 Good morning, Hiccups, dudes. A quick note, we will be on tour this weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hope to see lots of you. They're links to tickets in the doobly-doo. So a little known fact about me is that I nearly failed 11th grade English. There were several reasons for this. For starters, my teacher and I had fundamentally different belief systems about class attendance, his being that students should attend class, and mine being, eh. But also, I just wasn't a great reader. I really struggled with critical and abstract thinking, and our teacher was always trying to get us to understand, like, metaphors and how different narrative structures could shape reading experiences and all that stuff. Now these days, I believe that when we talk about metaphor and the like, we're mostly talking about how to use language in ways that foster deep understanding. Like if a writer tells you that a character has anxiety, you might register that and move on. But if a writer can use figurative language to put you inside that character's head, you can actually experience that anxiety. You can glimpse not just what it's like, but what it is. That's why metaphor exists, not to torture high school English students, but to make the dull bright and the old new and the distant close. Anyway, high school me thought all of that was a bunch of BS and that laying a live novel upon a table and dissecting it was a form of torture for all involved. So that was part of the problem, but also I missed a lot of class and never turned anything in on time. As my teacher wrote in my report card that year, John has reached a juncture where he just can't mail it in anymore. So I tell this story for two reasons. First to point out how many chances I had, like if I hadn't had extraordinary teachers who believed in me and school systems that supported those teachers, I might never have graduated from high school, let alone college. But also because I received an incomplete in 11th grade English in order to pass the class, I was required to read two books over the summer and write papers about them. One was Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, the other was Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye. We'd read Morrison's novel Song of Solomon that year in English class and I liked it, or at least I liked the parts that I read, and so my teacher ordered me to read The Bluest Eye, which is about a young black girl named Pakola Breedlove, who was told by the social order that she's ugly and who grows up horribly mistreated by people who claim to love her. It's a structurally innovative novel that uses point of view with astonishing brilliance, but it's also accessible, and reading it absolutely wrecked me. I still remember the tears streaming down my face as I finished that book, The Dense Sphere of Longing and Sadness in my Chest. I'd known, of course, that the world was unjust, but reading The Bluest Eye, I felt it. And I wanted to write about that book. I wanted to write about how this character had been traumatized not only by individual people but also by a racist and misogynistic social order. And while writing that paper, I also began to understand that what my teacher called Mailing It In was itself a privilege and that I wasn't being cool or clever by skipping class. I was wasting opportunities that many people are never given. Later that summer, I read Morrison's novel Beloved, even though it wasn't a sign for school, and I reread Song of Solomon, all of it this time. Did I understand all of the endless nuances and resonances of those books? Of course not, but I loved them. They challenged and haunted me as they challenge and haunt me still, and they made me, if not a good reader, at least an enthusiastic one. Toni Morrison died last week, and it is hard to imagine the world without her clarion voice, but the books survive. They go on helping readers young and old see the world more clearly. In her Nobel Prize lecture, Morrison said, Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. She gave language to so much and to so many. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.