A Letter To A Friend

 Dear Cinnamon, 

It’s been almost forty years.  Do you remember me?  I’m not quite sure why I remember you.  Sometimes, I wake up hours before my alarm goes off, and the past visits me like Christmas ghosts and bothers me until I write it all down.  

I can’t use your real name because there’s a chance people will know who you are, and that is not my purpose.  I just put cinnamon in my coffee, and when I knew you, your hair was the color of cinnamon.  Normally, I’m drawn to darker shades, but I punctuated that with some remarkable specimens of another hue, including you.

When we last met, I convinced myself that you were the worst thing that would ever happen to me and congratulated myself for getting past it.  I was so very wrong.  In the end, what happened between us wasn’t even in the top ten worst things that ever happened to me.  

I talked to your father.  He’s been dead for a while now.  He was angry with me because he was making a point and wanted you to raise the money yourself by working.  He could have done what I did to help you, but where’s the life lesson in that?  The life lesson, I suppose, was my own.  I never mentioned the fact that you wept uncontrollably, worried that he might find out what a mess you made of your finances–that the last thing you wanted was to disappoint him, which, I suppose, is what moved me to get involved in the first place.  

I had, I think, different ideas about the nature and the future of our relationship than you did.  There ought to be rules, or at least guidelines, in these matters.  There may have been a time when romantic or sexual encounters were a good measure of a woman’s feelings toward a man, but if there were, I never lived during them.  Some women will do more than you can imagine sexually and not care a bit about you; some are afraid even to kiss you but love you more than anyone.  That’s hardly a reliable measure.  I learned not to use it

In those days, my plan was always to assume that a girl had my best interests at heart, and in that way, if they see my heart heading in a way they’d rather it not, they’ll guide me back on a course they were more comfortable with.  For the most part, that worked.  I try only to become interested in women who are ladies, to begin with, and that helps, but there were times when that strategy failed miserably.  

My grandmother told me to avoid social entanglements with girls who weren’t properly introduced to me.  While that sounds like a rule from the 19th century, I followed it, and for the most part, it worked for me.  I can tell you what trusted person introduced me to every girl I ever kissed.  At least four were Inez, and one significant one was Maggie Nippes.  I suppose that makes it sound like I mostly meet women in bars.  Maybe that’s true.  

I met you, Cinnamon, at Millsaps.  You were one of the sorority girls I was sworn to protect.  Debbie Fisher introduced us at a swap when you pledged.  We never talked much after that.  There were an awful lot of other people taking up my attention and my time in those days.  A few months after you graduated, I saw you at Walmart with a big box of kitty litter.  “Let’s go out!” you said.  “I’d love to see you.” You said, and took the pen out of my pocket and wrote your phone number on the back of my hand.  

There were always pretty girls I overlooked because I focused on someone else.  I assumed that’s what happened here.  You seemed like fun, so I called, and we went out.  Then we went out again and again.  You wanted to move apartments, so I moved you.  There’s no sense in having a large, muscle-bound friend unless you’re going to have him move things.  

Like a kitten, you sat in my lap while we watched movies.  I was never very good at figuring out the exact point where someone becomes a “girlfriend,” but several days of the week, I kissed the same girl, and it was you, so forgive me if I was confused about where I stood with you.  

One night, eating upstairs at Scrooges, you didn’t seem yourself.  “It’s nothing.”  You said.  “I don’t want to talk about it.” You said.  Rather than hang out at the bar, we went to my apartment to “watch TV” and feed the fish.  My lionfish ate live minnows from the bait shop, and you liked to watch, so I saved it for you.

Lionfish look like a bass that became a drag queen.  They eat with lighting ferocity, though, and I suppose that’s why you enjoyed the show.  In a moment, all that’s left of the minnow is flecks of silver scales floating in the water.  As impressive as that show was, it didn’t change your mood.

In my lap, watching the television, you fought what you were feeling with determination.  When you began losing the fight, you turned your head and hid it from me.  When I smoothed your hair with my hand, you couldn’t hide it anymore and buried your face in my chest and wept.

The car that you drove to work, the car you were so proud of having, needed over two thousand dollars worth of repairs.  You had some of the money but not enough.  You’d gone to your father about it, and he helped lay out ways you could solve the problem, but you couldn’t make any of them work, and the thought of returning to him and admitting you failed is what brought on the tears.  More than anything, you wanted him to be proud of you, and having failed to get the money, you didn’t know how he would be.  

