The Marrow Reading Series: Summer School, Alternative Education, and Some of What I Think I Know About That

Here's the essay I read at last night's wonderful reading series, The Marrow, hosted by Naomi Huffman and Leah Pickett, and had a number of great readers and truly is all-around excellent. I encourage you to check it out when you get the chance, Chicago! It's at the Whistler, a wonderful Logan Square bar, and you can follow the series on Twitter, @themarrowchi.

The following is a modified version of the essay I read, "Summer School, Alternative Education, and Some of What I Think I Know About That" --

I started teaching English during summer school in the Maine Township High School district way, way back in 2012. I’ve taught it every summer since then, and found it’s really its own animal from a teaching perspective.

 Here are some of the things I’ve learned so far:

 It’s funny, really, but all the stereotypes about summer school students, that they’re completely unmotivated, that they don’t care about their futures, that they are wildly immature, are only half the story. Yes, some aspects of those qualities are reasonable enough to believe, but like so much of our shared human experience, they tell only parts of a bigger story.

In my experience, a lazy student isn’t just a lazy student. It’s always more complex than that. More times than not, students who end up in summer school are there because they’ve rejected some part or whole of the four-year high school model, one that if you’re at all aware of the bigger educational picture, has sought to make learning progressively homogenized and structured around the idea that there can be one singular model for educational success that all students will aspire to, and, what’s more, all students are expected to reach.

But that’s not how education works, really. Teaching is a jumbled, disorganized system of adults, many of whom pretend to have secret knowledge of how things “work,” teaching students who either do or do not have faith in said adults’ abilities and are suspicious of their actual understanding of how things “work.”

It’s also having a student only a year removed from living in Iraq thrown into your classroom without regard for that student’s circumstances or how overwhelming it might be for him or her to learn among a classroom entirely full of native English speakers. But that was the case for me this past summer school session. And fortunately, the student in question was willing to meet with me for ten minutes after every class for a recap of the day’s lessons and to discuss things we talked about, and I had time to set aside to modify an essay assignment so that it wouldn’t be too overwhelming but still challenge this student, adjust the final exam to make it likewise something both comprehensible and capable of being completed.

 That’s life in a credit recovery classroom, in the reality of such a situation where students are brought together in a combined English I through IV section, somehow, freshmen through seniors. Evening high school is much the same, something I also teach, although the class sizes are smaller. I had twenty students in summer school this past month, entirely manageable and arguably close to the ideal number of students, which in my opinion is around fifteen.

And the weird thing is, these classrooms seem less competitive and hostile than the ones I’ve experienced in classrooms during the regular school year. There’s certainly playful teasing, and the occasional incident that’s a bit more extreme, but usually those incidents are directed at me, the horrible authority figure ruining their lives.

 It has gotten me thinking a lot about an article Rebecca Solnit recently wrote for Harper’s entitled, “Abolish High School.” That and an article by Megan Stielstra entitled “An Essay About Essays.” Both deal with assumptions about how we educate and questions the established approach. In short, Solnit is making the point, why should students suffer through a one-size fits all approach to a four-year high school when there are plenty of ways to implement and make available many different alternatives, and Stielstra is making the point, essays don’t have to be the tedious and mechanical experience they are as they are currently taught in most high schools, they can (and let’s face it should) offer an opportunity to explore ideas and challenge a person’s individual sense of creativity.

 We read these essays in most of my classes and every time we do they’re met with a mixture of awe and the kind of eye-opening revelation that comes with someone speaking a very real and honest truth. The kind of truth that’s all-too obvious when it’s spoken aloud, like the emperor having no clothes, that sort of thing. Force and power and authoritarian constraints will only alienate a sizeable percentage of students, which my alternative students always seem proof this notion. They can do the work. I’ve read and discussed over my years in alternative classrooms celebrated authors and thinkers like Solnit and Stielstra, as well as Franz Kafka, Philip K. Dick, ZZ Packer, John Steinbeck, Roxane Gay, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Voltaire, David Foster Wallace, Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Daniil Kharms, John Cheever and George Saunders, to name a few.

