry that silence in a special place within my heart, a place right next to my ire and my righteous indignation. As my heart pumps the ink I let pass for my blood, the cadence of the beat, to the words that I write, to the joy of a well-turned phrase landing pie-like on the face of yet another Veepings - all of that is thanks to old Milton Mayer, and for that, for so much more, I salute him.

Tales from the Health Wars

When I was in college, a good many years ago now, it was right around the time of the first Gulf War. You might not remember the name of Tom Costen, but I remember that name. Tom was the first American pilot shot down and killed when the conflict broke out. Tom was also a Sewanee graduate.

The Sunday after Tom was shot down, the pastor at All Saints Chapel on campus preached a sermon in his honor. Actually, it wasn't so much of a sermon as a full-on eulogy. I remember that Sunday morning, and Tom's name, because that church service was pretty pivotal in my life.

The pastor did a fine job with the eulogy, all things considered. He certainly was clear that what had happened - Tom's being shot down and having died - was a tragedy. I had no quarrel with that part of the sermon. It was a tragedy, and the whole war was a tragedy, and I and my male friends were scared to death we somehow were going to get caught up in it and die ourselves.

I was waiting, however, for the pastor to give the rest of the story. I was waiting for him, from the pulpit, to fix his eye on the congregation and remind us that - no matter how tragic the loss of Tom Costen was - it was equally tragic, and wrong, that he was sent to drop bombs on villages and towns and possibly (or probably) harm innocent civilians - women and children - in the process.

I waited for the pastor to do what I thought was his Christian duty, no matter how difficult, in naming that uncomfortable truth. However, he did not speak that truth. He finished the eulogy, and left it at that.

I wasn't a Christian then. Hell, I was just barely a theist. That was the morning I stopped singing in the choir at that Episcopal church (the chapel, being in the center of campus, was the center of life and arts, so I had joined the choir the year before, interested somewhat in the Christian mumbo-jumbo, but mostly baffled. By that point, however, I had at least figured out that Jesus would not be cool with the bombing part). So I left, and did not return. I wish sometimes that I had had the good sense to go talk to the pastor and confront him about it, but I didn't. A few months later, I happened upn the local Quaker meeting - but that's a whole 'nother story entirely.

Why I relate this old memory, here and now, is that last Sunday I saw a pastor be gutsy in a pulpit, and preach a homily with some balls, and it got me thinking about that old, old Sunday of my youth.

This past Sunday Father Val, our pastor here at the Cathedral in Memphis, preached a simple and straightforward sermon in which he reminded those present that Catholic social teaching about the protection of life does not end with the birth of a child. He reminded the congregation that the Church considers health care - for everyone - to be a basic human right.

Father Val went on to speak of Mother Theresa, of blessed memory, who would confront visitors to her mission in Calcutta, who wanted to help her, and challenge them to leave and find their own Calcuttas - not in remote India but in their own home cities. Father Val related this story and then challenged us - challenged us - to take that example to heart. He challenged us to remember that all human beings, as children of God, have the right to demand of us, and loot of our comfort and excess, for their basic health and welfare. He suggested that, following the words of Mother Theresa, that we might find some Calcutta right here in our midst, and that getting involved in these conversations about health care and getting right with Jesus and the poor might be a wise course to take.

I tell you, it was a gutsy homily. I left the church that morning with a feeling wholly different that the feeling I had, all those years ago, in the wake of the tragic death of Tom Costen.

You know, they say Lincoln once snuck into the side door of a church in D.C., and slipped out right as they were passing the collection plate. An aide accompanying him asked him what he thought of the sermon.

"It was fair," the Great Emancipator replied.

"Only fair? Not great?" pressed the aide.

"It was not a great sermon," Lincoln concluded, "because the pastor failed to ask anything great of the congregation."

I think last Sunday, Mr. Lincoln would have been pleased. Lord knows I was.

***

***

Dear Senator Corker and Senator Alexander

I am writing to encourage you in the strongest possible terms to change your position on the health care debate. Please become an advocate for the hard working people of Tennessee who are being bankrupted and ill-treated by corporate insurance companies who value profits over people, who deny legitimate claims made after years of premium payments on the basis of recission (i.e., retroactively applied "pre-existing condition" status found after a claim has been made), and who refuse to offer affordable coverage to all citizens. Senator Corker and Senator Alexander, I pray that you will come to support not only health care reform and health insurance reform in the strongest manner possible, but that you will also fully and visibly support the public option, to allow the people of Tennessee, and of America, the greatest number of choices for their health. Thank you for your service to this state, and please, for all our sakes, do the best for your constituents. Health care and health insurance reform, WITH a public option, NOW!

