Reading and Living in Uncertainty

Transcript: 5.07 Reading and Living in Uncertainty

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Key Terms:

• Uncertainty and similar terms
• Aporia

 

5.07 Reading & Living With Uncertainty

Intro: Pianos and Birds and Empty Spaces

Have I mentioned that I used to play jazz piano? Yeah, I was never really very good, but I found myself in a whole bunch of different bands through the 1980s and 1990s. And when I say I wasn’t very good, I’m not being humble. As a classical pianist I never had enough discipline to take on the great works, and as a jazz pianist I never had the spontaneous creativity to make it work. But I tried, and I suppose that speaks to something.

But I’m telling you this because as a beginning jazz pianist, high school and into college, I read sheet music fairly well. You put the notes in front of me, I’m all over it. I could do what they called “blocking” chords; in other words, I filled in the spaces in big bands when the wind players weren’t playing, made sounds behind the soloists, big chunks of chords banging away to keep the music going. But I didn’t really understand the music. By this I mean, I could read it fine, but making musical sense of it, getting the soul of it, the vibe, wasn’t something I understood very well.

So I was invited one night in the early 1980s to a rehearsal of a local blockbuster professional band out here in the Detroit area called Brookside Jazz. A lot of powerful players came out of that group, and I am ashamed to say I no longer remember the name of their pianist at the time, because this story is really about him. He was fairly young, a little wild looking, and he talked like it was 1965.

I watched him play a few tunes, tried to make sense of what I saw on his written music vs. what he was doing with his hands. They didn’t match. He was blocking chords in a way, but doing what we called “comping,” changing the rhythms, adding counter-melodies in different places. It was gorgeous. He understood how to “music,” you know?

So he let me sit down to try it. Of course I was petrified. The band started playing, fortunately ignoring me completely. And I played, blocking in chords with big chunky hands, filling spaces. At some merciful point, he stopped me. And I remember some of his advice. He talked about some of the jazz greats of the past, then he said, “Let me lay something on you, man. You gotta listen to Basie. The Count knew what it was about. Get away from thinking it’s all gotta get filled in. What Basie does, he just lays it down in bits, lots of space. Like little turds from birds.” 

And his hands dropped to the keyboard while Brookside played, just dropping a few chunks of notes here and there. Little turds from birds. 

Over 40 years later, and that phrase stays with me. This one idea–a sick little metaphor– transformed my way of playing. No, I didn’t suddenly become a powerful jazz piano player; I already told you, I was never very good (emphasis on the never part), but I grew in that moment in a huge way. I couldn’t ignore the music in front of me, but it was a guide, a territory, for me to work within.

Little turds from birds. Yeah. My hands would produce the notes, sure. But the music came most from the spaces between them, in the unpredictability of where my hands would fall next and what form the chords would take. 

As a musician, I began to create and live in uncertainty. For my listeners, they too could never predict exactly where the music would take them. It was fresh. It was . . . music now, not the Muzak they used to play through shopping mall speakers.

So, too, with literature. With reading. There’s very little entertaining or artful about a story that we can predict and know completely; it’s in those points of frustration, those spaces where we simply do not know, that the real power of literature happens.

Theme

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

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I have a confession: There’s a lot I don’t know about what I read; and I’m cool with it.

Fear and Uncertainty and Fuzzy Dice

We’re in a weird space here. More and more, I see book writers and movie makers seek to answer every question a fan ever has. We want “Explainers,” answers to why Han Solo has fuzzy dice hanging from the Millennium Falcon, what the spinning top means in Inception, or why Hogwarts had no functioning bathrooms (and I’ll let you Duck Duck Go that last one to find a disturbing answer). In books, students have of course been finding “answers” to the meanings of symbols and conflicts and themes forever. I could name dozens of teachers who owned Monarch Notes and Cliff Notes, as well, to “check their own answers” before teaching the book.. 

You shouldn’t need me to tell you something is amiss here. We have a demand to know. I mean, to have the absolute facts of story reveal themselves. Because, if we aren’t very good readers, we can’t find the vibe of what we’re reading, we’re ready to just have it explained. You know, the TLDR of it, or better, perhaps, THDR: Too Hard Didn’t Read.