And students never fail to appreciate these texts, often because they understand intuitively the arbitrary quality of the power structures that writes like Kafka weave into their work, despite his penchant for ambiguity. It’s why they quickly intuit that “The Knock at the Manner Gate” isn’t about someone being punished for literally knocking on a gate, but the absurdity of so many of our rules and laws and how easily they can be manipulated to condemn a person, when necessary, whether guilty or not. Most of the students I work with have been on the losing end of that power relationship before. And let’s be honest, so have most of us. Some of us just experience it sooner and / or more severely than the rest of us.

I think about porn for educators like Freedom Writers, which I like but let’s face it, fetishizes the teaching profession in the same way most professions are fetishized by Hollywood. I think about these kinds of movies, teacher as superhero, and I see a thousand essays people could write on missing the point. They mean well but they miss the point. I think they mean well. Whether they mean well or not, they miss the point. Most every educator wants to inspire kids but the real goal, the simple and useful goal should be to tell them the truth, as you understand it, as often as possible. That’s what they really want. That’s what I didn’t get as a student teacher awkwardly dancing around the fact that I had a girlfriend, not sure of how to respond to a personal question from a student. It’s important to remember to be human, I think.

 It’s how you avoid situations as an educator like ZZ Packer’s Lynnea, a worn-out first year teacher in a Baltimore public school, inhabiting Packer’s short story, “Our Lady of Peace,” who says, exasperated, to a former colleague who is now a police officer writing her a ticket for disobeying a traffic signal, “Do you know what it feels like … to have worked one long motherfucking day with a bunch of kids who want to strangle your ass and you want to strangle theirs and you think about that sentimental shit -- that ‘if I can only reach one’ shit -- and you don’t reach anyone?” Then her former colleague says “Yep” and hands her her ticket, which is both funny and true, all of it.

 I find myself wanting to just be part of the conversation, dipping in with my various questions, the ones essayists like Megan Stielstra encourage all of us to approach the craft with, or as she writes in her essay about essays, “What you need is That Thing; maybe a question, a fear or a fury.” That just sounds true to me.

The Paper Man Is More Than a Man Made of Paper

Gallaghar Lawson is a name to remember in the coming years. He's got his finger on the pulse of something and it's led to a wonderful conflation of aspects of modernism and fabulism in the spirit of Franz Kafka but with a smidge of someone more contemporaneous, like Shane Jones or Amelia Gray.

Lawson's novel is entitled The Paper Man and recently released by Unnamed Press (a press to keep an eye on in the future; I just finished reading The Fine Art of Fucking Up by Cate Dicharry, another of their titles in this year's catalog and enjoyed it immensely, as well). The Paper Man, meanwhile, is quite an unassuming titled for a novel so packed with ideas, ambiguities and in general the good "stuff" that perpetuates a narrative.

I mentioned Kafka, Jones and Gray but I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that Lawson's book stands entirely on its own. I don't know if he is a reader and / or admirer of any of those authors, but regardless of any similarities in spirit, his novel has a tone that's unique to himself and the world he's conjured in the The Paper Man.

My philosophy, perhaps without really knowing it and bungling it many times in the past (or maybe I've literally written this before and forgotten), with respect to a works of literature, is to consider those narratives like you would a Rorschach Test. And by that I mean, my interpretation of a novel and its "meaning" will usually say a lot more about me than it will about the book itself. In general, I perceive this to be the case with most literary criticism. So much of what the reader "interprets" is something they either want or don't want from the story they're reading, and, in some weird and quasi-fatalistic way, that was true before they ever even laid eyes on said book.

That's not to entirely let the author off the hook. They have a role in the process, too, and certainly I can say things about myself while perhaps indicating things about a story that might not work for other readers (in their manifold forms), and in certain cases, might represent things the author him or herself also believes are lacking in their story. Broad strokes questioning of a given writer's choices isn't necessarily an indication of something latent in me, as reader, I mean, it can also be something that genuinely adds to the discourse, even if it's not the most chipper thought or comment added to the discourse surrounding a book. Most recent and glaring case in point would be questions of Atticus Finch's racial awareness, i,e, does he need to be the perfect incarnation of all that is good about white people, or as Go Set A Watchman brings to the table, can he be human, too? And does it have to be such a bad thing that he's human? I don't know. I haven't read that book yet, but the most glaring questions already swirling by plenty of people who no doubt have also not yet read it in too many cases at least adds to the discussion.