“Why not get a bank loan?” I asked.  You said you tried, but without credit, nobody was willing to loan you anywhere near the amount you needed, so I gave you the name of a loan manager I knew at Highland Village and said, “Call this guy.  I’ll vouch for you.”

The guy I sent you to passed you down to another loan officer under him.  You called at lunch to tell me that the lady at the bank asked if I would co-sign the note.  I had to think about that pretty clearly.  If you didn’t pay the note, then I would have to.  We’d been seeing each other a few times a week for a couple of months at this point, and we had a lot of friends in common.   I felt like I could trust you, and it was unlikely you’d stiff me on the loan, but, at the end of the day, if I gambled two thousand dollars on a girl and lost, I wouldn’t be bankrupt.  I wouldn’t be very happy, but I could afford to lose the money.  

When I got to the bank to put my name down as co-signer, I noticed that my name was listed first on the note.  I pointed that out, and the loan officer said it was the only way she could get the loan approved.  “So, basically, it’s my loan, and she’s co-signer,”  I said.  The loan officer assured me that was the case.  “Would paying the loan off build her credit?”  I asked.  She assured me that was so.  I made sure the bank understood that she’d be making the payments, and the loan officer said it didn’t really matter as long as the payments were made.

“Can I go outside for a minute?  I just want to check something.”  You and the loan officer excused me.  I leaned against my car and smoked.  This isn’t at all what I had in mind.  I thought pretty intently about how you might react if I pulled out now.  If this worked the way you wanted, you’d get your car fixed, and you’d be able to tell your daddy you solved your own problems like he wanted, and if you made the note payments on time, then both of us get a positive note on our credit history.  

I stamped out my cigarette and lit another one.  There was no commitment in our relationship.  We ate together.  We drank together.  Sometimes, we made out like rabid teenagers on the sofa together, but none of that really spelled commitment.  In the parlance of the day, we were basically just screwing around, another summer romance at a time of life when I had a different one almost every summer.  

There were the tears, though.  Deep, meaningful tears.  Helping you make your father believe in you would probably be the nicest thing I did all year.  “It’s only money,” I thought.  A girl’s heart is worth twenty times that.  I went back in and signed the note.

The first payment went by great.  You were happy, and we were happy together.  The time came for the second payment, and I got a call.  You’d been talking to your old boyfriend, you said.  He wanted to come back.  You wanted him to come back.  Would I please understand?

The first thing I felt was anger.  Tremendous anger.  I drove to your apartment with the idea that if I could talk to you, then I could change the outcome of this.  I knocked on the door, and when you answered it, the old but new boyfriend was beside you.  He was half my size.  I grabbed his shirt.  “I want two thousand dollars now, and you’ll never see me again,”  I said.  

“We had an agreement!” You shouted.

“That agreement didn’t include you dumping me before making the second payment,”  I growled.

“Look, we don’t have that kind of money.”  The boyfriend said.  I don’t think he ever fully understood how lucky he was that I keep pretty tight control over my temper.

“Call your father,” I said.  “Get him to write me a check!”  

And with that, you sank to your knees, weeping.  “Don’t call my father!”  You pleaded.  “Don’t.  Please don’t.”

The boyfriend wasn’t expecting that.  I wasn’t either.  The waves of anger tearing through me crashed on the unrelenting, impenetrable shores of a woman’s tears.  

I really wanted to hit something, but there was nothing I could hit that wouldn’t make things worse, so I paced back and forth under the porchlight.  

“If you ever miss a payment.  If you’re ever late, it’s gonna be bad.” I said.  

“I won’t.”  You said.  “I promise.”  

“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” The boyfriend said.

I gave myself one last chance to knock his head off but didn’t.  I slammed shut your door so hard that something fell off the wall inside.  I could hear you crying inside as I walked to my car.

I didn’t sleep.  As the sun began to rise, I wrote you a letter.  I explained that I was concerned that you used my obvious affection for you to secure this money you needed without ever having any real concern for my feelings in return.  We had a legal and honorable agreement about the money, though, and I would be willing to overlook any misgivings I had about what got me into that agreement as long as you held up your end of the bargain.  I was sorry for shouting, and I was sorry for slamming the door.  I felt like I entered our time together honestly with honorable intentions, but since I no longer believed you did the same, I didn’t think we should try to be friends in the future.  And I said goodbye.

The note was for two years and six months.  By the spring, you said you were moving to another state with the boyfriend and gave me the address where you would be.  You promised to continue making the payments, but one or two may be late while you set up in your new home and job.  

