A Syllabus for Right Now: Week Three

This afternoon I was sitting on a bench outside my office reading ahead in my syllabus when a colleague stopped to chat. She asked what I was working on. I told her about a project inspired by Charlotte Beradt’s Third Reich of Dreams, which appeared on Week Two of “A Syllabus for Right Now.” I’m collecting dreams and their contexts in this moment as Beradt did in Germany beginning in 1933. “Some of them were obvious,” I said, “you know, ‘a Nazi came to my office,’ and some are indirect. There’s a woman who dreams that her oven is listening to her, recording her words for the authorities. Shades of Alexa.”

My colleague wouldn’t share her dreams, but she said, “speaking of the oven,” she was moving from digital distribution of materials back to paper. How long might it be before MAGA’s lower echelons begin sniffing through syllabi for unMAGA thoughts? After all, Vice-President Vance has declared “Professors are the enemy.”

I think she’s right. I think that’s coming. But I think Vance is right, too. Professors are and should be the enemy of those who’d strangle academic freedom. So maybe I’m getting ahead of the curve: Here you go, MAGA. Here’s what my students and I are reading in “The Reporters,” a creative nonfiction course in which students seek to document the Trumpocene as it plays out in our little corner of New England.

Week Three: Evidence

There is a space between what we see

and the actual, which means there is no such thing

as absolute proof, only competing accounts…

--Erika Meitner, “Images from the Archive of the Institute for Esoteric Research”

A collaborative artwork: Page 80 of an address book belonging to the late Jeffrey Epstein, redacted by the Trump administration Department of Justice; shared by journalist Jason Leopold, who has been referred to by an FBI official as a “FOIA terrorist.”

“Jeffrey Epstein” signifies both a billionaire child sex trafficker and a nexus of conspiracy theories from across the political spectrum. Liberals point out that Donald Trump partied with Epstein and flew on his private plane; Trump supporters point out that Bill Clinton partied with Epstein and flew on his private plane. Both facts are true, and yet neither proves that either man participated in Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Maybe one did, maybe both did, maybe neither. None of these possibilities would prove that those whose political beliefs align them with Bill Clinton or Donald Trump would be complicit in those crimes. And yet, all of these possibilities point to the collaborative nature of belief—close cousin to art—and the way Joan Didion’s famous observation, in her book The White Album, that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” has as much to do with the stories we tell about other people.

“FOIA” stands for the Freedom of Information Act, establishing the right of and procedure for the public to review the documents created by its government. It dates back to a 1967 act of Congress. Art has so many authors! To whom do we attribute this composition? Epstein, the billionaire financier and sex offender at the heart of a thousand conspiracy theories? Is Jes Staley—third column, second entry; a former J.P. Morgan CEO who appeared to resign from his public financial endeavors after his association with Epstein was reported—a collaborator? “Fun tonight,” Staley reportedly wrote Epstein of a visit he planned while Epstein was on house arrest for sex crimes. “What do we do next?????”

Or so reports the St. Thomas Source, a newspaper covering the U.S. Virgin Islands, in an article detailing documents released in a lawsuit by the Virgin Islands against J.P. Morgan. But I haven’t seen those documents! Only the one above, redacted; and, on a wall in Cleveland, I found this additional data:

If you’re not familiar with Kurt Cobain or Courtney Love, I’ll let you “do your own research.”

Here’s an unnecessary link to a Courtney Love song, “Violet,” from 1994. Maybe there’s a writing tip here: I listened to it on repeat countless times as a student writer. That’s just a matter of my decades-past 21-yr-old taste, of no importance. The tip: A sonic backdrop of repetition sometimes helps me lock into a creative mental space. The practice might work for you, too.

ASSIGNMENTS

Looking: American Geography, a 15-minute film by Matt Black. The film is a rough approximation of his book of the same title, and his subsequent book, American Artifacts. The photograph above, by Black, is one such artifact. It’s a mattress in Flint, Michigan, but it could be a mattress closer to us, in the camps behind the “Miracle Mile” in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, or in West Fairlee, Vermont. Or, it’s snow; or, it’s abstraction. The video gives you a sense of Black’s portraiture and ear for voices; it also features his eye for such “artifacts,” the detritus most step around or over. A reading journal assignment: Select a moment or photograph to pause on. Make a screen shot. Print the screen shot. Write a response—personal, literary, or otherwise. Add the screenshot and your response to the syllabus.

