Thoughts on Tony Soprano

I'm finally getting around to watching "The Sopranos," a decade after the show's peak in popularity and seven years since the series went to sleep with the fishes. I grew up loving "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather" (not to mention films like "Moonstruck" with funny and spot-on Italian-American characters who aren't in the mob), so it's about time I catch up with Tony Soprano and company.  In no particular order, some reactions:

• Tony Soprano strikes me as somehow more monstrous and hard to like than the so-called anti-heroes his character inspired (Walter White, Don Draper, pretty much anybody on "The Wire") on other marquee programs. Tony's a coarse bully. Walter White and Don Draper do some despicable shit but Tony is an even worse husband. He's got Catholic guilt but no remorse. His guilt is all sub-conscious; he has freaky dreams but never hesitates to kill, hurt, or embarrass people with less power than him.
• He's not really respected as much as feared. His "friends" are sycophants; even the goons who are related to him maneuver against him when they sense vulnerability or when the anger and resentment against him boils over.  (Possible exception: Silvio)
• Compared to other tv/movie mobsters, this group is pretty pathetic. Nobody is as glamorous as Vito or Michael Corleone. They hang out at a dumpy stripclub, struggle to "pass" anytime they're around civilians. They have monetary mobility but rarely cultural mobility. They don't know how to code switch when they go to a college campus or a charity function. I'm not saying their working-class ethos makes them pathetic--it's their lack of self-awareness. Lots of working-class people, both real and fictional, are much savvier and more flexible than Tony Soprano et al.
• Tony's life is ugly. He and his crew engage in domestic violence (in some cases with both their wives and their mistresses), abuse drugs, and suffer profound, visible, pyschic damage as a result of being criminals. This isn't just like Michael Corleone looking sad after killing his brother or even Henry Hill acting all paranoid and red-eyed as he keeps a look-out for helicopters and makes sauce. It goes beyond that. In "The Sopranos," we get prolonged images of, say, Christopher shooting up and Tony sitting in therapy. Like I said, they don't express any remorse, but we see the damage and destruction constantly. Even if he wears expensive clothes, Tony Soprano does NOT make this life look desirable.
• Last thing: James Gandolfini was brilliant in the role. The strained breathing, the compulsive eating, the non-verbal reactions to others...has anybody ever embodied a character this well? All the stylized camera work and heavy-handed symbolism (eggs! birds! prosciutto!...every object signifies something, as if David Chase had Joseph Campbell on his desk every time he wrote a script) help the cause but Gandolfini's acting was perfect. I think "The Wire" boasted better, more consistent writing. "Breaking Bad" is more addictive. But Tony Soprano was a vivid, compelling, despicable person thanks to brilliant, brilliant acting.

Groggily Returning to Motown

Here's a surreal experience. I dozed during part of my flight back home yesterday. I had also popped a couple Aleves to combat some neck pain from sleeping wrong in Savannah (get off my lawn!). So I was groggy and let most everybody get off the plane before me. Upon stepping off the plane onto the jetbridge, I saw my nephew Ali standing there behind an empty wheelchair.  He looks at me and says, want a ride Uncle Bill?

Now, Ali works at the airport assisting seniors and others who need help going from gate-to-gate, but I wasn't thinking about that. For a split second, I thought the plane had gone down and this was my journey to the afterlife. Ali was like some kind of Anubis figure, accompanying me as I passed. I came back to reality and realized he was just working.

Savannah Part 2

It's a rainy and humid Sunday in Savannah. Perfect day for soul food at the United House of Prayer for all People, a church that has its own cafeteria, the Masada Cafe. Soul food places better have all the sides: greens, mac-n-cheese, candied yams, corn bread. Masada has all of the above and more, including "red rice," already spiced but begging for gravy. I had the meatloaf, fork soft, not too salty, and perfectly paired with the sweetness of the yams.

