Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

In what I hope will be a satisfying sequel to my previous last post, I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2020).  

If you are (understandably) hesitant to pay the exorbitant $119.99 listed on Amazon or 85,59 € on Palgrave's website, I am pleased to make the Punk Rock move of posting the entire book here as a free PDF.

Link.

(This is all Open Access and legal and above board, if you're worried about that sort of thing; the PDF is just kinda buried on Palgrave's website, so I wanted to make it more publicly accessible).  

From the back cover:

‘Jacob L. Bender’s Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature is a remarkable exploration of the spectral in the broad Atlantic world. His argument moves beyond boundaries of land and sea to reveal the nuanced union of Irish, Caribbean, and Latin American peoples and cultures. Bender’s unique focus shows just what an intimate part of the writing life death is for artists like Joyce, Borges, Carpentier, and Beckett.’

― Maria McGarrity, Long Island University, USA, and author of Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008)

‘Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature examines an array of texts from different countries including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, comparing them with key works from the Irish literary tradition. This transatlantic focus makes for an engrossing study and the readings of the texts are persuasive and compelling. Bender’s study teases out the rich complexities of Irish and Latin American shared conceptualisations of death and illuminates the ways in which symbolic representations of the dead can act as mechanisms through which hegemonic discourses are disrupted, and erased voices may come to the fore. It promises to be a lasting contribution to scholarship on all of the individual authors featured while prompting additional comparative readings of literary conceptualizations of death in these and other contexts.’

― Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork, Ireland, and Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS)

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters―where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds―the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.

Jacob L. Bender is an English Professor at Middlesex College, New Jersey, USA.

 _______________________________

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction (pp. 1-15)

Chapter 2. The Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic Halloween on the Borderlands (pp. 17-43)

Chapter 3.  Graveyard Communities: The Speech of the Dead in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille. (pp. 45-75)

Chapter 4. "For You Galaxies Will Burn and Stars Will Flame": The Speech of the Dying in Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz (pp. 77-96)

Chapter 5. "Upon All the Living and The Dead": James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Their Infinite Ghosts (pp. 97-126)

Chapter 6. Interlude: "There'll Be Scary Ghost Stories"—English Ghosts of Christmas Past (pp. 127-138)

Chapter 7. The Swift and the Dead: Gulliver’s Séance in W.B. Yeats’s “The Words Upon the Window-pane,” Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive, and Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth (pp. 139-172)

Chapter 8. Under My Vodou: Haiti, Revolution, and Zombie Transformation as Liberation in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World and Brian Moore’s No Other Life (pp. 173-204)

Chapter 9. A Terrible Beauty Is Born: William Butler Yeats, Julia de Burgos, and Romantic Resurrection (pp. 205-232)

Chapter 10. Revenants of the Dispossessed: A Momentary Conclusion (pp. 233-236)

(Book PDF and other publications also available on my Academia.edu profile.)

How I Finished My Dissertation in One Year

Note: I entitle this how I finished my dissertation in one year, because what worked for me won't necessarily work for you, and vice-versa.  If you find anything I suggest here personally unhelpful, please discard it without a second thought.  But a number of classmates have asked me lately how on earth I finished my dissertation so quickly, so I post my process here for anyone else out there who might also be frantically googling for help.

Some caveats: I do not have any sort of formula or system, though my life would be far easier if I did.  But then again, if you are in grad school--and especially if you are in the Humanities--then you are likely already imbued with a deep-seated suspicion of any and all attempts to reductively quantify and contain the expansiveness and diversity of the human experience.  The last thing I want to do is write yet another Covey-esque management book, and I don't think you want me to write one either. Not only is there no formula, but you should embrace the fact that there is no formula; writing a dissertation is as messy as life is.

Moreover, most of what I will cover here you have either already heard before, or has independently occurred to you.  Please therefore take these tips in the spirit they are intended, as a series of useful reminders and encouragement to keep going.  (Few things irritated me more as a grad student than to be condescendingly lectured about, say, the awfulness of the job market, as though we didn't already know, as though we didn't need encouragement now more than ever.)

Yet even if I did try to set up a system, well, as John Lennon once sang, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.  Just in this one year of dissertating, I moved 3 states west; got married; started adjuncting at a community college an hour from where I lived; my car was rear-ended; my laptop died (twice); the vacuum cleaner quit working; my wife and I took in a stray-cat that turned out to be pregnant; and etc. and etc. and etc.  Now, none of these are necessarily big deals in and of themselves; some of them are even cause for celebration.  But they are all the sorts of things that can cause you to lose whole days of writing at a time, to the point that a week can go by and you've accomplished nothing.

And I didn't even, say, get pregnant, like some of my classmates have; nor did anyone close to me suffer a life-threatening illness (at least not this year).  Those are the sorts of things that really will disrupt your writing schedule, to say the least!  Even if everything runs smooth, even if you are able to live a perfectly cloistered life, then (unless you have a rich family that hired you a butler) you will still have to do all the petty minutia of daily life: grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning the house, and so forth.  Things are always going to come up and get in the way, no matter your best efforts.  A lot of what I will be writing about is how to make the best of the time you do have leftover.

I should also make clear that, contrary to what some friends have assumed, I am not especially disciplined; I oversleep, I eat too much, I don't exercise enough.  I am one of you, in other words; do not assume you need any greater self-discipline than you already possess to get this dissertation done in a year.

One last caveat before proceeding: The correct amount of time to spend on your dissertation is whatever amount of time is necessary to make it good.  That will vary from project to project and person to person.  This is not a race, nor will anyone think you are brilliant or gifted or whatever for finishing fast; at best, they'll think you're a drudge, and may even hate you a little bit.  Your motivations for finishing in a year cannot, repeat cannot be egotistical--such is counter-productive and ultimately self-defeating, for reasons I will get into shortly.  (What's more, the last thing we should be doing right now is giving the University administration yet another excuse to cut our funding packages.)

However, if you are worried about the precarity of your funding package next year--or a key member of your committee is retiring soon--or you are (like me) over 30 and simply sick and tired of being in school--or you are at a Midwest university and the corn fields are just getting to you--then I may have a few pointers that can be of some help.

The caveats out of the way, let us begin.

First, some nuts and bolts tips: The research article from your comprehensive portfolio should double as your first chapter.  That saves you an enormous amount of work; there is no virtue in making things harder on yourself by writing everything from scratch.  Work smarter, not harder.

If your program requires a prospectus (as mine did), then you need to start writing your second chapter at the same time as your write the prospectus.  Though you are technically jumping the gun without permission, it is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission--and besides, you're trying to finish in a year here. 

Second, Outlines: An outline can take many forms.  I personally hate to make detailed, structured outlines because they do not help me at all (though if they help you, then please, by all means, write one--do whatever it takes to get the dang thing written).  Partly that is because I am often figuring out what exactly my argument is while I am actually writing it.  However, I still do a primitive, brutish sort of outline just to get me started.