***

You can reach your representatives' offices by calling the toll-free switchboard at 1-866-210-3678, or by going to the Write Your Representative website.

***

Getting involved in something great feels good. You might should try it, if you haven't in a while. Just a suggestion from a good pastor I know. Thought I'd pass it on to you, friend.

Walking in Memphis

"...prodigality is the law, and excess alone is sufficient..."

- Fr. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 1968

You never appreciate the subtle importance of a grid system until you have lost it - as I did for the eight years I was in Nashville. I could never find my sense of direction there. I even asked native Nashvillians (I almost wrote "Nashvillains") about this, and they, too, admitted that - despite having been born and grown up in the city - the cardinal directions still eluded them on an intuitive level. There is nothing so disorienting as trying to dead-reckon in a city in which you have no sense of direction.

In this sense, Memphis was a cool, clear breeze. North and south, east and west, these are on friendly terms again with my psyche. There are a few roads that remain cattywompous (that's a technical term for "indecipherable"), but they are the exception, not the rule. Moreover, Memphis was resistant to the introduction of an interstate through-way cutting across the heart of the city. By this little act of defiance, they gained a lovely green space (Overton Park, with a museum, a zoo, and a symphony band shell), and maintained these old, broad, tree-lined boulevards that give the city a very different feel than, say, Atlanta, with its cramped arteries and traffic congestion.

This city is an experiment. We are here for a year, at least to start with. We came up for three days in late July to find a place to live, and settled on a house that is perhaps a little beyond our means in terms of space and rent, but that is close enough to Christian Brothers University (my reason for being here for the next twelve months) that I can walk to work.

* * *

Walking is the great adventure, the next frontier. For a long time, now, I have been stymied by my dependence upon the petrochemical culture in this country. I have resisted it in certain ways - most notably by refusing to buy in to the macho egotism of the semi-annual new car purchase. Instead, I got my absolute money's worth out of the old Nissan I purchased back in '96. It's got nearly 250,000 miles on it, looks like absolute Hell, and still runs fine getting nearly thirty miles to the gallon. If you discount the costs of gas, but include purchase and repair costs, that comes out to my having spent around $.06 for every mile I've gotten out of the car. Not bad.

So the plan, and the hope, is that, having moved to a central, walkable location, I can get rid of the car. Kira and I will pare down to a one-car existence, with added benefits like more exercise for both of us and less stress on my left (read: clutch kicking) leg and hip, which have both been troubling me of late.

There have been little forays already, in the several weeks I have been here prior to Kira's permanent arrival. Walking to Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, which serves the best freakin' breakfast in the city (Those of you who know me well know what a find such a place was, and close by!), was followed by a leisurely stroll over the Cathedral, which is about a mile from our doorstep, down the lovely tree-lined and shady Central Avenue. Evenings have been spent exploring Cooper-Young, our new neighborhood, with its panoply of shops and restaurants.

* * *

We call the new place "Kookyshoes." It is a two-storey, rambling collapse of a place, painted an indescribable shade of sea-foam green (is it blue? not exactly. Is it green? not precisely. It is too pale to be pretty, and too dark to be soothing - sort of like a hospital wall). I gave it the name one blistering hot day as I was pulling into the driveway, my air conditioning in the car failing yet again. Everything at that moment - no AC in the car, no AC in the house, boxes everywhere, no time to unpack them, too many huge things to do, money draining out of accounts like we had cracked a levee, and Kira two hundred miles away for the next several weeks - just seemed so absurd, the name just made perfect sense all of a sudden. Ol' Kookyshoes. Don't pay no mind, tha's just Ol' Kookyshoes's way.

Anthropomorphizing can help, those moments when you can only just barely keep from screaming with the rage in your skull. For me, I imagined the house as a doddering old man, well meaning but incompetent, and needy of our care and understanding. The house - Hell, the whole damn situation, was needful of much charity. That I have not yet murdered somebody in all this frustration piled upon frustration is proof enough to me of powerful forces of benevolence at work in the restraint of my soul, forces much greater than my own sorry will. I take a moment here to thank the angels for the patience I have been granted under their care.