Everything happened as you said.  I didn’t hear any more about it for well more than a year.  With just a few months left in the term of the note, I got a call from the bank that you missed the last two payments.  I called the number you left me, and it was disconnected.  I called your father to see where you were, and that’s when he cussed me for getting involved in his plan to teach you a lesson.  When I persisted in asking for your new phone number, he told me to fuck off that it wasn’t his problem and hung up.

I called the bank to find out how much it would take to pay off the note.  A little less than five hundred dollars, they said.  Without any way to contact you, I calculated my losses and decided if I could get out of this and only lose less than five hundred dollars, I should be grateful, so I paid the note and went on with my life. 

There was a time when I thought what you did was about the worst thing a woman could ever do to me.  That was a miscalculation.  Ultimately, your plot to defraud me, if it was indeed a plot, was somewhere in the middle in terms of the wounds I’d take aboard, trying to be a lover.  

It’s been quite a long while now, and I have no idea where you are, so I suppose I’ll never know if you intended to mislead me so you could get the money or if it just worked out that way.  When I found out that you’d been talking to your new/old boyfriend the entire time you were talking to me about getting a loan to solve your financial predicament, it sure seemed like a plot, one that maybe he was in on.  I felt like he should have been the one to stick his neck out and get you the money, not me.  I still feel that way.  

There might be circumstances at the time that I didn’t see.  There might still be circumstances that I don’t see.  I’d hate to have believed you did something evil for almost forty years when really it was just a misunderstanding, or maybe there just wasn’t any understanding at all.  Maybe you’re just not the kind of girl who considers what a man thinks or feels because you don’t understand us and don’t feel obligated to learn.

It could have been much worse, so I’m grateful for that.  I hope you’ve had a good life.  I saw, a few years ago, that your father died.  I hope he was proud of you and satisfied with your life when he did.  If you had a child, if you had a son, I hope that gave you insight into what men are and what we’re about.  If not, there’s really very little I can do about it.  

I’ve never been in a position where I was willing to say with certainty what you did was wrong.  I’m not your judge.  What I can say is that you made me feel overlooked.  You had your problems, your new/old boyfriend who came up out of the blue had his problems, the loan officer had her problems, your father had his problems, and the guy fixing your car had his problems, too.  I did my best to satisfy everyone and make a happy ending, but nobody really was looking out for me.  The guy fixing your car got paid.  The bank got paid.  Your new/old boyfriend got his girl back.  You got your car back.  Your father got to see you solve your problems without him getting involved.  What did I get?  

Like I said, you were hardly the worst thing that ever happened to me, but do you ever think about it?  Do you ever think I deserved better?  Do you think I deserved worse?  Do you wish you’d found a way to solve your problems without getting me involved?  I don’t think I learned anything from this story.  People in trouble sometimes have flexible morals, and you believed you were in trouble, even if the worst of it was just the fear of disappointing your father.  

I thought then that life would balance out.  With you, I lost, but surely I’d win the next time.  That’s not what happened, though.  If you’re willing to take a beating for someone else’s benefit, then that’s what will always happen.  I never learned that lesson because the lesson I did learn was that if I didn’t take the beating intended for someone else, they would take it, and there would always be times when I wasn’t willing to do that.  

I hope you’re happy.  I hope you were always happy.  I hope you don’t remember me.  I hope that if you ever had a moment where you thought what you did was wrong, you forgot it long ago.

I thought I had forgotten about you long ago.  I guess I hadn’t.  I remain,

Faithfully yours,

Boyd

Chen's Passage At Millsaps

 The first play of Millsaps’ Player’s one-hundredth season, the second season with Sam Sparks as the professor of theater, and the second season after Millsaps brought Theater out of abeyance is Christopher Chen’s “Passage.”  Chen is a young (under 50) professor of Theater at the University of California at Berkley.  He lists his race as “East Asian,” which I normally wouldn’t mention, but Passage is a play about race, even though it never mentions race.  I’ll talk more about that later.

Passage is an interpretation of EM Forster’s 1924 novel, “A Passage To India.”  I originally read the novel Passage in the summer before I entered Millsaps College.  I read it because David Lean was producing a film version of the play, written in 1960, which I’ve never read.  I read the book because David Lean was not only one of the most remarkable English directors working, he was one of the most remarkable directors in the English language, having directed Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Twist (‘48), and A Bridge Of The River Kwai.  The film was announced with Sir Alec Guinness in a major supporting role.  Guinness is a major part of nearly every one of Lean’s films, and, of course, he had also recently been Obi-Wan Kinobe.  

