WHAT CONVERSATION WERE YOU BORN INTO?
As The Association of Writers Programs meets in Chicago, Patterson takes a look back at crashing the Party in Vancouver.
The Conversation We Are Born Into
by James J. Patterson
I am The Reluctant Scholar.
I read slowly. Maybe I have slow eyes, I don’t know. When I was younger I even took a speed reading course. It was terrible. The technique they were teaching didn’t work on me. I quit after two sessions. I watch people who breeze through a heavy text at lightning speed with the envy some people save only for the wealthy. I savor every word, every phrase. Because I read slowly, I have no time or patience with bad writing, or bad ideas. One would think that the slowness with which I digest books would put me off the habit, but it only increases my zeal. I chip away at massive tomes. I can’t read for entertainment the way fast readers can. I save my guilty pleasures for other persuits; sports, alcohol, rock’n’roll.
My attachment to books is sensual as well as intellectual. A friend of mine once broke my concentration to remark that I will caress a book as I read along. I hadn’t noticed but it’s true, my hands move constantly over the pages. I love to hold them, feel them, I love the way books smell. I will fold a paperback in two and break the spine. I will bend the spine of a hardback feeling the turned page rend just enough until it rests loosely in position. Like a favorite old shirt, an old car, or even a dog, the books I have read and loved hang around, sit in my lap, and keep me company. I pull volumes off my shelves that I have combed through a thousand times, their spines cracked, pages slipping from their moorings, and favorite underlines I have made I read again and again causing a euphoric rush each and every time I return to them. I’m fussy about those underlines and insist on using a sturdy straight-edged bookmark as an underlining ruler. I have a system of asterisks and paragraph side-lining. I scribble in the margins. I could go on. Old books made on now antiquated printing presses had text you could run your fingers across, almost like braille, to feel the impressions left by the printer’s art. I do appreciate a good book cover too, and have shamelessly purchased many just for that reason. But what I crave most is the liberating compensation of such a sublime labor: reading and learning from what I read. Every time I finish a book, I can honestly say I look up from that last page a different man.
On my last day of college, I was marching across campus after a particularly unpleasant row with a teacher over a grade, on my way into a process I had visited again and again – the meeting with my advisor, then the deputy department head, then the department head, then someone from the dean’s office, to redress my grievence. As I marched righteously onward I slowed, the wind left my sails, and I stopped in my tracks. It was a brisk sunlit spring morning the buds on the trees a delicious baby green. Moisture from the dawn had yet to burn away. While standing there on the pavement between buildings like a rock in a river, as students hurried in both directions in waves around me, I looked down at the books I was carrying. The one on top which consumed all my attention was something I was reading for my own edification, required by none of the courses I was taking. And I thought to myself, who are you kidding? Why argue again and again with these people? Are you ever going to win? Can you even survive in this environment? They have their agenda, you have yours. You could walk off this campus right now, go somewhere pleasant, and finish this marvelous book in peace.
And that’s exactly what I did. I went down to the campus bookstore and perused the shelves, not as a frantic student looking to fill his course load, but as a book lover, searching for titles of pure interest, in a book mart like no other, a college bookstore. I loaded up, psychology, politics, history, novels, essays, poetry, and then I left. I told myself I would never be back, I was through with college, through with school. My love of learning was real, and without the shackles of the education system to hold me back there would be no limits to my investigations. I was out of there. But I’ll be goddamned if college has never been through with me.
* * * *
The Associate Writers Program (AWP) is an innocuous name for an organization of great literary minds. The AWP sponsors a conference held once a year, somewhere in North America, ostensibly for those who work in writing programs primarily at colleges and universities. Technically speaking, a “writing program” is a graduate level program of instruction which results in a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry, fiction, or creative-non-fiction. The AWP was begun by some ambitious educators at George Mason University in Northern Virginia in 1967 who, proud of their own writing program, wanted to link up with other such programs to see what could be accomplished on a larger scale. Forty years later there are 400 participating schools, 95 non-academic learning centers, and tens of thousands of writers affiliated in some way with their programs.