* * *

Everything I wear these days is pretty intentional. A couple years back, Kira and I were traveling in the Netherlands with some friends and we got caught in a rainstorm on the way to the train station, and ended up shivering and being chilled throughout the rest of the long day on the train and after. Since that time, I have been on a quest for clothing that manages temperature and moisture more effectively than my old cotton t-shirts and blue jeans.

The result is that most days I dress, like my old friend Chris had pointed out, like I was ready for monsoon season in India.

I look a little peculiar, I guess, in my ventilated shirts, Tilley hat, and convertable cargo pants. However, the clothes I wear leave me mostly fearless in both the rain and the beating sun. Needless to say, as I was exploring Memphis neighborhoods near Ol' Kookyshoes on foot, I was well-served by this get up. With the exception of one unfortunate run in with a patch of chiggers (little red no-see-um bugs that make your like an itchy Hell for a week), I have been pretty well protected and comfortable.

One Sunday, coming back from the Cathedral and, after, the coffee shop around the bend, I spotted a woman in the late forties weaving her way toward me on the sidewalk. As we passed, she slurred the words (in an accent? Perhaps, or perhaps it was simple intoxication), "Hello, Austrian!"

I am not Austrian. Not yet, at least. But I took it as a promising sign.

* * *

Now it's thirty years ago, and I am sitting in the gymnasium, playing Governor Fob James. I am presiding behind a desk with a microphone, and my suit does not quite fit, and I have been given a top hat that now sits on the desk in front of me. For some reason I am the narrator over our elementary school play, written by our teachers. It extolls the history of all things Alabama, from our Phenix City, deep in the east, to the muscled shoals of the north, and all the long acres between stretching west and south. I remember I could not pronounce "Appamatox," always stressing the wrong syllable, no matter how many times my loquacious tongue tried to work its way around the word. I remember the parade of bored miscreants that passed for my classmates, the actors in this embellished pageant, portraying the shambling and various characters that, apparently from the representation, bumped and mumbled the state to great heights.

Most acutely, I remember the retiring and ashen-skinny young boy in blackface, clutching a borrowed coronet and clad in a bowtie, standing straight at the microphone and telling us the brief but vital history of the man W.C. Handy. I cannot today recall the name of the youth, but I have never thought of him as anything but noble. In such a hostile context, there in the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt, he could easily have played the role in many a deprecating manner, yet he wore his stain nobly. He spoke quietly, but audibly and articulately, despite his tendency in normal speech to stumble over words. That morning he took especial care to be heard, and in my minds eye I see his dignity. Sometimes, in the years since, though I cannot explain exactly how, that simple memory has strengthened me.

* * *

I ignored Jesus again today. He's the man who lives under the railroad trestle, just around the corner from where we live. He has buggy eyes and, every time I've encountered him, he's been wearing what I can only describe as one of those old-timey football helmets. I know he's Jesus, even though I have not yet met him, and he scares me, and I am afraid to talk with him, or to listen to his questions when I think he is going to ask me for money. Each time, as I pass under the trestle or through the little park where he sleeps some nights, I walk to the other side of the street if I see him coming. One time he nodded at me. He knows that I know.

Jesus is the toughest. The minor prophets are easier. The guy who stopped me on Central Avenue today to ask me for change for the bus told me his name was Malachi. No kidding. I gave him the six bits I had in my pocket, wished him a pleasant ride, and walked away wondering at how the stitching that holds together the universe seems more bare to me here - like the laces of a football beneath my fingertips, or the rough thickness of a sewn-up scar.

* * *

And then, later that night, as I was driving home, there, without any irony whatsoever on the Elvis-heavy radio station, was the old Marc Cohn song, "Walking in Memphis." As I listened, I was overcome with the oddest feeling. The feeling was full, and heavy, and very undeniably there, all at suddenly once. It was the feeling that follows the unexpected rearrangement of a long-familiar room. The fact that the room was inside me only made it that much more immediate.

Whereas before, I just enjoyed the song, suddenly when the lyric got to mentioning Union Avenue, and Hollywood, I suddenly had a picture in my mind of both those places. I get my mail down on Union, where the PO box is, and I pass Hollywood when I head east. These places in that old song are now, overwhelmingly, my places.

And I had to pull the car over. For, you see, I was weeping, and for a couple of minutes, I couldn't stop.

