 Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for our online program at Mechanics Institute for constructing a nervous system, a memoir by author Margo Jefferson. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute and we are very proud to co-sponsor this event with City Lights Books and Publishing. I want to also welcome my colleague and friend Peter Maravellis, Program Manager at City Lights, and both Peter and I will be co-interlocutors for this event. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute and I see a lot of new faces out there, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. Here are General Interest Libraries, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday Night Cinema List film series. Please visit our website at mylibrary.org and also come on down and see us in person at 57 Post Street because we are open. Constructing a nervous system is available through City Lights Books and Publishing and we've put the link in the chat so if you'd like to actually purchase a book directly, go and copy the link and purchase a book. And for the 20 attendees receiving a book, you must be present on Zoom and your book will be sent to you by mail by City Lights. Constructing a nervous system, a memoir, it's an exploration of self through family, characters of literature, performers, muses, and obsessions that have shaped Margo Jefferson's inner life and her way of thinking and being. One critic said that her work and her writing is is belletic and I agree. Her writing sores and dives and dips with such grace and with such power. And we are just delighted to present her for the first time, and also this incredible memoir. We have a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and art arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. And her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Bogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Grinnecke. And her memoir, Negro Land, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. And my friend and colleague Peter Maravellis is a native San Franciscan with a lifelong involvement in the art and literary scenes, to say the least. He has used programs, the events calendar at City Lights Bookstore and is an editor of the first and second volumes of San Francisco Noir and also the producer of the most amazing literary festivals, which we have collaborated on many. So please welcome Margo Jefferson and my colleague Peter Maravellis. So Margo, I'm going to jump in with a first question, you know, with your work for so long as both a critic, a journalist, a writer. With this book, you stated that you wanted memoir and criticism to merge together. So what was your motivation and how did this evolve? I wanted them in conversation. I had spent all of these years as a critic, as a reviewer, as an essayist, and then the Michael Jackson book in some ways to me seemed transitional in that he was such a complicated, problematic figure that there was no way I could approach him with a kind of even critical authority, you know, with that, ah, here it is, here's, I knew there'd be ambivalences, uncertainties, mixed feelings and that I would have to explore those and that I'd have to get in some ways, you know, bring my own life to the ways in which my own emotions and as well as thoughts to the ways in which he, he moved me and also seemed to move a global, move the globe, shall we say. So I felt that was in a way a transition to what I knew then would be a memoir, Negro land. I'd been thinking about that for a long time because that world, you know, that had shaped me was that generation, my parents' generation was, they were fading, they were dying. And I knew that I wanted that to be what I called in my mind a cultural memoir, meaning, you know, the so called intimate, you know, private personal self is always moving in and out of this much larger culture that requires it to perform in a number of ways, you know, to play various roles. There isn't just one solitary, you know, lyric or finding, struggling, you know, pilgrimage cell. There are many of them. And you are as marked by the larger culture and by history, as by psychology, you know, aesthetics, etc. and family. So there was that. And then people kept saying, well, you're going to write another memoir volume two and I kept thinking, No, I don't, don't want to kind of step by step by step here is volume two. So I, I had, I was interested in, I think I posed this in Negro land. How do you tell what seems to be the same story in a number of different ways. How do you do that and thinking over that I really realized or, you know, often you know things first and but it takes them a while to surface. I thought, All right. Every, every encounter, or not every but many encounters ones had with everything from, you know, some little piece of ephemera, you know, to some major piece of art to the line of a song to the view outside your window to a postcard that you buy. After you leave, after you leave a museum. All of those, they're part of your personal culture and that means they're part of your psyche. And they are all as you are as intimate with them they're just as revealing their justice telling as the parents you grew up with, you know, the city you're part of all these, these identities that we name as geographic class religious sexual gender we take their importance for granted. But we don't always fully take account of these other intimations and and interventions and these things that stir the most vehement feelings in you and that you always possessed, you know, on your own and by yourself. So that I wanted to merge find not so much merge but have a conversations constantly being generated between those kinds of of memories