Grammar Gripes: Cut "That" Out

"That" is one of the more overused words in the English language. Consider the following:

You cannot expect that you will overcome the obstacles that impede post-academic success if you constantly revert to the same limited perspective that you developed while in academe that prevents you from seeing that the nonacademic world offers many opportunities that you only need to discover in order to take advantage of.

Gah!! If "that" monstrosity didn't give you a headache, you've definitely spent too much time in academe. Try this instead:

You cannot expect you will overcome the obstacles impeding post-academic success if you constantly revert to the same limited perspective you developed while in academe. It prevents you from seeing the many opportunities awaiting your discovery in the nonacademic world.

Still cumbersome but note how much smoother it reads when you cut "that" out. Of course, I came up with this example because I'm as guilty as anyone else of cluttering my prose with "that." Sometimes you do need the word, but once you start paying attention, you'll find plenty of "that" to delete. 

Just for kicks, let's look at another example, inspired by the only grammar book to die for:

Ezmerelda felt keenly that the vagabond libertine that she had unwittingly kissed last night had deceived her by whispering that he was a gentleman in disguise so that he could seduce her unwilling heart and ravish the objections that she could not help, ultimately, but relinquish.

Gah!!!! "That" just takes out all the romance. Try this instead:

Ezmerelda felt keenly the vagabond libertine she had unwittingly kissed last night had deceived her by whispering he was a gentleman in disguise, seducing her unwilling heart and ravishing the objections she could not help, ultimately, but relinquish.

Or, for those of you needing "real world" examples:

The Court held that the defendant was entitled to a charge that instructed jurors to find him guilty of the lesser included offense only if they found that he had not stolen the victim’s purse.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... instead:

The Court held the defendant was entitled to a charge instructing jurors to find him guilty of the lesser included offense only if they found he had not stolen the victim’s purse. (Via)

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Possibly I have Lost My Critical Reading Ability?

Or, maybe, that's just me being a smartass.

Less funny is that some people, it appears, actually have lost this ability. Or maybe never had it to begin with. Or maybe, possibly, never developed it in school because they skipped all the classes taught by "liberal" English professors?

In one of those wonderful little morning missives we sometimes get in our inboxes here at Think Tank, we were treated today to some good, old-fashioned libertarian literary criticism. Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 story Harrison Bergeron (if you don't know the story, click the link and read it -- it's short), we are informed, "helps explain" why "taking from some by force of law what they have produced and consequently earned, and giving to others merely to make ìncomes and wealth more equal is not justifiable."

True, in the story,

everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.

But what the story satirizes is not a society leveled by "taking from some" to make the disadvantaged "more equal" but rather a society literally weighted down by a misguided vision of equality in which the lowest common denominator rules. People who are smarter or stronger or quicker or better looking are forced by the "Handicapper General" to mask or disable these advantages. Yet nobody else gets to benefit from these advantages, either. Nobody competes, and no one ever gets to fulfill their potential. This is oppression, not equality. It's equality misunderstood, backwards, and upside down, and this paranoid vision of equality-gone-wrong is what the story satirizes, not equality as most Americans idealize it, whatever their politics.

What role do economics and class play in this satire? Contrary to free-market interpretations going back to William F. Buckley, Jr., who reprinted the story in the National Review in 1965, income and wealth play virtually no role at all. Indeed, they are conspicuously absent. If anything, income and wealth represent the only unequal aspects of this society, as suggested as much by their near absence as by a passing line about a TV news broadcaster with a speech impediment (all the TV newscasters have speech impediments) who "should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

Historical context helps explain how Vonnegut, an inveterate political liberal, could fool so many conservative readers. Darryl Hattenhauer looks at the opening lines I quoted above in this way:

This absurd dystopia's version of equality sounds like something from the pages of popular magazines during the Cold War--because it is. Vonnegut depended on those magazines to establish himself as a writer. ("Harrison Bergeron" first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.) Just as Twain could not have sold Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson if their sympathy with African-American characters had been obvious, so Vonnegut could not have sold a story overtly sympathetic to leveling. Instead, the Handicapper General apparently recalls the likes of John Wilkes Booth, proponent of slavery. [...] As a struggling writer, Vonnegut had to put a surface on this story that would appeal to his audience. And it did. More specifically, it did so because it appeared to rehearse central tenets of the dominant culture's ideology. It appealed to the literal-minded with such accuracy that William F. Buckley's National Review reprinted it as a morality tale about the dangers of forsaking private enterprise.

