John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and two novellas. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

I often feel this way, in many aspects of my life, despite the evidence of expertise scattered around my office, and despite the affirmations of the people who sign my checks. I often feel unprepared, despite my habit of rigorous preparation. So I tried to predict possible questions and, in my head, I worked out a few acceptable responses. Then I tried to remember some useful, all-purposes phrases to drop into the discussion whenever appropriate, or whenever I was in trouble. Then I ran out of time and had no choice but to consider myself ready.

When the recorded conversation began, the host asked me what I believed to be a few warm-up questions about my creative life, rather than my work as executive director of language education association. In what seemed to be a courteous gesture, or else an interviewer’s gambit to charm and disarm her interviewee, she lobbed a few softballs at me. I thought she was trying acknowledge my versatility, or maybe stroke my vanity, before we addressed the specific issues that really mattered to her. But as the conversation progressed, and as the host probed my initial answers with what seemed like real interest, it dawned on me that we were not going to talk about my professional life at all. We were only going to talk about the issues that really mattered to…me. Specifically, unexpectedly, she wanted to know about my relationship to words and writing. “Why do you write?” she asked.

That question should have been a relief to me. My relationship to words and writing is, without question, a subject about which I am an expert. In fact, it is the only subject about which I am the world’s only expert. And yet I found myself on my heels, my panicky brain working three times harder and faster than I expected. I know why that happened now, in hindsight, why my brain and my tongue parted ways. While I am the world’s only expert on the subject of my own relationship to words and writing, and while I keep dozens of notebooks (actual notebooks) filled with thoughts about this topic, no one else had ever asked me about it.

Wait. That is not entirely true. I have discussed my writing before, on some great podcasts in fact. And on several occasions, I have even been asked why I write. In those instances, I have given an answer I borrow from the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. (At least I think it was Kandel. In my memory, it was Kandel.) Decades ago, I saw him interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show, and Rose asked him the same question: “Why do you write?” At that point in my life, it was a question I had only asked myself. No one had asked me yet, and I was still struggling to formulate my own answer. So I leaned in closer to the screen, expecting to watch Kandel squirm a bit, as I always did when I thought about the mystery of my odd behavior, my literary habit. But, to my surprise, he had an answer on the tip of his tongue. He did not even hesitate. “I don’t know what I think until I write it.”

He had probably heard someone else give that answer before, and borrowed it, just as I have borrowed it from him ever since. I have learned, subsequently, that he was giving an answer common among the people of my subspecies, our subspecies, we graphomaniacs, we misfit homo sapiens who continue to scratch words onto paper—many of us still writing in pencil—forty years or so into the Digital Age. The internet credits Joan Didion with the first utterance of the sentence but if you pay close attention, you will hear writers of all stripes offering some version of it again and again: “I don’t know what I think until I write it.”

In the moments that followed that exchange, as Kandel and Rose moved on to other matters, I stood frozen before my television. I am a bit of a crier, as my friends and family will attest, and in the seconds just after Kandel offered that simple answer, I cried tears of relief. A little self-knowledge at last.

So when the host of the podcast asked me that same question last week, I gave her the same clever response I have given for years, handed down through the generations of my clan. “I write so I know what I think.” Done. One question down, smooth sailing from here. But then she did the unexpected. She asked a follow-up question. “What about writing helps you understand what you think?” And that was the trouble. That was the new territory. A first in my experience. No one had ever asked me a second question on this topic. I think I knew the answer intuitively—again, I am the world’s only expert in all things related to me—but I had never said it out loud. In fact, I cannot remember writing it out, either. Until last week, it was still hiding in the recesses of my brain. I could feel it trying to break free, but it was still lurking where it had always lurked, where I had left it all these years, in the recesses. Now the microphone was on, and the host was staring at me, and I was going to have to drag that answer into the world, for the first time, while she watched.

I am in my fifties now, and one of the benefits of that absurd number is that I have a passing knowledge of my own patterns. I know, for example, that in moments like this, when I feel myself cornered, I tend to fight my way out of the corner by wielding the one weapon I have at my disposal that no one else in the world has, the one asset that is uniquely mine: self-revelation. Brutal, self-deprecating, self-lacerating honesty. The safety of personal exposure. It is a quirk of my character, and it has served me pretty well. And so it kicked in again, during this podcast interview, which I paraphrase now because I spoke too quickly to remember the actual words.

“I have a very busy brain,” I said, “and an enormous amount of nervous energy, and writing slows me down enough to think clearly.” That was the first response. Good, and true. I still approve it. Then came another, something like, “I see writing as a search for precision. One word at a time. If I get one word right, I move on to the next. At the end, if I do it well, the words add up to a coherent thought.” Also good. Also true. Writing helps me know what I think by slowing me down and forcing me to be precise. Yes, just so.

