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Lazy Saturday...went on a boat ride down the Mekong River to see an artist's gallery in a village. The artist teaches at the Royal University of Fine Arts here and survived the Khmer Rouge tyranny. One painting started me thinking because I'm standing next to this pot-bellied very short man who is pointing at a man in the painting who is very tall and thin being shackled by the Khmer Rouge. He said, "This is me." Isn’t it fascinating how we depict ourselves, or how we remember ourselves or how we “see” ourselves interacting with the rest of the world? There is this concept called “narrative theory” that states that we create our own story in our heads based on how we want to see the world. Since we can never get out of our own individual heads (ahhh Being John Malkovich!), we run the story that we believe and which “makes sense” to us. All things are really random and disconnected but our brain tries to stitch them all together in a way that has a narrative, logical flow like a movie or a novel. We are the heroes of our own drama, our life. Even though we don’t know what will happen next, whenever something does occur, our brain places it into our “story” and tries to understand how it “fits” into our life. Okay, Mr. Leibner. You probably should put it out now. Gotcha. So what else? May. AP Exams. Ahhhhhhh....memories. I remember when I was at this point in my senior year, I knew I was going to the University of Wisconsin (now home now to Carson All-Stars Kristine Pineda, Yazzmin Lizarraga and Bruno Rodriguez) and couldn’t wait to get out of high school. But, it was a time when my love of literature really kicked in. Reading took the place of Senioritis for me. I know you all know exactly what you want to do in life, but I was not so lucky. I thought vaguely about journalism or making a movie, but it seemed so far off, so distant, so adult. I hated the high school I went to (maybe cause they kicked me out) but at this alternative hippie school there was an English teacher whom I took an independent study from. She set up a special class that I could take probably based on her interests. It was called, “Literature of the West.” It included such works as MARTIN EDEN by Jack London, MY LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI by Mark Twain, DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathaniel West, ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, and EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES by Tom Robbins. I still remember ALL of these amazing books, but the titles don’t matter. What does matter is that literature began to make sense to me because it made the world begin to make sense. You see a soap opera on TV and say well, there’s all you need to know about human beings. Everything is happy at first. They fall in love, they lie to each other, they cheat on each other, they backstab each other and then they fall in love. Then things really turn to shit. Repeat. Really, you can reduce anything to DAYS OF OUR LIVES. IRON MAN, THE SIMPSONS and the Bible follow the same tried and true formula. Literature tries to raise our understanding of our time on Earth to a higher level. There is no other point to someone writing to you. It is "their" take on what it means to be human. If it connects to you, it becomes A PART OF YOU. After that last semester of high school, it was one book after another after another. Hello Kurt Vonnegut. Hey there, William Faulkner. Howdy, Richard Wright. Good Morning, Thomas Pynchon. Bless You, Graham Greene. Put 'er there, John Dos Passos. You’re looking beautiful, Vladamir Nabokov. Nice to meet you, Patricia Highsmith. Hola Mario Vargas Llosa. And with each new introduction, it was entrée into a brand new existence. Traveling without perspiration. But what a truly fulfilling experience to close a tremendous book and know you are a changed person. Usually we only think of a person influence on us, but these authors who wrote these books create a psychic ripple effect throughout the universe. My teaching, my learning, my “way of seeing” is because of something Sylvia Plath, George Bernard Shaw, Leslie Marmon Silko and Art Spiegelman cast out into the universe. On a subway in New York, I bore witness to a lovely girl who was on the last page of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's THE BROTHERS' KARAMAZOV, my favorite novel of all time. I watched her as she finished (it's about 800 pages!) and she just shut her eyes, in what I'm assuming was blissful contemplation. When she opened them, I was able to quote the last line to her. We had such a wonderful discussion about the meaning of the book for the duration of our flight underground. Michelle Papilla (Carson '07), is now finishing up her first year at Berkeley. She gave me permission to quote from an e-mail she sent: “I have to say that I've fallen in love with everything here, what I study, the people, the culture....As far a reading goes, I've been doing a lot more of that than I probably should. If only I could read as much of my textbooks as I do other books, man! I'd be the genius setting the curves in class. But, I finished Burmese Days by George Orwell a few days ago--I should've expected a depressing ending, with it being an Orwell book and all. This semester I went through books from junior and senior (White Hotel, Handmaid's Tale, Do Androids Dream...and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) years and reread them, this time, understanding the stories a lot better. Other than that, I've read whatever novels my suitemates give me (we've started a little circle and just pass around our favorite reads) and right now I'm about halfway through Kite Runner. A year ago, I never would have thought that I would be reading novels for fun. It was such a pain to have to do whatever required reading you all gave to us, but now I have a hard time putting my books down.” Thanks Michelle!!! I remember in college, I raided every thrift shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army of their books and built myself a huge library for a quarter a pop. It was so fun going through and getting books for a fraction of the cost in a book store. They were novels I would pull off my books shelf and one day get to. And what is fantastic is that one book led me to another which got me thinking about this that sent me off in that direction that got me thinking about this and someday, because of some influence of some author upon you, it would be my personal dream to pull a book YOU wrote off a Barnes and Noble shelf. Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's ULYSSES (1955)  Okay. That's enough. Read whatever the hell you want, but you'll have no truer friend than a book. Malcolm X once said that wherever he went he carried a book so that he was never alone. Wish you could see this. The afternoon showers are here...gonna bring relief. Looking forward to some good dramatic lightning. Pizza tonight. Jeeez. I am living just like I lived in college. Wish my dad would send more money.
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