My first AWP Conference took place in Vancouver, British Columbia. I had always wanted to visit Vancouver, a place I have never heard a single negative thing about. Plus, it was the year the National Hockey League suspended play to straighten out a labor dispute, and, being starved for my favorite sport, I heard that Vancouver had a really good minor league team called the Giants that would be entering the playoffs at the same time the conference was being held. So, for me, going three thousand miles for a writer’s conference just made sense.
My wife would be attending and participating in two panels, one on the books of Howard Norman, and another panel on independent non-academic writing programs such as The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, provide. Our plan was to arrive in town a few days early, stay someplace nice and romantic, get the lay of the land, and do some touristy stuff before hunkering down at the convention. It was a good plan. The only flaw in the plan was that I asked a Canadian buddy of mine who had lived and worked in Vancouver for several years where to go and what to see. We spent those first few precious days in an empty hotel by a deserted seaside that wasn’t going to spring to life for another six weeks. Gray sky backed with gray cement. Thanks, Charlie. So much for Vancouver.
The convention was held in a giant old world hotel called The Fairmont, in the heart of downtown. We had stayed at Fairmont Hotels before and my wife, ever doing research, had signed us up for a brownie points program that gives upgrades and cheaper rooms the more you stay with them, so even though we registered too late to get the conference rate, we found ourselves upgraded to an exclusive business person’s floor with office accomodations, daily shoe-shine, laundry, and dry cleaning service, and mercy of mercies, a decently stocked help-yourself bar in a private lounge. Peace, privacy, and booze. So this is how the other half lives! Not bad for a couple of writers huckstering their work. One, writing poetic retellings of ancient myths, and the other ranting and raving at the kakistocracy.
So when I wasn’t sampling a tasty Scotch in the hushed privacy of our upstairs domain, where other conventioneers were not allowed, and feeling so very elite, I might add, I was haunting the cavernous and ornately detailed lobby lounge, oiling up the old harangue, and preying upon the tender souls of North American Academe. How oddly perfect that, instead of boring boisterous business men, with their pinched vocabularies and haughty arrogances, there were platoons of turtlenecks, blue jeans and sport coats, yes, some even with leather patches over the elbows, and billowing gypsy skirts or tight little sensible suits. These are people who drink wine and count their change, who quiver with naughty conspiratorial glee at the suggestion of having more than two glasses of wine at a sitting. These are quiet people, reading, or scribbling, or calmly and earnestly going about their conversations. Some are fretting over essays to be presented at panels, before the most discerning audiences possible; some are vetting after having just done so. The more time one spends in this atmosphere, the more you realize how missing it is in the world outside these walls. These are people who live and thrive on research. To them it is fun. They don’t watch television, except when something “quite good†is on. And although many are luddites to whom the computer is an unwieldy and frustrating scourge, for most, the dawn of the Age of Process has made their professional lives so immensely easier; those joys of discovery have taken to soaring higher than ever. As they rethink their own processes, they find it a greater joy to teach, and share in the experience with others.
* * * *
My wife’s panel, for which she and the four other panel members had been preparing for weeks, went smoothly. She was talking about the use of a photograph as metaphor in Howard Norman’s novel, The Haunting of L. Norman himself slipped into the room, furtive-like, as though he might be entering a trap, fearfull, perhaps, that one of these scholars might have detected a flaw in his craft, what then? He was accompanied by legendary poet, teacher, and essayist, Stanley Plumly, and the keynote speaker from the night before, Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod.
MacLeod (pronounced Muh Clowd) had delivered his address after tipping back quite a few beverages, it seemed. He had decided to get up in front of a largely American throng and give them all a long, doddering, pixilated discourse on the history and development of Canadian literature. The audience, peppered with earnest intellectuals and snappy, impatient, agents from New York, Seattle, Chicago, and LA, was restless and condescending. But I loved it. I sought out the commercial-press book store the next morning and bought every title of his they had. He is a delight to read, with great depth of descriptive feeling about wilderness towns and life in the woods and lakes of the north. His prose is clean, bold, and unafraid, like the waters, forests, men, women, and beasts that populate his stories. Everyone I meet says I’m crazy to think what he did was cool. Everyone here is professional, on the best stage they have to display their work, and like true North Americans, they expect to be sold to, they want the pitch, and they want it delivered well. That’s not what McCleod was all about. So be it.
