Pam and Jess Walter discuss stuff at my house. Hopefully they're not talking about the weird smell.

Pam Houston visited EWU last year for a reading and a craft talk.  I got to do the introduction at the reading, have dinner with her, and then she came to a party at my house and we got to chat about literature, my cats, and kids. I was a big fan before that, though, which was why I jumped at the chance to host.  I first read Houston’s only work marketed as creative nonfiction, A Little Bit More About Me, a book of personal essays, and I took to her right away, as they say, because she has a voice that you just don’t forget.

Houston says her fiction and nonfiction alike is around eighty percent autobiographical, and being drawn to nonfiction and still sort of unsure about where the boundaries lie, for me personally, between fiction and nonfiction, I loved listening to her read some sections of her newest novel, Contents May Have Shifted, with the narrator named Pam, who is a writing instructor and world traveler, an animal lover and an athlete, as is Houston in for reals life.

The novel is structured in 12s.  Each section is titled with a flight number, and then followed by a dozen tiny travel essays.  Wow, has she traveled.  Tibet, Spain, Mexico, Scotland, Newfoundland, Iceland, France, New Zealand, Tunisia, Laos, Argentina, Turkey.  And that’s only a dozen of the places she writes about.  Houston doesn’t give us any concrete indicators of chronology, but if you read carefully you definitely see a narrative unfolding.  It’s not a new story, certainly (Sam Ligon was known to say there are only two stories anyway—was it sex and death, Sam?), but Houston chronicles relationships and her own vulnerability.  The relationships with men change and sometimes end, but her friends stay and accumulate, and the relationships with beloved animals also provide a subnarrative.  There is camaraderie and heartbreak, love and loss.

What sets Houston apart from a lot of other folks writing about these same things is, first of all, that her narrator doesn’t just rattle off flights and trips and terrific emotional struggles.  She lays them out carefully, reflecting on each one, sometimes drawing from an earlier story, reminding us of the movement.  And there is a great momentum in this novel, as the narrator flies around the globe looking for a reason to live and a reason to love herself.  During a few close calls in air travel, the narrator never comes off as frightened, but being left to contemplate herself seems to terrify her.  (If you think this novel’s a simple “Why can’t I find love” story, you’re way off.  Consider the original ideas for a title:  Suicide Note and 144 Good Reasons Not To Kill Yourself).  And there’s a soft but definite turn in the novel about two-thirds of the way through, in which Pam the character seems to begin a process of understanding, after the plane she is in is struck by lightning, which takes out an engine.

“Where on the continuum I fall, when this kind of thing happens—between Oh please not how that things are finally looking up and Well this sucks but it will sure solve a great many problems—has become my mental health measuring stick in this era of exponentially increased sky traffic, airline bankruptcy and accumulating mental fatigue.  This, I understand, is not at all the same as being suicidal.”

I think Rachel will forgive me.

Aside from the writer at the desk, which us NFers might talk about too much but which nevertheless is critical to creative nonfiction, I find inspiration in Houston’s writing because holy crap, does she care about her sentences.  After not reading her work for a year, I forgot how her writing echoes, how it hits you.

“He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines.  He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black.”

That’s a pretty good description of good writing, too, I think.  Cracking ourselves open and looking for the thing that shines.

Not even counting the depth of the narrator’s insights, though, I appreciate her sentences on a very individual level.  In grad school we talked some about weighting sentences.  What word do you want to hit?  How do you want the sentence to build, or to die down, or to peak in the middle?  That takes exquisite attention to every sentence, each and every word.  “Dawn breaks over camp, rose-colored and cool on the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, twenty miles downstream from the town of Mexican Hat.”  First of all, I love the Homer reference here.  Rosy-fingered dawn, anyone?  Second, this line is so rhythmic I stopped to scan it.  I’d hit “Dawn”, “rose,” “cool,”, “San Juan,” the first syllable of “Utah,” and “twenty,” and then hit “MEXican HAT” hard right at the end.  The last line of the book fades, leaving a soft impression:  “Eventually, on that long night over the parts of the globe I’ll never see, the sun rose over Myanmar, and in Rangoon, where the Yangon River meets the Adaman Sea, the turrets and domes of the temples lit up as soft and gold in the early light as a fairly tale.”

There are stories within stories within stories, the narrator always being reminded of something, which reminded me of the way David Sedaris writes.  Houston’s not without wit, either:  “Bruce says he hopes they turn the burger barn into an exotic dance club, and he’s barely said it before I realize the exact translation of those words if you put them in a woman’s mouth is It’s such a beautiful day.  I think I’ll put on my new leggings and do some stretches in the park.”

Parts of some of the sections seem parenthetical, but it’s those parts that pack the most punch of all.  Like this one, which had me unexpectedly sobbing near the end:  “I didn’t trust it at first, the way Madison and I fell for each other.  ‘You don’t even like kids,’ she likes to say now, flirtatious as hell.”

Houston doesn’t like to draw the line between fiction and nonfiction with a thick pen, and I’m right with her.  She didn’t want to pick teams, but she had to.  No matter what she’s labeled as, though, Houston has a lot to teach me about using metaphor, about structure, about playing Operation with sentences.  My verdict:  Read it.  Read it now.

Cross-posted at Alala Mamas.

Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book.  But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.