Savannah

At the WPA workshop and conference, the annual gathering of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, we drink wine courtesy of textbook publishers, share research and ideas, and chat with people we went to grad school with. It's Savannah, so there's shrimp and grits to be had too. Last night after sundown, the heat but not the humidity having lessened, two friends and I walked around old Savannah, through gothic-looking cemeteries and squares, by gigantic homes with even more gigantic front porches, and down to the river, where an electric guitar called us into a place called the Bayou Cafe. A trio, never caught their name, was playing the blues, guitar, bass, and drums. Three young guys, locked in, amps turned way up, wailing, at a place with no cover charge. Behind the band, through a window, you could see a riverboat on the Savannah. They did a version of the Stones' "Monkey Man," with no piano or rhythm guitar, their ax guy recreating the slide guitar parts on his regular electric. Wild.

Change of Venue

I've been going down to my office at the University most every weekday. Days when my program faculty are grading placement exams are really the only days I need to be there, but I've been meeting with various folks about the curriculum of our honors writing classes, working on some scheduling issues, brainstorming programming for the Writing Center this year, and doing a bunch of other administrative things.  It's just easier to be present than to figure out how to do these things at home, plus there's something about just being present.

Today, though, a nice change of pace.  I'm at home waiting for a contractor to come give an estimate on laying a new front porch (really, more of a stoop).  So I'm doing some writing at the dining room table, plus making black bean burgers from scratch, and contemplating a bike ride later this afternoon, if it's not too hot.  I'll likely spend a little time getting organized for my trip to Savannah, Georgia, later this week for the Writing Program Administrators conference.  Good to smell the veggie burgers baking, good to have a ceiling fan and a snoring dog nearby, good to get back to the writing.

6 Burgers: 2 cans of black beans, 2 eggs, big onion, big carrot, garlic, handful of panko bread crumbs, salt, coarse pepper, parsley, generous squirt of mustard. Blend well, form patties, bake at 375 for thirty minutes or so.

A Lot Of People Won't Get No Justice Tonight

Logging onto Facebook makes it impossible to ignore last night's Trayvon Martin verdict. And while the vast majority of my Facebook friends see the verdict as a gross miscarriage of justice, the sad truth is that we live in a country that values vigilantes and guns and denies racism. By all accounts, George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin around the neighborhood because Trayvon looked suspicious. We live in a country that wants Zimmerman to be armed, a country that's going to provide Zimmerman with niches in which he'll get rich and famous. Trayvon Martin is dead and now we can watch Zimmerman earn six-figures at speaking engagements at gun conventions. How many days until Zimmerman has a book deal?

Re-Entry

Coming back home hasn't been easy. I miss the surprises of the Middle East, the sensations, newness, and pleasant hardships that come from distance. The rush and push of airports and metro stations. The bread and zaatar and coffee. For the past month I've walked slowly through life at home and on campus and in Detroit. I've watched too much television, had too many migraines, and eaten too much shitty American food. If I say some things out loud, maybe I'll do them. I'm going to finish my book about Lebanon that I've started and stopped writing too many times to count now, and then I'm going to try to publish it. I'm going to lose a lot of weight. I'm fifty pounds heavier than I was when I moved back to Michigan in 2005 and even then I was fat. Blogging's going to be part of my day-to-day life once again. Re-entry has taken a month. That's too long. I'm back.

These Are Days

Natalie Merchant performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra last night. Her setlist emphasized her more recent recordings of sleepy folks songs as opposed to songs she made famous (to me anyway) while fronting the 10,000 Maniacs in the 1980s and early 1990s. She forgot lyrics a few times (she performs sporadically) but the DSO sounded great and her music with and without the Maniacs has always been compelling and pleasant. That word, pleasant, sounds like faint praise but it's not. She has a warm, comforting voice that as much as her lyrics make her songs seem much more like poems. Orchestral arrangements of her songs make all kinds of sense.

