6.14 Le Guin - What I Carry With Me

 

Re-Packing for What’s Ahead

 

Okay, we’ve been here before. Packing up. Our stay has ended, but as is the way with all places we’ve come to stay for a while, we hardly leave it all behind, do we? Sure, there are pictures, maybe some gifts or souvenirs, but these aren’t exactly ever satisfying on their own. Our photos and scrapbooks (Hey, does anybody really scrapbook, anymore?) aren’t really the trip: they’re spurs, sparks, proddings for our memory to recall experience, to think again, to reflect back upon what was most important to us. 

The good news about most recollections is that good memories sometimes seem to grow across time. And, if there was an unpleasant moment or two, these are forgotten or turned into amusing stories for friends, defused a bit by distance. Funny how distance works: we rewire our narratives a bit in our favor, suppressing those stories which don’t favor the experience, discarding the dull moments in a car or plane utterly. Sometimes, if a photo stirs a poor memory, we destroy the photo, disabling our pain a bit. 

Why remember anything bad, anyway? What would be the point? That kid in the cellar? Yeah, wow, that sure was a trippy question, wasn’t it? I remember we really struggled over that, LOL, haha, but what are we gonna read next? 

And so goes most of our reading experiences, right? We move from book to book, story to story, and while we remember some of what we read, we were mostly in it for the present experience, the temporary thrill. After that, bringing back much that was significant is . . . well, harder. 

There are ways to coerce us to keep it all a bit longer. School does it: quizzes, tests, the occasional essay. But we don’t remember even these much, unpleasant as they are. Take no photographs, and if you do, file them in what we called “the circular file,” destined for landfill. 

But we do want to hang on to our reading experiences, and we want to do it on our own terms. What’s cool about this podcast? I might sometimes make recommendations and even call it “homework” on occasion–out of some residual and hostile vocabulary that I’ve retained from a past life, now meant only ironically. No one is checking any of us on our work, now. We do it for ourselves.

We do it for ourselves. This is a key difference, a critical difference. Scrapbooks, I hear, were once fun to put together, carefully arranging our life experiences and attitudes through special paper, themes, and carefully-positioned googly eyes stickers. I guess we’re lucky now if our friends offer a “July photo dump” for their Insta-stories, unedited piles of mostly crap for us to sort through. The “dumper” likely will look at few of these ever again. Ah, well.

We have no business leaving Le Guin’s Suffering Child behind in an act of trauma suppression, though. True, our discussion was hardly a pleasant one, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant for each of us, that it wasn’t potentially behavior-shifting, ethic-altering. And, you know, frustrating, humbling, and uncertain. 

But let’s not treat our reading like a photo dump. And let’s make some choices about what we want to keep of our visit with Le Guin. The trick is, short of photographing the pages (something I admit I occasionally do), how do we? 

We did something like this with Andrew Marvell a few months ago, too. We packed up and moved on, but we didn’t abandon his ideas (and some of them are still working on me even now). We need to decide for Le Guin what we want to carry with us, what to pack to preserve the experience, to make them part of our psyche, our character.  

You and I are leaving “Omelas” behind now, we’re walking away, but this is only because the city has made its point, and it’s imaginary, anyway. Whether we stay or walk or fight mentally in our own worlds is now on us. Burning the photo of this utopia will say a great deal about our choices for accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More. 

But who knows what is still before us? The literary and cultural space out there is a criss-cross of possible trails: we could encounter just about anything. And here again for Journey 6 begins the “nomadic” part of this podcast. Having spent some time with Le Guin and privileged otium and the Suffering Child, we do see where our ideas and questions might lead us. We want to be ready for the journey, so we need to carry a few key tools and ideas with us; and, due to the capacity of our own brains and ears, we must selectively leave some behind, maybe regretting that choice later, but practical is practical, after all.

What we’ll use and won’t even I don’t know, just yet. That’s the nature of exploring, isn’t it? But let’s take a few moments today to think about what we’ve gained from Le Guin’s utopia and decide what is most important to each of us. 

And you can hear the underscore now, can’t you, so you know what’s coming. Yes, I’m about to play some music for you now–you may recognize it–and that will give you about 35 seconds or so to choose your ideas, the questions and challenges we will hold our memories accountable for. (Of course, since I know we’re all cheaters, you could just hit the Pause button and jot a few things down.) And after that, we’ll talk about preserving literature in memory, and I’ll let you know what I’ve chosen to pack and why.

Time to go.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and my suitcase is full. How do I carry it all, and will there be extra fees?

Trails and Tools

Last week’s Q & A offered me some insights into what listeners are thinking, for sure, along with a couple of late-arriving questions. I’ll do another Q&A episode down the road a bit once I’ve gathered enough questions, but in the meantime, always feel free to use the Literary Nomads Mailbag. You can send me comments and questions–written, or even better in audio form–and I will respond to them first personally and later, if I think they’re helpful for listeners, on the podcast. If they connect to anything we’re talking about, I’ll do it in an episode directly. 

All you have to do is go to the Show Notes and click the link for Literary Nomads Mailbag, and drop in your question or upload an audio file. This will be an ongoing link, too, so if you don’t have something right now, try it tomorrow, or next Wednesday. It all works! But I want to help you with your literary questions and projects, in making sense of any of the ideas we’ve been talking about or something of your own. 

I said earlier that here, on this podcast, we treat literature on our own terms. So while I may be talking about ideas and responding to questions and basically just exploring what I think is interesting for me and maybe for you, you may be thinking some very different things from what I talk about. I’d love to know what those are! But more importantly, they’re yours, and that is what makes them important. If they weren’t, your odds of remembering them and using them later, making them an active part of your future, . . . well, less good. 

I’ve got a few techniques for helping us keep those personally-created questions and ideas with us. Some involve talking about them, others are for reading more, and still other techniques–you knew it would be there–writing about them. And it’s all pretty basic: we must actively engage our brains with what we’ve read, not just while we’re reading but perhaps before and certainly afterwards. 

For Journey 6, I offered you several episodes of preparation for our thinking before we reached our reading. Then we read and talked through Le Guin’s issues (and now our issues). Now, we make these personal by continuing the conversation, the exploration, by carrying these reading experiences forward, etching them into us if you wish, by deciding which are most vital. What We Will Carry With Us. 

Imagine how many directions, how many trails lead from this place we stand, here at the place where we camped out on Omelas. Down one path are more works by Le Guin and that could only be fruitful, since we have even now only barely introduced ourselves. Or it could be down these paths over here, which lead to dozens of works which respond to her. But if you prefer some more backcountry paths, we could explore new works which touch upon the same topics or themes: works of utopia, works of the global commons, works of revolution, works of philosophy or ethics, works with unusual narrators. I just read a flyer from my mailbox which offered cool recipes if only I bought these international products, and I thought: What do I know about where those are coming from? And why should I have the convenience of 24-hour delivery of them to my door? 

Once they’re with us, these ideas, they’re hard to set aside. We could find trails which cut across the ones we choose, ones that lead us back through history, through literary eras, through religions, psychology, or politics, works of the marginalized, various strategies for resistance, the analyses of news stories, and the stories of our friends. Your paths and mine will stay together for a bit while we walk together and explore, but ultimately you will take all of this in your own direction, to learn more, to teach, to read.  

And as literary nomads, we recognize the breadth of choices, but prepare for what we imagine we will meet along the trails we select. 

So I’ll be the main guide while we walk on this podcast’s trails, since I’ve already surveyed ahead a bit, and I’ve walked paths similar to these before. Along the way, I’ll point out ways we could take, and I’ll encourage you to explore some on your own as your own interest and time allow. Maybe up ahead we’ll find some other guides who know better what we might find.

But today I want to make sure we’ve packed well. We have some important tools or terms to work with. And while I’ve used over 50 these past episodes, I’ll limit these to the most relevant and I’ll offer them in seven pairs.

