Raymond Carver Revisited

I: A Different Kind of Story

In this wonderful season of holiday breaks and seniors away on projects, I've been reading like crazy, working my way through some Christmas presents: The Brothers Karamazov and the Library of America edition of Raymond Carver's collected stories.

I first encountered Carver's fiction in an English class I took during the first semester of my senior year of high school. We read a bunch of stories from Where I'm Calling From, a new and selected collection published shortly before Carver's death in 1988. On the Christmas break after that semester, I read most of the other stories in that collection. Then in my sophomore year of college, I took a contemporary American fiction class in which we studied Cathedral, Carver's 1983 collection.

This time around, I started by reading stories from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Carver's first collection—the stories, that is, that I hadn't already read in Where I'm Calling From. Then I went ahead and re-read those, too.

In the back matter of the book, the editors include a little note that Carver wrote for a 1973 anthology in which his story "Neighbors" (from WYPBQP) was included. In that note, Carver expresses some equivocal feelings about the story:

I think the story is, more or less, an artistic success. My only fear is that it is too thin, too elliptical and subtle, too inhuman. I hope this is not so, but in truth I do not see it as the kind of story that one loves unreservedly and gives up everything to; a story that is ultimately remembered for its sweep, for the breadth and depth and lifelike sentiment of its characters. No, this is a different kind of story—not better, maybe, and I surely hope no worse, different in any case—and the internal and external values in the story do not have much to do, I'm afraid, with character, or some of the other virtues held dear in short fiction.

A number of the stories in WYPBQP have this elliptical, even inhuman quality. Few of them are told in the first person; we tend to stand outside the characters, coldly watching them in their pathetic and venal moments.

Not all of the stories are this way—especially not "Nobody Said Anything," one of Carver's greatest stories, about a kid who cuts school one day and goes fishing. But besides that one, I don't know that any of these early stories are remarkable for their sweep, breadth, or depth.

II: Carver vs. Lish

This Library of America collection has drawn a lot of attention (for example) because it includes Beginners, the manuscript that Carver's editor Gordon Lish drastically cut, basically against Carver's wishes, and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's second trade-press collection of stories.

During his lifetime, Carver eventually made clear the differences between his and Lish's visions by re-publishing a story called "A Small, Good Thing" in his third major collection, Cathedral; the story had been published in a truncated and much bleaker form in WWTA as "The Bath."

I had already been familiar with these two versions of the same story, along with the differing versions of the title story, published in the New Yorker a while back. Now, though, having read the first three stories as Carver submitted them, alongside the first three stories as published in WWTA, I find that I much prefer Carver's versions in these cases as well.

- - -

Lish does streamline the first story "Why Don't You Dance?" effectively, but he tampers with the overall mood of the story, which I would describe as a tempered sweetness. In this story, a young couple buys some household furnishings from an alcoholic man who has set them up on his lawn. Lish makes the man nameless, a good editorial choice for this story about a random moment of connection between strangers. But he adds a darkness to the story that is at odds with what Carver's up to.

In the original version the alcoholic man is charmed by the couple's negotiation over the price of the items:

In the lamplight, there was something about the expression on their faces. For a minute this expression seemed conspiratorial, and then it became tender—there was no other word for it.

But Lish makes the moment much more ominous:

He looked at them as they sat at the table. In the lamplight, there was something about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling.

In Carver's original it was never nasty.

Lish adds a nasty element to the conclusion of the story as well, as the girl re-tells the story of what happened that day:

We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?

Her crudeness and mockery sharply contrast with the tenderness in the original version:

We got drunk and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played records. Look at this phonograph. He gave it to us. These old records, too. Jack and I went to sleep in his bed. Jack was hungover and had to rent a trailer in the morning. To move all the guy's stuff. Once I woke up. He was covering us with a blanket, the guy was. This blanket. Feel it.

- - -

The next story, "Viewfinder," is a very short one in both versions. In it, a man with hooks for hands offers to take pictures of another man's house for a small amount of money. But again Lish darkens the ending, severely warping its implications.

In the original, the man, whose wife and children have recently left him, seems to gain a new perspective on his situation when he climbs up to have his picture taken on the roof. He finds a pile of rocks that kids have thrown up there, and in the process of chucking them off his roof he seems to feel that he is cleaning house metaphorically as well as literally.

The photographer snaps a shot and looks at how it's turned out, injecting a positive feeling into the final moments of the story:

"By God, it's okay." He looked at it. He held it up. "You know," he said, "it's good."

"Once more," I called. I picked up another rock. I grinned. I felt I could lift off. Fly.

"Now!" I called.

The photographer has offered the man some empathy (his wife and kids left him too), and helped him by his own example. This story seems like a precursor to Carver's famous story "Cathedral," in which a blind man leads another man to a similar epiphany.

But Lish would have none of it. In the Lish version, the photographer never says the photo turns out okay, and the man on the roof seems to throw the rocks only out of increasingly hysterical anger. The story ends this way:

I laid back on my arm and I hollered, "Now!" I threw that son of a bitch as far as I could throw it.

