Keynote address, Roosevelt HIgh School graduation June 17, 2016

Dear graduating class of 2016:

                On June 14^th, 1989, a few steps from here at what’s now Key Arena, I graduated from Roosevelt High School. I was obnoxious and inserted extra names on my name card as a shout-out to friends and also dolled up my big 1980s hair. I did the hair thing so often—nesting toys like a purple monkey up in my fro—that I won Most Distinctive Hairstyle in the Senior poll. I was very excited to be graduating, because I knew how happiness was made and how it wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t made running day after day from one period to the next filling out multiple choice tests in the company of arbitrary communities until a day a counselor could look at a piece of paper and label me educated.

                This is why the graduation announcement I sent around the country opened to the following words: “Come see me receive a rolled-up piece of blank parchment and hear the saccharin speeches of the select bureaucrats who have slowly been swallowing the fruits of my education and who will not leave so much as an impression upon my life (or yours) as an aftertaste.”

                Here’s the point: Adults thought they knew the important building blocks of our happiness. I was pretty sure they didn’t. But now I’ve spent more than half my life at Roosevelt, and I’m now the adult, here to deliver my very own saccharin commencement address.

                What’s more, I do think I’m wiser than you, in some respects. For example, if you put purple monkeys in your hair, I will laugh knowingly and say, “Ha ha, yes. Cute.” But I also think that adults much too easily dismiss the vibrant passions and thoughts of adolescents, probably because you say and do some really stupid things; still, many of these passions and thoughts and questions are absolutely visionary and can indeed guide a life that’s rich with adventure, love, compassion, artistry, commitment and devotion to a just, healthy world; and I do think you already know both the major building blocks and the stumbling blocks to a happy life, and have developed strategies to dealing with both.

                One thing I-think-you-think-you-know-but-I-no-longer-believe is that to be happy, you must do work that you love: “If you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” This idea is dangerous, and not just because it’s elitist when so many in our country can’t make such choices, but because it’s spiritually misleading.

                 If you can find a job you love, that’s terrific, that’s great. I have two friends who are poets, one who’s a clown, and one who’s a professional artisanal pencil sharpener. They‘ve found ways to earn livelihoods out of their passions. I love my job too—about a quarter of the time, just like I love you all a quarter of the time. But I’m not talking about me, or poets or clowns or artisanal pencil sharpeners. Too many people I know feel like they’ve blown it somewhere because they’re not passionate about their jobs; they’re deeply dissatisfied with their very lives, believing a job is a way happiness is made and then demoralizing themselves when they try to force it to be so. But there’s nothing wrong in life with a not-perfect job that pays the bills.

                Love your family, your friends, your co-workers; love artistic and spiritual pursuits. You don’t have to love your job.

                That’s one thing I don’t trust you to fathom right now, and, really, you shouldn’t: go forth and honor your passions and interests; but in five or ten years, remember that you were given permission to place your identity in something other than what you do to get by.

                Everything else I want to tell you this evening, you already know. If you’re like I was in Seattle Arena in 1989, you’re idealistic and judgmental and you know something about how happiness is made and how it isn’t, and you’re right to be idealistic and judgmental.

                You know adults in your life who aren’t happy, and you know why: They’re working too hard, or they’re too focused on things that don’t ultimately matter, or they no longer try new things. Anyway, that’s what it may look like, and you may not be far off. I know I’m this adult often enough: it’s easy to get overwhelmed and just get through the day and week and then zombie out in front of a screen as an easy but not very effective means of rest and renewal.

                I also know that that’s been you. Are you okay with that? Who are you in the moment you are most numb and overwhelmed? How do you get through it? How do you revive? The struggles and strategies you employed in high school you can lean on for the rest of your life. But if you aren’t good at dealing with your coping mode now, you better work on it, because, believe me, what you felt the night before key terms were due or when you were struggling to make sense of my ridiculous writing rubric or when you had to sit politely through a long, ceremonial speech—that detached sense of a sometimes frantic coping—that is not unique to high school; and without self-reflection and deliberate action, you could be stuck following a pattern that will hurt and dull you. “When abstraction sets to killing you,” as Albert Camus says in The Plague, “you’ve got to get busy with it.”

