A Syllabus for Right Now: Week Four

Week Four: Yes, and—

(Week 1; Week 2; Week 3)

From I’m Looking Through You, by Tim Davis

“Yes, and” is, of course, the basic unit of improv comedy, a method by which one comedian accepts and expands the premise of another. A form of collaboration. It’s also a method of this genre, a means of being open to, and following the possibilities of a story rather than turning narrative into argument. I love the photographer Tim Davis’ work because like so many writers in this genre he’s a wanderer, and his visual response to what he encounters—both in the moment of making a photograph, and later, in the production of a book which proceeds through pairings such as this one—is a kind of “yes, and.”

Or maybe it’s a slant rhyme. That’s a poetic term for a “type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not-identical sounds.” Also known as a “lazy rhyme,” which is apt since I just quoted that definition from Wikipedia. Lazy, indeed. But I’m glad I did because I found this delightful example, from a Sex Pistols’ 1977 punk anthem:

God save the Queen

the fascist regime.

Overstatement, perhaps, or maybe a perfectly imperfect rhyme, a recognition of the monarchy’s constriction of a deeper democracy. A following lyric reads:

There is no future

in England’s dreaming.

A different kind of overstatement. Hyperbole that clarifies the meaning and literary potential of slant rhyme, the pairing of like/unlike sounds/images/ideas.

Here are a couple more, arranged by photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb by means of shape and color and meaning, from their book Slant Rhymes. It begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Writing: Keep going with what you began last week.

Reading:

1. Method: excerpt, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, by Patricia Evangelista

2. Method: “Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti, Harper’s

3. Looking: More “yes, and,” pairs from Tim Davis’s I’m Looking Through You.

4. Resource: “Ten of My Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” by Lydia Davis, LitHub. This is how a fiction writer does it. She keeps a notebook, too.

5. Resource: “Inside the Iron Closet,” annotated by Jeff Sharlet and Elon Green. I add my own work here, adapted with Elon Green not because you should emulate my work but because this annotation peeks behind the curtain of a finished work, and as such functions as both a possible how-to and an example of “Yes, and”—there’s the finished story, and what I also wished I could have written, and Green’s responses.

Green’s a great literary journalist, author of two works that might be said to be queering the true crime genre: Last Call, about a series of murders of men picked up at gay bars in 1990s Manhattan, and The Man Nobody Killed, about Michael Stewart, a young Black graffiti artist beaten to death by NYC police in 1983. Another, terrifying slant rhyme: Defacement: (The Death of Michael Stewart), by another young Black graffiti artist, Jean-Michael Basquiat, who instead of being killed would receive all the acclaim of the art world.

“It could have been me,” said Basquiat, who knew Stewart before he died. The photograph above of the painting is by Allison Chipak, and accompanies a good article about the painting in New York magazine by Dream McClinton.

If only this slant rhyme could end there. But it doesn’t—it has echoed countless times since, death by death up to the summer of 2020 and the nationwide surge of Black Lives Matter protests—to which President Trump on April 28th issued his response: “Strengthening and Unleashing Law Enforcement…” Always pay attention to the verbs: unleashing. “Please,” the President once told a group of police officers, praising the violent treatment of arrestees, “don’t be too nice.”

6. Data: “Dartmouth only Ivy to abstain from signing letter against Trump administration funding cuts,” by Kelsey Wang and Charlotte Hampton, The Dartmouth, and “Our University’s Commitment to You,” by Cora Frazier, The New Yorker

7. Context, “Investigate,” from On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, illustrated by Nora Krug. Below. Snyder, a historian, became famous beyond academe for his harrowing book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. He subsequently distilled what he’d learned from his study of those dictators’ accrual of power into a short book called On Tyranny, published in 2017. It became a surprise #1 bestseller. Or maybe not such a surprise. “History does not repeat,” he writes, “but it does instruct.” Hence, thus far, our slant rhyme approach to the past: in Week Two, via the dreams recorded by Charlotte Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams; in Week Three, via the kitchen table conversations documented by Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free.

This is not 1933, and we’e not in Germany. We are in the United States, in 2025. Snyder offers us not a repetition but a possible lesson, with the help of a German graphic memoirist named Nora Krug.

Snyder was until recently a senior professor of history at Yale; along with two other Yale senior scholars of fascism frequently targeted by far-right enthusiasts, he has taken an indefinite position at the University of Toronto.

(Online readers: I can’t reproduce Snyder’s and Krug’s entire chapter here, but I’ve selected a few pages below. You can read the rest in the book, which should be engaged with in print.)

“While anyone can repost an article,” writes Snyder, “researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride ‘the mainstream media,’ note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that’s edgy and difficult.

“So try for yourself to write a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining relationships with sources, researching in written records, verifying everything, writing and revising….”

NEXT WEEK: Samizdat.