Esoterica / Part One

Being an esoteric reader, it is common to find books that are really off the beaten path for mainstream readers. Sometimes, it makes complete sense that these books aren't consumed by a lot of people because they fall into the experimental, obscure, or disconnected genre where they may have originated. But it is from these lands of "esoterica" that some really fascinating stories, ideas, and designs emerge from writing. If there is a land of writing and thinking that is worth exploring, to me it is on the edges. It is from these places that new ideas, new approaches come into focus. And while they may remain obscure and strange, they may also push the form and act of the storytelling into new places. 

Take that vision of reading to Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair, and consider what you are reading and why. It isn't for the faint of heart or the casual reader. The story is based on the life of Swiss officers who guard the border and interview Russian asylum-seekers where they are subjected to the stories of the oppressed. The book is written in a long prose question and answer style that meanders and moves through ideas and connections. Some of it seems like myth and tales. Other stories are complex and dark. And it begins this complex tapestry that takes its toll on the guards. 

While reading this novel, which is not difficult to read thanks to the translation from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, it begins to feel like something else. Shishkin is doing more than crafting a plot. He is plotting to change the reader in a different way. The conclusion? What if this isn't a novel, but an ethical guide to understanding why we write, why stories are important, and the significant weight of being in possession of the stories we tell. There are times in this book when I am reading and following the life a soldier, or hearing some sad story from an orphanage. And then suddenly, there are one hundred ideas coming to mind, or the basic weight of truth as it pertains to fiction. And suddenly, you don't care about the story, but only in that, it happens to you. And you start to think about the unwritten stories you have yet to write, and you start to wonder why you haven't valued your own stories like your life depended on them. 

"Those speaking may be fictitious, but what they say is real. Truth lies only where it is concealed. Fine, the people aren't real but the stories, ho, the stories are! It's just that they raped someone else at the orphanage, not fat-lips. And the guy from Lithuania heard the story about the brother who burned up and the murdered mother from someone else. What difference does it make who it happened to? It's ways a sure thing. The people here are irrelevant. It's the stories that can be authentic or not. We become what gets written in the transcript"(24). 

Make the point that the transcript is an official document of record, making it feel important and factual, although this is all about the way things shift and move in terms of fiction, stories, and the world. What part of this do we accept? It isn't about facts, but accepting truth as it is. We know that rape, violence, war, and other terrible things happen, and it validates the story. So, what part of belief do we accept? The line between the plausible and implausible is based on the writing, the style, and the ability of the writer to tell that story into plausibility. 

"In the wee hours the interpreter woke bathed in sweat and with a pounding heart; he had dreamed of Galina Petronvna - except the boys all called her Galpetra, out of sheer meanness - and it had come back to him - the lesson, the blackboard - as if all these decades lived had never been. He lay there looking at their brightening ceiling and returned to himself, clutching at his heart. Why be afraid of her now? And what exactly was in your dream - you forget right away and are left with just your schoolboy fear. It's a nasty feeling, too. You never know what empire you're going to wake up in or who as"(26).

This paragraph relates to understanding the 

In terms of writing about writing, we find great style and how-to writing books. I think Stephen King's On Writing is a great approach to understanding a writing life. But once writers immerse themselves in books about character, plot, getting into a routine (and the hundreds of other elements to writing), the writer need a deeper understanding of the relation understanding of texts and storytelling. It is time to move out of how and why we write and move into a higher understanding of what it is we do. We might find this in something like Annie Dillard's The Writing Life * or in the essays of Scott Momaday and his culture of oral tradition. We are convinced that we can define the nuts and bolts of writing, but we need to connect to its higher plane. Some of that is seeking out people who have connected to that thought level. The other difficult part, is having the vision as a reader searching out that information.  This article series discusses the value of defining and searching for texts that change the way we think and write. They can inspire, but they can also remind us of the deeper value in the writing and thinking we create as writers. In this day of diminished word counts, technological distraction, and polarized points of view; it is important to find that place, time, and room to make the a writing life more than words on the page. 