To that end, I'm a subscriber of Rebecca Solnit's thoughts on criticism, which she articulates succinctly and pointedly in her essay "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable." She says, "The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end." The latter is the goal to aspire to whenever reflecting upon a work you admire. The Paper Man certainly lends itself to discussion and the kind of conversation that need never end.

And so the following analysis is filled with plenty of light spoilers. Therefore, read it with caution if that's something you're concerned about, spoilers. I hope with it I can open up the discourse, because Lawson's book is certainly one deserving of that treatment and, still more than that, deserving of many readers.

Michael, Lawson's protagonist, has recently left his home in the south for some kind of opportunity in the city. The vagueness of the topography and other elements of setting in the novel are what give it such a Kafkaesque quality. Michael lives in a land that is not entirely devoid of the one we understand as our own, but he also enjoys surrealist elements that are nothing like what you'd find in typical realist fiction. He's a man actually made of paper, which occurs after a train accident that also results his mother's death. His father, an artist, manages to save him, but leaves him trapped in the body of a boy made of paper.

One of the things I liked best about Lawson's description of Michael is that he leaves very little to the imagination. It works somehow. And as odd as it is to hear that Michael has been given a paper penis by his father, one that is as puny and flaccid as a roll of small coins, it seems important information and keenly brings to mind the fragility of this paper man (beyond his being composed of a material that is in itself so apparently feeble), among very many other things.

While questions of aesthetics and what makes for true, honest art are a huge component of the novel, I have to leave that to others, because, as though this were a Rorshach Test and I the one interpreting, those areas of concern didn't move me terribly much -- which says nothing of Lawson's novel and only of my own personal deficits, so take this as one example of what I mean in the preceding part of this review.

Indeed, I'm much more interested in the ways Michael is treated by the other primary characters, those whom I'd classify as Maiko, a young woman who takes him in early on both saving his life and growing to view him as some cross between her ward and romantic partner; the artist David Doppelman, whom he meets when he discovers the man has painted a portrait of the adult-version of a girl he loved in his childhood; and Mischa, that very girl he loved in his childhood who seems to see it as her responsibility to return Michael to reality, no matter the draconian measures required to do so.

The story is in fact separated by a moment in it when Mischa literally tears Michael apart. His old body is then made new by David Doppelman, who gives him an upgrade in every way, which includes his genitalia, one of the many things Mischa had mocked about him, as she both rightly and cruelly turned a mirror to Michael and tried to make him understand that he was not simply a victim but also a person who had to become something less flimsy if he ever wanted to grow into the person he dreamed of being, which included artistic aspirations of his own. In his new body, he gains a literal strength and a figurative confidence he'd never previously enjoyed.

He reunites with Maiko, with whom he'd had a falling out in the earlier part of the story because he'd lied to her about his dealings with Doppelman and his search for Mischa. He gets work in the window of a department store as a living mannequin, more or less, which is one of my favorite, and also arguably one of the most humorous moments in the novel, because he's absurdly expected to model department store clothing and dance and interact with two other non-living mannequins for the public's amusement. They play music and he finds himself increasingly invested in his part, until the day the window literally comes crashing down due to an explosion caused by forces from the north.

And as other reviews I've read have noted and I've already alluded to, there are only the most tenuous comparisons to be found between our world and that of the inhabitants of The Paper Man. The north is the power center, and the south and the city are at its mercy. Still, like our world, and the climatic finish of the novel, there feels constantly the prospect of combustion, one which a man made of paper seems perfectly apt to find himself at risk of being made tinder in.

I highly recommend The Paper Man, and with it all of the titles of Unnamed Press.

