Infinity Under A Roof

The following talk was given on October 23, 2025, at a wonderful storytelling event called The Hearth, in  which members of the community tell stories about a given theme. That evening’s theme was “I Remember.”

The talk can be viewed here (it begins at 34:13)

***

“A library is infinity under a roof.” Gail Carson Levine

This quote by the author of Ella Enchanted has always ALMOST summed it up for me. It’s true: libraries contain the stories of the past in all their complexity and the possibilities of the future in all their potency. But that’s not all. Libraries also blow that metaphorical roof clear off the building by housing ideas, concepts, potentialities that go as high as the sky and as low as the core of the earth.

So, if you haven’t figured it out by now, this story is about libraries (and if you know me, you won’t be surprised by that). But borrowing from tonight’s theme of “I Remember,”  I’d like to take an odd sort of path through my story. There’s no narrative arc spelled out, no rising action, no denouement. Instead, it’s a story made of mental snapshots, impressions, and revelations. After all, memories are not always stories.

First vignette: 

I’m a kid, maybe 10 or 12, watching a rerun of The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough At Last.” I’m sure you’ve all heard about or seen it, but I’ll recap. 

Opening narration (imagine me doing a Rod Serling voice): “Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself… without anyone in The Twilight Zone.”

In other words, Harold Bemis is a man born to read but forced to work. One day, he eats his lunch in the vault of the bank he works in. He emerges to find that nuclear war has demolished everything he knows. Through his despair he spies an intact public library. In a revelatory moment, he realizes he now has all the time in the world to read.

I remember that feeling of elation. Imagine, reading all the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and the Chronicles of Narnia–for as long as you wanted, as many times as you desired!

And I remember the despair when, reaching down to pick up the first book on what we would now call his TBR pile, Henry Bevins’s glasses fall and are smashed.

Second vignette:

Flash forward to college. I decide to study in the fancy library, the kind with the green table lamps and polished wood tables. I see in the marble carved above me a quote, “knowledge is power,” by the Elizabethan writer, poet, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon, whose new model of intellectual inquiry sparks the scientific revolution.

Three words. Sixteen letters. A whole universe of awareness. It sticks with me.

Third Vignette:

It’s 2007 and my daughters, ages 5 and 7, are sitting at the Bluestone Cafe drinking hot chocolate. My husband and I have taken them to an election party. On the ballot was a library district–it didn’t pass. Everyone in the room is shocked–what would happen next? Would the library close? I look over to the kids to see my eldest staring at me, tears cascading down her cheeks.

Fourth vignette:

It’s 2009, I think, though the numbers are fuzzy. The nonprofit Josephine Community Libraries, Inc., is reopening the libraries with a ‘soft open’ of the children’s room. Some of us  behind the desk, frantically using the cutting board to make bookmarks to give away. When we look out the front door, we’re gobsmacked to see a line that goes all the way to the street. When the doors open, kids and their people flood into the children’s room and then check out, arms full to the brim. I cry.

Fifth vignette:

My family travels to England and my kids want to tour the Bodleian Library in Oxford because parts of Harry Potter were filmed in the Divinity School, which is on the library tour. We go to the oldest part of the library called Sir Humfrey’s library (or, to the Potter fans, where the Restricted Section is filmed). The tour guide tells us that a unique tradition of Sir Humfrey’s library was that no books could be lent out–even King Charles I had to stay in the library to read. 

I’m struck by this. As magnificent and storied as the Bodleian was in the 17th-century, almost every library in the world today is better because you can take the books home. 

In this, we are richer than kings.

Sixth and final vignette:

Last month. I’m not going to get into the politics or nitty gritty of it (that would take all night), but after ten months of uncertainty and instability, the commissioners vote 2-1 to pass a 5-year lease that allows the library to stay in the building it’s occupied since 1959. There have been rallies, countless letters to the editor, documentaries, articles, and interviews. Meetings and more meetings.

And when it finally happens, where am I? Alone in a hotel room in Grand Rapids, Michigan, watching the meeting online, staring in disbelief as, at a sparsely attended meeting in a conference room, three men determine the fate of the library.

