This Is Not About Performative Reading

I'm fifteen, sitting on the floor of one of the causeways in Penn Station in NYC. My back is to the wall, I'm wearing headphones and reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. I'm sitting here because, at this time of day, there are never enough seats on the platform where the LIRR trains arrive. I can't remember whether I'm returning from a trip to see family in upstate New York or whether I'm cutting school for one of my cultural fulfillment days made up of some combination of museums, record stores, book stores and the like. I spend a fair amount of time on trains and train platforms, so I'm pretty comfortable. Despite the degree of fear most adults I know have about an unaccompanied minor being in or traveling around New York City, I know there are kids in NYC who do this regularly. It isn't impossible. It's a matter of understanding how to do it, which one can prepare for, but can't really acquire until one does it. Contrary to their reputation, very few New Yorkers get frustrated if you ask how you can get where you want to be. I've also learned a book and headphones not only help pass the travel time, but help prevent unwanted conversations. [At this age, the conversation I most view as unwanted is, "Why aren't you in school?"] My ready excuse is that I've taken the train to see a doctor, an allergist, if the questions are more persistent. It's stolen from family stories of my father needing to visit an allergist in "the city," and my grandmother who rode the LIRR to attend a school for the blind. Fortunately, it's rarely more than two hours between trains that can get me back to my small town on the east end of Long Island, and I won't ever be asked why I'm not in school.

I remember this day because my book, instead of protecting me from unwanted conversation, attracts one. I don't realize she's noticed me until she's bending over, trying to attract my attention and I look up to realize speaking to me. I have to take my headphones off to hear what she's saying. An older white woman has noticed the book and launches into tales of her time and exploits among the Beat movement. I'm not too surprised, as reading in public regularly has also taught me books can invite great conversations. I am a little flummoxed at first though. (A) I'm a child and a stranger is talking to me. (B) she's not practicing the time honored tradition of being too busy or too inundated with stimulation to not notice something like a kid reading a book, and (C) this means the beautiful anonymity of the Five Boroughs has failed me. Even when I was a thirteen year old, being in a museum, book store, record or video store in the middle of a school day never caused a second look. The only thing that mattered was that I looked like there are enough people in my life to take care of me, and since this is true, it's not an effort. I'm just another organic unit among a few million other organic units, existing in proximity.

On this day though, I've been perceived. At least, the book I'm reading has. There I sit, as this woman, I think in her fifties or sixties, goes on to regale me of her experiences in the subculture the book is an eponymous symbol of. At first, it's fine, and honestly, I've been thoroughly enrapt by the book, what people say is its romanticism, so I'm curious to hear from someone who was in some of the places Kerouac was writing about, during the time he was writing about. She's speaking to me as a fellow traveller, and because of this, I tell her I find the book beautiful in its way.

We are fellow travelers in both a literal and figurative way. Public transportation means whatever your destination, wherever you might be departing from, you are in the same conditions as everyone else, at the mercy of the schedule, and in the case of trains, the maintenance of the train, tracks and station. You're quite limited in your ability to control the experience. In this way, we certainly are fellow travelers.

It's not just this very real word, practical condition of using public transport though. I'm enthralled by On The Road, because the great pulsing vein that carries what gets called romanticism through the narrative is actually curiosity. Plenty has been made of the sense of adventure, and in less flattering but valid criticism, the naiveté and privilege of its protagonists. What that all overlooks is curiosity drives every sentence. Sal and Dean, more than anything else, are overcome with, drunk on, the prospect of experiencing and witnessing all the life and humanity, in its complexity and volume, what makes human beings beautiful and terrifying. I understand this curiosity. It's what put the book in my hand, the headphones on my head, and why I have been in seats in trains and on floors in their stations since I was roughly thirteen. The adults in my life believe I've been cutting school out of defiance, and there is some truth to this. I'm defying their curriculum, in search of a different education, because I'm curious about things they can't or won't teach. I have no doubt my fellow traveler involved herself in the Beat movement, out of something not so different.

The town I live in is comfortable, and later I'll realize it was a great place to grow up in many ways. Within reach of beaches, waterways, pockets of undeveloped land, a public transportation system connecting me to one of the world's great cities, and this being the early nineties, I don't have an electronic leash. It's a place that in many ways, makes wonder and adventure easy.

It's not a place that affords anonymity or has much use for the kind of curiosity I have though too. It's a town of about two thousand people. My mother is a nurse at the walk-in clinic in its center. During the period she was going to get her nursing degree, she was a real estate agent. My graduating class consists of roughly eighty students. There are eyes everywhere and they are eyes that recognize. Parents, siblings, relatives, coworkers and friends are about everywhere. A boy walking or riding bicycle through town in the middle of the school day would be recognized as out of order. It's an incursion on adult time, when adults do the adult business of working, and neither have nor want time to have to consider the presence of children who should be at school.

It's a place of order. I know this because I've been raised in it, and because in this small town, I have been stopped to ask why I'm not in school in the middle of a school day. I don't realize it yet, but this order and my curiosity are in a constant tension. I've learned some of this because of books, in a relatively direct way. Sitting on that train platform, I'm only a few years away past having had a book confiscated at school, both because I'm consistently reading novels in class when I should be paying attention to the lesson, and because I was in seventh or eighth grade, reading either It or 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, which results in a question about my age and the appropriateness of the novel.

I do stop reading in class, after this experience. But it's not the confiscation and lecture about paying attention in class that achieve this goal. It's yet another phone call to my mother. These were bordering on regular. Since we don't have electronic leashes in the form of cell phones yet, I'm very aware that there is work time, adult time, and there is all other time. My mother is not to be bothered at work, and to cause this to happen with the regularity I did, was not at all good. The only thing that causes tension between myself and my family, is school. I find neither my penchant for reading in class or the material I'm reading rise to a level of alarm making a phone call to my mother while she's at work appropriate. The assistant principle, to whom I've been referred to retrieve my book and to be lectured about reading in class again, does not share this opinion. I sit in his office as he makes the call. It's a short call, during which my mother makes clear two things, in no uncertain terms. First, she will again speak to me about reading in class. Second, at no point in the future, unless it's pornography or Mein Kampf, is anyone to take a book away from me based on its content. Paying attention in class is one thing, but anything that might discourage my habit for reading, is not something she's allied with. My mother and I are in close agreement, for the most part. He shouldn't have called.

It's not long after this incident I learn Stephen King and horror aren't the only books that can perplex adults. Alex Haley's Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X gives them a shiver too. They are cause for interrogation and my face always betrays my confusion at this reaction, which most adults take as some kind of lack of respect for authority. Few things made me dream of adulthood more than the promise of the end of the question, "Aren't you a little young for that?" where books, movies and music were concerned.

It was confusing because I had yet to come across the idea that this was all part of the order the culture of that small town was presupposed on. When I did come across it later, it was like it had been staring me in the face the whole time. All I knew was that it seemed incongruous with so much of what I was told were positive traits. Honestly, it would be too many years before I came to understand curiosity was my most constant, reliable lifeline. I took people at their word when they said thing to the effect that I had an artistic bend to my personality. Not that they were wrong, but it's kind of like describing a Komodo Dragon as a big lizard. It's technically correct. It is a big lizard, but that doesn't encompass the sheer wonder of the grandeur that make them what they are, and not just in their size.

It wasn't just the books, movies and music, and it wasn't just the adults. Clothing, shoes, there were "right" version of these things. One rode one of the "right" brands of bicycle or they didn't, in the way adults had the "right" brands of cars. I recognize now that there are reasons for all of this, and I recognize the majority find these reasons acceptable, though many years later, I don't know I'll ever understand why. I'm loathe to think much about my clothing and so on. "Does it meet its function?" is about as far as I want to consider. If I'm going to perform, I want to perform, not engage in the strange rituals of performing as if I'm not performing, in order to be perceived as if I've understood the right degree, dimension and shape of performance. I don't think I'll ever understand how one's clothing contributes to demonstrating something like respect or dedication as much or more than one's willingness or effort in engaging an endeavor or with a community. I love an excuse to wear a "costume." I didn't then, functionally, understand the difference between a costume and "appropriate" dress. "Appropriate" costumes have always seemed as likely to be camouflage for predators as they do signal an acceptance and willingness to adhere to norms, even when I was a child, and more so as an adult. Being someone who values anonymity, I have a profound understanding they allow what the majority might find troubling to hide in plain sight.

Some years later, Thom Yorke will keen through the lyrics of Everything In Its Right Place, and the robotic voice of Fitter, Happier will put a fine point on my discomfort not so much with the order of small town life, but the dissonance between the facade and the many varieties of result it refuses to acknowledge.

Age and persistent curiosity have lead me to the understanding all of these are about order.

But on this day, I'm in Penn Station, unable to find a polite exit from a conversation that goes from two fellow travelers on the paths of curiosity, to a fifteen year old being talked at. I'm not sure a fifteen year old has existed who enjoys being talked at. Maybe not even a fifty-one year old, though I can report back with more certainty in a few years. Later in life, I'll come to understand the grip of nostalgia, the degree to which we all yearn to be recognized and understand, often the source of "oversharing." I have yet to learn there is a concept for oversharing, I'm not sure it's entered cultural lexicon yet. I do get one of my more memorable experiences with it though. I am rotating "Oh yeah?" with "Oh, really?" and "Wow," on my end of the conversation. Hers is a reportage of her experiences right there in NYC, as well as Paris and Berlin. Even then, I wanted to visit Paris, but it was also clear her Paris might have been in the same country, but it wasn't what I understood to be Paris. Hers was mythical, gilded by being regularly revisited in the way nostalgia can become a pollution of memory. Is that glowing haze real or the product of the smog of the machinery of an unfulfilled life that crushes our sense of curiosity, adventure and possibility? When has this lashed you into accepting the order necessary to survive, after you've aged out of the permission to evince a drive for curiosity, experimentation, the passion for possibility? Does any of us really know when we've polluted the memories we revisit a little too fondly, a little too often?

Time though, is a curse and blessing for human existence, and this conversation becomes deeply unsettling. It ends because the blessed time to make my way to the platform has come around. For her time is cursed, because I think she doesn't get to spend much time with fellow travelers anymore, which is part of the intensity of her nostalgia, why it's spilled out on me. I might be an adolescent, but I'm not an idiot, and I get some sense of this, which is part of why I don't find another socially acceptable exit from the conversation sooner.

