I have not put much time into this site because I don’t have much time.

That’s all I got to say about that.

The Friends of the Library Booksale at the Fateville Public Library is a place where you can buy tattered paperbacks from Patterson to Grisham and first-edition hardbacks from the likes of Stevens. (Used book sales in university towns are always a good place for a find.)

The book featured in the photos is one Luke kindly let me borrow. Transport to Summer was originally published in 1947, but the edition pictured here is from the second printing in 1951. Dust-jacket is frayed but intact. Signed by John Williams, former professor at the University of Arkansas.

The book smells like heaven. I wish I could bottle this smell.

It cost Luke all of $2.

Now, I am a convert and a proud advocate for digital books and a paperless age, BUT I am no hater of the book object. The book as a piece of technology is as archetypal as the wheel or the four-legged chair. Something in the soul of us upright monkeys loves the codex. I am not immune.

But it is the words more than their conveyance that ultimately enslave me, so I leave you with a stanza from Stevens’ poem “The Motive For Metaphor.” This is a poem fitting for the chilly, damp day:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In his essay “Honey-Winged Song,” David Rattray also explores the idea of what makes the world’s hardship literature great. 

I did not know of Rattray, but a week ago, Luke plugged my book-empty hand with a copy of Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible, and I’ve been spelunking Rattray’s prose ever since.  I am a firm believer that books (like people) come into our lives at the appointed time (Ranganathan’s “Every Book it’s Reader” mixed with Zhuang FuLang “We believe in predestined relationships”)

How I Became… is a collection of essays, each exploring a particular author. Rattray writes as a critic and reviewer, but he also writes as a lover–maybe even a worshiper–of the written word. These essays are imbued with spiritual power.  I do not say that lightly.

Rattray writes alive the questions that trip around my brain, and in “Honey-Winged Song” he asks, “does sufferring in the form of political oppression make better art?”

I’m not convinced that degrading poverty is what creates this kind of vividness, a vividness observable in the arts of so many Third World countries. We have a lot of the same thing right here, yet our sense of life is muted by comparison. The key difference has got to be one of continuity. The accelerated rate of social and political change in the industrial countries has borken the old continuities and brought us to a point where art in the old sense is dead, or the next thing to it. We don’t make music and poetry and painting the way the oldtimers did, in a tradition passed from master down to pupil, from generation to generation. The arts of every nation and period are of course available to us through museums, libraries, and other media.

As an example of ‘third world’ literature, Rattray uses the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I confess that I know nothing of this poet. But in Faiz, Rattray sees an answer to the question of the ‘vividness’ in art.  To be a ‘vivid’ artist one need not be oppressed, but one must be participating in the continuous stream of art. It is an argument in favor or continuity, connectedness, derivativeness. It is aligning one’s art in one’s tradition.

Faiz exercises flawless mastery of an idiom that has been the language of lyrical and elegaic utterance all the way from North Africa to India for the past four thousand years–the rhetoric of the Bible and the Koran, or ancient Egyptian love poetry, of the Song of Songs; of Arabic poetry both before and after the coming of Islam; of Attar, Rumi, Omar; of Bilhana, Kabir, and Tagore.

In the Western tradition we tend to shy away from our literary elders–in the same way that in our personal lives we tend to create more and more distance between ourselves and our family of origin (“For this reason a man shall leave…”)  We believe strongly (or at least I do) that the process of maturation is a process of becoming more and more self reliant, individual.

We also tend to prefer words and writing that is “fresh.”  Patterns, archaic language, these things seem trite, and we miss the meaning because of the triteness.

The Surface of all these poets’ language is flowery and sugar-sweet. Even when straightforward and unadorned, it more often than not echoes earlier traidtion…All this is tough for an American to accept as 20th century poetry. To us, it has an anachronistic ring, undeniably. 

Yet, this is part of what makes Faiz great:

…every one of Faiz’ poems has multilayered personal and political meanings that have resonated so powerfully in his own world that millions still love him for that resonance and treasure his words all the more for the sweetness of their sound and imagery, their mastery of age-old poetics. Can a Westerner stomach them on the strength of that?