I look around the hotel room and think, “That was it?” 

But then the anticlimactic feeling fades when I think of the library’s history and all the moments just like this that allowed it to continue. I remember all the folks over all the years who’ve dedicated themselves to the library. The people I never met, like Mrs. C.M. Stone, who served as the library board’s first president in 1893, and philanthropist Ben Bones, who in 1962 gave funds for a community meeting room. The couple who gave up their Saturdays for months to table at the Growers’ Market. The volunteers who shelve and check out books and answer a gajillion questions at the information counter. The new folks who bring energy and savvy and the experienced folks who bring local history and wisdom.

And then I don’t feel so alone.

So to close, I’d like to modify Gail Carson Levine’s quotation just a bit. Yes, the library is “infinity under a roof,” but it is also a multitude under a roof–and out on the streets, and in the halls of power. 

The library is us.

To Be Continued . . .

The talk below was given at The Hearth, a community storytelling organization, in Grants Pass, Oregon, on January 25, 2024.

It’s taken me years to be able to say this: I am a novelist. My debut book, The Village Healer’s Book of Cures, was published in November. 

As a novelist, stories are my bread and butter. As you can imagine, I think a lot about beginnings and endings and sequels and prequels.

Tonight I’ll tell a bit of my story, but I also want to talk about stories in a general sort of way, about how they allow us to preserve hope, imagine a better day, and work towards a better future.

The last time I attended The Hearth, it was February of 2020, and I was bald. Not prickly, just-shaved-my-head bald, but the kind of unnaturally smooth, eyebrows-nonexistent, eyelashes-falling-out bald that can only come from chemotherapy.

I’d been diagnosed the summer before with Stage 1 breast cancer. We’d caught it early with a preventive mammogram (AND I’M GOING TO INTERRUPT THIS TO REMIND Y’ALL TO GET YOUR MAMMOGRAMS!). My prognosis was and is excellent, but based on my age and genetic testing, my doctors advised me to be aggressive with treatment: surgery, chemo, radiation, hormone blockers. The full arsenal.

But this isn’t a story about cancer. This is a story about stories.

So, as a storyteller, maybe I shouldn’t frame the opening scene there. Maybe I should begin even earlier.

The year before, my youngest daughter had graduated high school and my husband and I would soon have an empty nest. A new chapter of my story was pretty obviously starting, and I got a part-time job as an adjunct professor my local university. 

I loved it. I loved the students, the planning, the classes–all of it. (Except for the grading. Nobody likes the grading.)

And I loved my colleagues and supervisors, so when I told them about the cancer and asked for two weeks off to recover from surgery, I thought it would be no problem. But, instead, the department took away my teaching contract and gave my classes to another instructor. Yeah, that sucked 

Since we’re talking about stories, let’s imagine we frame that scene as the end. The story becomes “middle-aged woman gets cancer and her bosses fire her.” If you end there, the story is a sad one, even an enraging one that sets up a discussion of capitalism and academia, of budgets pitted against human need and community.

But let’s look ahead a month. I went to Twitter and posted about my situation. Thousands of people liked and shared the post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Calls came in from other states, other countries even, from media and lawyers advising the university that what they were doing was discriminatory. 

They gave me my job back.

Let’s pretend that’s the end. If we frame it there, the story has a happy ending, with After-School-Special levels of good feels, and we can talk about the power of community and the occasionally happy stories made possible by social media.

BUT, remember how I said the last time I’d been here at The Hearth was February 2020? Remember what happened the month after that? 

Yup. Lockdown .Covid hit, the university was shut down, and I lost my job anyway. (Sigh.)

Stop the story there and frame it, and this becomes an absurdist tale, Kafkaesque, ridiculous and hopeless.

But fast forward: I finished a novel during Covid and the novel just got published.

Stop. Frame. Happy story.

You can all see the pattern here. In some ways, this is a lesson as old as time: it’s all in the way you look at things, the way you frame them.

