The Politics of Teaching Finger Painting: A Revisited Look at Contemporary Elementary Education

            The local coffee shop is covered in abstract art depicting nude, Caucasian female bodies in suggestive positions. Full-grown adults order their lattes and vegan scones and, while waiting for their goodies, stare at the paintings and giggle like schoolchildren. I sit in a booth beneath one of the fleshy paint globs and grade papers and think about the nature of writing. A wiry, salt and pepper-haired woman in designer glasses approaches the art display and takes in each piece with a look of awe and puzzlement. She finds the work a flowing homage to human reproduction (probably), and enjoys the way the artist has rendered her subjects both hyper-flexible and ambidextrous. She stares at the peach swirls of entering and takes deep, audible breaths. She is a picture herself, of artistic appreciation and hard-thinking.  I sip my breakfast tea and remember how happy and confused she looked when I raised my hand in her small, stuffy classroom one seemingly long-ago autumn.

            The woman, of course, was my Teaching Elementary School Art instructor from a failed undergraduate education degree life I don’t really like to talk about these days (for fear that the anger I hold towards the current American public education system might boil up from my belly and burn my tongue.) Her course was fantastic: twice a week a handful of potential grade school teachers met in the basement of the university art building and learned how to bring the joys of the visual and plastic arts to kindergarten through sixth grade students. We finger-painted, we sculpted zoo animals out of papier-mâché, we burnt clay pots in the university’s outdated kiln. Our instructor was a neo-Midwestern-hippie who hadn’t succeeded in her attempt to write the next great American novel and had instead decided to try her hand at educating future educators. She was kind and energetic and loved to help us discover the creative selves that hid beneath the surface of our wannabe “professional teacher” veneers. In short, she was the delight of the education department and one of the only reasons I didn’t have a nervous breakdown in the fall of 2007.

            After dropping out of the education program and switching to English (because a teacher had praised my limericks in fourth grade), I loathed seeing my old education professors. For the most part, they were by-the-book, stalwart pedagogues from the American educational old-school. They looked down on innovative teaching techniques and told drawn-out stories in class about the “good ol’ days,” when they could spank mischievous pupils with thick wooden paddles and not worry about jeopardizing their tenure. I struggled in these professor’s courses because they refused to listen to any of my progressive ideas about education (almost all of which were most likely a combination of idealistic, naïve, or impossible-to-execute silly-babble), and I refused to believe that their archaic classroom knowledge (some hadn’t had classroom experience in nearly twenty years) had anything to do with contemporary education. My struggles led to below satisfactory grades until I eventually had to leave the program, not truly knowing if I was a “bad” teacher (do bad grades in poorly facilitated courses actually equal a double negative of academic promise?) For a time I thought my leaving the education department meant the backwards instructors had won, and when seeing them on campus, they often gave me smug, almost pitiful, smiles that I took to mean, “you just couldn’t handle the way things are always going to be when it comes to teaching.”

            Several semesters into the English program, I saw my art teacher walking across the quad, stopping ever twenty or thirty paces to look at a tree or a squirrel eating acorns on top of a university garbage can. She noticed me as I walked by and smiled and stopped to chat. I asked her how she was doing and she gave a misty answer about trying to find meaning in the small things of life or something of that nature. She asked me how I was doing and I had to admit that I had dropped out of the education program and was pursuing a degree in writing instead. Surprisingly, her face lit up when she heard I was no longer working towards a life as a grade school teacher. Her hands when to her rosy wrinkled cheeks and she said, “Oh thank goodness, you would’ve made a terrible teacher! While we [the education faculty] were trying to teach young people about how to best convey material to their students, all you cared about was politics. I remember when you were in my class, I would be talking about how to teach students to paint and all you would talk about was, ‘What does the painting process actually mean?’ and ‘Why should we encourage children to paint?’ and ‘Why should we teach in the first place?’ You were only interested in the politics of it all!”

             I was shocked by her comments (I didn’t know I was so outwardly vocal as an undergraduate), but also felt strangely comforted by her observation. As she so keenly perceived, the reason I struggled in the education program wasn’t, as I had previously and erroneously thought, because I was a bad or inept student. It wasn’t even really because the instructors I had were bad teachers (although, to this day, I still find some of their ideas about education to be misguided and potentially damaging to student development.) I was a poor future-teacher candidate because what I care(d) about when it comes to education is at odds with what many education students and faculty in America care about when it comes to education.

            But, upon seeing my old art instructor at the coffee shop (inquisitive eyes and bright smile still intact), I am reminded of her comment about how I wasn’t a successful education student because I was “only interested in the politics” of teaching and learning. What I took as an attempt to encourage me when it was originally said (“it’s not that you or education are flawed individually, it’s that you don’t make a good match for each other because you have different, and opposing, values”), I now, after having taught college-level writing for the past three semesters, find troubling. What does it mean to “be interested in the politics” of education, and why, in the case of my undergraduate education instructors, is this interest necessarily considered a bad thing? Why is it frowned upon to ask the big questions of “Why does learning matter?” and “How should what we teach students affect them as human beings?”

            Now, after five more years of pedagogy instruction and practice, I find myself at a different place in my understanding of education than when I took my instructor’s Elementary Art Education course back in 2007. Where in the past I might have answered the question, “Why are you so interested in the politics of education?” with a confused smile and nod, I would now respond to the question with the question, “On what level are teaching and learning not overtly political acts?” Furthermore, I would note that it seems troubling not to consider the political ramifications of the educational process, for, at each phase of said process, value, meaning, and power claims are being asserted and exchanged. To ignore these assertions and their consequences is not only academically and politically irresponsible, but potentially harmful to the way we think about education and its value in our globalized human community.

            While I would like to approach my old instructor and inform her of my intellectual and pedagogical growth, she looks too happy observing the nude female bodies in all their twisted eroticism. And why would I want to bother her with something as disconcerting as personal empowerment in her moment of private aesthetic pleasure? I already know how troubling it can be to some teachers to combine the discourses of art, education, and politics.  

I’m Just Two Scrambled Eggs Away from Having Everything I Could Possibly Want

             Yesterday began with an all too familiar story about surviving panic attacks at Buddhist meditation retreats and the understanding that roughly fifty student final papers were not going to grade themselves by the end of the day. The understanding regarding the grading triggered a wave of anxiety that cycled itself back into the Buddhist meditation retreat story. The meditation retreat story provoked a certain level of existential dread. Comfort for the existential dread came in the form of knowing that writing matters (at least enough for there to be a required first-year writing course at a state university that demands students complete final papers.)

            The just-passed semester has been a collage of hectic moments usually spent wondering if this writing business (in strictly non-economic terms [for there is certainly no apparent immediate economic upside to lit-paper writing]) is worth the time and nerves required to pursue it. It has been an academic term of ritualistic quad-walking with one’s palms facing the sky in an “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself” stance. It has been a time of considering if there is something, anything, that would make me happier than I am when I’m writing scholarly papers that I know will never be published anywhere at any time (“I bet working in a cubicle isn’t nearly as bad as they make it look in Office Space. And hey, at least those guys never had any homework.” — The shameless things we tell ourselves to make it through just one more assignment that will maybe, just maybe, turn out to be the fated “last” assignment.)

            But, alas, to grade one’s papers one must physically possess one’s papers (i.e., one must have said papers on one’s person in order to mark them with smiley faces or encouragingly constructive comments that always read snarky and elitist.) And the papers were asleep in my office, and my personhood was in my apartment wearing unwashed sweatpants and loathing the weight of final grade entry deadlines. So I drove in to campus, the recently-purchased used-Amazon copy of Stillmatic scratching through my car cabin, and thought about what it is like to wake up groggy and congested at one o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday in mid-December under gray Midwestern drizzle clouds. And it felt bad and strangely alienating in the same way one might feel bad and alienated standing idly by and watching a farmer harvest her crop knowing one had absolutely nothing to do with the maturation of the season’s bounty (one only partakes of the bounty [both visually and nutritionally], making one a disgusting harvest toady with no right to anything delicious and good.)

            And in my late-waking-upedness I hadn’t eaten breakfast, reinforcing the notion that I lack purpose and direction with my chosen life path (one should begin to ask questions about one’s vocation when one can no longer plan and execute a simple feeding schedule, no?) The English building that holds my office in its larynx was naked in the winter wind and abandoned of students off celebrating academic “freedom” with the families who likely pay for the opposite of the freedom. I climbed the cold stairwell alone and imagined the steam coming off scrambled eggs and a hot cup of tea, how these things, their flavors, might help me make sense of an academic life I don’t really recognize I signed up for. And there at the top of the steps was Marcel Duchamp playing chess and living a life I read about in a book sometime last year.

            The iconic, and iconoclastic, Dadaist dropped his flourishing art career to pursue a chess obsession that cost him personal relationships, art-money, and perhaps his wits. An old anecdote placed Duchamp in his Paris apartment every starry night of the year, maniacally solving chess puzzles found in international gaming periodicals. Early in the morning, when he had solved all the puzzles but the final, most difficult one, he would excuse himself from the board (and the genius-ghosts sitting on the other side of it) and wander downstairs, to a small café that propped up his second-story apartment, to eat scrambled eggs alone in a corner booth. Nothing but scrambled eggs, for he believed their protein (or maybe their hidden, hard-boiled potential for life) would inspire him to crack the last chessic riddle. He would eat eggs and smoke cigarettes and, in my imagination, contemplate the life choices one would have had to make in order to be in the position to be living such a life (i.e., to contemplate the things one would have to be not doing in order to have the time to do the things Duchamp was doing/eating/solving.)

            A life that revolved around the obsessive pursuit of artistic harmony (for maybe, in the achievement of the harmonic moment, the genius-ghosts will fly back to where they came from), be it on a canvas or toiletry supply store or sixty-four-squared wooden permacanvas. For a seemingly forever I wanted such a life, with its erratic, passionate idiosyncrasies related to eating times, caffeine intake, and protein life-force. And in the office hallway, with a stomach grumbling scrambled eggs divine, I tasted the life for an out-of-breath moment. It tasted confusion covered in cracked peppercorn and the mist of oak trees sagging in the campus quad. It tasted papercut blood earned deep in the pedagogy pulpit. It was everything I never wanted to feel confusion over. All of it soaked in marble tiles and asbestos-removed ceiling panels the color of Illinois winter.

            It doesn’t take much to curse the things one doesn’t have—the catalog of not-had things is limitless and writes itself into eternity (like a bastard Christmas list). But the breathing in of having everything one needs to live the life one already has: this takes the pain of a botched meditation excursion, a stack of ungraded final papers, a fountain pen dry of bulletproof ink, and a urinal nicknamed “art.”

Poetics of Puppetry: Dan Hurlin's Work in "Puppet"

Several weeks ago, I was napping on my parents’ living room couch and watching afternoon television with their two-year-old Yorkie. There was nothing on TV and, worst of all, my parents had made the quantum home technology leap to a satellite dish, so I had no idea how to navigate the seemingly random order of the channels (not to mention how lost I felt in a new digital landscape full of hundreds of new and unknown channels that no doubt promised amazing television content beyond my wildest dreams). I was depressed. Not just about the new-fangled television stations, but about the state of my world in general: writing had stopped being fun, I felt stressed out at work, and I hadn’t made any real human connections in the graduate writing program. My mood was perfect for a day of couch-napping with a lap dog.

Not knowing what to watch on TV, I flipped through the limitless stations until I landed on the Biography Channel. “I like biographies.” I lied to myself, and settled in for a sleep-inducing meditation on some weird aspect of a historical figure’s life who no one really cares to know anything more about. But after a brief commercial break came to an end, I found that the channel’s current programming wasn’t based on an historical exploration of General Grant’s favorite color of wool socks. Instead, there was a documentary airing about the history of American puppetry. My mind jumped fondly to childhood memories of the Muppets and Kermit the Frog singing songs about hard times. But the puppetry being discussed in the documentary wasn’t about anthropomorphized farm animals teaching American children about morality and arithmetic. The puppetry in the film was deeply theatrical, postmodern in design and production, and powerfully moving in ways I hadn’t experienced in any other medium. Despite the pull of the documentary and the beauty and novelty of the artistry I was seeing on the television screen, the warmth of the lap dog and the personalized comfort of the worn-in cushions on my parents’ couch were successfully nap-inducing. I faded off to sleep with images of automatized wood, clay, and strings dancing and speaking and singing for their lives.