A final thirty-minute set without the orchestra found Natalie with her pianist and guitarist doing an unplugged set of songs that people came to hear: These are Days (easily the most recognizable 10,000 Maniacs song) and solo tracks like Carnival. Plus, fun, on-the-fly snippets of motown oldies. It was an unabashedly laid-back, joyful way to end her performance. She reminisced about opening for R.E.M. decades ago at a Michigan show on the evening of her birthday and being given a cake on stage by Michael Stipe. She introduced "These are Days" by telling the audience it was a song they loved in their dorm rooms back in Ann Arbor.

Natalie and the audience owned the nostalgia in equal parts.

Present company included. 10,000 Maniacs was my first concert. Summer, 1989, with Tim Finn of Split Enz as opening act. At Nautica Flats in Cleveland, Natalie sang most of In My Tribe and Blind Man's Zoo, the two classic Maniacs records. I saw them again later that year and once more, a couple years later in college. Their songs were topical (learning disabilities, child abuse) but also imagistic ("he kicked a tumbleweed and his mother called him home, when the Arizona moon met the Arizona sun"), wrought and smart and affecting without seeming too pretentious, when I was 15 and found appealing the idea of a rock band with a worldview and when I was 19 and that worldview seemed less likely to mean life would forever feel alienating. 1992 was a moment, maybe because there was a democrat in the white house for the first time since I was in first grade. Natalie sang a duet with Michael Stipe at Bill Clinton's inauguration and rock stars were writing songs about Anita Hill and Buddhism and touting feminism and authenticity in Rolling Stone.

Nicole and I were talking about concerts before the Natalie Merchant show this week and I commented that circa 1993, if certain bands came to Detroit, it was only a question of who I'd go with. Kids from dorm (in Detroit, not Ann Arbor), maybe my pal from high school, Jason, who lived across town. It was rare that a show would be more than $15 or $20 and a couple hundred saved from slinging Taco Bell all summer or a work-study check from the school paper could cover that no problem.

Somehow Natalie's flawed show with the symphony captured both a collective, personal present and collective, personal past. The sleepy present in her main set, the freewheeling past in her encore.

Hey Jack, now for the tricky part: / When you were the brightest star, who were the shadows? Of the San Francisco beat boys, you were the favorite. / Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days.

a new beginning...

here is the new blog, which I'll be updating live from the United Arab Emirates for the next 5 months:

http://shemesterinsharjah.blogspot.com

We're hiring...

Asst Professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric

Job Summary

Work-Title: Assistant Professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric
Department: College of Arts, Sciences, & Letters-Language, Culture, & Communications
FLSA: Exempt
Posting Dates: September 26, 2012-November 26, 2012
Go here to apply:
http://umjobs.org/search


The University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-Dearborn) is one of the three campuses of the University of Michigan. UM-Dearborn, a comprehensive university offering high quality undergraduate, graduate, professional and continuing education to residents of southeastern Michigan, and attracts more than 9,000 students. Our faculty comes from respected universities and doctoral programs, are recognized for excellence in research and teaching, and are active in professional and academic service roles in their respective fields. US News and World Report recently recognized our campus as a Best Regional University.

The campus is located on 200 acres of the original Henry Ford Estate. Dearborn is centrally located within one of America's largest business regions. The geographically diverse area provides faculty with a variety of urban, suburban, and rural areas within a reasonable commute, including Detroit, Detroit suburbs, and Ann Arbor.

Job Description:
The Department of Language, Culture & Communication (Composition & Rhetoric Discipline) invites applications for a tenure-track, assistant professor of Multicultural or Multilingual Writing and Rhetoric faculty position, starting September 1, 2013. Funding for this position has been approved.

The Department of Language, Culture & Communication has 17 faculty members representing Composition & Rhetoric, Public Communication & Culture Studies, Journalism & Screen Studies, Linguistics, and Modern & Classical Languages. The Composition & Rhetoric discipline has 7 faculty members and has responsibility for the college-wide Writing Program and Certificate in Writing.