Mark Twain once said “humor is tragedy plus time.” And maybe that’s why, as we get older, we (hopefully) get wiser: we have more stories, and we start to see beginnings and endings as two sides of the same coin.

It’s old, hard-earned wisdom. 

But there’s also powerful new research that shows us that the way we imagine and tell our stories has a profound impact on how we remember our past and think of our future. 

I recently came across an article written by Nick Hobson about emotionally intelligent people that focused on the medial frontal gyrus, which Hobson described as “a swath of spongy brain folds on the outside middle region of the frontal lobe. It is the seat of our identity. It is your ‘you.'”

Researchers in the journal Neuron explain that “the function of the medial frontal gyrus is to learn associations between context, locations, events, and emotional responses.” It also “facilitates decision making, long-term memory recall . . . [and] helps with the memory and consolidation in time scales ranging from seconds to years.” 

In other words, this part of the brain is a storyteller.

Ah, but the brain is tricky. The medial frontal gyrus is located next to parts of the brain that control negative emotions, judgment, and attention–it lets us decide whether to pay attention to bad feelings. It can turn our good stories into bad ones, our romances and comedies into tragedies.

So what do we do with this knowledge? How do we use it to celebrate our wins for the successes that they are and reframe our losses away from pure devastation?

Hobson’s answer? We time travel.

Scientists call it chronosthesia, a “learned capability absent in other animals and human infants.” Hobson explains that “it’s the brain’s natural ability to be constantly aware of past and future versions of ourselves. It’s believed to be the basis of human consciousness.”

 In other words, chronosthesia is a fancy way of talking about getting perspective, of moving the frame of your story around in time 

Let’s reframe my story again. Whether or not I publish another book is highly variable: sales, reviews, and market trends all play a role. My publisher may say no to the next full manuscript. But that’s only one frame. I can time travel, reimagine. Maybe they’ll say yes, and I’ll build a relationship with them. Maybe they’ll say no, and I’ll be disappointed. But maybe that will spur me on to write and publish an even better novel. 

This may not be the end but the beginning. Or maybe the middle third, or the second half of the first part of the middle 🙂 But barring something unforeseen (crossing my heart), this is not the end.

Unlike in novels, the story goes on.

Gathering Rosebuds

I’ve decided to practice what I teach (<–nope, not a typo).

When I teach writing, I harp endlessly on the need to write often, to keep the muscle memory of writing flexed and supple. It’s like playing an instrument, I say, or practicing a sport. 

That’s why at the beginning of each class I provide my students with two quotes and ask them to write about them for a bit. Mostly they’re writing for themselves–I might read a few when I collect at the end of the semester, but it’s spotty.

They love it.

But do I do it myself? Eh, not really.

Here’s another thing I tell my students: we are always writing for an audience, even if that audience is our own self. We tend to be more precise writers, however, when that audience is another person. So it’s a great idea to get feedback on writing, to hone our skills and broaden our perspective.

Do I do that either? Nah, not enough.

That’s why I’m going to try to revive this blog. I’m tired of stowing my writing in a drawer like it’s some dirty secret, of being jittery when anyone reads it. I need to toughen the calluses of my writing muscles (<–that probably doesn’t make sense anatomically, but you get the drift).

This blog started out as a way for me to frame what I was researching in the 17th century with current trends and my own (sometimes random) pairing of historical ephemera and political and social trends. Hence the name of the blog–Out of Time.

That name has taken on a new meaning for me after being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer.

I’m not out of time, not yet (did I just tempt fate or the gods or something? Yikes).   My cancer was caught very early and I have an excellent prognosis. But an experience like that changes you, ya know? 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and all that.

So if you’re reading, thank you. You’re giving me the gift of flexing my writing muscles and overcoming my writerly cowardice. 

I’ll be back in a few days. Take care and gather those rosebuds, my dears.

This Old Grey Goose is Kind of a Bitch

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So I was standing outside a groovy record shop in the college city of Eugene, OR one day last week. I was waiting for my husband, who could have happily been in the store for hours, but I was outside (because small store, Covid, etc.), scrolling through Twitter.

A youngish (teen? 20 something?) couple walked by.