                So what do I do? I read. I surf the net. Once a week, my wife and I go to dinner and come home and watch something on Netflix. That’s not enough. Certainly purple-monkeyed David would not be impressed with his adult self. But sometimes I write. Sometimes I dance with my daughters. We lived in Hungary for a year and tried new routines. Sometimes I bask in my family’s music (though sometimes I hide). At work I’ve been able to revive by taking on Meghan O’Kelley in a rap battle, or by getting a hug from Jessamyn, or by getting a big, clapping, Julianna Quinn Hello.  I also do take full advantage of the holiday moments that stop routine and demand reflection, like every year when I graduate from Roosevelt and think back on what I learned and where I’m going and whom I’ve grown to cherish. These are building blocks for happiness.

                As for you, I know one thing you do is seek out new experience and adventure. You’re way up on adults with this one. Studies show novel encounters trigger the brain’s limbic system, which is where happiness is made; and yet adults often find themselves in a comfortable soothing stagnation. Getting out of a comfort zone allows a greater shot at making happiness and memories, and when you’re making vivid memories, you’re also slowing down the high speed blur of time passing. Many studies have shown that, after basic needs are met, experience brings about more happiness than material things. Even a bad experience turns into a good story. So travel; take a dance class; go to a monster truck rally:  hang on to your sense of adventure, especially when it seems easier to just stay home.

                Another thing you do beautifully is engage with sensitive immediacy. This includes responding to the world’s wounded-ness, or expressing the social patterns undergirding your own pain. I only have time for platitudes at this point, but I’m saying what you already know; I repeat it because it’s too easy to get swept up in our own dramas and deadlines. Give everyone their due humanity—the partisan, the panhandler, the person cutting you off in traffic: shut down the clannish outrage machine and the numbing distant busy-ness of your life to respond to the humanity and pain in others and thus engage in the bright, tender humanity of your own. This keeps you vital and vibrant too.

                My younger self believed in the importance of questions and wrote in a journal that questions are more important than answers. I agree with me. So here’s one final meditation, because I can’t get off the stage without inviting us all to wonder about the dominant social interloper of our lives—the Internet. You know how plants use animals to reproduce? Like when a bear eats some berries and wanders off and then poops out the berry seeds in some other territory and the seeds stick to the ground in their own soft fertilizing goodness? You know how a plant uses a bear? How is the internet using you? How has your smartphone been training your mind to behave?

                Okay, that’s it. Because you already know how happiness is made and how it’s not, I remind you only to be purposeful: not just loving but deliberately grateful, admiring, understanding and warm; not just happy but deliberately reflective, creative, friendly and bold; not just generous, but deliberately empathetic, healing, humble and kind.

                To the graduating class of 2016, I leave you with this impression, and this aftertaste. May your lives be filled with love. I’ll miss you. Thank you.

David Grosskopf

Stepping in It

I feel like I’ve been dealing in shit all night. I finally came home from taking Maisie to orchestra in Edmonds, with ten minutes all day to eat a dinner, which is ten minutes more than I had for lunch, more than I had for breakfast, though I was able to eat cookies and little donuts by the sink in those ten minutes, and later, while I was waiting for Therese and Maisie, a Blizzard at Dairy Queen while I graded eight more papers after the fifteen I graded when I returned to school from the field trip and the pouring rain on my bike; when I finally came home after the three and half hours out towards Edmonds, the kitchen was a mess, the yard waste container was overflowing, and the plugged-up toilet, which Stephanie noted before she left for accompanying a rehearsal and I left with Maisie to orchestra, was still full of thick floating turds.

But Therese had also stepped in what seemed like eight cubic feet of shit before she got in the van; and me, having eaten only once at 5:30 in the morning and then some salami and cookies and donuts just before driving tonight, was in a spiritual-fast state, my senses utterly heightened, so that, for every stop light, of which there were maybe twenty along the way, and for every cycle before each stoplight, of which there were usually at least two or three thanks to the backed up traffic of rush hour further clogged by power outages and the chaos of I-go-you-go intersections all through the city, were already urgently aware of every car’s small lurch and slow start, and I was more aware than ever of every little sound, and the sound that was happening was Therese, who’d never been in a car with me, whispering, scream whispering, but not clear enough so I could understand, but what she was whisper screaming was about the poo on her binder and on her shoes, the shit somehow smeared thickly down her notebook, and what I later found was more shit glopped and scraped onto the floor of the van; in my fasting spiritual state, I was aware of the lights, the whisper shouts, and, at every warming stop before a stuttering traffic light, in the oven of our van as it belched out its heat, the shit the shit the shit, even when I opened the windows and the rain and wind came in.