Some of the attendees at the AWP have taken on mythological status with the rank and file. Certain names are whispered with reverence or unexpected joy. Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, Galway Kinnell – these are literary minds of first rank who should be leading the discourse of the nation, but they are not. They dwell in the minor off-shoot presses or independant presses. You can get their books, but you won’t happen upon them. They might distract us from our real mission in life which, as we’ve been told again and again, is eating fast food, watching television, and letting others do our thinking and voting for us. “Americans watch 6 hours of television a day,” Gore Vidal once said, “how can they defend their liberties when they’re busy watching The Gong Show?” Insert American Idol, and I think you see his point. But we need to know what we are missing.
On the plane over, in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, who had recently killed himself, I was re-reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972, which, by the way, is still as fresh, bold and as death-defying as when it was written. A book like that can spike one’s testosterone or estrogen level; up the ante on one’s refusal to compromise; remind one that the truth plainly spoken is a devastating thing to hear. We are all so starved for it these days, we look furtively about when we hear it, feeling suddenly naked in public. That’s what it’s like listening to these people make their witness, before packed committee meeting rooms normally reserved for hedge-fund operators and corporate movers of popular brands of toothpaste. Listening to Plumly, or Michael Ondaatje, Henry Taylor, or Coleman Barks (and now I’m picking names at random who have passed through the AWP or it’s overlapping parallel organizations) gets one’s dander up at the shutting down of the American intellectual main stream. It’s a shameful reminder of how pitifully low the bar has been reset, and reminds one of all the noise and vulgarity we are subjected to every day in place of such heady and necessary discourse.
After the Howard Norman panel, David Swerdlow, a poet and professor from Westminster College, in Pennsylvania, was heard to lament, “If a panel for Howard Norman, why not one for Stan?” The wife and other panel members took up the call, and by the end of the conference, plans were being made to honor Plumly with a panel on his work at the next AWP Conference in Austin, Texas, the following year. Plumly is a leathery old coot who still has all his hair. He has a maverik’s swagger and a youthful twinkle in his eye. The legion of individuals who have gone forth from his classrooms bent on writing well and forever is most impressive, almost spooky. I meet them everywhere. I will tease him when we meet that all his former students, when they hear his name, suddenly turn cold and glassy-eyed and repeat verbatim in a droning lifeless monotone, “Stanley Plumly is the greatest teacher in the world. Stanley Plumly taught me everything I know. I would be nothing today without Stanley Plumly,” and the old boy geezes himself into a coughing fit, as his middle-aged and twenty-something acolytes alike, nod automatically in agreement. Why his book of criticism, Argument & Song, is not required reading is a mystery. His publisher wouldn’t even run a paperback edition.
* * * *
I wasn’t a good student. My home life growing up wasn’t conducive to study or intellectual pursuits. In our house, if you were caught sitting reading a book you were acused of doing nothing. Wasting your time. That’s just the way it was. The bathroom was the only safe place for reading. Dickens, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Herodotus, Steinbeck, Bierce, Orwell, Rod Serling, and countless Civil War and WWII historians and I spent a lot of time in the jon together. I’m not complaining. I had a fascinating childhood full of adventure and wonder. And I wouldn’t trade it. But I had to be careful not to let the vocabulary stretch out too ostentatiously around the house. Also, the aging WWII generation didn’t understand dissent. They took contradiction to authority as a personal insult. And they reacted accordingly. Thoreau to them was a filthy hippie, not a man of great intellectual courage. Let me put it this way: my father was a Depression Era Republican, mad as hell at “do-gooders” and liberals of any and all stripes, who found a savior in Barry Goldwater, and later Ronald Reagan. My mother was a Franklin Roosevelt/ Pierre Trudeau/ liberal, and a Jack F. Kennedy Democrat. Things around my house could get loud and unpleasant.