Book Review: ActivAmerica by Meagan Cass

ActivAmerica 
Meagan Cass
University of North Texas Press / 2017
Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction
ISBN 978-1574416947 / Paper / 192 Pages

ActivAmerica is a collection of short stories drawn from America's obsession with fitness, sports, and how we re-envision ourselves through sports. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you are probably wrong. This book is a dynamic, funny, ironic, brilliant, and often biting commentary on how we live our lives through the perception of sports. This collection tackles more than just the concept of sports but reframes the American dream in tangents and connections that often feels at once hilarious and so ironic 

This selection of short stories meditates on the ideas around sports. And one thing that Cass does so well is that she is able to bring out the absurdity and the complexity of these ideas and bring that forward into a complex and often poignant vision of America in the face of changing times. Stories range from traditional sports and teams to a more visionary look at how people embrace things like Soloflex, ping-pong, and infatuations with famous athletes.

The story based on the collection title, ActivAmerica is a hilarious story based on securing a new health plan that requires the participants to run a mile every day. In some cases, the sport is a mere reflection of who we once were or who we never tried to become. Cass captures the absurdity of a moment and then turns it into a poignant and emotional connection to how we live our lives. Every line in her stories hold value, depth, and often humor. Nothing feels wasted in the prose. 

In the story Hawthorne Dynasty it reveals life in a typical girls’ soccer league, with a sassy coach and her all-star daughter Alana. The girls admire Alma and watch her become something beyond them. “When the starting whistle blew, she snapped her fingers, rocked onto the balls of her feet and didn’t stop moving until it was over…. She wore blonde hair loose, and on breakaways it would stream back behind her, catching the afternoon sun so it looked like her whole head was on fire.” It isn’t until later that we see Alana in a different life, away from her coach (her mother) and away from the life of suburbia. When we see her again later in life, Alana is a shadow of the woman who played soccer – free from clutches of her mother but haunted by the past. In Night Games, a group of late night, high school ruffians draw out a figure skater to join them in their secret hockey matches in the middle of the night. “Afterwards we sit and drink and the stink of our gear and our sweat rises around us. I breathe it in. It feels good to be a woman with a smell.” And the longing that these games, reminiscent and tribal would be lost in the next cycle of the season, it draws out change, doubt, and loss.

Some of the stories shift a bit from a traditional sports theme into ideas of what it means to be an American on the go. The Body in Space is a visionary story about a science teacher that is selected to go into the space program and the repercussions it has on his family. Ping-Pong, 12 Loring Place also intersects with competitive siblings staying clear of their fight parents. As they kids master the nuances of ping-pong “top spin and back spin, experimented with the flick, the block. … Our rallies grew longer, more heated, our bodies slamming into the gray walls as we struggled to return the push, the loop, the lob, the chop shot.” Through the winter, brother and sister continue the competitive ritual of playing in the basement. Finally, with the death of a marriage, and the coming of spring, the two must leave their bunker. “I was going to college and she was selling the house, buying a smaller one without a basement, without room for a ping-pong table. By then our paddles were barely functional, the stippled rubber worn away from the faces, the red and gold paint dulled. Before we left, Ari put them in one of our grandfather’s old cigar boxes, buried them in the backyard. A time capsule, we called it, as if some distant, future family would know to dig it up, would decipher the hieroglyphics off our nicknames, blurred with sweat. As if nothing was passing away.” In the end, it is more than the sports and activities that draw significance to these stories, it is a sense of measuring the world as it was and how it may become – and the forecast is often fraught with a myriad of emotions that Cass masterfully controls like musical notes on a staff.

