circus
250119 | Essay season, teenage dirtbags, and what is and is not Beethoven.
This week’s promises, a stretch of stinging cold, a tenuous ceasefire, and a circus for the charlatan, taking office again.
“The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.”1The composer JS Bach: born in the month of March in 1685. Died in 1750.
The author: born in the month of March in 1985. Not dead, not yet.
What’s the word for the tendency to keep getting caught in the same old trap? Insanity? Inhumanity?
Gulfs and Walls. “In the end,” Tolstoy reminds us, “works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.”2
Higher Things. The philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche on music:
Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of the melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate us, even to make us tremble.
Grilled Onions. Two teen girls approach the counter. The cashier braces herself for their ire. “You’re not listening to me, though,” one girl moans. “When you said ‘okay’ and I gave you the burger I thought you were, like, gonna make me another. That one didn’t have grilled onions like I asked.” “Yes but you said—” the cashier murmurs, faltering. The girl sucks her teeth; her friend, detached from the confrontation, mashes her thumbs on her screen. Still justice is sought: “But like, I don’t think you do. And I’ve been standing here and like—” A queue has formed; impassively we watch the impasse. “You owe me a new burger. A new burger. With grilled onions,” the girl says finally. “Grilled. Onions-uh.” Her friend has left her, is sitting now, bored with the exchange. I’m left to mull to necessary art of dialogue in community of experience. The cashier looks at them, beyond them. My order’s called; I grab it and make my own escape.
Panem et Circenses. Panem: bread. Circenses: circus. Bread: government checks, tax holidays, cases of beer, happy hour cocktails, cannabis, painkillers, cortadi crafted with care, for you. Circus: luxury spas, inaugurations, police dramas, the story wheel, pocket tv, 5G, exploding rockets, halftime shows, breaking news, TikTok’s dead.
Inheritance. In her illness, she stuck little notes to each of her things, inscribing each one with the name of the person who’d inherit it after her death. We found the post-its on everything: on picture frames, and furniture, and cups of old pens. There was one on a big bag of rice, long past its best-before.
reading
Brothers Karamazov. Mitya in his torment, the night before his sentence: “I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
The economist-activist Gary Stevenson’s memoir, The Trading Game:
The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon. The obliteration of opposites.
studies in media
The neighbourhood billboard has been replaced. Last week, oil. This week it’s coffee.
From Drill baby, drill to Treat yourself. The West runs on black gold. Commodities, fuel, candy, money, oil, coffee. What a circus.
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. A student recommended this video by the Puerto Rican rapper-singer Bad Bunny, released this month. I was expecting a music video — it’s not. It’s a beautifully-shot, melancholic short film (12 min.) on music and change and the land. Lots of layers here. “I should have taken more photos.”
school
M texts P to tell me that he’s sorry for missing class again. Haven’t seen the boy in six weeks. ‘And tell him,’ types M from who-knows-where, ‘that David Lynch is dead.’
Essay season. This semester, to dissuade the use of AI to writing process means students write in class over the course of two weeks, by hand, using an HB pencil and foolscap paper. This time, I’ve asked them to voice-record themselves reading their essay. This strikes me as a valuable exercise. I’ll be doing it again.
From the grading rubric:
Communication: Writes to be understood. Aims for clarity. Tries out a variety of sentence types. Sentences that have music, perhaps. Or precision. An accurate and varied use of punctuation. Consistency: in the use of punctuation, or style. The essay is voice-recorded by the author. The writing lends itself well to, is edited for, the spoken word. The essay is edited by the essayist and perhaps by another.
Application: Attention to form. To formatting. Strong introduction. Presence of a hook, the author’s name and work, a thesis. Ideally three topics. Clear topic sentences. Confident analysis or discussion of literary devices.
In the halls: “I hate doing my lashes. It’s like so much work.”
Friday energy. Commotion outside the classroom. I head into the hall to disrupt the disruption, to confront the culprits, to send them back to class. She’s wearing large headphones, dancing to music I can’t hear. She spots me, but doesn’t interrupt her dance. Instead she presses the headphones against her ears, and presses shut her eyes, her head swaying, and sings: “I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby.” I stand there dumbly. After a moment I say, “No, you’re not,” I say. Her friend grabs her by the shoulder. “It’s true, though,” says the friend. “You’re not.” They slip into the stairwell.
That’s Beethoven
R, my five-year-old neighbour, sits with me at the piano.
R: “Does that book have Beethoven?”
Me: “It does.”
R: “Play Beethoven.”
I turn to the jaunty sonatina in G major, by Beethoven, and play the subject.
R: “Stop. That’s not Beethoven.”
Me: “It’s not.”
R nods seriously: “Beethoven is—“ He vocalizes the opening motif of the fifth symphony.”
Me: “Oh. This.” I play it. Da-da-da-da.
R: “Yes. That’s Beethoven.”
Broken Images
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter3
Don’t lose your head. Everything’ll find its rightful place; justice shall be served. Evil doesn’t win, not in the end, at least. Bank on kindness, and on smarts in the service of empathy. Don’t get caught in the same old trap, or the language of things. Help where you can and think for yourself. We can sit out the circus, or pass on the bread, or instead eat the men who fix the price of a loaf.
From Rumi, ‘The Guest House’
From John Dewey, “The Expressive Object,” Art as Experience (1934), p. 109.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Wasteland’