Tony Peake, Derek Jarman: The Authorised Biography, London: Allison & Busby, Limited, 2025. First published 1999.

Derek Jarman. Derek Jarman's Garden. Photographs by Howard Sooley. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.

Last year, while visiting England for the wedding party of my daughter Molly and her husband Doug, I got to visit Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness. Doug, by sharing the book derek jarman’s garden, had introduced me this to place a year or two before our trip. I had an idea what it might be like, but that was no preparation for the reality.

It is not what they taught me in landscape design school to think of as an “English garden.” It is a completely open setting by the side of the road, rather shocking in its availability to the passer-by. A miracle garden, the beauty is pulled from a stark landscape, with a nuclear power plant puffing away in the background.

This year, at the beginning of the UofO retreat, Doug showed me the authorised biography of Derek Jarman. Quite thick. I read a couple of pages and was hooked. He lent it to me, explaining that he’d packed a number of books for the week in New Hampshire. I started on my journey of reading it, which I hoped to do while we there. The glory of summer vacation is that it offers long stretches of time for reading. There were not quite enough hours for me to finish, but re-entry was blessedly calm allowing me to finish with focus and joy. I don’t think I’ve read in this way in many decades, maybe since I was 12 and plowing through the works of Tolstoy. This biography had some of the same puzzle as War and Peace held for me: what was I reading?

Neither the cruising nor the ferocious art-making made much sense to me. Then, hundreds of pages in, I got to the point in 1986 when Jarman receives his diagnosis of HIV and that shook my whole being. That year I got a phone call from Sala Udin, later a councilman in Pittsburgh, who asked if I would like to study AIDS. I said no. He said would I come to lunch? I said yes, which led to a meeting with the senior scientists who were gathering to create a center for AIDS research. In my memory, it was Tom Coates who broke form, and spoke the rage-infused grief of losing friends every day. I felt the cataclysm to my core and thought, “My life will never be the same. I can never turn away from this struggle.” Indeed, Tom Coates opened me to collective pain. In the years to follow that emotional touchstone enabled me see the connections among trauma, crack addiction, and violence; name “root shock”; identify the “Tao of K-drama”; and experience the terror of a river rising 650 feet as a mountain broke in Nepal.

Biographer Tony Peake synthesized Derek Jarman’s story for me, noting the first part of Jarman’s life was hemmed in by the vicious oppression of homosexuals in England, the second buoyed by liberation celebrated in mass parties and a lot of sex. Through all of that Jarman struggled to create liberated, anti-imperialist art through painting and film. In the midst of his work he learned that he had been infected with the infernal virus and he added militant advocacy to his artistic efforts. He became a prominent face of the struggle for care and dignity in the face of an epidemic that was focused among the stigmatized. Through all of this — in the face of all this — Jarman created a very bold and beautiful body of work.

His garden mirrors that effort to pull beauty in spite of. Dungeness was an unlikely place to imagine an English garden, so he reinvented the genre to include him. I was very happy to read that Christopher Lloyd, who created the quintessential English garden at nearby Great Dixter, had visited Derek Jarman’s garden.

At this moment, my own garden has been prospering with the help of neighbors and friends as my arthritic knee rebels against the up and down. My raised beds are producing a bounty of cucumbers and tomatoes, the Jersey tomato being the best thing in the world. The flowers in the front have taken a hit from the bouts of heat, but the variety of greens and their many forms invite my touch. One of my neighbors confided that she too pets them as she passes by.

When I finished the biography, I wept for a while and then turned to making dinner. I went to my garden to cut herbs for my chili and felt the gift that Derek Jarman’s courage to make what he wanted to make offers to me.

World Fellowship is a bit like the HUUB in that it is a complex of buildings that, though wearing down, won’t break if you spill your juice. Innovation moves slowly which means it seems much the same this year as it did last year or 10 years ago. The British psychiatrist Hugh Freeman, who served as editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry and observed the destruction of the old fabric of British cities, argued for the “psychological conservation of the environment… ‘The need to sustain the familiar attachment and understanding, which makes life meaningful, is as profound as other basic human needs.’”*

The need for continuity breeds some grumbling, as new directors seek to add their two cents to what’s going on. I like the grumbling because it teaches us to move carefully. Change is the only constant, and hence the most difficult aspect of life for us to manage.

In that respect, there were many layers to discover over the seven days. Molly pointed out that ORNG INK had donated a brick to the walkway. I found it prescient that it read, “Stay woke. ORNG INK.” There were so many names of families and so many generations represented there.

There are many layers in the libraries, too. During my last visit I came across The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes.* This 1941 volume represented voices from the long Civil Rights movement, the period from the 1890s imposition of Jim Crow to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The ways they had of saying things were sharply different, hence very precious. They pushed the boundaries as fast and as far as they could — others would build on their success.

This year, while looking for a mug for tea, I came across a small pile of cocktail napkins, that read, “The best thing about the good old days is I wasn’t good and I wasn’t old.”* Whose party did those napkins grace? I wondered. And another new feature was paintings by Robert Shetterly, from his series, “Americans who tell the truth.” (You can see one of his paintings in my photo of the coffee center.)

One of the special continuities for me has been presenting my work on the Tao of K-drama over the years. When I was deep in the analysis, I showed clips from K-dramas, and appreciated the tech support of Gahlia Greene-Kaufman and Doug Farrand as well as the unbounded enthusiasm of Leo Anderson. This year I did a reading from my actual book! It was my first reading — quite a thrilling experience to speak my writing out loud. Molly Kaufman served as interlocutor, which was unique in that she knew every bit of the story and every nuance of my analysis so her questions came from her knowledge. I enjoyed people’s response to the reading and our exchange, and particularly that they found aspects of what I was saying that matched their own experience of K-drama.

On the whole, I treasure the continuity and appreciate the grumbling about the newfangled ideas. World Fellowship Center endures, which helps all of us have a compass in a swiftly evolving global community.

*Notes:

Hugh Freeman quoted in Fullilove, MT, “Psychiatric Implications of Displacement: Contributions from the Psychology of Place,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1996; 153:1516-1523.

Brown, Sterling A, Davis Arthur P, and Lee Ulysses, editors, The Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes, New York: Citadel Press, 1941.

Shannon Martin Designs, Humorous cocktail napkins. Sold in packs of 20.

Peter Gould, Horse-Drawn Yogurt: Stories from Total Loss Farm, Brattleboro, Vermont: Green Writers Press, 2017.

Lucy Terry Prince, Bars Fight, 1746.

Every summer I go Newfane VT to see my medical school classmate, Martha, and her partner Hubey. On this visit, they asked for my thoughts about sites to see in France, as I’ve been there many times. While people tend to think of particular points of interest, I argued for getting to know the fabric of the place. Thanks to my mentor, architect-urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart, I have driven through many parts of the southwest, which is their destination. The structure of France, in some ways, is similar to that of Vermont, which they know intimately. I thought they would get great pleasure from discerning the ways France sets towns and farms and sites of history in relationship to one another and in the midst of the rivers, mountains and lush valleys.

The fabric of habitation is shaped by an area’s history, which, by twists and turns, got us talking about the evolution of Vermont from a Republican to Democratic stronghold. Hubey explained that one factor in the transition was the arrival of young people who established communes in the Brattleboro-Putney area. He added, “And you can read a book about it: Horse-drawn Yogurt. You can get the book at the library, which is called the Moore Free Library which is not the best name — in Malborough New Hampshire they have the Frost Free Library.”

So the next day we went to the Moore Free Library and Martha kindly took the book out for me. On the cover was the author’s drawing of an old fashioned farm kitchen with a Home Comfort stove and a rocking chair, a homey scene to call the reader into the story. And the opening paragraphs make the call explicit:

I’m thinking about how to lead us into this book of stories, finished and assembled during a frightening time. There is so much intolerance abroad in our land; the stockade within which we live is growing tighter, more secured by confusion, technology, demagoguery, and fear of the other.

I see a lot of good that stands against this tendency, especially when I look through the lens of the stories in Horse-drawn Yogurt. The lens is not original. Other writers have pointed out that we who came “back to the land” in the 1970s eventually and directly enabled so much of positive activity in Vermont and beyond: successful co-ops, organic agriculture, CSA’s, farm-to-table food, farmers markets, microbrew beer, artisan cheese, public radio, socially-responsible investing, renewable energy, craft tours, our community college —

All these would be radically different or even unknown if a generation of idealists had not arrived in these hills nearly fifty years ago.

