Corresponding Fractions

Postscript: Faulkner and Race

2012-01-19T21:36:00.007-06:00

I'm still mulling over the subject of my last post. Per a reader's recommendation, I've ordered from the library Haki Madhubuti's memoir Yellowblack, but in the meantime I also checked out Faulkner's Selected Letters, edited by Joseph Blotner. In it, I found a fascinating and troubling letter from Faulkner to Paul Pollard, a black man who had worked for the Faulkners in Charlottesville. Pollard had written to Faulkner asking Faulkner to subscribe for him a lifetime membership in the NAACP.

Faulkner's reply expresses many of the same sentiments about racial inequality in the South that Gavin Stevens expresses in Intruder in the Dust. Here is what he wrote, in 1960:

I cannot send you this money. I will try to explain why. In the past I contributed indirectly to your organisation, since I believed it was the only organisation which offered your people any hope. But recently it has seemed to me that the organisation is making mistakes. Whether it instigates them, or merely condones and takes advantage of them, it is anyway on the side of, in favor of, actions which will do your people harm, by building up to a situation where the white people who hate and grieve over the injustice which your people have to suffer, will be forced to choose either for or against their own people, and they too, the ones which your people consider the best among my people, will have to choose the side of the rest of the white people.

I agree with your own two great men, Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Carver. Any social justice and equality which is compelled to your people by nothing but law and police force, will vanish as soon as the police force is removed, unless the individual members of your race have earned the right to it. As I see it, your people must earn by being individually responsible to bear it, the freedom and equality they want and should have. As Dr. Carver said, "We must make the white people need us, want us to be in equality with them."

I think that your organisation is not doing that. Years ago, I set aside a fund of money which I am using, and will continue to use, in education, to teach the people of your race to earn the right to equality, and to show the white people that they are and will be responsible to keep it. In Dr. Carver's words, make, compel, the white people to want them equal, not just to accept them in equality because police or military bayonets compel them to, and that only until the bayonets are removed again.

As I see it, if the people of your race are to have equality and justice as human beings in our culture, the majority of them have got to be changed completely from the way they now act. Since they are a minority, they must behave better than white people. They must be more responsible, more honest, more moral, more industrious, more literate and educated. They, not the law, have got to compel the white people to say, Please come and be equal with us. If the individual Negro does not do this by getting himself educated and trained in responsibility and morality, there will be more and more trouble between the two races.

This letter was later reprinted in the New York Times, on August 3, 1967. I don't know why or under what circumstances. 1967 was also the year that Madhubuti published Think Black. I don't know if Madhubuti read this letter before writing the preface to his book, but I'm sure that this letter would have only reaffirmed his determination to destroy Faulkner as a literary or political influence.

I do know that, in the future, I will use Faulkner's letter to explain to my students the rage toward Faulkner that comes out in Madhubuti's writing. The letter is an arresting primary source, one that I think will be very interesting for my students to read, having studied Booker T. Washington earlier in the course (and perhaps knowing Faulkner from previous courses).

What ironic and poignant and tragic about it, too, is that this is the same Faulkner who, also in Intruder in the Dust, could write this passage, which is so stirring that Eddy Harris quotes it approvingly in South of Haunted Dreams:

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear it.

It seems that the tangled ideologies of race confused Faulkner into thinking that somehow the injustices and outrages and dishonors and shames of racism had to be borne until black people had somehow "earned" justice and equality.

Faulkner and the Black Arts Movement

2012-01-11T21:47:00.005-06:00

1.
Teaching the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s this past semester, I shared with my students the introduction to Think Black, Haki R. Madhubuti’s 1967 collection of poetry. In this aesthetic and political manifesto, Madhubuti (born Don L. Lee in 1942) sets out a boldly racial vision of himself as an artist:

Black. Poet. Black poet am I. This should leave little doubt in the minds of anyone as to which is first. Black art is created from black forces that live within the body.

He then presents a succinct formulation of the goals of the Black Arts Movement:

Black art will elevate and enlighten our people and lead them toward an awareness of self, i.e., their blackness. It will show them mirrors. Beautiful symbols. And will aid in the destruction of anything nasty and detrimental to our advancement as a people.

For example, Madhubuti writes, “We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil.”

This is obviously not a literal threat of destruction, a fatwa like the one declared against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Faulkner died in 1962, five years before Madhubuti published this declaration. Madhubuti is calling for a more literary destruction. Yet his singling out of Faulkner strikes me as noteworthy and curious. Of all the “perpetrators of evil” Madhubuti might have targeted, why Faulkner?

2.
Was Faulkner truly a perpetrator of evil? A racist?

According to Arnold Rampersad’s 2007 biography of Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man was shocked and disappointed when Faulkner, a writer he deeply admired, was quoted in a magazine in 1956 saying that he was ready to shoot blacks in the street if necessary to save the Old South. (Ellison himself would have a complicated if not antagonistic relationship to the Black Arts Movement. In the same introduction that calls for Faulkner’s destruction, Madhubuti also asserts that the “black forces” that live within the body “can be lost at any time as in the case of Louis Lomax, Frank Yerby, and Ralph Ellison”).

According to the chronology included in the Library of America editions of Faulkner’s novels, however, in the 1950s Faulkner wrote letters to editors advocating school integration and publicly spoke against segregation. He disavowed the sentiments that so shocked Ellison, saying “They are statements which no sober man would make, nor it seems to me, any sane man believe.”

So Faulkner blamed his racially offensive comments on booze. Realistically, though, how could someone who grew up in Mississippi in the first half of the twentieth century not be in some way influenced by the mindset of racism?

But surely there were plenty of less ambiguous racists. The question remains: Why single out Faulkner?

3.
The subject of race in Faulkner’s novels and stories has been well covered by the academy, and while I can’t claim to have read a lot of this scholarly work, it seems to me that John Cooley’s overview of its critique is as good as any:

… most of Faulkner's African American characters represent stereotypic categories: the tragic mulatto, the Mammie, the faithful retainer, the rebellious marginal man. [Bernard] Bell and other African-American critics have also observed that Faulkner's blacks are defined in relationship to his whites, and that they frequently express white, rather than black, cultural values. White life and racial perspectives remain the primary orbit of action and thought for black characters, rather than attention to their own goals and strategies.

Yet Faulkner also wrote some of the most incisive fictional portraits ever created of the pathologies of white racism. “Dry September,” for instance, delivers a multifaceted dramatization of the horror of lynching. Stories like “Pantaloon in Black” and “That Evening Sun” display great empathy for the pain of black characters as well as pitiless eviscerations of white characters’ callous blindness to their suffering.

In The Unvanquished, black Ringo may be white Bayard’s faithful retainer, but he’s also usually two or three steps ahead of Bayard. Even Bayard’s father, the Confederate colonel John Sartoris, believes that Ringo is smarter than his son.

As noted in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, in contrast to the dysfunctional and self-destructive white Compson family, their black servants “endured”—including Luster, “A man, aged 14. Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could also keep him entertained.”

In his groundbreaking collection The Portable Faulkner, which helped to bring Faulkner out of obscurity in the mid-1940s, Malcolm Cowley identifies in Go Down, Moses what he calls “one of Faulkner’s most impressive themes: the belief in Isaac McCaslin’s heart that the land itself has been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse is to relinquish the land.” This sounds not too far from the idea of reparations for slavery—an idea that one might think would endear Faulkner to someone like Madhubuti.

On the other hand, Faulkner’s 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, appears to present a liberal version of the classic Southern resistance to “outside agitators” for civil rights. Gavin Stevens, the lawyer who often seems like a mouthpiece for Faulkner himself (and who, in this novel, is defending a black man against those who would wrongly convict and lynch him for murder) talks about “the outlanders who will fling [the black man] decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight.” Stay out, Attorneys General and National Guardsmen: “the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice.”

Did Madhubuti wade through all these abstruse novels and stories, though? Did he parse Faulkner’s fiction this closely to tease out, underneath it all, the truth about Faulkner’s racial attitudes? Was Madhubuti thinking about any of this when he called for Faulkner’s destruction?

4.
Or was it about what Faulkner symbolized for Madhubuti?

For any writer in 1967, Faulkner must have represented an image of literary excellence. A Nobel laureate, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a recently deceased American legend whose final comic novel, The Reivers, capped a monumental career, Faulkner had composed a corpus epic in scope though mostly limited to a single Mississippi county.

The map that Faulkner drew of Yoknapatawpha County for his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! lists that county’s population as 6,298 whites and 9,313 blacks. A white man, Faulkner was writing about a society in which blacks were the majority. And his portrayal of that society was no doubt given considerable credence as an accurate depiction of reality.

To black writers especially, Faulkner’s work must have represented a daunting challenge. In David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis writes of the struggles of black writers during the Harlem Renaissance to create great black art—and he uses Faulkner as the yardstick. “Where, in the fiction of the Renaissance,” Lewis writes, “was there a character portrait to equal Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s Light in August?”

If the writers of the Renaissance strove to compete with Faulkner, as Lewis suggests, then it stands to reason that the writers of a subsequent literary flowering, the Black Arts Movement, would also strive to do so.

Perhaps we can understand Madhubuti’s desire to destroy Faulkner as another instance of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence—the writer’s Oedipal need to kill off his literary father in order to make room for himself to create.

Killing off Faulkner, the (great white) Father, probably seemed even more necessary for Madhubuti because of race—because Faulkner’s depictions of black characters were at once indelible, given Faulkner’s powers as a writer, but also limited, ultimately, because of who Faulkner was.

The black writer Eddy L. Harris, in his work of literary nonfiction South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride Through Slavery’s Old Backyard, uses a motorcycle journey through the South as an opportunity to reflect on race, writing, and America. Near the end of the book, he has a realization:

I see now why certain themes are not only expected from black writers, but why black writers themselves feel compelled to explore them…. No one else but a black man knows their contours. It doesn’t have to be, but a black man’s point of view—a black writer’s point of view—is different precisely because he is black.

Faulkner knew the contours of race in the South pretty well, I would argue, and he dramatized them more powerfully and thoroughly than perhaps any other writer in American history.

Yet, for those very reasons, someone like Madhubuti must have felt a strong need to destroy Faulkner. Without doing so, without rejecting the authority of Faulkner’s imposing body of work, how could black artists gain the self-assurance to explore the contours of black experience with the authority of their own eyes and voices? For all of its rhetorical excess, Madhubuti’s introduction is ultimately a call to arms, an exhortation to a new generation of black writers to shake off the weight of white literary tradition and to breathe new life into their own tradition.

5.
Three years later, Toni Morrison would heed Madhubuti’s call with her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Morrison begins her novel by destroying “dick and jane,” as Madhubuti demanded. In a series of three increasingly degraded iterations of the schoolhouse primers featuring these generic white characters, Morrison suggests their inadequacy to reflect and instruct the lives of people like her protagonists. Taking a tip from Whitman’s declaration that “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher,” Morrison, who had done her master’s thesis on Faulkner, would go on to win the Nobel Prize by transforming his style to dramatize more directly the black lives that often occupied only the periphery of Faulkner’s world.

Morrison’s novels do not destroy Faulkner. They do, however, destroy any notion that his works present a complete truth about the lives of African Americans, and they occupy a towering place in the literary tradition that Madhubuti sought to invigorate.

A Year in Reading

2011-12-23T21:22:00.011-06:00

This year I continued to focus a lot of my reading on books that I thought would help me teach my African American Voices class. Some of that reading included nonfiction books about the African American experience: Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism; Eugene Robinson's Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America; and Randall Kennedy's The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. All three were gripping, addictive reads.

Shortly after I read Robinson's book, I saw him speak as part of the St. Louis Public Library's Black History Month program. His talk, on the the role of African Americans in the Civil War, led me to Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. A more hardcore history book than I typically read, and somewhat tedious at times, the book nevertheless had some useful material that I ended up incorporating into a class on popular fiction of the post-Civil War era, in which I set up the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt as a corrective to the fantasies of white writers, exemplified by Joel Chandler Harris's "Story of the War."

I also read Gerald Early's new book A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports, as well as Albert Murray's 1970 The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture. These were both stimulating books by first-class thinkers and writers. Less intellectually rigorous was Patrice Evans' Negropedia: The Assimilated Negro's Crash Course on the Modern Black Experience, a collection of glorified blog posts that made for entertaining bathrom reading but not much else.

Over the summer, I participated in another NEH Institute, this one on American culture as viewed through the lens of Motown and Jazz music in the years 1959-1975. It turned out to be quite fascinating, as well as a lot of work. Here's what I read; and here is what I wrote. Perhaps inspired by the course's emphasis on how music can be used to study culture, I ended up reading a number of books about black music: Gerald Early's One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture; Michael P. Jeffries' Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop; David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Blues People: Negro Music in White America; and Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues.

I also read several famous African American autobiographical narratives, all of which were great: Richard Wright's Black Boy; the Autobiography of Malcolm X (I taught the 1964 chapter in class); Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (which I plan to teach next year in place of Toni Morrison's Beloved); and Langston Hughes' The Big Sea (which I'm going to have the students read for summer reading).

Among all of this nonfiction about African Americans, I did read a few important pieces of fiction: Toni Cade Bambara's 1972 short story collection Gorilla, My Love; Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance classic The Blacker the Berry; and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (the only piece of fiction Malcolm X read in prison).

Of course, the most unforgettable novel I read this year was Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which I read along with a number of my colleagues. You can read the blog I kept about the experience here. Afterward, I enjoyed reading Isaiah Berlin's illuminating Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History.

Early on in the year I also read Sherman Alexie's rather uneven collection War Dances; over the summer I re-read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men for my school's all-school summer reading project (which culminated this year in a great student production of the play); and I also plowed through David Foster Wallace's posthumous manuscript The Pale King, which, though it is nowhere close to a coherent, finished novel, still contains some pieces of writing which rank among DFW's best. What a loss that he is gone.