This resonated with me as a reader, a writer, and an overall lover of story. I am a book slut. Books fit into the narrative of my life. I could tell my life story by the books I was reading as life occurred, and my own critical impression of these books is/was shaped by what was happening with me as I read.

I thought about this as I read Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy. Taylor, you may remember, is the youngish author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a collection of short stories I have praised on this blog. Gospel is his first novel.

The novel follows a group of young anarcho-Christians in Gainseville, Florida. These are punk rockers, dropouts, and radicals transitioning from teenage rebellion to young adulthood. The book sparked with me because of my own time as a young adult. Back when I was a woolly anarcho-Christian.

I have never been able to fully express what happened to me at that time. Even after shedding most of the dogma of my youth, even after walking slowly backward through all those memories of really crazy christian stuff, and forgiving myself the craziness, after all that, I still think think of that time as being a movement of god. Yes, we were crazy, but we were also divine.

Taylor brought out all these emotions. He wrote the story that I wish I had written ten years ago.

Again I find comfort in Willie Nelson, “pickin’ up women, instead of my pen, I let the words of my youth fade away.”

Words of my youth indeed.

If you know what it was like to identify with the freaks and losers, if you know what it was to find comfort in belonging with them, if they were not a them but a you, then you will enjoy Justin Taylor’s Gospel of Anarchy

Go read.

I ventured out on foot today, for as you can see our car was buried. 

This is my first blog post composed w my phone using WordPress for Android.

Cobain and Taylor : Strike and Strike

Early in the year, in the cold of January, I got a surprise with Heavier then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I thought Heavier would be a mindless read, something to keep the brain processing words while I cast about for a better book. I read the book while poised next to Skull Creek, a bitter Ozark wind crippling my hands, and the book took me places in the mind I had not been in fifteen years. It was good to go back and remember Kurt Cobain, and Charles Cross, the author, was wise enough to get himself out of the way and let Cobain’s story tell itself without any fanfare. Quality rock ‘n’ roll journalism, and my first Strike of 2010.

I followed up Heavier than Heaven with Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis. Taylor is a writer I had known through short stories, which I had found to be readable but forgettable. I had never read his Summons–the book that made the man a bit of money and won him the National Book Award. Summons was one of the Strikes of the year. Delightfully written, Taylor captures the social anxiety of a Southern family during a time when the idea of the “Southern family” was becoming more myth than reality. The book has pathos.

Walbert and Adams : Gutter and Gutter

After Taylor came a couple of the 2010 gutter balls.

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women was on every critic’s short list of the best books of 2009. Almost ten years ago, I was enraptured with Walbert’s novel The Gardens of Kyoto, so much so that I emailed Walbert to tell her how much I loved the novel. Ms. Walbert even emailed me back and suggested I read Elizabeth McKracken’s The Giant’s House. I loved her for this. But A Short History of Women disappointed me. A Short History is a muilt-generational narrative about the feminist movement, starting in 1918 with a hunger strike and ending in 2011 with a young Yale graduate toting Chopin’s The Awakening like the Bible. Something in the tone of the novel bothered me. Linda Hirshman at Slate’s Double X put this something into words in her critical essay “What’s Wrong with ‘A Short History of Women,’ the Novel.”

Both in form and in content, this neutered, novelized history of women teaches that political feminism is passé. No choice has meaning, and no choice makes life better. It takes a very good writer to produce a value-free novel—think Camus’ The Stranger. Walbert is not even close. Some of A Short History is so hackneyed that, were it not for the earnest acknowledgements, you might think Walbert was writing a parody of the history of women, sort of a feminist Colbert Report.

I had a similar reaction to Lorraine Adam’s novel Harbor, another of the 2010 Gutters. This is Adam’s first novel after a life spent in journalism, and I had high hopes. In Harbor Adams attempts to tackle illegal immigration and the war on terror in one fell swoop. There is a great tradition of the social novel in America. Journalists, tired of the lens of reality, find they can express more of our social malaise with fiction. Steinbeck was the master of this American archetype, but then there are folk like Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, even Fitzgerald and Whitman, who came to literature through journalism. But Adams doesn’t make the leap from journalism to literature seamlessly. Harbor reaches for a higher level of language than is warranted for the topic and fails to reach even that. I put the book down before I could finish it, which is unprecedented for me. Harbor, a definite gutter ball this year.