Today, I will take a walk, and I will observe the loose black dog, children choreographing a dance, the cardinal in the redwood blossoms, the fire truck driving in circles, the blond woman weeping on her porch. If the sky unfolds for me, and I begin to question the invisible forces controlling my life, I will not think about them in a tense, collegiate way. I will forgive them. I will forgive them because today is actually a startling, nice day, and I’ve picked up a renewed appreciation of the present while reading Ray Amorosi’s new book of poems, Gnawing on a Thin Man.

After twenty years of not publishing poems, Amorosi has been back in full force with his second book out in three years. As he tells it, he moved to a place of “marshes upon marshes,” and he couldn’t write about himself—he had to record what he saw. His poems are grounded in this observation the natural world, rich with startling imagery from Marshfield, Massachusetts, or from the distant past, perhaps Italy is there, perhaps Amherst or one of the other towns where Amorosi has taught, perhaps our eyes linger on a still life instead, and we move with the poem from the exterior to ekphrasis to a cracking, inward moment.

“They were all written here in Marshfield,” Amorosi said in an interview with Micah Flores at Gatehouse News Service. “I’m about a two-minute walk to some of the most beautiful areas you would want to see. [That beauty] drives you out of your soul.”

He presents his observations so that they reader may follow along on a journey that often leads to a surprising conclusion. In the tradition of many poets, Amorosi walks each evening with his dogs. When he returns, he simply asks, “Ray, what did you see today?”

The poem answers; we repeat the walk:

WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN TODAY RAY

Empty stables, grass high in the paddock.

Infirm wheeled into hospital.
Dog playing catch with himself.
A blond woman weeping leaning on a cane.

There was a young couple fishing for bass in a bend
at high tide on the North River.
She smiled at me. She smiled at no fish in the basket.

The usual hawks chased out.
Turkeys flew through pines and white pollen
fell over me sticking with a full heart.

So graves opened, the dumb sang, the crooked nose
of a deacon whose coffin slid off the cart
appeared at a roadside.

But none of these answers. Today
there are dancers inside of each eyelid.

The idea of the present occupies many of the poems. Today is fluid, humiliating, haunting, well-lived, jubilant, incongruous, and rejuvenating. It’s capable of shaking you back to your old self. Today blends with the afterlife, infuses itself in relationships between objects, people, angels, God. Today is, perhaps a spiritual center in the poems. In his last collection, In Praise, Ray writes God:

God,
It’s Ray.
Thank you for the storm

And later, in another poem, God responds:

Ray,
It’s God.
I’m disappointed in you

Again in Gnawing on a Thin Man, Amorosi writes intense, wise, memorable interactions with the Christian spirituality. He scrutinizes and doesn’t pussyfoot around tough questions and answers: “God is God even though he deserts everyone.” He juxtaposes earth and heaven, concrete and ethereal, the world as delivered and an inability to expect anything more filled with wonder than what we already have.

WHAT’S HEAVEN AGAIN

Pickerel sizzling.
Open palming an apple to a mare.

The still life by G.D. Hoffman over my right shoulder,
peonies, opera cape, carp, pears, a blue vase
on white linen.

The grey barn, red sliding door, my wife strolling
through horses in the afternoon my God
I’m blessed and then it’s heaven.

What do I feel on this tawny rock.
Clots, blisters, slime.

Give me fire; knees oiled no pain.
Benjamen, son of my right hand’s little finger
rises as dens
collapse.
The river returns is dead in a shoebox.
I wish on no star.

Amorosi defines his own voice, saying “I’m honest. It’s an honest, crisp understanding of what comes in to me as the world. I don’t fudge around. I don’t try to make something out of nothing. I’m not a magician.”

His voice is honest and may not “fudge around,” but he’s also fun. The same warm humor that graces the poems In Praise returns in Gnawing on a Thin Man:

WIZARD

All this havoc
just means I’m a poor wizard.

Once, I lit three twigs and fanned the smoke,
from miles away,
into the girl who jumbled scales through my spine.

As she vanished I clapped a delighted tune.
But not without aches of my own.

Did the sack of no echoes fail me?

Now, on such a mild curse—
boils, sewn eyes, a shrew
in the loin my ankle reddens up and eyes me
with disdain. Toenails fall off.

How far will this go?

Poor wizard. Poorly done in.
These pangs are power are power as both
knees lock up
ashamed to move under me.

The lines turn, surprise with enjambment. The poems turn, recording and piercing simultaneously. Somehow the unexpected flows well. You will want to go for a long walk, to see deeply, and smile.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Being Flynn is a newly released movie, based upon the best-selling memoir by Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.   At some point over the next few weeks, I plan to see this film.  But before I do, I wanted to write a review so as not to be over-influenced by the subjective experience of it.

First of all, Nick Flynn is a poet and prone to madness.  That is to say, he’s genetically predisposed to delusions of grandeur, which is the non-technical name of the condition suffered by Nick’s father, Jonathan Flynn.  Plus, and this truly sucks, the mother of the writer committed suicide when he was 22 years old.

Second, Robert DiNero plays the part of Jonathan Flynn, which is reason enough to fork over the funds for a $9 matinee viewing.  Spoiler alert:  it’s his best role since playing that scary father-in-law in Meet The Fockers.