So that brings me to the end of my tally of 2011's reading. As I look ahead to 2012, I anticipate spending more time with Tolstoy—reading some of his shorter works; as well as with Gogol—his novel Dead Souls. I'm planning on dipping again into Library of America editions of William Faulker and Zora Neale Hurston that I bought during the summer of 2010. I'd also like to read the short story collection Hue and Cry, by James Alan McPherson, who seemed to come up a lot in my AA Voices class this time around.

Beyond that, who knows?

As I wrote this post, I was a little surprised by how much I read this year (and I didn't even mention all of the Judy Blume and Roald Dahl I read to my daughters before bedtime). Part of me (and I fear, part of you, dear reader) wonders, Where did I get all the time to do this? Don't I have a life?

To answer those questions in order: I don't know, and, I think so.

I don't think I neglect my family to read. I do exercise somewhat regularly. I prepare my classes thoroughly and carefully, and grade papers promptly and conscientiously. In fact, much of what I've been reading lately is directly useful in my teaching.

Perhaps the biggest factor is that I watch almost no TV. Not that there's anything wrong with TV. A year or two ago I got completely addicted to The Wire and watched all 60 episodes in a month and a half. But somehow I just generally don't have the patience for TV, strange as that may sound. You have to have a quiet house to watch TV; you have to plop yourself down and passively observe a screen for a set period of time.

This may sound bizarre, too, but in the end I guess I read so much because it seems to me that reading is one of the best things that life has to offer.

New Yorker Fiction 2011

2011-12-19T22:43:00.007-06:00

This year the magazine published 48 pieces of fiction, of which I read 24. Here are my favorites, in chronological order. Not all of them are available online, but I have linked the ones that are:

The King of Norway, by Amos Oz (1/17)—an aborted romance on a kibbutz in Israel

Axis, by Alice Munro (1/31)—a great story about how lives can turn profoundly on a single moment; it just occurs to me now that this story would be an interesting companion to Margaret Atwood's "Stone Mattress," a sort of feminist "Cask of Amontillado" published in the final issue of the year

The Other Place, by Mary Gaitskill (2/14)—a disturbing story about men and violence

Paranoia, by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (2/28)—an eerie parable of race and class in America

The Trusty, by Ron Rash (5/23)—a convict attempts to escape from the chain gang

Home, by George Saunders (6/13)—a war veteran's struggles

Gravel, by Alice Munro (6/27)—a childhood trauma

Reverting to a Wild State, by Justin Torres (8/1)—tracing, in reverse chronological order, the devolution of a relationship

Tenth of December, by George Saunders (10/31)—a moving iteration of one of Saunders's favorite fictional structures: two characters, lost in their own worlds, who encounter each other out in the world

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (12/12)—a take-off on Raymond Carver's famous story, this time about two Jewish couples, one ultra-conservative, the other quite secular

If you're curious, here are my favorites from 2008, 2009, and 2010.

More Talk About Raymond Carver

2011-12-05T10:08:00.003-06:00

Nathan Englander, in an interview about his new story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," with an interesting comment about the differing versions of Raymond Carver's stories—the ones with and without the editorial cuts of Gordon Lish—which I wrote about here and here:

I did follow the debate, but from afar, taking it in with a sidelong I’m-already-decided kind of glance. I’m a compulsive re-drafter, and I’m pretty religious about the idea that in the end a story will find its final true form, and when it has found that form, that’s what the story was meant (in some fated way) to be. I did not read “Beginners,” but I do remember—and this is probably when I was studying in Iowa—reading “The Bath” after reading “A Small Good Thing,” Carver’s original exploration of the story. I just see them as two different works. They’re not in conflict to me. “A Small Good Thing” with its “Small Good Thing” ending cut, is a totally different experience. It’s not a different version of the same story, it’s a different story. I’d say the same feeling would apply to the other stories of Carver’s which have also been published in what Tess Gallagher calls, in The New Yorker article you reference, their “true, original” form. Simply, anything that puts more Carver stories into the universe, makes for a better (if more depressing) universe.

Confessions of a Musical Philistine

2011-11-29T21:02:00.007-06:00

Recently a Facebook friend of mine posted a letter she had written in which she extolls the virtues of vinyl records—their longevity, their physicality, their ability to evoke the times and places in which they were listened to. Along with the text, she also posted photos of herself holding up various LPs she was giving away to a young man as a Bar Mitzvah gift. Merely by looking through the photos, I got a taste of the pleasures she was describing in her eloquent letter.

Though I spend a sizable portion of my own leisure time listening to music, however, and have a constant mental soundtrack playing in my head most of the time, I've never been a vinyl guy. In my earliest memories, I can recall listening to a couple of my parents' records: the soundtrack from Grease, the Steve Martin album with the King Tut song on it. I had quite a few read-along records, 45-rpm sized, but that's about it.

When I first started listening to music in earnest, it was on tapes. I didn't get a CD player until I was a senior in high school; and now, mostly, I listen to music on my iPod and my computer. I don't have a particularly nice speaker system. I rarely patronize record stores anymore (particularly since there's virtually none within the city limits)—I buy music from Amazon. In these ways, then, I am anathema to audiophiles, a gauche consumer of tunes without the refined habits of the connoisseur.

Yet, in my own perhaps debased way, I have had something of the experience my FB friend describes. I thought of it a few months ago when R.E.M. announced their final dissolution, and I was moved to pull down from the closet shelf all my old R.E.M. tapes. I took a photo of them and thought of writing a blog post about what R.E.M. had meant to me., but I never got around to it.

Looking at these tape covers, holding the little plastic boxes, I do recall all the time I spent listening to them—working on math homework at my desk down in the basement of the house I grew up in, or hooked into headphones in the back seat of my family's van as we drove somewhere. I remember going to the Streetside Records on Watson Road to buy many of these.

Let's face it, though: tapes aren't the same as vinyl LPs. The cover art is shrunken; the recording material is not as durable; the listening experience is less sensual, and less convenient as well—it's harder to go directly to the song you want to hear.

So maybe it's not surprising that I've become a musical philistine. I never had much of a chance, coming of age in a world of tapes, never having had that formative emotional experience with vinyl. As Huck Finn says, "it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show—when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up."

It may be that eventually all my CDs will deteriorate and my MP3s get corrupted. I certainly won't have fond memories of the fleeting moments I spent buying music online (or downloading my free weekly songs legally from the library). I know that I'm settling for a less beautiful life as a music listener. But, honestly, I don't envision ever changing my ways.

Covers

2011-11-29T06:57:00.003-06:00

An interesting series of covers (with accompanying article) for Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of stories about Auschwitz by an author who was there.

Change

2011-11-26T09:32:00.003-06:00

The first paragraph of Timothy Noah's review of Paul Starr's Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform is striking:

Barack Obama achieved more significant change in domestic policy during the first two years of his presidency than any president since Richard Nixon has over the course of four or eight. That’s because in 2010 Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. We don’t know how this story will end, but there’s now a law on the books that, for all its many shortcomings and unpopularity, will extend health coverage to most of this country’s uninsured. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the share of legal nonelderly residents who have health insurance will rise from 83 percent to 94 percent. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, some unquantifiable number of people will live who would otherwise die.

As are the final two sentences:

Should the Supreme Court chuck Obamacare, health policy will be back to Square 1, and Obama’s presidency will be instantly transformed from a substantive success to a substantive failure. I fear that Justices Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito and Kennedy may find that possibility too tempting to pass up.

Halfsies

2011-11-20T09:43:00.002-06:00

The provocative opening to Martin Amis's review of Don DeLillo's new collection of short stories:

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?

Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee.

Anchored Down

2011-11-14T22:09:00.004-06:00

It occurred to me the other day that Michelle Shocked's classic 1988 song "Anchorage" is now a period piece, kind of like the old Marvelettes tune "Beechwood 4-5789"—made quaint by the evolution of communication technology.

For example:

1) The first lines: "I took time out to write to my old friend ... mailed my letter off to Dallas." Who writes letters anymore? Who mails them?

2) Later in the song, the speaker's friend writes back: "Hey girl, it's about time you wrote me. It's been over two years you know, my old friend." Today these two would obviously be friends on Facebook.

3) Near the end of the song: "Tell me, what's it like to be a skateboard punk rocker? Leroy says send a picture. Leroy says hello. Leroy says, As keep on rockin' girl. Yeah, keep on rockin'." In the song, these lines speak of Leroy's yearning for a window into a world beyond his drab workaday existence with the speaker's old friend in Anchorage, Alaska. Nowadays, he'd just Facebook stalk her and look through the albums of photos she'd post of her skateboard punk rock life in New York.

4) I hate to say it, but would it be possible to write a song about Alaska now without making at least a humorous reference to Sarah Palin?

Ah well. It's still a great song.

The Revival of Laughter

2011-11-12T08:56:00.001-06:00

A nice bit from a review of a posthumous collection of John Updike's essays:

His own word-pictures — of events remembered, books read, pictures seen, games played, loves grasped and relinquished — are among the gifts of our literature. “Perhaps,” he writes in an essay on humor, “one reason we laugh so much in childhood is that so much is unexpected and novel to us, and perhaps fiction revives that laughter by giving us back the world clearer than we have seen it before.”

Word of the Day

2011-11-07T07:17:00.004-06:00

My day has already been made: by David Remnick's use of the word "callipygian" (look it up) to describe Kim Kardashian in his Comment in the upcoming New Yorker.

A Nod to Bob

2011-11-05T23:40:00.003-05:00

Today I downloaded some early Bob Dylan tunes (legally!) that I'd previously had only on tape. Listening to them, I became curious about the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, about Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez. Eventually I ended up on the Wikipedia entry for Dylan, where I found this funny little nugget:

In the late 1970s, Dylan became a born-again Christian and released two albums of Christian gospel music. Slow Train Coming (1979) featured the guitar accompaniment of Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits) and was produced by veteran R&B producer, Jerry Wexler. Wexler recalled that when Dylan had tried to evangelize him during the recording, he replied: "Bob, you're dealing with a sixty-two-year old Jewish atheist. Let's just make an album."

Breakfast

2011-11-04T20:30:00.003-05:00

From a review of a new biography of Kurt Vonnegut

Mr. Shields provides a good assessment of misconceptions about Vonnegut’s writing. Those impressions persisted throughout his later life, perhaps because the books that followed “Cat’s Cradle,” “The Sirens of Titan,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” became increasingly unreadable.

“On the strength of Vonnegut’s reputation, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ spent a year on the best-seller lists,” Mr. Shields writes of that 1973 disappointment, “proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.”

Huh. Should I be embarrassed to admit that Breakfast of Champions has always been perhaps my favorite Vonnegut novel?

I Know Who You Are

2011-11-03T08:07:00.001-05:00

In my adolescence I read a lot of Stephen King. I haven't read anything more than a short story or two by him in years, but I do tend to pay attention to what he's up to.

His new novel—a time-travel story about a guy who tries to prevent JFK's asssassination—is being marketed as a new kind of Stephen King novel. Whether it is or not, I found this Wall Street Journal article interesting and this anecdote amusing in particular:

Mr. King recalled a woman who approached him in a supermarket in Florida, where he has a winter home.

"She said, 'I know who you are, you're that writer, you write those horror stories, and I said, "Yes, ma'am, I guess," and she said, 'I don't read that kind of thing. I respect what you do but I don't read those. I like uplifting things like that 'Shawshank Redemption,' '' Mr. King recalled. "I said, 'I wrote that one, too,' and she goes, 'No, you didn't,' and she just went on her way."

Slavery and Shaw

2011-11-01T10:47:00.003-05:00

Here's a piece I've got up at the Occasional Planet today about a memorial to slaves who attempted to escape from estate of St. Louis's own Henry Shaw.

Saunders Does It Again

2011-10-29T22:19:00.004-05:00

George Saunders is one of the writers who can make me cry. He did it again with this new story, "Tenth of December"—in which, as he did in "Escape from Spiderhead," Saunders seems to be working through his feelings about the suicide of his friend and artistic compatriot David Foster Wallace.

A teacher of writing at Syracuse, Saunders is also a reliably perceptive commentator on his own work and on the craft of fiction. This Q&A with Deborah Treisman is no exception. Here's a nice bit:

I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general—the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

Tell Tale Charts

2011-09-17T13:29:00.006-05:00

Colin Gordon, a professor at the University of Iowa, wrote a book called Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, which I wrote about in St. Louis Magazine.

Now Gordon has put together a series of remarkably illuminating short films about the American economy. About three minutes long apiece, they're narrated graphs that illustrate basic facts and trends related to topics like the minimum wage, Social Secuirty, and the current recession.

They're well worth checking out. You can watch them here.

Persistence

2011-09-05T22:00:00.002-05:00

Today I've been gobbling up Randall Kennedy's book The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. Among many great insights, this statistical point, made in a footnote and drawn from Nate Silver's blog FiveThirtyEight, struck me as particularly startling:

In 1980, nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan's voters were white. In 2000, 91 percent of George W. Bush's voters were white. In 2008, 89 percent of John McCain's voters were white.