1. Genre and Trope: Literary categories of expected forms which carry recurring plot or character types as tropes. We’ve also discussed how subverting these expectations can be a strength, cracking open our complacency
2. Otium and Negotium: The Roman concept of private time and leisure  vs the negotium of business life, public life, duty, responsibility. 
3. Hideous Bargains and Suffering Children: These now exist as motifs or archetypes for us, situations which represent a moral dilemma based on transactional pain.
4. The Alienation Effect (Bertolt Brecht) and Defamiliarization (Russian Formalism): A technique to prevent passive readings and instead force intellectual engagement and critical reflection on the audience, often by presenting things in unfamiliar or uncomfortable ways
5. Ambiguity and Uncertainty: A place where meaning is complex, nuanced, and not easily resolved into a single, clear interpretation, often leaving us with questions rather than closed answers
6. Binary Relationships and Unimaginability: Our tendency to frame concepts or choices as having only two opposing parts (e.g., good vs. evil, Left vs. Right), which oversimplify complex realities. But when we escape these binary blindspots, we often get into new cognitive territory, perhaps beyond our imaginative capacity due to systemic, cultural, and ideological closure that a binary creates.
7. Dialogics and Ethical Attentiveness: The idea that stories are inherently conversational, interactive, inviting  skepticism, additions, and revisions from readers, sharing the meaning-making. But when we engage that dialogue, we must be attuned to our roles, our influence, how our decisions ripple outward into community. 

None of these specifically have to do only with Le Guin, but they are concepts for our reading and meaning-making, tools that will help us with other works later. 

These are good enough for now, and we’ll use each again. So let’s turn, instead, to some bigger issues, the things I’m carrying.

I gave you about 30-odd seconds earlier to choose the ideas you want to carry with you. Now, I’ve been nice and I’ve delayed offering mine to give you a few more minutes. 

And I’ll mention here, too, that the topics I’m working through myself are as genuine as I could have them. They’re ones that influence not only our discussion here but all of what I’m doing at Waywords Studio. So your questions hopefully are also significant, ones that are more than an “exercise” while we’re together. 

And if you want to find out more about what I’m doing with my questions, some of the broader work at Waywords, subscribe to the Newsletter! It’s a  bi-weekly email of all the projects I’m working on, not just the podcast. You can find out about books and blogs, other educational topics around reading, my own political campaigns to defend literacy and account for privilege, my larger bank of readings and reviews, a whole host of topics and projects around growing our literacy. The link to subscribe is also in the Show Notes. It’s absolutely and forever free!

But onwards. We’ve delayed for you long enough. Here’s what I am Carrying With Me

 

Six More Lousy Questions

For me, the best way to capture a tricky idea in literature is to frame it as a question, one that can’t be answered with a quick Yes or No, and one that isn’t a factual response but instead sits somewhere else, not entirely a matter of opinion but a matter of reasoning and intuiting and investigating my way to answers.

From Journey 5, I had six questions. Questions about mortality and legacy, about my present choices, about the role of reason, about ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and my own accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, and about how I’m going to keep it all straight. To be honest, as we explored, a few of those questions fell by the wayside (It happens; it’s okay), and some of the others are still hanging out with me now, since I am not certain I got an answer which fully satisfied me, even yet. That uncertainty is still there with those, too, and I have to be okay with that. And now I am going to add some more. Here they are. I’ve got six again that I’ve settled in on after my visit to Omelas. And a couple will feel familiar.

 

1. What’s wrong with the Andrews family?

Okay, so this is not exactly the question I have, but framed this way it represents a fair amount for me. It’s easy enough to cynically answer with “rich people,” but that’s not exactly what I think about with that portrait by Gainsborough. I mean, yes, the couple is wealthy and they’ve used that wealth to create an artificial scene of utopic happiness.

But I’m also interested in some issues around that obvious strategy of theirs. The first is in the erasure of parts of reality, the deliberate artificiality of that constructed happiness by removing that which is repugnant or disturbing. Kind of like we might do by trashing that photo which causes unpleasant feelings, or omitting someone in photoshop. And–I suspect–kind of believe, I think–that the audience for that happy scene is partly themselves, but also us, but also them seeing us see them. There’s a middle finger in there somewhere that is the intention of the painting, the constructed narrative: ‘Yes, you can see that we are happier than you and we take pleasure in having you see this.’ 

Connected to that, is my own normalization of that scene. Honestly, until I did this podcast I never looked at the painting overmuch and I certainly never questioned it. I don’t remember now how I even came across it except that I wanted to start the Journey off with a relatively unassuming bit of artwork. But this normalizing of the experience of art is a blind spot, a powerful message that I have chosen too long to ignore. How have I done that? Why have I? That’s wrapped up in the question, too.

More even than this, Thomas Gainsborough painted these two, and–in my interpretation of this painting–worked a bit to subvert that message, to expose the lie, even leaving a section of the painting unfinished. Subversion of these normalized scenes, just like subversion of tropes, works to reveal my blind spots–and so I’m appreciative–but geez, there’s a bit of risk going on there, artistically. I’m curious about it.

