This seminar series is concerned with the latter

.

Over the past four seminars, we have followed a story through several stages of its emergence. We began with the question of how an idea becomes a story. We then considered why certain images remain with us, and how an image can become more than description—how it can begin carrying the weight of an idea. From there, we examined how a writer moves a reader from a moment to a meaning, and then looked beneath the visible surface of an essay to consider the invisible structures that allow writing to feel natural and alive.

Each seminar has taken us a little farther beneath the finished sentence.

Today we arrive at the true heart of composition. A writer may have an idea. A story may begin to form around it. Images may appear. Connections may emerge. Meaning may begin to gather. The prose may even acquire a rhythm of its own.

And then comes the surgery.

The writer looks at what has accumulated and faces the question every piece of writing eventually asks:

What belongs?

And its companion:

What needs to be left behind?

A writer cannot determine what belongs merely by deciding what is good...God I hate that word it’s almost as bad as stupid. A beautiful sentence may be unnecessary. A funny passage may be distracting. A fascinating fact may lead the story nowhere. A memory may be true and still belong to another story. An idea may be important and still arrive too early. Even a sentence that the writer loves may have to go and it’s within that final incision that the heart of the story becomes observable.

So today’s seminar will not begin with a finished essay.

It will begin with a rough one.

The purpose is to watch the process by which a writer discovers the difference between material that exists in the draft and material the story actually needs.

And, as usual, Thornton Krell,the master of metaphysiction and author of The Shattered Universe has agreed to conduct the experiment.

Here he is ......the master of metaphysiction and author of The Shattered Universe

Thornton Krell entered the classroom carrying a stack of papers. He placed them on the desk then he looked at the students.

“Five.”

He walked to the board and wrote:

SEMINAR FIVE

Beneath it he wrote:

HOW DOES A WRITER KNOW WHAT BELONGS—
AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE LEFT BEHIND?

He turned toward the class.

“Today we’re going to find out whether a story can tell you what belongs.”

He picked up the stack of papers.

“Or whether you have to tell the story.”

He began passing out the pages.

“The material in front of you is a rough essay.”

He waited until everyone had a copy.

“It is called Nepal Had Other Ideas.”

He returned to the board.

“And we’re going to do something slightly different today.”

He wrote:

WHY IS THIS HERE?

Then:

WHAT DOES IT CONTRIBUTE?

Then:

WHAT HAPPENS IF I REMOVE IT?

He paused.

Then he wrote one final question:

DOES THE STORY NEED IT?

Krell put down the chalk.

“Those are your questions.”

He pointed toward the pages.

“Don’t improve the essay.”

He pointed toward the board.

“Interrogate it.”

He looked around the room.

“Because today we’re not trying to discover whether the writing is good.”

A pause.

“We’re trying to discover what the writing is doing.”

He turned back toward the board.

He stared at the four questions for a moment.

Then he picked up the chalk again.

“Actually…”

He wrote beneath them:

WHAT DOES THE STORY NEED TO BECOME?

He looked at it.

The students looked at it.

Krell considered the sentence for another second.

Then he drew a single line straight through it.

“Five questions.”

He turned toward the class.

“Four will do.”

A few students laughed.

Krell nodded toward the crossed-out question.

“And there’s your first lesson.”

He put down the chalk.

“Revision begins before you touch the manuscript.”

He sat down.

“Begin.”

THE ROUGH DRAFT

The students looked down at the pages.

At the top:

Nepal Had Other Ideas

Then the first line:

You ever think about mountains

?

Big things. They sit there. They look permanent. Then every once in a while one of them moves and when a mountain moves, you get out of the way.

That’s all I’m saying.

Mountains move. And yes, they come out of the sky and they stand there

[And then another voice enters.]

There are forces in the world whose magnitude we mistake for stillness.A mountain appears permanent because we measure permanence by the length of our own lives.

A glacier appears inert because its movement exceeds our perception. Gravity requires no permission. Ice requires no intention. Water requires no explanation. When these forces converge, what appears immovable can become catastrophic motion.

We call such moments disasters.

Perhaps they are also reminders.

[And now the story.]

If you know a lot of guys like me, there’s a good chance that one of those guys has a friend who had an adventure in Nepal.

I’m one of those guys myself. I had such a friend. He taught with me for one year. 1970 maybe.

Then he joined the Peace Corps. Then he went to Nepal. When he was in Nepal, he was walking that’s where he went. He went about as far as he could walk.

And one time he found himself riding an elephant.

And one time he found himself riding an elephant.

I don’t know how a guy from Rochester, New York, winds up riding an elephant in Nepal but he did.

And he told me that while he was up there on the elephant, something started happening to him.

He started looking at himself.

Really looking at himself.

And he began to realize that the person sitting on top of that elephant couldn’t possibly be the same person who had been standing in front of a high-school classroom a year earlier.

He was still trying to hold on to that guy. The teacher. The American. The Peace Corps volunteer. The guy who had gone to Nepal thinking he might be able to help.

Maybe teach.

Maybe improve things.

Maybe help the people there become a little more like him.

But there he was.

Sitting on an elephant In Nepal,

And he was beginning to understand that this wasn’t going to work.

He never knew exactly how he got from the elephant to the ashram but that’s where he woke up; flat on his back.

People were kindly attending to him.

There were various kinds of balm being applied to various parts of his body.

And then he looked up.

The ceiling was beautifully decorated.

Spiritually decorated.

There were gods and goddesses everywhere.

Human figures.

Animal figures.

Figures that seemed to move back and forth between human and animal.

And there was Ganesha.

The elephant-headed god

.

Now, I didn’t know much about Ganesha then, and I’m still no expert, but I’ve learned a little about him since.

Ganesha is one of the best-known Hindu deities. He is the son of Shiva and Parvati, and he is usually shown with a human body and the head of an elephant.

He’s associated with wisdom and learning.

He’s associated with beginnings.

He’s the god people turn to when they’re starting something new.

And he’s known as the remover of obstacles.

That last part gets me. Because my friend was lying there in an ashram at the beginning of something he didn’t yet understand.

And the obstacle wasn’t exactly the road ahead.

It was the road behind.

It was the person he had brought with him.

The American.

The teacher.

The Peace Corps volunteer.

The guy who thought he had come to help other people. And now he was the one being helped.

He had just been riding an elephant. Now he was lying on his back looking up at an elephant-headed god.

I don’t know whether he knew what Ganesha represented at that moment.

Maybe he didn’t know anything about him.

Maybe he just saw the elephant.

But later, when he told me the story, the connection was impossible to miss.

Ganesha was the remover of obstacles.

And my friend had an obstacle.

Himself.

So he let go.

He stopped trying to make the people around him become more like him.

He stopped trying to make Nepal accommodate the person he had been.

He was alone there.

He needed them.

So he accepted their help.

He let them teach him.

He let Nepal change him.

And he survived.

There was another elephant in this story.

My friend was from Rochester, New York.

And if you’ve spent much time in Rochester, you’ve probably been to the George Eastman House.

And if you’ve been to the George Eastman House, you’ve probably seen the elephant head.

The real elephant head.

Mounted there.

My friend had seen it.

He had told me about it.

So there was an elephant in Rochester.

Then there was an elephant in Nepal.

Then there was Ganesha.

I don’t know what that means.

Maybe it means nothing.

But there it is.

Rochester.

Elephant.

Nepal.

Elephant.

Ashram.

Elephant.

Sometimes a story keeps handing you the same object until you finally figure out you’re supposed to be looking at it.

Anyway, my friend came home from Nepal a different person.

How different?

Well, his driving wasn’t too good.

After all that walking, I suppose the automobile had lost some of its authority.

He had been walking.

He had been riding elephants.

He had been waking up in ashrams.

He had been looking up at Ganesha.

And now somebody expected him to get back into a car and drive like an American.

That may have been asking too much.

But he also brought something else home.

Hundreds of slides.

Hundreds.

And to this day, I think it was the best slideshow I’ve ever seen.

Not technically.

Humanly.

It was full of people.

Faces.

Villages.

Mountains.

And smiles.

Lots of smiles.

My friend had a gift for bringing out smiles in people.

I’m not suggesting everybody in Nepal was smiling all the time.

Of course they weren’t.

But somehow, when he took their pictures, people smiled.

And that’s how I came to know Nepal.

Through him.

Through those slides.

Through those smiles.

For years, whenever I thought about Nepal, I thought about my friend.

And whenever I thought about my friend in Nepal, I thought about smiles.

Until a couple of days ago.

Then Nepal showed up on the national news.

And suddenly I was looking at a different picture.

Actually, it wasn’t just Nepal that had changed.

The news had changed.

When did the national news become a weather show?

Seriously.

When did we cross that line?

I don’t know exactly when.

But we crossed it.

The weather used to be the thing that came after the news.

Now it seems to be the thing that happens to the news.

Every night there’s another one.

A blizzard.

A tornado.

A flood.

A fire.

A hurricane.

Another atmospheric bastard has arrived.

And suddenly that’s the story.

The weather report used to interrupt the news.

Now the news interrupts the weather.

And then came Nepal.

It wasn’t the lead story.

The weather in the United States was.

But I couldn’t stop watching Nepal.

Because what I saw coming down that mountain was something I had never seen before.

And I don’t think anybody living has ever seen anything quite like it.

It looked like a fist.

A giant fist coming down the mountain.

Pounding.

Pounding.

Pounding a village.

I know what it was.

Ice.

Rock.

Water.

Mud.

A glacial collapse.

A debris flow.

A catastrophic flood.

Those are the words.

I believe the words.

But I watched the thing come down that mountain.

And what I saw was a fist.

And suddenly I thought of Marciano and Walcott.

That punch.

Bam.

And I heard the old language.

One.

Two.

Three.

Fuck you.

You fucking fucker.

Bam.

That’s the deadly combination.

Except this time there wasn’t a man throwing the punch.

It was nature.

Nature doesn’t have to be angry.

Nature doesn’t have to hate you.

Nature doesn’t have to be trying to teach you anything.

Nature just has to happen.

And when ice and rock and water and gravity and a mountain all decide to happen at the same time, you can wind up with one hell of a punch.

Pounding.

Pounding.

Pounding.

And the fist keeps coming.

That’s what I saw.

And I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Because Nepal had always been smiles to me.

My friend’s slides.

The people.

The faces.

The smiles.

And now Nepal was a fist.

And while I’m trying to write this, another news flash.

The Grand Canyon.

A flash flood.

A wall of water and debris coming through the canyon.

Two people dead.

Another person missing.

People rescued and evacuated.

Bridges damaged.

Trails closed.

And the park’s only water pipeline badly damaged.

The Grand Canyon.

For Christ’s sake.

What is a flood doing in the Grand Canyon?

Well, of course there are floods in the Grand Canyon.

Water made the damn thing.

That’s how the Grand Canyon got there.

But that’s almost beside the point.

Because when you see that much water suddenly charging through a place that looks as though it has been sitting there forever, it changes the picture.

It looked like a tidal wave inside the canyon.

A tidal wave where a tidal wave has no business being.

Except this wasn’t the ocean.

It was a canyon.

And the canyon had become a funnel.

The water came down through Bright Angel Canyon and into the Colorado River, carrying debris and boulders with it.

It damaged bridges.

It damaged trails.

It damaged the water system that keeps the people in the park supplied.

The canyon itself seemed to have changed its mind.

And there it was again.

Another warning.

Another punch.

Another reminder that permanence is largely a trick of human perception.

We look at the Grand Canyon and think:

That’s going to be there forever.

Of course it will.

It has been there forever.

Except it hasn’t.

It was made by movement.

Water.

Rock.

Time.

Gravity.

The whole damn thing is a monument to the fact that what looks permanent can move.

And suddenly I was thinking about my friend again.

Because he went to Nepal thinking he might help change the place.

And Nepal changed him.

He learned that if you’re alone in a strange country, you may have to stop trying to make the place accommodate you.

You may have to learn how to accommodate the place.

You may have to listen.

You may have to accept help.

You may have to change.

My friend learned that.

He learned it on an elephant.

He learned it in an ashram.

He learned it looking up at Ganesha.

And then he came home.

A different person.

A person who apparently had trouble driving.

Maybe that’s what happens when you finally understand that the place you’re in is bigger than you are.

And that’s where we are now.

We’re living here.

On this planet.

And the planet gets a vote.

Sometimes a very large vote.

A glacier.

A flood.

A fire.

A storm.

A mountain letting go.

A wall of water racing through the Grand Canyon.

And the weather report has become part of the national story because the weather keeps becoming part of our lives.

That’s the strange thing.

Thirty years ago, some of this was presented to us as a nightmare.

A warning.

A future we might someday have to confront.

Now pieces of it arrive every night on television.

The whole enchilada hasn’t arrived.

But enough of it has shown up to make you look up from your dinner.

And that’s what I’ve been doing.

Looking up.

Looking at the television

.

Looking at Nepal.

Looking at the Grand Canyon.

Thinking about my friend.

Thinking about the elephant.

Thinking about Ganesha.

Thinking about the smiles.

And thinking about that fist.

The smile and the fist belong in the same picture.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

The world my friend went to was beautiful.

It still is.

Beautiful places have mountains.

Mountains have glaciers.

Glaciers have gravity.

Gravity has a very long memory.

And nature has been here a lot longer than we have.

My friend figured out that he had to learn how to live in the place where he found himself.

He went there thinking he might change the place.

The place changed him.

He survived.

That’s a pretty good lesson.

And it may be the only lesson we need.

We’re here

.

This is where we are.

We’re not in charge of here.

That’s where we are now.

The news keeps showing us.

The mountain keeps showing us.

The canyon keeps showing us.

And every once in a while, the message arrives with enough force to get your attention.

One.

Two.

Three.

Fuck you.

You fucking fucker.

Bam.

Maybe that’s the wake-up punch.

Maybe it wakes us up.

Maybe it doesn’t.

But the punch has landed.

And I’m paying attention.

I am alive enough to have watched him spellbind an enormous percentage of the American public.

That fact interests me. because I have spent the past several days thinking about prosody—the part of language that lives beneath and around the words: rhythm, speed, pitch, stress, pause, tone, cadence, repetition, volume, inflection, duration, texture, articulation, contour.

And once you begin listening for those things, Donald Trump becomes a fascinating speaker.

Not necessarily a beautiful speaker.

Not necessarily an elegant speaker.

But a remarkably effective one.

Trump posses profound prosody.

He prosody is so distinctive that you can recognize him before we have processed the words.

That is no small accomplishment.

Let’s begin with Rhythm

Trump’s rhythm is cumulative. He says something. Then he says it again. Then he alters it slightly. Then he says the altered version again. The repetition establishes a beat. And once the audience recognizes the beat, the audience begins to participate in it.

And the beat goes on

This is one reason a Trump rally can sound less like a conventional political speech and more like a performance. He moves the rhythm forward if not the argument which is automatically intensified

Tone

Trump’s tone is extraordinarily elastic. He can sound triumphant. Aggrieved. Amused. Threatened. Threatening. Disbelieving. Contemptuous. Conspiratorial. He can turn a noun into an accusation simply by the way he says it. This is where prosody begins doing semantic work. The listener knows how Trump feels about the thing he is talking about before the sentence has finished or even started (or if whatever it is is in fact a sentence if a sentence is in fact a complete thought with a subject and a predicate which is a form of communication more primitive)—and sometimes more powerful—than argument.

Stress

Trump knows where to drop the hammer. He has a killer instinct for the word that carry the weight. His father would be proud.

BIG.

BEAUTIFUL.

TERRIBLE.

DISASTER.

NEVER.

EVER.

The surrounding words can become scaffolding. The stressed word becomes the building because his vocabulary tends toward short, familiar words and straightforward sentence structures, those words are easy to hear and easy to remember.

Simplicity, in this context, is the delivery system for rhetoric.

Cadence

Trump has a cadence that belongs almost entirely to him. You can imitate it.The moment a speaker becomes easy to imitate, the speaker has acquired a kind of cultural ownership over a rhythm.

Trump’s cadence often consists of a buildup followed by a hard landing.

He will circle a phrase.

Repeat it.

Stretch it.

Pause.

Then drop the important word.

The cadence tells the audience when to listen and when to applaud

And sometimes it tells them when to applaud.

Repetition

If I had to choose the single strongest element in Trump’s prosody, I would choose repetition because he understands what repetition does to an audience what repetition does to an audience etc

The first time we hear an assertion, we evaluate it. The second time, we recognize it. The third time, we anticipate it. The audience begins supplying part of the speech.

Trump has understood instinctively that repetition turns language into rhythm. Rhythm turns speech into expectation. Expectation turns an audience into a participant.

That’s how it works.

I’m tellin’ ya right now. Ya nome say’n?

And then there is speed

Trump’s speed is captivating because he changes gears. He can move conversationally, accelerate through connective material, then slow down around a word he wants remembered which produces certianity. A falling pitch sounds final. A hard stress sounds decisive. A short sentence sounds finished.Trump’s voice frequently makes a statement sound settled before the listener has had time to examine whether it is.

That is prosodic persuasion.

The interruptions matter, too

Trump’s speech is less polished than traditional presidential speech.

He starts a sentence. Changes direction. Adds something. Returns. Repeats. Leaves a thought unfinished. Begins another.

Here’s the rub:

What might sound like linguistic disorder to one listener can sound like authenticity to another because polished political language often sounds prepared. Trump can sound as though the thought is occurring while we are hearing it.

We are invited into the process. We’re getting it raw which creates intimacy like your buddy whispering the punch line to a joke while the sermon is going on or the wife is berating. We’re in this together

.

The voice itself

Trump’s voice is unmistakable.

The pitch.

The grain.

The nasal quality.

The occasional rasp.

The hard consonants.

The stretched vowels.

The sudden downward drop.

You can caricature it almost instantly. Caricature is evidence of recognizability. Did I repeat myself? I did oh good deal. Maybe you’ll remember somethng so here it is again in another form: a voice that can be imitated is a voice with a strong prosodic signature.

We can go deeper still. We can listen to the vowels. We can listen to the consonants and we can listen to the fricatives because speech isn’t just an arrangement of meanings. It is physically breathed through openings with tongue touching teeth with vocal cords vibrating and the mouth shaping air into recognizable pieces.

Trump’s voice is physical, physical. Let’s go physical physical let me hear your talking talk etc

The vowels

Trump often stretches the vowel when a word needs to become larger than the word itself.

BIG.

GREAT.

BEAUTIFUL.

The vowel gives him duration. He can make a word occupy more time than its dictionary meaning requires. The vowel becomes the runway on which the word gathers force.

The consonants

Consonants give speech its edges. They begin the word. They interrupt the airflow. They stop the word. They strike.Trump can make those edges particularly audible when he wants emphasis.

The consonant provides the percussion. The vowel provides the stretch and the combination gives him one of the central physical characteristics of his speech: expansion followed by impact.

The fricatives are the friction

The /f/, /s/, /sh/, /v/, /z/, and the various forms of /th/ allow air to pass through a narrow opening, producing turbulence rather than complete closure that can make a word feel rougher, sharper, more abrasive.

Consider the word FAKE.

The /f/ begins with friction.

The vowel can stretch. The /k/ closes the word abruptly.

Friction. Expansion. Impact. And there is a kinship here with the word we have been examining elsewhere:

fuck.

One syllable.

A fricative opening.

A vowel.

A hard consonantal ending.

A word that lands.

Trump didn’t invent any of this. Neither did the English language invent Trump but Trump has an instinct for words whose physical construction gives his voice something to hypnotize with.

The five-star Trump

Rhythm — ★★★★★

Tone — ★★★★★

Stress — ★★★★★

Cadence — ★★★★★

Repetition — ★★★★★+

Repetition creates rhythm.

Rhythm creates anticipation.

Stress tells us where to listen.

Cadence tells us where the thought lands.

Tone tells us how to feel about the landing.

And beneath all of it, the vowels stretch, the consonants strike, and the fricatives create friction. We have something more than a speech.

We have a prosodic machine.

Spellbinding for the use of a better word

A spell has rhythm, repetition, expectation, voice.

Trump understands all four.

I don’t have to admire what he does with his understanding to recognize that he possesses it and prosody gives us a way of talking about his character without pretending that we can see directly into his mind. Thank God. Trump’s voice suggests momentum. Emotional immediacy. Magnification. Performance. Persistence.

Five characteristics.

One remarkably coherent public character.His speech is less interested in occupying a thought than in occupying the listener. He works on its attention/intention, stretching a vowel, striking a consonant, jabbing a fricative, repeating a phrase,stressing a word,

pausing

He returns. He enlarges.

He stretches a vowwell

He strikes a consonant.

He rides a fricative.

He repeats a phrase.

He stresses a word.

And he does it again

and again and again and again.

That is prosody.

And it is power.

I know what we’re looking at here. I’ve been listening to people talk, and lately I’ve been listening a little harder than usual, and I’ve finally got the whole damn thing figured out.

Well—most of it.

There’s the King.

There’s Donald Trump.

There’s Al Pacino

There’s this thing called prosody, which turns out to be considerably more interesting than the word itself would suggest.

And then there’s fuck.

And Muhammad Ali.

And Joe Frazier.

And vowels.

And consonants.

And fricatives.

Okay, maybe I don’t have it quite as figured out as I thought.

But I know there’s something here.

And now, if you’ll bear with me, we’re going to listen.

Not simply to what is being said.

To how it is being said.

Because somewhere beneath the words within the rhythm, the stress, the pitch, the pauses, the repetitions, the vowels stretched across time and the consonants striking against them language begins to reveal the person using it.

Which means that a voice can tell us things a sentence may carefully conceal.

Tonight, then, we enter a small linguistic theater.

On one side stands a King, speaking in the measured cadence of an inherited language, carrying with him the peculiar authority of restraint.

On the other stands an American President whose voice has become almost as recognizable as his name, a voice built from repetition, impact, exaggeration, interruption and extraordinary command of attention.

Between them lies a single word.

A four-letter word.

A word that has survived centuries, changed its grammatical clothing, acquired a thousand emotional uses and become one of the most efficient percussion instruments in the English language.

Fuck.

And if that seems like an unlikely place to begin an inquiry into language, power and character, well—

welcome to the neighborhood.

The door is open.

Come on in.

I heard the King speak, and I realized that I had missed something.

Not the King himself. I have never spent much time missing kings. My childhood was filled with other voices—radio announcers, ballplayers, preachers, teachers, politicians, fathers, mothers, and the occasional man at the end of the bar who had somehow solved the world before lunch.

What I had missed was the sound of restraint.

King Charles was visiting President Trump earlier this year, and somewhere in the course of the visit, the old phrase came back to me: the King’s English

.

It seemed almost quaint until I heard it.

There was a cadence to the man. A measured rise and fall. Words allowed to occupy their proper spaces. Sentences that seemed to know where they were going before they got there.