Qualifications:
All candidates with a primary interest in composition in multicultural or multilingual writing and rhetoric are invited to apply. Secondary areas of interest may include multicultural literacies, contrastive rhetorics, teaching in global contexts, transnational rhetorics and literacies, rhetorics of race and ethnicity, or related secondary areas.

Candidates must have a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric or closely related field in hand by 9/1/13 and must show demonstrated achievement in scholarship and potential for publications in the areas of multicultural or multilingual writing and rhetoric. Experience teaching writing at the collegiate level is required. Evidence of familiarity with best practices in the teaching of writing, including within multilingual or multicultural contexts and using computer-mediated pedagogies, is highly desirable.

In addition to teaching writing and rhetoric courses at the introductory and upper levels, the candidate will be expected to pursue an active scholarly agenda, engage in curriculum and program development within area of expertise, and contribute to undergraduate writing certificate program and first-year writing program. We especially welcome applicants who bring culturally and theoretically diverse perspectives to their research and teaching practices.

The University of Michigan - Dearborn is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic faculty committed to teaching and working in a multi-cultural environment. We are an equal access/equal opportunity employer and campus community, and do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, color, marital status, age, national origin, disability, veteran or marital status, sexual orientation, or genetic information.

Currently this classification is considered exempt in compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Note: Please make sure to upload all your application materials as one single PDF file.

U-M EEO/AA Statement

The University of Michigan is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.

Peanuts

Jesse 2009

I find myself wandering through Patti Smith’s “Camera Solo,” the exhibition of the singer-poet-artist’s black and white Polaroids at the Detroit Institute of Arts.  My favorite Patti Smith songs play in my head, “Ask the Angels,” “Redondo Beach,” as I look at the everyday and the extraordinary.  Like her muse, the late Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith has a fetish for everyday objects and she captures simple, decontextualized, sometimes cold images of slippers, pieces of jewelry, and other ephemera owned by persons Smith admires or loves.  “I suppose it’s my way of taking their portraits,” she writes.

The exhibition features numerous photographs of literary beds: John Keats, Victor Hugo, Virginia Woolf, the poet and punk rock icon Jim Carroll, with whom Smith shared a bed.  We see their beds, sheets crisp, undisturbed, empty forever.  Smith: “I like to take pictures of beds.  We have extraordinary things happen in beds.  We sleep, conceive.  We dream.  We make love.  We are ill in our beds.  We recuperate.  So our beds are very important in our lives.”

Many of us die in bed too.  Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist with whom Smith lived in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, first as a lover and then as a collaborator, died in a hospital bed in 1989.  Smith’s beautiful memoir Just Kids, deserving winner of a National Book Award among other accolades, narrates their complex relationship and exists as a eulogy and encomium to her soul mate.

Mapplethorpe’s life and death hover over Smith’s work, her memoir obviously, but also her lilting and vital new record “Banga,” and certainly the pictures of beds that are part of “Camera Solo.”  Lonely images of beds, resting places if you will, are litanies of Smith’s deceased inspirations.  Smith sings to Detroiters walking through her exhibition, Where would I be without Keats, without Hugo, without Woolf?  Jim Carroll’s most famous song was called “People Who Died,” also a litany of the dead.  Carroll didn’t die in bed, but rather is said to have died at his desk, writing.  All of this hovers as well.

No matter how strong the invocation of Mapplethorpe, “Camera Solo” is never maudlin; beds are a more affirming motif than, say, gravestones.  Yet the empty beds suggest coffins with their crisp linens and their extravagant austerity.

Iconic images of beds usually feature persons in them.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their love-in.  The grandparents in the first Willy Wonka movie.  Most of Patti Smith’s beds are empty, their owners no longer in need of them.

