6.36: What I Get Wrong: Mailbags, Intimidation, & Interpretation

 

The Praxis of Complicity

 

Oh, man, this isn’t a bit awkward.  But here we are. I’ve got my fingers on the keyboard, I’m writing more and more, just as I’ve asked all of you to do, to “write back,” to craft manifestos, to practice the New Sincerity. And yes, you’re entitled to ask, “All easy enough to say, Steve, but what are you doing?” 

Fair question. And if you’ve been following this Journey, you know that a few months back I was writing a speech to give before a local school board about their recreation fees, but also to signal to them that I had noticed the quiet withdrawal of books from their libraries, a kind of pre-emptive censorship. 

Also since that time, I have joined my local public library’s advisory committee, a trustee board, to work for the next several years building community support and library services. I’m involved in political advocacy in our capital of Lansing for library funding, and I’m participating in conferences in policy and platform creation. But none of that is directly about my writing, just a surrounding circumstance. My point is, we’re all busy people with lives that sometimes get too complicated, but I never lost sight of the recreation fee battle.

I want to read you an excerpt from the speech, because I made no earlier recording of it. But to set this up, I’d discovered that our Community Health Center, which has been hosted and managed by our school system with decent fees for many years, has begun to suffer budget challenges, which led the school board to raise the membership rates. The budget itself was never shown at public meetings, at least that I saw.  And so, with only a few minutes, after introducing myself and summarizing the issue, this follows:

At no point in the original public discussion was any solution asked about or sought beyond an increase in membership rates. This is still a community service: but no partnership agreements with the broader community of businesses or organizations were considered, for instance. Far easier, it seems, to place the cost burden onto those who rely upon the Center’s low fees.

And rates literally doubled, at the smallest increase, for every user. So this was not an increase to adjust for inflation or mere higher operating costs: this is a longer-term funding decision with a range of impacts that (again, I can only presume) were discussed in private. And who pays the fees?

• Teachers, staff, and retired personnel: those who serve and have served the children and schools;
• And all the folks I mentioned earlier: families, seniors, those with lower incomes, those with special needs where awesome but underpaid instructors make all kinds of accommodations and spaces;

 And you must have calculated, I presume, how much you believed they could all afford to pay: 25% more? 50%?  What was that calculation, the one where you determined the point beyond which it was no longer affordable, the point where the fees are now equivalent to the local business gyms, thus eliminating the very purpose of the Community Rec Center, that it offered opportunities for families and seniors who could not otherwise afford health club memberships? Who did you just lock out of programs?

Maybe you’d respond, “No, Steve, the seniors are fine. Programs like Silver Sneakers will pay for it, regardless!” Ah, yes, let’s charge the insurance companies more. And we wonder why our health care system is hyperinflated. 

One board member said, “It’s a necessary but unfortunate increase, but fortunately it is not that much more.”  A 100% increase? If this were true—and we all know doubling a price could never be described as “not much,”—then we would not have seen a new membership rate type offered this year, would we, one that is actually lower than all the other group rates. It is a lower rate than that for seniors, for those struggling with income, for those who are and were teachers for you, for families. It’s a rate lower than even the previous membership rates before they doubled. It’s a special rate offered only to school board members. 

Surely not. Surely this was not discussed with all of you when it somehow appeared, briefly, on the Center’s website. But here it is, printed on a flyer sent around to central office folks. Surely this was not discussed somewhere out of the spotlight, in a private meeting, where it would be hoped it might pass without comment. 

As Orwell’s pig Squealer paints on a barn wall: “Some animals are more equal than others.” But fortunately, you may not have to worry too much. Orwell’s Animal Farm is no longer to be found in your school’s curriculum or in its libraries.

That last bit with Orwell was meant to signal to them—well, at least the two central administrators who I believe have undertaken the quiet censorship activity—that I was well aware of them, too. I was thinking of it as a warning shot: maybe they would re-consider my now 16-month-old continuing offer to assist the district with building acquisition and review policies. Not very nice, but there it is. I’ve been nice up to now, but I’m not ready to pretend that school personnel bound to help kids learn should be removing materials for literacy. No apologies there.

But, you know, last week I said that we need to be full of this New Sincerity, to embrace our beliefs and vulnerabilities, to write what we feel without ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More. And this piece, written a few months ago now, surely speaks what I believe, but you heard it: it’s dripping with sarcasm and implication and innuendo. It’s angry and accusing. I was mad. Am mad. And I let that anger lose control in the writing.