And third, I’m now officially wondering (and worried about) what my children, presently ages 17 and 20, may write about their dear ol’ M.F.A. student Dad.   I mean… don’t misunderstand:  I would be proud to have the same thespian who honed his craft on “taxi driver” interpret my curiously complex personality in his dotage.  There are things far worse than having your own chromosome-kin write something like  Cartoon Physics, Part 1, only to then revisit and rehash your own life’s closing chapters:

 

Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down — earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

***

In terms of “Love Poems” that we — as in, “everyone”–  ”should know,” nearly all have been penned by Brits with one rebellious colonial (e.e. cummings) and two women (Dorothy Parker and Christina Rossetti) who’ve made the list because of some editor’s deference to fairness.

Well, fairness be damned.  (Haven’t you heard of Bill Gate’s Rule #1, delivered in a speech to Mt. Whitney High School in 2003???)   Euro-centrism be damned.  (Haven’t you heard the U.S. Helsinki Commission demographic report on the declining population in the west???)  Moreover, the fact that the crack-staff in London didn’t acknowledge the existence of homosexual love, and therefore include someone like Sappho, is not my bailiwick at the moment…

None of these is the issue at hand when it comes to love and the poetry of love.  My issue relates to what we truly desire in poetry with erotic or romantic themes.  And what we want in such verse poetry is something that the moral tone of “should” and the overly ambitious “everyone” works against.  We want specificity.  (No one else will do.)

C’est l’amour!  N’est-ce pas!

We don’t want the obligation to express affection as if it’s a chore.  We want the gushing torrent of it to carry its readers away.

We don’t want the standard Hallmark card that nearly anyone (if not “everyone”) can purchase at Walgreens on this very day.   We want uniqueness, originality, passion that issues from the deepest reservoir of the human psyche.

Whereas Nikos Kazantzakis can write eloquently — “There is one woman in the world.  One woman,  with many faces” —  a love poem wouldn’t dare give way to that sort of temptation.  A love poem has already jettisoned its cargo of “fond regards” for fear of running aground on the shoals of cynicism.   And let me be clear, this cynicism goes by another name that doesn’t smell as sweet.  In fact, it gives off the toxic stench that’s often been associated with a cache of discarded bones, bones that have been picked clean over time, bones from previous relationships where individuals have been reduced to their functions and roles.  That is, narcissism.

And so, even though I love Kazantzakis, and believe the author when he loves the hell out of life, I also believe a person to be irreducible and irreplaceable.   That stance, of course, suggests something that only some love poems may address; and that’s the delicious mystery of an individual who loves another individual for reasons which diverge from the mutual meeting of needs.

Getting back to the analogy of the barge trying to avoid the shoals, there is potentially something better around the bend in the river, something that can’t be evaluated in terms of chemistry or in terms of the soaring spectacle recorded by Lord Byron or John Keats, who may have informed Whitney Houston all too well.

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies…

Okay, nice job.  The London Times says you and I “should” know this one.   But we might also know something else.  We might know the person who crawls through the ugliness of a family of origin and survives.  And how stunning would it be if we were there to love that man or woman for who he or she has become in making it out alive!  How stunning!

 

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art —

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite…

…

No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest;

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

Now, I don’t want to argue with John Keats; he had a tough enough life as it was.  But imagine an infatuated soul who lives well into his or her forties, someone who does not die prematurely from tuberculosis.  My guess is that if that solitary individual would like to risk that “Bright Star” status with another person that we’d have a poem or two about change and changeability.   We’d have a rhyme scheme or an allusion that corresponds to the peculiar suffering that a beloved person may endure.  And we’d evoke and invoke that suffering for generations to come.  Plus, as everyone these days should know, what’s most interesting about love is not how the desires ebb and flow, but as Walt Whitman reminds us, “I too am a part of that ocean, my love… we are not so much separated…”

I’m thinking now about a poem or two by Donald Hall.   And I’m feeling them as well.  Donald Hall had been married to Jane Kenyon, another poet since 1972.   She died of leukemia in 1995, and Hall wrote Last Days, in which there are these two amazing stanzas:

They talked about their
adventures – driving through England
when they first married,
and excursions to China and India.
Also they remembered
ordinary days – pond summers, working
on poems together,
walking the dog, reading Chekhov
aloud. When he praised
thousands of afternoon assignations
that carried them into
bliss and repose on this painted bed,
Jane burst into tears
and cried, “No more fucking. No more fucking!”

Incontinent three nights
before she died, Jane needed lifting
onto the commode.
He wiped her and helped her back into bed.
At five he fed the dog
and returned to find her across the room,
sitting in a straight chair.
When she couldn’t stand, how could she walk?
He feared she would fall
and called for an ambulance to the hospital,
but when he told Jane,
her mouth twisted down and tears started.
“Do we have to?” He canceled.
Jane said, “Perkins, be with me when I die.”

It’s strange, I know, to wonder about this stuff on Valentine’s Day when love seems nothing more than a collision of two hormonal weather fronts.  And I get that.  I love the whole hot, orgasmic ride down that part of the river.  I appreciate, and can still appreciate the tender intimacies that Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, A.E. Houseman et al bring into our line of sight.   That  romantic landscape is gorgeous.  But it’s not the only territory that “should” be known by “everyone” — it should at least be discovered by some.

Click here to view the embedded video.