of experiences of of lives really. Peter, you want to continue. Thank you Laura and it's great to be back to Mechanics Institute again and wonderful to be working with you and Pam and and really, Ms. Jefferson a great honor to be here tonight and such a wonderful package on top of everything else that cover is stunning I just absolutely love it. Baby, it worked so hard on that we kept going over it I'm glad. Okay. So firstly I'd like to congratulate you really on creating a wonderfully kaleidoscopic and very immersive narrative experience. Those are two great words. Thank you. Yes. I really enjoyed it. So my thoughts gravitate towards how you redefine a nervous system I mean not as something physical or biological but but you as you describe, you know, you know, quote, I my structure of recombinant thoughts memories sensations and words. So, would you address how you came to this theme how the fragments came together to make the whole how the elements of memory shape the writing. I mean, what was the interplay between them like. Whoa. Well, Peter, that's a big question. Okay, I, by, I have always even with what appears to be a straightforward review I've always worked in a kind of magpie way, you know, I'll take, start taking random notes associations with let's say this particular bulk of this play, then I'll decide. Oh, this, this makes me think of this piece of music so I'll do that. Then I'll go off on the research, either the direction or the tangent that I need. Then I will start combining and recombining those elements and continue and then that will tell me not only what it'll tell me when I'm missing what I need to know in a very practical way might just even be a day, but it will also tell me what I really am interested in what really is driving me. And when you're reviewing, you know, you don't bond equally to everything you see so it can be a real, real effort, you know, a long and winding road to find your way to your particular pull, you know, to your, your link with it. So that is a way I have always worked and, and that it helped me here because it made me trust, okay, you know, you are, here's Willa Cather, you're obsessed with her, here's Ooh, here I contain a Turner. How do you work with them? You know, some of them I knew I loved. I had no idea, for example, that Ella Fitzgerald would come out of Bud Powell, you know, and sweat. But, but it did, you know, you, you start associating and then you follow it through. I think, okay, maybe, maybe this won't work. Maybe it will, but it's, it's driving me and it's pulling me forward. So I'll go with it. That Ella Fitzgerald Bud Powell section started, those, it started out as two very short pieces, though they were clearly linked. And then I had not written about my father at all in, well, I've written about him, but in a formal, distant way in Negro land. But, but Bud Powell helped me dig into my father and his deep relationship with jazz, but also, you know, the, his melancholia, his certain kinds of isolation, then, then I found my way to, to Ella Fitzgerald partly because I realized I was, I was in that mode where you're thinking, you're a child, what music stirs you, what unnerves you, which Bud Powell did in some ways, and what restores you, what comforts you. And then that led me to Ella. So, you know, often what you're writing about will make you start asking questions that will lead you to, to a linked subject that you really didn't know was there. And the ways in which my magpie, magpie was tricky was I kept accumulating material and then I would thinking but wait, you know, then I would think, okay, this week, all I'm going to do is try to is organize it is find a structure and then I wouldn't find the right one, what felt like the right one. I wouldn't find the momentum, I wouldn't find the links and it would be too, too obscure. And I get very, very, very discouraged. So, a little bit like Penelope, you know, and the you undo that weaving every night and then you start making it again. But the more material I got, the more and the clearer it was that I was that, you know, count that memoir and varieties of memoir varieties of memories varieties of being personal and criticism, the ways in which I wish I had a more intimate word for criticism. But the ways in which that altered the personal, but then took on its own intimacies that that I could trust so that helped me keep going but you really just keep restructuring and restructuring and restructuring. What was hardest. Sorry. Peter, I just want to jump in to ask two things along these lines. Are you a diarist you keep diaries and also, because that's another element, not just from criticism and observing and observance but also you have some really amazing pairing where you start pairing people together comparing, pairing and comparing like Sammy Davis Jr. And James Baldwin and this one, that one and really Catherine and someone else and and he's interesting comparisons and contrasts and intermingling. So, none of you could address that. How did, yes, how did, how did what part of this was just, you know, coming from what I was just describing and a series of association, but it was also willed in a certain way I growing up when and where I did. I, for example, let's just take literature I grew up with the traditional literary canon. I was largely white largely male by the time I came along it was as American as it had as it was European but had those limits. Then there was a kind of progressive because I went to progressive elementary and high schools there was a kind of progressive layer on top of that. And then when I went to college, 64 to 68. This was when black studies and ethnic studies emerged and these alternate cannons and ways of being