It wasn’t that my parents were unintelligent. They were very intelligent, but my mother thought the display of too much intellect phony or pretentious, and my father thought the only serious topic for conversation or concern centered around money. All else was bullshit, and he would tell you so. My mother read history and lots of it. Although she didn’t complete high school, she must have had some readers among her family growing up, because she would quote Shaw, Voltaire, Franklin, Gibbon, and Jefferson all the time, without always knowing the source of her aphoristic wisdoms. People of that generation and those previous had those sayings on the tip of their tongues. Sayings like “I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but I would defend to the death your right to say it,” and, “youth is wasted on the young.” The wisdom is what they drew their strength from, and those little wisdoms, like their prayers, were what they used to cope with a world of very few mercies. Ethics mattered a great deal in being able to discern who or what an individual was, to people on both sides of the isle. Ideas helped guide them through some very tough times. No matter the source. When did Americans stop memorizing and quoting their geniuses, or as my mother would put it in her old world style, their betters?
As the 1960’s gained momentum, parents of all houses noticed something terrible happening around the dinner table. Their kids were giving them contrary arguments to the conformist status quo, and were backing it up with the words of the intellectual masters, many of them American, from history. In most cases throwing what they perceived as their parents shallow devotions back in their faces. It didn’t set well. And as the political establishment became more and more right wing, the academic establishment was blamed for teaching this seditious rubbish in the first place.
This social dichotomy spilled over from the dinner table to the classroom. Teachers and administrators were just as divided as the rest of the country. Half of them wanted you to carry on a rigid social tradition and groom yourself accordingly; to go to Vietnam, if called, as they or their friends and loved ones had served in WWII and Korea. For them, supporting the government meant supporting your culture, your way of life – whatever that was. I remember after the famous first appearance of The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, dozens of boys at my Catholic grade school showed up the next day with their hair combed down over their foreheads. They were sent home, suspended, and in some cases, expelled. Later, at college, having a draft-board office on campus was considered by many in authority a splendid idea. The draft office monitored grade-point averages of the male students who enjoyed a deferment if they kept their grades above a certain level, and scooped them up if they slipped below the line. Now this is where it got sick and twisted. Professors would grade you down if they simply didn’t like you, your style, who or what they thought you were. The military, they preached, would do you good. To counter that, other teachers, people of conscience, would try to lift you up, help you out with your grades and shepherd you through the labyrinthine college administration. Both sides thereby created a totally adversarial and artificial environment. Not exactly the warm fuzzy place where you could curl up with Mr. Rabelais of an afternoon, but Mr. Nietzsche was always welcome.
Four years after I walked out of school, I was living in Georgetown, Washington,D.C., not far from the Georgetown University campus. I would stroll across campus like I owned the place, volunteer at the alternative rock radio station, scan the courses offered and attend classes without ever applying or paying a dime. I was a phantom, losing myself in the throng of earnest faces, in the crush of pre-professional wannabees, future yuppies, young kakistocrats. If a professor looked out across his youthfull charges and wrinkled his brow at seeing me nestled in the back of the class, when he looked again I would be gone. I took courses by Father Richard McSorely, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese for four years during WWII, was part of the radical Berrigan Brother clan, and taught classes on the history of non-violent activism. I took courses on Middle Eastern politics, Civilian Space Exploration, the future of ground transportation, intelligence gathering, ethics, and literature. I even handed in final papers and when I did I signed them John Glenn, after the first American to orbit the earth. School, I found out, can be a marvelous place if grades don’t matter, if you never have to deal with its administration, if all you want to do is learn.