“Can I leave the notebook in the car?” she asked when I was dropping them off. I stared at the hardening bulges of shitdust on her binder.

At Dairy Queen, after eating the Blizzard and grading the eight papers, I brought her folder to the bathroom and scrubbed it clean, went to the car and scrubbed what I could; retrieved Maisie and Therese and drove everyone home; and then, in my kitchen -- the full sink, the spilling yard waste, and Maisie coming down to say that the toilet upstairs was still plugged up.

Unhiding Old Writing

Last Saturday night, friends came over and shared old writing intended like fine aged cheese: stinky, but hopefully tasty. The event was inspired in part by Mortified Nation, a documentary I'd watched on Netflix, but mostly from an autobiography Stephanie's mother sent back to her after almost thirty years, during which Stephanie made pronouncements about the nature of love, world peace, her personal qualities, the depth of a boy, and the other boy, the one she tossed over for the deep one. The autobiography ran thirty typed pages; but such was her writing and adolescent delusion that if Stephanie started reading, no one wanted her to stop.

So, about a dozen friends and their kids came over, with the understanding that the kids could read something but then had to disappear from our shame. This was a request from a particular couple, one of whom, we discovered, justified the request. Her contribution was a letter to one man about the step-by-step process that led to the bed of another man who eventually turned out gay. My sister read from a journal she'd kept while traveling in Granada, a place so stunning, it knocked the verbs right out of her. Another friend read a letter from her then-fiance, now-husband explaining why he wasn't going to ask her to marry him yet, which she then followed up with three diary pages from the following month describing a perfect moment that came and went when he still didn't ask her to marry him. One person shared a diary of complaints about her furniture and thoughts about her boyfriend and time spent in the day, which was poignant because twenty years have now passed but the state of mind less so. 

I shared two journal entries from middle school, which reveal the sad little boy inside me, and one from high school.

1) "Alone. I hate that word. Unless I am with a person I am afraid of. Then I am even more alone."

2) From high school: "If you need a crutch, I have long bones. / If you are cold, warm yourself in my urine."

 3) And the best one of all, my first dance. "Slow music is bad for your system of fun."

I'm hoping to go to Seattle's Salon of Shame soon, and see what humiliation looks like for the pros.

Testing, testing...

This is the Roosevelt gym for the next two weeks while we are testing. The other gym is available, though.

For more testing. That gym is also full of chairs transported from a storehouse downtown.

A colleague of mine (department chair at Center School) captures her disgust in a great article  in everyday feminism. Jesse Hagopian explains why testing is a civil rights issue in generous detail. And a local blog explains the corporation behind the tests--Pearson.

We moved into our house!

Before and after renovations, rooms:

Living room before:

Living room after:

Library before (when it was a guest room):

Library after:

 Hallway before (when it was a library):

Hallway after:

 Kitchen before:

   Kitchen after:

Dining room before:

 Dining room after:

Upstairs bathroom before:

Upstairs bathroom after:

Maisie's room before (when occupied by all three girls):

Maisie's room after:

Sophie's room:

 Amelia's room:

They Stumble that Run Fast: Why I like teaching Shakespeare

            In 1995, I taught in a school district where I wasn’t allowed to teach Joy Luck Club to 17 year olds in an Honors American Lit class because a swear word appears on page 209, and I wasn’t allowed to teach Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man or Malcolm X or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, because they were too violent; and I couldn’t say out loud that Oscar Wilde was gay, which I know because our principal called me into his office and told me a parent said I was “recruiting.” At a certain point, I was annoying the Instructional Materials Committee with title requests so much they said I had to get all my dozen department colleagues as well as the principal to read any proposed book and each sign off on it before the IMC would even consider anything else.

            And that was how I fell in love with teaching Shakespeare—gender-flipping, triple-entendre, binary-busting, blood-and-blaspheming, pratfalls and poetry Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare I was automatically in the clear. Phone calls to the superintendent slowed to a trickle. But I wasn’t going to avoid nuanced or challenging themes or the complacencies that privilege brings to bear; I wasn’t going to infantilize students; I wasn’t going to trade what’s gorgeous and radical in literature—that it allows us to observe and take part in the messiness of social relations and human feeling, to steep ourselves in the experiences and points of view of people not ourselves—for testable content and skills.