The young woman looked up at where I was perched on the stairs and sneered. “Hi, Grandma.”

I froze for a second while the shock hit me.

I had chemo last year and lost all my hair. Before chemo my hair was kind of mousy brown and super straight. Now it’s a silvery grey and curly. To be honest, I kind of love it, but I know that it makes me look older.

So the encounter went like this:

Me: Why would you say that? Why?

Her: Because you look like my grandma, don’t you?

Me (in annoyingly prim and proper voice): Well, that’s so rude.

Her: *walks away*

Me: *curses at her* (probably could have handled that better)

And then I started crying. I cried because it’s been an extremely shitty year. I cried because I couldn’t help but wonder if my husband is going to be asked someday if I’m his mother. I cried because even though I mostly like my new hair, I don’t look like myself anymore.

And while I was crying, I was also mad at myself for my ageism. What the fuck do I care if I look like a grandma? Grandmas are awesome.

I’d like to think it was the sneer that set me off, but if I’m honest with myself, it’s also the idea that I now look 10 or 15 years older than I did (which is stupid and shallow and I’d really like to pin this on society’s expectations that women look eternally young).

And then I did that thing. You know the thing. The thing where for the rest of the day you come up with witty rejoinders, snappy comebacks, devastating putdowns:

***

Her:    Well, you look like my grandma, don’t you?

Me:     How dare you? I just went through CHEMO and my hair just came in like this. I’M ONLY 23 YEARS OLD. [I’m emphatically NOT 23 years old]
***

Her:    Hi Grandma.

Me:     I prefer “crone.”

***

Her:    *sneers*

Me:     *hexes*

***

That made me feel better, but for the rest of the day I was a bit melancholy. I got over the comment and could even forgive the young woman (just as she didn’t know what was going on in my life, I couldn’t know what was going on in hers). What’s stuck with me, though, is that this thoughtless young woman’s comments made me confront my own internalized ageism. I’m gonna have to do some thinking about that, some journaling. Because, as I told my husband after he came out and consoled me and I calmed down, “better a grandma than a cancer-riddled corpse.”

On Trying

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne around 1578 by Dumonstier/Public domain

I’ve been thinking a lot about trying: trying times, trying new things, trials and tribulations. And last week, trial by fire as the devastating Almeda fire burned just 25 miles from my home.

As I went for my walk today (freshly reminded of how rare and wonderful a smoke-free sky can be), I tried to remember the etymology of the word “trying,” recalling that in Les Essais, Michel de Montaigne transformed the French verb essayer (to try) into the one of the most ubiquitous literary forms we have: the essay.

The essay is, or should be, fluid and malleable, shifting form and purpose as the writer, the reader, and society transform. Aldous Huxley called the essay “a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” It can be personal and autobiographical. It can be informative or persuasive or entertaining. It can, rarely, be all of these.

But I fear we (society, teachers, schools) have also turned the essay into an object of dread, an academic Mad-Lib with arcane terminology. We teach that the thesis statement should go here; the topic sentence there. Sometimes we explain why, but often we don’t, and students get the impression that the essay form is immutable, a natural product of a mature, academic sensibility. That it has always been thus.

But, of course, it hasn’t. The essay form as it stands today is as contingent as any cultural artifact. Montaigne’s essays could be four paragraphs or fourteen, his paragraphs direct or meandering. Montaigne didn’t have exactly two proof points in each paragraph. He certainly didn’t worry about having an engaging-and-interesting-but-not-too-cheesy-academic-hook.

I’m not teaching right now, but when I was, I thought about this a lot. I tried to historicize for my students the form the essay takes today, the rationale behind citation styles, subtitles, etc. But I also tried to impart a sense of that original meaning of essayer: to try, to experiment, to test, to prove. To reclaim the joy and freedom of thoughts and ideas. To play.

***BREAK***

^^^This is me playing with this essay form now. In an academic essay, I would be expected to provide a logical, seamless transition from one idea to the next, but I’m not going to. I’m going to jump to the next paragraph with all of the connections, connotations, and intuitive understanding left unwritten. (I like to think that if Montaigne had written his essays today, they would have been in a blog.)

