My newest book of personal essays: . . . Quite Contrary
In this series, my second compilation of essays published originally on Substack, I use the “lost” Gospel of Mary of Magdala to examine matters pertaining to teaching and leadership in the current dystopia of the American experiment. The “weft” of my argument opens with a very blunt retort to I.A. Richards’ famous assertion that “rhetoric should be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies:” “Sorry, Ivor, there is no remedy for misunderstanding! The best thing to do is avoid it.” Subsequent essays proffer an assortment of prophylactic concepts and strategies toward that end, including “passive listening,” “safe” spaces, and “unconditional trust.” Other essays explore the intentional dismantling of the public education system in the US over the last 25 years, the coincident and equally intentional diminution of higher education, and the valorization of “ignorance” as a means to assert control over everyday Americans. The “woof” of the argument is a series of close readings of the Gospel of Mary, examining the many misunderstandings it enacts and perpetrates in the context of the contemporaneous cultural clash between Gnostic and Orthodox Christianities during the first half of the first millennium CE, the sum of which reveal that many of the most intransigent problems vexing us today were baked into the system right from the outset. It all ends, surprisingly (even to me), on a positive note about the future, the current madness clearing the ground for what’s next and new. And much better. Free PDF here, at-cost paperback on Amazon.com.
Quite Contrary 1:24
My newest poetry book: the other side of the light
November 8, 2024: “Poets, like all artists, can inhabit liminal spaces that are both vividly present, right now, documenting the moment, and powerfully futural, opening ways towards what’s next and new. These two ways of “envisioning,” often at odds in settled times, tend to coalesce cooperatively at historical moments like ours, an old order on the way out, a new one not yet fully fledged, see-er and seer becoming one. The poems in this book may seem on the surface to be doing the former in an extreme way—they are tiny and precise records of perceptions, almost-nothings in a way—and very little if any of the latter—absent as they are of assertions or prescriptions, or even linguistic novelties. For me, what these poems don’t do is more important than what they do. My foundational belief is that the eyes we see with create a default path forward. So to alter that path, which is urgently important right now, one needs first to learn to look in a new way at what’s right there, now, in the moment.” PDF here, paperback via Amazon.
the other side of the light PDF
My newest work on digital platforms
My Substack page, called The Spirit of Olympia, now contains two series of essays: “In the Spirit” uses poetry, ancient wisdom texts, philosophy, ethics, and, especially, quantum mechanics, to explore a range of issues that have to do with recovering a spirit of presence in the world. “Quite Contrary” explores the relationship between teaching and leadership, using the Gospel of Mary of Magdala as a scrim. Both series are now available in book form, free PDF here or at-cost-paperback on Amazon. Here is a link to my page:
https://paulkameen.substack.com
On my Instagram page, called “my tiny poems from olympia,” I write snapshot poems to illustrate photos I take on my walks, a reversal of the customary word/image relationship: