So much miscellany (books, movies, speakers)

Unexpectedly I am watching the Caps in game 1 of the Stanley Cup. This is unexpected primarily because Washington teams forever seem to blow their wads too early, and so it's slightly surprising that they've made it to the league finals. Sorry, but that's an honest assessment. See RGIII times many, for example. Though I've been a DCer since 2005, I'm still a Cubs fan through and through, and to a lesser degree, a Seahawks and Bruins fan. I think this has to do with growing up in Louisiana which has/had, prior to the Saints, no such thing as a pro team, a father who much preferred college football, having zero athletic inclination myself, and being visual enough to appreciate the aesthetics of good (and bad) uniforms. 

In any case, I do love the physicality of hockey and the fact that hockey players do on skates, on ice, and in bulky gear, what some of us cannot even do on our feet, on land, and in no gear. It's really something at times- beautiful, graceful, and then POW! I love it. Go Caps!

This past week has been full. FULL, y'all! In so many ways I love living in DC- it is an embarrassment of riches culturally, and despite fatigue, I ate it up this week.

Monday: Cecile Richards (a heroine of mine) and Kate Germano (new to me but wow) in conversation with Michel Martin (one of my favorite radio personalities) at the Hirshhorn Museum. Cecile's new book is Make Trouble and Kate recently wrote Fight Like a Girl. I told Cecile how much I enjoyed last month's Planned Parenthood Metro DC gala and that I was a monthly donor to PP-IN on behalf of Wax Pence, and she said, "We all need to keep up the good fight. Tough to be a woman in the midwest in some ways, so thank you." PS- Cecile is stunningly beautiful. All three women are stunningly articulate. WOMEN!
After the event, I wandered into a side garden by the Hirsshorn. It's so lovely, and I am covetous of the bug hotel there.


Tuesday: T and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary. It was one of the nicest anniversaries in a while, and I made a great dinner. You should all try this fried asparagus with miso dressing from Nobu. and really, when is key lime pie ever bad?!


Wednesday: A dear friend and I met other friends and members of our school community at the National Portrait Gallery for a private showing of The Sweat of Their Face with my friend and the co-curator of the show and the head of our school whose area of study and dissertation was America's working class and the various representations of it. Also got to see the Obama portraits again and the new Henrietta Lacks portrait!

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Friday: Tom and I took the boys and a friend each to the opening night of Solo, the newest Star Wars story/flick. We all loved it and found it delightful. (In fact, Oliver and I saw it again today.) A) Alden Ehrenreich is a perfect young Han, and B) Donald Glover (who is always good and also hot) is a magnificent Lando, and C) Ron Howard really did almost-perfect justice to this back-story. Lady Proxima is a "no" and why does Dryden Vos have the facial scarring but otherwise, A+!!

Sunday: Cirque du Soleil with the kids. Luzia is no Kurios, that's for sure. Dang. I didn't much care for the show. The kids didn't either. The bendable man who could rest his own head in his butt crack was disconcerting, and the women don't need to be nearly naked to be impressive.
Today (Monday): Solo again. It's fantastic.

Meanwhile: I finished The Complete Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn. I'd started reading them prior to the release of the 5-part Patrick Melrose series on Showtime staring, yes, my Benedict, and my god are they spectacular. INCREDIBLE prose, not least because the story itself is largely autobiographical. I've watched the first two PM episodes and while I do think Benedict is perfectly cast as Patrick, I found the first episode lacking. The second, while terrifically tough to watch, is excellent. The novels are magnificent. I couldn't put them down. 

Alright, y'all, it's 2-2 Caps-Golden Knights. More later. 

My children are safe at home tonight

One of my sons has been asleep for a couple hours now, tucked in after a fun family afternoon, a good dinner, and a warm bath. 

The other just got home from a school dance, sweaty and flushed and "so pumped up." He smelled a bit, but I couldn't help but hold him tight as he told me about the dance and the music and the ice cream. He's had a tough year, and I was so hopeful that tonight would be fun. It was. And now, he is safely in bed, here with us at home.

Worrying about your child having fun at a middle school dance is a typical, expected parental concern.

Worrying that your child will be shot to death at their school is not, should not be, cannot become an expected parental concern.

Today, again, more children were gunned down while simply trying to go to school. While most of us are counting down the few remaining days of this academic year, some parents tonight are instead planning shockingly unexpected funerals. With this, the 22nd school shooting of this year and the third just this week, "2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members."

If we as a nation are not mortified and ashamed into real action by that obvious disregard for our children (and the converse which is the obvious idolatrous obsession with firearms), then we are truly beyond repair. 