Maureen Dowd, writing about the visit, described the pleasure of hearing “the King’s English,” devoid of the “vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity” common in our leader’s language.

That stopped me.

Because Dowd wasn’t really talking about grammar.

She was talking about prosody.

We’ve been using that word around here lately, and I suspect it is beginning to feel less like a term from an English textbook and more like a thing we can actually hear.

Prosody is what happens when language becomes audible as character. It is the rhythm beneath the words. The pressure placed on one word rather than another. The pause. The acceleration. The hesitation. The sudden drop in pitch. The sentence that arrives gently and the sentence that comes at you like a thrown chair.

We usually listen to political speech for information.

We should listen for temperament. A leader’s language doesn’t merely tell us what he thinks. It tells us how he inhabits power which brings me to a word that has become so common in American speech that its very commonness may be the most interesting thing about it.

Fuck.

I am not interested in whether we ought to say fuck. I am interested in what it does to sound when we say it. Phonetically, it is a remarkable little creature. It begins with a fricative, /f/, the air forced through a narrow opening, and ends with the abrupt closure of /k/. Friction, then impact.

Fuck.

One syllable.

It doesn’t trail away. It lands.

And because it is one syllable, it can be dropped almost anywhere into the rhythm of English.

Fuck.

Fuck that.

What the fuck?

That’s fucking good.

Fuck, that’s good.

The word changes grammatical function almost without changing its body.

Verb. Noun. Intensifier. Exclamation. Dismissal. Punctuation.

It is one of the most versatile little tools in the English toolbox.

And then I thought of Muhammad Ali.

Not because Ali was particularly fricative in his speech. He wasn’t. Check out the non-fricative flow of “float like a butterfly: sting like a bee”.

Ali’s genius was elsewhere.

Rhythm.

Ali understood that a combination of punches isn’t simply three punches thrown in succession. The first punch changes the conditions under which the second can arrive. The second creates the opening for the third.

Language can do that, too.

Consider:

Fuck you, you fucking fucker.

There it is.

Two jabs and a right cross.

Joe Frazier might have been left right to the body and left hook to the button.

Fuck you.

The first jab

.

It is directional. It throws the hostility toward you. The old sexual meaning has almost entirely disappeared; what remains is rejection.

You fucking—

The second jab.

Now fuck has become an intensifier. It isn’t telling anyone to do anything. It is loading the next word with emotional force.

Fucker.

Bam.

The right cross.

Now the word has become a noun. The sexual meaning remains buried inside it, but in ordinary speech it has been transformed into an identification—a person being attacked, insulted, sometimes even admired or loved, depending upon the circumstances.

FUCK you | you FUCK-ing | FUCK-er.

Left. Left. Right.

Three appearances of the same root. Three grammatical functions. Three slightly different meanings. Repetition is what makes the combination work.

It is crude, funny, economical and it is prosodically precise which interests me because if fuck disappeared from English tomorrow, the meanings would survive.

The rhythms wouldn’t.

Try replacing:

That’s fucking ridiculous.

with:

That’s extremely ridiculous.

The proposition remains intact.

The music has changed.

Fucking gives us two syllables. Extremely gives us four. More importantly, the emotional pressure has moved. The little verbal jab has been replaced by an explanation which raises a question I had never thought to ask:

What would English sound like if the word fuck had never existed?

The word itself is medieval. There is evidence of it in English by the early fourteenth century, and it appears in increasingly recognizable forms over the following centuries. But the modern fuck that astonishingly versatile intensifier, exclamation, noun, verb, adjective and conversational percussion instrument is a much later creature.

English gradually discovered that this particular word could do almost anything because English needed a word like it.

A one-syllable verbal jab.

A little linguistic Ali.

A pitch you could throw into a sentence without winding up.

A sound that could accelerate the rhythm, interrupt it, puncture it, or give it a hard downbeat. We might even wonder whether the word became more useful as American life became faster, louder, more compressed and more emotionally immediate.

A curse word derives some of its force from scarcity. If a word is socially forbidden, its appearance carries voltage. If it becomes routine, the voltage diminishes. which doesn’t necessarily mean the culture becomes worse. Languages constantly domesticate formerly shocking words. Damn, hell, bloody, awful and countless others have traveled through similar processes but fuck has an unusual position because it can function as a kind of universal intensifier. When almost every emotional register can be marked with the same emphatic word, we may gain expressive convenience while losing some gradation.

That’s the prosodic possibility.

We didn’t create the times for fuck. Fuck was one of the words that helped create the sound of the times. I was one of the English teacher trying to turn back the fucking tide in fear that something like what we have now is what we would get now which in fact it is.

And then there is Donald Trump. I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But I am alive enough to have witnessed him spellbind an entire percentage of this country which has to count for something.

Whatever else we think of Trump, his instinct for publicity is magnificent. He understands the mechanics of attention in a way that few politicians before him ever have. He knows how to make a sentence travel. He knows how to make a word stick. He knows that the sound of a political figure can become as important as the content of what the figure is saying which brings us back to fuck.

Trump did not invent the word. Presidents before him certainly used profanity in private. What changed was the address. The word moved from the private vocabulary of the citizen to the public vocabulary of the President. The distance collapsed. The President sounded less like an institution/constitution and more like the guy standing beside you.

I’ve watched it happen. I heard it happen and I’m alive enough to know the difference between disapproval and astonishment which is part of Trump’s particular genius. He understands that attention is something a public figure can engineer.

He knows the useful word.

He knows the dangerous word.

He knows the word that will be repeated.

And he knows the word that cannot be printed without being noticed.

Fuck is almost perfect for that purpose.

It is short. It is unmistakable. It carries emotional voltage. Put it in the mouth of the President of the United States and it becomes larger than the sentence containing it. Trump has understood something many politicians spend careers failing to understand: being talked about is itself a form of speech. He speaks into the machinery that carries speech away from the speaker and that, whatever else we may think of him, is a remarkable talent.

Which brings us back to the King.

Charles doesn’t need the jab. His language can make a point by allowing the sentence to breathe.

Trump has a different rhetorical arsenal, one that frequently relies upon repetition, escalation, insult, and verbal impact meanwhile the rest of us are somewhere between them, speaking an English that has accumulated centuries of linguistic ammunition and has decided that one particular little word is useful for almost everything.

Language is doing what language has always done; adapting, finding new rhythms, borrowing old words and giving them new jobs and begs for another essential questionings

What happens when the verbal jab becomes ordinary?

What happens when the explosive becomes part of the percussion section?

And what happens to all the other words when one little word can hit almost every note?

I don’t know yet but I think I can hear the fucking questions.

Tomorrow we’ll examine the explicit porosody of Donald Trump.

Tonight I’m gonna watch Glen Gary Glen Ross for the 10th time to prepare

.

If Kingfish is a character—and I think he is—then why do we so readily grant other comic characters the freedom to be ridiculous? Take Ralph Kramden. Ralph is loud. Ralph is boastful. Ralph is forever hatching schemes. Ralph is perpetually convinced that the next idea will make him rich, famous, or both. Ralph is also insecure, jealous, impatient, occasionally foolish and frequently his own worst enemy

.

Nobody watches The Honeymooners and concludes that Ralph Kramden is a portrait of the American white male.

He’s Ralph.

That’s enough.

Chester Riley gets the same privilege. The Life of Riley began on radio, where William Bendix played Riley, and eventually made its way to television. For a brief period, Jackie Gleason played Riley on television before Bendix himself took over the role. The character survived the change of actor. Nobody seems to have found that mysterious because there is a convention in comedy: a comic character is allowed to be a comic character

Because we understand the convention.

A comic character is allowed to be a comic character. We don’t demand that he carry his entire demographic population on his back.

Ralph Kramden doesn’t have to answer for every loudmouth white man in America. Chester Riley doesn’t have to answer for every foolish white husband.

Kingfish was asked to carry a different burden.

And I understand why.

The television landscape of the early 1950s was overwhelmingly white. A Black character appearing week after week on a nationally popular program occupied a different cultural position from a white comic character appearing in a landscape crowded with other versions of whiteness.

If Kingfish was one of the few Black characters a white viewer encountered regularly, then his behavior could acquire a representational weight that Ralph Kramden’s never had which is the strongest argument against my argument. I take it seriously even as it suggests another important question in response.

When does representation become overrepresentation?

At what point does a character stop being permitted to be an individual because his skin has made him responsible for everybody who shares it?

Kingfish is a schemer.

So is Ralph.

Kingfish is a blowhard.

So is Ralph.

Kingfish is frequently ridiculous.

So is Ralph.

Kingfish gets himself into trouble because his mouth outruns his judgment.

So does Ralph

.

The difference is that Ralph gets to be an individual without anybody worrying that he is teaching America what white people are like.

Kingfish didn’t receive the same exemption because the country was still learning how to see Black people as individuals on its television screens which brings us back to the voice ; what some people heard as a stereotype, I am increasingly hearing as prosody. The rhythm, stress, pitch, timing and musical structure that make one speaker’s voice unmistakably his own.

Kingfish doesn’t merely sound the way he sounds because the script requires it. Tim Moore knows how to use the voice. Once you begin listening to what he’s doing rather than simply identifying the category of voice you’re hearing, the whole thing becomes more complicated because that voice didn’t disappear with Kingfish.

I had heard it somewhere else.

I had heard it in Sammy Davis Jr.

The odd thing about a voice is that it can outlive the person who owns it. A face is attached to a body.

A voice can travel. It can move through a microphone, across a radio signal, onto a record, through a television speaker, into a movie theater, and finally, seventy-three years later, through YouTube and into the room where I happen to be sitting.

And sometimes, somewhere along that journey, a voice encounters another voice that’s what happened when I heard Kingfish and thought of Muhammad Ali.

I don’t mean that Ali sounded like Kingfish all the time. He didn’t. Ali had a voice of his own, and eventually he became one of the most recognizable voices in the world.

But listen to the prosody.

The rhythm.

The sudden acceleration.

The deliberate pause.

The emphasis placed on a particular word.

The stretched vowel.

The rise and fall of pitch.

The sense that the speaker isn’t merely answering you but taking possession of the conversation.

Ali understood the theatrical possibilities of speech. He could turn an answer into a performance. A prediction into a proclamation. An insult into a joke. A boast into a piece of poetry. He didn’t merely tell you he was going to win.He built a little verbal universe in which his victory had already happened and everybody else was simply waiting for the news.

The nickname Louisville Lip tells us something about the phenomenon. Ali’s talking was inseparable from Ali’s identity. His voice created anticipation before the fight, entertainment during the interviews and mythology afterward.

And then, as I promised there is Sammy Davis Jr.

Sammy interests me for a different reason because you can sometimes hear him change registers. One moment the diction is polished, precise, almost immaculate. Then something shifts.

The rhythm loosens.

The vowels lengthen.

The cadence becomes more pronounced.

The voice acquires another kind of musicality.

When I first noticed it, I assumed I was hearing an imitation of what Sammy understood as a Black vernacular voice.

Maybe.

I’m less certain now because there was a tradition there that preceded Sammy and preceded Ali. Black American speech had developed extraordinarily rich traditions of preaching, storytelling, joking, boasting, verbal competition and musical delivery.

Listen to a great preacher. Listen to a great storyteller. Listen to somebody who has discovered that the audience belongs to him for the next three minutes.

The voice rises.

Falls.

Pauses.

Accelerates.

Repeats.

Builds.

And then releases.

The words matter.

But the delivery carries another layer of meaning that layer is prosody. and prosody doesn’t belong to a particular sentence. It belongs to the human voice. It can be inherited. Borrowed. Adapted. Transformed. Imitated

A young performer hears an older performer and thinks, I can do something with that. He absorbs a possibility Nobody has to announce the transmission. Nobody has to sign a receipt. It happens through listening. Which raises a question I hadn’t considered when I first heard Kingfish again:

Maybe Tim Moore wasn’t the source of the voice I heard in Muhammad Ali. Maybe Tim Moore and Muhammad Ali were two very different performers drawing upon a much older tradition of Black American vocal performance. Kingfish used the voice to sell a scheme. Ali used it to sell Muhammad Ali.

Sammy used it as part of the enormous repertoire of a performer who could become almost anybody he wished to become. He could sing, he could dance, he could act for God’s sake during the days of the Western’s on teevee it was rumored that the fastest draw in the business belonged to Sammy.

Three men.

Three careers.

Three purposes.

And yet the ear catches something.

A rhythm.

A timing.

A confidence.

A willingness to make the voice itself part of the performance which brings us back to Kingfish because the more I listen to Tim Moore, the more reluctant I become to call what I’m hearing simply an accent.

An accent tells you where a person comes from. Prosody tells you what a performer can do. Tim Moore could do plenty.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable part because the very qualities that made Kingfish such a memorable comic character were among the qualities that made Amos ’n’ Andy so controversial.

And that is where this story gets considerably harder.

I had been asking the wrong question. I had been trying to decide whether Kingfish sounded like Muhammad Ali.

I should be asking where both of them learned that a voice could be so pivotal because the Black American tradition of expressive speech reaches much further back than either Tim Moore or Muhammad Ali. Preaching, storytelling, verbal play, boasting, joking, call-and-response, all developed forms in which the delivery of language carries as much force as the literal meaning of the words

.

The voice becomes an instrument. A preacher builds to an idea before announcing it A storyteller controls the speed at which we discover whhat happened. A comic lets you hear the joke approaching.

A good talker knows when to repeat a word, when to stretch it, when to drop his voice, when to accelerate, when to leave a little space before the sentence’s final blow

It helps explain why the connection between Kingfish and Ali struck me so suddenly. They weren’t borrowing from each other. They may have been participating in the same larger tradition of American verbal performance.

There is evidence that the Amos ’n’ Andy performers themselves understood voice as a highly constructed instrument. On radio, Gosden and Correll deliberately differentiated their characters through vocal qualities, microphone distance and modulation; they had essentially created an entire cast through the manipulation of voice alone.

Television changed the equation because the voices suddenly had bodies attached to them. And the bodies were of a different shade.

Tim Moore brought his own history to Kingfish. He was a veteran of vaudeville, and his earlier con-man routines helped shape the television character. His Kingfish became the dominant comic presence of the television version. I was hearing a performer using a tradition of vocal performance to construct a character.

That distinction matters because an accent can be imitated. A tradition can be inhabited.

Once you begin thinking about the voice that way, Muhammad Ali starts making even more sense. Ali didn’t merely have a distinctive way of speaking. He understood that speaking itself could be an act of creation. He could invent Muhammad Ali with his mouth. He could announce the future before it happened. He could turn an insult into a joke, a prediction into poetry, a boast into theater.

And he understood something Kingfish understood too:

If you can control the rhythm of the conversation, you can control the room.

Kingfish wanted to control Andy.

Ali wanted to control the audience.

Kingfish’s confidence was comic.

Ali’s confidence became mythological.

Kingfish was trying to sell a scheme.

Ali was trying to sell himself.

But both understood the ancient performer’s secret:

The audience doesn’t merely listen to the words. It listens to the person who believes the words are worth hearing.

And then there is Sammy Davis Jr which complicates the matter again because Sammy could move between vocal worlds with extraordinary ease. He could speak with immaculate diction, then alter his rhythm, pitch, emphasis and cadence for a performance. That switch is precisely what first made me wonder whether he was putting on a “Black voice.” The performer carries it forward, changes it, exaggerates it, strips it down, makes it personal. By the time it reaches the next performer, the original source may be invisible. Ali reminds me that Kingfish’s voice had a life beyond Kingfish.

The controversy surrounding Amos ’n’ Andy looks different to me because the same voice that could be heard as a stereotype could also be heard as craft. The same cadence could be used to caricature a character, entertain an audience, dominate a conversation, or create a legend.

The voice itself doesn’t tell us which of those things is happening.

The context does.

And now we have to return to the context.

Because there was a time when millions of Americans heard Kingfish every week.

And then there was a time when they couldn’t hear him at all.

That disappearance is the next part of the story.

Let’s disappear for awhile>>>>

Let’s Go to Vegas

The Sands.

The Copa Room.

Frank Sinatra

.

Dean Martin.

Sammy Davis Jr.

The Rat Pack.

And the audience.

That last part matters.

Because the audience was overwhelmingly white.

This was early-1960s Las Vegas, a city whose entertainment industry had been perfectly happy to put Black performers onstage while treating them as second-class citizens the moment they stepped off it. Sammy could headline a showroom and still be unable to sleep in the hotel, eat in its restaurant, drink in its bar, swim in its pool, or gamble in its casino. Black entertainers could be the attraction and the exclusion at the same time.

That was the world in which the Rat Pack became the Rat Pack.

The timing is almost impossible to ignore.

The great “Summit at the Sands” of 1960 occurred just as Las Vegas was being forced to confront its racial policies. The color line was formally broken in March of that year. Sinatra’s insistence that Sammy be treated as a member of the company—and not merely as a Black entertainer hired to perform—was part of that changing landscape.

So picture the room.

A largely white audience.

A Black performer standing at center stage.

Two enormously famous white performers beside him.

And all three of them know Kingfish.

All three can reach for the voice.

That is where the question of racism enters the room.

Tempo isn’t racist.

Pitch isn’t racist.

Rhythm isn’t racist.

A pause isn’t racist.

But a voice has a history.

And Kingfish had a very particular one.

As we now know and for the last time...He had been created by Tim Moore, a Black comedian, but Amos ’n’ Andy itself had begun on radio with white actors portraying Black characters. The television version reversed the casting, putting Black performers on the screen, but the characters remained products of a tradition deeply entangled with racial caricature.

So when Dean Martin reached for Kingfish, the audience didn’t hear merely “a funny voice.” They heard a character whose voice had already been culturally marked and Martin’s use of it is fascinating because Dino’s own voice was already a performance.

The lazy drawl. The loose consonants. The leisurely tempo. The stretched vowel. That marvelous sense that he had nowhere else to be. Martin didn’t have to build Kingfish from the ground up. He could bend Dino toward Kingfish. Push the drawl a little farther. Relax the consonants. Shift the stress. Let the vowel hang in the air.

Add Kingfish’s absolute certainty and suddenly the audience knew Kingfish but it was still Dean Martin.

That matters because Martin’s performance seems less like putting on a racial mask than finding a comic voice that overlaps with his own.

That doesn’t make the history disappear.

It makes the mechanism more difficult to classify.

Sinatra is another story altogether.

Eric Lott’s reading of Sinatra at the Sands makes the racial question almost impossible to avoid. Sinatra had turned fifty, and Lott sees the performance as a kind of theatrical negotiation with age, masculinity and identity. Sinatra moved through a succession of masks—streetwise Italian, old New York tough, comic figure—and among those masks was Kingfish. Lott argues that Sinatra’s Amos ’n’ Andy material and his adoption of Kingfish’s speech patterns and vocal mannerisms belonged to a tradition he describes as blackvoice.

That is a considerably heavier charge than saying: Frank Sinatra did a funny voice because Sinatra wasn’t simply reproducing Tim Moore.

He was taking pieces of the machinery.

The cadence.

The emphasis.

The vowel.

The pause.

The sudden turn.

The absolute confidence.

He knew how little he needed to do. A phrase could begin as Frank Sinatra. Then the rhythm would shift. A vowel would open. The emphasis would land somewhere unexpected.

The voice would suddenly lean toward Kingfish and the audience would recognize him.

That is what a great mimic understands.

You don’t reproduce every part. You reproduce the parts the audience has learned to recognize.

Sinatra could summon Kingfish without becoming Tim Moore but the question is what else came along when he summoned him.

Because the audience was largely white.

Because the country was still wrestling with segregation.

Because the history of white performers adopting exaggerated Black voices was very much alive.

And because Sammy Davis Jr. was standing there.

That last fact makes everything harder.

It would be easy to say Sammy’s presence legitimized the performance.

I don’t think it does. It makes the situation more complicated.

Sammy was a friend, colleague, fellow performer and master mimic. He could do Kingfish himself. He could do Sinatra. He could do Dean. He could do Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Billy Eckstine and a remarkable range of other performers.

So the Rat Pack lived inside a culture of imitation.

They borrowed voices.

They stole rhythms.

They parodied one another.

They made identity itself part of the entertainment.

But the three men could use essentially the same vocal machinery and mean three different things. Sammy was impersonating Kingfish. Martin was bending Dino toward Kingfish. Sinatra was putting Kingfish on as a mask.

And because Sinatra’s mask existed inside a country with a long history of racial impersonation, we have to consider the possibility that the performance carried racial meaning whether Sinatra intended all of that meaning or not.

That is the uncomfortable part.

And I think uncomfortable is exactly where we should leave it.

Because the question isn’t:

Was Frank Sinatra a racist?

That’s too crude

.

The question is:

What happens when a white performer, before a largely white audience, adopts the vocal characteristics of a Black comic character whose history is inseparable from American racial caricature?

That question deserves an answer even if the answer is complicated because the voice has done something remarkable.

It has escaped the character.

Kingfish began as a character. Then Kingfish became a voice. Then the voice became prosody. And prosody can travel.

Which brings us to Muhammad Ali.

The Louisville Lip

I had started this whole thing because Kingfish reminded me of Ali.

Now I knew enough to be careful.

I could document Sammy doing Kingfish.

I could document Dean Martin doing Kingfish.

I could document Sinatra doing Kingfish.

But I couldn’t document Muhammad Ali deliberately imitating Kingfish because now I had to separate what I heard from what I could prove.

So I listened again.

And there it was.

The rhythm.

The timing.

The acceleration.

The stop.

The word that suddenly carries more weight than the words around it.

The vowel allowed to linger.

The pause that isn’t empty at all but loaded with expectation.

And above all—

the confidence.

Ali didn’t merely answer questions. He performed answers.

He could make a prediction sound like a fact from the future. He could make an insult sound like a joke. He could make a joke sound like prophecy. He could make a boast sound like poetry.

He understood, instinctively, that how you say a thing can become part of what the thing is.

I loved hearing him speak and I miss his presence and I understood why Kingfish had sent me toward Ali. It was because Kingfish had taught me how to hear Ali and it changed the whole journey.

Sammy showed me that prosody could be borrowed.

Martin showed me that it could be absorbed.

Sinatra showed me that it could become a mask—and that the mask could carry a racial history with it.

Ali showed me something else. The machinery could become completely one’s own. The voice could become identity. The identity could become performance. The performance could become memory and memory could become history.

That’s quite a trip for a television program I watched when I was six.

Seventy-three years later, I found Kingfish again.

Only this time I was listening as a teacher.

And I finally had the word.

Prosody.

A word I might once have put on a blackboard.

A word that gives you another set of ears.

That’s what teaching is supposed to do.

Give you a word.

Open a door.

Let you discover that the thing you’ve been hearing all your life has been carrying information you didn’t know how to name.

I was a kid when I first heard Kingfish. I didn’t understand much of what was going on. I liked the characters. Now I understand a little more and I hear a great deal more. Which is one of the compensations for getting old.

