The Opposite of Dying in a Classroom

I sit still, in one of the few still moments that will happen this week of finals. The room of writers has emptied but for two, one of which is apparently writing slowly and with great anger. The other is meticulously detaching the ragged ends of paper left from having torn a scribbled page from his spiral binder. I know the student, one of those I’ve unsuccessfully tried to teach over the last fifteen weeks.

His writing will be adequate, barely, which is all he really wants it to be but much less than it could be. The effort it would take to organize his thoughts and make his sentences communicate clearly is more than he cares to do, not more than he can do. He will have a general topic, one or two sentences that will make me stop and guess at what he’s trying to say, a conclusion that is a mirror image of the introduction, and the most interesting things he has to say will be flailing digressions. But it won’t be dreadful.

The slow angry student finishes with a sigh that just eviscerates the room. Behind him, after nearly two minutes of pulling, the edge of the paper from the spiral notebook is clean and straight. Those two minutes might have corrected the comma splice or cleared up that confusing pronoun, but I suppose we each do the work that we’re inclined to do and let the rest fend for itself.

In Paragraph City there’s much talk about measuring results, but increasingly I’m more concerned with the individual moment. If I “do” each moment in a way that is somehow right, I trust the little boat of my life will eventually dock at some kindly port.  Over the last few days, I have loved this quote from Will Schalbe, writing  in the NY Times about the book he had not yet published, The End of Your Life Book Club: “But reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/reading-together-knowing-the-ending.html).

All the things that make up the opposite of dying, this is what I want each moment I “do” to be drenched in. The angry student and the spiral bound student pass this test with me: their writing class and my teaching and our conversations and all the assigned reading, it’s all been the opposite of dying, whatever they choose to make of it. I will never know what that is; somehow, to know would not be the opposite of dying.

Bad Grades, Blame Games, and Defenestration

In ParagraphCity, most of the students who fail my courses expire from self-inflicted wounds, often when they are upon the threshold of success. The final draft gets “lost”; their transportation breaks down and they abandon the course; a paper is plagiarized; they acquire a new job, a debilitating case of the flu, a new boy/girlfriend, or a series of court dates,  and they vanish in the last weeks of the course. Almost always the F I record at the end of the semester sprouts out of their own bad choices and not an inability to get a passing grade from me.

“Fear of success” is the diagnosis  from one of our advisors.

“Some people just can’t break old patterns” says another; “missing deadlines, putting fun above work, getting immediate gratification: when that’s all you’ve known and all you’ve seen from your friends and heroes and plus it worked in high school, that’s a pretty hard habit to break.”

My colleague who growls says, “We reward success with more work, and they know that. Get an A once and all you get is everyone expecting A’s all the time: more pressure, less free time, more work, more pain, and certainly less cool. It’s a loser’s choice, getting good grades.”

I can understand all that up to a point: I was a pretty dreadful student in high school and for a couple of semesters in college. But it’s not just college courses; it’s a way of life. At some point, don’t we stop and decide what we want to be – a life that’s the product of own volition (yes, even if that volition is mostly illusory – but still, don’t we fall for the lovely illusion)? And yes, environment and conditions vary wildly from person to person, I know, but I think I should see more people really trying.

Here’s an example. It’s one of the most debilitating self-inflicted wounds I see:  Blaming others for the fate we ourselves choose. Just recently, I’ve seen the student Blame Game played these ways.