Source Citation: Hattenhauer, Darryl. "The politics of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron'." Studies in Short Fiction 35.4 (1998): 387+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 27 Mar. 2012.

And so, conservative readers like Think Tank Senior Fellow, whose prose so freshly and eruditely greeted us this morning, continue to hold up this story as a dire warning about the end result of our nation's "liberal" efforts to promote equality. Senior Fellow writes,

The goal of a society should not and cannot be to make people equal in outcomes, an impossibility given the individual attributes with which we were each endowed by our creator. It is the opposite of justice and fairness to try to equalize outcomes based on those attributes. It is not fair to the beautiful to force them to wear ugly masks. It is not fair to the strong to punish them by holding them down with excess weights. It is not fair to the graceful and athletic to deprive them of their talents. In the same way, it is not fair to the productive, the risk taking, or the hard working, to deprive them of what they have produced, merely to make them equal to others who have worked less, taken less risk, and produced less.

Hey, dear readers! Didn't you know the reason you have an advanced degree and are working as a secretary is because you're not productive, don't take risks, and don't work hard enough? Wow! I feel so enlightened.Why didn't I think of my plight this way before? I guess I just wasn't smart enough.

Sure. I agree it would be tragic if we made the Virginia Woolfs of this world

go out and about their business every day wearing Slipknot masks:

But the analogy between physical and mental "advantages" and socioeconomic ones is false. Think Tank Senior Fellow wants to believe,

As Vonnegut’s story shows, putting social limits on the success people are allowed to achieve with their own talents and abilities makes everyone worse off, because it deprives society of the benefits of their brilliance and beauty and skill and talent.

Yes, true. However, requiring people who make more money to pay more in taxes does not "handicap" them in the same way as requiring smart people to wear thought-disrupting devices in their ears, as they must in the story. Being born into privileged socioeconomic circumstances (define that as you will) opens up a host of compounding advantageous opportunities that have little to do with an individual's own talents, abilities, or efforts -- their brilliance, beauty, skill, or talent. Two people can be equally hard-working, equally smart, and equally good-looking but end up in very different places in their lives at the age of 35 because of how much money their parents had and what circles they traveled in growing up.

Hattenhauer's analysis of that opening definition of equality further clarifies where Think Tank Senior Fellow goes astray:

This definition codifies the common American objections not just to communist states, but also to socialist ones. The narrator begins with the widespread assertion that the United States not only can and does know God's law, but that God's favorite country is instituting it. (American history is replete with statements like Ronald Reagan's that his policies reflect God's will--see, e.g., his 1982 address to the National Catholic Education Association). So the narrator's definition of America's equality begins not by positing a future equality as much as exposing the misunderstanding of it in the past and present.

The narrator continues to give not a possible egalitarianism of the future [...] but rather an enactment of how absurd society would be if egalitarianism were what America's dominant culture thinks it is. The narrator defines equality only in terms of intelligence, looks, and athletic ability. There is nothing about kinds of intelligence, or how it is used. Similarly, beauty includes only the human appearance; there is nothing about painting, architecture, etc. The first two concerns, intelligence and looks, address two of the traditional categories of philosophy: the true (epistemology) and the beautiful (aesthetics). The third category, the good (ethics), vanishes.

What truly perplexes me is not Think Tank Senior Fellow's superficial reading of the story but the failure to grasp the significance of that absence of ethics from the story's representation of "equality." TTSF continues:

But doesn’t the Declaration of Independence itself say “All men are created equal,” and isn’t equality a fundamental American ideal? Yes, but these expressions invoke a concept of equality different from the social justice concept of equal incomes and wealth for all. The original and traditionally American concept of equality is “equality under the law.” That means the same rules apply to all, not the same results.