The past doesn’t necessarily become clearer. Sometimes your ears get better.

So there I was.

Kingfish on the screen.

Ali somewhere in my memory.

Sammy.

Dino.

Frank.

And a word on the imaginary blackboard.

PROSODY.

Didja know that I was teaching? I didn’t get here waiting for a bus.

Although if Ralph Kramden had been driving it, we probably would have been late anyway.

Class dismissed

.

Long before Muhammad Ali.

Listen to a great Black preacher and you hear many of the qualities Professor Krell put on his imaginary blackboard.

Tempo.

Pause.

Stress.

Pitch.

Rhythm.

Timing.

Confidence.

But preaching adds another dimension:

musicality.

The voice rises and falls with an almost physical force. A phrase can begin quietly, gather momentum, circle back upon itself, and finally explode into emphasis. The congregation doesn’t merely hear the words. It participates in their rhythm.

Then there is storytelling. A good storyteller knows how to hold a room. He knows when to hurry. When to wait. When to repeat. When to lower his voice. When to let the audience anticipate the punch line.

Punch line took on a whole new meaning when issued first from Clay and later from Ali.

And then there is boasting. American Black verbal culture developed an extraordinary appreciation for the art of saying more than the circumstances strictly required. You don’t simply tell somebody you’re good. You tell them you’re so good the laws of nature have become inconvenient.

You don’t merely say you’re going to win. You explain, at length and with considerable confidence, why the universe has already arranged the victory. The boast becomes entertainment. The entertainment becomes identity and identity becomes performance.

Ali understood this instinctively. He turned boasting into a national art form. That is why calling him the Louisville Lip was so much more than a joke about a man who talked too much. The mouth was part of the act. The cadence was part of the act. The exaggeration was part of the act.

The audience knew it.

Ali knew that some of the audience knew it, and that mutual understanding made the performance even more powerful, as did the mutual misunderstanding which passed for agreement, which passed for promotion, which passed for ticket sales, which passed for money, which passed for capitalism, which passed for the United States of America.

Which brings me back to Kingfish. What I heard in Tim Moore’s voice wasn’t an imitation of a racial dialect. I was hearing a performer working inside a tradition in which the voice itself was an instrument of character, which doesn’t erase the controversy surrounding Amos ’n’ Andy.

It makes the controversy more complicated because there is a great difference between saying, This is how Black people talk, and saying, Listen to what this particular Black performer can do with a voice.

The first reduces a person to a category. The second recognizes an artist. And somewhere between those two possibilities sits Kingfish. He is a comic stereotype. He is also a remarkably skilled comic performance. Both things can be true, and that is why the voice survives the argument because long after the cultural arguments surrounding Amos ’n’ Andy have become historical material, the sound of Tim Moore’s voice still works.

And then, seventy-three years later, sitting in front of a television in 2026, you suddenly hear another man inside it.

Muhammad Ali.

And you realize that the voice may have traveled farther than the character ever did. And you miss Ali and wonder what he would be saying about what’s happening in our country right now and if we’re wishing he were still here, let’s wish him here in the era when he was resisting the draft.

There is another distinction we need to make before going any further.

Amos ’n’ Andy was a situation comedy, which sounds like a small distinction.

It isn’t. Situation comedy begins with characters who have lives. They have relationships. They have histories. They have recurring problems. You put those characters into a situation and see what happens. The comedy comes from the collision between the characters and the circumstances.

Sketch comedy works differently.

Way back in ‘83, SNL presented a sketch Featuring Joe Piscopo as Andy Rooney and Eddie Murphy as Kingfish; Eddie Murphy is performing Kingfish while simultaneously being an SNL sketch performer performing a character who originated in another medium.

Which raises an essential question which Krell might have used as kindling in his class on Oral Interpretation at Geneseo :

When Eddie Murphy plays Kingfish, is he imitating Tim Moore, resurrecting Kingfish, parodying Amos ’n’ Andy, or demonstrating that Kingfish has become a piece of American comic vocabulary?

A sketch may begin with an idea, an absurd situation, a particular behavior, a voice, a type. The character exists primarily to serve the joke. He may appear for five minutes and disappear forever.

Did Eddie Murphy ever portray Muhammad Ali on SNL?

Of course he did.

A situation-comedy character has to survive. He comes back next week. And the week after that. He develops habits.

Relationships.

Grudges.

Ambitions.

Fears.

Friends.

Enemies.

He becomes, in a curious way, a person, which is important when we’re talking about Kingfish because Kingfish isn’t simply a collection of comic mannerisms designed to produce a laugh and then vanish.

He has a wife. He has friends. He has schemes. He has ambitions. He has a particular relationship with Amos and Andy. He has an established place in the little social universe of the show.

He’s a character, and characters create a peculiar problem for audiences. We start confusing the person with the performance. Then we start confusing the performance with the category, and Kingfish becomes, in the eyes of some viewers, a statement about Black men rather than a statement about Kingfish.

This is where another word becomes useful

.

Prosody. Prosody is the musical architecture of speech.

Prosody is everything carried by the voice that exists beyond the dictionary definitions of the individual words: rhythm, stress, pitch, timing, duration, intonation, pauses, emphasis. It is why the sentence on Krell’s blackboard could remain word-for-word identical while becoming eight different sentences when he moved the stress.

Prosody is what tells us whether a speaker is joking or serious, whether he is inviting us in or keeping us at a distance, whether he is frightened, delighted, furious, uncertain or completely convinced of his own brilliance.

Prosody is why two people can say precisely the same words and give us entirely different human beings. Kingfish has prosody. A lot of it. His voice doesn’t simply carry the dialogue; it creates the character.

The pitch tells us where he is emotionally.

The rhythm tells us how quickly his mind is moving.

The pauses tell us when he’s calculating.

The emphasis tells us what he wants us to believe.

The timing tells us when the joke has arrived.

And the confidence tells us that Kingfish himself has already arrived at the conclusion that whatever he is saying must be true, which is a very different proposition from saying:

This is how Black people talk.

It is saying:

This is how Kingfish talks.

And that distinction becomes enormously important when we return to the controversy surrounding Amos ’n’ Andy.

Because the question isn’t simply whether Kingfish was a stereotype.

For the purpose of this essay, the essential question is what happens when a brilliantly performed comic character belongs to a group that has been given very few other characters with which to share the screen.

That is where comedy collides with representation and where the story gets complicated.

What do you think of when you think of Laurel and Hardy?

What do you think of when you think of Abbott and Costello?

There’s probably a little difference in the way those questions land.

Laurel and Hardy.

Abbott and Costello.

Amos ’n’ Andy.

You may have felt it. A little hesitation. A little recoil. That’s fair.

I felt it too.

Maybe you remember a television show. Maybe you remember the radio program that came first. I doubt that.

Maybe you remember Kingfish, Sapphire, Amos and Andy. Maybe you remember the controversy.

I surfed my way into an epsiode of Amos and Andy on You Tube. The episode was from 1953. Seventy-three years ago.

I was five, six, seven, perhaps eight years old when Amos ’n’ Andy was on television, and I remember liking it. I didn’t really have a clue what was going on but I liked the characters.

Amos. Andy. Sapphire. Kingfish

.

Watching it now was different.

I was engaged and listening hard. I heard something I had never consciously heard before. Kingfish had a voice. Of course he had a voice. Everybody on television has a voice. But this was something more than an actor delivering dialogue. There was a construction to it, a musical intelligence. The words seemed to ride along on the voice rather than the other way around.

He could hurry through a phrase and then suddenly slow down. He could let a word stretch. He could lean on a syllable until it became almost a little comic instrument. He could pause just before the word that mattered.

Even in the most absurd of situations he sounded absolutely certain. Kingfish could announce the most preposterous proposition imaginable with the conviction of a man reading the contents of his final will and testament.

I found myself thinking about something Thornton Krell might say in an Oral Interpretation class.

About speech.

Krell would walk to the blackboard.

He would pick up a piece of chalk.

And, as was his habit, he would write a single word.

TEMPO

Then he would turn toward the class.

“Speed,” he would say. “The rate at which you speak. But tempo is more than speaking fast or speaking slowly. Tempo is movement. It tells the listener how the thought is traveling.”

He would demonstrate.

A sentence delivered quickly. The same sentence delivered slowly.

“why don’t you just turn around and head back to where you were going before you got here.”

“why don’t you just turn around and head back to where you were going before you got here.”

“Same words,” he would say. “Different experience.”

Then he would turn back to the board.

PAUSE

“A pause is part of the sentence.”

He would let that sit for a moment.

“Most people think a pause occurs when the speaker has run out of words. A skilled speaker pauses because he has found something worth doing with the space and speaking of space call Captain Kirk or Bill Shatner.

STRESS

“This is where you put the weight.”

He would underline it.

“Every sentence has a center of gravity. Move the weight and you move the meaning.”

Another word.

PITCH

“The voice goes up. The voice comes down. Sometimes it stays where it is because the speaker has nowhere interesting to take it.”

A few students would laugh. Krell would continue. “Pitch can turn certainty into doubt. Doubt into surprise. Surprise into disbelief. The words remain where they are. The voice changes their address.”

VOWEL

He would pause before explaining.

“The vowel is where a speaker can spend time.”

He would pronounce the word time, stretching the vowel just enough for the class to hear what he meant.

“ Tiiime is on our side. Yes it is.You can clip a vowel and move on. Or you can stay with it.” Again he would demonstrate.

RHYTHM

“Every speaker has one.”

He would turn. “Some march.”

A few clipped words.

“Some glide.” A longer phrase.

“Some bounce.”

The words would come with a different internal beat.

“And some speakers possess no rhythm at all, which is why you occasionally find yourself wondering how they managed to get through dinner.”

Then:

TIMING

“Timing is rhythm with consequences.”

He would let the sentence settle.

“A joke can fail because the final word arrives a second too early. Or a second too late. The same is true of an insult. A threat. A declaration of love.”

He would look around the room.

“Human beings are creatures of expectation. Timing is the art of knowing when expectation has ripened.”

Then the final word.

Krell would write it more slowly.

CONFIDENCE

He would put down the chalk.

“Now we come to the dangerous one.”

He would look at the class.

“A speaker who believes himself can persuade you to listen. A speaker who believes himself completely can persuade you to doubt your own good sense.”

A pause.

“A confident speaker can make a bad idea sound promising.”

Another.

“A great performer can make a ridiculous idea sound inevitable.”

Then Krell would return to the board and, underneath the eight words, write:

THE SEETHING SEA CEASETH AND THUS SUFFICETH US.

He would stand aside and let the class look at it.

“Read it.”

They would.

Or try to.

Then Krell would say:

He would stop.

Then again:

Again:

He would keep going, moving the emphasis from word to word.

And finally:

Krell would turn back toward the class.

“Same sentence.”

He would wait.

“Different sentence.”

Then, almost as an afterthought:

“The words are the furniture.”

He would tap his head.

“The voice is the room. Every so often ya gotta move the couch”

And sitting there on my couch in 2026, watching a television program from 1953, I realized that Kingfish knew exactly how to furnish every room.

He had tempo. He knew where to pause. He could shift the weight of a sentence with a single syllable. His voice rose and fell. His vowels lingered. His rhythm carried the words forward.

And, above all, Kingfish believed in Kingfish.

That last quality may have been his greatest gift.

Kingfish could stand in the middle of an absurdity entirely of his own making and explain it with such magnificent assurance that you almost began wondering whether you had misunderstood the situation that was when I began listening differently because Kingfish wasn’t simply talking. He was using speech. And once I began to hear what he was doing, I began to hear echoes of that voice elsewhere.

The first one startled me.

Muhammad Ali

.

Most of the conversation seems to begin at the end. Somebody produces a piece of writing with AI, and we ask whether the result is better or worse than what the human might have written alone.

I’m interested in what happens along the way. More specifically, I’m interested in what changes, and how it changes so I decided to create a 100% raw piece of writing and let AI enter it at different stages.

The original piece began with a trip to the movies. Lynn wanted to see Insidious 6. I went along. There was an empty theater, too many trailers, some actors whose names I couldn’t remember, a movie I didn’t particularly enjoy, and a large popcorn whose buttering became considerably more interesting to me than the movie itself.

I wrote the piece the way I normally write a first draft: quickly, imperfectly, following whatever thought appeared next with all the ragged beauty of spontaneous composition Then I asked AI to work on that raw material at approximately 50 percent.

After that, I asked it to take the same material to 100 percent.

The result is three versions of the same experience.

But as you’ll see, they aren’t simply three versions of the same essay. Something changes each time. The first is composition as discovery. The second is composition as recognition.The third is composition as construction.

And the changes aren’t limited to spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, or polish. The relationship between the writer, the material, the structure, and eventually the reader begins to change.

After we examined the three versions, I asked AI to explain what had happened. It produced a polished analysis of the differences. Then I asked it to reverse itself—to take that polished analysis and return it to something closer to the way an idea might emerge in a writer’s head before the architecture has been imposed upon it.

So the final section is another specimen. The experiment therefore moves in both directions raw → assisted → constructed and thenconstructed analysis → raw thought.

What remains constant?

What changes?

What does the AI add?

What does it remove?

And finally what happens to the act of composition itself as the machine takes on more of the work? And who owns what?

I’m going to leave the versions largely as they emerged.

The point isn’t to decide which one is best.

The point is to watch the writing change—

and to watch how it changes.

Composition as Discovery

Well we had a coupon for a half off popcorn and plenty of time so we went to go see the latest version of Insidious. This is the sixth version and we’ve seen them all. I’m not the fan. Lynn loves ‘em so off we went.Let’s dtart once again with the popcorn. We got a large simply because with our coupon that was the best deal that we could identify. When we got the corn we asked if the pop was already buttered which we found out that it wasn’t but we were directed to a side section where we could apply our own salt and butter. Lynn did the honors and voila we were popped buttered abd corned and ready to head into the darkness. Todya’s darkness was as near empty as our last darkness at the End of Oak Street was full. The End was sold out and this showing of Insidious 6 had one other guy in the audience and that was it. We had the whole place to ourself much like I had our commuhnity pool to myself the day before both occasions predicated by the start of the school year around here which is another big diff from Rochester where school is still a week or two away after Labor Day. So anyways there we were the three of us.

Now when yoy go see a movie like Insidious 6, you can expect a lot of trailers and indeed there were too many all of them featuring cringe momnets and loud noises from up coming films. In the trailers it was hard to ignore the fact that these movies are starting to attract some big name actresses. Anne Hathway for one and that red head who keeps popping up in decent movies with forgettable titles which lead me to always forget her name even though I like her and she usually elevates the movies that she’s in...oh yeah Jessica Chastain that’s who it is and another trailer featuring another actor whose name I also can never ememebr but he was a star in succession and as soon as we saw the guy we identified him as the guy from Succession and finally the movie began with a head bashing which is starting to become routine cringe. As the story sank into its usual formula which it was careful to jiggle just enough so that fans would marvel at the progress that the series was making which led to further cringe moments several of which I pulled my eyes from the screen and at least one time when I hid behind my hands and asked Lynn twice if the part was over yetbecause I knew that this was a part that she would be willing to watch. Pretty soon Lynn Shaye showed up and started explaining the premise/rules of the movie with the usual opening of doors and evil spirits trying to inhabit the minds of innocnet sleeping people etc all of it was a purgatorail experience not only for the folks in the movie but als for the three folks in this particualr theater trying to watch the movie although I can’t speak for sure about the other guy

.

Anyways I started thinking about the popcorn which is not a good sign for the movie. The popcorn was pretty good and the butering was well done when I began to realize that since we had applied the butter ourselves it was only gonna be on top and that’s the way it worked out. I wondered if at the onset we had asked the concessionaire for the butter if she would have juat squirted some on top just like we did. I wondered what woukd happen if we asked her to load the corn in sections and thenapply a load of butter to each section from the bottom up but since she was offering no buttering assistance at all the questionn seemed moot. I’m used to generating moot questions so I kep imagining. I wonderd if we could strike a deal where we would pay for the popcorn...have her fill one thirf of the container at that pint we would go over to the butering zone. squirt in a proportonate amount of butter and then take that back to the stand for her to put the next thrid of popcorn into the container when we would go back to the buttering station and squirt another lload of butter and finally returnto her and have her top off the popcorn container and we would hit it with ther final blast of butter anf then voila..we had a jumbo container of popcorn properly buttered from top to bottom rather than the usual butter on the top. Next time we come back here if it’s not crowded I’m gonna try that.

The movie itself? If you like that kind of thing you’ll like the movie whch apparently a lot of people do and did because the box office has been soldi which virtually guarantees there will be another subsequent film probably out of the further into the furthest/ out of prgatory and straight into hell.

VERSION TWO

50% AI: Recognition

At this stage, the AI was allowed to clean, organize, clarify, and sharpen the material while retaining the basic discoveries and movement of the original. The question was no longer simply, What did I write? It became: What is already here?

Well, we had a coupon for half-off popcorn and plenty of time, so we went to see the latest version of Insidious. This is the sixth one, apparently, and we’ve seen them all.

I’m not the fan.

Lynn loves ‘em, so off we went.

Let’s start once again with the popcorn.

We got a large because, with the coupon, that appeared to be the best deal available to us. When we got the corn, we asked if it was already buttered. It wasn’t. We were directed to a side section where we could apply our own salt and butter.

Lynn did the honors and voilà.

We were popped, buttered, and corned and ready to head into the darkness.

Today’s darkness was nearly as empty as our last darkness at The End of Oak Street was full. The End had been sold out. This showing of Insidious 6 had one other guy in the audience.

That was it.

We had the whole place to ourselves, more or less, much like I had our community pool to myself the day before. Both occasions were apparently predicated by the beginning of the school year around here, which is another big difference from Rochester, where school is still a week or two away after Labor Day.

So there we were.

The three of us.

Now, when you go to a movie like Insidious 6, you can expect trailers, and indeed there were too many. All of them featured cringe moments and loud noises from upcoming films.

It was hard to ignore the fact that these movies are beginning to attract some big-name actresses. Anne Hathaway was in one. Jessica Chastain was in another—the redhead who keeps popping up in decent movies with forgettable titles, which always leads me to forget her name even though I like her and she usually elevates whatever movie she’s in.

There was another trailer featuring another actor whose name I could not remember, although he was a star in Succession. As soon as we saw him, Lynn and I identified him as the guy from Succession, which apparently was sufficient identification for the moment.

Finally, the movie began.

With a head bashing.

This is becoming routine.

As the story settled into its familiar formula, the filmmakers were careful to jiggle things just enough so fans could marvel at the progress the series was making. This led to further cringe moments, several of which caused me to pull my eyes from the screen.

At least once, I hid behind my hands.

Twice I asked Lynn if the part was over yet.

I knew she would watch.

Pretty soon Lynn Shaye showed up and began explaining the premise and the rules of the movie. Doors opened. Evil spirits attempted to inhabit the minds of innocent sleeping people. The usual business.

It was a purgatorial experience.

Not only for the people in the movie.

For the three people in the theater.

Although I cannot speak with authority about the other guy.

Anyway, I started thinking about the popcorn.

This is never a good sign for the movie.

The popcorn was actually pretty good, and the buttering had been well done. But then I began to realize the obvious problem: since we had applied the butter ourselves, it was only going to be on top.

And that’s exactly the way it worked out.

I began wondering whether, if we had asked the concessionaire to butter the popcorn, she would simply have squirted it on top the same way we had.

Then I wondered what would happen if we asked her to load the corn in sections and apply butter to each section from the bottom up.

Since she was offering no buttering assistance whatsoever, the question seemed moot.

I’m used to generating moot questions.

So I kept imagining.

What if we struck a deal?

We would pay for the popcorn. She would fill one-third of the container. At that point, we would take the container to the buttering zone and apply a proportionate amount of butter.

Then we would take it back.

She would put in the second third.

Back to the buttering station.

Another load of butter.

Then back to the counter for the final third.

One final trip to the buttering zone

.

Voilà.

A jumbo container of popcorn properly buttered from top to bottom rather than suffering from the traditional butter-on-top system that leaves the bottom two-thirds dry, disappointed, and wondering what they did to deserve this.

By the time I had completed the engineering design in my head, I realized I had spent more time thinking about popcorn distribution than I had thinking about the movie.

Which, I suppose, was its own review.

The movie itself?

If you like that kind of thing, you’ll probably like it. Apparently, a lot of people do, because the box office has been solid, which virtually guarantees another film.

Probably something involving further progress out of purgatory and straight into hell.

I’ll probably be there.

Lynn will want to go.

And next time, if the theater isn’t crowded, I’m going to try the three-stage butter system.

Some experiments are simply too important to abandon.

Something has happened.

The writing is cleaner.

The route is easier to see.

Some jokes have become sharper.

But the writer is still recognizable.

The popcorn has moved closer to the center of the piece, but it was already there.

The AI has recognized a structure that the writer was discovering.

Now let’s remove the brakes.

VERSION THREE

100% AI: Construction

At 100 percent, the AI is no longer merely helping the writer see the architecture. It is constructing the architecture. The raw material remains the same. The relationship between the material and the reader changes.

The Buttering Problem

We had a coupon for half-off popcorn and plenty of time, so Lynn and I went to see the latest Insidious movie.

This was the sixth one.

We’ve seen them all.

I’m still not entirely sure why.

Lynn loves them. I tolerate them in the same spirit people once tolerated dental work before anesthesia. So off we went.

The coupon presented an immediate economic opportunity. We bought a large popcorn because, with the discount, it seemed foolish to buy anything smaller. There are moments in a marriage when fiscal responsibility requires a jumbo container of popcorn.

When we received it, we asked whether it was already buttered.

It wasn’t.

Instead, we were directed to a side station where we could salt and butter our own.

Lynn did the honors.

And there we were: popped, buttered, corned, and ready to enter the darkness.

The darkness, as it turned out, was nearly empty.

The last movie we had seen, The End of Oak Street, had been sold out. Insidious 6 had Lynn, me, and one other guy somewhere in the theater.

The three of us.

I had experienced similar solitude the day before when I had the community pool entirely to myself. Apparently, the beginning of the school year had removed large portions of civilization from public circulation.

That would not have happened in Rochester.

Around Labor Day, school was still somewhere ahead of us, like a distant threat moving slowly across the calendar.

Here, everybody had already disappeared.

The trailers began.

There were too many.

They all seemed to follow the current rules of horror promotion: somebody turns around, somebody screams, something suddenly appears, the audience is expected to experience a small cardiac event, and then a title flashes across the screen.

What interested me was the casting.

Anne Hathaway appeared in one.

Jessica Chastain appeared in another. I could not remember her name at first, despite the fact that I like her in nearly everything she does. For several minutes she remained, in my mind, That Redhead Who Is Always Good in Movies Whose Titles I Forget.

Then Jessica Chastain came back to me.

Another trailer featured the guy from Succession.