I'll Fly Away

2011-09-04T07:40:00.003-05:00

In honor of last night's fantastic Gillian Welch show—which featured an electrical malfunction (the lights and A/C at the Pageant both proved unreliable), a wardrobe malfunction (one of the straps of Gillian's dress apparently failed, causing her to disappear off stage for a while, leaving David Rawlings to entertain the crowd with a solo version of "Big Rock Candy Mountain"), and a lyrics malfunction (Rawlings momentarily blanked on the words of the eighth or ninth verse of "Sweet Tooth" before bringing the song to a rollicking close)—here's Alec Wilkinson on the guitar playing of Rawlings, from Wilkinson's 2004 New Yorker profile of the band:

Rawlings is a strikingly inventive guitarist. His solos often feature daring melodic leaps. He uses passing tones as signal elements of a solo rather than relying on them merely to bridge chord changes, and there is an obstinate, near-vagrant quality of chromatic drifting to his playing--of his proceeding with harmonic ideas at a different pace and perhaps even in a different direction from the song's changes. He uses double and triple stops and open strings for dramatic effect. Often, he leaves an open string ringing as a drone against which he plays a note that conflicts with the chord the drone refers to. He likes to go as far out on a limb as he can before figuring out how to get back. In Carrboro, he played a solo that seemed as if it were going to skid right off the pavement and recovered itself only at the very last moment. The crowd applauded the simple audacity, and a woman beside me, clearly familiar with his playing, began laughing and shaking her head. "Of course he ends it there," she said to her companion. "Why wouldn't he?" In the dressing room afterward, I asked Rawlings how he would describe his playing, and he said that he simply has a fondness for certain notes and he finds ways to play them. When I asked which notes they were, he shrugged and said, "The ghostly ones."

Remnick on Obama

2011-09-01T21:52:00.004-05:00

It's been a long time since I've last posted, but what better way to get back into it than with an excellent Fraction from David Remnick, from his fine piece on Libya, Obama, and "leading from behind":

The trouble with so much of the conservative critique of Obama’s foreign policy is that it cares less about outcomes than about the assertion of America’s power and the affirmation of its glory. In the case of Libya, Obama led from a place of no glory, and, in the eyes of his critics, no results could ever vindicate such a strategy. Yet a calculated modesty can augment a nation’s true influence. Obama would not be the first statesman to realize that it can be easier to win if you don’t need to trumpet your victory.

What I've Been Up To

2011-07-13T07:27:00.005-05:00

From my graduate school days, I recall a quotation from Nietzsche, an exhortation: "Obey in a single direction."

Regular readers of this blog (a small but distinguished group—and you know who you are) may have noticed that my posts have been trailing off lately. I suppose it's because I've been trying to follow Nietzsche's advice. Pulled in a number of directions by my responsibilities as a parent and by some other projects I've been working on (including this one), I've let the blog go for a while in an attempt to focus my energies.

Currently, I'm in the midst of another NEH Summer Institute, this one on jazz, Motown, and American culture from 1959 to 1975. It's been a great experience so far.

For those who may be curious about what I've been doing in that Institute, or who may be experiencing the unpleasant symptoms of Corresponding Fractions withdrawal, here are three posts I've written for the Institute's blog:

Why is Popular Music Important?

What Is Black Music?

Nothing But a Man and Black Art

Stone Walls Redux

2011-06-16T13:28:00.013-05:00

Not too long ago I did a little post about some stone walls I noticed on a bike ride through the south side of St. Louis. Today I went riding again and ended up in Carondelet, where I saw this interesting example at the intersection of Iron and Michigan:

In this case, the extensive stone wall remains even though the houses that it once framed are gone.

The wall rounds the corner, on which stands an unkempt in-fill home that is largely shrouded by dense tree cover.

As I rode around today, I was struck by how many beautiful and well-kept houses there are, even in areas of the city that would probably be considered sketchy by prospective home-buyers. The admirable people who stick with these houses and these neighborhoods are quixotic in their commitment to these beautiful places that have been bypassed by highways and real estate trends.

The stone wall above is an example of the sheer abundance and wealth of St. Louis's architectural past. Despite all that has vanished, there's so much that still remains—and much that retains its glory.

A couple examples:

(Boathouse in Carondelet Park)

(at Livingston and Holly Hills)

Last Words

2011-06-14T06:50:00.002-05:00

I've got a new piece up at The Millions today. It's an idea I've been kicking around for a while, but just last week at tennis my friend Ben told me a story that was the final piece of the puzzle.

You can read it here.

A Covenant of Pathos

2011-06-09T22:30:00.006-05:00

From an interview with George Saunders about his story in the current New Yorker, a passage that I think crystallizes what I love about him (i.e., his humanity toward his characters):

Deborah Treisman: You seem, ultimately, to have a lot of sympathy for Mike, despite whatever it is that he has (or hasn’t) done, and the violent urges that keep surging up in him. Why is that?

George Saunders: Well, yes—I think that’s one of the fundamental goals of fiction, and its most efficient modus operandi: as a writer you’ve got to keep trying to “de-Other” your narrator until you’ve established him as basically you but on a different day. (I mean, that’s not the only way, but it is a way that, for me, can have the effect of making the narrator non-negligible, i.e., of minimizing the possibility of authorial slumming/puppeteering.) There’s this funny thing where the technical stuff (trying to make the voice convincing and compelling; operating at a sufficient level of detail; trying to keep the reader emotionally with the narrator) will dovetail with the moral valence of the piece—that is, technique leads to sympathy, or maybe, the appearance of sympathy.

I may have to pay the Art Institute a commission for these quotations I’m nonchalantly dropping in here, but here’s something the German artist Ludwig Meidner said that seems relevant to this question: “Do not be afraid of the face of a human being. Don’t let your pen stop until the soul of that one opposite you is wedded to yours in a covenant of pathos.”

Stone Walls in South St. Louis

2011-06-01T11:03:00.012-05:00

On Memorial Day I took an afternoon bike ride around the South side of St. Louis. On this particular ride I found myself noticing stone walls, starting with this one on Oak Hill:

These ornamental but functional walls speak of a more glorious era of craftsmanship in the city. Unlike the generic retaining walls that tend to get built these days, stone walls give neighborhoods a sense of place and history.

Notice how the stone walls frame the entryway up to this stone house, also on Oak Hill:

This modest home on Ulena is given a touch of charm by the stone wall bordering its front lawn.

And the long expanse of stone wall on both sides of Macklind as it approaches Gresham frames the street beautifully and uniquely.

The city is full of these treasures which, though they may belong to individual homeowners, seem to emanate from a more public-spirited notion of how architecture can create community space and aesthetic pleasure for all to enjoy.

Risky Business

2011-05-31T23:09:00.003-05:00

From a very interesting Louis Menand article about the value of college in America:

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Menand goes on to point out that business is the number one major in American colleges, accounting for 22 percent of bachelor's degrees.

Writing Roundup

2011-05-25T08:47:00.003-05:00

For the past year or so, my blogging pace has slowed a bit, but I've been trying to do around eight posts a month. This month I'm lagging behind and might not make it. I've been stymied partly by my own sloth and partly by the demands of the final weeks of the school year.

I have been doing some writing in other forums, however. For example, today I have a piece up at the Occasional Planet entitled "Racial Politics and Obama: A New Era?"

Having finished War and Peace at the beginning of the month, I've also written a couple posts about Tolstoy's ideas of freedom: one focuses on Tolstoy's ideas about history and freedom; the other focuses on his ideas about freedom and individuals.

If you're feeling cheated by this month's dearth of Corresponding Fractions, I'd be honored if you checked out one or more of these pieces.

Cheers.

Weeds

2011-05-21T13:20:00.003-05:00

Today as I took out the recycling to the receptacle in the alley, I stopped to notice the weeds that inevitably grow up in the little strip of soil between the pavement and the retaining wall in our backyard.

It's so ordinary that it often goes unnoticed, but it's wondrous that life is so persistent, isn't it? That something will find a way to live in any little bit of dirt that gets watered by the rain?

The spiny specimen above seems well-suited for its inhospitable environment. As if it knows it's unloved and unwanted, it bristles menacingly, threatening to sting those who might casually try to pluck it.

Meanwhile, this weed, an unauthorized occupant of a more privileged space (the elevated flowerbed atop the retaining wall), gamely emulates the florid attractions that earn other plants the right to be there:

And these intrepid leaves poke up through the barest crack in the concrete, scrabbling out a photosynthetic subsistence:

Life, inexorably it seems, seeks to thrive wherever it can—just as the human mind, perhaps just as inexorably, seeks to make meaning and metaphor out of whatever comes into its purview.

Don't Bury Me 'Cause I'm Not Dead Yet

2011-05-13T15:24:00.000-05:00

Some say that blogging is on its deathbed, overtaken by quicker forms of cyber-communication like Twitter.

Pshaw, says Chris Mattarazo, in this eminently sensible piece:

The content of blogs is so diverse that to say they are “dying out” is almost to say that people are going to stop saying diverse things in a free medium that offers instant world-wide publication. What are the chances of that happening?

Obama, Bush, and Osama

2011-05-02T19:30:00.003-05:00

Over the past few months, I've re-worked some of my Corresponding Fractions posts into more fully realized pieces that I've published in the friendly confines of the Occasional Planet. You can check some of these out in the list entitled "Integers: My Writing Elsewhere" on the right side of this blog, underneath the "Favorite Fractions" list.

Last night, watching coverage of the President's announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden, I started writing a post in response to what I was seeing and remembering. Halfway through, I decided I would send it to the OP when it was finished. You can read it here.

What a Story Can Be

2011-04-27T21:38:00.001-05:00

Some wisdom from the great George Saunders, at the end of this interview:

I like the idea that a story—well, that we don’t really know what it is, exactly. And that this is actually the purpose of every story: to find one more active, breathing example of what a story can be.

Newsweek's Revival, and a Mind-Boggling Fact

2011-04-17T20:42:00.004-05:00

For no apparent reason, several months ago we started receiving Newsweek magazine. It seemed pathetically thin of substance, and I was under the impression that it was on its last legs.

Then I heard that erstwhile New Yorker editor Tina Brown had taken over and had been charged with bringing the magazine back to life.

Now I'm wondering if part of her strategy is to try to hook as many New Yorker subscribers as she can.

Newsweek's cover story this week is by Peter J. Boyer, a great journalist who's long been associated with the New Yorker. And the magazine features illustrations of some of its contributors by Grafilu, who also did the distinctive portraits of last summer's 20 Under 40 fiction writers in the New Yorker.

It's not a bad strategy, if indeed it is Brown's strategy: start by throwing free magazines at New Yorker subscribers; then improve the magazine's content and make it more New Yorker-ish, in appearance, contributors, and article topics.

Case in point: an interesting article about Henry Louis Gates (himself a sometime New Yorker contributor), who's got a new PBS special airing soon called Black in Latin America.

I found this little tidbit blogworthy:

Black in Latin America was inspired by one mind-boggling fact. Of the 11 million Africans who survived the middle passage between 1502 and 1866, only 450,000 arrived in North America. The rest landed south of the border in places like Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and Brazil, which have their own, largely unexplored histories and legacies of race and racism.

Startling, isn't it?

Anyway, now that Corresponding Fractions has taken notice of Newsweek's revival and added to the buzz, I believe Tina Brown's marketing strategy is complete!

Inverted Capitalism

2011-04-14T07:18:00.000-05:00

Bill Moyers interviews David Simon. I've seen this type of argument made before (John McWhorter says some similar things in this piece), but Simon puts it especially vividly here:

Bill Moyers: I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.

David Simon: Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.

Bechdel Test for Gender Bias

2011-04-12T22:47:00.006-05:00

My wife was reading Tad Friend's recent New Yorker article about Anna Faris last night, and she quoted this interesting passage to me:

The Bechdel Test, established in 1985 by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, is a way of examining movies for gender bias. The test poses three questions: Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man?

Bechdel, incidentally, is the author of Fun Home, one of my all-time favorite books. She's also an old college buddy of Kathleen Finneran, the author of The Tender Land, which may be my absolute favorite book of all time.

In any case, I found the idea and the simplicity of this test striking. It occurred to me that none of the books I teach to my freshmen would pass: The Odyssey, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Huck Finn, or Romeo and Juliet. (Not to mention O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

It's startling to realize not only how many movies, but also how much of classic literature fails to pass this test.

Must give this issue more thought.

Marx, Brother

2011-04-12T07:08:00.003-05:00

The opening of Terry Eagleton's stimulating essay "In Praise of Marx":

Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

The Wire and Winter's Bone

2011-04-03T09:38:00.003-05:00

On a related note to the previous post, I think an interesting comparison can be made between The Wire and the recent film Winter's Bone. That movie is also about an economically depressed area (the rural Missouri Ozarks) and centers on characters whose lives are shadowed by the drug trade. One difference is that all the characters in the film are white.

Another difference is that the film is told entirely from the perspective of a character who herself is not directly involved in the drug trade but who has to negotiate that world in order to protect her family, her younger brother and sister.

But the most interesting difference to me is the way that law enforcement officers are portrayed in the film. They're basically peripheral, for one thing. And their roles are even more ambiguous than those of the cops in The Wire. There's a bail bondsman who's sympathetic but ultimately the enforcer of a vicious system. There's a craven sheriff who's either ineffectual or corrupt.

Mostly, the story is about the protagonist, a heroic and brave teenage girl. The film presents nuanced, interesting portraits of her uncle, an addict who's been involved in the meth trade; and, like The Wire, it also presents even some of the most villainous characters in a fairly complicated light.

My point, though, is that at no time are we encouraged to see this as a story about the forces of justice and law tackling the evils of those involved in the drug trade. The film is not interested in that. I wonder if such a movie has ever been made about black characters whose lives are lived in the shadow of the drug trade.

Maybe Boyz in the Hood?

Black American Lives and THE WIRE

2011-04-03T08:44:00.009-05:00

A friend of mine who's also a reader of this blog sent me a question today. He just finished watching the fifth season of The Wire. He went back and read this post, written after I had watched the first two seasons and a few episodes of the third. In the post, I reflect on how the show's focus on crime and punishment narrows the range of black American lives considered in the show.

My friend wondered if I thought the later episodes and seasons of The Wire address this issue:

Do you feel the show successfully presented a broader range of black American lives in the later seasons than the narrower range of criminals and crime-fighters which you identified in the first few seasons?