and ways of reading and each one shakes up and makes you realign we recombine these elements of your education of your community. Then, alright, we are just out of the 60s and there is the women's movement and right on the heels of that there are queer rights in every part of this is, you know, pushing at and reshaping and your your sensibilities and and what you think of as, you know, as world orders. And of course, well, let me go back, let me let me let me now run past myself. So all I, I needed to find both I needed to find and to be forthright about engaging with this disparate, you know, very hated hybrid impure in every way mix of things that I loved and hated that, you know, across through through and across race and gender and and chronology mattered to me desperately and I didn't want to, you know, feel like just a little dilaton for these and I didn't want you know I did this I did that I was cared about this I cared about that and I didn't want those old those more conventional conflicts. I mean of course there are conflicts, for example in the willy I didn't want to have it but I, I didn't want, I once wanted a structure emotional and intellectual and literal formal that was much more, more complicated and promising or more vigorous more surprising than oh alright that that was black that was white that was male that was female there, you know, or they're contending. I wanted multiple relationships between all these parts of my inner and outer world. And that's one way in which being older is is very interesting and very useful my God, you know you think I actually made my little way through all of those movements and eruptions and disruptions and that's that's fascinating what do what do I do with that's rich material. Back to you Peter. So though your influences are theatrical musical literary I mean what I find really just touches me is the role of your family. The members like your sister your mother your grandmother I mean they act as a kind of a chorus throughout all of this and we did a little bit about the role they play and then and you know the influence. Of course that's that's very tell me a little more before I do that you're thinking of like the chorus and an ancient play where exactly thank you. They are taking in everything that's going on but it turns out they're also a kind of. They're there like the the golden mean almost they understand all sides and they're yeah okay. Okay, well. They were, they absolutely shaped me almost every moment of and my sister every moment of the day this this world of of the block bourgeoisie was so in many ways running along a gamut from from very good to very not good to to. Too bad. They were why wildly conscious of their historical place and their meaning. And every one of us, every one of their children. We saw in the sense as symbols of where the race was going where, if you were a young black woman where the sex was going, you know, you had you weren't simply an individual you were part of this progression of what was supposed to be always a progress forward of black destiny. And that meant that, you know, on every front educational political cultural. They, they were making sure that we were educated. That was indicating in ways that were wonderful. I mean they're both of them they're deep engagement with all kinds of music dance art in other ways. I'm speaking of the hierarchies and snobberies. That that was very tricky that was a kind of manipulation that I would prefer not to have you were being scrutinized. You, we were, I was also we were both deeply loved, but that love was accompanied by real demands and expectations for a kind of perfection, I would say. It was fascinating to me people they were charming. Oh, they were. Yeah, complicated. They pleased me very much as did my grandmother as did in many ways that whole world, they can be very stylish and you know that that sense of drama they came from, they're having achieved certain things that society in no way wanted them to have achieved or expected that that that was major that was, you know, in that way I see why you pick there are chorus you know in an in an old play from any an ancient play from any civilization, the stakes are very high it's like that it's survival and it rather felt like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And living, you know, yes, and they were of course the ghost of their ancestors, who would be who would be cited, but I'm also just a cute sensory and intellectual and temperamental engagement at all times. I always have the privacy wanted and then maybe another reason that this, this my obsession with these, these items, these, these mementos of a personal culture, you know, this, the voice of a singer, the gesture of an, of an actor, and also turning into a sense in some way which I think you're addressing and my grandmother and my sister into these kind of large, you know, major characters, major figures with which you have to engage dramatically. Speaking of character and dramatic entrances. You know, you have many heroes and muses and you've devoted in terms of having a real heroine here 20 plus pages to Josephine Baker. And as an icon is a diva provocateur as a gesture and you know, shaper of identity, women's identity and black identity and sexual identity. I'd love you to talk more about what, what was what inspired you about her personally. And also I want to mention, for those of you in the audience that Margo was also one of the narrators of that incredible PBS series on Josephine Baker which was shown on KQED if you haven't seen it please go back to the KQED website and try to find it it's really phenomenal and Margo your contribution was was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Well, actually, Josephine