A Play for a Thanksgiving Killjoy

My friend and officemate is what Sarah Ahmed might call a “Thanksgiving Killjoy.” She’s not going to sidle up and nip into that green bean casserole without bringing up the 1621 “Thanksgiving” where the settler-colonists poisoned their native guests. Which is something I love about her.

Kevin Loring’s play, Thanks for Giving, honors the need to have your turkey with truth serum. In it, an Indigenous family in Canada celebrates a fraught Thanksgiving. The title refers to First Nation’s people’s play on Thanksgiving that frames the colonists’ celebration as a thanks to them.

The play moves quickly, several years in three acts, so the dialogue is packed and polemical. One reviewer suggests that by trying to include every aspect of the indigenous experience the play is a bit much. But one year after Loring was named the Artistic Director of Indigenous Theatre at the National Arts Centre, “the first Indigenous Theatre Department of a National Theatre in the world,” the Canadian government pulled 3.2 million dollars of its funding.

If this play, right now is your only chance to tell your story, you’ve got to stuff it all in there.

To soften the didactic edge, Loring puts most of the teaching in the mouth of a college student home for Thanksgiving Break. Marie brought with her a girlfriend her family doesn’t know about, so she can’t help but lecture them on colonialism and false consciousness. She needs them to be woke.

“The history we are taught to celebrate,” she opines, “just glorifies the settlers and erases our struggles and experiences. It’s just a total trumped-up, bullshit colonial narrative that serves to perpetuate the marginalization of Indigenous people and erase our history of continued existence on this continent (48)”

It’s a mouthful at the dinner table, but for someone who has just finished Intro to anything, it’s a matter of course. She also tells the story of colonists kicking “the heads of Indians they killed through the streets like soccer balls” (44), a story I picture Jean telling at her next Thanksgiving.

If Marie is the play’s “Thanksgiving Killjoy” trying to protect the native past and perpetuate it into the future, her grandmother Nan is a living artifact of that past. As a girl she was taken to a re-location school, a brutal system of residential schools where native children were brutally cleansed of their heritage.

In some ways, the generational dynamic between Marie and Nan is universal, and Thanks for Giving is a very traditional Thanksgiving story: a grandmother gathers her family around the table with her ornery husband (Clifford, a white man), upstart grandchildren home from college or the military with new partners and ideas, too much drinking, and too much past, unspoken and hauntingly present.

Except that the play starts with a stylized invocation to the Bear Dancer, a mythical figure, interrupted by a gunshot, and the play’s narrative. Clifford has killed a grizzly bear, an animal sacred to Nan’s people, and for the rest of the play its carcass hangs over the stage, a grotesque physical reminder of the violent past. Is that too much for one play?

Or is it just enough?

#Metoo in 1968

Something I read as part of the Almodóvar project mentioned Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, so the last time I was in Buffalo I picked it up from the bookshelf my mom still keeps for me at home (thanks, Mom). My copy comes from the Barnard Center for Research on Women library. The Center’s idiosyncratic indexing categories are hand-written on the inside cover in Allison’s neat handwriting. I worked there in the late 90’s, and we were beginning to move toward internet technology instead of print journals and books, and our amazing ephemeral files (an actual copy of the SCUM Manifesto!) This was inevitable and way more efficient than clipping articles related to women from the NY Times, but still sad. Like the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which has also entered the digital age (sort of), the miscellany and the handwriting shaped our ethos and epistemology.

But when they started unloading books, I grabbed a bunch, including Sexual Politics, because she has a chapter on Jean Genet. My high school theater instructor, Toni Smith Wilson, introduced me to him because she thought his writing and sensibility (sainthood through sin!) were right up my alley. Because of the nature of our relationship, I took that as a compliment.

Allison (right) with student workers and researchers in the Women’s Center before the internet was really a thing.

Sexual Politics was published in 1968, but it reads like a deposition in a Harvey Weinstein trial. Kate Millett was looking at the representation of sexual violence against women and the feminine and the way it registered larger attitudes and practices within the culture. And she was pissed.