I guess my answer would be yes and no. Season Four brings in all of the schoolkids and widens the scope a bit. The character of Cutty also provides an interesting example of someone who forges a life outside of the world of crime and punishment. Bunny Colvin becomes a very interesting example of a middle-class black character who struggles heroically, at times quixotically, to change the world for the better.

In the end, though, the show is still about crime and punishment. We root for the cops to defeat the bad guys. Now, it must be said that the show does an incredible job of blurring the lines: showing us the corruption and dysfunction of the cops—even some of the ones we might admire most—and showing us the humanity of the bad guys. The Wire is a remarkable work of art, one that can actually make us feel more empathy for a character after he brutally beats another character to death. (I'm thinking of Chris Partlow's killing of Michael's stepfather.) And the film's cast of characters does include an impressive number of what Zora Neale Hurston called "average, struggling, non-morbid Negroes." Many of these characters are committed to the apprehension of black criminals—but there are white criminals as well, some of whom operate on a much wider scale than the black criminals. (I'm thinking of Vondas and the Greek, of course.)

So yes, I think the later seasons do add important and interesting nuance to the show's portrayal of black Americans' lives. And yet, at the same time, I still think everything I said in my earlier post is true.

I still need to watch David Simon's earlier mini-series The Corner, which other readers of this blog have urged me to look at in the context of this question. And Simon's most recent show Treme would probably also be interesting to watch with this issue in mind. My understanding is that it's not about crime and punishment at all.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

2011-04-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

File this under South Side Curiosities. Seeking to enjoy today's lovely weather, I took a bike ride over to the intersection of Oregon and Miami, where there's a strange rupture in the continuity of the street—of Oregon, that is.

I don't understand why the street does this. Did it originally end up where the wall is, and then later get extended? But if so, why didn't they just continue the street itself, putting in some dirt to make a smooth transition down the hill?

A couple of neighborhood kids came up to me while I was taking pictures. I explained why I found this street odd.

One kid solemnly told me that it had been like this as long as he could remember.

The other kid said, "One part is a high street, the other is a low street."

Here are some views from the upper part, looking to the south.

What is the purpose of the fence and the gates?

If anyone knows the story of this rupture in the street, please fill me in.

Why Literature Matters

2011-04-02T09:38:00.004-05:00

I liked this essay by Joseph Wood, and especially this passage:

After all, humans contradict themselves, behave in morally troubling ways, think circularly or contingently, and resist a singular pinning. If we judge poems not on their abilities to capture human experience, but rather on their ability to perpetuate and frontload a singular aesthetic or political theory, then we rob ourselves of the right to be unknown to ourselves. We rob ourselves of the ability to try to find what is necessary in our own lives and to articulate that through the artificial and highly flawed artistic mode of poetry. Literature matters to most people not because it reinforces a dominant ideology or singular politic, but because it reflects tension and uncertainty.

Cultivating Athletes, Cultivating Writers

2011-03-30T20:50:00.003-05:00

Sabermetrician Bill James contrasts how America cultivates athletic talent with how it cultivates writerly talent:

American society could and should take lessons from the world of sports as to how to develop talent. How is it that we have become so phenomenally good, in our society, at developing athletes?

First, we give them the opportunity to compete at a young age.

Second, we recognize and identify ability at a young age.

Third, we celebrate athletes' success constantly. We show up at their games and cheer. We give them trophies. When they get to be teenagers, if they're still good, we put their names in the newspaper once in a while.

Fourth, we pay them for potential, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world.

The average city the size of Topeka produces a major league player every 10 or 15 years. If we did the same things for young writers, every city would produce a Shakespeare or a Dickens or at least a Graham Greene every 10 or 15 years. Instead, we tell the young writers that they should work on their craft for 20 or 25 years, get to be really, really good—among the best in the world—and then we'll give them a little bit of recognition.

What Literature Teaches

2011-03-30T20:41:00.003-05:00

From a fine review of what sounds like a good book by Marjorie Garber (whose Shakespeare After All is a worthy companion to the Bard's complete works):

"The absence of answers or determinate meanings" is exactly the set of "qualities that make a passage or a work literary." Literary works have no single meaning, whatever the author intended. Indeed, Garber points out, "one of the key features of what might be called the literary unconscious is a tendency on the part of the text to outwit or to confound the activity of closing or ending."

This is not relativism. This is not deconstruction. People have been saying things like this about literature since Horace - and indeed, Horace's ancient dictum (that literature should both teach and delight) is, I believe, one of the underlying themes of Garber's book. It's just that what Garber thinks literature teaches is not a set of univocal moral truths but rather a habit of mind: a way of questioning the world, a way of understanding just how hard it is to make decisions, fall in love, express desire, worship, rule and serve.

We read books often to learn how others do these things - and often to learn how others failed to do them. We read books to be pleasured, too, into an admiration for a writer's choice of words or for an author's command of our emotions.

Barry Bonds and Black Manhood

2011-03-26T14:15:00.000-05:00

One well-known theme of the African-American quest for civil rights and justice is manhood. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, for instance, one white slaveowner likes to flatter his own sense of mastery by referring to his slaves as men, a practice that draws disapproval from his peers. Continuing into the era of neo-slavery commonly known as Jim Crow, black men were still routinely referred to as "boys," and the lynchings of black men often included ritual castration. It's common knowledge that black jazz musicians slyly fought back by casually referring to each other as "man," a form of address that, like so many originally black locutions, has made its way into the wider (and whiter) American vernacular. More recently, on Kanye West's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the controversial hip-hop artist defiantly asserts his manhood in response to his critics:

... the same people that tried to blackball me

Forgot about two things: my black balls.

In popular culture, black masculinity is often contested in the arena of sports. Think of Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali—two powerful black male athletes whose assertions of self, sexuality, and political independence brought them into direct conflict with the U.S. government. Or think of Hank Aaron, whose pursuit of Babe Ruth's venerable homerun record brought him piles of racist hate mail.

All of this history sprang to mind for my yesterday when I read an article in the New York Times about the ongoing Barry Bonds trial. Bonds, who long since passed up both Ruth and Aaron as the career leader in homeruns, is on trial for perjury, accused of lying to a grand jury in 2003 about whether or not he ever used steroids.

I don't listen to a lot of sports talk radio or talk much about sports myself, but even from my rather distant perspective, I'm aware that there are a lot of white people in America who revile Bonds in much the same way that many whites in the past reviled Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali. I also get the sense that many of them are licking their chops at the prospect of Bonds' getting cut down to size in this trial.

There's something unseemly about it—this white desire to see a black man punished for getting too big, literally—that puts me in mind of a fatalistic comment made by the poor black sharecropper Trueblood in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: "no matter how biggity a nigguh gits, the white folks can always cut him down."

Kanye's lyrics notwithstanding, the people who are going after this black ballplayer have not forgotten about his black balls, whose size may soon become a piece of forensic evidence in the trial, according to the Times article:

Jeffrey Nedrow, an assistant United States attorney, asked (Larry) Bowers, the chief science director of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, how steroid use could affect a man’s testicles.

“It’s been well documented that you could have testicular atrophy,” Bowers said, before putting it simply. “They will shrink” ...

While listening to that testimony, some jurors knitted their brows or even giggled. When they return to court Monday, though, they will learn the relevance of that information.

Kimberly Bell, Bonds’s girlfriend from 1994 to 2003, is expected to testify that she noticed a marked decrease in the size of Bonds’s testicles while they were dating.

This is surely one of the more absurd turns in recent American jurisprudence. At the same time, it's hard not to see it as merely the latest variation on the well-rehearsed theme of America's uncomfortable relationship with black manhood.

Find Some Occupation

2011-03-24T14:27:00.004-05:00

Reading this wonderful Garry Wills essay today, delighting in its discussion of a favorite passage of mine from the Odyssey, it occurred to me that, in selecting one's "desert island" books, one would be best served by selecting books like the Odyssey—huge books that strive to contain all of life within them. A few others occurred to me: Middlemarch, the complete works of Shakespeare (if that's not cheating), Moby-Dick (despite that book's seemingly circumscribed milieu, in its psychological and philosophical range it seems to fit on the list), and War and Peace, which I'm currently making my way through, and in which I just read this great passage:

Sometimes Pierre remembered stories he had heard about how soldiers at war, taking cover under enemy fire, when there is nothing to do, try to find some occupation for themselves so as to endure the danger more easily. And to Pierre all people seemed to be such soldiers, saving themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with drafting laws, some with women, some with playthings, some with horses, some with politics, some with hunting, some with wine, some with affairs of state. "Nothing is either trivial or important, it's all the same; only save yourself from it as best you can!" thought Pierre. "Only not to see it, that dreadful it!"

I guess the whole idea of "desert island" books itself is an example of what Pierre is talking about: the occupation you'd need to ward off insanity or suicide if you were stranded alone on a desert island.

The Pale King Begins

2011-03-15T08:22:00.003-05:00

Over at The Millions they've got an exclusive look at the opening sentence of Wallace's forthcoming posthumous novel The Pale King.

At first glance, it seems to me to have echoes of the beginnings of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and, especially, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, of which we know DFW was a fan.

Epstein and Envelopes

2011-03-15T08:16:00.003-05:00

I don't necessarily agree with everything Joseph Epstein writes in this piece about the recent dust-up in the human sexuality course at Northwestern, but I've always admired Epstein's writing. I particularly like this tart little sentence, in which Epstein refreshes a contemporary cliche:

A man with a penchant for smashing taboos, Professor Bailey enjoys pushing the envelope, but, like many another radical academic, prefers not to pay the postage.

Reversing the Great Migration

2011-03-14T20:47:00.008-05:00

From Ta-Nehisi Coates, an interesting reflection on why some African Americans move back to the South, particularly Atlanta, in a kind of reverse of the Great Migration:

The fact is that, in Atlanta, you can live in a neighborhood with a sprawling lawn, a two-car garage, four bathrooms, and see nothing but other black people around you. Moreover, you can enjoy a lifestyle—a range of food, a way of speaking, a particular bearing—which many of us experienced as children going South in the summer, and now think back on wistfully. And many of us with no such direct memories, lived around people who told such stories, and thus have shared in the collective memory.

The point here is that it's important, not simply to consider the number of people returning, but their thinking as they return. African-Americans moving South are returning to the place where much of their collective identity was formed. They're often returning to places where they still have kinship ties, or where large swaths of people share in their culture. This is different, and specific to black people. "The South" means something to Northern African-Americans with Southern roots (which is to say a lot of us) that it just doesn't mean for Northern whites. The black folks who return there are not simply returning for a good job, they are, in large measure, returning to something ancestral....

The Terms of the Form

2011-02-21T13:24:00.002-06:00

In an interesting piece that weighs criticisms of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Chris Jackson makes what I found a useful point for framing my recent efforts to listen to and study rap music:

We all know that rap is narrative, with unreliable narrators, and that the point-of-view in any narrative is not necessarily the point of view of the writer, but then we occasionally choose to forget this; in those moments we make judgments on rap songs without making the effort to first understand them on the terms of the form.

Homeroom [EXPLICIT]

2011-02-16T19:37:00.002-06:00

Today in homeroom a promo played over the TVs, trying to drum up interest for the upcoming swimming season.

The music for the promo was a rap song I'd never heard before. The clip ended with a couple lines that the swimming coaches probably would have preferred not to have broadcast under their imprimatur to the entire school at 7:55 a.m.:

Told her beauty is why God invented eyeballs
and her booty is why God invented my balls

I raised an eyebrow, but none of the freshmen in my homeroom seemed to notice.

I thought the rapper's voice sounded familiar, though, and I asked the students who it was. A kid near the front of the room said it was G-Unit. Then I realized who it sounded like: Kanye West.

Thinking about ways of talking about rap and hip-hop in my African American Voices class next year, I've been reading about and listening around in the genre lately, including Kanye's recent album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I guess the timbre of his voice had wormed its way into my consciousness.

The student challenged me, so I looked up the lyrics and confirmed that it was indeed Kanye, making a guest appearance on the Lloyd Banks song "Start It Up."

"That's pretty sad," I told him, smiling, wanting to make it cut a little deeper, "when I know rap better than you do."

The lines are obscene, of course, not to mention crudely sacrilegious and completely inappropriate for homeroom. But on the level of sheer wordplay, they're pretty impressive.

As the bell rang and I walked out into the hall, I thought of all those 17th century wags, poets like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who delighted in writing sexually obscene and politically transgressive poetry. One might develop a comparison between contemporary mega-star rappers and these decadent aristocrats.

I doubt their poems were ever read after morning prayer at Eton, though.

My First Sexual Experience, in 100 Words

2011-02-11T13:09:00.003-06:00

I'm having my seniors write 100-word stories on Monday. This story is one I wrote years ago and have been giving out as an example almost as long. As I ran off the assignment today, it occurred to me that this blog might be a good place to share this story, to get it off my chest in a more public way. So here you go.

It's about 1% fictionalized.

The Night Elizabeth Dorsey and I Swapped Spit

“Can I have some gum?” she asked, jog-bra’d, brown hair sweaty. We were seventh graders.

I took the wad from my mouth.

“Here.”

She plucked it away, popped it into her mouth, and smiled.

“Thanks.”

As she bounced back onto the court, laughing at Phil’s banter, I felt a buzzing emptiness in my stomach. Slightly dizzy, I ran after an errant volleyball.

Later, nervous, at the drinking fountain: “Can I have my gum back?”

“Yes.”

I took it like Communion, tasting her warm saliva.

During rotation she asked for it again. Back and forth, and then she left. I kept chewing.

Bishop on The New Yorker

2011-02-10T07:43:00.003-06:00

As a lover of the New Yorker and a (less fervid) admirer of Elizabeth Bishop, I found this Dwight Garner article delightful. The opening paragraph:

“What I think about The New Yorker,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in 1940 to her mentor, Marianne Moore, “can only be expressed like this: *!@!!!@!*!!”