Baker was first presented to me by my mother who loved show business, and it was presented she was presented as this glamorous questing, you know, Europe, you're European based but from our own, you know, black America figure who I don't know if mother actually put it that way but who embody risks, you could take and talents that you could choose to, to develop and to foreground and to be almost shameless about mother wouldn't have used the word shameless to later in her life and she got naughty but you know you don't love Josephine Baker if you don't love a certain shamelessness so you know she was fascinating to me I was you know always trying to, you know, project myself into this glamorous figure and that glamorous figure as you know, as young people did but oh god young girls in the 50s we were we were obsessed with finding these, you know these mirrors these glamorous mirror images that elevated us. So there was Josephine and she's been with me really since since in that way she was first presented to me and in high school what then happened was in the 70s. It was the women's movement and it was the aesthetic wing, a whole number of black women, white women also but for our purposes we're talking black women singers and performers were being their records, like Bessie Smith from our any their records have been out of print for year. They were being reissued. They were being, you know, written about the whole history of in terms of gender of popular song and blues was being altered so that and being re investigated so that you know women were not on the lower level of popularizers, you know, who weren't really thinking and working and feeling their way, you know, through innovations. Josephine Baker that's in the early 70s was when an LP of her singing both in French French songs, and some fatwaller that came out and I bought it and I was so charmed by her voice and by these persona you know she would sound both French but Harlem when she sang fatwaller and she would sound it seemed entirely French but maybe also Harlem and she sang j'ai deux amour. So she entered my, my gallery of fascinating performers that I got to know. Well, actually it came it was after when Jean Claude Baker who was one of her adopted sons and who ran a restaurant in New York called she Josephine when he wrote a biography of her and by that time I was at the time so it would have been in the 90s. You know me, you know, at all of this, everything I needed to know this, the complications, the, the social complications, the historical complications this, this warrior of a personality, you know, a seducer or warrior really in that way, like, you know the old pantheons of of goddesses, you know, I will, I will slay. I will seduce I will master the, the, the canny recklessness just fascinated me enough she nothing held her back. Now, if black people didn't like her wearing bananas which sometimes they didn't. She still did if white people insulted and patronized her for it even while you know, patting her on the head. She kept going, but not that struggling with keeping going she she would just keep like a great musician who improvises that's what she could do with her dancing for singing and her, her presence in the world. And that to me that kind of joie de vivre as combined with technique, you know, with art with the mother part for example be adopting of all the children some of whom she all but stole from their parents that interests me less than frankly her performance but the fact that she kept finding new identity for herself, and that that was one of the identities and that it in some way did have to do it did not make her a good mother but it did have to do with some kind of global vision. How do you resist that. You know I saw her on stage when she was in, she had to be in her 70s or 80s and she came out in one of those, you know, form fitting costumes and she was enchanting, there was nothing pathetic there was nothing ridiculous. How do you know how do you master yourself. And you know on top of that, she was undercover in World War two fighting against the Nazis, and she wore the uniform of the Free French Army and to the march on Washington. Yeah, which is quite a wonderful gesture. Yeah. Wasn't she the only other speaker of the Martin Luther King. She was, she was the only woman woman. She was wearing, was it the French uniform. The uniform of the Free French. Yeah. And those big, big, big sunglasses that the certain age always wore, which became a badge of honor. Yeah. But she really, she came home. I mean she, she really had that she was she was brave and she came home for the issues and the, the politics that she really wanted to speak. In that way, she was a great, she was a great tactician and strategist, cultural, cultural and political, as well as, you know, wonderful artists. Yeah. And that just brings me to my other question about the theatricality and the conventions that you use in the book because there's references to blackouts and on tracks and exits and entrances and can you talk about how those conventions gave you a voice or gave you a structure. They gave me was many, many voices they gave me the opportunity to impersonate to masquerade to not pretend that I was smoothing over disruptions and conflicts intentions in fact to use them. Like Peter earlier when we were talking use the word momentum, which makes me very proud because I did want that sense of, you know, this, this stage this landscape these screens where actions internal and external were always unfolding. So those those devices allowed me to switch time switch focus switch voice switch character, and by keep, you know that I was able, most of the time, I mean I could go into the