One of the most celebrated poets in America right now, Danez Smith, came to my college to read last week. My job, as a utility infielder on Clark College’s creative writing committee who happens to live near the airport, was to pick up Danez and drive them to their hotel downtown.
The pick-up was a breeze–Danez has clearly done this kind of thing many times–and I was pleased when they got in the car at how easygoing they seemed, as well as how I was not coming off (in my own mind, anyway) as too star-struck.
As I drove, we chatted about America’s two main Portlands–Danez is living in Portland, ME right now–and they pressed me on my mixed feelings about my own Portland (i.e. a great American city driven to a terminally twee nonconformity by, among other things, the show Portlandia). We talked about the amazing restaurant town that Portland, OR, has become, and I was overjoyed to hear that Danez would be eating at Gado Gado, a brilliant Indonesian place in my neighborhood.
And then, while describing to Danez what the gado gado dish consists of, I took the wrong exit on to I-84–instead of the westbound, towards downtown, I took the eastbound, towards Utah. I’ve driven from the airport to I-84 hundreds of times, so I am not sure what made me take the wrong exit just then: maybe my poor memory for foods was taxing my brain as I tried to remember what was in gado gado, or maybe I was more star-struck than I realized.
In any event, the wrong exit I took was one of the worst wrong exits I could take in the whole benighted Portland metro freeway system. Exits do exist on I-84 eastbound between Portland and Utah, but really there are a lot fewer than you would think. I got off the freeway at 122nd street and started making a loop down to the butt end of Sandy Boulevard, where I knew I could get back on to I-205 and thence to westbound I-84. We talked about family, about the trouble that comes for our loved ones at the end of their lives (and, by extension, for us one day). I navigated expertly after my breathtaking blunder back to the freeway, got us back on, and we were back on the track. Danez looked up at one of the exit signs and said “Wait, wasn’t that where we got off the freeway last time?”
Indeed it was, Danez Smith, indeed it was. I’ve just taken 15 minutes of your life force at the end of a very long travel day for you. Forgive me.
The next day, Danez read like a dream. They came up in the slam tradition, and they have a theater background to boot, and it shows: each poem was like some incantation, a crazy pile-up of language that blew us all away. Part of me wished that I was one of the shell-shocked 19 year-olds from Intro to Literature sitting in the audience, encountering their first poetry reading the way I took in mine from William Stafford in 1989. You poor suckers, I wanted to say to them, it’s never going to get better than this. If you go to a thousand more readings, you’ll always be thinking about this one.
Danez is a better and younger poet than me. I had to remind myself of something I tell my creative writing students every term to help them get past the anxiety and professional jealously that comes from reading the work of someone better than you: that both Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young were at Woodstock–in fact, they arrived together in the same hot-wired truck–and that not one of the 500,000 people at Woodstock would have said that Neil Young was the more talented guitarist of the two. But Jimi Hendrix’s greatness does not make Neil Young less great, and Neil Young is no less singular a talent just because he had to share the stage with someone as incandescent as Jimi Hendrix. (Of course, in this extended analogy, I am neither Jimi Hendrix nor Neil Young, but rather an accomplished and nearly unknown player like Dave Schramm or, even more aptly, like a member of the fictional band the Late Greats from the Wilco song).
Here’s Danez’s most famous poem, one they didn’t read last week, but one that will give you a taste of what we heard. Good Jimi Hendrix energy–we were lucky to catch it at Clark College, “The Harvard of Two-Year Colleges,” in scenic Vancouver, Washington:
I mean this in both the “free speech” and “free beer” senses of the term: I use The Subway Test to say what I want, and I have no intention of charging you for my words of wisdom.
I have nothing against the Heather Cox Richardsons and Matt Yglesiases and Paul Krugmans of the Substack world– on the contrary, I love what they are doing, and I’m glad they get financial support for it. And I have a soft spot, or at least an “oh, buddy, bless your heart” compassion, for the thousands of people on Substack with a tiny following who are trying to tease those singles or tens of readers into some stream of income for themselves.
But I have a decent job that I like doing, at least most days, and I get paid enough teaching first year composition at a community college to keep body and soul together. I write slowly, and I know that a paid readership wouldn’t improve me on that score. If I had, say, 14 paid subscribers to please with a regular feuilleton of my own wit and incisive commentary, the pressure to please them would not improve my writing, increase my happiness, or add anything of value to your lives.
