This is tragic. Jack Layton was awesome. It feels like only yesterday I wanted him for Starship Captain/Prime Minister and now he’s dead? Goddamn. Cancer sucks. He was exactly the kind of man we need in these times: idealistic and energetic and wry, forceful but not disagreeable. The kind that does not consider hope and compassion to be things one shies away from, no matter how jaded the populace (oh America, how jaded you have become). A joyful politician, that’s a rarity, one I hope we see more of in the future. I’ve never seen him in person–I wish I had during the last election when he sprightly campaigned with a walking stick–but even on TV, he always seemed a man deeply alive. L’espoir/hope is the most beautiful word in any language. It needs its defenders. It’s so goddamn easy to be nihilistic about the economy and politics. It’s easier still to be angry and bitter, full of resentment. It’s so tempting to think society and government aim to serve everyone but you and yours. These are troubled times to be sure but that’s why men like Jack Layton should exist, to remind us of the better angels of our nature, and to coax us into justice and compassion. Us modern humans, we don’t ever go quietly into our better nature.

It’s fitting, I guess, that Jack’s last lines (as expressed in his deathbed letter) were “My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

My first time at this particular library was on my campus visit. Mike Turner and Ryan McIlvain were on hand to show me around the library building. I didn’t think the layout was particularly impressive, especially compared to the bustling modernity that is the Vancouver Public Library. newark’s Public library could, instead, double for a cheap vintage hotel with its central rotunda and spiralling staircases. There was a book sale on the third floor. We dug through stacks of old paperbacks and made fun of their titles and cover art. The elevator was dirty. On the main floor, the stacks were ugly and utilitarian. Even so, it was, unmistakably, a library, and made me happy.

That’s not why I’m sad about its eventual closing. It isn’t nostalgia but a notion of nobility that has me willing to donate money to a cause no one seems to care about. A library is like a forest in a national park, a relic perhaps, but beautiful and worthwhile in and of itself. We don’t go to parks to see ourselves. We go to parks to be among those not ourselves, the birds and the trees, the rivers and the trails. Libraries are like that. Unlike the internet, where the pages talk back, in a library, all one has is one’s yearning presence. We’ve gotten great at searching but not seeking. We search on the internet, and that’s well and good and worthwhile, but we really only seek at a library.

“You’ve got nipples, yes?” I replied. “So do women.”

So zen, drunk me. Awesome.

-Jump Little Children, Cathedrals

They told me via text message. They told me to check my twitter. The twitter isn’t mine but I use it anyway. It reminded me of how they told me via text message then too, on 9/11. I was with my buddy Yazir then. I was his wingman, and vice versa. We were picking up a girl. Did we score? Did we fail? I don’t recall. When we heard the news, he said “they deserved it” and danced. He was born in Saudi Arabia. I jokingly called him a terrorist. I told him it was all downhill from here. He’s over all that now. He has a job and significantly less rage. 10 years will do that to anyone. These days, I take the PATH in to World Trade every week. I could have been there, celebrating with the others, if rehearsal hadn’t been moved up to 7 pm. It would have been an excellent excuse to drink and party with strangers. Things would have come full circle.

It’s strange how I’m of a generation that’s defined by coming of age in the post-9/11 world. It must be somewhat like being an Eastern European coming of age behind the Iron Curtain. That same reckless feeling, hollow. We lived and loved and all the while, folks were telling us there were bad people about to kill us, ghosts, basically, with impossibly long claws, prehensile tails and a stick of explosive clay. We went along, apathetic, while enhanced security, enhanced interrogation and enhanced screening were normalized. Three wars. We were kids. All we could do was grow up a little. To tell the truth, I can’t remember a time before this. I fucked my first girlfriend shortly after 9/11. I watched tens of people die, swept away by a flood in the years after. I had a gun pointed at me on the near side of that day. I graduated high school, college and grad school in the post-9/11 world, grew a metal beard, started a rock band and two metal bands, took up smoking, drinking, learned to cook but never to clean, all of this…life, for better or worse. Funny, I wasn’t even in the US in 2001, and new york was just where all the Christmas movies were set as far as I was concerned, but I wonder what it would have been like to have smoked my first cigarette in the pre-9/11 world? Would it have felt any different? This is the sort of thing that defines a generation. I’m glad it’s over.

I’ve felt like we’ve been living in Don DeLillo’s world for 10 years. Mao 2, perhaps, because that’s my favorite. That’s the book where he talks about how when the artists cede their place as the vanguard, that space is taken over by terrorists in the popular imagination. These 10 years have been a foolish time, hollow and electric. Things could happen at any minute, theoretically, though they never would, not the way we were told, but we prepared anyway. We gave up so much for so little. You’d feel cheated, if you were anything like me, young and determined to be hopeful about the world. 9/11 set up a static charge that hung in the air, infecting everything, that is only now finally finding release. In the days before today, all the passersby’s hair stood on end as they passed each other on the street.

The beginning of all this was a symbol. The beginning of the end, also. It’s okay to celebrate.

So as we were talking, we ended up on novelizations of X-Files episodes. I haven’t watched this particular episode (Unruhe: Season 4) but I have read the novelization. Bad idea. The premise of the episode concerns a German psychopath who lobotomizes people through the eyes to save them from “howlers.” The “saved” end up repeating the German word “unruhe” or unrest when they are discovered. He asked me “would it be so bad if we were lobotomized?” and I replied in jest “it’d be heaven, no? Of course provided you had someone to take care of you.” That made him cry. I really shouldn’t talk to people after 2 am. My tendency to make jokes about everything gets worse after 2 am. Sorry, dude.