* * *

I am not sure what I am doing here, Lord. I have uprooted my life and my suddenly-expanding family to a new place, with radical hopes and not much in the way of security and assurance. I missed my wife so much when she was not here. Now that she is here, some moments I find I am also missing the solitude of those weeks terribly. My soul is always so confused. My life is a series of moments in which I always feel I should be doing something else, no matter what it is that I am doing at that moment.

I pray for some peace in all this newness and upheaval, some peace in my restless soul.

And a direction, Lord. Point me out a direction.

Prayer, and some place to walk to, that's what my soul needs.

I pray. I walk.

I hope.

Probably the reason I made it out of the Eighties alive.

I summer where I winter at. No one is allowed there.



Thanks, Bob. Thanks for everything.

The 23rd Grand Illusion

Once, many years ago, I lived in my mix tapes. For me, they were an art form; a style of communication better than a written letter (back when we used to write letters). What was wonderful about the medium to little teenage me was the ability (the hope, at least) of conveying not just semantic meaning, but emotion. Like all teenagers, I was inarticulate about feelings when it came to using mere words, but I found I could achieve something like communication through a collage of sounds. I wooed with mix tapes. I worked out anger with mix tapes. I found the possibilities that arise out of juxtaposition and combination. A few cubic inches of plastic and iron filings were my palette. Into this space, which was not a real space but rather a space of the mind and the ears, I painted and collected and assembled sound.

What I found then, and find often now, was that this language of assembly and sound was not (as Wittgenstein cautioned against) any sort of "private language." The assemblages on my mixes spoke to me, certainly, but the only reason I really found them useful was because I believed they would speak to others, as well. To the high school crush to whom I could not bear to reveal my feelings, I could give a mix tape. The mix was crafted and constructed to convey without literal conversance. The mix spoke a secret language of Gnostic inference and ghostly symbols, but it was never meant to be indecipherable. The whole point was for the assemblage to be deciphered.

Years later, I find that I am still bound to those crushes who have remained in my life, no longer or never as lovers, but as friends, by these secret languages. An old acquaintance (for whom I never made a tape, though I am certain she was offered many by others) once said that she did not trust the medium of the mix tape: "They are always political; they always mean to say more than they are." Precisely.

Assemblage is powerful. Assemblage accomplishes, and its accomplishment is always and often unintentionally greater than the elements assembled. How is this so? The answer is not in the elements, or even in the assembly. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are interpreters and meaning-hounds. In psychology, the word apophenia is used to describe an overly heightened state of pattern recognition, where the sufferer seems to be seeing connections in every unrelated thing. If we take a step back from the precipice of pathology, however, we find that each of us benefits (it would be hard to say "suffers") from this condition. Without a certain level of the apophenic, a good game of chess would be impossible, negotiating city streets would be a nightmare, and we would never be able to locate a loved one's face in a crowd. We differentiate and combine, and in that process we associate and imagine that which is not there, but should be. We connect the dots, we fill in the colors among the spaces and the lines, we find new things. For the majority of humanity, this is simply what we do. Hence the articulate inarticulate joys of the mix tape, given and received.

Books that changed my life: How Children Learn / How Children Fail, by John Holt

Years ago, during the first couple years of high school, I had a pretty cool English and Literature teacher, Mr. Youngblood. Being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much for English, or Literature, or sitting in a desk to listen to much of anything being taught to me (so goes adolescence). I did, however, care about Mr. Youngblood. Mr. Youngblood was pretty cool.

I guess he thought I was okay, too, because when he was packing up to move (he left for new horizons and opportunities between my sophomore and junior years) he invited me and a couple other kids to his house to get first crack at a bunch of his stuff before he pared it down in a series of yard sales.

Mr. Youngblood pointed me to a stack of albums by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - and since that moment there has not been a day gone by that I am not eternally grateful for that gesture. He also had a large and unruly pile of unsorted books, and, being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much that they were unruly or unsorted. I dove in.

Turns out a lot of those books in that pile were about education, and it turns out that a lot of them soon made it into my car and eventually into my personal library. Mr. Yougnblood had been schooled in the sixties and early seventies, and a lot of the education books I found had a sort of granola/hippie uselessness to them (I was them, as I am now, essentially a punk rocker at heart, and I distrust mightily all that "peace-love-dope" crap). These were eventually read, considered, and discarded from my own unruly pile. Wheat and chaff, after all.

