Imagined Audience

March isn't just for Madness

2010-03-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

Folks,

We're roaring into the spring and asking you take a moment to put down your bracket for ten minutes...okay, more like thirty minutes but it's in the name of something important to all of us, the neophyte and the initiated: the humanities.

There has been much discussion among many of you, I'm sure, about William Chace's article, "The Death of the English Department" in The American Scholar last year. It seems to me that most of the people I've asked have found the article a bit simplistic in its thinking as well as nostalgic and ill-prescriptive. I have different views but I'm saving them for the end as Dave and I try to host, electronically, a round table discussion on this article and the conversations it has spawned.

To lead off our discussion we've invited Bobby Baird. Bobby's an old friend and an intellectual of the first-rate. He's way smarter than I could ever hope to be, in part, because he spent last night studying about Che Guevara’s "disastrous final guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967" in a story he's working on for Narrative and I spent most of last evening trying to understand how Kentucky was going to navigate its way through the East Regional of this year's NCAA Tournament.

Anyway, here's Bobby's post. Read. Respond. Re-respond. We want to know what you think. We're going viral. Which is a hell of lot different than going feral, or so I'm told.

All best,

Mike

Dave, Mike,

Thanks for having me on the show. The topic of the week, I’ve been told, is William Chace’s essay in The American Scholar, “The Decline of the English Department.”

The meter’s running on my 500 words, and since my colleague at digital emunction, Michael Robbins, has already quoted some relevant passages, I won’t waste time recapitulating. In his rebuttal, Michael cites a sentence from John Guillory that’s key to my own argument with Chace: “Needless to say, the emergence of theory is the symptom of a problem which theory itself could not solve.”

This is my problem with the essay as a whole: Chace regularly confuses cause and effect, disease and symptom. That confusion keeps him from seeing that the sterling heyday of the humanities he remembers from his youth was a wild anomaly that was made possible by two conditions. The first was the post-WWII economic boom, which gave students (especially those at elite universities) the freedom "not" to make their curricular choices based on economic demand. In the '50s and '60s a college degree was still special enough that it would find you a well-paying job even if you graduated in something as practically useless as classics. The glut of college diplomas in today's job market means that kids need to major in disciplines like business and economics to get a jump on their post-collegiate competition.

The second and more crucial (because rarer) condition was a situation in which a liberal-arts education was considered a marker of social class. You learned Shakespeare not only because you thought it was good for your soul but because it would help you get the jokes at a business lunch. It helped you fit in. That's simply not the case anymore, and hasn't been for a while. Exhibit A: another essay from The American Scholar, this one from 1985, in which Peter Baida wrote:

A couple of years ago...my wife and I gave what might be called a Yuppie dinner party. All six of our guests were young professionals with degrees in law or business from top-ranked schools. At one point I mentioned that my wife recently had finished reading Proust and that now I had begun. "Who is Proust?" one of our guests asked. I thought someone else would answer, but all eyes turned toward me. Suddenly I realized that not one of our guests knew who Proust was.

Commenting on this, Guillory cites Barbara Ehrenreich—"No doubt they knew what Brie was, or pesto or Chardonnay"—and goes on to say, "Consumer culture provides myriad opportunity for producing effects of status differentiation." Proust doesn't signify because other markers of elitism (real estate prices, travel experience, obscure Brooklyn bands) do the job so much better.

Chace simply doesn't get how unusual (and, frankly, un-American) that brief blaze of the humanities was. (Guillory again: “The undermining of high culture is as old as the formation of the American bourgeoisie, but it has especially characterized the history of the professional-managerial class, at least since the later nineteenth century.”) We’ve had booms come and go since the ‘50s, but in the end, I suspect that the liberal arts were simply too democratic to serve reliably as a social indicator: what good is Shakespeare as a class boundary marker if people are teaching him at state schools?

As a corollary I’d say that if your real concern is to improve access to literature—teaching people to read well, to appreciate complex works of literature, to develop an ear for language and an eye for irony— then the English department as currently constructed is probably not the best place to focus your activism. I agree with Chace about the importance of teaching; for a while now I’ve thought that there should be something like a teaching Ph.D in the humanities, a post-Master's degree for people who want to teach literature but don't want to do research. But college is just four years of a person’s life; if it’s readers you want to encourage, why not find ways that work for 15-, 40-, and 60-year-olds?

What concerns me much more than English department woes is the absence (I won’t call it a decline) of any durable non-academic intellectual culture in this country. But that’s maybe a topic for another episode, so I’ll end here, awaiting your responses with breathed bait, or something like that...

More Best Ofs.

2010-02-16T15:13:00.001-08:00

Some welcome and much-appreciated addenda to the list of lists. Thanks to the following friends/poets/listmakers who have contributed. Their lists follow below:

Megan Levad

Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (edited by Jenny Penberthy) (2002)
Joyelle McSweeney, The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004)
Spencer Reece, The Clerk's Tale (2004)
Anne Carson, Decreation (2005)
Susan Stewart, Columbarium (2005)
Erin Belieu, Black Box (2006)
Kate Greenstreet, case sensitive (2006)
Amy Gerstler, Ghost Girl (2007)
Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, then Holes (2007)
Alice Notley, In the Pines (2007)

Erika Meitner

Total: 20 Books of the last decade for teaching and reading

Books from the last decade (12 of them) that I love to teach or find myself compulsively handing off to students from my own shelves, which means they must be doing something amazing and unique and interesting (in no particular order):

Some Ether - Nick Flynn (2000)
Modern Life - Matthea Harvey (2007)
Controvertibles - Quan Barry (2004)
One Big Self: An Investigation - C.D. Wright (2007)
Broken Hallelujahs - Sean Thomas Dougherty (2007)
Insomnia Diary - Bob Hicok (2004)
Letters to Wendy's - Joe Wenderoth (2000)
American Linden - Matthew Zapruder (2002)
Two and Two - Denise Duhamel (2005)
Cocktails - D.A. Powell (2004)
My American Kundiman - Patrick Rosal (2006)
Fire Wheel - Sharmila Voorakkara (2005)

Books I keep going back to myself, for my own work, that I refuse to lend out to my students (8 of them, in no particular order):

Steal Away: Selected and New Poems - C.D. Wright (2003)
Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities - Olena Kalytiak Davis (2003)
Selected Levis - Larry Levis (2003)
The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems - Denis Johnson (reissued in 2007 by CMU Press, which counts, right?) [Editor's note: Anything you want to count can count.]
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 - Lucille Clifton (2000)
Museum of Accidents - Rachel Zucker (2009)
Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine (2004)
Wind in a Box - Terrance Hayes (2006)

Ross White

My top ten is in no particular order; it's probably not as much a top ten as it is a "ten books that had a profound impact on me." I did exclude selected/collected volumes, which would have seemed like cheating, and didn't include friends and teachers, which robbed me of a couple of terrific books of poems.

1. Beth Ann Fennelly, Tender Hooks (2005)
2. Carl Dennis, Practical Gods (2001)
3. Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard (2004)
4. Ross Gay, Against Which (2006)
5. Mark Jarman, Epistles (2007)
6. Sarah Manguso, Siste Viator (2006)
7. Carl Phillips, From the Devotions (2002)
8. Matthea Harvey, Sad Little Breathing Machine (2004)
9. Olena Kalytiak Davis, shattered sonnets, love cards, and other off and back handed importunities (2003)
10. Ander Monson, Vacationland (2005)

A Very Special Episode: The Best Poetry Books of the 2000s

2010-02-13T22:52:00.001-08:00

Mike,

I hope you'll forgive me for a little poetry detour, but the people are clamoring for poetry, and who are we to deny them?

Here's the story: in December 2009 I asked a group of friends and poets (mostly poet-friends) to list their ten "best" books of poetry of the 2000s, with "best" defined as liberally as they'd like--"great," "favorite," "passable," whatever. The lists that follow below represent the replies I received/coerced, some of which came--understandably--grudgingly. I'm ashamed to say that, just as in high school, no women responded to my request. Then again, all this list-making has always seemed a very male interest--but that's another post.

I recognize quite well that "best of" lists are worth only slightly more than a Democratic supermajority in the Senate, but like the Senate, they are meant to be an arena for debate. Debate is fine with me, but I'm just as interested in publishing these lists as a way for people like us to discover books we may have missed in the past ten years. In my grander moments I fancy myself a well-read poet, but many of these were new and exciting for me to learn of. I'm grateful to all those who participated for providing me with a new reading list, and just as grateful that they took the time to think about the question I put to them.

These lists proceed alphabetically, with a short biographical note for each contributor, and they end with a list by Paul Muldoon, soon to read at our very own John Carroll University. Muldoon's list was published in the Times (London) at the end of 2009, but I thought it was well worth presenting it here.

One last note before the lists -- if any of our several readers want to contribute their own list, I'll be glad to update this post to include it. Now then:

James Arthur

I don't feel qualified to list the 10 *best* books—or even to list 10 books—because I haven't read all that widely; I tend to latch on to a few poets here & there and obsess over them. I do want to put in a good word, though, for some writers I love, and who I think don't get talked about as often as they deserve, in some cases, maybe, because they're not American.

Simon Armitage (England). The Shout: Selected Poems (2005)
Christian Bok (Canada). Eunoia (2001)
Joseph Brodsky. Collected Poems in English (2002)
Richard Kenney. One-Strand River (2008)
Les Murray (Australia). New Collected Poems (2002)
Derek Walcott. Selected Poems (2007)

James Arthur's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Southern Review, and Shenandoah. He has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and a Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, fiction writer Shannon Robinson.

Michael Dumanis

I made two separate categories, one for debuts and one for non-debuts because I think comparing a new book to, say, a book by Gluck or Ashbery or Merwin is an apples-to-oranges kind of comparison. Listed in alphabetical order by author. It's hard enough to think of my ten favorite books of a particular year, so this is no way a ten best list, but rather a list of the first ten books I thought of that definitely stand out for me (though others could have found their way in on a different day). Also, I excluded any New or Selected Poems. I did not include one book in English translation by a non-American author, though I was very tempted to include Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Lidija Dimkovska.

Ten Remarkable Debut Poetry Books, 2000-2009

Jericho Brown. Please (2008)
Oni Buchanan. What Animal (2003)
Arda Collins. It Is Daylight (2009)
Monica Ferrell. Beasts for the Chase (2008)
James Allen Hall. Now You’re the Enemy (2008)
Sabrina Orah Mark. The Babies (2004)
Jennifer Millitello. Flinch of Song (2009)
Robyn Schiff. Worth (2002)
Zachary Schomburg. The Man Suit (2007)
Richard Siken. Crush (2005)

Ten Remarkable Poetry Books by More Established Authors (1 Prior Book or More), 2000-2009

Olena Kalytiak Davis. Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (2003)
Terrance Hayes. Wind in a Box (2006)
Cate Marvin. Fragment of the Head of a Queen (2007)
Chelsey Minnis. Bad Bad (2007)
Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002)
Michael Palmer. The Promises of Glass (2000)
D.A. Powell. Cocktails (2004)
Claudia Rankine. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)
Frederick Seidel. Ooga-Booga (2006)
Juliana Spahr. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005)

Michael Dumanis teaches literature and creative writing at Cleveland State University, where he serves as Director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and edits the books in their poetry and novella series. His first collection of poems, My Soviet Union won the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press and appeared in Spring 2007. He is also the coeditor, with poet Cate Marvin, of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century.

