Since attending that symposium I went to a screening of the documentary, The Interrupters, held by my community association. It’s a film about a group of people trying to find ways of stopping violence in the exact moment in which it is about to happen. And the people who are attempting to interrupt the violent actions are people from within the community—not police officers, not city officials, not people who have sat outside the situation and divined a solution, but rather people who have lived in those neighborhoods, who have lived with violence for much of their lives, and some of whom have committed or been an accessory to violence themselves. They literally walk into these situations, trying to catch them before they start to erupt, trying to interrupt the thought process of the person about to take action—offering them a chance to think differently about the situation and so take a different action. Certainly it doesn’t work in every instance, but it seems that it does work a good amount of the time. At base, it is a person-to-person attempt to have people respond to their feelings (of hatred or being wronged or injured pride or desperation and fear) differently.

More than anything, this documentary illustrated for me the deep importance of allowing people within a community to suggest and try out their own solutions—solutions that are typically quite different from those implemented by people with positions of power within hierarchical structures that prevent them from ever being directly affected if things don’t work. This is something that I keep hearing over and again, particularly well-articulated in two books I’ve read this year: Wangari Maathai The Challenge for Africa, and Jared Duval’s Next Generation Democracy. We need to provide structures for those directly impacted by the problem to help solve it.

A couple of days after seeing that documentary, I stopped by St. Mark’s Bookshop to hear the writer and historian Sarah Schulman read from and discuss her new book, The Gentrification of the Mind. Again there was a specific emphasis on the importance and value of difference. In this case it was her clear and pointed discussion of the way that urban settings force us to live amidst difference, and also that the lives of each of us in an urban setting are lived in front of one another. This idea leads me to think of all those encounters I have on a daily basis, living here—the couple slow-dancing in their kitchen on the second floor, visible through their open window; tens of spent bullets littering the street where a woman was shot sitting on her front stoop a few blocks from my building on a busy street by police officers pursuing someone else; the daily greeting between me and the super who manages the co-op two doors down; the so-called “Straight Pride Rally” that took place on the corner of my block when controversy erupted around some violently homophobic lyrics in the songs by a group of West Indian musicians; the Jehovah’s witnesses smiling quietly and offering their hellfire-covered magazines for free; all those that gather to sit and watch the fountain and people passing by in front of the Brooklyn Museum. I can’t help also thinking of the way that each of these things takes place seemingly in isolation. Without the memory of those who stay and who notice, these events would be random, un-related occurrences—like the West Indian Day Parade, that is swept away with barely a single trace left less than 24 hours after it finishes.

It seems clearer and clearer that you can only see the differences if you choose to acknowledge them in the first place instead of ignoring or washing over them. And that seems to be Schulman’s point. As the city changes to mimic the cloistered, gated lives of those who live outside it, we risk shutting out the very thing that reveals the humanity of a seemingly inhumane place.

As some of you may know, I’m working on a book about the role of artists and the arts in society, particularly the US. While I’m working on the book, I’m also working on publishing journalism around the topic. Just recently I’ve published two OpEds on the subject, specifically related to funding for artists:

• New Data Reveals Artists Aren’t Gettin’ Paid

• Aren’t They Happier That Way? Artists and the NEA

There will be more articles on the subject going forward, so keep an eye out on my Twitter feed.

Here’s some basic info:

Useless
Written by Alexis Clements

Friday, May 11 at 7pm.

Informal reading at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (484 14th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215)

Light refreshments will be provided.
Donations for the Archives suggested/appreciated.

Some of those present will be able to read parts in the play – actors welcome.

There are seven roles in the play, all female. Ages range from 15-78. Multi-ethnic cast.

Read more about the play here.

You can get the full info about the reading on Facebook. You can also get in touch if you need more info or are interested in reading one of the parts.

University Settlement is the oldest settlement house in the US and they just celebrated their 125th anniversary in 2010. The organization has a fascinating history, including anecdotes about Eleanor Roosevelt teaching dance classes there as a young woman. For the 125th, I did an interview with Alison Fleminger, who runs their Performance Project. If you didn’t get a chance to read it, you can have a look at the link below:
• ”The Rebirth of the Settlement House Movement“

Why

How is it that we come to know someone? Particularly someone we’ve never met in person, or only interacted with occasionally and in a certain setting. Think of that strange feeling you may have had as a child when you saw one of your teachers out in the world doing normal un-teacherly things. In this play I’m asking questions about how we come to know a person as something more than the role they play in our lives or the definition we have in our heads for them.

