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 And, honestly, expect me to be on hiatus for a while after this.

COVID Wartime

 Lately I’ve been trying to read the books of the High School Canon* that I missed during my own education (which isn’t really that much of an endeavor, the High School Canon is distressingly limited), so that I won’t have to do too much catch-up work once I get my first teaching job. Right now I’m on A Separate Peace by John Knowles, which I’ve heard quiet a lot of complaint about, but I like it a lot. Knowles only explores two characters and one very small and specific setting, but he describes them in such precise and sturdy detail, both physically and psychologically, that it all feels much more real than so many other things I’ve read. Sure, maybe we shouldn’t be teaching too many books like it, given that I’m halfway through and the only women who appear are the headmaster’s wife and a maid (both of whom disappear after less than a page), but so long as other texts in the curriculum show a different slice of experience, I think this one is a fine addition.

In the middle of the beginning, when Knowles is taking his time setting up the world as it is, the narrator, Gene, goes on a long reflection on how he remembers the United States during World War Two. In his recollection, everything was rationed, every young man is thought of as a future soldier, foreign travel is unimaginable for any purpose but war, and “There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.” It’s a very evocative passage, the kind that could never be written except by someone who lived through an era personally. And when I first read it, I couldn’t help comparing it to the present moment, beat by beat.

I’m probably not the first person to make this comparison, but a pandemic seems like both a natural parallel and opposite to a war. In each there is a looming threat of death hanging over certain parts of the population. In each a society’s resources suddenly concentrate in one specific area. In each we read the news obsessively, trusting experts to inform us on trends far too big for us to observe from home and instruct us on how best to protect ourselves and serve our community. But there are also clear points of contrast. While wars prey on the young and fit, the pandemic has attacked the old and most vulnerable. War drove us to all kinds of action, from military service to victory gardens, while the best defense against the pandemic seems to be lonely passivity. And I don’t see much of the patriotic unity in the fight against COVID that most sources recount from World War Two, though that’s less of an inherent part of the situation and more an effect of our dysfunctional government. 

Being in a constant English teacher mindset these days, when I read this section, I immediately though that it would be a good assignment for students to write something in a similar style but about our current situation. And, even though I’ll never use that assignment (because by the time I start teaching there won’t be an international crisis anymore, I hope), I still tried it out myself to see how it would work.

The answer is: not well. Most of it was too vague to present any clear imagery or emotion. The only evocative sentences were pulled directly and awkwardly from the text: Knowles wrote “The prevailing color in American life is a dull, dark green called olive drab,” I wrote “The prevailing color in American life is the pale blue of a surgical mask” (which isn’t even true; most people who care enough to wear a mask care enough to wear a double-cloth one). But the real problem was that none of what I wrote could be certain. I wrote the death count I remembered hearing last, then looked it up and replaced it with the updated number, then took it out entirely because it was sure to climb much higher. In the same way, I flip-flopped over whether to put in anything about a national mask mandate, since Biden is sure to implement one if he wins the presidency, but that victory is far from certain. I couldn’t write anything about how long it would last, except that it was much longer than anyone would admit at first. I couldn’t even make any generalizations about how it changed people’s lives, because there are plenty of people who have refused to let it change their lives at all (to disastrous consequences, of course). 

I guess World War Two is essentially different for Knowles and his narrator than COVID is for me. The novel came out in 1959 and the story is told by Gene fourteen years after the fact. Both are looking backward. And no one can remember or construct the past exactly as it was, because you can’t force yourself to forget how all the unresolved tensions finally settled. If the Americans had lost the war, would Gene have focused so much on the hardships of the time when describing the era? Personally, I think he would’ve focused more on the pain to come. It works on the personal level too: the nostalgic memory of Phineas is undoubtedly shaped by the tragedy that meets him later.

Maybe I was so fixated on applying that sort of detached view of the past to our present situation because I really want to have that kind of certainty. This is something I’ve written about before**, but what I find hardest about this situation is that no one can be certain about any part of it: how long it will last, how many will die or suffer, and if we can depend on a stable government to guide us through it at some point. But there’s no cure for this uncertainty, really. We can do our small parts to make the future we want to see, I guess, by voting and volunteering. But mostly, we just have to live and wait.

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* Defined as any book you’re almost guaranteed to find at least a hundred well-worn copies of in any high school English Department storage closet. 

** Sorry to post about this so often. I've just been thinking about it so obsessively lately that there isn't that much else I can write about.

Video Games, Grading, and Small Addictions

 I’ve developed two bad habits lately. Calling them addictions would be an overstatement, but it seems like they’re headed in that direction: compulsions I don’t enjoy, don’t want to continue at the same rate, but have difficulty stopping.

The first is playing video games, specifically Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s beautiful and engaging, maybe the closest thing to a video game masterpiece I’ve seen*. But I’ve been playing it for three years at this point. In that time I’ve beaten the main quest and either completed or intentionally abandoned just about everything else. So now I just hop from point to point on the map, fighting monsters that have died and risen too many times to count by now. There’s always some kind of thrill in the midst of a fight, even though death just means a quick reset and victory only yields a few more monster parts to sell. And once the fight is over and the thrill is gone, I go looking for another monster to start it all over.