walk and say, oh no I shouldn't have done this better but not tonight. The fact that I was able, you know, to, to keep that keep those diverse parts mobilizing into into a spectacle. Yeah, yeah, a journey, but a spectacle with lots of digressions along the way that still made their way back to the multiple personalities but not as a disorder. Yeah, yeah, personalities and and narratives yeah. Tiny but but narratives yeah. Well very very very effective as punctuation. Great. Good. I have a really favorite quote, it's it's, I think it's on page seven memoir is your present negotiation with the versions of your past for the future you're willing to show up in. I just love that. And I'm curious to know. Is there anything in hindsight now that was revealed to you what secrets. What does the time traveler possess the time traveler possesses the, I don't know if it's a secret, but maybe it's a secret pathway through back to your past, where without rejecting it without falsifying it. You can realign its elements to allow you to to consider to reconsider your, the choices that you made and to ponder what choices you might make in the future. It allows for a kind of improvisatory, you know, the music musician you've got your technique you've got all this information which is your past, you know, and, and also your present, but every time you sit down at that piano or, you know, whether you're using your voice, you can, you can't not necessarily going to rewrite the composition but you're going to change the notes, the harmony, the melody, maybe the tempo, and all of that that those are the negotiations. So it allowed me to review revise revamp stories, experiences, memories that are often in our lives certainly in mind had become somewhat static. You know, I had one way of processing them of arranging them. So very the scene. Place it somewhere else, have the dialogue written, you know, put it in someone else's mouth. See what happens. Well, and that's the future and that's the future you're willing to show up in the next page. Yeah. Well, speaking of that, Margo, would you like to read a short section from the book and reveal some of your great writing to us. You're very sweet. Do you have a duel? Does either of you have a passage you wanted me to read? If not, I think, okay. Your choice. All right. I'll actually review how it, the opening, because it does kind of demonstrate what you were saying about the, the theatrics. I stood in a bright harsh light. The stage was there. I extended my arm. No, plung, hurled it out, pointed an accusatory finger, then turned it to an unseen audience and declared, This is the woman with only one childhood. It was part of the night's dream work. And I was rattled when I woke up for I've been addressing myself. I was harsh and my outstretched arm with its accusing finger had the force of that moment in melodrama where the villain, either too successful in his schemes to ruin the heroine's life is revealed condemned and ready for punishment. I understood what I had to do. I ended his stage shows. Bill Bojangles Robinson would look out at the lighting booth and shout, Give me a light. My color. Blackout. When the light returned, I knew it was time to construct another nervous system. In my adult life, I'd felt that to become a person of complex and stirring character a person as I put it up inner consequence. I must break myself into pieces hammer saw chisel away at the unworthy parts and rebuild. It was laborious, like stone masonry. The human masonry model the human self says, go on. Those are actually the last words of me well and go on, admires itself for saying, go on and proceeds to go on. When on I grew dissatisfied this edifice was too fixed. I wanted it to become an apparatus of mobile parts parts that fuse first fracture cluster hurdle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous from go the materials of my life, chosen, imposed inherited made up. I imagined it as a nervous system but not the standard biological one he wasn't some watch. My nervous system is my structure of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations. Repeat after me. It's time to construct another nervous system. You write criticism you write memoir. What will be your tactics strategies instruments for constructing this nervous system. I keep carping and fussing rearing up against the word critic and criticism. Such a gust temperate words. They make me think Richard Stein was right but nouns are boring because all they do is name things and quote just naming names is all right when you want to call a role that is good for anything when you're thrilled by a taffeta petticoat flying buttress a sound chamber of notes and syllables when an ideal makes you feel as if the top of your head were being taken off. Abandon your two temperate pros and keep writing criticism as for memoir, I keep attaching adjectives to it. Cultural memoir, temperamental memoir, what makes me so anxious. I want memoir and criticism to merge. And if so, read on. Okay, yeah, okay. Oh, merci merci. All right, we're going to now open up for questions from the audience so. Before we do that, let me just thank you both. It is. I'm an east coaster but I know all about the west coast and city lights and mechanics Institute, and you are legendary and I am very happy to be here so thank you. It's been a pleasure. And now we're going to open up to questions from the audience Pam Troy our events assistant is going to read out your questions. And we'll engage with you. All right. It's always a little scary. Okay. Okay, the first question is from VT IL. I realized many authors were influential. Could you choose the top five. No, I can't you mean influential in my life or influential. No, I