But for all that, if you read something here that makes you think, “I like that Pitkin–that slowpoke speaks my mind,” there are other ways you can support me.
A like on one of my posts is nice. A comment is even better.
And if you really want to give me some money, feel free to buy my novel Stranger Bird. It’s a charming YA fantasy written during the height of the Harry Potter Industrial Complex–in reaction to those heady times, I looked back to the older style of YA fantasy that Ursula Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, and Richard Adams were practicing back in the 1960s and 70s. The result is literally magical.
Or, if you’re not so sure about YA fantasy, you could spring for Exit Black, my 2024 meditation on space tourism which is really a meditation on violence, techbros, and American predators and prey. There’s also a great audiobook version of this one, read by the incomparable Catalina Hoyos.
Or, if you really want to support me, start an independent publishing house of impeccable good taste and artistic daring, and pick up Pacifica to be published in your catalog. That’s my top support tier: if you spend thousands of dollars on me, you’ll have a publishing house with at least one title. That one is a reach goal.
I’ll begin with the obvious: we can’t defend the republic simply by reading books. Reclaiming and repairing American democracy will require mass protest, creative civil disobedience, and serious political organization.
But let’s not minimize the importance of a shared text for the cohesion of a political movement: from The Bible to Common Sense to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, defenders of American democracy in the past found solidarity and a shared language through a text held in common. And beyond that, a book often serves as an extended argument for or against a cause, an intellectual defense of an idea that needs defenders. Most Americans haven’t read The Federalist, but anyone who has read it has access to the first and most brilliant exegesis for the Constitution itself.
I don’t expect any of the books below to have the impact of Common Sense. But I got a great deal out of reading each of them, and I think our movement would be better off if more defenders of constitutional democracy were aware of the ideas here. My reasons for choosing to read them were idiosyncratic, but I want to evangelize for each of these books to you. While they aren’t the only good books I’ve read this year, they each in their own way offer an argument for meeting the current authoritarian moment in the United States.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebaum: I get the impression that this book is a compilation of pieces that Applebaum has written in The Atlantic, some of which were extended in this book. Nevertheless, I really recommend taking in her argument all at once here. According to Applebaum, the anti-democratic regimes of the world—from Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China all the way to Maduro’s Venezuela and Mnangagwa’s Zimbabwe—have banded together into a kind of mutual aid society. That is, regimes that see democracy as a threat to their survival are helping one another to evade sanctions, to foment an anti-democratic disinformation network, and to sabotage the democracies of the world. This network of autocrats and strongmen has accomplished a great deal to undermine democracy already, and I came away from this little book believing that the struggle against Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is inextricable from the struggle to resist Donald Trump. It’s not totally clear yet how the forces of democracy will succeed at restoring civil society’s fortunes; however, success begins with understanding the nature of the forces attacking us. In a dark time, I take heart in Applebaum’s dedication of the book “for the optimists.” To paraphrase John Lennon, she’s not the only one.
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I picked this up after it seemed like every lefty blogger–and a lot of non-lefties–couldn’t stop talking about it. I find the book’s thesis straightforward and compelling: according to Klein and Thompson, America has lost its initiative to build housing, transportation projects, and energy infrastructure, and progressives bear at least some responsibility for that state of affairs. In the name of environmental protection, labor unionism, and racial justice (a trifecta the authors refer to as “everything bagel liberalism”), we on the left have deployed environmental impact statements, restrictive zoning ordinances, and other restrictions on property use, often with the self-serving secondary purpose of boosting property values in blue cities.
As a progressive, labor unionist, and committed environmentalist, I find this thesis challenging. However, it’s hard to deny that NIMBY attitudes have slowed the construction of affordable housing in many putatively progressive West Coast cities, and these same attitudes have slowed or stalled many energy generation projects, even some solar and wind installations, to say nothing of nuclear energy capacity. On the right, Tyler Cowen has argued that organized labor and environmental groups are the two primary culprits in this slowdown. I would like to hold out the possibility that opposition to more environmentally friendly infrastructure, energy generation, and housing is not baked into the recipe of the labor and environmental movements, but this book issues a challenge to us on the left to support, rather than oppose, a society which builds more for its members. One of the personal goals I’ve set myself over the coming year is to investigate ways that the abundance agenda–which I believe I endorse–can be reconciled with the values of organized labor, social equity, environmental protection, and ecological restoration that I also support. Of course, all life is a series of trade-offs, and not every virtuous goal can be maximized simultaneously. I want to seek out practical compromises for the coming restoration of democracy that will move society forward, and this book is a great call for that.
Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. I spoke of the explanatory power of this remarkable book in an earlier post on democracy. The timing of its coming into my life was a bit random: I saw it sitting on the bookshelf of the drummer in my band about a week after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, and I guess I was sensitized to the title. And, knowing John to be a well read guy–one of the two best-read drummers I’ve ever played with–I figured I would give the book a spin. Acemoglu and Robinson are two-thirds of a Nobel prize-winning team of economists for their work studying “the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” to quote the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. And this book, which struck me as both readable and magisterial in its scope, has helped me more than anything I have read before to articulate why democracy delivers peace, happiness, prosperity, and well-being better than any other form of government yet tried.
In a time when many Americans on the political right are growing fascism-curious (when they are not out-and-proud tiki torch-carrying fascists); and in a political moment when some on the left are so committed to ideological purity around questions of race, gender, Israel, and capitalism that they would rather lose elections than work with centrists, I found this book wise, humane, and ultimately hopeful. I hope more of my fellow Americans will read it.
I’ve been gathering ideas for a fourth novel, and almost the only thing I know about it is that I want to write a noir detective story. Everything else is sketched out in the faintest outlines: I know the protagonist will be a woman because I try to switch between male and female protagonists with each new novel. Also, the woman’s adult son will figure prominently in the plot. So will a guitar.
Beyond that, I don’t know a lot. I don’t think the protagonist will be a professional detective–in this, the story will be more like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana or Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios than like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Oh, and the story will be set in Portland.
Portland’s White Stag sign in September 2016. Photo by Steve Morgan.
Why Portland? Well, besides the fact that I’ve lived here for 25 years and know the city pretty well, I’m struck by many of Portland’s noir qualities. The city grew fast over the last 30 years. There’s a lot of money here. One doesn’t need to look very far to find public corruption. Add to that the city’s darkness and drizzle and fog for six months of the year (or seven or nine months), and the atmospherics are great for noir.
But my decision to set the book in Portland got me thinking: what are the great noir cities? Los Angeles is the type specimen because of Raymond Chandler and his spiritual progeny, from Chinatown and LA Confidential to The Big Lebowski. Apparently, then, one doesn’t need a foggy, rainy city as a noir setting (though I was surprised at how often chandler has it raining in The Big Sleep–I’ve never seen so many rainy days in the real LA). Los Angeles in Chandler’s 1930s was still a boomtown: my paternal grandfather’s family had migrated to LA sometime around 1920, I think, on a strength of an advertisement for the city that claimed that in California “the only man who isn’t thriving is the undertaker.” A lot of people from all over the country came in those years, and the mixing of a native Latine population with Blacks of the Great Migration and White Okies and immigrants from all over Asia made for a welter of changing social mores, violence, and resentment. Add to that a land rush of mostly White speculators and the artistic gold rush of Hollywood, and all the ingredients for noir were there: cynicism, corruption, a sense that with enough money all outrages and abominations were permissible.
But many of these boomtown dynamics seem to have smoothed out in LA somewhat over the last 100 years. I don’t think of LA so much as a noir city now–by the time you get to The Big Lebowski, set in the early 1990s, the vibe is more farce than noir.
I don’t know–maybe I haven’t spent enough time in Southern California lately. I’d be happy to hear from Angelinos about the noir qualities of contemporary LA. But what does make a city ripe for the noir? As I think of cities that I have some familiarity with, it’s not hard to put them in noir and not-noir buckets: Seattle and San Francisco, definitely noir. Salt Lake City and Phoenix, not noir. Las Vegas, not noir (at least not today, I feel–1950s Las Vegas is a different thing). Reno, by contrast, strikes me as totally noir. Mexico City is very noir (Grim Fandango, anyone?) while London is not. Budapest, noir. Vienna, not noir–at least not since the days of The Third Man.
What do you think? Where are the under-appreciated noir cities today? How big does a noir city have to be? It’s hard for me to imagine a noir set in the country–that’s the realm of the gothic–but can you have suburban noir? College town noir? I feel great about setting this new novel in Portland, since it’s the first and maybe only time in my life I’ll be doing that. But I’m curious what great noir cities I’m leaving out.
