Kaya Oakes's Blog

Eight hundred years ago,  Chiara Offreducio heard the message of radical poverty being preached around town by a young guy named Francesco, and she ran away from home, eschewing the life of nobility she and Francesco had both been born into. Legend has it that when her family came into the monastery to claim her, when they picked her up, her body became heavier than stone.

Back in the early 1200s, the papacy was not thrilled by the idea of a bunch of women living under a way of life authored by a woman, but Chiara resisted every attempt made by a pope to reform the order she founded, known as the Poor Ladies. The mission of the Poor Ladies, and of Francesco’s brother order, was simple: they practiced poverty. No possessions. No land. They tended to the physical and spiritual care of others and lived collectively. The Poor Ladies were enclosed, simply because the itinerant life that the friars lived was dangerous for women in medieval times. Francesco and Chiara attracted companions who embraced their ideals.

Fast forward. Franciscans and Poor Clares live a similar lifestyle today. Poor Clares’ lives have changed since Vatican II; depending on their monasteries, they’re allowed to travel and wear street clothing instead of habits. They still live a life of austerity and prayer, but they also write, give spiritual direction, lead retreats.

Back in January of last year, I was on my way to Assisi, where I sat in the tomb of Saint Francis, walked through the low-slung rooms of San Damiano, the monastery where Clare formed her order, and stood in streets and piazzas unchanged from medieval times. Assisi’s #1 tourist attraction is Francis, Italy’s patron saint, with Clare coming in a close second. The gift shops full of religious kitsch are everywhere, but so is the sense that you’re in a place of pilgrimage, where you’re more likely to run into a brown-robed friar or nun than a fancy pants wearing Vatican guard.

But before I left for Assisi, I got tourist advice from a couple of friends. I met Sister B and Sister D through a theologian friend who’s been doing research on Clare for several years. They got permission to leave their monasteries to come to California and lead retreats and give talks, and over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk with them many times. When they asked me if I was going to Assisi on pilgrimage, and I asked them in turn if pilgrimage could include a lot of food and wine, they laughed and laughed and said, sure, why not?

Once or twice a month I go sit down across from another Catholic woman religious, my spiritual director (a kind of God shrink; this article explains a lot about what spiritual directors do). Sister J is a Sister of Saint _______, not a contemplative order like the Poor Clares but an order dedicated to teaching, working in hospitals, working with prisoners, impoverished communities, the dispossessed. The Sisters of Saint _______ are famous for being pragmatic, thoughtful, and tough: a combination that turns out to be pretty useful for someone like me: a skeptical, critical thinking, dogma rejecting political progressive with a religious streak that’s shockingly deep.

When I asked Sister J how she felt about the Vatican’s recent condemnation of American sisters (including her order, which is why I’ve blanked it out above) for promoting what the dudes in Rome call “radical feminism” (you know, respecting and listening to women), she let out a bitter chuckle and said “Disgusted.” And then she paused and said, more thoughtfully, “But I’m optimistic too.” The national media firestorm that was ignited by this critique of women religious, she said, might actually lead to the kind of reformation Vatican II promised but which was squashed by the more conservative popes of recent years. There is a huge fracture running through the institutional church at the moment: on one tiny side of the fault line are those who agree with the Vatican’s condemnations of women religious (who are those people?). On the other, enormous side are those who side with the sisters and nuns. If those women started their own Catholic church, millions of believers would line up to follow them. As you can see from the photo above, I’d be one of the first in line.

A quick and dirty update during this lovely pause of a weekend before reading week begins at Cal. So I thought I’d talk briefly about reading.

First, I’m just about halfway through Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother and it’s mind-blowingly good.

Second, I gave my advanced comp/narrative nonfiction students a list of recommended nonfiction books, and asked for their recommendations in return. Their list is so eclectic and interesting I thought I’d share it. I’ve removed their names for privacy’s sake, but there’s a lot of cool stuff on here. List below.

Third, my colleague Mike Larkin, together with the UC Berkeley libraries, has helped to put together this year’s Summer Reading List for Freshmen. The theme, appropriately enough for the moment, is “revolutions”, and I was happy to contribute a little thing about one of my favorite music books, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation. So excited for the forthcoming follow up, Who We Be.