“A Passage To India” is often included in lists of fifty or one hundred of the “most important” books in the English language.  When I first read it, I was spending time socially with an older woman (25!) who had just begun teaching English in the Jackson Public Schools.  She described it as an English version of “To Kill A Mockingbird.”  Even though “Passage To India” was written some thirty years before Mockingbird, she was right in that it dealt with many of the same themes and developed them in similar ways.

The theme of both books is a divided society, where the division is tragically uneven.  In Passage, it’s between the English and the Indians.  In Mockingbird, it’s Whites and Blacks.  Historically, what happens when you have one of these divided societies is a sort of calm skin or detente forms over the daily injustices.  It happens because you can’t live in a constant state of revolution.  Look at what it was like trying to live in Mississippi in the sixties.  In our society, people sometimes ask, “Why didn’t you rise up and fight the oppression?” the answer is they did, but you can’t live in peace and have a revolution, and for many generations before the revolution, people chose to live in peace, even though it was an unjust peace before their revolution.  The same thing happened in India.  The novel is written about the period leading up to India’s struggle for independence.  

In a divided society, there develops an uneven, unjust detente and balance of cultural powers that leads to its own kind of struggles, and a lot of people have written about that.  When Eudora Welty writes about race, this is what she sees.  Forster and Harper Lee realize that to really expose this thing for what it is, there has to be an act that pierces the thin skin of civility that grows over a divided society.   They create in their stories an unjust, false accusation of a crime; in Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell accuses Tom Robinson, and in Passage to India, Adela Quested accuses Dr. Aziz Ahmed.

In both of these stories, it’s the trials where the author gets to investigate and develop the themes they’re interested in.  Sometimes modern critics make a point of the author’s own racism in that Forster’s character of an educated, young, white Englishwoman eventually comes to her senses and saves the day, whereas, in India, in the ‘20s, that most likely would not have been the case.  Likewise, Harper Lee is often criticized for setting up Atticus Finch as the great white savior so that her readers in white society can feel better about the situation they created in the first place.  Toward the end of her life, we learned that Lee originally had different ideas, but the god-like, near-perfect version of Finch was what her publisher preferred.  

In “Passage,” Christopher Chen chooses to take the words “English” and “Indian” out of the play’s vocabulary and replaces them with “Country X” and “Country Y.”  He does it to bring out some of the universal themes in the story, and it works, but if you’re familiar with India’s history at all, the Indianess of the story still comes through.  

The novel, the original play, and the movie all focus on the trial part of the story.  Even though there are scores of plays that are exciting courtroom dramas, Chen chooses to focus instead on the events and attitudes leading up to the trial and barely covers it at all.

Chen changes the script so that it focuses more on the Indian perspective than the English, sort of a reversal of what you see in the movie and the novel.  He’s written it so that many of the parts don’t specify race or gender.  He does that, I think, to illustrate how both race and gender are constructs we impose on ourselves.  Later critics of the film were uncomfortable with Alec Guinness playing a Hindu character.   In Chen’s script, he mentions Hindu and Muslim ideas but really leaves these religious differences behind so that you can focus more on human and character differences instead.

Settling into our new space, Sam and his team are learning more about what our new equipment can do.  The design of the play is dominated by the painted floor, which incorporates both Muslim and Hindu shapes.  Alumni Shawn Barrick graciously donated her time to apply the multiple layers in this presentation.  The rest of the set is simple shapes and movable set pieces that fill out the impressionistic style of the design.

Millsaps is in a fairly unique position in that it can produce plays no other organization in Jackson can.  Both Belhaven and Mississippi College are limited in the thematic elements they can present in plays, severely limiting the number of modern and contemporary plays they can produce.  New Stage and area little theaters all have to produce works that appeal to little theater and regional theater audiences.  Millsaps can, and is, produce works that are more intellectually challenging and deal with themes that some of the other educational theaters can’t touch.  

Anytime you deal with an undergraduate theater company, there are limits to what you can do with the age of your cast.  Everybody you can find is around twenty, which can be frustrating because many of the plays you want to do focus on characters who are around forty; Passage is one of those.  I think our cast handles that issue pretty well, though.  Most of our kids tend to be more mature and serious-minded than what you get at some other companies.  They clearly understood the material they were working with and represented their characters well, even if it’s really hard to portray gravitas when you’re twenty.  

Some of the speeches are long and complicated.  I was really impressed by our actors' ability to handle the line load, particularly Lizzie, who plays Aziz in this, although his name is never given.

