JACK LONDON IS DEAD launch now available at PennSound

For a recording of the launch of Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry (and some stories), go to PennSound, here.

This anthology is an important intervention in Hawai`i's literary politics, and offers a fine selection of poetry, as well as statements by the writers on what it means to be a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i in the 21st century.

To buy the book, go to our website, here.

You can also buy this book along with three others published during this past year. See our website for details of the sale.

The dream course I neglected to send: Literature of Alzheimer's

Curious that I hadn't heard a verdict on the graduate course proposal I thought I'd put in several months ago, I was told that I'd not sent it in.  Found it in my "drafts" folder, unsent.  The course is on Alzheimer's and literature. Might re-tool it for an honors course next year, or simply frame it. Posting it here, in case anyone might want to cannibalize it for their own purposes. Courses like this one are needed, at every level and in many departments.

Graduate Course Proposal

Prof. Susan M. Schultz

October, 2013

Literature of Alzheimer's

According to the Alzheimer's Association, five million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease or other dementia. One in three seniors dies with the disease. By 2050, the disease will cost the USA (alone) over one trillion dollars a year. Recognition of Alzheimer's as a disease has inspired a literature of and about it, including novels, poetry, and memoirs. But it also provokes the reader of Modernist and Postmodernist literature to reconsider works of literature by Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and other writers whose use of language often resembles that of someone suffering early to mid-Alzheimer's. It asks readers to consider how different cultures approach the disease. It provokes the consumer of popular culture to take a close look at television shows, movies, and advertising that engages with Alzheimer's. It demands that the citizen look at parallels between the ways in which Alzheimer's sufferers and “illegal aliens” are described in similar terms, and similarly (in some ways, if not others) are put in “homes” for their and society's “safety,” and to prevent them from “wandering” across “borders.” It asks questions of the scholar of life writing about how best to write about the illness. And it asks questions of all of us about identity issues: what makes us human? Is there a point beyond which we are no longer ourselves? Why are most of us so afraid of acquiring Alzheimer's? Are we the sum total of our memories, or are there another bases to our being human?

This course will address these issues by engaging with literature (and film) of and about Alzheimer's. Students of literary history and creative writing will be invited either to work toward a final critical project on literary works, or toward a creative project (poetry, fiction, memoir) that uses Alzheimer's either as content, as theme, or as manifested in language use. We will have visitors from Gerontology and Disability Studies, as well as a field trip to an Alzheimer's home. There will be a final project of 20 pages of writing, as well as blog posts every week, and a significant amount of reading. Students will be asked to lead discussions and to report on Alzheimer's related writing they find in the mainstream media and on-line.

Readings will include books (or selections) by Daniel Schacter on how memory works and files; Jesse Ballenger on the history of Alzheimer's in the United States; Gertrude Stein (and an essay on her work by Michael D. Snediker); Samuel Beckett's Rockaby; Don DeLillo's Falling Man; Thomas DeBaggio's Losing My Mind (a rare memoir by a journalist who had Alzheimer's); David Chariandy's Soucouyant; Lawrence Cohen's No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things; Poetry/Shi (Korean film with Alzheimer's theme) and other video projects; B. S. Johnson's experimental novel, House Mother Normal; Catherine Malabou's philosophical projects, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage and What Should We Do With Our Brain? While, as a rule I do not teach my own work, I would consider asking students to read one of the volumes of my two volume mixed genre series, Dementia Blog.

Rancière's questionnaire

In my last post about education, I said I wanted to ask my students why they're in college. I intended only to ask my freshmen and to lead from that to a discussion of intellectual honesty, as there's been an outbreak of plagiarism in that class. But I ended up asking all of my students yesterday, using the prompt: "I am in college in order to ______________." The overwhelming answer was "to get a job." Other answers included, "to get the piece of paper"; "to find a husband"; "to make a stable life for myself"; "to appease my parents"; "I don't want to be here"; "to learn about the universe . . . student debt is putting my life into a box," and so forth. While completing a sentence like this only tells me so much--my students are, after all, interesting, talented people--I was struck by the level of instrumentality in their answers. One of my freshmen erupted with a counter-argument that only proved the point he was arguing against: "Everyone here has it wrong," he declaimed. "You don't need to go to college to get a good job--my father has one--nor do you need money to be happy." I was hoping for the idealistic follow-up, "but you go to school for other reasons."  That was not forthcoming. "It's the economy, stupid," I could hear someone stage-whisper to me, and there's no time or money for mental luxury.