Brownstein on Franzen & Goodman

2011-02-09T08:32:00.004-06:00

This Gabriel Brownstein essay, a side-by-side comparison of recent novels by Jonathan Franzen and Allegra Goodman, gets it exactly right. I have read only parts of Freedom and none of The Cookbook Collector, but Brownstein's evenhanded discussion matches exactly my feelings about Franzen in general, and the contrast with Goodman matches the one I see between Franzen's memoir The Discomfort Zone and Kathleen Finneran's less-known masterpiece The Tender Land.

The essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but here Brownstein sums up his point:

Franzen is dancing with you, sure, and with Walter and Patty as well, and his moves are wild and Tony Manero dazzling—but he’s not wholeheartedly on the floor with his partners. Allegra Goodman loves her characters—they absorb her attention as if she could wish for nothing more, and she offers them intimately to her readers, so much so that the author herself all but vanishes. Franzen’s characters meanwhile exist somewhere beneath the glory of his prose. His book is not so much addressed to the intimate reader, it’s addressed to the judges and the crowds. His characters are anxious, but he is supremely confident. He has managed to shuck the difficulties of postmodern fiction while retaining much of its cool and distant pose.

Lift Ev'ry Voice

2011-02-05T09:16:00.006-06:00

Born in 1871, James Weldon Johnson was a poet, a songwriter, an educator, a novelist, a diplomat, and an activist, the first African American to head the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1900, Johnson, then a school principal in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing” for a school commemoration in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Set to music by Johnson’s brother, the song would eventually come to be known as “the black national anthem.”

While doing a bit of research on "Lift Ev'ry Voice" for a project at school, I came across this rendition of the song, which accompanies a montage of images from African American history. It was originally presented at the African American Church Inaugural Ball. I found it pretty moving.

Black Odyssey

2011-02-04T07:06:00.003-06:00

My essay comparing Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Odyssey is up at the Millions today, the first Friday of Black History Month.

I'd like to affectionately dedicate it to my students who mocked my obsessive Odyssey references as we studied Morrison's novel this past semester and I developed the ideas that I explore in the essay. Thanks for your patience, guys.

Mitt, Health Care, and the GOP

2011-02-02T13:05:00.005-06:00

Erik Hayden at the Atlantic notes a new development in the struggle over the health care legislation:

Why is a state able to impose a mandate that people buy health insurance, but not the federal government? Variations of that question have plagued Mitt Romney as he's tried to differentiate his Massachusetts Health Care plan from President Obama's health care reforms. But when the question was recently posed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the Republican responded succinctly: "States have rights that the federal government doesn't have," he said, before asserting a state's right to try different things to see what "works" and issuing a non-apology for his plan. On Good Morning America Tuesday morning, he "refused to apologize" for Massachusetts's plan.

Pundits have now seized on Romney's answer as a potential strong strategy for a looming 2012 presidential bid.

This line of argument—that it's OK for states but not for the federal government to implement such a plan—along with Paul Krugman's point that the Obama health care reform is quite similar to '90s-era Republican proposals, makes me see more clearly than ever that a large part of the Republican zeal for undoing the reform is merely a desire to take a political victory away from the President.

Meaning and Sound

2011-01-28T07:08:00.004-06:00

More than two years after David Foster Wallace's death, his reputation continues to grow and the conversation about his work only increases in its intensity and pervasiveness. You see his name popping up all the time. For example, he gets mentioned briefly in this Ken Auletta article about the CEO of America On-Line, and in this Adam Haslett review-essay about Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

Haslett argues that "Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature":

Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.

I particularly like Haslett's final point. It's one that I try desperately to make to my freshmen when I see them furtively reading their Sparknotes before a class on the Odyssey or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Huck Finn or Romeo and Juliet: if you're just trying to cram information from a pre-digested summary, you're missing the biggest reason for reading in the first place—to learn how to experience a book.

Incomprehension

2011-01-27T19:07:00.003-06:00

From Dan Chiasson's review of The Anthology of Rap in the January 13 issue of the New York Review of Books:

Only in hip-hop is the age-old comedy of grown-ups trying to understand young people yoked so uncomfortably to the American tragedy of whites trying and failing to understand blacks. Age incomprehension is comic, since everyone eventually grows old; race incomprehension is tragic, since nobody knows what it is like to change races.

Chronicling Parenthood

2011-01-26T20:17:00.006-06:00

From an interesting article by Libby Copeland at Slate, about the way that Facebook and the Internet may increase loneliness by exacerbating our tendency to underestimate other people's unhappiness:

Any parent who has posted photos and videos of her child on Facebook is keenly aware of the resulting disconnect from reality, the way chronicling parenthood this way creates a story line of delightfully misspoken words, adorably worn hats, dancing, blown kisses. Tearful falls and tantrums are rarely recorded, nor are the stretches of pure, mind-blowing tedium. We protect ourselves, and our kids, this way; happiness is impersonal in a way that pain is not. But in the process, we wind up contributing to the illusion that kids are all joy, no effort.

As I paste this passage, however, I think of all the counter-examples: the Facebook posts in which friends of mine ruefully recount their parenting misadventures, mini-disasters, and truly scary moments; or my friend Steve's blog, Our Three Oranges, which he uses to keep relatives and friends informed about his family, including developments both encouraging and discouraging with his son James, who has Down Syndrome.

I often don't comment on these posts—although I appreciate when people comment on similar posts of mine—but I do find that, far from increasing my loneliness, they have the opposite effect: they give me a sense of the day-to-day struggles of other people, a sense of shared vulnerability, and simply a wider sense of the lives of the people I know than I would probably get without the Internet and Facebook.

Brody on The Hurt Locker

2011-01-20T22:25:00.005-06:00

Richard Brody's interesting argument about The Hurt Locker, which I enjoyed watching last night, confident that I'd be off school today (as indeed I was, thanks to six or so inches of snow):

Sure, the bomb-planters come off as monsters. But the movie’s wider implications emerge with the recognition that the world is full of monsters—but that it would be self-destructive for the United States to assume the right and the responsibility to rid the world of them (and would also suggest precisely the kind of war-addiction that the movie dramatizes). So, yes, “The Hurt Locker” is definitely a liberal movie—especially in the general sense of suggesting that wisdom and justice consist in learning to accept the existence of evil. But it’s a very particular kind of liberal movie: it suggests that the United States faces dangers that are indeed self-destructive; the question of Iraqis and their well-being is secondary to the story. It is, in effect, a liberal movie without guilt; and, I think, this fact accounts, at least in part, for its widespread acclaim.

Take a Village

2011-01-20T11:48:00.006-06:00

Ray Hartmann demolishes the Ballpark Village, a bad idea that continues to resurface:

The latest incarnation of the project promises “a plaza for concerts,” which St. Louis—overrun with concert venues (even before the old Kiel Opera House is restored)—most certainly does not need.

It also proposes “unique stores and restaurants” for which there is no demand. If there were demand, they would already have existed around the old Busch Stadium, or the new one, since St. Louisans have been going to the same place downtown for the same purpose (to watch baseball) for 45 years.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that the average family spends hundreds of dollars and takes several hours out of the day to attend Cardinal games. Spending still more money and time in “unique” stores seems a uniquely unattractive idea.

So, too, does the notion of constructing a new, 12- or 13-story office building that would use city-government subsidy to compete with a downtown core that it is already plagued with a 25-percent vacancy rate. Adding insult to injury, the new building’s prized tenant—Stifel Nicolaus—would be lured from an existing downtown skyscraper, leaving it with a devastating six-floor hole.

A Riff for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2011-01-17T20:06:00.008-06:00

The Odyssey begins not with Odysseus, its eponymous hero, but instead with his son, Telemachus, whose journey to manhood occupies the first four books of the poem and is brought to fruition in the final books.

After some years of teaching this epic, I was startled to realize something obvious: that most of Telemachus' maturing, especially in the first four books of the Odyssey, is accomplished through public speaking: his address to the assembly of Ithaca, his public accusation of the suitors, his conversations with great kings like Nestor and Menelaus. As he faces these difficult rhetorical situations, the prince gains confidence and experience.

Odysseus also faces challenging rhetorical situations. The most memorable may be when he has to beg for help from the virginal princess Nausicaa on the beaches of Phaeacia. He has to win her sympathy after he's crawled out of some bushes, naked and filthy, with only an olive branch to cover his privates. Yet throughout his rhetorical trials, Odysseus performs brilliantly. In contrast to his fledgling son, he is a full-fledged master.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is another story of a boy becoming a man—and its narrator's trajectory is also mapped out along a series of speeches: the Booker T. Washington-esque one he naively delivers at the end of the bloody battle royal; the one he gives on a Harlem sidewalk as an old couple is getting evicted from their apartment; a speech at a Brotherhood rally in a large auditorium; and another at the funeral of his fellow organizer Tod Clifton.

Except for the first one, each of these speeches—like those of Telemachus and Odysseus—is extemporaneous, jazz-like, born of intense moments when the speaker feels out his audience and adapts his message to fit their needs and the needs of the occasion, discovering his own identity along the way.

Today, on Martin Luther King Day, as we recall, among other highlights in this modern hero's life, his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, it struck me how King's speech at the March on Washington fits into this rhetorical tradition of momentous change brought about by a well-made and at least partly improvised speech.

In Parting the Waters Taylor Branch explains how on August 28, 1963, King recited his formal speech as written until near the end, after he said the line, "We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream":

The crowd responded to the pulsating emotions transmitted from the prophet Amos, and King could not bring himself to deliver the next line of his prepared text, which by contrast opened its lamest and most pretentious section....

There was no alternative but to preach. Knowing that he had wandered completely off his text, some of those behind him on the platform urgd him on, and Mahalia Jackson piped up as though in church, "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin." Whether her words reached him is not known. Later, King said only that he forgot the rest of his speech and took up the first run of oratory that "came to me."

Like the speeches given by Telemachus and Ellison's narrator, this improvised speech—delivered as part of what was essentially another of the mass meetings so common during the Civil Rights Era, but this time on a gigantic scale and broadcast to the nation—catapulted King into a new stage of his life. Like those given by Odysseus, the speech exemplified the work of a master who had been honing his craft for years, sharpening his oratory in preparation for a hugely challenging situation such as this. As Branch notes:

What quickly swept the press of both races was the "Dream" sequence, which stamped King's public identity.... More than his words, the timbre of his voice projected him across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father. It was a fitting joke on the races that he achieved such statesmanship by setting aside his lofty text to let loose and jam, as he did regularly from two hundred podiums a year.

Budding Mammonism

2011-01-15T16:07:00.007-06:00

Eugene Robinson's very interesting new book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America asserts that the African American middle class—which according to him represents a slight majority of all African Americans—is doing pretty well:

Socially, economically, and culturally, the black Mainstream is part of the American mainstream. Middle-class African Americans buy too much on credit and save too little for the future, they burden their children with high and often unrealistic expectations, they drive automobiles that are excessively lare and wasteful, they become emotionally attached to professional sports teams made up of wealthy, spoiled, indifferent athletes—in short, they behave just like other Americans. Even though there is still ground to be made up, it is fair to say that for all intents and purposes, Mainstream African Americans have arrived.

They have arrived, in Robinson's view, because they've become just like other Americans. This account makes me think of something W. E. B. Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in a chapter on the economic rise of Atlanta, in which he worries that African Americans will lose sight of their higher ideals as they buy into the general American worship of riches:

What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions?

It's important to note that Robinson also reports that he's met few Mainstream blacks who don't feel a responsibility to help "the Abandoned," Robinson's term for those blacks who have not seen much benefit from the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and affirmative action.

But it also seems to me that this could be an interesting topic for discussion in my African American Voices class next time around. Have Du Bois's fears been borne out to some degree?

Krugman and Two Sides of American Politics

2011-01-14T16:26:00.003-06:00

Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

New Yorker Fiction 2010

2010-12-27T21:24:00.001-06:00

This year the New Yorker published 54 pieces of fiction. I read 27 of them. Here were my top ten favorites, in chronological order:

Safari, by Jennifer Egan (1/11/10)—a psychologically astute portrait of a group of people on safari in Africa (excerpted from A Visit from the Goon Squad) (post)

Trailhead, by E. O. Wilson (1/25/10)—the Queen of an ant colony dies; the colony reacts (excerpted from Anthill) (see also)

Ask Me If I Care, by Jennifer Egan (3/8/10)—adolescent punk rockers and their passions (also excerpted from A Visit from the Goon Squad)

Ash, by Roddy Doyle (5/24/10)—disorienting eruptions in a marriage

Agreeable, by Jonathan Franzen (5/31/10)—a searing episode in the life of an adolescent girl (excerpted from Freedom) (posts)

The Landlord, by Wells Tower (9/13/10)—a man's investments go sour

Birdsong, by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (9/20/10)—a woman in Lagos has an affair with a married man

Corrie, by Alice Munro (10/11/10)—subtle surprises in a long-standing extramarital affair

Boys Town, by Jim Shepard (11/8/10)—a socially disconnected and increasingly dangerous unemployed veteran

Escape from Spiderhead, by George Saunders (12/20 & 12/27/10)—disturbing experiments and moral choice (post)

Honorable Mentions to Fjord of Killary, by Kevin Barry (2/1/10); Blue Roses, by Frances Hwang (11/1/10); and Costello, by Jim Gavin (12/6/10)

If you're curious, here are links to my top ten lists from 2008 and 2009.

St. Louis Public Schools (2)

2010-12-23T15:27:00.004-06:00

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post in which I tried to take stock of the challenges facing the St. Louis Public School system, as I understood them.