Having peeked inside, I put the book away so that we could visit the history fair, a circle of booths on the Newfane village green. They seemed to represent many of the area’s historical societies, and each had some interesting artifacts and stories to tell. I wanted them to tell me about the impact of the Civil War — it felt like everyone was ignoring the monument in the middle of the green which lists all the names of the local people who served in the Civil War, between 1861 and 1865. Newfane is not a large place, but 168 men fought in that war. By contrast, in World War I, 33 men and one woman served, a measure of changes that came to Vermont and elsewhere as the nation industrialized and urbanized.

From the green, we strolled over to see the Railroad Museum, where Hubey demonstrated the railroad handcar, and then the Windham County History Museum, where we saw many fine exhibits, including one on the Civil War. That exhibit did not explain what it meant to have 168 names on the town’s monument. Later, Martha found a Wikipedia entry which told us that 10% of the state’s population served in the war, of whom 5,000 died. From the Black population of 709, 166 — 23% — went to war. The entry notes, “Decades after the war, the upland hillsides of the state were littered with the cellar holes of long-gone farmhouses from farms that had been abandoned because all the family's sons had been killed in the Civil War.”

Hubey asked if I had seen the entry on Lucy Terry Prince, a Black woman who lived in Guilford, Vermont and wrote poetry. Her 1746 poem, Bars Fight, is considered the first writing by an African American. Her life story is painful to read. She was repeatedly attacked by a racist slave-owning white man. Although consistently supported by the courts, the attacks left her impoverished. She continued to be articulate and told her story to young boys who liked to visit her. And it would seem that she triumphed in the end, when Vermont sent its sons to end slavery.

Which brings me back to Horse-drawn Yogurt, and Peter Gould’s story of joining a commune in Guilford, where Lucy Terry Prince once lived, and spending 10 years in a new form of the struggle for progress. The commune, he underscores, was not a bunch of lazy hippies, but a diverse and inclusive group of people working regular hours to milk the cow, sow the crops, and tend the aging farmhouse and its satellites. They arrived, he believes, just as the “old ways” and “old machines” were about to be lost. They served as a bridge to a new imagination of the bounty and beauty of the land. He left the farm ten years later to use his creativity in new ways. He has maintained a connection to the farm and its lessons, which he has generously shared with us in this gorgeous volume.

Peter Gould quotes Walter Benjamin in Horse-drawn Yogurt’s epigraph:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Peter Gould has, in a moment of danger, seized hold of memories to share stories of people caring for one another and the land. Thereby, they nurtured place and helped to make a change. It is a vivid demonstration of what is required of us in this moment.

My mother Maggie was a modest person, not given to public displays. So none of us knew that she’d been taking writing classes and had snippets of character studies tidily organized in her filing cabinet. When it seemed her time might be finite, I asked her to write down some of the stories that I loved best. For example, I wanted her to record the story of her family going to an abandoned farm house and digging up its white lilac to replant in their yard. I always imagined this happening in moonlight, with the shrub glowing in the night light. I imagined Mom might write a few short things.

Turns out, she was ready for this request, and quickly produced a book, From One to Ninety-One: A Life. We published it using the Bridgebuilder imprint that had released my dad’s book in 1976. We had a book launch at the local theater and 50 people came. We quickly sold out our first printing and ordered more. People loved the book, reporting that they’d stayed up all night to finish it. Nobody had ever said that to me, I told my mom. Instead, they say it’s on their bedside table. If they are like me — and they might not be — “bedside table” is like the elephant burial ground. By contrast, people’s joy in my mom’s book was infectious. She became a different person. To everyone she met she said, “I’ve written a book. You should read it.”

She knew she was having an amazing experience and she wanted other people, especially those who were poor or sick or elderly to have an opportunity to experience the joy and relief that she had been given. That is why, before she died in 2012, she created the Maggie INK project at the University of Orange and got her friends to endow it. She left us a soapbox. “After telling your story, all the days of your life are free,” she said.

And on Tuesday night there was a “Speak Out!” and a series of people got up on the Maggie INK soapbox and said what they had to say. These were not light comments. The readers shared thoughts stirred up by our times and polished by the working on them in the Maggie INK memoir class, What’s the Story? At the end, the leader Sarah Howe asked if we had questions, but we didn’t have words for the experience. After a series of people telling us, “This [ ___] in my life is painful and here’s how,” we had gone somewhere that we all needed to go and learned something we needed to learn: that, having processed the [this which is painful], the days of our lives would be free.

I am reminded of Maggie’s book party in July 2011, when people who loved Maggie came pouring in, until it was standing room only and latecomers were peering in through the door. Maggie had carefully orchestrated people to read sections of the book. At the end of the reading we were all cheering! At ninety-one she had got up on the soapbox and said what she needed to say.

Why is this so important in our times?

My dad always said that we have to know what we’re FOR. I believe that, in facing the [this which is painful], we clear wreckage which might obscure our vision of the present. Facing why it hurt helps us articulate the FOR, we begin to know where we stand and why. At the end of her book, Maggie shared her credo. At the end of the Speak Out! reading, Sarah Howe shared the stand she took in opposition to the harms of family violence. It was a firm note to end the hour of hard stuff. And that is what sets us free.

There is never a “truth” but there is always a compass. Getting on the soapbox helps us learn the use our compass. And, by the way, the What’s the Story class invites you to join!

Syou Ishida, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, New York: Berkley, 2024.

Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Torunka Cafe, New York: Harper Perennial, 2025.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Tales from the Cafe, Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2021.

I have found myself deeply attracted to books from Japan that tell small stories of people responding to kindness, if I may summarize them that way. Some of the titles I’ve read are noted above. My son Bobby went to Japan to play basketball and became a fixture of Tokyo. As one of his friend’s said, “If you see an tall orange dot coming towards you, it’s Bobby Fullilove.” One day, walking around Tokyo with him, he pointed out a small cafe — I mean it was really a large box — and he said that his dream was to have such a place and sell his signature sandwiches. That he had a dream and had invented signature sandwiches was so lovely — he was not a peaceful youth, but he found some Zen in Japan before his death in 2016.

On a trip to Japan in 2006 my friend Hirofumi Minami organized the visit so that I could attend the annual observance of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima in World War II. I have been a anti-nuclear activist since I was quite young and the chance to be there was deeply meaningful to me. We also visited the rock garden at Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto, which has been my favorite garden for many years. The horror and the Zen sit in my heart as direction signals.

We have just passed August 6th and 9th, the days of observance of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it occurred to me that the Japanese books I read have exactly the feeling of that small cafe on a back street of Tokyo.

For my studies of K-drama, I have often encountered the story of the Japanese colonization of Korea, which lasted from 1910 to Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945, at the end of World War II, in the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bombs. There is nothing gentle about Japan’s actions as an imperial power in Korea or elsewhere. Wikipedia has this map of the Japanese empire:

The United States’ imperial aspirations are very much on display these days, from President Trump’s insistence that he be given Greenland to his war with Iran. I have been thinking that countries caught up in empire — present or past — are different from countries which were colonies or never colonies but never empires. Empire imposes a cast of arrogance about the self and a dehumanization of others that justifies the acts of empire and contaminates its art and culture. Conscious anti-imperialist artists, of course, feel this and oppose it, creating a powerful dialect of the struggle to affirm that all people are created equal.

In Japan, World War II brought an end to empire and the emergence of a powerful sentiment for peace and against nuclear war. And so the integration of Zen into simple stories of daily life — going to a coffee shop, getting a cat from a magical place (well, that’s not so ordinary but the magic of the cats is) — create a space of after-empire that I long to occupy. How relaxing it must be to put down the worry that your country is starving another nation to death as a way to impose its will.

What these post-empire stories make clear is that there is plenty to do without running around destroying other people. I like that. I want that for myself and for my children. In that regard, on the 81st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, I had some of those “life post-empire could be like this” moments, watching Mom and Bambi eating the (overgrown) forsythia in my yard, and enjoying stilt dancers performing with the Orange Steel Band at the band’s launch festival.

Which leads me to the conclusion that I should prescribe myself a cat!

Some months ago, my friend Dr. Isabel Lee wrote to the University of Orange to say that Dr. Jang, a professor she met in Korea, would be in town in August and would give a class at the University of Orange. She assured us that he was excellent — and we have complete faith in Dr. Lee — still, we were not entirely sure what the class would be about and even less sure about Dr. Jang himself. It felt like a summer school mystery, maybe Nancy Drew style.

