Dorian Gray and Difficult Conversations

Transcript: 5.08  Dorian Gray and Difficult Conversations

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Key Terms:

• ethical attentiveness
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5.08 Dorian Gray and Difficult Conversations

 

Disturbing the Olive Garden

Okay, I confess that the Waywords Instagram follows a few accounts which are not so “serious” when it comes to digging into books and poems. One that I will linger over longer than I should is the account called “Where I Would Like to Read.” Now, I am not at all jealous that they have like 1000x as many followers as Waywords does. Nope. Not jealous. Not a bit. 

But talk about an account with a vibe: basically all pictures of beautiful spaces where reading can happen: antique libraries, home studies and nooks, seaside windows, and nearly every one with an inviting chair that is–98% of the time–empty, ready for me to go and sit down. Cool.

A seclusive step into these private and even intimate spaces, me and the book. 

And that’s how we picture it, isn’t it? Reading as a private retreat, a step away from the world and its noise and nonsense. Because reading is a solitary act, a quiet, individual space for thinking what we wish to think. And it’s this very solitude, perhaps, which contributes to reading’s growing social reputation: that it is irrelevant to what the rest of the world is doing. Reading is for introverts and losers, nerds afraid to engage the world, the people who will major in liberal arts and become failed writers, baristas in coffee houses or even, because there are no other choices, teachers encouraging more people to follow their lead. (Now let me set the mirror down for a bit to talk more earnestly.)

I’m not here to disparage books or readers or the miracle of the act of reading, obviously. But I have always been concerned about what happens to us “after” that miracle, how little is often done in any significant way. I’m the first–well, maybe the third or fourth–to support the idea that reading itself as a transformative venture for readers is sufficient, that how we change as people from the act of reading is both worthy and socially impactful. As readers move through the world, they cannot help but share this informed self that they’ve become, much to the boredom and irritation of most neighbors and co-workers. 

But today I want to dig into something more concrete, that school-level accusation that reading has no purpose because “we never do anything with it.” There’s a lot of reasons for this, one of the largest being that most school reading across all disciplines is developmental skills-based work rather than idea-making. All of the reading guides for 100 years have told us so: students must first have literal and comprehension-levels of understanding before they can be allowed to think critically or creatively about their reading. And while this is pedagogically sound, it often comes paired with the side effect of turning many students off to reading forever because they never get beyond Level 2. And, because the higher levels must often be measured objectively in test-making, the critical and creative part of the critical and creative levels of thinking is neutered. Those students who claim that they do nothing with reading? They’re often right.

The scariest part of reading for master readers (this is of course all of you listening who can comprehend most sentences when you read or hear them)–the scariest part of reading is going out into the world with that experience and processing the ideas directly with others. I’m not talking about the breathless excitement of boring people with the endless plot summaries of the latest Buffy faniverse or Star Trek novel. [“And then, Sulu’s son? He took off his red ensign shirt and disguised himself as a Borg in order to access the phase adapters for the ionic stream which were holding the temporal portal open.”] I’m thinking about our last two episodes where we were carrying these harder questions, the ones gleaned from Marvell.

Not a discussion of what Marvell’s poem does, exactly, but what we should do about our own mortality, or the relationship between rhetoric and Reason, or how much accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More I have as a writer, even what ethics I must adopt as a reader. Those are thicker, stickier, more awkward questions for casual or sometimes even classroom conversation. I mean, I can hardly be expected to crash an Olive Garden restaurant gathering and ask randomly, “Do you think our appetite for breadsticks is a kind of parallel to the bestial urge to sexual lust, as Andrew Marvell understands it?” I might chew a breadstick for a contemplative moment and then follow this with, “I mean, Marvell’s speaker is a cad, but his wanton desire to consume, to bite and ‘tear our breadsticks with rough strife’” is the only thing animals can do to fool ourselves that we won’t die soon, right?”

I’m not saying the restaurant will throw you out (it is only Olive Garden, after all), but I doubt your table will invite you back. Even so.  Even so . . . 