"I don't know," I heard him shout. "I don't do motion shots."

"Again!" I screamed, and took up another rock.

- - -

Most startling, though, are the changes Lish made to the third story in Carver's manuscript, which Carver titled "Where is Everyone?" This story of addiction and recovery seems a clear precursor to "Where I'm Calling From," from Carver's next collection, a story that John Updike chose as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Indeed, at one point in the story, the exact phrase "where I'm calling from" is used twice.

The story is sprawling, a bit lurid in its details of alcoholic dysfunction. Yet, told in the first person, it's quite affecting; we inhabit the narrator's voice and come to like him. Carver's story is some 11 pages long. Lish, changing the title to "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," cut it by 78%, according to the editors of the Library of America volume, in which the WWTA version is only three pages long. In this case, Lish doesn't alter the overall implications of the story, but he makes it a very different experience, a jolt of espresso instead of a rich, full-bodied cup of coffee with even a little milk and sugar.

In his review of this volume, James Campbell notes that, later, Carver learned "to curb his characters' tendency to become prolix and sentimental." Perhaps he's thinking of this passage, part of the 78% cut from "Where is Everyone?", in which the alcoholic narrator and his alcoholic wife talk about their marriage:

"When I was pregnant with Mike you carried me to the bathroom when I was so sick and pregnant I couldn't get out of bed. You carried me. No one else will ever do that, no one else could ever love me in that way, that much. We have that, no matter what. We've loved each other like nobody else could or ever will love the other again."

Sentimental? Well, drunks tend toward sentimentality at times, don't they? And, on the other hand, this is rather beautiful, isn't it, and true? It's human, and lifelike, to use the terms Carver used when discussing what was absent from "Neighbors."

And Carver is well aware, too, of the limitations of such sentiment. As the wife says this and they hold hands, the narrator begins to think of something else:

I remembered the half-pint of whiskey or vodka or gin or scotch or tequila that I had hidden under the very sofa cushion we were sitting on (oh, happy days!) and I began to hope she might soon have to get up and move around—go to the kitchen, the bathroom, out to clean the garage.

What Lish has done with this story is taken a messy but lifelike and affecting story about alcoholism (of which Carver had nearly died not long before) and re-tooled it into a sleek, arch piece of hipness, something closer to the type of story in Carver's first book (which Lish had also spent time "cutting and fixing," as Carver puts it in a thank-you note to his editor).

- - -

In any case, it's been fascinating to read these very different versions of the stories, and I'm looking forward to continuing.

Some have suggested that the whole Carver-Lish affair leaves us wondering what's left of Carver as a writer, but I find myself feeling even more respect for Carver and his vision, along with some sadness that he found that vision stymied by an editor with more professional clout and, perhaps, mental stability at the time.

The Fabric of a City

From an interesting piece about Jonathan Lethem and Brooklyn:

Lethem is not a mourner for the past in the way that traditional Brooklyn nostalgists are – not wailing that people were friendlier back when things were cheaper and more dangerous, or that the Dodgers should never have moved to LA. He observes continuity as much as change. When I say, walking with him and thinking about what he's written, that it's interesting how the fabric of a city creates a kind of human fabric, he responds: "Yeah. I guess I'd call myself a kind of addict of that process. Because it's the unfinished quality that's surprising. Being able to come back here and feel like it was still alive came from realising that gentrification didn't mean that it was somehow sealed in amber now, but that frictions and juxtapositions are still being generated here." He coins a lovely phrase. The Brooklyn that he loves, Lethem says, is marked by "a definitive incompleteness".

I feel the same way about St. Louis: fascinated by the swaths of old neighborhoods, the layers of development, the scars and retrofits, the palimpsest of our built environment. Ride your bike around the South Side—through Tower Grove South, Dutchtown, Carondelet, for instance—and you can see all of that, frictions and juxtapositions akin to those that Lethem finds in Brooklyn.

Stephen King Revisited

The other day I came across this website, which compiles the bestselling books from each decade in the 20th century. Looking through the 1970s through 1990s, I was struck by the emergence and endurance of Stephen King on the top ten lists. He's got a book on the list for virtually every year from 1980 through 1999, and sometimes two at a time.

Skimming through the list reminded me of all the Stephen King books I read between 1988 and 1993, from the time I was 12 till I was 16. Looking over this chronological list, I find that I read 21 of his books. I have very fond memories of some of them; it occurs to me that they were the perfect things to be reading at that time in my life—a bridge to more serious literary fiction. Although I once read literary critic Harold Bloom saying that he had looked in vain for any evidence of "aesthetic dignity" in King's work, his work does in fact have virtues that are well-suited to an adolescent reader: compelling plots, clear (verging on simplistic) character motivations, a lively (if unbeautiful) prose style, and visceral emotional power.

All of the King books I've read were published between 1975 and 1992. Here are the five I think are most worth remembering. (The links are to the Wikipedia entries for each—I find that the plot summaries are quite enjoyable to read.)