One notable exception is “Jesse, 2009,” Patti Smith’s photograph of her daughter reclining in bed, a shy, melancholy look on her face.  Jesse wears a tank top as white as the three pillows propped in the photograph’s background.  She shares her mother’s androgynous style, a style made famous in the album covers shot by Robert Mapplethorpe.  The photograph’s composition is Cartesian, vertical creases on the sheets, a horizontal headboard, but Jesse’s body is sclerotic, sprawled atop the sheets, too human to conform to the object’s coordinates.

The photograph is the most humane image in “Camera Solo,” and not only because it’s one of the few to depict a person.  The photograph is life itself and changes the resonance of the bed motif.  Toward the end of Just Kids, Smith describes her final encounters with Mapplethorpe, who died when Jesse was a toddler.  Smith returns to New York from her adopted home in Michigan, Jesse in tow, to visit the dying Mapplethorpe.  One of his last photographs of Smith is a picture of her holding Jesse.  Part of Smith’s life, slipping away, another part only beginning.

Indeed, our beds are important in our lives, and in our deaths too.  “Camera Solo,” another gift from Smith, celebrates the breathing.  I’m glad I wandered.

Unsolicited Advice

Not that they've asked me or anything, but here are my suggestions for the DNC:

At your convention, don't mention the names Romney and Ryan.  Resist the temptation to discuss the dude who doesn't think you can get pregnant from rape and the dude who held the congressional hearings into the loyalty of American Muslims.  Don't talk about Clint Eastwood or the chair.

You don't have to take silly ideas seriously.

Show the country that you are the big boys with big ideas, the party that doesn't care if gay people get married, the party that believes that church groups are less equipped to handle natural disasters than the federal government, the party that wants to maintain safety nets for the poor and old.

The Republicans used their convention as a chance to criticize Obama (I get it, that's what the opposition party does when running against an incumbent.)  Use your convention as a chance to articulate ideas. Not opinions, not silly stuff, not pandering, not religious dogma.  Ideas.

By The Numbers

Two weeks until my summer class begins, and I'm trying to get in as much work on my scholarly writing as I possibly can.  I write in my basement office.  It's cool down here, which is a blessing on days like today that are in the high '90s.  My dog sleeps on the room's futon.  My desk is an over-sized old library table.  What else is in the room?  A University of Michigan welcome mat.  A laminated "Clergy" sign (meant to put on the dashboard of a car parked illegally) that was in the glove compartment of the first car I ever bought (from a priest).  A framed front page of the Youngstown Vindicator from August 14, 1945 ("Japanese Surrender; WWII Ends"). 

What else?

Number of pictures of dogs playing poker...3
Number of images of St. Anthony...2
Number of images of Mary...2 (little knic knac of Pieta; pic of Our Lady of Barea)
Number of records and CDs...hundreds and hundreds
Number of images of dogs...29 (about half of them are playing poker)
Number of things that used to belong to any of my four grandparents...7

I've gotta hang up the flags we bought in the Middle East.  There's not enough stuff on the walls yet.

Hitch

Good evening.

Cable's been running Alfred Hitchcock films in heavy rotation and I've managed to see several for the first time and several I haven't seen for years.  I caught "Family Plot" and "The Trouble with Harry" this weekend.  They prove that he not only can do dark humor but also outright parody.  The former in particular is every bit as funny a Hitchcock homage as fellow 1970s comedies like "Silver Streak" and "Foul Play."  Great cast too: Babara Harris, Karen Black, Bruce Dern, and lots of very familiar character actors.  I guess this is a drop-off for a guy who directed Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart a bunch of times, but, still, pretty cool.  Meanwhile, "The Trouble with Harry" is absurd and whimsical.  Both are fun and generate real laughs.

Also managed to DVR and watch "Rear Window" and "Vertigo," two of his most famous.  Both are so stylish and cool-looking, it's easy to forget that they are also very very suspenseful.

