When Chelsea’s performance is complete, Beans thanks her for sharing her middlebrow creation. He remarks on how interesting it is that we think of certain topics as being best suited to poems. So, for example, Chelsea has elected to write about matrilineal matters of the heart, plus the twentieth century. It’s not, Beans observes, a poem about romantic love. Rather, it’s a poem about memory loss, decay, the vagaries of intergenerational succession. It’s also a poem, Beans maintains, about how bodies and objects signify, about how and where language exists, outside/beyond language, as such. This said, Beans continues, even if the poem (as if the poem might be somehow alive or sentient in itself) gestures or nods at enlivening possibilities for its own meaning, it is not in itself fully inhabiting these gestures. The poem does not appear to fully know what it is doing, and in conclusion—Beans sighs and there is a popping sound as of knuckles cracking (these may well be Beansian knuckles)—this effort at walking amnesia fails to make good on its own possibility and lands as a debased platitude.

Beans’s disquisition is greeted with what to Harry sounds like shock. But maybe it’s silence of another type. Harry is not sure if Beans is psychotically convinced that everyone around him is in awe of his skills of literary observation or if he is convinced that he is altruistically disrupting everyone’s tacit misting-over of their true identities as mediocrities, hacks. There are, one must admit—and see Don Hillary’s own class-time speeches—way, way too many individuals accepted into the Seminars, selective as it is, for even a small majority to become acknowledged, award-winning writers. Beans is, however, not about to let even small offenses slide, not when they have broader implications, and moreover he seems to have some sort of crypto-critical agenda. Beans, for all his pessimism, really seems to believe in the process! Of course, perhaps this is just a way of delaying his own realization that he is among the ranks of the talent-free . . .

Others weigh in. A few are, like, “This poem feels so utterly familiar. I like it for that. It reminds me of home.” Hooray, they say.

Harry ponders this notion: it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a poem—or any other piece of writing, for that matter—could have value because it reminds a reader of home.

This tame rejoinder sets Anton Beans off. Now Beans is well-nigh unstoppable; he is locked into a track and can no longer be reached for negotiation.