The Best Number of Kids

I found this Elizabeth Kolbert article about the ethics of having children interesting, especially this passage, since it concludes by affirming my own procreative fate:

According to Caplan, a professor at George Mason University, the major mistake that parents (or prospective parents) make is overvaluing the present. This is a common enough error. Workers in their twenties and thirties don’t save enough money for retirement because it seems such a long way off. Then their sixties roll around, and they wish they’d spent less on S.U.V.s and HDTVs and put more into their 401(k)s.

Couples, he argues, need to think not just about how many children they might want now, when they have better things to do than microwave Similac, but how many they will want to have around when they’re old and lonely and watching “The View.” Caplan recommends what he calls the “take the average” rule:

Suppose you’re thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you’ll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness. 

Caplan does the math and concludes that in this case “the best number of kids is three.”

Reading Fiction

From Ann Patchett's compelling piece about the disappointments of a year with no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

I've posted lots of sentiments like this before, and this isn't necessarily the most original formulation of them—but I do agree with her (this is a big part of why I do what I do as an English teacher), and her essay as a whole is quite thoughtful and worth reading.

What Caro Knows About LBJ

I was impressed by the sweep of Charles McGrath's summary of what Robert Caro has learned about LBJ in this paragraph from his long NY Times article about the biographer, and I was amused by McGrath's final detail:

In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.

MLK and the Modern Republican Party

This passage from a 1964 essay by Martin Luther King, Jr., succinctly describes and predicts the emergence of the Republican Party as we have known it for the last 40 years or so, and it comments as as well on the basic sentiments that are activated to rally against President Obama:

For some Americans deluded by myths, the candidacy of a Goldwater seemed a solution for their ills. Essentially he identified big government, radicalism, and bureaucracy as the cause of all evils. Civil rights legislation, in his view, is not a social necessity—it is merely oppressive big government. He ignored the towering presence of discrimination and segregation, but vividly exaggerated crime in the streets. The poverty of the Negroes, he implied, is due to want of ambition and industry. The picture that emerged to delight the racist was that of undeserving, shiftless, criminally dangerous radicals who have manipulated government for their selfish ends, but whose grievances are largely fanciful, and will wither away if left to the states.

—"Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast"

I Know a Man

I know a man—and I just want to talk about him a minute, and maybe you will discover who I'm talking about as I go down the way because he was a great one. And he just went about serving. He was born in an obscure village, the child of a poor peasant woman. And then he grew up in still another obscure village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was thirty years old. Then for three years, he just got on his feet, and he was an itinerant preacher. And he went about doing some things. He didn't have much. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness. He had no credentials but himself.

He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker. They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience; he broke injunctions. And so he was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. And the irony of it all is that his friends turned him over to them. One of his closest friends denied him. Another of his friends turned him over to his enemies. And while he was dying, the people who killed him gambled for his clothing, the only possession that he had in the world. When he was dead he was buried in a borrowed tomb, through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history. All of the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life. His name may be a familiar one. But today I can hear them talking about him. Every now and then somebody says, "He's King of Kings." And again I can hear somebody saying, "He's Lord of Lords." Somewhere else I can hear somebody saying, "In Christ there is no East nor West." And then they go on and talk about, "In Him there's no North and South, but one great Fellowship of Love throughout the whole wide world." He didn't have anything. He just went around serving and doing good.

This morning, you can be on his right hand and his left hand if you serve. It's the only way in.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Drum-Major Instinct"

St. Louis Slavery, St. Louis Freedom

Back in November, I wrote an essay about the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site on the St. Louis Riverfront Trail. I explored St. Louisans' historical amnesia about our city and state's role in slavery.

The November piece focused on slaves who attempted to escape from Henry Shaw. Today at the Occasional Planet I have a kind of sequel to that earlier piece. Based on a fascinating talk I went to in Tower Grove Park on Sunday, this new essay explores another route to freedom many St. Louis slaves attempted: the freedom lawsuit.

I'd be delighted if you took a look at it.

Founding Father

A fascinating passage from Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family:

The terrible predicament the Jeffersons, and other couples, faced—marriage with no birth control—pitted Jefferson's own sexual desires against Martha Jefferson's health, and Martha lost. Jefferson, it must be said, acted in accordance with the mores and expectations of the time. Martha Jefferson probably did as well, for she and Thomas were raised in a society where husbands were expected to have unfettered access to their wives' bodies, and girls were raised to submit. This is not at all to suggest that Martha did not benefit in her sexual life with her husband, that she was not a sexual being herself. The reality was, however, that she and other women had to think about sex in a different way than their husbands. As an elderly man, Jefferson remembered his marriage as "ten years of unchequered happiness." But he had survived his marriage, and we cannot simply assume that Martha Jefferson, who did not survive, felt the same about it—that she was unequivocally happy to have to endure nine months of pregnancy, six times within ten years, and to be brought to death's door nearly every time. For practically her entire marriage she was either pregnant or lactating. Her body was not her own. Women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ... expressed exasperation with constant childbearing. In fact, women have rather dramatically shown the world, and everyone inclined to romanticize perpetual pregnancy, how they really feel about the matter. In every society where they have had the choice, they have dropped the birthrate down to at or below the replacement level. After all her struggles with childbearing, Martha Jefferson died at age thirty-four, when she did not have to. Jefferson understood this, and it fueled his agony.