Totalitarianism And The Great Masses Fully Roused! (Part I of Hopefully Many Parts)

Great novels keep you thinking. Reading "Bend Sinister"(And while I"m on this tack I might as well include Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading," George Orwell's "1984" (much as Nabokov would have disliked being named alongside him) Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and Albert Camus' "The Stranger" to the list of novels that have got me to thinking, especially regarding the leitmotif (word of the day 05/31/11) of this post, but thinking of several things -- aside from Nabokov's being perhaps the great writer of our time.

The first was I've been meaning to read Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" for far too long, and it was high time I got that started. So I've got that started and it has been quite a treat, from the standpoint of keeping me thinking.

The second was that, easy as it is to say otherwise, we've got just as much potential for totalitarianism here in the good ol' USA as any country that's ever existed, and possibly more potential for it considering our great size in terms of population and the falseness of the proposition that democracy inherently breeds free thinking, or embraces it.

I've read Eric Larson's latest book, "In the Garden of Beasts" (concerned primarily with the first U.S. ambassador to Hitler's Germany, and the change in Germany's social complexion in the year's time between Hitler as merely Chancellor to his final ascension to Fuhrer and total control.) So thirdly, in conjunction with the facts of "Bend Sinister" and "Origins," is this: it never ceases to astound me how easily freedom is willfully handed over to a regime (and bureaucratic machinations subordinate to it) that desires anything but the freedom and welfare of its citizens. Hitler and the Nazis' rise provide perfect historical testimony to this fact, and damned if this is something we can sweep under the rug -- isolate to a "crazy" place and time -- and be done with it. You'd have to be crazy to do that. You can't fail to recognize that what happened in Germany was not uniquely German; it was disturbingly human.

Certainly democracy, of whatever you wish to term our current form of government in contemporary America, allows for the possibility of freedom -- but it also invites the opportunity for the contrary, a systematized manacling by those who urge oppression. Its machinations are usually subtle. That is to say, forces such as "The Silent Majority" of President Nixon's famous citation, which is a powerful, capable force. The Silent Majority that tacitly (or not so tacitly) backs the Machiavellian ends of an unscrupulous administration (think justification of Iran Contra, for one notable example), provided it means ends that a statesman can justify. These must somehow be linked to the American way, a certain pursuit. 

It is true there is a large swathe of apolitical denizens in America today. And it's possible to consider this group harmless, consider it to be an aggregate of those whom it would be hard to muster to aspirations above the most basic. But it's precisely these individuals disaffected by the political mechanisms of an entrenched government and its corresponding party system who are, historically speaking, most easily aroused to react forcefully against it. Which actually makes a great deal of sense, purely from a psychological standpoint. As you begin to feel more and more the outsider, holding no advantage, you likewise begin to -- often -- resent the group you see as responsible for your marginalization. For instance, think of how children most often hate bullies and, even if not bullies, the most popular children -- begrudging their privilege. The fact is, though, this isn't in this case without merit. Now, conversely, isn't it true that many times the most popular children, bullies, will turn children against the very lowest on the totem pole, the very weakest of the weak, which helps the popular children or child / bully consolidate power (no one wants to be the lowest on the totem pole, and expend energies mostly on distancing themselves from that person / people). You can see this working on a macro scale, as well. There wouldn't be need for scapegoats in the hugely repressive governments, totalitarian governments especially, were it not for this psychological precondition. Or at least scapegoats are a useful means of deflection. And deflection is a common means of controlling opinion in contemporary America, if not globally.

Herbert Marcuse termed it, in an eponymous essay published in 1965, "Repressive Tolerance," which is to say when tolerance for freedom of speech goes "too far" (quotes around too far quoting the questionable idea of what exactly constitutes too far). I'm inclined to agree with Marcuse. When a line of discussion of a certain heightened vitriol gets to the point where its promulgators are actively speaking of repression, you've got to call attention to, and probably vitiate, this fact. The problem I see with squelching a repressive line of thought is, how do you do so without making martyrs of the people you're silencing? If conservative commentator Glenn Beck, at the height of his popularity, had been silenced by the government for being too provocative, I feel safe in saying it would have compelled a war, or if not that then some kind of violent retaliation by a fringe, fanatical right-wing political group, at least. But I suppose this effect is something to be returned to.

