“How many times as black men have we heard something before and had to bite our tongues?”
DeRon Cash, his tattooed forearms resting on his knees, curled a paperback revered by the late Nipsey Hussle in his hand. He didn’t really mean it as a question — and the other black men huddled around a coffee table in Boyle Heights knew not to answer.
Once a month, Cash and a group of men come together for The Marathon Book Club — one of several chapters across the country that were founded after Hussle was killed outside his South Los Angeles clothing store in March.
Any skilled endeavour entails concentration, but chess is unusual in requiring that we concentrate not for a few minutes at a time, but for several hours at a time, within tournaments, for days at a time, and within careers, for years at a time. Concentration is the sine qua non of the chess experience.
In chess, concentration usually unfolds in quick succession through perceiving, desiring and searching. But it’s recursive, so I often find something I didn’t expect in a way that leads me to see my position differently and want something else from it. My perception is pre-patterned through years of experience, so I don’t see one square or piece at a time. Instead, I see the whole position as a situation featuring relationships between pieces in familiar strategic contexts; a castled king, a fianchettoed bishop, a misplaced knight, an isolated pawn; it’s a kind of conceptual grammar. The meaning of the position is embedded in those patterns, partly revealed and partly concealed, and my search to do the right thing feels fundamentally aesthetic in nature.
The elder of the two is an edited volume on American literature as world literature. In his introduction, Di Leo states that he doesn’t mean this in the obvious, unobjectionable sense that American novels are read throughout the world, sometimes in the original as well as in translation, and that they have an international status and influence far beyond that of, say, Estonian literature. He tells us he means “world,” “American,” and “literature” in a more complicated way, which I have several problems with, particularly with his indiscriminate use of the word “literature.” But rather than start this review on a combative note, let me first describe some of the more satisfying contributions to this volume before circling back to the unsatisfying introduction, and Di Leo’s own provocatively titled essay, “Who Needs American Literature?” (What follows is drive-by criticism that can’t do justice to the complexity of these essays.)
The Missing Course is part education theory, part reflection on labor, part toolkit. Gooblar critically diagnoses how teaching gets done (or doesn’t) in modern colleges and universities, but he goes beyond critique, offering a series of activities, approaches, and strategies that instructors can implement. His wise and necessary book is a long defense of the idea that a university can be a site of the transformation of self and society. A profound sense of care motivates it: “The students are the material,” and to teach well is to practice “the mysterious art of helping people change.”