Recommended reading from CW 110, Spring 2012

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey

Stuff White People Like; anything by George Carlin; John Dies at the End, David Wong

Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons; I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max

Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie

The Man in the High Castle, P.K. Dick; Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi

The Color of America Has Changed, Mark Burnett

Hitman, Brett the Hitman Hart

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño; Compasson, Henri Nouwen

Essays, Montaigne; Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

Luminous Airplanes, Paul La Farge

Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

In a Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid

The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport, Tyche Hendricks

Eunoia, Christian Bok

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler

 

 

Yesterday the semester came to an end (sort of; we still have dead week, and finals, and a boatload of grading to do, so things don’t really conclude until mid May). But the last class meetings are done and over with. Since I taught two upper div classes (which, like, never happens) I had a lot of seniors in my classes this semester, and when I asked them yesterday about their graduations — Berkeley is so huge that these are staggered over a period of weeks — they all seemed pretty lukewarm about walking. Understandable. It’s the end of the school year, people are gearing up for finals, and perhaps most terrifyingly, these students are facing entering the current middling job market. That combination of circumstances would make anyone feel overwhelmingly blah.

Let me rewind for a minute here to 1993, when I graduated from college. I went to a small, Catholic liberal arts school, so my graduating class had maybe a few hundred students. Most students lived on campus all four years, so, as one of the few commuter students in most of my classes (and one of the few with a job — this was a pretty high-income place), I never really got to know any of my peers very well, preferring to hang out with off campus friends. And due to some sort of technical paperwork mishap, when I was supposed to walk cum laude, instead I was cum nothing. And even though I had close to a 4.0 GPA in my major, some other guy got the English prize (oddly, I recall nothing about him either, and it was a pretty small school). So when graduation rolled around I was pretty understandably blah. Graduating into a recession, my job prospects were not great.

I did end up going to graduation, but recall only the sketchiest details about it. It was hot, and wearing a black polyester gown in hot weather is not pleasant. On either side of me were drunk girls I’d never met before, and the convocation speaker was the Bishop of Oakland, a nice enough guy and progressive enough compared to our current bishop, but not exactly the caliber of speaker Cal gets. I remember I was wearing those awful, square-toed, chunky heeled shoes we all wore in the early 90s, and that my car broke down in the parking lot and I had to have it towed home. Not a fortuitous occasion by any means, but in the long run, things turned out alright. Sitting there sweating in synthetics among strangers, however, I recall only wishing that it would end quickly.

Rituals matter, and for people who make it through four (or five, or six) years of undergrad work at Cal, especially in these days when Cal treats almost everybody like shit, they deserve something awesome. But rituals that are fine for extroverts, people who mix easily in crowds, and people who can sit through a bunch of boring-ass awards and speeches in scorching heat aren’t particularly appealing for introverts or people who don’t do well in hot weather. I don’t get asked to participate in graduations as a faculty member because my program doesn’t grant degrees, so I have no idea what it’s like on the other side of the platform. Probably equally dull.

I wish we could come up with a better ritual for graduates. Maybe setting fire to those stupid synthetic gowns (okay, bad for the environment), or a session of Punch the Chancellor (and Punch the Regents), or maybe just sitting around and talking about all the mixed emotions that surround such an event. The good news is that nineteen years after that shitty graduation, and in spite of administrative crap currently looming over all of us at Berkeley, things worked out pretty well for one very sweaty, grouchy, antisocial young woman who sat there thinking she was pretty much screwed for the future. And I have the feeling things will eventually work out for all of these walkers as well.

 

Updating from end-of-semesterland, a.k.a. the place where Berkeley students, faculty and staff go to freak out, with great intensity. I'll be able to say more in a few weeks when I can wrap my head around something other than my students' work, but in the meantime, dates for the book tour are pinned down. We're still working on a few additional events, but here's what's happening.

The Radical Reinvention Tour

7/11- Moe's Books on Telegraph, Berkeley (with music by the Conspiracy of Beards)

7/12- A Great Good Place for Books, Oakland

7/18–Village Books, Bellingham WA

7/19– Elliot Bay Books, Seattle, WA

7/20– Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA

7/21–Orca Books, Olympia, WA

7/25– Reading Frenzy, Portland, OR

7/26— Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland, OR

More events to come: Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco. And more info is available (plus lots of Catholic jokes) on the book's Facebook page. If you might be interested in booking me for a reading/talk, please visit the contact page on my website and talk to Julia Kent, my publicist at Counterpoint Press.