I begin my rough outline by gathering a bunch of articles and books, and then I extract relevant quotes, either by typing them out free-hand, or (if the pdf will allow it) copying and pasting.  I group the various quotes together thematically.  I go by the rule of halves: over half of all articles and books I skim through will turn out to be irrelevant and useless; about half of all the articles that are relevant will not make it into the final chapter; and at least half the quotes I extract into a word document will end up cut as well.  There is no efficient way to do research, or to determine which books and articles will be relevant, so just embrace the inefficiency.  (Learn to trust yourself, too; you can normally tell within a couple pages whether an article or book chapter is relevant or not).

Once I have arranged the quotes into the rough order I think they will appear in (full well knowing that I will be moving things around a lot later), I begin writing the connective tissue between all these quotes.  Slajov Zizek once said that he actually hates to write, that the way he tricks himself into being so productive is by telling himself that he is just typing down thoughts and notes, until one day, voila, he has a manuscript.  Do the same.

This brings me to a very important Third Point: You must learn to embrace what Anne Lammott calls "Shitty First Drafts".  I am dead serious here, read her whole essay; I don't proselytize for much in pedagogy, but I absolutely proselytize Lammott's essay.  I teach it to my freshmen.

Terrible first drafts are how you break out of the perfectionism inherent to graduate students.   Other folks really do need to be told to get off their lazy keister and do something with their lives, but the sheer fact that you are a grad student speaks well of your innate ambition and drive.  But ambition and drive can be good servants but terrible masters--they breed a debilitating perfectionism that prevents you from ever getting started, because you are filled with this horrible need to make your manuscript brilliantly perfect from the first draft.  This, in my observation and experience, is what slows down grad students more than anything.

You have just got to shut off your perfectionist tendencies when you start writing.  You have just got to give yourself permission--nay, encouragement--to write so horribly that, like Anne Lammott, "I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot".  This all will result in an awful draft that is hell to revise; but, as you well know, it is always far easier to revise a terrible draft than to write a draft in the first place.  Remember that.  No matter how nightmarish the revisions are, it is still way easier than writing the draft from scratch in the first place, so just grind it out as fast as possible.

On the revisions: Once you have completed a terrible chapter draft, lay it aside and start writing the next chapter.  That way, when you finally return to that chapter a few weeks later, you can read it with fresh eyes, as though it were written by someone else.  Give yourself frequent breaks from your drafts, always try to read it with fresh eyes.  Ideally, you stagger your chapter revisions apart, such that, though you are continually working on the dissertation as a whole, you are only looking at any single chapter once every few weeks.

Now to discuss the importance of writing continually: I don't know about you, but every time I begin a new writing project, it is preceded by an ungodly amount of procrastination.  I can't tell you how many times I announced to my wife that I was going to sit down and write all afternoon, only for her to come by a half-hour later and catch me surfing Facebook and YouTube.  It was embarrassing, but it was what I needed to work through in order to get to a place where I could finally force myself to write.

And as you know, every time you take more than a day or two break from writing, you have to get back into that mode again, and go through that whole time-sucking procrastination process once more.  You must therefore make an effort to write at least once every day, to stay in that writing mindset.  Even if your writing's terrible--especially if it's terrible--you must write constantly; because, as Lammott astutely observes, "Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go--but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages."

That also means setting stupid goals, of how many pages you are going to try to get through each day (but not beating yourself up when you inevitably fall behind); that also means being willing to cancel meetings, stand-up friends, ignore phone-calls, blow-off chores and commitments, if you ever get into a good groove.  When we were still dating, my wife would call me sometimes to chat and I would just say, "I love you but I have to call you back later, I'm in a good groove and don't want to lose it."

Now, this is not a call to be irresponsible or anti-social (you need your friends now more than ever), just a reminder that when you get into a good groove, to do everything you can to ride it out as long as possible--because that groove doesn't come often, but when it does, you usually get more accomplished in those few hours than in entire days of forcing yourself.  You put the groove first, and it will put you first--for the more you ride out those good grooves as long as possible, the more likely you are to have them.

On that note: pace yourself. Don't write all day. If you're not in the mood, don't force it. Take short, frequent breaks, so your eyes don't glaze over. Go on walks. Maybe set aside one day each week that you tell yourself that you will NOT work, to rest and recuperate. I'm religious so I take Sunday off (I ironically take that whole "day of rest" thing more seriously in grad school than I ever did as a kid in Sunday school), but it could be a different day for you; the point is that you have a day, you draw a line in the sand, where the outrageous demands of the world are not allowed to touch you.

Finally we get to the elephant in the room: the problem of motivation. You don't need need me to rehearse to you the awfulness of the current academic job market, or how few people will even read the finished dissertation.  It is difficult to stay motivated in the face of such existential despair.  We can talk all we want about becoming "self-disciplined," but let's face it, "self-discipline" is just a smarmy code-word for doing something you don't actually want to do--and more damning, don't really believe in, either.  You don't need discipline when you are motivated.  The problem is not one of discipline, but of motivation.

Therefore, make sure that what you write is something you actually care about, are passionate about, that you would want to talk about anyways even if you weren't getting school credit for it. Caring about it will also make you happier to write it, and paradoxically makes it more likely other people will actually read it voluntarily. So write your manifesto! Stick it to the man! You can tone it down later in your final drafts depending on your advisor's feedback, but for now, rant and rave (if ever there was a better year to do that than 2017...)

You may here protest that your dissertation is not particularly political; while mine, for example, examines how Irish and Latin American modernist literature utilizes tropes of remembering the dead as a form of decolonization and resistance, yours may be nowhere close to as explicitly political.  Here I would remind you of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian formalist, who wrote The Dialogic Imagination whilst in exile in Kazakhstan; his fear was not about getting tenure, but of being shipped off to the gulags.  In the face of such monumental oppression and injustice, what did Bakhtin choose to write about?  The structure of the novel, of all things!  He wrote about what he wanted to write about, no matter how brutal the political situation.

In fact, Deleuze and Guattari claimed in Anti-Oedipus that desire itself can be inherently politically destabilizing, especially when you determine what you desire, not a corporation or a government or the job market.  Robert Pirsig argues something similar in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Proust in the final volume of In Search of Lost Time likewise describes a propulsive need he felt to create a work of art no matter the devastation of WWI.  And as Doris Lessing stated simply, "Whatever you're meant to do, do it now.  The conditions are always impossible." 

In short, when you write about what you want to write about, it is not only an act of genuine desire, but of resistance.  It is how you find your motivation to finish what you started.  May your own stubborn and liberating desire likewise to carry you through to the end--of not only your dissertation, but beyond.

I wish you way more than luck.