• “My computer (or my flash drive, your course management system, the Internet, my cable company, or a virus) destroyed my paper.” Every semester, a colleague tells me about a new conversation that follows this same old pattern:
  • “You didn’t submit a paper. Do you have it?”
  • “Yes I have it. Great paper.”
  • “Where is it?”
  • “On this flash drive.”
  • “So you don’t have your paper.”
  • “No I have my paper on this flash drive.”
  • “You don’t have a paper to turn in, one I can read.”
  • “I have a paper; it’s on this flash drive.”
  • “I can’t read a flash drive, but I’ll give you ten minutes more so you can print it out.”
  • “I can’t print it out. The computers at the college won’t let me.”
  • “So you don’t have your paper.”
  • “I have my paper on this flash drive but my computer has a virus so the computers at the college won’t let me print out my paper.”
  • “So you don’t have a paper to turn in.”
  • “Oh, I have my paper. It’s here on my flash drive. See?”  (I love the tech, but I much preferred it when it was a dog eating papers.)
• “You don’t explain things.” There are plenty of times when this is not a blaming but a real effort to understand something better, like an assignment, so I’ll usually respond,
  • “Well let’s see what we can do about that. What don’t you understand?”
  • “Everything!”
  • “OK, let’s focus on this paper that’s due. What don’t you understand about that?”
  • “Alright, now how long does it have to be?”
  • …and at this point I know it’s Blame Game time. Of all things to understand about a paper, the 600 to 800 words length given in the document that describes the paper is not that tough to understand….except for those who haven’t read the assignment yet and who haven’t been in class when we discussed it.  I’ll certainly see this blaming in my teacher evaluations.
• “The things you assign for us to read are too hard to understand.” This too is sometimes a real asking for help. It becomes Blame time when I find out the student doesn’t know what the readings are, hasn’t tried to read them, and in a recent case, hadn’t bought the book yet. “I can’t afford these books, and you don’t put one on reserve in the Library for us either,” was a different spin on blaming me, not his reading. Now, the book we were discussing costs $3.05 new, $2.40 used. The material that was too hard to understand was a John Updike short story. I wonder if such students ever think about what they imply about their incapacity to be college students via such blaming.
• “The placement test put me in the wrong class.” At the beginning of the class, we blame the placement test for putting us into a class that is too easy; by mid-semester we blame it for putting us in a course that is too hard. It must indeed be a terrible instrument to put us in classes that are both too easy and too hard.
• “Your homework takes too long. Re-write the paper? Read that chapter? You ask us to do things there’s just no time to do. Some of us have jobs and families you know.“

I imagine blaming is wonderfully rewarding in the short run. Responsibility for my own bad work is lifted from my shoulders, plus I get all the benefits of not having to do any more work. As I spread the story of blame around among my friends and parents and teacher evaluation forms, I may even get a self-righteous rush. “What a success I would have been if not for …..”  And the sympathy I win from those Rescuers in my life feels even better (again in the short run, and it’s all about the short run) than the good grade would have felt.

I think of it as sort of voluntary defenestration. Mostly our classroom windows don’t open, but still the image of bailing on a class is pretty familiar, and in ParagraphCity we’re dealing with metaphorical windows anyway, which always open.

What the student says: “It’s true I didn’t do the first two papers, and remember I told you that was because my Uncle’s house was practically destroyed by that hurricane, and I missed some classes when I was sick, but I am going to come to all the classes now and if you give extra credit – you give extra credit, right? – I will do all that. I know I can catch up. English has always been easy for me.”

What I hear: “Please professor, just give up all hope that I will put any effort into this class and kindly fling me out the window with all dispatch”

 

Explaining the Black Hole of Applying for Community College Jobs

EssayCity, the larger metropolis north of Paragraph City, published in its newspaper an article on that gap between when you apply for a job and when you hear back from the employer (http://career-advice.monster.com/job-search/getting-started/job-application-process-following-up/article.aspx  ). They refer to that time as the Black Hole, and I have to think that it must be even worse for applicants for faculty positions. However slowly business progresses, certainly a faculty committee moves slower.

On search committees, I have always felt terrible about how little we can respond to applicants, so to salve my conscience, here’s something of an explanation.

I’ll start by describing the steps that a faculty search committee in Paragraph City goes through, once enough applications have come in to rev our engines.