           Teaching Shakespeare allowed me to close the door to my classroom and say fuck you, censorship—or rather, fuck you, canker blossom!

            Here’s an example—a Shakespeare text that gains meaning and power from directly mucking around in its grime.

            Many of my ninth grade students have already read Romeo and Juliet by the time they get to high school, and they groan to hear they’re reading it yet again. That means I’ve got them exactly where I want them.

            The play begins. Here come a couple servants from the house of Capulet, talking trash in the street.

SAMPSON: When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

GREGORY: The heads of the maids?

SAMPSON: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maiden-heads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.

Take it in what sense thou wilt. A little translation and students come to attention. Sampson is joking about rape.

GREGORY: They must take it in sense that feel it.

SAMPSON: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and ‘tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

Know what Sampson’s talking about there? I ask, whether or not they’ve started buzzing with the language. They hesitate, and I say, He’s talking about his pretty piece of flesh.

            They read these lines in middle school, but their teachers surely didn’t linger. I do. And I do it because there’s rowdiness in Shakespeare’s plays and I want them to experience the energy of that, but also because it feeds themes of the story so deeply—the swagger and energy and teasing and bluster of youth (and then the shattering disbelief when someone dies from their rough play); a sexism so pervasive and natural and potentially violent, Juliet thinks to die or feign death before even for a second imagining running off on an abusive father.

            Soon after, we meet Romeo, one of the great incarnations of love in all the world, and he’s gone nocturnal, running off to the woods each night to weep, and then collapsing in his room each morning for some fitful, despondent sleep. All this is because he’s in love. In love? “Out of her favor where I am in love.” What we find out is that he knows Rosaline doesn’t love him because she “hath Dian’s wit, / And in strong proof of chastity well armed.” After asking students about the goddess Diana (of the hunt) and the detail of most interest to Shakespeare (virgin, never to marry), I ask about chastity. Then students start to say, Wait a minute.

BENVOLIO: Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO: She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste.

            This is such important character development for Romeo. When we first meet him, he is so certain he knows what love is; and he’s so certain that he loves Rosaline; and he feels all over his itchy body that Rosaline has no feelings for him, which he knows because she won’t “ope her lap to saint seducing gold.” Here’s this guy who’s supposed to be the greatest lover of all time, and he’s a just a kid: he’s passionate, articulate, pained, but young and dumb. How can we understand either that Romeo’s love for Juliet is different than this and therefore tragic in its explosive brevity, or even more tragically, that his love is not so different at all, but enthusiastic and bright, trusting and good?

            Take these things together, the boyish bluster of Romeo and Juliet’s wild, young love, and I just want to protect these kids. Because this is what the story for me is about: teenagers at play and in love who get caught in the spokes of adult foolishness. If you take out the rowdiness and horniness and the sexism, how do you understand the tragedy of this childhood forced so needlessly to its end?

            Infantilizing students by stripping literature of its vulgarities and of the disorders the art then reflects smothers students from grappling with issues as adults; and it does something else, too: it doesn’t let them take delight as children.

Amelia's Golden Birthday

Amelia's birthday wish was to go away with just her parents and no sisters. While we only had one night two weeks late because of the prison-house of activities at which I always marvel and despair, it was happily anticipated. Stephanie rented a room in Coupeville, the town on Whidbey Island we lived in the very romantic year before we were married. 

The town itself is the second oldest in the state and lovingly zoned, a couple of times standing in for Martha's Vineyard or thereabouts in movies like War of the Roses and Practical Magic.

But as a getaway for Amelia's birthday, it was also close and featured one of our favorite walks in the state.

In the end, Stephanie and I were able to revisit a place vividly and affectionately remembered from our days of courting -- places we walked, air we tasted, the quaint and quiet and slowness that had room just for us. And by the end, we cherished the beauty of the place, and remembered, too, why when surrounded with such natural and historical treasures we rented a movie almost every night. 

One of the very fun things about our visit was that we were only three store fronts away from the house we'd occupied, a beautiful craftsman celebrating its hundred year anniversary next year (sharing the date with our house in Seattle). The house is now a store-front called Lavender Wind, and its opening made the kind of local news I'm happy now to see. 

We talked with the owners inside, and they told us of many others who'd stopped through to tell of their years in the house. They promised to make a Facebook page where we could share our story, and they did it right away. The page includes a video of their remodel that will be of much more interest to Stephanie and me than anyone reading here -- but the video does include images of the house the way we remember it.