Eventually he sent a description of the class and a poster:

Developing Creativity in the time of AI

Lecture by Jang Tae-gyu (Heritage Arche Creative Language Research Institute)

August 4, 2026 (Tuesday) 10:00 AM | 47 Cleveland St, Orange, NJ

In this hands-on session, students will discover their personal creative thinking style through image and language interaction exercises. The workshop challenges us to tap into our unconscious mind — using points, lines, and shapes — to unlock the unique human imagination that AI simply cannot replicate. Come explore how creativity is already alive in your everyday life!

The class was Tuesday, August 4th, and we all got to meet Jang Tae-gyu, the man of mystery. He has traveled all over the world, working to help everyone learn and in the process to be empowered. To our class, he stressed that AI cannot replicate human creativity, which is what we must accentuate. His nunchi — that Korean super power of reading the room — is extraordinary. He moves toward his goals with drive, he told us, and I could feel it. These qualities give him powerful charisma.

As I was in Kansas City last week, I like to say, “I’m not in Kansas anymore,” although of course I was in Missouri. But still, you get the point: in his class we weren’t in Kansas any more. He created a space of learning that was outside anything in my experience and then he let the guardrails down — so carefully that we didn’t even notice but so thoroughly that our deeper selves were peeking through. Eventually, we were all telling a story together about Peter the Sad Pigeon. It came to have a name — “Peter the Sad Pigeon Who Found His Way” — which was a metaphor for the day’s work.

For my part, in that unguarded space, what came out was Korean — I really hesitate to use whatever Korean I have but it seemed both welcome and urgent to call upon it to communicate with Dr. Jang. I could see that others felt similarly called to bring themselves into the room. In the aftermath we wondered if it had been safe to show such real parts of ourselves, but as the class was full of friends, I think it was. As Molly put it, it was a team-building exercise — an unexpected ropes course that we went through together.

Dr. Jang’s bottom line was that you can tell a good teacher because they ask questions of their students and in that process liberate 32 qualities and actions that help people be successful. But of course he also wanted to show us how to get to the deeper levels of our own thinking, past the chittering monkey brain, into the unique and powerful ideas that are lurking beneath the surface and which cannot be replicated by AI.

Although it was a joke that Dr. Jang was mysterious — who was he? what would he teach? — in the end, it was not exactly wrong. A person who, in two hours, can help you jiggle your brain, has a superpower and is very mysterious. When I was learning to speak French, I watched a series called “French in Action.” The show’s story included a mystery, “Who was the man in black who was following Robert and Mireille?” From time to time they would say, “Mystère et boule de gomme!” (mystery and a ball of gum). This class was exactly like that!

If Dr. Jang comes back next summer, I think he will have a huge class, excited for the mystère et boule de gomme!

Ben Wikler, This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, New York: WW Norton Publishers, 2026.

This Is the Plan, the book for the new Move-On Book Club arrived a few days ago and the Book Club meets on Thursday, hence my frantic rush to get the book read. I picked it up a few times and found Ben Wikler’s Wisconsin humor a bit much. However, I want to be prepared so I pushed on. My new approach is to groan at all the Wisconsin/Dad (hereinafter WD) jokes and to soak up the distillation of electoral victory science. It’s a HOW-TO book — not a read-for-an afternoon’s-pleasure book — and so it joins the pile of books I need to keep close at hand as I move through the process of staying Zen while ending America’s meltdown and saving democracy.

One of Wikler’s WD jokes is to do the Dale Carnegie thing of tell them what you’re going to tell, tell them, then tell them what you told them. Groan. Though weighted with Carnegie’s 1 & 3, he does tell us that our super super power is to “affect which people hold public office and what they do with the powers they wield.”

He argues, “In a democracy, power comes from the math. You assemble enough people together, you win. Which is why this book, fundamentally, is a field guide on how to make organizing—working with groups of people create change—a part of your life.” (p. 19)

Here’s a core series of points:

• Saving democracy depends on winning elections at every level of government, from school board to president;

• Winning elections depends on connecting with voters by door knocking; and

• You need a group to help you because “small groups are the secret sauce of politics.”

The story of his godmother, Ada Deer, inspired me. It’s a long quote, so I hope that’s OK, Ben? I think it really sells the whole concept. He writes:

My godmother, Ada Deer, was born in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression. As a young person, she saw the hopes of her people — her Menominee tribe — snuffed out by the federal government’s policy of termination. But when she saw a federal law in her way, she decided to change it. She built a group—at first, a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals, then, eventually, a group so large and powerful that it included Congress and the president, who signed recognition of the Menominee tribe into law. She devoted herself to political change, and change the world she did, over a lifetime. She saw Scott Walker rise and fall; she nominated me to lead the Democratic Party of Wisconsin; and she passed away, at peace, eighty-eight years old, two weeks after her state supreme court majority shifted away from its assault on democracy, the sovereignty of the Menominee Nation an established fact, and democracy in her state renewed. (p. 293)

I grew up an activist household and my dad Ernie Thompson was always out door-knocking. For one campaign, he himself knocked on every door in our ward. In another campaign, when control of Essex County government was on the line, voter turnout for our ward was crucial: the Democrats took leadership of the Essex County but their plurality was less than our ward’s majority. In fact, dad’s whole book, Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power, is a story about building electoral power in order to implement a people’s agenda.

The path to power is not a straight line, though. The Powers-that-Be have implemented many policies to destroy working class and minority communities, as they did in “terminating” the federal recognition of Ada Deer’s tribe. Thus setbacks mean that broken networks have to be reorganized and this can impede the work of getting people to the polls. Many of the strategies that Ben Wikler is proposing rest on being connected to one’s neighbors. If there is enough disruption, people are not connected to one another and they don’t trust the system enough to vote. Deborah Wallace tackled this profound challenge in a paper in a special issue of the journal Built Environment on 20th anniversary of my book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It. She noted, “The built environment anchors social, economic, and political community. A limited neighbourhood milieu fosters and maintains relationships that enable a community to realize its values. Fundamental civic activities such as getting out the vote depend on this empowerment.”

Thus, we see two problems facing communities hurt by serial forced displacement. The first is the need to reweave the fabric of the city. The second is to build people’s power through ballot box, as dad did in the 1960s and as Wikler is describing now. I believe that our work in energizing the city has gained momentum, and enabled us to respond to crisis. At the moment the crisis is the federal assault on the immigrants in Orange and in the US. Like the federal “termination” policy that Ada Deer fought, it is a policy that all of us have to fight at this time. Taking a page from her book, if there’s a federal law, let’s change it! As councilman said at our Saturday “ICE OUT!” vigil, “Why don’t we have a path to citizenship?”

Here’s a photo of our vigil. People from many parts of the Orange community and the nearby towns joined for the vigil, which represents a breakthrough in reweaving the social fabric of the city.

One of the sponsoring groups was the Laundry Workers Center, which is an anchor partner of The HUUB Community Campus. LWC does monthly door-knocking and had been out earlier in the day talking to people about their rights.

In the months ahead, it will be our work to build on these initiatives — monthly vigils and door-knocking — to turn them into a solid people’s platform and power at the ballot box to get our platform enacted into law. These are not easy tasks, but they are essential. Having myself written a book called Urban Alchemy, I was delighted that Wikler, near the end of This Is the Plan, writes:

Democracy is alchemical. It can turn our beliefs and our wishes into power, leaders, and laws.

Yet it helps that some of it is normal, because neighbors getting snatched from us is horrible: a zombie movie playing out on the streets of my hometown. This is very offensive, as my hometown was a backwater place where pretty much nothing happened. You never would have pegged it for scenes from “The Rise of Fascism.” After our last “ICE OUT” vigil July 4th, we decided to do it again, maybe every first Saturday of the month, but certainly this first Saturday, August 1, 12 to 2, at the intersection of Scotland Road and Central Avenue, Orange, NJ.

And the protest helps ease the guilt of planning a book release party. Someone posted a sign that read, “Somewhere in an attic, a girl is hiding and writing.” That one was rough, tempering the great pleasure of partying because years of my life will appear in hardcover September 14th. Yet the book holds a very important message — or at least my interpretation of the message — that the Republic of Korea sent the world via its television shows. That nation has had to fight back from the edge hundreds of times in its long history and the shows detail for us what I call the “Narrative Arc of Restoration,” or you might say, “This is the way we rebuild.” More about the party to follow, but save the date, September 26th, 2-4, in person at The HUUB Community Center, 35 Cleveland Street, Orange, NJ and on Zoom, 3-3:30.

