Radical Transparency

There's a Borges story, I think, involving an unintentionally poetic murder and the observation that history repeats literature.

Makes sense. Literature, if it's good, is true.

Apparently some birds don't lie either.

Thank you PSFK.

I'm reading Philip Pullman, loving it, thinking about it in relation to (comparison with) the JRR Tolkien Middle Earth Project, and wondering about value.

I think Tolkien's work is immensely impressive in its imaginative scale and as a demonstration of accessible but ambitious storytelling, and I think it's educationally valuable in that it turns people into readers, writers, and explorers of the originally weird thoughts we all have.  In my opinion, however, Tolkien's orcs are a very big worry.  I think it's fundamentally unethical to tell war stories in which the bad guys don't have families.

So.

How do we teach Tolkien?  (If we teach Tolkien.  Which I'm pretty sure we do and I'm pretty sure we should.  Because of the imagination, the fact that his work can be a gateway to literature and learning and love of stories, words, and communication.)

Maybe we teach the man with the work? Explain his personal weirdness and how it contributed to his (in my opinion problematically simplified) vision of good and evil and the virtue in violence? 

Worth some thought I think.

And then there's Pullman.  I'm halfway through the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, so far, I love it.  So far, it feels questioning and complicated and real. 

So.

So far, I say teach it.  For imagination.  For storytelling.  And for truth.

Yikes.  Bold statement from someone that still has 500 pages to read.

I just read the first chapter of East of Eden again.  Because I couldn't resist.  Too good not to want back in, even if just for a moment.

And, of course, as not so secretly expected, I found something new.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers.

I don't have those kinds of memories.  I have snapshots and impressions and a handful of incomplete, skeletal stories, but I don't remember my imagination.  Not as far back as childhood names for grasses anyway.

I can tap imagination memory a little bit in relation to sports and music.  I remember counting down, commentating, and launching three pointers to take playoff games to OT.  I remember walking out on a spotlit stage, long hair swinging, and hearing the crowd explode as I picked up my guitar.

But I think that's where it stops.  Or that's where my access stops.  At the moment anyway.  I do hear faint echoes of crawling around pretending to be animals.  I know stories of my days dressed up as Robin Hood and carrying a quarterstaff.  I can't imagine my mind wasn't racing all day every day.  And I hope I'll someday dig deeper into those memories.

But not today.  No secret flowers for me.

Every Friday, Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem and asks his readers for their thoughts.

Today's is Middle Passage by Robert Hayden.  A white man writing about slave ships.  From white perspectives.  Sympathetic, it seems, to everyone involved.

Click here to download:

06 Crossing (Lee).mp3 (4675 KB)

Life has been a little tougher without East of Eden these past couple of weeks.  As Tom and I discussed in August (while he was reading East of Eden, incidentally), it's tough to walk away from something that has truly grabbed you.

But read on we must.  And I'm trying.  With Melville.  Benito Cereno.

The beginning was a struggle.  But not so much anymore.  Not for the past 10 or so pages anyway. 

Something happened.  Something clicked.  And I suspect it had to do with one character wondering if another might be "of a piratical character."

Those were the first words I underlined.  I dug them.  Piratical.  A new word for me.  And a damn good one.

And, then, nine pages and much pen scratching later, I hit this:

Trying to break one charm, he was but becharmed anew.

In fourth and fifth grade, I refused to read books.  Almost without exception (I think I might have half-assedly skimmed a Matt Christopher novel or two).  Every book report type assignment was a work of imagination and imagination alone.  I'd look at the picture on a book's front cover.  I'd read the notes on the back cover.  I'd flip through and remember chapter titles.  I'd read the first and last few pages.  And I'd make the rest up.

I think.  That's how I remember it anyway.  Which also might be a work of my imagination.

But, regardless, in sixth grade, everything, whatever that was, changed.

I read Jurassic Park, on my own, for fun, and I loved every word of it.

I loved it so much I started reading.  I think Andromeda Strain came next.  Then maybe Rising Sun.  And Sphere.  And The Great Train Robbery. 

And books by other authors as well.  Catch-22, eventually.  Then it was ON.  I'd had my next big reading epiphany: that the best literature didn't have to connect in some way to dinosaurs. 

And then came the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test epiphany: that journalism could be literature. 

And then Ken Kesey.  And Borges.  And Vonnegut.  And Hunter S. Thompson.  And Baldwin.  And Nabokov.  And now Steinbeck.  Epiphanies every one of them.  Epiphanies tracing back to Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton was a strange and controversial and fascinating guy.  And he died day before yesterday. 

He taught me to read, and I wish I could have thanked him in person for that.