First, most progressives (I guess I'm speaking for myself here, but correct me if I'm wrong) are NOT saying equality SHOULD mean equal incomes and wealth for all. That's just blatantly false.

But, more importantly, we've had "equality under the law" since the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868. On February 26, 2012, Treyvon Martin was shot dead. His killer walks free. Before we can talk about whether the same results should apply under the same rules, we should first consider whether the same rules DO apply to all, just because the law says they do.

Through the Looking Glass

Blogging, we commonly presume, carries with it a veracity similar to autobiography. Whether bloggers use real names, totally anonymous pseudonyms, or pseudonyms openly linked to real people, we attribute a subjective truth, at the very least, to the lives bloggers appear to represent.

Why is this? A persona is not a person, no matter how much or how little correlation exists, or that readers think exists.

At least with other kinds of writing, we respect distinctions: An autobiography is not the same as an autobiographical novel, which is not the same as a "regular" novel merely informed by the author's experiences. Nor, again, is a "regular" novel the same as an epistolary novel, with its deliberate gesture towards "real" people telling a "real" story through "their own" writings.

But we assume blogs are like diaries. Whether we know the authors as real people, think we know them, or have utterly no idea who they are, we read each entry believing its contents more like autobiography than fiction.  Yet, it is a persona, not a person, that speaks to us, a digital construction of an identity that develops and evolves with each new post.

Some graduate student has probably already written a dissertation entitled Blogging, Baudrillard, and Barthes: Authorial Simulacra and the Creation of Hyperreal Identities in Online Communities.

Barf. Don't worry. I won't take that any further. But, just as a thought experiment, consider the following:

What if you were to find out that "recent Ph.D." didn't have a Ph.D., didn't work at a think tank or as a secretary, and had never even gone to graduate school? What if "After Academe" were a work of fiction, invented by a stay-at-home mom who had once entertained aspirations of going to graduate school and becoming a professor and wanted to explore the "road not taken" as a means of finding consolation for her choices? She had considered writing a novel but found the immediacy and flexibility of blogging more appealing. Her husband has an important position at a think tank, and she sometimes helps out with administrative tasks.

What if you were to find out "recent Ph.D." was actually a tenured professor who, while always advising his undergraduates NOT to go to graduate school, saw his graduate students year after year -- many of them very talented and committed -- trying and failing repeatedly to get jobs, lingering on in the department as adjuncts? What if he felt terrible about this situation but couldn't speak openly about reforming the department, despite tenure, without being ostracized by other faculty and administrators? What if graduate students wouldn't listen when he told them to walk away because, for them, his position undermined his ethos, making them feel as if he simply thought they weren't good enough, a feeling that only reinforced their determination to prove him wrong? What if "After Academe" were a work of creative nonfiction this professor hoped would convince graduate students and other recent Ph.D.s, whom he could not otherwise reach, that they had other options? What if a former graduate student of his was now working at a think tank?


Of course, you can believe whatever you want to believe, but sometimes readers do raise questions about the real identity of "recent Ph.D." My answer is this: I am as "real" as you want me to be. And the "book" you ask about ... why would you treat it any differently than the blog? If I wrote a book, it would have to fit in a genre: autobiography, creative nonfiction, novel. I'd be an "author" and I'd "die" when you read my "text." Blogging is its own genre, but it can freely incorporate any number of others. And since a blog only ever is, as a text, incomplete, the author/persona retains an active role, disembodied but not dead.

What if "recent Ph.D." is just a highly imaginative, clever, and creative undergraduate, contemplating graduate school but discouraged by what ze has heard? Ze would be just as happy, happier even, if ze could become a famous writer, inventing new literary forms, reaching wider audiences, cultivating "art for art's sake," but for now, ze finds hirself interning at a think tank, bored and overdosing on critical theory.

Won't you follow me through the looking glass? How much of me is you and vice versa?

