Hello and let's talk about the legacies of MS Dhoni, the former Indian skipper, retired from all forms of international cricket very symbolically on August 15th. Dhoni who played 90 tests, 351-day internationals and 98 T20 matches was one of the legends of Indian cricket no doubt. His captaincy saw some major landmarks including the famous victory in the 2011 World Cup. Dhoni's retirement has been a topic of discussion for quite some time and his last international match was the semi-finals of the 2019 World Cup against New Zealand. He was clearly India's most successful captain and his legacy both the positive and the negative aspects continues and will continue to be felt for quite some time. We spoke to Leslie Xavier on some of these aspects. Thank you Leslie for joining us. So the big news last week was of course the retirement of MS Dhoni as well as Suresh Raina and now there's been a lot of discussion about his contributions, a lot of glowing tributes from his teammates, those from the establishment, even the highest authorities in the country. So let's take a look at some of these issues today and one of the key issues of course is the idea of the legacy a player leaves behind and there's of course one way of looking at it which is the quantitative aspect, the numbers, the matches but both in Dhoni's case in positive and negative terms it's much more bigger than that. So let's say could we first start maybe talking about your idea of how you evaluate a player's legacy as in what maybe are the benchmarks even although it's like we said difficult to exactly point it down but what would be the some of the key benchmarks? So firstly let's also remember Suresh Raina because everyone seemed to have forgotten Suresh Raina but that's how he has built his career. He was always playing second fiddle to Dhoni or Kohli later in his playing career internationally but always a second fiddle too and I mean a sidekick to Dhoni so to speak both at the club CSK and as well as at the national team setup and getting back to Dhoni and legacy as such player legacy. So in cricket there are two distinct aspects to look into when we talk about legacy. First in Dhoni's case first is because in Suresh Raina says it would have been simple it's a player legacy we are talking about but in Dhoni's case we have to talk about the legacy of the wicketkeeper batsman as a player and also as a skipper of the team and in the Indian team setup or generally also if you look at international teams in cricket the captain has a big role to play as far as the building of the current lot is concerned and also building a team towards the future. So a classic example I would like to give is when we talk about cricket history we talk about Clive Lloyd and the role that he played in shaping the All-Conquering West Indian side and he was a skipper and he is always considered as the pivotal figure. There were a lot of stars that that team was full of stars Vibhichars, Michael Olding. I mean you just close your eyes and point a finger you will be pointing at a star. So the same thing applies to the Australian side of the 90s and the early 2000s. So that transition of the side began with a great Aussie captain Alan Gauder and then Mark Taylor took it forward and then it Steve Bohr inherited a momentum with the team a beautiful team that was built over the last previous 10 years and then just he just dominated the next 10 years and even the Australian side took a dip after that golden generation period where they I mean arguably they are still trying to get things figured out as far as getting back to where they were 10 years back. So that's the role that the captains have to play in cricket in a larger sense. You mould the current team as world beaters but also ensure that you blend in youngsters into a system which takes the team forward to the next level not necessarily just World Cup winners. Because World Cup as a tournament, individual tournament, victory, losses, I mean all these things are not exactly an aesthetic I would look into but generally the team's domination over a period that's what the strength of the team or the greatness of the team lies and such kind of a building I mean whether Dhoni was able to as a leader of the team make that crucial link between two generations it's that's that would be his real legacy and when we when we talk about his contribution to cricket that's the biggest catchphrase that's been doing the round Dhoni is thanking for your contribution to cricket. We should not just think in terms of two World Cups but think also in terms of what the kind of setup and the team that he gave handed over to Virat Kohli the next in line as keeper. Right so in this context let's maybe say start from the beginning in the sense that when he did get the team and he when he did become the captain he was actually in some senses given a team which was already moving towards its peak and that was actually a major role especially in the 2011 World Cup. So he took over the T20 captaincy to start with the 2007 World Cup and it was a disastrous year till then for Indian cricket because they played atrociously bad at the ODI World Cup in the West Indies the loss in the first round came back and in fact Dhoni sites it as one of the turning points of his career the kind of mob the attacks that happened around his house and he was not allowed to travel to Ransi he stayed put in Delhi for safety concerns etc. So that's the T20 and so T20 was a new concept at that point and people say that Dhoni made the best out of a very I mean rag tag team so to speak not exactly a team full of legends yeah they had great explosive players like you were saying Srichan great short short over format fast bowler they had good names in it in the mix as well as far as the team is concerned but then the format was new BCCI decided that they are not sending some of the bigger players they were resting them because they were not very keen they didn't understand the new format they were not very I mean open about its potential that he had IPL changed that obviously now 10-12 years down the road we know what exactly this format has done for cricket and with in that set up Dhoni steps in and Dhoni as a cricketer it was perfect for Dhoni the format as well as the kind of team that he had because then he could exert the kind of leadership which had become his hallmark in the later years which we celebrate now also the maverick nature of his decisions the logic the street smart logic if I can call that that he brings on to the playing field and which which I mean revolutionary ideas as well just like his batting and which which catch opponents by surprise most of his field settings the change of balling the the kind of point by point ball by ball observations and tips that he gives to ballers when the ball saying there is for yeah I mean these are caught on camera caught on the microphone the way he talks with ballers I mean not just saying shabash shabash which was the role of the wicketkeeper from earlier days but but giving exact inputs in yeah yeah up a dollar so this guy will get out so it the format was perfect for him the leader the style of players that he had and I was perfect for him he made the best of it and yeah with a bit of luck and whatever he made victory out of it but the larger setup was the ODI setup which which which took years in the making till the narrative that team and it had legends in it it had Sachin Tendulkar the start will be in the sevag VBS was there in the setup rabbit was there so some of the greatest players to have ever played in India was there in that setup and a team that was I mean more or less complete in its transition from where it was when so let's let's go back to the this team's roots it started in early 2000 after that match fixing scandal when Saurav Ganguly took over as the as the stripper and foreign coaches started leading the Indian side so it started with John Wright and then Greg Chappell so Dhoni's entry into the national team setup came around Greg Chappell and Greg Chappell has been quoted multiple times about the vision that he had for Dhoni he always felt that Dhoni as was a national leader he was fearless he had a lot of qualities which he correlated with posse qualities as far as players are concerned and then came Gary Kirsten so so with this I mean player the coaches who were at some point legends in the game themselves coming in and into a system where there was always hero worship as far as captains or the leaders of the team and the seniors in the team is concerned these coaches were able to break that kind of a system Greg Chappell not so successfully because he felt he had a lot of issues with people like ganguly etc but Gary Kirsten was able to partly because of the nature that he carries himself with he was able to break into that mold and then he got someone like Dhoni to execute his plans Dhoni himself had his own inputs things like that it worked perfectly so he had a team in a platter it's I'm not saying Dhoni didn't have contribution in that team but if you look at that 2011 World Cup winning team the team was swimming with legendary players if they had not made it into the final and won that championship they would have of course we all as fans we always think that all the Indian teams underachieved at the World Cup but this team for sure if they had not won that World Cup they would have under underachieved grossly and Dhoni was there and he led the team perfectly because even with the greatest of teams and the greatest of players you need a leader who could bind it all together and Dhoni had that kind of a persona for sure absolutely that's my assessment as far as his leadership is concerned but let's move to towards the end of his career as a captain since you're talking about these aspects was he able to do pretty much the same to the team regarding what he got when