And you know the response? What happened after?     Absolutely nothing. Crickets. No responses, no questions, no counter-challenges, no follow-up or return emails, no phone calls, not even a midnight book-burning on my front lawn to silence me. They are practicing what is becoming the most insidious politics today: ignoring everything that doesn’t cause an immediate threat.  They’ve felt that my words are insignificant. (Now it’s true that someone on the board or administration might well be working on the issue quietly behind the scenes, but it has been some months since, so . . . )

So I’m ready to blame myself. My words here do not show in any way that I am someone they want to work with productively. My sarcasm, my vocal sneer at their audacity, is at least partially responsible for their lack of response. I failed there; it’s on me. I knew better.

I don’t think I’ve burned the bridges down, though. I’ve since had a couple of one-on-one informal discussions with folks, and my work with the library is going and growing well. There are a lot of fronts, a lot of movements, even in local politics. There is no final resolution to any issue, and I can recover and rebuild my arguments. The only thing I must not do is go away.

Orson Welles. He said it, this idea: “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” 

So who am I to offer strategies for writing and reading and action? Somebody who, after a few decades of this, still gets it wrong sometimes. 

Let’s see how.

 

Theme

 

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

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I don’t mind getting it wrong; I just don’t want it easy.

 

Messy Dialogues: Our Mailbag

 

I also have some consolation in my frustrations and failures along the way. First, it confirms what we’ve been talking about for some time: when the Hideous Bargain is so broad, so ideologically set, so systemic, just firing off a single letter or speech, even dropping a “guerilla text” into the mix, is unlikely to uproot it. Saying nothing, however, will pretty much guarantee the injustice continues. Every day is a new choice.

And I’m also gratified to know that many of you share these frustrations with me. Literacy loves company. Over the past months, I’ve had some great conversations and picked up some powerful emails from some of you about your experiences and concerns. And we’re overdue to address them. Today, I want to focus just on those related to our current Journey 6 on Le Guin. Just you and me, one frustrated reader to another.

 

Ben

 

So let’s start with Ben from the Tucson area. Here’s part of his email:

“I’m retired, and I’ve always viewed my evening reading time as a peaceful, honest escape from a stressful career that spent decades grinding me down. But your episodes on the ethics of reading have left me feeling incredibly guilty. Can’t I just enjoy the beauty of a well-written sentence anymore? Or is my quiet relaxation with a novel always going to be a selfish act of denial while the world is falling apart outside my window?”

And yowch, Ben, I totally get you! I spent my whole career with classroom reading and writing and stressful projects, and since I retired, I turned to free-choice reading of books with a ravenous appetite. So let’s get to this first and foremost: I absolutely am not condemning reading for pleasure or relaxation or even as a substitute for romance. Escapism in most all its forms are healthy strategies against fatigue and stress, for sure. I just didn’t spend time in the episode talking much about that form of reading.

The danger of escapist reading isn’t that it exists as a choice, but when it becomes our only mode of reading, when we do it explicitly as a replacement for critical thought, frictional reading, worldly engagement. And that beautiful sentence can be read for beauty, can be read for its marvelous craft and meaningful impact, or both. I definitely consume some content for its pure pleasure or artistic beauty, too, whether it’s the poetry of Joy Harjo or the movie Jaws III; I’ll let you decide which one is artistic. 

But then we have to ask the hard question, too: when we have the freedom and privilege to turn off the extreme news, does this say anything about our responsibility, too? Does taking a break impact our level of complicity in any way? What we do after the break, the next morning after that evening of terrific reading? Maybe that’s something like Cicero’s “honest leisure.” 

It’s hard. It’s the Neurath’s Boat problem, where we just keep moving forward, patching and learning along the way. So no, Ben, please don’t feel guilty, especially on my account! Instead, really value that otium relaxation of reading when you have it, knowing that you’ve earned it, and that you will earn it again and again.

 

Aakash 

 

Related to Ben’s question is a communication I got from Aakash, who says this in part:

When you talked about how we turn our free time into another chore, I saw myself. I’m that guy who reads so that I can track my page counts on Goodreads. It’s like I want my free time to be measured and I can brag about it. It’s what I’ve learned, all I’ve learned. It’s like the school and work world want me to prove I’m being productive 24/7.

And Aakash, I’m putting your worries here with Ben’s because I think you’re both talking about the same thing from different sides: how much we’ve destroyed our concept of otium leisure time. I made Ben feel guilty about it—sorry, Ben!—and you’re talking about how it’s being commodified. Excuse me, the cool marketers today are using the term “gamified.” Let’s have everything from our coffee shops to our dating apps include points and badges, please.