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Surprise! Conservative Christian English Instructor Finds Animal Studies and Posthumanism Objectionable

I am not going to dignify the opinions expressed here by writing a defense of Animal Sudies (Go ahead and take a look and then tell me why again have I linked to this in my blogroll? Sometimes they do post insightful pieces, but this? Meh...). I think scholars working in Animals Studies, a few of whom are mentioned in the article, do a fine enough job of articulating why their work is valuable to the humanities. It's easy enough to deride the titles of academic papers, as the author does -- especially those that suggest ideas one finds objectionable -- for reasons of religious belief, rather than engaging with the arguments meaningfully.

But, forget engaging meaningfully with key scholars. How about simply reading what the Institute for Critical Animal Studies says about the field in an introductory paragraph? While Conservative Christian English Instructor does cite and even quote from the ICAS website, she seems to have lost the capacity for basic reading comprehension. She writes,

Adherents of Critical Animal Studies generally look with contempt on animal-welfare organizations and “animal studies” not preceded by the word “critical.” 

But the whole point of Critical Animal Studies, again according to the ICAS's website (from the description of their journal, JCAS), is

to breakdown and mediate oppositions between theory and practice, college and community, and scholarship and citizenship, in order to make philosophy (in a broad sense) again a force of change and to repatriate intellectuals to the public realm.

In other words, far from looking with contempt upon these related fields, Critical Animal Studies seeks to bring together the activist work of "real world" animal welfare organizations and the theoretically oriented academic work of Animal Studies. The whole point is that theory and practice work best -- and accomplish more -- together.

Sure, interpretation can be political (pick your side), but critics owe it to their political opponents to understand their positions before disputing them. To do so, basic reading comprehension is a prerequisite, and Conservative Christian English Instructor fails to meet it (BTW, she doesn't identify as a conservative Christian in the article, but if you Google her name, that's the first thing that comes up, a self-description on her website).

Moreover, she struggles with the term "posthumanism," another prerequisite to "getting" either Animal Studies or Critical Animal Studies (she'd have some real fun with Animality Studies). Admittedly, posthumanism has a host of differing and complex definitions, as well as varying origins, but if the whole business of poststructuralism isn't your cup of tea (and it is clearly not CCEI's), please stay away from Foucault.

Far, far away...

What CCEI does get is that posthumanism is indeed a response to Western humanism, what it's done and what it stands for -- that posthumanism represents a rejection or at least a critique of the anthropocentric notion that humanity is golden, that whatever serves "Man's" interests is right and good in the eyes of God, that God Himself created Man in His image to do His work on Earth....

But here we are, at the end of Conservative Christian English Instructor's essay, back to square one, for she does, indeed, recognize exactly what posthumanism (and fields like Critical Animal Studies that draw upon it) means to her own core beliefs: Making such critical moves signifies

the rush to embrace the primitive and the popular in order to undermine the Judeo-Christian ethic of man’s dominion and the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and reasonable discourse.  This is just one of the ominous aspects of  Critical Animal Studies.

Well, exactly. But why is such a challenge "ominous"? Isn't there a way to approach posthumanist and other poststructuralist positions through reason?

In fact, reason never really went anywhere, even as we critique it. We just no longer think of it strictly in opposition to emotion, in a relationship of positive to negative, male to female, human to animal, etc. (pick your Derridean pair). But.....can we have some, please? Can't we do more than simply point and say, "Look! There's a fly in my Golden Chalice. Look, see? It's a fly!"

Or, a sphinx in our historical vista:

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Or a freakin' snake in the Garden:

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Posthumanism and Critical Animal Studies may be relatively new, but it's not as if there isn't a fairly long history of humans turning to animals in the search for identity.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

What's new is that in the last century and a half since Darwin published The Origin of Species, it has become less and less reasonable to presume upon mere faith that humans are entirely exempt from the rules that govern the coming, going, and changing of all the other species that inhabit the planet Earth. In other words, the opposition between "human" and "animal," whatever differences you might point to, itself has become less than a rational one.