Rancière writes about people who don't think they're worthy of knowledge, which reminds me that Booker T. Washington thought nothing so sad as a poor black person studying French. The sense that we ought to do something practical is very strong in my students, and that "ought to" includes job, financial security, and--in many cases--seemingly little else. There was an allusion in one student's response to courses that "aren't necessary," with a smiley face after it, by which I gathered that s/he considers Freshman Composition to be an unnecessary course. This belief seems to me wrong in two very different ways. First, if you want a job, English 100 will provide you the skills to communicate and do the job that's out there, if there is one in this "post-employment economy." It will help you go through the interviews, organize your thoughts, analyze data, and it will even help you write memos, the coin of our realm if there ever was one. If you need to invent your own job--create a website to offer services, for example--this course will help you do that, even if each assigned essay does not. If you need funding for your website, you'll have to write grant proposals. And second, if we want to have any pleasure in this life, thinking is surely primary among them, as we spend more time with our thoughts than with anything, or anyone, else. I look at their tired faces and realize that pleasure is far from their minds. The frequent in-class exercise, geared toward activity and, yes, fun, seems a blip in their otherwise grim days of attending classes, working a job or two, and then getting up to do it again.

Getting pedantic about joy seems backwards, too. But Rancière's "emancipation" narrative requires a field of possibility before it can take place, before "stultification" cedes to movement and ignorance to learning. This is what is at stake in Rancière, the how-to of teaching someone to teach herself. His notion that the teacher should also be ignorant seems helpful in some classrooms, if not others (Calculus, anyone?). But the university system enforces hierarchies, just as it currently enforces the ideology of practicality. That my department is cutting poetry courses only makes us complicit in this reduction to the god of non-fiction that seems to be occurring more generally in literary studies. Give them facts, contemporary Gradgrinds ordain. The playfulness of language is an ornament. Insofar as we listen, it's to poetry that tries hard to make something happen. That's good, but surely not all there is. Sometimes something has happened: a death, a loss, a work of art. Our responses to those stimuli need time, too.

And time is the biggest problem. My students don't have it. What they have of it they spend trying desperately to relax, by way of iPods and iPads and iPhones (the I might seem lyrical if it did not encourage passivity). These are instruments of liberation, too, with immediate access to knowledge--Google as godsend--but they aren't often enough used as such. "I'm looking something up," is a rare moment in my classroom, when I chide a student for appearing to send a text message. As a teacher, I can offer students 50 minutes or an hour of creative time, but I cannot give them more time than that. Once they leave the classroom, they're back in the world where what matters is the "piece of paper," as one student put it. I'm tempted to ask, "what else can you do with a piece of paper?" Here's a xeroxed diploma, now write or draw all over it!

The head of my son's school for dyslexic kids, Paul Singer, recently wrote an essay in the Huffington Post about making learning "relevant" to children. He added, "The great educational philosopher John Dewey believed that the school curriculum should grow out of the needs and interests of the learner." This may work best when college students don't have such fixed notions of what their "needs" are. When "needs" revolve around stability, income, job, and nothing else (though one student wrote that he "just wants to study music," with the "just" hanging out there to dry). I can't tell them they don't need to pay off their student loans, don't need to be employed, don't need to get that degree as a step along the way to adulthood, but perhaps I can suggest that there are adventures to be had beyond the job, that there are forms of insecurity to court, too, those that are not financial but artistic. It's a hard sell, I know.

That metaphor (that of "the hard sell") gives away the store, doesn't it?

_______________________

My son's school is Assets in Honolulu.  Have a look at their website. 

Eric Parker, via facebook, sends a good link for students to consider, both in terms of job prospects and the relevance of their liberal arts courses.