I could not remember his name either.

But Lynn and I both immediately identified him as the guy from Succession, which is apparently how celebrity recognition works now. We no longer need names. We need only remember the show from which the person has escaped.

Eventually, the movie began.

With a head bashing.

This is becoming a thing.

Insidious 6 then proceeded through the familiar machinery of the franchise, occasionally rearranging the furniture so devoted fans could admire the renovation. Doors opened. Spirits appeared. Innocent people slept while evil entities considered moving into their heads.

At some point Lynn Shaye arrived to explain the rules.

Every horror series eventually requires a person whose primary job is explaining why the previous five movies happened.

There were several moments when I removed my eyes from the screen.

At one point I covered my face with my hands.

Twice I asked Lynn if it was over yet.

I knew she would watch.

She did.

And somewhere during the movie, I began thinking about the popcorn.

This is generally a bad sign.

The popcorn was good. The butter was good.

The problem was distribution.

Because we had applied the butter ourselves, nearly all of it had landed on the top layer. The first several handfuls were glorious. Then, gradually, the butter disappeared.

The popcorn beneath it became increasingly dry.

This struck me as a design failure.

I began wondering whether the concessionaire, had we asked her to butter it, would have done exactly the same thing: fill the container, squirt butter on top, hand it over, and call the matter resolved.

Then I began developing alternatives.

Suppose she filled one-third of the container.

We would take it to the buttering station.

Butter it.

Return.

She would add another third.

Back to the buttering station.

Butter.

Return.

The final third.

One final application.

The result would be a popcorn container properly buttered from top to bottom.

A system.

A process.

Civilization.

I spent several minutes working through this arrangement while ghosts were presumably doing something terrible to someone on the screen.

I have no idea what.

And that’s when I realized I had found my review of Insidious 6.

The movie was fine.

The popcorn had me thinking.

If you like the Insidious movies, you will probably like this one. Apparently, plenty of people do. The box office has been solid enough to make another installment seem inevitable.

The spirits will return.

The doors will open.

Someone will explain the rules.

I will probably cover my eyes.

Lynn will watch.

And before any of that happens, I intend to solve the buttering problem.

Some franchises have six movies.

Some problems deserve a seventh trip.

What Changed?

Now we can ask the question that matters. Which version is best? I’m less interested in that question than I was when I began because these aren’t simply three degrees of improvement. They are three different relationships between thought and structure.

The raw version is composition as discovery.

The writer follows his attention. He doesn’t know where the piece is going. The movie is the subject until suddenly the popcorn becomes more interesting. The writer doesn’t announce this transformation. It simply happens.

That is what makes the raw version valuable.

The errors aren’t the composition, but they are evidence of the composition.

The 50-percent version is composition as recognition.

The AI begins noticing relationships already present in the material. It sees that the popcorn isn’t merely a detail. It sees that the empty theater has comic value. It sees that the narrator’s inability to remember actors’ names is part of the voice. It sees that the butter problem is beginning to compete with the movie itself.

The AI doesn’t have to invent the essay ;i t has to notice the essay that is already trying to happen. At 100 percent, however, something different occurs. The AI becomes composition as construction.

It decides what the piece is about. It establishes the popcorn as the organizing principle. It creates callbacks. It creates escalation. it creates symmetry. It creates a final line.

The raw writer discovers the popcorn.

The 50-percent AI recognizes the popcorn.

The 100-percent AI makes the popcorn mean something.

That’s a significant distinction.

And it leads to a question I find more interesting than whether AI can write.

Of course it can write.

The more interesting question is:

At what point does assistance become authorship?

The Architecture Was Already There

Look at what happened to one small detail.

In the raw version, the writer says he started thinking about the popcorn that’s almost an aside but the aside becomes an extended meditation on how popcorn should be buttered.

The writer invents a system. One-third of the popcorn. Butter. Another third. Butter. Final third. Butter.

The movie is still playing. The demons are still doing whatever demons do in Insidious movies. The writer has left.I’m thinking about popcorn which I wasn’t thinking about when I sat down to write.

That’s the discovery.

The 50-percent version sees it.

The 100-percent version builds the essay around it.

Nothing new happened in the theater. What changed was the composition. The popcorn was always there. So was the movie. So was Rochester. So was Lynn. So was the empty theater. So were the trailers and the actors whose names wouldn’t come when summoned. All the material existed in the raw composition.

What changed was the intelligence deciding what deserved structural importance.

And that may be one of the most consequential things AI can do to a writer. It can make the writing better. It can also make the writing more itself. Or it can make the writing something else entirely. The difference depends upon where we allow it to enter.

The raw version contains the writer discovering the essay.

The 50-percent version contains the writer and the machine discovering it together.

The 100-percent version contains the machine deciding what the essay ought to be.

All three are readable.

All three are compositions.

But they are compositions produced by different relationships between thought and structure.

And that, I think, is where the real experiment begins.

The question isn’t whether AI can write.

It plainly can.

The question is how much of the writing we want to surrender before the architecture stops being ours.

Wheew

Yes. The “What Changed?” section and everything after it was 100% AI-generated from the experiment we had just conducted.

And that actually gives us a useful fourth specimen, although I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “fourth stage” in the published piece.

There’s a distinction worth making:

• Raw version: your composition, untouched.

• 50% version: AI editing and recognizing structure already emerging from your composition.

• 100% version: AI taking the material and deliberately constructing the essay.

• “What Changed?” section: AI analyzing its own compositional intervention and explaining the differences.

That last part is especially interesting because the machine is now both the participant in the experiment and the analyst of the experiment.

Wait a minute. If AI is explaining the difference between human composition and AI composition, what exactly am I reading?

This is where the piece stops being merely an experiment about AI-assisted writing and becomes a demonstration of the problem of authorship itself.

If we take the ideas in the “What Changed?” section and let them exist as an unprocessed first-draft thought stream, rather than turning them into a polished argument, then I think we should deliberately put the brakes back on.

It might sound more like this:

What Changed?

Okay so what actually happened here because I think this is where this gets interesting.

The first version is just me writing. It’s got all the stuff in it that happens when I’m writing and don’t really know yet what I’m writing about. I’m talking about the movie and the popcorn and Rochester and the empty theater and Jessica Chastain and the guy from Succession whose name I can’t remember and then I’m back to the popcorn and suddenly I’m spending more time figuring out how to butter popcorn than I am thinking about the movie. That’s what happens when I write sometimes. You start with one thing and then the writing starts showing you another thing. The movie was what got me started but the popcorn turned out to be more interesting. I didn’t sit down and decide that the essay was going to be about popcorn. I just kept thinking about the popcorn.

Then we gave it to AI and asked it to work on it at 50 percent. And that’s different because now the AI is looking at what I did and seeing things that I probably didn’t see while I was doing them. It can see that the empty theater is funny. It can see that forgetting the actors’ names is part of the voice. It can see that the popcorn has started taking over the piece. So at 50 percent it is more like somebody saying hey, there’s a thing happening over here. And then at 100 percent the whole thing changes. Because now the AI isn’t just noticing what happened. It’s deciding what happened. That’s the part I think I want to pay attention to. At 100 percent it takes the popcorn and says okay, that’s the essay. So it builds around it. It gives you the title. It gives you the progression. It gives you the callbacks. It gives you the ending. It makes the popcorn problem into the architecture of the whole thing.

And it does it pretty well.

That’s what makes this interesting. Because if the question is which one is better, that’s actually a pretty easy question. The 100 percent version is probably a better constructed essay. It’s cleaner and funnier and it knows where it’s going. But that’s also the problem. Because I didn’t know where I was going. And maybe that’s part of what writing is. Maybe writing isn’t just constructing something. Maybe some of writing is discovering what the thing is while you’re writing it.The raw version has that in it. The 50 percent version still has that in it. The 100 percent version mostly doesn’t. It knows and that’s the difference.

The raw version is me finding the essay. The 50 percent version is the machine helping me see what I found. The 100 percent version is the machine taking what I found and building the essay it thinks I was trying to write.Those are three different things.And now I’m wondering whether that’s really three versions of the same essay or three different kinds of composition.Because nothing changed about what happened.

We still went to see Insidious 6. There was still a nearly empty theater. There was still one other guy. There were still too many trailers. I still couldn’t remember Jessica Chastain’s name for a minute. I still hated the scary parts. The popcorn was still good. The butter was still on top and I still came up with the ridiculous idea of buttering the popcorn in thirds. All that stayed the same.

What changed was what happened to those things after I wrote them down. The material didn’t change. The relationship between the material and the structure changed.

And maybe that’s where AI gets really interesting for writers.

Because it can help you find the architecture that’s already there but it can also decide on an architecture for you. So the question isn’t really whether AI can write.

The question is how much of the composing we want to hand over to it before we’re no longer discovering the thing we’re writing but simply approving the thing it has constructed.

More particularly; where does compositional ownership begin?

I propose at the beginning of the raw and all the way through.

I don’t know if that’s the answer.

But I think that’s the question.

And if ya got this far...good for you. You are a student of language.

We’ve been traveling through the back rooms of writing, looking at what happens beneath the finished piece—the decisions, discoveries, accidents, and little acts of construction that somehow disappear once the writing begins to feel natural.

So far, we’ve asked three questions.

Week 1:
How does an idea become a story?

We began with the moment when a thought, memory, observation, or curiosity stops being merely an idea and begins asking to become a story.

Week 2:
Why do certain images remain with us long after we finish reading?

We looked at the curious transformation by which an ordinary object can become an image—and how experience accumulates around that image until a chair can become a memory, a paper plate can become a signpost, and a word like Rosebud can carry an entire vanished life.

Week 3:
How does a writer move a reader from a moment to a meaning?

We explored the distance between what happens and what it means, and the ways a writer can lead a reader across that distance without simply announcing the destination.

Now we come to the fourth question and the subject of today’s seminar;

What invisible structures allow an essay to feel natural and alive?

Compelling essays give the impression that they simply happened. One thought leads to another. A memory appears. A detail catches the writer’s attention. A question arises. The writer follows it. Something unexpected turns up. The piece seems to discover itself along the way.

And sometimes it actually does but beneath that apparent spontaneity there is usually an architecture.

The writer may know exactly where the essay is going; or may discover that destination only after beginning the journey. Either way, certain invisible structures begin holding the piece together: recurring images, questions, patterns, contrasts, reversals, echoes, and returns.

The reader may never see those structures.

That’s the point.

The best architecture is often the architecture we don’t notice while we’re inside the building. So today, rather than simply taking an essay apart and showing you how it was built, we’re going to try something a little different.

We’re going to build one.

I’ll give you a set of instructions.

Then I’ll show you an essay that follows them.

And afterward, we’ll go back inside the essay and see whether we can find the beams because here’s the great secret of invisible structure: If it works, the reader experiences the movement.
The writer experiences the architecture and when the two meet just right, the essay feels as though it was always going to become exactly what it became.

Let’s see if we can find out why.

Here is a set of compositional instructions. Follow them, and you may discover that an essay begins to organize itself.

The Invisible Architecture: A Writer’s Instruction

s

1. Begin with an image, but don’t explain it.

Give the reader something concrete to look at then let the essay spend its time discovering why that image matters.

2. Start with the known and move toward the unknown.

Give the reader enough factual ground to stand on. Then begin asking questions. Curiosity is structural propulsion.

3. Follow the question wherever it leads—but keep returning to the central object.

The essay may appear to wander. It can investigate. It can digress

Remember.

Speculate.

But underneath that movement, an anchor remains constant remains constant.

That is your anchor.

4. Let each discovery create the next question.

Don’t force the essay from Point A to Point B. Let Point A reveal something that makes Point B necessary.

Discovery should generate structure.

5. Give important people different jobs.

When several characters inhabit the same event, don’t allow them to become a crowd. Give each one a function. Let their separate actions gradually reveal the larger event.

6. Narrow the lens.

Begin with the world.

Move toward the room.

Then the person.

Then the gesture.

Then the object.

Then the instant.

A large story becomes intimate when the lens keeps tightening.

7. Repeat important words or images—but let their meaning change.

Repetition can be architecture.

The first time the reader encounters the word, it means one thing.

The fifth time, it carries everything that has accumulated around it.

8. Earn your speculation.

Facts establish trust. Once the reader knows you have done your homework, you can step beyond what can be proved and ask the questions that facts alone cannot answer. Just make sure the reader knows when you’re crossing that boundary.

9. Return to where you began.

The ending should make the beginning look different. If the reader encounters the opening image again at the end, it should have acquired new meaning from the journey.

10. Hide the scaffolding.

This may be the most important instruction of all.

Don’t announce the structure.

Don’t tell the reader:

Now I’m going to return to the photograph.

Just return to the photograph.

Don’t announce:

Here is the central metaphor.

Let the reader discover it.

The architecture should be strong enough to support the building and invisible enough that the reader forgets there is a building.

Okay those are the rules...are you ready for the exemplification?

October 8, 1956.

Yankee Stadium.

Baseball was the national past time. Households throughout America focused on their teevees as never before

Game Five of the World Series, with the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers tied at two games apiece, and Don Larsen, a pitcher whose career had given remarkably little indication that he was about to become immortal, standing on the mound with one out separating him from something baseball had never seen in a World Series.

Twenty-seven Dodgers have come to the plate, and twenty-seven have gone back to the dugout; nobody has reached first base, nobody has gotten a hit, nobody has walked, nobody has been hit by a pitch, and Larsen has thrown 96 pitches.

One more batter.

Dale Mitchell.

And suddenly the perfect game has a face.

The name may not carry much weight with a contemporary baseball reader, but it should, because Mitchell had spent eleven seasons in the major leagues, almost all of them with Cleveland, where in 1949 he led the American League in hits, with 203; singles, with 161; and triples, with 23, while striking out only eleven times in 640 at-bats.

Eleven.

He was an All-Star in 1949 and again in 1952, and in 1954 he was part of the Cleveland club that won 111 games, then an American League record for a 154-game season, and captured the pennant.

For his career, Mitchell hit .312, drove in 403 runs, hit 41 home runs, collected 1,244 hits, and established himself as precisely the sort of hitter a pitcher would prefer to encounter almost anywhere except at the edge of perfection.

But the number that matters most here may be another one:

119.

In 3,984 major-league at-bats, Dale Mitchell struck out 119 times, while drawing 346 walks and compiling a 2.91 walk-to-strikeout ratio, one of the finest such ratios in major-league history.

He was a contact hitter in an era when contact hitters mattered, and between 1943 and 1960, only Ted Williams and Stan Musial hit for a higher average.

And now, at the very end of the 1956 season, this man was standing in the batter’s box with two strikes against Don Larsen.

There is an almost comic perversity in it, because the perfect game had arrived at the one man who seemed least likely to cooperate.

Mitchell had been purchased by Brooklyn from Cleveland near the end of the season, and now, wearing a Brooklyn uniform and serving as a pinch-hitter for Sal Maglie, he found himself in a Yankee Stadium batter’s box, standing between Don Larsen and the first perfect game in World Series history.

He had one job: don’t make the final out.

Larsen had another: make it.

Yogi Berra had another: call the pitch.

And Babe Pinelli had the strangest job of all: decide what he saw.

But before we get to Pinelli, we have to get to Yogi, because Yogi had been doing his own kind of work all afternoon.

He had called every pitch Larsen had thrown, ninety-six pitches and ninety-six calls, and Larsen had trusted him, pitch after pitch and out after out, until the ninth inning had arrived and perfection was sitting there waiting for one final conversation between pitcher and catcher.

Yogi wasn’t merely crouching behind the plate waiting to receive whatever Larsen happened to throw; he was reading the hitters, reading the count, reading the situation, thinking ahead, and calling the pitches that brought Larsen through the afternoon.

And Larsen was responding.

Ninety-seven calls on ninety-seven pitches.

That is another kind of perfection, because Larsen threw the perfect game, but Yogi called it, and the perfect game was therefore a conversation that lasted ninety-seven pitches.

The photograph catches only the final sentence.

Perhaps that’s why the photograph is more complicated than it looks, because we see Don Larsen, we see Yogi Berra, and we see celebration, while behind that celebration lies a long conversation between a pitcher and a catcher in which Larsen threw what Yogi called, Yogi called what he believed Larsen could throw, and the two of them were right again and again and again.

Ninety-seven times.

Then there is Babe Pinelli, who may have had the strangest role of all.

Larsen could throw, Yogi could call and catch, Mitchell could hit, but Pinelli had to judge, and judging is different because he was the man who had to determine whether the thing everyone was about to remember had actually happened.

There was another complication: this was Pinelli’s final game behind home plate

.

He had been a major-league umpire for twenty-two years, and he had already decided that this World Series would be his last, which meant that the final game of his career had somehow placed him behind home plate for a perfect game.

Think about that: the last game of your career, the World Series, the final inning, two outs, two strikes, and a perfect game hanging in the balance, with Dale Mitchell—a .312 hitter who almost never struck out—standing in the batter’s box.

The puzzle Larsen had been handed for the final out.

Larsen throws.

Mitchell checks.

And now the decision belongs to Pinelli.

This is where Outside Baseball steps outside the historical record and begins asking its more peculiar questions.

Did Babe Pinelli picture perfection?

We cannot know, because we cannot climb inside his mind and we cannot say that he literally saw the future, but we can imagine the possibility.

He knows the game is perfect; he knows no Dodger has reached first base; he knows there is one out remaining; and he knows this is his last game as an umpire.

The pitch comes.

Mitchell checks.

And for perhaps a second or two, the future has not yet arrived.

Except perhaps it has.

Perhaps, in that tiny interval between seeing the pitch and making the call, Pinelli catches a glimpse of the thing that is about to happen—not a prediction, not a calculation, but a glimpse.

The perfect game.

Already complete.

Already waiting.

The Yankees running onto the field, Yogi leaping toward Larsen, the crowd exploding, the photograph that will exist, and the story that will be told—all of it somehow appearing before the present has finished becoming the past.

And then Pinelli has a choice.

Ball or strike.

The future has offered him one version, and he recognizes it.

He raises his arm.

Strike three.

And two seconds later, the future becomes the past.

Yogi explodes from behind the plate and runs toward Larsen, leaping into him as the Yankees come spilling from the dugout and the crowd rises around them, while somewhere in that eruption the camera catches the moment and turns it into history.

Suddenly the thing that had existed only as possibility has acquired a name:

Don Larsen’s perfect game.

But perhaps that’s only the beginning, because Larsen threw the pitch, Yogi called it, Mitchell confronted it, and Pinelli judged it, and somewhere inside those four acts something happened that baseball has been trying to explain ever since.

The game became perfect.

Not when Larsen released the ball, not when Mitchell held his swing, and not even when Yogi caught it, but perhaps when Pinelli recognized what the moment was becoming and called it accordingly.

That is the mystery.

We can never know whether Pinelli actually saw the future, and we don’t need to, because he raised his arm, called strike three, and the future arrived.

There is another thing about Mitchell that makes the ending even more remarkable: he wasn’t simply the final batter because his turn happened to come up; he was a formidable hitter, a .312 lifetime hitter with 1,244 major-league hits, 346 walks, and only 119 strikeouts in 3,984 at-bats, a man who had once led the American League with 203 hits and 161 singles and who had struck out only eleven times in 640 at-bats in 1949.

And now, at the very end, he was standing in the box with two strikes against him.

The man who almost never struck out.

The man whose entire career had been built around making contact.

The final puzzle.

And Don Larsen had to solve him, Yogi had to call the pitch, Mitchell had to decide whether to swing, and Pinelli had to decide what he had seen.

Four men.

One baseball.

And the possibility of perfection.

Mitchell believed the final pitch was a ball, and he would believe it for the rest of his life, which matters because the perfect game contains, inside itself, a disagreement.

The record says strike three.

Mitchell said ball.

Pinelli said strike.

History sided with Pinelli.

But Mitchell never surrendered his version, and so the perfect game, which looks so absolute in the record book, contains a tiny human fracture: a disagreement about one pitch that has survived for seventy years.

Perhaps that’s precisely where baseball becomes metaphysictional.

The pitch disappears, the catcher rises, the batter walks away, the umpire removes his mask, the crowd goes home, and the stadium empties, but the moment doesn’t; instead, it acquires another life, then another, and then another—a statistic, a photograph, a memory, a disagreement, a legend.

Nobody knows a moment is perfect while it is being made.

Larsen didn’t know in the first inning, Yogi didn’t know in the fourth, the Yankees didn’t know in the sixth, and even in the ninth perfection was still only a possibility.

Then came the final pitch.

Mitchell held his swing.

Pinelli judged.

His arm went up.

Strike three.

And suddenly the invisible became visible.

Larsen had done it, America had witnessed it, Pinelli had called it, and the camera caught the moment when everybody finally understood what had happened.

Perhaps that’s why we keep looking at that photograph.

We’re trying to find the instant when possibility became fact, but the camera doesn’t quite give it to us; it gives us Yogi, it gives us Larsen, and it gives us celebration, while the actual mystery happened a fraction of a second earlier, when one man threw a baseball, another man watched it pass, and a third man decided what the baseball was.

Strike Three

That was Pinelli’s final great act as a plate umpire, and it made Don Larsen perfect.

But Yogi had been there all along.

Ninety-seven pitches.

Ninety-seven calls.

A perfect game called into existence one pitch at a time.

Perhaps that is the deeper photograph: Yogi Berra standing behind the plate, imagining the game before it happened; Don Larsen trusting him enough to throw exactly what he imagined; Dale Mitchell, the .312 hitter who almost never struck out, standing between them and perfection; and Babe Pinelli, for one impossible instant, standing between the present and the future.

Then the future caught up.

Together.

Perfectly.

Invisible architecture lets the reader move through the essay believing they are simply watching the game.

AI slop is still slop and as sloppy as human slop.

Most of us have been writing and reading human slop for years as our reading levels tend to plateau at about the seventh grade level when reading instruction sort of disappears and morphs into study/analysis for which God created Cliff notes and or James Patterson and we begin to write at the same level of development established by our reading level.

.

Once upon a time I asked one of my most respected colleagues if he had read a certain book.

He said:

“Read it!? I haven’t even taught it!”

Most of us know what he meant.

There is a difference between reading a book and knowing about a book.

We can know the plot. We can know the characters. We can know the themes. We can know what somebody has decided the book means.

And still never really have read the thing.

Which brings us to Wilson’s Revenge.

I read it.

I enjoyed it.

I liked its down-home human simplicity. I liked the feeling that somebody had simply sat down and written about the little things that accumulate into a life. The poems seemed comfortable with ordinary subjects and ordinary language

.

They simply seemed to be there.

And we liked them.

Then we learned that the entire thing had apparently been composed by AI with minimum human prompting.

Well.

Now what?

How guilty should we feel if after reading and enjoying Wilson’s Revenge and basking in its down home human simplicity we discover that the entire thing was composed by AI with minimum human prompting?