What

Characters: 7 female (6 actors with doubling)
Running Time: 100 minutes
Summary: Nobody knows Sydney Anders. Nobody living anyway. Well, maybe one or two people, but they don’t know her well at all. So nobody paid much attention when the boxes came in to the Archives—seven to be exact, six full of personal journals, and one full of cassette tapes.

Sophie was there when the boxes came in. Sophie just turned 30 a couple of months ago and has been volunteering at the Archives for almost two years now. Thea was also there. Thea is 15 and has been spending a lot of time at the Archives lately. Her parents seem to like the idea that she’s at a “library” (sort of), so they don’t ask questions about it.

Useless follows Thea and Sophie, and a handful of characters who interact with them, as they go about their business at The Lesbian Archives—a brownstone building in Brooklyn, NY, that houses a large and very idiosyncratic collection of materials related to the lives of lesbians.

• This project was begun while I was in residence at the Millay Colony.

When & Where

Availability: In development: available for readings and developmental workshops.

Walker, and others like him (because there always are others), were known as filibusteros in Spanish, filibusters in English, which means pirate or freebooter—men who weilded weapons under the guise or control of no nation, for their own personal gain (gives a whole new meaning to Congressional filibusters, doesn’t it?).

What struck me most is that a figure essential to the make up of Costa Rican national identity is virtually unknown in the US, at least he was completely unknown to me and the other Americans I’ve spoken to about him since. And I couldn’t help further wondering what such a figurehead must mean to the shaping of a Costa Rican understanding of US citizens. But then again, look at how so many Americans proudly proclaim themselves anglophiles after that little bit of history we call the Revolutionary War. Which really just got me thinking about a lot of other things. But rather than try to summarize those thoughts myself, I will borrow from a book by an American journalist that I picked up in a tiny used bookshop while on a brief stop in the beach town of Jaco about her year spent in Central Asia:

Imagining the lives of others is an essential human instinct. It is an act of empathy, a gesture of faith in a common bond. It is also a kind of travel, an attempt to move outside the parameters of our own narrow universe. But it almost always fails. Once we pick up and go—once we cross the borders, physical and intellectual, political and emotional, that divide countries and continents—we come to realize that we’re not merely imagining. We’re projecting. And if we’re honest with ourselves about that, we at least see the truths, or at least the puzzles and muddles in which they are buried.
—So Many Enemies, So Little Time, Elinor Burkett

While, on the surface, it may seem as if the issues around the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Virginia’s abortion and “personhood” laws have passed us by for the moment, the reality is that seven states in the US already mandate ultrasounds before abortions and countless non-profit organizations aimed at serving women (and all their parts) kowtow to vocal donors and political pressure. And though the Republican presidential debates seem like an annoying farce much of the time, they serve as a kind of chaotic sideshow that allows actual legislation to slip through the big tent of Congress when the popular attention shifts to a new topic du jour. And nothing makes the sideshow barker happier and sells more tickets than screaming about ladybits.

When it comes to election time and the Right you can forget crippling unemployment and personal debt, or a health care industry so far off the rails that over 60% of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 were caused by health care costs, or the utter lack of health care for a huge swath of the American population, a severely underdeveloped US manufacturing sector, an out of control political campaign finance situation, and government impasses that seem to prevent any meaningful change from happening on a national scale, not to mention ongoing international conflicts and humanitarian crises. None of that is as important as the threat posed by America’s vaginas.

What’s perhaps more troubling is that in order to attempt to quash this supposed threat, Conservatives regularly seek to take control of those particular parts, to both colonize and dominate a certain sector of the country’s nether regions—a science fiction-sounding proposal that ought to remind us of some books and plays we all should have read in school (where it’s still legal to teach literature that demonstrates opinions and ideas unsupported by Conservatives, that is).

So much of this could be seen as rhetorical posturing and semantic tomfoolery if it weren’t for the fact that it is language that is used to write laws and it is language that is used to interpret the meaning of those laws when they are challenged in the court system.