"There is nothing to understand": Jacques Rancière & November's weary pedagogue

It's the time of year, as one Michael Nye writes, when teachers and students are sick of one another, and are mostly just tired (often also sick). It's also the time of year when, especially in my lower-level classes, I wonder if I've done any good work at all. Writing problems begin to seem intractable, and what to do in each next class starts to become more of a mystery. Time speeds up, but the mind slows. And it's not just in classes that these effects occur. Department meetings seem pre-scripted, the silences in the halls all too predictable, and the work to be done in navigating the academic life too difficult. But Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation arrived in the mail this week. After I posted several links to articles about adjunct labor in the academy, John Bloomberg-Rissman recommended the book to me. Then UHM philosophy professor, Joseph Tanke, spoke about Rancière's work, and my colleague John Zuern, responded to him, at a International Cultural Studies talk I couldn't attend, but listened to via podcast.The series is organized by another colleague, Ruth Hsu.

It arrived at a moment of crisis, if feeling fed up can live up to that word. I don't know if I'll have time, but tomorrow I'd like to present my students--at least those in English 100--with the following prompt: "I am in college because . . . " There's been a rash of plagiarism in that one class, some of it involving ideas borrowed but not cited, some the "total recall" method of cut-and-paste from the internet. Students in my honors class ask me every week what they should write about on the class blog, until yesterday I told them I hoped they would find something that interested them in the reading, or in the course more generally, and write about that! My middle class, which suffers both my indulgence and sometimes my neglect, is full of bright, creative students who never google anything they don't know. So, opening up Rancière to Chapter One's title, "An Intellectual Adventure," feels like a step back into that before-time of wanting to teach because you could have intellectual conversations all the time and enjoy "the life of the mind." Ha!

Rancière is telling me what I already know, but what the ordeal of a long semester causes me to forget: that learning is an activity; that I am not a conveyor belt of knowledge but a goad to it; that my job is to create the possibilities for knowledge, rather than offer neat packages of knowledge as fact. There is no before and after in Rancière, no moment before you learn and no moment after I have have taught you something. There is no sequel, in which you now know something I've taught you, but still lack the knowledge to know that next thing I will spring on you later!  His ideas, by way of Joseph Jacotot, whose intellectual biography he writes, remind me why I love to teach writing more than almost anything else. It's an activity, not a pit stop.

And it's an activity that depends not on "understanding" (as in, "I don't understand poetry," or "I don't understand how to analyze") but on letting go of that word in favor of other words, like "enjoyment" or "thinking" or "attention." Rancière is especially good on that last word, one that I find myself using more and more. "Power cannot be divided up," he notes; "There is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says." The good teacher does not interrogate, like Socrates, asking questions that lead to an inevitable answer; instead, she points to a text, asks students to read it (even if it's in a language that she herself does not know). The teacher models the search, not the discovery. "Whoever looks always finds. He doesn't necessarily find what he is looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to that thing he already knows." Finding relation is the intelligence he celebrates, and anyone can do that.

Those who embark on what he and his subject, Jacotot, call "universal teaching" realize that "it is a question of observing, comparing, and combining, of making and noticing how one has done it. What is possible is reflection." The other day I entered my Introduction to Creative Writing class and talked to the students about how to make a chapbook, since their final project is to make one for their semester's work. Then I handed out pieces of paper and stacks of newspapers, a few scissors, and some glue sticks. They formed teams of two and began immediately to cut and paste and arrange bits of paper on the table. I hadn't given them directions; had simply provided the means for an exercise that they recognized as they started to do it. "We've been well trained," laughed one student when I remarked on my own lack of directions. I take that as a pleasant irony, that training toward taking command of the exercise at hand.

So on the good days, I see the voyaging happening in my classrooms, that eager combination of social event with intellectual or creative activity. The sense of "I can't understand" gets replaced with "I am making something." But it's a struggle. As I get older, I'm inclined to talk more in my classes, to try to convey knowledge rather than feed the hunger that demands it. I get more impatient with what I see as pedagogy that demands affiliation rather than opening unexpected connections. I grow more doctrinaire in my desire to rid my department of doctrine. I get more frustrated with my students' apparent passivity, forgetting that I once let assignments drop, plugged myself in (in an awkward 1970s way). If only "an emancipated person" can be "an emancipator," then self-emancipation is not an easy task.

It's been valuable then, on a day away from teaching, to indulge in this book, and to be reminded of the truth of Rancière's perception that we are the "being" who "examines what he sees," and that the real question to ask is "what do you think about it?" Or, "what do you notice?" Or, "how can you make something of this, whatever 'this' might be?"

My coda to Tony's coda to the Spirit & World Series conversation

Aloha Tony--

As I begin to write my coda to our Spirit & Series dialogue, it feels as if the statue of limitations has run out. Or, perhaps not: my life's time-line includes many years that I don't remember well (at least not as themselves), but those years during which the Cardinals won or lost the World Series seem better punctuated than most. The punctuation I'm now most deeply immersed in, as a teacher of English composition, is the semi-colon, but there's also the exclamation point (the one I'm reminded was a single quote, backspace, period on a manual typewriter). The Cards were in the series twice in the late 60s, when I was a child, three times in the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, then four times again since I've lived in Hawai`i. These Series gather other memories together, like snowballs (though where I live there's a snowball's chance in hell that there are snowballs), fleshing out my various lives, re-casting me in places where I watched games, re-joining me to friends from each era. I'm reminded of the ways in which my emotional lives have changed; the intensity of the losses and the wins is lesser now than it was, though I do confess to losing a couple of days to this most recent loss, catching up on needed sleep while luxuriating in my grump. Insofar as there are real continuities to our emotional lives, I've carried these emotions, attached to this team, to every place I've lived since I was an 8 year old in Virginia. When the emotions revive I'm in a restaurant in Charlottesville watching one of those old projection televisions, or I'm in my car asking my son to call the game for me, or I'm in the living room sharing the joy and sadness with my family.

While the Series was going on, I was teaching a unit in my Honors class on the Khmer Rouge. We read Chanrithy Him's memoir, When Broken Glass Floats, and had a guest speaker, Hongly Khuy, come talk to us about his own experiences during the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia. One of my students in that class is also a Cardinals fan--by way of his grandfather--and we would attend to the grim task of talking about genocide until class ended. Then, in ritual fashion, I (sans smart phone) would ask him quickly what the score was. After the Series ended, we talked briefly about how odd it was to move between these two subjects, their relative weights so utterly different in our minds. He noted that part of the reason he got over the loss so quickly was the comparison he made between these two events.

Something moves me to look up a poem I remember reading, though the content escapes my memory. It's William Carlos Williams's "At the Ballgame." Written in the late 1930s, this poem directly addresses the conflict between game and genocide. But Williams doesn't address it as opposition, rather as part and parcel of the same phenomenon, that of the crowd.  His poem can be found here, but I'll quote some of it now. After describing the baseball crowd, its "spirit of uselessness," its attention to detail, its excitement, Williams makes a horrifying turn:

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

He warns against the very beauty he sees before him, not as he sees it, but as it reminds him of 

another crowd.

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying— 

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—  

Like the Adrienne Rich poem we read in class on Friday, "Eastern War Time," Williams juxtaposes two scenes, the one in the United States (where a girl goes to school, a crowd to the ball game), with one of genocide, holocaust. He isn't interested in evil--the evil our guest Hongly said was in all of us--but  in spectatorship as a lack of thought:

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought 

The ballgame might take an afternoon, but the crowd is permanent. Just as our emotional lives are permanent in their own ways, the human tendency to look on, even to look for beauty (what is purity

but a perfect totalitarian desire), to look on as others suffer and die.

This is getting far more grim than I'd intended. So let me, for now, suggest that while Williams noticed a permanence across the continuum from sporting event to totalitarianism, we can also imagine a disjunction between them. We are discontinuous, as well as consistent, characters. If we know, or can imagine, the differences between these polar similarities, we can create lives for ourselves that combine joy with ethical fitness. In whatever small way, our discussion of the Series has struck me as an extended reading of this poem I'm ending with. We choose the beauty, even the 

grief, of the Series, but we also aim to refuse the apparent beauty of ideological purity. Baseball is not an ideological sport, but one that depends on chance events, on knowing that identities are not bound up in your last action on the field, that a loss can be as good for you as a win, no matter how awful that feels.

 I'm now back to watching the off-season news.  What can the Cards do about the shortstop position?  Will Matt Carpenter play third, while Kolten Wong plays second? Does that mean that 2011's hero, David Freese, will be moving elsewhere? What pitcher can we do without? Which must we hold onto? These are not rhetorical questions; they're real ones that members of my Cardinals hui are mulling over, just as we once thought hard about the Albert Pujols question.

So, Tony, good luck to your Sox next year, but watch out for the Cardinals!  Young pitching, lots of talent in the field, and we might just have another contender. 

Tony Trigilio's coda to our Spirit & Series conversation

I'll be writing my own coda soon.

Hi Susan--

 

As giddy as I am after Sox’s World Series victory, I’m sorry the Cardinals were the team they beat.  I would’ve much rather seen them win against at a group of ballplayers I disdain.  I could’ve seen ex-Sox villains like Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett moping in the Dodgers’ dugout, and the schadenfreude would’ve been more satisfying than seeing Yadier Molina consoling Michael Wacha after he was leaving the mound after the Sox had blown open the game.  How can a fan not like Wacha, or Molina, a backstop maestro?  Even as I write this opening paragraph, it’s clear to me that baseball is still a space where I allow myself to revel in attachment.  My remarks on Gonzalez, Crawford, and Beckett were literal, not metaphoric, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I really would’ve taken pleasure in their misery, as I did watching A-Rod’s face after Pokey Reese scooped up the final out of the 2004 ALCS and A-Rod realized the Sox had just come back from a 3-0 series deficit and the Yankees had completed the most profound choke in the history of baseball’s postseason.  But, of course, ballplayers are millionaires in Ayn Rand’s America, and they don’t really feel something as strong as “misery,” I think, when they lose.

 

This baseball fandom—at its worst, it’s like jingoism, and I understand that, at a spiritual level, it can be as obscene as fetishizing a national flag.  Writing about it, though, helps me understand the need to channel our desires rather than try to avoid them.  What happens if I take this desire and, like you did with the giving and receiving of Tonglen practice, turn it into something that is communal rather than divisive.  Putting myself in front of my laptop after every game and writing about my spiritual and psychological reactions—rather than just clicking my heels at a Sox win, or cursing the Sox when they lost (OK, but I’m still holding a grudge against Saltalamacchia)—helped me see, however temporarily, how the energy of my sports fanaticism can be redirected.

 

I’m sad to see our Spirit & Series exchange ending.  The back-and-forth of our emails helped me avoid a total, unmitigated attachment/addiction to the Sox during their high moments, and prevented the displaced, out-of-body aversion that comes when they look more like WoeSox than Bosox.  But I have a long way to go.  Our cats, Simon and Schuster, kept a wary distance from me during games (all those unpredictable, jerky movements I make during a game—all my shouting when someone hits a homer or obstructs another player from running to home plate—and all they ever want is a little pinch of catnip to smooth the rough edges of the day).  Shimmy was a paranoiac—who could blame her, when G.W. Bush used to break into her litterbox and bury her copy of the Constitution in the sand and clumps of waste—and she had no patience for my postseason clapping and hollering.  She hid under the bed after each game's first clap and shout.  Thank you, by the way, for mentioning her in your recent posting.  Shimmy’s ashes looked down on me with disappointment, I’m sure, that I couldn’t stop cussing when the Sox swung and missed. 

 

I’m grateful that our exchange spurred me to root around in my imagination—the creative imagination and the spiritual imagination—to try to make peace with baseball attachments while in the act of experiencing them.  After Game 6 ended, Fox showed an image from behind home plate of the final out.  I thought about how often I would sneak into the behind-home-plate seats at Fenway during blowouts or at the end of rain-delayed games—in short, anytime the more well-heeled paying customers had already left.  I remember one time in particular, early 1989, with my dear friend Mitch (who, bless his heart, texted me Saturday from the Sox’s victory parade), when we slid into seats two rows from the backstop in the ninth inning of a Sox/A’s game.  The start of the game had been delayed by rain.  The Sox were up 2-1 in the top of the ninth, and closer Lee Smith was trying to end it.  Dave Parker, instead, bashed a gigantic, game-tying home run over the Wall—one of the most impressive homers I’ve ever seen, and it landed somewhere in western Massachusetts later that morning.  Fox's camera Wednesday showed the same view, behind the plate at Fenway, in their replay of Koji’s final strikeout.  Seeing the Sox jump like giddy children after the final out, feeling the camera shake slightly from the crowd reaction, I realized that I never once envisioned the Sox winning a World Series at Fenway.  No matter how rich my imagination might be, I never thought to imagine what a Series-clinching game would look like at Fenway.  I never visualized what it would be like to see the Sox’s shortstop leap into the air after the final out, with the Wall behind him in left, staid and stoic yet drunkenly eccentric, towering now 37 feet above a World Series win.  All the games I’ve seen at Fenway—and, as I mentioned earlier, all the papers I’ve graded at Fenway—and I never pretended to envision what a World Series clinching win would look like there.  Blake once wrote that “what is now proved was once only imagined.”  But this final shot of Koji reminded me, humbly, that sometimes what is true (in this case, a Sox championship clinched at Fenway) was once absolutely unimaginable. 

 

Best,

Tony

Will Caron interviews Tinfish Editor in INHonolulu.com

Will Caron has an exciting new on-line journal.  Please check it out.  Here's an interview he did with me about Tinfish Press. Check out the e-chapbook format, which is really lovely.

I remember reading to Will when he was about four years old, a story that reminded me of none other than Gertrude Stein. He's now a young man, doing good work in the community.

An Out of Order Tony Trigilio contribution to our dialogue on Spirit & the World Series

 The World Series is over, so what is "order," anyway?

Hi Susan--

As you say, regarding Game 3’s final play, motivation means everything in Buddhism and nothing in Major League Baseball’s rule book.  No place for karmic intent.  Game 3 will always end with Middlebrooks as the rule book’s archetypal infielder who “dives at a ground ball and the ball passes him and he continues to lie on the ground.”  Game 4 will always end, too, with Kolten Wong—whom Sox fans in Hawaii definitely are noticing now—continuing to lie on the ground after Mike Napoli’s sweep tag on his arm.  Saturday, we were treated to the first World Series game to end with a walk-off obstruction call; Sunday, we saw the first World Series game to end with a pick-off.  Tonight’s game should end with David Lynch on the pitcher’s mound describing his Quinoa recipe. 

Everything’s tied—the series, 2-2, and the number of strange walk-off endings, 1-1.  Fitting, I agree, to talk about how attachment leads to connection.  I’m fascinated by the communal ties that are created by baseball fandom.  Your Cardinals Hui sounds like a real joy—the equivalent of finding a Cardinals’ fan bar where you live, but without having to deal with the clangy-loud “bar” aspect of it all.  During the 2004 and 2007 World Series, I rent my garments with other Sox fans on electronic bulletin boards, and this helped share the communal angst.  But very few folks on these boards were actually writers by profession.  I think it’d be therapeutic, for instance, to complain about AWP between innings.  If I see Saltalamacchia behind the plate tonight, I’ll get that feeling of first looking into the new AWP Conference Program every year and recognizing endless variations of the same panels I avoided the previous year.

The community is now happening for me through text and email—of course, in our exchanges on your blog, but also in the electronic messages I’m getting from friends around the country, not all Sox fans, sending notes of encouragement or, just as often, sending texts with the words “Salty” and “third base” in the same sentence just to see what kind of apoplectic reply they’ll get from me.  Yesterday, I texted the URL of our dialogue to an old friend, a journalist who enjoys sports but has no emotional attachments to baseball teams.  He replied: “Oh, the angst.  Forget about you and your friend with all your tributes to the serenity of baseball.  It’s like fandom everywhere—pure unadulterated angst.”  I texted him back in the middle of Sunday’s game.  First reply: “I agree re: angst . . . then Gomes comes up w/runners on 1st & 2nd, and I start freaking out.”  I didn’t have much time to reflect on the panic, though.  As I was writing the text, Gomes hit the three-run homer that eventually won the game.  I know that we can’t get into much emotional and intellectual nuance in a text message, but I was trying to understand the boundary between serenity and angst—a boundary so important to everything you and I have been writing during the World series—and before I could form a sensible sentence in my head, Gomes walloped Maness’s hanging sinker. 

The stress never quite went away, though.  To stay within myself—this is my new koan, by the way, to stay within myself—I read student work between innings last night.  This brought back Fenway nostalgia for me, countless memories of walking to the ballpark after my late-afternoon class and buying a bleacher ticket (such an innocent time, when ordinary folk without corporate bar codes tattooed on their foreheads could just walk up to the ticket window and buy one for less than $10).  I’d take my backpack into the game, find a good seat in the bleachers and, along with other grievance-collecting Sox fans, bask in our communal anxieties.  Between innings, I’d relax by grading my students’ composition and technical writing essays.  I usually could finish two or three long essays during the course of a nine-inning game.  Strange to think that the mediocre Sox teams of the mid-1990s could produce anxiety, but you know how it is, once you’re at the ballpark, you feed off each other’s catastrophizing, even when we knew that beyond Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, and John Valentin, the team was mostly a bore.

These questions of community—virtual and real—are a part of how I became a Sox fan.  I didn’t spend my childhood in Boston, and I agree with Leonard Schwartz that our baseball partisanship “is an identity issue” more than a question of the cities we live in.  I actually spent part of my childhood as a Mets fan.  You can imagine how this made the 1986 World Series utterly debilitating for me, since, by then, I followed the Sox fanatically.  One of my brothers (I’m the youngest) used to hit me every time I rooted against the Mets.  I had a great impetus as a child, then, to wish the Mets all the success in the world, and to do so loudly in front of my brother.  After a time, I developed a version of Stockholm Syndrome, adopting the Mets full-bore as my team.  As I started to play baseball myself, and to gravitate toward pitching, Tom Seaver became an unequivocal hero.  But the whole time, I was secretly interested in the Red Sox.  Everything they did was unorthodox.  Their asymmetrical stadium was reflected in quirky personalities like Bill Lee and Luis Tiant—much of this coming to my knowledge during the riveting 1975 World Series, which made televised baseball feel as important to me as rock concerts.  Once the Mets traded Seaver to the Reds (an organization that forbade its players from wearing long hair or facial hair—I think Bill Lee once called this rule “fascist,” which only endeared him more to me), I expressed my Sox fandom more openly.  By then, the brother who used to hit me was nearly 20 and didn’t care much for baseball anymore.  He wasn’t going to punch my shoulder if I rooted for another team.  My oldest brother was a Yankees’ fan.  Rooting for the Sox, then, was a perfect metaphor for the unstable communities of my childhood: one brother used to hit me if I rooted against his team, and my other brother was stereotypically loud and brash in his allegiance to my team’s Satanic Majesty enemy, the nefarious Yanquis.  Thank goodness my mother hated Nixon and Reagan, or I would’ve been even lonelier growing up.

I loved how you put it—that “we create sanghas of a sort around this game.”  Our partisan ties to ballclubs are only barely geographic, I think.  This seems a self-evident statement; yet most people I talk with are surprised that I spent my childhood in Pennsylvania but wasn’t a Pirates or Phillies fan.  But these teams did nothing for me—and I found their artificial-turf ballparks repugnant.  The Sox of the ‘70s possessed an aesthetic, I guess, that appealed to me as much as their strange ballpark did.  I never could’ve rooted for, say, Sparky Anderson’s close-shaven Reds, who ran to first base on ball four and who played All-Star exhibition games like they were the seventh game of the World Series.  (I detested Pete Rose, who always reminded me of the uncle who wanted me to take up boxing as a way to get tougher, when I just wanted to read books and play in bands.  Ironically, this uncle was a Sox fan.) My affinities were with pitchers like El Tiante, turning his back to the batter during his windup, and Bill Lee, who once said, “Sparky Anderson says Don Gullett is going to the Hall of Fame after the World Series. I'm going to the Eliot Lounge.”

My initial fandom began with connection—an effort to connect with quirky players, once I didn’t have to worry about my brother hitting me, and once the Mets yanked Seaver from my life—but then it grew into attachment.  I want to find my way back from attachment to connection.  I don’t know if it’s possible.  It might be easier if David Ross starts tonight instead of Saltalamacchia, or if every time Saltalamacchia looks like he’s about to throw to third, Farrell would shout, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little Solitaire,” and, like a good Manchurian Candidate, Salty would hold on to the ball, let the runner slide into third, and trust his pitching staff to get out of the inning.

Best,

Tony