Do we forgive ourselves for our previous affection or—and here’s the one I like—present our testimony to the jury and then allow the judge to instruct the jury to strike our testimony from their deliberations even though they heard it and were affected by it at the time?

Because we did read it.

We did enjoy it.

And we did so before we knew.

So what exactly are we supposed to strike?

The book?

The poems?

Our enjoyment of them?

The memory of sitting there and liking what we were reading?

Can a judge tell a jury to forget something it has already felt?

And if the jury has already heard the testimony, what happens when we tell them afterward that the witness was somehow disqualified?

The testimony has already happened.

The reader has already experienced it.

And that, I think, is where our argument over Wilson’s Revenge really begins.

Because the question isn’t simply whether AI wrote the book.

The question is what happens to us when we discover that it did.

And that question is larger than Wilson’s Revenge because it reaches into the very thing we have always meant when we call a piece of writing authentic.

If I enjoyed something before I knew how it was made, does knowing how it was made change the experience I already had?

I suppose it can change my opinion.

It can change my trust.

It can change my willingness to recommend the work.

It can even change the way I read the words the next time around.

But can it change the fact that I enjoyed them the first time

?

I’m beginning to think that’s the testimony we may have the hardest time striking.

And that leaves us with a few questions worth carrying forward: and these questions might be the judges instructions to the jury as they begin their deliberation.

Can discovering how a work was made invalidate the experience it produced?

Is authenticity something that belongs to the writer, the writing, the process—or the reader?

If a machine produces language that genuinely moves a human being, what exactly has been falsified?

If we cannot unread what we have already read, can we ever completely undo what we have already felt?

The jury has heard the testimony.

The jury has already been affected by it.

And now the jury has to decide what, if anything, can be struck from the record.

Which is a tribute to the metaphysictional quality of the film although it dips just a bit too much into the metaphysical

.

I’m not going to explain either metafiction nor metaphysiction in this review but if you have a grasp of those two perspectives then I can stop the review right now because you already have a brainful.

Yeah good. I see a few nods so let’s not stop the review; let’s start it.

We haven’t been to the movies since the massive and overwhelming experience of The Odyssey which was a far cry from the movie we saw before that called Obsession which Lynn just informed me is available for free in the stream. I’m not anxious to see Obsession again because it is an exceedingly disturbing film on many levels and ya know what, I get it thank you very much. Yeah...wow...yeah that’s Obsession.

Obsession came on the heels of Backrooms, another limited budget masterpiece. It too is available in the stream. I went so far as to pay for it which tells you something about my high regard for the movie. It’s not for everybody fer sure but it was damned straight for me.

So we were looking to see another movie but nothing attracted us. Then I noticed Ewan was in a new movie. We’ve loved Ewan ever since Moulin Rouge and we heard something about dinosaurs so off we went.

The mall parking lot was as full as I’ve seen a mall parking lot in a long time.

Hmmm.

Well, after a little bit of a glitch regarding the validity of our paid-in-advance status, we chose our seat before boarding. On the seat-choosing screen I noticed a whole shitload of X’s which I figured stood for empty seats, so as usual we had the entire theater to choose from until we didn’t

.

The X’s stood for seats that people had purchased.

In other words the place was packed.

Full.

To the rafters.

Huh.

So we found our seats and sure enough the entire row was occupied except for four seats at the end of the row. Our seats were next to the seats next to the aisle and yep shortly after we sat down; another couple came in and took those seats which was kinda uncomfortable since we’re used to having a lot of space between us and everybody else but provided living proof that the place was packed.

.

Huh.

What’s causing this?

So the movie started and the challenge began immediately.

What the hell is going on here?

Why are these things happening?

What’s up with Ewan’s socks?

Oh yep there’s the bully and there’s the dog and there’s the unexplained murder and oh no...they can’t be trying to pull this is bow and arrow gimmick out of the bag in order to send everybody home in the mood to talk about what was going on in the film which is about as far as I want to go with plot so if you combine that sentence with the opening sentence about metaphysics/metaphysiction you’re arriving at a good place to continue reading because now I want to tell you what the movie is about.

It’s about creating a summer blockbuster.

It has everything although I can’t remember a kitchen sink but that’s probably in there as well.

It has just the right amount of CG which everybody now knows is CG which means the actors are in front of green screen or something equally effective but making it clear that this movie cost more to make than you might think it cost when you first sit down and yet it cost a lot less than that Trojan Horse down the hallway which made the dinosaurs and the jungles and the ongoing tributes to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Jurassic Park and A Christmas Story and Field of Dreams and Moulin Rouge and everything else all wrapped up and designed to be an example of a modern blockbuster busting the block while also exemplifying itself in the process

.

Ya know...Thornton Krell kinda crap because somewhere as you watch you stop saying:

“Are you kidding me”

to

“Okay I see what you’re doing”

to

“Holy shit you’re pulling it off”

to

“This is all about intentionally making a movie using every device to deliver a packed theater and there we are sitting in a packed theater and loving it and loving movies and loving life which doesn’t happen all that much particularly in the wake of Backrooms and Obsession and Christopher Nolan and cost a lot less but probably more than either Backrooms or Obsession, all of which come charging into this review unexpectedly even into this very last sentence and everybody can go home feeling good which is kinda what movies used to do and are capable of doing again if you can put J.J. Abrams with a hot new director (and I’m not even going to pretend that I know this director’s name even though I know he directed It Follows which some people like but intentionally would never become a blockbuster except within the cult of its admirers and detractors, neither one of which I am because they were not aimed directly at 21st-century blockbustering just to show the world that it could be done and make sure to do some visual, literal block busting within the film itself uh huh). And when’s the last time ya saw a sentence end in a parenthesis etc.

.

Aida had already used it once, and although the salve had left no visible trace except for a faint sheen along the knuckles, she could still smell it on her hand whenever she lifted it close to her face: beeswax and herbs, a cool green scent underneath a warmer note that reminded her of crushed rosemary, with something darker beneath that, perhaps clove, perhaps cedar, perhaps a root she had never encountered. It was an unusually handsome salve, if a salve could be handsome, its color somewhere between sage and old honey, its surface smooth except for the shallow crescent left by Ashley’s fingertip.

Aida touched the lid.

“You said you’ve seen it help people.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew I would need it.”

Ashley looked at her.

“I knew you might.”

“That isn’t quite the same thing.”

“No.”

Ashley smiled.

“I read about your hand.”

Aida’s eyes moved toward her own.

The fist.

She had been making it more often lately, sometimes without realizing she was doing it, as though the hand had become an experiment she conducted upon herself: close the fingers, observe the resistance, measure the power, release the pressure, begin again.

“Where?”

Ashley hesitated.

Aida noticed.

It was a small hesitation, but Aida had spent enough years watching people to know that hesitation was rarely empty.

“You’ve already told me you’ve read Ice Rivers.”

“I have.”

“His books.”

“Several.

”

“And you’ve read his essays.”

Ashley nodded.

“Daily Deep Archer.”

Aida looked at her.

The name seemed to remain in the air a moment after Ashley had spoken it.

“Substack?”

“Yes.”

“The village?”

Ashley smiled.

“The quaint little village.”

Aida laughed.

“I wish people would stop calling it that.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I read about that too.”

Aida leaned against the counter.

“So you came here because you read about the village.”

Ashley nodded.

“I wanted to see it.”

Aida looked toward the window.

The square was almost empty now. The post-office bench held its usual afternoon occupant, a man who seemed to have been sitting there for years without having any particular reason to leave, and the church steeple rose beyond the roofs with the quiet authority of something that had been there long enough to have forgotten why.

The building stood across from them.

It seemed closer than it had a moment ago.

Or perhaps Aida was simply looking at it differently.

“And you recognized that building?”

Ashley nodded.

“I remembered it from the piece.”

Aida turned toward her.

“What did Rivers say about it?”

Ashley thought.

“That it appeared to belong to an earlier period.”

“It does.”

“Although nobody could determine which one.”

Aida smiled.

“That’s true.”

“And the repairs and additions had softened the original brickwork.”

Aida’s smile remained, but something else had entered her expression.

“You really remember it.”

“I remember the way he described it.”

Aida looked through the window again. That distinction mattered. She had never thought about it before. She knew the building. Ashley knew the description of the building. They were looking at the same structure in different ways.

Aida said, “Did the description make you want to come here?”

Ashley nodded.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Ashley took a moment.

“I don’t know.Maybe I wanted to see whether it was real.”

Aida looked at the building.

“It is.”

“Yes.”

“But you weren’t sure.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Ashley shrugged.

“Because I’d only read about it.”

Aida turned toward her.

“And now?”

Ashley looked at the building again.

“Now I’ve seen it.”

Aida smiled.

“Is that enough?”

Ashley looked back at her.

“I don’t think so.”

That pleased Aida.

She walked toward the pastry case and opened it

.

Ashley watched.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure you have enough evidence.”

“For what?”

“That the bakery is real.”

Ashley laughed.

Aida removed a cinnamon knot.

It was still slightly warm from the morning’s baking, the outer layers browned deeply where the butter and sugar had reached the heat of the pan, the folds crisp enough to crackle when touched while the center remained soft and yielding. A little glaze had settled into the creases rather than covering the whole thing, so that the sweetness came in concentrated places, with the buttery dough between them.

Aida placed it on a plate.

“Try this.”

Ashley looked at it.

“I’ve already eaten.”

“You’ve barely begun.”

Ashley smiled.

“You’re very persuasive.”

“I own a bakery.”

Ashley took the cinnamon knot. The first bite produced a faint crackle. Then the softness. Then the butter. Then the cinnamon and brown sugar, warm and deep, with the caramelized edges giving way to dough that still carried the heat of the oven

.

Ashley closed her eyes.

Aida watched her.

“That’s ridiculous.”

Ashley opened her eyes.

“What?”

“You look like you’ve discovered religion.”

“Maybe I have.”

“It’s only cinnamon.”

Ashley shook her head.

“No. It’s evidence.”

Aida wondered out loud. “Of what?”

“That the writing was incomplete.”

Ashley gestured toward the bakery.

“He could describe this.”

“Yes.”

“He could describe the smell.”

“Yes.”

“The flour.”

“Yes.”

“The bread.”

“Yes.”

“The light.”

“Yes.”

“But he couldn’t make me taste it.”

Aida smiled.

“No.”

“Neither could you.”

Aida laughed.

“I just gave you the pastry.”

“Exactly.”

Aida shook her head.

“You’ve been reading too much.”

Ashley smiled.

“I’ve been reading exactly enough.”

The answer pleased Aida more than she expected.

She went back behind the counter.

For a while they said nothing.

The bakery seemed to make conversation unnecessary without making the women feel alone. The oven had begun ticking again. Somewhere behind them, cooling bread gave off a faint crackle as its crust contracted. Coffee sat warming in the pot, and the fragrance of butter, yeast, cinnamon, fruit, and roasted beans had become so thoroughly mixed with the room that Aida sometimes wondered whether people carried a little of the bakery home with them.

Ashley looked toward the mirror. Aida saw her doing it.

“What do you see?”

“Myself.”

“Only yourself?”

Ashley smiled.

“Mostly.”

Aida turned toward the mirror.

Their reflections stood beside one another; an observer observing herself while being observed. The old glass did what it always did, giving each woman a version of herself that was recognizably correct and yet somehow less certain than the person standing before it; one observer observing another observer observing her observing herself

Aida looked at Ashley’s reflection. Ashley looked at Aida’s.

Then Ashley said, “There’s something I remember from the piece.”

“What?”

“The writer described the village as though it were observing itself.”

Aida considered that.

“That sounds uncomfortable. It can be; I guess that depends upon self-awareness”

“It sounded curious.”

“There’s a difference?”

“I think so.”

“What is it?”

Ashley looked at her.

“Curiosity wants to know what it will find.”

“And observation?”

“Observation discovers that what it finds is looking back.”

Aida smiled.

“You really have read Ice Rivers.”

“Yes.”

“More than I thought.”

Ashley nodded into the mirror and all the observers observed that.

“More than you know.”

Aida turned away from the mirror.

“How much do you know?”

Ashley looked at her.

“About you?”

“Yes.”

Ashley hesitated. Then she said, “Enough to know that you were going to make a fist when you were alone.”

Aida stopped.

The room seemed suddenly larger.

“You read that?”

Ashley nodded.

“In the village piece?”

“Yes.”

Aida looked down at her hand.

“I didn’t know anyone knew.”

“I don’t think anyone did.”

“Except the writer.”

“Yes.”

Aida looked toward the window.

The building stood across the square.

The village stood around it.

And somewhere beyond both, there was the man who had written about them.

She said quietly, “That’s an odd thing.”

“What is?”

“To know that someone has seen you doing something you thought nobody saw.”

Ashley smiled.

“That’s what reading can do.”

Aida looked at her.

Ashley continued.

“You can meet someone before they meet you.”

Aida smiled faintly.

“And that is why you came?”

Ashley nodded.

“Partly.”

“Partly?”

“I wanted to know what the woman was like.”

Aida laughed.

“The woman?”

“The woman in the story.”

Aida looked at her. “You mean me.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Ashley looked around the bakery. Then at Aida.

“You’re better.”

Aida smiled.

“Better than the story?”

“No.”

Ashley took another piece of the cinnamon knot.

“Better than I expected.”

Aida laughed.

“That is acceptable. Expectation has a way of influencing experience”

Ashley looked at the little tin of salve.

“I brought it because I remembered your hand.”

Aida touched it.

“And now?”

“Now I’ve met the hand.”

Aida raised an eyebrow.

“You mean me.”

“I mean both.”

Aida looked at her for a long moment.

Then she opened the tin.

She took a little salve herself this time, rubbing it between her fingers until it softened, watching the green-gold surface become almost translucent as it warmed against her skin.

She tenderly worked it into her own knuckles. The scent rose again.

Ashley watched.

Aida closed her hand.

The fist came.

Not as it once had.

Better.

The salve had become more than an ointment without becoming anything supernatural. It was a small thing carried by one woman because she had read about another woman. It had crossed the distance between a sentence and a hand, between a description and an experience, between a reader and the person she had first encountered as writing.

Aida understood that much.

What she did not yet understand was how much of herself Ashley had encountered before walking through the bakery door.

Krell understood even less. He watched the two women from the peculiar position available to a narrator who knew that one of them had been written by Ice Rivers and the other had read what Ice Rivers wrote.

He knew Aida was a character.

He knew Ashley was a reader.

Yet Ashley was now sitting across from Aida eating cinnamon bread, while Aida was using salve Ashley had brought because she had read about Aida’s hand. Krell found himself wondering whether the reader had become part of the character’s life simply by reading it.

He disliked the question when he noticed that Ashley was looking toward the window again.

Toward the building.

The building the former traveler had imagined.

The building Rivers had described.

The building Ashley had read about.

The building Aida had always seen.

And now, for the first time, Krell wondered whether the building might be doing more than merely standing there.

Aida noticed Ashley looking.

“What?”

Ashley smiled.

“I was just thinking.”

“About the building?”

“Yes.”

“What were you thinking?”

Ashley looked at Aida.

“I was wondering who built it.”

Aida looked across the square.

“So was I.”

And then Aida laughed.

The bakery seemed to approve. The oven ticked. The coffee remained warm. The cinnamon bread waited beneath its cloth. The raspberry donuts gleamed behind the glass. The flour remained in its familiar crescent beneath the worktable. And for a little while, nobody needed to know who had built the building.

There was bread to eat.

There was coffee to drink.

There were two women discovering that they had already known one another in different ways while somewhere a bunch of subscribers coalesced inside a story they had once read from the outside.

For the moment, that was enough.

Krell watched.

Aida watched Ashley.

Ashley watched the building. Ice Rivers watched his narrator watching the women watching the building.

The bakery remained warm.

The village remained quaint, whether it liked it or not.

And the reader, who had been invited inside, had no particular reason to leave except perhaps to turn another page and anticpate

.

Read more

He wrote one word:

QUAINT

He looked at it for a moment then he turned to the class.

“Once upon a time, there was a village

.

“And anytime anybody would pass through this village, they would say,

‘What a quaint village.’

“The village heard this often enough that, after a while, it began to wonder about it.

“Then one day the village said:

‘You know, I’m really not that old, comparatively.

‘And I’m in pretty good shape.

‘So, you know what? I don’t appreciate being quaint.

‘I mean, you can’t rush quaint on a village.

‘I’m not quaint.

‘I might be a little behind.

‘I might be a little small.

‘But quaint?

‘Nah.

‘Not yet.’”

The students laughed.

Krell smiled.

“The village has objected to the description.”

He paused.

“The objection is now part of the description.”

He underlined QUAINT.

“And that,” he said, “is where we begin.”

He drew a line beneath the word.

“The travelers kept coming. They said the same thing.

‘What a quaint little village.’

“Then people began arriving who had never seen the village. They had heard about it. They came because they had heard about it.

“And what had they heard?”

“Quaint,” somebody said.

“Exactly.”

Krell wrote:

RUMOR

“The village had become portable. You could carry it in your head without ever having visited it.”

He wrote beneath it:

ABSORPTION

“And after a while, you didn’t merely carry the description. You carried an expectation.”

He wrote:

EXPECTATION

“You arrive expecting a quaint village.

“You look around. You notice the bakery, the old houses, the narrow streets, the crooked fence.

“And you think:

Yes. Quaint.

“That is experience.”

He circled EXPECTATION and EXPERIENCE.

“But now we have a little problem.

“Your expectation entered the experience before the experience had a chance to introduce itself.”

A student raised a hand.

“So expectation changes experience?”

“Sometimes.”

“Then experience changes expectation?”

“Precisely.”

Krell drew a crooked arrow between the two.

“Expectation enters experience. Experience modifies expectation. Expectation returns to the next experience.

“And so forth.”

Krell stepped back from the board and folded his arms. He looked at the crooked arrow between EXPECTATION and EXPERIENCE, then at the class, as if waiting for somebody to object.

Nobody did.

He nodded once.

“You never quite arrive at the village empty-handed. You arrive carrying a village.”

A student frowned and leaned back in his chair, as though trying to move far enough away from the idea to examine it.

Krell noticed.

“Don’t worry. It gets worse.”

The class laughed.

“Eventually fifty travelers agree that the village is quaint. A hundred. A thousand.

“Now tell me: has agreement brought us closer to the truth?”

“Yes,” someone said.

Krell turned.

“Why?”

“Because everybody saw the same thing.”

“Or everybody arrived carrying the same thing.”

He wrote:

AGREEMENT

“Agreement is persuasive. We like agreement because it makes us feel that perception has become knowledge.

“But agreement can be another form of distortion.”

A pause.

“The distortion has synchronized. Mutual misunderstanding is the most common form of agreement.”

He erased QUAINT.

Then wrote it again.

“Now the village has a reputation, and the reputation has a population.”

He wrote:

LEGEND

“People tell the story. Other people hear it. More people arrive. More people agree.

“And eventually the village becomes famous for being quaint.”

He turned toward the class.

“But the village still objects.”

Laughter.

“Soon people are coming specifically because the village objects to being called quaint.

“They arrive expecting non-quaintness.”

Krell wrote:

NON-QUAINT

“And then they look around.

“And one traveler says:

‘I’ve never seen anything so non-quaint.’

“Another says:

‘Remarkably non-quaint.’

“And another says:

‘I’ve never encountered a village so determinedly unquaint.’”

He stopped.

“The village hears this.”

He looked toward the imaginary village.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

The class laughed.

“The village has escaped one description by acquiring another.”

He erased NON-QUAINT.

“Now we have a question.

“Can the village ever get outside the descriptions?”

A student said:

“No.”

Krell shook his head.

“Too easy.”

He wrote:

SAME FIELD

“The village remains what it has always been. The streets remain the streets, the bakery remains the bakery, the houses remain the houses.

“What changes is the way the village is perceived and, eventually, the way the village perceives itself.”

He looked at the class.

“That distinction matters.”

He wrote:

PERCEPTION → SELF-PERCEPTION

“The village has not become more quaint.

“It has become more conscious of being perceived as quaint.

“And its attempt to become non-quaint is therefore an attempt to alter its own perception of itself.”

He paused.

“Which is a very quaint thing for a quaint little village to do. In fact, it is what all quaint villages attempt when they try to alter their perception of themselves, which is precisely what this little village has begun to notice itself doing.”

The class laughed.

Krell smiled.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

He wrote:

PAST — PRESENT — FUTURE

“One village. Many perceptions. One present. Many times.”

He wrote:

FICTION — NONFICTION

“Same field.”

He put down the chalk.

“And now something very peculiar happened.”

The students waited.

“One particular traveler saw the village trying to escape quaintness.

“He understood what the village was attempting and also understood that the attempt itself had become quaint.

“He appreciated this.

“And then he imagined a building.

”

Krell drew a rectangle on the board.

“It was a large steel-and-glass building standing near the center of the village.”

He looked at his drawing.

“The traveler thought:

‘That’s bizarrely modern and way out of place.’”

Krell paused.

“The building heard him.”

The students laughed.

Krell continued.

“Now, you may reasonably object that buildings cannot hear. That would be a reasonable objection.

“Unfortunately, the building had one of its own.”

He turned toward the rectangle.

“‘Modern?’

‘Me?’”

He looked back at the class.

“The building considered the matter. It had been imagined as arriving in 1987 and had been standing there ever since

.

“It looked at its windows, considered its steel, then considered its plumbing.”

Krell paused.

“Then it said:

‘I’ve been here for years.

‘Frankly, I consider myself rather antiquated.’”

The class laughed.

“It looked at the ceiling. It looked at the pipes.

“Something made a noise somewhere inside it.”

The building thought about this.

“‘I’ve got maintenance issues.’”

Krell waited for the laughter to settle.

“Now here’s the interesting part.

“The building exists only because one traveler imagined it.”

He wrote:

IMAGINATION

“The village did not imagine the building.

“The village did not change.

“The traveler changed his imagination of the village.”

He circled the rectangle.

“But once imagined, the building acquired an opinion about the imagination that produced it.”

He turned.

“The traveler imagined the building.

“The building now has an opinion about the traveler.”

He looked at the class.

“Who is imagining whom?”

Nobody answered.

“Good.”

Krell smiled.

“We’ll leave that unanswered.”

He drew a smaller rectangle beside the building.

“Because there was also a bakery.”

The students laughed before he said anything else.

“The bakery had been there much longer. It considered itself a respectable establishment. It baked bread, had flour on its windows, and had been called quaint for generations.”

He looked at the building.

“The building, meanwhile, considered the bakery excessively quaint.”

The bakery heard this.

It was offended.

“‘Excessively?’”

The building said nothing.

“‘You’re a bakery,’ it said.

“‘Exactly.’

“‘You have flour on your floors.

’

“‘That’s character.’

“‘That’s flour.’”

The students laughed.

Krell nodded.

“The bakery considered the building terribly modern.