The day after dozing to the documentary, my thoughts were dominated by all things puppets. I discussed issues of performance and embodiment with my first-year writing students (they found my interest in the unique medium both childish and weird). I searched the Internet for puppetry resources and Midwestern theatres that might put on contemporary puppet performances. There wasn’t much out there to satisfy my puppet appetite; few people wanted to talk about the aesthetics of puppetry that I had found so fascinating and engrossing the day before. Shut down by an audience of colleagues and peers who had bigger academic fish to fry than discussions of puppet politics, I buried my new interest deep inside myself. And so puppetry as a concept went the way of so many of my artistic inspirations: it filled a day or two of thought and then disappeared into the imaginative mental file cabinet labeled “Things I Tried to Be Into But Ultimately Feel Somewhat Alienated Because Of.” A week of academic and personal responsibilities quickly passed and I forgot all about the film and its conceptual and theoretical promise.

I always spend Thanksgiving Eve alone. It is a holiday tradition I have come to truly enjoy. While Thanksgiving itself is spent surrounded by other people who I love and respect, Thanksgiving Eve is spent reflecting on the things I am thankful for about my own life and pursuits. I spent yesterday morning and afternoon reading, writing poetry, and chatting with a friend at the coffee shop connected to the university library. By evening my eyes were tired and my mind was tapped of creative ideas to put down on paper. In short, it was TV time.

After scanning my trusty basic cable television preview guide (of less than 500 channels, thank goodness) and finding nothing of substance, I decided to peruse my Netflix queue. And there it was, Puppet – a film Netflix describes as an “illuminating documentary [that] looks at the history of American puppetry - its cultural roots and influence - as well as its current renaissance.” - sitting serenely in the “Arts and Culture Documentaries You Might Like” category. The sweet felicity of Netflix interest profiling! I clicked “play” and spent the next 74 minutes enraptured by art, humanity, and the creative spirit.

Although Puppet might claim to be a historical look into “the history of American puppetry,” what it fundamentally documents is one man’s search to find out more about himself, and his reality, through an artistic medium he finds beautiful, mysterious, and strangely human. Dan Hurlin is a New York-based artist, choreographer, and theatre professor who takes on the role of puppet show director to tell the larger/weirder-than-life “true” story of Mike Disfarmer, a deceased Midwesterner who made his living running a portrait photography studio in the early 20^th century. As the character of Disfarmer slowly realizes his livelihood (and, more importantly, his artistic passion/identity) is being made obsolete by modern technology (i.e., personal cameras), Hurlin takes the opportunity made possible by the narrative and meditates on themes of human mortality, artistic extinction, and the often disharmonizing role technology plays in the modern world.

While too much of the film is spent trying to validate puppetry as a legitimate American art form that should be in the same conversation as live theater (“The book was better!” “No the movie was better!” “There would be no movie without the book!” blah blah blah), Puppet actually makes several strong arguments for puppetry as a category of performance in and of itself.

First, Hurlin discusses how puppetry is the perfect medium to express notions of queerness. One of the voices in the film notes that puppetry plays on the ultimate human taboo: the lines between life and death, “the living” and “the dead.” A puppet, having the qualities of an inanimate object that is “brought to life” by human manipulation, is the ultimate other. That is, a puppet is not really “dead” and not really “alive,” either. Existing in an in-between state of mortal ambiguity, the puppet serves as a symbol of that which cannot easily be forced into a single, definitive category. Puppets, simply by existing and performing, teach us to embrace things as they are, not as what we want them to be or what we think they should be.

Secondly, and more importantly, the transparency of puppetry promotes understandings of trust and empathy amongst audience members. Puppets, unlike human actors, are not alive, and we know this. But less obviously, as one of the puppeteers in the film points out, puppets are not trying to be alive (in fact, they’re not trying to be anything. They’re just puppets!). Where we might see Marlon Brando in The Godfather and believe, in the actor’s finest moments, that he actually is the Godfather, we ultimately know on some level at all times that Brando lives a life off camera that has nothing to do with Vito Corleone. In some sense, Brando is pleasantly “tricking” us when he convinces us, through his performance, that he actually is Corleone. This “tricking” does not happen in the same way in puppetry because the puppet has no agency; it is clear that the puppet is “performing” only insomuch as humans are allowing it to perform. When we feel empathy for a puppet character (like the down-and-out character in Disfarmer), we are not feeling empathy for a suffering human actor who is pretending to be another suffering human character. When we feel empathy for a puppet character we are responding to suffering itself and witnessing how it can be communicated even through non-human mediums. Puppeteers argue in Puppet that if humans can feel empathy for a block of wood and the strings that bring it to life, they can learn to be more empathetic to the beings and environments the puppets represent. In this way, puppetry is not just another mode of performing narratives, but an empathy-teaching device that transcends its merely aesthetic goals.

Ultimately, Puppet was a joy to watch because it argued for the importance of art as being both delightful and critical, both beautiful / haunting as well as practical in its human objectives. I have yet to watch the entire interview linked below, but it introduces Dan Hurlin and his work more extensively (and in the artist’s own words) and will hopefully offer ideas that contribute to the theoretical discourse of puppetry and the performing arts.

 I suppose the moral of this story is: if you nap enough, you’ll find an artistic outlet that wakes you up. 

How I Finally Learned to Be a Black Woman

If you're a Black person, have a Black friend or you have occasional run-ins with a Black person, you should probably sit down and read this book:

I heard about this book when my Black friend, Evelyn, told me: "You need to check out this book about being Black." I said: "Whaaa?!"

Being Black is a full time job that I sometimes do half-assed. There are days I wake up and completely forget that I am a Black woman in America. I go about my business drinking coffee, reading the morning paper and it's only when I leave my house, I am confronted with the reminder: "Holy fuck, I am BLACK!"

At work, someone will ask if they can touch my hair. When I tell them no, they will ask: "How do you get it like that?" When my white husband and I order chicken sandwiches at Wendy's, the cashiers always asks (no matter how close I stand next to Noah. His arm could literally be draped around my shoulders clutching my right boob) "Are these orders together?" When I'm standing in the shampoo aisle of a Target for too long an old White woman will inevitably ask me: "Could you tell me wear I can find your denture adhesives?"