***END BREAK***

I imagine that one reason I’m thinking so much about trying is that I’m now in a newly empty nest. My daughters have both left for college, and there is a world of ideas and opportunities out there to be tried.

But I’m scared. In the past, I’ve been pulled away from things that called to my heart, and it hurt to turn my back on them.

I’m tempted to stick with the formulaic, the security of knowing where my thesis statement should be.

But I know that my joy lies in the essayer.

It’s time for me to try.

My breasts tried to kill me.

12 Signs of Breast Cancer — #KnowYourLemons Breast Health Education
knowyourlemons.com provides a new way to notice, think about, and assess any breast changes or weirdnesses

I don’t have cancer. I have had cancer. I maybe will have cancer, and I maybe will have had cancer.

In the end, I may die of cancer. Even if I don’t, I’ll still be what they call a cancer survivor.

I guess when I was diagnosed about a year ago (the day before my birthday, which COME ON UNIVERSE, REALLY?), I didn’t think about how intimately cancer would be entwined with my identity.

And the thing is, my cancer (<– see how it’s “my cancer,” not “the cancer”) is one of the easily treatable ones (<– there is no such thing as an “easily treatable cancer”).  I had two tumors, one on each side, both tiny, both non-aggressive, both hormone positive. And I’m BRCA negative.

At first, I was just going to have a lumpectomy, radiation, and 5-10 years of the hormone blocker tamoxifen. Then after some genetic testing, my oncologist recommended chemo as well.

“During the lumpectomy,” my oncologist said, “in addition to the tumors, we also found some ductal carcinoma in situ.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Basically, you have busy breasts.”

It’s okay, you can laugh at that. I did. She did. We laughed like crazy.

So I went through chemo, as well, which is a whole other set of stories.

The thing is, I’m here on the other side of it, and while I try to let my body rest and recuperate, my brain seems to be constantly working to make sense of what happened. How did I go in for a routine mammogram, with no suspicion of anything out of the ordinary, to where I am today: fatigued, scared, and to be honest the teeniest bit paranoid?

What the hell just happened?

And while my survival-centered lizard brain tries to make sense of that, the rational part of my brain scolds me, reminds me that I’m crazy lucky, that it could have been so much worse, that I’m blessed, privileged, fortunate. And I am. God, yes, I am.

I’m not complaining, really. I’m just trying to make it make sense.

I read about cancer survivors running 5ks within months of finishing chemo.

That ain’t happening.

Any cancer-related internet search is filled with medical advice to stay positive, to eat well, to exercise—I know this because I Google while lying on the couch eating an ice-cream sandwich.

The positivity message is good and wise and helpful. But I’m so damn tired. A long walk today means two days of muscle pain and fatigue tomorrow.

And I’m just so freaking sick of hearing myself whine about it. And yet I can’t stop whining about it.

And that’s it. That’s where I’m at. It is, as they say, what it is.

There you go, brain—I gave you space and time and words to think through this. Now I guess I’ll get up off my bum and go for a walk.

I hope Ursula K. Le Guin’s paradise is a kind of library

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I want to share some memories about one of the coolest nights of my life, when I met and shared a meal with one of my heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin.

I’m not even going to try to be clever in this post (I usually try too hard at that anyway). I’m surprised by how kind of raw I feel about her passing, and I feel like it would be good to share these stories still sharply etched in my mind and heart.

Ursula K. Le Guin came to our small, poor, rural library with her friend Roger Dorband. They had collaborated on the book Out Here:  Poems and Images from Steens Mountain, and they were coming to Grants Pass because it was where Roger had grown up.

I was asked to be the facilitator.

I was terrified.

How do you share a stage with a woman whose writing had consumed you, whose stories had taken up residence in your brain and soul?

How do you do it? Easily. Ursula K. Le Guin was kind, and generous, and warm. She was smart, and funny, and passionate. She loved libraries, and she spoke fervently about the magic and wonder of books and learning.