I further agree with Marcuse with respect to a politically inundated society being counterproductive to the free thinking of its members. He puts it more precisely, and in terms of how we are taught to think, when he explains, ". . . learning to know the facts, the whole truth, and to comprehend it is radical criticism throughout, intellectual subversion." Those things which foster control discourage knowledge of the whole truth, and how to find it. You find the whole truth by reading and reacting to / interacting with everything. John Stuart Mill's call to understand the other side's argument as well as your own (which has led me to read a great deal by Ayn Rand, F.A. Hayek Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, William F. Buckley, and Ray Kroc -- hell, even odious talking heads like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity). Well-roundness, exposure, more holistic education, should make those scapegoats (entities in need of oppression) the masses are trained to dislike in, say, a fascist society, less terrifying and thus less in need of repression. So that my favorite mantra, put forth by Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal work "The Ethics of Ambiguity," offers a kind of axiomatic thesis to Marcuse's essay, viz., "A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied." In other words, a right-wing Christian stating a gay man's freedom to be gay impinges on his/her freedom -- viz., (s)he wishes the gay man be denied his freedoms so as not to be exposed to nor have his/her family be exposed to the "gay lifestyle." This is the standpoint from which repressive tolerance can most properly and reasonably be understood. But still I cannot see how repressive speech would be undermined or stifled without granting martyrdom and probably impelling a violent reaction, perpetrated by those who cannot see the incongruity of imposing their "freedoms" on minorities and so forth. I understand that Marcuse would say children are the focal point from which this battle is won or lost, but how do you achieve that without enraging families who have been told/taught to believe seditious forces are attempting to brainwash their children, that it's done in the schools through re-education. Ironically the real dogmas perpetuated by larger factions of America seem to exist elsewhere. In, yes, my own personal object of bias, the church of modern American Christianity, that right-wing conflation of church with state variety (other places, too, but that's a big one). Is it crazy to say Christianity in these general terms I classify it, as one example of dogma, would be free of the scrutiny it now is subject to were it open to the rights of others to believe / worship / et al as they so choose? And is it not the fundamental opposition to this, to the rights of individuals to live as they choose, free of proselytism, that engenders a real cause for such antipathy?

How about, as long as I'm asking questions, if everyone believed the same thing as this very specific brand of Christianity I describe would that therefore make it true, finally, at long last? What about trees in the forest? At least people'd be able to sleep easier with the question of the righteousness of their beliefs taken off the table and ruled as beyond contest. That'd keep things simple, certainly.

Now, what was my point again? (Digression will be a big theme of blog posts from here on out, if it wasn't before.) Ah yes, this will be an ongoing series. Investigations in philosophy of the state and man, especially as such discussions prove relevant to whatever the hell is going on in our own country, in this day and age. I see a lot of good in opening up a dialogue. I see a lot of good, likewise, in not rambling on and onward in one single post forever.

(If it isn't apparent this is a post I've been building on and expanding for too long. I hope most of what I've written to this point flows well enough and plays off the preceding points I've made in a clear enough way, a way that by itself indicates the purposefulness of things being framed as they have been. If I have failed at this, I'm truly sorry but I hope it was a fruitful read, anyway. I don't want to waste anyone's time, especially by rambling.) 

Kafka had a Good Writerly Name, Wrote Good Short Stories, viz. "The Village Schoolmaster"

Maybe it's because I like him a lot, but no author's short fiction seems as subtly loaded with the minutiae of the human experience as Kafka's short fiction does. (Hmm, what? That's what everyone who's ever studied Kafka has noted about his work? Its abstruse, nuanced character? Well now so too am I!)

Case in point: his story "The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole]" in which there is the strange discovery of an abnormally large mole, hence the bracketed auxiliary title. But the brackets are a nice touch, suggesting the kind of compartmentalization into which the mole is relegated. So at first blush it's a story centering on a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon not unlike some other Kafka stories that come to mind, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor." Instead, though, the story is crafted to speak of issues very different, very complex and far less surreal than a giant mole. But then, would you expect any less from Kafka? What's more, what can you expect when reading Kafka? -- Not the unexpected, that's paradoxically for sure.