On Swan Songs

[One last attempt to properly capstone and wrap-up this silly ol' blog]

Amidst our current vinyl Renaissance, I've noticed that the one Beatles LP you are guaranteed to find in every surviving record shop, in every book-store music section, and on the shelf of every hipster, collector, nostalgist and enthusiast, is Abbey Road.  Where once upon a time Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and/or the White Album garnered the lion's share of the attention, now as the years turn to decades and the fame of the Beatles turns from legend to mythology and finally to historical obscurity, it is Abbey Road alone that has become the sine qua non of every record collection.  It appears that in our age of streaming and free downloads, if you are actually going to pay money for a Beatles album, Abbey Road is the one.  Everybody's one Jazz LP is John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and everybody's one Beatles LP is Abbey Road.

There are a number of reasons for that staying power: for starters, the songs have aged exceptionally well; it also feels custom-made for a record-player, what with how the driving groove of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" ends only when Side A runs out of space, and with how the "You Only Give Me Your Money" suite closes out Side B; the album is also undeniable cool--it's the supremely self-confident statement of a band at the height of its powers with nothing left to prove; perhaps most importantly, it's the all-too-rare sound of a great band choosing to end on its own terms, to definitively say "The End."

As any Beatles nerd can tell you, while Let It Be was their last album released, Abbey Road was their last album recorded.  The Beatles had shelved the Let It Be sessions as the band tore apart at the seams; John and Pauls' massive egos were pushing each other apart, George was sick and tired of only getting 2 songs per album, and Ringo even briefly quit during the White Album sessions amidst the endless verbal abuse from John (who nowadays is less the martyr and more the wife-beating villain in Beatles lore, though Paul weren't no saint, either).  Yet though the writing was on the wall, the Beatles also knew that the sloppy and unpolished Let It Be was not how they wanted to go out, nor how they wanted to be everlastingly remembered!  Knowing this to be the last breath of the Beatles, these four egomaniacs, against all odds, put aside their differences, rallied together one last time and went out on top!

While nothing lyrically gives away Abbey Road as a swan song, it nevertheless just feels like a grand finale.  I still have clear memories of the afternoon of my High School graduation, decked out in my robes and an ever-uncertain future, putting on my Mom's ancient copy of Abbey Road on a record-player older than me, and listening along with all the swelling passion of my soul like only an 18-year-old can--it was the end of my public education, of my childhood, of my youth, everything was ending, and only Abbey Road seemed to understand.

Now, part of every young man's personal growth is to realize that there are other bands than the Beatles; and throughout college, grad school, and adulthood generally, I've had the privilege of hearing a grand diversity of artists who have moved my soul.  But here's what I've only lately come to understand--so few of them ever got to end on their own terms, to self-consciously produce their swan song!  If acrimony tears apart the band (e.g. The Smiths, The Talking Heads, Dead Kennedys, Oasis, Guns 'n Roses, Rage Against the Machine, etc), they tend to never rally one last time a la the Beatles, to produce a final, definitive statement.  Or if they get along great, they tend to keep producing albums weeellll past their relevancy (e.g. The Rolling Stones, U2, Pearl Jam, REM, etc), severely blunting the impact of whatever their final album turns out to be.  If sudden death disrupts the band (e.g. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Prince, Nirvana, etc), they rarely if ever realize that their last album was in fact their last album.  So few acts ever actually produce a genuine Swan Song!

This point was really driven home for me in 2016, when, 47 years after the release of Abbey Road, we finally got not one, but two bona fide Swan Songs worthy of the name.  They even bookended the year: David Bowie's Blackstar came out in early January, just a scarce a few days before his death of cancer, while Leonard Cohen's You Want It Darker came out in October, just a month before his own passing.

What sets apart these two albums is that 1) both artists knew the end was nigh and that this would likely be their last dance, and 2) both artists had actually pulled off the rare feet of returning to relevancy in their twilight years.  David Bowie had tapered off recording new material with the new millennium, dropping off the musical radar after 2002...until 2013's The Next Day welcomed him back to the scene with surprising enthusiasm.  He discovered that the queer kids considered him a godfather of sorts, the art kids a progenitor, the hip kids a living legend.  When Blackstar debuted less than 3 years later, fans were excitedly talking about what a bold new direction this was for him, what a delightful new reinvention in a career replete with them--that is, the discussion was not on his past glories, but of what he was still going to do next!  Despite the endless references to death, heaven, resurrection, and saying goodbye that permeate the album, his impending mortality was the last thing on anyone's mind.  To the very end, Bowie got to control the narrative, to define himself, to go out on his own terms.

Cohen, likewise, had basically taken the '90s off after a couple decades of critical and commercial success.  He returned to touring, in fact, only because his manager (who was apparently a jilted lover, in classic Cohen fashion) embezzled millions of his dollars, and so he needed to recoup his retirement fund.  But he didn't just do a simple cash-in tour, but by all accounts created a religious experience for all present.  He, too, had achieved living legend status.  As You Want It Darker prepped for release, Cohen said in a NYT interview that he was "ready to die."  The title track's mix of Jewish funeral calls and chorus of "I'm ready, my Lord," affirmed the inevitable.  If he was going out, he was going to go out deliberately, in his own way.

So few other acts get to do that.  One of the only other example I've been able to find so far is Fugazi, who, as they pulled apart in different creative directions, made sure that 2001's The Argument finished off the band as principled and uncompromising as they started.  The band had accomplished all it had set out to accomplish, and no mere commercial considerations was going to artificially (and monstrously) lengthen its life.  Frontman Ian MacKaye, speaking of his own Dischord Records--the indie label that had kept the faith even when they had multi-million dollar offers from the majors-- has described Dischord as a "living thing," and therefore will die one day, like it should.  Fugazi, likewise, completed its natural lifespan, and there is something paradoxically life-affirming about that attitude.  "Have you made your peace with God?" someone asked Thoreau on his deathbed; "I hadn't realized we had quarreled," he replied, and Fugazi could have responded the same.

I guess I've just become slightly obsessed, lately, with how an artist chooses to end.  It just feels more organic, more honest, more alive, to always keep foregrounded in one's own mind how it all ends.  There's something liberating about knowing that you're going to end, when you're going to end, in choosing to end, deliberately, on your own terms, to say "I'm ready, my Lord"--to affirm that "Here comes the argument"--to declare "I'm a Blackstar"--to say "In the end, the love you take/is equal to the love you make"--not as a platitude, but a warning.

Ending is how you lay aside the things of this life to pursue those of a better.  It's how you move on, progress, grow.  It's how I end this silly little blog, once and for all.

On Cuban Currency

We briefly interrupt the silence of this retired blog to bring a public service announcement to any and all stray googlers prepping a trip to Cuba.

There are two national currencies in Cuba (I learned this the hard way): The CUC (Cuban Convertible) and the CUP (Cuban Peso), also known as MN (Moneda Nacional).  Now pay attention.

The CUC is pegged to the dollar; that is, 1 CUC is equal to 1 USD.  The CUP, however, divides into the CUC by 24.  That is, 24 CUP make up 1 CUC.  Are you with me so far?

