 ere we spokespeople for a generation? A generation we had never met. A generation who found that getting degrees was a way to buy legitimacy and respect as a thinker and an individual for a short time, but then, again, there were jobs. Jobs would take one look at you, and squint, and the totality of who you were would be refracted into a list, which the job would then hand back to you, and say no. And they terrified us, these jobs, and we never spoke to each other about each other, it was only about the jobs. The jobs we couldn’t have that didn’t want us. But there we were. And we were good writers, as good as anyone, job or not, and we were, in effect, the language and the species. We were writing history, text that history would sort from the slogans and ads, and somehow we had failed to notice this. We needed jobs to prove that there was nothing wrong with us. But there was something wrong with us. We were alive. And we were together. And we knew what we were doing. But we were waiting for the jobs to separate us and silence us, and lead us off one by one to the altar or the gallows.
But we made this book. We made this book over many years, which were waiting for it, and which are living in it. These words come from Champaign and Chicago and Normal and Seattle and Alaska and Cedar Rapids and Cincinnati and San Francisco. |
 The Three of Us Read 9/5/98 at Mike’s House 2:24 274K RealAudio Clip |
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