Marx, Brother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.