1) The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)—The first King novel I ever read remains my favorite, a fact which is kind of disappointing, in a way. This novel is a fairy tale, of sorts, with an evil magician and a spooky castle and a tower prison, with snowy journeys and hair's-breadth escapes, and a charming narrative voice. I re-read it a number of years ago to make up a bonus reading test for my freshmen, and I found that the book held up pretty well. The freshmen who've chosen to read it have invariably enjoyed it, too.

2) Misery (1987)—Most people know the story from the movie, which was also well done. This one filled me with delicious dread as an adolescent, and I re-read it several times. Of all of King's books about writing and writers, I think this one has the most interesting things to say about the craft. I even considered using this book as the summer reading requirement for my Reading and Writing Fiction class. (Instead, I went with Tobias Wolff's Old School, but who knows—I might try this sometime.)

3) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982)—The first novella in the collection Different Seasons, this is another great escape story (as are the first two novels on this list), which of course was made into a fine movie. I think I read this in one sitting, unable to stop, and completely blown away by the ending.

4) It (1985)—Topping 1000 pages, this was the longest book I'd ever read. And while it certainly has its share of ridiculous scenes, it has an evocative sense of place (the sewers, the forts in the woods) as well as an impressive imaginative range: as counterpoint to his main narrative, King dramatizes horrific eruptions of evil from the historical annals of a small Maine town.

5) Thinner (1984)—This book was originally published under King's secret pseudonym Richard Bachman, but soon after its publication its true author was revealed. It's a fairly pulpy story of a guy who gets cursed by a Gypsy and begins steadily, uncontrollably losing weight. But as I recall, it had a pared-down narrative directness that was irresistible.

Honorable Mentions: Firestarter, The Dead Zone, Christine.

Other than some short stories and essays he's published in the New Yorker (and the first third of The Green Mile, which I took on a vacation in 1999 and found very boring), I've not read much Stephen King in the second half of my life. I don't really see myself ever getting back into him, but he was certainly a major figure in my development as a reader. And I remain impressed by his superhuman output and his personal story.

Rival Genres of Reading

From Sam Anderson's reflection on how reading and novels changed in the last decade:

The DFW generation’s primary technological bugaboo was TV, a rival narrative engine that both attracted and repelled. (See Wallace’s classic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he calls TV “both medicine and poison.”) Novelists in the aughts, however, had to contend with a very different bugaboo. The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

Harlem Renaissance?

From an interesting NY Times article about changing demographics in Harlem:

Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, said, “Harlem has become as it was in the early 1930s — a predominantly black neighborhood, but with other groups living there as well.”

The Contradiction

James Surowiecki's Financial Page in last week's New Yorker is the briefest, clearest, most encouraging thing I've read on health insurance reform. It also has the virtue of affirming my own notion of what's going on.

An especially nice passage about the debate's central contradiction:

Politicians on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly believe, likewise, that insurance companies should be prohibited from taking preëxisting conditions into account when setting prices or extending coverage. Both the House and the Senate reform bills include language banning this. Even Republicans have been vehement on the subject: Senator Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma, has said that “everyone agrees” that we need to eliminate the use of preëxisting conditions, while Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, declared that insurers have to be barred from “charging higher premiums to people who are sick.” The insurance companies themselves have accepted that the only factors they’ll be allowed to take into account in setting prices will be age, region, and whether or not someone smokes. The general consensus, then, is that even if you’re already sick, and guaranteed to run up huge medical bills in the future, you should be able to get health insurance at the same price as someone your age who’s perfectly healthy. Economists have a name for this: “community rating.” And the fact that it has such strong backing in Washington is heartening. Americans, and American politicians, have decided that people should have guaranteed access to insurance, and that they shouldn’t have to worry about losing it just because they get laid off or fall ill.

So where’s the contradiction? Well, Congress’s support for community rating and universal access doesn’t fit well with its insistence that health-care reform must rely on private insurance companies. After all, measuring risk, and setting prices accordingly, is the raison d’être of a health-insurance company. The way individual insurance works now, risk and price are linked. If you’re a triathlete with no history of cancer in your family, you’re a reasonably good risk, and so you can get an affordable policy that will protect you against unforeseen disaster; if you’re overweight with high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, your risk of becoming seriously ill is substantial, and therefore private insurers will either charge you high premiums or not offer you coverage at all. This kind of risk evaluation—what’s called “medical underwriting”—is fundamental to the insurance business. But it is precisely what all the new reform plans will ban. Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them.

English

From Tad Friend's fascinating article (subscription required) about protests at Berkeley to statewide budget cuts in education, a perhaps surprising point, which I appreciate, as a former English major and graduate student in a family of engineers:

Another danger is that privatization can turn a university into a glorified trade school. Business programs and computer-science departments will attract wealthy supporters, but who will bankroll poetry? This concern is heightened because English—a high-enrollment, low-teaching-cost department—actually subsidizes disciplines such as nuclear physics and engineering, which require expensive equipment.

Drop the Thousand

Yesterday one of my Facebook friends asked whether we should call the current year "twenty ten" or "two thousand eleven." It hadn't occurred to me that this was a meaningful question, but apparently some people are really serious about this.