compared to what he got as in the transition you talked about which is perhaps the most important aspect of a captain's legacy one of the key aspects of his functions has the same kind of transition process was that set in place where the captaincy was handed over to Kohli so it's a very subjective issue because when we look at numbers again so under Kohli the team has done admirably well except for the ICC tournaments where they have failed in the I mean failing in the semis is not an achievement in ICC tournaments when you consider that there are only 10 teams playing so let's just be very clear you reach the final otherwise you are and being India the kind of resources and the kind of money that is there in the game you better reach that final and better in it I mean at least reaching the finalist of this thing so Kohli received a team from Dhoni the test team first and then the then the sort of format teams but the interesting point is that there was Dhoni was in the last World Cup team and the idea was that Dhoni will bring in experience will bring in things that would help Kohli so there itself there is a bit of a what do you call that conflict of interest as far as Dhoni's legacy and Dhoni's continuation in the in the team setup because his presence is important because the next leader doesn't have that kind of a capability of reading the game so I mean is it Dhoni's responsibility to nurture the next line of skipper you bet it is because it's the same in any arena you look at a corporate setup you want the current CEO to nurture second line of leaders so that the company is taken forward otherwise otherwise it's a failure and the same thing applies to any sporting setup political system also we have seen empires collapse because because there was single leadership strength strength concentrated on single leadership in political parties the same thing applies here so Kohli the transition from Kohli's captaincy to the kind of players that Kohli has under so Dhoni had a bunch of legends in the team current the Indian team setup as a lot of players were talented we have number one ODI Gowla we have good batsman we have Rohit Sharma for instance who is a tremendous short format batsman a bunch of decent players very talented some would go on and mark themselves as great in the future hopefully but there is not kind of a awe-inspiring figure or figures in that setup yet so and that that that requires years of build-up it's not like a talented player comes in and the same thing applied with Kohli so I have I've had this discussion with the people who were involved in the team setup when Kohli came into the scene 2008 2009 thereabouts the trainer the physio was involved physical aspect of it one of the batting coaches they all said the youngsters who were coming into the setup when the legends were there playing game regularly I said they were allowed freedom you developed your game you practice you being the setup you get your game you train you fail you come back you work on it so that kind of a building building setup was there for these youngsters which was partially implemented of course by Dhoni's presence and partially because the leadership the coaches also had that kind of a vision the current manager or coach Ravi Shastri and Virat Kohli their setup works slightly different differently it's evident from the way things are and when we look at building a site for the future and building a site for the present it's it's it's it's not happening anymore and that kind of a culture shift started towards the fag and of Dhoni's stint as as captain because ultimately you get into that result cycle and building a building a leaving legacy lasting legacy as far as this comes and so that happened a little I think right yeah and also finally the key issue of Dhoni as a captain's captain outside the field too as a representative of India India his clubs cricket the country's cricket because we also went through a time when with the nature of media attention that was happening with the kind of money that was happening the captain also becomes far and more and more a pivotal figure so in those aspects do you think that of course there were a lot of ways and a lot of things he said a lot of attempts he made to sort of stand out outside the field also but do you how do you how do you sort of square his legacy at the end of when we look at it right now in terms of off field say performance or off field positions and the role he occupied so Dhoni's role has always centered around cricket that way yeah of course the kind of stances that he is love for the armed forces and the stances that he has taken it's it's questionable we ourselves that means click at question some of his antics if I can call it that and but otherwise within the cricket circle itself there are certain questionable aspects which I feel we should we should mention also when we discuss Dhoni's I mean now that he's retired and when we discuss his long career I mean great career no doubt and it's let's get into the IPL aspect of it first because he is the longest standing he has the longest standing association with with the particular franchise Chennai Super Kings and he led the team to title there they were finalist multiple times under him and he built a very successful franchise over there I mean successful over I mean the last 11 years of IPL CSK is the most successful team but CSK is the most controversial team also and it was right in the embroil right right in the middle of the match fixing controversy that it hit IPL along with Rajasthan Royals and understandably at that point Dhoni was silent about it because it was under subjudice it was under investigation also but then post whatever the decisions and the suspension of CSK and then green station of CSK into the IPL I feel as a skipper because he has a larger role here he's not just a mere player because Indian cricket team skipper is a figure which is larger than the I mean the game itself in as far as the country is concerned it's evident from the kind of tributes that has come out for him after he retired and he is still silent there is no clarity one documentary which was produced by CSK he spoke about how testing it was for the players who had done no wrong as far as he knows and he equated match fixing to be worse than murder because cricket has made him so if he fixes match or if any of the players fixes match it will be worse than worse than the biggest crime that a man can ever commit so but then these are all sweeping I mean borderline I mean not touching anything specific so yeah so as far as cleaning that slate was concerned the best would have been to present what exactly happened as far as the team said it was concerned just to explain that the team was clean because now when as outsiders when we look at it the team was penalized because they did something wrong and and the people who were penalized where the guys who were involved in the team management not and in the coterie outside the playing playing 15 or the squad for sure but still when the team is penalized and then when there is silence about what exactly the player stands and the players was at that point then then doubts come in how can a team be wrong and players be clear but these are just doubts and I what I'm just saying was that as as people of Indian team the the stature that Dhoni had risen he could have risen above it all by just clarifying it all together but then again he has I mean he has shown that he is just an Indian cricketer that way because we have someone like Sachin Tendulkar who was right in the who was god of cricket when match fixing happened in the Indian team setup and even in his biography he just he just didn't find it worthy enough to be to be clarified so exactly that's how that's how it works here I mean so what we what we what we do have is someone who perform admirably on the field both as a batsman as a wicked keeper as a captain but also someone who came in as an outsider but also became in some senses very much an insider and part of the core establishment exactly that's that's that's a kind of assessment that I would look at it and I I feel that that's how that's how Indian cricket is set up you can't be an outsider forever and stand out or or take it forward so Dhoni had to be part of that setup and I had to accept whatever the status quo is as far as a skipper should be or a player in the Indian team ship that you you become a system man absolutely thank you so much Leslie for talking to us that's all we are time for today we'll be back tomorrow with major news developments from the country until then keep watching news click


