Above and Beyond

I was so touched and proud last night to receive the Above and Beyond Award from Heartland Big Brothers Big Sisters.  In the Lincoln area, 1,009 women and men serve as mentors to local children and teenagers, and 5 of us were honored at a lovely dinner. 

It did feel a little weird.  As I stood there, having words read aloud about the mentoring relationship I've had with Amara for these past couple of years, I thought, Amara's the one who should be here.  She should be receiving this award, just for surviving her life.  Only the cash bar helped to ease this ontological angst. 

A lot of corporate donors were there, and I hadn't realized how expensive a program BBBS is:  it costs approximately $1,000 a year to support each mentoring match (in terms of paying office staff to run background checks, handle paperwork, and do monthly check-ins with each member of every pair).  But considering the payoff, it's not such a high price to pay.  It's a program that changes kids' lives, and it's a worthy cause.  If you have time (and patience, and you genuinely like kids), consider being a mentor.  If you're short on time but have some cash and want to change a child's life, consider making a donation; BBBS has been thoroughly vetted as a sound charity.

In totally unrelated news, writer Charles Baxter was here on Monday to give a lecture and a reading.  His lecture was on "lush style," and here are some quotable quotes (or rough paraphrases) for all you craft-talk gluttons out there:

In our own postmodern era, an era of irony, skepticism, and understatement, we live with an "aesthetics of suspicion."  Only established writers like Angela Carter or Toni Morrison can get away with a lush style; in workshops, lushness is "vetoed" or "sneered at."

"If you want to be cool, you can't be lush.  You can be one or the other, but not both."

Lushness is "undefended, naked, vulnerable, embarrassing."  It is a "hot style" that "works out of a fever" and is given to "unstable self-dramatization."

It often "refuses to give up the past," and instead "superimposes the past on the present through lyric expansion."

Whenever two time frames are superimposed, there's the possibility of lushness.  The lush style is nostalgic, backward-looking; Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, Garcia Márquez, and Nabokov, especially in Lolita, are all practitioners of the lush style.

"When the claim is being made that everyone should believe in an emotion and agree with it, lushness veers into the overripe, the coercive, the fraudulent, the manipulative.  It stops being poetry and becomes rhetoric."

"Lush styles are about fullness."  They are about being open and unprotected.  They believe in the possibility of transformational love.  Irony, by contrast, is a form of protection, and it is possible that we are all, now, over-protected.

"In a trashy, duplicitous culture" (like our own current culture, apparently), "irony, a cold style," is the default.  Since we are always being lied to, we are always skeptical.

Those were the highlights of his lecture on style, as predigested for you by Joy.  It was an unusual presentation; we were given a handout that began with 4 pages of sheet music by Rachmaninoff and instructed to follow along as the piece was played for us, which quickly separated the musical wheat from the chaff.  (I'm definitely chaff on that score.) 

I'm still thinking through the things Baxter said.