Hey! This was the entrance to a
coffee shop where I'd grade papers!

Amelia celebrated with us and seemed almost as interested as we.

I'm sure not everything was interesting, such as comments like, "Hey, that used to be a coffee shop where I'd grade papers!" But Amelia is always game, always curious, and always a gratifying traveling companion.

We could not have predicted, though, when we drove to Ebey's Landing, one of Stephanie's favorite walks in the state, that the January afternoon would surpass so many of our past walks in light and warmth. Amelia experienced Crockett's meadows in  painterly otherworldliness; after we hiked past beet fields and ascended the yellow cliffs along the meandering lines of the water, we returned along the beach as the sun softly began to set, turning the grasses a full gold; and by the time we neared the beginning again, Mt. Rainier reflected the pastels of the sky and its bready red hunks of cloud.

Happy thirteenth, Amelia!

Measure for Measure

The origin story of David and Stephanie has its biggest roots in a couple scenes we performed together in our college Shakespeare class. I had no acting experience, but I saw no shortage of inspiration and devilry from the role I was working on--Angelo from Measure for Measure; soon, the "strong and swelling evil / Of my conception," and the exhilaration of performing, was just like any other kind of flirting--energetic, presumptive, sly.

Angelo is given charge of Vienna by its duke, who wants to crack the whip on a city of sin but is himself too soft and friendly to do it. Perhaps the need to give Vienna a cold shower is a necessary one, given how Italian it had all been getting there (all those Austrians named Claudio, Angelo, Lucio and Vincentio?). Angelo, though, is described as having urine of "congealed ice," and has no such problem, immediately sentencing a man to death for extra-marital relations. The condemned man's sister comes to Angelo to plead for her brother's life, and though Isabella is nearing vows of the sisterhood and though Angelo has been unyielding in matters of sex and love, he discovers a little spark, and finds himself telling Isabella leniency can be earned.

It's stunning and wildly grotesque, because the story is over 400 years old and fictional and yet not nearly fantastical enough. At the time we performed the scenes, the Clarence Thomas / Anita Hill story was just a couple years old. I was aware of the political charge of our play, but also of the scent of Stephanie's hair as I stepped behind her to whisper at her ear, "Plainly conceive, I love you."

Last Wednesday night, Stephanie I went to see Seattle Shakespeare Company put on a performance of Measure for Measure. We had last seen an interpretation in 1992 with the college class, an unfunny, sober performance with a screeching rape scene that had only reinforced my sense that the play deserved its lesser accolades. We had been looking forward all these years later to going back to those resonant lines and discordant intimacies that put us together.

And it was amazing--one of the best performances I've seen out of this production company. And it put my one-note, sanctimonious college-y interpretation to shame. I wrote a letter to this week's Angelo, and he wrote a deeply satisfying and thoughtful response back. I include the letters below.

Watching the play with Stephanie two dozen years after our show was more satisfying and rich than I thought it could be; discussing performance decisions afterwards was delicious. Shakespeare doesn't have much in the way of successful marriages (who's his most united couple, the Macbeths?)--he mostly likes the getting there; but my partnership with Stephanie, these many years later, has as much the energy, joy and desire as it ever had.


Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 10:26 AM
To: Grosskopf, David
Subject: Re: Your Angelo was outstanding

David,

I can’t express how much I appreciate this letter. Like you, I have had an attachment to this role and play since I was in training, and to hear that an audience member, especially one so familiar with the play and character, saw and appreciated my journey though thrills me. 

When I was twenty, I saw Angelo much the same as you did….as a grotesque mustache twirler, yet as I studied him over the years I saw that there was so much more there. My first thoughts that he wasn’t two dimensional came when I realized that the way he is portrayed relies more on the plays journey than his. 

The simple fact of the matter is that if he is played to be unredeemable, then Marina and Isabel just look foolish in the end. He must be forgivable (one of the hardest things for us humans to do for the play to work. Forgiveness is a knot I believe Shakespeare tried to understand for most of his later plays, Winters Tale becoming his greatest treatise on the matter…in my opinion. Ironic that in one of the last speeches Marina refers to a "marble monument”. The interdependence of the characters to tell the story is the key here. 