To me, the sad part of all of it is that, by and large, having these answers provides no real satisfaction at all. Either we get some boring plot-level answer (Han Solo got his dice when he was a kid, then they were hung in the starship by Chewbacca as a joke. Okay. But at least I can now buy the dice as Collectibles from Walmart for $19.99, those words combining in their own nest of contradictions.) Or we find that the green light in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a symbol for his enduring love of Daisy. Excellent, then! Slap that on the back of your flashcards so you’re ready for the test–do kids still use flashcards? Probably not. But anyway, that method of studying has worked for students–and teachers, too, of course–must find a way to measure what they’re learned!–for years. Until one kid’s flashcard says “Undying love” and another one’s reads “American Dream” and another one’s reads “money” and “envy” and “hope” and “despair” and “distance” and “orgiastic future.” 

Well, that’s just confusing. We demand to know: which one is it? Because obviously, one is correct. Some decent number of us listening to me talk are bound to say, “Well, all of them!” Terrific! But wait, so now what? When we attach all of those words to a dock, do the meanings change? When we attach them to Daisy whose dock it is, what happens? When we recall Gatsby’s ending, what then?  . . . And now we have the spaces between the notes. And not many readers want to spend time here overlong. More’s the pity.

There are a bunch of names in literature for these moments of uncertainty, for what is operating in these non-textual spaces between the words or between the meanings of the words which we find: Uncertainty, ambiguity, slippage, undecidability, tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More, subtext, multiplicity, polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, contradiction, deviation, disruption, cognitive dissonance, aporia. Now each of these terms also has different meanings, but we’re speaking in broad ways for the moment. They each describe this uncertain moment of “spaces” between words, between notes, of a kind of unknowable unpredictability. 

Recently I was reading a text by Sophus Helle who described it as “the murky space between the subjective and the objective, never fully one nor the other.” He was specifically referring to the undecidability in deciphering the meanings of Sumerian texts, but he meant it in a more general way, as well. Uncertainty in literature is a base-level quality of it; what it does is make literature worthwhile across time, with different audiences, in different spaces. Within a single reader with each new reading. It’s why we keep going back to that statue I talked about in the last Marvell episode; why we return over and over to gaze upon it and wonder, to read the poem, to hear a new rendering of that jazz tune. What will it be for me this time?

At its best, this uncertainty is sustained, prolonged, and it is productive, healthy. There are all kinds of other uncertainties which don’t do this, of course. I mean, I can be uncertain whether that fence over there is electrified and then grab it to check (neither sustaining the uncertainty nor producing a healthy outcome). No, at its best, the uncertainty itself fosters the healthy outcome, not its final resolution of readers fricasseed like a cheap chicken dinner.

Books and Literature and Rubik’s Cubes

Now, I’d hate to get myself into the classical (and somewhat boring) debate between what makes one book better than another, what makes some books great and others drivel, what it is about texts that are literary vs those which are pulp or beach reads. But what the hell, I’m going to offer a couple of ideas, anyway.

I’ve already said that these “spaces between,” these places of uncertainty that remain unresolved, can be the real power of art, can be the living vitality of it. In music, it was the spaces in between those “little turds from birds.” In literature, these spaces are often in the polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More of many contradictory meanings, in symbols, in narrative distances, in aligning the ideas to attempt a coherent total meaning. We struggle because genuine art, at least as good as humans, is layered, contradictory, complex. 

For an opening gambit, let me suggest that “books”–which I leave as merely books, stories told between two covers, offer adventure-level escapes, plot twists, and resolutions and denouements which tie everything up at the end. The detective solves it. The bad guy loses (or gets a sequel). But we are left with no serious questions to wrestle with. (Again, I am not treating fuzzy dice and castle toilets as serious questions.) We close the book at the end with a satisfied sigh for having been on the adventure; then we walk away to do something else. In my own classroom, I compared such reads to roller coaster rides. We might even ride the thing several times, but after that first one, we know exactly what to expect. Unless we’re in the movie Final Destination 3 or something and the roller coaster flies apart, there will be no more that the story can reveal to us. No more surprises. 

This last bit is important. I’ve heard all kinds of students, adults, and even aspiring writers talk about poetry or stories as “puzzles to solve.” This is nonsense, and it’s actually the exact wrong attitude to adopt about reading for meaning. Good poetry is not a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s Cube (™); the writer is not burying secret codes to decipher; this isn’t a Road Rally and we’re not looking for the “missing piece” to finish the jigsaw. So far as I know, most all writers–good or bad–simply want their meanings understood; that’s why they write. Why would I go to all the trouble to write a book in order to hide my meaning? Instead, those meanings may be large, complex, open-ended, contending, layered in contradiction, but they are there to be found, to be read. This “literature is a puzzle” metaphor teaches us the same thing as the multiple choice quiz: that there are answers, solutions, doors to close. Something ended.