Say something costs $15 CUP; you can hand the vendor 1 CUC, and get 9 CUP back as change.  The CUC can be converted into Pesos; hence the name "Convertible."  Still with me?

It gets tricky, because both use the dollar sign - $ - so you have to look to make sure the price lists either CUC or CUP (and/or MN) next to it.  Otherwise you can be taken advantage of, as I was, when I went to a little hole-in-the-wall place in the touristy areas of Old Havana.  I ordered a plate of rice and beans and beef, but was scratching my head when the price was listed as $30.  It was my first day, and not sure what else to do, I handed $30 CUC to the cashier.  Without a second look or a second thought, she took it and sent my order to the kitchen.

Needless to say, accustomed as I was to favorable exchange rates in Latin America, I was suddenly very worried about how the heck I was going to afford to eat in this country (for that matter, I worried how the heck anybody affords to eat in this country)!  Moreover, U.S. credit cards and debit cards do not work in Cuba, so all I had was the cash I had on me--and the Havana currency exchange had already taken their standard 13% off the top, so I didn't have as much as I thought I would have to begin with.  I was suddenly looking forward to a very belt-tightening few days.

I considered just eating once a day, but late that evening, my hunger-pains got the best of me, so I ventured out to a pizza take-out place I spied near my Airbnb (cause those exist now in Cuba, apparently).  I was staying in a much poorer part of the city, so they were arguably all the more incentivized to just take my clearly-tourist money and I would've been none the wiser.  But they didn't.  They were good, honest people.  I meekly offered my $15CUC to the cashier and he immediately rolled his eyed and, with a guffaw, asked if I spoke English.  That's when he explained to me the difference between CUC and CUP/MN.  I am deeply grateful to that man.

CUC is typically used for taxis, hotels, and fine sit-down restaurants; CUP is for local goods and services.  The museums will charge, say, $8 of everyone, but it will be 8 CUC of foreigners, and 8 CUP of locals, in order to keep the museums affordable to Cuban nationals.  The CUC was first introduced in 2003 in order to try and prevent the US dollar from infiltrating the local economy too deeply as it had after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I just want to save you from making a $30 mistake like I made.  Whatever you buy in Cuba, make sure you first ask if it's in CUC (typically pronounced "coo") or in CUP (typically referred to as either "peso cubano" or "MN").  Good luck, and have fun!

On the Evolution of Teaching Letter From a Birmingham Jail

When I first started teaching college composition 6 Autumns ago, I threw Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" onto the syllabus mainly because it was a famous essay and I was a last-minute hire still trying desperately to flesh out a course plan.  In my painful naivety, I taught "Letter" like a historical artifact, a relic from some bygone and incomprehensible era--fantastically well-written of course and well worth modeling, but fundamentally dated.  The students responded well to it so it stayed on my syllabus; nevertheless I still felt slightly guilty, that I hadn't assigned a selection that was more contemporary, more "relevant."

But then Trayvon Martin happened, and Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and the Ferguson riots and the Baltimore riots and etc and etc and etc, and it became sadly clear to me that there was nothing dated about MLK's message at all, that for all our lip-service to his memory, his fundamental message is still as urgent as ever.

Then Election 2016 happened.  Now "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" is my manifesto.

Early in this essay, he writes, "In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action."  I am now entering my self-purification step, as I prepare myself for what will come next, examining my motivations, removing my fear and anger, considering what my responses should be, strengthening my commitment, contemplating how I can do the most effective good. Self-purification is no longer something that once happened, but must still happen.

Teaching this essay, I had often praised to my students how MLK, despite having every reason and justification to lash out viciously at his critics while he sat in jail on trumped-up charges, nevertheless still engaged with them respectfully, kindly, friendly, in love and charity and brotherhood, all the while still remaining uncompromising, unyielding, and outspoken in his convictions--he sincerely sought to persuade, not just shout.  I will now be meditating on how to consistently perform such a feat myself.  Following the admonition of Christ, I must always love my enemies, no matter how vociferously I disagree with them, no matter how many people they hurt, including me.

I will not condemn protests but consider their causes; forswear the path of the "white-moderate" more committed to peace than justice; become an extremist for love and not hate in the face of a resurgent White Supremacy (yes, they had always been there, I know; in a perverse sense, it's almost a relief to have them back out in the open, where we can see them). 

It used to be a sterile intellectual exercise for me to wonder whether I would have supported the Civil Rights movement had I been alive in the '50s and '60s--of course I hoped I would have been, but one can never be certain, what one would have been like, how one would have been raised.  But we no longer need to wonder now, do we; in fact, as protests and KKK parades sweep the nation, we can prove with whom we stand right now.  I will forthwith be teaching "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" accordingly.

I started teaching college composition the same year I started this silly little blog; I may take a break from writing here awhile--or, I may need to express myself here more than ever, who knows, I haven't decided yet, I've never decided yet.  But either way, whether this is a final sign-off or but a brief pause, in the words of Dr. King:

"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

"Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr."

The Last Time the Cubs Won the World Series...

I of course can only put it in temporal terms that would most resonate with me personally:

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, TS Eliot was still at Harvard, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock not even a twinkle in his eye--and it would be far longer before the Cubs would again dare disturb the Universe.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ernest Hemingway was 9--the Sun would not Also Rise over the Cubs for another century.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ezra Pound still hadn't arrived in London, let alone turn to fascism (a word that didn't exist yet)--there were still no apparitions of these faces in a crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Gertrude Stein had yet to self-publish Three Lives--A Rose was not yet a Rose was not yet a Rose was not yet a (Pete) Rose.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Virginia Woolf hadn't even started work on her first novel yet--for that matter, she still couldn't vote or legally inherit property, rights she would obtain before the Cubs saw another pennant. 

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive and writing new Sherlock Holmes stories--he would solve more mysteries in the 20th century than the Cubs would win series.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Marcel Proust had not started In Search of Lost Time--For a long time he still went to bed early, as did the Cubs' repeated playoff's hopes.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Picasso was only barely past his Blue period--though the Cubs, unbeknownst to them, had only begun theirs.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Bloomsday was just another forgotten Thursday--History was not yet a nightmare from which the Cubs were trying to awake.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ireland was still entirely part of the UK, William Butler Yeats had no notion of one day memorializing the Easter Rising, James Joyce had only just barely ditched work on Stephen Hero for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and George Bernard Shaw had yet to write Pygmalion, the precursor to My Fair Lady--Ireland made more progress in 107 years than did the Cubs.

That is, the last time the Cubs won the World Series, the term "Modernist" did not yet exist, nor did any of the texts it would eventually get applied to.

In short, the last time the Cubs won the World Series, my entire dissertation topic didn't even exist yet!