Once I understood this, Shakespeare’s road map burst from the page and I saw the intense struggles that Angelo faced. The opposites he uses from couplet to couplet , and the antithesis he uses even in the same lines. Like all of Shakespeare late characters he lives in a moment in time, struggling with thoughts he has difficulty understanding. He in in an emergency room, looking only at what is in front of him.  Experiencing emotions he has no skills to conquer. Washing over him like a tsunami. 

God it is fun to play.

So thanks again for this. If you run into me at some point please introduce yourself. I’d like to put a face to the letter.

All the best

Brad

Dear Mr,

                My wife and I went to last night’s show of Measure for Measure and were thrilled by the performance. D. Chiang’s direction was so insightful and creative, lighting up the undertones and overtones of a play I thought I understood before; and your interpretation, in particular, gave me the illusion that no other interpretation of Angelo was possible.

                I am a Shakespeare teacher at Roosevelt High School, and I usually refer to this play when I’m talking about opportunities stage-direction-less texts present: I give the plot of Measure for Measure (but how did I forget the bed trick?), and I lead up to the moment the duke asks for Isabella’s hand, explaining that she has no more words in the script: does she take his hand, slap him, look quizzically at her rosary beads (loved it!), what?

                But the play also has special meaning for me because, twenty years ago in college, I performed a couple scenes as Angelo and ended up going home with my Isabel—last night was the first time we’d seen the play since all those years ago.

                I had played Angelo as a straight up hypocritical sleazebag. My performance journal is attached (ignore it, or just read the first paragraph), and you can hear my Sophomoric confidence as well as my stupid interpretation—one that held up for me until last night.

                Your Angelo is consistently principled, or tries to be; and when you launch into the “Plainly conceive, I love you” scene, Angelo continues to wrestle with himself much longer than mine did; I did not pick up the hypothetical cues in the scene well, though so clear in your performance; and so your Angelo, as he presents Isabella with what-if’s, does not seem merely to be trying to manipulate Isabel’s moral reasoning: he’s still wrestling somehow—until he goes for it.

                The smallness of your Angelo, the space he takes up on the stage especially when the duke is there, and then the slight puffing—pretty desk, Mao jacket—made Angelo so familiar, and even sympathetic: a middle manager who believes in the company he works for.

                Your acting was nuanced and thoughtful, and gave complexity and tragedy to a character I’d just seen as exploitative and villainous. He is as surprised by his downfall as anyone.

                The play really came together for me in a way that it never had before with Mariana’s lines, which your Mariana so powerfully belted out: “They say, best men are moulded out of faults; / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad.” I just saw this play as melodrama before; but with these lines, everything Chiang had done, everything you had done, really began to sing for me, and the play became a real play, and one certainly worth doing: our dogma and our righteousness is stupid in the face of our faults, and we should be led by our humanity above all else.

                In any event, I thought you were brilliant, and I thank you.

David Grosskopf

Best Reads of 2014

The year 2014 is at an end. I'd like to take a look back at books I've read and share reactions and insights. I'd like to, but I can't, because I have the worst memory of any English teacher alive. 

If a student asks me if I've read a book, I can say yes or no, but usually I check with Stephanie to know for sure; and then when the student asks me if it's a good book, I usually give my overall impression, but that's as far as I can go, almost always: I don't remember characters, plots, styles, settings, images, endings, climaxes, any of it. If I'm handed the book because a student thinks to jog my memory, once I flip through pages and see names and places, none of it is familiar. I've had moments reading when I suddenly remember, within 50 pages of the end, that I'd read the book before. And yet, I have a resistance -- one I did not have in my teens and twenties -- to re-reading. There are simply too many good books out there. This obstinate stance raises the question why we read, or rather, why I read. To educate, to amuse, to feel, to guide, absorb? When I forget everything I pick up, the most principled of these purposes are lost to me, and the ones I'm left with don't mind a little eternal return.

I remember a moment in the middle of reading The Betrayers, a book by the author of a collection of short stories I adored (Natasha), David Bezmozgis. Something was nagging at me. This book was so similar in mood to another novel I'd read only recently, two or three weeks before, but I couldn't remember it. So I turned to Stephanie for the book I'd read recently taking place partly in the USSR, partly in Italy. The Free World, she told me, also by David Bezmozgis.

For a while, I kept a journal, so I'd know what I read and could even retrieve my responses. I liked doing it and I liked having it and then I stopped. Why are there so many routines in life that bring us pleasure but are nevertheless abandoned? Just a lack of consciousness, a little life getting in the way, and just, again, a little ridiculousness to the way we lumber and crash through the days of our year. 