It's a story about the village schoolmaster who discovers the giant mole's existence. Even more awkwardly it's told through the first-person narration of "Mr. So and So," an individual referred to only as a businessman, but therefore of a rank suggesting he's held in some esteem, which it's safe to presume a lowly schoolmaster is beneath. And so the story begins to show its true nature, describing the contrivance of credibility and those possessing the means to adequately and convincingly argue their case, with all the superfluity accompanying any and every overture or public gesture.

It's conspicuous how the narrator chooses to handle the situation of the village schoolmaster. He wants to help the schoolmaster, but can find no way to adequately achieve this endeavor, which is ultimately botched despite his hyper-awareness of possible consequences. As the narrator puts it:

On the one hand my own influence was far from sufficient to effect a change in learned or even public opinion in the teacher's favor, while on the other the teacher was bound to notice that I was less concerned with his main object, which was to prove that the giant mole had actually been seen than to defend his honesty, which must naturally be self-evident to him and in need of no defense.

The narrator sums up his travails / the dilemma of attempting to represent the side of the schoolmaster. What I think is so cool about it is there is no debating where the mole fits in the narrative, i.e. tangentially. The mole is an aside, maybe even a footnote, but probably it doesn't even warrant a footnote. They could be talking about spontaneous toilet explosions and the narrative would change not at all. (Well, a little bit, if only to describe the expulsion of water and porcelain shrapnel.) It's about how we the people negotiate the human interactive landscape, how to best speak on another's behalf with the classist tools you possess. The narrator I think definitely understands the nature of human behavior, or at least as goes the finer points of custom.

This really is the kind of story you could write endlessly about, because it's so fucking layered. And it's oddly intense. And for all those reasons and more it's just plainly brilliant.

After the narrator publishes a pamphlet with the misguided belief that it will help confirm the veracity of the schoolmaster's claim he slowly but surely finds a different truth, to wit:

. . . the few opponents of his who had really occupied themselves with the subject, if superficially, had at least listened to his, the schoolmaster's, views before they had given expression to their own: while I, on the strength of unsystematically assembled and in part misunderstood evidence, had published conclusions which, even if they were correct as regarded the main point, must evoke incredulity, and among the public no less than the educated.

Because that's what people will do. It's amazing! And with that I close this review. But I still don't think I've sated the itch, scratched to the end. We'll see. May be more to come on this story. There may need to be.

Nabokov's Beheading Invite; Kafka Guest of Honor

Cordially invited to witness something like a beheading. It's fair to say Vladimir Nabokov's "Invitation to a Beheading" is not your usual story involving the issuance of keenly violent corporal punishment. Nabokov wouldn't be Nabokov if he had a habit of doing that, or moreover suggested the possibility that his writing was derivative of whatever it is I'm describing.

Stylistic similarities are notable, though, and a name does come to mind: Kafka. This work is not lock, stock & barrel reminiscent but reminiscent nonetheless of everyone's favorite modernist, Franz Kafka. The (possibly kneejerk or wanton) comparisons I've heard were made are, for good or ill, both reasonable and apt. Actually, if I had any issue with the novel it was that I could not find a way to shed this obvious comparison from what is a typically enjoyable read by Nabokov.

I know those who are familiar are familiar with The Term, but I refuse to use it, REFUSE! Nevertheless, I can think of no more appropriate novel to apply it, The Term, than "Invitation to a Beheading." That now said, there are differences, distinct and notable differences, of course, concerning the styles of Kafka and Nabokov. (I also won't delve further into the fact that Nabokov claims not to have read anything by the famed Prague writer at the time of his penning "Invitation" -- which may certainly be true, but changes not a bit of its kindredness, in any case.)

