Wandering Stars

https://www.dominican.edu/events/tommy-orange-wandering-stars-conversation-greg-sarris

In the review of the magnificent book, There There, by Tommy Orange, (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/there-there/) you will find this:

Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Sequel Is a Towering Achievement

“Wandering Stars” considers the fallout of colonization and the forced assimilation of Native Americans.

By Jonathan Escoffery

After completing the exceptional book I concur with the sentiment expressed by Mr. Escoffery.

Having spent time in the book world I know that, like the music world, there are many “one hit wonders.” Sometimes, somehow, the magic that was the first novel is lost with the second book. This is not one of those times. Asking which I like best would be like asking a parent which twin they prefer. These books will stand the test of time. Tommy Orange had something to say, and he wrote it beautifully.

Readers can find a plethora of reviews in many places, including the interwovenwebofallthings. This writer has previously been called “unconventional”, something I wear like a badge of honor. To be honest, I realize my words matter little, if that, when it comes to attempting to review books like There There and now, Wandering Stars, two of the best novels these eyes have ever seen. Therefore I have chosen to allow some of the words written by the author speak for themselves. The words chosen resonated with this reviewer. There is nothing that can be added to writing this good. If you are reading these words, obtain the books

pg 45

Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.

pg 95

I need to tell you about your father so that you might come to know him. He is making his way over there, on his journey home, and the dead want to be remembered before they journey home.

And yes he will be gone once he goes, but the dead are never far. They find us in dreams,

and keep teaching us from the inside long after they go, so you might find each other, in some blue-white field, or overgrown underbrush, or beneath a forest home you’ll remember but have never known.

pg 103

I don’t know where the Havens got that crazy name from. Cholly. He’s one of these mutts you don’t know what kinds of breeds are in him and you don’t much care because he seems all his own in the eyes. Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse men than those with no life in their eyes. It’s worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it,

white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done? My mother once said, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors, or how strong their weapons.” I wondered about American women. White women. Where were their hearts?

pg 132

You will begin to go to the library, become a member and read as much as you can about Indians. About Cheyennes. There won’t be much but you will read it all. American history, too. Even some world history. You will read Mark Twain and dislike him. Jack London will hold your interest for a while, and the librarian will tell you that he became a reader at Oakland Public Libraries. But you will hate the way Jack London writes about Indian people once you get to those books. You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any.

pg 143

But stories are for telling after the fact. And the one true fact about the afterlife is that nothing comes from there. Everything goes there.

pg 139

You will tell her you are bringing a new child into the world and you will begin to dream up the life you will all live together once she comes, as if she were bringing a bright future with her from that otherside, from the beforelife.

pg 198

A bad thing doesn’t stop happening to you just because it stops happening to you.

pg 221

Lony dreamed about dominoes. He dreamed that he was a domino tile, and that there were lines of dominoes as far as he could see, falling in rows that seemed to get closer and closer to him. In the dream he didn’t know when the line would come that would knock him over and end his life. He knew that being knocked over meant that, and that the line was his family line, that something had begun long before he was born that was coming to know him down, but that this was true of everyone, each family line falling down on top of the living when they die, all that they couldn’t carry, couldn’t resolve, couldn’t figure out, with all their weight.

pg 237

One thing you can do when it seems there’s nothing else you can do, which is to say when you feel restless, is to walk, move your body through space and let the wisdom of what comes from that be your guide.

pg 251

“Look it up. But tell me this, do you think Bob Marley’s American grandchildren living in America are trying to act like they’re real Jamaicans? Even Bob was half white.”

“Bob Marley’s American grandchildren?” Sean took a second to reregister the pill bottle. He wondered what Orvil was taking, if he was some kind of high. Orvil closed his locker and started to walk away.

“Hey, wait up though,” Sean said, and followed Orvil. He noticed just then that he was taller than Orvil by a good foot. “I mean I know who Bob Marley is, but I don’t know if I know what you’re talking about.”

“Bob Marley’s son Rohan grew up in Miami. He played football. Almost went pro. His kid ended up playing for the Washington Redskins. You know the buffalo soldiers were named because of what Indians called them because they thought their hair looked like buffalo hair?” Orvil was gripping a metal railing, kind of rocking a little back and forth.

“Buffalo soldiers? Oh yeah I know that song.

So you spend a lotta time on the internet.”

“Some of the Havasupai people, they’re the ones who live down in the Grand Canyon next to some waterfalls, they believe Bob to be the second coming of Crazy Horse. D’you know hella Native people love reggae music, love Bob Marley?”

“I mean. Everyone loves Bob Marley, but that is still pretty crazy,” Sean said.

“Horse,” Orvil said.

“What?”