It's the guns, stupid.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the white murderer was taken into custody without a scratch. If he'd been black, he'd have been blown to smithereens in moments.

Jesmyn Ward

Last night I had the profound fortune to meet Jesmyn Ward and to hear her discuss her most recent novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, with Aminatta Forna. I have been an enormous fan of Ms. Ward's since reading Sing, Unburied, Sing early this year, after which I immediately read Salvage the Bones. She won the National Book Award for both books, the first woman ever to do so. I'm now reading her memoir, Men We Reaped, and have in my stack of to-reads the essay collection she edited, The Fire This Time

If you're not familiar with Jesmyn Ward, please acquaint yourself for she is a stunningly gifted writer. Born in Oakland to Mississippi-bred parents, she was raised in DeLisle, Mississippi, as her parents moved back when Jesmyn was three. She was the first in her family to attend college, earning a BA and MA from Stanford. She also has an MFA from the University of Michigan and is now a professor at Tulane. Her family home flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and the storm, as well as south Mississippi, makes a regular appearance in her work. 

A few months ago, when I heard she would be speaking here in DC, I bought a ticket as quickly as I could, and last night, no amount of fatigue or running around all afternoon with the kids could keep me from getting to the event 50 minutes early to obtain the best seat possible (thank you, dear T, for leaving work early to meet me in the parking lot and whisk the children away so I could scurry inside). 

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Like the lit nerd I most definitely am, I went armed with a tote bag full of Ms. Ward's books, sat in my seat like the eager student I also am, and felt positively star struck when she walked on stage. She is a luminous human with real humility and a quietly powerful presence. I could not help but beam at her throughout the evening and even mustered the courage to ask a question which, per my usual nerdiness (who remembers the three-part question I addressed to Gabrielle Hamilton?), turned into a two-part query that she was kind enough to answer in full.   

She talked about how she writes, told us that beginnings are difficult for her but that she has to write linearly so soldiers on until the beginning is as it should be, that she is not the most confident writer, that her characters just come to her and then she follows them through their journeys. She doesn't like to write villians because “They’re flat and don’t engender empathy or interest. People are complicated. I don’t want my readers to feel easy emotions.”

She talked about why she writes, and why, despite her "love-hate" relationship with Mississippi, she moved back home after her brother's untimely death. 

"I am trying to bring forgotten stories from the violent past back into the light and into the public memory and imagination." Stories before her time but also during, as the only black student at an all-white high school one of her mother's employers paid for her to attend. Stories about beloved men -brothers, friends, family- lost to poverty, drugs, racism, and happenstance.

Why?

"Because there is an effort to disavow and rewrite that history. That results in its continuation." Same root, same violence. We see it every day.

Regarding home. "I left as soon as I could. But I have a huge family, and they are all there. I was missing out, time I couldn't get back...Living at home keeps me honest and lends urgency to my work." For, as Ward softly averred, "The violence of America endures." When asked by Ms. Forna if she believed a truth and reconciliation effort a la Canada's might be needed here, Ms. Ward replied, "Yes." Firmly, resolutely, "yes. But is there the will? Not now."

Ms. Forna replied that indeed, "the absence of a will to reconcile with its past is shocking for visitors to America." 

I hope desperately that in the immediate future we become willing, as a country, to own and atone for our past. I think efforts like the newly unveiled lynching memorial in Montgomery, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, are excellent starts but we need a national movement and a national reckoning. Ms. Ward suggested that we all read Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism post haste. I have ordered it already.

After reading several passages, shyly really, or perhaps just humbly, and answering all our questions, Ms. Ward received a standing ovation that brought me to tears. Then, in a largely polite fashion, people queued by number to have books signed and share a few words. Fortunately for the five books I had in my tote, the limit on signed copies was five. I had one inscribed for a dear friend and the others for starstruck me.

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I was grateful to have the brief chance to be near Jesmyn Ward, to thank her for sharing her profound gifts, to wish her the best in her next endeavors. I was grateful to have a supportive spouse, to live in a city with such rich resources and opportunities, to bear witness to the strength and resilience and diverse beauty that really are what make America special. 

I was pensive on my drive home, speechless really. Tom and the kids were playing Monopoly despite the late hour. I poured a bourbon and made some scrambled eggs and sat at our kitchen table considering that Ms. Ward might still be signing books and hoping that she felt full in good ways. That she could feel and ingest our gratitude and admiration and that perhaps those sensations might offer her some company when her confidence falters or the loneliness of a blank page is undesired.