And I can’t forget that Monday we had a visit with Dr. Taegyu Jang who will teach a class on Tuesday, August 4th, at 10am at The HUUB. His class is called “Creativity in the Age of AI.” He will use traditional Korean music, played by a master, to help us get to our deep and novel ideas. That someone, here from Korea, would teach in our people’s free school about how to use our brains in this weird new age reminds me that the world is positively bigger than our troubles. This class is in-person, and you can register here. I am a bit anxious about showing our appreciation of his kindness in coming to our small school, but Isabel Lee, who organized the visit and will translate for us, suggested that my books and a bookmark would do the trick.

But we also had something else to offer in return. Our Summer Steel Drum Intensive was setting up during his visit and he was enchanted by the drums. I proposed that he stay for the Steel Pan class that will meet after his teaching is over. “진차?” he asked, his face lit up with delight. Jevaun, who leads our steel pan program, replied, “Of course!”

So lots of contradictions: hate raging in the streets, plants struggling with the weather, a helpful book about to be born and highly-valued international visitors coming to town. How do I hold all that, other than zigzagging among conflicting emotions?

I was at The HUUB Community Center Wednesday to pick up my CSA share. Isaiah was here organizing a three-way split and he helped me divide mine in half. He is thrilled about all the zucchini we got because he loved Melissa Clark’s Olive Oil Zucchini Bread recipe. He promised to share some with me when he bakes it. I gave him some of my corn to share with his friend. And I shared a cucumber, because he is pickling and I am about to be inundated. He promised to help teach pickling. While this was going on, many people were in and around, picking up their shares.

In the sanctuary, the Youth Steel Pan intensive was going on. I popped in to say hi to the team. The University of Orange now was 22 instruments, some of which have multiple pans. Some of the pans are full-size oil drums. The sound is astounding and I look forward to their upcoming concerts. I told Jevaun I would bring my bottle and spoon!

Over at Hale House, the UofO and The HUUB teams were managing all of it.

I sat down in the Parish Hall with fellow HUUB board member and my seonbae Becky Doggett. I told Becky a long story about a woman who’d come by on Monday and been so enchanted by the drums that she thought she would sign up for the intensive. “Aren’t we lucky that 10 years ago we started the HUUB?” I asked rhetorically. We laughed. Little did we know that it would become what it has become. Little did we know how much we would need it.

Which brings me to the quote from Urban Alchemy that Jake and Dina chose for the Museum of Kansas City, which I wrote about on Monday:

The HUUB is a small “engine of society, a machine for problem-solving.” And the immediate problem I brought to The HUUB was the stress of all the contradictions arising from society’s polycrisis and the powers-that-be efforts to manage them by bearing down on the working class. In that long sentence, stress is the key word. The HUUB, by being a hub, reminded me a lot of things, like joy and fellowship and music and zucchini. In the face of change and continuity, there is zucchini, there is fellowship, there is a vigil on Saturday.

Reverend Jesse Jackson, in his famous “Crossroads Speech” to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, described a crossroads as a place of encounter at which people get to know each other, share ideas and chart the moral value forward, what Lawrence Halprin called, “valuaction.” The crossroads both grounds and directs us, easing the pull of the conradictions by helping us reach a synthesis and a select a valuaction. I took my dilemmas to the “mill" which could grind them so they can be baked into the break of change.

And here’s the question: is the claw machine a metaphor for all of K-drama? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

On the Orange NJ end of the walk our class will take, the area is given a “C” rating and the text says:

About 5% of the structures containing some 30% of all dwelling units are apartment houses. On(e) small portion of the area - Ogden, Hickory, & Olcott Sts. are negro (sic). Most of the recent sales have been effected by use of B/L shares at discounts.

I grew up on Olcott Street! Definitely Negro!

At the other end of our walk, we pass through the Montrose section of South Orange, graded “A,” wealthy and 0% Negro. The text says:

This area for many years has been one of the prime residential districts of Essex County. While there are many large older houses of decidedly declining values, there are also numerous thoroughly modern ones with a substantial amount of new building of high type.

The concept of a redlining map is that some areas are marked to discourage investment. I was shocked the first time I saw such a map to find that there was no red line. Such a misnomer, for a psychiatrist, is like a red flag for a bull! As the maps became digitized, I was able to find many of them on the internet. What I saw explained the deeper intent of the maps. Here’s a sample:

While there is some green on the maps, by and large, the American city in the late 1930’s was marked out-of-bounds for investment. When we say “redlining maps,” we are led astray. Instead of seeing the abandonment of the cities, we see only what happened to the working class and minority neighborhoods. And then we fail to see how the maps prepare the way for the federal highway project, which will rip apart the cities to open up the suburbs, which were “greenlit” for investment. Our eyes distracted by the hype, we fail to recognize that the point is not stability, but rather the search for investment opportunity. Now we are living through a swing of the pendulum in which the suburbs are over and cities are the new green— that is the real meaning of gentrification and the utility of those craftily named “redlining maps.”

All of this was on my mind on Saturday July 25th, as I joined the team of “Land of Opportunity” and leaders and residents of Kansas City MO to see the third installment of the series which focused on I71 tearing through the city, and destroying historic Black neighborhoods in the process.

An extraordinary part of the Summit was the series of talks by Placemakers, each of whom described the traumas and struggles that defined their efforts to rebuild what had been shattered. I don’t know which of the four moved me most: Marvin Lyman, TJ Jolly, Chris Goode, or Damon Patterson.

The premier of the new show followed. It carefully excavated the ways in which the highway had ripped at the heart of Kansas City. The stories were extraordinary, in part because the director, Nico Giles Wiggins, is an exceptionally gifted interviewer and friendly person.

After the show, Nico and I had a “fireside chat.” I told the audience that all week I’d been telling my friends in New Jersey, in the words of the classic song,“I might take a plane, I might take a train, but if I have to walk, I’m going there just the same!” What a great pleasure to be in Kansas City!

Then Nico threw out some questions and I expostulated. Nico and the audience were so friendly that I went on and on. But the main point I wanted to make was that the Placemakers had given us a “Master Class” in “root shock and what we can do about it.” Their honest exposition of the pain of upheaval and their creative solutions to repair were the answer for KC and the whole US. In the photo, I’m listening to one of Nico’s questions. My dear friend Dina Newman took the photo.

After the fireside chat, Nico and his team showed the trailer for Episode 4, which is about the fight for neighborhoods. I am in the trailer! I am saying that resilience is overrated — the struggle we are in tires us out, given the forces we are up against, is both hard and never-ending. My remarks were followed by a family that dedicated itself to this hard work, their testimony underscoring the pain and the meaning they found in making place.

After this lovely event, my friends Dina Newman and Jacob Wagner, who lead the Center for Neighborhoods at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, took me out for barbecue at Gates BBQ, one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in the city. They took a roundabout way, driving through the neighborhoods featured in the show.

Over our delightful meal I asked Dina and Jake for suggestions for a Sunday morning activity before my flight. They had various ideas, including a visit to the Museum of Kansas City. I love city museums and have been to many. Jake gave detailed instructions, suggesting I start on the third floor, where there was an exhibit on the Dunbar neighborhood, which Damon Patterson had described, and in fact, Damon was part of the team that made the exhibit. Jake described the fun the team had had, going to New York to work with a museum exhibit design team.

I got to the museum right at its opening. The man at the welcome desk gave me a thorough explanation of the ins and outs of the place. I started to wander, and slowly made my way to third floor, where I spied the room that Jake had described. I walked in and was stunned because there, right at the opening, was a quote by me!

I texted Jake my shock and he wrote back that he’d wanted to surprise me —and Dina played right along! But the great pleasure of it — I mean besides being part of the permanent collection of a city museum — is that it is exactly the right quote. It sums up everything I believe — that the city is a machine for problem-solving, precisely what we need as we struggle to find our way through this difficult era of polycrisis.

As WC Fields said, “Kansas City Kansas or Kansas City MO?” Definitely KCMO, the city of fountains! I might take a train, I might take a plane…

This year was my fourth time at a Memory Parlor. When she first explained the idea to me, I was quite puzzled. Connecting fragments of memory? I’ve grown accustomed to her idea over the years and I adore the mix of Korean and American scholars that she convenes for these conversations. Among them is Jun Bum Sun, who is a writer, musician, philosopher, and animal rights activist, among other things. Jun Bum Sun’s talks have had a major influence on my thinking about K-drama, as he placed the genre in the flow of Korean intellectual and spiritual history. He has recently published, Korean History Therapy: 200 Years of Modern History Healing the Trauma. The Han Books website has an excellent description of the ideas that animate the text and offers it for sale in the US, cautioning “this book is in Korean.” I am looking forward to reading it, with the help of my Korean teacher, Professor Kyla Park, and google lens.