Hendrik Hertzberg adds to the discussion an interesting bit of sociolinguistic analysis:

In my opinion, the late Stanley Kubrick is the culprit for what we’ve just been through. If his movie had been set a hundred years in the future, everyone would have called it “twenty sixty-eight.” But “2001”? You couldn’t call it “twenty one,” obviously. It wasn’t about Blackjack. And you couldn’t say “twenty oh one”; that would just sound stupid. So it was, as it had to be, “two thousand and one” or, less frequently, “two thousand one.”

It was natural for everybody to call 2000 “two thousand.” Besides the millennial portentousness, there was the fact that “two thousand” has one fewer syllable than “twenty hundred.” But when the big three-zero year was over, I’m convinced, we would have reverted to the usual practice and said “twenty oh one,” “twenty oh two,” and so on. (We’d most likely have avoided “twenty one,” “twenty two,” and so on, to avoid confusion with card games and starter rifles.) But Kubrick’s space odyssey had already conditioned us.

New Yorker Fiction 2009

This year I got to about 50 percent of the fiction in the New Yorker, same as last year. Here were my top ten favorites, in chronological order:

Al Roosten, by George Saunders—a classic Saunders tale of a morally mixed-up fellow

Wiggle Room, by David Foster Wallace—an excerpt from the forthcoming, posthumous Pale King (post)

She's the One, by Tessa Hadley—a young woman in the wake of her brother's suicide (post)

Vast Hell, by Guillermo Martinez—buried secrets in a small Argentinean town

The Slows, by Gail Hareven—a thought-provoking piece of speculative fiction

Good Neighbors, by Jonathan Franzen—the title is ironic (see also)

Idols, by Tim Gautreaux—a darkly humorous homage to Flannery O'Connor (post)

Rat Beach, by William Styron—a soldier awaits his day of reckoning

War Dances, by Sherman Alexie—a funny and beautiful story about a man and his father (post)

Victory Lap, by George Saunders—a surprisingly violent story told from multiple perspectives

A Year in Reading

It's December again, time for another look back at my year in reading.

In my own memory, this year in reading will go down as the year of Cormac McCarthy. Having read The Road and the Border Trilogy last year, I made a resolution to tackle Blood Meridian, widely considered McCarthy’s greatest work. I was expecting something brutal and difficult but was surprised by the humor of the novel as well as the pace at which I found myself reading, borne along swiftly by the joys of McCarthy’s language. There was plenty of brutality, to be sure, but overall the book was such a great experience that I couldn’t stop reading McCarthy. I picked up Suttree, another masterpiece, McCarthy’s vast episodic wonder of invention and verbal music. From there I went on to more minor parts of his oeuvre: Child of God, No Country for Old Men, The Orchard Keeper, The Stonemason, and The Sunset Limited. In the midst of all this, it was a treat to come across Scott Esposito’s essay about McCarthy’s novels.

I also read a fair amount of nonfiction this year, much of it having to do with the African American experience (fortuitous, perhaps, since I’ve recently been tapped to teach a course next year called African American Voices). I read David Remnick’s great book on Muhammad Ali, King of the World; Harper Barnes’s gripping account of the 1917 East St. Louis riot, Never Been a Time; and Douglas A. Blackmon’s eye-opening book Slavery By Another Name. Jeffrey Toobin’s A Vast Conspiracy was not about African Americans (unless you take seriously the claim that Bill Clinton was our first black president), but it was a gripping account of the sex scandal that nearly brought Clinton down. Rose George’s The Big Necessity was an interesting set of journalistic pieces about sanitation—what humans around the world do with human waste.

For my big summer book, I read Anna Karenina and loved it. I’m going to try to read War and Peace this year, as well as The Brothers Karamazov—though preparing for the African American Voices class may put a damper on some of this Russian reading. This past year, though, I also read Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, by Chekhov, who had long been a major gap in my short story reading. Speaking of short stories, I read a couple recently published collections, both of which were excellent: Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout; and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower. (The penultimate story in Tower’s book, incidentally, features a major allusion to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.) I also read Ian Frazier’s Lamentations of the Father, a delightful collection of short humor pieces, one of which is among the funniest things I’ve ever read.

Some assorted novels: I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and am planning to teach it this coming semester in my Alienated Hero class. I read Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy, whom I’ve found to be a pleasant summer author in the past. It didn’t work out that way with this one, though. I finished up the year with two recent classics, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude—both epics, of sorts, both set largely in Brooklyn, both featuring comic books and superheroes, and both great reads, deserving of their reputations.

The Basic Novelistic Substance

An interesting passage from an article about E. M. Forster in The New Criterion:

A lifelong artist, Forster nevertheless valued life over art, and he came down firmly on H. G. Wells’s side in his famous debate with Henry James on the point and purpose of the novel. “What repelled him in James,” Kermode writes, “was the lack, as Forster saw it, of solidity and of character, and the preoccupation with what James took to be the art of fiction, with ‘pattern,’ what James would call ‘the doing’—a fanatical attachment to the treatment of the subject rather than to the material Forster regarded as the basic novelistic substance, the rendering of bourgeois life.” “He seems to me our only perfect novelist,” Forster drily remarked of James, “but alas, it isn’t a very enthralling type of perfection.” The particular problems James set himself—such as, with What Maisie Knew, telling a story entirely from one character’s very limited point of view—Forster dismissed as mere technical exercises; if a change in viewpoint enriches a narrative, then why not use it?