In reading this book, I have discovered that I need to take my job as a Black person in America seriously. I can quite honestly tell you that I've learned valuable lessons from author, Baratunde Thurston, a full-time black man, that I will carry with me forever. Such as:

• How to be a "Black Friend"--- I had no idea how important my role as "Black friend" is. I am the bridging peacekeeper between my White friends and Black America. If my White friend asks me why we love eating macaroni and cheese for Thanksgiving, I will give her or him an honest, thoughtful answer that will ensure she or he won't get slapped by a black person who is not their friend. I'm keeping lines of communication open, while saving a life!  

• How to be the spokesperson for all Negros--- This is a tough one, but I feel like I've had some preparation. In fifth grade, I and one other student were the only Black students in the entire school. He was an "Angry Black" student who had more than one race related conflicts with the White students in our class. On the one day Adam was absent, our teacher made the class get together to have a pow-wow about angry Adam. Mrs. Hoffarth turned to me and said: "Charish, you and Adam are friends, can you tell the class what's wrong with Adam?" I'm ashamed to say that I dropped the ball for all Negro-kind and said, "I don't know." Where ever you are, Adam, I'm so sorry.

• How to be a "Black Employee"--- I'm still working on this.

•  How to be an "Angry Black"--- This is especially difficult for me since I am so afraid of conflict, I avoid it entirely. In fact, while writing this, I just let a complete stranger sit at my four person table just because he asked and because I couldn't tell him, "Step off, chump! I found this fuckin' table three hours ago and I've been hording the surrounding space since then." Oh man, he smells weird. But I do look forward to appropriating phrases like these, into my everyday vernacular: 
• "I'll get that memo to you when I get my forty acres and a mule!"
• In reference to President Obama: "What's more frightening than a black man? A black man with all the power and NOTHING left to lose!"
• "Why are you trying to colonize my proud African body with your European beauty standards?"

•  And so much more!

As you can guess, I came away from reading this book, a more well-rounded, aware black woman than ever before. Hopefully the same results can happen to you!

If you could drink tea (or whiskey) with any author, who would she be?

I asked myself this question when I was at Barnes and Noble with my husband. We were doing our weekly loitering session, reading magazines we wouldn't buy and nursing cups of coffee in the cafe area.

I just finished reading an interview Alice Walker in Bust Magazine and then another interview she did for Yes! Magazine. I almost forgot how awesome Walker was and then I landed myself into a full on daydream session.

Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and I are hanging out on an old porch, sitting in rocking chairs and sipping on tea or bourbon. We're just shootin' the shit. Talking about life and being strong black women. I don't know. I haven't given too much thought about this!

They're all still alive and perhaps it's still in the cards for me to have a porch meeting with them. Maybe they could help me workshop some of my poems? Uhg, no that's boring. I think I want to hear the salacious tales of Maya's dancing days.

What would you be doing with your favorite writer?

A Lesson from Nuns: Create with Patience

At 1:30, I find the ceramic studio and Sister Margaret, one of those nuns who doesn't seem to suffer fools. I tell her I'm to volunteer with her and the other nuns. I'm there to do whatever they need me to do.

"Have you ever painted?" she asks briskly. I told her I have. I don't tell her in what capacity. I also don't tell her that I'm not overly religious either. None of that will matter, because she sets a ceramic tile of a frog in front of me.

"This is Frankie." I stare down at the frog. Okay.
"That's short for St. Francis. It's a new project of mine and I want you to paint one of these Frankies. She gives me an example of a finished "Frankie" and shows me hows she wants them done. Easy as pie, I think.

"What do you know about frogs?" Sister Margaret asks. I know that they're amphibians. "I'm going to say two words and I want you to finish out the sentence, all right?"

I nod.

"Forever rely. . . "
I'm getting quizzed on something. Something that's not strictly ceramics. "Forever rely. . . on. . . God?"

She nods, pleased with my response. "That's what Frankie means to me. All right, then, let's paint!"

I sit down to my own work station. I've got my brushes and three types of green acrylic for "Frankie's" body. As I get started, I don't realize my first mistake is loading down the first layer with too much paint. It's so thick it looks glazed. Oh well, nothing to do but to keep trucking. 30 minutes later, Sister Jane, the oldest of the nuns and perhaps the nicest, passes by my work station and nods. "Very lovely."

I find out later the Sister Jane corrects all of the mess-ups and she'll no doubt have to correct my tile. Sister Margaret tells me so. "You're going too fast."

"Am I?"

She sidles up next to me and shakes her head. "You've got to slow down and take your time." She shows me what I've down wrong; sloppy edges, dripping paint. My "Frankie" doesn't look quite as nice as her "Frankie." I hold my left hand in my lap, fearing she'll slap it (everything I know about nuns, I got from television).

As I watch her correct my mistakes, I realize how quickly I do work. When I start something creative, I want to be done with it as soon as possible. Or else, I grow bored of it. I want results and I want them now. And I half expected the sisters to congratulate me on my speed and offer to hang my "Frankie" on the wall.

I realize that one three hour session is not enough to finish my frog. I'd have to come back next Friday and work on it again. This isn't how I write poetry, is it? Steamrolling until I have a finished product and patting myself on the back for my speed?

I look around the studio at these women who are completely zenned out. Public radio plays in the background and they have no where else to be but here. Here, with their art. Sister Jane, with her spider-veined fingers and intent eyes squinting behind glasses, chiseling away at the Virgin Mary's face. She's at least, 95-years-old, but she's in no hurry. She knows that with time and patience, she can make her next mosaic project sing.

It's 4:30. My frog looks like crap. Sister Margaret appraises it thoughtfully. "It's pretty good for your first time."
"Yeah?"
"Oh sure. Now I want you to come back on Friday and finish it."

So I'm due to return to the studio next Friday. But the next time, I hope to bring a different attitude. I'm hoping to learn the valuable lesson of patience through these women. Anything created with love and patience is bound to be magnificent, right? We'll see how "Frankie" fares.

Gas Station Gizzards

Rallys is the only drive thru 
open at one in the morning.
My brother and I read a back lit
menu for food when I see
Churches Chicken next door.
“Gizzards and chicken livers,”
I read aloud.

He says he wishes they were open
and we discover we both like gizzards.
I tell him about the gas station
I went to as a kid, the gizzards there
were good in a guilty way.
He shakes his head. He’s learning
about me and it makes him laugh.

Fall So Hard Motherfuckers Can't Find Me

Lynda Barry has my back. Or, I think she would if we ever met. Her 2008 book, What it is, is 30% writer’s guide, 30% autobiography and 50% visually-dynamic existential freak out/cure for said freak out. “But that’s 110%!” you might be thinking to yourself. And you’d be correct in your calculations, which is why mathematics is an inappropriate mode for me to talk about how much Barry’s book is meaning to me right now.