1. Preliminary sort, either by the committee as a whole or the committee chair. Committees are formed of four or five faculty. We eliminate candidates who do not meet the minimum requirements as stated in the ad: usually the degree held and the amount of experience in college teaching, but it can also include particular coursework, leadership experience, and amount of familiarity with the community college. As per our HR office, it is illegal to consider applicants who do not meet “applicant must have” job requirements, and we don’t even look at those.
2. Then we each read the resumes, cover letters, and transcripts of the remaining applicants; time passes. Applications with missing parts go into a kind of limbo, some never to emerge if the transcripts or references or whatever never come through. Others that we consider ‘acceptable’ we each put in a ranked order of preference.
3. We meet (often harder than you’d think, given our various teaching schedules), share our ranking, agree on a committee ranking, and decide on a group of candidates to interview by phone.  This number varies by committee, but it might be as high as 15 or 20; often more like 10.
4. Now more time passes as someone has to mesh the committee schedules with candidate schedules and find a block of half-hour periods when all can talk on the phone. If you are not in this group to be contacted, you must wonder what’s taking so long, because you’ll hear nothing from us. If these interviews aren’t satisfactory, we may well go back and pull you out for a second round of phone interviews, so we don’t tip you off that you have been put in a second tier somewhere (which is still not as bad as limbo).
5. Over a couple of days, the committee or its subgroups interview candidates, trying to decide which we most want to meet in person. We meet & decide on five or so to bring on campus.
6. Now we each take one or two of these five candidates and phone their references. Depending upon the time of year (Spring Break, President’s Day holidays, the dates of a major conference in the discipline), it can take a few days to speak with three or four of each candidate’s references. The candidate can’t come on campus, though, until we do.
7. If the reference checks don’t produce any surprises, we finally have a go-ahead on five applicants. Five candidates means that the entire committee has to free up most of five different days to meet with them. In Paragraph City we consider it rude to have candidates bump into each other, and we also expect to need several hours at least to know whether or not the fit between the candidate and the college is good. You see, we already know you can do the job; the review of credentials and phone interview told us that. We’re now in the business of comparing to find the best of the competent.
8. Once I was on a committee that could meet only once a week. Those five candidates took five weeks to interview.  Between every interview I thought of those applicants in the Black Hole. Yet if those five we brought on weren’t satisfactory, and the candidates we had phoned had all found jobs elsewhere, it was possible we would still go back to that second tier pool of candidates.
9. On campus interviews usually involve this: meeting time for anyone on campus interested, interview time with faculty, a teaching demonstration, a meeting with deans and a meeting with the president, a tour of the college, and a meal.  It’s surprising how much comes out over the meal, good and bad, about the candidate and the college.
10. After the interviews, assuming all has gone well, the committee passes two names on to the administration, which can accept one or reject both (a rare event), so a few more days pass. Then the candidate is contacted and the job offer made. Often the candidate wants some time, possibly to consider (or wait for) other offers. When she accepts verbally, a contract is mailed to her, and only when a signed contract is returned and HR is happy with all the paperwork, then are applicants sent a Thanks for Applying letter. How much time has passed? Not always as long as two months, but that’s common.

The article linked above gives great advice on what to do while waiting in the Black Hole. I’ll add a few more tips.

• It’s probably ok to call, and most understandable if you are in that phone interview or personal interview group. But know that you are more likely to reduce your chances of getting the job than you are to increase them.
• If you call, what you are doing is re-opening the interview, so act and sound that way. You may speak only to an administrative assistant, but his or her office is probably three steps away from the division chair, and what you say will be conveyed those three steps.  We don’t want people who are easily annoyed, self-important, impatient, or rude teaching our students, so don’t communicate that.
• Better action is to follow-up any interview with a thank you note. I’m more impressed by something that comes through Snail Mail and is not the generic silver Thank You script on a white card with a generic remark inside. Make the note as unique as you want to be remembered and send one to each member. Don’t jot off an email to the chair and ask her to forward it to committee members. Then if a couple more weeks pass, instead of the phone call, contact them by email with an offer to send any more information the committee might desire, and at that point ask for an update on the process. You can control the message better in writing. Communicate a sense of how interested you remain in the qualities of the hiring institution, and feel free to get a little specific (without being long-winded).
• Then let go. You finally have very little control over the process once you have sent in your materials. It is not a reflection upon you personally if you are not called for an interview, and if you were called in, and you were genuine during the interview, then just trust in the wisdom of the committee. They thought you would not be happy there, and why not leave it believing that they were right?

Make Every Career Munificent

In Paragraph City, some of us become better because of our career. Being a cop or a teacher or a nurse or a mechanic lifts us up. We recognize in the ideals of the career something essential to who we are, and as happens when we find ideals to reach for, we improve. It’s more than careers, too. It happens when people join girl scouts or the chess team or volunteer to help teach adult literacy or give out books on World Book Night or become a mom or dad.

Becoming a father lifted my expectations of myself that way, surprisingly, shockingly, and to a lesser degree so did becoming a professor. It’s what I imagine the medieval guilds or monasteries might have given to their members: a better self to strive toward.  As the examples of guilds and monasteries suggest, though, such affiliation doesn’t always pull a person up. Sometimes the group identity is taken by our baser natures as an indication of our superiority: the professor who glories in the ignorance of his students, the doctor too proud to talk with his patients, the mother whose favorite phrase is “I told you so.” I wonder if politics mainly pulls people this way, dashing the ideals, pumping the adulation like a drug into the blood, lavishing praise on groupthink, elevating contention, and calling forth a sneer at the notion that anything like a “common good” exists.

But what I set out to write about is those who make the group better because they belong. They remind us of the ideals, show us things that are possible, give us a leg up, excuse our failings (where would we be without forgiveness?). These people, the ones I know from Paragraph City, tend to think of their work at least partly as a calling, and their work as one of the helping professions, almost a healing profession, regardless of their job title. How much better we would all be, it strikes me, if we thought every career were a service career, bred in its DNA to make life better for others. Is there any career, club, hobby group, cub scout den, coffee klatch, or profession which wouldn’t be better if it had in its core, like the transmission of a car, the desire to take other people to a more munificent land?