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But my next thought was the real discovery. And while I managed to keep it bottled up in the moment, it nagged me for the rest of the interview (and, obviously, for some time thereafter, since I am still writing about it). As I was confessing all sorts of other personal quirks and foibles, I suddenly realized that the reason I was on my heels for this entire conversation, the reason I felt panicky when I should have felt most confident, when I was only talking about me, was that I could not rely on the pace and precision of writing to guide my answers, to edit me, to save me from myself. The host had coaxed me into speaking first, without a plan, unedited. And in so doing, I was forced to confront all kinds of anxieties, including social anxieties: imposter syndrome, self-doubt, even worries that my Long Island accent would break through again if I was not vigilant.

Writing is how I control all of that misfiring. Writing is how I control…everything, including myself and my own manic energy. But here I was now, speaking off-the-cuff, in an interview that was different in tone from what I had anticipated. Out of my control. And the pattern I just mentioned, the tendency to fall back on self-revelation, that “safety of personal exposure”…I suddenly saw all of that as related phenomena, the character traits of a man who only operates at two speeds: tight, literary control or complete divulgence.

How odd, then, this second revelation: If I cannot control what and how I communicate, by writing and editing what I think and say first, I exercise no control at all. That is, if I cannot write it down first, I will say any damn thing. What a strange admission that would have been on a podcast, and what a late date in my life for this epiphany.

To be clear: I do not consider this binary mode to be a character flaw. Not entirely. None of the traits I describe here are character flaws, necessarily. Not my oscillation between self-control and self-revelation. Not my tendency to spill my guts in self-defense. Not my manic energy. Not even my anxieties. These traits are as definitional as my name, as specific to me as the fact that I will never be tall enough to play for the Knicks. And when I feel myself becoming too self-critical, I try to remember that I am a functioning member of society, a man who meets his many responsibilities, and that some people actually seem to like me…and even like my writing sometimes.

Nevertheless, I now recognize the dangers of my ways a little more clearly than I did before that interview. Writing is a crutch that gets me through my days, one of several I suppose. And like all crutches, it is also a dependency, one that I am unlikely to overcome completely. My entire character has grown around it like a vine around a tree, and I have continued to grow that way for many, many years. Writing supports me. It is my solidity. Without it, I would be—and sometimes I am—flimsy.

Or, to put it even more precisely (here he is again, the editor come to save me), if I did not write constantly, I believe that my life would be little more than a series of free associations or, worse, a steady stream of strong emotions. One burst after another. An endless eruption of laughter and anger and tears…and literary references. Unprocessed. Inarticulate. In that sense, writing contains me.

We shall see if the interview in question ever appears online. I would not blame the host for filing it away forever. The uncontained Tessitore can be a lot for anyone to suffer through, let alone an unsuspecting podcast editor. But the effect of that conversation is memorialized here, now, in this little essay, and so is the lesson I learned from it. I have written it down, fixed it in place, where it makes the most sense to me.

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 120 episodes of Be True.

To celebrate spring, I read "Pomegranate," a poem by D.H. Lawrence. I also discuss the beauty of...the birds and the bees, the hypocrisy of our species, stupid euphemisms, and The Beach Boys.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and two novellas. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and two novellas. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

For years, writers and artists, and nobody citizens like me, have been advised to avoid political speech in public.

We’ve all heard this sentiment, or its equivalent: “Shut up and write pretty if you want to keep your audience.”

We’ve been told to leave the strongest political expressions to the pros, the self-appointed thought-leaders, the people sitting in front of tv cameras. More often than not, the people telling us to be quiet have been white men inconvenienced by our opinions.

The most recent threat of this type was an outright atrocity: “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Yes. J.D. Vance’s self-serving ignorance and douchebag arrogance are always breathtaking. But what statements like this actually reveal is a more general, perhaps-deliberate misunderstanding of the ethical purpose of politics.

Politics is not, by definition, a separate sphere for experts. It’s certainly not an endeavor reserved for men in power. It’s not a “lane.” Politics is everywhere.

Human society is inherently political in the same way that it is inherently economic.

Every human life is a negotiation of competing interests (my rights vs. their rights) in an age of scarcity (our oil vs. their oil). In other words, economic and political.

And that’s not a bad thing.

Politics and economics are not mysterious or alien to our everyday lives. They’re not even inherently distasteful. They’re omnipresent tools of mediation. Like the law, or the humanities, they’re ways of organizing and expressing our thoughts that help us settle our differences and arrive at important conclusions.

Which social policies to follow. How to distribute our goods and resources. How to solve our disputes. How to understand each other through time and space.

These are the salient questions of our lives and politics is a tool, a way of answering them.

In a wise society, politics is an alternative to force and violence. It helps us settle our differences peacefully (insofar as self-expression and debate are preferable to bloodshed). In fact, that may be the whole purpose of politics: non-violent conflict resolution.

And that’s why I believe it’s time for Americans to get even more political, not less political, in the weeks and months ahead. Thoroughly, unapologetically, honorably political.

I am not suggesting that we should double down on politics as we currently practice them.

What politics have become in America is a distortion, a corruption, an ineffectual con.

For far too long, under the careful watch of fearful corporations, political discussion has been treated as if it were a form of bad manners, an impolite disruption to our normal state of affairs…which is to make money and buy stuff.

Shut up and spend.