The Nixon/Reagan/Bush crowd blamed the liberal arts schools for dissention against the war in Vietnam. And they blamed their failure in that struggle on that dissension. Theirs was a dystopian universe where learning the very principals of the founding of America and holding the establishment to those ideals was in and of itself seditious. They still believe that Liberal dissent is why their policies failed. The Iraq War proved that wrong. There was no meaningful intellectual dissent against the Iraq War that would register on the average American’s radar in the early/mid 2000’s because by the time that conflict was engaged, the Arms Industry had partnered with big oil and computer conglomerates to buy up all the major communications industries, leaving those few independent voices small and insignificant and easily shouted down. By 2007, 91% of all talk radio was right wing. The media at large was now definitely right wing, pro war, and anti-intellectual. No, the government botched the Iraq War up all by themselves. Protest from the left had nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, after Vietnam “Liberal” Arts took a beating.
The bourgeois tuition-paying business man or woman thinks all learning institutions should be glorified trade-schools. If you aren’t learning how to redesign his or her favorite widget, or to become a useful bean counter, you’re wasting your time, and ultimately, his or her money. Being proudly obtuse, the conservative minority boastfully excoriated anything with the “L-Word” in it, unaware that they pledge allegiance to what is technically a “liberal” democracy. They then set about destroying the liberal arts schools in America by transforming them into business schools. They did this under the fiction that young people go to school to get a job. Young people, of course, do not go to school to get a job, no matter what they are told, they go to school to learn how to think. The notion of becomming an educated person, a well rounded citizen capable of making informed choices, contributing and participating in the culture at large had gone out the window. I never met a graduate of English or Philosophy or the Arts who didn’t get a job. It’s a little more difficult starting out perhaps, but a Liberal Arts major can do something that most business majors can’t, i.e., write a cogent letter, analyze information, make an informed decision. Ask any corporate executive what he thinks of each year’s batch of new recruits and he or she will tell you all he hopes for is someone trainable. Memo to business school majors: Don’t spend more than you take in! Now go get yourself a life.
* * * *
Ironically, your Reluctant Scholar toured American campuses as a musician during the 1980’s and 1990’s, playing to hundreds of schools a year. Our act involved political humor, and it was shocking to witness campus after campus go through a transformation from Liberal Arts to Business right before our eyes. One semester we would visit a campus that was famous for turning out intelligent History, English, and Arts majors, the next semester we would return and find the campus book stores jammed with accounting text books, statistics, and computer manuals.
On one tour through the State University of New York school system (SUNY), we were awakened four nights in a row, at four different campuses, in the middle of the night, because someone had pulled the fire alarm. As the dorms emptied and the bleary-eyed students scrambled out into the cold night air, it wasn’t the fire department that went and checked out the buildings, but the local police, searching the student’s rooms for evidence of alcohol. Students found with a single can of beer, empty or full, in their rooms, were sumarily expelled. The 4th night it happened, a fireman explained to me that it was the police who had in fact pulled the alarms; the fire department only showed up because the law requires it when an alarm is pulled.
The following semester we returned to play those campuses again. When I asked administrators how their evil pogrom was working out, they replied that they had to cancel the program because, in the midst of the Reagan/Bush Recession, they simply couldn’t afford to lose all those tuitions. The Rathskeller at the average big university could hold a thousand or fifteen hundred students. They were all shut down as the drinking age rose from 18 to 21. Don’t fool yourself into believing the government actually gave a rat’s ass about traffic fatalities, or the safety and well-being of the youth of the country. It’s about beefing up security, curbing dissent by keeping assemblies small; it’s about budgets, and finding ways to keep them growing. See: Drug War. See : Homeland Security. See: SDI.
I will maintain till the bitter end that preventing a big war in Central America in the 1980’s was the crowning achievement of the Peace Movement begun twenty-five years earlier.
* * * *
Meanwhile, back at the AWP, Marybeth Holleman, Linda McCarriston, and Richard Hoffman are giving a panel on what motivates writers, and issuing a basketful of encouragements for would-be authors to add heart and substance, to give three dimensions to their students prosaic musings.