That blog post was influenced by some of my introductory experiences with SLPS as a parent, as well as by Daniel J. Monti’s book A Semblance of Justice, which takes a somewhat cynical view of the school desegregation efforts that have occurred in the St. Louis area.

I had found Monti’s book after reading Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas’s celebrated account of school desegregation in Boston. I was looking for something that would explain and analyze St. Louis’s school desegregation with similar perceptiveness and rigor. But in comparison to Lukas’s gripping and incredibly informative narrative, Monti’s book felt abstruse and opaque—and it took for granted that its readers already understood the basic facts of the situation.

I was born in 1976 and grew up in Lindbergh school district, though I attended Catholic schools. Although the desegregation case was being negotiated and settled in my formative years, I had only a vague notion of its origins and a general understanding of its purpose and meaning.

Through an old article in the Riverfront Times I discovered another book on St. Louis school desegregation, Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools, by Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain. This book, published by Yale University Press in 1997, finally gave me what I was looking for: deep background on the roots of school desegregation in St. Louis; a clear description of the voluntary interdistrict transfer program; an analysis of its execution and consequences; a sense of how St. Louisans, black, white, urban, and suburban, felt about the program; and an understanding of the political realities involved with the program.

After reading this book, I took another look at my previous post about SLPS. I’m surprised and gratified to find that much of it still seems true. But Wells and Crain’s book has given me a much deeper context for understanding the issues I was struggling with.

Most significantly, I have a more nuanced response to Daniel J. Monti’s central thesis, as I understood it: that the desegregation program was mostly a symbolic gesture that purported to address deep-seated issues of inequality while in actuality not doing much to deliver justice.

On the one hand, I can see Monti’s point. I was startled to read, near the end of Stepping Over the Color Line, that in a representative year of the deseg program (1993), it consumed only 3 percent of the state’s total budget, compared to the separate 25 percent of the state budget that went to education. Though politicians may have used the program demagogically as a symbol of government waste and handouts to the undeserving black poor, in the end the amount of the budget devoted to the desgregation program was relatively small. And many black students, victims of Missouri’s long and ongoing pattern of unequal housing, educational, and employment opportunity, did not benefit at all from the program.

On the other hand, many of those who did participate in the program did benefit significantly. I’ve met several of them since I wrote my original post, actually. Wells and Crain, in addition to documenting convincingly that black city students benefit from attending suburban schools, also show the falseness of the alternative that opponents of the program often proposed: to use the deseg money to fix up the city schools instead. Politically, that was never an option. The deseg money was there because the courts forced the state to provide it.

Or, more accurately, the suburban and city school districts that agreed on the out-of-court settlement, in combination with the courts, forced the state of Missouri (which refused to participate in the settlement talks) to provide the money.

These St. Louis-area school districts agreed to the settlement not because they acknowledged that they had helped to create a racially unjust system and wanted to atone for their sins. Instead they agreed to the settlement because (1) they didn’t want to risk losing local control of their district, and (2) they realized that the settlement would mean lots of money for them. (And thus the settlement proved a fact of politics that I’ve come to understand: For the poor to get anything, the middle-class and wealthy have to get something too.)

In my original post, I explored the idea that the St. Louis Public Schools were the biggest losers in the desegregation settlement. My reasoning was that they had lost some of their best students and most committed parents, while also having to open up some of their most coveted spots to white county students. But, having read Wells and Crain, I now see that in fact SLPS saw significant gains from the settlement: for each student who left the district for one in the county, SLPS still received 50 percent of the funds they would normally have spent on that student. In addition, SLPS got additional funding for curriculum development, personnel, and capital improvements; and for the creation and maintenance of the magnet school program.

The biggest losers, I now realize, were the county districts—like Wellston, Jennings, Normandy, and others—that were “on the wrong side” of the lawsuit, according to one of the SLPS lawyers involved in the case. They were on the wrong side because they were already predominantly black and therefore received none of the money that flowed to the city and the rest of the county during the desegregation project. They were basically in the same plight as the all-black schools and neighborhoods in the city, yet they received no help from the state in the desegregation agreement.

SLPS, Wells and Crain helped me see, were both victims and perpetrators of segregation and attempts to remedy it. They created a separate and unequal system before Brown v. Board of Education and were slow and ineffective in dismantling it after that 1954 decision. At the same time, they were also in a bind because of the racial politics of the time, with rapid white flight (often spurred by racial fear) from the city and intense racially motivated demands from the white families who remained. They were stuck with the challenge of educating a largely racially segregated and impoverished population—stuck with this challenge by the suburban districts who thrived on the tax base that St. Louis County sucked out of the city. Yet the city schools often did a mediocre job, at best, of actually using their resources to help that population. This mediocrity is not surprising when one considers not only the daunting nature of the task, but also that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the school board included a powerful contingent of anti-desegregation members with ties to a local white supremacist group.

For that reason, in addition to the suburban districts that were largely African American, the black students left behind in neighborhood schools also got the rawest deal in the desegregation agreement. It’s understandable, from that perspective, that a group of black city dwellers would turn against the program. Their views were shared by Freeman Bosley, Jr., who found an anti-desegregation stance a useful political strategy for capturing both black and white votes and becoming the first African American mayor of the city.

As Wells and Crain acknowledge, there were political casualties of the desegregation agreement, and significant monetary benefits went to the very suburban districts who had helped to create the problem in the first place. (Though many suburbanites were ignorant of this basic fact.) Yet the book convinces me that the St. Louis city-county voluntary transfer program was something extraordinary. It was a real if small step in the direction of justice, one that gave black students a real chance, in fact, to achieve success in the way that conservatives always prescribe—to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

After all, don’t the images of black students standing on deserted corners by despair-filled housing projects waiting at 5:30 a.m. for buses to take them on the long ride to school call to mind other famous bootstrap examples of black Americans who endured discomfort and hardship in order to grasp the rare chance at an education?

Think of Frederick Douglass learning to read with the cast-off books of his master’s son. Or Booker T. Washington sleeping under a sidewalk while on a walking journey to a school that would be open to him. Or Ralph Ellison hopping a freight car in order to make his way to Tuskegee Institute because he couldn’t afford to get there any other way.

For the most part, however, white suburban St. Louisans didn’t see it that way. They just saw those students’ long journeys as a waste of money. Or they focused on the taxi cabs that took home the ones who had to stay late for some athletic contest or disciplinary consequence. Or they felt pity for the transfer student, a pity born of an aesthetic distaste for such a seemingly nonsensical arrangement—without understanding the much more disturbing nonsense of the historical and present color line in St. Louis.

With the desegregation plan set to end in 2014, what is next? Do all of the resources that went to provide at least a semblance of justice to black students simply melt back into the general budget for the state, or get returned to the taxpayers?

It’s clear that ignoring the educational problems caused by segregation does not work. In recent years, a number of the virtually all-black suburban districts passed over by the desegregation settlement have lost their accreditation, and the Supreme Court has ruled that parents in those districts have a right to send their kids to schools elsewhere. It’s the same issue that led to the desegregation settlement that will end in three years. The underlying racial, economic, and political realities have not really changed. It’s just that now the conflict is even more pronounced within St. Louis County.

Looking at a district like Wellston or Riverview Gardens, one realizes that, were it not for all the desegregation money pouring in from the state, SLPS would be in much, much worse shape than it is today. If middle-class whites (like my family) are to some degree moving in to the city, surely it has something to do with the fact that there’s still some hope left for the district. Would that be the case if not for the desegregation arrangement?

Reading Wells and Crain, however, I also come to understand more deeply how even well-meaning whites get caught inexorably in a system that perpetuates racial inequality. As the city scrambles for students, competing with private schools and charter schools and the ever-present alternative of exodus to the suburbs, and the racial balance requirements for the magnet schools fade, the best schools in the city system become whiter. This happens because white parents, who tend to have more connections, more time to make pestering phone calls, and more personal and cultural resources, will naturally do all they can to give their children the best chance at a worthwhile education.

From one perspective, there’s nothing wrong with that—just as there’s nothing wrong with a family moving to a suburban neighborhood that’s safer and has better schools. Yet, from another perspective, it’s exactly what perpetuates racial inequality, and exactly what led to the lawsuit that eventuated in the desegregation agreement.

Apart from straight-up racism, much of St. Louis whites’ distaste for the desegregation plan comes from the loss of local control (which feels to many like a basic American tenet) and a sense that the government is unfairly giving something to someone who hasn’t earned it. What this perspective misses, though, is how long the government unfairly took away something—opportunity in education, housing, and employment—from African Americans, how recently it stopped doing so, how long the legacy of that injustice will take to remedy, and what type of steps will need to be taken in order to do so.

For St. Louisans, these perspectives are a determinative part of “the cultural framework through which they view the world,” to use a phrase from Wells and Crain. In our segregated city, it’s all too easy for whites and blacks to develop quite different frameworks and thus to respond to the world in very different ways. The voluntary transfer program forced white St. Louisans to think about their frameworks. Some, Wells and Crain show, responded by becoming resistors, actively criticizing the program and hoping it would go away. Others became sympathizers, feeling a sense of charity toward the transfer students but no real strong enthusiasm for the notion of desegregation. A smaller group, mostly teachers, became visionaries, embracing the new perspectives offered by desegregation and changing their own behaviors in ways that ended up making life better for everyone involved, not only the transfer students.

As I finish reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I ask myself what my own response has been. On the one hand, I’ve largely been on the sidelines: educated in parochial, Catholic schools, I now teach in a prestigious and very predominantly white private Catholic school. In that school’s library, a reading room is named in honor of Daniel Schlafly, an alumnus who sent his own kids to Catholic schools but spent decades on the St. Louis school board, playing an important but ultimately ambiguous role.

There are many things I love about the school where I teach (of which I am also an alumnus), yet I also recognize how it is implicated in the racial injustice of the St. Louis area. I love the city magnet school my daughters attend, but I understand the privilege my white family has secured by obtaining coveted spots in this school while other city students are mired in failing, segregated schools.

What might “being a visionary” mean for me?

This past semester, for the first time, I taught an African American literature class. I learned a lot, not only from the large amount of reading I did to prepare for the course, but also from talking about race every day with a group of high school seniors that was 25 percent black (much higher than the overall percentage of black students in the school). For me, teaching that course is part of being a visionary, but it can’t be the end. After reading Stepping Over the Color Line, I realize that I need to do more. I need to get involved with the student group at my school that works to promote intercultural understanding. I need to get on the diversity committee at my daughters’ school, to help ensure that this great school doesn’t become a haven only for white students.

And I need to keep reading.

Hope in the Christmas Season

2010-12-22T12:44:00.003-06:00

From a series of reflections (including my own) on hope in the Christmas season, a powerful passage from my colleague Jim Linhares:

The experiences we desire most deeply in life—love, joy, meaning and fulfillment—don’t come automatically for us or those around us. Fundamental things about life get in the way: the experiences of loss, loneliness, violence, vulnerability to forces we can’t control, the inevitability of death. Eventually, as mature adults, we come to see that these things will never go away. Under these very difficult physical, psychological and spiritual circumstances we have to figure out whether or how we can keep pursuing those deep desires. The term “God”—and many other terms in other languages and traditions—has served as a placeholder for the deeply felt experience that we keep going not only by our own efforts or by solving the problem of existence with our own minds, but by somehow being OPEN to a gift that is larger than ourselves. “God” is the name we’ve given to the source for that gift, that hope. I’d say we are in a period of human history in which the term “God” feels small and irrelevant to more and more people who have mistaken it either for something we human beings made up to solve our problems or for something completely beyond us that might as well be appealed to through something like magic.

Plutocracy in America

2010-12-21T19:34:00.003-06:00

This interesting essay by Francis Fukuyama about whether America is a plutocracy, and if so, why, includes this important point:

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.

Watching People

2010-12-21T16:07:00.005-06:00

Catching up on New Yorker fiction this Christmas break, I went back and read two pieces by Jennifer Egan, inspired by a couple of year-end posts at The Millions that praised Egan's new novel as one of the year's best.

It turns out that both pieces, "Ask Me If I Care" and "Safari," are excerpts from that novel. Both are excellent and have left me eager to read the novel in its entirety.

At the end of "Safari," an eleven-year-old boy dances with his sister in an African discotheque full of tourists like themselves. A couple of old women, his sister notices, are watching them dance. These two women have been on safari with the group during the story, mostly peripheral characters who are never without their bird-watching binoculars.

"Maybe when there are no birds they watch people," the boy says.

His sister grabs his hands and they keep dancing, and then he has a further realization:

"I don’t think those ladies were ever watching birds," he says.

Egan herself, one is tempted to imagine, is much like the old women who may have found their companions more interesting to observe than the birds. The great pleasure of these two excerpts is Egan's intense perceptions of her characters, of the interplay between them, both overt and subtle. She's a people watcher reminiscent of Alice Munro, and she shares Munro's intricate sense of the complexity and ambiguity of human emotions and relationships.

Escape from Spiderhead

2010-12-19T15:55:00.007-06:00

**Spoiler Alert**

George Saunders's story "Escape from Spiderhead," in the current New Yorker, has echoes of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers For Algernon," as well as some previous Saunders stories: the clinical horror of "93990" and the clinical entrapment of "Jon"; along with an ending that's quite similar to the ending of "CommComm." At times it veers on the edge of the thought-experiment quality that made "In Persuasion Nation" and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil less successful as fully realized fictional worlds. But, on the whole, it's a gripping story, a "wild ride," to use Saunders's own term from this fascinating and illuminating interview with Deborah Treisman—and it lingers in one's mind.

In the interview, Saunders asserts that "if the writer is doing his job the story will have an understory that steadily becomes more apparent." In Saunders's own best work, the "understories" are multifaceted and echo off each other in interesting ways. Thus "Jon" can be a re-working of Plato's cave allegory, a satire of our modern advertising-soaked brains, an intiation story, as well as a human drama "about having to rise to the occasion of love," as Saunders puts it.