She made sure any children in the audience (clutching their Catwings books) had extra time with her. She asked them questions and whispered to them that Catwings had been her favorite books to write.

She agreed to go to dinner with several of us who volunteered for the library. I got to sit next to her husband, Charles. He asked me about my children and clapped when I told him my oldest daughter played the cello. So did his, he said humbly (not letting on that she is the accomplished cellist Elisabeth Le Guin, professor of musicology at UCLA and a founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Artaria String Quartet). He told me the story of his daughter arranging to have her whole string quartet fly to Portland to play for them because they didn’t feel well enough to travel on airplanes anymore. I think he teared up a bit.

(He and UKLG lit up when talking about their children. It was a joy to see.)

All this, and then Ursula K. Le Guin pretended to lick my husband.

We, the group at dinner, started talking about book signings, and how in some ways it’s kind of a weird phenomenon. “I’ve just given my readers several thousand words. What’s a couple more?” she said. We all agreed a signature was like a souvenir at the atomic level—a sense that the page had touched the ink that had touched the pen that had touched the hand of the writer. It was incarnate, immediate.

Then my husband grinned and said, “Maybe next time, you should just lick the books.”

It was funny, but oh god. I held my breath. I looked at Ursula K. Le Guin–a Library of Congress “Living Legend” and a recipient of awards from PEN and the American Library Association. Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. A National Book Award winner. A freaking Pulitzer Prize nominee.

What would she think?

She was roaring with laughter.

When dinner was done and it was time to leave, my husband went to shake her hand. She looked at him with a mischievous smile and gave a quick, lizardy lick to the air.

When I went to shake her hand, she instead wrapped me in a hug.

“OMG,” I shrieked after she left the room, “Ursula K. Le Guin hugged me!” I fangirled for days, weeks. Okay, I’m still fangirling.

And I’m not at all embarrassed by my excitement about that moment. Because I am a fan not just of her piercing, evocative, magical writing, or her ground-breaking, deeply human storytelling, but of her.

May she rest in peace.

 

***

Edited to add: I forgot about this, but about a year later, as we were gearing up to ask voters to approve a library district (we were operating just on donations and grants–long story), our library director asked her to write a letter to the editor. She did. I was stunned, and still am, that she would take the time and energy to write a letter in support of a smallish library system some 300 miles away. Here it is.

To paraphrase Borges, I hope her paradise is a kind of library.

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A Coupla Thoughts in the Time of Trump

Hi.  Just checking in with you all. It’s been a while.

I wonder if you’re having a rough time, too.

Have you, like me, had a tiny little festering ball of worry in the pit of your stomach since November 8, 2016?

That’s the date we elected this man president of the United States.
trump

. . .

Wow. I didn’t expect that. As I was typing out that last sentence, I started tearing up. It’s been a long few months.

. . .

Anyway, maybe, like me, you’ve put your life on hold a little (or a lot). Maybe you look at your retirement accounts (such as they are) and for a few seconds wonder why you bother since the stock market’s going to crash any day now, probably a few days before the nuclear bombs fall.

No? Am I the only one who thinks like that?

Oh.

I wonder about a dear friend’s daughter, on the cusp of adulthood, excited to go off to college to prepare for a career as an environmental lawyer. I love her enthusiasm and positivity, even as I worry that there will be no more national parks, no old-growth forests, no coral reefs to protect.

I wonder why I write. Why bother? Why make plans for more than a few months out when a megalomaniacal toddler has access to the nuclear codes?

I used to be able to get swept away by things I thought were cool and interesting. The history of science and medicine. Renaissance literature. Libraries.

Now, in Trump’s America, the only things that help me forget that our country is being run by a cadre of kleptocrats and Putin’s “useful idiots” are cat videos and chocolate.

Here you go, reader:

But at my core, like it or not, I’m an optimist.

(I know that history is littered with optimists who said everything was just fine right before the most horrific acts of violence and hate. So please know that I am trying to talk about the good while also keeping watch for the bad.)