can't really. I don't know what the question but what in what context, those top five should be. Okay. I think, I think a lot will be revealed in the book so get yourself a book. Yeah, you will find that I are certain certain writers, often poets, but, you know, essays, there are, I quote Emily Dickinson I quote James Baldwin I quote Du Bois and George Elliott, and it various points. I quote I've Scott Fitzgerald at various points Richard right to Linda Linda. God no it's a Harriet Jacobs her original pseudonym was. Was Linda Harriet Jacobs, I quote Carol Walker who writes as well as draws. So it's, it's, it really is an awesome barge of influences. This, this BT IL has clarified by saying in reference to the question he was asking about the top five literary influences and I think you've, you know, by citing them you've basically, you know, it's who you're obsessed with they're not the people and I think that's what threw me off that every day or every year are necessarily my favorites but they, they stay with me they am I taught, I taught Catherine. I've read Baldwin and Fitzgerald and you know for years. I just recommended that President Biden should read Richard writes black boy. Yeah, okay. The question I have I do have a question is somebody who also love will a cat or I would be interested in knowing what was it about will a cat or that you found so compelling. There are these. There are these. There are these about many, many, many things she's profoundly wise about the intricacies and the silences often between people that shape human relationships that shape a psyche that cannot reveal itself, you know, to anyone else in her narrative but she understands there are also beautiful expansive sentences that that move across the page she creates. She really plunges into scene and characters, but yeah there is a kind of wisdom to her to the whole to her best books and there are there are pieces of wisdom in in in that song of the lark which I'm hard on in terms of in terms of race but there are other ways in which it's a wise bone about about women making art. Yes. Well, I'm not seeing many questions I do have some some comments and one. Mr. August, Edgar August has said as a member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. I was delighted to read about your sister's gift of Alice's adventures underground in your charming New York Times interview. Oh, that's nice. Thank you. Yes, that's some. Yeah, I still can recite a whole bunch of those forums. But don't get me started. Yeah, to be understood by someone you love as a reader or as a listener it's it's very moving. Yeah. There's a question Pam about Michael Jackson and other other. Speaking of speaking of a central influential figure yeah. Is there any other cultural figures that fascinate you as much as Michael Jackson that you might write about, you know, I don't have the desire to write, you know, another short book about a single figure there are people who these prints fascinate me as much. Yes, but I don't want. I don't want to go that route. Yet, again, so you know that's that's that's not uppermost in my mind all most of the people I wrote about in this book are dead. In terms of the cultural figures that fascinated me so I'll have to see what what what the culture throws up and you know what inside me suddenly gets galvanized but right now now. Do we have any other questions from the audience Pam we're looking looking through the Q&A. No, no just some comments. One from Ferna hi Margot I was an intern at Newsweek during the summer of 1975 when you work there. You met with our group of interns once in a while, and you made such an impact on me. I've kept up with your career all these years. And she's written a memoir leading little Havana. She's looking forward to reading your book all the best to you Cecilia M Fernandez. Oh my goodness. All right. Hello. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. Oh my God. I have never forgotten you. I was only 21. And I don't know you know but those are impressionable years but I thank you for that. My intern at a major news magazine so everything in you was like quivering and vibrating right. Yes but you stood out somehow from the entire group of people who were there and I don't know I just felt this connection to you. You don't remember me I'm sure. But you came in I think you were working there as an editor. I was as I was you know I was a book reviewer basically or book reviewer and arts writer. Yeah. But you also were at Columbia at that same time I thought. I mean I think I was I think I may have been adjuncting teaching and adjunct journalism school probably. Yeah. Well I just wanted to say hello. Thank you. Hello hello. I have another former student here who should have produced a question by now Rodney Ferris a former college student. I did the question about Michael Jackson was mine. But the question about Michael Jackson was mine. Oh, so you're hoping that I'll find someone else to write about. Give me. I was totally curious as to whether or not you would but I do have another question. Yeah, which is so I was fortunate enough to be taught by Margo when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and she co taught this amazing class with Elizabeth Kendall to whom she dedicated her latest book. She's one of my best best friends and a wonderful biographer and critic. And I was wondering, is there ever going to be a chance that the two of you are going to collaborate on something anytime soon. Actually that is a plan. That's very funny that you divine that yeah. We're the same generation. We're both women we have these, you know, many many differences we grew up through certain historical movements and we want to write also about friendship