My second compulsion is grading. I know that grading is something most teachers avoid and dread and only do out of duty, and I know my view on the matter will probably change once I have more than a few worksheets on my plate. But for me, for now, I find it deeply satisfying to scroll through answers, mark the wrong ones, leave a few critiques or compliments on the more open-ended sections, and add up the final score at the end. It’s so satisfying that when I’ve caught up on grading, I’ll look through Google Classroom, hoping that someone has turned in their assignment since I checked last.

On paper, these habits don’t seem like much to complain about. One is a wholesome and popular hobby that I usually don’t sink more than an hour into each day. The other is literally part of my job, and something I’m sure a lot of teachers wish they could enjoy as much as I do. 

The problem isn’t so much with what I’m doing as it is with what I know I’m not doing in that time. On weekdays I only have a bit of free time, time I could spend reading or writing, chatting with my family or girlfriend or friends from high school, or even playing a video game I’m less familiar with. And during designated working time I have lessons to plan that I’ve barely begun to consider and a research project that looms ahead. So whenever I choose Breath of the Wild or grading, I’m disappointed with my decision. 

But I still keep choosing them, and I think I choose them for similar reasons. For one, they’re both familiar: I’ve got loads of experience with Breath of the Wild and had the concepts on the worksheet mastered a long time ago. They’re also both pretty easy. But despite that ease, there’s always a distinct feeling of accomplishment at the end of each fight or worksheet. My continued enjoyment relies on a comforting myth: that I can keep on doing what I’ve already done, what I’m already good at, and that there’s nothing more to do.

I’m staring adulthood down the barrel right now, particularly the part of adulthood where the last of the comforting structure that guided me since birth disappears and I have to put your life together. It’s no wonder that I’ve found solace in routine and easy victories. Maybe it’s not even unhealthy, kept in moderation. But it’s something I need to try to keep away from.

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* Regarding gameplay and graphics, at least.

Remembering RBG

Our country has had a lot of bad weeks lately, but this probably ranks as one of the worst. The development that affects me most is Donald Trump creating the 1776 Commission by executive order, aimed at shifting public schools curriculum towards thoughtless jingoism and directly opposing the anti-racist 1619 Project (and it doesn’t take an English major to decipher what anti-anti-racism is). So far it seems mostly aimed at history curriculums, but there’s a potential leakage into English as well, and as a soon-to-be English teacher who hopes to give my students an honest and accurate education, this has me worried.

But honestly, that’s probably the week’s smallest disaster. News also broke this week that immigrant women in detention centers are being systematically sterilized. So far we only have an anonymous whistleblower account, but given how close our country has already come to eugenics, that’s enough to be terrified and ashamed.

And then there’s the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I found out, I was at a socially distanced dinner with some teachers I’ve been working with. One of them got a notification on his phone, said he had some bad news, but then fell silent for a while. During that silence, I was certain that he’d gotten an email from the principal saying that there was a COVID outbreak at our school and we had all been exposed. As it turned out, though it wasn’t the immediate crisis I feared, the news was worse.

When we all found out, there was a little while when we shared the shocked silence, then we said a little about how much she’d done and what a tragedy her death was. But it didn’t take us long to get into the immediate implications. Could the Democrats convince enough moderate Republicans to hold off the vote until after the election? Would Joe Biden take the nuclear option and expand the Supreme Court? Would the Supreme Court stay reasonable enough to hold back the worst case scenarios? Though we didn’t answer any of these questions, anyone offering a hopeful take did so with a shakiness in their voice, and anyone assuming the worst had a grim certainty.

Pretty much every take I’ve seen, online or off, Democrat or Republican, has followed a similar pattern. There’s a respectful moment at the start to mourn her passing, and then an fast shift into what we can or should do about it. Even Donald Trump spent a tweet on her memory before gloating about how quickly he’d replace her, and even if others are more authentic in their grief, remembering her is still always a transition into what her death means politically. There’s something about that feels a little perverse to me. Especially after seeing the documentary RBG a few years ago, I’ve deeply admired Justice Ginsburg, and want to take a little time just to remember all that she’s done and mourn her passing. I want to treat her like any other public figure who led a heroic life, to linger on her memory before moving on.

But I can’t blame anyone else for zipping through the normal rituals because I do it too. I have to; we all do. That’s the problem with representative democracy: we get attached to our favorite leaders. We learn about their personalities, their histories, their families. We feel like we know them. But if they die before they’ve left office, we have to face the fact that who they were as a person matters less to the world than what they had the power to accomplish or prevent. The death of Justice Ginsburg is a tragedy, but only a single life. The threat her open seat poses to reproductive rights, to LGBT rights, to the rights of immigrants, and to so many other issues I can’t name, all go beyond any single life. I know that I’m falling for a fallacy whenever I think that her life was more important than all the lives that depended on her, that we should all slow down and mourn. I know that my desire to slow down comes from a place of privilege too, since I’m one of the least likely citizens to be put at immediate threat in her absence. Still, it’s hard to shake that feeling.

But I’ve found a bit of solace in the increasingly common responses to her death that don’t move from memory to action, but who honor her memory through action. Action is necessary in her death, there’s no doubt, but then again, she defined herself by action. She was a person who dedicated her life to protecting and uplifting the oppressed; doing the same in her name is the most fitting kind of mourning that there can be. It’s a good strategy too, since using her name might be the only way we can shame Republicans into following their own precedent and holding off on a new appointee until after the election. But most of all, I think this kind of remembrance is important because it shows that the attachment we have to our leaders isn’t a one-way street. We aren’t stuck admiring people we’ll never meet and moving on once they die. We can act in their names too, even after they’re gone. 

Geek Salvation

 

For the first few days of student teaching, I was routinely shocked by how student-like the teachers were. When no one below the age of eighteen is in the room, they swear and call each other by their first names and gossip and procrastinate. Maybe those aren’t distinctly student-like behaviors, though; they’re traits so common you’d find them in nearly any profession. Aside from my parents, teachers were the only grown-ups I interacted with daily, so I grew up subconsciously expecting that everyone grew into the kind of baseline formality that even the most open teacher has around students. Now that I’m grown up enough, I’m constantly surprised to see that it was an act all along. I’d heard that adults were human from countless sources, but I’d never really believed it.

With all these thoughts of teachers and high school and growing up, I keep returning to this one scene in the last episode of Freaks and Geeks, where the AV club teacher breaks down how growing up works to all the nerds. First he graphs the lives of their popular classmates with his hand: sports heroism and friends build to a high point around senior year, then wobble and crash once their charisma and strength can’t cover up their bad work ethics any longer. Next he graphs the years of isolation and sadness that the geeks will endure, all turning around in college where their intelligence wins them wealth and admiration. The dialogue, the score, and the subtle choreography of the teacher’s mimed graphs all make the scene intensely satisfying and hard to disbelieve.

Because it was set in the place and era when they went to high school, my parents waived their usual censorship and let my sister and I watch Freaks and Geeks in elementary school. I don’t remember much of that first watch-through and probably didn’t understand much to begin with, since I quickly gave up trying to decipher all the innuendos and archaic references embedded in the dialogue. But I understood every word of that scene one scene with the AV club, and took it as creed, because it put something to words that I’d been noticing throughout all sorts of my favorite stories: that the heroes were always despised and forgotten, and they always won everything in the end. Ergo, if I wanted to be the hero or win anything, the best place to start out was to be as miserable as possible.

I had a great childhood, but if you’d asked me about it at the time, I would’ve responded with loads of self-pity. Sometimes I passed the time just mentally repeating all the unfairnesses of my life: being the least popular kid in my class (not that it says much in a class of seven), being a weak and skinny boy (not that I had any interest in sports outside running), being bullied (which mostly meant being excluded from activities I didn’t really want to do anyway). And I would feel so joyful thinking this, because to me all this misery was proof that I’d have anything I ever wanted someday.

There’s an oddly religious tone to this idea of childhood suffering equaling adult happiness, a lot of it likely inspired by misinterpretations of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. What’s meant to be a comfort to sufferers becomes a celebration of suffering in this warped perspective, and salvation becomes adulthood. Which is stupid, both because adulthood is never certain and because the people who follow this train of logic usually don’t suffer much to begin with. Your stereotypical nerd is unpopular and unattractive, maybe, but also male, white, and either wealthy or well-educated enough to be wealthy soon. Despite all my self-pity, I had a loving family, a stable home, and more opportunities than I’d ever appreciate. From what I’ve seen, people who really suffer have either more dismal outlooks on the future or more active plans than just waiting for fate to take its course and even the scales.

The real irony is that I’m pretty sure the Freaks and Geeks scene that started it all is meant to be ironic. The teacher who tells them all this isn’t the fortune-five-hundred CEO that he guarantees they’ll all be. All we know about him, actually, is that he has a serious smoking addiction. The entire episode is actually about them learning to sympathize with burnout Daniel Disario, who believes he has no future to look forward to.

All this is to say that I’m starting to take a bit of a longer view on life. The freshmen I teach talk about college in hushed and awed tones. Maybe, if I find a chance to bring it up, I’ll point out that life continues well into college, and past it eventually, though I’m not sure they’ll listen. I sure didn’t.

Waiting and Uncertainty

For the past few months, I’ve been doing a whole lot more posts focused on books and movies and TV shows, with the only references to contemporary reality coming in bits about nation-wide news and my own limited glimpse of it from my own life. No one living in the world right now really needs me to explain why: we’ve all been doing most of our living through fiction and the news these days. 

That’s an oversimplification, of course. My life has kept going on: this summer I visited my girlfriend twice, went to a socially distanced family reunion, gave literary enrichment sessions to every elementary schooler within a hundred feet of my house, and learned how to drive. But I haven’t been able to blog about any of those things, or anything else very personal this summer, and I think it’s because I didn’t have enough certainty about them to have anything meaningful to say. When would I be able to see my extended family or girlfriend again? Would I keep myself busy through the school year doing the enrichment sessions, or would some other opportunity work out? Would I be around Minnesota long enough to take my driving test? Most people talk about boredom and repetition when they describe the pain of COVID life, but the uncertainty is at least half of it. The waiting, boring and lonely as it is, would feel a lot more bearable if you had any idea when it would end and what you would do next.

And then, almost out of nowhere, the waiting ended, but the uncertainty didn’t. I got an email saying that a position for in-person student teaching, which I’d dismissed as an impossibility months ago, was open at Grinnell High School. Plans changed three or four times from there (no one’s fault, things tend to get messy when an inland hurricane devastates the state). Things were so up in the air that I didn’t know what housing the college would provide until the day before I arrived, when I found out it would be an actual house, all to myself. 

A little less than twenty-four hours ago the uncertainty ended when I arrived and moved in, but then the waiting returned. I was under self-isolation until this afternoon, when I got my negative COVID test back, and even now that I can go outside, there isn’t much to do in the two days before teacher-prep begins. I know I shouldn’t complain; an entire house to myself is more than I ever could have asked for. But I still feel a little like the winter caretakers of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining: more space than I need and nothing to do with it. 

I’m glad to have certainty now, I really am, and the waiting will be over before too long. But certainty brings its own curse: once you know what you’re going to do, certain options are closed. Of course, a fifth year as a Grinnell student was never an option, but I’m only beginning to fell nostalgic for college now that I know for sure that I’m doing something different. I nearly cried as I walked around the park where the Cross Country team would have its opening picnic every year, past the dorms where I’d lived and the houses where I’d timidly partied for the past four years. It’s hard seeing it empty, as though everyone who used to be here graduated alongside me and left for good, but I know that it would be harder to see the campus full and alive. If that were the case, odds are I’d slip into the New Student Orientation and be a freshman all over again.

Which is a bizarre thing to want, because I was terrified my whole first semester of college, and nearly paralyzed my first week. I didn’t know if I’d pass my classes or make friends or choose a good major, and as though the immediate problems weren’t enough, I also worried myself sick that I’d never find a good job or love or happiness. But, while I remember all that, I have trouble taking my past self seriously because I have what he doesn’t: certainty. I know that I found passing grades and friends and love and happiness and more at this college. So all I see is what the scared little twerp I used to be had ahead of him, and I envy him for that.

And, if I use the same logic from my past self on my present, I think the real struggle right now is the same one I faced back home: waiting and uncertainty. A shorter wait, sure, and a narrower sort of uncertainty;  I know that I’m going to student teach and I’m fairly sure I’ll be at least decent at it. But it’s less certainty than I had the past three times I came back to this campus, and I miss it. I’ll get past it once work starts up and I get started shaping this new part of my life. In the meantime, I guess I just have to wait.

Learning to Love The Legend of Korra

Introducing my girlfriend Mica to Avatar: The Last Airbender was an easy win. I knew that she adored fantasy, animation, spiritual philosophy, and good storytelling, all of which are the hallmarks of Avatar. And I also knew that she’d grown up without much TV, so I was certain to be the one to introduce her to this magical confluence of so many of her interests. And, better yet, it would be a way to show her something special from my childhood, since Avatar was my central obsession in elementary school, second only to Bionicle*.

So, as I expected, we watched it and loved it. The only problem was, bingeing without commercial breaks filling out the episodes and an airing schedule stretching the story, it was over a lot quicker than I expected, and we both felt the need for more. My options were to recommend the terrible live action remake** or the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, which I remembered being competently made, but nowhere near as satisfying as the original, and leaving an odd feeling of melancholy after each episode. I watched it more out of obligation than excitement when it first aired, to prove that I was a real fan of the original.

Watching if again with Mica, I felt the same disappointment as before, and after a few episodes apologized to her, offering to watch something different if she wanted. But she said something like, “What are you talking about? This is great!” So, as we watched the rest of the series together, I paid close attention to what she liked in it, and what failed to connect for me.

Part of it, I’m sure, is the gender politics of it. Avatar starts out with a very male-dominant cast, though it evens out quite a bit by introducing of a bunch of women in season two. Korra, meanwhile, features a diverse cast of women, especially middle age and old women rarely seen in animation. Watching it in middle and high school, I wasn’t mature enough to realize how revolutionary this was, and some subconscious sexism probably biased me against it from the beginning. Even watching it again recently, I didn’t really grasp the importance of the representation until Mica explained it to me.

But the deeper reason I didn’t get Korra at first has more to do with nostalgia, I think. In this world’s mythology, a new avatar can only be born once the old one dies, so the entire premise of a show following a new avatar meant that a character that I’d beloved in my childhood had passed away. The fact that he’d died after a long and meaningful life didn’t make it any better, because it brought with it the truth that, no matter how much you accomplish in your lifetime, eventually the world moves on without you. It didn’t help that the show invokes that sense of loss and nostalgia constantly: in season one you miss the original show, in season two you miss season one when Team Avatar was still together, in season three you miss season two before the world had become so distorted by Harmonic Convergence, and in season four you miss season three before Korra’s trauma. It’s hard to ever get your bearings on where you are when the show keeps reminding you where you were, and how much you’ve lost since then.

Not only does Korra change the familiar world of its past series and seasons, but it challenges the ideas that made those stories so comforting in the first place. Avatar shows a world where growth and struggle can atone for sins and heal harm. Characters are either like Zuko and Iroh, who come to terms with their flaws and undo the pain they have caused (Iroh does this before the story even begins), or Ozai and Azula, who are too far gone and need to be taken down to restore balance. Korra complicates this. When the world changes, it changes permanently. The solution isn’t to return to the past, but make the most of what is now, sometimes even by destroying what came before. Not everyone can be redeemed, even well-meaning people whose ideologies seek to address real harms. And for every villain there is a character diametrically opposed who is immoral, mistaken, or stupid enough to prove that opposing evil isn’t enough***.