James Allen Hall

In no order

Richard Siken. Crush (2005)
Jericho Brown. Please (2008)
Lucie Brock-Broido. Trouble in Mind (2004)
Terrance Hayes. Wind in a Box (2006)
Claudia Rankine. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)
Louise Glück. Averno (2006)
Olena Kalytiak Davis. Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities (2003)
Michael Dumanis. My Soviet Union (2007)
Tracy K. Smith. The Body’s Question (2003)
Brian Teare. The Room Where I Was Born (2003)

James Allen Hall is the author of Now You're The Enemy, selected for the 2008 Arkansas Poetry Prize, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters. A graduate of the PhD program at the University of Houston, Hall currently teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York, Potsdam.

Dave Lucas

Kay Ryan. Say Uncle (2000)
Mxolisi Nyezwa. song trials (2001)
Spencer Short. Tremolo (2001)
Maurice Manning. Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001)
Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002)
Mary Szybist. Granted (2003)
Alice Oswald. Woods, etc. (2005)
Robin Robertson. Swithering (2006)
Seamus Heaney. District and Circle (2006)
Todd Boss. yellowrocket (2008)

I’ve arranged my list sequentially. I’m deliberately leaving off close friends and teachers, though in doing so I’ve lost one of my favorite favorites of the whole decade, Alan Shapiro’s Song and Dance (2002), so I mention it anyway. Also, I disqualified translations and Selected / Collecteds. Finally, since it comes out next year and I’m not technically including it, I’ll at least mention Sarah Barber’s The Kissing Party (forthcoming in 2010), which I read this past year in manuscript.

Philip Metres

I hate lists, but here it is. 10 Poetry Books Published in the 2000s

Michael Palmer. That I Have Not Forgotten the Promises of Glass. New Directions. 2000.
Jen Bervin. Nets. Ugly Duckling Presse. 2003.
K. Silem Mohammad. Deer Head Nation. Tougher Disguises. 2003.
William Stafford. Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War. Milkweed, 2003.
Lev Rubinstein. Catalogue of Comedic Novelties. Ugly Duckling Presse. 2004.
Mark Nowak. Shut Up Shut Down. Coffee House Press. 2004.
Mahmoud Darwish. The Butterfly’s Burden. Copper Canyon. 2006.
C.D. Wright. One Big Self. Copper Canyon. 2007.
Today I Wrote Nothing: Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Overlook. 2007.
Rachel Loden. Dick of the Dead. Ahsahta. 2009.

Philip Metres is the author of To See the Earth and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

Tomás Q. Morín

1. Robert Hass. Time and Materials (2007)
2. Zbigniew Herbert. Collected Poems (2007)
3. Gerald Stern. American Sonnets (2002)
4. Seamus Heaney. Beowulf (2000)
5. Adam Zagajewski. Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002)
6. Elizabeth Bishop. Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (2006)
7. Henri Cole. Middle Earth (2003)
8. Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The Orchard (2004)
9. Jack Gilbert. Refusing Heaven (2005)
10. Edward Hirsch. Lay Back the Darkness (2003)

Tomás Q. Morín is a Texas native whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Blackbird, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets 2007, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He has been awarded scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Idyllwild Arts Academy. He holds an MA in Hispanic and Italian Studies from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from Texas State Univeristy, where he is a senior lecturer in English.

Paul Otremba

Elizabeth Arnold Civilization (2006)
Rick Barot The Darker Fall (2002)
Anne Carson Men in the Off Hours (2000)
Andrew Feld Citizen (2004)
Nick Flynn Some Ether (2000)
Louise Glück Averno (2006)
Stanley Plumly Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me (2000)
Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004)
Alan Shapiro Song and Dance (2002)
Richard Siken Crush (2005)

Paul Otremba is the author of the poetry collection The Currency. His poems and criticism have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Washington Post, Poetry Daily, Tikkun, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics. He has won scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship, a Krakow Poetry Seminar Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Eric Smith

1. Maurice Manning. Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001)
2. Donald Justice. Collected Poems (2004)
3. Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The Orchard (2004)
4. Frederick Seidel. Poems 1959—2009 (2009)
5. Ilya Kaminsky. Dancing in Odessa (2004)
6. Michael Hofmann. Selected Poems (2009)
7. Randall Mann. Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009)
8. Bob Hicok. Animal Soul (2001)
9. Terrance Hayes. Wind in a Box (2006)
10. Jack Gilbert. Refusing Heaven (2005)

Eric Smith recently graduated from MFA@FLA. He co-edits cellpoems, and has new work appearing or forthcoming in Green Mountains Review and Tampa Review.

Paul Muldoon (published in The Times)

Among the most significant books of poetry of this past decade was The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson (2001), a tale of marital haps and mishaps for those who continue to like their poetry appropriately dense and difficult. District and Circle by Seamus Heaney (2006) and The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley (2000) show two leading Irish poets tending their plots and reaping the benefits. The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin (2009) is a book in which deep image and deep ecology are happily combined. Weeds and Wildflowers by Alice Oswald (2009) includes wonderful snapshots of the physical world while Rain by Don Paterson (2009) is a splendidly intense and intelligent collection from the great Scottish poet. A Scattering by Christopher Reid (2009) includes some of the best elegiac writing of recent years while Failure by Philip Schultz (2007) includes the observation "failures are unforgettable." Rounding out this top 10 list are the unforgettably successful My Noiseless Entourage by Charles Simic (2005) and Collected Poems by C.K. Williams (2007).

All Things Come to an End

2010-01-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

Dave,

I read your post with interest and eagerness. It's been so long since we've talked to each for all 11 readers of this blog. But I think 2010, and this new decade, is where we go past the 20 reader mark. I anticipate this blog going viral just like all those cute cats on YouTube.

I recorded Conan' O'Brien's final show the other night, Dave and he said that all things come to an end a decade too soon. The show was sad to watch, in some ways, because, well, you saw that his heart was broken by not being able to continue on in his dream job and one of the coolest things he said was that he wanted young people, especially young people, to not be cynical. That it was "his least favorite quality" in a person that rarely do things work out the way we thought they would.

Since I was a boy I've always been prone to nostalgia. And your post has me thinking about these last ten years (and the books I've read aren't what come to mind for me.) I certainly didn't believe ten years ago, as a college senior, I'd be a university professor, much less a version of a writer. Like most college graduates who don't have a penchant for numbers or science (or a business degree the B school keeps telling us) I really had no idea what I wanted to be or could do. I had this notion of being a writer, but that seemed like a pipe dream (and still does some days). Conan has asked young people to not be cynical and I don't know if I quality as young, but I've found that coming of age as an adult the last ten years has made it awfully hard to not be cynical. I'm sure that we can find somebody's journal entry from 1972 saying the same thing about coming of age in the '60s, and yet for all the advances in technology, our ability to communicate and disseminate information, I find our country as nearly polarized now as it was then and I see no real coming together, aside from natural disaster, except for the passion of keeping Conan O'Brien's television show on the air at 11:35 and for the vitriol directed at Tiger Woods for being, among other things, a jock.

These last ten years have taught us both about both egregious corporate greed (Enron, do we remember them?) and egregious imbalance of power in government (Rove, Cheney, and W.). And yet, we stand here at the beginning of a new decade, I would argue, nearly as dumb and ignorant as we were ten years ago. We are certainly a more fearful country. 9/11 and two financial collapses have aided in that, but we are not smarter. I might argue (if I were smarter, myself) that Americans' short attention-span has grown even shorter. Or I could say that given the terrorist attacks and attempts on our country, the destroyed 401ks and lost homes, Americans have turned to diversion rather than dealing with their problems.

After all, isn't easier to argue that Conan got screwed? That Tiger is a terrible husband by anybody's standards? Those are easy answers for nearly all of us, much less murky than what to do about the state of health insurance in this country or whether or not waterboarding will reveal information to save the life of someone you love? TMZ.com can show me beautiful people behaving badly and suddenly I don't feel like the schlep I did five minutes ago. Given all that I understand why the black and white results of the playoffs are on your mind (I too am a Colts-Vikings, man). But here's the thing, Dave. Scott Brown won in Massachusetts on Tuesday. I still don't know who lost.

I'm with CoCo (or trying to be),

Mike

Leno Agonistes

2010-01-21T20:30:00.001-08:00

Mike,

I had almost given up on our blog, but then I heard some good news that renewed my faith in everything: he is risen.

Everything seems different now. I hear birds singing, I feel the sunshine on my skin. I laugh just thinking of all those headlines. Oh, Leno be praised; Leno is back.

Anyway, It's the end of January 2010, which means two things: It's almost time for my Halloween 2009 post, and just in time for a very special Best of the Decade list to go along with all the others you've been reading almost two months ago now--I mean--recently. I'm talking about poetry, Mike, and while you may be surprised that as many as ten books of poems have been published in the last ten years, it's true. And next week, right here, on our beloved blog, I will be publishing various poets' lists of the best books of the Oughts. But maybe while we're at it, you could tell me your top ten works of fiction of the last decade. Let me guess: Eragon?

But in the meantime I have the chance to complain about some of the other lists that I spent so very much time reading as the odometer ticked over from 2009 to 2010. Let me ask then, Mike, if I should be shocked or resigned to the fact that Newsweek's "Cultural Predictions for 2010" are all about either TV or movies? I like TV more than the average self-satisfied ivory-tower type, but nothing from this country's museums, bookstores, concert halls? Even video game consoles? Nothing? Take a look:

Nonsense

Oh wait, Twilight is a book. Disregard everything above. Or ever in my life.

Speaking of culture, there are a few other things I've been meaning to ask you:

Mike, did you know that Brittany Murphy died of a broken heart?

Exactly who is prosecuted for murder when all of Hollywood is responsible? Harvey Weinstein?

Mike, did you know that Conan O'Brien is actually the one who screwed NBC?

It's true, all Conan cares about is PR. I think that's probably why he's left his hair like this:

Now, usually I'd be more interested in talking about an asinine list of upcoming cultural non-events. But these other news stories made me mad, and I don't know what to do with anger but indulge it.

So: I am reminded of what you've said about political campaigns: you shouldn't be allowed to lie. I don't care if that sounds naive. Someone should call you on it, and--to whatever extent is possible--should punish you for it. Even if that punishment is only a footnote in a blog that is read by literally several insomniacs between ordering Slap-Chops and Snuggies (neither of which, by the way, did this blogger receive for Christmas). I'm reminded of the email I received from the Ohio Democratic Party, requesting money to fight the Republican machine that "lied, cheated, and stole" the special Senate election in Massachusetts. Now perhaps you've noticed that I'm a liberal, and maybe that's why I find it so doubly disgusting that the Democratic party shit the bed in this election only to--in Ohio, at least--claim that the Republican party cheated to win it. Because only Republicans cheat, apparently. God knows the Kennedys never resorted to anything underhanded to win an election.