And finally, there’s the darker question that these three concepts–erasure, normalization, and subversion–add up to. That the Andrewses know that I see the falsehood of their scene and they do not care. More, they may even be pleased that I see the lie. “You can see, now, that we are lying about our happiness, but we don’t care about the fact that we’re lying–we all do–and that you can see this is a demonstration of our power to lie with impunity.” This painting is a demonstration of power over its painter and viewer.

Yeah. So maybe I’ve gone too far with that, but I don’t think so. And the question tells me that this is a narrative theory I want to explore.

 

2. To what uses should I put my otium?

This question naturally flows from the “Andrews family” discussion. Once the idea of this privileged, constructed happiness is here, the ethical use of my own leisure (otium) becomes kinda critical. I’m suspicious of the binary here, but am I the painted or the painter? The one who lives in privilege and is prideful or oblivious to it, or the one who subverts and attempts to arrest or expose it? What blind spots have my garden walls created?

I’m reminded of a few people I know who routinely boast on social media about their yoga and meditation work, how happy it makes them and how good it feels. Okay. Knowing that they are showing off about a practice of selflessness is itself a trifle, shall we say, ironic, but that doesn’t mean I’m not somehow doing the same somewhere. My own otium, my own privileged time (and now there is a fair amount of it since I am officially out of the paid-by-the-hour work force) might need an accounting. Else am I guilty of what Le Guin calls the “treason of the artist,” writing and creating and even glorifying resistance and pain because they are more intellectually interesting than interrogating good; that I am ignoring the actual “banality of evil” and wickedness. Hmm. I’m still not sure I even buy into that idea of treason.

So yes, I need to interrogate how I spend my time, not the “utility” of my free time, because I am remembering what Bataille said about the nature of utility, but it’s interesting that I can think of no words that emphasize the importance of that time without using a word of exchange or commerce: my time is valuable? Is saved or wasted? Is spent or lost? Is budgeted, managed, or made efficient? Is mine or yours? Damn. I think we have another blind spot. Otium is “free” time.

 

3. What responsibility do I have for what I read? And for what I write?

And while this doesn’t come straight out of our episodes so far, it is a kind of personal extension for me of what I just discussed. Knowing all the questions of time and privilege, isn’t what I do with that time and privilege worth interrogating? 

We all–well, most of us–have marked a book as DNF, did not finish, because we realized it just wasn’t for us, that we couldn’t waste more time on it (someone please find me another metaphor for time that makes me happier!). Okay. So we see that link. So what do I consider a “valuable” use of my reading time? What topics do I choose to write about? Do I really have to feel a little guilty if I write a poem about a flower? When I look around at the tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More and anxiety across the world and in the US right now, how dare I? Aren’t my choices indicative of my values and priorities? I like bad 1970s horror, but really, of what value is that now? 

And, arguably, there was a lot of terrible stuff in the 1970s, too, so why would I spend time with that entertainment even then? (And yes, the fact that I was in elementary and middle school then only makes this question representative of the larger issue.) 

Now, I think I’ve had a kind of answer to all of this for a while, but our recent episodes have provoked me to revisit it, especially since nearly all of my retirement time now is mine to choose. 

And I want to be wary of another phenomenon which is related to virtue-signaling on social media. If I read challenging titles and ideas or even write about them, but those ideas go nowhere later, really, what good does any of that even do except assuage or trick me into believing that I’m socially conscious? 

This last concern is one of the reasons I’m even asking these questions, that I want to be certain I have the capacity to use my thinking later. The quiz I took on the Omelas story in eighth grade, to be honest, really didn’t do a lot of good this way. 

 

4. How can I tell if I am “morally disengaged” or have rationalized my interpretations into a kind of “numbing,” and how do they help me understand the citizens’ choices in Omelas?

You can sense now that I’m kind of on a progressive track with these questions, right? Me, too. That’s okay. I want you to see how my brain is working on this. For me, this is a careful alignment of time, activity, and moral responsibility, and now here I’m wondering how my blind spots are created, how psychologically I might weigh my choices for behavior and perhaps reason poorly or problematically along the way. After all, I’m pretty convinced I’ve been an Omelas citizen in a lot of ways up until this moment. 