In his talk at the Memory Parlor, Jun Bum Sun used kimchi as a metaphor for Korean history: the generations of experiences of outside forces imposing their will on Korea, leaving the country, as he put it, more Buddhist than India, more Confucian than China, more Christian than the US. All those ingredients, arriving on the substructure of Korea’s indigenous philosophies and religions, have been mixed together under pressure and left for a period of time, as one must leave kimchi to ripen. And now Korea was taking the lid off and savoring what has been produced by all those experiences and all that time. K-drama and K-pop emerge from this kimchi of history. Understanding the history and what it has produced creates an opportunity for healing, which is what his book addresses. Professor Won Kwang Paik, one of the speakers at the conference, was grinning from ear to ear imagining the tasting of that kimchi of history. “That’s the good s**t,” he chortled, using an expletive for its shock value.

Jun Bum Sun offers a complex and beautifully woven argument. My study of K-drama has benefitted from his insights and offers independent confirmation of his proposition. Professor May has proposed that next year at the Memory Parlor he and I should be in conversation about our ideas and our books. One small point, of many: Jun Bum Sun emphasizes the ancient Shamanic blurring of subject and object, which is a feature of the Korean language. Every day I read stories on the Talk to Me In Korean app and I am frequently stumped by the Korean approach to “who is speaking about what?” In English grammar, these have to be clear and sharp. Clauses have to be placed in exact relationship to the words they are modifying. Our sentence diagramming is very specific about this. Here is a wonderful example from Elizabeth O’Brien’s Grammar Revolution:

All I can say at this stage of my studies is that Korean is not like that and I am often confused. I appreciated Jun Bum Sun’s suggestion that that is the point: the sharp distinctions in English make us think that things are separate, when, in fact, they are not. The blurring of the lines in the Korean language support the deep commitment to relatedness.

Jun Bum Sun’s larger point is that this is the first time in history that Korea can “open the jar of kimchi” and taste what has been formed by the thousands of years of traumatic history. That is a gift from Korea to itself. And, I believe, via its great cultural products of K-pop and K-drama, from Korea to the whole world.

The theme of this year’s Memory Parlor was “The Shadow of Intention.” This led, naturally, to the investigation of intention and the inevitable question, “Why did I do that?” I’m not sure I could answer the question, “Why is it my intention to go to the Memory Parlor every year (God willing and the creek don’t rise)?” Yet I find that Hope Elizabeth May’s intention to bring strands of history together, under the protection of beauty, is both a provocation and a healing art.

In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Euny Hong, author of The Birth of Korean Cool and The Power of Nunchi, listed many factors that are linked to the Korean catastrophe of childbearing. Then she proposed, “If you want to understand how these factors play out in the experience of South Korean women, look to the plots of the most popular K-dramas on TV.”*

What does the plot of Dynamite Kiss show us? To disadvantage her brother from advancement in the family baby products company, Gong Ji-hye sets up a “Mother’s Task Force” for her brother. The only job requirement for the interns of the team is having a child under six. She eliminates all the candidates with serious credentials and staffs it with people she thinks will be incompetent. Of course, the mothers aren’t incompetent, they just have pulls on their time, like sick children or school talent shows they need to attend. In addition to the mothers on the Task Force, the several mothers of adults — including the heroine Go Da-rim and the hero Gong Ji-hyeok — fill in the long arc of the demands of motherhood. The heroine’s best friend is a single dad, caught up in the same issues, and maybe more because of the prejudice against single dads in Korea.

The show makes clear the ways in which the work could be supportive of child-rearing women. Instead of firing them because a child got sick, the Mothers TF rushes them home. Instead of discounting the relevance of their knowledge about baby products, the Mothers TF puts it to good use. Kim Seon-u, the single dad, makes a living doing baby photography, which showcases his vivid enjoyment of children. And the mothers of the adults tackle the crucial ways in which parenting goes on — supporting one’s children in their search for love, acknowledging the limitations of one’s world view, and shouldering one’s own burdens so that the adult children can move into their own lives.

All this parenting is not easy work and the show, I thought, treated the challenges with care and respect; the whole was much buoyed by laughter. My personal theory about pregnancy is that it is an infectious condition and women catch it from others in their friend circle. Various sub-theories have been advanced about the spread of pregnancy in friend circles, among them that women smell the baby feet, another has to do with baby cheeks calling to be squeezed. What all the sub-theories have in common is proximity — one has to be in the vicinity of a baby for the call-and-response to be triggered. What South Korea did wrong, in my opinion, was to replace the tight-knit urban neighborhoods in which large families prospered with Corbusian towers-in-the-park. Le Corbusier, for all his greatness, did not have children and was frozen in the patriarchy. He got “house a machine for living” but not “house as merry-go-round in the cycle of life.”

Dynamite Kiss gets my point: the heroine, Go Da-rim, ensconced in a society of mothers, goes on to have two children, and one of the other mothers of the Task Force has another child. It is truly a cycle of life, vulnerable at every the point. We can reestablish it, but I do not think it will happen right away. At the moment, people are busy making the world safe for all of us. If we can stop isolating people in cities, stop war, stop climate change, stop the out-of-control greed of capitalism, I think we can protect the cycle of life and babymaking will rise to the top of the agenda again.

Many K-dramas end by breaking the fourth wall so that cast and crew can thank us for watching what they made. Dynamite Kiss ends with everyone dancing and waving to us, which is exactly the point. I’m very grateful that, stuck inside to escape poison air, I got to laugh and ponder this delightful show.

I wanted to include a slightly blurry photo of cast and crew dancing, because I was inspired by Mark O’Connell’s essay on the photos people have posted while watching soccer on television.* It seems a bit weird that one might make art from this secondhand experience. But then, it’s a first hand when viewed in its own right. And that position is close to my heart. People challenge my authority to write about K-drama, asking “What do you know about Korea?” Answer: very little.

But I know a lot about my living room and my television, which is the site of my encounter with K-drama. I don’t have to know about Korea to think about what I just saw. I appreciated Mark O’Connell’s validation that watching something on television is a real thing that is happening to a community of people, in his case, 1.5 billion people watching the World Cup, in my case the 500,000,000 people watching K-drama.

*Notes:

Euny Hong, “Watching South Korean TV Won’t Make You Want to Have a Baby,” The New York Times, June 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/opinion/k-drama-birthrate-crisis.html.

Mark O’Connell, “A Billion Eyes. One Shared Experience,” The New York Times, July 19, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/opinion/watching-the-world-cup.html.

This question reminded me of other times I wanted to put a “new” idea into the mix. Our research group was in the forefront of writing about each of the mad plagues that tore at US cities in the 1980s and 90s: AIDS, crack cocaine addiction, violence, and trauma among them. While some of our findings were integrated more quickly than others, it was never an instant process. Until the new idea was assimilated, it was hard to get funding, hard to get papers published, hard to explain. To make it even harder, the proverbial “funny thing happened on the way to the Forum”: we realized that the mad plagues were hitting disinvested neighborhoods and we needed to understand what had happened in those places to disturb the ecology so profoundly.

In 1994 I read From Where We Stand by Deborah Tall, who pointed out that, in our studies of psychology, we pay a lot of attention to time but very little to place. It made sense to me that our team should be studying neighborhoods, but we needed methods. Oh, I thought, I should invent the psychology of place. Announcing that I was going to study the psychology of place provided my first lesson in the ways in which ideas are folded into the mix of hegemonic thinking: ideas that are outside the mainstream are cut off before they can even be articulated. My public health colleagues looked at me askance, the “why would you waste your time on that?” apparent in their body language when it wasn’t said out loud.

It turned out I didn’t have to invent the psychology of place. It existed, I just didn’t know about it. Psychiatry had made a drastic biomedical turn, nearly severing the study of the context of people’s lives. The pathbreaking work on place carried out by geographers, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists had not made its way into psychiatric thinking and training. That was my second lesson in the movement of idea: disciplines place boundaries around themselves. My first major paper in this domain, The Psychiatric Implications of Displacement: Contributions from the Psychology of Place, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP), offered connections among the literature on the psychology of place, the tradition of social psychiatry, and modern psychiatric practice. My paper had no place to land within the specialty, as social life had been cut out of our thinking.

The third lesson, which has to do with competition in the marketplace of ideas, has two parts. The first part is that ideas jostle for attention, but they don’t compete on equal footing. Ideas that fit the hegemonic model of the world get moved quickly to the front. “Minority” ideas — if I may use that term — face disparagement. My book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It was published in 2004. You might say that one of the first sets of readers it encountered was an anti-advocacy group: the corporate leaders of Columbia University. They were getting ready to use eminent domain to snatch a piece of Harlem. The usual puffing off of faculty works was denied me and my book was pushed to side.