I'm sure it's clear by now I've thought about this experience quite a bit through the years. I've thought about it because of how unsettled it left me. If I'm honest, I initially wrote it off to a stranger, an adult, being a bit too revelatory about their feelings about the quality of their sexual experiences. In retrospect, I don't think that's really it. There was, to some degree, a lack of familiarity with women speaking plainly about their feelings about their sexual experiences, sure, but that's all she was doing. I'm sure some would read this and think it an example of an adult attempting to groom a child, considering how forefront it is in our current cultural milieu these days. You're free to believe that, of course, I can't stop you. I see it as the honesty people give strangers, saying things they'd never say to even their closest friends. Along with this, the book certainly makes plenty of references to sex, directly and indirectly. At the time though, I'm just uncomfortable, mostly because she's not actually talking to the fifteen year old in front of her, but herself. I grasp that it was an opportunity to say out loud things she says to herself often.

The thing that scared me, the reason this conversation has stayed with me all these years, was the manic yearning behind it all. The desperation for a time lost, and more so, the complete belief that none of what made it formative, beautiful and valuable, was gone forever. It was implicit and explicit in what she said, nothing of equivalence could be found in the present. That terrified me, in a deep, existential way. It was the first time I'd encountered it and recognized it as something different than a grief for people and places circumstance and time had excised from someone's life. It was the bitterness that precluded the ability to find some equally fulfilling way to exist in the present. It was sad in a bone deep way, but it was also a possible future for someone like me. She saw me as a fellow traveler, but she wasn't a fellow traveller anymore. What had given that some truth had been snuffed out or left behind. I was too young to understand or maybe to admit, who can really know the difference when looking back, that what I had seen was a future I could experience, and not one I wanted for myself.

I'm twenty-one, on a Greyhound bus, heading home to Long Island, with my tail between my legs.

I have, as far as I'm concerned, failed to create the life I have envisioned for myself. I am a capital "F", bold, italicized, Failure. I have left New Orleans behind, having moved there with romantic visions of adventure, love, community and creativity. I have surmised The Big Easy is not so easy, and The Crescent City not one I can survive long term. The chances I will end up a broken drunk, still toiling away at some job that barely affords me the opportunity to subsist are far too high. I have to become somebody. You know, a responsible, sensible, adult type person who can make a decent living, be respectable... be orderly.

My nascent and naive ideas about love have resulted in a six month relationship of both a sexual and romantic nature, with a woman who is engaged. Her fiancé, in discovering this, decided he needed to restore his dented masculinity through the time honored ritual of a fist fight. The combination of curiosity in the form of adventure seeking, and growing up in a place where order was so important men and boys regularly engaged in this ritual as a way to establish or assert their masculinity, had not left me without some experience in a fist fight. Do not be fooled into believing I am trying to convince you I am "tough." I am not. Some experience is just enough experience to avoid initiating these rituals at all costs, with very few exceptions related to bigotry. I have no desire to subject myself to the pain they extract, and only in those rare cases the desire to extract it from others. It is though an undeniable truth the distance between some experience in a fist fight and none at all is considerable. One cannot comprehend this distance without experiencing it, and by this point in my life, I have. I had also experience the distance between some experience and a lot of experience, and decided it wasn't a distance I was actively looking to cross. Lacking in curiosity, a penchant for adventure seeking and any experience in a fist fight, his plan to secure restitution via glory and victory in fisticuffs is thwarted. His reward for these efforts is a fat lip, a sizable knot on the head, and the wound to his pride going from a painful bruise, to the equivalent of an infected and oozing gash.

I've wondered over the years, if I had the place of mind to endure a black eye and split lip, maybe a broken nose, if he would have decided to acquire the firearm whose business end, I'd been informed, he intended to use on me. We all have questions we'll never be able to answer. Instead of a split lip and black eye, I endured a broken knuckle, swollen hand and bought a bus ticket, feeling I'd made about as good a mess of an opportunity at the life I wanted as any person could. Being too broke to afford a doctor at the time, that knuckle has whispered or complained in the cold weather ever since. Not so bad, as reminders of hard earned lessons go. When I'd later read domestic disturbance calls are the ones to most likely end up in injuries for police, I wasn't surprised.

I was too young to understand there was nothing mythical, circumstantial or conditional about New Orleans that made my assessment about that the city itself was somehow connected to the likelihood of ending up a broken drunkard absurd. It was a mystical city, but that was in its history, which is carried in and emits from its people, not its circumstance. New Orleans was neither the problem or solution. It was a place, subsumed in its own riotous humanity.

Nor was I experienced enough to understand I was wavering back and forth between blaming that young woman for the violent, potentially deadly entanglement I found myself in, in my attempt to escape blaming myself. I didn't yet understand she saw in me a path similar to the one I saw in New Orleans. Youth and the fear of not being allowed to be and be recognized for who we were, the lives we wanted to live, instead of who and what we felt others wanted to require us to be brought us together. I represented to her an escape from an order producing the kind of cognitive dissonance I believed New Orleans was an escape from. Like me, she understood from hard experience, the call of safety within the facade of that order was counterfeit, a hoax. It contained no less violence or danger than a life which promised less safety, but more experience in the living of it. He was the picture of sensible, reasonable, following all the steps to the life people like us were supposed to want. I was restless, curious, suspicious of, and afraid of the dishonesty I'd already seen in all of that. She was no more to blame than I was. We shared responsibility equally, and were trying to answer questions neither of us even know we had. As I've found is often the case, failing to find the answers was part of alerting me to the existence of the question within me.

If she ever even thinks of me, I wonder, is this what she sees or in her estimation, was I a usurper who swept in to disturb the plan she had for her life ahead, the order she had been moving toward? My best hope is she didn't then and doesn't now go the opposite way, to try carry more responsibility than was hers, that other equally painful, distorting side of the nostalgia coin. Another question without an answer.

I didn't have the distance to know and understand all of this, nor that the things I believed the source for that failure can be the building blocks for a life. I was no more likely to end up in poverty in New Orleans than anywhere else, and the drive to contribute to community would have enabled the building of a life not entirely unlike the one I'd later be part of in Richmond, Virginia.

Time, the experience of living we call maturity, gives clarity to these things. It's also given clarity to the degree violence gestates in the rigidity of a particular sense of order. That my experiences with violence in the whole of my life, on Long Island, in New Orleans, Chicago, Richmond and Charlottesville, all sprung from the cognitive dissonance faith in the facade of order produces. Any order which can't accommodate the richness and breadth of humanity can only be maintained through violence. At the end of everything, this is the question human civilization is attempting to solve, "Is there an order we can create and maintain which can accommodate the reality of humanity, without maintaining it through violence?" I don't think we know the answer yet. We have a record of what doesn't work. We call it history, and some of us are learning slowly what does or can work. At some point, I can only hope, we come to realize how little this violence is inherent, and how much is the product of being forced into competition with each other, because it benefits power.

On this day though, I'm on a Greyhound. I have don't have any real idea where. The full trip from New Orleans to Penn Station could take anywhere from twenty-four to thirty-seven hours. I was not economically situated in a way as to afford the most direct route, so it was closer to thirty-seven for me. Somewhere around or after hour ten, time and space become meaningless. There is sitting on the bus, arriving at the next station for transfer, the time waiting for the next bus to depart, and little else. Sleep is hard, if not impossible to come by. Nutrition is even more scarce. The names of stations, signs on the road, become meaningless too. The distance travelled makes no sense in comparison to the perceived time spent. It is easy to come to believe you were born on a bus and will likely to die on a bus or in a bus station. Interstate bus travel is a void into which one throws time, money, what little sanity has been cobbled together prior, and hopes for the best.

Once again, I'm reading a book. This time it's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael when the book was originally written and published) and Charles V. Hamilton.

In part, I'm reading it because of my time in New Orleans. It's the first time I've become acquainted with illiterate adults (that I know of anyway), and I've met more than one. In becoming acquainted, I have seen this isn't related to ability, capability or some lack in general motivation. These weren't stupid or lazy people. A person who can perceive there are rewards for illiteracy, by way of laziness, is a person whose ability to conceive of how others measure reward, punishment and conflict is paltry enough to be non-existent in practical terms.

My acquaintance with the city and its people has also taught me illiteracy is one of many planned results of the history of segregation, white supremacy. Its social and political manifestations are still active and evident nationwide today. It's not a coincidence these adults were lifelong residents of New Orleans, who are also Black. They remembered when Southern schools were segregated, then ordered to desegregate, followed quickly by the establishment of a network of private schools, the implementation of Massive Resistance involving the closing of schools whose majority of students were Black and white flight. At the time I lived there, New Orleans is majority Black, and seventy percent of its residents live below the poverty line. I don't know how much of this is true today, but it was then, in those pre-Katrina days. One can only keep up with so much of the combination of international, national and regional news. The stories of Katrina and New Orleans after Katrina became too heartbreaking for me to continue to follow too closely, if I'm honest. I tried for a while, but the consistence of matter of fact banal cruelty, smothered by the facade of order was overwhelming. The predictability of it all, in relation to the history of the city and the nation, was too much.

I'm also reading this book because it's been proven to me, repeatedly, "mainstream" is not interchangeable with the concept of "reasonable," despite how these words are treated in our news, textbooks and political theory.

My childhood was marinated in the experience of Satanic Panic being legitimized. It was impossible for me not to see the nation I was born and was being raised was (and still is) bulging with full grown adults who are terrified of things that do not exist. the experience engendered a curiosity for those things found frightening by the people who are presented to us, the public, as reasonable, sensible, responsible representatives of the acceptable. I was already aware Malcolm X had been rendered a boogeyman to many of the adults in my childhood, and the proclamations made about the Black Panthers were the product of what passed for imagination in terrified minds. Curiosity had spurred me to investigate what was so different about a small group of Black men who asserted their right to protect themselves and loved ones through the Second Amendment, from the many white men I'd grown up around who proclaimed the same right, often as loudly as possible, to the point of neurosis.

How reading a book called Black Power: The Politics of Liberation on a bus might look to a certain variety of white person who thought I might be a fellow traveller was something I'd considered. I can't say I wasn't aware that they might think they would be welcomed to express discomfort with being a minority, confined to a bus with a variety of people of color who didn't have to sit in the back, when I chose the book.

But, I'm stuffed in my uncomfortable seat, letting Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton tell me about their conception of what the politics of liberation are, as a way to try to escape all of this discomfort. From the aisle across from me a voice says, "Hey man, can I ask you something?"

I turn to see the questioner is a young Black guy, not far from my age. Interstate buses stop in a number of places. People get off, people get on. At some point, I've stopped paying much attention to who is sitting around me, other than the older lady next to me, mostly to respect her space. I say, "Sure."

He asks, "What made you decide to read that?"