 AFFIRMATION

–By Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

 

Peace–

1. Post something incendiary about gender or race. If you could get something like a transcript of a Caitlin Flanagan interview, that’d be awesome. Or you could just take quotes from her book and put them in Q&A form. Wait…DIBS.

2. Insult a famous writer who most literary people consider a god. But choose carefully. Look, it’s not shocking if you don’t like Munro, okay? We don’t need to hear you describe at parties how you don’t like her stuff, as if you were soooo anti-establishment for not liking her work, and you want to make sure everyone knows how anti-establishment you are. If you don’t like that aesthetic, you don’t like it. Cool. But to make a really controversial post, you’ve gotta go after someone legit in a way that isn’t lame. It’s gotta be semi-researched and vaguely believable, but mean as hell. Throw in some cheap shots for good measure, to ensure the crazies comment on it.

3. You’ve always got an ace up your sleeve: the ol’ MFA or anti-MFA debate. Everyone whines about how they’re tired of arguing over it, except that those same people read the arguments and comment like crazy. You could get away with between 4 and 16 of these a year, maybe more. You can point-counterpoint that baby to your highest traffic of the year.

4. This is key to any literary blog: if you are the main person running it and everyone knows you’re the main person running it, you’ve gotta promote the shit out of yourself. Your story just got published? One of your editors should probably mention that in a sidebar. You have a film coming out? Your blog should review it, and that review will be favorable, of course, even if it’s tempered with a few gentle criticisms like, “I questioned the casting of the sixth-most-important character” or “I thought it could have been longer.” Your band is playing a show after the local Rotary Club meeting? Perfect. Make sure to use your blog’s social media to promote your personal accomplishments. That’s what it’s there for, right?

5. Lists. If there’s one thing literary blogs excel at, it is motherfucking lists. You’ve gotta be on top of that. You’ve gotta have lists in your arsenal for things that haven’t even happened yet, like The Top Ten Books Margaret Atwood is Reading After Being Jailed for Stabbing a Mountie, or for things the other guy hasn’t thought of, like the Top Five Poems You Suspect Were Composed On the Toilet. People consume lists like candy and cocaine. They can’t get enough of them. Want proof? You’re still reading.

6. Milk the end of the year like there’s not gonna be another year. This is closely related to #5. You’ve gotta start posting your end-of-the-year lists in like, August. I swear I saw one in October 2011, and I don’t read that widely. I guarantee there were some before October, and you’ve got to be ahead of the curve. Year in Review, Year in Books, Year in Music, Year in Literary Controversies; Year in Literary Gossip; Year in Publishing; Year in the Evils of Amazon: there’s so much to cover. No wonder you have to start in August. Wait, scratch that. You should probably start writing these in March, to make sure you’re ready to post them by July/August. Plus, you could guarantee yourself 40 posts a day for two months straight by having EVERY PERSON YOU’VE EVER MET write one. They’ll think you’re asking them because you value their opinion or respect their taste, but instead you’ll just be firing those lists at your readers like fucking machine guns. You’ve got to be reviewing the current year before anyone else and in more ways than anyone else. Otherwise, your literary blog will become irrelevant and die.

7. Closely related to #4: Favorably review books by your friends. It’s not a conflict of interest, dude, because you really fucking loved that book. Doesn’t matter that part of the reason you loved it is because you’ve read it seventeen times in its entirety because you’re the person’s main reader, or because the two of you were taught by the same person and therefore your aesthetic and his/hers are so similar as to be nearly identical. And it definitely doesn’t matter that you’re super proud of how you changed the last line of chapter four, and now the line is so killer that you’re pretty confident it will blow that whole “so we beat on, boats against the current” shit out of the water. (Intended.) You’ve got a blog, your friends have books. It’s a natural fit, and gray areas are for people who live with their mothers and never have sex.

8. Get weird. You’ve gotta post some really fucked-up stuff on a semi-regular basis, to prove you’ve got street cred and you’re savvy to counter-cultural shit and you know all about the world of S&M and hard core drugs. Otherwise you’re not really literary enough.

9. Make lots of hipster jokes. Even if you wear skinny jeans and smoke incessantly and brag about how your taste in pretty much everything is better than everyone else’s, just give it those goddamned hipsters as often as possible. Even if last weekend you told someone that no, you couldn’t come over for dinner because you’re allergic to gluten and lactose-intolerant and a vegetarian and also you hate being around other people, mostly. And even if you write your angry diatribes about hipsters on your IPad while driving around in a car your parents bought you, listening to your IPod full of indie music that your favorite indie magazine told you to listen to…that’s fine. But man, fuck hipsters.

10. Start a war on something. There’s a War on the Poor and a War on Women and a War on Christmas and a War on War, so why not? Declare your own, rage about it, whip your friends into a frenzy about it. As soon as someone on Twitter uses your “War on…” phrase, you’ve won.

11. Jump on every bandwagon you can. By this I mean, are the other literary blogs talking about it? Well, you better goddamn well be too. Especially if it’s sordid. Because even if your post is a basic summary of all the crap other people have said about the given issue (see: Marie Calloway) people will read it. It’s like taking candy/cocaine from kids.