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but there was a moment when one of the actors went up on their lines.  That’s an actor's nightmare.  It feels like you’re rocking along, doing your thing, and suddenly, the floor falls away, and you’re walking on a tightrope and really cannot remember what you’re supposed to say next.  She handled it like a champ, though, and in just a moment, she centered herself back into the beat of the scene and picked back up where she left off.  I was really proud of her.   

A couple of things are different that we’re trying this season.  One is that Shawn Barrick and her friend Fernanda Coppollaro  were offering complimentary wine, soft drinks, and coffee leading into the show.  Originally, we were going to do a cash bar, but it ended up being complicated with regards to getting a liquor license and insurance.  

You might also find it best to enter the campus by Webster Street (by the cemetery) rather than using Park Avenue, which goes behind the library.  Park Avenue is one of the city’s shortest streets and is in dire need of maintenance.  Webster Street, behind the dorms and the Christian Center, was resurfaced by the College just this Summer and is perfectly smooth.  It may be time to stop using Park Avenue to enter the school altogether.  The fewer entrances there are, the more our security team can monitor them, which increases the overall safety and security of the campus.  Changing the flow of traffic through campus has been changing every so often since I was a boy.  It’s just part of the deal.  

There are two more performances of Passages, tonight and Sunday Afternoon.  It’s with the trip to see what our cast can do with the material.  If you’ve seen the movie, it’s very different from that, but what Chen came up with is very interesting, and the way Sam and the Millsaps Players present it is a really thought-provoking hour and twenty minutes.  

John Kennedy Reads Dirty Books

Last night, I saw a video of Louisiana Senator Kennedy reading just the sexual bits from the book All Boys Aren't Blue in a Senate hearing on book banning in schools.  The way he read it really put me off my lunch.  I'm pretty sure that was his plan.  

On the Forbes YouTube channel, they have this listed as SHOCKING MOMENT: John Kennedy Reads Graphic Quotes From Childrens' (sic) Books At Senate Hearing.  All Boys Aren't Blue is listed as "Young Adult" reading level and is a collection of autobiographical essays from the author about his life when he was a teenager.  Saying the book is for children, I would say, is inaccurate.  Young Adult means young adult, i.e., teenagers.   It's a book about gay teenagers written by a man who was a gay teenager.

The witnesses in the hearing were teachers, librarians, parents, and students.  The issue was: How do Public School Libraries choose their books, and should parents have a hand in removing books they find objectionable.  This process is often called "Book Banning" or "Book Burning," although none of these groups have yet moved to try and make these books entirely unavailable, just entirely unavailable in schools.  

When I was younger, I heard Ray Bradbury speak on what motivated him to write Fahrenheit 451, and I had several opportunities to ask him questions.  This is the sort of thing that motivated him to write the book.  I don't know how far we have to go from Republican Parents making banned book lists to firemen burning books instead of putting out fires, but he felt, and I feel, that we're on the way.

When I was in High School, most of my free reading was science fiction, so I didn't really need that much help contextualizing what I was reading, but for the books I had assigned in class, Candide, The Red Badge of Courage, All's Quiet On The Western Front, Of Mice and Men, Dr. Zhivago, Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, did, at times, have passages, particularly violent or emotionally brutal passages, where I'm glad I had really good teachers to help me contextualize what I was reading.  

None of the books I read had much sexual context.  Candide had a lot of sexual subtext, but that's a different story.  I'll be honest with you, though: at sixteen and seventeen, I was having a great deal of sex, both with my steady girlfriend and a couple others along the way.  Besides that, my Biology Teacher, Dan Rose, taught the whole class pretty extensively about birth control and then went on a side venture to describe how people in New Guinea take care of feminine hygiene needs that left quite an impression.  I don't think I grew into a degenerate, and even if I had, I don't think you can blame Dan Rose or some freckle-faced girl.  

They say that teenagers are less sexualized now than they were when I was sixteen, and that may be true, but they also have the internet on their telephone, so I'm pretty sure they know a whole hell of a lot more about it than I did when I was sixteen.  Teenagers are making sexual decisions and learning much more about sex than we can ever control.  That's what people like Sen. Kennedy are afraid of, but I don't think that's what's going on here.  

I haven't read "All Boys Don't Wear Blue."  I probably won't unless this controversy gets much bigger.  I have read the reviews and the ratings on it, though, and this is clearly a major work, and it's won several awards.  For teenagers who are gay and black and looking for books that include people like themselves, this might be an important book for them.

I'm assuming that what Senator Kennedy read aloud was the most graphic passage in the entire book.  The part of this you don't see is all the staff members frantically reading books with a young adult rating for lascivious passages the Senator can berate his witnesses about.  