Huneven and Muller : Strike and Strike

Michelle Huneven then rescued my Spring reading in 2010. I blogged about Huneven in March. I won’t say more here, except that Huneven’s Jamesland was one of the 2010 Strikes.

As was Herta Muller’s Passport. I would read anything Muller penned.

Barthelme and Hannah : Strike and Strike

In 2010, I also discovered two short story writer’s whose influence over contemporary literature is undisputed: Donald Barthleme and Barry Hannah. Barthelme and Hannah are very different stylistically, but they both have mastered their form.

Barthelme’s Sixty Stories consistently appears on the syllabi of creative writing teachers. The absurd world Barthelme creates with his stories gives him the nomen “difficult writer,” yet there is more wisdom in Sixty Stories than in most of the drivel published today. I suspect that if Barthelme were still alive, he would be struggling to publish his work. Thankfully, we have him encapsulated forever in Sixty Stories. If you only have time for one of the sixty, read “The Balloon,” a story that David Foster Wallace said “made me want to become a writer” (he said this in an excellent interview with Salon.) You can read a shortened version of “The Balloon” online,.

Hannah’s style is more in the Southern realist tradition than Barhelme. His characters are recognizable to anyone who has spent some time here in the dirty South, but his themes are universal. Hannah, like Andre Dubus, is a writer whose absolute compassion for his characters enlivens all his prose. He’s a Mississippian by way of Arkansas. His death in March of 2010 brought a deluge of remembrances. The best of which is Wells Tower’s interview with Hannah shortly before Hannah’s death, published in the Believer. Read any of Hannah you can grab. I read several collections of his stories in 2010. My favorite was High Lonesome.

One last thing on Barthelme and Hannah: I came to read Sixty Stories and Hannah’s High Lonesome after reading Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a remarkable book of stories from the neophyte Taylor. I expect great things from Justin Taylor in the future. He collaborated on an appreciation of Barthelme’s work and has more than a programmatic view of contemporary literature. You can find him all over the interweb’s spreading his views on the state of literature and generally advancing the art form. I appreciate the fellow, and his collection of stories did not disappoint.

Prose and Bowles and Chekov : Spare and Strike and Turkey

This brings us to April 2010. I read Francine Prose’s book about writing titled Reading Like a Writer. My Auntie, a fellow writer, gave me this book for my birthday two years ago, but it mouldered on the shelf because deep down I loathe these writing books and deeper yet I cherish them. What’s beautiful about Prose’s writing book is that she approaches the topic as a lover of books, and all her suggestions are illustrated by generous quotes from Prose’s favorite writers. She has a whole chapter devoted to Chekov, for godsakes. Prose’s book was a solid spare. She knocked the eight pins with the first chapters and picked up the split with her chapter on Chekov.

Reading Prose did two thing for me. First she turned me on to Jane Bowles tremendous book Two Serious Ladies. Seriously, Bowles’ Ladies is a forgotten masterpiece. Read it. Then read it again. Something in the tone of Bowles’s book sparked my own writing fire, after I read it, I started writing everyday again, and deriving more joy from my writing than I have in years.

The second thing Prose did for me: she sent me back to Chekov, and when I start reading Chekov I start writing. I haven’t over analyzed this about myself because I don’t want to jinx it. I am, at heart, a very superstitious author. I have noticed about my writing habits that when the urge to read Chekov hits, I should keep a pen handy, because my brain is going to be filling with ideas. It happens every year. Spring 2010, with a nip still in the air, I had my yearly dance with Chekov, and it was Francine Prose who put me on his dance card. Thank You, Francine. Chekov is a perfect game.

Graham and Watson : Nine Pin and Spare

My wife has an African dream. She wants to live there. She just returned from spending two weeks with some Kenyan friends working at a grammar school. In our life together, Joanna and I are trying to negotiate how to fulfill both our dreams: hers to help women in Africa, mine to write my mind alive.

Enter Philip Graham.

I am a devotee to my Google Reader, which I have stocked with blogs by the young and literate. I came across this interview with Philip Graham in The Morning News. Graham is a novelist and short story writer who has been plying his trade for as long as I’ve been alive. His early married years were spent in the Ivory Coast, where his wife was working for an NGO. Graham wrote most of his early novels there in Africa, but the subject matter was uniquely American. He did not write directly about the expat experience until he was older and back in the States. This piqued my interest.