There's so much to talk about this year, Mike--I mean at least until we get bored with being bloggers again. We need to talk about the fate of the university English department. More on that soon. We need to talk about the playoffs, no matter what Jim Mora says. I'm picking the Colts and Vikings, which means you can look forward to Jets vs. Saints. We'll have two whole weeks to hype the Super Bowl, and I'll have at least one week to complain about the logo for next year's Super Bowl. I'm going to count how many people say, "I just like the commercials." It's true; they're so funny.

You know, in 2010, I'm not going to take our blog for granted anymore. Because--well, do you remember that night when you were blogging on your Macbook and I was blogging on my Macbook, and we saw that shooting star go across our screensavers? Well, this is what I wished for.

In Leno,
Dave

P.S.: Thank Christ for this, too.

I've Got Your Punditry Right Here

2009-10-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I took an additional week away from our blog because I had some catching up to do on the job that actually pays me money but is a distant to second to where my heart and allegiance lies--the devoted ten readers of Imagined Audience. But while stuck in my Ivory Tower I did manage to follow the news and I have some things I'd like to say in response to your post and about the big events of this past week.

First off, let me say your post was entertaining and full of what you and I both hope to achieve on this blog, a mix of high and low cultures threaded seamlessly together like the NFL's campaign for raising breast cancer awareness with the inclusion of pink into football cleats and team baseball caps. PTI is my favorite show on ESPN and the only one that I really watch with any interest and it's sad to see ESPN commit programming cannibalism by ripping off the format to parade out a slew of other shows that have faux arguments in them among men trying to outdo each other on the wittiness scale. But thank God for Sunday NFL Countdown, which is pretty much The View for men and about football, except when Elisabeth Hasselbeck is talking about her husband and the War in Iraq, then The View is The View for men, I guess.

I woke up on Friday and saw that President Obama had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about pundits hitting the throttle, Dave. Look at this article from the New York Times and see if you can count on all your digits the number of people weighing in on this. My first reaction to the news was probably much like Obama's. "You're fucking kidding me, right?" I mean, can you imagine getting called in your room at 6:00 a.m. and on the other end is a senior staffer (in your case, Winston the dog) and having him say, "Dave, Stockholm just called. You've won the Prize." At first, in this scenario, you're thinking that the Prize is a talking dog but once you are corrected you find out you now share the same lofty space as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. But really, imagine that moment. The shock. The names that run through your head (probably not Kissinger). And then the amazement and disbelief that he must have had at hearing the news. And then in the next three hours how none of that matters because the professional pundits in this country are going to shape the narrative of how this plays out not just this week, but for the next three years. Perhaps, this will go on for the rest of his life.

To comment on this is the nature of news and the nature of pundits. Hell, it's the nature of a blog like ours. But one of the problems with blogs as my friend, Elisabeth Chaves, points out in her assessment of the political economy of litblogs, is that:

If it is the case that the Internet only changes the form of discourse (by moving away from print media) and not its content, then how much of a difference does a change in form make—enough of a difference to begin to change the substance? One of the primarily specified changes in form is speed and its effects...In simplified terms, the speed of the Internet allows for quick communication, and quick communication is inherently unthoughtful [with the] writing [often displaying]...some sort of compulsory reflex rather than deliberative act.

In our news media today speed much more than content is what seems to matter. Nearly every columnist I enjoy reading has his or her own blog now so that they can often delve deeper into their own previous columns, providing hyperlinks to the data they are using to cite their information and/or facts and the major newspapers in the country have all taken to posting multiple blogs on multiple subjects on their websites. So when are we actually slowing down to consider what's happening in the world around us? Is that the job of the news media or the ordinary citizen? Both?

I'm not crying for the good old days here. Weekly columnists have always had to meet deadlines but in this amped up news cycle we seem to anticipate the news, and the response it will generate, rather than consider what this news might actually mean to our lives. The argument against what I'm saying here is that is exactly what pundits are trying to do. They're trying to frame the arguments in the context of how they will affect you, Dear Reader/Viewer, through a lens of how I feel/think about the subject. But how much time do these pundits actually get to spend on any one topic before something new breaks and they're on to the next thing?

It's impossible to slow the world down. I know that. And you can't turn back time unless you're Superman and Lois Lane has just been crushed in a rock slide. Yet, I found myself on Friday longing for a little more thoughtfulness on the big news of the day. For the record, I think Obama was the right choice as a president but the wrong choice to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner. His victory says more about the committee than it does about him and that's fine. After all, it's their prize to give away (and in this case that's what they did, they didn't award anything). But in a time when the two political parties in our country are rushing to decry or defend, I would have liked just a moment for us to all shut up and consider what this might and could mean, in the larger scope of the world around us, for our country. I saw somewhere, the Times probably, that said this victory was a call from the International community that they wanted America to retake its perch and be the leader that it has always been, but I have a hard time buying that. I mean, do schoolchildren in France really dream of the day when America will lead them again? Indonesia? Actually, they might, since Obama holds citizenship or permanent legal resident status there, but you get my point.

As the son of a Korean mother I have to tell you that America is as revered overseas as it is vilified. Not that having a Korean mother makes me ideally suited to express that, but I didn't grow up in a house that was always rah-rah, Go USA. I was able, sometimes, to see the fault of our nationalism and at the same time its great strength. And I was also able to see that we make mistakes as a country in our foreign policy, domestic policy, and in the way we change our currency (have you seen the new ten-dollar bill?). What has been bothering me since the summer, since Obama has been elected really, is that there are large portions of this country that will never see anything he's doing as an act of honest and sincere belief on his part. I never thought George W. Bush was a great president but I never really doubted the sincerity of his convictions, which is to say I believed he thought he was acting in the best interests of the country and on a set of deeply held principles.

Now, I don't know how many people thought Bush was pure evil on the left (excluding, Kanye, of course). I'm sure some of them thought this, only MSNBC wasn't willing to put them on the air whereas Fox has a whole network dedicated to proving that our President isn't interested in anybody in this country. If he's not in it for anybody, then who is he in it for? What would Obama stand to gain in a socialist America? Everybody would get some of his royalties from his bestselling books. Is that what he wants?

The point is this, Dave. Rather than discussing how Obama can use this to strengthen our position in the world and advance the interests of American policy overseas we spent most of Friday, and for me part of my Saturday morning golf match, talking about what a sham(e) it was that he won this award. The complaints from the people that I was playing golf was that they gave it to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter too but never gave one to Ronald Regan instead choosing Gorbachev. As my friend said, "When a Democrat promises to do something he gets one and when a Republican does it he gets nothing." You can't argue this but not because it's a ridiculous statement that undermines the work of three great men and overstates the role of another. You can't argue it because so much of world only wants to see black and white. My guy lost so the other fuckers are just that, fuckers. We on the left aren't interested in hearing that the second Bush gave lots of aid to Africa for AIDS (while also espousing abstinence only, I know) and we seem to casually yawn when we think about the ravages in Rwanda during Clinton's presidency.

I think our pundits can do better by us. We live in a world where you can't make a name for yourself unless you go to extremes--see David Blaine--and that any matter of gray, any moving into the murk is considered somehow weak or untenable. Our pundits need to stop telling us what to think and they need to start telling us where to find our information and how to ask the right questions. Obama has and is going to make mistakes that will have consequences for us all but he's also going to have successes that we need to recognize in the moment. What is the sum end gain if only one party in our country wins power of everything? I mean, isn't democracy about deciding what kind of country we want while not simply overriding the minority but protecting their rights too? There are big, big questions out there that nobody seems interested in answering. I think there is, more often than not, a truth in the mystery of life here on planet earth.

If all this makes you as depressed as it makes me then read this. It made me feel better and made me believe that somebody was thinking rationally last week. And if one person is thinking rationally, then maybe we call can. And if we call can...well, you know where I'm going. Slow down, Dave. Think about your response. Speed kills, after all.

Keeping my hopes up,

Mike

Talking Heads

2009-10-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Mike,

I feel like we never talk anymore. But I hope you had fun on your vacation from our blog. I sure did.

I was so stoked. But Mike, we've got plenty of time to talk about surfing as November approaches here in Cleveland. Instead, I want to tell you about a book I came across the other day, the title of which sounds fascinating: Eric Alterman’s Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics. The title seemed to capture just the sense I’ve had recently as I’ve watched and read whatever media pass before me, and I was pretty sure I saw in a description a reference to its take on the Bush Administration and Iraq. I was interested enough to look up the publication date:

August 1992. My fault. Wrong Bush Administration.

Here’s the Publisher’s Weekly description:

An elite group of self-declared experts has seized power over the political life of the United States. Is it the Best and the Brightest? The CIA? No, argues Eric Alterman in his first book, a scathing, humor-filled expose: it is the "punditocracy"--the media commentators who intimidate politicians and mislead the public they ostensibly keep informed. After several background chapters focusing on Ur-pundit Walter Lippmann, Alterman beams his searchlight on "The Reagan Punditocacy." In particular he assails syndicated columnist and TV commentator George Will and TV roundtable host John McLaughlin for derelictions of journalistic duty and ethics. Alterman also scrutinizes the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic and the TV news shows, dishing up juicy tidbits of behind-the-scenes gossip spiced with indignation. The final third of the book analyzes pundits' relationships with the Bush administration, focusing on what Alterman contends was their propagandizing for the Gulf War. Successful both as political history and as media criticism, this work deserves a wider audience than the political news junkies it is sure to attract.

If there is a better-informed consumer of media among our nine readers, I hope s/he is laughing at me as we speak. I probably should have known about this book already, especially considering the fact that I’ve admired Alterman’s writing from time to time. Then I thought, "Wow, that book sure is due for a second edition."

Then I found the second edition, "with new material on the impact of the O.J. Simpson trial and the rise of MSNBC as well as on the Clinton scandals, the media's obsession with Monica Lewinsky, and the resulting conflation of investigative reporting with gossip."

Fine. Fine. But that's still a second edition from January 2000. There must still be plenty left to say about the continued dominance of cable news and the explosion of the blogosphere.

The point, I guess, is that the "Punditocracy" has been working toward media oligarchy for a long time. But I don’t really want to talk about politics. I want to talk instead about the way punditry has spread from the political media into every other variety, so that most of my own media consumption, at least, consists of reading, watching, and listening to other people's opinions.

For me -- a poet and literary critic, by training -- that's not necessarily a bad thing. If I didn't care about rhetoric and argument, and if I didn't enjoy a little showmanship from time to time, I'd be wasting all that effort and attention. But like so many things that I do and enjoy, I'm not sure I want the entire country doing them. (Like voting, for instance.) And since I'm a hypocrite, I don't mind praising PTI in one breath while condemning (the now-defunct) Crossfire in another.