If that paragraph is the most troubling thing in the entire book, then I really don't think the Senator has much of a case.  If conservative parents consider their being able to control the school's library collection, I recommend private schools for them.  

A public school Librarian has an obligation to select books that speak to as many of the students as possible and not to obfuscate the perspective of any student because of their sexuality.  Honestly, if you can get a student to read the entire book just to get to that one-hundred-word passage, then I'd say that was a win. 

There are books written just to be pornographic, but there are also really significant books that include sexual issues to tell the whole story in the same way that other authors use violence or other extreme or private human events.  It takes a lot of work to become a librarian.  Their job is to figure out which books are just using sexual experiences to make money and which books use sexual experiences to say something important about the human condition.  I heard the testimony of the librarian in these hearings, and I have to say, I agree with her; despite Kennedy's every effort to discredit her and her position.

In her opening statement, Emily Knox, professor of information science (formerly known as library sciences), said, "When the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released its data for book challenges in 2022, the headlines were glaring. “A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” Almost all of the books can be categorized as “diverse” or books by and about “LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities." 

What Knox, and the American Library Association are alleging (if not outright stating) is that this rapidly growing movement to limit access to books is based on bigotry.  If the numbers gathered by the American Library Association are correct, then their conclusion might also be correct.  I fear it is.  All of the passes Senator Kennedy read, with a face like he was walking through sewage, were from books about the experiences of gay men.

This entire movement to limit library books is the result of certain conservative forces spreading the idea that schools are unacceptably liberal and using their position as educators to indoctrinate your children.  It's openly a fear tactic.  I've known hundreds of professional educators, maybe even a thousand.  I was married to one, and I grew up supplying their material classroom needs.  From my experience and a lifetime of working with these people, I can say without hesitation that there is no organized effort to indoctrinate your children.  You are being told a lie to help gain your political obedience.  

Ray Bradbury said that Joseph McCarthy stoked the fires that led to his fears about books.  Hitler and Stalin too, but having this happen in America was particularly disturbing to him.  Bradbury wrote the novel in the basement of the UCLA Powell Library because, in the basement, they had typewriters that you could rent by inserting a dime into a slot every thirty minutes.  When he was trying to figure out what to write next, he would wander the aisles and let the books' physical presence infect and inspire him.  

Several years ago, I learned that electronic books were easier for me to read than physical books, I had a collection of books that had grown massive, and I didn't want to take them with me to my new home, so I gave most of my books to St. Andrews.  If your child at St. Andrews ever brings home a play or a book on film from the St. Andrews library, there's a chance it came from my collection.  Most of my reading I now do on my tablet or on my phone.  I take some comfort in knowing that nearly my entire library goes with me most of the day, nestled safely in my breast pocket in my cellphone.  Just knowing that books exist and I can access them means something.

Like nearly all of the social issues of the day, I believe that these things should be left up to the professionals, not some jaybird in Washington.  It's a lot of work to become a librarian, and there's fierce competition for good ones.  In 1987, when both Millsaps and The University of Mississippi applied for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the reason Millsaps won and Ole Miss didn't was because the review board thought we had the better library.  Libraries are important, even at the high school level.  Parents who are concerned about what their children might read should focus more on communicating their values to their children than trying to put limits on how librarians do their job.  

I'm starting to have trouble trusting some of the conservative elements in our country.  If their goal is to limit the amount of homosexuality or limit the visibility of homosexuals in our schools, then I wish they'd be upfront about it and not hide in an effort to control library books.  Let people decide the issue on its own face, without trying to accomplish your goals by fighting through other issues by proxy.  Librarians are not responsible for children becoming homosexual, and their providing books for students who are homosexual isn't part of some political agenda.  

Sensitive Artists

 People make much from this notion of artists being emotionally sensitive; even other artists make fun of it sometimes.  The phenomenon is genuine.  You can create art without emotion, but many question whether you should, and once an artist opens themselves up to the emotions related to what they’re trying to create, it can be difficult to shake them once the artist is no longer in the studio.

There’s a fairly famous story that came out of filming “Marathon Man” where the younger Dustin Hoffman kept himself awake for two and three days without sleep and lost a great deal of weight to create in himself the sort of emotions his character might feel for when filming began.  The story goes that during the setup for a particular shot, Hoffman complained about the preparations he went through (which he is somewhat famous for doing,) and his costar, Lawrence Olivier, said, “My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?”

