Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Luciano's Good Death
Aired: 2022-10-24
Duration: 05:04


=== Luciano's Classroom Vibe (04:32) ===

[00:00:04]  Hello Conspirituality Podcast listeners.
[00:00:07]  Welcome to a sample of a Patreon bonus episode.
[00:00:10]  We release these every week for our subscribers.
[00:00:13]  They're usually solo essays from our team.
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[00:00:24]  You can sign up at patreon.com backslash conspirituality.
[00:00:29]  Thank you.
[00:00:32]  So I think that when I walked into Luciano's class, he saw a boy having his mind blown by this whole vibe, and he recognized it.
[00:00:43]  He also had grown up in a Catholic milieu, rich with prohibitions and shames.
[00:00:50]  He had grown up in the extremely straight-edge, patriarchal community of first-generation Italian working-class immigrants.
[00:01:00]  Who would never have expected him to wear Travolta flared trousers as a teen or to wear makeup like David Bowie and then to plunge himself into a 1980s version of bohemian artful recklessness.
[00:01:16]  I think he saw me standing at a familiar edge.
[00:01:20]  He too had moved from extreme to extreme in his life and he knew all about leaping.
[00:01:29]  Now, what did I see?
[00:01:32]  Well, Luciano was 34 years old, and I've searched for the appropriate noun here, but I haven't had much luck.
[00:01:40]  I mean, mensch is good, although it implies nobleness, which I think is a little pious.
[00:01:49]  He was relaxed, welcoming, gregarious, charismatic.
[00:01:55]  But I'm going to let him answer the question, not as a 34 year old, but close to the end of his life.
[00:02:03]  I'm a poet, a bit of a visual artist, educator, publisher, gambler.
[00:02:14]  A lover and a sinner.
[00:02:16]  That's the opening of an interview film put together in May of this year by his friend, the writer and publisher Antonio D'Alfonso.
[00:02:25]  That's the same month that he let me know he was really dying after years of cancer.
[00:02:32]  You might be able to hear that he's a little bit awkward with the question, like any artist who is suddenly asked to summarize what they're about and what they're trying to do.
[00:02:43]  When I walked into his class at the age of 17, I didn't know about the gambler, the lover, or the sinner parts.
[00:02:52]  But over the years, he never failed in the honesty that I believe forms the real backbone of teaching.
[00:03:00]  That amidst the reading and discussion and context, one can also show that one is struggling to learn.
[00:03:09]  So, what was it like to be in his class?
[00:03:11]  sometimes even struggling to live.
[00:03:15]  So what was it like to be in his class?
[00:03:18]  Well, I must have sat at that long conference table desk in that very messy room a hundred
[00:03:27]  times over several semesters, twice a week, poetry one afternoon, fiction writing on the
[00:03:32]  other.
[00:03:34]  As students, we read to each other, we praised each other, we argued, we got jealous, we asked questions, and Luciano held space for everything.
[00:03:44]  Everything was on that table.
[00:03:46]  There were no taboos, nothing we couldn't write about, nothing we weren't allowed to express.
[00:03:53]  But there were boundaries and guardrails in the form of the books on the shelves behind us, and in the discipline of showing up, even if it was empty-handed.
[00:04:05]  Luciano was extremely well-read and never let us think that we were somehow inventing the wheel.
[00:04:13]  On that note, here I'll put a pin in his most characteristic rhetorical technique.
[00:04:21]  Whatever we brought to him, on paper or verbally, he would consider and listen carefully and say, that is interesting.

=== Core Pedagogy Connects Learning (00:41) ===

[00:04:32]  Interesting.
[00:04:33]  That is so interesting.
[00:04:35]  And what it reminds me of is...
[00:04:40]  That was at the core of his pedagogy.
[00:04:43]  To validate, respect, become excited by, and then connect the learning offering back to a network of comparables.
[00:04:56]  It was a pedagogy of yes and.
[00:04:59]  And this is really structurally generative.