I'm suddenly self conscious of how it might look to him that a white guy, my age, is reading this book. I tell him the shortest version of the truth I can, "I'm curious about what so many of the people I grew up around are so afraid of." I realize today, what it says about me at the time that I hadn't considered how it might look to anyone who wasn't white, for a young white guy to be reading this book.

He seems satisfied with my answer though, and we begin a conversation. I can't remember where he was from or where he was going. There's only a vague sense it was New York, Jersey or Philly. Somewhere up north. I remember feeling like he was looking for an opportunity to make a pitch. It doesn't take much experience with people to get familiar with this. There are all kinds of people who love to make a pitch to a stranger, many of them are harmless. Some of them, less so. We like to tell ourselves grifters and scam artists are somehow concentrated in big cities, but there is nothing more American than a grift. There's plenty that is as American, but there's nothing more American. I could have chosen to try to exit the conversation, and go back to my book, but I've already been on a bus for many hours, and memory suggests there were many more hours to go. It's possible his pitch will be a grift and the end of the conversation, but it also might lead to an interesting conversation. If he's willing to keep conversing with a white guy reading Kwame Ture on a bus, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and hear him out.

It's not too long before he gets to it. I don't remember the onramp he found or created. What he's pitching me on is a conspiracy theory, a hodgepodge of Five Percent Nation theology and Illuminati conspiracy theory. I'm familiar with the Five Percent Nation because I've already read a fair amount about Malcolm X, which lead to reading about the Nation of Islam. I know the 5 Percent Nation is an offshoot of it. Again, curiosity about boogeymen of the adult world of my childhood. It's also something that comes up in New York hip-hop regularly. Hip-hop and I are almost the same age. It has always just been a part of my world. As a child, it was no more or less new to me than anything else. Growing up on Long Island, in the shadow of New York City, we were exposed to it a bit sooner than the majority of the country, because some of the city stations had local affiliates. I'm familiar with Illuminati conspiracy theories because I am conscious, and every adult age male who talked about politics or something in the realm of politics, had a theory about who shot JFK and why. A number of them involve the Illuminati.

This guy though, is a very good storyteller. Part of what makes him a good storyteller is his zest for the material. It's a long conversation. It is a conversation too. I don't tell him I think this is crazy, but I do ask sincere questions occasionally. My mother's second husband, my stepfather, was Jewish. I'm aware that many conspiracy theories are basically antisemitism wrapped in a shiny package. As we talk, at no point does he come across to me as antisemitic. There is no indication he believes the Illuminati are a collection of Jewish people. The commonality among Illuminati members is being born into it, with the wealth and power this would indicate. Even when he begins to fold paper money to show me the "secrets" embedded in them, and goes on to say the eye at the top of the pyramid on US money is a subliminal message to make us aware we're always being watched, he doesn't veer into antisemitism. I'm aware there are many conspiracy theories involving the Federal Reserve and the World Bank that are explicitly antisemitic, and I know some of those are also obsessed with the symbols on our money. As I said, as I sit on this bus, I'm a young white male, raised and indoctrinated by white people on Long Island. You hear some crazy shit in the years growing up in that world. Having a thoughtful, kind stepfather who happened to be a secular Jew helps puts some static in the signal though. This guy just seems happy to have someone to talk to, and who'll listen to him without being a dick, and I find all of this fascinating in an entertaining way.

It will be some years before I come to understand the conspiracy theory communicated, pitched to me on the bus that day, is a mirror to no small number of the conspiracy theories among the white supremacist movement. The only real difference is who the teller believes the conspiracy is intended to keep under control. In this version, it's Black people, and anyone who happens to have the misfortune of being poor alongside or in alliance with Black people. It is the mirror of the white supremacist version. For white supremacists, it's usually Jews, controlling the economy and the media, using all the other groups of people white supremacists consider subhuman in a plan to enslave white people. It'll be some years before I come to understand how corrosive conspiracy theories are, and how much a part they've played in US history. Sitting on that bus, I find this all somewhat amusing as a kind of combination of group storytelling project and being another example of people believing the fictional to be real.

When he finishes, and this was a pitch mind you, something he was essentially asking me to subscribe to, I didn't really know what to say. I knew enough to know there is no reason for their to be a conspiracy against Black America. Racism doesn't hide. The surprise on the reasonable and sensible faces of so many people in my small town and on the news during the LA uprising/riots isn't hiding. I did, in fact, come from the place that more or less invented white flight, selling the planned community as a utopia. I was well aware that when the suburbs of Long Island began, Black people and Jews were not allowed, unlike those "filthy, crime ridden cities" white people were flying from. A conspiracy to dehumanize and render Black people the source of cheap labor wasn't necessary. America commits its conspiracies in the open, and tells you they are God's will, as is evidenced on the news daily today.

The need for conspiracy, the version I'm told on the bus that day, grows from the theology of the 5 Percent Nation, and the belief among some of its adherents, that the people of Africa are gods whose realm has been stolen, usurped, by the servants of The Devil, in the form of white people.

I'm not raised religious. Both of my parents are lapsed Catholics. As I said, my stepfather is Jewish, but a secular Jew. My parents didn't even put me through the ordeal of Sunday School or Catechism. I believe I was baptized, but I never went for Communion. There are few places my out of placeness is more impossible to ignore than a church or house of worship. I am, to this day, bemused and confused by how many different faiths seem to believe they are The Chosen People, in whatever way they've been chosen. Five Percent Nation's claims are no more confusing to me than Catholics, Jews, Muslims or anyone else, though I am aware how much they tend to frighten Protestant evangelical Christians. I understand that to the theist, to claim to be gods or the descendants of gods seems an unthinkable hubris. This is splitting hairs to me. I can't get passed the fact of the different varieties of beliefs that have existed. I can't square the certainty that being a member of a Chosen People is hubris in the face hundreds of thousands of belief systems claiming the same. That kind of cognitive dissonance, once again, is baffling to me. But, you have to have some awareness of how many different faiths have believed this, for there to be dissonance, right? In any case, there isn't much difference to me in saying, "We are gods" and "We are the chosen by God."

Not knowing what to say or where to go with this conversation when he'd reached the end of his pitch, the best I can come up with is, "I'll think about it." There's nothing about this guy that suggests he's a bad person, at all. He's charming and personable, funny, a good and warm conversationalist. I don't really know what else to say though, and he does seem a little put off that I haven't more enthusiastically taken on this idea.

We're friendly enough for the rest of the time we share a bus, but we don't really talk much. I can't say what it was on his part, but on mine, it was the discomfort with the degree he described this conspiracy as an organizing principle in his life.

At the same time, I couldn't dismiss conspiracy is part of the history of the United States and its racism. COINTELPRO was a real conspiracy, from efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Movement, with agents of the FBI trying to induce targets to commit suicide, using agent provocateurs to create dissension, distrust and conflict, targeting organizations and individuals for their speech that by law should have been Constitutionally protected. Even then it was accepted, if not admitted, the FBI had a hand in Fred Hampton's murder, and I'd already read a bit about that. The State of Mississippi allowed the equivalent of a show trial in the murder of Emmett Till. It turned a blind eye to a conspiracy to protect the perpetrators in the face of efforts to secure justice for his murder. The list of conspiracies, especially localized regional conspiracies, to deny or take from Black people anything white people didn't want them to have, would be too long to recount. What is the history of lynching, if not the history of localized conspiracies made public, not to create justice, but to terrorize the Black population?

I remember thinking about offering him my copy of The Fire Next Time. I didn't realize when I moved to New Orleans, I'd begun the habit of making sure I had a copy at hand. Baldwin is thought of as someone who wrote about race, and this is true, but not wholly accurate. He wrote about human dignity, liberty and community, which meant he had no choice but to write about race, as a Black, queer man born and raised in the United States. By extension, because of his intimidating intellect and dedication to the practice of writing, he's the best writer in US history on the topic of preserving one's dignity and sanity through the experience of a nation which seeks to undermine both. Again, it would be some years before I came to understand Baldwin's work was so foundational for me because he was, and was not, writing about "race" as we call it.

I didn't offer it to him the book though. Maybe I couldn't bear to think of being without one to grab and read should I feel the need. Maybe I was too worried about how it might look for a young white guy to tell a young Black guy he should read James Baldwin.

This conversation has come back to me with some regularity through the last decade or so. Christian white nationalism has no exclusive claim to the land of conspiracy theories, though it purports an exclusive province to the land between the nation's borders and the concept of truth. It is prolific in its production of conspiracies theories, certainly, but this is a function of the thoroughness of its embedding in American culture. There are just that many more people to contribute to this kind of group storytelling effort, and the more people contributing, the more likely it is to find strains which are compelling to other people. They throw shit at the wall, to see what sticks. The more people throwing shit, the greater the likelihood some of them are going to get something to stick. Conspiracy theories are also a matter of faith, in their way. Once one builds the scaffolding for belief in a central, organizing power of the universe, it's clearly not difficult to apply that scaffolding in a multitude of ways. It's easier than to believe the world and our conception of it is shaped by the whims and needs of powerful people having access to means that maintain and further it, in the banal pursuit of self interest. There are no cartoon villains in the seats of power, twirling their mustaches, who love committing evil for its own sake. There are people, adrift in self sustaining delusions, aided and supported in that delusion because of the source of their power, whether it's wealth, position or their pursuit of achieving a delusion shared by many others, with the belief their self interest aligns with the greater good being the justifications for the evils they commit. These self sustaining delusions are not unlike what is required to believe in conspiracy theories. The conversations of "the free market" are awash in both faith and conspiracy, though it's adherents are loathe to or incapable of admitting it.

There are other things these have in common. Exclusion and isolation. They can't be sustained, without the person who believes them whittling down the people they have to come in contact with who don't share their delusions. Power, by nature, vets those in proximity to it in search of the true believer, in the delusion that power is reason in and of itself. It has always been peculiar to me, that we, the masses, the average people who have to live amongst each other, in all our strangeness, our conflicting delusions, are constantly called on to insure we aren't whittling the people we have to come into contact with to only those who share our delusions, yet this is one of the most common goals of wealth and power. Rounding the corner on fifty years old, having spent thirty of those years in some way attempting to find the right combination of words to encourage people around to me to seek a better way, to not so easily trust the ways in which those with power suggest there is a humanity which is less human, it's clear what I do, who and what I surround myself has far less impact than that of say Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mitch McConell, Nancy Pelosi and so on.