One of the understories in "Escape from Spiderhead," I think, is the suicide of David Foster Wallace, who was not only a friend of George Saunders but also very much akin to him as an artist.

Though another of Wallace's friends, Jonathan Franzen, dismisses the notion that DFW's suicide can be explained as being the result of a chemical imbalance, most accounts of Wallace's final months make it clear that he had gone off his normal meds because he disliked the side effects, but that the change in medication left him adrift, feeling the kind of terrifying depression that a character in Infinite Jest memorably compares to being in a top floor of a burning building, weighing the fear of immolation against the fear of jumping out the window to one's death. It seems to me that, in fact, recognizing the chemical aspect to Wallace's suicide is actually part of a humane and sympathetic response.

"Escape from Spiderhead" forces us to think about chemicals, about how much of what we think of as our identities depends upon the chemicals that our bodies produce. The prisoner test subjects in the story are all equipped with "MobiPaks" by which researchers intravenously pump drugs into them. These drugs can make them obedient, articulate, or sexually erect. Indeed, they can make them fall in love. Or they can make them suicidally depressed.

In the climax of the story, the main character chooses to dose himself with Darkenfloxx, which has already driven one test subject to destroy herself, in order to avoid being a party to the death of yet another. Here's the result:

Then came the horror: worse than I’d ever imagined.... Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here’s how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.

It's a horrifyingly succinct description of suicide—and the first thing I thought of as I read it was David Foster Wallace, and how his death could be summed up just as briefly and horrifyingly: belt, patio rafter. Also, how Wallace's death, judging by his own descriptions of suicidal depression, was probably precipitated by just this type of unbearable psychic pain.

Saunders's story, perhaps at some level inspired by its author's response to his friend's suicide, moves beyond Franzen's snarkily dismissive statement about chemical imbalances and confronts us instead with profound mysteries: What if our personalities, our actions, our happiness or sadness are, in large part, determined by the chemicals in our bodies, our brains? How do we understand ourselves and each other? How does that affect our notion of morality? How should that influence the organization of our societies? What does it mean to be human? To be humane?

A Year in Reading

2010-12-18T11:39:00.012-06:00

I started this year’s reading by alternating between a big Russian novel, The Brothers Karamazov, and a big collection of stories, the Library of America’s edition of Raymond Carver’s stories. The Carver volume I found intensely enjoyable and thought-provoking; Dostoevsky, on the other hand, though intermittently gripping, left me agreeing with Nabokov’s judgment that Tolstoy is a much greater writer. For that reason, I’m planning on reading War and Peace this coming year with a group of my colleagues.

After that, I dedicated most of my reading to preparation for a class on African American literature that I taught this fall. I read Arnold Rampersad’s recent biography of Ralph Ellison, which I found quite enjoyable and informative for teaching Ellison’s novel Invisible Man in the spring in my Alienated Hero class.

I read three coming-of-age memoirs by African American males, Jerald Walker’s Street Shadows, James McBride’s The Color of Water, and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. I taught Obama’s book in my fall class and was astounded again by its intelligence and the complex understanding of the world that it communicates—astounded and grateful once again that Obama is our president. David Remnick’s The Bridge was a compelling and useful companion to Obama’s story.

I did take a couple detours into Faulkner during the year, re-reading As I Lay Dying early in the year and reading The Unvanquished in the summer. As I Lay Dying came alive for me this time in a way that it did not the first time I read it. The Unvanquished was a quick, enjoyable read, though also troubling in what it seemed to reveal of Faulkner’s understanding of the South’s past, especially in comparison with the vision presented by the stories and novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, which I also immersed myself in over the summer.

I re-read a couple African American classics by women, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (which I taught) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; along with a couple more recent mysteries by African American men: Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.

One of the great pleasures of the year for me was my participation in an NEH Summer Institute at Washington University on the New Negro Renaissance in America, 1919-1941. The voluminous reading for those three weeks was great preparation for my class as well.

I read some great books analyzing race in America—Cornel West’s Race Matters, Derrick Bell’s fascinating And We Are Not Saved, and the delightful Best African American Essays collections of 2009 and 2010—along with some works of African American history—David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue (rather tedious), Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters (fantastic) and Pillar of Fire (unexpectedly not fantastic), and Isabel Wilkerson’s highly and justifiably praised The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration.

In addition to works of African American history, I also read some works that one might label primary sources: the anthology Ain’t But a Place, an illuminating compendium of African American writings about St. Louis, from slavery times to the recent past; Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a remarkable first-person plural account of the African American experience; essays by James Baldwin; and the most famous works by two towering African American figures: Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, both of which I’ll probably teach excerpts from in next year’s incarnation of the class.

Today’s the first day of Christmas break, and having finished The Warmth of Other Suns yesterday, I’m looking ahead to my vacation reading. For one, I’m planning on catching up on some New Yorker fiction. In addition, I’m looking forward to reading a book called Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools, which I read about in this article, and which seems like it will provide something I’ve been searching for for some time: a close analysis of school desegregation in St. Louis.

Scoreboard

2010-12-05T23:16:00.003-06:00

In the midst of this post, Andrew Sullivan offers a nice tally of what Barack Obama has accomplished in the first half of his first term:

prevented a second great depression, rescued Detroit, bailed out the banks, pitlessly isolated Tehran's regime, exposed Netanyahu, decimated al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, withdrawn troops fron Iraq on schedule, gotten two Justices on the Supreme Court, cut a point or two off the unemployment rate with the stimulus, seen real wages for those employed grow, presided over a stock market boom and record corporate profits, and maneuvered a GOP still intoxicated with failed ideology to become more and more wedded to white, old evangelicals led by Sarah Palin. And did I mention universal health insurance - the holy grail for Democrats for decades?

Immortality

2010-11-29T19:52:00.003-06:00

My thought on personal immortality is easily explained. I do not know. I do not see how any one could know. Our whole basis of knowledge is so relative and contingent that when we get to argue concerning ultimate reality and the real essence of life and the past and the future, we seem to be talking without real data and getting nowhere. I have every respect for people who believe in the future life, but I cannot accept their belief or their wish as knowledge. Equally, I am not impressed by those who deny the possibility of future life. I have no knowledge of the possibilities of this universe and I know of no one who has.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1929

Foosball as Muse

2010-11-25T21:43:00.004-06:00

We celebrated Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle's house in Holly Hills this afternoon. After the meal, I ended up downstairs engaging in a friendly competition on the foosball table they've had down there as long as I can remember. I've played foosball on that table since I was seven or eight years old, probably. In fact, one year I was even inspired to write a poem about foosball. I thought I'd share it here.

The Foosball Men's Sonnet

Brothers skewered arm to arm,
Our chubby cherub faces’ charm’s
infectious, as we flip and strike,
coordinated, lockstep. Like

Rockettes deprived of their free will,
we kick a solid, plastic ball
toward gaping goal and hear it fall
and roll beneath. We rest until
it pops out through a sideline hole.
We spin for yet another goal—
jerked this way, that—or try to block
a shot. Our game’s not ruled by clock:
we play to ten, or till you tire.
To nothing more do we aspire.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Red Dragon is a Hard Novel

2010-11-23T09:44:00.002-06:00

From an interesting little Newsweek piece about the DFW archive:

His class materials take up a couple of boxes in the Ransom archive, providing readers with the opportunity to see which essays and stories Wallace assigned, and then read the professor’s own marked copies of the works. You can see the lines of Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here” that Wallace thought were either funny or “bad”—as well as how Wallace saw that Stephen King made the potentially stock character of Carrie into a fuller portrait. (When Wallace assigned genre fiction to his students, he warned them against slacking off. “Red Dragon is a hard novel, at least the way we’ll be reading it,” he wrote in one handout.)

Of course, some of us already knew the closeness with which Wallace read (and even, some might say, plagiarized) Thomas Harris's novel.

To Take a Place in the World

2010-11-17T16:37:00.002-06:00

I like this little bit from Richard Brody:

The first challenge that young people must face—whether they state it this way or not—is to exist, to take a place in the world: to do fulfilling things, to make a living, to look for love, to go beyond the assumptions of home and family and discover their own identities and abilities.

The Plaza After Rain

2010-11-13T12:42:00.010-06:00

Washing our cars outside on this gray day, I thought of this painting, Paul Cornoyer's The Plaza After Rain, and this piece I wrote about it eleven years ago, when I was in graduate school:

It feels like a day in late November, or early December, Christmas in the back of the mind but nowhere to be seen in this wetness, this cold. The patina of water on the dull street mirrors back at the mother and two children the black trees and gray buildings and gray, unassuming sky. Water tiptoes into the grated drain in the crotch of the curb. Water sprawls out, exhausted, on the beaten muddy strip that divides the street in two. The children step behind their mother, warm in coats that extend to mid-thigh, hats that casually cover their ears. Their mother carries umbrellas for each of them. They may remember this day fifteen years from now but forget the errand that brought them outside into the mostly empty streets. They may remember a feeling of emptiness—the sunless sky, the street made more lonesome by the one mail carrier trudging behind them, the double-decked bus and the horse and carriage waiting at the curbs down the block, waiting and empty, waiting. They may remember the emptiness, the cold and wet, and yet they may also remember a feeling of shelter, not just in their generous coats and hats but in the embrace of the buildings that line the avenue that leads them away from the plaza. They may remember looking back to the plaza and seeing the faint pink light that only one building seems to have grasped, and grasped only fleetingly. They may remember seeing, out of their darkening avenue, the equestrian statue, no doubt brilliant and gleaming in the sun but muted now except for a golden flourish on the horse’s rump. The day holds no promise of spring, only of a few more weeks of falling away, a few more weeks till the few yellow leaves—fluttering now on the uppermost branches that finger up into the sky like reverse roots—fall and join the general dormant brown.

So much depends upon the date of this day, for if it’s January and not December or November then the small signposts of color in this drab scene—the mother’s blue scarf in her brown collar, the mailman’s red shirt under his dull green coat, the wan pink lingering on the building that borders the plaza, the doomed yellow of the leaves, the stalwart evergreen bushes—point nowhere. Spring is unimaginable. But with the memory of Thanksgiving and the anticipation of Christmas (anticipation that is really just the memory of all the Christmases that came before) sheltering the pedestrians like the honeycombed, cubbyholed buildings on either side of the street—only with these internal and external monuments is this day bearable.

***

I’m looking at this painting on October 28. This painting is the future, as fall falls further and winter, the bland giant, lumbers impassively in the distance. But the painting is also the past. Indeed, the painting enacts the creation of the past, of memory. The children, the mother, the mail carrier, the bus, all the busy humans and vehicles in the painting are moving ever forward, down dark avenues that lead away from the softly glowing, indistinct plaza. The feeling of the day is palpable, as thick as the wet air, but no one in the painting can hold it now, for it slips away into the past and they must keep walking and driving, eyes on the concrete and the mud and the black trees ahead. The loveliness of the plaza, the subtle blues of the sky, perhaps not so featureless after all, the airiness of the buildings beyond the plaza—these can be seen, by the children, the mother, the mailman, only in the warped mirror of the glazed street. The present cannot be savored like a painting. Only the past can. Only in memory will the children be able to love the plaza after rain, to look back behind them as I look back behind them at the elusive beauty of an ugly day. And their memory, like the painting itself, will be impressionistic, indistinct, blurred by rain or nostalgic tears.

Authentic Frontier Gibberish

2010-11-11T07:42:00.000-06:00

I disagree with most of what this essay says about Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but I found this passage pretty funny nonetheless:

It’s not difficult to see why Blood Meridian is such a hit with high falutin’ critics like Bloom. Consider enigmatic passages like this: “For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by slight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”

Looks as if somebody’s been readin’ The Portable Nietzsche by the camp fire. As the character says in Blazing Saddles, “This is authentic frontier gibberish.”

Cognitive Dissonance

2010-11-10T21:35:00.002-06:00

Hendrik Hertzberg on the cognitive dissonance of the midterm elections:

Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.

Adventures at QT (6)

2010-11-01T09:45:00.003-05:00

In case you hadn't heard, I'm off the sauce: no more 32-oz. fountain Dr Peppers from QT. I went cold turkey over the summer when I started getting stomach aches and finally traced them to the large quantities of carbonated syrup I was imbibing daily.

Nevertheless, I sometimes still need the psychological treat of stopping at the QT fountain. The other day I went in and Tiffany, one of our buddies who works there, said, "What, are you coming to get a cup of water?" (My wife had told her I'd given up soda.)

No, I said. A lemonade. She made a face as if to say, "Oh, come on, now, you're better than that."

"It's kind of like my Nicorette patch," I said on my way back to the counter.

She looked at me sadly. "No, I don't think it's even remotely like that."

Anyway, yesterday we were coming back from Mira's soccer game down at St. Mary Magdalen's fields off S. Kingshighway, and I decided to stop in for a post-game lemonade. As we pulled in, my wife and I had a little negotiation with the girls about whether they would get their traditional piece of ten-cent candy, given that Halloween was that night.

Eventually we gave in and said they could each have a Laffy Taffy. Lisa went in to get the drinks and candy, and I sat in the van with the girls.

On the sidewalk in front of us, a grizzled man wearing a ragged camouflage jacket, sweatpants, and battered tennis shoes staggered by holding a cup of coffee and a long john. Judging by his unkempt beard and weather-darkened skin, he appeared to be homeless. He walked slowly, taking irregular shuffling steps, and as he passed directly in front of us he awkwardly lifted his hand to take a bite of the long john.

From the back of the van, Mira called out, "No fair—that guy gets a donut!"