The roller coaster comes to an end. The jigsaw puzzle is completed, usually by me who secretly kept the last puzzle piece in his pocket while my mother did the rest of it. The Rubik’s Cube reveals its secret and so the only new thing to do is see how fast you can do it. The video game loses its pleasure of the new and becomes an exercise in grinding for hours on end (complete with pee bottles). The piano player chunks out the chords in blocks of sound. The book cover is closed. The entertainment is over.

Not so literature which carries uncertainty. It echoes a bit longer, speaks differently to use sometime later, yields new questions or even anxieties about its meaning. 

I mentioned William Blake’s “The Tyger” a few episodes ago, how I thought I knew the work, then found more. This is not quite the same thing. This is not about “learning something new about how literature works” to find the poem appealing. What I did there was simply acquire more tools to understand him. 

Sophus Helle, that guy who talked about “the space between the objective and subjective,” between the single provable answer and the any answer will do, suggests that our discussions of literature are “reductions of the irreducible.” We are compelled to give an interpretation where no single statement of that meaning are possible. In literature, unlike mere books, the work itself defies answerability. I thought I followed Blake’s “The Tyger” years ago when I didn’t really understand Blake. NOW, I walk away from “The Tyger” wondering about the “reducibility” of my own questions in the face of the cosmic. Ironically, what Blake demands of us is exactly what I ask of reading: that we be singularly suspect of our own interpretations, the foundations for our questions. 

The questions we talked about last week were the same kind of thing. I’m carrying several questions for which there is no definitive answer for Marvell’s poem, and I’m highly suspicious that no final answer will be forthcoming, no matter how hard I search. This sounds kind of defeatist, when put that way, but I would argue the opposite: I plan to dig at those questions fairly hard–I think they’re worth the time–but it is the act of digging, not the filling of the hole, which I’m after. Let me try to explain.

Healthy and Sustained Uncertainty and Ralph Ellison

Let’s remember, going forward, the electric fence as a first example. Some answers we don’t need to test. But reading isn’t an electric fence. And it isn’t a Rubik’s Cube (™).  Why don’t I want an answer to Gatsby’s green light, to Marvell’s sexism and closeness to his speaker, to Blake and his questioning of the cosmic? 

The first reason is clear from our fence metaphor: the answer isn’t healthy. At its best, an “objective” answer which doesn’t exist in the first place makes us believe an objective answer does exist. More, the answer will be–must be–a simplificationHere, Waywords most often uses this term as a form of false ... More for what this nuanced and contradictory open space for meanings asks. How can Gatsby’s light be both love and despair and hope? How is Marvell both sexist and not-sexist as he connects with and distances himself from his speaker? Is Marvell arguing for or against a Christian ethic? How is the Tyger speaker both matured and also immature in his challenge to God? No flashcard is going to hold those answers. Thinking it does might give a lollipop to our childish impatience for answers, but it doesn’t make for complex thinking.

Engaging a literary text, reading it, means engaging the complexities, the spaces, the writer left for us. Those are part of the meaning. Engaging the text engages us. It also keeps those spaces open to us today and the next time we visit it. Unfillable as we dig, and new when we bring more and different experiences to them. Marvell is a different poet for me when I’m 15 and when I’m 35, or 65. The text hasn’t changed; but what I bring into those open spaces has. And it keeps us human. Any robot can spit out a flashcard answer (which is why we are so frightened of technology in schools which too easily challenges teacher content knowledge); but humans alone can understand the complexity of what it means to be human, and we demonstrate that through our questioning, not flashcards. Right now, there is no technology out there–and I am including all manner AI–can touch the areas of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and figurative language, can operate in the spaces between words where no certain data exists.

Now, in a few minutes I’m going to offer some stuff that will sound even more philosophical, but first, let’s buckle down on all this a bit and test it out. Because I’m afraid I’m already making all this seem too large and too complicated for its own good.

Finding spaces for uncertainty is not difficult. Here’s a single paragraph from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. This is a book I’ve taught every year of my career where I could make it fit. It’s just that good. A lot of that interpretative vertigo we talked about last time there as Ellison wrestles with race, identity, and the role of history. Early on in the first part, Ellison’s black narrator says:

One night, I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name.  I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize.  He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.