On "Checking In" at Standing Rock

So early yesterday morning, I opened up Facebook to see that one of my friends had checked in at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota!  Not only one, but several!  In fact, the list kept on growing!  At first it appeared that a bunch of my old classmates at University of Iowa had taken a road trip together, but then I saw folks checking in from Chicago, Seattle, and even L.A.!  Overwhelmed, I considered how the most I had done so far is donate a few bucks to their legal defense fund, while these courageous souls had actually put their own physical bodies in harm's way—

Except no, none of them were physically at Standing Rock at all, they had only "checked in".  Some sort of social media awareness campaign/solidarity strategy against the local Sheriff's office (though why the Sheriff would need to comb through FB check-ins to find all the protestors they had just arrested—or why protestors risking their lives would check into FB in the first place—I confess is beyond me).  And who knows, maybe it actually worked, or was at least useful in raising awareness and putting pressure upon the powerful or what have you.

But you'll understand if I still felt a little deflated. Facebook activism is to real activism what Facebook life is to real life.

Edinburgh, Scotland

I was about to insist that it should really be spelt "Edinborough" if they're going pronounce it that way--but then I remembered that "-ough" has 3 different renderings based on if it's prefixed by a t-, thr-, or b-, so I let it alone and reminded myself that English is basically 2 steps from Chinese anyways.

My wife worked a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland this weekend, and despite having to be re-routed through a number of totally different airports, I was able to join her and sight-see for a day.

The Scottish secession vote was just 2 scant years ago (and on a side-note, I'm genuinely curious as to how big the Venn Diagram overlap is between those who opposed Scottish independence and those who voted for the Brexit--and vice-versa), and given the specific economic grievances the Scottish National Party held against merry ol' England, I guess I had kinda assumed that Scotland must really suck or something.  And perhaps outside the capitol, things are more sketch.

Nevertheless, I was still so unprepared for just how lovely Edinburgh is!  The pristine, clean streets, the dazzling diversity of architecture from Medieval to Modernist, the bag-pipers busking on the streets, the Halloween decor simultaneously exported to and imported from the United States (now there's the paradox of post-colonialism in a nutshell!), the lush green trees tinged with autumn leaves--it was rejuvenating, is what it was.

Edingburgh Castle was of course the highlight, and everything else was a cherry on top--but there were still lots of cherries.  I was especially enamored with the Sir Walter Scott Memorial; I've seen a number of dead-author's placards by now, but there are Kings and U.S. Presidents with less elaborate monuments than Scott's.

My middle-name is derived from the clan MacLeland, my Dad's Mother's line.  As in Denmark, I was again left wondering: does the weather here feel homey cause it reminds me of Washington, or is it the other way around?

[View from Edinburgh Castle]

On Bob Dylan and John Ashbery

So one of the predominant responses I'm noticing to Bob Dylan's Nobel for Lit. is (generally unfavorable) comparisons to John Ashbery, of all people, e.g. "Look, Dylan's fine, but he's no Ashbery" or "So when does Ashbery win a Grammy?" and etc. Implicit in these responses is the argument that Dylan, as a song-writer, is not a poet, that he writes in a completely different genre.

However, though I'm sympathetic, this argument is complicated by the fact that Ashbery himself blurs the lines between genres; for example, his 1972 work "Three Poems" is a collection of extended, book-length prose meditations--"prose-poems" we now call 'em, but usually folks just call them essays. In fact, I'm willing to bet a number of critics would still dispute whether they should be called "Poems," so much do they resemble straight-prose. 

 But that's exactly the nomenclature that Ashbery is questioning with the title "Three Poems": can any text be read as a poem as long we label it as such? How does genre influence our engagement with a text? Why *can't* song-lyrics be read as poetry? Was not ancient epic poetry sung? Was not Beowulf? How do we even define "poetry"? We are a long, long way out from meters and rhyme-schemes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think Bob Dylan's Nobel is kinda silly: the man certainly doesn't lack for recognition, and I generally prefer the Nobel goes to folks who do (e.g. as happened with Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner). Nevertheless, Ashbery deeply complicates these questions, not clarifies them.

Also, this comes only 8 years after the Nobel Lit. committee announced that there were no plans to award an American in the near future, considering out literature to be too "provincial". The pull of Boomer nostalgia crosses national partisanship, I suppose.

A Defense of "Rockism" So-Called

Nowadays, to be labeled a "Rockist" is a borderline slur: music critics lob it at each to slander their opponent as snobbish, stagnant, out-of-date and out-of-touch.  Among certain cultural critics, it is practically synonymous with "racist," inasmuch as "Rockists" supposedly only prefer music gate-kept by an overwhelmingly-white establishment of elderly men. A part of me is sympathetic to these anti-"Rockist" screeds, for indeed a myopic insistence on a single, aging genre can indeed cut one off from so much other excellent music--especially from minorities, which our country has a long, atrocious history of silencing.

Yet like all sweeping terms, there are significant problems with "Rockist".  First is the fact that the biggest, most unapologetic "Rockists" I have ever met are Hispanic.  It is the young Mexican-American men I've known who are the biggest fans of, say, Soundgarden, of Metallica, the White Stripes, the Strokes, who claim that Radiohead peaked with The Bends. Given how much of Rock 'n Roll was influenced by Ricky Valens, Carlos Santana, ? and the Mysterions, Rage Against the Machine, and even At The Drive-In, this shouldn't surprise us. To stereotype "Rockists" as exclusively white is itself rather racist.

It's also classist: Coastal elites and suburbanites may have long ago moved on from Rock 'n Roll, but, having lived in the Midwest, I can assure you that most the middle of the country has most certainly not.  And lest one dismiss that all as "Flyover" country conservatism, let us remember that Rock was first and foremost a Working Class genre, the music of the anti-elites.  From Chuck Berry singing "Johnny B. Goode" to Little Richard out of Jim Crow Georgia; from Alan Freed broadcasting across rust-belt Cleveland to Elvis Presley emerging from Memphis, Tennessee; from the Beatles out of the Liverpool docks to Bob Dylan hitch-hiking from northern Minnesota; from Bruce Springsteen escaping the failing-factories of New Jersey to the Ramones trapped in Queens; from Black Sabbath in the Birmingham steel mills to Guns 'n Roses running from Indiana to L.A.; from Jimi Hendrix out of rained-out Seattle to Kurt Cobain on the muddy banks of the Wishkah; from The Stooges' Forgotten Boy to The Replacements' Bastards of Young; from U2 in bombed-out Ireland to the White Stripes hailing from dying Detroit, and etc., etc., etc.--Rock 'n Roll has most often been identified with the Working Classes.  Even when so many of these bands are of Middle-Class or even Upper-Class extraction (as with, say, Led Zeppelin or Queen), their most faithful audiences nevertheless remain found in the lower income tax brackets that dominate the middle of the country.