In some ways this can also be said of Audre Lorde or Virginia Woolf or Mary Wolstonecraft or Victoria Woodhull. The same themes are repeated throughout what we think of as Feminist Criticism, though each era has its particular focus. Is this teleology or eternal recurrence? Are we able to make these arguments because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants? Or do we fight the same battles over and over because we are incapable of learning from our monstrous past?

Unlike me, Millett focuses only on male writers. Do you like D.H. Lawrence (I thought I did), Norman Mailer (I didn’t particularly care for him, but I didn’t loathe him like I do now), Henry Miller (I did. I really did? Yes, I’ve gone to his library every time I’ve visited Big Sur)? You probably won’t after reading this. Her treatment of Genet is kinder, but this seems to be because he identified as a passive homosexual and portrayed the marginalized with care and reverence. This is the same reason Almodóvar gets a pass for his representations of sexual violence, and something that might be worth looking into - I love any reason to look back at Genet.

Millett’s strategy is to just quote from their works. The attitude toward women is predatory, contemptuous, and objectifying, if not entirely murderous. There is no intimacy in their graphic representations of sex and rape, only humiliation and dominance. Why were these men taken seriously, or given such a stage for their writing? I mean Mailer’s “poetry”? The lack of self-awareness is frightening.

In the case of the first three, Millett’s close readings are nauseating and prophylactic: she’s trying to protect us from something. Her irony in these chapters is biting. I love it:

“Since his mission is to inform “cunt” just how it’s ridiculed and despised in the men’s house, women perhaps owe Miller some gratitude for letting them know (309). ”

Before she gets into the close readings she does a very nice history of female revolution and the inevitable counter-revolutions in the U.S., and in Germany. The rise of fascism and similar turns toward authoritarian government are linked to the idea that female agency weakens Western culture. In this section, she ruins Ruskin for you. Though I love Ruskin, for some reason that one wasn’t as painful for me. Same for Hardy. It’s not like I didn’t know their work was problematic.

My work differs from hers in that I’m not going to give men the floor. I’m going to look at Weinstein through Almodóvar, but then I’m going to turn to women’s representation of these experiences. I’m not giving these outrageously misogynist images and ideas any more space, or any more air. People talk about cancel culture, but she’s not calling for these writers to be cancelled. She is just making it impossible for us to look at them, or the culture that centers their narratives, in the same way again. That’s what she meant by “sexual politics.” Is that what #Metoo means for us?

Idealism without Fanaticism: Octavia Butler’s Bible

In my English 1 class we’re reading The Fall, a piece of documentary theater about a student-led protest at The University of Cape Town. The play gets its name from the students’ call to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus (#rhodesmustfall), but morphed into a larger unfinished conversation about what a decolonized world would look like.

After the statue was successfully removed the students had to figure out what to do now, literally what do they put in the statue’s place. One student says,

“I remember thinking, ‘We have to fill that space with us.’ Things, shapes, people we can recognise. Now the real work of decolonizing starts.”

But the students quickly realize that their desire to create a decolonized world founders because they can’t agree on what a mutually-empowering intersectional revolution should achieve. They struggle to imagine a different world. Can they avoid toxic gender hierarchies? Acknowledge the historical pain of racism? The burden of income inequity?

In class we talked about the need in all social justice movements for destruction as well as creation. You have to imagine what you will put in the place of the thing you burn down or, in the case of the statue, load onto a flatbed truck.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, is an exercise in that kind of creation. In Parable the destruction is not brought by revolution but infrastructure collapse, extreme economic inequality that shreds the social fabric, and environmental disaster. 1993, y’all! This book makes Nostradamus read like a generic fortune cookie. She was writing about climate change deniers and anti-vaxers before anyone could believe people could be so craven and/or ignorant.

