It’s a little dark

My friend Tony and I went to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu last night at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is one of those new-style movie theaters that serves food and drinks and has big, comfy chairs. I had been looking forward to Nosferatu since it was first announced ages ago, mostly because I’ve really enjoyed Eggers’ other movies — particularly The VVitch.

Nosferatu was too…dark. I don’t mean in terms of its story or the inherent violence of a vampire movie, but that the movie tries to build tension with copious use of shadows. When it was over, my friend and I both remarked that somebody could make a cut of the movie that was only the scenes in which you couldn’t see anything, and it would probably amount to 15-20 minutes of video.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with making a vampire movie super-dark, but it’s an artistic shot in the foot for Eggers. Here’s a guy who makes amazing compositions with all of his scenes, and half the time the screen is filled with stuff you can’t see. It’s like if Bob Ross were to paint 1/3 of a picture all black. “Let’s have a happy little shadow, maybe with a happy little eldritch being in there. It’s your world!”

A good movie, though, and one that I’ll watch again when it comes to streaming.

Nikolai Gogol probably would have loved Nosferatu. (Slick transition!) When reading about some of his other works written before Dead Souls, I came across a short story called “The Nose,” which is about a nose that leaves a man’s face and goes off to start a life of its own. There are a few different PDF versions you can find.

Dead Souls doesn’t seem to have any of that same magical realism, but there is something fairly macabre about a man going around the countryside buying dead people. So far, that’s been the entirety of the story. Chichikov (the main character) bounces from estate to estate, meeting a bunch of colorful characters who enter the narrative and disappear just as quickly, never to be heard from again.

What’s impressing me is how funny it is. I rarely expect 100+ year-old novels to be truly humorous, but Dead Souls sure is. I laughed aloud when one of Chichikov’s “business partners” got arrested after blatantly cheating at checkers.

Gogol himself was also a strange bird. From what I understand, he didn’t just not finish Dead Souls, he seemingly burned part of it in a fit of religious fervor. He had a “spiritual awakening” toward the end of his life, became an ascetic, starved himself, and then said, “This book isn’t serving God!” Then he tossed part of his manuscript into the fireplace and promptly died. (Or did he?)

That may be a lot of talk, though. We really don’t know that much about Gogol’s personal life. He never married, was horrible at lectures, and apparently had a fear of being buried alive.

It’s said that, when Gogol was exhumed to be re-buried in a graveyard for fancy people, they found his body lying on its side in the coffin. Is it possible that Gogol was actually still breathing when they put him in the ground?

Or was he, perhaps…Nosferatu!

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

I had a tough time meeting my reading goal yesterday. Being on winter break can really throw me for a loop, and any productive habits I have developed are likely to get tossed out the window in favor of bumbling around the house, eating junk food, and taking frequent naps.

I try not to be too hard on myself about it, but I do feel that midwestern yearning to be busy all the time, which mostly just amounts to my feeling guilty about eating carrot cake in bed at 2 in the afternoon.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (#378 on the list) has been entertaining so far, but is steeped in the quirks of Russian literature that make it difficult for modern readers to approach. The story follows a guy named “Chichikov” as he travels around the countryside buying up “dead souls.” This might sound like the plot to a bit of bizarre magical realism, but really it’s a satire of Russian bureaucracy. Chichikov, the hero, is running a scam.

In the early/mid 19th century, landowners in Russia also owned the serfs who worked their land. The government would tax the landowners based on how many serfs (“souls”) they owned, but the census that counted those serfs was taken infrequently, and if a serf died during the interim, the government wouldn’t list them as dead until the next census was taken. Thus, it was possible for landowners to be forced to pay taxes on their dead workers.

Chichikov, hoping to make a quick buck, realizes this and goes around asking landowners if they’ll sell him their “dead souls,” or the rights to those serfs who are deceased but still listed on the census. Practically, Chichikov will own nothing, but on paper he’ll have hundreds of serfs.

Landowners are, most frequently, glad to be rid of their “dead souls,” because it means they have to pay fewer taxes. A few, though, try to make Chichikov pay through the nose.

What’s the endgame of this gambit? Well, Chichikov plans to take the deeds he has to these serfs and secure a loan against them, after which he will disappear with the cash. When the bank tries to recoup their losses, they’ll find they now own nothing but a bunch of corpses.

I would be excited to find out if the plan works, but nobody knows how it ends. Nikolai Gogol died before he could finish Dead Souls. The copy I have just sort of…quits in Part 2.

Why did anyone bother to publish an unfinished novel? Gogol was just that popular, I suppose. If anyone found an unfinished work by, say, Charles Dickens after he died, there’s no doubt that they’d publish it, climax or no. And, as a matter of fact, Dickens’ last novel — The Mystery of Edwin Drood — was published in its unfinished state.

I’m not a huge fan of this practice. That is to say, I’d much rather read books that have an ending, but what can you do?

Dead Souls is entertaining so far, and it’s strange to think that people think of this as a “realistic depiction” of life in rural Russia. Some of the characters are so over-the-top it’s hard not to think of them as absurdist.

Georgia for your health

I spent the morning reading a bit more about Robert Louis Stevenson, who, it turns out, moved to Samoa due to chronic health problems. It seems to me that it was a common thing in the past to suggest that people suffering from bronchitis or other respiratory infections were told to go someplace else “for their health.” Not only did Stevenson live in Samoa for his health, he also spent time living in France.

Imagine! Your doctor pulls a thermometer out from under your tongue, looks at it, sighs, and says, “You’d better move to Paris.” He says it “Pair-ee.”

The nineteenth century really was a different world. Seriously, though, when did doctors stop telling people to get some “sea air” or “more sun?” And was that all quackery, or does it actually help sick people to move half-way across the globe? I wish doctors still did that. “You’ve got a cold. Here’s some heroin and a ticket to Hawaii.“

With the healthcare system we have in America, though, your GP would probably tell you to go somewhere shitty, like Texas. Or Georgia.

Now that I’ve finished up Treasure Island, I’ll be switching gears a bit and tackling a seminal work of Russian literature, Dead Souls by Nokolai Gogol.

This is a book that I know next-to-nothing about, and I’m looking forward to “going in blind.” I can already guess that I’m going to get confused by the characters’ names — Russian names all sort-of blend together when I read Russian novels, and this book has been described as “Dickensian,” which means there’s going to be a britzka-load of characters.