The ultimately ominous portent of posthumanism for someone like CCEI is surely that, implicitly, it embraces a Darwinist narrative and suggests that humanity itself will, over time, eventually either evolve into something "posthuman" or go extinct.

Bloomsday Today

Everyone always quotes the part about "liverslices fried with crustcrumbs." Which you're supposed to eat, like Mr. Leopold Bloom, for breakfast -- or "grilled mutton kidneys" or "giblet soup" or "nutty gizzards" -- washed down with a Guinness:

I'll take the Guinness and feed the organ meats to the cat, who, says Mr. Joyce,

walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

—Mkgnao!

—O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

—Milk for the pussens, he said.

—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.

—Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

—Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To lap better, all porous holes.

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The World Is Coming to an End AGAIN!

As members of a storytelling species, we create narratives to make sense of our lives. Our individual lives have arbitrary beginnings and inevitable endings, and we have very little control over either. Narratives -- the powerful ones that shape entire cultures and civilizations -- permit the illusion of control by giving structure and meaning to time, which nonetheless persists in unfolding relentlessly, as individual lives come and go.

There's nothing particularly new about the most recent set of predictions -- that the Rapture will occur on May 21st and that the world, along with those of us unbelievers "left behind," will be engulfed in flames on October 21st. Even some Christian fundamentalists are disputing this latest prediction by, in their words, "false prophet" Harold Camping. Just click on their website here and scroll down to see a list of over 200 such predictions in their "Library of Date Setters for the End of the World" going all the way back to 44 A.D.

If you are disinclined towards fundamentalism altogether, it's easy to ridicule the believers, but their fanatic attachment to a "real" end that aligns with the literalism of their faith says something more generally about a human need for such narratives. Frank Kermode (one of my favorite "old school" literary critics), writes in The Sense of an Ending,

it makes little difference -- though it makes some -- whether you believe the age of the world to be six thousand years or five thousand million years, whether you think time will have a stop or that the world is eternal; there is still a need to speak humanly of  life's importance in relation to it -- a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end.

In a frequently quoted passage, Kermode likens the narrative shape of an individual life to the literary shapes that poets create:

Men, like poets, rush into the middest, in medias res,* when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus,* and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.

As a result, narratives of the Apocalypse become a recursively self-generating cultural phenomenon, re-imagined time and again as each new prediction is disconfirmed. And thus what we see with this most recent prediction is but further evidence that

eschatology is stretched over the whole of history, the End is present at every moment.

How is this possible? Even as the End is always falsified, always disconfirmed, confidence that "this time" the "real" End has come persists with each new prediction:

It is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route.

It's a strange -- and I think, on the part of believers, involuntary --psychological investment in what Kermode calls peripeteia, a reversal of circumstances, which here become a way of "re-enacting the familiar dialogue between credulity and skepticism."

These persistently recurrent predictions of Apocalypse, in other words, give people a way to impose structure, purpose, and meaning on their lives as they pass through each new test of their faith.

It's what Kermode calls a "naive apocalypticism," really, and might only become dangerous if its followers had access to some weapon of mass destruction that would give them the power to make their predictions come true.

*    *    *    *    *  

Personally, as a Buddhist-sympathizing atheist, I'd put more stock in the rapturous experiences nature provides in the ordinary course of our earthly existence -- there are plenty of narratives of those experiences, too:

Alice Sitting on a Shroom Via

*"in mediis rebus - in the midst of things; in medias res - into the heart of the matter."

Should We Care About Spelling and Grammar Mistakes in the Blogosphere?

Just wondering what others think. I usually try to be careful and proofread before I post, but I wrote the third post yesterday hastily, just as I was about to leave work. I just wanted to skedaddle and go home, but the mistakes I discovered when reading over it today (now corrected) grated on my brain like nails on a chalkboard. Does anyone else notice and/or care about such things? Do you go back and correct mistakes in your posts? Should blogs be held to a different standard than other kinds of writing?