 

Sample Paragraphs About the City

Nothing teaches like an example. Examples come with dangers, though: they can shrink the horizon so a novice writer sees no possibilities other than the one the paragraph offers. When that happens, everything the novice writes is a modest imitation of the original, never approaching its quality. A good writing exercise, probably, but somehow not quite enough like “real writing” to satisfy my designs in the classroom.

Yet we have to start somewhere, and imitating a master to learn his brushstrokes is a time-honored lesson, so I’m posting some example paragraphs on New York City  (with a thank-you to About.com: http://grammar.about.com/od/shortpassagesforanalysis/A_Scrapbook_of_Styles_Passages_for_Rhetorical_Analysis.htm 

• In no other city does life seem such a perpetual balancing of debits and credits, of evils and virtues, as it does in New York. No other city seems so charming yet so crude, so civilized yet so uncouth. I recall once going out with two friends to bring back Chinese food from a restaurant on upper Broadway. With the food in hand, we were stopped by a young Puerto Rican drugged to the hairline who wanted the wristwatch worn by one of my friends. We were able to joke him out of it, but the prospect was fraught with danger. Such, paradigmatically, is New York: the prospect of the delight of first-class Chinese food, the danger of having a knife pulled on you while getting it home.    (from Joseph Epstein’s essay, “You Take Manhattan”)

• We steamed up into New York Harbor late one afternoon in spring. The last efforts of the sun were being put forth in turning the waters of the bay to glistening gold; the green islands on either side, in spite of their warlike mountings, looked calm and peaceful; the buildings of the town shone out in a reflected light which gave the city an air of enchantment; and, truly, it is an enchanted spot. New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments–constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall.   (from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man )

• Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see distracted looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are the people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible–like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadows are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.  (from Toni Morrison’s Jazz )

• New York is full of people from small towns who are quite content to live obscure lives in some out-of-the-way corner of the city. Here there is no one to keep track. Though such a person might have come from a long line of old settlers and a neighborhood rich in memories, now he chooses to live in a flat on 231st Street, pick up the paper and milk on the doorstep every morning, and speak to the elevator man. In Southern genealogies there is always mention of a cousin who went to live in New York in 1922 and not another word. One hears that people go to New York to seek their fortunes, but many go to seek just the opposite.   (from Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman )

• I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for the solitary restaurant dinner– young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.  (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby )

• There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter–the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last–the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh yes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company. . . .   (from E. B. White’s essay “Here is New York”)

And finally, one last paragraph on New York City, from the same E. B. White 1948 essay as above.  White earns a second paragraph in this collection by being utterly magnificent.

• The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest editions.
  

How to Write a Paragraph About a City

People arrive in Paragraph City by accident all the time. They step into the tiled train station or pull their luggage from the carousel in the airport or glide down the Interstate exit ramp looking for “a paragraph about a city.” That’s what they asked the Google for and the Google brought them here, and I feel a little sorry when Paragraph City doesn’t have one for them. So here’s the instructions I would give for writing a paragraph about a city.