“The building considered the bakery terribly quaint.”

He wrote:

BAKERY ↔ BUILDING

“And then something peculiar happened.”

He looked at the two rectangles.

“The bakery began envying the building.

“It thought:

‘I wish I could be modern.’

“And with that wish, it became more quaint.”

Krell turned to the building.

“The building began envying the bakery.

“It thought:

‘I wish I could be quaint.’

“And with that wish, the building became more modern.”

He looked at the class.

“And neither one realized that it was already partly what the other imagined.”

He let the sentence remain.

“The bakery thought the building was modern.

“The building thought the bakery was quaint.

“The bakery thought itself quaint.

“The building thought itself modern.

“And both were wrong.”

He paused.

“Both were right.”

He smiled.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

The bakery and the building began talking.

The conversations were not always pleasant.

“You’re quaint,” said the building.

“You’re modern,” said the bakery.

“I don’t want to be modern.”

“I don’t want to be quaint.”

“Then what are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

They were quiet for a moment.

The bakery smelled of bread.

The building listened to its plumbing.

Finally the bakery said:

“You know, I think you’re becoming rather quaint.”

The building was horrified.

“Don’t start.”

The class laughed.

Krell looked at the board.

“The building had begun to fluctuate.”

Some days it felt modern; its glass looked modern, its steel looked modern, and its elevators, when they worked, felt extremely modern.

Other days it felt quaint. A window stuck, a pipe complained, and the heating system made the same noise it had made since 1994.

And the building thought:

Perhaps I am rather quaint if quaint means falling apart and being imagined as non quaint.

Then a traveler would photograph it and say:

“What an astonishingly modern building.”

And the building would feel modern again.

Then someone else would say:

“It has a charmingly old-fashioned quality.”

And the building would spend the afternoon feeling quaint.

Eventually it became deeply conflicted.

Sometimes it was extremely non-quaint.

Other times it was way, way too quaint.

And occasionally it was both at once.

“This,” Krell said, “was particularly exhausting.”

He turned toward the class.

“The building had begun to discover that it could not maintain a stable identity.”

A student said:

“Because people kept seeing it differently?”

Krell nodded.

“Yes.

“But that’s only half the problem.”

He pointed at the bakery.

“The bakery was seeing it differently too.”

Then at the building.

“And the building was seeing itself differently.”

He pointed at the class.

“And you are seeing it differently again.”

He paused.

“And none of these perceptions has to cancel the others.”

He wrote:

SINGULAR / PLURAL

“One building. Many buildings.

“One bakery. Many bakeries.

“One village. Many villages.”

He looked around.

“Do you see the difficulty?”

A student raised a hand.

“The building isn’t one thing anymore.”

Krell shook his head.

“No.

“It may be one thing precisely because it can be many things.”

The room went quiet.

Krell put down the chalk.

“And now we have arrived at the problem I wanted you to encounter.”

He pointed toward the building.

“The building is fictional.”

He pointed toward the class.

“But your experience of it is real.”

He pointed toward the bakery.

“The bakery is physical.

“But your experience of the bakery is also shaped by what you have been told about it.”

He pointed toward the village.

“The village is physical.

“But the village you carry in your head is not.”

He pointed to himself.

“I am fictional within the fiction.”

He looked at the class.

“And yet you are listening to me.”

A pause.

“So where does the fiction stop?”

Nobody answered.

Krell smiled.

“Good.”

He picked up the chalk again.

He wrote:

DISTORTION

Then:

TRANSFORMATION

Then:

RUMOR

Then:

ABSORPTION

Then:

LEGEND

Then:

MYTH

He looked at the sequence.

“These are useful words but don’t make the mistake of believing that they are steps.”

He drew a circle around all six.

“They are conditions.”

He looked at the class.

“A village is encountered. It is altered. It is described. The description travels. It is absorbed. It becomes expectation. The expectation enters experience. The experience changes the description. The description becomes legend. The legend becomes myth. and the myth returns to the village. They’re even talking about it in lectures in seminars in community colleges”

He stepped away from the board.

“The field has no obligation to proceed in a straight line.”

He looked at the students.

“Neither do you.”

A hand went up.

“Professor Krell?”

“Yes?”

“So what is metaphysiction?”

Krell stared at him.

Then smiled.

“You’ve ruined everything.”

The class laughed.

“I could give you a definition. You would absorb it. You would repeat it. Someone else would absorb it. Soon everyone would agree and eventually you would have a very respectable definition of metaphysiction.”

He paused.

“Which would be precisely the problem.”

He erased the word MYTH.

Then LEGEND.

Then ABSORPTION.

One by one, he erased the words until only the circle remained.

“Because metaphysiction has a peculiar dimension”

He looked at the class.

“It cannot describe what it is without becoming an example of what it describes.”

The room became still.

“If I explain how imagination alters experience, your imagination alters your experience of my explanation.

“If I explain misunderstanding, you will misunderstand me.

“If I explain absorption, you will absorb the explanation.

“If I explain the field, you will enter it.”

He paused.

“The lecture becomes part of the lesson.”

A student raised a hand.

“Is that intentional?”

Krell slapped his forehead and shuffled his feet and ignored a distractive doo wah diddy.

“That depends on whether you misunderstood it.”

The student frowned.

“I don’t understand.”

Krell nodded.

“Excellent.”

The class laughed.

Krell turned back toward the blackboard.

“That is metaphysiction.”

He did not define it.

He had already demonstrated it.

He put down the chalk.

“One final question.”

He looked at the students.

“Would you be happier if you saw what the student next to you saw rather than what you saw?”

Nobody answered.

Krell nodded.

“Because then you would agree.”

He looked toward the building.

“But agreement is another form of distortion.”

He opened the door.

“Sometimes the most interesting thing two people can share is that they don’t see the same thing that they are looking at which is the beginning of misunderstanding.

He left.

The students sat quietly.

Then one student looked at the other.

“What did you see?”

The other student thought about it.

“A quaint village.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw a non-quaint village.”

They laughed.

Neither of them noticed that the student behind them had seen neither.

She had seen the bakery.

And the bakery had seen the building.

And the building, which existed only because somebody had imagined it, was thinking about its plumbing.

It was also beginning to wonder whether it was quaint.

Or modern.

Or both.

It decided it was probably both and it soothed itself by imagining itself as a modern version of quaint and a quaint version of modern which only increased its neuroses as it approached wisdom

This annoyed the building

Then it thought about the bakery.

The bakery thought about the imaginary building thinking about the flour on the floor and using that thought as the proof of quaintness.

Neither knew who had thought first.

The building sighed.

The bakery smelled the bread.

And the building said:

“I’ve got maintenance issues.”

And somewhere inside the village, the story continued.

How does a writer move a reader from a moment to a meaning?

That is the question we’re going to pursue today, and rather than answer it with a list of rules, we’re going to watch it happen

.

A writer begins with a moment.

Then the writer puts the reader inside that moment, allowing the physical details to accumulate before explaining what they mean.

Then something happens inside the moment that creates a disturbance—a contradiction, an unexpected object, a question the writer cannot quite answer.

The writer stays with that disturbance rather than rushing past it.

Eventually, the writer begins to recognize a pattern.

The pattern becomes a meaning.

And finally, the meaning reaches beyond the original moment and tells us why the story needed to be told.

Seven movements:

Begin with the moment.

Put the reader inside it.

Let the moment create the disturbance.

Stay with the disturbance.

Recognize the pattern.

Discover the meaning.

Carry that meaning beyond the moment.

But there is a catch.

If we know the meaning too soon, we tend to write toward it, and when we write toward a predetermined meaning, the story can begin to feel like an illustration designed to prove a point.

The more interesting possibility is to let the meaning emerge from the moment itself.

So today we’re going to try something slightly different.

We’re going to watch a story discover what it means.

And the story begins with a boy on Parsells Avenue who thinks he knows what a heart is.

There was a time when I thought I understood what a heart was.

I was a boy on Parsells Avenue, and my understanding was probably adequate for the ordinary purposes of childhood: a heart was the thing inside you that kept you alive, while somewhere in the growing vocabulary of romance there was another heart, the one you gave away when you fell in love, although I had little practical use for that definition yet.

Then Mike Maggin shot a deer.

Mike was the outdoorsman who had moved into the house next door to ours on Parsells Avenue, and after he brought the deer home, my father thought it would be a good idea for me to go over and see what Mike was doing with it.

I thought it might be interesting.

So I went.

Mike was working on the deer in the basement of his house, a basement I had never been in before, and that alone made the experience feel like an expedition into territory I hadn’t previously known existed. I knew the house from the outside, I knew Mike lived there, and now I was downstairs inside it, watching him take apart an animal that, only a short time earlier, had been moving through the world on four legs.

My father was there, too, standing somewhere behind me, I suppose, watching Mike work and watching me watch Mike work, which gave the whole business the faint quality of an adult-sanctioned lesson whose subject I had yet to understand.

There was something educational about it, at least in theory.

This is where meat becomes meat.

I didn’t have those words then, of course, but that is what the basement seemed to be teaching me: there was a place where the living creature became the thing we ate, and Mike knew precisely where that place was.

I watched him work, and the longer I watched, the less I liked what I was seeing, although my discomfort had less to do with blood or gore than with the gradual destruction of a category I had previously regarded as permanent.

A deer was a deer.

Meat was meat.

The two ideas had occupied separate compartments in my childhood mind, and Mike was methodically removing the wall between them.

Then came the heart.

Mike took it in his hand and presented it to me and my father, as though he had reached a particular point in his work at which there was an object worth seeing.

I don’t know exactly what he expected from us—validation, approval, awe, or perhaps simply that we would see it—but whatever the reason, he held the deer’s heart there in the basement, and I looked at it.

And the first thing I remember thinking was that it didn’t look like a heart.

Which wasn’t quite true. It was recognizably heart-shaped, and even as a boy I could see that, but it didn’t look like the heart I knew. It wasn’t the neat little Valentine’s Day heart that appeared on cards in February, symmetrical and self-contained, its two rounded lobes descending to a perfect point as though love itself had been given a geometric solution

.

The thing in Mike’s hand was irregular, muscular, folded in upon itself, and unmistakably an organ. It looked like a heart because it was a heart.

And that was the problem.

I had known the heart as a symbol long before I had encountered it as flesh.

The word heart had already accumulated meanings that had very little to do with the object Mike was holding. A heart was something that beat; it was something inside a living body; it represented courage, affection, love, feeling, and perhaps even the deepest part of a person, so that by the time I encountered the actual organ, the word had become almost entirely detached from the flesh it originally named.

This thing in Mike’s hand was simply there.

It was physical in a way the word heart had never been physical.

I wanted to look at it and wanted to look away, and those two impulses arrived together with a force I couldn’t yet explain, because looking seemed necessary if I was going to understand what Mike had placed before me while looking away seemed equally necessary if understanding turned out to be worse than ignorance.

I remember thinking that it was repulsive, but even that word seemed inadequate because repulsive suggested that I knew what I was feeling, and I was beginning to discover that feelings could arrive before the language required to describe them.

I didn’t.

I was attracted to it because I needed to understand it, and horrified by it because I understood enough to know exactly what it was. It had that Abraxas quality; the attraction and the horror occupying the same space at the same time, each making the other more intense.

The deer had been alive.

Now it was meat.

And inside that meat was the heart.

The heart was still the heart.

But the deer was gone.

I think that was the part I couldn’t quite reconcile, because the object in Mike’s hand was telling the truth with a kind of brutal simplicity: this was the heart of the animal, and the animal itself had already become something else.

The object in Mike’s hand was telling the truth, and the truth was uglier than the idea.

For the first time, perhaps, I was discovering that the things we name aren’t necessarily the things we imagine, and that a word can become so burdened with metaphor that the physical object underneath it almost disappears.

A heart can be an emblem of love; it can also be a piece of flesh, and the unsettling discovery is that both meanings are true at the same time.

Sometimes the distance between those two truths is where the story begins.

I didn’t know any of that while I was standing in Mike Maggin’s basement. I knew only that my father had brought me there because he thought I should see this, that Mike was holding the heart of a deer in his hand, and that I was expected, somehow, to look.

So I looked.

And I remember the moment.

I’m still not fond of it.

But perhaps there was more happening in that basement than I understood at the time, because Mike was doing something that I would eventually come to recognize as a fundamental operation of both butchering and writing: he was separating the whole into its parts so that the essential parts could finally be seen.

Mike took the deer apart carefully, separating one part from another until the animal that had arrived in his basement as a whole creature had become a collection of recognizable parts, each with its own purpose, shape, texture, and meaning.

And then he found the heart.

Years later, I suppose, I began to understand what he had been doing.

He was looking for the part that mattered.

And perhaps this is where the writer’s work begins to resemble Maggin’s work, although I certainly didn’t know that when I was a boy in his basement. He was taking a whole animal apart to discover what was inside it; years later, I was taking a whole memory apart to discover what was inside it.

This is the movement we’re after in composition: from the moment to the meaning.

The writer doesn’t begin with the meaning and manufacture a moment to illustrate it. The writer begins with the moment, stays inside it long enough for its particulars to become alive, and then asks what the moment has been trying to tell him.

The meaning comes later.

Sometimes much later.

That is also what happens when we try to tell a story. We take the memory apart, move this piece over here, remove that piece, examine what remains, discover that one detail carries more weight than another, and eventually realize that the story has a heart of its own.

The writer’s work, like Mike’s work, involves a certain amount of cutting, although the writer’s knife is made of language and the wounds are made in sentences. We remove what obscures, separate what belongs from what merely happens to be there, and keep cutting until the essential thing begins to show itself.

The trick is recognizing it when you see it.

And then having the nerve to pick it up.

Maybe that is why the memory of Mike Maggin’s basement has stayed with me. I began with a boy’s understanding of a heart as an idea, encountered one as an object, and spent the rest of my life discovering that the two meanings were never really separate.

The physical heart had been there all along, beating inside the deer before Mike brought it home; the other heart—the one made of love, courage, feeling, metaphor—had been there too, living inside a word that had somehow managed to conceal the organ from which the word came.

Mike showed me the first one.

The story took much longer to show me the second.

And somewhere between the two, I began to understand what it means to find the heart of a story.

You have to take it apart.

You have to look.

You have to be willing to discover that the thing you thought was the story may only be the flesh surrounding it.

And when you finally find the thing that matters, you have to be willing to hold it up and say:

This is it.

Even when you’re still a little afraid of what you’re holding

.

If there was a rule, he preferred knowing what it was, understanding why it existed, and then deciding what he thought about it. Sneaking, as a general method of getting through life, seemed unnecessarily complicated, requiring as it did a degree of advance planning that Krell rarely brought to anything as immediate as a cookie.

Krell had no particular number in mind.

He had no cookie quota, no predetermined limit, no little internal counter ticking away in his head. If cookies were available, he ate one when he wanted one; if he wanted another, he ate another, and eventually the appetite passed and he stopped. He trusted his own appetite to tell him when enough was enough, which was a form of inner discipline he would never have thought to call discipline because he wasn’t trying to be virtuous about cookies. He simply saw no reason to establish a stopping point in advance for an appetite that would eventually establish one for him.

That was characteristic of Krell in ways he had never quite articulated. He was comfortable finding his way as he went, comfortable with an ending that announced itself rather than one prescribed at the beginning, and more inclined to trust a boundary he discovered internally than one somebody else had drawn for him.

Haylen, apparently, operated by a different system.

She had a number in mind.

There was nothing inherently unreasonable about that. Haylen could decide for herself how many cookies seemed like enough, and once she had reached that number, the matter was settled from her point of view. Her boundary existed before the appetite arrived; Krell’s emerged only after the appetite had spent itself. Haylen had a very strong conception of constituted normalcy.Abnormal behavior was irritating at least and intolerable unless curtailed which made confrontation part of her job within the belief that what was tolerated was encouraged.

For Haylen, enough was a number.

For Krell, enough was a condition he eventually reached.

The difficulty was that Haylen knew her number and Krell didn’t have one which meant that what had been a private limit in her mind had somehow become, by the time he heard about it, an accusation against his behavior.

“You’re a sneak.”

Krell looked at the cookie in his hand, which had suddenly acquired the uncomfortable appearance of evidence.

He began walking slowly across the kitchen.

Sneaky.

The word followed him.

What did sneaky actually require?

He passed the counter, turned toward the window, and thought about it. Sneaky implied intention; it suggested that a person knew where the boundary was and deliberately tried to get around it.

But Haylen had known where her boundary was.

That was different.

Her limit was real as a limit, but unless they had agreed that it was a boundary between them, why should Krell have known that it applied to him?

He stopped near the window.

A property line has markers. A game has rules. A contract has terms. Even an ordinary boundary between two people requires some recognition that the line exists on both sides of it. Otherwise one person may have a limit while the other remains unaware that a line has been drawn.

Krell started walking again.

Haylen had a boundary.

Krell had an appetite.

Somewhere between those two private realities, a boundary had been presumed.

That was the interesting part.

He rubbed his chin as he crossed the kitchen again, testing the accusation against the circumstances. Sneaky still didn’t quite fit because sneaky required knowledge, and he hadn’t known. He had encountered somebody else’s limit only after he had crossed it.

There had to be a word for that.

He tried the familiar possibilities in his head—sneaking, sneakily, sneaky—and rejected each one as it passed.

Then the word arrived.

Sneakery.

Krell stopped.

“Sneakery.”

He said it aloud and listened to it.

The word sounded faintly ridiculous, which encouraged him. Good words, Krell thought, sometimes arrived wearing clown shoes.

He resumed his slow circuit of the kitchen, rolling the word around in his mind and testing its edges. Sneakery was what happened when a person moved along the edge of an unspoken boundary, crossed it without knowing it was there, and was then informed that the crossing had been deliberate.

That was better.

The word wasn’t describing a crime so much as a collision between one person’s boundary and another person’s ignorance of it.

Krell looked at the cookie.

And then, while he was still working out precisely what the word meant, he took another bite.

He chewed.

Considered.

Took another.

The behavior was beginning to look suspiciously like an experiment as he relearned how quickly an object could become both a symbol and a system.

“Sneakery,” he murmured. He had invented the word and, almost immediately, demonstrated it.

That seemed either very clever or deeply duplicitous

He finished the cookie and set the wrapper aside.

The word stayed with him.

Then he noticed the book lying open on the kitchen table.

Irresistible.

The biography of Gorilla Monsoon

.

Krell picked it up.

Gorilla Monsoon’s name Krell backward into the old world of professional wrestling, when enormous men had enormous names, enormous bodies and, on occasion, ears that looked as though they had survived a separate career.

Mike Mazurki came to mind.

Mazurki had the sort of face that seemed to have been given considerable thought by several generations of sculptors and then subjected to wrestling, acting and whatever else the twentieth century could devise. He had been a wrestler before becoming the actor whose physical presence could fill a screen without requiring much assistance from dialogue, and there was something about men like Mazurki that made the old wrestling world seem less like entertainment than a peculiar branch of anthropology.

Krell thought of Cauliflower Alley.

Even the name sounded like a place where the evidence accumulated.

Cauliflower Alley wasn’t merely a geographical location in his imagination; it was the fraternity of professional wrestlers, the old fellowship of men who had spent years throwing one another around for the pleasure, money and punishment of the trade. The name carried the humor of the business and the damage of it at the same time. Mike Mazurki was the founder of Cauliflower Alley yet in his eight by tens he made sure to have his cauliflowers surrender to airbrushing.

.

Cauliflower was what happened to an ear when cartilage was repeatedly subjected to pressure and friction, swelling, tearing, hardening and eventually becoming a permanent record of what the body had been asked to endure.

The ear became a résumé.

Krell found that fascinating.

The old wrestler could walk into a room with cauliflower ears and need no introduction. His ears had already told the story. They announced that he had been there, that he had taken the punishment, that he had paid the price. He belonged in the alley.

The scar became evidence of authenticity.

And then Krell’s thought made a small turn.

What if the scar wasn’t the work?

He looked again at the photograph.

The wrestling had been real.

The pain had been real.

The ear had been real.

But the ear was still only an ear.

It was evidence of what the wrestling had once cost, not evidence of what wrestling required.

That distinction became increasingly visible in the modern business. The cauliflower ear hadn’t vanished entirely; there were still wrestlers who carried it, and a few made a kind of visual mythology out of it. But the old, almost expected deformity had largely disappeared from the contemporary wrestling landscape.

The wrestling hadn’t disappeared with it.

The modern wrestler still hit the mat, still grappled, still threw and was thrown, still absorbed impact and sold pain and made the body part of the story. What had changed was the way the body moved through the encounter. There was less reason to leave the side of the head grinding against canvas or another wrestler’s body for extended stretches when a change of position, a quicker transition, a different angle or a different piece of physical choreography could accomplish the same dramatic purpose without producing the same permanent souvenir. Modern wrestling is as much about flying as it is about grinding.

The wrestler hadn’t stopped wrestling.

He had simply stopped assuming that every injury traditionally associated with wrestling was therefore an essential part of wrestling.

Krell stood very still.

That was a useful distinction.

Perhaps the old wrestler had been confusing the evidence of the work with the work itself.

And perhaps writers did that too.

For a long time, writing had come with its own cauliflower ears.

The rejection letter.

The manuscript returned with a form note.

The years spent trying to find an agent. The years of traveling dishonorably through his native land.

The editor who loved the first three chapters but didn’t know where to put the book.

The publisher who decided the book was excellent but commercially impossible.

The writer who kept sending the work out until the accumulation of refusals began to feel like a credential.

The scars became evidence.

Look how much I’ve suffered for my writing.

Krell wasn’t sure suffering had ever been part of the definition.

The emergent writer was beginning to discover that some of those old injuries were optional.

The writing itself wasn’t.

The sentence still had to find its footing, the paragraph still had to carry its weight, and the story still had to survive contact with a reader.

But the machinery surrounding the writing had changed almost beyond recognition.

Everybody, Krell thought, was now walking around with a miniature printing press in their pocket.

The telephone had become printing press, camera, recording studio, bookstore, newspaper, distribution network and, increasingly, publishing house. A person could write something in the morning, photograph it, edit it, publish it, send it to readers and discover before lunch whether anybody cared.

That changed the writer’s job.

The emergent writer still had to write, but he also had to become an editor capable of deciding which of the things he produced deserved to escape the room and which should remain where most writing ought to remain: unfinished, unpublished and quietly forgotten.

He had to become a publisher, deciding what belonged together, what deserved a title, when a piece was ready to leave and when it needed another day, another paragraph or another ruthless cut.

He had to become a distributor because producing the work and getting it in front of the right reader were two entirely different operations. The little printing press in his pocket could make the work available; it could not make anyone care.

That required another kind of intelligence. The emergent writer had to learn where to place the work, when to release it, how much time to spend telling people it existed and when to stop promoting yesterday’s piece and get back to making tomorrow’s.