So let’s be as clear as we can be: otium, leisure, is supposed to be restorative. I guess I would urge you not to turn your reading and other enjoyments into data points. And I can sense that you already know this: you just have a hard time acting on it because we’re so well trained to mark ourselves as successful, to post the IG Reel of ourselves on the beach when we could just be enjoying ourselves on the beach. 

But both you and Ben are doing what you should be, I believe: thinking about your roles and uses of leisure, asking questions about them. The next part—and again, there’s no real end point or final answer to this—is to reconcile yourself to those choices. Let that reconciliation, that deciding, work until you question it next. Then question it again and again later. Neurath’s Boat. The patch might hold for a while, but we and the world change, new leaks appear, and if we do well, the boat ends up stronger each time.

Have you ever done one of those ecological or carbon footprint calculators? They show, especially for Americans and Europeans, how much more impact we’re having on the planet with our lifestyles that the average human or that the planet’s resources can actually tolerate. It’s always humbling and disturbing. Okay, so I make changes, work on reductions, make some lifestyle changes. That will take a while, and maybe after six months or a year of work I circle around to try something more. 

What I like about each of your questions isn’t so much what you do or don’t do with your leisure time: it’s that you’re both asking questions about your own uses of it, your own tolerances and strategies. Ben may end up giving me the middle finger and doubling-down on YA Romantacy reads (sorry Ben, I don’t really know what you read, but I suspect it’s not Rebecca Yarros). Aakash may give up the lowbrow Amazon-owned Goodreads and instead publish a massive spreadsheet that tracks representations in literature and then opening up a Twitch stream for it. 

Okay. The point is that you make choices about your otium time and leisure, understanding what those choices mean. We can make wrong choices, as we understand them to be wrong later, but the choices should not be thoughtless ones.

 

Jim 

 

Jim from Livonia, Michigan, is a teacher and I’m going to paraphrase his question in our conversation here:

My students read a Shakespeare play or a serious essay about race and immediately say, ‘Oh, this is just like when my phone broke and I felt isolated.’ It feels like their constant need to find a book ‘relatable’ is actually a wall that keeps them from really reading and learning about lives different from their own. How do I stop them from turning every story into a mirror of being a teenager?

So, the first thing I want to underscore for us is that investing texts with meaning and bringing our own contexts and experiences to them is both essential and natural. Schools, in the interest of testing objectively, work very hard to isolate and cut out anything that smells like subjectivity. But this process of reading, of making a text relevant because of the personal connections we make from it, is what develops curiosity, builds interest in reading in the first place, and causes deeper learning that is meaningful for us as readers. When we tell readers that what they find relatable isn’t valuable or interesting, but only that we learn that Nick Caraway isn’t a reliable narrator, we kill all those: curiosity, motivation, and real literacy in reading. If we can’t ask questions of the relevance of what we read, what are we even doing?

Now Jim isn’t doing that. He’s more concerned that it’s gone too far, that in turning stories into “mirrors,” that the students have forgotten that there is still a text to learn from. That is a problem. But you see how we made this into a binary opposition? Do we read the text without the reader’s input or do we allow the reader to make up the meaning of the text?  It’s a false binary again, because the answer must be that the relationship between text and reader is always negotiated, just like the roles of otium and negotium, or the choice between saving the universe or kicking the puppy. 

And that’s because, I think, there’s something else going on here. Jim’s student’s, if they keep only comparing literature to themselves, might be confusing the relatability of a text with actual empathy. If all we get from reading–whether books or social media or the choices of our friends—is the mirror, we are building for ourselves the echo chamber, that thing the Zhuangzi warns about with the Three Emperors, drilling our own faces into the Other because we cannot understand the concept of difference. We can read the text, letting it remain different, and then engaging with that unfamiliarity, and this is where that reader relationship should sit. 

 

Sarah

 

From the other side of this same question, Sarah P wrote to me:

Steve, I’ve spent sixteen years telling my students that reading books makes them better, more compassionate people. Now you’re telling me that crying over a sad book is just an easy emotional release that lets kids off the hook from actually changing how they act. How do I get them to connect the book to real-world action without turning English class into a depressing political debate?

Thanks for writing, Sarah, and yes, it’s an excellent question, because it is my position that at some levels, every text we encounter is political in some way. But—and we’ll talk a lot more about this moving forward—taking “action” doesn’t mean telling your students to invade Hershey, Pennsylvania, to protest chocolate supply chains. (Well, unless they want to.)

Let’s start a little closer to home, to that trendy “growth mindset” concept that is all over the schools now. Let’s try a “growth discourse,” a position or mindset or attitude your students might develop instead of passive consumption. As I said with Ben’s concerns about otium, there’s nothing wrong—and a lot right—about showing empathy and immersing ourselves into reading. But if it stops there, does nothing but this, here becoming a catharsis that paralyzes later thought, we do have a problem. Critical literacy for democracies requires civic muscles: what’s the point of crying over someone suffering in literature if we’re not even going to learn how to talk about what that means? For us and for the sufferer? 