We have our families, those beloved souls who, whether or not they are linked to us by genetics, are connected to us at some metaphorically cellular level, the people who hurt when we hurt, laugh when we laugh, cry when we cry. The people who embrace us despite our fears and our faults (and sometimes because of them).

We have our friends, our kindred spirits, the people who spark our inner joy, who embrace us in difficult times. Our tribe, our +1s, the people who open their doors and their hearts to us every day.

We have our communities. This is harder: a lot of times, our communities don’t think like us, feel like us, have the same values or opinions. But for whatever reason—geography, a shared faith, a shared interest—fate has brought us together.

And we still have, for now, the idea of America. A place of equality, of opportunity, of promise. A place where our shared humanity links us together.

I sure hope we can keep it.

 

My New Year’s Resolutions (May Contain Trump)

2017

Sorry, this is going to be really self-indulgent. I mean, who fills up a blog with their New Year’s resolutions as though anybody cares?

Resolutions:

  1. Stop apologizing for being self-indulgent. Especially about my own blog. (Actually, I should stop apologizing quite so much all around. My friend Teresa pointed it out to me once and I told her I thought I was being kind of charmingly Britishy, like occasionally saying “I reckon” or “that’s rubbish.” But I think she’s right. I reckon it’s probably a way to forestall other people finding fault with me first.)
  2. Fight Trumpism. This is different from fighting Trump himself. The bloviating Cheeto has given birth to his hideous progeny, this loose conglomeration of ideals and values, and now it can exist independently from Trump himself. How do I see Trumpism?
    • Valuing personal success over the good of the community
    • Devaluing of constitutional rights
    • Normalization of vicious stereotypes based on ethnicity, religion, and country of origin
    • A self-serving and cynical treatment of facts and of truth-telling
    • Treating women as objects to be viewed, grabbed, used, and cast aside
    • Horrible syntax
    • Adulation of the strong, rich, and powerful
    • Disdain of the weak, poor, and disenfranchised
    • Kleptocracy
    • An unhealthy obsession with the size of one’s hands
  3. Exercise.
  4. Exorcise. My inner demons, that is, mostly the twins insecurity and perfectionism.
  5. Write more. Because FFS, how can I call myself a writer if I don’t write? No more namby-pamby excuses. What I produce may be garbage, but it will be MY garbage.
  6. Refuse to allow anybody else to tell me to worry about Thing A instead of Thing B. I am perfectly capable of worrying about climate change and petulant PEOTUS tweets and Hamilton and SNL and fascism and whether the cashier at the grocery store thought my jokes were weird. When it comes to worrying, I contain multitudes.
  7. Worry less.
  8. Eat more vegetables. Ancillary to this: stop counting No-High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup Strawberry-Banana V-8 (“contains one whole serving of vegetables!”) as a serving of vegetables.
  9. Get a thicker skin.
  10. But not so thick I become hidebound or insensitive.
  11. Be a better wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of these. Let me know how I can do better, ‘kay?)
  12. Be better at asking for forgiveness when I can’t do or be any of the above (like, pretty much always). That includes forgiving myself.

Love to all of you, and I hope you have a joyful, fulfilling, peaceful, and prosperous 2017!

I am George III, Know You Not That?: On Trump, Hamilton, and Shakespeare

Theater is a distillation, not a distraction.

Like most of America, I have a lot of thoughts about the statement Brandon Victor Dixon read to Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence after the November 18th production of Hamilton and Donald Trump’s tweeted reaction.

There are those who think it was disrespectful for the cast to call out a member of the audience. “You go to the theater to be entertained,” those folks say, “not to have politics shoved down your throat!”

If that’s your take, you might want to stop reading now. You’re not going to like what I have to say.

There are others who will argue that by focusing so much on this Hamilton controversy, I’m falling into Trump’s trap of redirecting attention from his other scandals, especially the news, announced the same day, of the $25 million fraud settlement in the Trump U case.

Those folks have a point: we need to pay attention to as many of Trump’s misdeeds as we can. But this critique implies the theater is somehow not a part of the larger political world, that it is a distraction from “the real world.” I couldn’t disagree more. Theater is a distillation, not a distraction.