Welcome back to my channel and welcome if you're new here. It is Saturday. So it is a grocery haul day Luckily this week I didn't have to get as much as I have the last couple of weeks because We really stocked up the last couple weeks But I did find a couple of new finds that I'm excited to share with you guys I went to both Trader Joe's and Fred Meyer, which is also a Kroger store I'm also going to share this week's meal plan and what I am doing for meal prep So I have lots of fun in store for you So if you want to see what I picked up for groceries this week as well as what's on the schedule for meal plan and meal prep stay tuned So here's my haul from Trader Joe's luckily this week I didn't have to buy a ton because I've done that the last two weeks So I did go to Trader Joe's for produce and a few other staples So let's jump into the Trader Joe's haul. I picked my dogs up some treats Of course, these are the grain free peanut butter and banana They really like these and they have no chicken and no grain so it's perfect for them I also restocked my organic shredded mozzarella cheese again The price for this isn't as bad as I originally thought and I really like this cheese You can have one ounce or a quarter cup for only two points. So not bad and it's really really good and flavorful I did grab another bag of the Trader Joe's dried bean cherries. I need this for a recipe now I count these as zero points because all that's in there is dried cherries So I don't count these as any points. Of course, you can if you would like so here's the nutritional Information, but I just add a little bit of these to a salad or a recipe So basically the same amount of regular cherries that I would eat And I just make sure that I drink some water to kind of rehydrate them And then I've got another thing of the organic feta cheese. I really like this feta I'm planning on making some salads and I needed this also for a recipe Restocked my maple syrup. I was so sad to be out Trader Joe's has one of the best prices for maple syrup. So this is their organic Vermont maple It was $4.99 and then this was the last one I saw on the shelf and this is their organic pure bourbon vanilla extract I grabbed it because this is a limited edition item They usually have a vanilla extract, but it's not organic and this was the same price as the regular So pick that up just gonna throw it in the pantry to have on hand Also a repurchase these were amazing. These are the Trader Joe's organic milk chocolate caramel eggs These are so good you guys. They are so incredibly good. Well worth the points Individually wrapped so you don't overeat them and they are really really delicious. I picked those up Everything else is produce. So I grabbed some organic baby broccoli I needed this for a recipe and then also just some broccoli florets for another recipe It seems like I've been using broccoli a lot, which isn't a bad thing. So I picked that up I grabbed this salad mix for a salad I'm gonna have a salad for lunch tomorrow and this sounded really good this herb salad mix and some of their Lettuce didn't look so hot So this is one of the best ones that was organic. So I grabbed that and then I also picked up some organic cuskin tape Tuscan kale Wow for a recipe and then some red potatoes. These are the ladybug organics I need to potatoes for a couple of recipes and we do like to have those with veggies on a sheet pan Another bag of the teeny tiny avocados. I did eat all of these last week. I've been having an avocado every day I love it so much keeps me nice and full a papaya again. It just sounded really good I seriously can't wait for summer when fruit is in season. I'm kind of tired of the winter fruits the oranges of the world So I'm excited to have some papaya to give me some tropical vibes some organic strawberries They actually look pretty good at Trader Joe's so I grabbed those so I'll do strawberries and papaya for the week And then one lone shallot for a recipe. So let's jump into what I picked up at Fred Meyer And here is what I picked up this week at Fred Meyer So first we're gonna start with our my new find you guys know I love the siete chips, but you can usually only find them in the big bag now I found them in the little individual bags six bags in a bag I want to say this was about eight dollars. So it's a little over a dollar a bag, but these are the best chips They're so good. They had sea salt and they had the lime I went ahead and got the lime, but these are pre-portioned ready to go You guys the ingredients in these are perfection and they're literally absolutely delicious chips I love them with salsa guacamole with the cheese dip the siete queso So I picked those up for me that way they're pre-portioned out ready to go For my husband, I grabbed just a regular chip variety pack I like to show you guys everything I pick up Whether it's for me or not because we all eat different foods on our program So these are just the little 18 bags a variety of individual chips also for him I grabbed the little bites. He likes these party ones for in his lunch These are those little individual bags of the muffins and then I decided to try these again These are the Oli or Oli sleep gummies. I've been taking a sleep gummy. It's helping me sleep a lot better especially on days that I'm just home and not doing a lot I have a hard time sleeping so I had a coupon for these So I grabbed those. I also needed a can of corn for a recipe. So I got the simple truth organic super sweet corn I'm making my husband his favorite pasta salad not WWE friendly, but nonetheless his favorite salad. So this is just some diced ham for that Picked up a pound of ninety three seven organic ground turkey. I need this for a dinner recipe and A dozen eggs for egg salad sandwiches for this next week for my husband He wanted a salad this week also for that pasta salad. I needed a big block of cheese So this is just some mild cheddar cheese And I had a coupon for the this that was about to expire So this is the private selection center cut double smoked bacon So I picked that up It never hurts to just have some bacon in the freezer on those days that you just want some bacon So I picked that up the rest of what I grabbed is produce. So I have three organic red bell peppers I need peppers for a couple of recipes. So I picked those up also running a little low on my mixed fruit for my smoothies And since I didn't go to Costco this week, I grabbed the simple truth organic mixed fruit This is fresh frozen strawberries peaches pineapple and mango So I thought that would be really really good and speaking of smoothies.  I wanted the ones with the orange, but they were out of the organic ones I always buy my port potatoes organic because they're on the dirty dozen list So I just grabbed these sweet potatoes for a bootable recipe can't wait for that Some green onion for my husband's pasta salad and last but not least some Radishes for his pasta salad not shown is some diet coke and some Coors like so that is my grocery haul this week from Fred Meyer So let's jump into my meal plan and my meal prep So here is what is on the menu for this next week. So this is the week of April 4th through April 10th So starting today Saturday, we always go out for dinner or pick up something for dinner on Saturdays Tomorrow I'm going to be making chicken Diven which is really really delicious and then on Monday. I'm making a kale cranberry and feta salad So we're going to keep it nice and fresh maybe pair that with some chicken Tuesday, we'll do leftovers to eat up what we didn't finish from the last couple of days Wednesday is spaghetti cups. These are clean eating little mini spaghetti cups made in a muffin pan So these should be really really good Thursday, we're going to do some turkey burgers I don't know if we'll cook those up on the barbecue or in the house And then Friday we'll barbecue up some garlic and ginger kebabs And then on the back of the weekly menu is where I write down what I'm doing for a meal prep So all of these recipes you'll see in Monday's meal prep video So I'm going to be doing a healthy breakfast hash using sweet potatoes This should be really really good for breakfast Lunches for the week are going to be sweet potato bootables So that's my first time making a bootable. So I'm excited to share that recipe with you guys And then I'm going to be making some clean eating chocolate chip cookies Just to have some dessert options on hand. So all three of these recipes you will see in my meal prep And then these other recipes you'll kind of see throughout the week The ones that I do decide to share you'll see those on my channel Also, I wanted to point out that a lot of people have asked what this BLDS means This is breakfast lunch dinner and snacks So you can actually plan all of your meals I just do my dinners because I meal prep breakfast lunch and snacks So now let's take a look at the meal planner. So this is my meal planner. I use the Kerry L meal planner I get a lot of questions on this. I actually just featured this in Thursday's favorite video But this is the brand new cover for 2020. I love it. I think it's beautiful But this meal planner is awesome. It is everything you need to plan Stay on track. So the first tab will go through is the top one That is the resource tab and this is where you can just jot down your favorite websites meal planning blogs You can even write down your favorite recipes So that they're at a glance if you want to make them again in the future The orange tab is inventory. I did kind of take advantage of this section over This whole quarantine, but you can do your freezer inventory Also your pantry inventory and the one that I took advantage of is my spice inventory So I went through my spice cabinet and I wrote down all of my spices that I don't use very often And when their expiration date is that way I can make sure that I use them up And I don't have them on hand too far past their expiration date The yellow tab is where we just were and this is where you go to plan your meals So let's go to the current month, which is April So there is a calendar and at a glance for the month I love this because I take advantage of this by the night before checking to see what's on the menu Making sure I have all of the ingredients But also making sure that I pull out any meat I need out of the freezer and have that ready to go So I just write down my menu for the entire month now. Yes, it changes I even write down extra recipes So on one of the nights that I planned for leftovers if there isn't any or not enough I have a couple of backup recipes as well So I like seeing everything at a glance and then each week there is also the weekly menu And that's where you'll write down your menu and the detachable grocery list for you to take to the grocery store And you guys know I take it every single week. So when you look at mine I don't have the grocery list anymore. It's actually what I use at the grocery store. So love it And then the gatherings tab looks pretty similar to the meal planning tab It's where you're going to go ahead and plan your events similar to planning your