That Forster thought War and Peace the world’s greatest novel, and that James thought it a mess, should come as no surprise. The technical self-consciousness that overtook the novel during Forster’s lifetime, the sense in which novels came to be “about” themselves as much as their subjects, did not much interest him, and he could be quite dismissive of contemporaries like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. (“He was in his seventies when the nouveau roman appeared on the scene,” Kermode says, “so his age would probably have cancelled any obligation to look into it, not that he was likely to have felt one.”) He deplored the modernist preoccupation with formalistic concerns over actual subject matter: “So marriage,” he complained, “love, friendship, family feuds, social nuances, lawsuits about property, illegitimate children, failures on the stock exchange—all the products of liberalism, in fact, all essentially the subject matter of Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, Arnold Bennett—don’t serve the modern novelist so well. He doesn’t even find death very useful.”

An Homage to the Darkness

From Gerald Early's review, in the current issue of Belles Lettres, of a new book about Sugar Ray Robinson:

Professional boxers, like all high-performance athletes, are, indeed, rare people. In fact, even among athletes, boxers exhibit a rare mentality: theirs is the only sport where the object is to try to so severely hurt your opponent that he cannot or will not continue the contest. Better still if the boxer can knock out his opponent, render him unconscious, give him a temporary brain trauma.... It takes a rare mentality to want to to do that to someone else and a rare mentality to endure the possibility of experiencing it oneself. It goes without saying that boxing is a violent sport. That is a trite observation. Boxing is something more profound than that. It is a shockingly persistent will to violence, an homage to the darkness that drives us as human beings, done up as a cultural ritual.

St. Louis and the Cult of Destruction

Over at Dotage, Matt Mourning has a fiery manifesto about St. Louis and historic preservation. I like this passage in particular, in which Mourning, who's moving to Baltimore soon, contrasts that city's intact (if largely abandoned) urban landscape to the carved-up built environment of St. Louis:

The depression took me upon seeing whole blocks of these rows boarded, vacant. No cars, no trees, no pedestrians lining the streets. Just walls of row houses sitting vacant. I could “hear” the eerie silence even behind the computer screen, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. I got to thinking: how has Baltimore not torn out more of these rows and created park space or built new housing or just left them fallow, waiting for a time when investment would bring something new? Do whole abandoned blocks not cause issues with surrounding occupied blocks? Do they not pull the image of the city down? This, mind you, was my gut reaction, even as an avowed preservationist. Of course, I was happy to see them remain—thus the hope that later kicked in—but even I was wondering how they could have been spared the wrecking ball.

Then I remembered that I’m a St. Louisan; an automatic member of the cult of destruction.

My leaders have, time and time again, supported the removal of a sturdy built environment and its replacement with something much less, something much worse. Often the replacement is meant to serve the purpose of moving or storing automobiles. This is the city’s greatest power because it is the simplest task at its disposal. Vacant buildings and lots provide convenient opportunities for combining narrow urban lots to form parking lots and garages. A 1920s-era bond issue already widened most roads to an extent likely even then excessive; certainly this was so by the time the region’s vast interstate network was introduced. So a declined city that wants to better move automobiles through itself need only maintain its roads and ensure every new development has ample parking.

Whiteyball

In the St. Louis American, a couple writers reflect on the significance of Whitey Herzog's Hall of Fame-worthy managerial career, including his development of African American players.

Mike Claiborne:

One thing Herzog may not be recognized for in St. Louis but that should not be forgotten is the night in 1989 when he started nine players of color, with names like Smith, Coleman, McGee, Pendleton, Ford, Hill, Booker and Durham (and Pena). It is a far cry from what you see now, when some teams have a hard time finding African Americans to make the roster let alone stock their farm team. For Whitey it was about giving his team the best chance to win. Granted, some of these men were players who would come off the bench, but when the injury bug would bite Herzog had no reservations. He was the one manager in St. Louis who could pull it off and there would be no backlash, because Whitey was golden for all the right reasons.

Earl Austin, Jr.:

It was also a wonderful time for African-American fans who had a chance to cheer on the exploits of great black stars such as Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Vince Coleman, Terry Pendleton, George Hendrick, and Lonnie Smith and so many others during the Herzog era in St. Louis.

I can still remember the days when fans would call the talk shows on KMOX radio complaining that the Cardinals had too many black players on the field, but that mattered little to Whitey, who flooded the field with great African-American stars throughout his tenure in St. Louis.

Misadventures at QT

Last night, my wife was at the QT on Big Bend, just off Highway 44. She heard the workers there talking about how a dead body had been found in the restroom of the QT at Gravois and Nebraska (where we often stop for sodas after picking up Gus's pretzels, incidentally).

Sure enough, in today's Post is a brief story about the incident. It suggests, as did the QT workers last night, that the death was a drug overdose. The QT workers last night had also heard that a child was found (alive) in the restroom as well, but that isn't mentioned in the article.