This conversation caused confrontation with the fact that I could be susceptible to conspiracy theories. The person relaying this one wasn't stupid. He wasn't mean or hateful. He was similar to me, as different as we may have been. Our experiences were different, but we found ourselves in the same conditions. You don't use interstate bus as a means of travel, if there's better, more efficient means available to you. He had found an answer though. One to help make his choices simpler, less intensive in how much time and energy was dedicated to whether or not he even had the right questions. The appeal was clear. It would certainly be easier to move through the world believing the cruelty which has shaped so much of it, including my experiences and those of people I love, if there were some genuine, pure evil responsible for organizing all of it.

It should be clear now, I'm talking about my experiences with reading in public began young. I am an only child, and have no siblings, save a stepsister with whom I am not very close. As a young child, if my parents looked around to find me missing in a grocery store, they'd find me in what were then much more expansive magazine sections. I'd be reading a magazine, occasionally a comic book or maybe a copy of Mad Magazine I hadn't yet giggled my way through. Standing in line, I'd study the tabloids covers (my parents were mortified if I tried to pick one up and read it) or thumb through People or Time or whatever was there. If you're around my age, you know the indelible, too clear image of Bat Boy, and that feeling of the paper used for tabloids, clearly made from the materials rejected by the major book publishing houses and whatever printing process magazines like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair or National Geographic and Life were made through. If I was being taken to one of my parents friend's homes, and they had no children of my age or too young for me to play with, excursions of any kind really, I brought a book. I spent a whole lot of my childhood carrying a backpack, filled with music and at least one book.

This was part of how I came to be a young person who had a specific kind of experience with reading in public, added to by becoming a fan of the horror genre. This meant reading as much of it as I could get my hands on. I've already mentioned Stephen King, who was my introduction to the genre. I also read Peter Straub, Robert Bloch, Dean Koontz, later Clive Barker, Brian Keene, Ramsey Campbell, and of course, Edgar Allan Poe. I was around ten when I saw John Carpenter's Halloween, after which I read every copy of Fangoria I could get my hands on, eventually convincing some adult in my life to gift me a subscription, though I can't remember who anymore. This all meant reading horror in public, pretty often.

I got used to the fact that people had something to say about what I was reading. I had the good fortune to have parents who didn't believe children should be seen and not heard, but it was clear to me that where most adults were concerned, we were all much happier if I was reading. Neither I, nor they, were as likely to ask uncomfortable questions if I was reading, unless I was reading horror or a copy of Fangoria, its covers splashed with the latest and greatest monsters from the land of horror on film.

Was it "appropriate" I was so fascinated by this genre? Was it a sign something was "off" about a child who was so enrapt by tales of monsters, madmen, mayhem and murder? Doesn't it give you/him nightmares (depending on whether it was me or my parents answering the questions about its propriety)? "Isn't there something wrong with the fact that it doesn't give you/him nightmares?" These were the kinds of questions my horror habit regularly inspired.

That experience was concurrent with the period of time when I couldn't turn on daytime television, evening news or pick up a magazine about current events that didn't heavily feature tales of the Satanic Panic, itself a conspiracy theory. Before I'd even begun to know what a conspiracy theory was, I was being inundated by a "reasonable, sensible, responsible" adult world that was treating one as real. Not only was it a conspiracy theory, but one that featured a stream of horrific tales of the victimization of children. Add to this that the news, the dispatches from the adult "real" world, was always chock full of stories about the latest shocking murder (remember Super Predators?) and the terror of drug gangs who waited around every dark corner to offer children free drugs. At the time, the story was that this was their method of enslaving children to the scourge of crack, and weed (even as I knew many adults, far from evil, who indulged in this particular scourge). Every Halloween was a flurry of stories about the perils of poisoned candy.

The image of some young man in his late teens or early twenties, walking around the streets like a grocery store employee with a platter of samples, begging people, especially children, to sample his product is still comical, when compared to the same new broadcasts constantly showing people of color in handcuffs on drug charges. Today, we get tales of adults handing out THC laced candy on Halloween. Let's not forget how long it took the public and news media to accept that one could not contract AIDS from a doorknob or a toilet seat, despite the many doctors and scientific researchers featured on the news and in print saying otherwise. I had yet to come to understand all the dynamics behind these things, but I definitely didn't understand why these doctors and scientists seemed to have to keep repeating this. It seemed clear there was consensus about it, among the people whose entire lives were dedicated to understanding medical science.

On the more personal side, my own grandmother used to close the living room curtains when I spent days or weekends at their house, and forbade me from playing in the front yard, lest some creep hatch a plan to kidnap me when visiting her house. In contrast, at home, I rode my bicycle all over the small town I lived in, my parents having little idea where I was or what I was doing for entire days. It was how I went about exploring the waterways, undeveloped plots of land, abandoned houses and so on. It was a major part of the reason so many children in town were recognizable to adults. When we weren't in school, we were in or out front of their shops, in their parking lots, riding by their houses etc. Someone's sister, brother, mother or father worked here or there. This shop owner or clerk had been seeing us since we were seven, and knew us. These were all touch points for safety. Soap and water for a skinned knee or escape from a bully was rarely very far.

My friends and I were often in pursuit of an escape from the prying eyes of the adult world, specifically because our understanding was that they were so attuned to the well being of children it foiled our plans for exploration or adventure. You didn't tell adults you were going to jump your bicycle off a twelve foot drop, because you wanted to know if you could successfully land it. You found a place to do it where they couldn't see. Unlike some people my age, I do not lament the inclusion of the bicycle helmet as standard equipment, which wasn't part of my childhood. I do, to some degree, lament the constant supervision of children that prevents this exploration though. The medical bills for a broken arm are expensive, but they are cheap in comparison to the later costs which come from not learning to tune one's assessment of risk in comparison to their practice.

The twelve foot drop wasn't where the practice began. It was the evolution of it. It came after years of three, five and eight foot jumps and drops. The number of injuries incurred was small, and with the exception of one or two broken arms and wrists, relatively minor scratches and scrapes. In comparison to the thousands of times we engaged this practice, those injuries were small outliers, and good lessons about the line between confidence, hubris, and so forth. It wasn't coincidence that those of us who'd been already engaged in this practice were the ones attempting the twelve foot jump, and those of us who hadn't, avoided it. We could get eight or ten of us together to play basketball, but only four or five for the "bike track" we'd made on a piece of land cleared for a house never built. It was perplexing that my grandmother's house, only twenty minutes drive, and their slightly more congested town, somehow changed the nature of the human beings in proximity.

I never believed I was in so much danger of ending up scuttled into a van. It was just another odd fear in the adult world. I would have believed, had someone told me then, children were far more likely to encounter danger from people they knew than from strangers. There were adults we all knew to avoid, sometimes in the form of classmates homes, sometimes in the form of a yard you didn't run or ride a bicycle through or dawdle in front of for too long.

When I look back on it, the fact that I took to horror isn't at all shocking. The voraciousness of my reading habit produced an outcome I couldn't have predicted, and it's clear adults never considered. That I read so much horror, so quickly, gave me that ability to spot a good boogeyman story when I saw one, and it was clear, quickly, the adults were all afraid of boogeymen of a few different kinds. It was perplexing to have adults suggesting somehow, my ability to tell fiction from reality wasn't sufficient to be able to handle the material I was reading. I understand now why it made me so angry every time it happened, and maybe suspicious of adults who suggested it. Also, these ideas about kids and media were so accepted, I didn't then have a chance to consciously consider it might be the adults who were struggling with their assessment of reality, but it was a factor in how I assessed the adults in the world.

The Satanic Panic has become something of an obsession over the years, as a result. It's only recently I've come to understand that this is why. At the same point that my youth my love of horror was the reason people were questioning my ability to tell the difference between reality and fiction, I became aware a large portion of the adult world seemed unable to.

I understand now, I saw the Satanic Panic as fictitious specifically because of how much horror fiction I was reading. It would have too easily fit in a horror novel to have been real. The Satanic cults and the nationwide conspiracy they were supposed to have been orchestrating, were just boogeymen. They were The Farm in Stephen King's Firestarter, Kurt Barlow and Richard Straker in 'Salem's Lot, whatever that organization was in Dean Koontz Watchers. They were Mr. Dark and his traveling carnival in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. They were every villain in every episode of Scooby-Doo, just waiting for some meddling kids and their dog to unmask them. It was clear though, a substantial portion of the adult world believed they were as real as I was, and very few seemed interested in pointing out how ludicrous that was.

It wasn't just that my ability to assess reality from fiction was being questioned. It was maddening that they were also inherently questioning my ability to tell right from wrong, as the result of the fiction I chose to indulge, in the midst of all this. I understand now, it was my first real introduction to the concept of cognitive dissonance, as well as "Every accusation is an admission."

I got a few other things from that experience too. The first is that people's perceptions of what I read do not dictate what I do or do not read, at all. I follow my curiosity where it leads.

I remember reading Lost Souls by the author Billy Martin (then known as Poppy Z. Brite) and being amused by the usual befuddlement from some that anyone could want to read horror, because it told me their ignorance of the content of the novel robbed them of a righteousness they would have enjoyed even more. Yes, it's a violent novel, full of the obsession with blood any vampire novel has, but it was also blatantly, openly, screamingly queer. It was full of queer people fucking or yearning to fuck queerly, lending to its obsession with other bodily fluids. I felt like I was getting away with something, and it added further evidence to my already established belief that unlike so much of the world of adults feared, engaging with art made by queer people wouldn't be some magic recipe to make me queer. Somehow, the fact that David Bowie, Elton John, and Queen were among the most popular and celebrated artists of my parents generation or that Liberace was beamed into living rooms across the country throughout their childhoods, at their parents choosing no less, didn't seem to convince a whole lot of people that proximity to or engagement with queer art didn't make anyone queer, was baffling. Nothing and no one was harmed by the revelation that Rock Hudson was gay, except the pride of some women who'd found him attractive, and the delusion that being gay was some kind of malformation on a cellular or spiritual level.

It seemed to me, the only thing resulting from engaging with queer art was that it detracted from one's ability to render queerness as outside the human experience. Lost Souls was added evidence of how many people form ideas and opinions about things like books, without having the first clue what's in them, and that they are not people I really want to take into consideration where my reading is concerned.

Reading has always been a combination of pleasure, exploration and utility for me. I am, for some unknown reason, fitted with a curiosity that burns. As rewarding as it has been, it's not pleasant. I'd have been happier if urgency had never been among its features, but it is. I don't say this with any hope or design on how I might be perceived in writing it. The truth is, if I'd been able to turn it off and make it go away, there are many, many times in my life I would have.