So we grow and extend our meaning-making. We engage in dialogue, first about where our sympathies and gut responses come from, and then what we might learn from these questions. One of my most horrifying journal prompts for my students was whether they would tear the wings off a living butterfly for $100. And wow, the discussions that always followed, often in questions about whether we rejected the money only because the victim was beautiful. Students would inevitably say they’d be happy to dismember flies or moths and such, but not butterflies. Now imagine the kinds of exploratory projects which might result from such a realization. They talk together, learn about their empathy and how it functions, grow their understanding. 

 

Kendall & NLH

 

Teacher Kendall James from Oregon worries that her high school students are simply too well-trained by common assessments and standardized schooling to change. Besides, she says,

…they are terrified of thinking for themselves. They just want the rules. When I ask them to find their own patterns in a text and trust their own conclusions, they just look at me and ask what they need to write to get an A. 

And oh, Kendall, you are singing my song and that of thousands of other teachers who struggle with this. Can we get them there in a system that expects very different outcomes? But I wish it was just the schools. I want to combine your question with another from a message to me from NLH who writes:

Our book club has been meeting since Covid. We are all very polite—everyone gets a glass of wine, we chat, and if things get tense, we agree to disagree. But after listening to you, I realized we never actually change each other’s minds; we just nod along to make sure everyone feels safe. We don’t want to turn a friendly living room into a political knife fight, but it would be nice to have better talks. We just read Kuang’s Yellowface and I had a lot to say; but I couldn’t.

Nobody wants to be disruptive. We’ve all been trained to operate with the least amount of friction, not to risk or stand out. And while Kendall is right that most of schooling has trained students to this behavior, it’s my experience that the larger motivator to silence and risk is fear of being the cause of disruption. So what we need in classrooms and book clubs are ways to break the “polite company” of silence safely. 

Here’s a gentle one: Ask students and book club members to use “I notice” and “I wonder” statements about their ideas. This lowers the stakes. Try, “I wonder if Kuang’s writing from a white narrator point of view complicates her ideas on race.” Or, “I notice that The Lion King is kind of like Hamlet.”

In addition, for Kendall, I had my students contribute ideas anonymously through online forums from home, reducing the fear of “being wrong” and learning that risking ideas was more often rewarded and never condemned. Of course, this means building a classroom culture of that kind of respect from the beginning, too. And dare I say, it’s critical that both NLH and Kendall practice their tactics themselves.

But my biggest suggestion for both is a pretty standard strategy for me: take the awkward or unspoken topic and put it right up on the table for discussion, for exploration. Yes, it can be bold or awkward, but if it’s done not as a threatening gesture but as an “I notice” statement, it works better to have thicker discussions in the long run. 

Try, “I’ve been wondering, if we weren’t in a classroom right now, would we still have some of the same worries, or would discussion be easier? Can you tell me why?” followed by “Okay, so we see the issue: what can we do about it?”  Or, “You know, I’ve noticed for the past several meetings that we’ve kind of walked around discussions of race (or grief or sex or politics) in these books. I wonder if the authors would think we were honoring their work. (Or,) I wonder if we’ve missed some interesting discussion by omitting these topics.”

I know that classrooms benefit from reading and interpreting themselves as texts, in open dialogue about the nature of schools, their learning, their fears and needs for validation, the concept of what interpretation is, etc. There really is no need not to be transparent about that. And book clubs and other organizations should occasionally set aside time for discussion about the group itself, about its goals and what it wants to do differently. Most times, we end up speaking out loud what many have been thinking, anyway.

There’s more to both of these issues, of course, but this is a question of inculcating more frictional reading into our community spaces, the topic of my next book, and what we will continue to talk about here on Literary Nomads. Thank you both for your concerns, and to Kendall, specifically, I would also recommend reading just about anything by Paulo Freire or Henry Giroux—not for methods but for ways to think about the space you’re in.

Now, if you’ve written me a comment, worry not! I’ve held a few messages back this week, and I may be saving yours for this Journey’s final episode next week!

 

What I Get Wrong

 

Well, I started this episode with some failures on my part, so it seems fitting to come full circle and end with some more. But as I’ve said a few times here, my goal for us as readers, as writers, and people, is not to worry so much about making choices that are wrong; I just don’t want us to make the ones that are easy—too easy, that allow our complacency and complicity. And some of these admissions are from my own reflections, some come from comments and surveys. 