 

This past weekend was the first in about six weeks when I didn't have papers to comment on or grade, so the lapse in stress meant catching up on Netflix stuff. The film Anonymous had filtered its way up my queue, so last night my dude and I watched it; or rather, my dude sat there while I shouted "bullshit!" at the movie approximately 5,000 times and loudly declaimed all of the ways in which the Oxfordian Theory is an elitist pile of shit.

For those who haven't been obsessed with Shakespeare since they were 12 (blame my parents), and who don't get all Oakland on a bitch when scholars, actors, and Roland Emmerich decide to try and prove that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, here's the short story. In the Renaissance, there wasn't the obsession with record keeping and author's hand-written manuscripts that we have today. So we know very little about the way in which most writers lived. The only reason we know Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in the eye was because the guy who did it got arrested for it; we know nearly nothing about the lives of most writers of that era unless they attended University (many did not) or had some connection to the court (most did not). So the film's opening monologue (Derek Jacobi, how could you?), which posits that we don't know Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because no hand written manuscripts of his plays exist is crock of shit #1. (If you want to head down the rabbit hole of the Shakespearean handwriting controversy , check out the Hand D controversy vis a vis the Elizabethan play Thomas More.)

Crock of shits #2 through a million unfold throughout the rest of the film. Shakespeare was a no talent ham actor, whore monger, and an illiterate slob. By the way, Shakespeare killed Marlowe. Ben Johnson? Talentless hack writer and lackey to the Earl of Oxford. The Earl of O wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was eleven years old (you know, 40 years before secular comedy existed). Then there's the whole incest subplot, the portrayal of Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave, how could you?) as a dithering royal Valley Girl, the stupid paen to art as the only thing worth living for if you're lucky enough to be born wealthy and tutored by scholars because public school education could never produce a genius and by the point I was tired of shouting "bullshit!" at the movie (and my Lenten discipline this year, by the way, is not to run my mouth so much), so I shut up and started reading up on the Oxfordians online.

I do not like to talk shit about groups of people en masse, but I've got to say this to the Oxfordians: Y'all are a bunch of nutjobs. My favorite quote re. the Shakespeare authorship controversy comes from this NY Times piece by Stephen Marche

You don't have to be a truther or a birther to enjoy a conspiracy theory. We all, at one point or another, indulge fantasies that make the world seem more dangerous, more glamorous and, simultaneously, much more simple than it actually is. But then most of us grow up. Or put down the bong. Or read a book by somebody who is familiar with both proper historical methodology and the facts.

Word. The bottom line is this: every Shakespeare authorship "theory" stems from the fact that Shakespeare was a rural-raised, middle class guy from a family of little repute. So how could he have any knowledge of foreign countries, the law, royal life, and all of the other things he wrote about? He read. Public school education in those days was rigorous. Shakespeare's teacher was likely an Oxford graduate. And Shakespeare had the real gift of writers, the gift of observation. Everything he wrote is touched by the fact that he was a brilliant observer of humanity. You don't have to be a titled, educated pomp to be able to understand people. In fact, being from the middle means you can look at the goundlings and the people in the boxes and understand both. When you're always seated above everyone, you can only peer downwards.

So what is Anonymous really about? It's about the 1%. Following the nutjob logic of the film, only an Earl could be a genius. Only money and power can lead you to a position where you're capable of making art. So you know where this is leading. Occupy Shakespeare. Let that rural rube genius be what he was: a rural rube genius who's the greatest writer in the English language. And one who really speaks for the 99%.

 

This is the last day in my five week stint teaching creative nonfiction, and on Tuesday when my colleague who's next picking up the class baton to teach fiction came in*, we tried to talk to the students about revision, how it's intimately tied up with the same impulses that make us want to start writing something. One of the students asked whether the image of the writer drunkenly revising her or his prose was true or not, which lead to a lot of laughs about what's really in my omnipresent Sigg water bottle and why Faulker is hard to read. But my response surprised me: since I started getting paid to write books, I told the class, I would never drink while revising or writing, because this is my job. It would be like coming to class hammered.**

At this moment, four or five of my good friends who are also writers of my generation are all going through writerly crises. They're all trying to finish books but find their day jobs crush the impulse out of them. Many of them also work second jobs to make ends meet, thus eliminating any modicum of free time for writing. I found myself emailing one of them recently and telling her that the only solution is monasticism: you have to hoard one day a week to work on your shit. But even that's almost impossible when you've got errands and responsibilities and dinner to think about and friends you never see. And yet, it is the only way.