I once wrote a paper for Brent Lefavor on the history of acting teachers.  I tried to find it before working on this, but I think I named it something funky and can’t find the file.  My point was that we discussed all the branches that grew off the seed Stanislavski planted but didn’t discuss much about what went on before that.

Before Stanislavski’s ideas about using memory and emotion in acting, most actors were trained in a type of pantomime where they used gestures to portray emotion, where holding your hands and feet in a certain position displayed this emotion, and changing how you hold your hands represents another emotion.  If you look at early silent films, this type of acting is pretty evident.  The Gish sisters were famous for using the same few gestures over and over again, but they were among the most famous actors of their time, so maybe they were on to something.

Olivier studied acting in London in the twenties.  He would have been the right age to study under Stanislavski but did not.  There may have been a language barrier.  Most of Olivier’s acting training came from working.  He does not use much of the pantomime method, even in his earliest films.  Olivier was one of a few actors who, early on, discovered on his own how to act for the camera.  He was a master of the medium shot and closeup,  which is very different from acting on the proscenium stage.  

Hoffman studied under Lee Strasberg.  Hoffman might be his most famous pupil.  Of all the “method acting” teachers, Strasberg might have been the most extreme.  If you look at who the Strasberg school produced, it’s easy to think maybe he was onto something.  Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Geraldine Page and Eli Wallach, and Elia Kazan were all students of Strasberg.  Even Marilyn Monroe took under Strasberg because she was tired of people saying she could only work as an actor because of her body.  You could see her work improving under Strasberg’s tutelage, but Hollywood, then and now, isn’t very interested in a Pinup girl once she hits her 30s.

My wife played piano.  She was also a devoted fan of other people who played the piano.  She set great store in the idea of pianists playing with emotion, as much of it as they could muster.  I always thought that was fascinating.  Of all musical instruments, the piano is possibly the most mathematical.  The pianist strikes a key that pushes a lever that makes a hammer strike a taught strong, and the vibrations of that string make a sound.  Then, the pianist strikes another key.  The pianist controls three things.  He controls the intensity he uses to strike the key, which translates to the intensity of the hammer hitting the string.  He controls the pedals, which change the duration of the string’s vibrations, and he controls the amount of time between notes, which is supposed to be consistent with what’s written on the page, so you’re talking about fractions of a second where he can portray anything like an emotion.  

All of that sounds very mechanical, and indeed, you can build a robot that plays any piece ever written for piano, but a robot playing will never really move you like the way a human pianist can.  It doesn’t look like there’s any room in the formula for playing piano for emotion, but there is. That propensity to express emotion by striking keys separates pianists from robots.  

Psychologically and biologically, we don’t really know where emotion comes from or how it fits in with evolutionary development.  It seems to come from the communication centers of the brain.  Some animals, like dogs, cats, and monkeys, clearly show that they also feel emotions.  Dogs and cats communicate a great deal.  When I would close the door so my cat Buddy wouldn’t come into the room with me, he would sing an opera with all the emotion of La Boheme until I opened the door for him.  While he might have used it to manipulate me, he clearly felt and expressed emotion.

Sometimes, who we communicate with changes how much we express and feel emotion.  When I was in college, one of my fraternity brothers died in an automobile accident.   The visitation and funeral at Wright and Ferguson downtown was packed with really very young people who, just a few days before, considered such an event impossible.  As an officer in my fraternity and the Chi Omega Owlman, I thought it my duty to be as much like a rock during this as I could.  Even though I’d known this boy since we were little, there would be a great deal of emotion and considerable fear that day, and everyone would be looking for signs of stability in a world that suddenly seemed very unstable.  I decided that should be me as much as possible.  

At least a thousand young people came through that day—most from Millsaps, but many from the other organizations he was involved in.  We had sort of a system set up where a KA officer stood at several points in the line to sort of greet people and basically do whatever had to be done.  My position was close to the door to greet people as they entered.  

This was very difficult for me.  There were an awful lot of young people that I cared a great deal about coming through who were very emotional and already crying.  Cotton handkerchiefs are pretty cheap, so I buy them by the box.  I kept about six in each coat pocket in case a lady needed one.  As the line wore through, I was running out of handkerchiefs, but I kept my resolve.  Even though I felt great emotion about what was happening that day, I kept it to myself as a matter of obligation.  That worked as scores of people I knew came by until…

Nearly everyone I expected at the funeral had come through, but then, through the window, I could see her get out of her car.  For people who went to Millsaps in the eighties, CS’s was part of the landscape, and at CS’s, there was a woman who not only cooked our food and served our bee, but she also took care of us and told us when we’d had enough, and sometimes when we were spending too much time with her and needed to go study.  Just seeing her made the emotions I successfully tamped down inside of me start to rumble.  