He had to become visually literate because words no longer traveled alone. A photograph could alter the temperature of a paragraph before the paragraph was read. A cover could determine whether the reader ever entered the book. Typography, image, sequence and presentation had become part of the invitation.

He had to become a reader of readers, too, which meant learning to distinguish information from judgment. A thousand clicks might mean very little; one reader writing, I couldn’t stop thinking about this, might mean nearly everything.

He had to learn how to build a relationship with readers because the audience was no longer necessarily waiting somewhere beyond the publishing apparatus. The audience could be present while the work was still being made.

He had to become his own archivist because the machinery that once preserved a writer’s work no longer necessarily stood behind him. Drafts disappeared, platforms changed, links died and photographs wandered away from the words they had once accompanied. If the emergent writer controlled publication, he also inherited responsibility for preserving the record.

Then came artificial intelligence.

Krell paused there.

Here was another peculiar development: a machine that could help produce language at a speed no previous generation of writers had imagined, capable of suggesting, reorganizing, questioning, compressing, expanding and occasionally producing a sentence so polished that the writer might accept it merely because it had arrived out of nowhere and had ceased turning creativity into a typing contest.

The new writer therefore needed another skill.

Judgment.

He had to know when the machine was helping him think and when it was thinking in his place; when it was opening a door and when it was quietly walking through the door without him.

And, increasingly, he had to understand the economics of his own work.

Subscriptions.

Books.

Rights.

Licensing.

Donations.

Direct sales.

The old writer could imagine that all of this belonged to somebody else because, quite often, there actually had been somebody else: an editor, a publisher, a distributor, a bookstore.

The emergent writer might discover that there was nobody else.

He had to become the publisher, which meant he had also become, however reluctantly, part of the business.

He had to become a networker because work now traveled through relationships among writers, readers, photographers, podcasters and publications rather than moving exclusively through the old institutional channels.

And because everybody could publish, he had acquired perhaps the most important new skill of all.

He had to become a diagnostician of bullshit.

Krell smiled at that one.

When publication was expensive, the machinery itself performed a certain amount of selection. It created scarcity. It created waiting. It created gates.

Now the gates were falling.

Words could be produced almost without friction and distributed almost without cost.

More words.

More books.

More essays.

More photographs.

More opinions.

More everything.

The emergent writer therefore had to become better at recognizing the difference between what merely looked like writing and what was actually alive.

Krell saw the connection.

The modern wrestler had learned that he could preserve the wrestling while avoiding some of the damage that had once been mistaken for an essential part of it. Modern writers were learning the same thing.

He didn’t have to reproduce the old injuries to prove that he had done the work. He didn’t need the rejection letter to validate the manuscript, the publisher’s permission to validate the book, or the old gate to prove that he had passed through something difficult.

And yet—

Krell looked across the room at the bookshelf.

There they were.

His books.

He walked toward them slowly.

His fingers moved along the spines until they found his name.

Again and again.

He pulled one from the shelf and opened it.

Pages.

A cover.

A title.

A copyright page.

His name.

His words.

He turned the book over in his hands as though inspecting an unfamiliar object.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to argue with the evidence.

And yet some stubborn part of Krell still wondered whether these were actually books or merely long, obscure disclosures produced by a man who had somehow acquired access to a printing press and mistaken access for legitimacy

.

He looked down at the book.

Then at the shelf.

Then at his own name.

The old voice returned.

Writer ?

The word still carried an accusation.

Who exactly did he think he was?

A writer?

Or merely a guy in a Big Blue House tee shirt pounding keys?

Krell stood there holding the evidence against himself.

The problem was no longer the absence of evidence. The evidence was everywhere.The problem was the boundary he had constructed around the word writer. He had been waiting for an authority who no longer needed to exist.

The old scars were disappearing.

The gates were disappearing.

The printing press had moved into the pocket.

The work remained.

And now the writer had to decide whether he could recognize the work without first disfiguring himself to prove that he had done it.

Krell slowly returned the book to the shelf.

His fingers remained on its spine.

Somewhere behind him, in the kitchen, the cookies were still sitting where he had left them.

He thought of sneakery.

He thought of cauliflower.

He thought of Gorilla Monsoon.

He thought of Mike Mazurki.

He thought of all those old ears carrying their histories around in plain sight.

Then he looked at the books ; the question was no longer whether the old boundaries had been legitimate but rather who had taught him to need those boundaries.

Somewhere inside that question, Krell felt the hinge move again. He turned toward the kitchen. The cookies were still there.

Krell walked over, reached for the plate, and grabbed another cookie. He took a bite.Behind him, his books remained on the shelf,

.

Hello Joshua Báez

I have seen a lot of things in sports.

I’ve watched improbable comebacks, impossible catches, balls disappear into the night, careers begin and careers end. I’ve watched enough baseball to have accumulated a respectable inventory of the things baseball can do to a human being.

But every once in a while, baseball reaches into its bag of tricks and pulls out something it has never done before.

That’s what happened with Joshua Báez.

I had recently read about the kid and pic

ked him up for my fantasy team. He had been tearing through Triple-A pitching, and the St. Louis Cardinals had finally called him up. A prospect becomes a major leaguer every day. Baseball is forever introducing somebody new.

Distortion

So I was curious.

I was watching the condensed version of the Cardinals-Cubs game on MLB the day after it had been played at Wrigley Field. I knew the game was over. I knew the score. Technically, I knew I was watching history after history had already happened.

But I didn’t know what was about to happen on the screen in front of me.

Joshua Báez came to the plate for his first major-league at-bat.

Transmission

First pitch.

Gone.

His first pitch in the major leagues.

Home run.

I sat there and thought, Well, that’s a hell of a way to start.

Then he came up again.

This time he saw a couple of pitches.

And then—Ignition

Gone again.

Two at-bats.

Two home runs.

Now I’m paying attention.

Because there are moments in baseball when the ordinary rules of expectation begin to loosen their grip. You find yourself watching a young man who, only a few minutes earlier, was merely a name you had read about and a player you had added to a fantasy roster.

And now he’s done something extraordinary.

But baseball wasn’t finished.

Báez came to the plate for his third at-bat.

I watched.

He swung.

And—

Gone.

Holy shit.

Three at-bats.

Three home runs.

Absorption

Joshua Báez had just done something no player in the history of Major League Baseball had ever done: hit a home run in each of his first three major-league at-bats.

Straight to legend

Stop the train.

Stop the automobile.

Stop everything.

Because what has just happened?

There was a peculiar intimacy to watching it this way. I wasn’t sitting in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. I wasn’t there when the first pitch was thrown. I was sitting at home, watching a shortened version of a game that had already happened and yet, for me, the event was happening even as I’m writing this and while you’re reading it

That’s one of the little miracles of televised sports.

The television doesn’t merely show us what happened. Sometimes, if the circumstances are right, it allows us to discover what happened.

And I discovered Joshua Báez.

Now I have a problem.

Because if this kid turns into the player the baseball world is suddenly wondering whether he might become, I’m going to have to follow him.

I’ll have to watch. I’ll have to see what happens next. And years from now, if Joshua Báez comes to the plate in a big game, I already know what I’m going to say to whoever happens to be sitting beside me.

I’ll lean over, probably at precisely the wrong moment, and say:

“Joshua Báez? Yeah. I know Joshua Báez.”

They’ll probably look at me.

I’ll continue.

“I saw his first major-league at-bat.”

A pause.

“First pitch he ever saw in the majors. He hit it out.”

And then I’ll have to tell them the rest.

Second at-bat.

Home run.

Third at-bat.

Home run.

Three for three.

Three home runs.

The first player ever to do it.

I know that sounds like the sort of thing an old baseball guy might say after forty years of accumulating stories, the sort of story that grows a little taller every time it gets told.

Except this one won’t have to grow.

The truth is already ridiculous enough.

I picked up a kid for my fantasy team because I’d read something about him.

Then I watched him begin a major-league career by doing something nobody had ever done before.

That’s baseball.

You can spend a lifetime watching it and still have the game reach through the television screen and grab you by the collar.

So now I have a new player to watch.

I don’t know what he’s going to become. I know we’re gonna remember him even if we forget his name. He’s the kid who came up to the show and went yard in his first three at bats

Joshua Báez.

That’s the beautiful part.

The record belongs to yesterday.

The career belongs to tomorrow.

And I was there for the first three swings.

**Yeah.

I know Joshua Báez.*

*

ws, which can only be determined through spontaneity. So let’s try this experiment.

We intend to measure cognitive latency in the presence of an unexpected semantic switch, with the ultimate objective of converting our observations into what we anticipate will constitute a reasonably defensible Semantic Response Latency Protocol.

The methodology, while still in its developmental phase, is straightforward. We require a subject. We require an observer. We require an environment in which the subject has sufficient freedom from distraction to permit the uninterrupted operation of ordinary cognitive machinery.

And, most importantly, we require a stimulus.

The stimulus is as follows:

A skeleton walks into a bar.

The bartender says, “What’ll you have?”

The skeleton says, “A beer and a mop.”

At this point, the experimental stimulus has concluded.

The investigator must now resist the powerful human impulse to assist

.

No explanation.

No smile.

No raised eyebrow.

No helpful:

“Get it?”

The subject must be permitted to negotiate the semantic disturbance independently.

We are particularly interested in the interval between the auditory reception of the word mop and the moment at which the subject demonstrates evidence of conceptual acquisition.

This interval shall henceforth be designated the Mop-to-Oh Interval.

The designation is provisional.

We anticipate that subsequent research may require a more technically sophisticated nomenclature.

During this interval, the observer should monitor the subject for observable indicators of cognitive activity.

These may include:

A pause.

A narrowing of the eyes.

A slight alteration in facial configuration.

A sudden widening of the eyes.

A delayed smile.

A laugh that appears to arrive from somewhere several seconds behind the rest of the person.

Or, in particularly dramatic cases, the unmistakable facial expression of an individual whose brain has just located a piece of information that had apparently been misplaced.

The investigator should refrain from interrupting this process.

The hesitation itself is data.

The hesitation is, in fact, the principal data.

We are not merely interested in whether the subject finds the joke amusing. We are interested in when the subject understands why the joke is funny.

These are separate events.

A subject may comprehend the semantic displacement before producing laughter.

A subject may laugh before consciously articulating the reason.

A subject may produce a delayed laugh after an interval during which the joke appears to have been abandoned entirely.

Each represents a different form of response latency.

For purposes of preliminary classification, we may therefore distinguish among four observable outcomes.

Immediate Integration: the subject laughs essentially contemporaneously with the delivery of mop.

Brief Latency: the subject pauses momentarily, undergoes the necessary semantic recalculation, and then laughs.

Delayed Acquisition: the subject appears to move beyond the joke, only to experience the delayed arrival of comprehension several seconds later.

Non-Acquisition: the subject fails to demonstrate any observable evidence that the semantic switch has successfully completed its journey.

There are, however, two additional responses worthy of observation:

**Irritation. **The subject may understand the unexpected semantic twist and decline to reward the investigator with laughter.

**Anger. **The subject may understand the joke and determine that the investigator has become insufferable.

There is, however, a methodological complication.

Non-acquisition cannot automatically be interpreted as cognitive failure.

The subject may understand the joke and dislike it.

The final possibility must be retained as a legitimate experimental outcome.

We must also control for prior exposure.

A subject who has previously encountered the skeleton, the beer, and the mop is unsuitable for an initial latency measurement. The semantic switch is no longer unexpected. What was once an event of discovery has become an event of retrieval.

Our interest lies in the virgin encounter. We want the subject to hear mop without knowing that mop is coming that is where the experiment lives because the cognitive jolt is extraordinarily small. The apparatus surrounding it is considerably larger and therein lies the peculiar elegance of the investigation.

We have taken three sentences, a skeleton, a bartender, a beer, and a mop and constructed an inquiry into the temporal relationship between language, expectation, incongruity, comprehension, and response.

At the end of the experiment, we may possess a Semantic Response Latency Protocol.

We may possess a collection of anecdotal observations.

We may possess nothing whatsoever.

But we will have measured at least one thing with reasonable precision:

how long it takes a human being to discover that a skeleton needs a mop and, more importantly, for the purpose of what I am currently writing—and what you must be reading if you’ve gotten this far—we have begun the transition into a movie review and readied the stack for an essay on cauliflower before we transition back into baseball a coupla days from now.

The Weather Between Reality and Representation

When Lynn and I sat down last night to watch Pressure, the reason we chose the film was simple: we are both big fans of Brendan Fraser. If another actor had been playing Dwight Eisenhower, we might never have pressed play. Fraser’s presence was the invitation that brought us into the story

.

What followed was a film centered on one of the most consequential decisions of the twentieth century: when Dwight Eisenhower should launch the D-Day invasion. The question was never whether the invasion would happen. That decision had already been made. The question was when the conditions would allow thousands of men, hundreds of ships, and an entire military operation to cross the English Channel with the greatest possible chance of success.

On the surface, the conflict appears to be about weather. Beneath the surface, it is about judgment, trust, and the terrifying responsibility of making a decision when certainty is impossible.

The Allied commanders were not searching for permission to invade. They were searching for the moment when nature would provide the narrow opening they needed. The weather forecast became the deciding factor, but it was not merely a prediction about rain, wind, and waves. It was a prediction about whether human courage and military preparation could survive the conditions waiting for them.

Eisenhower was not simply reading the weather above the English Channel. He was reading the weather surrounding the decision itself—the pressure, uncertainty, personalities, and consequences gathering around him.

The Allied commanders needed a forecast for June 5, 1944. The invasion depended upon conditions that could change by the hour, and the meteorologists studying the skies did not agree. Eisenhower had to choose among competing predictions, knowing that the wrong timing could cost thousands of lives and potentially alter the outcome of World War II.

The remarkable part of the story is that the final decision depended upon more than weather patterns. It depended upon judgment, trust, and the willingness to listen to an unfamiliar voice.

The meteorologist who became central to the decision was not Eisenhower’s usual adviser. He entered the process as a last-minute addition, recommended by Winston Churchill because Churchill believed he possessed exceptional insight into the unpredictable conditions of the English Channel. When this meteorologist offered a forecast that contradicted the expectations of Eisenhower’s established adviser, he found himself challenging not only another professional opinion but a person who already possessed the general’s confidence.

Eventually, Eisenhower had to choose.

He chose the recommendation that had arrived from outside his normal circle.

The decision carried an extraordinary chain of consequence. Without Churchill’s judgment in identifying the right meteorologist, Eisenhower might have relied on the familiar advice of the person he had used before. That choice could have placed the invasion in the middle of disastrous conditions and potentially changed the course of the war.

History does not always announce its turning points. They arrive quietly, carried by a person whose name disappears while the decision they influenced changes the world.

History moved through a gap in the clouds.

That alone would have made a compelling film.

Yet as I watched, another question slowly began competing with the weather forecast. The question involved Brendan Fraser, who portrays Eisenhower in the film.

I like Brendan Fraser. I have admired his work for years. He brings intelligence, warmth, and emotional honesty to his performances. His challenge in Pressure is not a lack of ability. The challenge is the unavoidable presence of the actor himself

.

He never completely disappears.

Although Eisenhower possessed the kind of authority that required neither height nor physical dominance to command obedience, Fraser’s larger-than-life presence continually reminded me that history and representation negotiate under different rules, and I found myself watching that negotiation as intently as the film itself.

That sentence reveals a larger problem than casting.

Every historical performance asks an audience to participate in an extraordinary act of imagination. We know we are watching an actor. We know the person on the screen lived a different life, in a different body, during a different era. Yet we agree to temporarily cross the distance between the original and the representation.

The question becomes: how much distance can imagination travel before belief begins to struggle?

A historical figure reaches us through layers of interpretation. Photographs, biographies, documentaries, historians, screenwriters, directors, and actors all become part of the journey. Every stage changes the original. Every stage alters the way the person is understood.

Yet those transformations are also how the past reaches the present.

A weather forecast is itself a form of interpretation. It is not the atmosphere. It is a human attempt to translate invisible patterns into a decision. The meteorologist studies evidence, creates a model, and offers a prediction.

A historical performance operates in a similar way.

An actor studies evidence: photographs, speeches, personal accounts, recorded behavior, and historical memory, but the actor must eventually transform those fragments into something living, creating a human forecast of the person who once existed and asking the audience to believe that this interpretation can still carry the essential truth of that life.

When that forecast succeeds, the audience may find the actor receding until the historical figure seems to emerge in his place, yet when the transformation remains incomplete, the distance between performance and person continues to remind us that we are witnessing an interpretation rather than a recovery.

That tension becomes especially important when considering younger audiences. I can watch Brendan Fraser portray Eisenhower and recognize the interpretation because I already possess a collection of images and ideas about the historical figure. I have photographs of Eisenhower in my mind. I know his appearance, his manner, his place in history.

But what about someone encountering Eisenhower for the first time?

For that viewer, the representation may become the foundation. The performance may become the original.

That possibility reveals the deeper responsibility involved in historical storytelling. A person who understands the difference between history and interpretation can examine a portrayal with curiosity. A person without that background may absorb the portrayal as reality itself.

The greater danger emerges when the translation becomes invisible, because an audience that loses sight of the interpretive process may begin accepting the creation as though it were the original. A dramatic choice can gradually become a historical assumption, a creative decision can settle into memory, and a performance can take on the authority of the person it attempts to portray.

Every act of communication requires transformation. A photograph captures only a moment. A biography selects certain events over others. A film compresses years into hours. A person telling a story emphasizes certain details while leaving others behind. The challenge lies in determining whether those changes preserve the essential truth of what is being carried forward or whether they begin to reshape it into something fundamentally different.

Perhaps that is why Pressure stayed with me after the credits ended. I began the evening thinking I was watching a movie about weather. Instead, I found myself thinking about the invisible weather surrounding every attempt to preserve the past.

History is always moving through uncertain conditions.

The people who carry it forward must make choices about what to emphasize, what to simplify, and what to transform. The best storytellers understand that they are creating a bridge between reality and imagination. The bridge may change the landscape, but it can still lead us toward understanding. The responsibility is making sure we remember that it traveled.

And now we can close the experiment.

Or, more accurately, we can reveal that the experiment has already been completed.

You were the subject.

You may have assumed you were reading about baseball. Then, without warning, baseball disappeared. In its place came a skeleton, a bartender, a beer, a mop, and an increasingly preposterous discussion of cognitive latency.

You were told that this was an experiment designed to measure an unexpected semantic switch and then the switch occurred.

Baseball became a skeleton. The skeleton became a cognitive experiment. The cognitive experiment became a movie review. And, somewhere along the way, cauliflower was placed on the runway for a future landing before baseball eventually returns a couple of days from now.

You may have noticed the transitions. You may have experienced a small moment of semantic disorientation in which you thought, Wait. How did we get here?

That moment was the experiment. The real subject was the reader’s expectation.

We began by establishing one semantic environment and then abruptly changed the conditions. We asked your mind to carry one set of expectations forward and then replaced the destination without providing a conventional transition.

And yet you followed.

That is the remarkable thing about language.

A sentence does not merely tell us where we are. It creates an expectation about where we are going next. We begin constructing the next sentence before we have finished reading the current one. We anticipate continuity. We assume the writer knows where this is going.

Then comes the mop.

Or the movie.

Or the cauliflower.

And for a fraction of a second, the mind has to recalculate that recalculation is the behavior that we set out to observe.

So perhaps we have, after all, arrived at our reasonably defensible Semantic Response Latency Protocol.

Step one: establish expectation.

Step two: introduce an unexpected semantic switch.

Step three: observe the hesitation.

Step four: allow the subject to reconstruct the meaning independently.

Step five: resist the temptation to explain what just happened.

And step six, perhaps the most important:

Do it again before the reader realizes you’ve been doing it all along.

The skeleton needed a mop.

You needed a transition.

And I needed a way to get from baseball to Brendan Fraser without pretending that any of us knew, when this began, that Brendan Fraser was where we were going.

That, I suppose, is the experiment.

And if you are wondering how we got here, then congratulations.

Your latency was measurable.

Try it on a friend or a veritable strange

r

I’ve been writing about Bryce Harper all week, calling him the face of baseball.

And sure enough, there he was.

The festivities got underway with Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber introducing the Hall of Famers as they emerged from the corn. And Bryce was so thoroughly done up in corn—from his uniform to his bat and seemingly every other available inch of baseball real estate—that for a moment he looked as though he had been grown there.

Which seemed appropriate.

Here was the face of baseball introducing the ghosts of baseball’s past, while perhaps giving us a glimpse of baseball’s future at the same time. Harper and Schwarber are, after all, the two men on the field tonight who look most like they are headed toward Cooperstown themselves.

Then the Hall of Famers began coming out of the corn

.

Steve Carlton.

Mike Schmidt.

Joe Mauer.

Bert Blyleven.

Jim Kaat.

Jim Thome.

Tony Pérez.

Scott Rolen.

Billy Wagner.

Paul Molitor.

Cal Ripken Jr.

Andre Dawson.

Rollie Fingers.

Ferguson Jenkins.

Iván Rodríguez.

Larry Walker.

Adrián Beltré.

Fred McGriff.

Harold Baines.

Trevor Hoffman.

CC Sabathia.

Lee Smith.

Andruw Jones.

Jeff Kent.

Joe Torre.

Tony La Russa.

Twenty-four Hall of Fame players and two Hall of Fame managers, twenty-six men in all, emerged from the corn before the Phillies and Twins played their game.

It was touching.

How could it not be?

Baseball has always been particularly good at turning old players into ghosts and then finding a way to bring the ghosts back. What better place to bring back ghosts then emergent from a cornfield in Iowa?

But I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this wasn’t really the Field of Dreams.

This was the capitalized, monetized Field of Dreams; manufactured, carefully staged, Major League Baseball version of the place, built near the original field and surrounded by all the appropriate machinery of modern spectacle.

Corn.

Lights.

Television.

Sponsors.

Cameras.

Nostalgia, professionally administered.

I’ve walked out of the real corn several times. I’ve never walked out of this particular corn.

And there is a difference.

The first Field of Dreams game had the eerie advantage of feeling as though the movie had somehow escaped the screen and become real. This one feels more like the machinery of baseball has learned how to reproduce the image.

That’s okay, I suppose but it isn’t quite the same thing.

As I watched these Hall of Famers emerge, though, another thought occurred to me, one that was considerably less reverent.

Hell, I look as good as most of these guys.

I’m the same age as some of them, older than others. And without the uniforms, the numbers, the introductions and all that accumulated baseball mystique, they’re just a bunch of old men walking out of a cornfield. Which is perfectly fine. Baseball players are real men.

Real men get old. They get bald. They get heavier. Their knees complain. Their backs remember every season they ever played. Their bodies eventually become historical documents of everything they once asked them to do and yet there was a casual grace to these men as they came through the corn

.

That was the thing.

For a few seconds, they occupied that peculiar space between the men they had become and the players we still remember. They once again stepped into the sandlot of extended boyhood.