If the questions we carry away from a work of literature are important to us, why aren’t we talking about them more, enlisting others to help us process, and provoking them to think more richly still? I mean, something cooler than “Marvell’s love poem celebrates beauty and youth,” – which, by the way, is currently the top Google result for the poem from the site LitCharts. Nice job, guys.

But all this, all this to ask, if literature is one of the highest achievements of civilization, one of the greatest incarnations of the thinking of humankind, // why aren’t we talking about it?

Theme

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

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m here to talk about talking about.  

Lost Roads and Madness

So there’s conversations and then there’s conversations, am I right? We can make small talk and social talk about our reading in all kinds of spaces.

• “What are you reading?” “This book of metaphysical poetry.” “Oh, cool.” 
• [gushing] “Hey, guys, I don’t know about you, but this poetry book made me cry, like, seven times. It is so deep! Five stars!”
• “The binding is gorgeous. It will look terrific here on this second shelf.” 
• “Goodreads just gave me a digital badge for reaching my reading goal! Post to Insta…”
• Well, what did everyone think of the book? “I liked it.” “Yeah, I liked it too.” “Some of the poems were just okay, and others were really good.” “Yeah.” “Are those pics of your new grandkid?”

To be honest, we don’t leave a lot of spaces in culture for substantive discussion. Books receive as much or more attention in our virtue signaling and status-building than for their ideas. 

And I know, it’s not like we all haven’t looked for places to talk about our reading! What else are you listening to me for right now but to get a kind of passive “fix” for the book talk hunger? 

Which, by the way, you could make a trifle less passive of a fix by dropping a question  in our Literary Nomads mailbag. It’ll be fun! And very brave of you! You’ll be proud of yourself for having done so. You’ll even hear your name on the podcast, if you want, and then I’ll talk back to your question! And heck, trust me when I say that doing that is going to be a significantly smaller challenge than what the rest of this episode is going to propose, so build yourself up, get your hottest question ready, and find the link in the Show Notes!)

Yes, we’ve all looked for places to share and discuss our thinking about reading, and most all we’ve found are ill-fitted substitutes for that desire. In my classroom, I found myself building students’ chops up for this kind of talk all the time, and engaging with them was a pseudo-fulfillment of my own selfish need, I admit. We could wrestle with Charlie Gordon’s intelligence, Invisible Man’s boxing ring speech, Elaine’s torturous detailing of Toronto memory, Cyrano’s plume, Noboro Wataya’s glasses, Okonkwo’s act of sacrifice, Ethan Frome’s sled ride, Victor Frankenstein’s self-absorption and denials, O’Brien’s politics. 

I loved it. But I admit it remained a pseudo-fulfillment, as I frequently came round to the same texts year after year, and we could not spend the time where I would have liked. But I remember one of our student Zoom call farewells going into the first summer of Covid, all of us gathered on camera for the last class and they heading off to wherever after high school. One of my students was hugely upset, crying during our time together, and she said, “I don’t want to have these talks end!” Hmm.

No, we don’t want them to end. But as Bobby Frost says, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.” The paths we choose and the rest of the world’s trivial and necessary demands make the return unlikely.

And so it is on us. All of it. It is on us, we who are listening here and still reading and thinking where and how we can: to make space for and engage in these harder, richer, more difficult conversations. This is our contribution. This is what we do, for ourselves and for everyone who might wonder about that other road in the yellow wood. 

We read. And we talk about what we’ve read. We’re not crashing any Olive Gardens, but looking to make real spaces for talk, a kind of Sartrean sidewalk cafe for the 21st century. 

I’ll talk more about the need to do so a bit later, but I imagine right now that you have one of two big questions in your head: First. “Where?” And the second, “How? What do I say? Let’s deal with the second question first. What do I mean about what to talk about? 