A bunch more on the DVR, so I've got lot of reason to put off some schoolwork.

X

I taught The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my English 327 class this past term.  I've always found the text interesting and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, important, but this time reading it was a deeply affecting experience.  Conversion plays such a profound role in the narrative.  This time I read the text as a story of changing who you are.  It's fundamentally possible to do just that, the book suggests.

"The young...are the only hope that America has.  The rest of us have always been living in a lie."

"Anything I do today, I regard as urgent."

And his representation of the Middle East, the site of Malcolm's second great converstion, resonated:

"Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land."

Indeed, when Malcolm leaves the U.S. for the first time, he's struck by comparative friendliness.  Even in Germany, en route to the Arab world, he sees this change:

"We went into a lot of shops and stores, looking more than intending to buy anything.  We'd walk in, any store, every store, and it would be Hello!  People who never saw you before, and knew you were strangers.  And the same cordiality when we left, without buying anything.  In America, you walk in a store and spend a hundred dollars, and leave, and you're still a stranger.  Both you and the clerks act as though you're doing each other a favor."

From USA Today

Sigh.

Budgets

In between classes with little time to think or convince myself to maintain some semblance of optimism, but let me just take a moment to say that the proposed budgets coming out of Washington and Lansing are atrocious. When you're too far to the right for the U.S. Catholic Bishops, Rep. Ryan, you've wandered from the herd my friend. A significant portion of the country (and perhaps the state too) want to dismantle not only safety nets and social service networks but also the entire public sector and public sphere. How can you look around and not conclude that this place sucks?

Heard Outside the Courthouse

Dropping off some papers for Nicole, I overheard the following conversation among two men and one woman who were enjoying a cigarette break outside of an area courthouse.

Woman (pointing at the building): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Man #1 (shaking his head): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Man #2 (nodding his head): "That place didn't do shit for me."

Reading Locally

I found myself in St. Louis last month, wandering downtown streets with locals, NCAA basketball fans, and fellow attendees of a conference for college writing teachers. Never one to pass an indie bookstore, I stopped at Left Bank Books where I noticed a sign proclaiming “Buy locally, read globally.”

It’s not bad advice.

And yet I tend to advocate for reading locally too. I like local writers. I also like writers who write about the physical spaces and places I know. Those who write about my hometown and adopted hometowns, map the geographies where I too have walked, and imagine what the place is and how it means. They do the crucial, intellectual, and affective work of making the familiar unfamiliar. They write their own versions of a place and invite me to do the same.

At 17, in love with Kerouac, my favorite sequence in On The Road was Sal’s bus ride through my home state: “[W]e got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight across.” Ashtabula, just an hour north of Youngstown, my hometown. Sal doesn’t even get off the bus in Northeast Ohio, but this mention of the local suggested transcendence to the young me.

Somehow this affinity for Kerouac’s Ohio allusion led me to an anthology called Youngstown Poetry put out by the great Pig Iron Press, a local institution, a legendary small (and thoroughly local) press. Talk about buying and reading locally. The Pig Iron volume contained “local” writers, which was great and all, but what I loved was the text itself: the poetry of steel mills, the poetry of Italian neighborhoods and sausage sandwiches and Catholicism, the poetry of Mill Creek Park. The poems themselves, some by locals and some by transplants, put this familiar place in a whole new context.

At 19, I took a community-based poetry-writing workshop at the Pig Iron facilities. Other participants were a generation or two older than me, but I felt at home at that local place: part Kinko’s, part lending library, part artist’s studio. The press called downtown Youngstown home, sitting a block or two from Cedar’s, my favorite bar in town. Pig Iron welcomed anyone committed to reading (and writing) locally.

