Elvis, Stop Dat! You Know

The Greatest Thing About Form And Convention Is That It Saves You From Having To Reinvent The Wheel. Now, Whether You Mount The Wheel To A Horse Carriage Or A Formula One Racing Car, Make It Plain Or Give It Spinning Rims, Those Are All Craft Decisions. But The Fact Of The Wheel Remains: It Will Turn If You Set It Down. That's What I Mean About The Beauty Of The Gifts Genre Can Offer.

The Internet Is Really Our Meeting Place. We Have This Amazing Listserv. Every Time I Log Onto It I Feel A Sense Of Pride, Because If You Log On And Say, "oh I Was Just In San Diego And I Was In A Park And I Saw A Lion," The Flurry Of Replies On Average Is Just Like--wow! All These Existential Questions About What It Means To Be An African, And Never Having Seen A Lion At Home, But Having Seen A Lion Here. Everything You Say Turns Into This Real Philosophical Debate--it's Incredible In So Many Ways. And It's An Invigorating Place To Be.

The Truth Is, Everything We Know About America, Everything Americans Come To Know About Being American, Isn't From The News. I Live There. We Don't Go Home At The End Of The Day And Think, "well, I Really Know Who I Am Now Because The Wall Street Journal Says That The Stock Exchange Closed At This Many Points." What We Know About How To Be Who We Are Comes From Stories. It Comes From The Novels, The Movies, The Fashion Magazines. It Comes From Popular Culture.

Narrative Is A Very Feeble Weapon In The Face Of Human Darkness And Yet It's All We Have. That We Have To Hang The Transformation And Survival Of Our Species On The Journey And Transformation Of One Singular Person So Far Outside Of What We Expect They Can Do.

There Was A Positive Side To Not Trying At Something: You Could Always Pretend That Your Life Would Have Been Different If You Had.