What I’m trying to say in all this is that the melancholy I felt wasn’t a mistake or the effect of bad writing, but the point of the show itself. This isn’t to say that Avatar was morally simple (it tackled genocide on episode three) or that Korra is in every way better and more complex (Korra’s wider cast means more dud characters, while the seven main heroes of Avatar are all excellent). I just mean that Korra grows up from Avatar, showing a more complex and modern world, and the new problems that come with that. You can see this even in the art: where the original Avatar had bright shapes surrounded by bold, black outlines, Korra has duller colors that fade into each other more, and the low lighting makes every scene feel like it’s shot at the end of the day, as light has just begun to leak from the world. 

The difference between Mica and I is that she saw both series shortly after each other, so she could understand Korra for what it was: a natural and necessary extension on the ideas of the original. I, meanwhile, had rewatched and obsessed over the original since childhood. I treated it like a sacred text, and the newcomer like a false prophet. I needed a new perspective from fresh eyes to see genuine growth where it really was.

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* And, while Avatar is famously accessible to people of all ages and interests, the entire convoluted mythos of Bionicle is sort of an inside joke, in that it only makes sense if you were in the six-to-twelve year-old age demographic between 2001 and 2009. Anyone coming later is inevitably hopelessly lost.

** Which I planned to shave my head for so I could dress up as Aang at the premier. My Mom didn’t let me go through with it, though, which was lucky both because the movie wasn’t worth bodily modification and, given my unnatural skinniness, with a bald head I’d look a lot like a chemo patient.

*** Best as I can figure, the secondary villain opposing the main villain for each season is Tarrlok for season one, Varrick for season two, the Earth Queen for season three, and Prince Wu for season four.

I Prefer Burr

Like almost all families too careful to go out on the Fourth of July and too cowardly to set off fireworks from home, we watched Hamilton this Saturday. I’d heard all the songs before, but never in order, so as much as I already loved the music, I didn’t really understand the shape of the narrative until I saw it. For example, I’d always assumed that Aaron Burr’s song “Wait for It” came in-between his escalating threats to Hamilton in “Your Obedient Servant” and their duel in “The World was Wide Enough” as a way to explain the villain’s motivation before he kills the hero. But it’s actually one of the first songs, and in the context of the entire story, it doesn’t describe his essential nature as a character (as I’d assumed at first), but his initial philosophy, from which he grows and changes. He starts out patient, willing to restrain himself and wait for his chance, but his envy of Hamilton’s seemingly effortless success pushes him to imitate Hamilton’s recklessness without forming corresponding principles, which in turn leads him to rage and murder. As much as Hamilton is the center of attention, he’s really a static character throughout the show: he’s always ambitious and passionate, always puts his political career above family or friendship, and not even his public humiliation and his son’s death can teach him the restraint he needs to step away from the duel with Burr. As charismatic as Hamilton is, in the end I identify with Burr more for how much he changes over the course of the story. Sometimes that malleability is for the worst; his famous flaw is his inability to commit to any issue he truly cares about. But it also gives him the ability to reflect and apologize at the story’s end. For all his wit, Hamilton never has that sort of introspection.

I tried explaining all this to my mom, but she didn’t really get it. She understood where I drew my argument, but she told me she couldn’t see Burr in quite the same way because the real history is so much more complicated. For context, she has a PhD in history and has taught college classes on this time period for years, so she knows well as anyone what sort of person Aaron Burr really was. And yes, he did regret killing Hamilton later in life, but after the duel he didn’t exactly calm down. His main project after the murder was trying to get a chunk of Louisiana to secede from the union, something that goes completely unmentioned in the musical. 

This brings up an interesting question: does history matter to Hamilton? Can you enjoy Burr’s character, knowing that the pensive and reformed man you see at the end isn’t the whole truth? I tend to answer yes on that question, and my mom tends to answer no, and our respective statuses as an English major and a history professor probably explain a lot of our positions. But Hamilton is a more interesting place to interrogate this question than most historical fiction. On one hand it dismisses any pretense of being a historical enactment quite blatantly, featuring rapping founding fathers and casting slave owners and unapologetic racists like Thomas Jefferson with black actors. But it also puts so much emphasis on the mostly true historical narrative that you can’t divorce it from history easily either. 

The solution, I think, is that the plot is meant to be more than a retelling or a story. The characters are meant to be more than recreations or constructions from the author’s imaginations. It’s a commentary on the American founding, not on how it actually was, but how it’s remembered. The contradictions and holes in the story matter just as much as the places where it coheres beautifully. This is most obvious on the broadest thematic level: a celebration of America’s promise of equality and opportunity, with sly asides showing how those promises have never been fully delivered to women or people of color. The truths oppose each other, but neither are negated. 

The same is true on an individual level too. Burr was the introspective, remorseful man whose rage came from a mistaken but deeply human place, as well as a liar and traitor who never really learned his lesson. Human minds are always messy and compromised, after all, no more loyal to our highest ideals or defined by our lowest crimes than national histories.