Holleman spoke about the Renaissance person being someone who prided his or herself on being an “intellectual generalist,” and how in our age of specialization, it is nigh-on impossible, even for academics, to break through the categorization mentality of corporate marketing theory when crafting a piece for publication. British philospher John Ralston Saul has even gone so far as to call the contemporary specialist “illiterate” once he or she steps outside their respective field, and he has a valid point.
Linda McCarriston continued in this vein, lamenting that in our current intellectual void capitalism has nothing left to dialogue with. She says that capitalism’s other half is socialism, and the two concepts need each other to balance out society. But now, she laments, capitalism ignores its spouse, socialism, and without its better half, talks down to its children – us.
By the time Richard Hoffman took the podium, we were softened-up pretty good. Hoffman teaches memoirists, and he starts them out with a most simple question, but upon which a universe of human inquiry is quilted together. With a working answer to his question his students find a perspective from which they can begin to map out their own inquiries. Hoffman wants his students to address the question, “What is the conversation you were born into?”
As you sit back and contemplate the question yourself, you see a very personal path stretched backward as far as you dare look. Ask that question of the person sitting next to you, or of the author of the book laying in your lap. I was born smack dab in the middle of the 20th Century in the Capital of the Empire. Eisenhower, the McCarthy era, Beatniks, Marilyn Monroe, the Cold War, the Bomb. I was a patrol boy one Friday afternoon, we had been let out of school early without being told why. A voice from a passing car called out to me, “President Kennedy is dead!” I was eleven years old.
Three months later, The Beatles hit town.
Of course, one could ask Hoffman’s question of a culture or a country. What was the conversation America was born into? Poet Rose Solari says that “if we (in the United States) are to have a literary tradition that can stand alongside older cultures, then we have got to claim our founding geniuses.” I would add that those ideas, left behind by the great thinkers, are the very ideas that can save a culture when it founders, or suffers crises of spirit. Because the military draft was a genuine plague upon the youth of the nation, plucking young people from their classrooms, homes, and jobs, students wanted and needed the eloquence of the Founders, the Transcendentalists, the Reformers, to use as weapons of defiance. We turned to Walden Pond, a hundred and thirty years previous, and found, among others, a scruffy little man who lived in a wood.
These days free thinkers and intellectuals are on the run, besieged by what I would call the illiterati. America is a nation of merchants. And our culture has been defined by the merchant’s aesthetic for so long even members of the non-merchant classes have learned to think in terms of extolling the virtues of an idea’s earning power as part of its validation.
John Adams, America’s first Tory, or conservative president, once famously remarked that, “I study war, so that my son will study business, so that his son will study art.” And although business men and women play a key role in the health of society, their cultural, intellectual and philosophical contributions are by definition always narrow and limited, too narrow and limited to be allowed to take a leadership role in the culture of our society. They have usurped from academics and the philosophers around us, who, quite simply, have been shouted down and locked out of our governing and cultural processes by these same moneyed interests. It’s as though Adams’ son, the businessman, kept Adams’ grandson, the artist, locked up and hidden somewhere on the estate, but, every once in a while the little bastard, to everyone’s chagrin, gets loose and runs free!
* * * *
Book-haters, people who make fun of ballet and classical music, or ridicule people who use words longer than three syllables, are dangerous dumb animals as far as I’m concerned. My compassion and tolerance for them is about as deep and profound as theirs is for me. People who are stupid by choice deserve to be laughed at, ridiculed, and shamed into admitting their shortcomings. Not lionized for being “real,” or somehow “genuine” or anything “noble.” There is nothing noble about being stupid. Nothing at all. Being ignorant – and proud of it – might make for soothing television drama, or a chest-beating seminar for jingoist op-ed writers, but it’s a devastating socio-political syndrome that those who know better have an obligation to dispel.