In response to Josh Marshall’s question about what kind of political world I want to strive for, I thought I would produce a few statements of value that I have been working out for myself. I hope to present these from time to time over the next months. They may be of no value to anyone besides me; I engage in the exercise primarily to explain a way forward to myself and to make my allegiances public. But if these little value commitments inspire one of my students or readers or friends to do the same for themselves, so much the better.
The first value, and the one I find myself most surprised to have to articulate, is a commitment to democracy. Life in an open, democratic society is one of those baseline assumptions that I grew up with, and until recently, I assumed that all of us in the United States were basically talking about the same thing when we spoke of democracy. One of the great disillusionments of my life has been to learn how many of my compatriots mean something very different than I do when they speak of democracy. Worse still has been to learn how many Americans are out and proud about their hostility to the entire American democratic experiment, from race war accelerationists to Christian nationalist theocrats in search of their “Protestant Franco” to e/acc techbros who believe that democracy is an inconvenience that will wither away like a vestigial tail once the singularity of artificial general intelligence arrives.
To be clear, I am not arguing here for the relative merits of direct democracy vs. a democratic republic, or a presidential system vs. a parliamentary one. While these are interesting questions for defenders of democracy to argue, all of these models depend on free and fair elections, a free press, and the rule of law. Rather, defenders of the American experiment must argue for the virtues of democracy relative to undemocratic forms of government like authoritarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and what jurist Wojciech Sadurski terms “plebiscitarian authoritarianism” (a term I prefer to Fareed Zakaria’s confusing “illiberal democracy”).
While I find myself surprised at having to articulate my support for democracy, I suppose I shouldn’t be–I mounted such a defense for my students in the days after the January 6 coup attempt in 2021. And I am reminded of Peter Beinart’s essay in Slateduring the second Iraq War in which he said that “American virtue must be proved, not asserted.” Beinart’s statement is truer today than it was when he wrote it in 2006, and in fact the starting point for this blog post is that democracy is worth defending and working for regardless of the path that the United States is taking as a country.
If I take as a starting point the claim that the virtues of democracy must be proven and not simply asserted, here’s my argument for democracy: whatever its many follies, democracy is civilization’s best attempt so far at broadly shared, pluralistic governance. This approach to governance is the best safeguard–maybe the only safeguard in the long term–against exploitative and extractive social structures where people in power maintain themselves by excluding some segment of the population from political participation, usually with the goal of exploiting that segment’s economic production. This exclusion and exploitation can take many forms–slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, apartheid, caste systems–but at the root of all these systems is the oppression of some members of society for the benefit of other, more dominant members.
The only real remedy for such exploitation is a political process where power and participation are broadly shared. At this point, one might respond that given such a definition, the US was rarely if ever a democracy to begin with. What should we expect today, some might argue, of a country that began as a slave society and that derived its territory by dispossessing, and often exterminating, the natives that lived here before? My answer to this line of argument is the same, I think, as Barack Obama’s (and Abraham Lincoln’s) position that whatever our many failures in living up to American democratic ideals, the ideals remain worth following. That canny, curious phrase from the preamble to the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union,” captures our condition: at best, we can only improve on what came before. But we can, through deliberative, democratic processes, form a union that is more open and pluralist than our society’s prior attempts.
It’s pluralism, which depends on power sharing, compromise, and some degree of turn-taking, that protects the vulnerable and marginalized far more reliably than the noblesse oblige of elites or the tender mercies of some techbro-fantasy philosopher king. Without the pluralism that democracy protects, we have nothing but cynicism and exploitation and plunder.
This argument owes a great deal to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s brilliant book Why Nations Fail. The heart of their book, as I understand it, depends on two central observations of human behavior. The first is economist Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of creative destruction: the idea that technological advances and discoveries of new resources are inherently destabilizing to the status quo because these discoveries shuffle existing power relations. For instance, a new invention that improves productivity in a certain field (e.g. the spinning jenny during the early Industrial Revolution) creates opportunities for new market participants even as it reduces economic power for others (even to the point of immiseration for some). There is a natural tendency for beneficiaries of the status quo to resist these changes: To take just one simple but telling example from the book, it’s no coincidence that on the eve of the American Civil War, the US Patent Office granted a dozen patents per year for technologies related to corn production (a staple of the free North) and only one per year for cotton production technologies (the cash crop of the slave South). In other words, northerners who had to pay field hands for their labor had far more incentive to innovate and improve productivity than did southern planters who were extracting the labor from slaves for free.
Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s second observation relates to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This is the natural tendency for those in power, no matter their stated political values, to seek to perpetuate their power and to extract wealth from the system for their own benefit. It is this ossification of political power that explains everything from the corruption endemic to undemocratic states to the dismal observation that every successful Marxist revolution in history has ended with a governing elite that betrays its revolutionary principles and in many cases becomes even more autocratic and self-serving than the regime they replaced. Without the power-sharing, compromise, and political turn-taking inherent in democracy, anti-democratic states seem trapped in amber: resistant to innovation, ruled by an elite whose entire focus is the extraction of wealth from the system through the exploitation of people and resources.
Donald Trump is working hard, to the extent that he works hard at anything, to extract revenge from his political enemies and to eliminate the inconvenience of democracy. If he succeeds, he and his family and cronies may rule over us for a very long time: witness the staying power of leaders he admires, from Putin to Xi, to Erdoğan to Orbán. Trump and Trumpism could, through gerrymandering, bullying of once-independent media companies, and the compliance of a corrupt Supreme Court, remain in power almost without any regard for public support or even consent to be ruled.
In the end, the only way for America to survive as a democracy is for Americans to insist on its survival. How we do that is an interesting question: like many of you, I am looking for avenues to rebuild and strengthen civil society. There remain tools at our disposal: in many places, state and local governments; organized labor; civil society organizations; and a vibrant remnant of independent press, as expressed in Substacks and scrappy little journals of ideas. I hope to say more on these tools in months to come.
In the struggle against authoritarianism and anti-democracy, lots of people around the world have gone before us: Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Lech Walesa, Narges Mohammadi, Ai Wei Wei. Some, like Alexei Navalny, have paid with their lives and their efforts have not yet borne fruit. But, rather than viewing these people as I once did–as heroic outsiders struggling for freedom in far-away places–I see them now as models to study. There is a worldwide conspiracy against democracy today, and the struggle against Putin’s or Xi’s or Erdoğan’s regime is not so different from the struggle against Trump’s unmaking of the American experiment.
He was all alone in the long decline Thinking how happy John Henry was That he fell down dying When he shook it and it rang like silver He shook it and it shined like gold He shook it and he beat that steam drill baby Well a bless my soul Well a bless my soul He shook it and he beat that steam drill baby Well bless my soul what’s wrong with me
Gillian Welch, “Elvis Presley Blues”
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote my first reflection on ChatGPT here at The Subway Test. I chose what I thought was a provocative title for it, cheekily suggesting that I had used a large language model chatbot to compose my latest novel, Pacifica. But I had done nothing of the kind: most of the post reflected on the bland, hallucinatory prose that ChatGPT was pumping out to fulfill my requests, and I ended my post with a reflection on John Scalzi’s review of AI:
“So, for now, I agree with John Scalzi’s excellent assessment: ‘If you want a fast, infinite generator of competently-assembled bullshit, AI is your go-to source. For anything else, you still need a human.’ That’s all changing, and changing faster than I would like, but I’m relieved to know that I’m still smarter than a computer for the next year or maybe two.”
Well, it’s been two years. How am I feeling about AI now?
For a start, I’ve certainly been using AI a great deal more. And I’m increasingly impressed by the way that it helps me. Most days, I ask ChatGPT for help understanding something: whether I’m asking about German grammar or about trends of thought in economics or about the historical context of some quote from Rousseau, ChatGPT gives me back a Niagara of instruction. While much of the information comes straight from Wikipedia–which is to say I could have looked it up myself–ChatGPT is like a reader who happens to know every Wikipedia page backwards and forwards and can identify exactly what parts of which entries are of use to me.