Traffic

From today's Post-Dispatch:

St. Louis commuters abandoned their side-street detours and secret shortcuts, returning to Highway 40 on Monday in numbers rivaling those before the lengthy rebuilding.

Missouri Department of Transportation officials said they expected displaced motorists to return gradually after the stretch between Interstate 170 and Kingshighway reopened early Monday. They just didn't think the cars would return so soon.

"The thing that probably surprised me was that people came back as quick as they did," said Ed Hassinger, MoDOT's district engineer in St. Louis. "We were thinking probably over the next few days people would start moving back. But it looks like ... they all came back today."

This report reminds me of John Seabrook's 2001 New Yorker article about traffic, which notes that highway construction doesn't necessarily reduce traffic, and can actually have the reverse effect:

No major new highways have been built around New York since the nineteen-seventies, partly because there's no room left, and partly because many people believe that building highways makes congestion worse, because drivers who had previously used mass transit to avoid the traffic begin using the new roads. Even if no new drivers take to the new roads, scientists have shown that increased road capacity alone can increase congestion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Braess's paradox," after a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess. In the twenty-three American cities that added the most new roads per person during the nineteen-nineties, traffic congestion rose by more than seventy per cent.

An Early Version of Facebook

From an interesting review of a new selection of Sofia Tolstoy's journals:

For Leo Tolstoy and his extended household, diaries were an early version of Facebook. Everyone had his or her own page, and most people were fanatical recorders of their own feelings. The great man himself kept voluminous diaries, making entries almost to the day of his death. His doctor, his secretary, his disciples, his children, and – most of all – his wife also kept journals.

I like the way this passage suggests a kind of continuity between the logorrheic journalling of people in the past and the writing that people now do online. The passage suggests that our current era is something other than simply debased and illiterate.

Comic Books and Fascism

From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, an interesting passage in which a comic book artist reflects on the implications of his work:

Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman—Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death's-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. For months he had been assuring himself, and listening to Sammy's assurances, that they were hastening, by their make-believe hammering at Haxoff or Hynkel or Hassler or Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.

Adventures at QT (3)

I was filling up our sodas today at QT. Standing next to me, a guy with an empty cup in his hand scanned the ice dispensers, half of which were hung with blue signs.

"Out of order. Out of order," he read.

"I guess your only option today is cubed ice," I said with a grin.

He shook his head. "She's gonna be pissed," he muttered, filling his cup to the top with ice.

As he walked away toward the register, he called back, "I hate a pregnant woman with crushed ice, don't you?"

A Sort of Talismanic Quality

Cormac McCarthy's old typewriter, on which he composed all of his novels, recently sold for $245,500 at auction. The rare-book dealer who handled the auction had this to say.

When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.

I like this comment, although it's actually kind of ridiculous if you think about it: the idea that fiction composed on a computer would necessarily be any more innovative or unusual than fiction composed on a typewriter—or by hand, for that matter. It's actually not at all as if Mount Rushmore were carved with a Swiss Army knife. All those sentences still had to be formed by McCarthy's mind, regardless of how they were transmitted to the page; the invention, composition, arrangement, and revision evident in works like Blood Meridian and Suttree would no less stunning if the manuscripts had been produced on computer, and no more so if they'd been written with a No. 2 pencil.

***UPDATE*** Over at the Book Bench, Thessaly La Force writes about the same comment, taking issue with the aspersions it seems to cast on the typewriter itself.

A Cultural Artifact

I came across this old Letterman clip via Facebook today. It seems to me a rather striking artifact from a bygone age.

What I mean is, the whole conceit of the interview is based around humor that is no longer really acceptable on a show like this. The first gag, for example, is about Murphy and Cavett being gay lovers. From there, the humor quickly shifts to jokes about the idea of a white guy being friends with a black guy.

Deadpan, Cavett says he and Murphy met on the street when both were collecting Coke bottles to return for the nickel deposit. They hit it off, he says, because their backgrounds were so similar. The joke seems to be that Cavett is the ultimate white guy (indeed, Murphy laughs about how blindingly white Cavett's skin is) and thus an unlikely buddy for Murphy.

There are jokes about "Negro talk" and dreadlocks, all seemingly made safe, I guess, by everyone's assurance that Dick Cavett is a sophisticated liberal, quite above any risk of being racist. Eddie Murphy gamely plays along, getting in his own digs at Cavett along the way, though he pointedly doesn't laugh at certain remarks.

Near the end of the interview, Cavett pulls out of his sock a tube of "Darkie Toothpaste," which he says he bought in Bangkok. Murphy takes over at this point, mocking the blatant racism of the toothpaste and suggesting that its sellers should be punched in the face.

I suppose Cavett would say that he brought the toothpaste on the show in order to mock it, too. But the whole logic of the segment strikes me as antiquated and backwards. It's like, "We've got a black man on the show, so we have to make jokes about his blackness and his differentness." And the differences between Cavett and Murphy are cast in familiar, stereotypical ways. Ultimately, the piece emphasizes the gulf between whites and blacks in America.