1. Collect data, a heap of it, a mountain of information, way more than you can use. This is my “Write from richness” axiom. If you have 40,000 things you could say about your city, then you can pick the very best 120. If you have only 120 things to say about it, then it all goes in, regardless of quality: that’s bad. So what are the city’s nicknames, its founding date, its major exports & imports & industry & employer, its most beautiful & ugly & dangerous & loneliest parts, its average income & SAT scores & rainfall & snowfall & days of sunshine, its number of parks & apartments & malls & markets & theaters &  firehouses & schools & homeless shelters, its rate of violent crime & college education & taxes & cancer…..? Download photos. Jot down notes on your favorite memories. Use all your senses.
2. Decide on a dominant impression you will build from a selection of that data. This will guide your description and help you decide what to include in your paragraph. Will you describe the city as a friend, a monster, your child, your mother, a ghost, your culture, your coffin, your wings, a mockery, a trap, a springboard…? It can be fact-based, such as a picture of the city as polluter and a stain on the landscape, or more subjective and personal, such as the place that launched you into a bigger world.
3. Gather and order the stuff that will show or prove your dominant impression to your reader. Put all the rest of your heap in a closet and shut the door (another axiom: “What you leave out is as important as what you put in”). What will come first; something that makes a convincing splash about that dominant impression? Some odd contradiction that will make the reader curious to read more? A perfect first impression of the city?  A commonly held false-face that your paragraph will contradict? What will come second, what third, and so on?
4. Compose a topic sentence, which will probably be your paragraph’s first sentence. You can’t do all the work creating that dominant impression in the first sentence, but everything that follows must be suggested by that topic sentence. The topic sentence is an umbrella in a downpour, and everything you will write about must fit safe & dry under that umbrella. Of if you prefer, your actual city is a mansion of a thousand rooms, and that topic sentence is a door that opens into the one single room that you’ve decided to tour.
5. Now write the description. This is where you do your best thinking about the topic, as you write (another axiom: “We learn what we have to say in the act of saying it”). In the process you will think of things in the closet that you want to use, and find other things you thought you would use that now you discard. That’s good; that’s part of the process. Try to use every one of your reader’s five senses at least once – without being absurd.
6. Proof read the draft and see if it still matches the topic sentence. If you have strayed away from under the umbrella, then either cut what has strayed or change the topic sentence to include it. Check the last sentence; try to make a lasting impression there. Re-write clichés & stereotypes so they are your own original wording (often getting a specific instance you have experienced to replace the generalization of the cliche helps). Replace the most general verbs (is-am-are-was-were, have, do, go, get, look, see…) with more descriptive verbs wherever that seems like an improvement. Read your paragraph aloud. If anything makes you stumble or sounds funny as you read, write it again until it sounds better.

Finis. Except a piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned (my last axiom for the day, with a nod to Hemingway). But it’s just a paragraph and shouldn’t consume one’s life; there are always new and more amazing things to write. At least that’s the attitude in Paragraph City.

On hiring a thoughtful colleague

In Paragraph City it sometimes snows over night, eight or ten inches bleaching the landscape into cold dunes and slowing everything down a bit. To clear the walks and driveways, people can receive either flame throwers and sponges or snow shovels. Their choices are revealing.

This morning as I was shoveling out my drive I thought about one particular faculty search we ran some years ago.  It came down to two people who looked really good to us, but in quite different ways as they were quite different people.  The committee had screened by matching the resumes to the published job description, then screened further by looking at the cover letters and judging which candidates had the “preferred” qualities, mostly mentioned in the job posting but also the typical desirables that don’t make it into print. Then came a round of phone interviews, followed by conversations with the candidates’ references, and finally several were brought on campus for a half day of meetings, Q & A, and a teaching demonstration.

They were both well qualified, but one had more experience teaching, some leadership roles in the background, a bit more maturity, less familiarity with community colleges, less interest in teaching the remedial levels. This candidate’s classroom manner involved very clear, crisp communication; precise boardwork of a textbook quality; a professionalism that gave his listeners great confidence in his knowledge and credibility; a detachment from those he communicated with. The second candidate had only part-time experience and less of it, but was familiar with community college students and comfortable teaching levels from remedial to advanced.  At the board, this candidate was much less direct and took longer to arrive at an answer, but interacted with the class more, taking a “let’s see how we can figure this out – any suggestions?” approach.  No leadership background, a less impressive degree.

After their presentations the committee gathered in a room and tried to weigh the two, recalling even casual comments made during a meal or a tour of the campus. Again and again, the two candidates came out equally balanced. I knew which candidate I’d take if it were just up to me, but I could more easily justify selecting the other candidate, and really either would be a great addition to Paragraph City.

In the end, the committee selected the one I preferred – the second, less experienced candidate – though  I never knew what finally tipped the committee to select this one. And I myself wasn’t sure why this one was my preference, until this morning, pushing around snow:  it was just more fun to sit in the classroom of someone who wasn’t entirely about the content but was also about the student in the class and how they could think about the content.

We professors, endlessly, keep forgetting that our little classroom gig is less about what we teach and more about how the students before us must take our content and think about a lifetime of things. It’s not first and foremost art or philosophy or writing or music or math or history or literature or sociology that we teach; it’s thinking.  To be a thoughtful human requires all our disciplines and more, but in a dynamic, vital way. To passively hold in my mind the reverberations of a Schumann piano concerto & the ironic operations of fate in Achebe’s “The Sacrificial Egg” & the obedient cruelty of the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s Yale experiments on authority is pleasurably enlightening and disturbing all at once. But it’s all selfish prattle until it nudges into better places the furniture of my mind and the actions of my hand and voice and wallet.  At least that’s what the last shovelful of snow, wedged out from under the front bumper, said.

In Paragraph City, it snows so that I have time to think while I clear clean bright places to go.