The most important answer I can give to this is to engage in the questions that you find important, the ones you are carrying after reading one or more poems or stories, the ones which have gathered in you and frustrated you, provoked you, paralyzed you, affected you. This is important, because anything else is the dullest of classroom exercises. If you don’t care about Marvell’s speaker’s rhetorical failure, then leave it alone. But if you’re worried about the woman mistress’s silence in the poem, go there. Who knows what questions might come from that: 

• Can men even write women authentically? 
• Do men expect success in their pickup artistry or are they as interested in just hearing themselves put clever words together?
• How do we interpret the silence of a woman in the face of male narratives? 
• What strategies do women use to negotiate power with men, and which are the most effective?

Again, these questions won’t necessarily be about Marvell directly but about the poem’s significance for you. For us, this is good, because more people are likely to have thoughts on those questions than have read and considered Marvell at length, anyway.

Not only that, but begin by trusting that humans do wonder about the big questions. They just don’t believe they have the time to consider them, or that doing so won’t embarrass someone somehow, or that they can be “solved” ( a resistance which is sometimes worded as philosophical “navel gazing”–if I can’t take it anywhere, what use is it?)–but finding solutions, as we discussed recently, isn’t a goal, anyway. 

Educator Nel Noddings, in her book Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach, suggests that the biggest and most important questions humans have are exactly the ones we need to address as often as possible, to demonstrate the complexity of the questions, but also that having the discussions themselves is not impossible. But listen to the subjects she offers as important for students and consequently important in our adult lives:

• Learning itself: what can be learned and how do we do it? Are we really done with learning after school? I’m still getting started.
• War & Patriotism
• House/Home and how we value and protect those spaces
• Others, how we engage those different from ourselves
• Parenting, practices and lessons parents must pass on
• Animals / Nature and our relationships with them
• Advertising and Propaganda
• Making a Living and how significant that is in contrast to other values
• Gender and its varied expression
• Sports and Media
• Religion

To these I might add:

• Science and Climate
• Science and Medicine
• Democracy and the role of the individual in civil society
• Love
• Freedom, Authority, and Obedience
• Equity and Equality
• Money and Class

It may or may not surprise you to know that I built my freshman curriculum around these topics, choosing groups of readings and experiences to help students ask questions and explore their surmises outside of class. (And for those of you out there who are teachers wondering how I got the freedom to build my own curriculum, I’ll only say now that everything has layers, even prescribed goals and objectives.)

My point is, there really isn’t any big question we can take from literature that won’t be of interest or importance to someone else, too, probably many someones. And we do everyone a solid by creating spaces for the asking. (And did I just say “do a solid”? Really? 2010 just called.)

And I ask, boldly I suppose, exactly why is it that such discussions in our society “just aren’t done?” They’re sensitive, can be triggering, get political too fast, become polemic, devolve into rhetoric and simple-minded responses, make people uncomfortable, worry us. Why get into all of this uncomfortable stuff–especially things that will almost certainly force me to ask difficult questions of myself and my behavior–when we can just talk about the latest Star Wars series? Or the price of eggs?  

Right. It’s not easy. If it was, the questions wouldn’t be worth asking. As we talked about last time, feeling uncertain makes people defensive, not open to exploring the uncertainty. But I also argued that this uncertainty, this exploring of questions we find difficult–and doing it through literature–can be a powerful training for going after more current and practical questions in our daily world. But I get it. It feels like madness to accost people with questions, and surprise! I’m not asking you to. Not exactly. To get into our possible approaches, let me pose a text for all of us, even our new listeners, to consider.

Dorian: The Seduction Fulfilled

Let’s take a moment or two to divert from this discussion, putting a pin in the How and Where of discussions, to give us all a common space for thinking about it. If you’ve been with me through the Andrew Marvell episodes, you know I’ve been turning over this carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More live-in-the-moment philosophy Marvell puts in the mouth of his speaker: You’re only young right now, so right now is the time to sleep with me. That’s basically his poem, I guess–what the hell did I spend almost three hours talking about, then? 

Here’s a new old passage from literature that–if you’ve read it before–you may not have remembered exactly as a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More parallel. But it is. The perspective is from an older gentleman who is arguing this same carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy before a younger protege. You may recognize it before I’m done:

He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.