There are, of course, important differences. Kornheiser and Wilbon are fascinating to listen to because, as you've said before, you can tell that they love disagreeing because they like each other. And if you've ever seen an episode when either Tony or Wilbon is away, you know the sinking feeling that comes from hearing the name "Dan Le Batard." Just like when you go to Cats and end up with the understudy performing the role of--um--that one cat. Whenever you watch cable news, you know what you're going to get, no matter who's playing the role of Liberal and who's playing Conservative. (There are exceptions, and these are elected to a separate canon of holy punditry.)

Perhaps it is a peculiarly American phenomenon that we watch shows where people sit around and talk about whether or not something someone else said was appropriate, and then we ourselves argue about whether or not what that person said about that person saying it was appropriate. Sometimes the people we are watching on TV are talking about the relative appropriateness of the actions of other people on TV. If that is a purely American thing, well, let freedom ring.

Full disclosure, Mike: I write for a blog. That means I’m a pundit too. Don't listen to any of us.

Your favorite talking head (besides David Byrne),
Dave

PS -- The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday. Who's your prediction? I've got either Adonis or Ko Un. We're due for a poet.

Ingrates

2009-09-24T17:40:00.001-07:00

Mike,

I feel like Thanksgiving's come early, what with all this gratitude going around. Just some turkey and some passive-aggression and things would be perfect. But I'd be grateful (see what I did there?) if we could steer the conversation away from politics, because the Google Adsense Robot seems to think we're trying to get people to contribute to Joe Wilson's reelection campaign and to stop the Liberal Campus Monopoly. Which, by the way, I think would be a great board game. You may have put up a hostel on your Oberlin, but watch out for the Whole Foods on my Berkeley. Dibs on the Vespa gamepiece.

Anyway, Mike, I’d love to talk about gratitude, and its more abundant cousin, ingratitude. As I believe you’ve seen, I flinch with rage when someone I’ve let ahead of me in traffic fails to acknowledge the favor with a wave. I say you’re welcome—loudly—to those who have not thanked me for holding a door. Two reasons for this: 1) I’m grouchy. 2) We may have transformed into a service-based economy, but I don’t work for these people.

On the other hand, if you’re like me, you go around every day annoyed at traffic instead of grateful for those who designed and maintain the highway, annoyed at the computer instead of grateful to those who invented the internet, annoyed with your family instead of grateful to them for everything. We are all ingrates. The important thing is to admit it.

That’s no easy thing when everybody wants to believe that what they’ve accomplished they’ve accomplished on their own. Those from tough circumstances may want to believe that they’ve overcome obstacles on their own. Those from a privileged background may want to believe that they justify their lucky circumstances just by being themselves.

I think about the writers I’ve known. The selfish, solipsistic asses are always those clawing desperately for some kind of recognition, looking around the room to see if there's someone more important they should be talking to. The great writers I’ve known—and I’ve been lucky enough to know a few—have almost without exception been gracious and kind. They are people I don't hesitate to ask for advice or help because they never make me feel as if I'm asking something of them. This has been true of my greatest teachers, too.

But why get bogged down in who's thanking whom for what when there are more important things to discuss:

Mike, why do football people always fawn all over Bill Parcells as if he's been a guru everywhere he's gone? Parcells won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants in the 1980s, and he's taken other teams to the playoffs. But football commentators act as if everything Parcells touches turns into the Vince Lombardi Troophy. Take a look at this list. Note the conspicuous lack of Parcells. (He would be #31.) Bill Walsh did more to change the modern offense and Buddy Ryan did more to change the modern defense. Bill Belichick and Joe Gibbs both won three Super Bowls, and Belichick's taken two teams to the playoffs, though I don't want to talk about that. So what is it about Parcells? This sweater?

Pass the stuffing.

Gratitudinously,
Dave

Thanks, thanks a lot--now love me

2009-09-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I've had a hard time thinking about what to write about this week. I mean, we've talked politics and we've talked books. God knows we've not talked as much about the NFL as we should have, but that's been covered too. So what new ground is there for us? What can two guys like us, with too many advanced degrees and time on their hands, possibly discuss? I know what you're thinking. When Delonte West was pulled over in Maryland a gift from the Gods was handed to me and I could go on for pages about the stupidity of an NBA player carrying three loaded weapons with him, but I'm not going to do that. You know why? I don't shoot fish in a barrel, snuff puppies in a croaker sack and take them to the creek, or cruise high schools for dates (not since 2003 anyway). It's just too easy, Dave. I don't do easy.

Instead, I want to talk about gratitude and the lack of it abounding around us as well as humility. At my college graduation Wendell Berry told a group of yawning, sweating undergrads that "We grow always into the knowledge of debts that cannot be repaid to those whom they are owed." One of the things he cited in that speech was that many people like to believe because they come from tough circumstances they like to believe they've accomplished their goals on their own. "You may think you've paid for your education all by yourself and that may be true, but you did not write the books that you studied from. You did not create the language you use or the culture you inherited." You owe a debt to everyone, in short.

I remembered this speech after reading a pair of recent editorials. The first by David Brooks of The New York Times, my favorite conservative columnist (and that's not an oxymoron), and the other by Rick Reilly, the one-liner extraordinaire from ESPN the Magazine (also the worst title ever for a magazine). Both pieces mention Michael Jordan and his Hall of Fame speech and its utter lack of gratitude and humility. While Reilly uses his piece to basically expose the facade that is MJ, Brooks uses the bizarre speech as an example of a larger problem in the culture. Primarily, that we've become a little too expressive, a little too individualistic. The grace note is this sentence: "Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine."

He's not talking about market forces, he's talking about people that are only in it for themselves and have little regard for anybody else. Recent examples of this he cites are MJ, Kanye and Joe Wilson. In a culture that commodifies everything, all that is valued is that which we can buy. An education and the teachers within that system are service providers rather than facilitators of a two way street of thoughtful ideas is one example that hits close to home for me. But this kind of me culture adds to our lack of civil and thoughtful debate in this country and it's what allows members of the media to operate under the auspice of the greater good while only serving their own best interests, giving rise to a host of demagogues all over our air waves, bolstered by corporate advertisers looking to sell product. Who stood to gain the most in last weekend's 9/12 rally? Fox News and a commentator named Glenn Beck. It certainly wasn't the ordinary Americans who are in the midst of this financial downfall and high unemployment percentage. As the Census Bureau reported last week, Americans lost ground in nearly every important financial marker in the last year of the Bush presidency and yet when I was home last weekend in rural Kentucky, it struck me as odd to see a sign in a neighbor's yard that read, "Take Back America." What, exactly, I wanted to ask needs to be taken back? What have we lost now that we didn't lose four years ago when Bush was reelected? And who is taking it from us?

It's not ideology that separates us so much as it is a lack of human empathy. There is a distinct belief that what we feel and what we know is best and to hell with everyone else that disagrees. This is what fuels, as Hendrick Hertztberg writing in this week's New Yorker, calls:"This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—[that] has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment." Neither side, it seems, can or is willing to see through to the other side. We hold no gratitude for the gains that are beneficial to us created by those we oppose (and therefore we will oppose with all our might) and we offer little to no humility in defeat. They call the students you and I teach, Dave, the Me Generation but it's hard to believe that they are the most egregious offenders of narcissism, especially when you consider the last two sitting presidents are both baby boomers and I wouldn't say either of them was hurtin' for confidence or self-servitude.

There is a moment early on in Faulkner's great short story, "Barn Burning" when young Sarty is confronted by his father, Abner, after having almost told the judge of his father's misdeeds. "You're getting to be a man," he says. "You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you." The irony is that Abner is a selfish man asking for sacrifice from his son. A smart reader sees the essential truth of what Abner is saying despite his moral deficiencies as a father and a man and if we could all just open ourselves up a little more then maybe we'd be a humbler people. A more grateful nation.

All best,

Mike

A Treatise on Aesthetics, featuring Ric Flair

2009-09-16T08:17:00.001-07:00

Mike,

Let me begin by sharing with you the best news of the week, maybe of our whole lives: Linda McMahon running against Chris Dodd. As far as I know, professional wrestlers and those who are sometimes piledrived by professional wrestlers are batting 1.000 when it comes to political campaigns:

I hope Linda McMahon's decision will make way for the political campaign I've been waiting for all my life: RIC FLAIR FOR POPE. You may say I'm a dreamer, but it would only be natural for the Nature Boy to be Christ's vicar on earth. After all, he already dresses like the Pope--

And speaking of the Catholics, my people and your employers, let's talk about Dan Brown. Now, I don't understand much about money, given that I made a decision some time ago to make "poet" my career. But I spend a lot of time thinking about literature vs. Literature, and in particular the question you asked: "And who gets to define literature"?

As far as I know, the best answer to that is: Borders. After all, you can study and write on just about anything in graduate English programs these days. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. But Borders will put Gabriel Garcia Marquez on one shelf, Dean Koontz on another, and then give Dan Brown his own cardboard shelf from which his books fly at 40% off.

Maybe the best essay I've read on this particular topic in recent years has been this article by Jonathan Franzen, which I have used with my own students. I know you like Franzen about as much as you like mandible claws, but I think he's on to something here, in naming the distinction between "status" and "contract" readers and writers. But it's a fickle distinction, as you'll see as Franzen details his attempt to read William Gaddis's JR. I, like some readers, am perfectly happy to describe themselves as a staunch defender of Lit-rah-chuh--one of Franzen's "status" readers--until I run into a book I cannot get through. Then, with the quickness of a Kanye West apology, I become a "contract" reader, mumbling to myself about the pedantry of an author whom I don't understand.

I mention all of this, Mike, because I think it has to do directly with the things that makes you (and me, for that matter) angriest about Dan Brown: his success. When I see The Da Vinci Code on someone's list of "favorite books," it makes me doubt the mission of my profession. Because I can't exactly explain why it shouldn't be on this someone's list. If literature should primarily give pleasure, as I and some others believe, who am I to say that a reader should not take pleasure from a particular book. Or a particular movie? On one side, the critics; on the other, the mass market. Between them, a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.

My best answer is that I go to literature not only for pleasure, but also for wisdom. There is only slight comfort, at best, in the Matthew Arnold poem I just quoted. Everyone dies at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies, and in the comedies they live, which Shakespeare doesn't necessarily portray as all that much better. So why not read something like The Notebook (which, I understand, is as comforting as a Snuggie and a puppy combined) instead?

Well, because I don't believe it, for one thing. I don't believe what it has to tell me about my life and, more importantly, our collective existence as a species. It's too easy, not in that it's stupid, but in that they treat me as if I were stupid. "Renowned symbologist Robert Langdon"? Of course, because if you believe in such conspiracy theories, the one thing I imagine old money New England Brahmins with their morning frocks and brandy snifters and private islands would be thrilled to endow is a Department of effing Symbology at Harvard where one particular symbologist--and renowned, at that--is unraveling their enigmas one by one.

But.

Although.