Still. Russian literature has always been surprising. When I read The Brothers Karamazov way back in the day, I was amazed at both the humor and the characterization. I’ve always had a bit of a preconception that Russian literature is as dry and bland and a frozen parsnip, but there’s always something that winds up amazing me.

I hope Dead Souls does the same.

Mornings for the past few days have been filled with dense fog and unearthly quiet. The days between Christmas and New Years are a kind of temporal limbo, and I’m afraid its affect the weather patterns.

Home is the sailor…

Here’s a poem called “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

If you think that’s morbid: The poem is also the epitaph on his grave stone where he lies buried on a mountainside in Samoa. It honestly reads as if he wrote it specifically for the purpose, doesn’t it? Like he knew he was going to die and thought, “Better have some fire-ass lyrics ready!”

Here’s what his grave looks like:

If you had to write a poem for your tombstone, what sort of poem would it be?

Reading Treasure Island (#870 on the list) has been an absolute treat so far. A lot of the books I’m going to be tackling for this project aren’t what you’d call “fun.” Some of them, I know, are going to be a lot more like “work” than the actual work I do. (Looking at you, Proust!)

Treasure Island is a straight-up adventure story, though, and I’ve honestly wanted to keep the story rolling, staying up late in some instances to listen to it. I feel…young again (?) when I’m tucked into bed listening to the adventures of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.

I’ve been both reading a physical copy of the book and listening to the audiobook version, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of with books I’ve read recently. I mostly listen to audiobooks when I’m falling asleep, or, as happens with stark regularity, when I randomly wake up at 3 AM and can’t get back to sleep.

I kind of enjoy reading in multiple formats. I particularly like it when I wake up in the morning and find out how many “pages” I listened to at night — it gives me a strange sense of accomplishment.

I’ll never understand people who don’t like audiobooks or say that listening to audiobooks is not “reading,” but I know they exist. The argument seems to be that media aren’t interchangeable and can’t be labeled as “reading,” which is just semantics. I wonder if the clown who wrote that article thinks reading in “braille” doesn’t count because you don’t use your eyes?

Like many people probably told Robert Louis Stevenson towards the end of his life, “That’s a strange hill to die on.”

“Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tsu

I’ve never understood the idiom, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Book covers have a lot of useful information on them: there’s a synopsis, author information, maybe some helpful photos that’ll key you into the genre — one of the fundamental goals of a book cover is to help you judge whether or not you want to read that book.

The gist of the saying is that what’s inside matters more than what’s on the outside, but you can’t dismiss the elements of a book that aren’t related to its words. You’ve got to think about the whole package, including the cover.

When I was picking out the copy of “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tsu (#30 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die) that I was going to use, one of my primary concerns was the way the book felt. It had to be something that felt good in my hand, something sturdy with a little bit of give to it, something elegant and yet robust. There’s no easy way to describe the way a good book feels when you hold it, but you know the feeling when it strikes you.

At Barnes & Noble (the only local bookstore that had any copies of Tao), I was able to find four or five different editions. They were all slim — the book is not long — and had a variety of covers and weights of paper. Some were flimsy, some were sturdy. Some were glossy, some were matte. I collected them all and took the small stack of books to the Starbucks in the back of the store, ordered a latte, and sat down to inspect each one.

Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
Mastering yourself is true power.
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I felt silly doing so. There’s something inherently funny about a middle-class white guy getting into an ancient Chinese philosophy, and there’s something ironic about doing so in a corporate coffee shop in the back of a corporate bookstore. That didn’t bother me, though. You’ve got to find silly, frivolous things to do with your time. Things that would baffle an outside observer, things that you can’t account for. A certain percentage of your life ought to be spent on a figurative trampoline, bouncing pointlessly for the sheer enjoyment of the act. In my case, I like to sit down in coffee shops and read translations of books whose first lines essentially tell you that you won’t understand what you’re reading.

Flipping through each of the editions of the “Tao Te Ching,” I noticed there were some fairly stark differences in their translation. This is not only because the text was originally written in 2,500 year-old Classical Chinese, but because many of the phrases and ideas don’t have one-to-one English equivalents. “Tao” is typically translated as way or path, even though the actual word is something more ephemeral, but every book had stark differences on a line-by-line basis. Were they accurate? Did the meaning change based on who had translated that particular text?

I read a lot of translated works and have thought about this question frequently, ultimately deciding that it doesn’t matter one bit. One can never know — it’s best just to judge the translation on its own merits and don’t fall into the rabbit hole of, “Was this correctly translated?” Meaning is lost in translation, but new meaning is also constructed, and (short of mastering both languages) you’ll never understand how.

The text upon which I settled was a small paperback edition with a black cover featuring a rocky outcropping in front of a foggy forest scene. I picked it because I liked its wording of the first chapter, and also because the paper was the right weight. It was the kind of book I could see myself annotating with a pen in the early morning when I was taking a train to work, underlining passages that I would ponder while looking at the countryside speeding by.

(I should point out that this image only exists in my mind. In Nebraska, trains haul corn or coal and little else. There are maybe a handful of passenger trains in this state, but they are kept more for novelty than practicality.)

Each of the chapters of the “Tao Te Ching” reads like an instructional poem, as if part of a poetry collection meant to teach you how to live a life of virtue. (This, in fact, is not far from how it was originally used.) The meanings of the poems, however, are quite elusive.

Here’s how it starts:

ONE

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

If that seems confusing, don’t worry — you’re not alone in your confusion. It’s meant to be confounding. The first line points out that you can’t express the Tao (“way”) in words. In a certain sense, it’s saying that you won’t learn about the Tao by reading a book. You can only live the Tao; it’s an experience, not words.

My reading of the “Tao Te Ching” was not a quick one. I’d been feeling pretty overwhelmed with the amount of work I had taken on over the past few months, so I’d decided to incorporate a little bit of meditation into my daily routine. Nothing too fancy or time-consuming; I meditated each morning for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Was it helpful? I think so. I’ve gotten better at noticing times when I’m feeling anxious and have been able to ground myself. Reading the “Tao Te Ching” was a part of this practice, and I’d read a few chapters every day before work.

I also visited websites that offered interpretation of the Tao. While I would read each chapter and try to form my own understanding, it was helpful to be given some context. This website, I thought, was one of the most useful, offering chapter-by-chapter analysis and a clear “reading” of each section.