meals Including even the supplies that you need for the event And then there's a detachable grocery list for that as well And lastly is the notes tab and again, this is where you're just going to jot down notes Anything you want to keep track of they give you lots of note pages in the back Which I love and then there's a little two-sided folder Now I use this I put my printed out recipes for the week. So when I go to make a recipe I just grab it right out of the little folder. So that is the carry ale meal planner I do have 10 off. I'll go ahead and put that here on the screen You do actually have to go through the link down in the description box in order to get the 10 off So simply click the link in the description box and are my code here on the screen at checkout And you'll get 10 off. So this is my carry ale meal planner. You guys know I love this highly recommend Thank you for joining me on another weekly my w w grocery haul I'm so excited to share this week's grocery haul and meal plan with you guys You will be seeing meal prep recipes uploaded on monday for my typical meal prep monday You'll also see a couple of these dinner recipes kind of scattered throughout other videos throughout this next week So definitely stay tuned for that down in the description box Is the link to come on over and join up on my website that way you have access to all of my recipes You can print them off. There's photos. Make sure you enter your email So you're subscribed to my website as well I'll be doing a lot of giveaways and fun things especially for those that are part of my website So make sure that you join me over there down in the description box Is also all of the discount codes that I can offer for my favorite things So check it out if you're new to my channel Welcome. Welcome. Make sure you're subscribed and your bell notification is turned on so you don't miss a single video Give this video a thumbs up if you love grocery haul and comment down below Let me know which of these recipes are you most excited to see and try for yourself Thank you so much for watching. Happy saturday and i'll see you next time. Bye guys


Welcome to tell us those tycoons. I'm Cody. I'm Jacob this video is all about your pitch and getting your pitch down Which is why? We have a script and you know what our agents think we're crazy because our because our scripts is like four or five pages long I know it's like but you got to build the relationship you get asked certain questions And I think even more importantly than like having a good personal pitch and using a script is that We want the call to flow right we want to be like an outline Yeah, can we do a video we prep a little when they do a call we want them to be prepped Prior preparation prevents poor performance. We want that to come through in the call So that when they're rolling through their script that outline They're able to go from hi my name is Cody to welcome to the family Thank you for your business and that's on the script. I love the welcome to the family thing man I mean anything else that we do when we're thinking about building a pitch building a script and Flowing a call well in our scripts in our pitch Everything is based on getting a yes. We want that customer to continuously say yes So you don't want your family to go unprotected right right? No, no, I do you care about your family, right? Right, right, and they just it gets them in that that that cadence of saying yes and yes and yes trial closes Small closes get them to say yes 15 times and guess what when you ask them to buy and you make ask them to make a decision What are they gonna say? What are they used to saying? It's because of how well you've done a long way That's why it's important to build a good pitch


of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramanitish community. If you're online, check in the chat to find out what territory you're joining us from today. Also go to sftl.org to see how the library is celebrating First Person, our Native American heritage celebration. So before we get started with our conversation, which we are all very excited to talk about today, I also want to thank our partners at the Museum of the African Diaspora, MOAP, for helping us host this event and where you can also find a copy of Dr. Norse's book for purchase on their online bookstore. We also wanted to let you know about some upcoming events that we're sponsoring through the Center and at the library. Tomorrow, in person and online, in the corret downstairs, we're going to have Kimberly Cox Marshall, who is the daughter of Field Marshall Don Cox of the Black Panther Party, along with Steve Wasserman, Hay Day's publisher and executive director, to discuss the legacy of Don Cox and the Black Panther Party in the New Block Making Revolution. Cox was in charge of gun-running and planning armed attacks for the Panthers in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. So it's a very interesting book and should be also an interesting conversation. Wednesday, online, we are also going to be having Kevin Simmons, who we'll read from his new book, The Monster I Am Today, Leon Teem Price and A Life Inverse. He will be joined by poets Willetta Brinson, James Kavneek and Devorah Major. And that's online Wednesday, November 10th at 7 p.m. That's a program sponsored in partnership with the Hormel Center, our LGBTQIA Center, which is just across the way here on the third floor. And now to our main event. Described by Wendy Jean Fox of BuzzFeed Books as a significant new voice in fiction, Norris has written what may be one of the defining novels of the era at the intersection between Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. And by Michael Thatcher as a potent cocktail of lyrical dexterity, societal critique and fascinating characters, the confession of Copeland Cain brings to mind Ishmael Reed's classic Mumbo Jumbo. Norris's first novel, Brother and the Dancer, won the 2012 James D. Houston Award and he served as editor of the Critical Anthology street lit representing the urban landscape. He's been a fellow with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Kalaluw Writers Workshop and the Public Voices Program. His editorials and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alta, Lit Hub, Electric Literature and Ramzellica, sorry, I probably mispronounced that. Norris teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at San Jose State University. He'll be interviewed today by Natalie Enright, the librarian for the African-American Center and without further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr. Keenan Norris and Natalie Enright. Yay. Thank you, Shauna. Thank you everyone for being here, to everyone online who's joining us, welcome as well and of course Dr. Norris, thank you for being here today. We're going to, well I'm really excited there. I'm really excited to jump into my questions but first I thought we would do a reading from the book if you don't mind. Thank you and I also want to thank everybody here. Okay, so I'm going to read first from the very start of the book. For those who have read the book or know something about it, you know that the book is a kind of correspondence, a kind of oral correspondence between two characters, Copeland Cain, the eponymous main character, protagonist of the story and Jacqueline, his friend, high school associate and journalism major one year ahead of him, he's not in college, she is, one year ahead of him in the educational tracks, so the book begins with Jacqueline. Don't worry about who I am, like Copeland would say, don't vex or do it on your own time and about yourself. Don't vex me, I have enough to worry about all by myself. I stayed up all night last night with my thoughts and on this sleepless morning, they are still with me. Maybe I should say yes, yes, I'll make this recording and risk my reputation and possibly my freedom in the process or maybe I should tell him to turn himself in, make sure to text it to him, put it in writing so that law enforcement doesn't go getting its black people confused, who am I? I could say more about myself, but it would only reveal my methods of misdirection. The real tell is what I decided to do with this dilemma that that boy has decided to drop into my voicemail like an orphan child onto my doorstep. If I put my student journalist suit on, there's no way I can say no to the wailing child, not when his story has all but knocked on my door and asked me to tell it, not when his story could make my career before I've even made it out of college and all I have to do is hit record. That's a question, not a statement. That's all I have to do. I have no idea what to do, let alone what comes next. Only the copes gotta talk to someone, gotta tell his story to someone to everyone. After all, law enforcement, V is so clear, has wasted no time telling theirs. Early reports indicate that the remaining fugitive is a male between ages 15 and 25. African-American athletic build has a history of criminal behavior as a juvenile. Investigators are reviewing his records. A second bulletin states that if he does not turn himself in before their next scheduled briefing in two days time, that they will bring charges. They might charge a single individual or multiple persons, maybe with one crime, maybe with multiple crimes. The public wants answers, so apparently everything is on the table. The timetable is even on the table. Charges might come sooner. One part of me doesn't wanna involve myself in this. Another tells me that I'm already involved, that there's no way not to be involved. Maybe being black means there is no means of escape. I'm always implicated. Even when I have no connection to the crime, even when it's only my heart that keeps me here thinking, questioning, fighting myself over freedom. That boy, he's out there phoning me like fear of arrest doesn't factor