It is, of course, the wanton talk of Lord Henry Wotton before Dorian Gray that provokes Dorian to make a dark bargain to preserve his perpetual youth. In essence, Dorian does stop time, at least for himself, and where Marvell’s speaker would have a night of pleasure to stop the sun, Dorian’s pleasures–his debaucheries–will carry on for almost 20 years. He succeeds, if this is the right word for it, at what Marvell’s speaker calls for.

Of course, there’s much more to the novel, but this segment of it is enough to carry us forward. Lord Henry dazzles young Dorian with imagery and paradox, the same sorts of craft in “To His Coy Mistress,” even making obscure references to a “wise Omar,” here Omar Khayyam who in his Rubaiyat also explores the purpose of life and our fleeting existence–definitely worth a visit, I suspect. He also mentions the dance of a Bachante and a guy named Silenus, both references to a priest and companion to Dionysis, the god of wine and revelry. In all, Henry offers Dorian the idea that sensuality, the love of touch and taste, of sexuality and even drug use, can be appreciated most only by the young who are most sensitive to it. Wotton understands even here that as witty and mesmerizing as he is, he was “brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible.” That such a philosophy cannot, as an absolute, survive much scrutiny. There are questions of civil order, of course, but also of personal accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More. With these erased, at least in argument here, and displaced to a painting which will transform Dorian’s image as he sates himself, why wouldn’t he carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More all over the place? So he does. 

And just an additional note, that if anyone thinks that Lord Henry is not arguing for outright perversion and debauchery, he soon afterwards gives Dorian something called the Yellow Book whose title we never hear. But it doesn’t matter much. While many suggest the book is actually Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours (basically, “Against Nature,” which confuses vice and virtue), yellow books in France were any number of texts of explicit, lascivious content that were being passed around with plain yellow paper covers to both disguise their subjects and for those who wanted them to identify what they were getting.

Anyway, where were we? Yes, now we have a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy in front of us again, this time attached to Victorian horror, a kind of moral tale which places Dorian as villain or victim to a philosophy of hedonism. I am going to call this hedonism, not epicureanism, because it seems to elevate heightened sensual pleasure above all else, whereas epicureanism’s goal was simple sensual pleasures and the absence of pain. What’s more, this is a story that many people know, either from the book or any number of bad film versions.

From it we have a wide range of questions, from our responsibility to others while we pursue pleasure (the moral question) to why pleasure appears only as sensuality and applies only to youth, or from accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More in our language (Lord Henry’s irresponsibility) to the source of our morality (where Dorian’s consequences seem removed to a painting and so give him freedom to sin). 

Let’s carry some of these questions with us and see how we could use them.

Some Discussion Strategies 

Let’s think first about our goals in any literary discussion or any discussion about hard questions. And I know there are some–especially in today’s political clime–who will disagree with me on some of this. I’m not speaking in absolutes here, but in general terms for 97.3% of situations, that we all likely share some primary goals for talking with others that we should keep in mind. They seem obvious, but if we think about how the world talks to itself, amnesia is a contagion.

1. The first is to maintain and grow relationships. The moment our talk becomes adversarial and personal, we have not only failed our goal, but made our place in the world worse off. One of the reasons I have my call for conversation is to spread the ideas of literature, because doing so makes us all better at thinking about where we are and what we do. Once the relationship is broken, all of that just got replaced by animosity. 
2. Another obvious one, avoid violence. This goes hand in hand with the first, very likely, but as a discussion strategy, we need to be careful that we do not inadvertently (or advertently) scoop our friends into categories and accusations which become personally antagonistic: “Hey, haha, you’re just like Dorian!” That won’t do at all, and it may result in a different kind of violence.
3. It should follow, then, that the folks you’re speaking to agree. So let’s make sure everyone agrees to the basics of civility. We always believe we do–truly, all of us–but making sure by getting that agreement out in the open? That’s good. As much as I am put off by much of Socrates’s style of argument, he does frequently remind everyone to agree that they are together in the search for truth, wherever it might lead, and offers them a chance to end the discussion if it’s uncomfortable.
4. Only then do we head to that fourth goal, engage the questions. Of course this is our goal, but we’re not likely to succeed without the first three.
5. And finally, listen and build upon what you hear. Since we are the ones initiating these discussions, we might want to “lead” the exploration. But to achieve all of the previous goals, especially the first few, we must see our role (especially early on) as listener. And then, once we’ve listened, our responses should use what was said and thoughtfully reflect and add to it. 
   1. But more than this, I want to use another of Nel Noddings’s terms, “ethical attentiveness.” This means the kind of listening and responding we are doing has as much to do with needs and feelings of others, how they are responding and to what, as it does with the ideas we are talking about.
   2. Many years ago in one of my classes, we were talking about young Dorian’s vices and the immorality attached to a monopolistic pleasure-seeking. I don’t know exactly what was said by who anymore, but after class one of my students approached me, nearly in tears. She felt we were talking about her through the entire class–and obtuse me had not noticed her troubled looks through the discussion. Fortunately, she told me–how many would ever be brave enough to do that?–which gave us the space to explore and process more carefully what questions she was having.