Writing: A Miraculous Technology All Its Own

As an English teacher and a devotee of the written word, I was interested and disquieted by this essay by Robert Moor in n+1, and this passage from it in particular:

The problem with Our Choice [a recently published multimedia "book app"] is that among the elephantine hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried. Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text. If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed. Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.

Fictional Gloss and Brutal System

Faithful longtime readers of this blog know that one topic I've returned to multiple times is the HBO series The Wire. One of the topics I've considered on numerous occasions is the show's portrayal of African Americans. (See, for example, "Watching the Detectives," "Black American Lives and The Wire," and "The Wire and Winter's Bone.")

I thought of The Wire and those posts this evening when I read this paragraph in Michelle Alexander's 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness.

We may think we know how the criminal justice system works. Television is overloaded with fictional dramas about police, crime, and prosecutors—shows such as Law & Order. These fictional dramas, like the evening news, tend to focus on individual stories of crime, victimization, and punishment, and stories are typically told from the point of view of law enforcement. A charismatic police officer, investigator, or prosecutor struggles with his own demons while heroically trying to solve a horrible crime. He ultimately achieves a personal and moral victory by finding the bad guy and throwing him in jail. That is the made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system. It perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals and punishing them. These television shows, especially those that romanticize drug-law enforcement, are the modern-day equivalent of the old movies portraying happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal system of racialized oppression and control.

I want to think more about the extent to which Alexander's point applies to The Wire.

Light in August in Winter

This past month, I've continued my preoccupation with Faulkner, re-reading his 1932 novel Light in August along with a couple of my colleagues, one of whom is teaching it to his junior Honors English class.

Faulkner scholar Theresa M. Towner writes that "Faulkner shared some of the racial prejudices of whites in his region, but he came to see those prejudices as self-delusional and unjust; indeed, his fiction is ahead of its time in representing the warping effects of racist ideology."

Light in August supports Towner's claims, as it demonstrates powerfully the warping effects of a variety of racist ideologies, which take on the character of religious belief for many characters in the novel (and indeed are often combined with warped religious belief).

We're nearing the end of the novel, and I've been considering some of the various cover images that have accompanied various editions of the book over the years.

One way of looking at the novel is as the story of a lynching—with an incredible amount of backstory and context, so that you might not realize this is the story of a lynching until you're well into the experience. The image on this cover creeps up on you in the same way: only after thinking about it in connection with the novel do you realize that the silhouetted image of a window resembles a gallows.

Faulkner has a way of combining the cartoonish with the dramatic and profound, and I think this cover captures that aspect of the novel nicely:

This one, another Vintage International edition of the novel (and the one I'm currently using), is lovely and evocative, but perhaps a bit too sepia-toned and pastoral for a novel that is, after all, pretty disturbing and violent.

I like the concepts of these next two Penguin Classics covers, but I feel that the execution leaves something to be desired. The wild multifariousness of this one does a good job of suggesting how many different characters and worldviews the novel will incorporate:

And the rough-hewn, folksy feeling of this one—combined with the modernist Picasso vibe—is also quite appropriate to Faulkner's aesthetic:

I think this image is from the first edition of the novel. Perhaps it's meant to represent the home of the disgraced minister Gail Hightower, where Joe Christmas meets his end in all of its Christian echoes of crucifixion.

This cover appears to portray Joe Christmas himself, though he seems too imposing and solid, too definite in identity for a tormented and, at bottom, vulnerable soul like Joe.

My favorite, though, may be this one. Abstract and symbolic like the window/gallows image above, it seems less limited than that one. The telephone poles in the distance may be crucifixes (Joe Christmas), yet they may also be connections between human beings (Lena and Byron). The road goes two ways, and though it may be soiled and cracked, there's more than a hint of green in the landscape, and a sky that seems poised equally between cloudy and sunny.

This dense, huge, rich book—Malcolm Cowley and others consider it perhaps Faulkner's greatest novel—gives us so many indelible images. I can see why it's inspired so many different cover designs. It's hard to capture the complexity of the novel in one single image.

Postscript: Faulkner and Race

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faulkner and the Black Arts Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Year in Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond that, who knows?

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

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

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

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

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

New Yorker Fiction 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Talk About Raymond Carver

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

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

Confessions of a Musical Philistine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covers

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

Change

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

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

As are the final two sentences:

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

Halfsies

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

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

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

Anchored Down

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

Ah well. It's still a great song.