First, I want to offer my loose apologies for the curriculum of readings this Journey. My first conception of our Journey with Le Guin imagined a pretty comprehensive list of titles which, by the time I got to Poe, grew quickly. As I suggested to Jim and Sarah both, meaning is made from our investment in the choices as much as it is in the titles themselves. More, we build themes and ideas not only on what is presented to us, but what we leave out. This is as true of our classrooms as it is in building a podcast.

Way way back in the season trailer, I promised you some poetry by Alfred Tennyson, some anime works, and even the movie The Truman Show. And ah, the best laid plans! They ended up on the back-up list that we never got to. I mean, sure, we could go further down this road and keep adding titles: I had over 50 originally on my list and would likely discover more, after all, but I decided that the titles I had set aside had largely already been discussed, at least in terms of their “takes” on the Le Guin question. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable and won’t appear later, but we’ll probably do something different with them. Our Journeys are pathways that lead from place to place, and—depending on weather, fatigue, and whimsy—what we meet and where we stop is a living and adaptable trip. No river is ever the same twice and all that.

Oh, and speaking of titles that are definitely being set aside for the future, ouch, I really wanted us to talk about the Benjamin Britten opera Peter Grimes (the violence that results from scapegoating), and Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros (the challenges of resisting conformity). I just have to decide now what theme or question will open them up best to our thinking. 

More, though, based on some of your feedback and comments, I’m going to be making a few changes to the podcast going forward, so thank you for helping me make this a program that works for you. First, and I’ve definitely understood this as we went through this longer Journey, doing two titles in a single episode is not the best strategy. I want us to really have the opportunity to dig into the texts of these works, and that means longer and more sustained discussions of depth rather than quick 10 or 15-minute hits and overviews. We started to get into that pattern, and I resented it every time I did it. So, one work with perhaps a related title mention, but one work. 

More, I have to scale back the length of episodes. Some of you have said that 45 minutes can be too long–either because I’m packing in too much to think about in one shot, or because your commutes aren’t that long, or because you can’t spare that size block of time. Yes, I’ve added chapters to break the episodes down and offer pause points, but that isn’t how many of you listen. So if I’m digging in to a heavier piece, I’ll break it into two episodes rather than push longer or rush the discussion. I’ll work for 25-30 minute episodes with 35 minutes being my absolute break point. 

Finally, today, I sometimes get a comment that goes something like this: “That isn’t what we learned in my English class!” or “I found a source that contradicts you.” Yup. I can only agree. I’m not here to offer the most traditional approaches to the poems and stories we consider. We can find those elsewhere, anyway, and if that’s all we did, we could bounce around and talk about anything in one episode completely unrelated to anything else.

But you know what? That’s not how we read. Every time we read one story, it becomes the context for our reading the next poem. And then it snowballs. That’s what happens with our season Journeys. I open with a question or two posed, and then we begin opening that question up through other literature and thinkers, and we sustain it for an entire 10 to 40 episode series. This necessarily means that we’ll read some literature in very narrow and particular ways, because we’re kind of mining it for how it helps clarify our thinking. This is the very thinking that we want the students of teachers like Jim and Sarah to do: bring something to the reading, a question, idea, attitude, or strategy. My gosh, if you missed reading Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon,” go give that a look. It must have 500 different entry and exit points for exploration. It’s an extraordinary story, as so much of his writing is. But, you know, I gotta say, for writers like Lois Lowry and Shel Silverstein and Stephen King, it’s pretty much the same thing.

Even so, this is part of the problem. So much to look at and read and talk about, and now I just said we can circle back to previous titles and re-read them differently. Of course we can. For the teachers out there, bringing students to this level of frictional inquiry necessarily means that you’ll never never never teach the same book twice the same way. If you do, consider it a warning sign. Even so, even so, expect that our Journeys going forward will be a bit more brief than this one. I love Le Guin, and we’ve only looked at a short story of hers (well, two), but I’m betting no one expected over 30 hours of discussion about it, least of all me. Future Journeys will be shorter, somewhere between 10 and 25 episodes rather than the 37 or so this time. 

But we’re not done, even yet, with Ursula K Le Guin and the Omelas question. We have one final episode ahead (for now), and I might have, even now, some ideas about our otium and Hideous Bargain questions that we have not yet considered. And the stakes are, well, high, even global.

What is it I haven’t raised, even yet, about the story? And how could any new idea possibly shift our thinking now? Well, I can only say that, I’ve saved them for the end.

In the meantime, write some more, read some more, send me some more comments and questions, challenge each other, and after you’re done with all that this week, 

Go read some more. 

 

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, 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.