Now, in the first decades of the 21st Century, educators have moved from anger and denial to acceptance. They are having to admit the failings of their own system, no matter the source of those failings, and put reading courses into their curriculums so that students are capable of advancement. And the students are eating it up. Nowhere is this more evident than at non-academic learning centers, the best of which, in my very biased opinion, is the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Whenever they post a class in reading good books, plays, or poetry, the classes fill up instantly, with otherwise educated professionals. People smart enough to know they’ve been denied, and that their popular culture has moved away from substantive discourse. At the AWP you hear it everywhere, in the conference rooms, down the corridors, in the bars. All are having great success offering classes in the basics of reading, comprehension and ultimately, writing down their thoughts. It is a giant step backward from the culture of our parents, but it is a necessary step forward if we are to save our society, our culture, our democracy.
Listening in on these panel discussions, lingering in the lounge, strolling the halls and exhibit hall I’m trying not to think of the fate these gentle people and their counterparts in history receive at the hands of brutal regimes. When, I ask myself, will intellectuals band together and fight anti-intellectualism? At what point will they have had enough of the right wing, religeous fanatics, and take them on by going passed them to their constituencies? When, if ever, will there be an intellectual movement that is combative in its lionization of the mind? If they don’t see the danger they’ve courted by being herded into smaller and smaller communities, they will fall victim to the repetition of the very histories they teach in their classrooms. The book burnings, executions, censorship and destruction many have seen with their own eyes. But although I rant and rave that these people need to train their considerable mental might at the hounds of idiocy who would defame and ridicule their intellectualism, I have to remind myself that these people aren’t warriors, they are thinkers; they aren’t killers, they’re poets. Can thinkers become warriors? Sure they can. Should they be warriors? Not in a perfect world, but perhaps in this imperfect one yes, but warriors, champions, of the mind. I think they’ve got the message. Everywhere I turn here at the AWP, I see educators, writers, and professional articulators standing their ground. They are willing these days to take you by the hand, sit you down, and teach you how to read rather than expecting you to already know.
* * * *
The conversation I was born into is a mad harangue. And that’s what a Democracy should inspire. From inside it’s loud, scarey, and weird. It is frustrating and infuriating because it feels so chaotic. But it isn’t chaos, not real chaos. Just once, a person would like things to turn out right and orderly, but if that’s what you want, then fascism is for you. In a democracy, squeeky wheels get greased, or they should. The rest of us live with our decisions, good and bad. But they are our decisions. From outside a democracy looks weak and unorganized. Enemies have watched from without and misread what they see and hear concluding that such discord is a sign of weakness. But it is a strength. As long as we argue long and loud and publicly, we are safe, from without and from within. Recently, on Canadian TV, I listened to a group of European intellectuals dissect the American presence in their lives. One, a German conservative intellectual named Josef Joffe remarked that “As soon as the Americans went to war in Iraq, they began arguing among themselves, for all the world to see and hear, about when and how to get out of there.”
The only time I regretted walking off campus that day was more than a decade later, the morning after playing a concert at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. I had gotten up early to go to the campus laundrymat, and as I started doing my clothes, a couple of students querried me about the content and structure of the songs they had heard us play the night before. They wanted to know the purpose of the rowdy progressive politics lurking in the lyrics. They wanted to know the process by which the lyrics, the music, and the message were all laced together; was the end result which seemed to them a frenzy of abandonment and fun, simply a spontaneous entertainment? And how much of what they heard was placed at their conscious level by a master hand? Ragged-out, tired, and delighted someone had noticed, I gave a serious answer, but with a chimerical bit of attitude, “What you saw last night, my friends, was the result of a fusion between a cultivated vision, constant touring, and teamwork baby!”
A few minutes later, as I went to explore the campus book store, I found a coffee shop in the lobby. There were big cozey chairs scattered all around, the place was teeming with students on a Saturday morning, flopped in chairs, lying on cushions on the floor, all reading, writing, or quietly discussing. One wall of the coffee shop had a rack of books all written by professors who teach or had taught there. I grabbed one off the shelf, poured myself a java, and nestled into a corner and spent an hour drinking it all in. I never wanted to leave. And in a sense I never have. I just had to arrive here, on my own terms.
This essay will appear in the upcoming volume, Bermuda Shorts
-JJP