(But, because I agree that it’s imperative for us to hold Donald Trump accountable for all of his decisions, here’s a partial list of the things I’m also paying attention to: the $25 million settlement in the fraud case mentioned above; the appointment of white-supremacist, misogynist, anti-semitic Steve Bannon as chief strategist; Trump’s many business ties to Russia; the evidence that Russia hacked the 2016 election; the choice of a Jeff Sessions, a man considered too racist to be a federal judge 30 years ago, as Attorney General; and the choice of an islamophobic national security advisor. There are a lot more. Feel free to add them in the comments.)

I can worry about all of this and still have thoughts about what happened at Hamilton. As I tweeted on Saturday, when it comes to worrying (paraphrasing Whitman) “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Okay, now that all that is out of the way….

I have always thought that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is like a first cousin to Shakespeare’s Henriad (which comprises Richard II, Henry IV, Part I; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V). Like Richard II, Hamilton depicts the overthrow of a king. Like Henry IV, Part I, Hamilton addresses the aftermath of that overthrow and subsequent internecine conflicts. Like Henry IV, Part 2, Hamilton embraces the place of the tavern and the commons.

But most of all, Hamilton reminds me of Henry V with its looming questions of succession and its grappling with ideas of nationhood, national identity, and pluralism, the political role of the center and the periphery. Where Henry V expands the definition of “Englishness” with its inclusion of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish soldiers, Hamilton defends an inclusive and expansive meaning of “Americanness”–insisting on the fulfillment of the promise of equality–by casting people of color in main roles.

But with the aftermath of the performance on November 18th, these days Hamilton is reminding me most of Richard II in the way the play has adapted to and entwined with contemporary political crises.

The staging of Richard II has a history of being famously controversial. By depicting the deposing of a king (in very immediate and symbolic ways), the play skates perilously close to treason. Elizabeth I has long (if erroneously) been reported to have said, “I am Richard II know you not that?” And supporters of the Earl of Essex paid the Chamberlain’s Men to perform Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion.

Richard II may or may not have been written with these intentions in mind. Art is funny like that—it morphs and mutates, takes on a life of its own.

Similarly, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was written before Trump’s election, but the social and political ideas running through it have unintended connotations and consequences.

According to audience members at the November 18th production, there were two moments in the musical that served as touchstones.

The first occurred in this famous exchange between Lafayette and Hamilton in “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”:

COMPANY:
The battle of Yorktown. 1781

LAFAYETTE:
Monsieur Hamilton

HAMILTON:
Monsieur Lafayette

LAFAYETTE:
In command where you belong

HAMILTON:
How you say, no sweat
We’re finally on the field. We’ve had quite a run

LAFAYETTE:
Immigrants:

HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE:
We get the job done

hamilton

That line (“Immigrants/We get the job done”) caused the audience to erupt in cheers. Small wonder when Trump has been declaring that he will deport immigrants, build walls, and deny Muslims entry into the country based on an unconstitutional religious test.

The other big moment of the night, though, shows how Hamilton has adapted to current political crisis: King George singing “What Comes Next.” According to this account of the performance in Fortune,

 “The audience members weren’t the only ones reacting to Pence’s presence. King George III, played by Rory O’Malley, reportedly sang portions of “What Comes Next?” directly at Pence and had to pause the song for a standing ovation after he sang the words, “When your people say they hate you.”

In the direct aftermath of the evening, Pence was silent (he has since then, in an interview with Fox News, said of the audience booing “that’s what freedom sounds like”).

Donald Trump, however, was neither so generous nor so well-spoken, tweeting out:

My view: Trump’s response had little to do with any concern for Pence. Rather, Trump took the audience’s reaction as a personal insult. I don’t know whether Trump has seen Hamilton or read the lyrics or heard the music. But I can imagine Trump seeing himself in the portrayal of King George: rich beyond the imagination of the people he represents; unwilling to listen to criticism; petulant, childish, and out of his depth.

So far Trump has only claimed to be King of Debt, but he is not far from some Trumpish version of “I am King George III know you not that?”