It all started, like these stories often do, with a harmless trip to Milwaukee. After a solid breakfast of freshly sugared donuts my girlfriend, her brother, her brother’s girlfriend, and I decided to make a quick stop at Boswell Book Company. While perusing the graphic novel section, my girlfriend’s brother’s girlfriend (from now on, my GBG) pointed out What it is and told me that, as a writer, I’d probably be into it. I opened the large book and randomly (as much as anything in this life happens randomly) flipped through its pages, finally landing on page 39 where I found the following:

"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it."

After reading the material I immediately did two things:

1. Tried to hide my scrunched-up, pink-eyed, about-to-cry tear face from my GBG.
2. Bought the book.

After reading What it is in its entirety, the providentially placed passage on page 39 was set in even more powerful context. Barry had a childhood and a half. She loved the arts, had a wild and vivid imagination and a good heart, and felt things in ways that other children found weird and adults found concerning. She was told, as many overtly creative young people are told by American authority figures of various brass, to shut up, sit still, and keep her odd ideas to herself.

            And she did keep them to herself for a while, and in that time of creative hibernation (artistic slumber/unconsciousness) a part of her started to die. And the remarkable thing is, no one seemed to care. In fact, the people in her life (parents, peers, teachers, etc.) were perfectly happy with Barry’s spiritual atrophy. It meant they didn’t have to worry about what she was going to say or do. Her silence (both physical and emotional) was a sign of health. The idea, of course, is that if someone isn’t complaining they can’t possibly be miserable, right?

            Barry’s childhood memories struck me especially hard because they were so reminiscent of my own. Some of the clearest images in my hazy past-life history-thoughts contain people I wanted to like me (parents, peers, teachers, etc.), telling me in no uncertain terms that everyone would probably be better off if I wasn’t so weird/talkative/energetic/creative. So I wasn’t anymore. And people liked me. And everyone went about his or her business pretending that we all loved ourselves. And there was a lot of silence.

            People not being allowed/encouraged to be/express themselves can go on kind of fine for awhile (even decades), but it almost always ends in someone crying in a bookstore in Milwaukee. Somewhere along the line, sensitive children who are told by adults they are too sensitive have their emotions straightened out like teeth are straightened out. Then, everyone lives in the fairytale world of no-feelings and the adults think “That worked out well just like we knew it would, because thoughts and feelings are like teeth, they just need to be straightened out from time to time.” And then, maybe in a bookstore in Milwaukee, the oversensitive child realizes the fairytale is threaded with a plot of hopelessness, and really isn’t a fairytale at all but a tragic comedy. But no one is laughing; there’s still only silence.

            Barry gives the sensitive children-now-adults one option to combat the fairytale-hopelessness and silence: write/make stuff. Making things implies that life can be better; it implies there is a future that is better (or at least more complete feeling) than the one we currently inhabit. Often, making stuff doesn’t feel like enough. Writing simple words on simple paper feels like it is no match for the years of “shut up/sit still/be normal.” And maybe it isn’t enough. But there is something important, maybe even essential, about making noise in a world that would rather you be silent. There is something important, maybe even essential, about declaring vitality in a world that would rather you die quiet. 

The Mark of a Good Book

"You haven't read Invisible Man?" asked my friend in Columbus, GA. We sat around on her porch smoking cigarette after cigarette and drinking bottles of beer. I hadn't and I prepared myself for the onslaught of "Oh my god, you've gotta read it!" and "It's definitely YOUR book!"

I don't know how I've graduated high school and college without reading this canonical piece of literature. But I was never interested in it. Now that I'm 28 and I'm having one emotional crisis after another, I've turned to the book for answers.

I only did it after the umpteenth person questioned my literary prowess. I went to Noah's bookshelf (yes, he's read it too) and got started on it. And now that I'm halfway through it, I can honestly say that Invisible Man is changing my life.

Every page holds some sacred nugget of knowledge. All of it's characters are pivotal to the story and hold some importance in my own life. After I've finished a chapter, it's usually customary for me to take a break, but I keep going until I feel like I'm drowning.

The physiological response to reading so much Ellison, might need to be measured. After I've found a proper stopping point, I swim furiously back up to the surface and inhale sweet air. When I've folded down a page corner to mark my space, I'm exhausted. I've learned something new about myself, some new about the world and I'm simply exhausted.

Is that the mark of a good book?

I tend to believe it might be. I'm shocked that I let this one get away from me for all of these years. This book seemed to have been written for me. A young naive man following a carefully the orchestrated plan set by someone else, is being introduced into the world under the most strenuous circumstances. If he can learn to navigated this circumstances, he might be able to recognize himself as a full human being.

It's difficult for me not to take such a personal approach to a book. I'm guilty of asking: "Yes, but how does it all relate to ME?" Not all books are for that. But I feel that Ralph Ellison wrote this text to included everyone. Not just the invisible black man, but the invisible human in a world of industry and the invisible young person grappling with life lessons they were never prepared for.

As I've mentioned, I'm only halfway through the book. I'm positive that when I finish the book that I will have the deflated yet uplifted feeling after all good books. I'll be mildly depressed about leaving the characters behind and forging a path of my own. My thoughts will have to return to my own head instead of mingling with the nameless narrator. My own neuroticisms will have to be just that. My own. I'll feel lonely.

But I believe that's what a good book is suppose to do. It allows you to escape, on a bus, at work, in the doctor's office, into its pages until it has no more to give. And believe me, I love taking and taking.

Language and it's Sex Appeal

You wouldn't know it just by looking at him, but former Gov. Jon Huntsman, is dead sexy.

This silver foxed Mormon with the grin of gold is pushing his way into my heart with only one charming attribute. It's not his conservative financial reform plan, no, it's something that makes him hated by the other 2012 GOP Presidential Candidates.

He can speak Mandarin.

I watched him weasel his way out of telling us what he really thinks about GOP pick Mitt Romney, on the Colbert Report yesterday. . . in Mandarin! Of course, the man was an ambassador in China from '09 to '11, so he must of picked something up!

But like I said, this is something that makes him reviled within his own party. This "living abroad with Mao" among other things is despicable to the "new" American Conservative. Nevermind, a certain soulless Henry Kissinger was in China so much, he probably had a second family over there.