I read Graham’s novel How to Read and Unwritten Language. The novel was a solid nine pin. Not great but not a gutter. But based on the strength of his biography, I’ll read more. I like particularly this snippet from the Morning News interview. The interviewer asks Graham if the anxiety of putting words on the page dissipates with age. Graham responds:

Oh, I’m much more relaxed about the whole process than I used to be. Basically, all that matters is what appears on the page, I don’t worry so much anymore about publishing schedules. I’m primarily interested in the trial and error of forging the patterns of my imagination’s fingerprint; the grimy marks it may leave on the world comes later.

Brad Watson is a youngish writer in the mold of Barry Hannah. He is a Mississippian and a short story writer. I read his latest Aliens in the Prime of Their Life. This is a solid collection, but not as enjoyable as his first collection, Last Days of the Dog Men. Dog Men was Watson’s breakout collection. Each story features human and dog in a some sort of relationship, not always man’s best friend. With this ploy, Watson manages to enter the world of his characters, whether they be murderous cuckolds or widower granny’s.

Days of Summer

I am prattling too much to maintain the attention of my one regular blog reader. Here’s a streamlined version of the strikes and gutters of the Summer of 2010:

• Tinkers by Paul Harding: Gutter Ball
• The Lonely Polygamist by Barry Udall: Gutter Ball
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: Spare with the last pin leaning almost falling for a strike.
• Collected Works of Isaak Babel: Strike, perhaps a perfect game. It’s a shame more people aren’t reading Babel. He is a Russian gem.
• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee: Strike. Coetzee, I have decided, is one of the weirdest but most pitch perfect novelists of my lifetime. Costello fits this mold. In 2010, I also read Coetzee’s Summertime and Waiting for the Barbarians. Stikes, both of ‘em.
• Dreamerby jack Butler: Strike. No secret that Butler is one of my all-time favorite writers. Dreamer is one of his later novels (came out in the late 90s); set in New Mexico rather than the South, but it pulls the usual Butlerian themes together. Intrigue, sex, god, shamanism, and even vampires. Butler is/was a genre bending literary novelist when that wasn’t cool.
• The Passage by Justin Cronin: Gutter Ball. The Passage was possibly the worst thing I read all year. Cronin made bank on this sprawling, apocalyptic, vampire romp, and I hope he is happy with his blood money.
• An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender: Spare. Quirky. Mystical. Life affirming. I liked this book when I read it, but I have mostly forgotten it.
• Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick : Spare and Spare. Humpty is one of Dick’s realist novels set in 1950′s Northern California. Interesting simply for the flesh it adds to the body of Dick’s Sci-fi literature. Time Out of Joint is one of Dick’s early Sci-fi novels that shows his fascination with the future and with how our technological world breaks into the our established world of forms. Again the book is interesting precisely for what it shows of us of the Dick who will later assert his gnosticism with the brilliant Valis trilogy.
• The City & the City by China Mieville: Eight Pin. I am not a big Sci-Fi fan, but I appreciate the work that Mieville does to attract non-fans to the genre. City is a fine read for the non fan.
• Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings by Zora Neal Hurston: Strikes. Hurston is my pre-imminent source for HooDoo literature. A devotee of HooDoo conjur, Hurston recreates her own experiences with this underground, snycretistic, and highly Southern religion. She is always a delight, and her writing informs my own.

Freedom’s Fall

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was released in late August, and I got my paws on the book in early September. The book is polarizing. Literary novelists who have been plying their trade for decades, seemed affronted by the publicity that Franzen’s latest book received. How often does a novelist get on the cover of Time Magazine? Book critics, especially those closest to the publishing houses, embraced Freedom. My sympathy leans toward the struggling literary artists rather than the critics, BUT, Freedom ensnared me. The book is a lengthy, twisty-turny War and Peace of a book. In interviews, Franzen repeatedly said that he consciously tried to forget being literary and to simply tell a tale. He succeeded. As much as I might like to dismiss Franzen because of his fame, I cannot dismiss him. He told me a good story; he made my mind travel his roads in much the same way as Dickens does at his best. Freedom was the game-winning strike of my 2010 year in reading.