The descriptions of sexuality, in euphemism and in more overt exhortation, is definitely apparent in "Beheading" where if extant in Kafka, it was far more on the latent (or cryptic) side of regard. Here for example is a reflection of the main character, Cinncinatus C., who is entreating in a letter his estranged wife, Marthe, to visit him anon, after their first visit together went poorly. He understands she has betrayed him; she has always been fairly cavalier about it. But he writes to her the following lurid if metaphorical description of his witnessed understanding:

Your and his kisses, which most resembled some sort of feeding, intent, untidy, and noisy. Or when you, with eyes closed tight, devoured a spurting peach and then, having finished but still swallowing, with your mouth still full, you cannibal, your glazed eyes wandered, your fingers were spread, your inflamed lips were all glossy, your chin trembled, all covered with drops of the cloudy juice, which trickled down onto your bared bosom, while the Priapus who had nourished you suddenly, with a convulsive oath, turned his bent back to me, who had entered the room at the wrong moment.

Huh? Well it was just a peach -- except that, wait a minute (NSFW) a peach kind of looks like the head of a penis, if you want to start invoking Fraudian theory and why I like peaches so much (which I'd prefer we cease with the digging into my own psyche and focus on Nabokov's really excellent and let's face it well known perversion). I don't think there's much reading between the lines here that's necessary -- Nabokov is describing in arguably the most eloquent terms I've heard it described the aftermath of a really effusive fellating. Lucky Priapus.

Can I speak to the ambiguity of each great writer for a moment? Yes? It's my blog? Oh, well right. Anyway, both Kafka (whom I plan to discuss in closer detail soon, having recently read and enjoyed his short story "The Village Schoolmaster") and Nabokov use the ambiguity of power, of its exercise, of the notion that there's a real lack of institutional oversight from an institution we might ought not to invest very much trust in, to express a kind of deficit in the variances of human relation, that there is a grievous lack of understanding and empathy threatening to widen an already-too-wide gap extant between us. Moreover, through humor (satirical elements but also plain old oddball irony) they illustrate the great lack of a brain, of a consciously evil presence that seeks to destroy the members of its society that are deemed anathematical. Instead, what you get is bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake, and whatever some abstraction of tradition and its oft inexplicable purpose has set forth as The Way of conduct in any society that at its core seeks either to normalize or expel.

I won't presume to know what the thought process of these two famously great writers was in writing their stories, nor in specific "Invitation to a Beheading." What I will say is that while I see both share a brooding manner in their work (nonplussed but detachedly so, angry in a sense but with the futility of a wildlife documentarian allowing nature to take its course, and thus showcasing this course taken, doing so wryly, too, as if it were not a documentary with animal subjects all of a sudden but switched to a human subject), the difference to me is that where Kafka will explicate the subtleties of the human relational experience, the distrust to be found between compatriots who mince words and regard each other with skepticism of a contemptuous but unspoken degree, which is deflected nicely to the issues that exist beside the case and are used to ably justify the contempt and contention that is ultimately unrelated and unspoken, smoke and mirrors to unconsciously muddle relational progress. This is of course only one way to dissect relational patterns in Kafka, but I think it is one he showcased with frequency. Some of his short stories stand out in my mind as evidence of this narrative streak, "The Penal Colony," "The Village Schoolmaster," and "The Judgment."

Nabokov reflects a greater solipsism or emptiness of relational gratification. His character Cinncinatus C. is unable to ever express his point to anyone, and his life has been riddled with nothing but abject failure and betrayal at the moments he lets his guard down. Every person with whom he associates in "An Invitation to a Beheading" is quick to list his flaws and quick to prescribe solutions to them. One chapter that was especially good at demonstrating this nature of Cinncinatus' circumstances was chapter thirteen in which the above cited quote is to be found, and which concludes with a game of chess played between Cinncinatus and his fellow prisoner Pierre, whose motives are for much of the story ambiguous but always questionable. The game is narrated by Pierre who humorously and constantly amends his moves and questions the logic of Cinncinatus' -- whose moves are definitely effective and thus constantly necessitate Pierre's unfair move retractions and so forth. And while a humorous episode, it also describes a fundament, I think, of the novel's ethos, of whatever higher motivation there was to describing Cinncinatus' plight. The owner of all the moves, whoever he is, is not Cinncinatus, and he is not a benign and loving god, either.