12. This is very important, because it’s coming up: sleep with every person you can (preferably famous) at AWP, and then write about it. Also, definitely write about every embarrassing or noteworthy thing that you see famous writers do at AWP- what they’re eating/drinking/saying/who they’re sleeping with. Or the posts can be like those trashy magazines that show celebrities doing normal things (OMG! Eugenides ties his own shoes!) People love that stuff.

Final tips: Curse a lot. Be as pissy and angsty as possible. Drop the names of every famous or semi-famous person you know, and if you don’t know any famous people, latch on to whatever six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection you can find. You both lived in New York during the year 1993? Well fuckin’ A, man, you practically hung out and did lines together. Also, mention New York or your previous time in New York as often as possible. If you don’t talk about New York with authority, no one will take you seriously/sleep with you/pretend to read your blog.

There you go, kiddies. Twelve steps (because ten is so passe, and you’re already doing one 12-step program) to starting your own literary blog. You’re welcome.

Body of a Dancer by Renée D’Aoust

Here’s something I don’t usually say: I majored in theatre. Normally, I opt for the also-true: I studied playwriting. But, really, the first gives a more complete picture. Like all the other playwrights, directors, designers, and stage managers in our program, I took classes in acting, in movement, in voice. I took stage combat where I learned to pretend to fight with a rapier and dagger. I took stage makeup where I learned to give myself realistic-looking wounds and bruises using latex and pancake makeup. I was no good at any of this. Worst of all was anything that involved me moving my still-awkward, recently post-adolescent body across a stage. The problem, according to the acting faculty, was that my brain got in the way.

At one point, I remember worrying myself into near-paralysis trying to remember whether it was natural to walk with arms and legs in opposition (right arm with left leg) or in tandem (right with right). Flummoxed, I wrongly opted for the later and went across the stage like some kind of retarded marionette.

This total incapacity for movement when I think anyone else is watching is my point of entry into Renée D’Aoust’s new book Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Unlike me, D’Aoust (pronounced “Dao”), who trained at the elite Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is competent of mind and body. Her book is a series of essays that chronicles her immersion in New York’s strange world of modern dance.

To call this a memoir is reductive. It is a history of modern dance, a critique of Martha Graham, a rendering of the world of dance both inside and outside the studio. It is a memoir too, of course—D’Aoust’s own journey into and, eventually, out of the physically and emotionally arduous world of Graham’s modern gives the book its larger structure—but it is more than that. D’Aoust is not enough of a prima donna, it seems, to limit herself to the traditional constraints of memoir. Instead, a testament to her generosity as a writer, she spends much of her own memoir in the wings, ceding center stage to often tragic, often beautiful, always frank and fleshy renderings of the lives of the dancers around her.

In an essay called “Daniela Can Fly,” an Argentinian dancer leaps from the fifth floor window of her apartment. Leaps, not jumps. Flies, really, as the title suggests. D’Aoust goes out of her way to clarify that this is not a cry for help, hardly even a suicide attempt. It is an insane extension of the insane rigors of the dance. We see Daniela again later in the book, out of the wheelchair and back in the studio. This isn’t romanticized.

None of the people are romanticized. Ted, the subject of a later essay, “Holy Feet,” left Lutheran ministry in the Midwest to study modern in New York City. D’Aoust takes us with him on his new mission to bring modern to the masses. He could be, D’Aoust says, Lear’s fool, “the wisest one around,” and, like much of the book, Ted is comical in ways that subvert trope. The closest D’Aoust comes to lionizing a dancer is Liz, who, in “Theatrical Release,” succeeds where Daniela has failed. She uses a rope. It is a chilling moment, Greek tragedy to Ted’s Shakespearean comedy. The eulogy for Liz is deftly interwoven with the narrative of D’Aoust’s work alongside her and others in the well-known Kevin Wynn Collection, a professional high point for D’Aoust.

What makes this stylistic range possible is that D’Aoust approaches it all with a clear, steady gaze. Her prose is straightforward, even as it reaches toward lyricism. She avoids the clichés about dance and dancers, often going out of her way to unmake them. The second essay in the book, “Graham Crackers” begins with a line of dancers jumping across a crusted patch of dried blood on the floor.

Spilled blood,” D’Aoust writes, “is a regular occurrence in a Graham class. Since modern dancers dance barefoot, often the skin tears or burns from the pressure of contact with the floor. If there’s blood, Kristi gets the rubbing alcohol and paper towel and wipes the floor. She never uses gloves.”

D’Aoust studied at the Graham Center during the early 90s, “at the beginning of AIDS.” This is in the mix too.

Writing about dance, D’Aoust must render the physical movements with precision and clarity on the page. And she does, as in this moment, from “Theatrical Release”:

I had to drop to my knees at the same moment Stef kicked over my head; if our timing was off, Stef would kick me in the head or, worse, the neck. I waited as long as possible to duck, daring Stef to kick too soon, and Stef smiled, her legs so long, so powerful, she controlled me with her limbs. After I ducked, I reached both arms overhead. Stef pulled hard, while I jumped, from a crouch up into her arms.”

And, from “Island Rose”:

I brought my right leg down, made a quick turn while curving my arms overhead in Fifth position, took a step, and repositioned myself solidly into the same stretched, tilted shape. Every cell of my being reached through and beyond my arms, my legs, the theatre walls. All else was appendage. The center was the whole.”

The writing feels kinesthetic, beginning in D’Aoust’s own physical memory of the movement—in the deep places of the body, the spine and the gut—and expanding out toward the lyrical.