Pardoxically, we also seem to have decided, as a society, that political affiliations—and, with them, personal opinions—are sacrosanct, brooking no criticism, the way we shy away from criticizing anyone’s religion. “If you tell him he’s wrong, he’ll be offended!”

Shut up and nod.

And, as if those conditions were not challenging enough, the media has reduced our politics to a color-coding scheme for maximum manipulation, a voting mob of red and blue states, in China-made hats.

Shut up and vote, for my favorite person.

The result has been catastrophic.

In 2026, it’s still a bit unsavory to be seen as overtly “political.” Misguided political opinions are still too sacred to confront directly. But whenever we get around to talking about politics—if we absolutely must—we’re advised to leave it to the pros, the pundits, who promise to make everything as simple, and simplistic, as possible.

This approach has always been doomed to fail. It’s nonsense piled on nonsense. And it’s led us into a corrupt bargain with the Trump administration:

• We’ve agreed to concern ourselves with the trappings of decision-making, rather than with the decisions themselves.

• We’ve agreed to uphold grudges rather than debate and solve anything.

• We’ve agreed to be partisan, rather than to practice wisdom.

• We’ve agreed to be complicit, or at least silent, in order to protect our bank accounts and investments.

• And in so doing, we’ve given our representative government a power beyond representation.

Trump and his cronies are currently lining their pockets in our name, and it’s all out in the open. What’s the public response? “I don’t like what Trump’s doing, but I’m a life-long Republican.”

This kind of partisanship—no matter which party—is the opposite of choice. It’s a preference for lifestyle branding over truth. And it’s always been a cop-out.

It’s the equivalent of buying a pair of Levis and calling yourself American.

It’s a way of avoiding criticism, thought, self-examination. A way of silencing diversity and eliminating nuance. A way of dodging the only question that really matters in the end:

Is what we’re doing right or wrong?

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But here’s the good news

In his dumb, addled, unworldly narcissism, Donald Trump has inadvertently ushered in a new age of politics. Not a fight over relatively subtle policy differences—“We have to find a new way to address the deficit!”—but a moral conflict between right and wrong.

Through his demented, delusional idiocy, we see the operation of naked power more clearly than we ever have before, at least in the United States of America. The misdirections. The false choices. The lies exposed.

On swollen ankles and an hour’s sleep, Trump has bleated us into a swamp of real consequences. Massive corruption. Environmental devastation. Lawless abductions and internment camps. Wars of choice.

For years we’ve been told that we have to honor “both sides” whenever we speak about political decision-making, since both sides, we’re told, represent legitimate options. Accept “fair and balanced.” Anything less is elitist. Even when we know that isn’t true.

We’ve been told for a decade that we have to listen to hate speech and nod, and to consider our worst impulses as viable matters of policy—kids in cages? the end of science?—in fairness to those with whom we disagree.

And we’ve swallowed this poison on a daily basis, for years. And lost all sense of right and wrong.

But all is not lost. Our compromises have led us here, now, to this moment in which our options are clearer than they’ve been in a long, long time. Right and wrong, staring us in the face.

Trump’s insanity—and the creepy, racist, nationalistic parasites who protect him—have returned us to basic questions of justice, faith, philosophy, and community. And we can either learn from this moment, and act, or suffer a worse fate.

It’s time to choose a thorough, unapologetic, honorable politics again. Not senile elephants and Boomer donkeys but adult conversation about right and wrong. And then to make some hard decisions based on reason.

The process is not always efficient, but it is humane.

And it may just give us chance of surviving the next three years.

In other words, don’t shut up. Speak.

Then listen. And make some fucking decisions.

You know…politics.

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 120 episodes of Be True.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and two novellas. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

Atomic Backfires: When Nuclear Policies Fail, is available, open-access, at https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6076/Atomic-BackfiresWhen-Nuclear-Policies-Fail. It is also available in hard copy at https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051859/atomic-backfires/.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist, biographer, and editor, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

• It’s a book that somehow contains everything I know.

• It’s very strange.

• I’m proud of it.

• I hope you like.

Not bad so far. Honesty is the best policy. And clarity.

Now here’s the back cover synopsis, which is always insufficient but another good place to start:

Thy Brother’s Blood is a tall tale told through the intersecting stories of a corrupt land surveyor named William Very, who discovers a dead body during a walk in the woods, and John David Chapman, an environmental activist engaged in a last-ditch effort to salvage his lonely life and collapsing career. Over the course of a single, seemingly-normal day in New England, their haunted destinies are revealed.

Informed by Gothic mysteries, Biblical allegories, and American mythologies, Thy Brother’s Blood is a parable of power, guilt, and retribution.

Ok. Fine. That doesn’t give it all away, and maybe it helps a little with positioning.

As the synopsis suggests, it’s a book full of echoes, resemblances, allusions, and outright thefts. Poe is loitering in the background of this one, and so is Nabokov, and Don DeLillo, and the AI revolution, a whole amalgam of the people, texts, events and histories that fill my head. And I’m not even mentioning the obvious references here, the ones that actually appear on the page.