For example, as others have already pointed out, the now dormant section of Virginia’s bill requiring doctors to give women seeking abortion a transvaginal ultrasound without obtaining the woman’s consent constitutes rape under the current Federal definition: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” So, sticking with that language, this means Virginia was proposing state-ordered rape of women. Or was it just their vaginas that were being violated?

Further, if you look at legal precedent and language, what is really being suggested by the hibernating “personhood” law, in which life is said to begin at conception, then what is really going on there is state-mandated pregnancy. Or, to borrow the language of people who work around the globe to protect the human rights of women in nations that some in the United States like to claim are less democratically enlightened than us, that’s “forced pregnancy.” And in the case of that Virginia law, it would be forced pregnancy not by a slave owner (yes, Virginia legislators, there is still slavery) or an abusive spouse, as is usually the case in the human rights trials that are being prosecuted around the globe, but by the state.

While these Virginia bills may be off the headlines for the moment, what they remind us of is that women’s bodies continue to be treated as a battleground in American politics—literally a site that can be occupied and blown apart by political forces. While it can seem as though only temporary flare-ups occur, the reality is that these are just the examples that were picked out of a crowd of laws that have steadily been put forward in the past 10-15 years (not to mention the past couple hundred years…).

When it even occurs to lawmakers of any stripe in the contemporary world to treat women as chattel of the state we have a problem, and you can be sure that the few times it floats to the surface these kinds of laws and ideas have been quietly making their way in other less prominent areas all along.

So who do we vagina-carriers go to when we (or at least certain parts of us) are being subjected to sexual abuse and slavery by our own government? I can only imagine that we resort to the international organs that the US and other nations worked so hard to institute—the International Criminal Court, perhaps, which is charged with ruling on crimes against humanity or “serious attacks on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings.” To be clear on that, degradation means to break something down, or, in a chemical sense, to reduce something into smaller parts. I can think of nothing less degrading than the current trend toward treating women as nothing more than discrete packages of flesh that can be carved up and controlled by any person or government body other than the human being herself.