Avoiding these quiet and damaging moments is critical, and all of this is a lot to take on if we’re the ones asking for the space to talk. So here’s a few strategies to think about when doing it:

For many, the easiest strategy to making all of this go well is to focus on “I” statements: What I feel, what I see, and (my favorite) what I notice. I can point out what I saw or noticed in a text (if that’s what we’re talking about) and leave it at that. Or I can point out two different things I noticed and see how others put them together:

• “I noticed that Wotton seems to call himself ‘irresponsible’ even while he admires himself for his cleverness.”
• “I was thinking about the pleasure argument he’s making, but then read the image of ‘crawled in red foam over the vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides,’ and that seemed kind of gross.”

There’s very little at risk in statements like this. No one can point back and say, “You did not notice that!” And, if you are choosing carefully, you grab things you’ve noticed that end up opening the door to others feeling good about their own speculation on the ideas. More importantly, without the “I” statements, it can seem like our points are more authoritative declarations which close questions rather than open them.

So “I” statements and “notice” statements work well. Around listening, look for places to draw others out to say more. And that’s literally what you can say: “Can you say more about that?” asking so that you can better understand their point, but also making space for them to explore more. But we’ll be careful, too. Notice how different that question is than “Why would Henry use that imagery?” which might make someone feel put on-the-spot for an explanation. Go back to the “I” statement: “I wonder why he’d accuse himself like that.”  

As the discussion thickens, we can still stay with these strategies. If we want to add a theory or more provocative idea into the mix, keep with the I, and maybe even frame it so that you are not drawing a line of argument: “I haven’t thought about this idea before, but this makes me wonder if Lord Henry sees his own ideas as dangerous. Maybe he doesn’t fully believe them.”  Or, “This ‘crawling red foam’ stuff makes me wonder if all sensuality is desirable, whether it’s pleasure or pain.” 

All of these approaches, too, have a larger outcome: they keep the questions more open and exploratory than closed and concluded. As we’ve already talked about, closing down a question inevitably simplifies into a platitude that our author wanted to avoid and that can give all of us a false sense of security. If we shrug Dorian off and say, “Oh, well, I don’t have time for much pleasure, anyway,” we avoid confronting the dynamic challenge of balancing the sensual, our ideas of vice, and our care for others. 

Are you familiar with the story of Austin’s Butterfly? It’s a story widespread in the education community about giving feedback. A young student is asked to draw a butterfly, and rather than accept the closure of the assignment, that the first response is “good enough,” the teacher talks to Austin about working more still on that “next level” of insight. Finally, after six tries, the transformation is amazing. As readers, we already know this. Books and our thinking about them transform, especially when we don’t let the conversation drop. Transformational. 