And it’s only about a hundred pages long, for God’s sake.

Do you see why I’m having such a hard time describing it?

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Let’s try a passage, something representative:

"There is clarity in such moments, clarity in broken bodies. A confrontation with our priorities. When we are forced to acknowledge that this is what we all become in the end, our skins unsealed, our bowels loosened, our veins leaking life. When we accept that the flesh we spend our lives protecting, perfecting, pleasing, will be claimed at last by the dust and grime of our origins, by the cosmic entropy. When the best we can hope for is that our scattered atoms will be gathered together by a force not quite random, and reformed again by an anima that remains, despite our fancy processing, beyond our comprehension. When we realize that the bodies we carry bear no resemblance to the souls of our inner selves. When we see it all as clearly as I did in that moment, peering around the young officer’s shoulder at the corpse that I alone discovered, the lifeless body, the mangled head of a man quite like me."

Right. Good. Except that it’s not all like that. This book also contains other voices, in conversation, and some action, and sex.

And it’s deeply political, although I’ve tried to avoid the dumb way that American life has been divided politically. I’m much more interested in right and wrong than blue and red, and so is this book (which may or may not include an actual devil, for Heaven’s sake).

Maybe that’s an even better way in, to say that I wrote it, and designed it, and published it, and now I’m marketing it all by myself because it should exist outside The System.

Because we live in a contradictory age that stifles independent voices of all kinds, but also allows for individuals to speak for themselves, as loudly as they can, if they can find enough people to listen. (Psst. If you like the book, pass it on.)

Which is to say that Thy Brother’s Blood is a book about people breaking The System as well as a book that is, itself, trying to break on through.

And I like that positioning for myself too. It feels right, and comfortable, to be in constant conflict with my society as I find it today. One foot in and one foot out.

Comfortable except for this: Thy Brother’s Blood is available through Amazon. I hate that about it. And I don’t mean “regret” or “dislike.” I really mean hate. I hate that I haven’t broken out entirely. I hate that I’m compromising, even as I pursue my dream of an independent distribution.

But that sense of confinement is true to the spirit of Thy Brother’s Blood as well. It’s so hard to break free. Sometimes we just have to accept our limits.

One foot in and one foot out.

In this one I read the opening of Thy Brother’s Blood. I also discuss the virtues of resistance, surprising fiction, the challenges of being human, and why it’s good to be uncertain.

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 120 episodes of Be True.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

The first No Kings event, back in June, was a joyful resistance. In Boston, it was paired with the Pride March, which was a great stroke of luck. I was proud to be among friends on that day, and I wrote about the experience here.

This time, however, life is intervening. Responsibilities. Preparations for a very busy and important week ahead. This post is one of the many substitutes you can expect from me in the coming days.

It’s not enough, but it’s something.

The threat of our government, to our society and to the world, should be clear by now. Which is not to say that we’ve hit rock bottom. This administration has proven that it has no bottom.

Nevertheless, we’ve fallen far enough over the past decade, and certainly in the past year, that the dangers are becoming clear to most thinking people.

That’s not just me talking. That’s not just wishful thinking. The polls support this interpretation. Lots of Americans are finally coming to grips with the true nature of our national disaster.

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Welcome, everyone. We need you all, even if resistance makes strange partners sometimes. (I refuse to say “bedfellows” to describe the anecdote that follows—I refuse to go that far—but you’ll get the point.)

Earlier this week, I watched a YouTube clip featuring the neocon political pundit Bill Kristol. He was lamenting the current state of his once-beloved Republican Party.

Two decades ago, I would have broken out in a rash at the mere mention of Kristol. Back in 2003, he provided an intellectual justification for the invasion of Iraq, a fool’s crusade, as many people dumber than Kristol knew from the start.

But this week he delivered a message I appreciated and admired, about the Trump administration, its corruption, and its cheap depravity. And he concluded his thoughts with a recitation of William Butler Yeats’s 1914 poem, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.”

I was impressed by the reference, and by the poem, which I offer here with many thanks to Kristol—for the Yeatsian education as well as for an important reminder: Most of us share a basic interest in human honor and dignity, no matter what policy differences may separate us.

Most of us want to believe, and may actually believe, that we’re doing the right thing. Which is the basic foundation of any functioning society.

And by “most of us,” I mean those of us who are not calling the shots on Capitol Hill in 2026…including those of us who are either taking to the streets today, or marching vicariously.

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

So I guess the message of the day, mine and Kristol’s, is this: Be honor bred, America.

And walk tall.

In this one, I read excerpts of my poem "Prophesy II," from my chapbook Apocrypha. I also discuss poetry in a time of war, the mysticism of the writing process, my literary Catholicism, and David Bowie.

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 120 episodes of Be True.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

A drawing that tries to square the circle but settles for recognizable proportions. Man as a perfect ratio. The center is his navel, unless you’re more interested in the square, in which case the center is his genitalia.

But either way, it is Man as a symbol of the universal order, of a Maker’s grand and elegant scheme.