The second part of the competition in the marketplace of ideas is that ideas are not, and cannot be, silenced. If ideas are “pushed to the side," they find themselves with all the people who have been pushed to side. It turns out that Root Shock encountered those people and provided them with stories they needed. Included in those side places were prisons, among them the prisons in upstate New York served by the Bard Prison Initiative. I wasn’t thinking of people in prisons as an important audience when I wrote the book. Yet, for reasons of history, it turns out that they and I were on the same path. Eddie Ellis and his Prison Think Tank found that 75% of the people in upstate New York prisons came from seven New York City neighborhoods.* Those were the same disinvested and devastated neighborhoods of the mad plagues, the very neighborhoods whose stories set me on the path of understanding the psychology of place. The people who went to prison had suffered both the root shock of what had happened in their neighborhoods and the root shock of prison.

I have had the opportunity to meet some of those students and to study their works. I know that a book doesn’t have feelings, but if my book did have feelings, I think it would be weeping to have met readers who understood what it offered. This is important because, on their return to their communities, those students were able to articulate for themselves and others both a diagnosis of what happened and remedies for healing. Eddie Ellis, for example, quoted Root Shock in an essay on language, challenging people to be sensitive to the harm done by words like inmates, convicts, prisoners and felons, which deprived people of their humanity.*

On September 14, 2026, The Tao of K-drama will be thrust into the marketplace of ideas. Whatever jostling the book encounters, may it be sturdy enough and useful enough to hold its own and find its people!

*Notes:

Fullilove, M. T. (1996). Psychiatric implications of displacement: Contributions from the psychology of place. American journal of psychiatry, 153, 12.

Eddie Ellis and the Prison Think Tank, quoted in The New York Times:

"The fact that more than 85 percent of prisoners in the state are black or Latino and -- most phenomenal of all -- that 75 percent of the state's entire prison population comes from just seven neighborhoods in New York City," said Mr. Ellis, citing accepted research data culled by prisoners themselves in a prisoner's "think tank" at Green Haven prison in Stormville, N.Y.

Eddie Ellis, Center for NuLeadership, Open Letter.

In the photo you can see a chunk of N-P. A carpenter made this bookcase and the five others in the dining room. He believed that 9” was deep enough for a bookshelf. It turns out I don’t agree with his theory because some books are landscape and I need room for other things. You can see a favorite photo of granddaughter Lily and some of my collection of wind-up toys. Other bookcases around the house are deeper and they bristle with tchotchkes, which the internet describes as “a small, inexpensive decorative trinket, souvenir, or knickknack.” Mine include a piece from an exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Barack Obama inauguration medals, a David E. Rogers MD Health Policy Colloquium medal, a handmade birthday card from artist/designer Jae Shin: I would define these as “small, precious things that I like to see.” Hence, deeper shelves fit my purposes better. When I was in college, Professor Richard DuBoff had a pet peeve about President Katherine McBride screwing up the shelves in the library-to-be. I never thought I’d be opining on the topic but life brings enlightenment.

Another thing in the photo: I don’t know why I have three copies of New Orleans by Pierce F. Lewis. It was a crucial book for understanding the effects and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and probably I had one at work, one at home and acquired a third because someone left it behind (kids today…). And obviously Origins of the Urban Crisis should be with the D’s as it is about Detroit: mine is an imperfect system.

I pulled a few things off the shelves that were mysteries. One of them was a 1937 limited edition reproduction of Manny & Co.: A Christmas Story, by Charles H. Sylvester, first published in 1913 by P.F. Volland & Co. of Chicago. The cover looks like a business ledger, which makes sense because it is about a business. The text is printed on heavy paper, each page framed with elegant borders. The story is the sentimental story of a man meeting a youth who turns out to be his grandson and thus the man reconnects with his estranged daughter. Many questions come to mind about the book, such as, “Where did I find this?” and “Why do I have it?” I am glad I do, though.

Some things have a clear provenance, but got shoved into Cities at some point and don’t belong there. In that category is Morocco, by Pierre Loti. It was published in France in 1889. An English translation by W.P. Baines was published by David McKay Publications in 1914. I was interested in the book because I had visited Pierre Loti’s house in Rochefort. There are twelve plates in color and tone, and the book is worth much less if these are missing. I didn’t count, but they seem to be there. Here’s one:

Some books could be in another place. Jews without Money by Michael Gold is in Cities because it offers such useful insight into the Lower Eastside in the 1930s. But it could just as well have been in Memoir/Biography. It works the other way, too: all the Virginia Woolf is in that section, but perhaps some should be in Fiction. I put other Bloomsbury people with Woolf, because I think of that era as revolving around her. It is beyond my shelving knowledge to say if this is according to Hoyle. Similarly, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge is in Cities, in the New York section, but could have been with Children’s Literature, except that it’s very important to understanding Washington Heights, I believe. Schoolchildren collected pennies to save the lighthouse, and in our era children made giraffes which helped our CLIMB project advocate for the restoration of Northern Manhattan Parks.

There are lots of books about specific cities, some big, some small: Copenhagen, Knoxville, Memphis, Spartanburg among them, though Chicago is the master city, in my opinion. My urbanism teacher, Michel Cantal-Dupart, would always buy a book about the city we were visiting, so I copied him during our travels together and have continued to do that. He was very good at reading the book on the plane home and then knowing what the city’s issue is. I was surprised when, as time went on, I could make a visit, read a book and have an idea what the issue was. Cities obey rules, which is why it’s good to read lots of books about cities.

And actually it’s good have a lot of books on any subject of interest. Take Korea, for example. What a delight to have found some wonderful books that taught me about the country and its history so that I might write my own book, coming out September 14th. Something you could add to your library…

Thanks for visiting the library with me! Come again another time — there’s so much more to see!

They — you know, they — say that something/someone can’t make you feel or act a certain way. It’s your reaction to the thing that you’re feeling. Do we believe this? My knee-jerk “it is making me” is usually followed by my woke correction to “my reaction to it is.” But this particular show — You and Everything Else — has been really rough. I should have stopped when it did its first grim turn — it was obvious they wanted to take it to some very dark corners of betrayal. Having not turned it off, I’m in for the long haul, not because I want to see how much the awful friend can torture my dear Kim Go-eun, but because I want to see how the writers do the resolution. I’m for killing the friend, and so are they, but it’s not Kim Go-eun that will do the job. Sigh.

What is “it” doing to me? Or, as I should say, how am I reacting to “it”?

Here’s how: besides wanting to kill a character in a show, I’m totally on edge and seeing betrayal behind every bush. And behind some of the bushes in my real life there has been dark stuff — boy, did they feel the “wrath of me.” I am lucky that in my Qi Gong class, our teacher Lori Enloe read No. 67 from John H. McDonald’s translation of the Tao Te Ching:

     The world talks about honoring the Tao,
     but you can’t tell it from their actions.
     Because it is thought of as great,
     the world makes light of it.
     It seems too easy for anyone to use.

     There are three jewels that I cherish:
     compassion, moderation, and humility.
     With compassion, you will be able to be brave,
     With moderation, you will be able to give to others,
     With humility, you will be able to become a great leader.
     To abandon compassion while seeking to be brave,
     or abandoning moderation while being benevolent,
     or abandoning humility while seeking to lead
     will only lead to greater trouble.
     The compassionate warrior will be the winner,
     and if compassion is your defense you will be secure.
     Compassion is the protector of Heaven’s salvation.

I have read many versions of the Tao, and much depends on translation. That strikes me as a metaphor for my crisis. The Tao and The Odyssey offer me the chance to explore this challenge. Here are the “three treasures” sections from some other translations of No. 67 to demonstrate the subtle differences:

     Gia—fu Feng and Jane English:
     I have three treasures which I hold and keep.
     The first is mercy; the second is economy;
     The third is daring not to be ahead of others.

     Witter Bynner:
     These possessions of a simpleton being the three I choose and cherish:
     To care,
     To be fair,
     To be humble.

     Roger Ames and David Hall:
     I really have three prized possessions that I cling to and treasure:
          The first of these is compassion,
          The second frugality,
          And the third is my reluctance to try to become preeminent in the world.

