A friend and I chat about Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents. It was a good conversation — so I think. A substantive, earnest thinking-through together. There is agreement that this could become a “reading group” of sorts. We’ve at least agreed to read another book together. But perhaps I should refocus my energies elsewhere. Grow vegetables. Tend the land. On my shelf sits Leaves of Grass. Beside it sit other books relevant to my work as a teacher: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Thoreau’s Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Time to clean up and make good. At some point I also ought to read Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. Sarah urges me to rethink. The book I need to read at present, she reminds me, is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.
Tag: Leslie Marmon Silko
Saturday January 25, 2020
Each day we invent new terms of affection for her: Buddha nugget, snuggle bunny, astral glow worm. We march through the neighborhood en masse, forming spontaneously around ourselves a people’s patrol. I picture as our avatars the toughs from Double Dragon. Afterwards I stand outdoors reading Thoreau on wild fruits. I take breaks and dip into Sherry L. Smith’s Hippies, Indians & the Fight for Red Power, a book that references an angry 1978 review-essay by Leslie Marmon Silko accusing Gary Snyder of “cultural imperialism.” Snyder’s book Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. It’s a book I wish to teach alongside the Silko essay the next time I teach American Literature.
Trance-Scripts 