As for utility, a book can be the equivalent of a ward against the incuriosity and worship of cruelty in the world. I mentioned one of the ways this works in why I chose to read Black Power: The Politics of Liberation on an interstate bus. A book can keep racists from treating you like you're in the club. I am no less capable of using a book as a ward today, than I was at twenty-one, though I may be a little more considerate in which ward I choose, and just who may be perceiving me.

Conversely, as it did in the two examples I started with, a book can be a signal of what I'm willing to talk about. Did I find these two convserattons troubling in some way? Yes. They were both conversations though, not confrontations. You could say, "Nothing lost, nothing gained," but there was some genuine human interaction exchanged that I learned from, not in the books I was reading, but because of them, and that's not nothing.

The other side of it is that I remember those conversations because I did find them troubling. Having a book in my hand has resulted in so many conversations that were enjoyable enough that I can't remember one of them as a standout anymore. The penchant for reading horror has resulted in many conversations with other horror fans, about the book I was reading or horror more broadly. Good recommendations on things to read can come this way. There have also been general readers who aren't averse to horror, but aren't as steeped in it, the kind of person who's just looking for a good book, no matter the genre.

My favorite version of these conversations though, is the fellow reader who takes note that I am reading, and can't stop themselves from saying something along the lines of "I don't know why anyone reads that stuff." Invariably, they're not lying. They don't understand. They've done little or no investigation into the genre or why people like "that stuff." It gives me the opportunity to give them some ideas they haven't come across. Most of the time, they have a perspective on what horror is that is very narrow. They are lacking an accurate conception of the breadth of atmospheres, moods, content and themes horror can contain, and the many different audiences that fall under what we call horror. It's also fun to talk to them about books or stories they've loved, and be able to point out how many of them contain elements of horror. I love every opportunity to have these conversations. I am, by nature, an evangelist for the horror genre, specifically because of how much it can do well, and that there are some things it does with an efficacy other genres can't.

What I've been writing about, in different ways, is being perceived while in the act of reading in public. There has been, of late, the introduction of a new label, for a thing that's existed probably as long as the majority of the population could read. It's being called "performative reading." The idea, so far as I understand it, is that people are reading some nebulous list of books in public, with the intent of being seen reading them, so it might elicit a specific impression from those who are perceiving them.

This idea can't be decoupled from the fact that it's inception and spread has been on social media. There is a critique of social media that I think is in some degree true. It's holds that social media is teaching us all to perform, that it encourages a certain lack of authenticity. A new avenue of public performance isn't so bad, I don't think. It an extension, a new outlet for the ways we have always chosen to perform. You remember (or may not as this piece is getting a bit long), I referenced the idea of things like certain kind of clothing or shoes being required of us in some circumstances. In childhood, we experience these as styles or fads. If one wants to have the esteem and respect of their peers, they don't walk around in a poodle skirt and bobby socks or a leather jacket over a white tee, with their hair slicked down with Pomade in 2025. There's a lot about the performance of youth and consumer culture that doesn't change. The costume certainly does, and a costume is part of the act of performing.

We all have some concept of the appropriate attire for a job interview and certain kinds of jobs. The willingness to put on a "business suit" (it's particular enough to have it's own name, and for some suits to not be appropriate, right?) says nothing about whether someone is qualified for a job or if they're intent on or willing to embezzle every cent they can. In fact, the requirement for the suit (a costume signifying the willingness to adhere to nominal standards) is as much a camouflage for those intent on embezzlement as it is anything else. A collar has never rendered a priest a saint, as we've been reminded too often. Then again, there is a certain degree of utility in a surgeon's scrubs. They can be reliably sanitized, as well as preventing all manner of stains one wouldn't want to have to explain if it appeared on their personal clothes. There is an arena for performing surgery, and being perceived as a surgeon, and many others where one does not do these things.

We all perform, nearly constantly. One of the common ways of talking about people with autism is to say they "have bad social skills" or "don't pick up on cues," which like the way people often describe James Baldwin as writing about race, isn't necessarily wrong, but isn't really accurate either. The research we have now suggests it's performance people with autism struggle with. It's the constant changing of context for social cues, social norms and so on. Most people don't have the first clue how much effort they expend in performing. We say things like, "Honesty is always the best policy." How one performs honest matters, in its context. The variety of honesty one performs with a romantic partner is different than how one performs honesty with someone of greater authority at work, and so on. It's why it's becoming more accepted among autistic people to say, "Autism can involve cognitive disabilities, but it is always a social disability." Autistic burnout, now accepted in as a phenomenon by medical science, describes the result of the constant effort performance requires. Ask an autistic person how much of existing in society is about performance, and you'll get a lot of information you may or may not want. The number of different ways we are required to perform, and their context dependent variations, don't occur to people whom the effort doesn't cause emotional dysregulation and cognitive consequences that rise to the level of disability.

It's not performance that is new. Sure, there's something to the idea that there's a kind of pressure for us all to become our own "brands" now, but again, it's an extension, not an addition. Social media and the technology that allows us all to carry cameras in our pockets, making the ability to post those photos on public forums with little or no effort, and the scale of those forums, is new.

This, I think, in combination with a bit of that tendency toward accusations being admissions, is why there is now a term for "performative reading." The truth is, people may read different books and may exist in public while doing so, for a combination of reasons that's in the thousands, maybe even millions, if we get very granular about it. The assumption by the person perceiving the reader, of this extra level of performance, as likely says more about the perceiver as it does the reader. It also suggests there doesn't exist in the person perceiving the capacity to read a book simply because they want to know what's in it.

I've never sat down and counted, but it's safe to estimate I've read a few thousand books. The only one I've ever read that without any prior interest in what was in it, and from which there was no reward, no benefit of reading, was Go Ask Alice. At some point in seventh or eighth grade, it was assigned to us, and I did read it. It was a book so bad, there wasn't even anything to learn from how bad it was or why it was so bad. It is the most generically bad book I've ever read, in every way a book can be generically bad. When it was revealed the book, and the entire reason we were required to read it, came down to a hoax, a con, nothing about it surprised me, other than the fact that the world of terrified adults in which I was raised had been hoodwinked by yet another moral scold who should've skipped Bible study more often, so they could read a few other books.

It wasn't written by someone who wanted to write a book, who loved books or had any respect for what can make a book or storytelling good, with the number of different things that can contribute to making a book a pleasurable or fulfilling experience. It makes sense this writer had approached this book this way too. I've read a fair amount of books I didn't particularly like, and I've put Crime and Punishment down on three occasions because it just bored me to tears, but even those have more concrete examples about why I didn't like them, and why they weren't very good books.

Go Ask Alice is the one completely lifeless book I've ever read. It's the only really notable thing about it, other than its place as yet another hoax committed on the fearful. It is its genesis that's responsible for that lifelessness too though. It feels like a book written by someone who sees the audience as a caricature, and it's certainly written by someone who only understands its protagonist as a caricature. There's never any real attempt to live in their skin, and if there was, the writer had so little practice with doing so, they're just not capable of giving their character (or themselves) the respect which brings any character to life.

It's essentially a Chick Tract, expanded into novel form. It's both a little frightening and very telling that its author was a Mormon youth counselor. How does one, as a youth counselor, attempt to square the history of psychology and psychiatry's history of sexism, while also presenting counsel from the deeply patriarchal beliefs of Mormonism? Pretty clearly, this was not a variety of interrogation Beatrice Sparks was interested in or her book wouldn't have been so lifeless. The lack of any understanding, any real degree of a sense of investigation into the humanity of the "troubled teens" she attempted to create a hoax diary for, is what makes the book so hollow.

This is one of the central lessons from the history of psychology and psychiatry too, isn't it? The worst harms (and therefore failures) the fields have committed have, at their core, sprung from the certainty of the men incapable of seeing their patients as being as fully human as themselves, and to therefore actually hear them. Be it where the history of these fields with women, people of color, and queer people are concerned, it has always been the failure to be able to look at the world through the eyes of someone so different, they are looking at, and experiencing, a different world.

This seems to be the foundation of this idea of "performative reading" too. People can't understand a relationship to books and reading different than their own, not coincidentally, their perspective on reading is so mired in the performative aspect of social media, they can't image something outside of it. A handful of people on social media don't cause me much concern though either. They're the source of the intent to give this "performative reading" a name. They are recognizing something that's been with us a long time, and something most common, but certainly not restricted to, youth.

Part of what makes youth different than later adulthood is our understanding that it is a nearly universal experience of (at least the desire for) experimentation. We try things on, especially in our teens and early twenties. One couldn't identify and recognize this idea of "performative reading" without the experience of having tried the same kind of performance. These performances are most especially part of the periods of transitions in our lives, as teens and people in their early twenties, but not only those.

We give markers in language to the outward signs of these transitions, the period when we have to reorient ourselves to changes, especially those that involve the society we exist in perceiving us differently than it had previously. Mid-life crisis, divorced dad, rebound relationships, women getting bangs, the revenge body/outfits... All of these are recognized as part of the process of moving through a transition. "How do I fit when my world changes?" Really, this is one of the most recognizable veins of great literature too. They provide a wealth of literary material, because they're difficult. All great stories involve navigating difficulty of some kind.

It's neither the act of "performative reading" or it's recognition by a relatively small handful of social media users that causes me concern enough to write about it, much less of this length. I wasn't aware of this trend in topics until a series of posts about articles dedicated to it started bubbling up in my social media feeds across different platforms. I am loathe to begin using into "Booktok" or "Bookstagram," not out of any particular antipathy for its users mind you, but because I'd rather be writing than arguing about writing or reading. I'd certainly rather be reading that scrolling through endless half formed arguments about writing, reading, genre parameters, whether portrayal means endorsement, and my short ventures into the world of "reader" and "writer" social media has revealed how deeply ensconced those are. Discuss? Investigate? Explore? Sure. Argue? No.

There's nothing wrong with identifying "performative reading" as a concept, as there's nothing concerning with naming any of the performances we engage in with a bit of the knowing, good natured humor that can come seeing ones self or a former self in it. A bit of laughing with, more than laughing at is good for us. Even a handful of people resorting to the more cruel side of this, mocking, isn't much of a concern. The variety of human who'd find that a good use of their time and energy, and the variety of human being who'd find it entertaining or interesting to participate in deserve each other, and I'm glad they're willing to publicly identify themselves, so the rest of us can leave them to it. I have better things to do, reading or writing being just the beginning of that list.

What's concerning is the crossroads of the period of time we're living in, the degree with which shaming or mocking people reading in public, and the fact that a number of major publications have decided this relatively small phenomenon, in a small corner of social media, deserves attention.