In response to this totally anarchic and feral world, the narrator, a young black woman named Lauren, imagines a new way of life called Earthseed. My friend Summer calls Lauren her favorite cult leader. Technically Earthseed can be considered a cult because its a prescriptive belief system promulgated by a charismatic leader with the ability to feel other people’s pain—but that word has such a bad reputation.

Let’s think of it like this: there’s nowhere to go that’s safe, everyone you know is probably dead, and this woman has a gun and seems to know how to survive. Of course you follow her.

And then she gives you Earthseed, which promotes community reliance, sustainability, and civility toward the end of “a unifying, purposeful life here on earth.” Lauren’s writing serves as the book’s epigraph:

“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all. ”

— Earthseed: The Books of the Living

Positive obsession.

Is it really a cult if what she’s saying is true?

Don’t answer that.

But there are a few important differences between this and other imagined ideals. Where Plato’s utopia is a thought experiment, Butler’s is situated in the vividly material. As in Lilith’s Brood, Butler is unflinching about rape and its normalization during times of perceived lawlessness. Every women in the novel is either raped or witnesses a rape or both. The threat of anarchy, but also the hopes of revolution, are embodied and gendered.

The wickedness of her world is not only explicitly gendered but also raced. Lauren’s urgency recalls Lucille Clifton’s "won’t you celebrate with me" and Audre Lorde’s "A Litany for Survival" (at times in the book Butler treats poetry and scripture as nearly interchangeable.) In the poems and the book, black women’s survival is a feat that demands commemoration and celebration.

Lauren “intends to survive,” but she cannot do that without a community, so she has to create one. And she wants it to be nice for everyone. Is that really a cult or just the bible you write from a particularly raced and gendered experience?

Does Earthseed have the potential for authoritarianism and dogma? Yes. Butler acknowledges this in glimpses of Lauren’s response to potential heterodoxy and the suggestive symbolism of numbers. But Butler also knew that creative world-making is a necessary skill. It has to be taught.

Step one. Write your own bible.

*In some ways this is going well, but I have some reservations about using it in the future. All of the untranslated Swahili makes it difficult for English Language Learners. Some of the ideas have been unfamiliar.**

**Update. I’m going to teach it again next year, but I’m going to do Notes from the Field first because it sets up the what of documentary theater and deals with more familiar issues. The shift to The Fall will exemplify a much more local instance of documentary theater practice.

She said. That's it. End stop.

When I started writing about Harvey Weinstein I genuinely intended to watch all the films he’d worked on including those for which he had only received “Special thanks.” That was going to be the title: With Special Thanks To: Producing a Culture of Impunity. At the time it seemed like I would also need access to Miramax and Weinstein Company documents, so I could prove more definitively how his predation shaped his filmmaking and promotion. To do that, I’d have to be an investigative journalist. Which I’m not.

Luckily other people are actually investigative journalists because Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey did that work when they broke the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017, and She Said is their memoir of the experience. There are other journalism memoirs that tell the story of a story more lyrically (Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief s a great one!), but She Said is such a satisfying portrayal of the research process that I read it in a day. I was reading it at red lights.

She Said is more procedural, but compelling because they are piecing together information that will satisfy strict journalistic and legal standards from women who can’t afford to see their experience from a merely empirical perspective. For them, the story was not only an incident to recall but the anticipation of its reception: a horrifying spectrum from seething vitriol to silence. The book’s title nods to this by truncating the cliched phrase that presents two versions of an event as opposing, when what typically happens is that the first part shout downs or swallows the second. The novelty of the Wesintein story is that after decades of that pattern holding it stopped. Women who were not on the record in the first article are named in the book because after the first story, and its response, they felt safe to come forward.

The Times recorded them all. The stories are so similar that it gets numbing after awhile. It starts to seem normal, or at least routine, or pervasive. She Said undoes that. Women who are reduced by the media to “Weinstein Accusers” are given names and full lives that have been shaped by Weinstein’s behavior but not only that.