It's debatable whether that gulf has closed at all in the quarter century or so since this clip aired. But it does seem to me that our culture no longer jokes about race in quite this way.

On the Radio

From The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem's 2003 coming-of-age novel, a brilliant side note about how oldies stations change one's perception of the music of the past:

San Francisco had a Jammin' Oldies station too. All cities did, a tidal turning of my generation's readiness to sentimentalize the chart toppers of its youth. Old divisions had been blurred in favor of the admission that disco hadn't sucked so bad as all that, even the pretense that we'd adored it all along. The Kool & the Gang and Gap Band dance hits we'd struggled against as teens, trying to deny their pulse in our bodies, were now staples of weddings and lunch hours in all the land; the O'Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we'd loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia. That on the other end of the dial hip-hop stations thumped away in dire quarantine, a sort of pre-incarceration, no matter.

A Brain-Dead Minority

Here's an interesting post from George Packer about "Obama's troubles," both real and perceived. This passage is about Obama's opponents:

Over the past eighteen months, I and others (e.g., Sam Tanenhaus) have written that conservatism is dead. I’ve been asked a few times whether I still believe it. Intellectually, absolutely: the August tea parties, the extremist language on the Capitol steps, the Palin self-promotional orgy, even the lockstep voting habits of congressional Republicans, are all symptoms of a debased movement composed of celebrity and bile. But in the past ten months I’ve remembered how powerful a thing it is for conservatives to have a target. Post-Reagan conservatism, with its overwhelming negativity, is back to doing what it does best—without even pretending to have a viable governing agenda. I imagined that in the aftermath of their historic defeat, Republicans would spend months, if not years, engaged in a serious internal debate between reformists and purists. Instead, the party has become more monolithic and shrill than ever. And in our constitutional system, a brain-dead minority party that spouts simple-minded slogans on TV and votes in rigid unison can be a serious obstacle to achieving anything.

Carver's Ex

In this review of a new biography of Raymond Carver, Stephen King relates unpleasant facts about Carver's first marriage:

Maryann Burk met the love of her life — or her nemesis; Carver appears to have been both — in 1955, while working the counter of a Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash. She was 14. When she and Carver married in 1957, she was two months shy of her 17th birthday and pregnant. Before turning 18, she discovered she was pregnant again. For the next quarter-century she supported Ray as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Carver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in “a tipsy flirtation” at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her....

Ray and Maryann were married for 25 years, and it was during those years that Carver wrote the bulk of his work. His time with the poet Tess Gallagher, the only other significant woman in his life, was less than half that....

Nevertheless, it was Gallagher who reaped the personal benefits of Carver’s sobriety (he took his last drink a year before they fell in love) and the financial ones as well. During the divorce proceedings, Maryann’s lawyer said — this both haunts me and to some degree taints my enjoyment of Carver’s stories — that without a decent court settlement, Maryann Burk Carver’s post-divorce life would be “like a bag of doorknobs that wouldn’t open any doors.”

Maryann’s response was, “Ray says he’ll send money every month, and I believe him.” Carver carried through on that promise, although not without a good deal of grousing. But when he died in 1988, the woman who had provided his financial foundation discovered that she had been cut out of sharing the continuing financial rewards of Carver’s popular short-story collections. Carver’s savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000.

***UPDATE*** Just discovered that in 2006 Maryann Burk Carver published a memoir about her life with Raymond Carver.

Pun of the Week

The Wicked Queen shows Snow White a killer app.

Thanks, Tricky Dick

From Ariel Levy's fascinating review-essay about the recent history of feminism:

These days, we can only dream about a federal program insuring that women with school-age children have affordable child care. If such a thing seems beyond the realm of possibility, though, that’s another sign of our false-memory syndrome. In the early seventies, we very nearly got it.

In 1971, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Walter Mondale, came up with legislation that would have established both early-education programs and after-school care across the country. Tuition would be on a sliding scale based on a family’s income bracket, and the program would be available to everyone but participation was required of no one. Both houses of Congress passed the bill.

Nobody remembers this, because, later that year, President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, declaring that it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing” and undermine “the family-centered approach.” He meant “the traditional-family-centered approach,” which requires women to forsake every ambition apart from motherhood.

225/365

Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of Corresponding Fractions. The fraction in the title of this post denotes the number of posts (including this one) I've done here over the past 365 days.

As a way of reviewing the year, I've listed my Favorite Fractions, the posts that seemed most worth saving, on the right margin under the list of labels.

Thanks for all of your responses, the ones posted here, on Facebook, by e-mail, and in person! Here's to another year.

And, as another way of expressing the goal of all this, a reworking of an Arthur Miller dictum (check out the last paragraph of this speech):

Whatever is not [blogged] disappears forever.

McCarthy, Interviewed

Stephen Schenkenberg notes that this otherwise interesting interview with Cormac McCarthy doesn't touch on McCarthy's 1979 novel Suttree. But perhaps we can see an indirect reference to that meandering, eddying work of nearly 500 pages in this somewhat embittered comment:

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

Like Stephen, I do prefer the luxurious density of high Cormac McCarthy, on display in this stunning consecutive trio: Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses. Yet in the next novel, The Crossing, I think McCarthy luxuriates a bit too much; the novel's density becomes leaden.