“Hey baby,” Inez said, reaching out her arm to hug my neck.  

My conscious mind still wanted to be in control, but my subconscious mind said, “She’s here now; you can let go.”  and I felt a great trembling, first in my fingertips, as this great wave of emotion worked its way through my body to my face, and I wept like a lost child.  

I regained my composure and finished the visitation and the funeral, and everyone moved on to the place of internment, where we stood in the sun while a family buried their son.  For some reason, everyone I knew had Ray-Ban sunglasses that year.  I wore mine and stood as straight as I could and stood between two of my Chi Omega girls, Maria and Mary Carol.  My goal was to be as strong as I could for them, but they were there for me.  Feeling another wave of emotion coming on, I clenched my fist as hard as I could to keep it out, and a tiny, french-manicured hand touched my arm. Water silently but freely flowed from my eyes while I fought back the shudder I felt in my legs.  My Celtic roots wanted to let out a piercing, deafening, keen of lament, but I kept it to myself.

Part of my technique in writing a memoir is opening myself up as much as possible to feel what I felt when whatever I’m writing about happened.  I did it just now, writing about the funeral.  In theory, this helps me choose words and choose formations of sentences that are more interesting to read.  I’m told it’s successful.  It’s interesting writing for this particular audience because there’s almost always someone reading who remembers the same events.

Most of the time, I’m very much in control of the process.  It can be really very cathartic, even exhilarating, as I’m convinced I’m actually feeling what Socrates and Plato meant when they talked about fear and pity and hopefully express that on paper, which is the whole point of the exercise.  It can have a very cleansing effect.  Most of the time, that’s what happens, but sometimes, things go off the rails.  

A few weeks ago, I was working on a piece (I still haven’t finished) that connects my conversations with Mitch Myers and Dan Rose with my Grandfather's conversations with Dr. Kirby Walker about how and why the schools in Jackson separated after Brown V Board of Education.  I should finish that this week if I get my head back in the game.  Working on that, I had a thought about a memory and decided to spend an hour or two writing about that as a procrastination from what I wanted to write about.  

I published that piece on the blog and had pretty good responses.  It was very emotional, and I felt like I could communicate what I wanted very well.  It was something of a pandora’s box, though, and opening it led to many other memories, and those memories knocked me off track for a couple of weeks, where I struggled to have any productivity at all other than to scribble about those memories.  I got stuck in a loop of fear and pity and regret that wrecked me for a while because it made me question what’s the use of really trying to create when that’s the result.  

I think a lot of writers go through this.  It probably explains why they drink so much.  Writing Naked Lunch, the friends of William S. Burroughs became very concerned about his well-being as the things he wrote about had a clear impact on the rest of his life, and he was becoming obsessed with his thoughts and feelings about the novel.  

When I talk to young people about acting or some other art, I tend to tell them that emotion is just another color you paint with, and on some levels, that’s true, but that’s really not a very complete description of what happens, and I probably should be more honest about it.  Art without emotion isn’t very filling.  That’s how I feel about most AI art, which is the thought that inspired me to write this entire piece.  

Art produced by artificial intelligence might be interesting, but so far, I haven’t seen any of it that was moving.   So far, I don’t think Michelangelo has anything to worry about.  Once we get to the point where computers feel emotion, we’ll have an awful lot more to worry about than just what AI does to the job market for artists, and without emotion, what they produce may still be art, but it’s art that’s missing the most important component.  

I spent this weekend working to get my head back in the game.  Trying to work as a serious artist can have pitfalls and tiger traps, and I fell into one.  I’m actually very pleased with the work I produced in that confused state, but I don’t think I can ever really show anybody.  I don’t mind opening my life up for people to read about, but I don’t feel right about opening somebody else’s life up for inspection.  That seems like a real violation of trust to me.  

What I’m trying to do isn’t always going to be easy or comfortable.  That’s ok, though.  I still feel like it’s worth it, and honestly, I’m pretty sure accounting and marketing have their ups and downs too.  

David Bowie was hired to write a song for the big-budget remake of Cat People, with really very little direction about what to write other than to write a hit, which he did.  While the name of the song is “Cat People,” the sentiment of the song is a repeated line where he says, “And I've been putting out fire with gasoline.”  Sometimes, to create anything, you have to turn up the heat as much as you can and work through the flames.  I’m not afraid of that, but I do need to get better at dealing with the aftermath.