Which makes sense, given that these "Rockists" are often folks from hard-labor backgrounds who work all day with the power-tools of heavy-machinery, and then work all night with the power-tools of amplifiers and guitar-distortion--all in a quest to reclaim their humanity from a dehumanizing industry.  It is no mystery to me why so many Hispanics are "Rockists" so-called--they above all are still entangled directly with physical labor, struggling to survive in an exploitative market system.  We can map the rise and fall of Rock's fortunes with the rise and fall of the Working Classes' fortunes, as America has shifted from a Manufacturing to a Service economy. 

This crucial shift may help explain that most petulant of "Rockist" boasts, "At least we play our own instruments!!"  Now I will be the first insist that whether one plays or programs ones music is completely irrelevant to whether or not the music is beautiful; nevertheless, one can understand where a "Rockist" Working Class is coming from, how threatened they would feel to behold their skills and livelihoods rendered largely irrelevant by computerized machinery--as has already happened to the American Working Class at large.  For the sad fact of the matter is that U.S. Manufacturing is not on the decline, in fact that sector has never been more robust--but the jobs no longer exist because it's all automated now.  Foreigners didn't kill the factory jobs, computers did--and so the Working Class is naturally resentful of computers.

Likewise, with the rise of the DJ, human beings are rendered irrelevant to the production of music--just as human beings are rapidly rendered irrelevant to production generally.  Even Hip-Hop at least requires a human voice; EDM requires no human presence whatsoever.  One can easily imagine a computer algorithm programmed to write all our dance music for us, eliminating human input entirely.  The dancers on the floor become subject solely to the whims of the machines, like some dystopic Matrix-cum-Terminator nightmare, wherein the vast majority of world is rendered superfluous, disposable, excess population.  It's not just Rock 'n Roll we worry about disappearing, but the human race entirely.

These are real concerns; the Working Class is indeed being left behind, as the majority of the jobs created in our sluggish economic recovery have occurred in the cities, and that primarily within service economies, while the Rust Belt and rural-areas are forgotten--where, not coincidentally, drug-use and suicides are soaring.  If ever you were baffled by the rise of Bernie Sanders and (much more alarmingly) Donald Trump, know that they have little to do with the rise of free-loaders or racists respectively, but the reaction of a working class lashing out.  It is telling to me that the most vicious thing Bruce Springsteen could think to call Trump was "a con man"--of working class origins himself, Springsteen fully understands the blind rage that drives so many of the working poor to Trump.  Springsteen only objects to how that anger is hijacked by a rich sleaze-bag, not as to whether its justified in the first place.  No matter what else happens in November, as long as this country continues to ignore the poor like we do, then all those potential-Trump voters will still be there--as will the Bernie Sanders voters.  And though those two groups may hold vastly antithetical ideas for how to fix America, one thing remains for sure: both groups will remain pissed.  And nothing fuels Rock more than anger.

Once Upon a Halloween in China

My one twinge of regret when I flew to China Autumn of '06 was that, for the first time ever, I would completely miss Halloween (even Puerto Rico has trick-or-treaters nowadays).  Little did I know that I was about to have the most intensive Halloween of my life.  For the private school I taught at wasn't just content to teach English with genuine American instructors, no--this place was all about cultural immerson, and as everyone worth their salt knew, that meant that these middle-schoolers were going to celebrate Halloween, dangnabit!

As such, Ken and I threw together a slap-dash, super-simple ppt. ("In this slide we see American children in scaaaaary costumes!  And in this one we see a haaaaunted house...  And in this one we see...candy!--no, no, you can't have any, that's just a slide on a screen").  We presented it over 20 times to over 20 different sections.  The whole shebang was only about 20 minutes long, followed by the first 20 minutes of Monster House on a pirated DVD, and then class ended.  While Ken gave the lecture, I carved a Jack-O-Lantern in the background, for the childrens' assignment was to carve a pumpkin of their own by October 31st, and I was showing them how.

That is, from fearing I wouldn't get to carve a single lantern that year, I carved more in one week than I had in near my entire life.

And with what factory-efficiency did I mass-produce those Jack-O-Lanterns!  It was probably the most American thing I did in China, for better and for worse.  A quick kitchen-knife around the stem, scrapping out the guts with brute strength, then stabbing out 3 triangles and a mouth.  There was neither care nor craftsmanship, only a need to crank out as much product as fast as possible.  My pride was not in my skill, but in my speed.  The U.S. work-ethic in a nut-shell, ladies and gents!

So imagine my astonishment when those Chinese children, who had only learned about Halloween the week before, not only carved Jack-O-Lanterns, but carved (doubtless with the aid of their parents and their fine-carpentry sets) some of the most exquisitely detailed pumpkins I have ever seen in my life!  Flying dragons, elegant calligraphy, portraits of old Confucians with their every wrinkle subtlety traced into the skin--and all this for pumpkins that would rot in a week!   To my shame did I fail to take pictures of them.  Yes, it is in the land of sweat-shops and cheap-production, of all places, that the tradition of careful-craftsmanship and beauty-for-its-own-sake still lives! 

Halloween night proper, Ken and I finally finished watching Monster House (you can only watch the first 20 minutes so many times before you are filled with an irrational need to witness the ending) and placed a lit Jack-O-Lantern outside.  The next morning Ken got up early for a jog, only to find that someone had turned its face around--superstition still lives in the Middle Kingdom, too.  Ken turned the face back around and then went running.  When he returned, he found the pumpkin on the ground, smashed to pieces.

China A Decade Later

My wife is a flight-attendant, and this weekend she worked a trip to Shanghai.  This has put me in a deeply reflective mood, because it was exactly a decade and a month ago that I first walked the streets of Shanghai myself.  At the time I was a junior in college, off-track at BYU-Idaho, and my chief goal at the time was to get as far away from Rexburg as I possibly could--and boy did I succeed!

Late August of '06, I flew from San Francisco to Shanghai all alone, a wannabe-English major with only an Associates and no formal teacher training to boot, sent by a fledgling Idaho-based outfit called China Horizons--years later, the founder Jacob Harlan even apologized for flying me over all by my lonesome self; the company has since vastly expanded, and now does a much more admirable job of sending whole groups over together, such that their various teachers travel with a mutual support system already in place.  In those early days, however, I was quite solitary.  Not only was I flying solo into one of the largest cities on earth, but from Shanghai I had to figure out how to take a 12-hour train-ride west to AnHui Province, to teach at a private middle-school in the "small" town of AnQing (pop. 600,000).  If ever anything was the opposite of insular, barely-populated, middle-of-nowhere Rexburg, it was The Middle Kingdom: China.

But of course my Chinese adventure was about more than just escaping the oppressive smallness of Rexburg.  At the time I had been home from my mission to Puerto Rico for 2 solid years--and at that halcyon age, being home from your mission for as long as you were out is a sobering moment, a realization that every missionary you could have possibly known is home now, that the institutional memory of your very existence there has already been erased, that you either live on in the hearts of a few scattered Puerto Ricans or nowhere at all.  The mission was no longer a thing I had recently done, had "just gotten home from".