I also listened to a Taoist podcast called, “What’s This Tao All About?” Mostly, I listened to it while walking home from work or taking strolls through my neighborhood.

While I was walking, a troubling thought entered my mind.

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.
― Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

I was worried that the whole thing was a scam. There are a lot of “self-help” philosophies out there that try to sell you on the idea that there’s something wrong with you and reading a book can fix it. While I don’t believe that Lao Tsu is a 2,500 year-old shyster, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that his philosophy has been co-opted by people who just want to sell books and videos and online subscriptions.

People who are looking for some sort of spiritual awakening are often vulnerable, and vulnerable people are easy to take advantage of. So are travelers, and you’ve got to watch out for fraudsters the same way you’d watch out for bears if you went hiking in the wilds of Wyoming.

Years ago, when I was backpacking through Cambodia, I had a similar feeling — a feeling that I was about to get scammed. My friend and I had just arrived in Siem Reap on a bus from the Vietnamese border, and it had been a horrible ride; passengers were tucked into seats like Tetris pieces, our legs jammed against the seats in front of us, our bags stored practically on top of us.

When the doors of the bus opened, we tumbled out of the vehicle and the driver shouted, “Jenga!” My friend and I did our best to stretch away the soreness while we looked around this new city.

While it isn’t always the case, you can generally tell how wealthy a country is by how clean its streets are. Only wealthy parts of the world bother to keep gutters clean; poor countries don’t hire cleaners to look after something as frivolous as the side of a road — they need that money for more important matters. By that rubric, Cambodia was not a wealthy place. The streets were lined with red dust and garbage, greasy and unkempt. We were dropped off in a parking lot on the side of a highway, and it was filled with tuk tuk drivers who were calling out to us. By name.

“Toad, hey!” they called. “Toad, you need a ride!” They weren’t asking.

We were quick to realize that the company through which we’d purchased bus tickets had likely called ahead to let others know the names of the passengers who would be arriving. The tuk tuk guys were trying to sell us rides, hoping that their use of our names would oblige use to ride with them. It was a tactic that preyed upon travelers who were insecure, unsure of how to proceed once they’d arrived.

While I was angry about it, this is just something that happens when you travel. People will take advantage of you in small ways, trying to sell you kitschy garbage, overcharging you at restaurants, leading you into obvious tourist traps where “art students” try to sell you paintings. In the worst cases, they will try to steal from you or (very, very rarely) abduct you. It’s something that you just have to accept, something that you have to prepare for and be wary of.

In our case, we did end up taking a ride on one of the predatory tuk tuks. The bumpy trip was only about $8, and it saved us having to walk two miles to our hostel.

Plus — and this is important — we were relatively wealthy people and the locals treat you well if you play along. Siem Reap is a tourist town; a lot of people there make their living selling tuk tuk rides, food, and drinks. There’s no use in angering a bunch of people who only want a few bucks.

While I had the sense that Taoism (or pseudo-Taoism) could be somewhat scammy, the tell-tale sign of a scam never seemed to materialize. In other words, there never came a point when anyone asked me for my credit card number. Sure, the podcasts I listened to asked for donations, but most small-scale podcasts do that. And the websites that are about Taoism all look like they were optimized for Netscape Navigator and certainly don’t ask you to subscribe.

The Taoist teachings you find in the “Tao Te Ching” are fairly difficult to parse. They all read like poetic parables that focus on juxtaposition and contradiction — paradoxical elements abound, and the overall message is about quitting the struggle. You’re advised to be like water, not to resist, not to seek wealth. Just be.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Tomorrow is going to happen whether you break your back trying or not, so what’s the use in breaking your back? Things will work themselves out; they have throughout all of history.

“They’re basically advocating for laziness,” I told Sarah. “‘Action through inaction,’ that sort of thing.”

“I can get behind that,” Sarah said.

“I mean…yeah. There is something satisfying about a philosophy that tells you not to worry so much and not to constantly try to improve.” Or, at least, after a semester of extremely hard work, it feels good to have a philosophy that tells you to take a break.

Hence it is said:
The bright path seems dim;
Going forward seems like retreat;
The easy way seems hard;
The highest Virtue seems empty
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

All of this, though, is completely at odds with the way most Americans live their lives. We are an awful bunch of try-hards, each of us hell-bent on “self-improvement.” Even as I read about Taoism, I constantly thought about how I could use this to become a better person. I pictured myself with a shaved head, perhaps wearing robes, perhaps walking through a jungle or a rock garden. I’d be a whole new man, a man to whom stress was a forgotten dream.

That won’t happen, of course. Even if I wanted to change, to become a full-fledged Taoist, I think the community I live in is fundamentally opposed to the transformation. It’d be like an ice cube spontaneously forming in the middle of a hot tub — theoretically possible, but utterly unlikely.

Still, there’s a side of me that longs for it. It’s the same side of me that will occasionally listen to a lecture by Alan Watts and dream of becoming a monk. One of those ascetics in wilds of Tibet, or perhaps Japan, who do walking meditation and only eat what people give them. I wonder if those kinds of monks are allowed to read books. They probably don’t get to go to Barnes & Noble, but there certainly can’t be teachings that go against libraries.

When those monks pick out what they’re going to read, do you suppose they consider the cover of the book they’re holding? The weight of the paper? The flexibility of the spine? Perhaps they’ve transcended all that to live on a spiritual plane that precludes such judgements. Paper is paper, and words are words. Trying to find books you enjoy is just needless struggle.

Or, more likely, they simply don’t worry about such things.

(I just looked it up and, yes, monks of both Buddhist and Taoist flavors can go to the libraries. It depends upon the sect, but many/most of them value education and don’t prohibit reading for pleasure.)

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to write about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” #462 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started reading books on literary theory to get inspiration. Most books on the subject are awfully dry and filled with the sort of academic jargon English departments are notorious for. 10-dollar words like “philology” and “hermeneutics.”

The issue isn’t that the book is hard to understand. Sure, the dialogue is written in dialect, but it’s not difficult for the average reader to comprehend. And the issue isn’t that the subject matter is inherently depressing, even though you do feel somewhat drained as you flip through the pages. A lot of bad things happen, and it can be difficult to read such a novel when we live in a world with so many bad things happening.

That isn’t the problem with my blogging about the book, though.

The problem is something usual, something that I experience with a lot of the books I read that are on this list: This book absolutely isn’t written for me. As a straight, white, American male, I am about as far from the “target audience” for “Their Eyes Were Watching God” as you can possibly get.

Zora Neale Hurston, **“Their Eyes Were Watching God”**

I feel like I’m bogged down by thinking of this blog as a “book review” blog, which is not what I want it to be.

I don’t want to give books five-star ratings. I don’t want to sell you on a story. I don’t even really want to give plot synopses, to be honest, although it’s hard to think of a way around it. What I want to do is have a chronicle of my journey (if you want to call it that) toward reading these 1,000 books. Something I can look back on in seven years’ time and think, “Oh, that was right around when the election happened and the whole world went to shit. My how time flies.“

The whole thing is steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when blogs were popular, when the internet wasn’t an ad-riddled, subscription-based nightmare of trackers and trolls and propaganda. Nostalgia for when we didn’t refer to this sort of thing as “content.” Nostalgia for when the internet was populated by people and you had a sense of community.

It seems as if we’re intent on killing that version of the internet. More’s the pity.

Anywho.

Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty after being nearly forgotten by the literary community. She had become popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but many people thought her work focused on the wrong topics — she tried to capture the everyday lives of black Americans rather than writing about social justice and the struggle for equality, which, naturally, were prominent topics in African American literature.

This is a simplification, of course, but sometimes books go against what are considered “modern trends” and fall out of public consciousness. This was the case for Hurston and many other “Harlem Renaissance” artists.

After Hurston died, scholars like Alice Walker “rediscovered” her writing and realized its uniqueness and importance. Suddenly, Hurston’s work was like a diamond that had been found in the garden, and Hurston has since become somewhat of an American staple — she is still taught in many U.S. classrooms, including my own.

I often think about what it’d be like to be forgotten in that way. It isn’t quite the same, but recently I’ve been wishing I could experience it. I’m not saying I’d like to disappear, but I’ve been having this desire to…hibernate, if that makes any sense. I’d like to experience what it’s like to crawl into a cave, cover myself with leaves, and sleep for three to six months.

In fact, I have been sleeping a lot more than I usually do. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is crawl under the covers for a quick nap. After dinner, I also go to bed relatively early, often sleeping for 9-10 hours.

Is it seasonal depression? Maybe. Nights are getting longer, and the weather has finally turned into the bitter cold that’ll be tapping at our windows around until March. Ultimately, though, I think I’m just craving the feeling of sanctuary you get when you crawl into a warm bed in winter. The coziness, the safety. Much like I imagine a hibernating bear feels when her nature tells her it’s time to go into her cave. No expectations, no responsibilities, just me and my earthen hovel and my leafy blanket.

It’s interesting to consider the impact of a book upon someone who isn’t the book’s target demographic. I said earlier that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” wasn’t “for me,” but that thought is slightly more complicated than it seems on the surface. Whatever literary theory you subscribe to (which may be no theory at all, and God bless you), it’s difficult to read a book if you can’t put yourself into it. There have to be characters, themes, settings, plot points, whatever that resonate with you. Or, at least, that’s the way our modern education system has trained us to approach literature. Right or wrong, we read books and ask ourselves, “How does this make you feel?”

In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, I can recognize that there are elements in the novel that readers might identify with, but they just don’t hit me the way I think they’re supposed to. I don’t know any people who are like these characters, I’ve never had these sorts of marital issues, and I’ve never been to Florida.

I would probably say that it’s a “difficult” book for these reasons, but there are others. There’s a lot of dialect in Their Eyes. It’s enough that you often get the impression that you’re reading two separate books.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The prose itself is not written in this voice, but whenever we hear a character talk, that’s what it looks like. It made the novel an interesting and…er, novel experience, constantly switching between standard prose and prose in dialect, and there are many people in American society who use a variety of voices when they speak. Depending on the context, people can often have what you might call “dual personalities.”

Some of my students are prime examples. To hear them speak in the hallways is one thing, but the way they talk inside the classroom makes them come off as entirely different people. Are teenagers everywhere like this? Probably, to some extent. Teenagers all over the world act one way with their peers and another way around adults.

That, I suppose, is something we all can identify with. While all of us don’t have modes of speaking with such dramatic and noticeable differences, there are times when all of us feel like we are someone we’re not.

In my case, I often feel like I’m pretending to be a “good teacher.” I’m not sure if I even want to be what I’d call a “good teacher.” I’m a competent teacher — don’t get me wrong — but the line between “competent” and “good” is one that, in my own mind, I’m not sure I can cross. “Competent” teachers have to do a lot, but “good” teachers take on extra. Often times, they take on more than is healthy.

There are teachers at my school who are there 11 or 12 hours a day, teaching regular classes and then doing sports or activities after. They work on weekends, organize field trips, do fundraisers, and generally throw everything they’ve got into the teaching profession. I do care about my students, and I do everything I can to make my classes engaging and useful, but when that final bell rings, I want to go home and do other things. I want to have a life outside the building.

When I first became a teacher, things were different. I wanted a career I could throw myself into with every element of my being. I wanted to be like one of the characters on The West Wing, a kind-of Sam Seaborn who sleeps, eats, and breathes his work. The problem with shows like that is the fallacy that there are intelligent and moral people in charge of things. In reality, there are no whiz-kid doctors who’ll stay up all night to diagnose your medical condition, there are no tough-as-nails police detectives working overtime to catch the guy who broke into your house, and there certainly are no brilliant political officers who are trying to make the world a better place.

I know it’s putting awfully high expectations on myself when I say that I need to work 60-hour weeks in order to be “good” at my job. One thing that you learn if you study mindfulness or Eastern philosophies is that a person should be okay with being “okay.” You don’t need to be brilliant — it’s enough just to exist.

That’s just a tough pill to swallow when you live in a country filled with bozos who brag about how little sleep they’re getting or how much overtime they’re putting in. As if it’s some kind of badge of honor to work yourself to the bone for a system that couldn’t give less of a shit about you.

Last night, a freezing rain fell that covered the whole city in a layer of ice. Sarah and I went out to get some drive-thru chicken and quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to get out of our neighborhood — there was no way to drive up even the slightest hill. We saw cars hopping curbs, cars that were stuck at intersections unable to move forward or backward, people who’d gone out for a walk and were slipping helplessly down the sidewalks.