One compelling story is Ashley Judd, the first celebrity to go on the record against Weinstein. I’ve always loved Ashley Judd. I don’t know why. But I’d definitely internalized the idea at some point that she was a little wacky. She Said reveals the way that as one of Wesintein’s techniques. With the help of PR people like Lisa Bloom, he actively went on the offensive to undermine stories about his abuse, primarily by targeting the women who make them. In fact, she’s a dedicated activist and scholar. She earned a Masters from the Harvard Kennedy School and in one of her papers she “propose[d] a model based on female-female alliances” as the only way to address “sexual coercion” (35). She was inspired by a lecture from her Gender Violence, Law and Social Justice class on the bonobo apes who have evolved to “eliminate male sexual coercion […] If a male does get aggressive toward a female bonobo, she lets out a special cry, Rosenfeld explained. The other females come to her aid, descending from the trees and fending off the attacker” (35). That was in 2009.

“Bonobo apes have evolved to eliminate male sexual coercion. If a male does get aggressive toward a female bonobo, she lets out a special cry. The other females come to her aid, descending from the trees and fending off the attacker.”

Laura Madden, a former Miramax assistant, was also one of the only woman to go on the record for the first story, which came out just as she was undergoing surgery for cancer. But she decided to go forward because, as she writes:

“I feel obligated to talk about events that happened to me at Miramax as I realise that I’m in the fortunate position of not being employed in the film business and so my livelihood won’t be affected. I’m also not one of those who have been silenced even though individuals under Harvey Weinstein have tried to persuade me to be silent. I do not have a gagging order against me either. I feel I am speaking out on behalf of women who can’t because their livelihoods or marriages may be affected. I am the mother of 3 daughters and I do not want them to have to accept this kind of bullying behavior in any setting as ‘normal.’ I have been through life changing health issues and know that time is precious and confronting bullies is important. My family are all supportive of my decision. I am happy to go on the record.”

Twohey and Kantor do this frequently throughout the book, include extended quotes from the women themselves. As the title so aptly suggests this is about what women say. It’s not about Harvey Weinstein. His appearances in the book are not at all titillating or intriguing the way behind-the-scenes access usually is. Perhaps we’ve been desensitized by crazy men making incoherent, threatening, and/or self-implicating comments in public. But Weinstein is only sad, impulsive, and brutish. He’s unforgivable because he refuses to see what he’s done. He attended a Women’s March in 2017, and Miramax produced The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus sexual assault. The lack of insight is chilling.

But it also makes the women’s bravery for speaking up even more powerful. Predators will keep lying until more women tell their stories, and more women listen, believe, and amplify their words.

If You've Ever Made a Mixtape

In my first phone conversation with my soon-to-be college roommate, Esther, she asked me what music I liked. I said Ani Difranco, and we knew we were a perfect match. It took awhile for her to get past my obsessive dustbusting, and for me to get used to her sleeping past noon, but this Spring—almost twenty years after we graduated— I went to New Orleans for her wedding and we got to see Ani together at Jazz Fest. It was a completely perfect day.

Esther and Jill!

Not only did we get to see Ani perform, but we got to hear her talk about her memoir, which was just coming out. Typically, I read celebrity memoirs standing up in Barnes and Noble like a surreptitious teenager paging through porn at a 7/11. Their lure is the narration of media events from the perspective of the media’s object, a titillating combination of familiarity and novelty. My ex-girlfriend, Sandra, and I read Monica Lewinsky’s memoir in the Union Square Borders more times than I care to admit.

For lifelong Ani fans No Walls provides this exciting combination when it addresses Ani’s sudden rise to fame, and her beefs with the Michigan Womyn’s Film Festival or Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. But it’s more focused on the music, what it is like to play, and write, and record. For an artist whose work is as intimate as Ani’s, stories about the recording of Out of Range, for example, add layers to an already rich experience of songs that have been soundtracks, and anthems, and carefully timed to fit perfectly onto mixtapes.

It’s also perfect to read at this particular moment when #MeToo feels like such a novel way of seeing the world. Ani has been developing a critique of patriarchy based on the experience of living in a female-gendered body since her days busking as a teenager, and it’s only grown more urgent.