It’s a key moment of violence early in the novel, a seemingly outrageous escalation over a simple name-calling. But let’s check that again. First, what do we know about the man who insulted him. The description again: “a tall blond man” who “looked insolently out of his blue eyes.” Yes, of course. He’s a white guy. So here the question gets more interesting: Why doesn’t Ellison simply write, “One night I accidentally bumped into a white man”? No, the answer is not that he could have done either and the meaning doesn’t change. The meaning is different. What are the qualities of this description? Blond and blue-eyed? Why not dark-haired and brown-eyed? Why does Ellison want us to think Aryan instead of just white? So, Ellison offers us a racially-charged subtext by giving us the quintessential Aryan bumping into his black narrator. Ellison didn’t name him “simply” as white. Now, can we guess what the “insulting name” was? I’ll bet we can. 

Excellent. So how do we “know” all of this? We don’t, not for certain, not an objective fact. But I’m suspicious that most all of us got to that reading fairly quickly. It’s not much of a puzzle; not too difficult, but not a certainty. Somewhere in between the objective and subjective. It’s the meaning which exists between the words. 

Ah, but this meaning exists not exactly between the words alone, does it? It also exists between these words (blond and blue-eyed) and we readers. We have to know enough European history to make that connection, the white supremacist iconography that exists, too, in the United States. Ellison is counting on us knowing and using our history. Oddly, he will write just a few short pages later: “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.”  This boomerang of history metaphor is a bit more difficult, but his steel helmet idea suggests that history comes full circle and hits us in the head. There’s little pleasant about it, this shared history that he and we understand together. And he’ll tell us soon enough that who he is and history are intimately bound up. Yes, blacks in America are caught up in a history that partly defines them; but so too are whites; so too are all of us. What do we do with that?

Hmm. This last question is a deeper one, isn’t it? Ellison will spin it out along with dozens of others across the next five or six hundred pages. And he’s an expert at leaving us all in places of uncertainty, faced with the daunting task of wrestling with our own histories and our accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to them.

To do otherwise, to dismiss these questions or answer them glibly or thoughtlessly, to suggest that “race does not exist” or that “it doesn’t matter anymore” is to grab the electric fence. Because history does not stop, nor do our readings of it. Our history does not stop, nor does our growth as people. We can visit the spaces in Ellison’s text and re-discover and discover something new again and again. That is why he didn’t write “I bumped into a white man.”

Our engagement with history, with race, with human relationships, with understanding ourselves thickly, means never closing the door on such questions. It means a sustained and healthy uncertainty, an openness to returning to the questions, over and over.

Crisis and Volatility and the Role of Literature

I’ve already mentioned a few reasons why being in uncertainty is one of the best things for all of us. It engages us as readers, it allows us to return time and time again for new meaning, and it promotes our humanness. It also, as a literary strategy, gives writers and artists the room to offer dynamic and complex meaning, to offer art.

So to another reading experience of my own. I read Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope back before he was elected. I wanted to get a more thorough idea of his beliefs and thinking, and I have to say, my first thought on reading it was that I was mesmerized. His values and his words compelled. He’s a fine writer, and he wrote so provocatively to many of my own ideals. I found myself nodding yes, over and over; that is, until I checked my own behavior. 

I recognized that as much as what he wrote seemed written to what I understood, he was also writing a book targeted, marketed to that purpose, one designed to match his own rise to power. And suddenly I was in that place of uncertainty. Did I support him because the book met my need, was I supporting his ideas because he seemed an enormous turn away from a prolonged war on terror which had decimated the country of Iraq, a war I had resisted? Or should I grow suspicious that what he represented was not exactly what he was? Just because it was my kind of propaganda didn’t mean it wasn’t a kind of propaganda. 

Notice, of course, that while my story begins in a book, I am suddenly broadcasting my uncertainty to something larger, something politically, even culturally significant, and something bound up in our national future. If I voted in the Democratic primary, I could choose between Obama and Hillary Clinton, a choice I won’t detail here. But then it would be between Obama and McCain for the Republicans. What I knew is that, despite anything Obama said or his record demonstrated, I was resistant to being mesmerized and I knew he was talented at it; certainly he had created a similar response for many.