This resentment towards other languages is boiling over into our political sphere and it's threatening our global relationships. You can see how our relationship with Mexico has colored our perception of language dramatically. "Why the fuck do I need to know Mexican?!" You can picture anyman Redneck spitting this question on to the pavement.

One of the many things that attracted me to my husband, Noah, was his grasp of language. If I asked: "Hey babe, what language family does Bantu come from?" And without skipping a beat or looking away from the television, he'd give me an intelligible answer and that's hot. But maybe I'm just a word nerd.

To me, a man that can speak another language outside of English, is a game changer. Would I pursue married, Mormon Jon Huntsman? No, not at all, but this makes his political message slightly more palatable. He's not a total dick.

I'm currently in Noah's grammar class learning about the history of English. Listening to him challenge his students on what they think they know about English is fasinating. He's showing that there is still a need to know something outside of our borders. At it's most basic, learning another language gives us a better appreciation and understanding of English. Do you know how many different people battled and married so we could get our beloved English? Quite a few! The Normans, Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Romans! JEEZ!

So yes, there is a need for learning other languages. Don't be arrogant enough to believe that English is the lingua franca and that the rest of the world will come to you. Don't think that the invention of cool new translating software will make learning unnecessary.

Well think about it like this, if I were still single and a guy approached me trying to "spit game" with this: "Hey girl, you are lookin' fine, head to toe. You need some of this." I would promptly laugh in his face. (Of course, there's a good chance that men don't even speak like this anymore, not since 1987.)

But maybe things would be different if same guy "spit game" in this manner: "Hey girl, tu es si jolie, la tête aux pieds. Vous avez besoin de cela." (I hope that this means the same thing I typed into Google Translate. THIS IS WHY I SHOULD LEARN FRENCH!!)

Burning Books

I had a long day of working at the university bookstore. School has started and the students are filing in to buy their textbooks. Some are also coming in to sell back some textbooks from the previous semester. I had an experience with a customer today, that was a especially interesting.

She wanted to sell us a couple of books, one was a text that we could use, the other was obsolete, an older edition. When I told her that we could only buy back one of her books, she seem fine with it. Which is nice because some students can get really disgruntled over that.

What was amazing was, the customer next to her chimed in to say: "Aw, that sucks when that don't take books back. My friends and I had a huge book burning party last year for the books we couldn't sell back!"

My jaw dropped. My customer also looked a little puzzled by the statement. "That's okay," she said slowly. "I'm pretty sure I can donate them somewhere."

And at this point, I could have (should have) held my tongue, but I'd never heard anything so. . . obtuse. "What are you," I asked (shrilly). "A Nazi?"

Of course, the young woman didn't know what I was talking about. She was about 20 and very proud of the fact that she socked it to the establishment. She shrugged. "I don't know, we thought it was fun."

Still amazed and still unable to keep my bloody mouth, I told her: "That's what fascists did during World War II." Again, the young lady didn't know what a fascist was or when World War II happened. Sigh.

Anyway the whole thing made me a think about how important books are. Even the ones you don't care for. To me, a chemistry book is the same as a copy of Moby Dick. Both are vital for society even if I can't see the importance in chemistry.

People burn books because they are afraid of the knowledge contained in them. They're afraid that knowledge will be read by people who will change the world. That is a real threat for those in control. Slaves in the American South weren't allowed to read because they might rise up and decide: "I might not need to be ruled by another human being."

The Spanish Inquisition burned the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an, in order to suppress a religious idea. The Nazis burned books to suppress a political ideology. A German writer by the name of Heinrich Heine, once wrote: "Where they burn books, so too will they, in the end, burn human beings." The Nazis burned a whole bunch of his books too.

Books were burned because of their filth content. Anything deemed pornographic by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (founded 1873). They were responsible for the destruction of about 15 tons of books for being "lewd."

Oh, and parents have partied around a bonfire of Harry Potter novels.

I'm just saying, there's enough trouble getting real sources of information in the world. There's no need for a college student to revel in the torching of information. When people in different parts of the world can't get a hold of books or freely print news, it doesn't make sense for us to just throw it all away.

So the next time you've got a textbook, any book, just laying around, and you don't want it. . . don't throw it in the trash, don't burn it! Donate it to ANYONE! Drop it off at the library, so something! Just let someone else learn something.

A Pallbearer for a Dead Poem

The eulogy is short.

I thought I was invited as a spectator.

I expected no audience participation

on my part,

but they asked me to be a pallbearer.

I politely declined.

but they refused my refusal, insisting

that I couldn’t stand on the side lines.

“You murdered the poem, now take it

to its grave.”

No one expects a dead poem to be

so heavy, laden with sour metaphor,

unnecessary dialogue, and lack luster

subjects.

But I lift with the rest, shouldering

the blame, all the while thinking:

“You did this. You even dug the plot.”

My heart is just as heavy during the

slow stumble to the hearse.

But I can't cry.

A murderer cannot cry,

she closes her moleskin and forgets.

And if she has enough gall, she turns

the page and starts the killing all over

with the witless stroke of her pen.

I load it up and shove it away expecting

a thank you for my services.

I am met with silence.

Don't Be Afraid of the Boogie Man: Identity Creation in Mos Def's The New Danger (Which is Dope)

I’ve been listening to Mos Def’s 2004 album The New Danger almost exclusively for the past 6-8 weeks. If you look in the front seat cup holders in my discolored, shaky 1996 Honda Accord, you’ll find the CD case propped against the gear shifter, the faded insert artwork revealing Mos’s long right index finger pointed at his dark right temple like a 9-millimeter. During my drive to work/school/Thought-Land, I ritualistically play tracks 9, 15, and 18 (entitled “Sunshine,” “Life is Real,” and “Champion Requiem,” respectively), and almost always in that order. The medley has become a type of intellectual prayer, a meditation that settles my mind into a bluish black calm. And the calm has enough poetry to drown out the suburban static sizzling up from the summer asphalt. Here’s the doctrine behind the practice: The first track in the lineup gets me ready for the thinking of the day, the second gives me the courage to keep thinking in the face of the alluring pleasures of not-thinking, and the last track promises that all the thinking (the struggle) will be worth it at the end of the day.