By the end of the book, D’Aoust has left Graham. She has left professional dance altogether, but her rift with Graham feels more pointed. In “Dream of the Minotaur,” she returns years later to see a performance by the Graham Company. She remarks that she is shocked by the ugliness and angularity of it all, by the lack of flight.

Modern now has too much irony, or maybe just cynicism, but it is especially hard to think where so much head-banging and meta-commentary can go but down into the dirt and into more earthbound movement.”

She is longing for ballet, of course, where she began as a dancer, long before New York and the Graham Center. But she is also longing for a version of modern made more in the image of Isadora Duncan than of Graham.

D’Aoust’s prose—and her book—exists between these poles. There is Graham in her language: bodily and plainspoken. There is Duncan in her scope: lyrical and large. A book about modern dance should inhabit this very pull between gravity and flight, between grit and grace. It is the beauty and problem of the form, and D’Aoust stands at the intersection taking the better impulses from both.

For those of us who do well to lurch across the stage, it is a particular pleasure to see all of this through D’Aoust’s eyes, to experience it through her physical memory. It is an exercise in physical and literary grace, an affirmation of the possibility of beauty in an age of irony.

*Full disclosure: Besides being a fantastic writer, D’Aoust is a colleague and a friend.

Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Oh, right.  I’d stopped reading because it hurt too much.  All the seconds Joan wouldn’t get to spend with her child, and here I am reading about it instead of spending time with my child.  That’s a hard line to tread, but it occurred to me that as mothers (and fathers?), we do it all of the time, and I’m sure Didion’s no exception.

Didion’s fears about being a good mother are ubiquitous, and she bares them.  What mother doesn’t feel inadequate? “I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents.” And if we don’t feel inadequate enough, plenty of people are ready to point out what they see as our faults.  Enter “The Autumn of Didion” by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (but I found it through Byliner.com, which is like Pandora for CNF and which you should totally check out)  Flanagan seems to know what kind of mother Didion was, and she doesn’t paint a very good picture.  And that’s unfair.  There is every possibility that Didion and Dunne were exceptional parents to their daughter—gasp—while managing to work.  Maybe they weren’t.  But because parents are busy and value their careers does not immediately qualify them for Worst Parent of the Year.

Critiques of Didion’s mothering skills and social anxieties aren’t really here nor there when we’re talking about her work, though.  And a lot of people would agree with Flanagan when she said that Didion’s best works were Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.   I’ve not read her fiction, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights both seem to rely on the fact that Didion’s audience already knows her and has some baseline from which to draw in order to get up to speed tone-wise.  Because I think it’s Didion’s tone that her fans love so much. Flanagan says Didion’s the Hunter S. Thompson for women:  “She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair.”

Oh, bullshit.  Didion didn’t give us quiet days and flowers.  Didion gave us subtle malaise and powerful ennui, a palpable pessimism, and we fucking loved it.  We emulated it, we studied it, we lived through those darkened sunglasses.  We learned from it.  And I think Didion’s still teaching us.  Over at The Guardian, Rachel Cusk writes:

 Didion’s strategy, or rather her instinct – the instinctive response to chaos – is to repeat herself. She struggles to revive the form and style of her earlier book, to make it live again; she repeats anecdotes, and often sentences, word for word; she creates repeating prose patterns whose effect, in the end, is to confer the author’s own numbness on the reader. What she cannot do is master her own material: instead of grieving with her, we are watching her grieve. This is a piteous and exposing process, and one which places a moral burden on the reader. And it is here that Didion’s lack of humility comes back to haunt her, for by burdening the reader she is also making herself vulnerable to judgment. Early on, describing a set of photographs of Quintana as a child, she writes: “In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park.” What passed in The Year of Magical Thinking as the camaraderie of husband and wife becomes, at a stroke, something more disturbing – a kind of parental attention-seeking that again and again drives Didion’s sentences away from their subject and back to herself. “Was I the problem?” she asks. “Was I always the problem?”

She’s right about the language, the repetition, the construction. But Cusk misses the point here.  Didion’s self-aggrandizement is a terrifying part of being a parent—never knowing whether you’ve done enough; or rather, knowing you’ve never done enough.  Blue Nights is about apprehension of an ending, and the fact that Didion can’t stop bringing it back on herself is more about a parent’s guilt than narcissism.

I guess Cusk wasn’t drawn into Didion’s grief, but I certainly found parts of this book startlingly sad.  I didn’t just watch as she grieved, because Joan Didion knows how to write grief.  She offers us so many tiny moments of her unbearable grief—the “sundries” box, are you kidding me?!  “Again, the careful printing.  The printing alone I cannot forget.  The printing alone breaks my heart”—that she avoids being drawn down too deeply.  As in The Year of Magical Thinking, she circles the subject, because it’s too difficult to linger there. She’s not melodramatic, but that’s never been Didion’s thing.  I do love that in this book she comes right out and tells us what it’s about:

When I began writing these pages, I believed their subject to be children…the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us…the ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.  The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.  As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all…their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death…only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.  When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

This is not in Didion style, and I think that’s why it feels so vulnerable.  My thesis advisor stressed that we are always evolving as writers:  “Do I really need to start this piece all over?”  “Yes!  You’re a different writer than you were two weeks ago.”  I think Didion’s style is evolving, and that fans of Didion like me (Didionheads? Joan Drones? Slouchers?) can appreciate where her work has come from and what it is now, and still believe we have things to learn from Didion.   Final words:  Quick read, sad, worth it.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

In the review of Something Urgent I Have To Say To You, Daisy Fried fires off a few warning shots in the direction of Herbert Leibowitz (the unsuspecting biographer of Williams).   With gumption, she relishes what the co-founder of Parnassus: Poetry in Review must have missed in the poem, The Last Words of My English Grandmother, saying:

“To misunderstand this is to misunderstand — at least partly — the life.”