In short, I needed a new adventure, something to reassure myself that my life hadn't already peaked at 21, that I wouldn't remain mired in memory, re-hashing half-remembered "glory days" forever, that there was still so much to look forward to.  What's more, I had to know that I was capable of doing such things--which was by no means a given for me at the time.  I was kinda shy and awkward growing up (in other words, I was a teenager), and frankly a bit of an unambitious home-body, yearning for something more yet still too trepidous to take any real risks.  Yes, I had risen to the challenge of a Caribbean mission at the tender age of 19--and grateful that I had--but that whole experience was still mostly financed and encouraged by family and Church, it was an expected thing that I should do. 

My sudden decision to go to China, then, was perhaps the first adult decision I made entirely on my own, took the initiative on my own, paid for on my own, accepted the risks of on my own.  And the risks were real--I even had a mini-panic attack on the flight over the Pacific, as I realized that I didn't know Chinese, I knew no one in China, that I scarcely had cash in my bank account.  "Turn this plane around!" I wanted to scream, "I'm going to die out there!"

Fortunately I was sitting next to a retired newspaper reporter who was returning to China for the 6th time to teach English himself, and he quickly reassured me of how kind and friendly and hospitable the Chinese are (which proved to be true), gave me some advice, some pointers, some encouragement, even complimented me for being so daring at such a young age.  I don't remember his name and I doubt he remembers me (if he's still alive...), but I would love to thank him again--he sure did help me get off to China on the right foot.

In the years since my semester in China, I've roamed fairly widely, enough to consider myself a reasonably confident, seasoned traveler (if I do say so myself), one who is no longer intimidated by foreign customs and unknown tongues.  (I'm also a much more experienced and confident teacher, while we're at it).  International travel now feels familiar to me.

But then, everything feels familiar after China--when you are an American abroad, you can't get much more jumping-in-the-deep-end than the People's Republic. The scorpions on a stick, pig-feet, steamed-lilies, and fish and foul with their heads still attached for dinner; the family-names first and given-names last; the baffled way you and they regard each other because they prefer their water hot while you prefer it cold; the opinions kept private and the Tai Chi practiced openly; the collective refusal to remember the '60s; the capitalist communism; the oxen plowing in the shadows of sky-scrapers; the swastika as Buddhist instead of Nazi; the stiff-as-a-board beds; the hole-in-the-floor toilets; the every-which-way they are blunt where you are delicate and delicate where you are blunt; the way even the local Police Chief calls you handsome, and random teenagers want their picture with you; how you will never be quite sure if they are actually inviting you over for dinner or just being polite; their utter lack of personal space yet profound discomfort with actual physical touch; the chaotic order of their every traffic stop, how the mass of pedestrians weave through the oncoming traffic in perfect safety; the language with zero correspondence to the Latin alphabet, that grammatically formalizes the vocal-tones we refuse to admit exist in English too--take every last thing you are used to in America and reverse it.  I had to sink or swim, and with a little help from my new friends there--Chinese and American alike--I learned to swim.

Over all, China was an important turning-point and confidence-booster in my life (and hopefully my students actually learned a thing or two from me also, as I faked my way through teaching them how to pronounce the letters V and L--and I do declare that you haven't lived till you've led a chorus of Chinese 7th graders in belting out "Yellow Submarine" and John Denver's "Country Roads").  And when I finally stood upon the Great Wall one brisk, bright mid-Autumn morning, it dawned on me: I might actually be able to do this whole see-the-world, seize-the-day, live-you-life-while-you're-still-young thing after all (it's probably no accident I married someone who chose to become a flight attendant).  While it is sobering to realize a full decade has now passed, it is supremely gratifying--even a relief--to note how full that decade has been.

But though I am now more sure than ever that there is still so much more to come, my wife in Shanghai today has nonetheless got me feeling nostalgic, so indulge me as I post the barest sampling of decade-old photographs:

The Jade Buddhist Temple in downtown Shanghai.

The very modern view from this very ancient temple.

The Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.

The Great Wall of China in Beijing

At the Great Wall with my American roommate/co-worker/friend Ken Carlston.

I had, and continue to have, no idea who any of these people were.

Entrance to the Forbidden City.

Mishaps at a Chinese masseuse parlor.

At Guniu national forest.

This pic is one inspirational quote away from a Dental Office.

Hiking Tianzhu Shan.

That chicken had been alive only an hour earlier.

A mere sliver of the view from atop Yellow Mountain.

Me taking in said overwhelming-view that no camera will ever be able to capture.

That bridge, for scale.

The sacred Buddhist mountain Jiuhua Shan.

The Catcher in the Rye Revisited; or, Catcher in the Rye as a Christmas Novel

When I was a teenager I read The Catcher in the Rye.  I also read Catch-22, Tropic of Cancer, Dilbert comics, wore Chuck Taylors, and listened to The Doors, Queen's Greatest Hits, and Dark Side of the Moon.  I wasn't exactly original. (Teenagers never are).

But maybe originality is overrated--not to mention a myth--and the reason why J.D. Salinger's lone novel continues to sell in excess of 250,000 copies a year well over a half-century after its publication is because there is nothing original about its premise: a teenager hates his life.  Holden Caulfield's is the common voice of adolescent dissatisfaction, distilled down to its purest and most impotent rage.  Sometimes you don't need to read something original--sometimes you just need to know you're not alone, that there's someone else out there who understands.

Or Holden Caulfield is just a total spoiled brat, an epitome of unexamined privilege so devoid of real problems that he has to invent some to justify his narcissism, selfishness, and general dickishness.  Such, increasingly, has been the summation of a growing number of folks, in the surprisingly burgeoning sub-genre of Catcher in the Rye re-reads.

These various responses, in fact, had me a tad trepidous to re-read Catcher myself.  Even after Salinger's death in 2011, I couldn't quite bring myself to revisit Holden.  Some cherished childhood memories are best left in the past, I figured.


But then last week at the airport, disaster struck: I lost the book I was reading (Vol. 4 of In Search of Lost Time--and boy, if there could ever be two more differing approaches towards remembering childhood than Proust and Salinger!).  Begrudgingly, like an amateur, I sauntered over to the Airport Bookstore & Minimart to find a replacement.  Amidst all those paint-by-numbers spy thrillers, hackneyed romances, formulaic fantasies, flavor-of-the-week best-sellers, cash-grab celebrity bios, petulant political screeds, insipid self-help books, and insidious Get-Rich-Quick schemes, I felt a sort of nausea fill the pit of my stomach.

That is, I was put in just the right mindset to re-read Catcher...which is why it startled me to find the book on the shelf!  What strange company for Caulfield to be keeping! How ironic to be so surrounded by "such a bunch of phonies," as Holden might say! It almost felt like some secret joke perpetrated by an irate bookstore employee.  I couldn't resist--I bought a copy.  Just finished it this afternoon.