The writing life is lonely because of this. At the end of working on a book, I sometimes stick my head up like a prairie dog only to find that some of my friends have moved on, had babies, started new careers. Since I don't have tenure and don't get sabbaticals, and because book advances are generally not that big these days, my job stays full time while I write. And I work summers too. So when I'm under contract to finish a manuscript, I have to freeze people out for a time. There's no nice way to do this. When you have a baby or get married it's socially acceptable for women to drop off the face of the earth for a while. When it's a book, people are less sympathetic, unless they're creative types themselves. But that's part of the sacrifice, and the necessity, of self isolation. You begin to find that most of your friends are also artists or at the very least fellow introverts. Actually, it's really not a bad trade off.

I hate telling people to do this, students and friends alike, because humans are social animals. But I'm not talking about staying home every single night typing away; nobody does that (and the people who do, well, we think they suck. Nothing makes me self loathe more than than highly productive fellow writers). Yesterday I started farting around with an essay I've been wanting to write for a while. Nobody asked me to write it; it's going to have to go through the agonizing process of submission and rejection rejection rejection if I ever finish it. But it's something that's been bubbling up inside for a while, so I turned off the email and the phone, ignored the guilt about not starting my grading pile right away, and worked for two hours. Nobody's feelings got hurt, and by the end, I had a skeleton of a draft.

Sundays are always grading and school prep days for me, but I don't teach Fridays, so that's my writerly Shabbat. Gym, cafe to write, nap, more writing, bedtime. Just one day a week carved out helped me finish this book when I was teaching a shit ton of classes on top of working a second job on top of volunteering. That is not romantic at all. But having been shut out of the writer's colonies I applied to and was rejected by, that was the way I had to work. I didn't drink, or do drugs beyond Advil and Zantac (arthritis and heartburn: the writer's real diseases). And at the end, my friends were still there. My husband was still there. My family and my job. My church. My life sat patiently, waiting for me to return and tend to it. Hello, life. Nice to see you again.

For those who don't have book contracts, or agents, this may seem like a crock of shit. But this is how I've always worked, and at 41 I know no other way. Deadlines can be self created, and stuck to, just like contracts. When you lose writing, you lose a chunk of yourself. And for my friends who are struggling with making writing flow into everyday life, I can only say that I love the whole of you, writing, nonwriting and all of the rest. And also that I'm sitting here, patiently waiting for your manuscripts. I always need something to read

 

*I think this class is unique at Cal and maybe at other schools too: three genres, three teachers, all in one semester.

**This has never happened, swear to God. Just once, as a TA in grad school, I came in after a sleepless night, with a hangover, and it was such a wretched experience I would never repeat it.

On Friday, my endodonist sliced my lower right gum open and dug a large abscess out of the bone, then drilled off the ends of the root of one of my molars and stitched me back up. By the time I got home, I was in the kind of weeping, shrieking pain that I've only experienced once before, when this same tooth developed its first abscess, seven years ago. After a couple of days of Vicodin, ice packs, antibiotics and 800 mg ibuprofen, I look like the bad end of a bar fight.

And in this state of mind, it was maybe not the best idea to try and read an N+1 essay, but Richard Beck's piece on Pitchfork got linked on Facebook a bunch of times, and I was curious to see what those logorrhea prone dudes with stylish eyewear had to say about those post teen kids over at what I've always thought of as the most annoying website on the internet. A million words later, I learned this: Pitchfork is annoying. Pitchfork has become the arbiter of indie rock taste. Pitchfork allowed its founder to move out of his parents' house. Okay, yeah. And more importantly: Pitchfork assisted in the slow death of good music writing.

Beck's essay slides toward obvious a little too often, but the nugget my dentally-addled brain took away was that Pitchfork has never produced a writer who might have a sustained career. I do like Nitsuh Abebe's work, and used to use his essay on Twee in my music research/writing course before I dropped the unit on indie last semester, but the writing at Pitchfork is generally so formulaic and grotesquely dependent on the dull music writing formula of "band x + band y – band z = verbal diarrhea" that I just gave up trying, and, in fact, have used the site as an example for my students of how not to write a music review.

But, yeah, I remember when there was a lot of intelligent, well written music journalism out there. Of course, there still is: Alex Ross, Jeff Chang, Douglas Wolk, Mosi Reeves and many more people (full disclosure: the latter three are friends of mine; Mosi and I have known one another since college). Maybe this is just symptomatic of my general feeling of boredom with indie rock, but I just can't be arsed to read about it anymore. After Kitchen Sink folded and my indie rock loving friends spun off to go live their lives, I went back into the arms of my first true love: JS motherfucking Bach. This collection has hogged my car stereo for God knows how long; my dude, who plays jazz and Cuban music but like me, grew up playing in classical orchestras, got sucked in, and we regularly attend classical concerts these days. If you're in your early 40s and want to feel young, go to a classical concert. Or the theater. But I digress.

I don't want to hang out with the people above (from the Pitchfork festival via Street Carnage), so I don't read Pitchfork. And I don't go to indie rock shows. And, you know, it's fine. There was a time and place when Beck's N+1 article would have made me feel all self righteous and indignant about having been in the indie scenes since blah blah blah, but my narcotics are wearing off right now, and there are at least a hundred Bach cantatas, and hip hop albums, and country songs that I don't know well enough to hum along with. Indie rock is dead. Let it bleed.

Before I tumble into the rabbit hole of spring semester, I wanted to update the blog, just in case it gets to be February/March/April and I'm going "shit… forgot about the blog again." This past week, I had a meeting with my new(ish) publishers, Counterpoint Press, and over the course of a long conversation about marketing, promotion, blurbs, Twitter, Facebook, touring, and so on, the subject of author blogs arose. Basically, they're still a tool for us to promote our work. Everything is a tool for promoting our work. And this leads me to think about the passage in Luke that ought to be an object lesson for every writer out there: "For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Complaining about book promotion always sounds like a humble brag, especially in light of the number of writers I know who are more brilliant, more hard working, more dedicated to the craft than I'll ever be, yet have had no luck finding an agent or getting published. If I were you, I would want to punch me in the face on occasion. This time around, however, things are a bit different. While my last book was certainly about topical issues that are important to me, this book is really, really personal. And thus it's going to be tough to separate some of the criticism the book will doubtlessly receive from criticism of myself, my religious beliefs, my  choice to align myself with the progressive fringe within my religion, and so on. And by extension that criticism would be of every other liberal/progressive within the church.

But at least my publishers, my editor, and some of the marketing people believe in this book. And while very few friends have read it yet, I have the feeling they'll believe in it too. Is that enough of a counter-force against the very vocal conservatives, the same people who bash and condemn every move that looks like heresy, when in fact each of those moves in made in the name of greater acceptance, tolerance, and love? (and can you believe that human beings are pointing the finger and calling one another heretics in 2012?) I don't know. But I do know that yesterday was MLK's birthday (and, in fact, my birthday too; my parents were planning on naming me after him until I turned out to be a girl), and KPOO, a local community radio station, was playing King's speeches over dub beats all day, and this quote floated up out of my car speakers as I went through the car wash, and I thought, yes.  This is the hardest work of all, but it's the work each of us must strive to do.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, 'Love your enemies.' It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can't stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they'll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That's love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

My dude is a member of the Conspiracy of Beards, a 30-odd group of guys who put on suits and hats to sing the songs of Leonard Cohen in 4 part harmony. Last night, I went to hear them sing for the third night of Hannukah at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and they did an amazing version of Cohen's song "The Window", one of his many tunes that combines language from the Hebrew bible with Christian imagery (and let's not forget that Cohen was also for years a full-time Buddhist monk who writes a lot of songs about sex. Love that guy.). Particularly, "The Window" uses imagery from one of my favorite works of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous 14th century monk. In many ways, it's the best holiday song ever written. For all of my friends: all you atheists, agnostics, no religion, spiritual but not religious, pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, goddess worshipers, Jews, Episcopalians, Methodists, Native American animists, members of the Church of John Coltrane, and Catholic liberation theologists. Enjoy the light.