And that’s what makes this book so incredibly satisfying. It is more of a feminist bildungsroman than a memoir because she can identify and articulate injustice in her writing, as she has in her songs, but she can also describe how impossible it is to escape:

“For a girl, the fear of not being pretty is the fear of not being a valuable object, which is the fear of not being loved. It is a conflation that is instilled so early on and runs so deep that, even when you know it’s a fear perpetrated by patriarchy, goaded by fashion magazines, and used to manipulate you into buying stuff, you still can’t stop the way it affects you.”

No Walls reads like a very personal and ongoing reckoning (it ends after 2001, so certainly there must be more to come). In it, she describes her gradual transformation from a singer/songwriter to the founder of Righteous Babe Records, a record label that gave her creative freedom and an overwhelming amount of responsibility. She grapples unflinchingly with her abortions, from the perspective of a mother of two and the young woman who sang in “Tiptoeing” “to the son/to the daughter/I thought better of.”

But she also takes us through how her sense of those events has changed. How understanding herself as an individual, a musician, and a woman is an ongoing conversation between her earlier songs and the ones she has yet to write. And it comes with a literal mixtape that enacts that conversation musically - she’s re-recorded songs she references in the book. They sound different and incredibly familiar.

Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector

I read Near to the Wild Heart on the Blue Line to Long Beach Airport. I was flying to Vegas to visit my girlfriend at her parents’ house for the first time. The whole journey — Expo Line to Blue Line to Long Beach Bus to Vegas — felt like a complete life experience. I wrote a poem about it:

on the tarmac
in Long Beach
at sunset

clarice lispector
the sound of the engine
and the sun
and the pleasure of smiling
and being smiled at
the woman on the bus
noting out loud
in a telling loop:
I’ve seen two little dogs that look like twins
how they make two little dogs look exactly alike?
Two devils.
She took better care of them than my dad took care of me.
He like Oprah. Oprah just be herself
majestic clouds outside the window
the sunset capped
beneath a tendril of weeping cloud
Thor’s own hammer
floating above the cloud ceiling
the horizon reddened and purple
like sand.

Luke,
you skip everywhere.
Everywhere.

You might notice that in the poem Clarice Lispector herself is included in a list of items that does not adhere to parallel structure. They are neither syntactically similar, nor are they similar in kind. Here is the clear influence of Lispector whose novel renders a sensory moment as an entire world.

She makes me wonder how I would capture my mother’s backyard.

Decoupage leaves lit
from above
sawing waves of cicadas buzz and hiss
and the breeze
and Burchfield.

If you’re going to write about synesthetes and Buffalo in the same breath, of course there’s Burchfield.

View fullsize

Insect Chorus, 1917.

In Lispector, synesthesia is polyvalent. Not only sensations have colors, but thoughts feelings.

There are many authors whose work Lispector’s is compared to. For obvious reasons (isn’t stream of consciousness a European modernist thing? No, but yes. Kind of.) This pissed her off in her life. Yeah she used a Joyce line as an epigraph and title, but she only “discovered the quote, the title of the book, and Joyce himself once the book was already finished.”

I’m not hung up on influence or categorization — is she the female Joyce, or the Brazillian Woolf, or the Ukranian Brazillian? I point this out to say that many people have written works in a similar style — you don’t have to read the one (you know which one I’m talking about) that’s at the top of “Read before you die” book lists. You need to figure out how to make that list for yourself. Everything good is born of curiosity.

The focus of this text is a young woman’s development in all the ways a consciousness can develop in and through language and sensation. In her work perception is the progression from impression to feeling to revelation, all of which are in a constant state of flux over the course of a lifetime.

It is also about the persistence of childhood, which means memories free of nostalgia.

“‘Me neither,’ Joanna hastened to reply, ‘not for a second. I don’t miss it, you see?” And at this moment she declared out loud, slowly, enthralled, ‘I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening.’”