On the other hand. Since earlier on I mentioned that limousine-riding, jet-flying son of a gun, I'll have to admit that I'm the same guy who believes--emphatically--that professional wrestling matches have aesthetic merit and can be judged accordingly. That probably sounds as absurd as saying that Dan Brown is an author whom we'll see in Sweden one day. I guess the point is that, no matter how we struggle against it, no matter which Roman poets one appeals to or Victorian poets one quotes, all of this comes down to taste. Which I hear, from the Romans, there's no disputing.

Except that mine is good and everyone else's is bad.

Aesthetically,
Dave

I'm Back on Facebook and Hate Myself For It

2009-09-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dave,

You probably noticed, amid little fanfare, i.e. absolutely zero, that I came back to Facebook after only a week hiatus. It was a tough week not hearing about status updates from 300 of my closest friends and not being able to kill whole hours looking at pictures, reading postings, and contemplating my own FB layout. I mean, am I coming off as hip enough with the books and music I've put out there? Are my own status updates sufficiently witty? And then, to beat all, I've got to reply to your post and then post on my own FB page as if everybody doesn't have enough stuff to read on their own already. Who the hell do I think I am? So there is much self-loathing going on here these days but that won't stop me from bringing your attention to this item that a friend of mine posted to her FB wall about what booksellers are doing with Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol. Hey, you mentioned it first when you gave away the ending.

One the key arguments the article makes is that by offering Brown's book at half-off bookstores are undercutting the value of their own product while also not using all that money they will make to help pull publishing out of a hole. The vendors argue that this will bring foot-traffic into stores. But here's what I'm latching onto: "Some might argue that putting Dan Brown on sale at half-price is a thoroughly democratic way of making literature more accessible to a mass public. In the end, though, price-cutting simply devalues the allure of what remains." And here's the thing, when the hell did Dan Brown become literature? I mean, isn't he just writing TV with words? There's no real character development there. It's all a plot based drama meant to get us from A to Z in as many crooked (and fast) steps as possible, correct? And who gets to define literature? Is it a guy like me who stands before a class everyday giving them what I think are some of the best stories around? I mean, am I wrong to think that Ron Rash's, One Foot in Eden, is about a million times better than all of Dan Brown's books combined and still he tells a fast story and a murder mystery while also probing the depths of the human heart? I don't think I am.

At the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and probably every other conference where books are discussed, there is a lot of wrangling these days over what the Kindle and price measures like those above are going to do to the state of publishing as we know it. And it's true that trees and paper are finite resources. Some say books will become like antiques, at least hardcover books anyway, and some say that they hope books will enjoy a new life as a valued hipster item like vinyl records. All that is fine. I mean, I'm still going to buy books and so are a lot of people, but I'm not sure it will be enough to sustain a behemoth industry because I do believe there are fewer people reading books these days (though let's hope they're reading the hell out of this blog). So we can't really worry about that. And we can't really worry about business models, even those of us that one day want to be part of that business model, because, well, we're not going to have any say so in future economic plans for DoubleDay, Random House, or Knopf (all of those, I believe, are owned by the same German conglomerate, by the way).

The larger issue for me is that publishers need to publish better material. Why does Pam Anderson get to write a book? Or Joe the Plumber? I mean, they're not writing it, ghostwriters are. I question the article's basis that money made from a Dan Brown book is really being diverted from helping the overall book industry. Publishers will tell us that the James Patterson's of the world pay for the Ron Rash's of the world. Maybe. It's not as if I don't believe there is a place for Patterson in this world just as I believe there is a place for Pynchon too. I know I'm parsing words with the article's use of "literature," but in the same way you can put a bow on a turd and call it a gift, it's still a turd. Literature is a term reserved for the best, even stuff that we can't understand, but that seeks to deepen our human experience and vision of the world. I don't think Dan Brown's vision of the Catholic Church and his examination of it is what Thoreau had in mind, but I also can't speak for Henry. The book industry to me feels a bit like the record industry. If they want to continue to survive and make money they've got to make better books. There are probably a million holes in my logic here, but why are we paying out millions of dollars to celebrities when that money can't possibly be made back. Even the outrageous advances to someone like Charles Frazier can't possibly be made back, can they? On this count the article is right and certainly not if the book sells for half-price right out of the gate.

As with all things a little fiscal prudence, a little more dependable product is the real step to saving our reading culture, which to me means saving our culture. Joe Wilson or Kanye can't save us here but I do think Serena can. Have you seen how ripped her arms are? And, lastly, wouldn't it have been nice if she said what she said with that tennis ball to Joe Wilson? God, that'd be the greatest mash up in history.

Non-threateningly yours,

Mike

Monday Morning Punting

2009-09-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Mike,

It's a new week. Joe Wilson is sorry, Serena Williams is sorry, Kanye West is sorry*. I'm sorry too. I want to start fresh -- because, Mike, you can do anything you want as long as you offer a half-assed apology for it later.

Instead of that, let's try this. Some good things I came across this weekend:

This enigmatic poem, by Paula Bohince, in this week's New Yorker.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill's article on Obama and Joe Wilson on The Root says what I tried to say in my post last week, but better and smarter. She also astutely skewers the liberals who cheered when their President (I'm talking about Bush this time) was assaulted in a foreign country. Ifill's absolutely right: if it's not okay to yell "You lie!" at a president you like, it's not okay to throw things at a president you don't like.

I posted on my Facebook page this Sunday the New York Times obit for Norman Borlaug. This summer we saw exhibitionist spectacles of public mourning for Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy. Neither one mattered to the world as much as Borlaug. Am I going too far in saying that few people of the last century mattered as much to the world as Borlaug did? Maybe, but we've spent enough time talking about why Jackson and Kennedy matter. I already said this on Facebook, but you've departed Facebook, so I'll say it here too. When the greatest of great men die, we tend to say, "Who?"

Mike, when last I checked, Hilary Mantel was the odds-on favorite to take the 2009 Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall. Have you read it? I know how much you like historical novels about the Tudors.

I want to add to my Big Fall Preview this new novel by Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist. Baker's writing--first recommended to me by the incomparable George Bilgere--is always gloriously weird and slightly disturbing. And he has one of the best beards in contemporary letters:

Also, did you finish The Lost Symbol yet? I did, and here's the ending: it's a sled. Spoiler alert!

Symbologistically,
Dave

*In other news, Kanye West is also a gay fish.

Thanks, Tango

2009-09-11T05:49:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I have to say I'm impressed by your blog response detailing the idiocy of one Joe Wilson. It's clear to me after reading your last post that I'm just the Teller to your Penn, the Costello to your Abbot, Ed to your Johnny (or Andy to Conan), Cash to your Tango. In some ways, I'm fine being the lesser of two bloggers because that's the way this life works. Some people have talents in areas that you don't. For instance, Obama is intelligent and articulate and cool-mannered and Joe Wilson, well, he's not any of those things.

But, if I could, I'd like to refocus the conversation back to my original post and show how much Joe Wilson is a dipshit in the process as well. If you remember, one of the things I find most troubling in our country today is our willful ignorance. My argument/opinion was bolstered yesterday when I came across Timothy Egan's blog on the New York Times website where he discusses some of this himself and much more pointedly than, perhaps, I ever could. See that use of "perhaps" Dave? I believe your last post has my confidence, as a writer, shaken. At any rate, what I like about what Egan is saying here is that we're letting our own self-interest get in the way of what's really important. Joe Wilson and others would like to believe that health care reform can come at a cost that doesn't actually cost anybody anything, but that's not really how it's going to work. I believe we have to make a choice in this country, as we do all the time, about what we feel is important. I don't want large deficits either or for the national debt to grow and I don't honestly see how this administration, or any other, can curb those effects of true health care reform, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in the solution of a single-payer system. I think we have to decide what is best for our country and the people living within it. We have to make a decision about what kind of country we want to be.

Smokers weren't very happy with smoking bans in restaurants and bars and automakers weren't very happy about putting seat belts in cars. But public health officials will tell you they consider the laws banning smoking in public places as one of the greatest successes of the concept of public health and I think we can all realize the importance of safety belts and the subsequent requirement of many states that one must be worn at all times while in the car. In both instances lives are saved. I know there are some Militia Men out in Montana that find both of these to be infringements on one's personal rights and you know what? They're right. But that doesn't make the laws wrong either. The greater good is served by these measures because the negative effects of smoking become more prevalent to smokers and potential smokers as well as more difficult to enjoy, thus diverting those who are too lazy to walk an twenty extra feet to light up that Parliament. The other result is that the next time you're at Applebee's eating your riblet platter you don't have inhale the second-hand smoke coming off Joe Wilson's cig. Tell me, who loses in that situation (other than the pig, of course)?

To me this question about healthcare, and most of the hot-button issues in this country, always comes back to that fundamental question, though: What kind of people do we want to be? It's hard for us to answer because we are almost always talking in abstract terms and even when we humanize the debate by recounting personal stories of friends, family, or our own, some of us are so steeped in our positions and world views that the idea of consensus will never be reached. And all that's fine except that it isn't because there is a distinct unwillingness to even consider somebody who holds an opinion different than your own comes to that position from a good place. But maybe I'm overstating matters and falling subject to the cable news media that prefers showing polarity over thoughtful engagement on the subject matter. I can't say for sure and I wish I could.

Now, let me see if I can wrap all this up, stay on point, and get back to Joe Wilson all at once (that's some fucking meta-blogging for your ass, Tango). Joe Wilson yells, "You lie!" in the middle of the president's speech and later explains he got caught up in the passion of the moment and apologizes for his lack of civility. We've all said things we regretted at times we regretted in places we shouldn't have. I'll grant the jacknut that much. But what kind of man believes his position, his own "passion," is so important that whatever counterargument he has to offer (and we have to pause here and admit, "You lie" is about as good as "Go fuck your mother" in the pantheon of rhetorical rebuttresses) needs to be voiced immediately and in the halls of Congress? A selfish one. Joe Wilson's response to the president isn't about passion or a lack of civility any more than my love for Rachel McAdams has to do with her performance in The Notebook. Though maybe that's because I never saw The Notebook. His response has everything to do with the fact that he needs to be heard here and now, and that all other arguments that disagree with his own don't deserve the same time and measure as his does. It's only occurred to me recently, which I admit sheepishly, that what's really going on in the right-wing cable news and radio world as well as every night on Countdown is that all these guys are trying to shout down the other side but rarely with any facts I'd trust. Joe Wilson isn't interested in learning anything, only in yelling something. We all want to be heard but we don't really care if anyone is listening, and if they are, they're only listening to what they want.

That's an awfully big brush I've just used there, I know. But as our schools crumble, as we turn our colleges into modern-day vocational schools where the only reason to attend is to get a piece of paper to get a job to make money, it's hard to believe that the days of Henry Clay, The Great Compromiser, are to return anytime soon. We don't want democracy. We want easy. We can't have both.

