A Year in Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Robert Mankoff

Packer on Iraq Speech

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

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."

Beck, Obama, and Innocence

In his now-classic essay "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" Shelby Steele argues that "the racial struggle in America has always been primarily a struggle for innocence."

White racism from the beginning has been a claim of white innocence and, therefore, of white entitlement to subjugate blacks. And in the ’60s, as went innocence so went power. Blacks used the innocence that grew out of their long subjugation to seize more power, while whites lost some of their innocence and so lost a degree of power over blacks. Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power (in relation to each other). Now to be innocent someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other’s backs.

Steele uses this concept of innocence to frame his narrative about the Civil Rights Movement, which I think in many ways has become the dominant narrative, especially among white people in America:

Non-violent passive resistance is a bargainer’s strategy. It assumes the power that is the object of the protest has the genuine innocence to morally respond, and puts the protesters at the mercy of that innocence. I think this movement won so many concessions precisely because of its belief in the capacity of whites to be moral. It did not so much demand that whites change as offer them relentlessly the opportunity to live by their own morality—to attain a true innocence based on the sacrifice of their racial privilege, rather than a false innocence based on presumed racial superiority. Blacks always bargain with or challenge the larger society; but I believe that in the early civil rights years, these forms of negotiation achieved a degree of integrity and genuineness never seen before or since.

In the mid-’60s all this changed. Suddenly a sharp racial consciousness emerged to compete with the moral consciousness that had defined the movement to that point. Whites were no longer welcome in the movement, and a vocal “black power” minority gained dramatic visibility. Increasingly, the movement began to seek racial as well as moral power, and thus it fell into a fundamental contradiction that plagues it to this day. Moral power precludes racial power by denouncing race as a means to power. Now suddenly the movement itself was using race as a means to power, and thereby affirming the very union of race and power it was born to redress. In the end, black power can claim no higher moral standing than white power.

This narrative appears to omit a couple important points: 1) The "sharp racial consciousness" that Steele says emerged in the mid-'60s has always been a part of the movement, in which Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are clear antecedents of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panthers. 2) Martin Luther King's saintly, Gandhian bargaining ended when he was murdered by a white racist. (As were white civil rights workers like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.) The path of strategically using innocence has problems too. Bargaining and challenging are probably both necessary strategies for blacks in America.

Nevertheless, Steele's formulation tells us much about the current Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck's rally today—the anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington—on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The Tea Partiers see themselves as oppressed innocents, inheritors of the moral righteousness of Martin Luther King. From the NY Times:

Tea Party Patriots, the largest umbrella organization for thousands of local groups across the country, posted a petition on its Web site calling for the N.A.A.C.P. to revoke its resolution “condemning the Tea Party movement as ‘racist.’ ”

“It is nothing less than ‘hate speech’ for the N.A.A.C.P. to be smearing us as ‘racists’ and ‘bigots,’ ” the petition declared. “We believe, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a colorblind, postracial society. And we believe that when an organization lies and resorts to desperate tactics of racial division and hatred, they should be publicly called on it.”

Entrepreneurial demagogue Glenn Beck is cashing in on this sentiment:

“We are the people of the civil rights movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.”

One problem with this formulation is evident in Beck's "us/them" formulation. As Steele asserts, "Innocence imposes, demands, division and conflict." Barack Obama, in Beck's view and that of the Tea Partiers, can't be a democratically elected American president who is interested in a substantive debate about how to make our country work better. Instead, he must be a foreign Manchurian candidate secret Muslim bent on a Marxist subversion of all that is good and true and American.

In Steele's formulation, Obama is a highly successful bargainer—a black man who assures white Americans of their innocence in order to gain entry into the mainstream. Stanley Crouch puts it somewhat differently, asserting that Obama's appeal stems from his ability to present "an American history that is common to us all:

Obama does that by building a blues- and glory-bound train. He has shown himself to be a master of making couplers that should have functioned before.... He takes his listeners to the station and shows them how well the train is built and how all of the cars are linked to each other by importance. The couplers of perception that Obama has designed link the Revolutionary War to the abolition movement against slavery. Those two are coupled to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. He then couples those four to women getting the vote and the emergence of organized labor. The train has become more impressive as those six are linked to defeating European fascism during World War II, saving the world from people driven mad by the superstitions of bigotry. That's seven cars held together by strong couplers made from facts, not dreams; timeless actualities, not nostalgia. The last car so far is the Civil Rights struggle in which white and black people, some young, some not, brought this country much closer to its democratic destiny. (from "The High Ground," published in Best African American Essays 2009)

Contrast that with the warped versions of history that Beck presents on his programs, and that permeate Tea Party rhetoric.

Crouch makes a strong case that Obama has reclaimed the high ground that Martin Luther King occupied—that he bargains (to use Steele's term) with white America by granting us our innocence and asking us to live up to it, to live up to the best of the American tradition.

Beck and the Tea Partiers reject the bargain, as many white Americans (including the federal government, as represented by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who considered King a Marxist threat and spied on him as if he were a terrorist) rejected Martin Luther King's bargain and helped add fire to the climate in which King was assassinated.

What scares me most is that Beck, the Tea Partiers, and their ilk are stoking a climate that may eventuate in some nutjob's attempting to assassinate the President. And the Secret Service's failure to keep the White House party crashers from gaining access to the President does not encourage me about his safety. And that's why, after I read to my daughters before their bedtime, I pray for Barack Obama.