The Window

Why do you stand by the window

Abandoned to beauty and pride

The thorn of the night in your bosom

The spear of the age in your side

Lost in the rages of fragrance

Lost in the rags of remorse

Lost in the waves of a sickness

That loosens the high silver nerves

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love

Oh tangle of matter and ghost

Oh darling of angels, demons and saints

And the whole broken-hearted host

Gentle this soul

And come forth from the cloud of unknowing

And kiss the cheek of the moon

The New Jerusalem glowing

Why tarry all night in the ruin

And leave no word of discomfort

And leave no observer to mourn

But climb on your tears and be silent

Like a rose on its ladder of thorns

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love, Oh tangle of matter and ghost

Oh darling of angels, demons and saints

And the whole broken-hearted host

Gentle this soul

Then lay your rose on the fire

The fire give up to the sun

The sun give over to splendour

In the arms of the high holy one

For the holy one dreams of a letter

Dreams of a letter's death

Oh bless thee continuous stutter

Of the word being made into flesh

Oh chosen love, Oh frozen love, Oh tangle of matter and ghost

Oh darling of angels, demons and saints

And the whole broken-hearted host

Gentle this soul

Gentle this soul

Dear reader, my 21st semester at Berkeley is winding its way to an ending, and it has been, all around, the most bizarre, troubling, and in some ways the most inspirational semester I've ever witnessed. We've had multiple earthquakes, a shooting, an ongoing Occupy protest on campus (during which two of my own former professors and dozens of students were clubbed by UCPD), cops pepper spraying nonviolent protestors at our sister campus UC Davis, a massive apartment fire that left many students homeless and devastated two longtime Southside businesses, ongoing devastating budget cuts, and now a diesel spill into the creek that runs through campus.

Essay question: In what ways is Cal a metaphor for the world?

Earlier this semester, while I was in the midst of teaching a full-time course load and writing and editing a book, I also somehow found the time to read Sarah Bakewell's recent book on Montaigne, How to Live. I'm not in the business of writing book reviews any more, but I will note that if you haven't read the Essays, please do. Like encountering Shakespeare or Bach or Bob Dylan or Joan Didion for the first time, it might just change your life. And Bakewell's brilliant book makes it clear that what was revolutionary about Montaigne wasn't simply his style and the fact that he was inventing a genre as he went along, but the fact that he used the prose form in order to understand himself, and in turn, how and why he reacted to things the way he did, whether than was confronting a "monstrous child" crippled by birth defects, wrangling with politics as the mayor of Bordeaux, or considering his own sexual equipment (Montaigne's frank discussions of sex were one of the reasons why the Catholic church banned the Essays for years).

Considering Montaigne whilst I was winding down a book I'd been working on for three years, which itself required a good deal of self examination, lead me to think about this question of how writing is ultimately a kind of problem-solving tool. That's not very glamorous; many "writing coaches" and teachers would prefer to tell you it's a vocation, a calling, a way of channeling a higher power and so on. Yeah, okay, sometimes. But rarely. More often, writing is a way of getting through some practical issue, or some philosophical one. Write to understand the world. Write to get to the bottom of something. Write to research. And so on.

And yet, what makes Montaigne the humblest of philosophers is the fact that he is so willing to say Que sais-je?, literally, What do I know? I recently watched the documentary Page One, about the New York Times, and while David Carr emerges from that film phoenix-like, the living proof that newspapers will continue as long as there are scrappy motherfuckers out there who never stop digging, Carr is not exactly the kind of writer willing to say "What do I know?" He won't surrender until he does, even if it means breaking open his own past as a crack addict, using reportorial methods to do so.

And yet, there is room in the world for both of these kinds of writers, and we need both. I stopped keeping a journal in high school; young as I was, the limits of the form revealed themselves to me early on. It was embarrassing to have the past constantly revealing itself in the minutia of teen-girl speak, and equally embarrassing as a 40-year-old to turn up one of those journals and find long, pained accountings of crushes, awful adolescent poetasting, whingeing stories of sitting by the phone waiting for someone to call. Journals are both a method for problem solving and the worst form of research: research turned entirely to the self, the literary lens focused only on the individual. Instead, I came to rely on memory, the biggest trickster of all, to fuel whatever it is that I write, and I supplement that with my second favorite tool, real research. To me, writing means reading, walking around, interviewing people, observing, collecting, reflecting. I do it all without a notebook in hand. The end result may not be New York Times style fact-solid news, nor is it Montaigne style philosophical querying. And yet, it is my way of solving the problems of life. And yet, those problems will never be solved.

What will happen in the Berkeley Spring? What do I know?

What will happen when this naked examination I've written is published in April? What do I know?

Why are bigots and racists and homophobes so much louder than everyone else? What do I know?

Why write? Why think about writing? What do I know?