Kerouac and the Youngstown poets started my lifelong affair with book and poems and songs about the idiosyncratic places I loved due to circumstance and quirk. The text need not name the place. Youngstown’s own Stiv Bators never mentioned, in my recollection anyway, Youngstown, but when I listened to his most notorious band the Dead Boys I knew that he too was a product of the Catholic Schools of my diocese. When the Dead Boys repeated the line “ain’t no loser” in their punk classic “Sonic Reducer,” the words wrote their own story about the place—a transgressive and loud narrative, the narrative I needed to hear.

But the literature of place, the work that I’m calling “local,” isn’t really about places. Those poems, songs, and novels are about me and my relationship, as a reader and a human being, to that place. Stiv’s not singing about Youngstown. Kerouac’s not writing about northeast Ohio. Though it’s called “Youngstown,” even Bruce Springsteen’s ode to the city of my birth has less to do with the events the song narrates and more to do with audience members, like me, who have a reference point. About the time Springsteen was writing the words “I’m sinking down, here darlin’ in Youngstown,” I was trying to scrape together the money to put down the deposit on the starter kit for new door-to-door knife salesmen, and, yes, working at a fast food joint in Youngstown. Surely you see that Springsteen was writing about me.

My affective relationship with places led me to great local work (and great local work stoked my affective relationship with places) even as my geographies changed. A few years later, when Detroit felt like home, the poet Jim Daniels and his verse about assembly lines and working-class auto workers in and around the Motor City held great appeal. I loved spotting names of streets I cruised and the narrators—especially in Punching Out, Daniels’ great cycle of poems about the reluctant young auto worker Digger—whose voices sounded like people I knew.

And I loved that poetry especially when I moved away from Detroit for the first and only time I’ve ever done that, in the mid-1990s. Homesick, I was missing Detroit and Detroiters and, yes, Daniels was writing for me. And I was still reading locally, even though I was miles from Michigan.

From Jim Daniels to Philip Levine, currently our nation’s Poet Laureate but I’ll always think of him as a local guy. Eventually the pulpy procedurals by the great Detroit crime novelist Elmore Leonard. Later still, the ultraviolent blaxploitation of Donald Goines, whose Detroit novels Whoreson and Dopefiend proved as influential in the hip hop world as Scarface and George Clinton. Reading locally.

I took temporary leave of Detroit last year, spending a year teaching and writing in Beirut, Lebanon. Another adopted hometown, another place I love. There, I read in translation the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote in exile in Beirut for many years and was concerned with place for so many important reasons. In his poems of Palestinian liberation, Darwish imagined a place whose very existence is often denied. Whose work could possibly underscore any better the need to imagine locales and speak to readers who share a complex affinity and connection to a place? His work wasn’t about Palestine. It was about his readers. I can’t claim to understand how it feels to be Palestinian, but I know how it feels to read one’s way into a new relationship with a place.

I just finished Annia Ciezadlo’s fantastic memoir Day of Honey, her story of being a war correspondent first in Iraq and then in Lebanon. More specifically, in Beirut. More specifically, in Ras Beirut, living at one point around the corner from the building where I lived in the Hamra neighborhood during my year abroad. Late in her memoir, she recalls a period of intense sectarian violence in Summer, 2008, and recalls the streetfights that took place on my block, even mentioning my building, where she visited the residents taking shelter in the basement.

These passages were riveting to me, not due to the subject matter, but because of that familiarity, albeit a familiarity that was challenged and recast as I imagined and remembered the place anew.

Reading globally? Maybe. As much as I love the steel mill poetry of Youngstown and the dirty crime fiction of Detroit, I’m increasingly drawn to non-fiction about the Arab world. A space on the other side of the globe, my most distant homeplace. My goodreads.com booklist suggests an eclectic, broad array of reading material. But so many of those books, so many of my own idiosyncratic obsessions (punk rock, working-class poetry, the Beats, the Middle East) have much to do with my shifting localness. Of all the things for which I’m thankful, some of the most profound blessings have been calling multiple places home and discovering writers who create place-based work that’s just for me.

Buy locally, read locally. Because it's all about you.