Beck to Where You Once Belonged

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Glenn Beck's upcoming rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, expertly eviscerated by Jon Stewart above, is a scary illustration of something that Hua Hsu talks about in his fine essay "The End of White America?"

Namely:

... a racial pride that dares not speak its name and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with "the real America" .... Arguably, this white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elecitons, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of "the real Virginia") as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it's possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as "the real America" becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority's sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

An Innocent Man

This passage, from Shelby Steele's 1988 essay "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" struck me as particularly perceptive:

I’m convinced that the secret of Reagan’s “teflon” coating, his personal popularity apart from his policies and actions, has been his ability to offer mainstream America a vision of itself as innocent and entitled (unlike Jimmy Carter, who seemed to offer only guilt and obligation). Probably his most far-reaching accomplishment has been to reverse somewhat the pattern by which innocence came to be distributed in the ’60s, when outsiders were innocent and insiders were guilty. Corporations, the middle class, entrepreneurs, the military—all villains in the ’60s—either took on a new innocence in Reagan’s vision or were designated as protectors of innocence. But again, for one man to be innocent another man must be bad or guilty. Innocence imposes, demands, division and conflict, a right/wrong view of the world. And this, I feel, has led to the underside of Reagan’s achievement. His posture of innocence draws him into a partisanship that undermines the universality of his values. He can’t sell these values to blacks and others because he has made blacks into the bad guys and outsiders who justify his power. It is humiliating for a black person to like Reagan because Reagan’s power is so clearly derived from a distribution of innocence that leaves a black with less of it, and the white man with more.

Abolition and Integration

A very interesting passage from Derrick Bell's gripping book And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice:

... racial integration is this era's idealistic equivalent of abolition in the pre–Civil War years. Each represented in its time a polestar by which those seeking reform could guide their course during a desperately hard journey—away from slavery in the last century and away from segregation in ours. While pointing the way, these beacons fail to provide us with a detailed blueprint of what to do upon arrival. They do not tell us how to ensure that those who have been long exploited by the evil now removed shall be recompensed for their losses in pocket, psyche, and public regard. Confusion arises from the failure to recognize the difference between the beacon we have and the blueprint we need. We inevitably lose our way and wander back to the situations of subordination from which we worked so hard to escape.

Ole Miss

Over at the New Yorker blog, Hendrik Hertzberg opens up the mail bag and finds a couple complaints, including this one, about a recent column of his:

I wish that Hendrik Hertzberg (“Comment,” June 28th), had not been so juvenile as to slander an entire diverse and long-suffering state by inserting the word “although” into his otherwise accurate reference to “Ray Mabus, the Secretary of the Navy, who, although a former governor of Mississippi, is an enlightened and competent public servant.”

His graceful apology takes note of Mississippi's troubled, complicated, rich history (it's not part of the heartland but part of the "bluesland," Hertzberg notes) and is a pleasure to read.

It reminded me of a less nuanced but still powerful take on the state, Phil Ochs' Civil Rights-era jeremiad "Here's to the State of Mississippi":

Advance Thoughts on Freedom

I'm still looking forward to reading Jonathan Franzen's upcoming novel Freedom, although this critique from NPR sounds all too familiar:

... despite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didn't want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color.

Thinking back on the two excerpts from this novel that have been published in the New Yorker, I can definitely see what the reviewer means. Franzen satirizes his protagonist, Patty Berglund, pretty sharply in "Bad Neighbors," along with every other character in the piece. Yet even though "Agreeable" certainly stands aloof from its events and showers its characters with the film of disdain mentioned in the review, I thought I detected in that snippet the possibility of some real empathy for Patty, a desire to understand her as a human being—which I hope comes to greater fruition in the novel as a whole.

I guess I'll have to wait and see for myself.

Country Time

Although I've never really listened to any of Brad Paisley's music, I enjoyed Kelefa Sanneh's New Yorker profile of him. The piece has some great insights about country music, race, and Paisley himself, who comes across as a funny, down-to-earth, and likable guy.

Sanneh pulls no punches, however. I loved this passage, about Paisley's second single, "in which a boy pays tribute to his mother's new husband":

It built to a chorus—"I hope I'm at least half the dad that he didn't have to be"—that was designed to make remarried mothers cry.... The song was a deft and novel articulation of family values, and it was Paisley's first No. 1 hit. It was also profoundly square, with plaintive piano chords and cozy lyrics about a happy family "crowded 'round the nursery window," and the literal-minded music video looked a lot like a commercial for something (maybe a mortgage company, or powdered lemonade).

It may have struck me as especially funny since I've been drinking a lot of powdered lemonade lately. It's my replacement for fountain soda, which was starting to give me stomachaches.

Paisley may also be a New Yorker reader. He's entered the Cartoon Caption Contest at least twice, and his captions are actually pretty good.

Two Guys, Opposite Directions

This anecdote, from David Mendell's excellent article about the former governor of Illinois, in whose trial the jury is still deliberating, actually makes me like the guy:

Leaving his radio show the next weekend, Blagojevich was greeted in the lobby by an autograph-seeker, a deeply tanned man wearing lipstick, a strawberry-blond wig, and a dress. The cross-dresser handed Blagojevich a photograph to sign: a picture of Blagojevich and Obama sitting together at a Democratic Party event several years earlier. He scrawled in black cursive, "Here are two guys whose careers have gone in opposite directions. Best, Rod Blagojevich."