Despite my skepticism, a handful of the books were worth keeping, and reading, and re-reading. Among these - the top of the unruly pile, certainly - were two books by John Holt: How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

The books are actually collected excerpts from a series of journals Holt kept during the early-to-mid sixties, as he was observing classrooms as part of his own training as an educator. His reflections on what he saw was revelatory to me - both concerning my own difficulties at the time with my schooling, and in years hence as I have worked with students of my own.

A basic thesis of the books can be boiled down to the fact that what a teacher believes is happening in an educational moment, and what the students believe is happening, may be profoundly different - even alien - from each other.

Education, of course, always involves discrepancies of power. Teachers are more powerful than students in that teachers have the power to grade. The difficulty arises in the fact that, in our culture, grading a student's "performance" feels (in many, if not the majority of cases) from the standpoint of the student herself like a summary judgment of her worth and quality as a person. This is not just true of young children; think about adults you might know who hear criticism as attack or disrespect - these responses are similar to how students, young and old alike, feel in such moments. Our culture blends ontology (the state of one's being and worth) with how well one "performs."

Holt argues that the result of this unspoken blending is a situation toxic to learning.

It works like this:

1. the feeling of being judged and found unworthy is uncomfortable, and it is an understandable and shared human trait to want to minimize or eliminate this discomfort as quickly as possible Schools subtly use this discomfort, especially in early education, to keep students "focused on the problem" they are given (as Holt puts it, "We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour" [HCF 198]). Teachers use the unspoken threat of disapproval and rejection to corral young students into "working hard."
2. Instead, students - motivated to minimize or eliminate the discomfort of feeling judged as quickly as possible - redirect nearly all their energy away from the educational moment in favor of working on the real problem, as they perceive it: how to stop feeling, as quickly and decisively as possible, the discomfort of being judged and the threat of being rejected or disapproved of as a person.
3. As a result, what students really learn from these exchanges are simple strategies to end the discomfort quickly. This learning is reinforced, again, and again, so thoroughly that by the time most of us are out of kindergarten they are already fully formed defensive maneuvers.

For some of us, the strategy is to simply learn whatever details will help us answer the questions we are asked so completely that we can always "perform" properly, and thus be praised and rewarded (we all know folks like this growing up. I remember in my class in second grade when one of them I knew got his first "B" - the terror and the tears of the tantrum that followed showed just how much pressure this poor little kid felt he was truly under). Others - perhaps the majority - learn how to "fake it." That is to say, they make a good show of pretending to wrestle with the problem, all the while watching the instructor for subtle, nonverbal clues about what the right answer might be - all amounting, in the end, to a highly theatricalized guessing game. Still others simply quit trying altogether, and just take their lumps, put their heads down on the desk, and tune out (I was one of those).

What is common to the entire spectrum of responses, says Holt, is that whatever the motivation for the student was coming in - curiosity, love of learning, enjoyment of community - it is very quickly replaced by fear.

What is essential to understand - and what is most brilliant in Holt's analysis - is that in every educational moment learning is always taking place. The problem is simply that what is being learned may not what the instructor, or the institution, thinks is being taught.

As a teacher, I may think I am neutrally teaching "a subject" like Algebra or Theology. Some of my students may have come there out of an actual interest in the subject. Many others are simply there because they were told they had to be there (and this is as true in college and seminary classes as it was in grade school). The subject is complex; I give what I think is an adequate and sufficient explanation - some of the students' brows furrow, and I glower at them. "I explained it once already, people - aren't you smart enough to get it...?"

The problem, of course, might not be in my students. The problem might (and often is) in the way I have structured the course, or my examples, or communicated my thoughts. But here we are in a situation where I have the power to make my judgement that some of them are stupid (not me) a matter of permanent and semi-public record. It is a lot easier (and advantageous, in the short run) to perpetuate the illusion that my teaching and reflection on teaching is up to snuff, and it must just be that some folks are too stupid to get it. They simply failed to learn.