COVID Numbness

So I’m embarrassed of my homestate yet again: COVID cases are way up in Texas after a premature and poorly advised reopening. They’re not alone: despite some states staying in shelter-and-place and keeping numbers low, the U.S. is facing a COVID explosion even more extreme than the days when the virus was just taking off. And it’s only getting worse.

Sometimes it’s hard not to wonder what’s wrong with these people. Not that I’ve been perfect about social distancing: I went on a few non-essential errands when businesses first opened up in Minnesota and don’t always move six feet out of the way when I pass someone on my run if they trail is too narrow. But how can you go to a bar when COVID has claimed nearly 130,000 live? How can anyone be so stupid?

There’s an Onion headline from a few years back: “42 Million Killed in Bloodiest Black Friday on Record.” A website called “Literally Unbelievable” archives Facebook posts that mistakenly share Onion headlines as legit, and this one has far and away the most incidents. Of course it’s ridiculous; how could more than ten percent of the U.S. population trample each other in a special sales event? But, glancing at that headline, doesn’t it make some sort of sense, at least for an instant? The reason why, I think, is that articles about Black Friday deaths start with a premise so bizarre and tragic that we can’t really engage with them, and most of the time we refuse to even try. We believe that it’s true, but hold that fact at arm’s distance to keep our mind at ease. With our willingly warped perception, the Onion can ratchet up the death toll to absurdly high levels and many people don’t even notice.

Aside from misleading media, I think that this phenomena is why reasonable people haven’t taken the pandemic seriously: the scale of tragedy is so enormous that no one can comprehend it, and from there it’s an easy step to apathy and denial. This isn't unique to people who refuse to wear masks; we all do limit our empathy, and most of the time it’s a good thing. After all, if we treated each death we heard about with more than cursory grief, we’d never have the strength to read a newspaper, much less a history book. Even those of us who take prevention seriously can’t pretend to feel the weight of each death as if it were new. If we did, then forget wearing a mask or staying six feet apart. We wouldn’t be able to leave our homes, if not from fear then from pain*.

With this all in mind, it becomes easier to understand people who disregard the pandemic. At this point, everyone is sick to death of being alone with limited activities, and if the danger is only an abstract and arbitrary number, then why not go to a bar?

I’ve seen a lot of well-intentioned people online (since that’s the only place I can see strangers communicate these days) try to convince COVID downplayers by citing the death toll over and over and over again. I’m not in the habit of getting into internet fights, so I’m really not one to say, but I’d recommend taking a different tact. Cite personal narratives of those who have lost loved ones to COVID instead. Sometimes this feels wrong; it’s certainly illogical. After all, a death is a death, whether you know the name or not, and focusing your attention on one story obscures the fact that there are too many stories to possibly tell. But the fact is that none of us are wholly logical, and to us, a death isn’t a death without a name. The way to force these statistics to shrink is to make them more than statistics.

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* By the way, I'm not saying that people who haven't worn masks or social distanced have done nothing wrong. They made their own choices and are responsible for the consequences. I just want to point out that their decisions aren't too far removed from the way any of us think.

Where's the Good?

I tried watching Hereditary the other night, and among the few movies that have made me cry, it is the only one that I didn’t finish, and I never intend to. Usually when a movie affects me deeply enough to trigger that sort of physiological reaction, I need to stick through to the end, hoping for some kind of hope, or at least resolution. But with Hereditary, I knew from nearly the very beginning that there wouldn’t be any. Every member of the family it followed was dismal and disconnected; if there was any love there, I didn’t see it (and love in movies, or any story, shouldn’t be the sort of thing you need to watch closely to discover). When tragedy struck, the gore and guilt forced a response from me, but I could already tell that the filmmaker wouldn’t give these people any satisfying conclusion. He was putting them through hell so he could make some esoteric point about society and construct a beautiful shots of severed heads crawling through ants, not because he wanted to tell a real story about these people. 

In retrospect, it was a bad idea to watch a horror movie as a palette cleanser from another horror movie, but the next night I watched Us, and it convinced me that at least some filmmakers can do it right. The family in this film is hardly perfect, but they clearly love each other enough that, when their lives are threatened, it actually means something. I read a few reviews that described the characters as superficial walking clichés that compliment the film’s condemnation of American materialism, but that misses the point entirely. We see mundane but charming scenes of family life that prove that these people aren’t hollow, that it matters when their lives are at risk. The true horror isn’t the superficiality of capitalism, but its human cost, and how arbitrarily it chooses who succeeds or fails. And I think it’s a real problem that so many critics would assume we shouldn’t care about the characters when we really should, in this movie especially but also in any well-told story.

Of course, the problem with being a writer is that any critique you have on a story could just as easily be thrown back against one of your own. And actually, I don’t think I would have noticed this trend towards ignoring characters’ humanity if it weren’t for a similar trend in my own writing. The past week I’ve been looking through short stories, searching for something fit for publication, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them are stories of disillusionment, of characters learning that their family or social group or faith isn’t as pure as they once thought. The problem, though, is that these characters never really trusted these things in the first place; they were always drifting, sarcastic creatures, keeping an arm’s distance from anything optimistic. And if my characters don’t have anything to hope for, then no one has a reason to care when they lose what they hope for. 