And I’m not fully convinced they are 100% wrong, either. There is a relationship between our conceptions of joy and pain, suffering and celebration, but these are being set up as binaries that I’m highly suspicious of. Le Guin offered us only “depends upon,” and that concept might be examined more, along with the question of whether dependency is even an issue. The biblical Good Samaritan’s life, after all, was not in the least dependent upon the suffering man he found and helped; that was the point. 

But at the heart of this question is the fateful relationship between knowledge and action. Just because I know something is unjust, what moves me to act or to fail to or to actively choose not to? There is an ethical burden to this knowledge, this removal of the blind spots of privilege, that I must account for (and I am still using economics vocabulary, aren’t I?) There is a line of complicity in here. 

I happened to be in Dharamsala, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile on the occasion of the Dalai Lama’s 70th birthday some years ago. Lots of adventures to talk about there in the future, from a Baskin Robbins sitting in the middle of what was essentially an upgraded refugee camp to my discussion with a Buddhist terrorist. But later. The Dalai Lama was asked how he could be the embodiment of compassion when each day he walked past the suffering and disabled refugees who had by great fortune reached his city. He said that his compassion was not about giving them money but about giving them his recognition of their humanity, and he blessed them in those encounters. 

Now there’s a guy who has avoided the transactional metaphor of morality. There may be something there that helps us understand our moral or ethical complicity in injustice, but I don’t know, yet.

 

5. What ethical differences exist between active maintenance of an unjust system, passive acceptance of it, figurative or symbolic resistance to it, and active resistance to it?

This was a question I actually posed in the podcast earlier, and it has stayed with me almost exactly as I originally asked it. If I am to engage injustice where I see it and understand it, are there actually gradations, levels of accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More? 

And let’s be honest. When I look around for injustices that need righting, there are more than I can account for. Why aren’t I fighting every one? For those I can’t because of time or resources (more economics), am I still responsible to them? Complicit in them? 

Again here, I have–as we all have–made some peace with these questions, but I want to lay them out explicitly for examination, because I am not certain that the “peace” I’ve made isn’t just a normalizing of my Omelasian moral disengagement. 

I know I want to be ethical, morally responsible, and that there are psychological barriers to action. I know that at the heart of these questions are the narratives or stories I tell myself and the ones that have been told to me. I am reading them all of the time, just as we all are. Yes, these are questions of philosophy and even religion, perhaps, but beneath them and these fields of study and faith are stories. Stories reveal or blind; it is only the choices and manner of our reading that determines which. 

Jemisin tells me I should stay and fight, or at least her hideous bargain looks that way. But I’m not certain her physical militancy is the best path, or at least the best path for me. My physical fighting days were never one of my assets and now even they are fading fast. My time and value is somewhere else. 

 

6. And, finally, then, the culmination: What do we do with our Now, our current life choices?

This was a question from our last journey where we explored epicureanism and the ways toward happiness or contentment. Well, I for one never got an answer, and so I’m doubling down. 

If our lives are to have meaning, then that meaning is something we construct or have constructed for us. I don’t like the second choice because having someone else do it also allows them to do some erasure, some revision, some labels on me that I would have to accept. I can’t help that after I die–the narrative is in the hands of those who follow me, just like books are left behind by writers–but I can definitely decide how to build that meaningful life now while I’m here, build it for myself. 

But that also means deciding how to write the story, how to make choices which make it meaningful. I read and followed a guy for a while whose bad advice was for us to live our lives like we were video game or RPG characters: we should do things which advance ourselves and our powers so that we can “level up.” I grew to resent the metaphor for all of its–well, gross, connotations. 

But the idea was right, I think: take control of our own narrative, stop slavering over the next installment of Dumb Movie X that is fed to us or the endless exclamation marks which hover around all of the clickbait. 

This question brings together all of the others, doesn’t it? Privilege, otium, accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, psychological obstacles, what I read and learn and write, and forms of action—right back to this moment, what I do now. It even echoes the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More themes from our Journey 5, now phrased a bit differently with Le Guin before us. That “harvest the day” philosophy suggests a new manner of significance to our behavior, one reliant upon my membership in something called community, where my place in this culture is dependent upon the place and actions and conditions of others. It redefines what I call “Now.”