So I can't reflect on a year of reading. I can reflect on exactly one week. Here they are, then, the best reads of the fourth week of December, 2014.

A couple weeks ago, I borrowed a recommended book from our friend, Alison--A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra. It takes place in Chechnya in the nineties and the few years beyond. I remember some echoes of the Chechen wars while I was in college, and I'd never looked too deeply or even studied a map; but this book took me over. While the language was a little too pretty at times, the characters and shifting points of view worked well; and I felt I glimpsed something of the war and geography. I was especially taken with the written treatment of an informant who everyone in a village knew was an informant, and who repeatedly led to deaths and harm of beloved characters, yet was not beyond the realm of sympathy himself. 

I liked the book; but what I especially liked was a list of the author's recommended reading at the very end. Half of the titles I had read before, and almost each of these was a novel that had affected me:  

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. I've read five of Patchett's books, I think, and this was one of the very good ones. I remember reading it or discussing it in Vancouver with my friend and great reader, Rachel, and I remember this strong, mean woman in the Brazilian Amazon and her medicines.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. I liked this book (it had twins in it, right?), but I know others liked it more than I.

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. I read this, then had Stephanie read it, and I definitely recommended it to others. As I was reading this piece of fiction about North Korea, I was realizing how little I knew, how few images I'd seen; and everything that seemed outrageous in plot, from the little research I did, held up in dissident testimony. 

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, by Ben Fountain. I don't remember how I ended up with that book, but I loved it, bought it for others. These short stories are endlessly readable and moving.

Because I agreed so strongly with Marra for these titles on the list, or for three of them anyway, I ordered several others from the library and read them this week.

We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, used a young narrator whose exuberance and innocence translated into humor and irony, which got me through some harrowing scenes in Zimbabwe. And who needs new names? Was it Darling, Chipo, Godknows, or Bastard? Was it Bornfee Moses, MotherLove or Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro? The book is very current. And while Bulawayo is definitely shedding light on tensions and lingering history in Zimbabwe, when Darling moves to the United States, we also get an outsider's perspective on this crazy country, its guns, its fragmentation of family, and the way poverty works here so differently than the way poverty works there. Through it all, the young narrator is likable and funny and wry.

I have a couple other books waiting for me from Marra's list, too: The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li, The Feast of the Goat, by Mario Vargas Llosa, and soon enough, I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal.

But I also decided to find another Ben Fountain book, having liked his collection of short stories so well. Over Christmas on Whidbey, I read Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and I was delirious with it. Billy Lynn is a soldier whose platoon's heroic three minutes are captured by an embedded reporter. They are all famous and lauded, and they are trotted around America for a two week victory tour, though they must return to duty and war in Iraq as soon as it's done. The entire book takes place during a Dallas Cowboys game the day before their return, and their exposure to Texas fans in the stands and high rollers in the VIP club from the point of view of a 19 year old narrator who is both a little stupid, horny and young but also remarkably astute is a terrific ride, satirical and absorbing. I am stilled awed by the horror and tension Fountain brings to a scene of Billy Lynn and the others simply standing still on the stage during Beyoncé's halftime performance. 

This morning I finished Garth Stein's A Sudden Light. I was looking forward to a ghost story taking place in the Highlands, a nearby neighborhood near Shoreline Community College. I enjoy the local geography, and I did learn some local history I'd never heard, such as about Billy Gohl, a serial killer from the late 1800's who murdered at least a couple dozen people near Aberdeen. I liked the plot of this book, and the imagery, but the dialogue and characterization destroyed me. Next time I read a narrative about a highly precocious child, that author is going to have to win back my trust, because otherwise I'm going to think what I think about Garth Stein here -- that he's just to poor an observer to inhabit an actual kid. The book started off with some good ghost creepiness, but the ghost of the house ends up just hanging out and talking just like every other character, leading our narrator to the perfectly revealing journal entries and letters and providing perfectly revealing dreams when more information is needed. Everything in the book is spelled out, and characters speak in stilted, aggravating cleverness. But the book did make me want to get past the guard at the Highlands (I failed the one day I tried) and see the palatial estates and their protected views of Puget Sound.

Stein also described a 300 foot tree. It was central to his imagery and his plot. I would love to see that. For now, I leave off with this picture, taken from the Boeing Creek Park nearby.