Say Something in Communist

2010-10-27T15:46:00.003-05:00

In his fascinating analysis of the ideological roots of the Tea Party, Sean Wilentz downplays the racial aspect of the Party's attacks on President Obama, arguing that "'socialist' is not a racial slur." As Taylor Branch demonstrates in Parting the Waters, however, white segregationists often labelled civil rights protesters communists. (Branch relates an amusing anecdote of a young white girl in Pike County, Miss., who asked the jailed SNCC activist Charles McDew to "say something in Communist" and thrilled to hear him speak to her in Yiddish.) Perhaps the Tea Party's penchant for calling Obama a socialist is the contemporary form of this crude attempt to describe African Americans who challenge the status quo.

Assumptions for Organizers

2010-10-26T19:01:00.003-05:00

According to Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, during Bayard Rustin's orchestration of the 1963 March on Washington he kept saying, "If you want to organize anything, assume that everybody is absolutely stupid."

Pretty good advice for teaching, too.

As is Rustin's follow-up: "And assume yourself that you're stupid."

Used Books

2010-10-18T08:13:00.002-05:00

I found this piece at Slate unexpectedly fascinating. It's written by a guy who makes a living selling used books online. He spends 80 hours a week scavenging books, using a PDA scanner that alerts him to the value of the books he's looking at. Perhaps I found it particularly interesting because I realized that I'm the flip side of this guy: I buy most of my books used online now, helping to create a market for people like this man, whom many in society judge as abhorrent, as depicted in this passage from his essay:

If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work? I'm not the only one who feels this way; I see it in the mien of my fellow scanners as they whip out their PDAs next to the politely browsing normal customers. The sense that this is a dishonorable profession is confirmed by library book sales that tag their advertisements with "No electronic devices allowed," though making this rule probably isn't in the libraries' financial interest. People scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops as well, though this hasn't happened to me yet.

I've had just one confrontation while doing my job, with an elderly man in a suburb. We were in the library's book-sale room when I overheard him telling his friend that the two of them were surrounded by a-------—that is, the people scanning. "It's a business," I said, but I felt all locked up and couldn't bear to turn and say it to his face. "This is a library!" he spat. "You don't work here—you don't work at the library!" He told me that he had 10,000 books in his house, and that he'd read them all. A dozen other people kept scanning silently. Later on, in the parking lot, I got some empathy from my comrades, but they quickly started to speak about their work with the same hunching defensiveness I had put on with my challenger.

Gopnik on the Nobel

2010-10-15T07:19:00.003-05:00

From the great Adam Gopnik's recent piece on the Nobel Prize in Literature, in which he explains his theory that the prize (and the list of those who've won it) would make more sense if it were named after Victor Hugo:

When this year’s prize was announced, last Thursday, it went to a writer who, if not a North American (again), is at least familiar to North Americans: the Peruvian novelist and man of letters Mario Vargas Llosa. So all hail Vargas Llosa, whom even his noisier left-wing critics have to regard as exactly the kind of writer the prize ought to go to: one with a host of well-regarded novels (“The Time of the Hero,” “Conversation in the Cathedral,” the screen-adapted “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The Feast of the Goat”) and a sense of social responsibility (he ran seriously for, and lost badly, the Presidency of Peru), not to mention a lively personal life that includes once punching out another future laureate with an equally impressive triple-barrelled moniker, Gabriel García Márquez, reportedly over something to do with Mrs. Vargas Llosa. The Nobel thus not only crowns a career but provides the basis for a fine future Javier Bardem/Antonio Banderas movie. (“The only thing they cared for more than Latin American epic fiction was . . . the honor of a woman.”)

Faulkner's Appendix

2010-10-11T19:15:00.008-05:00

Twice in her new collection of nonfiction In Rough Country, Joyce Carol Oates makes passing references to what she says is Faulkner's description, in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, of the black housekeeper Dilsey: "They endured."

In an essay on her writerly influences, Oates characterizes this description as a "terse encomium." In her essay on Cormac McCarthy, Oates mentions the reference again, this time addressing the apparent contradiction of the encomium's plural subject by suggesting that it is "as if the singular Dilsey were in fact multiple, emblematic."

Oates is trying too hard here, and not making much sense.

In fact, the final line of the Appendix, "They endured," applies to all four of the black people listed—TP, Frony, Luster, and Dilsey. Dilsey alone among the characters discussed in the Appendix (some quite brutally) is granted the dignity of not being summed up at all—as if this solid, powerful woman cannot be captured in words.

Oates' confusion arises from the formatting of the Appendix. The line "They endured" comes directly below Dilsey's name, and she is the last black character listed. But every other character's description begins directly after their name, on the same line. So it may appear that "They endured" is a description of Dilsey, but upon comparison with the other characters it is clear that Dilsey's name is simply left to stand for itself, and that "They endured" is a description of all of the black characters who survive alongside the self-destructing Compsons.

MLK's Pick-Up Lines

2010-10-09T15:16:00.005-05:00

A funny moment from the first conversation between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott, narrated in Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963:

Early in 1952, he called a woman blindly on the recommendation of a friend. After passing along a few of the friend's compliments as reasons why he had obtained the phone number, King threw out his opening line. "You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo," he said. "I'm like Napoleon. I'm at my Waterloo, and I'm on my knees."

"That's absurd," Coretta Scott replied. "You don't even know me."

Blood Meridian & The Border Trilogy

2010-10-07T16:39:00.003-05:00

From Joyce Carol Oates's essay on the work of Cormac McCarthy, in her collection In Rough Country:

Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Where Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—"War is god"—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment: "I love this life," says Billy Parham of Cities of the Plain. After the phantasmagoria of Blood Meridian, the domestic realism of much of the Border Trilogy comes as a natural corrective.

Down on The Wire

2010-10-05T19:56:00.004-05:00

At the Boston Globe, Ishmael Reed raises some objections about The Wire that are similar to those I explored here. The biggest difference: I love The Wire; Reed doesn't.

Mapping St. Louis

2010-10-04T15:35:00.003-05:00

In 2008 I published an essay about racial segregation in St. Louis. The piece was partly a review of Colin Gordon's book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City.

Gordon has now put together an interactive series of maps that show the progression of white flight, redlining, and more in twentieth-century St. Louis. They're pretty fascinating.

Mastering One's Work

2010-09-26T21:36:00.005-05:00

I've been reading parts of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery this weekend and enjoying the experience quite a bit. I liked this passage, in which Washington talks about how he manages his Herculean workload. It reminds me of a colleague of mine (those who know her will know whom I mean immediately):

I make it a rule to clear my desk every day, before leaving my office, of all correspondence and memoranda, so that on the morrow I can begin a new day of work. I make it a rule never to let my work drive me, but to so master it, and keep it in such complete control, and to keep so far ahead of it, that I will be the master instead of the servant. There is a physical and mental and spiritual enjoyment that comes from a consciousness of being the absolute master of one's work, in all its details, that is very satisfactory and inspiring. My experience teaches me that, if one learns to follow this pln, he gets a freshness of body and vigour of mind out of work that goes a long way toward keeping him strong and healthy. I believe that when one can grow to the point where he loves his work, this gives him a kind of strength that is most valuable.

Dionysian Energy and Moral Engagement

2010-09-25T14:54:00.004-05:00

Last night I saw the Avett Brothers play at the Pageant. It was an incredible show, full of humor, energy, and heart. As my friend Rich put it in an e-mail written after the show, "You get a strong impression of unusual rectitude in these strenuously upright human beings. Their combination of Dionysian energy with moral engagement is certainly an unusual and, for me, a wonderful conjunction."

Here's a fun clip of the band in a Jackson Hole gondola doing "St. Joseph's," a great song that they didn't get to last night.

Jumping to Conclusions

2010-09-21T21:09:00.005-05:00

I just read a couple great Comments from recent New Yorkers, both of which reminded me why I love this magazine so much.

This is the conclusion to Lawrence Wright's piece on Islam in America:

The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations. Until recently, America had been largely immune to the extremism that has placed some European nations in peril. America’s Muslim community is more ethnically diverse than that of any other major religion in the country. Its members hold more college and graduate degrees than the national average. They also have a higher employment rate and more jobs in the professional sector. (Compare that with England and France, where education and employment rates among Muslims fall below the national averages.) These factors have allowed American Muslims and non-Muslims to live together with a degree of harmony that any other Western nation would envy.

The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam. The unfounded attacks on the backers of Park51 and others, along with such sideshows as a pastor calling for the burning of Korans, give substance to the Al Qaeda argument that the U.S. is waging a war against Islam, rather than against the terrorists’ misshapen effigy of that religion. Those stirring the pot in this debate are casting a spell that is far more dangerous than they may imagine.

And here's the conclusion of Nicholas Lemann's piece on the so-called crisis in American education:

The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.

We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken. We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are—like subpar schools for poor and minority children—and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that.

Zora Neale Hurston's Facebook

2010-09-18T12:04:00.002-05:00

In the introduction to his essay collection Tuxedo Junction, Gerald Early quotes from Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. This passage, about Hurston's experiences working as a teenager in a white theater company, seems to be about a kind of proto-Facebook:

I got a scrapbook, and everybody gave me a picture to put in it. I pasted each one on a separate page and wrote comments under each picture. This created a great deal of interest, because some of the comments were quite pert. They egged me on to elaborate.

It soon becomes a kind of blog:

Then I got another idea. I would comment on daily doings and post the sheets on the call-board. This took on right away. The results stayed strictly mine less than a week because members of the cast began to call aside and tell me things to put in about others. It got to be so general that everybody was writing it. It was just my handwriting, mostly.

Naturally, her account ends up getting hacked:

Then it got beyond that. Most of the cast ceased to wait for me. They would take a pencil to the board and set down their own item. Answers to the wisecracks would appear promptly and often cause uproarious laughter. They always started off with either "Zora says" or "The observant reporter of the Call-board asserts"—Lord, Zora said more things! I was continually astonished, but always amused.

Young Boy Tryin' to Know Something

2010-09-11T15:38:00.003-05:00

I love this moment in Gerald Early's essay about Count Basie's autobiography, included in Early's 1989 collection Tuxedo Junction. I like to imagine it as a formative moment for him in his career as cultural critic:

There was a d.j. in Philadelphia back in the 1960s named Sonny Hopson who called himself the Mighty Burner. After having heard the original version of "One O'Clock Jump" when I was a boy, when I went through my period of fascination with the Basie band when I was thirteen, I concluded there was really only one mighty burner and it was not that d.j. In fact, it was not even the Basie band but little old Bill Basie himself. I remember standing around in the barbershop one afternoon listening to the old heads talking about jazz while some others were getting their heads cut. (One never gets a haircut in a black barbershop. One is always getting one's head cut. In the black beauty parlor the womn are getting their heads done, not their hair.) And I, quite timidly, interjected a little note about Basie:

"He's a mighty burner," I said.

And one of the older men laughed loud and raucous, saying:

"Why, lookahere, the young boy tryin' to snap out. The young boy tryin' to know something. Why, one day, he might even know who Bill Basie is. But he learning."

The Love Song's Embrace

2010-09-03T22:07:00.004-05:00

My friend and colleague Chuck put on my desk a copy of this lecture about love songs that Nick Cave gave in Vienna. I particularly liked this passage:

In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende," he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have in its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely. Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to, he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it.... but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.

All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.

Back to School

2010-09-01T18:12:00.002-05:00

by Robert Mankoff

Packer on Iraq Speech

2010-09-01T07:21:00.004-05:00

George Packer's response to the President's speech last night offers a nuanced check-in for those of us who, like most Americans, have lost track of what's going on in Iraq. Early in the piece, Packer wryly notes that "August 31, 2010, will go down in history as the day Americans could start not thinking about the war without feeling guilty."

Among Packer's numerous insights, I found this one particularly noteworthy:

Vietnam and Korea were far more changed by American wars than Iraq. Only a small number of Iraqis had any encounters with Americans lasting more than a few minutes (the ruthlessness of the insurgency, as well as the heavy-handedness of American soldiers trying to act like policemen, made sure of it). American English didn’t become a vital part of street talk. Few Americans learned Arabic, and you rarely heard soldiers say they wanted to come back as civilians and bring their children ten or twenty years from now. Americans, with a few exceptions, didn’t fall in love with Iraq. On the other hand, many Iraqis were half in love with America by the time the first troops arrived in Baghdad; over the following months and years, they lost their illusions.

Albert Murray's Blues

2010-08-29T15:12:00.002-05:00

Earlier today I read an old New Yorker profile of Albert Murray by Henry Louis Gates. In it, Gates talks about Murray's ideas about the blues. Murray and Ralph Ellison, college friends who later reunited in New York City, developed their very similar understandings of the blues' significance over many letters and conversations with each other. Both men wrote about the endurance at the heart of the blues, its power to help its performers and listeners overcome life's brutality with an awareness both tragic and comic.

Ellison and Murray also shared an impatience with black nationalists. And though the separatists accused Ellison and Murray of not being strident enough, Gates makes a compelling case that Ellison and Murray, who argued that blackness is essential to what it means to be American, had an agenda that was even more ambitious.

... as the clenched-fist crowd was scrambling for cultural crumbs, Murray was declaring the entire harvest board of American civilization to be his birthright. In a sense, Murray was the ultimate black nationalist. And the fact that people so easily mistook his vision for its opposite proved how radical it was.

I especially like Murray's comment to Gates about James Baldwin's celebrated essay "The Fire Next Time," the 1962 jeremiad in which Baldwin suggests a coming racial apocalypse if America does not quickly extend justice to Negroes. Murray's remark—in both its humor and tragic awareness of the realities of power in America—seems to come right out of the blues tradition that he celebrated:

He says, in that distinctively Murrayesque tone of zestful exasperation, "Let's talk about 'the fire next time.' You know damn well they can put out the fire by Wednesday."