And now seems a good time to pause and tell you that I’ve created an interesting resource for you: over 100 poems and short stories that make for great and even challenging discussion. Now, most of me believes that any literary work will accomplish what you want for talk, but I’ve been asked with some frequency what books offer the best ideas to talk about. I’m not offering that, because I have no idea what best is. What I can say about this list, though, is that it has a wide range of choices, from centuries ago to a whole bunch of things written in the past ten years, and all of them have links to find them online. You’ll find expected writers like Whitman and Yeats and Auden, but also new writers like Ada Limon, Natalie Diaz, and Tyehimba Jess. Short stories from Joyce, and Borges, Vonnegut and Marquez, but also Carmen Machado, N.K. Jemison, and Ken Liu. The spreadsheet link is available in the Show Notes. Just click and download. And let me know if you have any favorites I missed (probably about 12,000!).

Yes, But Where? 

Let’s get to the part, then, that everyone has been asking in their heads. Sure, yes, we can be careful as we talk about literature and its ideas, but Steve, you’re saying we should walk up to strangers in coffee shops or talk about hedonism while buying energy drinks at Wal-Mart. Well, yeah, in a way. I love the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More of that Wal-Mart scene, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, exactly.

Obviously, there are many places tailor-made for book talks, and I would certainly encourage every reader to find them for these talks: these could be book clubs, literary festivals, academic classes and webinars, even open mic nights and the like. These are all great places to find like-minded people for talk, and they serve important purposes, especially for ourselves and getting that personal fix. 

Even so, these are mostly spaces where book-minded folks meet book-minded folks. They stay in that bubble, that silo, and talk to each other. It’s probably good talk, but we’re not expanding the circle of inclusion for others who left that discussion road behind so many years ago. So let’s consider some other possibilities. 

One that I do is go fishing. I mean, wherever it seems possible or likely (even unlikely) I’ll drop a reference or allusion to some literature in a written or conversation space where I can. Nothing too obscure, nothing too highbrow, but something which will give my reader or listener a poke in the literary appendix. Maybe my next email will suggest the “Odyssey” we’re about to go on or how “April is the cruellest month” to schedule another inventory or project. In conversation, whether with colleagues or out and about, I might mention how a particular ad spurs me to practice my “doublethink,” or regarding the tech guy, ““Some are born to IT, some achieve IT, and some have IT thrust upon them.” 

It’s silly. But why do I do it?  A few reasons. One, I’m kind of a nerd and I like doing it to entertain myself and keep my wits as sharp as age allows. But the other reason is that I’m fishing. I’m looking for like-minded people who might have enough reading background to catch the references and therefore be more open to more talk. Those who don’t get what I’m doing will either ignore it, give me an indulgent smile (harmless enough), or at worst think I’m a book nerd (and they’d be right). But those who do–those who might offer a rejoinder–are good candidates for opening up that discussion. Maybe they say, “Yeah, but let’s hope our odyssey doesn’t take us 9 years.” or “Well, my April roots are feeling pretty dull right now” or “And 2+2=5” or “True, but with all that greatness, I’m still afraid of tech.” Maybe they won’t say anything half that clever in response, but just ask, “Hmm. What’s that from?” That’s what I mean by going fishing. 

Who knows what will develop there over time? With my IT guy, it was a love of Shakespeare comedies and the TV show Firefly. Did you know that had the science fiction series continued, they were going to do a Shakespeare episode? Neither did I.

But with new connections and new friendships made, we can start to build new spaces for talks. Cool. 

Today’s online searches and communities are easy places to find more people to talk to, of course. Platforms like reddit, Discord, and Goodreads all have communities where people are reading and talking about books. True, typing responses is often fairly limited compared to an exchange, and these spaces are already pre-packaged with folks eager to talk, much like physical book clubs, but with more trolls and solicitations.

So where else? Let’s think of some opportunities to look for or that you might be able to set up yourself that create opportunities for talk:

• Storytelling Circles - Here are thoughtful people brought in by story, by shared moments. These might emulate the Indian tribal communities in the Americas, the Victorian era parlor tales, or something like a sleepover or vacation cabin stay. 
• Poetry Slams – Nights where people gather to hear spoken word poets compete. What do you mean you’ve never been to one? Do you dare participate? 
• Author talks and book signings - Guess who goes to these? Are they also looking for spaces for larger talks?
• Public library reading programs and groups - If you have not checked your library, you may not realize that most of the people there like books.
• Book stores. True, some years ago, I found a book store whose customers seemed more interested in hookups than books, but this is not usually the case.
• Literature podcasts. Hey! That sounds familiar! Believe it or not, you’re currently listening to someone who likes reading. And conversation? An easy start is that Mailbag Question: who knows where it could lead? 