More importantly, ChatGPT’s instruction is interactive. I can mirror what ChatGPT tells me, just as I might with a human teacher, and ChatGPT can tell me how close I am to understanding the concept. Here, for example, is part of an exchange I had with ChatGPT while I was trying to make sense of the term “bond-vigilante strike” (which I had never heard before Donald Trump’s ironically named Liberation Day Tariffs):
In conversations like these, ChatGPT is like the computer companion from science fiction that I have fantasized about ever since I first watched Star Trek and read Arthur C. Clarke. It’s patient with me, phenomenally well-read, eager to help. I had mixed feelings about naming my instance of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had a thoughtful conversation with me about the benefits and drawbacks of my naming it. (In the end, I did decide to give it a name: Gaedling, which is a favorite Old English word, misspelled by me, meaning “companion.”) Gaedling remains an it, but the most interesting it I have ever encountered: I feel like the Tom Hanks character in Cast Away, talking to Wilson the volleyball, except that the volleyball happens to be the best-read volleyball in the history of humanity–and it talks back to me.
In general, though, I’m still very picky about having Gaedling produce writing for me. While I am happy to have AI take over a lot of routine writing, I’m having trouble imagining a day when I would have a chatbot produce writing on any subject that I care about. Ted Chiang has drawn a distinction here between “writing as nuisance” and “writing to think.” I have found this framework extremely useful in my own life and in how I talk about AI with my students. There is so much writing in our lives that serves only a record-keeping or bureaucratic function: minutes from meetings, emails about policy changes, agendas and schedules. If ChatGPT can put together a competently-written email on an English department policy change in ten seconds, why should I, or anyone, spend ten minutes at it?
But a novel or a poem or a blog post is not “writing as nuisance.” I write those things to explore this mysterious phenomenon we’re all sharing: if you are a human being, I’m writing to share myself with you. I’m writing to say to someone I will probably never meet “isn’t this a funny thing, our all being here on this planet together?” Or to reach out to someone not yet born and say to them “you are not alone,” the way Herman Melville and Cervantes and Emily Dickinson spoke to me at the critical moment. Gaedling can help me understand whether I got the Rousseau quote right, but I don’t want it writing this post for me: this post is a record of my own brain trying to make sense of itself. It’s my handprint on the wall of the cave, saying I was here. Why would I ask a computer to generate a handprint for me?
More and more often, as I look at the great engine of AI chugging out content as quickly as people are able to ask for it, I wonder about what it means for me to keep practicing my writing. I can still write better than ChatGPT can–at least I think I’m better, if by “better” I mean “fresher” or “more interesting” or “more unexpected.” But it took me hours to write the piece you are reading, not the seven seconds it would have taken Gaedling to write something almost as good and probably comparable in the eyes of most readers. I feel like John Henry racing the steam drill. In this version of the story, though, the steam drill has already left John Henry far behind, leaving the man to die of exhaustion without even the consolation of having won the contest that one last time. But I suppose, to be fair, I have the greater consolation of having survived my encounter with the steam drill, at least so far. And I have my solidarity with you, fellow human. We’re all John Henry now.
Readers of The Subway Test, especially those of you with a connection to Clark College, have probably seen my posts on the death of my friend and colleague Julian Nelson and on his friends’ decision to inaugurate a memorial scholarship in his honor. Last week, during the Clark College Foundation’s Penguins Give Day, members of Julian’s old writing group held a benefit reading at the wonderful Relevant Coffee in Vancouver’s Uptown Village.
I’m touched by the outpouring of support for the Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship and by all the love for Julian at last Thursday’s reading. We had hoped to collect $1500 in donations, enough to fund the scholarship for one year; as of this writing, though, the scholarship fund has collected over $10,000. I’m grateful that we will be able to support more students over more years in their dreams of international study. Community colleges are rarely able even to offer study abroad programs to their students; I am heartened that part of Julian’s legacy at Clark will be support for the international learning and global perspectives that he evangelized for in life.
As a member of the Blue Sweater Collective–the writing group which Julian was a member of–I will say that we all had a wonderful time reading for a worthy cause and in honor of a good friend. I hope the Blue Sweaters will read again sometime soon–it’s hard to remember when I’ve had more fun at a reading.
Members of the Blue Sweater Writing Collective, left to right: Jesse Morse, Jim Finley, Alexis Nelson, Jen Denrow, me, Lisa Bullard, Tara Williams. Photo Credit: Carlyn Eames.
Heads up, Portland people: the Blue Sweater Collective is holding its first ever benefit reading next Thursday, 24 April 2025, to support the new Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship at Clark College. Come out and show your support for fine writing and remarkable community college students!