Take care (and take shelter),

Mike

Being Joe Wilson

2009-09-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

Mike,

As they were for you, things were going fine for a while. I was all set to issue some conciliatory words, some elegant prose designed to calm you down, to talk you off this precipice of rage at the edges of which you find yourself so dangerously perched. I was going to say that the republic is healthy with dissent rather than to talk more about Obama, lest we become part of the liberal blogosphere. I was ready to let reason, instead of rage, direct my response. Then this happened.

That's Representative (which seems a strong word to me) Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, yelling "Lie!" or "You lie!" or "Liar!" at the President of the United States during the latter's delivery of a speech on health care reform to a Joint Session of Congress.

During Obama's last address to a joint session we saw Congressmen "Twittering" from the floor. I put "Twittering" in quotes because it's not the sort of verb any elected official should ever be doing, especially during a president's speech. If you're not allowed to text in my Creative Writing evening class, you sure as shit shouldn't be allowed to "Twitter" during a State of the Union. If anyone--Republican or Democrat--had done that during the Bush Administration, they would have been immediately added to the Axis of Evil.

And now Representative Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, feels entitled to interrupt the President as he sees fit during this speech. The message of Wilson's act is clear, and we've seen it repeatedly from those who have chosen to prefer fearmongering about Obama instead of attending to his policies. This president is a person who does not deserve our respect because he is not really the President of the United States. You do not need to listen to him, especially if you are enrolled in a public school. You do not need to allow him to speak to Congress. Soon enough you will not need to stand when he enters the room. Pick your reason for not liking him. He wasn't born in the United States. He's a secret Muslim. He's a socialist. He's a racist (wait, really?).

Mike, if I were going to address Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson in the spirit of his own heckle tonight, I would simply say: "Fuck you." And that might suffice, given Wilson's capacity for intellectual rebuttal and the long history of telling members of Congress to go fuck themselves.

Because I have only passing relationships with egomaniacal self-important morons, I didn't know who Wilson was before tonight. So I checked Wikipedia (as any good scholar does) to find that in 2002, Wilson, whom some* consider a modern-day Cicero, "called Congressman Bob Filner 'viscerally anti-American' and claimed that he had a 'hatred of America' after Filner suggested the United States supplied chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein."

All politicians are hypocrites because the nature of their trade is to make opinions of convenience sound like deeply held moral codes. But Mike, I hope you will remember tonight which of the two hypocritical parties it is who hates America, who has no respect for the republic's offices and traditions. Wilson's fellow South Carolinian, Lindsay Graham, was disgusted by a certain someone's behavior Wednesday night as being beneath the dignity of the office. He means you, Obama: "I was incredibly disappointed in the tone of his speech,” said Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).”At times, I found his tone to be overly combative and believe he behaved in a manner beneath the dignity of the office. I fear his speech tonight has made it more difficult — not less — to find common ground." Also, "Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is running for Obama's old Senate seat, said, "He talked at us. He didn't listen to us... It was a missed opportunity." Apparently Representative Kirk has trouble distinguishing between a speech and a town hall meeting. (Politico).

And then, since we are (in theory) talking about health care reform, I also want you to remember which party does nothing because it doesn't have the guts to stand up for anything they claim to believe in. No, not the Whigs.

BREAKING NEWS: Mike, just as I was completing this post, I learned that Wilson has offered an apology to President Obama. He let his emotions get the best of him. Great. Now he can be described as passionate. So yes, I do fear for the republic tonight, because here and now you can call someone "anti-American" just because you disagree with him, and half of the country will nod their heads and rub their palms in glee. And the other half will happily squander their majorities and their mandates.

And then there is what once was the fourth estate, now merely the pundit class (of which, by writing about Obama, I suppose we are now members), whose responsibility to the republic is perhaps the gravest (if only because they answer to the market and not to constituents). Tonight I heard Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan, offer reasonable and respectful dissent, skewering Obama's rhetorical tendency to set up straw men on the far left and right and then pretending to walk the center. I heard intelligent critique of the administration from Democrat Joseph Califano, who argues that Obama has ignored any genuine attempt at preventative medicine.

But who's heard of Thaddeus McCotter? Joseph Califano? Now who's heard of Sean Hannity? Of Keith Olbermann?

I'll try to take the long view--not that this makes me feel any better--because any republic is always in trouble. The will of its people is fickle, and too often too poorly-informed; there will always be tyrants marching across its fields and despots getting elected in order that they be stopped. All the guardians of the republic may be bought, and those who buy them will be lionized because, to modify some words from James Joyce, we "speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money."

So I don't want to say that Representative Joe Wilson was being anti-American. Because in America, you're still free to be a stupid dick.

Keep that in mind for your next post.

Dave

*Editor's note. Some = No one, now or ever.

A Litany of Pleasures--well, it started that way.

2009-09-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I began this post, originally, wanting to detail the beauty of the fall to you, how hopeful I've always felt this time of year to be, even as a boy playing football when I'd run out on a freshly cut field marked in chalk and see all the parents and students dressed in our school colors and I would think, even then, how nice it all seemed and how fleeting youth is. What is that Twain quote? "Youth is wasted on the young." And the thing was I don't think I wasted it. I think I savored my youth and I embraced it. Hell, I don't even think I'm old enough now to consider myself old and to not take a minute to embrace my youthfulness. So I had this big blog planned where I was going to talk about college football and the NFL and the fall movie season, and what it's like getting a fresh batch of new students who've never heard your jokes before, and how everything, for me, at least, seems rosy and new with the fall semester beginning. Because, after all, my life is marked by semesters not years, it seems.

But something happened. One, the post was really boring. It didn't matter that I included a clip of this punch from last Thursday's Oregon-Boise State game. Still dull. It didn't matter that I was talking about the NFL and made a really nice reference to the old television show Coach. Snooze City. There was nothing I could do to save this blog, this "stupid blog," according to our "friend" Arin other than restart it and tell you what's really on my mind.

Obama.

Obama has been president for nearly eight months and the slide to socialism, to hear media outlets of every stripe tell it, is upon us. Now, I know you agree with me on most of what I'll say here, but what's a blog for if not for venting to the 6 people that read us (and that's six people who are not blood relatives or that we're sleeping with--that I know of)? By every stripe I mean, the mainstream news is forced to cover the crazy right-wing propagators of falsehood because in our day and age, in our media saturated world, they no longer have the luxury to ignore them. And when those people scream, the people that feel marginalized in this country feel like they have a voice on their side. So, suddenly, it's okay to pull your child out of school so he or she doesn't have to listen to the president tell him or her to stay in school because based off of no evidence whatsoever, he's a socialist. I don't want to get into what a socialist is or if anybody even really understands that concept (they don't or they'd stop drinking milk in this country), but I want to get into the fact that we are willfully making ourselves dumber in this country. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is you have a salve for your wounds at MSNBC or Fox. There's no reason to listen to the other side because there's always one person on your side. When did this happen and what does it mean for our future?

Imagine if we made all our decisions based on listening to only one side of the debate. The De Beers company would have us believe that love only comes in the form of a diamond (at minimum 1 carat, don't you think?). Or if we took all our cues from, say, pharmaceutical ads, we'd see that the only way to solve our problems is through medication. I know these are both big leaps in logical reasoning, I'm aware of that, but the larger point is why does it seem so many of us are uninterested in educating ourselves about what's out there and determining for ourselves how we feel? I don't need The Huffington Post to tell me what to think or Rachel Maddow. I'm pretty sure I know how I feel. I do need Fox News to confirm for me that Sean Hannity is an evil man whose own self-interest outweighs anything he feels for this country. The point here is that I'll watch Sean Hannity but not Rachel Maddow. I already know I'm going to agree with her--probably. I know that the only thing Sean Hannity and I could possibly agree on is that the 1995-1996 Kentucky Men's Basketball Team is the greatest assembly of talent in college history. So I need to know what the other side is saying, or afraid of, if I'm going to combat those criticisms in an honest and fair way. And then I also need to read David Brooks if I want to know what the legitimate criticisms of the Obama plan are.

These are just small examples of a bigger problem: Our republic is becoming stupider (and, yes, I said stupider because it sounds worse than dumber and, well, stupider). The day we stop listening to the other side is the day we turn our backs on a free exchange of ideas and any chance we have at real movement and change in this country. Perhaps, it's always been this way, this divisiveness, but something about the rancor over this small speech tells me it's getting to a level of insanity that is unhealthy and damning to the state. After all, how can we better versions of ourselves, if we're not even willing to look at ourselves? The fall has already gotten bloody and Brett Favre hasn't even taken a snap against the Packers yet.

Shalom,

Mike

Graphic Content. (It's a Pun.)

2009-09-02T19:10:00.000-07:00

Mike,

Did you mean this?

That commercial reminds me that it's time for a new season of NFL football. Well, that commercial and your mention of the new season of NFL football. And while I can't wait for one more (one more) (one more) season of the courageous Brett Favre, I have an aesthetic bone to pick with the NFL before we start talking about our Fantasy Football league (I'm drafting an all-orc defense, by the way.):

A year ago, the NFL changed their logo for the first time in almost forty years, changing from

The new logo is bolder, more HDTV-friendly, and easier for manufacturers to reproduce on jerseys they sell to every guy I went to high school with. And the darker colors are an aspect of the metallic color regime under which team uniforms have suffered since the mid-Nineties. I prefer the grand, sweeping serifs of the old shield, but I'll save my vitriol to what they've done to my precious Super Bowl logos. Here are two logos from the Nineties, for Super Bowls in Arizona and Miami:

That Art Deco Super Bowl XXXIII logo is the Chrysler Building of sporting event logos. But both of these convey a spirit of the place where the event would be held, along with being (I think) beautiful works of graphic design in and of themselves. Just like a good book cover.

Now take a look at Arizona and Miami logos from this decade:

These logos are to the Super Bowl what Michael Vick is to terriers. Hey Super Bowl XLII, Close Encounters of the Third Kind called. They want their font back. (You can see many more of these logos here, at sportslogos.net.)

Now Mike, you may think this is all much ado about nothing. And you're absolutely right. It is. On the other hand, I believe wholeheartedly that bad art of any kind is bad for the soul. Especially when there's good art out there. Listen to me. Do you know how many football games I watch every year? Do I sound like a guy with a peaceful soul?

But why spend so much time on the NFL's artistic failure when there's so much good stuff out there? You mentioned Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, and I agree. It's stunning. I can't speak to how faithfully translator Anne Born renders Petterson's Norwegian, but I was struck at how much the English in this novel sounds like the English I heard spoken in Oslo and Bergen a decade ago.

There's (eventually) David Simon's new series, Treme, coming to HBO in 2010.

There's (I swear to God) Bob Dylan's forthcoming Christmas album.

There's this.

And there's the greatest helmet in the history of sports, the whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor in the first place.

Have you listened to those Bread Loaf lectures yet? Ed Hirsch's talk on "Poetry and Walking" is great. Have you ever tried walking? One of these days I just might.

Autumnally,
Dave

Books? We're Talking About Books?