After his election, my uncertainty continued, and I follow politics fairly closely. I am convinced now that this undecidability–one I created for myself, not one Obama desired–gave me the space I needed to become more critical of his policies than I might otherwise have been. When he quietly increased the use of drone warfare in his first term, for instance, I was surprised at the shrugs of so many of his supporters. Obama deployed nearly 10x as many drone attacks in the Middle East as Bush had done across two terms. Yes, I might have approved of Policy A & B over here, but what about policies C & D over there? I could not be either a single-position supporter of his nor a single-position critic. The reality–of course, its politics–is far more complex, far from transparent and objectively measurable, is human motives in complicated systems. How dare I be an unquestioning critic or an unquestioning supporter?

The thing is, from my vote in 2008 to my activism afterwards, I was uncertain of my (and our) future. I was highly sensitized to it, and it was a sustained engagement in that undecidability. 

So much of what we are anxious for–anxious about– is in this kind of uncertainty, a volatile and dangerous space where our very futures cannot be predicted. Choose your dates from where that real anxiety begins: 2016, 2001, 1993, 1981, 1972, 1967. It doesn’t matter when. When we begin to sense that the world (or our local community, or our business, or our family) is not as predictable as it once was, the stakes go up. And the key point: How we used to think about and solve problems no longer works as well. The rules have shifted; and we keep asking about “What about these old rules?” and find that few seem to care about those old rules. It’s an epistemic shift. It’s a change in the way we “know” things, in how we make meaning, in how we engage it. 

The topic of the interpretation could be anything. We can talk about climate change, or race politics, or the rights of the marginalized, or what democracy looks like, or our retirement plans, or where we will live, or to whom we bestow our loyalties, or how we are able to care for ourselves, or who we love. The possibilities and variables seem too many; our old strategies of working to meet that world fail us. The future is volatile and we are more than merely uncertain; we are in crisis. And most of us humans do not meet crisis in the healthiest of ways. 

I want to suggest that it is at this very moment where language, where writing and meaning-making, are most critical for us. 

The old models of meaning-making no longer work. We need new ones. We must use language to build them. We understand our world–we make meaning–from the language we use. We can find stability for ourselves and even create a new epistemic space–a new space for making meaning–in that process. There are dozens of ways to do this: writing down our experiences, communicating our processes, building new stories. 

Building new stories. Here, we can say that literature–especially literature where literary spaces offer openings for us–can be starting environments for that work. What have writers ever done but build us ways to understanding? Reveal to us the complexities that we must meet? Readers, teachers, where better to practice our comfort level with uncertainty than with literature? Yes, yes, literature provides us needed escape and comfort; books do, too. But literature, beyond the mere book, opens us up to possibilities, to use and experiment, to testing ourselves in discovering new meaning in different ways. Risk free. What better method to preparing for a volatile future out there, to meeting crisis, than in training our minds to engage it meaningfully? So many of our flashcard readers from school are ill-equipped for any world of real change, meeting one or building one.

You see? I told you I’d get more philosophical before we were done today. How’d I do? What I’ve suggested is that reading with uncertainty (whether it’s a book or something bigger–or smaller–in the world) is a way of meeting disruption and of causing our own; it is a means for growing our minds to deviate, to explore, to uncover. If we’re clumsy or quick with our meaning-making, with our literary interpretation, we wind up with resolution, closure and certainty, Sparknotes and AI answers, the book closed. 

Wondering and Noticing and Talking

And we’ve come to a crossroads in what this podcast is about, in a way, I guess. Yes, we must discuss literature, meaning-making, talk about strategies and practices, writing and story-building. But wrapped up in that, quite intimately from my view, is a kind of ethics, a “best practice” that places uncertainty near the top of the pile of accomplishments. I read to a point of uncertainty, to a state of aporia, a term we will discuss in the future.

Our uncertainties can come from many directions, and we will welcome them when they do, find the doors which refuse to close even after careful examination, carry the questions which remain with us. We may find uncertainty between the author and the speaker or narrator, between the text and the reader, between the author and reader, in any combination. We find it through an author’s word choice, detail or omission, imagery, tone, or even syntax–the building of sentence.

And you may rightly ask after all this, how? How do I find it? What do I do? To answer, first, I will direct you back to our discussion of Andrew Marvell where I demonstrated an approach across four episodes. Now that we’ve done that, I’ll start laying out some more strategies about how we get there. 