Writing: The assignment is the same as it’s been, but I’m giving you two weeks to allow you more time to find and sink into a place or a scene, some kind of story, before you have to pivot to writing. More time to immerse. That doesn’t mean you can’t be writing all along, producing “fabric”—fragments—every time you venture into the world, or maybe when, after walking across the Green, a thought, a possibility occurs. Immersion means not just time spent in the setting of the story but a kind of thread of contemplation pulled through daily life. Keeping the story always, inasmuch as possible, present in the back of the mind. Open to intersection with all your other concerns—so that another course’s reading, or a conversation with family, or a silly TikTok video, or just a juxtaposition of light and heat and sound on a particular spring day may suddenly spark a possibility. Creative nonfiction can draw from everything. A practice I recommend: when such thoughts occur, if you’re not in a position to write them down, make a voice memo. It’s a different mental process, speaking instead of writing, and sometimes it leads to new insights.

Reading:

1. Method: “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” by Joan Didion. A classic of the genre, it’s a story comprised of fragments, bits of fabric Didion presents not as an a-to-b-to-c story but as a kind of constellation.

2. Method: “Racked by Pain”; “She Devoted Her Life”; “Their Son’s Death,” by Eli Saslow, with photographs by Erin Schaff, New York Times. Saslow is as much as any journalist I know investigating through narrative nonfiction the ways in which the political moment plays out in the lives of everyday people. He’s a newspaper feature writer; he is as invisible in the action of his stories as Didion is present in hers. There is no “right” answer to the question of first person or third when it comes to literary journalism, but with Didion and Saslow we encounter a brilliant practitioner of each. Saslow will be visiting us in class by zoom; come prepared with questions. Bio:

Eli Saslow is a writer-at-large for the New York Times. He is a 2023 and a 2014 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, 2016, and 2017. He has published three books, including the bestselling Rising Out of Hatred, which won the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is a Writers Guild of America screenwriter, and the co-writer for Four Good Days, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Since I’m posting this after the fact, a few pieces of advice Saslow offered the class. He told us he often looks for a story at a “moment of tension.” If the situation is static, his presence—a NYT reporter—becomes the story. He looks for situations in which his subjects have more pressing matters to consider. In “Racked by Pain,” a MAGA conspiracy theorist seeks a snake oil medical treatment for severe pain; in “She Devoted Her Life,” a laid-off federal employee waits to find out what will become of her job, which is her calling; in “Their Son’s Death,” parents of a child killed in an accident face the MAGA politicization of his death. “I try to be there to watch the tension evolve,” Saslow said.

Such work, he advised, “is a matter of patience.” He’ll often spent many days or weeks with a subject. The first day, he says, is mostly just talk, he and the subject getting to know each other. He waits until his presence stops being so important to them; until he can observe conversations rather than be a part of them. “It takes awhile for the temperature to come down.”

3. Listening: “Perceived Threat,” by Sandhya Dirks (new Dartmouth faculty!) and Sukey Lewis, On Our Watch

4. Resource: “The Language of Trauma,” by Aubrey Hirsch, Florida Review

5. Data

   “Upper Valley Man Detained,” by Auditi Guha, VTDigger

   “No evidence linking Tufts student to antisemtism or terrorism…” by John Hudson, Washington Post

   “Tufts U. student arrested…” doorbell camera video, posted by NBC News.

8. Perception: “What Would You Have Done?” by Milton Mayer, from his book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

9. And last an old poem, below, the poem from which Didion took the title of her essay we’re reading this week and her most famous book. You may have encountered it, safely, in high school; it’s one of the best-known poems in English, by the Irish Nobelist William Butler Yeats. In quieter times, it’s an artifact, the fevers of 1919 forgotten—the wreckage of World War I, the 1918 Great Flu Pandemic, the Irish War of Independence. In 1958, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recalled that mood of turmoil with the title of his now-canonical anti-colonialist novel Things Fall Apart. In 1967, examining the great cultural flux of her time, against the backdrop of the building U.S. war in Vietnam, Didion found the language she needed in the poem. In 2013, a political pundit named Jonathan Alter, celebrating what he considered the United States’ steady and irrevocable progress toward equality and stability, inverted Yeats’ language with the now-tragic title The Center Holds. Which brings us to the current moment, and the echoes of the old in what Erica Heilman described as “what now sounds like”:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?