as a major model for how one lives one's life. So that is one of my plans yeah. Yeah, yeah. From your teaching career, do you have a favorite book other than you know will a catheter that you really just had a passion about teaching, and he tells about that. I will tell you, because I've taught so many of them is, you know, I'm now at the in the nonfiction program at Columbia. So when I came there, I was teaching, of course, criticism. And I got very interested, I think that was, I think I'd already I came to Columbia full time after I'd written the Michael Jackson so I was very interested in the fact that the essay, the varieties of the essay were really really really emerging in the you know, there was the political essay the cultural essay there was John de Gaulle, you know, in this lyric essay this experimental form they could borrow from short stories from poetry. So I, I, it was part of this whole move in what's now called creative nonfiction or literary nonfiction, you know, to for in which nonfiction writers felt that intellectually imaginatively, they could experiment and and combine certain patterns and, and, you know, it's a probe points of views and structures structural possibilities. That was, that was, that was thrilling to me so I started teaching a wide range of essays, you know, from kind of your kind of classic 19th century to wild prose poetry and I talked so many that I really couldn't entirely name but I used all John de Gaulle's anthologies I used Philip Lopez anthologies of the essay I would. And then I moved also towards on memoir in in surprising surprising ways so I would teach for example, Jamaica Jamaica can cave novel, but make the students really think about, we really try to explore the relationships we do research on or between what was being fictionalized and what we knew of as autobiography so just formally, you know how how you examine that. God, I tried everybody. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I think we have another question. I taught a lot of people I would teach diaries, you know, I, I would teach them. I would teach documentary poetry, you know, and claim that it was a form of nonfiction, which in its way it is. Great. I think there's another question there. Yes, I'll be tell us is asking. After reading right I'm always depressed. How do you live with this literature for so long. I don't read only right know exactly what you mean I, I actually think that you know as, as we tend to our, our psyches and our bodies knowing oh God this muscle has really been stretched I have to do something else. We do the same thing with with our reading and with our music listening you know when a writer has taken everything out of you and Richard right can really do that. You know, the, the ferocity and the rigor and the anguish. So, you know, I will turn to something I will turn to something wildly different. I won't turn for example to Emily Dickinson because she is every bit is intense and can be just as painful. But, you know, I will, I will just have a pick up something utterly lighthearted maybe that's when you do go back and read a Jane Austin. Like that, or nonsense poetry, you, we need to take care, take care of our, you know, our literary diets in those ways. Know how a writer affects you it's as cute as how, you know, a tone affects your ear, or a smell affects affects your olfactory system. Peter, do you have any other questions on mine. Yeah, actually, you know, w eb Du Bois, as of late as I think is getting much, much more play and also respect and appreciation for being one of the greatest thinkers of a century. Exactly. And, you know, and I think you know there's some incredible black scholarship coming out right now I mean it's it's a renaissance it really is and and could you speak a little bit about that knowledge as such. Yes, and there is this whole lineage, you know, of great and honorable and valorous black scholars whose work was for decade segregated meaning it was basically read almost entirely by other black scholars and students and whatever. Now it really has entered the mainstream. Everybody acknowledges that, you know, you're not just doing your good citizen liberal duty by, you know, but reading w eb Du Bois you are reading him to learn in a profound way about the, the key crises and complications and challenges and and the horrors of American history. So, you know, some, I mean that's that's not that's happening with literature it's happening with history but it's, it's, we're no longer a special interest. History is no longer a kind of special interest kind of do good task and something you don't need to think about unless for whatever reason, you have to think very specifically about race relations in America. No, this is about our relationships. You know, about psychology psychological crises and relationships. It's, it's major. I know it there, there isn't, there isn't a global issue that isn't affected by what we lightly, in certain ways still refer to as black or African American history. Well, I want to thank Marco Jefferson for such an inspiring conversation I want to encourage everyone to stretch your muscles and reef and revitalize your nervous system with her book constructing a nervous system a memoir. Thank you, Largo, you, you are a literary diva. We are so, we are so thrilled to have you and when you're when you get on a book tour live in person. Please come and coming. Thank you, Peter, I'll be there and thank you all for coming. Yeah, I can only see a few of your faces but thank you. Yeah. Thanks to Peter Maravella city lights books and publishing for joining us tonight and we will see you next time at our next event and everyone being good health. Yeah, be well stay well and