into his equation, like fear is foreign to him, which I know it's not. Maybe he knows something I don't and has figured out how to evade the police and the news, but I doubt it. As for me, I'm careful beyond careful not to state whether I'm contemplating my innocence in a studio apartment or a small condo or a town home or a student hostel. And my city shall remain undisclosed, thank you. I police myself better than the police ever could here. How about I play detective on myself and interrogate my own imagination? Where might I be? How about an unaccounted for New York City seller? Underground, literally. Like Hope's phone, I'm old school. I testify under a penalty of perjury that I am me and the far side is on the phonograph. I'm smoking the finest California cush, so good they might recriminalize it. Meanwhile, I've strung LED lights across the perimeter of the ceiling to illumine me to myself. That story makes more sense than the other one repeating itself in my thoughts. That story is the one where I tell Copeland to play it safe, turn himself in and prove his innocence in court. As soon as that story starts to take hold and make my mind up to call him back and tell him what to do, I hear laughter, loud, deep laughter. I'm laughing, but it's not my laugh, not my tenor at all that I'm hearing. It's something from the insides of the city instead, a boy laughing through the streets and my body so loudly that all I can hear is him and his laughing becomes crying and crying becomes testifying and he calls out through me to me.  And that leads into Copeland's first section. I just wanna read the very start of this as well. They already arrested Keisha Free and DeMichael, snatched them up easy because so clearly done searched out their location. Then law enforcement did that criminal contact tracing thing, followed them from their phones and whatnot, tagged them up. Long as we're talking technology, boss, you might as well know my audio comes to you unencrypted in this bootleg old pre-sage voice app, the most off-brand, unheard of cell phone app you will ever encounter. It calls itself the Cayman Island apps. Don't ask me how I got this mess on my phone. It's all yours, truly gots to work with right now. So you might have to trust me on this one, even if you're not trying to trust this technology. Real talk, Jack. I only ask that the people hear me all the way out. Won't jeopardize y'all no kind of way, except maybe in y'all's feelings. I can't tell you about your heart, Jack. But I'm gonna tell you what's in minds.  Excuse me, edit that, the one pivotal incident that everybody and their mama care so much about. The crime in question, the weed that worked its way up from spoiled soil to choke the chief gardener. Now I'm giving testimony the only way I know how, without having Mr. Miranda's rights read to me. I'm making a real record right now. Not just how that man got got, but about everything that got me here. Copeland Cain, the alleged accomplice, the fugitive, the ghost, the rabbit, the radiated, remediated, medicated, incarcerated, the child who fell out of color at people time and into America, the whole deal, to go against the apex predator, they steady creating the end to on the news feed every five minutes.   Thank you for that reading, I enjoyed it. In fact, the beginning of the book is probably, I mean, the whole book's my favorite, but that's my favorite part is that like first beginning part of the book. And something about this book that I noticed immediately when I started reading it is that it's so timely. There's COVID and the murder of George Floyd is very prominent in the book, which made me curious about your process. Can you talk about that? When did you start writing this book? Because it's like right now. Yeah, I mean, it's wild. Like this is the first in-person event I've done, like having a virtual book tour is really weird. This book came out in June, came out over the summer and so did all these events from like my dinner table. Yeah, I started writing this book in 2015. So quite a while ago. And I was spurred to it. I was inspired by the murders and armed black people back then, right? And going back long before that. I mean, my father grew up in the west side of Chicago and he had horror stories that he would tell me about the ways that police were treating black people going back to like the 1950s and 60s in Chicago. And so I've known about this my whole life. I think a lot of black kids grew up with this kind of like getting taught your ABCs, basically. But it was in 2015 that I began the book. I was also really, I remember I wrote the initial like 30 or 40 pages just under kind of initial rush of inspiration for those in the audience who are writers. You know how when you first just kind of get lit up to write something, you can jump into it and get pretty far. But then you need more to get past that. You need like structure and all that good stuff. And so something else that really helped me was that I was part of the 2016 Calaloo Writers Conference and went to Brown University to do this writers workshop with a number of great writers, including Nafisa Spires-Thompson, Hanif Abdul-Rakid was there, a number of other writers. Calaloo Writers Workshop is an African Diaspora Writers Workshop and so having the blessing of those writers getting that kind of go-ahead really inspired me as well. When you're thinking though about the presence of these very contemporary like 2020, 2021 life circumstances, the ghetto flu of the book which has obvious resonance with COVID. We're thinking about like the fires that haunt the book that haunt us here. Some of that was already in the book, long before 2020 because one environmental injustice, differential health impacts didn't start with COVID but were here long before that. So frankly it didn't take a lot of imagination to make that part of the story. And it was always like really crazy to me. I know you have a later question that kind of touches on this so I won't go too deep into it but it was always crazy to me like the kind of liberalism of the Bay Area contrasted with the kind of crazy, just depending on where you live in the city or in different parts of the Bay, the difference in your vulnerability or exposure to all kinds of environmental hazards that was just learning about the different parts of the Bay. I've lived here for about 20 years. I'm from Southern California but that really had impressed itself on me way before 2020. So in so many ways 2020 just reinforced and deepened and kind of put names to things that were already going on. And I really wanted long before 2020 to find a way to write dramatically about the undramatic processes of like the slow death of exposure to toxic superfund sites and all the other a dish of environmental injustice. And so that the fires obviously the masks were, we were wearing masks before 2020. You know, all of us here, if you're in the Bay Area in 2018, you're wearing masks already. So yeah, I wish I could say I had more imagination or I had like a crystal ball or something but I was just like walking around. And then I wanna ask you about location. The book takes place in deep East Oakland and Cope's neighborhood, the Rockwood, his apartment complex. They all felt like a character to me while I was reading this. But it's also, these are also places that even Cope himself talks about, they're not mentioned in the news. Even when big events, you know, there's a, at one point in the book, there's a fire of a barber shop. And he's like, it's not even in the news. So why set the book there? Why East Oakland and a place that maybe, you know, even people in the Bay Area, they know about or they've heard about it but they don't really know about it. You could have chose anywhere. So why there? And then also why in the near future and not exactly in this moment? Yeah, thank you, wonderful question. I want, as you said, right? East Oakland's a place that people, not just in the Bay, but I think around the country have heard of. A lot of that's probably because of rap music and whatnot, but for whatever reasons, right? It's one of these kind of, it's like one of the American, or it's understood as in the popular culture, one of the American ghettos that people just know about. But people haven't necessarily been there they don't know how like economically diverse, for example, East Oakland is, or the East Oakland's like half Oakland, right? So it's not just, you know, you kind of lower income community, right? So I wanted to, so I wanted to set it there because of that. I also, you know, there is this way that I remember, you know, back in 2006, 2007, there was a big crime wave and there were a lot of people getting shot and it wouldn't be in the news.  And so that really struck me and really had resonance with the way that back in the day, before the civil rights movement, the murder of black people was not in like the mainstream newspapers did not report on it.  And so that struck me and then in terms of it setting not in the present but in the near future, you know, the pace and intensity of gentrification in here in San Francisco especially and then it's kind of like tidal wave that is swept into Oakland and into the East Bay. It's so intense in the last, say, 10 years and had such visible, you know, present impacts.  