Curiosity has been my savior. As I alluded to earlier, I wasn't cutting school to take the train into NYC for debauchery in the standard sense. I wasn't seeking drugs, chasing sex or the usual kind of foolishness adults fear children and youth would lead to. Those would all come in time, but I didn't need NYC for them. As is usual, they were all introduced and encouraged much closer to home from that alchemic combination of peer pressure, curiosity, and rebellion that was my attempts to trying to figure out who I was, who I was supposed to be, and what livable compromise between the two might be. That requires experimentation. I was riding trains into NYC to go to museums, book stores, record stores and video stores. I was doing the best I could, with what was available to me, to expand my understanding of the world around me, to engage with the things in it that inspire joy and awe. My small town had a library, one I was quite familiar with, but it wasn't the kind of library one could find a copy of Lost Souls in either. I know, because I checked. I also wasn't going to ask the librarian to procure a copy, because that might lead to their discovery of what was in it. I wasn't particularly interested, at the time, of engaging in a conflict about why I might want to read a book not only soaked in blood, but the sweat of sex and desire, and God forbid, semen resulting from queer sex. I just wanted to read the damn book, because someone whose taste I trusted had enjoyed it.

I didn't grow up in the riot of humanity that is NYC. My local pizza place didn't have a view onto a NYC street, the way St. Marks Pizza did. But I knew that riot was out there, that the order and regimentation of my little town didn't have room for it, and many in that town lived in fear of anything that alluded to the existence of the riot beyond. Whether it had meant to or not, the adult world taught me very young, that it paid to be curious about what scared them, for many reasons. The experiences resulting from that curiosity, including no small number of books, taught me how to identify the difference between a boogeyman, the varying forms of madness that drive us to cruelty, and the varieties of pain we cause each other which come from the messy, complicated business of trying to love and respect each other. When I look back on it, that curiosity brought into my life nothing but beauty. It expanded me, my ability to feel humanity in others, because it allowed me to experience and witness different varieties of love, kindness and compassion that I never would have, had I not looked beyond the borders and order of that small town. The pain, terror, discomfort, all of it... these things we associate with being negative, were all either necessary lessons or could only have been avoided by a much larger portion of humanity being curious about them. The unnecessary harms, were all the result of systems built to require restriction of and circumcision of one's humanity for their own gain in status, wealth or power, or so that someone else may gain these.

This is part of why I've developed disgust for the term "culture wars." The conflicts that are siloed within it come down to two things, curiosity and the recognition of others humanity that results from it. I detest the phrase and it inspires this disgust because of the degree it tries to veil this.

As a reader, I'm not unfamiliar with how these ideas about curiosity being a danger work. "Woke" has become a pejorative simply because it describes the results of curiosity about the lives and experiences of other human beings. It can only be a pejorative if one accepts certain traits or experiences render someone less than human, and/or are unable to separate one's humanity from whether they qualify from the love of one god or another. What we are calling "culture wars" are the effort to prevent us from reaching some point where the recognition of our shared humanity shapes the way we organize society more than those things which we can recognize, identify and name, so we can claim they put us outside the experience of humanity, in competition with the efforts to prevent this from being our future. It is by reducing them to this stupid, now empty moniker, we escape confrontation with the reality of the conflict being who it is culture and society recognize as being as human as we are. The effort to prevent that confrontation comes in a few thousand different forms, but this is what it is. The surest way to guarantee this, is to guarantee ignorance, and the surest way to guarantee ignorance to create parameters around what kind of curiosity is acceptable, and what kind of curiosity will be publicly punished, shamed and delegitimized. This is why "woke" is a pejorative, and why when asked to do so, those who hurl it as an insult can't define it. Many of them are themselves too ignorant to understand this is what it is, and the rest are unwilling to be perceived in honestly admitting they believe this curiosity about our fellow human beings must be stamped out.

We can see this as well in "debate," and the way that like "woke," it has had a transmogrification of meaning. It does not mean a dialog which seeks consensus. It's not a coincidence it's meaning is directly tied to competition. A debate is, after all, a competitive event. It has formal rules, moderators who are act as both judges and referees, a system of points and a formal structure related to acceptable topics, which by extension means rules about what kinds of assertions one can make. The entire point of debate is to win.

It's not shocking to me these have been obsessions of so much of the press and political class in the last decade or so. These have been in response to their experiences with and observations of social media, and some of the things social media has brought about. It's important to note, even as I've come down hard on social media, these obsessions with "woke" and "debate" are part of the response to the more positive things it can do.

None of the things that would qualify as consisting of a debate exist on social media. There is, to some very broad degree, moderation. Each platform, site or group within, has rules about how different topics might be approached. There is no system of points, though I guess to some degree one could make the assertion the follower count or responses to specific posts are a system of points. There certainly is no specific topic or much moderation about how one might approach a topic, what assertions they can make. Fact checking is ad hoc, at best. This isn't victory though. No one wins, and one's points, at least in terms of follower count, are not final.

Debate, is frankly boring. There are skills it one can acquire in the study and practice of it that are useful, but it's hard to find a mass of people who are willing to sit down and watch a formal debate, because of how specified topics have to be. It's not a natural form of human communication, by any means, which is why it has to be formalized. "Informal debate" is a competition without rules, wherein the winner in some way humiliates or simply wears down their opponent. If I'm honest, I'm not sure informal debate, as a term or concept should even exist, because I don't think that what it's attempting to describe does exist. "Informal debate" is the attempt to use the facade of dialog to obscure bullying, essentially. It is, by nature, not an attempt to seek consensus and understanding, though dialog can involve the challenging of ideas and assertions in search of consensus, even if that consensus is, "We agree to disagree."

What we're calling the "culture wars" are an assault on any effort which might free us all from the most pervasive, most confining cage we all find ourselves. The cage of convenient and comforting ignorance of ourselves. One can't be achieved without the other, and both are necessary if people are going to accept this confinement, this theft of things we often call precious, our freedom and liberty.

We shouldn't forget the Satanic Panic was the refuge of the lazy, unscrupulous editor, producer, journalist and talk show host. Simultaneous to it, and I'm now sure purposely congruent to it, was the panic about video games and media more generally. Quickly too came a kind of secularization of Satanic Panic, in the form of the PMRC, so thinly veiled an attempt to present itself as the secular as to be laughable. Even as young as I was, it was clear the two shared the same boogeymen as the cheaply printed trade paperback horror novels I was consuming, though the novels at least had the respect to show the smudges of their print and carry the stains of greasy fingers that hand handled them, my own and the others who'd consumed them before me.

I understand now I've been interrogating this period because it was so formative. While being a reader of these texts so many people considered filthy, degenerate, and dangerous that threatened my mortal soul or my intellectual and psychological well being (sometimes both), it lead me to a confrontation with the degree of cognitive dissonance required to live peaceably and harmoniously in this nation and its culture.

It was often books that were the doors enabling me to step into my own humanity. This is not so different from how often a particular discussion of how antagonists and villains are portrayed comes up on social media. There is a baffling tendency among a portion of those who engage with discussions of storytelling, especially related to horror, to assign some kind of moral or psychological rot to anyone who tells stories where the villains or antagonists might be described as "sympathetic," even if it's not that they are meant to inspire sympathy, but understanding. They're not mustache twirling villains, but characters whose motivations are understandable. Maybe we might even sympathize with their motives, but feel what they do in service of those motives is reprehensible. The degree to which a sense of exploration and curiosity seems to have been lost, in favor of creating some sense of moral righteousness in preventing that exploration, is familiar and frightening.

This is, I think, an attempt to hide from ourselves. Everyone wants to believe they're the hero of their own story, and yet, we know we're not really. Most of us, at some point, are the villain in someone's story, and even if we put it in less dramatic fashion, it's an inescapable truth that our story is part of many stories, and one much larger than any of us ever will be. Books, reading, helped make this real for me.

To sit with The Creature of Viktor Frankenstein's creation, is to understand the denial of the most human of needs are the soil in which justifications for the monstrous grow. It's Viktor's own woundedness, the rejection he's experienced from his own father, that he re-enacts on The Creature in the novel. Viktor's inability to know himself, to see himself within the conditions he exists, leads to the creation of The Creature to begin with. But, no matter how deep a sympathy we might feel for The Creature, Frankenstein is a tragedy, in part because it's a novel without a hero.

The Creature wants love, affection, companionship, and its denial leads him to murder, yet The Creature is one of my favorite literary characters. It's not in spite of the fact that he commits murder either, but in concert with the fact that he does. A human being can't conceive of the doom The Creature has been consigned to. Some of the most beautiful passages in the book are The Creature's attempts to convey the loneliness, isolation, the degree to which the circumstances of his creation and consequences of these being eternal. It's heartbreaking, and terrifying, simultaneously and in equal measure. He can't even look to the great equalizer that is death as an end to wretched his condition in the world.

When The Creature murders Elizabeth in response to Viktor denying him a companion, it's horrible and horrifying. It's not random though either. It's not a mistake, without logic or reason. It's a premeditated act. Shelley invites us into identifying with him, then turns the tables. It's not impossible to imagine being driven to the justification of murder, given the circumstances. This doesn't make it any more moral or ethical, so what's horrifying about it is how understandable it is, how human it is.

One of the many things horror reveals is that we are all capable of being monsters. In fact, one of the central theses of the genre is that one of things most as likely to open the door to monstrousness, is our ignorance. Mix in a bit of experience in the world, familiarity with human history, the real life horrors humans commit against each other, and it becomes clear, relatively easily and quickly, the best thing any of us can do is to remain vigilant against the monster we can become. This isn't just the work of Shelley and the horror genre, it's also the work of Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Howard Zinn, James Baldwin, the history of philosophy and many others, isn't it? It's part of our fairy tales and fables as children, but when we get to be adults, it takes some searching, some effort, whether through conventional education or through our individual curiosity to be reminded of it.

I have my own Viktors. We all do. But it's this abiding lesson, from horror, from so much of the rest of literature and storytelling, and the curiosity about human beings and the human condition that I come to the greatest horrors of my life not being those harms committed against me, but those I've committed against others. I have at times been The Creature to my personal Viktors. Loneliness, fury, pain, these are makers of the madness that denies the humanity of others in its demand for vengeance we costume as justice, and the satiating of its need. I've violated that sanctity of others humanity, taking my place in this cycle, becoming the Viktor those I've harmed. In this, I create Creatures, who must then be vigilant against the same self ignorance I've demonstrated. These are the deepest, truest horrors of my life, the harms I've caused others as the result of that ignorance of myself, often encouraged and aided by those who believe there is power in cruelty. I'm not attempting to evade responsibility for my actions or decisions either, they have been mine. I am, however, attempting to express that I understand how easy and convenient it is to accept aid and encouragement in denying the existence of, the need to be vigilant against, The Creature in all of us. I am just as human as anyone else, and the constant pull of curiosity means being constantly reminded of it. Without this regular reaffirmation, it's easy to see how this vigilance might not seems so necessary.