What’s more, Franzen reminded me of the late David Foster Wallace. I gave up on Wallace in my twenties. I thought I was done with him. I wasn’t. I reread Wallace’s Oblivion and came away with a new love for the man. I also reread Broom of the System. Strike and strike. There is much to be learned from Wallace. I find that I read Wallace more like a writing instruction manual than a true reader. I think this is why I felt I was done with him. I didn’t want any more of his advice. Yet, rereading him injecting life into my own thought life, and ultimately into my writing life.

The Final Frame

As Fall bled into Winter, my reading year ended with a few more gutters and few more strikes. The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus was a strike, a perfect blend of experimental story-telling and historical realism. Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City was a disappointing gutter ball. I expected more from Lethem, especially since the book came so highly recommended. Lethem stried hard with Chronic City, but there is really no story to Chronic, just a collage of almost-interesting characters. I felt similar to Martin Amis’s London Fields. I sensed that there was greatness in his words, but I could not touch that greatness. Amis earns a gutter ball. By contrast, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicle surprised and delighted me. A strike, for sure. Bynum took me into the life of a grammar school teacher and she let me root around there for a few hundred pages. Bynum is a lady I look forward to reading more.

I rounded out the year with some research reading. The story that I’m currently writing features a veteran of the Vietnam war who is obsessed with the novel-turned-musical-turned-movie Showboat, so I spent a few weeks reading Edna Furber’s Showboat. It’s not a bad read. I also read We Were Soldiers Once and Young and I am still reading The Warmth of Other Suns, a non-fiction book published in 2010 about the exodus of Southern Blacks to the Northern promised land. Good stuff.

I read more than I’ve written here, but these are a few highlights. I have to reserve a few that I’d like to blog about individually. Hating Olivia, Charles Portis, Margaret Bolsterli, and All is Lost Nothing is Forgotten. Overall it was a good year for reading. 2011 promises more.

Last night, or rather, early this morning, I finished reading Moby Dick for the second time. Often, I had wanted to read Moby Dick again but was prevented from doing so by that same perception of the book that keeps many from reading for the first time, viz. The Boring Parts.

Moby Dick begins with the classic line “Call me Ishmael,” preceeds with several stunning chapters of narrative wherein the reader is introduced to Queequeg the cannibal, the whale fishery, and later the characters of Starbuck, Stubb, and Ahab. These are splendidly written chapters of storytelling that heighten the sense of expectation. The pending voyage–and all it presides–is felt with a sense of dread and wonder.

The ending does not frustrate these early expectations. In the last remaining chapters, the reader is taken into the turbulent brain of Captain Ahab. We see the final chase. We see the ultimate destruction of the Pequod and all the characters we’ve come to love.

But in between this beginning and end is the middle. The Boring Parts. Here we are treated with various depictions of whales. Here we read about the classifications of whales, the history of cetology and the history of whales in pop culture. Here too we are given the almost painfully exact descriptions of the whale’s body, head, fins. Our narrator, not content with the mere surface of things, will say things like “having seen the outer surface of the spermaceti’s cavernous head. let us descend like Jonah to the whale’s innermost being.” This type of description takes up hundreds of pages.

As a long time reader, I have come to believe that the act of reading a great book is a narrative act in its own right. When we read a great book, we enter the story, but we also create a story of our own reading of the book. The books that I remember–and there are many that I don’t remember at all–become situated in the story of my own life journey, and to recall the book is to recall what was happening to me as I read it and to fit the book’s narrative into my own.

Kerouac I read one summer while languishing in an un-airconditioned apartment in South Arkansas. Jack Butler I first read in Fort Worth, and he almost made me run from a pending marriage…almost. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence I finished at three in the morning at a Greyhound station in Gary, Indiana, where I was running away from my own depression.

It’s extrememly rare that I read a book twice, and reading Moby Dick for a second time has put me into a reflective mood, particularly because of those Boring Parts. I found these parts much less tedious, more insightful, even compelling, anything but boring. Why?

Thirteen years ago, at the cusp of my undergraduate days, I “discovered” Melville. I was not then a brave reader; I shied away from big books, especially those with a reputation as boring. So, my first introduction to Melville was in his shorter works: Bartleby, Benito Cerano, and Billy Budd. This later work proved the most compelling to me. Billy Budd felt like the perfect story. I wrote a paper for my American Lit class exploring the religious imagery of the novella.

Exploring religion through literature was an obsession of mine at the time. I had spent four years of university immersed in the academic study of the Christian Bible. I learned Greek and Hebrew and spent hours honing my exegetical skill, but I had also been awakened to the beauty and power of literature, and, more specifically, to the glory of words. “In the beginning was the word.”

I like words so much that I spent one final semester of undergraduate doing nothing but taking literature and writing classes. This was an exciting time for me. I felt I was taking all the knowledge learned through long hours of Bible study and applying it to life, for literature seemed like real life to me then.

I was also dating a girl who shared this passion. The two of us played like kittens in the Fall leaves of campus, learning together about love and words, exploring the potential of life, a lived life.

But all this ended with the end of that Fall semester. I moved home to save money and plot my next move, which sould either be to graduate school in English or seminary, for in spite of my love of literature, I had been told and I felt it to be true, that I was called of God to serve him.

Indiana. My childhood home. Here, cut off from my friends, away from my lover, and outside the clarity of university life where epiphanies seemed as common as one’s daily bread, I grew restless and confused. So I read. It’s what I had learned from almost five years of undergraduate. Read. Read like life depended on it, because it does. With nothing but time on my hands, I decided I could brave the big books of the Western canon. I picked up a handsome copy of Moby Dick at my local Barnes and Noble. It would take me months to complete.

I still remember the naive excitement with which I started reading Moby Dick. I read expectantly, feeling like Melville was going to give me a gift, a word of knowledge.

Those first few chapters fell off quickly. I sat in my father’s recliner in front of the TV and read late at night, after my work at a local pizza parlor. The house–my childhood home–was always quiet at this time of night. My father lived and worked hundreds of miles away in Michigan. My brother had moved out many years before. It was only my mother and I, and Mom went to bed early, so the hours of one to five in the morning, the house was mine.

From Dad’s recliner, I first began to contemplate the meaning of Moby Dick. I was immediately drawn to Ishmael. I pictured him as a young adventure seeking man, much like myself. I should add that I came to the book with a preconception from my university lit class that Moby Dick was about human kind’s pursuit of god. Ahab, the epitomized unbeliever, violent in his opposition to God, an opposition rooted in his own experience of suffering. Ishmael, I felt, was the neutral observer to Ahab’s blasphemous obsession.

I had my own misgivings then about god’s goodness, though I had little experience to support those misgivings. As much as identified with Ishmael, I feared the Ahab in my soul, trembled at the notion that he lurked there, beating at the door of my heart and demanding release.

Meanwhile, my life went forward. I decided to attend seminary in the Fall. I opted to enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. I would be in the family business. Moreover, my college love and I were to be married. She and I, separated by the miles, kept up a lively correspondence, and we saw each other as often as we could in those days of cheap gas.

So it was that in the Spring of ’96, I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Arkadelphia, Arkansas from Evansville, Indiana. I carried two things with me: a diamond engagement ring and my copy of Moby Dick.

This is the extent of my spirituality. The sum of all I can stand of religion today.

How does this belief express itself in my writing?

Bill Murray is Ready to See You Now

Here’s a quote of Bill responding to the question of what he watches on TV and turning it in to a commentary on Obama’s election:

I watch sports, I watch movies, Current TV on the satellite—I kind of like that. Honestly, I’m just easily bored. C-SPAN can be really great. Like the night Obama won the election, C-SPAN was the greatest. There were no announcers, just Chicago. It was just that crowd in Grant Park, and it was just fuckin’ jazz. You know, it was just wow. And that’s my town, you know? It was just: “Oh, my God, it’s gonna happen! [getting genuinely excited] It’s gonna happen!” You just saw the pictures of it, like, oh, there’s someone from the Northwest Side, there’s someone from the South Side, someone from the suburbs. It was the most truly American thing you’ve ever seen. [pause] Oh God, I get jazzed just thinkin’ about it. I don’t know anyone that wasn’t crying. It was just: Thank God this long national nightmare is over.