            

Mos Def (birth name Dante Smith) is listed as one of the 150 “things” white people “like” in Christian Lander’s aptly titled 2008 book Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. In the hip-hop artist’s half-page entry, Lander hypothesizes that Def’s popularity among “hip” young white folks stems from the fact that he is the perfect combination of underground coolness, poetic genius, and crossover appeal (did you know he co-starred opposite Mark Wahlberg in the 2003 remake of the Italian Job!). While in months and years past I have worried about what being a Mos Def fan says about my socio-racial identity, after having The New Danger on blast for the last 40-60 straight days I have come to prioritize how the artist’s music works to self-identify over how being a fan of said music helps me identify myself.

           

Most rappers perform under assumed names, and Smith is no exception. He has long been known as Mos Def, “The Mighty Mos,” or simply “Mos,” and I recently read that in the future he would like to be addressed as Yasiin Bey (a nod to Smith’s Islamic roots/ties). But throughout The New Danger, Smith/Def/Bey introduces several new monikers/personas/characters into the fray, the most interesting and ominous being the mysterious Boogie Man. On the album’s first track, Mos croons, “I am the most beautiful boogie man,” and in the process introduces listeners to the artist’s contrasting and at times paradoxical identity representations.

            Traditionally, the boogie man (or boogey man) is the amorphous representation of everything humanity is most afraid of. It is the darkness that lurks under our childhood beds at night, it is the thing that scares us into acting according to social or authoritative norms (if we didn’t behave our parents the boogie man surely would have gotten us at some point in our childhoods, right?). In announcing himself, or his rap alter ego, as Boogie Man, is Def warning us that we should fear him? Or is he ironically using a culturally understood representation of fear to play on the historically terrifying notion of a black man who can speak his mind whether white folks like it or not?

            

Besides being the modern(ish) rap world’s “favorite nightmare,” Mos makes several more identity claims throughout The New Danger. He calls himself “Black Dante” on one track, and then on another (track 06 – “Blue Black Jack”) he tells the blues tale of a bad man named “Black Jack Johnson” who may or may not be a heavyweight champion archetype the rapper connects with in his moments of lyrical brilliancy.

But beyond the explicit identities Mos Def claims in the titles and hooks of his songs, it is the subtle self-evaluations sprinkled throughout The New Danger that make the rapper’s identifications the most compelling. Take, for example, his bombastic, contradictory self-definition on “Ghetto Rock”:

I am a fighter and a lover

I’m the freaky baby daddy

I’m a bad motherfucker

I’m the earth, wind, fire, and the thunder

I said I am, go ask my mother

You don’t believe that shit

Believe what you wanna

Def tells us he is what he is, and if we don’t believe him we can ask the woman who birthed him (or we can simply check the weather patterns). And herein lies the strength of many of the songs on The New Danger. So many rap songs involve a man (modern rap music in all its fractured glory is unfortunately often, as Suge Knight once said “a man’s game.”) talking about what he could be or what he would be if he had this car or this amount of money or this sexual conquest notched on his mahogany bedpost. Mos Def bypasses the speculation and preaches what he is: a conflicted human being, a child of the universe, and at the same time a force of nature. Shouldn’t all artists/writers strive to identify in a similar way?

           

Over the past several months I have realized how important it is for word-people to identify themselves when they create stuff, even if this means creating personas to create under/as (like Def’s infamous Boogie Man). “Why,” you may ask, “is it important for us to understand who we are when we’re making stuff? Isn’t it only important that we’re making stuff?”

            Reality is a bastard. By this I mean, for many creative people, the real and the unreal tend to blur when they make their art. “What’s more real, the stuff I see in the ‘real’ world or the things I think in my head (I feel like we need another I Heart Huckabees clip here for clarification)?” “Is it better to be a realist or an idealist?” “Do I make stuff because I think things, or do I think things because I make stuff?” These questions can haunt the artist/writer, and sometimes it’s good to lay down the existential law:

  

  1.     I exist.

  2.     How do I know for sure?

  3.     Because I have this identity (be it “natural” or created).

  4.     How am I sure I have an identity?

  5.     Because my identity makes stuff

  6.     (Insert stuff made.)

In a mode of backwards reasoning, Mos declares in “Life is Real”

            What I spit and I write is real

            Cause my life is real

As creative people, we don’t need to completely freak about reality (I hope), because we can always be sure that our works exist and our identities exist (even when, or perhaps especially when, we can’t wrap our head around the existence of anything else). The two (our identities and our identities’ work) work in tandem to prove each other’s is-ness, and they also work to do good work for other people (I hope).

            Ok so we have our identities and we have their created works, so what? Surprisingly, an answer can be found in the first bars of Mos’s “Ghetto Rock.” The answer is: the work and its creator function at their highest level when the work is undeniable.

            The haters can’t fuck wit it

Cause they mom and they sister

And girl in love wit it.

The goal as creative people is to make things that editors/professors/critics/various Powers-That-Be/haters can’t quiet/stifle/ “fuck wit” because of the work’s universally powerful appeal. Work like this is difficult to categorize/compartmentalize/name because even if critics don’t like it personally, all the people in their families and friendly circles can’t get enough of it. It is this work that we should strive to create. No longer is it enough to simply “write what we know.” We need to make what others want and need to know and, most importantly, what they can’t deny. This work will be remembered and recognized as culturally helpful, the stuff people can’t or shouldn’t do without.

Dumb It Down!

Noah gave an exaggerated sigh this afternoon and waited for me to ask him what was wrong.
"What's wrong?"
"I don't want to plan my coursework this semester!" I agreed with him, I didn't want to plan his coursework either. I'm not a very good planner and that showed when I was an English teacher in Bangkok. As my first teaching experience ever, I didn't realize how badly my usual procrastinating would effect my work. I tried my damnest to stay just one lesson plan ahead of my students for seven different classes. By the way, Charansanitwong School of Business, thank you for hiring me!

Noah was concerned about that but was a little depressed about another aspect of planning a semester for four classes. He worried that his lofty creative plans would be shot down by his students. His students are not English majors and do not find his critical thinking useful. He was mentally preparing to dumb down his coursework for his students. If he didn't, there was a good chance a mutiny would rise against him. Apparently his students get resentful if they're pushed into thinking too hard.

If you think this is too harsh of him to admit, then consider the general intellectual climate of America today. Rick Santorum thinks going to college is for snobs. Texas is decides to do away with critical thinking in schools. Remember how G. W. Bush was able to lead the country? Average citizens didn't care about how frighteningly stupid "W" was. They just knew "this is a guy I can get a beer with."

