My dead father (apologies to barthelme, my hometown homie), which is G (and not MJ, who would be my very much alive uncle), is in fact correct when he references my cultural system as being “least tractable”– though it does not have so much bounce, at least not lately, given that the gym has been closed to accomodate a visit from the dalai lama, and the meetings have been scheduled during the time for bouncing. But he, (the dead father), is a terrible weight to bear sometimes, and capricious, and as he once said of his own prose, quoting dolly parton, it takes a lot of work to look this cheap… I too regret not having done more with science studies, but my regret does not have nearly the poignancy Geertz just barely summons.

Actually, I’ll have nothing to do with fathers and fathers and fathers… What I love most about MJ is that he is not my mentor, nor my guide, though he was and remains an extraordinary advisor, spiritually tractable or no, and that I always thought of his relation to Geertz as similarly distant but close… which is another way of saying that some of us are not actually very good at carrying out programs, or skilled in the game of rebelling against our fathers, which may in fact result in a large and diverse array of emerging forms of prose on which no fathers are visiting their sins. But who am I really, but a lowly cultural system…