Let's get something out of the way first: Holden Caulfield is indeed insufferable.  His critics are right.  But what his critics miss is that he is insufferable in the exact same way all teenagers are insufferable.  That is an incredibly rare feet--in most film, TV, and fiction, teenagers are idealized, articulate, a fantasy of what we liked to imagine we were like at that age, rather than a reflection of what we were actually like.  Ferris Bueller is who we wanted to be; but Holden Caulfield is who we actually were.  I suspect that much of the adult backlash against Holden is sheer resentment, for reminding us of how embarrassing we all sounded in our teens, which we've spent most our adulthood trying to forget.

But here's the other thing about Holden: he's also self-aware!  Multiple times throughout the novel, Holden mentions how he himself is a phony, duplicitous, inconsistent, and terrible.  Pay attention for those moments if you choose to re-read it.  Indeed, I dare say that a huge source of Holden's frustration and anger is his growing awareness--which, as a true teenager, he still lacks the vocabulary to fully express--that he is in fact inextricably complicit with the phoniness of the world!

And that I think is why the novel continues to resonate even today: because we all feel that same rage at our own inescapable complicity.  Our clothing is sewn by children in third-world sweatshops; our food harvested by exploited immigrant labor; our rubber comes from African and Malaysian slave plantations; our electronics from nightmarish Tawainese factories, built with rare-earth minerals mined by Afghan child slaves; our diamonds from genocidal warlords; our gasoline from hyper-destructive industries; our high standard of living from ruthless corporations; and so on and so forth.  In America, we are all spoiled, petulant, narcissistic brats, people who burn away all our many opportunities and invent problems to justify our misery--Holden, at least, is aware that he does so.  He is also one of the few characters in fiction who actively tries to disavow all his unearned privilege--and even fails as he tries.  The problem of privilege runs deep.

But then, his anger is not solely rooted in societal injustice, is it; early in the novel, we learn his brother Allie had recently died of leukemia.  Holden's grief, then, is of a kind with Prince Hamlet's--they are both morose, brooding jerks precisely because they are both grieving.  Grief has a funny way of stripping away our filters, dropping our defenses, making nothing feel like it matters anymore.  Holden isn't just the archetype for the raging teenager; he is also that of the grieving brother.

Nor do I bring up Hamlet arbitrarily (well, besides their shared spaces on every High School syllabi ever); a couple years ago I argued that Hamlet can be read as a Christmas play.  Remember that the latter takes place in the winter months; the ghost appears "against that season...Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated;" and that for centuries, the telling of ghost stories was a holiday tradition. As I pointed out back then, it is no coincidence that Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story, that Joyce's "The Dead" takes place at a Christmas party, that Andy Williams' 1963 hit "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" boasts "There'll be scary ghost stories..."  Up till two short generations ago, the dead were as much a part of Christmas as the trees and mistletoe.

And like Shakespeare's Hamlet, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (and I suspect this point isn't emphasized nearly enough) can also be read as a Christmas novel.  It, too, takes place in late December; Holden gets depressed at one point when he sees some men swearing as they put up a municipal Christmas Tree; his younger sister Phoebe is playing the lead in a Christmas pageant; she lends Holden some of her gift-buying money; and as had happened for centuries of Christmases, a ghost haunts the proceedings, that of the late Allie Caulfield.

I perhaps read The Catcher in the Rye a little too early in the season--it is really a Christmas story.  More precisely, it is a Christmas ghost story, in the same tradition as Dickens, Joyce, and Shakespeare.  Though a self-proclaimed "kind of an atheist," Holden nevertheless possesses Christ's same absolute impatience for "phonies"--or as the Savior put it, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" (Matt. 23:13).  The novel's title even comes from Holden's dream of catching kids-at-play from falling off a cliff--that is, Holden wishes to be a savior to little children, "for of such is the kingdom of God." Despite all its casual blasphemy, this text is permeated with desire for a Christ.

I may need to add Catcher to the thin list of books I re-read every Christmas, the books that actually remind me of the "reason for the season"--namely, that because we are all, like Holden, such prodigal sons, because we are all selfish, wasteful, despicable phonies (and that never more so than during Christmas), we are all in need of a Savior more desperately than ever.

Venice, Copenhagan, Rekljavic

Look, I don't want no guff from you--because life is already so capricious and unfair as it is, that on the rare occasions where it is so in your favor, you learn to take the money and run.  Hence, when an opportunity arises to go on what is in effect an all-expense-paid round-trip to Venice--especially when you are a broke community college adjunct grad student--then you friggin' take it.  Because you are the sort of person who's not supposed to be able to do this; you are supposed to be at the whims of the market, not vice-versa.  Flying to Venice thus becomes a form of resistance: politically, economically, even cosmically.  

But hark, there is danger!   For you may be tempted to be a total hipster about it, and roll your eyes at the Gondolas, sneering that they're all just some overpriced, overrated tourist trap. Protip: Ride the Gondola anyways.  And elect to ride the small canals over the Grand Canal, too.  Even the most cynical among you won't be able to repress a smile, nor a sense of awe at this romantic place.  It is magical on purpose.

For some reason, it wasn't until I was physically walking the streets of Copenhagan that I suddenly realized I was visiting one of the haunts of my Mother.  She straight-up skipped her High School graduation, I recalled, to fly across the Atlantic with my Grandparents, to pick up my Uncle Tom from his mission to Denmark.  I also have ancestors from this corner of Scandinavia.  You will also note that all of these people I just mentioned are now dead.  Hence, as I wandered past the Little Mermaid statue, the colorful homes of Nyhavn, the Danish Royal Palace, the Christus, I couldn't help but feel how I was now stepping where they once stepped, seeing what they once saw--the spirits and ghosts fluttered beside me.

I tried to quote Kierkegaard there, but I wasn't feeling existential enough (though it's not like Hans Christian Anderson is terribly cheery, either).  I'm from Washington, so the cool climate of Denmark felt especially like home--or is it the reverse?

In Iceland, everything feels primordial: the visible tectonic plates, the geothermal hotsprings, the moss-covered volcanic rock, even the language with letters unused by English since the composition of Beowulf, all make the island feel like a relic from the dawn of time, a vision of a young Earth.  The tour-guide may tell you that at a "mere" 18 million years old, the landmass of Iceland is, geologically speaking, an infant--but that is just another way of emphasizing how much older everything is than humanity, how we really are just guests. (Prometheus was filmed here with reason.)

Of course, such a recognition cannot help but make you feel younger, as well--and to take yourself less seriously.  Perhaps that is why the Icelanders, despite their general icy Germanic demeanor, were among the nicest and most helpful people I've ever met, especially when they didn't have to, especially when I needed it most (I almost got stranded at their tiny airport at the edge of the world, save for the kind airport employees who bent over backwards to get me rebooked). Iceland tops all those Human Life Indexes most deservedly.