     Derek Lin:
     I have three treasures
     I hold on to them and protect them
     The first is called compassion
     The second is called conservation
     The third is called not daring to be ahead in the world

As it happened, right after Qi Gong class, I read New York Times’s critic A.O. Scott’s comparison of the opening lines of three translations of The Odyssey. The first one he talked about was both the most recent and the first major translation by a woman, that by Emily Wilson:

     Tell me about a complicated man. 
     Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
     when he  had wrecked the holy town of Troy.

I remember reading the New York Times’s 1996 review of Robert Fagles’s translation, which hailed his version of the opening lines:

     Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
     driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
     the hollowed heights of Troy. 

The Times’s review noted, “Translators are the most generous of people, especially translators of poetry: they act as go-betweens, bringing us to an acquaintance with literatures other than our own, knowing all the while that there is so much in the best verse that can never be carried across from one language to another.”

The central point here is that people take the same text but translate it differently. This has a tidy parallel to my crisis. But I realize that I’m not translating at all — I’m just reacting. I know that if I am simply reactive, I will simply tremble with the raw emotions — rage, shame, grief. The reactive path, the Tao says, leads to more trouble and that is so right.

A translator, the Times points out, is a go-between. To translate the show, I have to stop the reaction, see the text, and, as the nursery school teachers say, “Use my words” to understand how what I am seeing is important to my own lived experience. In that way, I act as the go-between. My Qi Gong class helped with this. Our teacher lifted “compassion” out of the reading and wove that into our entire session. I let it wash into and over me, calming me so that I could do the root work of translation.

Though I was reacting to the show’s core story of betrayal, when I was calm enough to translate that to my own life, the stories of betrayal crumbled. I was so surprised! And also annoyed. It is not exactly “happy ending” but rather a new task — knead the new translation into my understanding of the world and my place in it. In our #MeToo world, Fagles’s rather geographic description of a “man of twists and turns driven this way and that” becomes Wilson’s “complicated man,” with all the connotations that carries. Maybe it is the humility which allows me to appreciate that it is complicated and that’s OK.

When I started writing “Monday’s Book” as a regular feature of my Substack, I thought I would write about a book I was reading that week. Some times one book linked to another so I wrote about two. Or a book and a show. But this past month there has been so much to read about the Declaration of Independence, I felt I should list all the books and articles that had touched me. I couldn’t fit them all, but, as the Whole Earth Catalog would put it, “cream rises”:

I find that we have all been around the Declaration of Independence so long that everyone has a knee-jerk reaction to something it says. It could be the hypocrisy of the “all men” or the genocidal “merciless Indian savages.” Even if they never read it, people might still be irritated by the general idea that, if the Declaration of Independence was so great, why I am suffering from [fill in the blank]?

Maybe the unfinished challenge of the Declaration of Independence is the issue the pundits are tackling. Jamelle Bouie noted that “five words” — “all men are created equal” — set a moral North Star and people charted their course towards it. The story of the Massachusetts woman Elizabeth Freeman is offered by the Times as a case in point. On hearing the Declaration of Independence at a 1781 celebration, she went to a lawyer to ask him to help her get free. Her case went to court and the justices found that slavery was incompatible with the new ideals. Jones writes about a case of an enslaved person which followed soon after Freeman’s:

William Cushing, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, presided in the last of those proceedings and instructed the jury on the relevant law: Colonial Massachusetts had once countenanced holding ‘Africans in perpetual servitude,’ treated ‘as we do our horses and cattle,’ but things had changed since the Revolution. ‘A different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind.’ He invoked universal rights including ‘that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion or shape of noses [or] features”) has inspired all the human race.’ the Massachusetts Constitution was ‘totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.’ (emphasis added)

The whole “bending the moral arc of universe toward justice” is the effect of different ideas which take place, which lead us to take a step, as the Declaration led so many enslaved people to say, “I am part of ALL.” Having taken that step, something becomes visible and desirable because we are in a new position with a new perspective. From that new perspective, we can assertive, “If ___, then ___” and a new different idea takes place among us.

There is no limit to this process, as illustrated by the July 5th story about a small town in Quebec voting to establish the rights of trees. Livni notes,

‘Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, therefore, a bit unthinkable,’ wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972 Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights of ‘natural objects’ like trees.

To show the tit-for-tat way that these things work, Livni also notes the attack on this idea of rights for trees by Wesley J. Smith, writing in the National Review. Smith, complaining of the nature rights movement, wrote, “It is an inch by inch, step by step tactic. One small town today, a city, province or country tomorrow, and eventually, an international treaty.”

He is so right. I would say that this arises because yet another different idea has taken place with all the people: the knowledge that the only escape from ecological catastrophe is to recognize that we share one small, delightful planet with a lot of beings other than humans. Survival depends on all of us surviving. The way this hits home for me is that bees are endangered, which poses a threat to all the plants bees pollinate, including tomatoes. I live in Jersey — need I say more? I planted a native plants garden that is full of pollinator food. Now I have lots of bees and the tomatoes are taking shape in my garden.

My new problem is that Jersey deer, like Jersey girls, like tomatoes. They jump into my garden and eat the tops of the plants, cutting off the potential harvest for me. I have introduced a harm reduction approach to this — putting in a much taller fence that, hopefully, they won’t bother to jump. I do not like the idea of shooting the deer, though there are quite a few of them. They might feel the same way about people — there are quite a few of us but we shouldn’t be shot.

Which brings me to Danielle Allen and her showstopper book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Allen had the idea to read the Declaration of Independence line by line, both with her night school students and her more privileged university classes. From this work emerged this volume. She makes many fine points in her book, among them that the form of this Declaration is that of a memo, written to the world to explain the reasons that the colonists were taking the step of throwing off England’s rule. Imagine that! I mean, I write memos all the time, but not one sentence from any of my memos made it to the NY Times’ list of “Six Sentences That Shaped the American Story.” A memo!

Allen’s book is so important because it helps us set the document in its historical moment. Marxists loved the American Revolution because, for its time, it was a great leap forward. It opened the way for the next stage. It did not solve all the problems — nothing can do that. (Looking at you, Magic Bullet!) What it did do was set tools in the hands of all of us, and we have used those tools. In 1781 Elizabeth Freeman took the “different idea” to a lawyer and got herself freed. By 1790 there was no slavery in Massachusetts. The Wesley J. Smiths of that era understood the threat posed by this “small step” and used the Congress and the Courts to hold on to power and their right to “own” people. This came to a head in the Civil War, which defeated them. In my hometown of Orange, NJ — where, by the way, you can see the whole history of the American city — the phenomenal expansion enabled by the defeat of the Southern Oligarchy is evident in the dates over the buildings and years the factories were built.

In Orange now we are fighting the latest round in this “tit for tat” exchange between the Smiths and the Freeman’s. ICE is in our town with its new tactic of swooping down on a neighbor and snatching them away from us. This is excruciatingly painful, which is what got us out protesting on the Fourth of July — what could be more perfect? The children’s signs were the best.

The Declaration of Independence is not the end all and be all of documents, how could it be? Rather, because it sets the North Star of our Moral Compass, giving our faltering steps inspiration and direction. During the years of slavery, many decided to take a ride on the Underground Railroad. The folk song group, the Weavers, shared this song, which used the metaphor of the Drinking Gourd for the North Star:

[Chorus]
Follow the drinkin' gourd
Follow the drinkin' gourd
For the old man is a-waitin' for to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinkin' gourd

[Verse 1]
When the sun comes back, and the first quail calls
Follow the drinkin' gourd
For the old man is a-waitin' for to carry you to freedom
Just follow the drinkin' gourd

The instructions haven’t changed really and we must not turn back. As Harriet Tubman told us, "If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going... Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going."

In My Royal Nemesis, called Brave New World in Korean, the souls of two girls, each in dire trouble, switch bodies and live each other’s lives for a while. A shaman helps one escape from Joseon to modern Korea, where the story picks up. There are many twists and turns before the young women are in their rightful bodies and eras and with their right beloved, but let’s skip all that. What I want to talk about is Halmeoni’s death scene, which affected me greatly.

Our modern heroine, Shin Seo-ri, has a halmeoni (grandmother in Korean) whom she calls “Halmae.”Shin Seo-ri has just gotten back to her own time, and found out that she is who she is, when the grandmother begins a rapid decline. Shin Seo-ri is with her as halmeoni approaches her final moments. She manages to tell her granddaughter that she is getting on a bus but doesn’t know where it is going.

Shin Seo-ri, after briefly protesting that Halmae can’t go, takes up the story of the bus. In the story, she and Halmae escape the hospital and find a bus waiting for them. They get on the bus and Halmae starts to drive. As the bus makes stops, people get on, all smiles and joy for Halmae. They drive to end of the world and then the bus stops. The passengers make a line of honor for Halmae and tell her that she did good in her life, she was a success. And then Halmae, with confidence, walks off, “back to where she came from.”