Of course, it’s demonstrably inaccurate in many cases, and Leonardo must have had his doubts about his work. He had dissected dozens of human bodies after all. He must have measured the length of the human arm enough times to realize that our wingspan does not always equal our height.

Nevertheless, it’s close enough, and the larger point holds true, at least as far as Leonardo was concerned. The drawing of the Vitruvian Man seemed to prove that Man himself was knowable.

And important.

And beautiful.

In other words, the Vitruvian Man is a cliché of Western humanism for good reason.

I would also suggest that this drawing is a clichéd symbol of a different but related concept: a liberal arts education.

Because the Vitruvian Man is an artist’s depiction of an ancient architect’s theory of human perfection. It’s also a mathematician’s representation of a biological rule of thumb. It’s also an engineer’s attempt to wrestle with intellectual history. And it’s also a humanist’s confrontation with religion. All on a single, yellowing piece of notebook paper.

Again, some cliché’s are clichés for good reason.

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The Vitruvian Man was Leonardo’s intervention in a long-standing tradition in Western art, a common brain-teaser which grew in popularity among scientifically-minded, philosophically-curious draftsmen during the Renaissance. Hundreds of fifteenth-century scribblers tried to prove, pictorially, what the first-century architect Vitruvius claimed about the human body, that it mirrored the perfect proportions of perfect architecture.

Dozens of attempts remain in archives around the world, but none of them are as successful, or as memorable, as Leonardo’s. And what could be more beautiful than his careful study, itself the culmination of a life of study?

So it was this drawing—this explosion of multidisciplinary learning and thought—that came to mind when I was asked to participate on a recent conference panel in Washington DC.

The panel discussed the importance of language advocacy in the U.S. today, as part of JNCL-NCLIS’s Language Advocacy Day—a topic that has been the focus of my professional life for about two decades, but that has been undermined continuously in American society, especially in this age of ICE-related atrocities.

The organizer of the panel provided a prompt for our discussion, a fill-in-the-blank question: “What’s really got my attention right now, what really has been on my mind about language education advocacy is _______.”

My answer, instinctively, was, “…its relationship to the fading ideals of liberal arts education.” We all have our obsessions after all.

“What’s really got my attention right now, what really has been on my mind about language education advocacy is its relationship to the fading ideals of liberal arts education.”

Then the organizer asked for one more bit of information, again in anticipation of the group discussion: “Think of (and supply us with!) a visual that makes the concept you are sharing memorable / concrete.”

Within seconds, I sent the chair a copy of the Vitruvian Man.

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 100 episodes of Be True.

I have spent most of my career either practicing or defending humanistic research. But I’m getting old now, and I’m tired of the clichés of that job, the we’re-important-too tone of it all, as I’ve written elsewhere. I’m tired of the humanities’ endless chasing after the prestige and funding of the sciences. It’s exhausting, and boring, and self-defeating.

Nevertheless, these really are dark days for humanism, especially in the United States.

In addition to all the usual threats, the AI boom may be challenging every aspect of our approach to knowledge and expression.

At the same time, the federal government has cut funding for research of all kinds and has reserved special punishments for historians, philosophers, and writers who do not toe the party line.

In addition, the federal government’s demonization of “others,” its criminalization of difference (including languages other than English) is anathema to the entire humanistic project, and could cause lasting damage to the pursuit of truth.

My personal mission statement—We study and teach the disciplines we call the humanities because it is our duty as humans to understand each other and communicate across our differences.—is not just an afterthought in American culture in 2026. In some settings, it’s actually considered a transgression.

But that does not mean that we, as a species, have a choice. Again, as I’ve written elsewhere, “Human civilization is and has always been diverse, and communication across that diversity is and has always been a challenge for humans.” In that sense, the only alternatives to the liberal arts—to a well-rounded and lifelong education—are misunderstanding, violence and, as we are witnessing now, war.

There’s no guarantee that the liberal arts can cure what ails us, be we have no chance without them.

So I offered the Vitruvian Man to the panel on language education as a badge and an emblem. It is Leonardo at his most humanistic, and his most humane, a drawing by a man using all of his skill and knowledge to try to understand himself and other people. Apropos of a convention of language educators and researchers, it is also a drawing by a scholar trying to communicate his hard-earned understanding to his fellow Man.

The Vitruvian Man isn’t the clichéd representation of the humanities-in-retreat. It’s the clichéd representation of the liberal arts unified, in-action.

Some clichés are clichés for good reason.

In this one I read Walt Whitman’s poem, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” a battlefield vignette about the true costs of war, a tragic poem for a dangerous time.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

Ultimately, it’s an episode about a topic I’ve been mulling for months, years, a decade in fact…like most of us have, in one way or another:

When is it time to throw caution to the wind and do what we were all taught to do in our churches and mosques and temples and synagogues? In our philosophy and ethics classes? In movie theaters and concert halls? Around our kitchen tables?

When is it time, at long last, to choose the right and the true over the partisan and the profitable? To stand alone if we must, to upend the system if we can?

We all have a sense of what that would look like, that shift in our priorities, to choose what’s right over what’s politically expedient. I know we do.