Some nights you’re just stuck. Nature will always remind you of that fact.

“The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy

It wasn’t at Barnes & Noble, and the guy behind the counter at Prospero’s Books in Kansas City told me that he hadn’t been able to lay hands on any of the Jack Ryan books in ages. They had vanished, it seems, from the national stacks; disappeared beneath the waves of the literary current.

“I’m on the hunt for ‘The Hunt for Red October,‘” I told him, well aware of how stupid that joke was but committed to telling it anyway. “It’s eluding my radar.”

He shrugged in commiseration.

“There’s that Jack Ryan TV show,” he said. “I think that’s why everyone’s buying it used. Just look for it online.”

*“Look ONLINE? For a BOOK? Since when?”*

I don’t like buying books online. Yeah, they’re cheaper, and there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t get elsewhere, but I am a huge proponent of supporting bookstores. Usually used bookstores, but at this point I’ll even throw money Barnes & Nobles‘ way if it means having a bookshop in town that isn’t going to go out of business.

It may have taken me longer than I would have thought possible to find “The Hunt for Red October,” #200 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, but it’s my own damned fault. I’ve owned more than one copy of Red October over the years, but have lost those copies in moves or through overzealous loaning practices. (Talking about you, Jerry. Just because we haven’t spoken in 15 years is NO EXCUSE.)

I was able to track down a paperback copy at Half-Priced Books, which really does have some gems now and again, and I managed to get to it before the pot-bellied guy in the “NAVY” hat did, due in part to my natural speed and agility. The navy guy was upset — you could just see his heart sink.

After taking a few days to read Red October again, I honestly don’t know why this series is as popular or as long-lasting as it is.

🎵 *Sing it! We all live in a yellow* **TOP SECRET OBLATE TYPHOON-CLASS ATTACK SUB WITH A SILENT PROPULSION SYSTEM CARRYING A LOAD OF 38 NUCLEAR WARHEADS.** 🎵

Published in 1984, Tom Clancy’s debut novel breathed fresh air into submarines. It was initially printed by the US Naval Institute Press, who — no joke — aim to “promote an understanding of sea power and other issues of national defense.” You can see their current publications here: https://www.usni.org/press/books.

They’re really just trying to raise awareness about … naval stuff. Weird! A whole publishing house dedicated to that One Great-Uncle of Yours who talks about Pearl Harbor every Christmas and maintains that internment camps aren’t the same as “prisons.”

Ah, the holidays.

Anywho, the thing that I don’t get about the popularity of Red October isn’t that, as an English major, I turn up my nose at military books, although I do, or that I think most military books are a form of propaganda, although I do. (Ronald Sata…I mean Reagan said Red October was “a heck of a yarn” or some shit. Better than shilling for mexican food in the oval office, I guess.)

It’s just that, well, my first introduction to Red October was the Sean Connery movie. It’s a great movie — I loved when I was a kid and I’ll still watch it now if I see it on a streaming platform. It’s such a great movie that it makes you realize it ought to be a movie — not a book.

“*I take my vodka with a side of haggis. And **ESPIONAGE**!”*

It’s paced like a movie, introduces characters like a movie, has movie dialogue, does movie cliffhangers. The final chapters are a series of, swear to God, jump cuts between a bunch of subs and ships. To this day, I’m convinced that Tom Clancy wanted to write a screenplay but was told, “Why don’t you make it a book instead?” To which he said, “No.” He only agreed after the publishing company said they’d mail a copy of the finished manuscript to Sean Connery himself, who was in Vladivostok at the time cultivating his eyebrows.

For what is essentially a spy-thriller in a heavily naval setting, the story is pretty simple. A Russian submarine captain wants to defect to the U.S., taking his ritzy new submarine with him. Will JACK RYAN the AMAZING YET RELUCTANT HERO be able to help him along, or will the submarine end up at the bottom of the ocean, a nuclear toothpick in Poseidon’s maw? There’s lots of boats and missiles and airplanes and helicopters and PINGing radar screens and people shouting, “Conn, sonar!”

You may as well eat buttered popcorn while you’re reading it.

Be sure to share it with your political officer, **or face five to seven years in a Siberian gulag!**

According to Mustich, the reason for the inclusion of this book on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die isn’t that it’s the best spy novel, or even that it’s the best submarine novel — it’s because it spawned a sprawling assortment of sequels, movies, TV shows, and video games. It’s fair to say that the Jack Ryan books have been impactful, but I consider it to be a dumb basis for picking which books a person ought to read.

Nobody, except maybe that One Great-Uncle of Yours, is going to be on their deathbed whimpering, “If only … I’d read more novels … that inspired crappy first-person shooters … “

I think the relative rush to turn these books into movies attests to how visual they are, how well they lend themselves to a screen of some sort. Who all has played Jack Ryan? Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Randall Park, and Alec Baldwin. Pretty big names, and that’s not including the supporting cast for those movies — James Earl Jones was Grier in a bunch of them.

For this particular read-through, I listened to a lot of the audiobook version of Red October, catching 30 minute snippets between the hours of 1 and 4 AM when anxiety keeps me awake like a malfunctioning alarm clock that’s been glued to my face like a trap in one of the Saw movies.

*“Let’s play a game. It’s called **‘How can you hit the snooze button with no fingers?’**“*

I’ve completely unplugged myself from news and social media since the election — except for over on BlueSky, where I’ve found a bunch of people who throw haikus at one another and are just lovely — and I’ve tried to replace all my doomscrolling with … doomreading?

Whatever you call it, it’s essentially a series of instances in which I reach for my phone, realize I’ve deleted every social media app, and then angrily pick up a book to fume over … er, read. It hasn’t been easy. My mental health has suffered. At the very least, this whole thing has turned my reading of “The Hunt for Red October” into an angrier affair than it ought to be. I don’t know what the equivalent of hate-f*cking a book is, but that’s what it’s felt like.

I suppose anything I decided to read right now would have gotten the same treatment. I’ve just got to remember that I won’t be this angry forever. Even super-secret submarines have to surface eventually. Staying underwater forever is just impossible.

Unless you blow up and radioactive material eats a hole through your hull.