Some of these stories reach into the absurd, but it isn’t without value. Cass has the ability to bring stories into focus using humor and satire to make even strange stories build with meaning and emotion. These stories were made for workshop dissection and discussions. Evocative and meaningful, Cass continues to innovate her own voice and style with every new idea and concept in this collection. These stories are not only entertaining and deeply poignant, but she innovates the push and pull that haunts what it means to be an American. Every story is layered in a complex tumult of emotions, action, and vision. Her voice, character, and mastery of the form creates brilliant opportunities to examine more than just themes on sports, but delves deeper into compelling elements of the American dream; to be competitive, physical, aggressive, and beautiful at the cost of our hopes, guilt, longing, and loss. This collection won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. 

Ron Samul is a writer and college educator. 

RonSamul.org 

Para-Text and Tangible Books

This post was designed and dedicated to Linda and her students. Keep up the great work. @LLumiss 

For Teachers:
Did you ever flip through a book and find a surprising artifact inside? I frequent a really good used bookstore and I often find random and often strange things tucked into books. Imagine, someone in another time, reaching for something to tuck into their books to hold a spot, mark an idea, or just keep something hidden from someone else. Some of my favorite finds are a four-leaf clover, a letter from one person to another about the poet of the book, and pictures tossed as a place holder. 

More than just holding a book and leafing through it is this idea of inserted things. When J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorset set out to make the book S. they took this concept to an extreme. The book is merely the vehicle in which the story is given through inserted things, letters, postcards, margin notes, and other things. For a better understanding of the book, The Story of "S": Talking with J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst from the New Yorker will give you an insight into the complexity and the focus of this fascinating book. Showing this book to readers in better than just showing them a book, because it shows the mystery and the complexity of what could also be added and inserted into the mix. This is a great book to show to a group of students and let them see all the elements inside. 

This leads to the idea that books are influenced by what surrounds them. Gerard Genette, literary critic, coined the phrase "paratext", he described these around-the-edge-of-a-book elements to influence not only how a book is read, but what expectations might be found there. Paratext includes blurbs, authorial comments, reviews, illustrations, footnotes, endnotes, and more. To dive into that world, check out his book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, which is worth perusing to understand his vision of thinking. His vision of how text around the main text influence the reader is significant. 

Ideas and Starters for Students 
For some students looking at a book and holding it is not a familiar thing to consider. Book lovers and librarians ruminate about how they adore books, but we are in the minority. 

Part One: Have students look at books and consider all the parts. Books with prefaces, introductions, indexes, endnotes, table of contents, footnotes, and other texts help them see the connectivity. Ask them to identify the different elements of the book and why they think they are important. 

Then ask them what they think of a fiction writer using a footnote in a story that they made up. Why would they do this? Why would this be useful? 

Louis Borges used made up books and connections to make his story seem more applicable and ground some of his more abstract ideas. Other books like the confusing and complex House of Leave by Mark Danielewski also works to confuse matters. 

Part Two: Collect random ephemera, postcards, sticky notes, napkins, little slips of paper, notes to friends, receipts, anything that can be concealed in a book. Have the students flip through the book and consider what the book is about. Then have them take out all the things in that book. Have them write a story of who they think owed the book and what happened according to the found things. 

Part Three: What kind of artifacts would students like to leave in a book? Would this hide a letter, underline the funny words, or make the entire book into a complex cipher. (I don't condone defacing books for the sake of these ideas). Have the students create a statement on an index card that makes a statement or a request from the reader who finds it. What would happen if someone read this card? What would happen if it was found in 100 years?

A cross-over type of social activity would be tapping into BookCrossing where students could read books and then release them in their environments and see where they go. This is a fun way for physical books to be considered in real time as they travel about. 

This would probably entail using donated books and then sharing them back into the community. It is a free resource and it shows that books can have a life of their own and a lot of people who may not have access to books, still love to read. -- # September 2017

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by Ron Samul from We Are the Curriculum
Please send fun classroom feedback, pictures, or general connections to this post to ronsamulwriter@gmail.com / Would love to see what you are doing in the classroom. 
Ron is an expert at the Digital Human Library and connects with teachers all over the world to inspire creativity in writing, books, and critical thinking.