But say like, what if we move this a tick or two forward? You know, what is Oakland gonna be like in 10 years? You know, for those who are familiar with Oakland, like obviously like the near west side of Oakland, downtown, definitely the north side of Oakland are very gentrified, East Oakland, not so much, right? But how hard is it to imagine East Oakland, right? Getting hugely gentrified. Now I mean like, you know, in the 10s and the 20s, I mean like out to the 80s, 90s, right? Is that so hard to, you know, to imagine, you know, think about San Francisco, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, right? So, I don't know, I was just sort of, you know, I'm like a writer, so I'm kind of a troublemaker. So I just like, let's, you know, let's do this. Let's see. I felt like, it felt like a scene from like a science fiction book when Copeland is on Treasure Island getting swallowed up by toxic soil. But in reality, it's not really fiction when you learn about places like Treasure Island and there's other places like that in the Bay Area and around the United States too. And so there's definitely this environmental injustice theme that I saw throughout the book, which was very interesting to me. And I found myself thinking about these places and how a place like Treasure Island, because everybody, you know, when it comes up in the book, everyone has like a really adverse reaction to it when they comment on it. But it's not inherently toxic, right? Like humans did that. That place became unwell because of human impact. And that made me also think about black and brown communities they're not inherently ghettos, but there's like this orchestrated neglect that happens to communities of color and to bodies of people of color too. And so yes, again, I was thinking about the environment and then black and brown bodies. So, and how their space has become unlivable. What is the connection between the environment and black and brown people in this book for you? Yeah, I mean, thinking about Treasure Island, thank you for the question. Thinking about Treasure Island specifically, I mean, so wild because it's true, as you said, that Treasure Island was not always this polluted place that specific human actions connected to war and nuclear experimentation and so forth, created its present state. It was also created or brought out of the water by human design, by human experiment, essentially. And so I think about the way that global capitalism, the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, unfortunately like it recreated us and why I say us. I mean, black Americans who are the descendants of the Africans who were forcibly brought over here created new kinds of people and hybridized cultures that had not previously existed and that were already, that kind of came into existence under enslaved but under threat and so forth. And so I think, so I think it's, when I think about like the sort of natural state of, of black and brown people in this country, I think about ways that the country itself in coming into being has already through colonization through slavery and then through all the kind of post-colonial and post-slave social structures has like sort of radically deformed everything from living situations, health, health and wellness, psychology, our psychology, so forth and so on. One way in which I've tried to speak to a kind of better state of being was through the use of time in the book. And so, you know, Cope says at the beginning of the book, you know, that he fell out of colored people timing into America, right? His child had fell out of colored people timing into America and you know, sort of the joke of CP time is that you're always late and like always late and all this stuff. And when he's, you know, like running for the bus at the start of the book, you know, he's always late and he's getting to school late. But, you know, he's in his body, right? And he's with his friends and it's later when he goes, you know, when he's incarcerated later that he gets, that he becomes punctual because he has to be on time for everything, right? For bed checks and for this and that. But he loses his rhythm, right? And so I wanted to show a way that, you know, sort of being on this one clock, you know, that is basically institutionalized. You know, all the ways that we've been institutionalized and deformed, right?  Now I wanna talk about one of my other favorite characters, Cope's my favorite, but his dad. And his dad, when he's introduced to us, excuse me, he's introduced as an inventor, which I've found that interesting and I like paused for a second when I read that. I think because me personally, I was like, you know, I don't know any inventors, but the, but I do, like the more that you explained or Cope explains who his father is, I do.  And, but his hustles, you know, I don't mean to, well, he's unemployed. On paper, he's unemployed and Cope describes it better than I can, but he's like, you know, he just basically has a social security number, he has his government name and a social security number. And so by societal standards, maybe that's like not impressive, you know?  And they really are a form of resistance against a lot of the forces that are impacting him, his family and his community, which I found really interesting. And so that word inventor was so fitting. And again, these inventions are pushing back against things like some of the stuff we just talked about, the environmental injustice that he's experiencing, eviction, the lack of job opportunity in his community. Can you talk about Cope's dad as an inventor and then maybe even inventiveness and black people in general?   He's like, I don't endorse many things that he says in this book, right? You'd like take on voices as a novelist, right? It's not just your voice, you'd take on these different voices, right? But he does have something like core to himself as a person that I really do like. And I like his journey, you know, what he explains toward the end of the book, you know, his whole journey and why he is this inventor. But yeah, I mean, there's a great irony to this idea of, you know, to black invention in part because like if you look at, like if you take, so like, if you look at like macroeconomic data around entrepreneurship in America, it'll all tell you that African-Americans are, you know, at the bottom of entrepreneur, you know, in terms of entrepreneurship, right? How many entrepreneurs there are and so forth. But it's not reflective of reality, right?   You know, I know, you know, there's one millionaire in the history of my family and he was a millionaire a long time ago, like decades and decades ago. And I know how he, you know, how he got that money above board and below board, right?  It's interesting you use the word hustling. I know my dad, after he was expelled from Fresno State for protesting the war and some, you know, segregation issues in Fresno in 1970, you know, and he lost his track scholarship and so forth, he eventually was able to get reinstated to the school, but his track career was over.  He wasn't gonna go to the Olympics and all this stuff. And he needed to start hustling and she didn't mean drug dealing or anything.  Like his dad had done, you know, be a janitor at the bar at night, just like that was hustling, right? And so how's all that not inventive? How's all that not entrepreneurship, right? What's Uber?  So there's a, so there's, there's a lot of irony there to this idea that, you know, black people aren't starting businesses and whatnot. Also want to say that, you know, Cope says very early on that, you know, how could he be anything but an inventor, you know, what with all the experiments we done had ran on us, right? And so there's this way too that American society, academia, not just America, but like Western society and academia has studied black people. You know, the whole domain of sociology in America is built off of this study of black people in the West and South sides of Chicago, you know, the University of Chicago, the School of Sociology from Robert E. Park in the early 20th century all the way on up, right? Is based on these white sociologists going into the black, into the black belt of Chicago and studying black people. That is, that methodology is replicated in a lot of different fields of study, the history of a lot of different domains of study in America, in American academia.  Who gets to be the inventors, right? And who are the subjects of the inventions, right? And the study. I wanna talk a little bit more about Cope and his father. Cope loves his father. His father loves him. That comes through very clearly through the book and their relationship is very fascinating. And they're different in a lot of ways, but they're very similar too. You know, I see them both as hustlers. You know, Cope has his shoe hustle. And like, then we've talked about his dad being an inventor and they both care about their community and they both care about family. Talk to us about the process of writing and creating their relationship and maybe speak to where each of them came from in your imagination. Yeah, I mean, their relationship is really fraught. You know, I think oftentimes we're very much like our parents, but in ways that are like hard for us to understand until we start to walk in their shoes, quote unquote, until we're like, sort of, until we're able to recognize that we're having similar experiences and in some ways dealing with things in similar ways, as they did. And that creates some humility, first of all, right? And some respect and kind of longer view of ourselves and time and history and so forth. And so I think Cope's in process with that. He's a kid, right? He's a teenager in this book and about to exit his teenage years. So he's not really like fully at the point where he can really take in just what you said, that he's a lot like his father. Like he's just starting to understand that, right? But you're right that they have a lot of similarities. I mean, the main difference is just that Cope is like, he's sort of like just, he's a kid in 2030, right? Or the book takes place starting in 2030 and going back to 2020 and coming forward. So he's like a kid in this modern world. He's got like, there are ways that Cope isn't going to refer to people that are now properly understood as bigoted or as insensitive that where his father was brought up in a different world, right? With different constructs and norms and so forth. I mean, those are their main differences, but frankly at the deeper level of who they, not what they say and how they say it, but what they believe, what they value, right? Yeah, they're very similar, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, so I just wanted to kind of portray the intensity. And I think we oftentimes like, we feel that way about our parents, right? Or our grandparents, we're like, why are they talk like that? Why are they saying that, you know?  