2009-09-01T05:14:00.000-07:00

Dave,

You should say the above in former Colts coach, Jim Mora's voice when he was asked about the playoffs after a game one time.

I was glad to see this post and was worried that, perhaps, you had moved to Vermont and enrolled in syrup-making classes. I'm glad to hear that you will still be a graduate student come October embroiled in the debate over whether or not Marx cared about Joyce. That is what you guys do, right? I was never smart enough for all that kind of talk. I just read the stories.

Before I get on to my picks for the fall, let me ask you something. Did you see Brett Favre play for the Vikings last night? I've never heard of this guy but I have to say that a 40-year old rookie quarterback has to be the sports story of the year, don't you? I mean, sure the fact that Michigan is in hot water over apparent NCAA violations is a big deal where you're living these days and the Big Eleven continues to be the conference where imagination goes to die, but this Favre guy is pretty amazing. Apparently, he was just throwing passes to high school kids back where he lives in Mississippi a few weeks back and the Vikes called him up. It reminds of a great and under-appreciated film, Necessary Roughness. A must for any fan of football and of human beings, in general.

Okay, so here are my picks for this fall, books I'm looking to forward to reading, all short story collections.

The first is Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle. This will sound sort of awful, but I love the domestic terrain McCorkle travels in these stories, most of which I've read in the journals in which they first appeared. Her great strength as a writer, I feel, is in her ability to take the common domestic stereotypes and turn them on their heads, giving them all the nuance, subtlety, and heartbreak life gives us. The story, "Intervention," appeared in Best American a few years back and will throw back your hair and shake up your soul.

The Southern Cross is the winner of the Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize and the first book for Skip Horack. Some of these stories first appeared in Narrative Magazine and can be found in the archive there. Horack's writing evokes all those cliches you use to describe muscle cars and, in your case, red zins, but it's true. This is spare prose and big emotion. It's like putting a HEMI engine in a Saturn and watching it roll down the street. The stories here all set in and around the time of Hurricane Katrina and they never use that disaster as a gimmick or an entryway into the sympathy. It's just the fact of what is going on in the world while his characters deal with their own confounding problems.

And one more book of stories that was released in the spring was by our friend, Kevin Wilson, Tunneling to The Center of the Earth. Not only is Kevin a great guy, he's a damn fine writer who is able to do quirky and edgy with a ton of heart and without feeling like the story you just read was full of pyrotechnics. He has the rare ability of blending funny with the tragic, mostly because I think he understands just how close the two are linked.

Books that are on my to do list this fall or that I need to finish, Per Patterson's Out Stealing Horses, which is pretty great so far; The New Valley by Josh Weil, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg, and maybe Ulysses by Rick James, I mean, James Joyce (the two are easily confused).

I'm also going to be eagerly awaiting how many games it takes Cleveland's Mangenius to switch QB's and I'm going to watch as more people protest Michael Vick's return to the Eagles than they do Donte Stallworth or Leonard Little, even though the last two killed people, as opposed to dogs, with their cars while driving drunk.

Bring on the fall,

Mike

Man Cannot Live on Bread Loaf Alone

2009-08-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Mike,

I owe you an apology. I'm no kind of blogger. I'm no kind of friend. I went away to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and did not blog, and then I came back, for almost a week, and did not blog. Now I come upon the site half-expecting your name to be gone from the "About Us," or worse, that my name would be gone and replaced with someone else's. Phil Metres, perhaps. Luckily for me, you're still here, my ~~Rhianna~~ Penelope.

If any of the thousands who read our blog want to know about Bread Loaf, I can recommend the bloggings and tweetings of some friends, both old and new. But you and the multitudes in our audience might be more interested to know that readings and lectures from the Conference are available via Middlebury College's iTunes U page, which you can get to here. So far only the 2008 material is up, but this year's should be up soon, I guess.

But I've come down from the mountain, having seen the promised land of summer and fall books and ready to talk about them, only to find that the Premier and the Virginia Quarterly Review had beat me to it. But I have no qualms about ripping off other people's ideas, so I'm going to try it too. So Mike, give the people something to read this fall. It doesn't have to be a new book, necessarily, but if there's something coming out that we should know about, all the better. Here's my own best, poetry-heavy shot at it:

Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica. This was a spring release, yes, but I haven't read it yet, and it's about time, given what Rita Dove can do with a narrative sequence in verse.

Philip Levine, News of the World. America used to build things, and lots of those things were made in Detroit. Philip Levine has always written about Detroit and the things built there with both fierceness and tenderness that make the place, the things, and the people seem marvelous.

Salvatore Scibona, The End. Scibona, a native Clevelander, read an excerpt from this novel at Bread Loaf, and I knew I'd have to pick up the book. I was about to Scibona's prose as being "muscular and willful," but then I realized it sounded like I was describing a Red Zinfandel. I'll just say how much I enjoyed the reading.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song and The Orchard. Another Bread Loaf discovery for me; how woefully ignorant I was of Kelly, who gave one of the best poetry readings I've ever heard. So it's time for me to catch up. And I have to admit that, for someone who goes around thinking he knows what contemporary poetry has to offer, it's wonderful to be knocked on the ass by poems I didn't know were out there.

Others I need to get to: Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, John Updike's Rabbit, Redux, and then, once classes start, one hundred articles about historicization, problematization, and performativity. I need a Spell Check that allows for academic jargon.

Also, our friends J and Jenny are driving across the country and blogging about it. Like we really need any more bloggers.

Intelligentsially,
Dave

What is a Feminist?

2009-08-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

Dave,

In looking at your blog, I guess my response is that perhaps we (the culture at large, not you and I--though that would be fine) need to define exactly what a feminist is and what that means to maleness, or masculinity, in our time. Each year when I taught composition I used to give my students an article by Gloria Steinem in which she pointed out that a large majority of serial killers are white, heterosexual, middle-class males. The white guys in the class always got their dander up over this, while the women often saw that it was simply pointing out an eerie coincidence. But when I pressed the class and asked who was a feminist, nary a hand ever went up. And each time, it felt like I'd been punched in the junk.

We've come to associate the word feminist as somehow dirty. Even women who enjoy the benefits of a post-feminist society run from the word--see Palin, Sarah--if not the idea. We've over simplified not just women but men, putting them into two camps. So it makes sense that we get a million Bud Light commercials every year where the Dude is marginally good-looking and with some really beautiful woman and he is using a dog as a football because that's what a Dude does when he drinks Bud Light. I've not actually seen this commercial, but I'm pretty sure it's been bandied about in the War Room. And if it does show up on TV, you saw it here first.

I think the larger thing we have to be cognizant of--and afraid for--is the emasculation of men. I think men need to be able to assert themselves and their masculinity in positive ways, which means that if they are the "house-dad" that doesn't mean they've been neutered either in their own minds or society's. Increasingly, playground bullies are using taunts of "gay" to marginalize young boys, but it often has less to do with actual homosexuality and more to do with ideas of feminity and masculinity, or to be blunt being a woman is to be less than human.

What these pussies (the bullies not the bullied) don't understand is what Steinem argues in her article, which is we've taught women to become whole people through the feminist movement. Suddenly, thousands of girls realize they can be both beautiful and atheltic. They can wear short cocktail dresses and study chemistry (just don't tell Larry Summers this). But men are still trying to fit themselves into a box that is all or nothing. You have to decide. Will I be Tom Hansen, hipster with a broken heart but a great indie rock vinyl collection or will I be Tom Brady with a square jaw, laser arm and a child out of wedlock? We have to learn to inhabit both sides of our brain, our impulses, just as women have learned and been encouraged to do.

We both know that's a complicated task, but it has to be an idea embraced by men and women, and that's really the tough part. It's not just the men that need buying in, it's the women. Judd Apatow doesn't know how to write women (or any man I'd want to hang out with, for that matter) but one thing he is right about in movies like Superbad, Knocked Up, and 40-Year Old Virgin is that women want their men to be sensitive and compassionate and they nurture that in their mates. But the minute they need them to be strong and the men aren't they are pushed aside and looked down upon as "bitches" "pussies" and the like. They are confused that men, encouraged to embrace their softer side, also don't have a more masculine side inside of them. Which brings us back to that idea of gender roles and how, for me at least, maybe holding onto a few of those isn't so bad, shouldn't be so unnerving to both sexes.

This Blog post will change the world,

Mike

Summer Is Her Name, Get It?

2009-08-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

Mike,

As you know, there are few things I love more than writing detailed critical reviews of movies I have not yet seen. 500 Days of Summer will suit me just fine, as a movie I have not seen and will not see, because (you may have noticed) I already spend too much time going around being angry about nothing and I don't need this movie, or Nickelback, or Countdown with Keith Olbermann to help me out with that. I learned my lesson when you took me to see Rachel Getting Married.

I don't see nearly as many movies as you do, but I'm familiar enough with the trope that "all men are buffoons who love beer, porn" and so on, from a depressing majority of the network sitcoms for the last ten years. Not sure that I've seen as much of the women treating them like dogs, but I do feel like I've been fed a consistent diet of the arms-akimbo, here we go again head-shake.

The woman-as-straight man, or what my sixth grade D.A.R.E. class would have called "an enabler." You can see a different species of this in the weekly happenings of House, M.D. What's that, you say? Dr. House is acting like a dick again? Oh, House, you rogue, you magnificent bastard, what are we doing to do? Double your salary, perhaps?

But I take your point about these stereotypes of maleness, most of which function in tandem with parallel assumptions about femininity. Popular culture, if you'll forgive me for attributing consciousness to it, seems to believe that so-called "masculine"qualities (maybe even including the enjoyment of beer and porn) are either faults to be corrected or righteous acts of rebellion against some sort of imaginary Feminist takeover.

And good luck negotiating between them. I can remember a single day in my undergraduate career when a professor asked our Victorian Literature class: "How many of you consider yourself feminists?" I raised my hand--one of two men in the class who did--to several snickers. Those people knew me, and thought I was being facetious, but I meant it, and I was proud to mean it. Later that night, I was studying for a final with some Dude-Friends in the library. A friend of theirs came to the table and asked me what my major was. "English," I told him. "Pfff," he said. "Don't you want to be able to feed your family?" For him, and probably for some of the people in that class, it was one or the other. A man makes money; a woman reads books. Just as for way too many men, a woman must be either a virgin or a whore. I can't speak for how women must feel to be typecast as one or the other, but I'm confident enough that any one person is more than one thing most of the time. Most of the tears I've cried in my life have been out of rage instead of sensitivity or despair.

It's staggeringly easy to fall into this trap, and the smartest among us do. The other day, I was reading Karina Longworth's really intriguing article on "The Ugly Truth's Cynical Rewrite of Sally's Fake Orgasm," and nodding in agreement as I went. Then I got to this paragraph:

The Ugly Truth is just the natural next step in the disintegration of the romantic comedy, which lately seems queasy about overt female sexuality. Juno and Knocked Up tell us sex necessarily results in unplanned pregnancy and general chaos; Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Superbad show women who aggressively instigate sex getting brutally rejected; (500) Days of Summer tells us that women with a healthy appetite for sex are ultimately heartless and out to ruin the lives of sensitive man-boys. In Judd Apetow's world, Sally would be the loser.