These reversals allow for a subversion of narrative closure. The story cannot be told completely because it hasn’t finished happening. And it’s being retold. And re-seen. And re-experienced.

If this can be reduced to Modernist introspection, or proto-postmodern solipsism, it is only so as an invitation to see how you see the world and see through it.

J. K. Huysmans, Against Nature

In grad school, this was my best friend’s favorite book. I also wanted to read it because many of my favorite writers, Proust in particular, are said to descend, in that weirdly patriarchal literary lineage, from this work. It also influenced Oscar Wilde who refers to it in The Picture of Dorian Gray as the “Yellow Book” that leads Dorian into a life of excess. It also came up in his trial for gross indecency. The introduction describes the protagonist Des Esseintes thus: “He is also, and above all else, the modern man par excellence, tortured by that vague longing for an elusive ideal which we used to call the Mal du siecle; torn between desire and satiety, hope and disillusionment; painfully conscious that his pleasures are finite, his needs infinite.” Of course I had to read it! How could I not!

This is an amazing idea in theory, but in practice is just chapter after chapter of self-indulgent things this rich guy does to keep himself busy. It’s not interesting to me. Life is short, and there are a lot of good stories out there. I didn’t finish this.

The description of him as the quintessential “modern man” also illustrates the poverty of the words “modern” and “man” when used in this way.

I prefer The Picture of Dorian Gray because the story and dialogue are entertaining. Dorian engages in the same kind of litany of crimes and debauchery to pass the time, but it’s even dirtier.

But if you want what I think I the quintessential representation of the upper class, Western, modern man: put aside an entire summer and read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. You’ll need a lot of time because you need to live in it.

Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon

I’ve loved Zora Neale Hurston since I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in High School. I went to Barnard in part because she went there. I taught Their Eyes in an English 2 course on the 80th anniversary of its publication. It was just as powerful all those years later. I’ve also taught her essays, including “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” which highlights her ambivalent feelings about segregation. Hurston grew up in an all-black community in Florida, and like bell hooks reminiscence of her pre-integration schooling, segregation meant freedom from white racism and paternalism.

Barrocoon is the edited record of her conversations with Cudjo Lewis, the man thought to be the only living survivor from the Clotilde, the last slave ship to bring Africans to America. He tells the story of his early childhood, his capture, the middle passage, his forced acclimation to slavery, and his freedom. As Hurton writes in the introduction, there have been numerous writings about the slave trade from the perspective of the slave trader, but “the thoughts of the "‘black ivory,’ the ‘coin of Africa,’ had no market value.”

We talk about this a lot in World Literature and in English 1 - the people whose stories are told and retold are not necessarily the best storytellers, nor are their versions of events the best - whatever we take that to mean. There are hidden stories, lost stories, and stories that have been forcibly erased. Hurston dedicated her life to saving those stories.

Hurston gives us not only Cudjo, whose Yoruba name is Kossula, but her with him. We only get his story because of her patience and care in listening. The purpose of her interviews is to learn about his experience, but when she tries to focus his narrative on just him he resists. In order to explain the Maafa, the Black African Holocaust, he has to tell the story of his grandfather and father before he gets to the gruesome telling of his capture, his days in the barrocoon, the journey to the sea, and his short time as a slave.

Most of the narrative deals with his life as a free man, and the creation of Africa Town (now Plateau, Alabama). As cargo on the last slave ship, he arrived shortly before the Civil War began, which means he was suddenly free, “but we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan.’” Unable to afford a ticket back to Africa, Cudjo describes himself as being trapped between two worlds. Hurston quotes him saying, “‘Edem etie ukum edem etie upar’: The tree of two woods, literally two trees that have grown together. One part ukum (mahogany) and one part upar (ebony). He means to say, ‘Partly a free man, partly free.’”

In his own words, he later describes his particular double-voicedness: “I been a member of de church a long time now, and I know de words of de song wid my mouth, but my heart it doan know dat. Derefo’ I sing inside me, ‘O todo ah wah n-law yah-lee, owrran k-nee ra ra k-nee ro ro.’” Though he learns the language, religion, and law of America, he never stops longing for his home.

In all of Hurston’s work, but particularly here, her craft combines the anthropologist’s capacity to listen with the storyteller’s ability to raise the voices of others into song.

Canon Crafting for Beginners

Learning, gathering knowledge, insight, awareness (however you want to think about it) is not linear. There are sources that suggest it is. In the early 1900s Harvard produced a fifty-one volume set of the Great Books, now available for free on Project Gutenberg. According to Charles Eliot, the man who collected these 51 volumes, you can read 15 minutes a day and get a liberal education. Think of the self-improvement!

This idea of self-discipline and self-mastery at the heart of education is steeped in so many assumptions about what knowledge is and whose observations gets treated as such that I just can’t. Though I totally admit to there having been a time in my life when reading all of those books and attaining that mastery was really important to me. So I started reading.

Unfortunately, the 51 volumes start with the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which I’d already read but felt like I should read again to be thorough. His autobiography is based on the idea of a self-made man who can, through education and perseverance, shape himself into an ideal citizen. It was a source of Protestant inspiration for a century, but is now mostly a straw man used to exhibit privilege and self-promotion. I mean, he wheeled his books around in a wheelbarrow so people could see how industrious he was.

It is telling that Eliot begins with Franklin because both treat education, and life, as a to-do list of tasks that, once completed, entitle you to speak with authority. As long as you read the right books or get the right to-do list.

For people outside of traditional academic/social circles of power, these kinds of lists can feed into the imposter syndrome that makes them feel like they don’t belong, or to believe that they can only belong once they fill in all of the “gaps” in their knowledge and experience.

But the lists create the gaps.

There is no to-do list for gathering knowledge and no list of “Books to read before you die” that will ensure that you read the book you need to read when you need to read it.

You have to make your own list. Which is what I’m doing here. This is a list of what I’m reading right now, what it means to me, how it connects with what I’ve already read, or want to read, or learn. I’m the only one who can write it. Just as you are the only one who can write yours.

Here are a few tips for doing that:

• Ask for recommendations from people you trust. Professors are always a good place to start, particularly if they’ve had a chance to get to know what you like to read and think about.

• It’s okay to ignore recommendations, or to stop reading. Life is short. There is no shortage of stories.

• Sometimes books will lead you to the next book. Follow.

• Attend to serendipity. If a book or a song or movie keeps coming up, that’s a sign that it might be the book for you.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was one of those books for me. I’ve taught Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery” probably for as long as I’ve taught. In the past few years, I’ve paired it with a South Park episode which uses Jackson’s set-up as a lens for looking at celebrity culture in America with a focus on Britney Spears. So when I read an article about this new edition of Jackson’s novel, I filed it away.

Then, on a road trip across the country, I found it on a friend’s shelf in Chicago. I couldn’t put it down. I considered stealing it. My friend was out of town, she wouldn’t notice. Or, she’s one of my best friends, so she’d understand. But I decided to pick it up at my favorite bookstore in Buffalo once we arrived, and then I could barely put it down for long enough to get to my sister’s wedding.

One more tip:

• You’re going to connect what you read/see/hear/experience to other things. Make those connections vivid and material. I often process my reading by writing in academic prose. But I also do it in poetry, collage, and fiction. And in my teaching where I’m constantly searching for works that will engender real responses from my students that they cannot help but express. Here’s what this writing might look like:

Like “The Lottery,” We Have Always Lived in the Castle mines the tensions of small town life to explore how morality gets constructed and negotiated by communities comprised of very imperfect people. Like “The Lottery,” mob mentality and unreliable narration undermine our ability to separate people, and their acts, into good or evil.

Our narrator, a young woman who says she’s 18-years old but who seems much younger, or at least more innocent, begins her story well after the events that catalyze the rest of the tale: the death by poisoning of her entire family, and her sister’s trial for the crime.

Merricat and her sister attempt to live peacefully surrounded by people who think Constance killed her family, and the town’s righteous indignation intermittently erupts into grotesque acts of violent retribution. Gossip consolidates into myth, and the girls become the outsiders the rest of the community uses to define their goodness.

The people in the town behave abhorrently, while Merricat and Constance remain eerily calm. Only their Uncle Julian, the only other survivor, is troubled by guilt. He spends his days researching the case, poring over papers and files, but his inability to face the conclusions is manifest in literal dementia which, when it lifts, leaves him in terror. How can he live in a world, in a house, with the person who has killed his family? How do we make sense of it?

We don’t, Jackson suggests. It lives right below the surface in nursery rhymes and fantasy: a reality too unbearable to be real.

Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy

I read Roy’s The God of Small Things in college because my roommate Esther read it for a class and said it was great. It is. I taught it in the first iteration of World Literature and was overwhelmed with how much I had forgotten or perhaps not noticed twenty years before. When Ministry of Utmost Happiness came out I was determined to teach it in the second iteration.

Like The God of Small Things this novel is polyphonic and non-linear, weaving multiple narratives, perspectives, places, and times. But rather than focusing on a single family, Ministry spans many families from a mother who cannot handle having an intersex child to a group of hijras (an Indian word roughly equal to transgender) living in sublime squalor to the militant intimacy of martyrs. The narrative moves between Kashmir, Kabul, all over Delhi, and all across the last 70 years of Indian history.

In a book like this, with so much happening and so many references, it can be difficult to moor yourself. I was constantly googling references, which turned into a guide for my students, but it was worth it the way Shakespeare is worth it. Roy is writing across several traditions, not just the Western tradition which is where Shakespeare gets the lions’ share of his references, so there is no way to master it all. There are references to the Indian poet Tagore, the painter Jamini Roy, Russian poet Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, and Leonard Cohen. There is also the last twenty years of Roy’s journalism including her searching essay “Walking Among the Comrades” about India’s Operation Green Hunt, a military campaign against Communist resistance.

Just reading this book, and following its dizzying array of intertexts, is a master class in the violent legacy of colonization and partition—the division of British India in 1947 into India and Pakistan on largely religious lines: Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan. In Roy’s writing these divisions exist not just in the way that people navigate the Line of Control, a border that might change in dangerous and unannounced ways, but also internally, in their bodies. This is articulated at the very beginning of the book by a hijra named Nimmo:

“No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”

In spite of the terror and the pain vibrant, loving communities emerge. The book starts where it ends: in the graveyard home of Anjum, a Muslim Hijira, which becomes a makeshift settlement of outcasts, animals, and children. And this book stays with you because it mixes pain and hope:

“That story had always stayed with Musa—perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.”

Água Viva, Clarice Lispector

“Can’t you see that this is like a child being born? It hurts. Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-to-be is a slow and slow good pain. It’s the wide stretching as far as one can go. And your blood thanks you. I breathe, I breathe.” (56)”

Lispector, a Brazilian, wrote Água Viva (1973) in Portuguese and had strict instructions for the translator: not even a comma should be moved. She wanted her dream-like syntax preserved in the translation. She is attempting to write the instant, not write about it. There is no plot, or character, or anything that you expect in literature. Samuel Beckett attempted this in his amazing The Unnameable, but in his attempt to write about nothing he found that characters and events emerged from language itself.

There are some repetitions in this text, motifs and images that provide uncertain mooring. Lispector is not writing to moor us in safe, tidy prose, but rather to throw us into the slipstream of language to mimic the experience of the instant, which exists, paradoxically, simultaneous with its passing, its recollection, and its representation. This plenitude is not to be feared or mourned but experienced and enjoyed.

“Truth be told the silence between them had been more perfect like that. But what was the point...Just bodies living. No, no, it was even better like that: each with a body, pushing it forward, eagerly wanting to live it. (181)”