We’re all grandsons and granddaughters—often begrudging, sometimes catastrophically—of Jimmy Stewart and Garry Cooper and and Henry Fonda and Clint Eastwood.

The Lone Ranger.

Tom Joad, the mythological commoner. (“Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy…”)

Or maybe, in 2026, it’s easier and more accurate to say that we know what a right and true world doesn’t look like.

That it doesn’t involve masked thugs roaming our city streets. And it doesn’t involve the climate collapse we can see with our eyes and feel with our skin. And it doesn’t involve our fealty to about 3,000 billionaires world-wide (.000036% of the global population if a poet’s math is correct) who seem to own and run every fucking thing.

In Ibsen’s play, the evidence of corruption is a polluted spring and a diseased health spa—a pathogen that threatens the tourism upon which the town’s economy depends. But the antagonist of the play isn’t a particular character or even a group of characters. The antagonist in “An Enemy of the People” is the corrupting blend of self-interest and politics that spreads like a contagion through a small Norwegian town.

It induces the townsfolk to ignore indisputable evidence that their beloved spa is a cesspool, because an acknowledgement would threaten the power of certain politicians and harm the town’s bottom line. Good, old-fashioned partisanship blinds everyone to the spreading decay—physical and moral.

This is why “An Enemy of the People” is a handy introduction for any conversation about personal and corporate responsibility, and why it has been understood as such for almost 150 years.

But as I was preparing the podcast episode, I kept thinking about another example of partisan blindness, this time a little closer to home and drawn from real life.

It involves a literary hero of mine, the great American author John Steinbeck.

I love Steinbeck for two major reasons.

First, he tried big things, always—wild, elaborate books of all kinds—and on a few occasions he succeeded…bigly.

He also failed rather spectacularly on occasion, in ways that are unusual for a writer of his stature.

In fact, the distance between his best work and his worst is shockingly vast. But I consider that disparity an occupational hazard for any restless, omnivorous writer. And I consider his lesser works a cause for celebration: “It might not be the greatest book ever written, but do you understand what this crazy bastard was trying to do?!?!?”

In that way, at least, he reminds me of some other literary heroes: Melville, Whitman, Don DeLillo, just to name a few. Fearless omnivores all. Go big or go home.

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The other reason I love Steinbeck is that he had the courage of his convictions. His loyalties, his ethics, his desire for a better world.

And, most of all, his desire to be useful in pursuit of that better world.

That too is a rarity for a writer of his stature, especially in America: a stated desire to be useful, in practical ways, in the pursuit of social justice.

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed,” Steinbeck declared in his 1962 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. “He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

Improvement. That was Steinbeck’s goal. And I admire it enormously, even if I have mixed feelings about it as a literary ambition.

Useful improvement shunted Steinbeck into a lifelong search for practical solutions to social problems, in his writings as well as in his public life. Remember the clean, New Deal migrant camp from The Grapes of Wrath, the place where the plot takes a pause? Steinbeck had a pragmatic eye.

In comparison, his modernist contemporaries—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, even Hemingway to some extent—can seem self-absorbed and timid sometimes, tough men guarding their ideals, aesthetes drowning themselves in gin.

I will not burden you with all the details of Steinbeck’s political interests or his attachment to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It’s enough to say here that he supported Roosevelt’s efforts early and often, and later transferred that same allegiance and energy to Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

And I would argue that, on the whole—and given the mainstream alternatives (even at his most radical, Steinbeck was a mainstream-adjacent thinker)—a New Deal/Great Society Democrat was not the worst thing he could be.

But if you know anything about American history, you know exactly where this story is heading—this New Deal/Great Society fable—with all the momentum of a runaway train.

Vietnam.

Famously, Lyndon Johnson made a devil’s bargain. Like everyone else with any sense, he despised the war in Vietnam, yet he escalated because he—the greatest political deal-maker of the 20^th century—could not imagine a way to pull out and save face. In the mainstream thinking of the day (has it changed?), domestic and international power depended on the presentation of masculine strength, in this case military strength, and the consequences were tragic.

As Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin later:

“I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really love — the Great Society‍— to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs ...But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be a coward and my nation would be an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

Those were the burdens Johnson carried, however crudely expressed. Whatever we might think of his response today, only a president faces such choices.

But for Steinbeck, a supporter of the Great Society in his old age, and a friend of Johnson’s, the choice was much simpler: to lend or to withhold public support for the war. Period.

For the good of Johnson, and Johnson’s party, he decided on the latter.

Steinbeck had enough foresight to turn down Johnson’s request to act as a presidential emissary in Vietnam, but in 1966 he visited the country as a reporter for Newsday and one of the only progressive-minded writers in the world who was open to the war effort, critical of its opponents, and supportive to the U.S soldiers on the ground.

That support cut both ways. It was fair and compassionate to the young men and women in harm’s way—including his own son—but it suggested that Steinbeck, after a lifetime of advocacy for the poor and abused, had become just another hawk, just another out-of-touch, bellicose old man.