Spring Break Book Recommendation: Arin Greenwood’s Tropical Depression

If you’re on Spring Break this week or looking forward to it next and wished you had made plans to skip town for a tropical island, then I recommend picking up a copy of Arin Greenwood’s first novel Tropical Depression (2010). Catch a vicarious flight (or 5) to a remote would-be paradise, “part of a chain of islands right smack in the middle of the Pacific, in that big stretch of blue—south of Japan and north of Australia, east of the Philippines and west of Hawaii—that looks empty on the map.”

Aren’t you already eager to escape your wintery doldrums and mountains of midterm grading? Ready for warm turquoise waters, gentle surf, soft beaches, languid afternoons, lush jungles, bright flowers, exotic birds, mangoes that fall ripe from the trees?

Perhaps, like the novel’s protagonist Nina, you are expecting to “escape to paradise. Get a tan, forget your troubles, forget yourself. Wear a thong?”

Paradise is never what we expect it to be.

As the novel opens, Nina, a young attorney from New York City, finds herself—all in the same day—fired from a job she hates at a firm that defends Big Tobacco and dumped by a boyfriend she still very much loves. When the opportunity arises to take a job as a law clerk on an island that is part of the U.S. territories in the Pacific, Nina jumps at the opportunity to put relationship angst and professional malaise behind her, embracing a fantasy in which the island is “empty, devoid of people, devoid of judgment.” She imagines, “sitting on a quiet beach where no one will see me, except whoever is in charge of bringing me fruity drinks. I see myself having a torrid affair with a beautiful local boy who climbs coconut trees to fetch me coconuts, who doesn’t speak English and so can’t ask me why I have absconded to this deserted island and how I plan to spend the rest of my life.”

A fantasy, indeed. While the island, “Miramar,” does have some beautiful beaches, it also has a “fecal lagoon” (there’s no proper sewage treatment), countless stripper/poker/karaoke dive bars (the detritus of a decaying tourist industry), corrupt judges and politicians, Americans expats, and all manner of drunks and gossips. There’s even an attractive, bad-boy CIA operative (probable—we never find out for sure if he’s a spy) who reminds Nina of her ex-boyfriend.

While Nina is somewhat horrified when she first arrives (not least by the lack of decent vegetarian food and the wretched polyester suits her boss makes her wear), she eventually begins to fit in among the locals better than she ever expected she would—a “misfit” among “mercenaries, missionaries, and misfits.” She snorkels, SCUBA dives, goes parasailing, has affairs with two men, and generally entangles her life in the life and lives of the island.

But even amidst these entanglements, the past is never far away. The island has rumors of ghosts of its own, and Nina can't ever seem to forget the joy and sorrow of her old relationship and the life she left behind when it ended. Why should it so hard for a girl just to get away? To escape herself and start fresh? To let go of the past?

Perhaps it is most difficult to get away from the past when one has never truly lived—or forgotten how to live—in the present. By the end of her adventure, Nina wonders, “if I ever really appreciated anything while I actually had it.”  

Who ever really does? It’s one of the hardest things to do: to accept the simple pleasures of life and the people who share them with us, to accept and relish the present, whether in New York or on a tropical island—to appreciate and then, when the time is right, to let go. As Nina is preparing to leave, she finds, “it is mango season again.” With her sometime lover, “sweet George,” she tastes the gloriously sweet flesh of the fruit, “try[ing] to record the taste of this fruit on my tongue, in my brain.”  They “eat the mangoes together and don’t talk much.” Indeed, the present is sweet, and it’s so easy to forget that sweetness of the here-and-now while you are—as we all often are—caught up in the what-has-been or what-will-be.

And so we seek escape in order that we may return to taste the present.

Wherever you are this week of break and almost spring, release your thoughts of past and future. Let go of your expectations. Put your students, your job market woes, your research and writing plans aside. Enjoy your well-deserved mid-semester escape, whether you are at home or on an adventure of your own. Eat a mango—or whatever fruit falls nearby.

 And read Arin’s book.

View from Office Window

Sun casting shadows,

Trees upon snow; traffic flows,

Streams past rising stone.