Back in the hospital room, Halmae says to Shin Seo-ri, “I hit the jackpot.”

“I hit the jackpot” was not what I expected and I was absolutely shaken by the line. The various plot lines of the show make clear that Halmae had a very hard life, made bearable by the arrival of her precious Shin Seo-ri. That child was the jackpot. I think Shin Seo-ri’s making up the adventure of the bus arises from their rich relationship, which was Halmae’s prize, the jackpot she won.

This made me wonder what jackpots had I won? So many. Of course, people being messes of contradiction, I immediately got greedy and thought of so many more I’d like to win. I got mad that my time in this dimension would be too short for all the new ones I was imagining. So, of course, I watched the show again and got the message: it’s the appreciation, not the number.

There is another lesson in the show, which is related to our problems, hence, although I hesitate, I believe I would be remiss not to discuss K-drama’s commitment to delving into the source of problems. In My Royal Nemesis, the hero, Cha Se-gye, maps out the network of Choi Mun-do, who is the villain of the story. This network enables all of Choi Mun-do’s evil deeds, which range from using coercion to acquire land for projects to attempted and actual murder. In a scene in episode 13, Cha Se-gye and his closest colleagues map out the network so that they can make a plan to bring the whole thing down. Thus, they will change the power structure within which they are struggling to survive and in this way, they will win the struggle.

A number of years ago, I got invited to a meeting at the US Centers for Disease Control which was going to discuss the connection between social structure and the AIDS epidemic. The topic was the heart of my research. But, the organizers said, capitalism, racism and few other big structuring factors could not be changed, so we won’t be discuss them. I said, “Well that’s stupid, so I won’t go.” Besides, we had just gone through the Reagan years when the structure was changed from New Deal to No Deal Unless Your Rich, so it was perfectly clear structures could be changed, just it wasn’t supposed to be changed by you and me. I was supposed to be disempowered. By showing the possibility that people, including you and me, can change structure, K-drama empowers us.

K-drama takes its cue from Korea. There, in living memory, the people got rid of a dictatorship and installed democracy. They actually did change structure. The Trump years have rattled the close partnership with the US and Korea may well change that structure, too. They know that structures can be changed by people. K-drama reminds people of this by moving the story from the core romance to the more structural challenges that are causing deeper problems. In this case, the lovers, Shin Seo-ri and Cha Se-gye have to bring down the corrupt, murderous cousin who is the reincarnation of an evil king, as well as the systemic corruption in the corporation and in the police force that were enabling him.

These two lessons of K-drama can be contradictory. I should appreciate what I have and not be greedy, on the one hand. And I can change structure, thus getting a better deal, on the other. It is a core dilemma and one for which there is no simple “one size fits most” answer.

In moments of crisis like the one we are in, we do have to remember all the jackpots that have come our way. But one of the jackpots was the founders’ commitment to democracy and inclusion — “All people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”*

Here’s one resolution of the contradiction: “Not being greedy” does not mean “roll over and get robbed.” So let’s not roll over and get robbed. Let’s read the Declaration of Independence from the rooftops — that jackpot is ours and we have to claim it!

*This is a riff on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 rewrite which said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”

After the panel, Jake offered to drive us back to our Airbnb, and we all agreed to go by way of John King Books, which is an massive emporium of books. As we approached the door the on squat four-story building, Doug chortled, “I can smell the books!”

The sheer mass of the books overwhelmed me. I have a lot of books in my house — what did I need? I bumped into a man looking for the Autobiography of Malcolm X. He moaned that he’d seen it in another store, but didn’t buy it. He thought he’d get it at John King. There were five copies of Colin Powell’s book, but no Malcolm X. That is the randomness of used bookstores. I did find a nice book about Detroit — my mentor Michel Cantal-Dupart always got a book about the city we were visiting and read it on the way home, somehow extracting the key story. I always wondered how he knew the story, which was not exactly in the book.

And I realized that what I need from a used bookstore is to sell my books! Turns out John comes to New Jersey on buying trips — when you’re ready, the saleswoman said. I loved the idea that my books could be reborn there in Detroit. For the first time, the idea of downsizing my library came with a feeling of comfort.

We are in a strange time — information delivered instantly and in quantities that are unimaginable. People are contented with the AI synopsis of the world’s knowledge, without the energy to read a book. But of course they don’t have the energy to read a book. Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra examined the current situation of the “middle class” family. Lacking a model, they said:

So we developed one: a model budget for a family of two parents and two children under 8. We set their annual income at $130,000 — well above the roughly $83,500 national median for all U.S. households, and right in the middle of the income distribution for a family of four.

According to our calculations, the math has stopped adding up for this family over the past 18 months. They had a small cushion in 2024. Now they are in the red after covering just the basics, such as housing, an Affordable Care Act marketplace health care plan and day care. The family has over $1,000 less than it did a year and a half ago. Rising costs have more than wiped out any gains from higher wages and recent tax cuts.

This family would have trouble paying for anything beyond the basics — say, a car breaking down or a kid breaking an arm. It could not budget for any of the things that a typical family might hope for: buying a new car, taking a summer vacation or welcoming a third child.**

Imagine that — $130,000 isn’t making it! I have to say, I went to the grocery store yesterday and had sticker shock at the price of chopped meat, a item they discuss. That is disconcerting. Hamburger has been a staple of my diet all my life. Not that I should or shouldn’t eat it — the point here is that sudden shifts in diet undermine people’s confidence and sense of “God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the world.” I learned about this when I studied nutrition — Margaret Mead and other esteemed social scientists, concerned about World War II food shortages, examined what it would take to get people to change their ways on eating. It was not a simple problem.*** So, as a psychiatrist, my conclusion is that the world is changing way too fast for us — it takes calm and time to read a book and we have neither.

But some day, people will discover that reading books offers a huge survival advantage. Some people will slow down and read. And they will learn that they can travel to Detroit and buy all the books they like. What if they find one that used to belong to me? How cool would that be?

*Mindy Thompson Fullilove, The Necessity of a Psychiatry of Place: Repairing the Person-Place Relationship in an Era of Mass Displacement, March 2026, American Journal of Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.20251068

**Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra, We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America, The New York Times, June 27, 2026.

***National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 1943. The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits, 1941-1943. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9566.

I made the serendipitous observation during UofO’s 2026 Music City Festival that we had lifted up three spots in Orange Main Streets in a way that reminded me of the urbanism of Pope Sixtus V.* His placement of obelisks around the city had helped to organize the movement of pilgrims in Rome. This observation helped us connect the themes of social reorganization with our placemaking in Orange.

We had an excellent time giving our panel — a large and lively crowd and plenty of people we’d met here and there. But being in Detroit also offered the opportunity to visit people and places, and heading my list was Sister Pie, a bakery we’d learned about from their gorgeous cookbook. There are various ways to get food from Sister Pie, including going there on Friday mornings, but you have to get there before they sell out. Molly and I, who are members of Pie Club, needed to make this pilgrimage, so we got some coffee from the Yemeni coffee shop around the corner, called an Uber and headed there. It looked awfully quiet when we got there, but it was open. And the bakery cases were filled with goodies. Lisa, founder of Sister Pie and author of the cookbook, helped us make a selection and we sat down to eat our hand pies. The cookbook says a lot about the dough for a hand pie—it has to be firm enough to hold in one’s hand but flaky to complement the moist and flavorful filling inside by l. That doesn’t begin to capture the experience of biting into one, a flaky flavor explosion, nicely complemented by strong coffee. As Molly concluded, “Some things don’t live up to the hype, but Sister Pie does!”

As we sat there eating, I admired the display of their favorite baking things. I have most of them, but not the French rolling pin. And of course I needed the Sister Pie rolling pin. Lisa said she found it the best rolling pin, and she added, “I’ve made a lot of pies!” Now I have to check my suitcase on the way home because I think they would not like me to have that hard baton on the plane.

As Molly and I waited for our Uber back to our Airbnb, we looked around the block. It was a mix of grassy plots, old buildings and new construction. Lots of people passed by and we considered the fact that the 60 strawberry scones they’d made were sold out by 8:30. In the sense of the urbanism of Detroit, Sister Pie was an obelisk, organizing movement, providing pleasure and offering a way forward from catastrophic disinvestment. It certainly affirmed my contention that Detroit will come back, just as Rome did after the collapse of Empire.

*See Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities for the story of Pope Sixtus V.