 

Now, whether or not I agree with Fried content-wise (and more or less, I do), her tone strikes me as strident.  Her rhetoric, although worthy of our deepest reflection and respect, is not a shut window or a locked door.  Moreover, while I can resonate with the Philadelphia moxie that sizzles off her tongue and that flares from her fingertips, I can also offer this feedback (as she has offered me her own feedback).

Ms. Fried — we all miss things, but for you to rub Mr. Leibowitz face in it by suggesting that he may have missed “the life” he’s trying to approximate on the page — that seems… ahhh… overly aggressive!

My argument has been and will remain that the lives of others are never fully grasped or comprehended.   That’s what makes them (philosophically speaking) OTHER.

We miss.  Ooops!  We lose sight of the maneuvers that Williams makes in his most potent verse (although we try to isolate and analyze them).   We miss, as Mr. Leibowitz has missed, how the husband to Florence Herman, wrote for a variety of reasons, many of which elude all readers and all writers — and this, as Ecclesiastes so aptly portends, is “nothing new under the sun.”

To live this way — to acknowledge the mutual and interpersonal misunderstandings between us — is, “at least partly,” [sic] to stand under the authentic nature of a sacred life…

I guess what seems so irksome to me is the presumption that literature and literary criticism ought to be an elite discipline in which only poets-in-residence from Smith and Bryn Mawr may participate.   On the contrary, Northrop Frye broadens our interpretative horizons when he notes that…

many of those who find it easy to write by an act of conscious will are those who are primarily concerned to say what is most readily acceptable in their cultural surroundings — in other words they are hack writers.   Poets who can  at will produce verse on approved moral, religious or patriotic themes seldom make a deep impression on the history of literature… (Words With Power, p. 52).

Of course, none of this repartee is meant to claim intellectual superiority over anybody, or to refer to Daisy Fried as a hack.   Far from it.  By the same token, self-deprecation and humility are not always the shortest routes to a moral high ground.  Nor are they automatic conduits to a stimulating cultural exchange.   And I wanted to make peace and not feel the burden of upholding this MFA program for exercising poor syntax.

The point is, whatever our cognitive, emotional and familial resources, lovers of poetry ought to feel welcomed to the party.   We ought to feel as if the splendor of the tradition outshines those who make it into the latest Billy Collins anthology and reflects off the wrench which has been thrown again and again into lecture halls mechanizations.  Let me emphasize  the combined celestial and corporeal banquet that we — the Herbert Leibowitz’s, the Daisy Fried’s and the Scott K-P’s — join in progress.   The reason for the feast is not simply that some may discern nuances in taste and texture, but that we’re starving!  Starving for news!

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men.  Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, a late poem by Williams, delivers all the goods, hits all the right notes and casts all the shadows necessary for us to realize that lives will be missed, missed entirely…   Moreover, if we’re fortunate enough to have an audience for our life-product (our poems, our short fiction, our creative non-fiction, etc.), the famous words of Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? require a follow up.   Gioia wrote,

A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

I say, Amen!

And yet, a little “tact” [sic] goes a long way.   There’s a finesse to misunderstanding a poet, a poet’s biographer, a astute columnist, a reckless barking blogger — and I hope we never stop practicing.

Peace–

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

So then, by some magic, everyone was supposed to treat the story as fiction, even though most people were aware that it had been published online as nonfiction, and even though the “story” uses actual quotes from the man’s writing that anyone could plug into Google and find out his name in approximately fourteen seconds. (Which I did.) So the internet exploded.

First, Emily Gould wrote a response to the original nonfiction blog post, in which she says that she couldn’t tell if Calloway understood what amazing things she was doing in the piece, and that she wanted to “locate her story in a tradition because for years I didn’t understand that my own writing was part of a tradition.” Gould then updates her own post after the piece is republished as fiction, and makes it clear that she’s absolutely unsympathetic to the fact that the male writer’s privacy may have been violated by making it so obvious who he is, and so she says: “But mostly you feel bad for women, who are in this and cannot escape and especially can’t escape themselves. At least they can describe their situation and I guess that’s what part of what I like, when people do that.” *

 The New York Observer did a piece, sharing some juicy gossip about how after publishing her story, Tao Lin invited Marie Calloway to accompany him to Paris but later rescinded the offer. Gawker weighed in, suggesting that the whole thing was ridiculous and that it wasn’t productive or necessary to take one woman’s account of sex and try to force meaning upon it:

I suspect (though I am no psychiatrist, or expert person of any sort) that people flock to sex stories for roughly the same reason that people watch pornography: because people like sex. There is nothing inherently noble, or brave, or feminist about relentlessly focusing on one’s own sex life to the exclusion of other topics. We all like sex. Most of us like reading about sex. But it does no favors to young female writers to convince them that they are courageous voices in the wilderness for dedicating their talents to writing stories that are received as lurid, not literary. (Hamilton Nolan for Gawker)