There is more to say about Steinbeck’s complicated relationship to the war, and to his soldier son, but the point here is that his loyalty to the Democrats, and his unwillingness to criticize their war publicly, ended up tarnishing his reputation as a champion of progressive causes. Just as Vietnam destroyed Johnson’s reputation as an extraordinary reformer and advocate for social justice.

And neither man had time to make amends or rehabilitate their public images. Johnson lost the 1968 election and died in 1973, before the official end of the conflict. And Steinbeck returned from his tour of Vietnam in February 1967, weakened by his strenuous travels, and died in May 1968.

In their separate ways, they both learned too late what Ibsen’s play has been trying to tell us all along, “that acting out of expediency turns morality and justice into a hollow mockery, until it finally becomes monstrous to go on living.”

In this one a monologue from Henrik Ibsen’s play “An Enemy of the People,” partisan corruption, the end of right and truth, and what it was like to reread Ibsen as Minneapolis became a battleground.

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
TikTok: @jtessitorewriter
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

John Tessitore is a writer, poet, and liberal arts advocate. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has published several chapbooks and a novella. He has been a journalist and biographer, taught history and literature at colleges around Boston, managed national policy studies on education and civil justice, and directs a national language-education association. He serves as Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.

In each episode of Be True—available on most major podcast platforms—he reads and discusses “the writing he loves and the writing he does.”

www.johntessitore.com
Substack: @johntessitore
YouTube: @johntessitore6366
Instagram: @jtessitorewriter1
Facebook: JohnTessitore, Writer
Threads: @jtessitorewriter
BlueSky: @jtessitore.bsky.social

Even the mean girls…and there were definitely a few mean girls prancing around, preying on the insecurities of their peers. Even them. Their self-consciousness was forgivable—they too were kids, after all—and I found their basic courage, precocious as it was, inspiring.

They’d travelled to the big city from all over the country, rural and urban kids, and lots of suburban kids, to take on Chicago, and all that jazz, and to show the world what they could do.

I’m not sure they realized it, given their pre-performance jitters, but they were participating in an American phenomenon, an American cliché, a ritual as basic to our sense of ourselves as the vote.

As mythical as Julia Jean Turner waiting to be discovered at the counter of Schwab’s Drugstore. In that sense, we’re all Lana.

But these kids were as ready as they’d ever be.

They’d travelled across the continent and arrived at the historic Palmer House with a nervous energy that required no additional caffeine boost, though caffeine was in the very air we breathed. And it was immediately evident that there was no escape from the general anxiety that hung like a glittery fog over everything.

An anxious buzzing greeted them in the noisy Jazz Age lobby with its high, echoey, vaulted ceilings. It whispered to them in the lobby Starbucks. It trailed them through the hotel’s hallways, lined with black-and-white portraits of showbiz royalty of the 1940s and 1950s, men and women (adults!) whose names they may have known but more likely had to read in fine print, if they stood close enough see it: Frank and Judy, Frankie and Annette, Eartha Kitt.

Every morning on their way to auditions they passed these portraits, tuxedos and gowns of a more glamorous age, an age they would now try to recreate for a few pressurized and strictly-enforced minutes, out of thin air, in front of a panel of glowering adults.

That was the conjuring, the magic trick they had come to perform. To act like they were already stars. And it was the whole point of the event known as “unifieds,” the National Unified Auditions, where dozens of university theatre programs interviewed and auditioned applicants for admission.

In other words, a common casting call for theater kids heading to college.

Brave, courageous, precocious, occasionally mean, exceptionally talented kids doing their very best for the glowering adults who claimed to know their future.

I’m always impressed by the kids. I’m seldom impressed by the adults.

I finished my teaching career a long time ago, at a major American university whose name you know, as a lecturer in history and literature. It was my alma mater, as it happened, and my old undergraduate department. But in the time between my own graduation and my last formal teaching lesson—about fifteen years apart—it was clear to me that the student population had changed significantly.

When I was an undergrad, there was still a ragtag randomness to many rooming groups on campus. Many seemed like mixed samplers of the American college experience. Legacy students living with first-generation students, natural geniuses, grinds…and kids who were still wondering, even as they were accepting their diplomas, how the hell they had been admitted in the first place.

(Not to mention the usual subdivisions: sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebs, dickheads, dorks…)

If you’re wondering, I was a grind. Still am. Also a variation on the first-generation kid, with a little of the how-the-hell-did-I-get-here syndrome thrown in for good measure. But mostly a grind.

By the time I stopped teaching, however, the balance seemed to have shifted. The legacies and geniuses remained, and there were more first-generation students, but there also seemed to be fewer who wondered why they were there in the first place. Fewer with imposture syndrome.

And, most obvious of all, everyone was now a bit of a grind. And everyone seemed to wear their ambitions, and their work ethics, and their exhaustion, on their sleeves. Visible. Like a badge of honor. “I’m always soooo busy!” We weren’t using the term yet, but in hindsight, the kids were building their brands as world beaters and masters of the universe.

What changed? Were students suddenly more ambitious than my cohort had been? More self-possessed? More talented than they had been just a decade earlier?