It probably appears I've come down a bit hard on social media, the harms that can result from it, so far. There are positives too though. We underestimate how much our current condition, the state of the nation, come down to its positives. The transmogrification of the word "woke" as an insult, for example. The continued pleading for a willingness to engage in a debate where one doesn't exist as an erasure of the concepts of dialogue and consensus, the banning of books, the legislative and administrative assault on educational materials and curriculums that acknowledge the long, monstrous history of this nation's treatment of anyone it deems Other, especially when it can summon righteousness in deeming them lesser. It is in defense of that ignorance of ourselves, and the inescapable nature of our humanity, with the goal and aim we be incapable of vigilance against, well equipped to keep from becoming, the monster within us.

It's not possible, without hyperbole, to say that the digital revolution and the advent of social media have impacted the effort to preserve this ignorance only. They've impacted the efforts to lessen it too. An almost perfect encapsulation of this has been expressed by Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom with some regularity. She's put forth the idea that much of what we're seeing today, from our government, from what we call "the right," is a punishment against Black women for their part in the radicalization of white women. She's not just speaking about the perception of the right on the rest of the society, but also the perspective most of the "center" and institutions have on the results of this process.

For those of us who find nothing radical (in the way of describing a boogeyman it is so often used) in the effort to reveal ourselves and each other to each other, understanding what she's saying can be served by substituting "revelation" for "radicalization." This revelation has been the result of Black women existing while being Black women and participating in social media. The reality of that existence has been slowly being revealed to white women, making the conditioned state of ignorance of themselves, and the world they live in, impossible to continue without making a choice. By definition, once it's a choice, it's no longer conditioned. It's no longer something imposed by institutions and conditions. The radicalization she speaks of, is the result of whether one chooses curiosity or willful ignorance. It's the result of dialogue, not debate, and that dialogue happens under the condition that consensus is possible, not under the conditions of competition. It's not about seeking a winner. It's about seeking harmony, and a mutual respect for humanity. Black women are being punished by the right for their existence making the idea of consensus possible, at least with a larger portion of white women than before.

This process hasn't just happened between Black women and white women. It's happened across many different boundaries which previously, were much harder to overcome, and in many circles, were considered unsurmountable. What has been described as political polarization, the thing pundits and politicians have been lamenting as they prescribe "debate" as the solution, isn't an accurate description in this light. It is, instead, a description of the choice that stands at the threshold revelation creates. The right is currently aligned with wealth, religion and government, and as is true of the alignment of these throughout human history, it seeks to manipulate and harness the ignorance revelation threatens to dispel. The only acceptable forms of curiosity to power that creates and relies on conditioned ignorance, is curiosity which will help to expand or maintain that power and its alliances. When white women choose curiosity, instead of willful ignorance, books are there as the reward.

Books have been extension of this process, as long as they've existed. Considering how much of the population of the book reading public is women, it's even less surprising this radicalization/revelation of white women is happening. I understand this process, because it's one I've experienced repeatedly, throughout my life. I grew up in a very white world, a world where the conditions of patriarchy were jokingly or minimally acknowledged, at best, the conditions of racism were ignored or washed in soothing fictions, the kind of waking dreams that are the other side of the coin to waking nightmares like Satanic Panic. This repeated process has resulted in a perspective, what we're calling "politics" now, that can only be described as "radical" within the confines of the cognitive dissonance which allows one to state "we are all created equal, with rights that are inherent," and then go about a life where that is so clearly untrue. It is backstopped by just how many people are conditioned into an ignorance of what rights even are.

I didn't sit down with Frankenstein, On The Road, Bradbury, or Baldwin seeking to have the sense of my own dignity, which in legal and political terms is the access and ability to retain and practice rights, tied so inexorably to the dignity of others. It was the result of wanting to know what was in those books. I did sit down with bell hooks, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag, in part to find what parts of the ignorance of that inexorable connection I had yet to confront. I sat down with Angela Davis because it was clear she frightened a lot of bloviating, officiously narrow minded white people. Her work did not disappoint in further revealing to me more opportunities to choose curiosity or willful ignorance. I can't claim I always choose curiosity, but I certainly try. All of this though, is the result of the question, "What's in that book?"

It strikes me now, that being addressed by some of the major news and current events outlets, the infotainment industry, how useful "performative reading" can be to those evangelizing the prison of ignorance of ourselves and each other, and the cruelty it would enact.

I think about the young man that I was, in my twenties, who'd realized he'd been conditioned to have attitudes and ideas about women were denying them the sanctity of their humanity, retarding my ability to have more meaningful relationships with people I cared for deeply and who cared for me, and sought feminist literature as one of the outlets to attempt to escape this conditioned ignorance. Social media was in its infancy at the time. I'd like to say that if I'd been spied and photographed, mocked on social media, because I sat in a coffee shop or a park reading Sontag or bell hooks, my response would have been to even more fervently throw myself into that exploration. It's certainly possible. Spite has driven no small amount of my exploration. It's also possible that being in a period where I was particularly sensitive about my relationship to women and gender, I would have retreated from that particular exploration, and it would have denied me the opportunity to expand myself and my ability to act on the respect for the humanity of people who are women, in a way that would have been very hard to replace. It certainly would have raised the cost of that confrontation with my own ignorance, and this I don't think is ever really a good thing.

From what I understand, this phenomenon of perceiving "performative reading" is right now more concerned with the canon of "Classics." I read Frankenstein as a boy, in part because I wanted people to leave me alone about the fact that I was reading so much "trash." I was reading a "real book" ("Literature," I say, holding my pinky out), as compared to the "garbage" I had become obsessed with. Frankenstein had the dual side effect of producing a curiosity for classic literature, and not finding it in any way odd, special or unusual to read books written by women. It was, immediately, one of my favorite novels. Frankenstein lead to The Haunting of Hill House and opened the door to On The Road, and To Kill A Mockingbird. What reason would I have not to read more novels by women or to scoff at people who said something disparaging about authors who were women, after Hill House and Mockingbird? The enmity toward just how male, white, cis and straight the canon of the "Classics" is deserved. This doesn't require the essentialization or atomization of the experience of reading them, as if the only available experience with them is the one assumed to be found in a classroom lead by yet another white, cis, straight man.

My experience with them was part of what left me open to "non-canon" and the legitimacy of people who weren't white, cis, straight and male. It's easy, and sometimes justified to mock the idea so many of these books are about the trials, alienation, and experiences of people who fit that description. It's definitely worth mocking how narrow The Canon is. The Canon is too white, too male and too heterosexual. That this is true deserves to be mocked. There are things about it that are instructive, and I think even useful to efforts to expand it. Considering how deeply alienation, issues of class and the drive to be able to find fulfillment without sacrificing their autonomy and identity run through that Canon, it seems worth asking what it means that even so many of the people whose privilege should protect them from this are experiencing it. Those novels were part of the progression of coming to see the conditions we're living in are failing basically all of us who aren't quite wealthy, with the ability to be removed from these conditions. We've constructed a society which doesn't seem to have much sense of investment or respect for the dignity of the majority of us who live in it, even as we may experience that disrespect, that refusal to accept our humanity in different ways.

What's concerning about "performative reading," is and isn't about the idea itself. Like so many other things, it's how little recognition there is about how much we face today creating parameters and punishment for curiosity. Is there an issue when it's combined with the rush of the dopamine hit that comes from performing on social media, which paradoxically is what posting about "performative reading" is? Yes. Does the he focus given it by the same variety of outlets who've been incapable of mounting any effective resistance to that boxing in and punishing curiosity add fuel to that fire? Yes. It's handing another weapon to people who are seeking to prevent the revelation this combination of curiosity and reading enables. They are deeply invested in preventing a belief dialogue and consensus are possible in service of the humanity we share, and any recognition of it.

We're living with the evidence of the economic incentives for shame too. There are no shortage of influencers who have made it an economic advantage. It's the stock in trade of people like Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) and Bari Weiss, who began her rise to prominence with her campaigns of disinformation by claiming a long list of Muslim educators were sympathetic to Al Qaeda, and who is now Editor in Chief at CBS News. These are just the most prominent too. There's an entire ecosystem of micro celebrity influencers who are profiting off this grift of using shame and disinformation to create hostility for curiosity. There isn't a female journalist or journalist of color in this country who can't describe the very thin line between mocking, ridicule and shaming that's relatively standard in disagreements on matters of public interest, and the more destructive, genuinely dangerous variety of harassment that's been normalized, with the aid of social media. Anyone who falls outside the narrow boundaries of what's acceptable to Christian white nationalism can tell us how often harassment campaigns leave the confines of the digital. Many of them have.

In these conditions, I find it hard to justify any reason to shame anyone for reading almost anything. There could be valid arguments for a few things though, say for instance The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf, right? It's understandable to question the motives of someone who would be willing to be seen reading these in public.

There are two other truths here too. The first is that despite its importance to organized white supremacy, ninety percent of the country has no idea what The Turner Diaries is. This is part of the conditioned ignorance which aids the concept of privilege, as abused by social media discussion as that term is. What people are not just allowed to be, but are conditioned to be ignorant of white supremacy. Things like turning "woke" into a pejorative and removing books that describe it from schools are about trying to insure the curiosity that breaks that ignorance never forms.

I read The Turner Diaries because I wanted to know what was in it, like basically all the books I've read. What about this particular book was so important to the kinds of violent extremists prone to finding inspiration in it to rob a series of banks to securing funding for their terror plot? What about it inspired the single most deadly act of domestic terrorism in US history? My takeaway wasn't that the book itself is somehow dangerous.

It was too poorly written to be dangerous by itself, in many of the same ways Go Ask Alice was poorly written. The danger of The Turner Diaries was, and is, in its introduction to an audience ignorant enough of the subject matter to want to believe it long before they pick it up. The worst practical claim that can be lodged against it is that within its narrative and pages, those who already want to believe it can find a proposed process by which to try to bring about the race war so much of the organized white supremacist movement bases its delusions on. One would have to be an ignorant fool to believe it would be successful in that effort, as well as not know that the other attempts to follow the plan have failed. Timothy McVeigh was the most successful, in actually achieving one of the steps, and it did not, in fact, cause the United States to descend into chaos and armed conflict, much less chaos and armed conflict along the lines of racial solidarity.