And I’ll give you one strategy right now that should please everyone. The first step in reading critically, in making meaning, is to notice. Notice what you find in your reading, where you are, what the words say and do, how they make you feel, what stands out. Trust what you notice to be important. If you noticed it, it almost certainly is important, whether or not you recognize why right away. Notice, and trust what you notice to be important.

That’s where we start. With that as a strategy, with recognizing that we are carrying questions from our experience with Marvell, and with a purpose set to not always be comfortable but to be looking towards uncertainty, we are well on our way. 

Where are we going? We nomads have a lot of ground to cover, more than even I can see right now (and I’ve already scouted ahead several months!).  But our next stop: Go talk to somebody! 

Have a difficult conversation. Tell them about what you’ve been reading. Ask them some of the questions you’re carrying–it will certainly make a more memorable conversation than Star Wars vs Star Trek, Marvell vs. DC, or whatever else we are being fed to purchase and posture over. And tell them about this podcast, while you’re at it. If you’re listening and you think we’re at the start of something interesting–I do!–let them know. Send them the link to this episode. 

Go talk to someone; and we’ll compare notes next time. But let’s turn quickly to our Mailbag!

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Mailbag: Too Much?

Phil from Novi, Michigan, dropped this in our Mailbag form (there’s a link in the Show Notes for you to use, too):

Question:  I’m enjoying the podcast, and it’s not anything like other book talks I’ve been a part of, but a lot of this is too far for most readers or my students. 

First, thank you, Phil, for the compliment. And I acknowledge that you didn’t really ask a question, but I want to respond to your thought that I’m too out there or too advanced or too far, especially for students, however you might have meant that!  

You’re right that I’m not holding back much. I’m not scaffolding my podcast episodes as a teacher might, starting with the basics and moving slowly up. And I’ve got a lot of different terms and ideas I try to pack into each listen, something I would never do in a single class session.

But I also don’t want to underestimate anyone, either. While I do hope that the podcast will be helpful to students and teachers and I refer to schools and my own classroom experience frequently enough, I am most interested in growing readers. I’m not thinking of the podcast as a “building up” so much as a “wandering out.” And one thing I learned early on about my students, from Grade 9 or so up, that most were unaccustomed to talking about literature in these ways, but they were not unready. I’d read and frame things differently, perhaps, but the level of ask –the space where we spent our time sorting and questioning and challenging each other–was pretty much here, the spaces where literature is operating as literature.

Yes, we’d talk carefully about metaphor and diction and such, too, but those were always in service to these larger questions, the themes and questions and idea-making and even literary theory, that built for us avenues to explore, to make personal, to keep with us.  

But your thoughts give me more to think about, and I’ll make a promise. That along this journey that we’re making between Marvell and our next deep-dive text, by the time we get there, everyone listening now will be comfortable with our level of talk. And thank you for creating that promise from me for everyone; it gives me a goal to hold myself accountable to.

And don’t forget that, for Andrew Marvell and for texts from the previous podcasts I made in this feed, there are free resources on the Waywords website, some of them perfect for classroom teachers of these texts. 

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Close and Theme

So now, I’ll leave you all a literary answer to that question, where are we going now?

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
 “I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if only you walk long enough.” 
                                                                   –Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

Thank you for joining me! Some hard conversations next time, but for now, go with uncertainty as your guide, and read something!

 

Bibliography

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Random House, 1952.

“Embracing An Uncertain Future through Literature.” Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, 6 May 2021, https://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/news-entries/2021/5/5/embracing-an-uncertain-future-through-literaturenbsp.

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New ed, Pimlico, 2004.

Encheduanna, and Sophus Helle. Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author. Yale University Press, 2023.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1925.

Kukkonen, Karin. “Literature as Uncertainty Practice: An Anomaly at the End of Literature.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift Für Literaturwissenschaft Und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 97, no. 4, Dec. 2023, pp. 1143–52. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-023-00219-4.

All Music by Randon Myles*, except:

Parker, Charlie. “K. C. Blues,” Boss Bird, Proper Records, 1951. Steve Chisnell wrecking it on Piano, Northville, MI. 1980.

Count Basie. “My Baby Upsets Me,” Verve Records, 1956.

Armstrong, Louis. “(What Did I Do To Be So) “Black and Blue,” Satch Plays Fats, Colombia, 1955.

Disney, Walt. Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney Studios, 1951.

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*Randon Myles : Composer, Multi-Instrumentalist. 2021, https://randonmyles.com/