And if it’s not about community but my role apart from it, maybe the answer has something to do with a kind of presentism, this self-care virtue, that we need to live in the moment, find peace in the now, meditate, make myself content, and like a good Buddhist, perhaps, forego the outside world that pollutes my thinking. And maybe I set aside the arguments that make me anything but a beast. After all, animals don’t seem particularly bothered by either of these first two questions. 

Questions, Directions, and What We Do 

So I’ve got these questions. Maybe yours are different.  I’ve certainly seemingly set aside a great deal to narrow them down, but these are the ones that are dominating my thinking right now. What are yours?

Maybe they’re about Dostoevsky, or Seneca’s stoicism, maybe about scapegoats or political power, maybe you were really into Bataille and his ideas about unproductive loss, or you wanted to spend time with other fantasy subgenres or with ecology stories like “Vaster Than Empires,” or you find you now love pastoral poetry or revisiting children’s stories or even Stephen King’s closed room sacrifices, or since I’ve taken a few passes at educational practice along the way, you have more questions about schools and curriculum and reforms. 

Good. I get it. There are a lot of places to go, and we may well cross through these avenues again as we wander. But for now, it is with these questions, and our growing list of literary tools, that we set forth on this journey, our next nomadic exploration, looking for answers and examining more literature. 

My path forward is over this way, into places of more Uncertainty and discomfort. In the next few episodes we’ll address these nuances more directly, looking at how other writers have responded, in and out of our own cultures, about critical literacy as a place of privilege and power and what that means in terms of accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More.  

But what we won’t do is a photo dump, a casual abandonment of memory into the refuse stream of the digital world. I want us to slow, recognize that our choices are our own–not someone else’s to write for us–but that whatever we make of them, they have consequences. 

But I’m going to give you some time to assemble your thinking on this journey. Over the next three episodes, I’m going to put a little “pause” on our journey while I offer something I’ve wanted to do for a little while now, three episodes of a kind of “How to” for Literary Nomads. What I mean is, I know that what we’re up to here isn’t typical of podcasts: the episodes don’t always stand alone, they don’t always have three takeaways, and they don’t even leave us with solid conclusions. You are entitled to ask, “Yeah, what gives?” 

Well, I want to answer that, but I’m going to do it over three episodes, each designed for one or more of your own roles as a reader. One will be for readers and lovers of literature: what’s the point of not just exploring different titles each week or interviewing authors? What are we doing here that is valuable and how can you make the most of it? Another episode will be more explicitly for teachers: why aren’t I dropping lesson ideas and practical strategies for motivating students with reading? And why are the suggestions I do offer so ill-fitted to regular classroom teaching? What should I do with a long podcast like this one? And the last will be more explicitly for students and learners, in and out of classrooms: Why aren’t I naming the themes of books and describing how to write a good essay for them? And what am I doing that makes learning all of this easier? After all, we’re busy people: let’s not waste our precious and valuable time!

I totally get you, all three of you. And, by the way, if you don’t fit one of these descriptions, would you tell me who you are and why you’re listening? I’d be fascinated. “Well, Steve, I actually hate literature and this podcast reminds me why.” If that’s you, hit me up. I’m buying you lunch. 

For everyone else, I hope to make one or more of these next three episodes really valuable for you. And if I don’t, let me know so I can fix that!  I want you getting something good for you out of every episode, and if that doesn’t happen, I’m doing something wrong.

And then, after those three, we’re back to exploring these questions through the end of Journey 6, wherever that is out there somewhere, but we have a ways to go, yet. After all, we just got to the big questions! Now we have to do the Nomads part of the Literary.

Will it be worth waiting for? Well, I think so. So let me give you a taste of the reading list ahead.

• Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
• Machado de Assis, “The Fortune Teller” and Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon”
• Wole Soyinka, The Trials of Brother Jero and Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

There’s some novels, short stories, and plays. Then:

• Alfred Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” and Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
• The music of Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, and BTS
• The films The Truman Show and Metropolis 
• Adichie, “Dear Ijeawele, Feminist Manifesto” and Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Poetry, music, film, and essay.

That’s not all, but I can see them ahead on our path. And I’d like to sit with Seneca awhile, too.

We’ve introduced the questions, and they are essential to have with us, but even now I can feel our packs are heavy. But sometimes, when we can see the stops ahead, it’s a little easier.

But you get a short break while you do these other episodes, so you can treat this quick look ahead like a reading list. Gather your bags, let’s move on out, and

Go read one of them. 

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.