Seriously, though, do you know how dangerous submarines are? I mean, we all read about the billionaires who imploded, and ha-ha-ha, but multiply that little sub by about a hundred, make it radioactive, and stuff it full of nuclear weapons, and then you’ll have a rough idea of what actual submarines are like.

It makes you wonder why the US Naval Institute Press is so anxious to get this sort of stuff out there for mass consumption. It’s hard telling, but be sure to check out some of their other thrilling titles, such as: “We’re F*cking Crazy and SO CAN YOU“, “Radiation Poisoning: A Love Story”, and “Many Ways Through the Back Hatch.”

To order any of these titles from the US Naval Institute Press, simply write your social security number on a $50 bill, put it in a glass bottle, and toss it into the Gulf of Mexico! One of the books (you can’t pick which) will be delivered to you via air-to-surface missile in seven to ten business months.

Or, you know, just look for them online.

“A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines

At a time when the whole world seems like it’s going to hell, it’s important to keep one’s spirits up, and I can think of no better way to do so than getting lost for a few days in a bright, uplifting tale of systemic persecution and marginalization of minorities. If you’re like me and look to pile bad thoughts on top of worse ones, “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines (#366 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die) can be found at your local library.

Like a perverse Fight Club, just go to a librarian and ask her to depress you as hard as she can.

In all seriousness, this book is amazing. While it is well written, the strength of “A Lesson Before Dying” isn’t in its prose as much as it is in the characters. It’s horrible to realize, but each one of them rings true in a way that you wish was impossible.

A black man sent to the electric chair for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That tracks. A black teacher who hates teaching but can’t find any other work for an educated black man in the South? Yup. A reverend who touts that the true test of being educated is how frequently and well one lies in order to help others? Alright.

You know from the get-go that the book isn’t going to be happy. It doesn’t want to be happy. It waves happiness in your face like a pair of someone else’s panties it found in your glovebox. “These yours?” it asks, to which you can only bluster out some semblance of, “Nuh-uh.”

You go through page upon page knowing that things like this did happen, are happening, and will probably continue to happen.

It’s hard to say why, but this book made me think about death.

There have been a handful of times that I thought I was done for. Not in some philosophical sense of the word, but in the actual, “Welp, I’ve had a good run,” deer-in-the-headlights sense.

One of those times was when I was 24 and I was going into surgery. “I feel like I’m not going to wake up after this,” I said. I was on an operating table and perfectly earnest. Things were bleak — I was vomiting bile and had, for a short time, been convinced I was in hell. I told the doctors, “This is it for me. I’m checking out.”

“Nuh-uh,” said the anesthesiologist.

“You’re paid to say that.”

“And paid well.”

I had the overbearing sense that I needed to do something, to say something. I was knocking at the door of the Kingdom, so to speak, and God was hollering that he’d be there in just a second, damnit, he had a quiche in the oven, and just hold-the-fuck-on, he was coming.

Ultimately, though, what could I say? What could I do? All of these scrubbed-up bastards were waiting on me, and they were busy people. Practical people with automobiles and bank loans and skin-care routines.

So, I counted backwards. I remember making it to 97.

Another time that I felt like I was dying was when I got food poisoning from a bad panini in Bangkok. I wish it had been from eating something cooler, but here we are. That time, death didn’t seem like such a bad thing. That is to say, I had such a high fever that I wasn’t worried about it.

“At least the pool’s nice and cool,” I said to myself, only realizing later that I’d been sweating so much that I was lying in an actual puddle.

Death is only scary if you’re aware enough to be scared. Otherwise it’s a novelty, this little curiosity, a new trend that everyone’s been talking about. Like fidget spinners. Nobody’s afraid of fidget spinners. If anything, we all think they’re sort of neat.

The hostel we were staying at had a pharmacy under it, so I sent Sarah down to get whatever drugs she could get for food poisoning. “Get the good stuff,” I said. “And make sure you tell them about the pool!”

(Thai pharmacies are strange places filled with medicines most Americans have never heard of. Between that and the language barrier, there was a good chance she’d come back with electric heroin or some other fun madness.)

I’m sure Sarah was more freaked out by the whole situation than I was. We’d just gotten engaged, or were about to be, and here I was hallucinating angels doing jackknifes off our room’s air conditioner. “The water’s fine!” I told them.

They knew already. Angels always do.

*Well, butter my biscuits if it isn’t the patron saint of swan dives!*

In “A Lesson Before Dying,” Jefferson — the character who is sentenced to death for no good reason — is continually asked to do things for other people. Talk, eat, find Jesus. His perspective is that there’s not much point in doing any of those things. Those are people things, and Jefferson is no longer a person; he’s an animal on the way to slaughter.

He’s been taken over by pessimism, which is easy to understand when you’re on death row. But his godmother, Miss Emma, wants Jefferson to face his end as a man. As if it matters how a man falls down!

“When the fall is all there is, it matters.” (That’s from The Lion in Winter.)

Like any good English major, immediately after reading the title of this book, I said to myself, ‘Who’s going to be the one learning a lesson? I bet it’s the narrator.” Narrators always go around learning things, and in this story, Grant, who is educated enough to be depressed about how dire everything is in the South, has a lot to learn.

There are a couple of ways, though, that you could construe the lesson. None of them are particularly upbeat, and the way I do interpret it isn’t the same as the way you will.

For me, the lesson is that your death isn’t about you. There’s something greater to be served in your final moments. Call it nobility or heroism or essential humanity, your death (and your life, I suppose) can be in service to others. You can show those around you that it’s possible to meet eternity on your own two feet.

It provides and reinforces a sense of hope, which is a feeling that’s in short supply these days, and there’s a good chance that the hope you feel is entirely misplaced. Can death ever be truly noble? I suppose that’s up to you and your own faith.

It’s probably happier to think it’s possible, that there are angels up in heaven scoring perfect 10s even from the East German judges.

Does Ernest J. Gaines think so? Beats me.

The book ends with an endless, lingering feeling of fear, doubt, uncertainty. The feeling you get when you are suffering and you don’t know when it’s going to end. An on-the-floor feeling, when very often a single image will appear to you. A mundane image given new weight by your mind’s willingness to accept its significance.

The swirls in the carpet, an insect on a hill, the particular dance of an auburn leaf moments before freefall. Your whole body turns into a telescope that brings the image into sharp relief, and you suddenly don’t know why you’re looking, why you care. But you know that the image will stick to you, like a painting glued to the inside of your skull. Perhaps it’ll haunt you forever.