Perhaps he realized that himself. McCarthy's work has surely gotten tauter in recent years—from the screenplays turned novels Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men, to the "novel in dramatic form" The Sunset Limited, to the boiled-down prose of The Road.

The greatest of these, clearly, is The Road. The tautness of that novel is entirely appropriate to the novel's subject, in which nearly all human comforts and tendernesses have been burned away. The father searching for food among the ashes becomes a parallel to McCarthy the writer, inventing a plot in this barren landscape.

Prize Specimens

The art director for Vintage and Anchor Books invited a bunch of folks to design covers for Nabokov books in specimen boxes (the kind that might be used to display butterflies). Above is Stephen Doyle's creation for my favorite Nabokov novel.

I also like this one by Chip Kidd because it evokes the structure of Nabokov's longest (at 600+ pages) novel, whose five sections get progressively shorter.

An Opportunity for the Gentrifiers

This short n+1 piece entitled "Gentrify, Gentrify," interesting if at times annoyingly oracular, ends with a call to action:

With the arrival of the crisis—a crisis of gentrification among other things—there is an opening for the development of a coherent, positive vision of city life. In intellectual and activist circles, this vision has already begun to crystallize around a slogan borrowed from Henri Lefebvre: le droit de la ville, or the right to the city. For if our civilization has a future, it lies in the city—the only form of habitation that can sustain a global population that would otherwise overrun the land—and it is a future to which everyone must have a right. This is also the right to produce the city: to be the equal of every urban citizen, equally responsible for and capable of making and sharing urban space. Students at Berkeley once claimed People's Park in the name of this right; today, organizers halt evictions, help squatters to claim foreclosed homes, and lobby for expanded public housing. And yet, truth be told, the right to the city remains a somewhat vague slogan, whose more precise meaning we will also have to build. For the moment, its signal utility is to reclaim urban life for politics.... The gentrifiers now have the opportunity to recognize themselves as what they are—the dominated members of a dominant class—with the power to ally with the displaced.

(Thanks to Steve M. for the link.)

Conversations of Our Time

This sentence, from Judith Butler's article "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time," won the Worst Sentence of the Year award in the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest of 1998:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

I came across it here.

Destruction of Urban Character

From a new post by Michael Allen about further deterioration of buildings owned by Paul McKee:

McKee and his consultants talk a lot about preservation, urbanism and sustainability. In no way is willful neglect of once-occupied historic buildings compatible with any of those values. Depletion of historic housing stock destroys urban character, wastes precious and irreplaceable natural resources and robs neighborhoods of affordable housing and small business spaces. We are losing solidly built, easily rehabilitated buildings for the uncertainty of a multi-phased project that places areas of St. Louis Place and JeffVanderLou dead last in order of development attention.

Those who want background on Paul McKee and the north side of St. Louis should check out this fine article by Jeannette Cooperman and Jarrett Medlin.

Children in Gaza

The most disturbing detail so far in Lawrence Wright's article about the Gaza Strip and Israel:

There is very little for children to do in Gaza. The Israeli blockade includes a ban on toys, so the only playthings available have been smuggled, at a premium, through tunnels from Egypt. Islamists have shut down all the movie theatres. Music is rare, except at weddings. Many of Gaza’s sports facilities have been destroyed by Israeli bombings, including the headquarters for the Palestinian Olympic team. Only one television station broadcasts from Gaza, Al Aqsa—a Hamas-backed channel that gained notice last year for a children’s show featuring a Mickey Mouse-like figure who was stabbed to death by an Israeli interrogator. The mouse was replaced by a talking bee, who died after being unable to cross into Egypt for medical treatment. The rabbit who followed the bee passed away in January, after being struck by shrapnel from an Israeli attack.

Swear Words

My colleague Chuck found this while flipping through Understanding Grammar (1954), by Paul Roberts:

As they are most frequently used, swear words fit the definition of the interjection. Many swear words are verbs which have lost their verbal meaning—thus damn, which in common use has lost the meaning "consign to perdition" and is used merely as an expression of anger, pain, disapproval, or whatever. Names of the deity are often used interjectionally as swear words, sometimes in euphemistic disguise: gosh, golly, gee, gee whiz, etc.

In Vulgate there is a strong tendency for certain swear words to lose all power of expressing meaning or emotion either, as a result of overuse. In Army speech, for example, two or three forms recur constantly, sometimes in every sentence through a long discourse. Such words lose even the color of indecency and become mere fillers, a linguistic sawdust.

Cassidy on Health Care Reform

In this extensive blog post, New Yorker economics reporter John Cassidy comments on the House Democrats' recently published proposal to reform the American health care system:

Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars.

He does indeed put on his green eyeshade, analyzing the long-term budgetary consequences of the proposed reforms, along with these reforms' limitations. But he concludes by essentially agreeing with Paul Krugman's assertion that an important step in American history is about to be made:

The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.

Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.