So I went back into these stories and tried to inject something worth caring about into them, but I abandoned every attempt because the results seemed too sappy, melodramatic, or self-serious. And that illustrates the problem that Hereditary and my stories and so many others try and fail to face: love, beauty, and hope are hard to write. The writerly part of our brains scream that they’re too simple, too over-done, not serious enough. Readers don’t take much convincing that a character or setting is corrupted, but suggest anything worth caring about and they go on high alert for unrealistic sentimentality. So a careful writer will edge away from anything authentically happy into stories like Hereditary, where everything is well-paced and thoughtful and aesthetically perfect and there’s no good to be found anywhere.

Looking back further in the archives of my stories, though, I found that I hadn’t always been like this. In high school I wrote stories where characters aimed for true happiness, and sometimes even found it in the end. On most levels they were much worse than what I’m writing now, but there’s something that I lost, something worth recovering. 

Not to blame Grinnell too hard, I got an excellent education there, but I think it’s clear where I lost it. In class discussions a professor would prod and doubt any new idea a student proposed, but let critique pass unexamined. We were taught to doubt everything, break every assumption or hope down to its component elements. And while critical thinking is essential, it would’ve been nice if the professors had said a little more about what to do with a system once you’ve deconstructed it.

I’m not advocating for stories where nothing bad ever happens, or even complaining about dark and disturbing stories. But the dark and disturbing stories that work are ones in which a character has something worth wanting or protecting. Once you have that, losing it actually matters. As nervous as I am to propose any new writing rules, knowing how many of those have failed me, I would tentatively suggest that any writer would do well to locate the hope in their story before going too far with it. A story without that might be exciting and funny and pleasing to the eye, like a painting, but I doubt it will ever really be satisfying.

I Regret to Inform You That I've Finished a Novel

I figured I've done enough posts accompanied by pictures of stacks of notebooks or me writing, so enjoy this juvenile drawing of marine life.

There’s really not a right thing to do when you finish the rough draft of a novel. The thrill of writing the final words on a story you’ve toiled over for at least a month (NaNoWriMo’s ultra-compressed time frame seems to be about the record) feels like it deserves some kind of celebration, so it’s only natural to tell your friends or post about it on Facebook. And while you’ll probably get a ton of likes and praise, inevitably someone will want to know what it’s about. Maybe some writers are better at this than me, but every time I try to describe my writing, I start in the wrong place and pile on twenty different genre labels and always end with “I promise it makes a lot more sense written out.” Even if you can clear that hurdle, though, you’ll still feel like a hack years later when you dig up the post celebrating the completion of a novel that you now know is unsalvageable. The other option is not talking about it, at least not until you’re ready for beta-readers. But you only need to let it slip once (and it’s hard not to, given how much it dominates your life) and suddenly you’re faced with that “What’s it about?” question again, and you feel like a self-important moron for staying silent. 

All things considered, it seems like the only right way to do it is to make your novel an international bestseller before it’s even finished, and that hasn’t worked for me yet.

I’ve finished first drafts of seven novels so far. I’ve announced four of them online (two on this blog) and stayed silent on two. Actually, I guess by writing this post, I’m choosing to announce the seventh one as well, which I finished this past Sunday.

To be clear, I’m not bragging. I’m admitting that I’ve written drafts of seven novels, only one of which I’ve ever seriously edited*. A writer saying that is like a mother saying, “I’ve given birth to seven children! One made it to kindergarten, I think. The rest I haven’t heard from in a while.” 

The problem, as I’ve written about often before, is that I always get distracted by the next story to wander through my mind. Things were especially bad back when I had a policy of letting each story sit for a year before revisiting it, by which time I’d be knee-deep in a new story, and the awful first page, if I even took the time to look at it, would convince me to drop this story before I could waste any more time on it. For me, writing new stuff is like discovering an uninhabited island, brimming with bright and endlessly diverse life. Editing, on the other hand, is like  finding an island that’s been overpopulated to extinction and sterilized by pollution and trying to find some use for the land. As much as I want to see something of mine published, the short-term thrill is addictive enough that I find a way to rationalize my behavior. I say that the next story will be perfect and published the first time around. No matter how many essays and interviews with successful writers tell me that’s worthless, I can’t help believing it. Even now, less than a week after finishing my last novel, I’ve got ten pages of notes on a new novel and I’m half convinced that I should just go ahead and start it, instead of polishing one of the seven novels, seven novellas, or countless short stories and other projects I already have.

But maybe I shouldn’t be quite so hard on myself. Back in early high school, I remember thinking that I’d be content forever if I could just finish anything I started writing. No need for publication, or any reader but me: if I could only give my story an ending, it’d be enough. And at an author-talk last year I heard the novelist Lan Samantha Chang** explain that publication, or even recognition, isn’t the eternal happiness most young writers expect it to be. The story doesn’t become any better once it’s printed and bound and shipped to bookstores. Aside from the odd one-novel-wonder like Harper Lee, most writers are probably never satisfied, and if we were, we’d never be productive again. This isn’t to say that I’m proud to finish seven novels and abandon most of them. But maybe I’m not quite as stuck as I thought I was.

