"A Thicket--No! A Forest--of Wood"

Recently I returned to James Wood's How Fiction Works, a book best consumed in small, mindful bites with lots of time left in between. In a chapter called "Sympathy and Complexity," Wood relates the story of a chief in police in a rough area of Mexico City called Neza, who assigned his officers a reading list, comprised entirely of fictional works, in order to help them to become "better citizens":

"[The reading list included] Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo's beautiful novella Pedro Paramo, Octavio Paz's essay on Mexican culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Neza's chief of police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways.

'First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary...Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy...Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people's lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.'

How quaintly antique this sounds. Nowadays, the cult of authenticity asserts that nothing is more worldly--more in the world--than police work; thousands of movies and television shows bow to this dogma. The idea that the police might as much or more reality from their armchairs, with their noses in novels, no doubt strikes many as heretically paradoxical."

This passage affirms a concern of mine that people--especially people of my generation--are largely turning away from invented narrative in favor of so-called "real stories": personal memoir, reality television, or even what one might call liberal journalism (e.g. Michael Pollan or Tracy Kidder). There's nothing wrong with any of this, of course (except for, arguably, reality television); the problem occurs when we begin to believe, either consciously or unconsciously, that only "real stories" have anything to teach us about reality.

Drawing: Solo Swing

by Deva Crouch

Poem: I'll Rule It

by Amy Berkowitz

“I wish I looked like my beautiful dog! He is so sleek with lean, taut muscles. He has inspired me to start doing weight workouts. I hope some day someone will tell me we look alike.” 

Weirdest Economic Indicator Ever

Train hopping punks complain of fewer freights running, longer waits

Amy likes her own link

Best Ideas for Music:

Cassettes

Horns

Complete pause then continue song

Song about band name

Everything wonderful abt T’s text message, inviting me to her sister’s Puerto Rican day bbq, and how her sister knows I would make something good and also wants to see me it’s been over a year. So happy that I broke off a leaf of a bush, a perfect leaf-shaped leaf – just to hold it, feel it, enjoy it in my hand, fold or tear it if I care to. I think: I have all this, and I can have this too! When they make Lawrence Street into a kingdom, I’ll rule it.

Blood beer siblings

And the time I accidentally discovered free jazz

When I stayed in my friend’s room in Medford

After I’d moved away, and my friend’s room

Used to be my room, the same

Except she painted it navy blue

And there was all this cool shit in it

They only thing she kept was my
broken red mushroom shaped lamp

Which I didn’t think anyone would keep

And there was all this other shit

I smoked her weed and put on whatever record

Was on the turntable

The cover was orange with some black on it
and I really liked it

My mind got blown

When Em got home I asked her what it was she said

I have no idea

But isn’t it awesome?

How strange the relationship
between food and the economy is

It falls off the bone

I fall off the bone!!

A Speech I Wrote for Graduation

The following was excerpted from the commencement speech given by Miles Strucker in May at Madison Square Garden in honor of the New School graduating class of 2009.

I was put on the waiting list to get into Eugene Lang. I don’t mean this as a zinger; I mean this as a compliment. It’s refreshing to come across an admissions office that is willing to see past the SAT scores and the grades and the “realness” of a high school diploma, one that has the courage to step back, look at the moral character of an applicant, and say, “This is not the type of person we want in our school.”

We are known as "The New School, a University." My high school was known as "NOVA, we’ve got a mushroom garden." It was a public school, which meant adequate teachers, inadequate funds. Furthermore, it was an alternative public school, which meant adequate teachers with prior convictions.

I’m only mentioning high school to highlight a certain transition that many of us here experienced. My attitude towards education changed radically four years ago—and not just because it started costing as much as three-bedroom house used to. For the first time in your life, you’re in a private school and it’s not to steal from the lost and found or to rob someone; you’re having meaningful conversations with adults and not because you’re trying to sell them fake raffle tickets; but most importantly, you’re part of a progressive education that actually works. In honor of “Eugene Lang, The New School for Liberal Arts That Waitlisted Me,” the title of this speech is, “College Experience, A Speech I Wrote for Graduation.” But enough about me.

Part I: a personal history.

Before leaving Seattle, you ask someone what it’s like living in New York City. Their smile resigns, and they speak earnestly. “It’s the only major city that has a multimillion-dollar ad campaign whose soul purpose is to convince people they love where they live. Also, there’s an abundance of small dogs and prepared food. You do the math.”

Do the math? You can’t do math. You’ve been doing independent study for the last four years. Then, suddenly one summer, you get a notice saying that you’ve been assigned to Loeb Hall, have you had your meningitis vaccination yet, and what about rabies? You arrive with a keyboard and sandwich grill; deep down you wanted to go to the jazz school but will have to make do with modernism and panini. Your roommate, a fashion design student, buys you a glow stick and pinecones that smell good. Eventually, you’ll have to move across town because he doesn’t understand you. Now that you’ve got a single room, things seem better, but your desk is under the bed and your head hits the ceiling when you wake up. One of the graduate students you live with says, “That’s how Platonists must feel.” You like your new suite-mates even though there are twelve of them. They call you “the kid” and buy you nonalcoholic beer as a joke. Joke’s on them, you think to yourself, finishing the last of it. At least I’m not graduating during a time of great strife.

Soon you’ll be asked to write an essay about Joan Didion. “Hasn’t she already done that,” you’ll want to ask. There’s an overwhelming urge to jot notes on the books you buy, underlining the sentences you like, and also the ones you don’t understand. In the true spirit of the avant-garde, you’ll get these confused. Time is divided between the Internet and the Lower East-Side. You see someone you recognize from back home. You ask what they’re up to these days. They say, “I’m in Brooklyn.” You’re not sure if that’s where they live or an adjective qualifying their mood. Whatever it is, it smells like cigarettes.

Photograph: Self-Portrait

by Jennifer Lobsenz

Poem: Tiny Mexicans

by Alex Gallo-Brown

I fool myself
into happy patter:
tap at keyboard, swing frying pan
listlessly across stove,
slumber briefly among strange
images of stormy men,
then launch myself back to work
come morning.

But earlier I was in the park, playing
basketball beside scores of tiny Mexicans.

But earlier I was in the street, bathing
in brilliant light made by silver cars.

For forever I have put finished 

cigarettes into the hollow womb 

of an ocean shell.

The ocean I have not witnessed in many moons.
But more of the moon I have seen than you.

Baucus on Baucus

After his healthcare proposal was roundly rejected by senators on both sides of the aisle (Howard Dean called it the worst piece of healthcare legislation he's seen in thirty years), Senator Max Baucus has finally, mercifully come clean about his own shortcomings.