Cal Ripken was still Cal Ripken.

Rollie Fingers was still Rollie Fingers—although, frankly, that mustache could probably have walked out of the corn by itself and received a standing ovation.

But some of the others?

I looked at them and thought:

Huh.

And that little huh started bothering me.

Because these men are in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Their careers are real. Their numbers are real. Their accomplishments are real. Cooperstown has rendered its judgment.

But what exactly does it mean to be a Hall of Famer?

And more specifically:

What does it mean to be Hall of Famish?

I’m interested in the degree to which a baseball player has escaped his statistics and become part of the permanent cultural imagination of the game. The players whose names don’t require an introduction. The players who remain present even when they aren’t present. The players who can walk into the room twenty years after their careers have ended and somehow the room knows they’re there.

Because that isn’t quite the same thing as being in the Hall of Fame.

And once you start thinking in terms of Hall of Famishness, the whole structure of baseball memory begins to wobble a little.

The system is supposed to be simple: Cooperstown decides who is great, and the rest of us agree to remember them in that order but that is not how it actually works.

Baseball memory does not wait for ballots. It does not respect eligibility rules. It does not care whether a player has a plaque, a controversy, a waiting period or a unanimous vote.

It simply decides, on its own terms, who stays visible.

And sometimes it keeps players who were never officially enshrined more present than players who were. That is where the system starts to break because there are names that do not need Cooperstown to feel permanent.

They already occupy space in the baseball imagination that feels larger than their official status.

You do not need to check their credentials.

You already know who they are.

The Men Who Could Only Emerge in Memory

Then I began thinking about the Hall of Famers who didn’t emerge from the corn at all. Mortality had already taken care of that and put them on the ineligibility list

And these are the names that, when I hear the phrase Hall of Famer, sound like Hall of Fame names in a way that almost transcends the institution itself.

Babe Ruth

.

Lou Gehrig.

Ty Cobb.

Walter Johnson.

Willie Mays.

Hank Aaron.

Jackie Robinson.

Roberto Clemente.

Ted Williams.

Joe DiMaggio.

Stan Musial.

Mickey Mantle

Ernie Banks.

Yogi Berra.

Ralph Kiner.

Frank Robinson.

Tom Seaver.

They arrive already wearing the mythology.

As the living Hall of Famers came out of the corn, these men came back in another way. They reincarnated in memory. They weren’t physically there, but in a way they were everywhere and this is where my little experiment with Hall of Famishness gets complicated.

Because when I hear the phrase Hall of Famer, these are the names my mind reaches for first. They pass the sound test because they became more than players. They became part of the language of baseball.

Babe Ruth isn’t merely a Hall of Famer.

He is Babe Ruth.

Jackie Robinson isn’t merely a Hall of Famer.

He is Jackie Robinson.

Willie Mays doesn’t need Cooperstown to certify Willie Mays.

And mortality has done something peculiar to these men.

It has removed their bodies while making their baseball identities almost impossible to remove.

They don’t get old in our memories.

Ruth doesn’t get old.

Gehrig doesn’t get old

.

Mays doesn’t get old.

Aaron doesn’t get old.

Jackie Robinson doesn’t get old.

Ted Williams doesn’t get old

.

The men disappeared.

The players remained.

And suddenly the old men walking out of the cornfield weren’t merely old men anymore. They were the latest physical embodiments of a baseball memory that had been accumulating for more than a century.

The corn was full of ghosts

.

Some of them just happened to be alive.

The Hall of Famers Who Stayed in the Corn

Then there is another category that may be even more interesting: the living Hall of Famers who could have emerged from the corn but didn’t.

And this is where I begin to wonder.

Because look at the names.

Reggie Jackson.

Johnny Bench.

Nolan Ryan

.

George Brett.

Ozzie Smith.

Dave Winfield.

Randy Johnson.

Greg Maddux.

Tom Glavine.

Frank Thomas.

Pedro Martínez.

Mariano Rivera.

Derek Jeter.

Chipper Jones.

Ken Griffey Jr.

That’s a pretty formidable baseball team right there, and they were all somewhere else while twenty-six Hall of Famers were walking out of the corn.

Now, I have no idea why each of them wasn’t there.

Perhaps some were invited and couldn’t come. Perhaps some weren’t invited. Perhaps some simply had better things to do on a Thursday night in August.

That’s baseball.

But I can’t help wondering about it.

Because if the purpose of this ceremony was to summon baseball’s living mythology, there are a few names on that list that seem almost impossible to leave standing outside the gate.

Johnny Bench.

The greatest catcher of my generation.

Reggie Jackson.

Mr. October.

Nolan Ryan.

The man whose fastball became a piece of American folklore.

George Brett.

The Royals. The pine tar. The batting title. Kansas City.

Ozzie Smith.

The Wizard.

Randy Johnson.

The Big Unit.

Greg Maddux.

The pitcher who seemed to throw without ever appearing to throw hard.

Pedro Martínez.

Maybe the most electric pitcher of his generation.

Mariano Rivera.

The closer who turned the last three outs of a game into a ritual.

Derek Jeter.

Captain.

And then there’s Ken Griffey Jr.

Griffey may be the one that bothers me most.

Because if we’re talking about baseball mythology rather than merely baseball credentials, how does the Kid remain in the parking lot while Hall of Famers are emerging from the corn

?

Griffey’s swing is one of the defining images of modern baseball. The cap turned backward. The smile. The effortless left-handed stroke. The home runs. The Mariners. The All-Star Games. The video games. The generation of kids who tried to imitate him.

You don’t have to introduce Ken Griffey Jr.

You simply say:

The Kid.

And there he is.

Which brings me back to Hall of Famishness.

Maybe the most revealing thing about this whole ceremony isn’t who came out of the corn.

Maybe it’s who didn’t.

Because when I started making this list, I realized that the absence of some Hall of Famers seemed almost louder than the presence of some others.

And that tells me something.

It tells me that my personal Hall of Famishness scale isn’t measuring accomplishment.

It is measuring presence.

Cooperstown tells me who belongs in the Hall.

My memory tells me who belongs in the room.

And apparently my memory has its own ballot.

It just doesn’t publish the results.

The Players Who Break the System

Once you start thinking in terms of Hall of Famishness, the whole structure of baseball memory begins to wobble a little more.

Because now we arrive at the men who aren’t in Cooperstown at all.

And yet somehow remain impossible to remove from baseball’s memory.

Barry Bonds.

Roger Clemens.

Mark McGwire.

Sammy Sosa.

Say their names and you don’t get a biography. You get an era. You get arguments. Headlines. Home runs. Steroids. Congressional hearings. The resurrection of baseball after the strike. The transformation of the game’s power culture. You get the late 1990s in one sudden blast of memory and this is where the whole Hall of Fame argument becomes inconvenient.

Four men who aren’t in Cooperstown can feel more immediately baseball than some men who are which doesn’t settle the question of whether they belong in the Hall. It complicates the question of what the Hall is supposed to mean because Cooperstown preserves achievement but baseball memory preserves presence.

And those aren’t always the same thing.

My Personal Hall of Famishness Ranking the guys who just came in from the corn

If I’m being honest, I don’t think this system ever settles into anything clean. It’s not a list you finish. It’s a list you keep revising every time baseball reminds you who it refuses to forget.

My first tier is actually easier than I expected.

Cal Ripken Jr.

Absolutely.

You don’t have to explain Cal Ripken to anybody who has ever watched baseball.

Steve Carlton.

Absolutely.

Jim Thome.

Yes.

Paul Molitor.

Yes.

Joe Torre.

Absolutely—especially because his baseball life exists on both sides of the baseball card: Hall of Fame player and Hall of Fame manager.

Tony La Russa.

Same phenomenon.

Tony Pérez.

Absolutely, particularly for anyone who remembers the Big Red Machine.

Andre Dawson.

The Hawk.

Yes.

Ferguson Jenkins.

Absolutely legitimate, even if my own memory doesn’t always place him as prominently as his career deserves.

And then things get murkier.

Because I looked at some of the other Hall of Famers coming out of the corn and, in all honesty, my first reaction was:

Huh?

That isn’t an insult to the men. It is an admission about me. Their plaques are real. Their careers are real. Their numbers are real but Hall of Fame recognition and cultural recognition are two different animals.

Take away the uniform, the number, the television introduction, the statistics and the little halo that comes with being announced as a Hall of Famer, and some of these men could walk through a shopping mall without anybody turning around.

That’s where my definition of Hall of Famishness separates itself from the official definition.

Cooperstown asks:

Was this man great enough to be here?

I’m asking a slightly different question:

If you took away the plaque, would baseball still know his face?

And that brings us, inevitably, to Don Mattingly. You don’t have to explain Don Mattingly to a certain generation of baseball fan. You simply say: Donnie Baseball.

And there he is. How close was he? How far away? How much of his absence from Cooperstown is a matter of statistics, and how much is a matter of the particular shape of baseball memory?

I don’t know but I know that I remember him.

And perhaps that’s the problem with Hall of Famishness.

Maybe greatness is what the record books preserve. Maybe Cooperstown is where baseball places its official memory but Hall of Famishness?

That’s where we put people.

And we are notoriously unreliable archivists.

We forget the names we ought to remember. We remember the names we probably shouldn’t. We elevate statistics into mythology and mythology into truth. We turn men into legends, then spend the rest of our lives trying to remember the men underneath.

So as the Field of Dreams game continued, I kept watching the corn.

The Hall of Famers had come out. The kinda cheesy uniforms had told us who they were. The introductions had told us what they had accomplished.The dead had returned through memory. The living absentees had somehow become more visible by staying away. And the men outside Cooperstown had suddenly become part of the argument.

Then the cornfield did something I hadn’t expected.

It made everybody human.

Twenty-six men came out of that corn carrying the weight of Cooperstown on their backs because for a few seconds, before the cameras found them and before the names were announced, they were simply old baseball players because the real Field of Dreams isn’t the stadium Major League Baseball built near the original. It’s the place in our memory where the players we loved remain forever young.

I know that place.

I’ve walked through its corn.

And every once in a while, baseball gives us a glimpse of the men they became which is the trick of the Field of Dreams.

The players don’t really come back.

We do.

A Few More Innings

And this, I should probably point out, is only the opening salvo.

I haven’t even gotten to the game yet.

I’ve been too busy watching people emerge from cornfields, sorting the living from the dead, rearranging Cooperstown in my head, inventing my own dubious Hall of Famishness scale, and wondering why Don Mattingly keeps wandering into the conversation.

There is considerably more baseball to come.

Because once you start watching a Field of Dreams game through the accumulated fog of memory, mythology, mortality, money, television and the strange machinery of nostalgia, nine innings suddenly seem like an awfully small container.

So this is the first inning.

Maybe the first two.

The game has barely begun.

Stay with me. We’ve got a few more innings to play.

Both had been married before, so when it came time to tie the knot again, Lynn Holland Burke was quite content to keep things simple. A small ceremony with a justice of the peace would suffice. But Jerry Ryan had grander plans. The Rush Henrietta High School English teacher was a true romantic, and he said that if he was going to get married again, he wanted the ceremony to occur “someplace special, someplace magical.” And, so, the lifelong baseball fan and movie buff told Lynn he had found the perfect setting — the ball diamond that had been carved out of an Iowa cornfield for the filming of “Field of Dreams.”

She initially thought he was bonkers and perhaps had selected such a faraway, middle-of-nowhere locale because, deep down, he was reluctant to get married again. But Lynn wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. In late August 1989, she called his bluff. She showed up at his door with a packed suitcase, and soon they were motoring from Rochester to a dot on the map that’s since become a mecca for dreamers, their pilgrimage inspired by the mystical movie now regarded as an American classic.

Many scenes from “Field of Dreams” resonated with Jerry, who watched the film for the first time a few months before he and Lynn embarked on their journey. Particularly memorable was the exchange between Ray Kinsella (played magnificently by Kevin Costner) and a young, back-from-the-dead ballplayer enthralled with the ballpark whose outfield wall was comprised of eight-foot-high cornstalks.

Ballplayer: “Is this heaven?”

Kinsella: “No, it’s Iowa.”

Ballplayer: “Iowa? I could have sworn this was heaven.”

Kinsella: “Is there a heaven?”

Ballplayer: “Oh yeah. It’s the place where dreams come true.”

In real life, as in reel life, this patch of green in Dyersville, Iowa would become a field of dreams come true for the Ryans. But their journey there, like most life journeys, would be circuitous and fraught with struggles. Jerry and Lynn would have to traverse a highway to hell before reaching heaven on earth. They’d have to stare down death.

About 10 hours into their trip, following a pit stop in LaGrange, Ind. for sustenance, bathroom visits and a quick nap, the Ryans were on the road again when they encountered a blind spot. Next thing they knew, an 18-wheeler was plowing through their windshield. When their van finally stopped spinning, Jerry wasn’t sure if he and Lynn were dead or alive.

“All these strange thoughts were careening through my head,” the 74-year-old recalled recently from his home in Huntersville, N.C. “I’m thinking, ‘We can’t die here. Nobody even knows who we are.’ I’m saying crazy stuff, like ‘I need to get back to Rochester because I have to start teaching next week.’”

When a stranger who had witnessed the horrific accident approached to see if they were all right, Jerry didn’t know “if he was real or St. Peter greeting us at the pearly gates.”

Miraculously, Jerry and Lynn escaped with little more than cuts on their right elbows. Their van had been totaled. After such a harrowing experience, most people would have canceled the rest of their trip and returned home. And Jerry was getting ready to do just that, when Lynn insisted they rent another van and carry on.

“That’s when I knew she was a keeper,” he joked.

So, on they went, and when they arrived in Dyersville, they discovered cornfields for as far as the eye could see.

“We couldn’t for the life of us, find the actual ‘Field of Dreams,’ at first,” he said, chuckling at the memory of a time without GPS’s or cell phones. “Luckily, we eventually stumbled upon it.”

Soon they were telling the farm’s owner, Don Lansing, about their accident and their plans to be wed on his field. Faster than you could say, “Moonlight [**Graham**](https://rbj.net/profile/297423/graham-corp),” Lansing and several other townsfolk mobilized to ensure the couple’s wish would be fulfilled. One of the wives even sewed a wedding gown for Lynn to wear. On Sept. 1, 1989, Jerry emerged, like the ballplaying ghosts in the movie, from the outfield corn stalks and walked to the pitcher’s mound where he escorted Lynn to home plate for the ceremony. The 50 or so residents of Dyersville who had brought fixings for the wedding reception applauded the couple after they exchanged their vows.

“It didn’t unfold the way we had planned,” Jerry said. “But the end result certainly was much more memorable and magical.”

He has been thinking a lot lately about his and Lynn’s personal connection to the movie and Dyersville. And that’s understandable because the film and town are back in the news. Thursday night, in front of a sold-out crowd of 7,000 and millions more on national television, the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees are scheduled to play a regular-season MLB game in a newly constructed ballpark within throwing distance of Lansing’s old farm. The man who taught creative writing and a cinema literacy course in Rochester for 35 years is hoping a new generation of fans feels magic similar to what he and Lynn experienced.

Jerry has lost track of how many times he’s watched “Field of Dreams.” What he can tell you is that it never gets old. And never will.

“It’s not really a baseball movie, but rather a father-son reconciliation movie, and that was one of the things that struck a chord,” he said. “My dad was an outstanding athlete at Aquinas Institute, and it would have been great to have been able to have gone back in time, the way Costner’s character did, and connect with him as a young man.”

Adapted brilliantly from W\.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe,” the movie reaches a tearful, heartfelt climax when Costner’s character discovers one of the ghosts is his father, and the two share a game of catch.

Throughout the film, the son hears mysterious voices in his head telling him “if you build it, he will come,” and feels compelled to plow out a diamond in the middle of his cornfield. The idealistic farmer appears to be a deluded fool, but his persistence is rewarded when ghosts of former major-leaguers begin showing up in uniform to play ball there. Among the apparitions is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the favorite player of Ray Kinsella’s father. As a rebellious teenager, Kinsella had mocked his dad for liking a player who had been banished for life from baseball after he and his White Sox teammates were found guilty of trying to fix the 1919 World Series. The Academy Award-nominated movie is built around Kinsella trying to make peace with his father. The final-scene game of catch is the culmination of listening to the voices in his head, including ones that had implored him to “go the distance” and “ease his pain.”

Interestingly, when Jerry met Lansing the first time and told him about their horrific accident and their plans to be married on the original “Field of Dreams,” he repeated the question posed by ghosts in the movie.

“I asked Don if this were Iowa or heaven,” he recalled. “He paused for a minute, and then answered, enigmatically, ‘It’s whatever you want it to be.’”

A few years ago, Jerry put pen to paper and wrote about his experience in Iowa. That compelling essay is included in his book, “Full Filler: Dreams & Distance,” which was published in 2020 under his pseudonym, Ice Rivers, and is available on Amazon.

Ballparks often have been called “green cathedrals” — spiritual places where powerful connections and bonds are made. And that’s what that diamond amid the cornstalks in the middle-of-nowhere has become for Jerry and Lynn Ryan. They heard the voices there that Kinsella heard. And after the field was built and the movie premiered, they went the distance. They traveled through hell and discovered a place where dreams come true

.
*Best-selling author and nationally honored columnist Scott Pitoniak is the Rochester Business Journal sports columnist.

Don greeted us warmly upon our return and invited us into the house. Yeah, the house in the movie. Don wanted to know what we were going to wear. All we had left were our jeans. Don went to the phone and called the local tux shop. They had one tux left. Don asked if we wanted a cake. We said yeah. He got on the phone and called the local bakery. He asked Lynn how big the cake should be. She said big enough for fifty. I laughed out loud. We didn’t know a single person in Iowa aside from Don and the guy who originally greeted us, a guy named Butch who was a caretaker for the field and his wife Annie.

Then he asked Lynn if she needed a wedding gown. He knew a dressmaker in town. He called Anne Steffen, the local dressmaker. He described our dream and asked Ann if she could help out. She said that she could.

That evening, we drove into town. The only tux in town fit me perfectly. Next we met Anne. She and Lynn got together and designed a wedding dress. That night we slept at Butch and Annie’s house and torrential rain poured down ending a monthlong drought.

The next day, we went back into town. The dress was made. Beautiful, like in a dream. We drove to the town office to pick up our wedding license that Lynn had requested before we left on our pilgrimage. By the time we got to the office the word had already spread. We got our license. They told us that they had heard all about the plan and so had the local television station. The station wanted to interview us. We met the reporter and she seemed very interested in our story. She had a full camera crew with her.

We told them that we had arranged for a magistrate to do the honors. We told them about the car crash.The town barber had heard about all of this and volunteered to give me a haircut while Lynn tried on her dress. The barber was the husband of Anne Steffin and Anne wanted to make sure that we looked as presentable as the dress that she had made for the occasion.

By that time it was getting late. We stopped at a restaurant to have our last meal as single people. We looked up at the teevee and there we were on the local news. We watched ourselves telling our story.

We made it back to the house. By this time, a bunch of neighbors had gathered.

I went into the room where in the movie Ray’s daughter looks out the window and says, “Something’s gonna happen out there.”just before the ghost shows up.

I had the same view of the field and I knew that indeed something was gonna happen out there. We were gonna get married. The ghosts were gonna show up.

I made sure I had the wedding ring which we had bought at Wall Drugs in South Dakota. The rings were made from genuine Black Hills gold. That’s a whole other story.

By this time about fifty people had gathered.

I left the house and walked into the corn in left field. I figured that since I still wasn’t sure that I was alive that I should come out of the corn like the ghosts did

.

I made my way to the pitchers mound where I met Don. I was on the mound for a few moments when the fifty people started to ooh and ahh as Lynn emerged from the house. Suddenly everything was in transcendent five dimension. I couldn’t have dreamed of a more beautiful bride.

She made the long walk past the bleachers and crossed the magical first base line. She didn’t disappear. She met me on the mound and we walked together to home plate where the magistrate awaited. We took our vows with Don standing right behind us. I shed a tear when Lynn agreed to accept me as I am. The witnesses cheered.

After the ceremony, we disappeared back into the cornfield before we reincarnated on the porch. The towns folk had brought fixings. We ate the cake (large enough for fifty) together. They all wanted pictures so we posed for a while. We drank some champagne that somebody had provided. We bid them farewell.

We had a rental to return and a plane to catch in Chicago.

The next day we were home.

On the flight back, we told the stewardess our story and she put us in first class. Sitting right next to us was Maury Wills, the ex-Dodger shortstop who had once stole a hundred bases in a season. She told Maury our story and he congratulated us. We made it home in time for the Ring of Fire around Canandaigua Lake.

We told my parents the news

We’re going to be celebrating our thirtieth anniversary next week. We’re still going the distance and easing each other’s pain.

I believe we’re gonna make it all the way to happily ever after. Maybe even Heaven.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Strikeout

And then, after all that, Bryce Harper walked to the plate.

Nine-time All-Star. Former MVP. World Series champion. One of the defining players of his generation and suddenly none of it mattered.

The umpire dusted off home plate. The batter nodded at the pitcher. For a moment, everybody seemed willing to let the scene breathe.

Harper stood there with all that history attached to him, and Cade Smith stood sixty feet, six inches away holding a baseball.

That’s baseball. The résumé stays in the dugout. The pitch doesn’t care.

Smith got him with the splitter. Harper swung. Strike two. The count went to two and two. A challenge. Harper swung again.

Missed.

Strike three.

Mudville

He turned toward the dugout.

And then the microphone caught him.

“That’s disgusting, guys. Sorry about that.”

I loved that.

Not because Bryce Harper had struck out.

Because he knew exactly what had happened.

He hadn’t been overpowered.

He’d been fooled.

And the man who had fooled him was Cade Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old right-hander who had arrived in professional baseball by the side door, an undrafted kid from British Columbia who went to the University of Hawaii, signed with Cleveland and worked his way through the minor leagues.

Harper had been Baseball’s Chosen One since he was sixteen.

Smith had been chosen by almost nobody.

And here they were.

One pitch.

One swing.

One of them walking back to the dugout saying, almost admiringly:

“That’s disgusting.

”

Baseball had just brought two very different careers together and reduced them to the same thing: A pitcher had a pitch. A hitter guessed wrong. And the face baseball made had just been fooled by a baseball.

It doesn’t diminish Harper. It completes him. The great player is still subject to the same laws as everybody else. The face baseball made can still be fooled by a baseball because the game never allows the face to become a monument. It keeps moving.

Harper walked away.

The crowd moved on.

The game continued.

But for a moment I had seen something I hadn’t expected to see when the night began.

The face of baseball had just been reminded that baseball was still the boss.

Tonight there will be another pitcher. Another at-bat. Another count. Another opportunity to fail. Another opportunity to succeed.

All of it taking place near a cornfield in Iowa where dreams come true

.