I hadn’t thought of the Abrahamic idea of heaven as a lobotomy before. It’s certainly intriguing. It’d be the only way to permanently still a mind and dedicate it to the singular task of praise. Seems like something an ever-loving god would do. Heh God as Jerry Schnauz.

Sure, I hate the book. It’s epically bad in terms of writing quality, which is forgiveable in a pulp novel, but not one of such abnormal length. As a smart-ish kid who felt underappreciated for his stupendous genius, I was all ready to love the damn thing. I wanted to be told, yes, the world doesn’t deserve your brilliance, that I was special, that I would be John Galt etc. But then I got older and actually met people who are fucking geniuses, much more than even I could fathom in my childish imaginings, and saw how they don’t exist in isolation. More to the point, they cannot. The world, I learned, was not as black and white as all that. But even before I understood all that, I could have told you “this book sucks. Don’t bother.” That so many people are willing to stand up and claim a turd for gold makes my 12 year old self look smart in comparison. I envy them their naivete and am terrified of the world where they have a degree of power.

I call myself libertarian not because I have a high opinion of Ayn Rand or Austrian economists or because I want to defund social safety nets or particularly care for guns but for other reasons. I will not be watching Atlas Shrugged.

Alfred Binet, the creator of what became the IQ test, was himself aware of the risks of intelligence testing in order to classify people intellectually. It became a tool of the “progressive” education movement that used it to justify only vocational training for minorities and the poor. As time went on, the biases in the test became more and more apparent. At this present moment, it is considered absolutely useless as a measure or predictor of intelligence by most social scientists. What does having a high IQ tell you then? You can probably recognize patterns in test settings very well. You may not necessarily have high reading skills, but you might. You have some conceptual grasp of math. That means fuck-all though in terms of value, coherence, or articulation of your views. It doesn’t make you a good negotiator. It doesn’t mean you can think your way out of a paper bag. If you can, then it isn’t because of your IQ. Your intelligence does not give you license to be a total prick. See: Adams, Scott, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and his “high IQ.”

I took the damn thing when I was a kid. I don’t remember my score but what I remember was how this girl who had been crying because her IQ test results weren’t as good as she’d hoped kicked my ass in the school debate. A (presumably) higher score didn’t make my ideas or delivery better. I told her afterwards that she could take it again and do better. The following year, she did. The local foundation that facilitated these tests also had a little separate branch staffed by a really sweet Indian woman who promised to train test-takers to be more intelligent. Apparently, she got results. So, fuck your fucking caste system.

This sort of testing is actively dangerous for children. Alfred Binet could have told you that in fucking 1910. I’m vehemently opposed to the education reform movement’s desire to quantify kids in this way. Just as I’m opposed to many of their ideas, which they hold unquestionable, simply because they’re “smart.”

Ursula LeGuin is my hero. I tell my students this every semester. And each semester, they find themselves excited to read her yet come away telling me “she’s not the greatest writer ever or anything, Professor.” This semester, I directed one of my students who said this, a rather bright girl in every other respect, to this commencement address by Ursula LeGuin.

What she’s arguing for in it is the creation of a new world, essentially. One that does not fetishize ascension, the afterlife and the common languages of power. A world not powered by the gender binary. A world where we don’t look upwards into the light but into the dark earth. A world where we are comfortable with the darkness in our hearts because it is what nourishes us. What she’s arguing is the Feminist Manifesto. It’s the Manifesto of the Other.

I was raised in a community of mostly women until I was 11. Female doctors and nurses in a rural community, mostly, with their husbands away in the bigger cities. I did not realize until I was much older how brave they were, and are, to choose a life outside of the paradigm. There were many partings, tears, intrigue, all varieties of the human experience. I witnessed a woman giving birth when I was 6. I’ve always known where babies come from. My sister will agree that I raised her much more than my parents ever did. Her values are mine. I taught them to her even though they were not the values held by the people around us at the time. I’m extremely proud of her. Where does LeGuin fit into all this, you might wonder. You see, I gave up med school, a safe career path, money and a small measure of power to become a nobody, another musician/writer in the Big City. I find kinship with those women whose names I’ve mostly forgotten but whose memories I honor in some small way. Sometimes, when I find myself questioning my path, I read this to myself.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

Well, we’re already foreigners. Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the only direction is up. So that’s their country; let’s explore our own. I’m not talking about sex; that’s a whole other universe, where every man and woman is on their own. I’m talking about society, the so-called man’s world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power. If we want to live as women, some separatism is forced upon us: Mills College is a wise embodiment of that separatism. The war-games world wasn’t made by us or for us; we can’t even breathe the air there without masks. And if you put the mask on you’ll have a hard time getting it off. So how about going on doing things our own way, as to some extent you did here at Mills? Not for men and the male power hierarchy — that’s their game. Not against men, either — that’s still playing by their rules. But with any men who are with us: that’s our game. Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him? Why should she live her life on his terms?

Machoman is afraid of our terms, which are not all rational, positive, competitive, etc. And so he has taught us to despise and deny them. In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean — the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life. All that the Warrior denies and refuses is left to us and the men who share it with us and therefore, like us, can’t play doctor, only nurse, can’t be warriors, only civilians, can’t be chiefs, only indians. Well so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers’ tales about it, we haven’t got there yet. We’re never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by going our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country.

So what I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you’re good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.