Can’t find any of these? You may have to get more creative and make an event with a select few or even open to the public. Try something less threatening, at first:

• Read to those that cannot read themselves: Reading to the elderly, or those that are hospitalized. Guess who wants to talk after?
• Buddy Reads. Maybe you can only convince one or two people to read a book with you. That makes for a series of less formal chats as you go, all good. And these could be online, as well.
• Neighborhood Book Exchanges. This could be set up through a party or just a walking door-to-door exchange of secret book titles (wrap them in yellow and see what happens). But 10-to-1, discussions follow.
• But if you’re doing that, have Book Swaps at work or through a church or other organization you’re already a part of. 
• I like the Little Free Library idea and I’m starting to build my own shortly. People gather around your little box and take and leave books as they like. LittleFreeLibrary.org for more info there.
• Try adding Book Talks into an activity you already do. One idea is a Book Discussion Walking Club, where next Thursday’s walking of the dogs will also discuss Pet Sematary.
• If you have the means, travel to a popular location for a book you’ve read. Other fans will surely be there eager to talk about the book. Of course, choose wisely: Going to the location of Midnight in Siberia may not have the effect you want. In that case, make it a group trip so others will join you for talk.

Once you’ve tried a few of these, it’s time to up your game, producing larger events that might draw strangers in, the ultimate in community-building around books and ideas:

• Readers’ Theater:  Set up RSVPs for the public to take on a dramatic role in a brief reading of a scripted book or play, staged seated or around a table; let the public listen.
• Silent Book Clubs: Set up a time and place where people can read together in silence; watch the relationships develop, anyway.
• Shared Reading in Parks or Cafes: Individuals or small groups reading together in a public space, creating a shared atmosphere, around a common title. Informal talks after.
• Read-Aloud Gatherings: Friends or family members taking turns reading a book aloud to each other.
• Read-a-thons/Read-ins: Events where participants read for a set period of time, often to raise funds for a cause. Some years back, we would stage an annual marathon reading of John Hersey’s book Hiroshima to raise money for peace projects. We’d read in a public space and audience would drop in and out as they wished. 
• Literary Pub Quizzes: Trivia nights focused on books and authors. Set one up at a restaurant or pub that already does trivia nights.
• Guest Speakers & Authors: Set up your own evening with a speaker staged at a library or book store. 
• Literary Salons: Quite. Gatherings focused on intellectual and literary discussions, often with readings and presentations. Work with the manager of some public space (a school, a pub, a library, whatever) to make it a routine “hangout” for those interested in books. It’s how all the elite artists did it in Europe.
• “Pop-Up” Book Talks: One time events posted on social media for all comers to arrive for a chat. Who knows if it will become something regular?
• “Read and Dine” Events: People read and come to the meal for the talk. Think of a menu inspired by the book. Set it up with a restaurant or in a private home. I met a woman last year whose current job is creating drinks that connect to different books.
• And, of course, just hosting your own informal get-togethers at home where people come to talk about a book. 

And there we go. That’s two dozen different ways to find or make spaces for discussion without accosting random strangers, still my personal favorite.

Do I Have To?

Do I have to do this? Of course not. 

We don’t have to, but let me take a moment to suggest that this too is a political choice. Avoiding politics is a political choice, to which we are accountable. If we don’t vote. If we do not speak in a democracy. If the option for dissent is offered in Robert’s Rules and we sit silent. The presumption is that our opportunity was offered to us, so silence is acquiescence, even agreement. So, too, our choices of what to read and what to discuss from that reading. 