Disappointing as it may be, because it's not something ninety percent of the nation would know, it's then not surprising when both the political and pundit class are incapable or recognizing someone like Charlie Kirk for what he was. Kirk was in the business of insuring a larger population of people would be both ignorant enough to be pre-conditioned to want to believe The Turner Diaries nightmarish promise long before they picked it up. In their ignorance, far too many of them have participated in the lionization of Kirk as a political figure, when he was really just another grifter, with an unusually large head. Kirk would have been as at home in the Klan of the 1920s, which was as much a multi-level marketing scam as it was nativist, racist organization sincerely dedicated to white supremacy. That is to say, he'd have been as at home as anyone with a melon that size attached to their neck could be.

I can't answer whether it would be good if more people, including our politicians and journalists, read The Turner Diaries. There is part of me which hopes it might enable them to recognize the deep seeded racism in the stereotypes and proclamations of bigotry in the next person who attempts to go into Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes variety of business. I have to confess, there is a part of me that questions how many are ignorant enough of the subject matter, and already in some part, waiting really, to become among those who to want to believe in The Turner Diaries.

The antidote to that, is writers like James Baldwin, bell hooks, Ta Nehisi-Coates, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lord and so on... and that's why books like theirs are being removed from libraries.

If the majority of our political and pundit class have read James Baldwin, they did so to satisfy an assignment in the process of earning the badge of legitimacy which precludes good, sensible people from learning too much about white supremacy, so they might not speak to it in a way too well informed. That is, of course, one of the ways one comes to be called "woke" today, which back in those Halcyon days of Satanic Panic, was referred to as "politically correct" (from which Bill Maher took the title of his first show Politically Incorrect, which says pretty much what you need to know about the man). In the struggle of the internal politics of the Democratic Party, it's referred to as "focusing too much on identity politics." Somehow, it seems to escape the requirements of legitimacy to be able to speak to the fact that white supremacists who commit homicide in the commission of bank robberies meant to fund their terrorist aspirations and the one who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, weren't particularly interested in the identities of the people they killed. McVeigh chose to park his rolling weapon of mass destruction as close as he could to the daycare center inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Why might one not want to know too much about the most violent movement and ideology in US history, I wonder? Despite the claims to the contrary by those who have created their sense of political identity around it, and their appeals to a belief in curiosity and openness in their mischaracterization of polarization, the definition of sensible, reasonable, moderated politics in this country, also requires rigorous, targeted constraint of curiosity.

It's this constraint of curiosity which has made the "sensible, reasonable moderate" politics today, so comfortable a bedfellow for the blatant domination politics of the far right, and why I so often find myself in conflict with one, and in an steadfast opposition to the other. I don't believe I am, we are, or the conditions we find ourselves in, represent the apex of human understanding. When I imagine the best future of two hundred years from now, I can only hope that should some researcher or other intrepid soul come across anything like the shape of my thinking on our world today, it is seen in the way I see the timid, half hearted abolitionism of Abraham Lincoln (and so many others of his time) as a product of its time. It may not reflect so well on me, personally, but it will mean theirs is a world far better for human beings than the one we experience today, in no small degree because it has enabled human curiosity. I'll be dead, so I'm not so worried about how it reflects on me or those whose thinking is in agreement with my own today, as they will also be dead. Curiosity has shown me, people of every age and era believe themselves to be in possession of the pinnacle of human knowledge and understanding, and it always looks quaint (at best) when seen from the perspective that makes it the past. This has been at the heart of the failure of the "sensible, reasonable, moderate" politics, in every age and era.

As I hope I've made clear, "performative reading" really just became and excuse to talk about the way curiosity is treated in the United States. The trend of recognizing "performative reading" began innocently enough, but the ease with which it will be deployed by people like Fuentes and Chaya Raichik, who has knowingly continued her anti-LBGTQ disinformation campaign, even when it resulted in things like bomb threats to children's hospitals. It will be just another arrow in the quill of those who seek to encourage and weaponize this ignorance of ourselves and each other. I have no doubt, should it rise to recognition enough, people like them will encourage confrontations with people reading any book they decide should be considered an act of performative reading.

It's because public shaming is powerful tool that we should be thoughtful and thorough in our considerations of how to use it. No power should be wielded without a thorough consideration of its responsibilities, and the power of public shaming is now in the hands of the public. Now more than ever, considering what we've come to know about the tech companies through which this shaming must be performed, the billionaires who own them, and the history they have where encouraging and empowering those who faithfully spread the gospel of conditioned ignorance and the power of cruelty. The internet has the capacity to stand next to the printing press in the most revelatory technologies in human history, but the thirst for wealth and the power that comes with it is quickly proving it can also be a tool to throw us into a state of ignorance not seen since the Dark Ages. The result is a rapidly decreasing efficacy in its ability as a tool to enable the necessary confrontation with ignorance which opens the door to further curiosity, and instead to be a tool adding barriers and locks to it.

It doesn't matter whether the curiosity one indulges is related to civilization shaping ideas, like the history of infectious disease or so banal as what movies may be available to watch six months from now, there is little difference in how much effort effort must be exerted to delineate the true from the false. Economically, it is more rewarding to indulge falsity than truth, because truthfulness results from determination, which inherently requires time. Verification of truth takes time. Fallacies meant to soothe conditioned ignorance don't. Add to this the invention of generative AI and its increasing efficacy at erasing markers between the human and the synthetic, and the ability of power to create, hold and maintain a state of conditioned ignorance expands at an exponential rate. Like many others, I don't necessarily believe human beings will readily accept the product of generative AI when given a choice, unless the cost of that choice in time and effort is too high. The evidence of recent history demonstrates that to trust the tech companies to care about how the policies governing their products effect the cost of delineating between truth and fallacy is no more rational than believing they're lizard people. Generative AI is not effective at reliably producing accurate summarizations of information, but it is capable of generating it information, accurate or not, at a rate which will dwarf the one which has already exponentially increased the cost in time and effort of attempting to delineate between the true and the false.

I am somehow unable to gather the sense of urgency for individuals performing a false curiosity in public space that I feel in watching the cost of rewards for sincere curiosity skyrocket, and only be available to those who can afford it or who are superhuman. It is hard enough now, to be able to find sources of information which are engaging in the rigor of presenting the public with accurate information. This will only become exponentially harder, as tech billionaires continue to see generative AI as a cash cow. They already have the ability to change what is presented to the public, based on their often absurd and downright weird whims, through what we euphemistically call "the algorithm." What is going to happen when they are able to control the production of what is presented to the public too? Gen AI social media accounts, presenting gen AI ads for gen AI books, all overseen by the same tech billionaires or whomever they can pay to oversee their interests.

I know I'm not the only one who is constantly adjusting their relationship to the digital realm and social media as a tool of revelation, and has begun retreating to the dated technology of the book, more and more. I can't even rely on ebooks being available to me in perpetuity, because even if I pay for them, I'm paying for a license to access them through a platform owned by a company that could decide it's not in their interest to continue paying for licenses. We're even seeing gen AIs effects on the market for physical books. A person who hasn't had the inclination to dedicated the time to writing a book well, isn't going to have the inclination, the experience or skills to thoroughly fact check their gen AI produced book. The desire to produce a book through use of gen AI is in direct opposition to these things. Part of the reason writing a book is worth doing is because it's difficult. People who use gen AI can produce what would suffice to be marketed as a book, in a few hours. Jeff Bezos doesn't care, as long as he gets his cut, whether accuracy has anything to do with the process, and this is clear in a quick scroll through Amazon's current book market.

Let's take this a step further. Elon Musk is on track to be he world's first trillionaire. What happens if, in a few years, a writer produces a book full of investigating reporting about Musk that doesn't paint him in so positive a light? Considering he's a trillionaire, how many gen AI social media accounts, videos, images, audio and books contradicting that reporting can he get for say... seven million dollars? Understand, seven million sounds like a lot of money to you or I, but Musk is on track to be a trillionaire. He's a billionaire now. Does Musk seem the kind of person who'd be beyond spending seven, eight, ten or twelve million dollars to flood the information environment to the point it drowns the accurate, pain staking research out? Does this variety of behavior seem beyond the likes of Peter Thiel, and his apocalyptic vision of the world?

The problems of social media, combined with the growing campaign to create both faith and reliance on AI, has me concerned about where I am going to be able to turn for those confrontations with my own ignorance, the conditions and conditioning which provide support for it. What exactly will be the method to discern the difference between a book someone wanted to write, needed to write, the desire to participate in the long history of our drive to reveal ourselves, our world and each other to each other, and the equivalent of millions of books that are the equivalent of a digitally enabled Go Ask Alice, whose authorship came with no real understanding or desire to engage with the humanity that is behind the claimed reason for the book to exist?

This is why I began this piece with an experience of reading On The Road. In the years since its release, success, and resulting canonization, it has been accurately recognized as a work, which like so much the Canon of Great American Books, was written by someone whose experience in life was shaped by the privilege of being male, cisgender and white and at least being able to pass for heterosexual. These are incontrovertible facts. I know this because curiosity lead me to the book, then to continue to engage with the criticisms of it, and the canon more generally. Curiosity enabled me to hear those criticisms, of the On The Road, and continue to engage with what they mean, what the effect of these things is on the world I live in. These are important confrontations with the conditioned ignorance I was raised in, and so much of our world supports. I am as grateful for those who've taken the time to think through and practice their ability to record well considered and thoughtful criticisms, as I am for the novel itself.

What this has given me, is a more complex, nuanced understanding of the book, the time of the experiences it chronicles, the time it was introduced, the world that is commenting on the book today, myself, and my relationship to all of that.

Even this though, misses the curiosity which drives the novel, and its summation. It is curiosity (at least in part) which causes this looking back, the ability to come to know ourselves today, through understanding who we were, in our interactions and engagements with other people. Curiosity is the difference between learning from the past and the toxic miasma which of nostalgia. It is this toxic miasma which makes something like Make America Great Again seem compelling, because it precludes asking, "When, exactly, is the 'again' you're trying to bring back? When, exactly, do you perceive America as having been great?"

It is in the same way On The Road is criticized for its romanticism, the curiosity driving the novel, we see things like the humanities denigrated as fields of study and education. The humanities, are just that, the study of human beings and our humanity. This act of curiosity about each other, can have a result that isn't just the knowledge, expertise, certification gained by a degree.

In this environment, this landscape, the condition we now find ourselves, I don't care about "performative reading." I don't even care that there was a minor trend around it.

I care that so few people with any amount of power or platform seem to be willing to think and talk about curiosity with any sincerity and sense of urgency, and because of the conditions and environment in which we exist, make "performative reading" something major publications are publishing articles about instead.