• Next Generation Democracy: What the Open-Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change, Jared Duval (Though I had heard bits and pieces of the ideas Duval is talking about before, he puts thing together in a compelling argument for a completely plausible and possible participatory democracy. It’s make me think how I could help to institute some of these ideas in the communities I live and work in.)
• A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, Marcia Tucker, with help and editing from Liza Lou (Like Smith’s book below, I felt like there was a certain insistence on being clear about what it felt like to live her life and make the choices she made. She was a remarkable lady. I’m only sorry it took me this long to get to know her work.)
• Just Kids, Patti Smith (This read as really honest and unconcerned with the need to make it fit other people’s ideas of who she or Mapplethorpe were. I don’t think that’s easy to pull of. I admire her for it.)
• Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, Ellen Dissanayake (Found this to be a compelling argument about the origins and act of art-making that attempts to avoid isolating it through a discipline-specific understanding. Will be reading one of her other books next.)
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo (As fascinating for its form as its content.)
• Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie – A Tale of Love and Fallout, Laura Redniss (A remarkable example of the unique domain of art and its ability to express ideas, questions, research, and provocation in ways that are untenable elsewhere.)
• The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone (How could you not love this book? And Gladstone’s On the Media has long been my favorite radio program. Well worth the read.)
• So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All teh Wrong Places, Elinor Burkett (I picked this up in a tiny beachside used bookshop in Costa Rica and wouldn’t let it go. A smart, tough, and fascinating discussion of what it means to be an American abroad and one of the most interesting post-Sept. 11 writings that I’ve read.)
• On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson (I heard Jefferson speak on a panel and was eager to read her book. There’s some very interesting thinking in here about America’s relationship with the so-called “freak” that would be worth expanding on.)
• I Married You For Happiness, Lily Tuck (Beautifully written and very well constructed. This book was excellent.)
• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn (Some of the cynical and problematic ways they tell their stories get in the way of a strong and important message. Nevertheless, it was illuminating and it’s hard to read without wanting to take some action.)
• The Challenge for Africa, Wangari Maathai (A compelling argument, beyond her other arguments and viewpoints, that true change can only come from within.)
• Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx (Read will in residence in the woods upstate—an literary escape while away from home.)
• Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, Gabrielle Hamilton (My best friend sent me this book. It is many things, but the two most worth nothing are it’s detailed look behind a few curtains I’ve never peeked behind before, and the willfulness of the writer.)
• Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, Kathleen Dean Moore (This book is so thoughtful and beautiful in so many ways. I picked this up at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, while brooding one day about how much I missed being in the woods. This book is so much more than “nature writing”—it’s comprised of observation, philosophy, lived experience, and serious inquiry. I admire the writer tremendously.)
• Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Hans Abbing (I think Abbing is too focused in this book on the products of artistic practice, specifically on the sale of visual art works, which causes the book to be too limited in its approach to figuring out the economy of the arts. That said, it’s a great beginning to a discussion that I think it only just getting warmed up.)
• World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on performance, place and politics, Peter Dickinson (A dense and far-reaching collection of scholarly essays that raises some serious questions about the nomadic nature of art that hopes to enlighten and inspire change being presented to people, who, inevitably, bring with them their local and personal experience.)
• Common As Air, Lewis Hyde (This book coalesces so much thinking so elegantly around issues related to intellectual property and the progress that ideas offer our society. Should be read by many.)
• The Next American Revolution, Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige (Cannot recommend this book enough. Read it.)
• The Radiance of the King, Camara Laye (A bit long, but a fascinating journey.)
• Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, Todd London & Ben Pesner (If you are in the theater you really must read this. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to it.)
• Thinking Like An Editor, Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato (Great advice for someone looking for it.)
• A Heart as Wide as the World: Stories on the Path to Lovingkindness, Sharon Salzberg (I’m just at the beginning of dipping my toes into Buddhism and this is my first foray. A very worthy one.)
• One Hundred Demons, Lynda Barry (A wonderful attempt at exorcism.)
• Harriet Chalmers Adams: Adventurer and Explorer, Second Edition, Durlynn Anema (Sad to think such a fascinating woman is largely lost in history, but such is the case with so many women.)
• West With the Night, Beryl Markham (Funny to me that this book is listed so often in lists of great travel books, when, in fact, it’s very much an ode to the country she called home for most of her life. It’s really only listed as a travel book because the presumption is that the reader has never been to Markham’s home.)
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design, Mary Flanagan (Recommonded by a friend—a great overview of games in art, in the broadest sense, that then taps into contemporary software-based gaming culture. Interesting that she also has an agenda in this book to radicalize gaming.)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell (A wonderfully engrossing read for cold New York nights. There’s so much too this book.)
• Inferno, Eileen Myles (Fantastic journey. I read it twice. To learn to live, to work, and to love—I should be so lucky to know all three.)
• Role Models, John Water (This book was more than a few pleasures to read—an intellectual pleasure, an ethical and philosophical pleasure, a guilty pleasure, and on and on. Waters’ self-awareness, his openness with himself and with others, his artistic integrity, and his humanity are remarkably present in this book. I had no idea. And now I love him.)
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman (Read this because I kept hearing about it from so many sources. In the end, I felt like the heavily moralistic overtones and the very anthropocentric view of most of the tales were kinda grating. Less soapbox, more imagination, I say. And kinda thought the one scenario where God was a lady was a little lame. Why even bother at that point, and when it’s so hamfisted?)
• Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, William J. Mann (Makes her out to be a conflicted human being rather than an untouchable. Ultimately it reads like there’s a good amount of speculation involved, but a sad true-ish sounding story.)
• A Challenge for the Actor, Uta Hagen (A really great book on the craft of acting.)
• Open, Andre Agassi (This is an incredibly compelling story, told in novelistic detail in the first half. A classic hero’s journey, but with more attention to the arbitrary nature of life’s trials. Just the right thing for a summer read.)
• Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin (This book was not good—a nouveau existentialism that reveals yet another story about a bunch of bored twenty and thirty-somethings who can’t think of anything more interesting to do with their lives than nothing.)