This is about us as individuals, absolutely. You know better than I do how hungry we are for more time and meaning-making from our books. That’s a matter of selecting or combining activities to create the time; and fostering relationships for the talks. But it’s also about everyone else. What we all need, and what readers might do to make spaces. 

It’s about lengthy, healthy, engaging, exploring, dialogue with others. The goal of hard conversations around literature is not polemics, not aggrandizing, not grandstanding, but exploration of the questions and uncertain spaces revealed. Why would we? Why wouldn’t we, when so much of what we hear is the opposite. And the best many can come up with for stress management is timed retreats of naps and meditation before we wade back into the mud. 

From my experience, so many of the Gen Z’s and Gen Alphas are ready to engage the world and are doing it, especially if social media is any measure. What they do not do with the same conviction is make the spaces to slow down for the larger, thicker talks. Healthy conversations about our reading is both satisfying in its slow consideration and its engagement in the world. And what about the earlier generations, the Boomers, Xers, and Millennials? They’ve been ready for more talk; they just have a harder time finding it. 

Yes, we can choose to read alone and in silence. But this is a political choice, too. Nothing less than who we are and what we make the world into (or fail to) is at stake.  And that’s as hard a statement as I will make about it. 

Mailbag: How Long Do I Spend With a Poem?

This one comes from a teacher, a Mr. H, but I’m going to talk about it from a broader perspective, I think: How much time should I spend on a poem? 

My first answer, Mr. H, is cheeky, but I don’t mean it that way: How much time should you spend? All of the time. 

By this I mean something I’ve been talking around for the past several episodes. Literary works keep giving more each time we return to them. Yes, I spent over three hours with Andrew Marvell (quite a bit more when you add the episodes which surround it), and I still felt like I was not nearly done. So, for starters, let’s accept the idea that no time will be sufficient time to “cover” a good poem, and that returning to it later is important. That said, for the teachers here, how often have you ever returned to a poem you discussed near the front of the term to be read again near the end of the term? Too much to “cover”? Maybe we’re not thinking about it the right way. Have the students gained nothing over the past months to make them see that first poem again differently? Is it worth showing them this? I think yes. Maybe often.

So, really, though, how much time? This depends almost entirely on your objective. Are you reading just so you can see what an author is up to? Or are you reading the poem in order to absorb the poem in its entirety? Or are you reading it to get a grasp on French Symbolism of the 1870s? Or for its response to the challenges of industrialization? Or for its use of meter? Or are you reading it to learn about how a writer masters craft?

Our purpose is going to determine a lot about that answer, isn’t it? For teachers, our objectives. But I would wish–for whatever other reason we engage it–the poem is considered for its ideas. If all we’ve done is dissect its structure, we’ve probably missed that those structural elements work on the poem as a whole to reveal its meaning. If all we’ve done is see it for its general style regarding the French Symbolists, we may miss its particular utterance, which is the reason for our author’s writing of it. In other words, all of these specific questions for which we might legitimately read are in service to the larger meaning of the work. And this larger meaning is often the most lucrative space for us to gather our own questions in examination, leaving the work with some uncertainty and a goal to return. If instead we tidily identify Malarme’s rhyme scheme and close the book on him, I think we’ve made a mistake.

I quickly referenced Eliot’s “Wasteland” today, but I could hardly expect anyone to call it sufficient. But if I gave it the four-episode treatment of Marvell, I still wouldn’t have pulled it off. 

All this said, I would always err on more rather than less time, if the poem is delivering on its promise of thoughtful and compelling meaning for its audience. If it’s my classroom, though, I have to measure out the patience of my adolescent readers against the merits of the search. In the classroom, I have spent a half hour with Marvell in the past, and also three or four classes. Regardless, his thinking would always come back around again later. 

And how do we know if we’ve “gotten” the point of the poem? First, we won’t, of course, because uncertainty. But also, we know because we’ve made the best use of the tools we have in unpacking what’s there on the page. And that’s where we’re going next week, to look more at some nuts and bolts of literature, ways we can discover the meanings that are out there. 

Sometime this week, take your time with a poem, find some new means to open up talk, and of course, go read something. 

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.

 

Bibliography