Perhaps you’ve seen it already.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury

Not only is #112 on the List of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, still pertinent because of all the bozos out there who are trying to ban books in 2024 (or, worse, treating the dystopian classic as a how-to guide), but also because there’s an undercurrent in America that seems hell bent on bringing the spirit of this nightmare to fruition.

A lot of people know that “Fahrenheit 451” is about burning books, but they think the novel stops there. “The bad guys don’t want anyone to read books so they go around burning every book they can find.” This is true, and I think the message has spread — people who physically burn books they don’t like are thought of as insane, they are ostracized, shunned. Which is fine; like I said, they’re bozos. But the pleasure of burning isn’t the actual problem.

The problem is that people find ways to get rid of books, to take them out of the hands of people who need them most. Why? Because ignorant people are easier to exploit.

To sprinkle a little Rage Against the Machine into the mix: “They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove them.” Burn a book and you’re a fascist, but, for whatever reason, convince millions of people that books aren’t important and nobody bats an eye.

The real message of Fahrenheit isn’t that we need to coat books in asbestos — the threat in Bradbury’s work isn’t as much a flamethrower as it is the presence of an anti-intellectual movement that has been growing like a dumb weed in the ditches of middle America.

Books are representative of knowledge. They are the virus that causes the disease of not-being-a-moron, they give rise to questions and oblige us to right the wrongs of the past. Anti-intellectuals, though, call that “unrest,” and they’ve convinced so many people to find pride in never having cracked a book.

Who are these anti-intellectuals? The U.S. is rife with them and they’re often in the news:

They are people who, when confronted with a worldwide pandemic, get mad at doctors who tell them to get vaccinated and/or wear a mask.

People who, after seeing the disastrous effects of climate change, send death threats to meteorologists.

People who, after wave upon wave of school shooting, don’t listen to any politician who says that maybe we all shouldn’t have access to goddamned assault rifles. (“But then how will we shoot cans of beer in protest of trans people?!?”)

“Fahrenheit 451” is about a man, Guy Montag, who goes woke. Or, as Elon Musk would put it, he gets infected by the “woke mind virus.” (If any of that just made you vomit in your mouth, just know that you aren’t alone, and be sure to take the time to brush and floss. If you don’t know I’m talking about: Here’s two idiots chatting about it. Note how the oligarch currently trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania talks about how “moderate” he is.)

A fireman by trade (a person who does the book-burning in this context), Montag meets a free-thinking youngster when he’s walking home one night and commits the egregious sin of becoming curious, which, a few people might recognize, is the first step down the slippery slope of learning. Montag begins to wonder why they burn books — what’s in them that’s so terrible? Does anyone know?

After he watches a woman get burned alive with her book collection, things start to spiral. He takes a few books home, he flaunts them in front of his wife and her friends. He starts questioning things. A robot dog sniffs around his door — a sure sign of trouble! Montag feels like he needs to do something.

But Montag doesn’t really know what he’s supposed to do. Once you realize that your whole society is based on a series of fallacies, what can one man do to fight it? Print more books? Run away? Actually fight back by planting books in the houses of firemen and then reporting them so they get arrested?

Montag doesn’t have the answers; nobody does, not in the novel, nor in our actual world of “Fahrenheit 74” (which is so named for the temperature at which assholes turn on their air conditioners).

Montag makes a series of rather bumbling mistakes (but they’re the “right” mistakes) and ends up getting found out (his wife turns him in) and running for his life before he encounters a bunch of other intellectuals who are on the run from Project 2025 … er, I mean, this nameless dystopian government that bears no resemblance to any current trends in American politics.

These roving intellectuals have each memorized a book and essentially serve as a walking library, hoping only to survive long enough to ensure that the knowledge they keep can be passed on and, maybe, be of use to the future. Because certainly, certainly this government can’t last.

(It can’t. Shortly after Montag goes on the run, his whole city is blown up in one of the wars that seem to start every day.)

It’s a bleak ending, but looking at the world today, one can’t help but feel that bleakness is the zeitgeist.

Because all those people who would have been burning books if they were fictional characters have realized that it’s much easier to convince people that they don’t want to or shouldn’t read books. It is astounding to me the number of students (and adults) who proudly proclaim that they don’t read, that they haven’t read a book since sixth grade. They say it as if they’ve cracked a code, or pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.

“Those wily teachers tried to fool me, but I got around them — I just had ChatGPT summarize the whole book for me while I watched YouTube shorts. Checkmate, atheists!”

One thing that I don’t believe was true when Fahrenheit came out (1953) but is certainly true today is that reading is considered work. The news I keep hearing from university professors is that more and more students are coming to English departments across the country unable to read books.

When I studied English, ages ago in the early 2000’s, I took any number of literature classes that would assign one book a week. Now, though, that amount of reading is impossible for many incoming university students. Is it an attention span issue? Are public schools failing us? Are parents and their “just give ’em an iPad” mentalities to blame?

A little of all of them, I’m sure. One thing is for certain: A whole wealth of knowledge, tremendous variety of perspective, and just general fun is being placed out of students’ reach — and all without the use of kerosene or matches!

Similar to Guy Montag at the end of “Fahrenheit 451,” I sometimes feel that we English teachers are wandering through the wastes of tomorrow, carrying information and skills that we hope will someday be valuable again.

Last week, I took an informal poll of my approximately 220 students, asking how many of them had heard of Mark Twain. You know, the author. All told, about 15 of them knew who I was talking about.

“Wait, really?” I asked. “You don’t know Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer?”

I was met with a sea of blank faces.

And in the distance, thunder.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

I try to emphasize in this blog (as well as in the classes I teach) that literature is a conversation that’s been going on since the invention of history. Authors respond to authors, books to books, and #21 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” It drives home one of the practical reasons why viewing literature this way is apt: For years and years in America, people were excluded from that conversation.

I just finished teaching a unit with my Juniors in which we had a chance to read and discuss people like Frederick Douglass, as well as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other authors from the Harlem Renaissance. “Hughes was one of the first black Americans who was able to make a living as an artist,” I tell my students. “That’s an astounding fact when you consider he’s the same age as my great-grandmother.”