• A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert (I’m not entirely sure why I feel such an affinity for Flaubert, but I do. His writing and his perspective are incredibly enticing to me, even when they border on the maudlin.)
• The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Anna Pavord (A very well-researched and readable book on the history of the development of an idea—taxonomy. Pavord explores the genesis of taxonomy through the lineage of botany, all the while revealing the individuals and historical events that contributed to the development of the naming of names in the plant world.)
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel (I’m struck most by the gyroscopic structure of this book—the way it circles back over the same set of circumstances with a new perspective, but still never gains control over the elements included. A fascinating book.)
• An Education, Lynn Barber (Funny how different the book is from the salacious promises that the back cover touts. I’m glad it is what it is and not what the marketing team attached to it wants it to be.)
• Barf Manifesto, Dodie Bellamy (A difficult work that circles back into itself and the community it concerns quite a bit.)
• Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (I tore through this book. Waters is clearly a very talented storyteller. The predominant thought I have after reading this one is about the prisons we create within ourselves and that we allow or perpetuate around us. Guess I’ll have to read Joe LeDoux’s book soon…)
• Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters (I would think it would be hard not to get sucked in to this book. Enjoyed it too much to think about what clever tricks besides strong storytelling she’s using to carry the reader along.)
• Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert (Not her best work. But she still gets my vote, as she had it from Pilgrims onward. I look forward to her leaving memoir behind.)
• Baby Remember My Name, edited by Michelle Tea (Who doesn’t like a good anthology now and again?)
• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (Haven’t read a good page-turner in awhile. Had to stay up late to finish this one.)
• Free Fire Zone, Theresa Rebeck (Picked this up after interviewing Rebeck. So far it’s the best book about the business of writing that I’ve read, with an emphasis on business. Learned and laughed a lot.)
• Martha Quest, Doris Lessing (Will finally have to read The Golden Notebook after reading this.)
• Lucky in the Corner, Carol Anshaw (A book club I was thinking about joining was reading this. Turns out I can’t go to the first meeting and didn’t love this book, but will give it another try.)
• Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman (A jarring reminder that despite my fondest beliefs, our civilization does not tend toward greater tolerance.)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (I was surprised to find that though I didn’t at first imagine myself having much interest in this story, at the end, when I began to think about reinterpreting it, something new entered the story that was exciting—the isolation of perception described here is a powerful and disturbing reality.)
• My Life in France, Julia Child & Alex Prud’Homme (I’m ashamed to say I had no idea how hard she worked. And I love the idea that a bildungsroman could start in the main character’s early thirties.)
• A Wheel Within A Wheel, Frances E. Willard (Too excellent; so much fun.)
• At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, Anne Fadiman (A perfect example of why the essay is one of the most insightful, interesting, flexible, and often unexpected forms.)
• A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert (Subtle, as promised. I can’t help wishing it was a bit richer.)
• First Execution, Domenico Starnone (This book calls a lot of attention to its structure and it’s easy to get lost, but the getting lost did pay off in the end, and my interest in tales of political disillusionment only seems to grow.)
• The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (Just wonderful. And the edition that my mother got for my brother and I as children has the most wonderful illustrations for the story, perfectly pitched, by Michael Hague.)
• Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, Jennifer Scanlon (Scanlon is out to paint a specific portrait of HGB, but it’s a very compelling and very timely one.)
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner (An incredibly well-told story, which weaves in many of the themes and ideas about the role of storytelling in our lives that I’ve been puzzling over lately. A wonderful read.)
• Disquiet, Julia Leigh (Recommended by a friend from work, an excellent, absorbing read, that reminded me of why I always loved to read Poe’s breathless and strange stories.)
• Our Life in Gardens, Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd (Everything I hoped it would be. I padded through it from cover to cover.)
• The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West (What great storytelling! And all the dreams of Hollywood dashed. A great book.)
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson (You can really see why Isaacson is such a popular biographer now—it’s a very readable and smooth progression that’s presented here, and a reasonable attempt to paint Franklin as the human he was rather than the caricature we like to imagine him as. It’s been a useful piece of research for my new show.)
• New Grub Street, George Gissing (And the closing chapter in this little triptych on the business of art, or specifically literature—a Victorian literary world trying to reconcile art and commerce as unsuccessfully as they ever have been. It seems like we might actually end up reverting to more of a Victorian model of investors and personal investments in the next century, but who’s to say.)
• Grub, Elise Blackwell (A funny book to read after Hyde’s. It’s amazing how much things refuse to change in certain arenas, but how much we insist that ought to.)
• The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, Lewis Hyde (A wide-ranging book with some interesting conclusions. Like many others I’ve spent a fair amount of time worrying over some of these questions, but I’m not sure yet that there’s an answer. I suppose what Hyde’s book leaves me with is a stronger sense that there likely isn’t a need for an answer to these questions.)
• The Ruins of California, Martha Sherrill (I’d been looking for books about California and my friend Beth brought this one over for me, it was a great start. And how odd for me two novels in a row with juvenile narrators, I’ve been reading so many other things in between this past two novels I didn’t even remember that Hedgehog was the last. Anyhow, a good story, and that satisfaction of a strange view of a country I only think I know.)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson (The title of this book does it no justice at all. The piece ranges widely, is sharp and incisive, has deeply human characters. And perhaps the most wonderful thing is the shattering lack of sentimentality that the author has for her characters or the world around her. I admire this story a great deal, heart-breaking though it is.)
• Advice for a Young Investigator, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson (It’s remarkable how aptly so much of Cajal’s advice applies to the artist. And it’s also amazing to see such concise and spot-on advice for scientists that is over 100 years old—the book was originally published in 1897. It’s also clear that this translation makes all the difference.)
• The Encantadas, Herman Melville (It’s imperfect, of course it’s imperfect, the metaphors are occasionally very foggy and sometimes get mixed up, but the richness and density of the imagery in a single one of his sentences is breathtaking.)
• Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert (What a perfect example of my own travails so much of the time…)