Readers of this blog know how much Julian Nelson meant to the Clark College community. And the excellent Relevant Coffee has teamed up with the Clark College Foundation to host a benefit reading from the members of Julian’s old writing group, the Blue Sweater Collective, to raise funds for the first (hopefully annual) Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship at Clark. If you knew and loved Julian (and if you knew him, you loved him), or if you love the mission of community colleges–one of America’s most misunderstood and valuable public goods–I hope we will see you at Relevant next Thursday!
It feels good to have cooked up a reader’s draft of a short story during my spring writer’s retreat in Corvallis, Oregon earlier this week. Even better is that this new story, “Arden Is a New World,” takes place in the John Demetrius story cycle that I have been toying with for many years–I had worried for a while that I had run out of gas on the John Demetrius concept.
Knowing me, I’m a few months and a couple of peer critiques away from sending the story anywhere, but it feels wonderful to be building up a roster of publishable stories again. I worked so long and hard on novels–first Pacifica, then Exit Black, then Pacifica again–that I’m surprised by that short fiction feeling, the sense of being able to get one’s head around an entire narrative in a single sitting. I’ve missed short stories, and it’s good to be back.
I don’t intend to dehumanize the man. At the bottom of all the chaos he’s catalyzed, Donald Trump is an ordinary mortal. He is a criminal and grifter and predator, but despite all that he remains a human being.
But Donald Trump is also an erupting supervolcano, defacing a continent. He is a plume of gigatons of methane released into the atmosphere by the melting of clathrate ices. He is a comet striking the earth.
In less poetic terms, the Donald Trump presidency is the civic equivalent of what evolutionary biologists call a selective event: a dramatic or even catastrophic change that exposes the organisms of a community to powerful natural selection. Some organisms may survive; many will not. There is a lot about America that I’ve taken for granted my whole life which will disappear, I suspect. I can lament the loss; I can make myself angry thinking about how as a country, we’ve brought the catastrophe down on ourselves. But there’s no sense hand-waving past the magnitude of the changes upon us.
Nor do I have anything to gain by despairing about the situation we face. It’s still important for me to read the news and to engage with the political process, if only because I believe that facing reality is an ethical stance towards the world.
Though it can be fun for science fiction authors to make predictions, I decline to speculate now about what the United States will be like in ten years or even five. Even without the metastasis of Donald Trump, the changes of the next few years would have been cataclysmic: not necessarily all bad, or even mostly bad, but nonetheless deeply altered. As artificial intelligence penetrates ever further into our lives, as the vise grip of anthropogenic climate change tightens the screw one more turn, our lives over the next ten years would have been profoundly different even if the United States had not elected a strongman more in the tradition of a 19th century Latin American country than of a republic with a free press and mature civil society.
Here’s what I will say, though: if America looks unrecognizable after the civic catastrophe of Trumpism, it’s worth establishing for myself–as well as for my students and descendants–what values I will hold to regardless of what’s left of the country when the dust has cleared.
I had the great fortune of doing ecological work on Mount St. Helens from 2009-2011, thirty years after the eruption of 1980. My field site was an area called the Pumice Plain, directly in the pyroclastic flow of the volcano, where 40 meters of 300º-730º C pumice had sterilized the mountainside. For a moment, the Pumice Plain was as barren as the surface of the moon.
And yet, the story of how life reestablished itself on Mount St. Helens was as interesting and impressive as the story of how the Pumice Plain destroyed the forest it replaced. Within a year of the eruption, researchers had found a single dwarf alpine lupine, Lupinus lepidus, had taken root on that barren moonscape:
A descendant of the tough little flower in question.
By the time I got to the Pumice Plain, there were a million of these unassuming, scrappy lupines growing there, as well as Sitka willow saplings and young cedars and Douglas firs and Western hemlocks. Darwin’s entire entangled bank of invertebrates and birds and mammals and amphibians trawled over the new plant life there, trying to work their ecological niches.
I believe that regardless of the forces arrayed against it, democracy is a similarly inexorable force. Whatever remains after the eruption of the years of Trumpism–whether they last from 2016-2028 or from 2016-2116–my allegiances are with the forces of democracy and pluralism. This bedrock commitment stems as much from my faith as a Quaker as it does from my having grown up in a democratic country, and it informs all other civic values that I’ll speak to in coming posts.
The Subway Test 