I don’t think so. It’s hard to believe that one generation could evolve so quickly, and be so superior to a previous generation in terms of talent and ability, or even in terms of self-knowledge.

No. I don’t think they were superior. I think they were better prepared. I think guidance had changed, and parenting. And I think they had more information, not just because they were children of the internet (which first arrived on campus in a general way during my undergrad years), but because an entire industry had moved in to groom them for the glories of higher education.

College prep. College advisers. College consultants.

I think their high schools spent a lot more money to prime them for the application process.

I think colleges encouraged too many applicants, perhaps by design, perhaps to drive down their acceptance rates, perhaps to drive up their U.S. News & World Report rankings, certainly to justify their skyrocketing tuitions.

I think parents got spooked by the rising costs and the specter of rejection, and they looked for help.

And I think the consultant business moved in, quite happily, with a list of shoulds—a checklist of hurdles and achievements, measurable goals to make sure that kids were accepted to the college of…someone’s dreams. (Whose dreams? the kids’ dreams? the parents’ dreams? the dreams of media and marketing departments?)

You should have this GPA.

You should have this score on standardized tests.

You should have this many extracurricular activities.

You should have at least one extracurricular activity in which you excel above all others.

You should start a business.

You should have a brand.

You should know who you are and what you offer, immediately if not sooner.

Your future depends on it.

Colleges played ranking games and raised tuitions. Parents got scared. Business took over.

And all the pressure and stress and anxiety of an out-of-control process was absorbed by the kids. Kids who were trained to work hard, to live strategically, to settle into defined identities, to look supremely confident and, sometimes, if only when absolutely necessary, to game the system.

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So there they all were in the lobby of the Palmer House. The anxious kids. The frightened parents. The consultants passing around business cards. And the college professors who sat on audition panels for eight hours a day and seemed to be the gatekeepers of the future, the ones who decided which kids were worthy of their dreams.

I’m not sure if all the professors saw themselves that way, as the many-headed Cerberus of old Broadway, but that’s certainly how they were seen by the parents and the kids alike. (And which one of these kids, or these parents for that matter, had the skill of Hercules?)

If the professors didn’t know that they were feared, they should have. And they should have addressed it in some way. Even through the usual clichés. “Difficult decisions.” “Everyone is so talented.” “Getting here is a victory.” Some did but, alas, too few acted as if they knew that simple script.

Instead, they glided by like the lords of music and dance. And at the end of the day, they closed their laptops, put away they’re checklists, and wined and dined with the advisers and consultants. Their “contacts.”

Meanwhile, the kids went back to their rooms wondering if they had fulfilled their potential.

Of course that will happen anyway, anytime someone (child or adult) attempts something important and difficult. There will always be doubt and anxiety.

But think about the context. This was a unified audition for college acceptance. Undergraduate education. The universally-accepted, one-and-only time for personal exploration.

What was missing, tragically in my view, was education, or at least the educational impulse. What remained was something like a Lana Turner desperation.

I realize I am too predictable, and too much of a cranky old man, and maybe even too self-serving, when I tell you that there was no mention of the liberal arts anywhere. There were gestures toward a broader world view, and plenty of talk about how to avoid common core requirements. But the tone was set early on: When you graduate, you will be a trained performer first, and a knowledgeable person if you’re lucky.

A few big programs even described themselves as pre-professional and “vocational.” The New York agents are just around the corner, waiting to scoop up future celebrities!

The implication, of course, was that Broadway was farming out it’s on-the-job training to higher ed—as most industries do now—and only a few, elite programs were reliable “feeders.”

Which may even be true. But it’s certainly a lazy system, for the colleges as well as for the entertainment industry. Inevitably, it’s a system that spits out kids whose parents could afford to game the system early enough to gain the upper hand. A system more like an assembly line for the well-off than an agent of change.

And it’s a devil’s bargain for higher education as well, to abandon the requirements of a broader education for vocational training. It’s self-defeating and it will catch up with the colleges and universities soon enough, if it hasn’t already.

All of these promises made to parents in order to justify the exorbitant costs of a diploma. They can only be broken. All of the half-truths about the success rate of graduates as measured in first jobs. When everyone knows damn well that higher ed should be preparing graduates for longer and longer lives—on and off the stage--and many careers in a single lifetime.

It’s all going to come back to haunt the colleges. It’s all going to come back to haunt all of us, if it hasn’t already. We all should know better than the marketing slogans we’re spreading as truisms.

*

I’m always impressed by the kids. I’m seldom impressed by the adults, especially those of us who have been through the process ourselves.

As I walked through the halls of the Palmer House, I kept hearing a chorus in my head. An obscure line by the oddball genius who wrote the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots—a ubiquitous score at “unifieds,” although the chorus I heard was not from that show.

“Money,” the voice said. “Money changes everything.”

Check out johntessitore.com for more about me and my work, and visit the podcast archive here on Substack (or any major platform) for over 100 episodes of Be True.

In this short episode, I discuss the always-embattled freedom of the press, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the colonial-era trial of John Peter Zenger.