Dumbing it Down is a sobering reality that critical thinkers have to deal with. But is there a way to cut through the layman bullshit with some serious dialogue on subjects we NEED to talk about? There has to be! Because those subject that we refuse to broach (because they're so damn hard to think about) are still going to be monkeys on our collective backs. Racism, Labor Rights, Global Warming and other "things that go bump in the night" are not leaving any time soon.

The subject made me think of a Lupe Fiasco song I'd heard a few years ago. It's aptly named "Dumb it Down." Give a listen.

Lupe Fiasco - Dumb It Down .mp3

Found at bee mp3 search engine

It sounds like Fiasco has his own coursework planning woes. His projected audience, listeners of hip hop, are just as disgruntled as Noah's students.

You goin' over niggas' heads Lu (Dumb it down)
They tellin' me that they don't feel you (Dumb it down)
We ain't graduate from school nigga (Dumb it down)
Them big words ain't cool nigga (Dumb it down)
Yeah I heard Mean And Vicious nigga (Dumb it down)
Make a song for the bitches nigga (Dumb it down)
We don't care about the weather nigga (Dumb it down)
You'll sell more records if you (Dumb it down)

And if that's not enough, Fiasco's getting it from the other side, from recording execs

You've been shedding too much light Lu (Dumb it down)
You make'em wanna do right Lu (Dumb it down)
They're getting self-esteem Lu (Dumb it down)
These girls are trying to be queens Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to graduate from school Lu (Dumb it down)
They're starting to think that smart is cool Lu (Dumb it down)
They're trying to get up out the hood Lu (Dumb it down)
I'll tell you what you should do (Dumb it down)


It's mighty hard to be an artist, a creative person, who is stuck in a box of societal norms. It's difficult for an artist or a critical thinkers to dine and be satisfied with mediocrity. What does ingenuity mean if we aren't able to evolve and push the limits of our minds. People say that ingenuity is what built this great nation. Where the hell did it all go? Why are we so proud to be ignorant?

Scratch that, being ignorant isn't necessarily a bad thing. The pride you feel when you know you're ignorant and refuse to do anything about it. . . that's a terrible thing. Watch yourself. If you feel like something you don't know is not worth knowing, if you feel that easy roads always work better, if you get angry with an intellectual and demand she Dumb it Down. . . you might be in trouble.

It's hard for me to advice Noah in situations like these. I don't want him to compromise his integrity as a thinker by inviting mediocrity into his classroom. But I know that's got to be some boulder to push up a mountain. I say stick to your guns. Some people will fall by the wayside but there will be others who trust that you're up to something good. I still like Lupe Fiasco even if he's not singing about his cars. I'm hoping someone in Noah's class will cut him a break.

Writing Then and Now

I've noticed in the last few years that my writing has been a lot less prolific. This is compared to my time in high school. Back then, age 16 or 17, I thought it was no problem at all to pump out a novel in a year. I'm not bragging, I just had a lot less worries and quite a bit more time on my hands.

Now that I'm 28, a wife and mother of a rabbit, things have changed. These days writing poetry is a lot more labored. I have to find time, inspiration and the editing process is much more involved. I'd like to think that my lack of writing has created some better quality work. I'd like to think that I treat my writing a little more tenderly.

Let's talk about younger Charish's writing. It. Was. Terrible. I was reading a lot of Anne Rice and Stephen King back then and that colored my poetry and the dialogue of my stories. Poetry was epically long and about handsome vampires wooing human girls. Sound fuckin' familiar? It's been done before, Stephanie Meyer!

Novel ONE: I don't even remember the title
Synopsis: A young girl with a rich archaeologist uncle is taken on a wild ride. As she searches for Egyptian treasure, she meets a handsome man and brings an evil pharaoh back from the dead.
Result: I had to immediately scrap the book once I saw The Mummy in theaters. It was a depressing moment to find out I'd written a Stephen Sommer film and didn't get paid for it.

Novel TWO: Gals on a Soundtrack (ugh)
Synopsis: Three high school BFFs, (narrated by aspiring writer, Mickey) drive a car cross-country after graduation. Hi-jinks, romance and life lessons ensue.
Result: It was rejected by 6 publishers. One publisher sited, "This needs a lot more development. Are you 16?" You'll notice that this also sounds like a movie from around that time.

Novel THREE: Accidentally Planned
Synopsis: Lucinda is a former wedding planner turned photographer, escaping the debacle of her last horribly planned wedding. When she finds out her twin brother is impulsively getting married and needs a planner, Lucinda is thrown for a loop (oy vey!). She meets a man though, he sweeps her off her feet and makes her believe that there's still a planner in her yet.
Result: It was definitely the longest of the three novels. That's all I can say about that.

Joe Spann Runs the Meat Counter

She purses her lips and surveys
her surroundings.
She knows something feels off.
A tension hangs above them
like a trickster fog waiting
for an inevitable crash.
She gropes around for a safe
handle, he stands still, hidden,
waiting for her to crash.

It must be satisfying to know
your country will be fine
so long as blacks don't 
lose they minds,
my great grand father muses
as he carefully folds the missus'
pork tenderloin in crisp white
papers. Individually. Taking care
not to touch the meat.

"You washed you hands,
didn't you, boy?" she asks
nervously.
"Yes'm"
Being head-nigger-in-charge
is hard enough without
some nervous ninny standing
over you.

"Where's Charles? He usually
takes care of this." She wrings
her hands and looks around the
butcher shop.
"Mr. Jeffries stepped out and
 left me in charge."
My great grandfather says this
more to himself than to her.

I'm in charge. 
And you will be fine. You will
all be fine so long as I stay 
behind this counter and do 
what I'm s'posed to do. 
"Anything else for you today?"
She shakes her head. 'That's all."

And Now We Take You to Libya. . .

"That girl who was stripped by army officers 
didn't just reveal her body but she revealed 
the brutality and atrocities carried out by the army."
The television is still on as she sinks down to the bed.
These are thing her husband never notices.
He will make love to her to any background noise,
it doesn't bother him, knowing that the whole world
is still alive.
She knows that things are still alive and lurking,
villains still haunt small village and large squares.
While he nuzzles her neck, her hand gropes the
darkness for a controller.