 Roxane Gay wrote a piece for HTMLGIANT, raising some questions about the ethics around disseminating such intimate details when Marie Calloway and “Adrien Brody” weren’t the only ones involved—his girlfriend stumbled across and read the very graphic account of them having sex, and had to deal with the fallout from everyone knowing that “Adrien Brody” was really her boyfriend. Kate Zambreno argued pretty vehemently that the story does have literary merit, that Calloway was aware of all the choices she was making in the piece, and that culturally we’re so dismissive of girls and young women’s experiences that everyone wasn’t taking the piece seriously simply because it involved a young female writing frankly about sex.* Zoe Zolbrod said “I was completely drawn into the story. It nakedly addresses so many issues I’m perennially interested in and currently writing about or around: Gender, youth, age difference, sexuality, power, honesty, attraction, ethics, transaction, responsibility.” Here is Tao Lin’s response to someone insulting Calloway and the story, in which Tao Lin defends the story and also Marie Calloway herself, and he does so by calling the person stupid, but he also asserts that the story has “relatively little sex and, I feel, no ‘shock value.’” (Which I disagree with, but that’s fine.)

There’s probably fifty-seven other responses to this whole thing, so good luck trying to be productive today if you get sucked into them.  So you’re pretty much up to speed, except for one thing.

The Rumpus posted an interview with Marie Calloway on December 29. Stephen Elliott did the interview, and makes it clear that he’s very sympathetic to her as a writer, that he enjoyed the story, and makes a point of saying that since the account was “published as fiction it seems only fair to treat it as such.”

And then he adds this at the end of the Q&A:

Postscript: While the story Adrien Brody is supposed to be based on a real experience Adrien Brody was published as fiction. I think it’s only fair to read it as such and to withhold judgements from the participants as you would with any work of fiction.

Wait, what? Seriously?

Not only am I confused as to why he’s so adamantly defending both the writer and the “story,” but I sort of thought it was my job as a reader to evaluate fiction and make judgments, good or bad, about the actions and motivations of the characters. But in this case, since everyone fucking knows that it really happened, it’s more complicated than that, and Elliot seems to be ignoring that, as if it’s insulting to artists everywhere that we won’t talk about the piece as if it were fiction. Calloway chose to share it with the world as nonfiction, and changing the guy’s name to a Hollywood actor doesn’t mean it’s a piece of fiction. (Note: Since I never read the original, nonfiction blog post, and it was taken down a while ago, I’m not an authority on what exactly changed between version 1 and version 2. Generally people seem to agree it was very little, mostly identifying details about the man. Although, as I said, even with the “fictional” edited version, I found out his name in less time than it takes to type “The quick brown fox” sentence. So only some identifying details were taken out.)

Does this whole mess raise some interesting questions? Yes, absolutely. Does the reaction to the piece prompt some thinking about fiction versus nonfiction, gender roles, cultural expectations, power dynamics in the older man/younger woman scenario we see everywhere (and I’ll admit I’m fascinated by it, too, and I generally love work that explores it, like Disgrace). My problem isn’t with those conversations. My problem is that the actual piece of writing which prompted all this doesn’t examine those issues in any meaningful way. Any number of things are referenced in the piece– feminism, Marxism, gender roles, pornography, narcissism, and more– but nothing in that piece opened up anything about the world for me, or made me think in any meaningful way about any of the subjects she mentions.

Instead, it reads like what I believe it is: a confessional piece by a young woman who is early in her writing career, who makes a lot of mechanical and grammatical errors, who is interested in writing about sex and probably compelled to write about it by the events in her past she alludes to. She seems to read a lot and take writing seriously, but the writing is rough. It just is, and that’s fine, because she’ll get better. But right now, there are many edits to be made, not to mention she has a tendency to drop in huge bombs alluding to information about her past and then never return to them. Reading the piece felt sordid, because I was basically just waiting to see if they’d fuck, and then they did, in detail. Could the writer have been trying to achieve that effect, to make the experience of reading the story like watching a porn? Yeah. But there wasn’t anything else going on– the story wasn’t doing any work, in my opinion. And while I hoped that reading her answers to the interviewers’ questions would prove that she was intentional and crazy smart and hard core feminist and trying to say something about the world, and she might be all of those things, but her answers struck me as immature and cringe-worthy. It feels condescending to talk this way about her, probably because it is, but I should try not to disrespect her. She’s a fellow aspiring artist, after all. My point is that I didn’t get much out of the “story” that was published. I think Tao Lin wanted to publish it because he’s Tao Lin, and he tries very hard to be provocative. I think Marie Calloway, pseudonymous writer from Portland, should keep writing, and if she wants or needs to, keep writing about sex. I know I’ll probably keep writing about the things I’ve been writing about, despite lots of eye-rolling, so if sexuality is what she wants to write about, she should, and the more she writes and matures, the better it’ll be. That’s all I can hope for in my writing.

P.S. The asterisk denotes things that piss me off, which I’d be happy to elaborate on, except that this post is already obnoxiously long. So you should probably just share what you think in the comments section, and if it’s related, maybe I’ll explain myself.