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* And the one I did do some work on, by the way, has a sexist subplot that I don’t know how to remove and a protagonist who makes it through a good seventy five percent of the story just standing around and blinking. If it has a chance of publication, that’s a long way away.

** Who wrote All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, which I highly recommend.

Chivalry and Tragedy

Note on the photo above: I went to the ruins of a French castle with my Dad as a kid, and I wanted to find a picture of that, but there weren't any, so here's one of us just hanging out.

Arthurian legend is one of those weird things in our culture where only the parodies really have relevance anymore. People mostly know king Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the vast majority of times I hear “Lancelot,” it’s a sarcastic way of calling someone annoyingly moral*. Most animated movies based on these stories have a moment where they try to prove that “this isn’t your classic story” by showing a self-reliant damsel or bumbling knight, but what kid in the audience knows about the classic stories anymore? What adult, even?

It’s not all that complicated why things got to be this way: the stories and tropes stuck with Western culture even as the poems that inspired them became too archaic for most people to take the time to read**. We still have a vague sense of the chivalrous battles and heartfelt romances of the Knight of the Round Table, a sense of a purer time when our culture was young and our world was simpler. Maybe it’s just me, but I could get nostalgic for the stories of the Round Table even before I knew anything about it. 

I don’t think it’s just me though. And the way that T. H. White plays with that nostalgia is what makes The Once and Future King so effective.

It’s a difficult book to get through, funny and charming much of the time, but filled with digressions made for a readership with better attention spans than most of us have anymore. And, though it’s populated with Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guenever, and all the other old names, it almost never deliver what we expect from an Arthurian story: romance and combat. Swordfights and jousts are often the most boring parts of the book, and usually the shortest, with White often dismissing an entire battle with a sentence like “They fought on foot for two hours.” We get a lot of dialogue around the morality of battle and the effect it has on the knights and the world around them, but the actions itself is rarely a draw. Meanwhile, the relationship between Lancelot and Guenever, the only real instance of romantic love in the book, is almost entirely out offscreen or told in summary. I don’t just mean sex; we hardly ever see real affection between Guenever and Lancelot. As with fighting, we know an awful lot about the romance’s results: Lancelot’s conflict between his religion and his love, Guenever’s growing envy as Lancelot spends more time with his actual wife, and we know both characters well enough to care about each of them. But as for proof of real love between the two of them, it’s almost completely absent.

This absence of the core appeals of Arthurian legend doesn’t make The Once and Future King a bad book by any stretch. In fact, it’s what makes it so great. Because it’s important to remember that, as old as the book may seem at times, chivalry was as foreign and fantastical to the world it was written into as it is to ours. Those readers had come looking for the same Arthurian tropes, and so they, like the modern reader, were a little confused that all the good stuff was kept hidden and undramatized, and a little anxious to see when it would be out in the open.

And White puts it out in the open at the most tragic time: when we already know it’s over. By this point the reader knows that a faction of rebellious knights are planning to catch Lancelot and Guenever in their affair. Even Lancelot knows on some level, he’s been warned, but he goes to Guenever’s chambers anyway, and dotes on her and brushes her hair. They’re already old by this time: her hair is white, the excitement of their love is past. But there’s a gentle affection between the two of them. And when we see it, it feels so much more powerful than if the love had been introduced outright, because it isn’t a simple love, it isn’t a love without stakes. It’s a love with a cost, the cost of Camelot itself, and so it means something.

The same pattern recurs a few pages later with the other element of chivalric tales: fighting. A knight arrives to catch Lancelot in the act. Lancelot goes up against this armed and armored challenger almost naked and wins. It’s the only fight scene in the novel that feels truly tense, mostly because it’s the only fight scene White chose to dramatize. And, like the scene with Guenever, the fight has the same melancholy aura to it. Even if you didn’t know that this was where the Arthurian legends turned sour, you could guess that, when Lancelot kills the knight sent to arrest him, things can never be the same again. The one fight we got to see was our last.

If White had written the story the way it’s expected to be written, with steamy romance and epic battles from the start to the end, it would’ve been awfully boring. That’s because the same quality that makes these things easy to romanticize and dream about also makes them dull to focus on for very long: they’re weightless. A knight and lady falling in love with only trivial obstacles, who never sacrifice anything to be together, doesn’t really matter much. Neither does a battle against a knight too evil or a monster too dumb for their death to matter. But we still love these things, in a sidelong and absent-minded way, because they’re uncomplicated enough to be loved easily. White takes that love and makes it tragic, because whatever is easy can’t last. Even though I’d never want to take the time to read the battles and romances that White skims over, I still miss them once I know that they’re over. I miss them in the same way I miss childhood; not any particular time or experience in it, but just the general emotions I might not have ever really felt as a kid, and that I don’t have a prayer of articulating now anyway**.

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* Which is kind of ironic, since Lancelot is mostly characterized as a guy cheating on his best friend’s wife, who knows it’s wrong but can’t help himself.

** Having read one genuine Medieval poem (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is widely regarded as one of the most accessible), I can say that yes, they really are a struggle, even if, in this case, it was worth it.

** Sorry for not doing something more timely in such a crazy and depressing week. Honestly, I felt I needed to write this as a sort of distraction from all the craziness and depression. Then the post turned out pretty depressing in its own right. Sorry.