“For the creative writer the major problem seems to be to know the patterning of the grain; and these can hardly be discovered in rich color without understanding of the many sequences of the American tradition on the popular side as well as on purely literary levels. The writer must know, as Eliot has said, ‘the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind.’ A favored explanation for the slow and spare development of the arts in America has lain in stress upon the forces of materialism. But these have existed in every civilization; they have even at times seemed to assist the processes of art. The American failure to value the productions of the artist has likewise been cited; but the artist often seems to need less of critical persuasion and sympathy than an unstudied association with his natural inheritance. Many artists have worked supremely well with little encouragement; few have worked without a rich traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn. The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition—many of them still buried—belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light. In the end he may use native sources as a point of radical departure; he may seldom be intent upon early materials; but he will discover a relationship with the many streams of native charactre and feeling. The single writer—the single production—will no longer stand solitary or aggressive but wihtin a natural sequence.”
-Constance Rourke in American Humor: A Study of the National Character

Regardless, I found my way there, first through one of Sharon Salzberg’s books, A Heart as Wide as the World. Though I am still very much at the beginning of what I think will be a much longer journey with Buddhism, I thought I’d write down some of the books that I’ve been reading and have kept off my main reading list, by and large.

I joke with my friends that I often have to go through an intense research phase whenever I take on a new project, a new stage of life, or a new anything. So my somewhat voracious appetite for books on this subject is reflected in this list, given that I’ve been exploring this for such a relatively short period of time. I’m still reading a handful of these as I type this.

• A Beginner’s Guide to Tibetan Buddhism: Notes from a Practitioner’s Journey, Bruce Newman (Bought this after skimming it on a break during a workshop at Tibet House in New York.)

• A Heart as Wide as the World, Sharon Salzberg (The first book that helped, after a lot of dabbling, begin to sink into the idea of this practice.)

• Buddha, Karen Armstrong

• Faith, Sharon Salzberg

• Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein

• Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Sharon Salzberg

• Meditation in Action, Chogyam Trungpa (I have the pocket edition of this and I love it.)

• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, Tara Brach (Sometimes hers claims of epiphanies and success seem a little overzealous, but the meditations and the ideas themselves were really great, I found.)

• Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, Sharon Salzberg

• Teachings of the Buddha, edited by Jack Kornfield

• True Love, Thich Nhat Hanh

Anyhow, as a fellow I’ll be continuing my arts journalism work and undertake a new book project that I started on late last year. In this book I’ll be examining the ways that the arts are currently valued in the US and suggest an entirely new way of thinking about their value. No small ambitions here either…