Maya Angelou is one of the major African American voices to follow the likes of Hughes and Bontemps and has become essential reading for anyone who is interested in African American literature.

I read the book mostly while sitting at my desk in the teacher’s plan center, thinking about how I just don’t “get it.” Not that I dislike it or don’t understand, but that it wasn’t a book meant for me.

Race and issues of race were about as far from my experience growing up as they could have been. The town I’m from has about 1,500 people in it and is about as ethnically diverse as Sweden — very white, very middle-class; a town that existed as a place where highways met and where there was a John Deere dealership. I don’t consider that a good thing, necessarily (it was a safe place to grow up, certainly), but books like Caged Bird were one of my only windows into the experiences of black America.

Was it a good window or a window that provided an accurate depiction? Probably not. I can only try to understand what Angelou is talking about. I didn’t “get it.”

Crispity, Crunchity, Peanut Butter-y

One of my first memories of Angelou comes from Saturday Night Live, in a satirical sketch starring David Allen Grier. It’s a sketch I still randomly quote to this day:

The joke being, I suppose, that Maya Angelou would never stoop so low as to to advertise for anything, much less a candy bar. Such was her integrity that the very notion of her appearing in a commercial was comical. That was my impression of her — she was a serious woman who talked about serious issues and spoke the kind of poetry you were supposed to frown at and say, “Hmm, yes, I see,” in very sombre tones.

Which is, quite honestly, one of the things that has prevented me from ever really connecting with Angelou’s work — it’s the sort of thing that seems to preclude humor. The sort of thing that you daren’t laugh at or make light of.

Oh, there’re funny bits in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — or, at least, bits that are supposed to be funny — but it’s the sort of humor that you feel obliged to laugh at. Like when your drunk uncle tells the same joke for the 10th time that Christmas and you better laugh or you’re going to get it — that’s the sort of energy Angelou brings to telling a story about how she laughed so hard one time in church that she peed her pants.

A Book Club Member’s Book of the Month Club Book

The particular edition of Caged Bird that I have features a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, who uses her introduction to express her disbelief at finally reading a book that spoke to her, a book that seemed to capture an experience both she and Angelou shared — namely, the experience of growing up as an awkward black girl.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the same way about a book. Sure, there have been books that I liked — I would even say there are a few books that I have absolutely loved — but I’ve never felt as if an author were reaching across some unfathomable gulf to tap directly into my brain, saying, “We’re alike, you and I.”

Mostly, I admire books by thinking, “Jesus Christ that author is talented.”

Even if it were possible that I could connect with an author like that, and it very well may be, I’m not sure I’d want to read that book. I barely like myself on the best of days and don’t particularly want to spend any more time in my own head than absolutely necessary. (Hello, darkness!) And if a person were able to capture what it was like where I was born and raised — really capture rural Nebraska — I probably wouldn’t care. It’d be like accurately capturing the essence of a random pigeon. Small towns are mostly boring and there’s a reason why Nebraska is called “fly-over country.”

(I have a theory that books and movies are only set in Nebraska if the authors/producers want a setting that is a metaphor for depression. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that’s fair.)

Still, I suppose I do take for granted that there are a plethora of books and movies that are about little white kids who go off on adventures. I never had to deal with the dissonance of wanting to play with a doll that didn’t share my skin color because I thought the other one was “normal.” That’s part of what Angelou is responding to — there’s an inherent question of why can’t we normalize books about the black experience?

Which is a fair question that a lot of people have asked and now it seems like we’re making progress in that direction. Or, at least, there are more published black authors today than at any point in America’s history. That doesn’t make up for anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Even if Maya Angelou is awfully dry.

What’s That Tractor For, Though

I’ve known several people who were that way — the kind of people that you’d just better laugh at or there’s going to be trouble. One of them was Grandpa Don, who was the sort of person who, when he retired, moved from a regular house in Iowa to a full-on farm where he had a tractor and a barn even though he wasn’t a goddamned farmer. He was just a guy who listened to Rush Limbaugh and thought farming was just peachy.

At Grandpa Don’s funeral, one of my cousins stood up at the pulpit and told a story about how Don one time pulled him, my cousin, and my other cousin around on a trailer behind his tractor. The boys were eating apples for some reason — that’s what they did for fun, I guess, was drive around on a tractor trailer and eat apples all afternoon. Anywho, Don cut a massive fart, presumably loud enough to be heard over the sound of a tractor, and turned around to say, “How do you like them apples?”

Everyone in the church laughed when my cousin told that story, even though nobody thought it was funny. Even my cousin didn’t really think it was funny — he’d only gotten up to tell the story because his mom had made him. It was a funeral, goddamn it, and you were supposed to tell stories. And you’d better laugh at those stories because we’re a family and that’s what family’s do.

I didn’t cry when we buried Grandpa Don, even though I very explicitly tried to. I stood right next to the casket and looked at the hole in the ground and thought, “Alright, better start the waterworks.” I got sidetracked though when everyone said the Lord’s prayer and I thought, “When in the hell did everyone memorize this nonsense?”

Seriously, were we supposed to know that? Just, like, at the drop of a hat?

We’re Dying to Know

Maya Angelou died in 2014 when I was in South Korea teaching kids how to write essays very quickly.

I said to the children, “Maya Angelou died today. Do any of you know who that is? Er, was?”

They all unsurprisingly said that they didn’t. South Korea is just as homogenous as the town I grew up in — almost everyone who lives in Korea is Korean. And, while Koreans are mostly….ambivalent towards the Japanese, there isn’t a whole lot of racism going around, and thus there has never been a struggle to overcome it. They’ve got a whole different set of cultural issues; sexism, ageism, a tremendous teen suicide rate; they’re just as messed up as Americans are, but for entirely different reasons.

I thought about how best to explain who Maya Angelou had been, but struggled to do so without bringing up how goddamned racist America was. In the end, I just said, “She was a very talented author.”

Which is, quite honestly, what I think about her. Maya Angelou speaks to experiences that are beyond my reckoning. I recognize that she’s very good at writing and I can get lost in her prose just as much as the next guy, but she’s never been an author that spoke to me.

I’m sad about that. Should I be? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just that I want to feel like I “get it” when I really don’t, when I’m just some kid standing by a hole in the ground wondering why he can’t cry, mouthing along with some alien litany. “Our father who art in heaven…”