Cloister Commentary, Day 171: Reading is Exciting, Bananas are Boring

My sweetie Nicole starts school today, and she put in about 12 hours of organizational work at home yesterday. After she finished in the evening, she showed me a deeply detailed spreadsheet of all the students she works with; I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s necessary, I think, given the strange new world she’s entering. But it puts the lie to the ridiculous “lazy” claims some are making about teachers (us, I should say) lately.

For myself, I’m missing the work, but at least I have good books handy. My favorite phenomenon in reading is encountering something in one book that leads me to another book that leads me to something non-literary. I have been strolling through a Zadie Smith essay collection for over a year (her best pieces are like a glass of good bourbon: strong, a little spicy, with unique notes), and in a piece I read recently she wrote about the influence a book, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, had had on her–she was re-reading it after having first wrestled with it as a kid. The chunks she excerpted were delightfully wicked, like Wilde, so I had to read it myself. 15 pages in, I had to look up Kureishi; I hadn’t known he wrote the screenplays for two movies that were wildly popular when I was a video clerk but had never gotten around the seeing, My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy & Rosie Get Laid. I may have missed the boat thirty years ago, but it’s docked and ready for me now (if I can find the latter streaming somewhere). I love reading–it’s incredibly exciting, simple as that.

A teacher friend of mine started his classes the other day with a counterintuitive ice-breaking query: “What’s one boring fact about you?” Takes the pressure off having to dare to be interesting! Let’s play: you share in the comments, and here is mine.

I completely peel a banana before I eat it.

Thanks, Kevin!

Streaming for Strivers:

Soul, jazz-style, courtesy of two masters.