And it's, you know, so it's like problematic, I think, is like the really nice term we use for it. And so Cope's kind of embarrassed by his father, you know? Some of y'all are embarrassed by, you know, you know, by your four bears too, right? You know, and I saw, I wanted to just portray that kind of angst and all that stuff going on. What was the second party question? Like, where did they come from in your back to you? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, one, yeah, just kind of, you know, going through that same process myself, you know, as a young person and as an adult. And seeing it in other people too.  So I saw, I've seen a lot of that in other people over the course of my life. So I think it comes from that. I'm also just like really kind of fascinated by these crazy black men. I'm like really interested in these people like LeVar Ball and, you know, whomever else. Although, you know, these guys are just like, who said we can't be entrepreneurs?  And the kind of reaction to that, like a lot of people being like, yeah, we said you couldn't be here, you know, right? Yeah, and so I think that I'm really interested in that. Gentrification is another big part of this book as well. And I really love the way Koch describes it. He says that, or he describes gentrification as aliens landing on East Oakland, which I thought was perfect. And his observations of gentrification, this force against his life, against his community were so real to me. And for anyone who hasn't experienced it, he shows us how insidious it can be and how violent it can feel and how slow and fast it happens all at the same time. And for me, while I was reading the book, this was most apparent when he's talking about the barbershops in his communities and how that changes over time. Talk to us about the importance of barbershops in his community and yeah, the importance of barbershops in his community and again, how their presence changes throughout the book. Okay, yeah, I mean he, yeah, Koch goes through some phases with his barbershops in the first part of the book. And it really, to me, like the first 50 pages or so of the book and my favorite part of the book, I wanna like briefly name check a book that some of y'all might not be familiar with, The Saul Bellows, The Adventures of Augie March. I really loved the first 50 pages of that book and I always wanted to write sort of a coming of age, beginning to a coming of age book that had something like that, kind of flavor and that kind of energy. And I don't know that I, I'm not trying to compare myself to Saul Bellow but I had just sort of the neighborhood stuff in the first part of that book is so cool. And so, yeah, I mean, in terms of the barbershops, I think you have this sort of just, I saw Trevor Noah earlier this week. It was like, yes, this daily show and it was something that they were asking black people about some issue or another.  So, I mean, you have this sort of like idea of the black barbershop as the hush harbor where black men are able to express themselves, be funny, to be emotional, they're like very cordoned spaces not just with black men but with men in general in America where it's publicly acceptable, socially acceptable to be emotional. And so, so you have that kind of thing but I also wanted to layer over it what's going on with the neighborhood. So you have like the nation of Islam Barbershop which just closes down at one point. And you have the, I mean he calls it the heathen barbershop. So the heathen barbershop. And I remember in the town I'm from we had just like right across the street we had like the Christian barbershop that guys would come up every day in like full suits and be playing gospel music and right across the street you had the heathen barbershop and everybody's always late and there's like smoking weed outside and you know it was just, and so I wanted to you know capture something about the community and its multiplicity, right? And, you know, because I think again like there are all these stereotypes about a place like East Oakland that it's just buck wild, you know all this gang violence and so forth and there are elevated levels of crime and violence and so forth but you also have institutions like you know that are of all kinds of different types that are reflective of the whole like journey of black people in this diaspora, right? Throughout American history and throughout the whole history of the Americas that are in every black neighborhood, right? If I could briefly say to a book, one book that really beautifully shows this is Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man. I really love that book too for its you know for its kind of panoramic view of the way that black diasporic culture is expressed in a black neighborhood in America. And staying on that topic of neighborhood and community coat in an effort to clean his community or support his community, he ends up getting accused for trying to destroy it by community members and not outsiders which I thought was really interesting. And so his relationship with his own community is complicated and it differs from how he's seen and his relationship with the community the private school community that he attends. What was the importance of or what is the importance of community in this book and then talk to us a little bit about Cobb's relationship with both of those communities? Yeah, that's a great question and one that I have not gotten yet. I mean, it makes me think of a lot of things. I mean, I think that like as individuals, you know, we're both who we are as individuals and we are also products of these different environments, right? So we are, I can define myself as Kenan Norris but also as like an African-American. I can define myself as an American. I can define myself as a writer and all these things, right? And so we both are like part of our communities and of our communities but also like in certain ways we are in contradiction, right? In our, as ourselves, we're in contradiction with our various communities, right? And this goes way beyond race, right? There are so many ways in which we are like misaligned with those, you know, those communities, those groups that we were either born into or even that we've taken up of our own volition, you know, at later points in our life, right?  None of us just fit in and Cobb doesn't just fit in, right? He's, you know, he's this kind of weird kid, you know? And so, yeah, there are all these ways like he sits up on his dumpsters and like observes Rockwood, right? Because I just, I like that kind of, you know, as a writer, you're many ways like you're the observer. You are both in it, you live in your community but you're also writing about it, right? Or you're living in the world but you're also writing about it, right? And so, you know, so I think that at base just sort of philosophically that's like the challenge. That's part of just the human challenge for everybody is how do you reconcile, right? That, so Cobb's just working through that within his own community in Rockwood, right?    And so the other kids are like, why would you do that? Right? But, you know, we all have stuff like that. You know, it doesn't matter who you are, right? We all have ways that we're sort of just an outsider to the groups that we're a part of. In terms of, you know, Pete Montay, his other community, I know, so, so inventively titled. You know, it's just, I don't know. I was having some fun with that.  Like, a lot of those wins came out of East Oakland, that's all I'm gonna say, right? So, you know, it is what it is. I mean, and so I wanted to kind of play with that, because Cope is not only recruited, you know, with the idea of playing sports, although that is sort of part of the idea with him, it's also that he'll be this voice, speaking to black issues and so forth. And I wanted to kind of dig into the complexity of that, of being, you know, a black writer, writing to a primarily non-black audience and about issues that are important, primarily but not exclusively to black people. And so I wanted to dig into the complexity of that. And because we're in the African-American Center and we have the black hair exhibit happening right now that's surrounding us, I wanna talk a little bit about hair in this book. There's a part in the book that Jack is describing and remembering seeing this photo of Cope when he's younger and he has cornrows and she describes it so affectionately and she says, what did she say exactly? She says, oh, he looks like a very young and very innocent Alan Iverson, which made me chuckle while I was reading that because, you know, anybody that was familiar with Alan Iverson while he was playing basketball, the media almost always criticized him for wearing cornrows and then there's also another part in the book earlier, a description of Copeland, or many descriptions of Copeland as he's going to the barber shops and people's impressions of his hair. And these were moments for me that, and someone else said this and I agree with them, that the book seemed so specific and universal. Those moments were very specific to Cope's experience but I think as black people, our hair is a point where we can connect with each other. It's a way that we can express ourselves creatively as individuals. It's also sometimes a point of trauma in our own personal stories. And so I'm curious, what were you thinking about when you were talking about Cope's hair? Because hair is like mentioned. Yeah, it comes up a lot. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I really wanna congratulate you on the hair exhibit here and for those who haven't checked it out, the hair exhibit at the African American Center here is wonderful. Thank you. I, yeah, I mean, I think as you so eloquently stated, black hair has a lot of connotations. It's like, it's very loaded, it's very loaded sort of topic. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that I did want to, you know, when Jack's talking about him and she references Alan Iverson, yeah, I mean, it's just like this way that, you know, Alan Iverson was seen in the general public versus the way that his expression of his personal style, right, was just seen totally differently by black folks, right?  Everybody's hair was, or not everybody, but vast majority, right? It just, yeah, yeah, close, close fade. And so it, I am, you know, so I just wanted to kind of, you know, give a moment to that, you know, and to the way she would see, you know, see him and see, you know, why she would make that reference.  Also, when he goes to jail, right, he, you know, they cut his hair. And if you read Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, you know, which is a, it's a comparative study of systems of slavery throughout world history, not just black people being enslaved, but people, you know, people all over the world have been enslaved, obviously. Right, one of the patterns that Patterson sees, right, is that they so often take people's hair, right, that that's one, you know, because you have control of your hair, right, your hair is, you know, you're one of the ways you can express yourself, right, your individuality. And so to take somebody's hair, right, to cut it off and not allow them to do anything with it, is a very powerful gesture, right, is a way of taking your identity. And so I also wanted to, you know, so like you have all the early stuff in the book that's, you know, around hair that's kind of wild and, you know, a lot of it is a little silly. And then you have this like very violent taking away, right, with that. And I think Cope actually, he says something about that too.  Yeah, yeah, I like that.   And speaking of that, Cope, his voice is one of the many things I dig about him as a character and I liked in this book. There's like an inconsistency with his language and maybe some of that's because of the two worlds that he lives in with the private school and his own neighborhood. So he does, he like code switches and he does it, so I felt like so effortlessly and sometimes even really politically. Can you talk about the importance of having a character in a book switch back from standard English to the language of his youth and his neighborhood and yeah, the significance of putting that and writing in a book? Yeah, I mean, I think we're taught again, I think there are probably some writers in the audience and we're taught as writers that like voice in a book has to be consistent, right? But that doesn't really make sense. And because we're not consistent in the way we speak, I'm not talking right now the way I talk to you if we were just talking one-on-one, right? Context matters, not just text, right? And so there was a talk, I saw the linguist John McWhorter who is mostly known as like this black conservative or whatever, like he's a very learned person where he's talking about code switching and he said, you know, code switching is only criticized with black Americans for some reason. You know, he goes through, I don't have the conversions with all these different cultures to speak to it in the way that he does. It's in his Google talk, though. He says that, you know, people all over the world, right, are code switching constantly, you know, first of all, from like work to home, but crossing borders, different dialects within a language in different regions and so forth, that people are constantly making these switches, right? And so Cope's just doing that, right? I hear black Americans doing this all the time, right? I mean, you're the same black people who use like double negatives and say can't instead of can't, you're right, and all this little stuff that probably a lot of people don't even hear, right? But we do. Also speaking, you know, like proper English, you know? Like they're not, you know, they're not like mutually exclusive one another.  So I just thought it was more realistic, honestly, to like write the book like that. I like that. Well, I have like 500 more questions, but we don't have that much time. I did want to give a chance to open it up to the audience here and also online if there are any questions from people. I don't know, Anisa, do we have questions online? Just some really nice comments. Yay. I did that. Did anybody have questions for Kimmer? So it seems like it's really made, like you've been able to meld parts of your life together, like being a literature professor, and writing this book because I've never heard anybody reference, Saul Bellow. For a book that's being published now, people know who he is. Sure. But it doesn't, a lot of people don't make that connection as well as the reference I think of if I heard it right, too, in visiting them. So do you feel like people who read a lot of books have more hope in terms of building our society that you're up against are bad for the next 10 years? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think that it's a great question and Ellison and Bellow, of course, were great literary friends, right? And so, you know, they were inspiring each other, but yeah, I mean, I think what reading books does is, you know, it's a more extended contemplation of somebody else's mind, their imagination, their story, than pretty much anything else. Like it's very intimate, and, you know, because of the- I think the reader brings something. Right, it's interactive, yeah. The reader learns something in the language of books, but that you can't really learn from a Wikipedia page. Oh, absolutely. That's what you can get a lot of information about. I won't say this. I mean, I think that one thing that I believe would, you know, make all of us better as individuals and make our society better by extension would be to know more about each other, right? And I think that, again, you know, the kind of vocation of reading does, you know, at its base it's about sitting with somebody else's mind, you know, for a long period of time, not for like the space of a song or a movie, but for a long time. And so I think the more we, you know, the more that we like kind of set that for ourselves as a discipline, you know, and a source of pleasure and entertainment at the same time, like I think the more we will know about each other. Thank you for your question. I also wanted to say in general, thank you for everybody who's here. Like I didn't expect like people to come to this. So, you know, it's cool. Yes, thank you everyone for coming. Do we don't have... I have another, I have an online question. Oh, okay. And maybe you can repeat it for the microphone. I'd love to know what other pieces of literature and nonfiction influence Kenan Norris's writing that influences your writing and those works that you absolutely love. And I love you're throwing down the book recommendations we love, you know, we love that. Okay, so let me try to rephrase that. They love the book list that you came throughout the talk and then they're interested in... What other literature influences you? What other literature influences you? And what you absolutely are loving right now. And what literature you're absolutely loving right now. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the question.  You know, as you said, it's right there in the book. William Faulkner, he's just kind of like going back. But more recently, like Barbara Everestow's Girl, Woman Others, an amazing book that's doing all kinds of really interesting stuff with language and with like narrative structure and with like just kind of jazz-like improvisation. Of course, like Toni Morrison. I really deeply love Sula, which is her second book. Like not one of her more famous books, but I really deeply love that book. I really love jazz. Those are my two favorite Toni Morrison books. Yeah, I mean, right now I'm reading Anthony Villazquez-Nassau's After Parties. Anthony Villazquez-Nassau, one of my roles at San Jose State is that I'm the coordinator of the Steinbeck Fellows Program. Program where we give fellowships to six writers every year to help them with their, you know, continuing their writing. Anthony, unfortunately, died last year during his fellowship, but he wrote this brilliant book that is really being acclaimed all over the place. And so I wasn't the program coordinator last year. So I'm just introducing myself to his work, Cambodian American writer, whose work is set in the Central Valley in California, Central Valley.  But, you know, just, I also write a lot of essays. Rebecca Solman, who's another Bay Area bass writer, really love her writing. Yeah, it could go on and on. Walter Mosley, many people. Thank you, thank you. Well, again, thank you everyone for being here online and actually in this physical space. This is really special. Thank you, Dr. Norris, for coming today and sharing the book with us and talking to us. I really appreciate your time.  Yeah, well, may I? Thank you. If I may real quickly, I just want to thank you for inviting me and for interviewing me and for really bringing all this together. And again, thank you for having me. What about the book? Oh, shot. Oh, yeah. It's on Amazon, you know, the publisher I named Press as well. You can go to their website, buy it. It is at Moab. It's at most of the bookstore around Bay Area. So, yeah, all those places. Cool. Is that part of the bookshed? Yeah. Yeah.