But Holt makes this a much more complex interchange. The students are aware, as I am, of this power dynamic at every moment. The difference is that the students are often much smarter about how this dynamic can be used to their advantage. Many of them, from the very first moment of class, are undeniably learning: they are learning to fool me. Most of them will be able to make me think they have learned something, despite the confusing and mis-thought manner in which I have presented the information. I will, unconsciously, communicate enough of my likes and dislikes that students will feed me exactly what they, very perceprively, have learned that I want. In that case, the subject of the class is no longer "Algebra" or "Theology," but rather "David's [or fill in any other instructor's name's] ego." I know, when I was a student, I sometimes got a decent grade in classes exactly this way - I imagine some of you have, too. It took a lot of study and critical thiking to get that grade - but not study of "Algebra" or "Theology." As Holt puts it, "[Students] in the right-wrong situation will naturally grasp at every available clue. We teachers have to learn to present [our educational tasks for the students in such a way that] irrelevant clues will not so often lead to correct performance" [HCF 183].

Other students, by contrast, develop elaborate strategies to outwit the educational expectations entirely. This may be for a variety of reasons. For some students, the instructor presents the material in a manner that is fundamentaly disrespectful or demeaning to the student's background or culture. The strategies developed in such a situation are no less elaborate, but they are much less pleasing to the instructor's ego. If you have been a teacher and ever wondered why certain students, who seem to be so alive and intelligent outside the classroom, suddenly become to dull and unresponsive when they sit down in the chair, it is likely that this is a strategy. By "playing dumb," the student allows herself the means to "preserve a small part of their integrity in a hopeless situation" [HCF 195]. As Holt goes on to say:

Subject peoples both appease their rulers and satisfy their desire for some human dignity by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent that they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies [HCF 195].

I think both Holt and I are pessimistic when it comes to the institutions of education currently in place in our society. Far too many of our classrooms reflect the unspoken dynamics of power mentioned in the quotation above. What I learned from these two books, however, is that I could work to be a better teacher than some that I had (and don't get me wrong - I have had some excellent teachers, and I'm not just saying that on account of the Captain Beefheart albums), and that it might be possible in some moments for actual, real and good learning to take place.

If you are an educator (like me), Holt will give you some concrete lessons in learning to listen to what is not being said (though it is very loud and apparent, once one has ears to hear) in your classroom. If you are a former student who has difficulty remembering multiplication tables and long division (like me), his books may help you unearth what went awry in your own learning all those years ago.

What I think you will most gain from Holt's books, though, is the hope and possibility that (whether student or teacher), even at this late hour, we still might learn something new and useful, together.

Of the Human and the Sublime

A few weeks ago, back in late March, I was in Manhattan for a conference and to visit with some old friends, and I had one of those moments that linger with you and affect you for a long time. In order to adequately describe it, I need to give a little context about myself and these sorts of "defining moments" that pop up every decade or so.

Years ago - a lifetime ago, really - when I was eighteen, some friends and I drove to Atlanta to see a show. We went to the Metroplex, a punk club in the heart of downtown Atlanta. It was 1988, and I think the Metroplex was on Moreland Avenue or somewhere like that. At any rate, we were there to see Fishbone. I hadn't seen many shows at that point in my youth. This night, however, would in many ways change and define my life.

The Metroplex was a fairly sizable club. It was rare in that, in addition to "the pit" (the area in front of the stage where the slamdancers "moshed") it had a balcony that circled three sides of the performance area. I was sitting in the balcony. That detail is important.

(The opener was the truly mighty Follow for Now. I remember they started their set out with an instrumental riff on the Rush song "Tom Sawyer" that opened a can of whoop ass in the room. But that just set the stage for what was to follow.)

To say that Fishbone was energetic would be an understatement. They started their shows hard, and then intensity just grew continually through the evening. The very first thing Angelo (the lead singer/saxophonist) did was run across the stage and dive into the audience, surfing on top of the crowd. The crowd, needless to say, was with the band from the first, and the spasmodic energy was palpable.

I have seen a lot of Fishbone shows in my time. One of the common threads to each was a point in the set where Angelo would induct the crowd into what they called the "Fishbone Familyhood." Though never exactly defined, the Familyhood was a sort of transracial love-fest. Ambassadors of goodwill to the cosmos, sort of like if the Deadheads moved faster and looked more like the Rainbow Coalition.

In most shows, the Familyhood induction speech happened from the stage, with Angelo leading the crowd, eventually, in a common "oath," of sorts, culminating in a chant: "Peace. Love. Respect. For everybody! Peace! Love Respect! For everybody!"

This night, however, when it came time for the Familyhood speech, Angelo had surfed the crowd to the back of the room. He had climbed one of the support columns beneath the second floor, and was now hanging from the balcony railing. He was less than ten feet from where we were sitting, and about fifteen feet above the floor below, hanging on with one hand while his other held the wireless microphone. Soon the whole crowd was chanting, "Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody! Peace! Love! Respect! For everybody!"...

...and Angelo leapt into the air, into the empty space above the crowd.

There is something about watching a human body hang in the void, even for a spit second, that stops your breath. I thought of this again, a few months ago, when Kira and I, along with our friend, Katy, went to the Belcourt to watch the award-winning documentary, Man on Wire.

There is a point, right at the end of the film, when - after all the preparation and intrigue, the planning and covert research that preceded Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center - Petit mentions that he "made the decision to shift [his] weight from the building to the wire."

What follows is a slow series of still photos of Petit in the air, a quarter mile above the ground, as lilting strains of Eric Satie play without voice or comment. I have seen the film now several times, and the sight of this still stops me short and chokes me up. (If you have yet to see the film, see it. The moment is indescribably beautiful. Sublime.)

So on that day back in March I was walking around Central Park with my old friend Anson. I was feeling bummed because part of what I had planned to do during my visit to New York was to go see a play he was in, "Mourning Becomes Electra," but it had been canceled before the end of its run. Anson, however, was insisting that this was good, in fact, because this meant I now had a chance to go see what he claimed was "the best show in New York" at the time, "FuerzaBruta."

I'm not much for last minute schedule changes, so I was initially hesitant. Anson, however, was both enthusiastic and insistent, and I soon agreed. He made a call on his cellphone to another acquaintance of mine (who was in the show), and arranged to have a ticket discounted for me. Done.

A couple of hours later, I was on the subway heading south to Union Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village. After looking around a bit, I found the Daryl Roth Theatre, which apparently used to be an old bank. I stood in line, got my ticket (thank you, Jon!) and walked up the stairs as the show was just beginning.

How to describe FuerzaBruta? It was like that moment when Angelo leapt out over the crowd; it was like the moment in Man on Wire when Petit makes the decision to shift his weight from building to space; only it went on for more than an hour.

The performance space is cavernous. every inch of it was utilized - horizontally and vertically. The sweep of the themes and narratives (there is very little dialogue) is cavernous as well. The narratives are open-ended and infinitely interpretable. Horrifying, startling, liberating, exhilarating, euphoric... every moment brings a new possibility for feeling huge feelings. I have never seen anything like it. It was beautiful. Afterward, in fact, when discussing it with Anson and Jon (the performer who helped secure me the ticket), I said it was probably one of the most beautiful events I had ever seen. I meant it then, and I mean it now. Beautiful.

More than beautiful, though. The right word isn't "beautiful," I think. The right word here is "sublime."

The sublime was important years ago to folks like Shelley, Wordsworth and Lord Byron - Romantic poets dealt with the sublime. "The sublime has its source in the associated qualities of 'power,' 'vastness,' 'infinity,' and 'magnificence,'" M.H. Abrams wrote in his classic, Natural Supernaturalism, "and its characteristic effects on the beholder are the traditional ones aroused by the conception of the infinite power of a stern but just God: 'terror,' 'astonishment,' 'awe,' 'admiration,' and 'reverence.'"

You will think I am exaggerating, but this is not the case. Standing in the crowd at the Daryl Roth Theatre that evening, I felt those feelings. I think many around me felt them, too, though I am also certain that the range of responses was vast and unpredictable.

As I stood in the crowd, I thought of my Mother, who passed from this Earth the month before. I thought of how differently she and I saw things, and yet how we were still both able to be moved so deeply, in our own ways, by huge intangible things like "Beauty" and "Truth." It is a connection we shared, though our lives together had been been broken asunder by time and circumstance. Standing in that crowd, I missed her and mourned her, as I do now, typing this: in my own way. Death has a sublimity, too. But love, strange and broken and interpretable thought it may be, is still the stronger, in the end.

You will want me to link to video and show you pictures of what I saw that night. I will not. You will want to go to Google and look it up yourself. I cannot stop you, but I will say: you should not.

What I will tell you instead is that you should go to Manhattan. Get on a plane and go to Manhattan and get on the train and go to Union Square. Go the the Darryl Roth Theatre and buy your ticket and stand in the crowd and never forget that you are human. Frail and fragile and lost in the immensity of the universe you may be; but you are human... And it is wonderful to be human.

Angelo leapt into the air. The crowd reached up to him with its arms, and caught him.

Go to Manhattan.