“Well if you believe the Havasupai people, he was Crazy Horse.”

https://www.ya-native.com/Culture_GreatPlains/firstpeople/1877-CrazyHorse.html

pg 257

“Imagine. All these years. I don’t know why I been holding on to it, lord knows we don’t have the room for it, but we keep making room somehow, says every hoarder on those reality shows, ayyyy,” she said. Opal laughed a little at this, having watched some of those shows.

pg 268

Loother’s on his phone too. He’s playing chess, which he first started playing because he thought it’d make him seem smart and because Vee plays, so they play each other, but then he kept playing because he legit like it, like once he got past the beginning stages where he didn’t know what to move and he was just moving with no plan, it started to feel really full, like a really big game.

https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/mobile/world-s-biggest-chess-set-is-back-and-growing-the-game-1.5477924

pg 308

It was one thing to be grateful for the ancestors, and another thing to know them on the page. I always felt like we didn’t do good enough. That our family line was in some way weak. And yes weakened by the effects of history, colonization, historical trauma. But also not strong enough to pass down the traditions or language successfully. Because we lacked something. I hadn’t considered everything that had happened. How far back it’d been happening to us. We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped. Was still being fought when my mom helped take over Alcatraz. I was part of the fight too. So were my grandchildren. But surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.
And yes it would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people, how we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through. The extent.

pg 312

School was a waste of fucking time. Literally. A factory farm for future office cows.

pg 326

“I don’t trust people who just believe, like without knowing anything or because they need to believe what they want to believe in more than they care about whether the thing they’re believing in is worthy of believing in, but I wouldn’t ever want to become a nonbeliever. Like how most adults end up. Kids know something you actively try to make us lose. You know that, right?”
“Make you lose what?”
“You know what I mean, Jacquie Red Feather.”

pg 352

I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being a part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.

pg 366

And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. – Clarice Lispector

pg 378

As for my higher power, I never found my way.

pg 381

No one noticed us, but that was the point. Sometimes a good sound is just supposed to be good enough to not be noticed. Rarely is anything so good a crowd gathers. Not at this kind of gig. There’s this old French composer I love named Erik Satie who wanted to compose what he called furniture music, by which he meant background music, music not meant to be noticed but to kind of just fill the room, which would now be called ambient music, but this was in the late 1800s, so pretty far ahead of his time, I’d say.

Can All the Talk Walk the Walk?

I read the March 27, 2015 edition of the Mechanics’ Institute Chess Club Newsletter, #703, by John Donaldson, the day it was published (http://www.chessclub.org/news.php?n=703). Of particular interest was this, “The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis has done the chess world a favor by conducting a literature review to answer the question, “Does chess provide educational benefits?” (http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/chess-literature-review-gives-base-claim-chess-educational-benefits)

I clicked on the link to find the headline: On Chess: Literature Review Gives Base To Claim Of Chess’ Educational Benefits. The article was written by Brian Jerauld, who “is the 2014 Chess Journalist of the Year, and the communications specialist for the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. He is a 2001 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and has more than a decade of experience writing about boats, sports and other ways to relax.” It was dated Feb 12, 2015. Since I had posted a series of articles on this very subject during the latter part of February I could not help but wonder how this had been missed. Further pondering brought forth the question of why no one had commented on this study on the blog or on the USCF forum thread concerning my blog posts on the subject. (http://www.uschess.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=21185&sid=95eabe87ba3a5d3ce890f4237d794c88)

Mr. Jerauld writes, “By now, the claim that chess comes packaged with hidden educational perks is a hype certainly heard around the world. And how could it not be believed? Just find some random piece of research that supports such big talk, tie it together with obvious, awesome-sounding hyperbole — like “decision-making skills” and “higher-order thinking” — and boom: You’ve got yourself some Grade-A propaganda.

Over the years, all this talk has given a rather rosy-colored narrative that always ends in support of chess curriculum implementation. But recently, the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, whose scholastic program branched out to more than 3,000 students and hundreds of area schools last year, dropped the rhetoric and set out to discover if chess actually has an effect on its students.

Empirically, can all the talk walk the walk?”

Good question. Brian continues, “A year ago, the CCSCSL set out to apply a rigorous and critical eye of existing chess studies by commissioning Basis Policy Research, an independent research firm that focuses on K-12 educational exploration. The goal was to survey the entire landscape of existing chess research, digging back through more than four decades of random studies, and compile a literature review of what was actually known about chess’ impact on student outcomes.”

This is exactly the kind of study I wrote about in my post of February 27, 2015, Does Playing Chess Make You Smarter? (https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/does-playing-chess-make-you-smarter/) The study mentioned, Educational benefits of chess instruction: A critical review, by Fernand Gobet & Guillermo Campitelli, (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstffg/preprints/chess_and_education.PDF) is dated now, having been published a decade ago, so I looked forward with interest to new literature on the subject. In trying to be scientifically objective, and also being a chess player, I relish a refutation. If new information refutes previous thinking, humans advance. For example, studies were done in the middle of the last century on the amount of radiation harmful to humans. During the course of my life the amount needed has been constantly lowered until now it is an accepted fact that even the lowest amount of radiation detected is deleterious to a human being. Decades ago there were many studies done on the effects of smoking cigarettes, funded by the tobacco industry, which concluded smoking caused no problems whatsoever to a human being. Over the years I have learned how difficult it is for old(er) people to change their preconceived ideas. For example, when I was young it was an accepted fact that an ulcer was caused by stress. It is now known that an ulcer is caused by a virus. My father was unable to wrap his mind around that fact, continuing to believe stress was the cause. There are many examples in the scientific community of a scientist with stature in the community refusing to accept evidence contrary to that with which his career was built. Change is difficult, and some people will stubbornly cling to the old ways “come hell or high water.” I try not to be one of those people. I do not care who is right, or wrong, but what is right, and what is wrong.

During the telecast of the third round of the US Championships yesterday the new study was mentioned by Jennifer Shahade when she said, “St.Louis commissioned a study that showed…they didn’t know what the study was going to say. They wanted to find out what kind of connections chess had to academic performance, and surprisingly, the main connection was math and chess.” GM Yasser Seirawan said, “Really?” Jen continued, “Yes, specifically math and chess.” To which Yasser responded, “I remember the Margolis study where it was about reading.” This comes at the 3:42:30 mark of the broadcast.

I clicked on the link and downloaded the PDF in order to read the new study, Literature Review of Chess Studies, By
Anna Nicotera, and David Stuit, dated November 2014. (http://saintlouischessclub.org/sites/default/files/CCSCSL%20Literature%20Review%20of%20Chess%20Studies%20-%20November%202014.pdf)
“This literature review identified 51 studies of chess. Twenty-four of the 51 studies met a set of pre-determined criteria for eligibility and were included in analyses. Results from the literature review were categorized by the quality of the study design and organized by whether the studies examined after-school or in-school chess programs. The main findings from this literature review are:
1. After-school chess programs had a positive and statistically significant impact on student mathematics outcomes.
2. In-school chess interventions had a positive and statistically significant impact on student mathematics and cognitive outcomes.
Although the findings are interesting, they do come with this caveat, “While the two primary outcomes listed above are based on studies that used rigorous research design methodologies, the results should be interpreted cautiously given the small number of eligible studies that the pooled results encompass.”

This is a caveat huge as the Grand Canyon. It is called a “small sample size.” If a baseball player goes one for three during a single game his batting average is .333, which is outstanding. This does not mean he will finish the season with a batting average of .333. Even if the batter hits .333 for a week, or even a month, it does not mean he will finish the long season hitting .333. If a chess player wins one tournament, even a so-called “Super tournament,” it does not mean he will become World Champion. Sofia Polgar had one super outstanding result with what I seem to recall a performance rating that was higher than any her sister Judit obtained in any one tournament. Yet Sophia did not attain the status that did Judit, because that one tournament is considered to be a limited sample size.

The authors studied the same studies as did Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli. The discredited Ferguson study is included among those studied, as is the Margolis study mentioned by GM Yasser Seirawan. While considering this post and thinking about IM John Donaldson, GM Yasser Seirawan, and to an extent, NM Jennifer Shahade, I kept thinking about something Upton Sinclair wrote – “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

My thoughts also keep going back to something else written by Gobet and Campitelli: “In spite of these disagreements about the nature of transfer, some results are clear. In particular, recent research into expertise has clearly indicated that, the higher the level of expertise in a domain, the more limited the transfer will be (Ericsson & Charness, 1994). Moreover, reaching a high level of skill in domains such as chess, music or mathematics requires large amounts of practice to acquire the domain specific knowledge which determines expert performance. Inevitably, the time spent in developing such skills will impair the acquisition of other skills.”

Mr. Jerauld ends his article with, “The literature review is a huge first step for the CCSCSL, acknowledgment of the research that exists and laying the groundwork for future research that may be implemented through the club’s expansive scholastic initiative. The Basis Policy Research chess literature review has kicked off a new Research Portal, meant to serve as a repository to all global research — and to keep St. Louis on yet another forefront of chess.”

If this is truly “laying the groundwork for future research that may be implemented through the club’s expansive scholastic initiative,” I would suggest not only a rigorous, controlled, scientific, type study which would include a control group, but also a study of the same size to study the game of Go, as a counter balance to the chess study. This would obviously double the amount of money needed to fund these studies, but we are talking about a man who has a BILLION DOLLARS, so money is no object if Rex Sinquefield actually wants a fair and objective study, not one in which the scientists aim to please the man with the deep pockets.