I don't buy this. I've taken Longworth's paragraph out of its context, obviously, but it makes Apatow sound like a misogynist instead of someone who just doesn't know how to write women. And I think she is just plain wrong about "women who aggressively instigate sex getting brutally rejected" in Superbad, one of the few of these I've seen. The only scene I can remember that even resembles that description is less a "brutal rejection"--that word, "brutal," meaning "like an animal"--than "Evan's" refusal, basically, to rape his drunk love interest. Well, it's not quite that noble. He "rejects" her because of his own insecurity, or terror. And then she calls him "a little bitch," bringing us back to that phrase you mentioned earlier, a term that says "you're less than a man" or "you're the wrong kind of woman."

My point is not to discredit Longworth's point of view about The Ugly Truth, which I will not be seeing either. Instead, it's to point out how very easy it is to get each other wrong when ire gets raised. I'm probably doing it right now. So allow me instead to offer some examples of what I think are complex and moving portrayals of maleness:

Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel
Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel of Love
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Boatman's Call
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Donald Justice, "Men at Forty"
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah

Look, being a white man is still the easiest thing you can possibly be in this country. But it's still hard enough to drive you crazy.

A man's man's man,
Dave

500 Days of Summer --Two Hours I think I Want Back

2009-08-10T12:59:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I know you've stated "on principle" you hate "500 Days of Summer" without viewing it. I'm not sure what those principles are, though I understand your point. I think what the movie has going for it is that it tries to push aside the cliche Hollywood love story. What the movie has working against it is that it's template for characters seems derived from www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. On the whole, even this isn't bad. What concerns me most, though, is a severe lack of men in this film, in film in general. The playbook for Hollywood these days seems to come from a sense that all men are buffoons who love beer, porn, witty tee shirts, and really hot women who will treat them like dogs. There's an obsession--that is well-funded with record breaking box office receipts--with men as infants and as even being feminine--see Apatow, Jud d. In "500 Days" the primary character is Tom Hansen, who is blindsided with heart sickness, by Summer Finn played by Zooey Deschanel and her impossibly blue eyes and even more impossible ensemble of cute dresses. And before I go on, let's be clear: Goodwill isn't selling this shit in any store in any part of the country. Nor is the Salvation Army.

So laid up with a broken heart Tom sets out to figure out why Summer doesn't love him and to see if he can get over her once he doesn't think he can get her back. I don't want to give away too much of the plot but what does occur, I'm sure of, is that the gender roles in this movie are reversed. Summer plays the typically apathetic male lead and Tom the sensitive female ingenue who pines and dreams for love. Add those two things together and you get Summer=Bitch and Tom=what-a-great-senstive-guy-why-can't-she-see-how-great-he-is-and-love-his-adorable-ass-with-his skinny-ties-and-hipster-tee-shirts-worn-with-cordouroy-blazers.

Why do they do this, Dave? Why can't Tom be a man and be sensitive? Why can't Summer be a woman and not want love? Why am I reading these things into the movie? Is this because we're part of some post-feminist culture where we (white people, or half, in my case) are hypersensitive to these issues? My point is that Tom is likeable to a majority of the movie's audience because the women find him appealing, the kind of romantic man they've been led to believe in is out there from movie's past (and which this movie is trying to stand against) and in turn the men in the audience like Tom because they all felt like they've loved a woman who seemed out of their grasp before and didn't realize how great they were, which makes her cold and frigid--that other great stereotype of women.

Now, maybe this is the nature of movies, to simply, but that doesn't have to be case. The larger issue is that a movie like this perpetuates in the culture that being a man worthwhile of being loved and appealing means softening yourself. But what are the costs of this softening? Robert Bly in his book, "Iron John," talks about this a lot and it's something that, as a man, as a human being, worries me. Is it wrong for us to take on the traditional roles our gender is imbued with? I'm not advocating (nor does Bly) that asserting our maculinity should come at the cost of undermining women or the powerful and important work of the Feminist Movement. But I'm concerned with a growing trend in movies and fiction that being a man means being a pushover and being a strong woman means being a bitch. I'm not saying that strong women are bitches but I'm saying if you look at the movies out there when a woman is strong she is made out to be a bitch on film. Of course that's because mostly men are writing these movies in which this is happening, but what's not happening is a ground tide against these depictions and when that doesn't happen, when people accept fiction as fact, it has the real problem of becoming fact, of becoming the way we see the world--see war, Iraq, part II.

Yesterday, I watched golf, Football Night in America, then came home and read "Oral History" by Lee Smith. The night before that I watched "To Kill a Mockingbird" again and when Atticus is at the jail, standing watch over Tom Robinson, and Jem, Dill, and Scout come to see him I nearly cried as Scout began to talk to Mr. Cunningham, the man who pays their father in Hickory nuts for legal services at the beginning of the movie. The scene is rendered so beautifully, so smartly and says so much about time and place, about what it means to be a man (in the case of Mr. Cunningham paying off what you owe and the shame from not being able to do that).

I don't apologize for nearly coming to tears in the scene of a book or movie. Nor do I apologize for loving a wide receiver cracking back on a free safety for a nearly decapitating block. The human animal is capable of many complex--and conflicting--emotions, so why do we keep turning away from that?

Wearing my Madras belt to the biker bar,

Mike

Beer Shall Overcome

2009-07-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

Mike,

You ignorant slut. Given that you've lived in Cleveland for just shy of a year, I hardly think you're qualified to comment on a bad week in Cleveland sports. And why should anyone care about baseball, what with mere hours remaining until the return of Bernie Kosar NFL Preseason color commentary. But I suggest you look at the Cliff Lee trade this way: imagine all the prospects the Indians are going to be able to trade these prospects for.

I guess I have to talk about Gates and Crowley and Obama, since I brought it up. Obviously I know next to nothing about Crowley, but by all accounts (except Gates's, I guess), the guy doesn't seem like a racist. Though that word is entirely inadequate as it's being used (by me, too), as if "racist" is something you either are or are not. On the other hand, Crowley does seem like a Dude, and from what I've read and heard about the situation, it seems like Gates let his own inner Dude come out. And the President -- well, a Dude has to stand up for his Bro. You and I know this all too well.

Did Obama apologize? If he did, I missed it. I saw him do one of those political non-apologies, which I think is even worse. Why should he apologize? He didn't say "Police are stupid racists," or "the Cambridge police are stupid," or even "Crowley is stupid." He said that based on what he knew, the police had "acted stupidly." I know, he can't say that. Fine, but it's because he's the president that he "can't" say it, not because he's black, or because the police didn't act stupidly. Maybe the biggest fault of Obama's response is failing to acknowlede that Gates might not have helped the situation.

What kind of beer do you think they'll have on Thursday? Coors Light? I hope it's Coors Light. Because the mountains turn blue when the beer gets cold. That's how you know it's cold. How else would you know?

I meant to ask if you saw Ross Douthat on Charlie Rose the other night. I haven't read him in the Times yet, but I think I'll start. Makes me almost forget the farce that was hiring Bill Kristol to replace William Safire.

Oh, and if I were you, I wouldn't go around in public identifying myself as "not totally white" and then calling Glenn Beck names. Kind of makes you sound like a racist.

Can we talk about books next time?

--Dave

Acting Stupidly--A Response

2009-07-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

Dave,

I'm having a hard time following your outrage/argument but let me see if I can get this straight to respond, if I can parse out what I feel your argument is getting at.

It's been a few weeks since this happened and this time tomorrow the three main parties in this ridiculous debacle (redundant?) Crowley, Skip (he's my dawg), and Obama are going to be having a beer at the White House tomorrow night. If all it took to get into the Obama White House was some overt or subconscious racial profiling, I'd have done this years ago when I visited Berkley.

In thinking over your response, I'm a little surprised at your outrage. The level of discourse in this country is somewhere south of my fight with Brandon Jackson on the playground in sixth grade. Of course the far right and far left are going to use this moment as a crystallization of whatever their agenda needs. I think Obama, without knowing the facts, should have said something a little smarter. He didn't. He apologized. That's not good enough for the far right. Surprise. I think Skip Gates had every right to yell at some dude who was in his house without being invited. I still haven't read all the facts on this case, but last time I checked my driver's license has my home address on it. Doesn't Skip have an ID card of some sort? Wouldn't that have solved some major problems?

To get back to your outrage, though, I think it displays the problem with liberalism in this country. Because I'm not totally white, I don't think I feel the same way you do over all this. I've certainly never endured the hardships of African-Americans in this country but I know what it feels like to be on the outside so that when something like this occurs I don't really feel the full weight of my ancestors as complicit in a system (as you described in your analogy to your students) coming to bear in my thinking. I think what we need to do in this country is acknowledge that if you're not white, middle-class, and of some level of intelligence it's hard to get on in this country. And I think the only way we get to some point of moving forward is to acknowledge that we will stumble in this regard often. Maybe this Crowley guy isn't really a racist. Maybe his subconscious is. I don't know. He messed up. Skip Gates messed up. The incident itself has less to do with race than the fervor that then came with it when Obama commented. The way everyone ran to their camps shows it doesn't matter who our president is we have to define ourselves either by what he is or isn't. We seem to be less and less a country that seeks out our identities and our own thoughts. Maybe it's impossible to do with the incalculable amounts of data and images being thrown at us, but wouldn't we all be a little better off to think for ourselves rather than running to MSNBC or Fox News? What happened to common sense? And I'm not talking about the kind peddled by that neanderthal Glenn Beck.

In other news the Indians traded Cliff Lee. Shaq was on WWE RAW. Not a banner week for Cleveland Sports. But what was a banner week for humankind was the news that Brett Favre (a quarterback, I'm told) is not coming back to play for the Minnesota Vikings. Whew.

--Mike

Acting Stupidly

2009-07-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

Mike,

The outrage over President Obama’s remarks about the Henry Louis Gates arrest has me—well, outraged.

I don’t know if you caught the press conference where Obama talked for an hour (he sure does love to be clear) about health care and then, in response to a specific question about the matter, suggested that Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Gates. It doesn’t really matter if you saw it because you’ll be hearing about it for the rest of the summer. The Massachusetts Police have asked Obama to apologize—for having the uppity gall, apparently, to criticize a seriously newsworthy mistake made by one of their own against one of the most eminent scholars on race in the country, and a friend of the president’s.

Okay, I'll hedge a bit. No, Obama did not have all the facts. Yes, it's possible that Gates bears some blame for this. And of course, it's only inflammatory to assume that Officer Crowley's actions were racist in motive. But any of that stopped mattering as soon as the President commented on the issue, if it ever mattered in the first place.

Gates has said that this is not about him, and that’s true. It’s not about Obama either, although we do see in this situation that Obama himself, who demonstrates that even a Black Separatist Indonesian/Kenyan Muslim Socialist Cigarette Smoker can get elected President of the United States, is not immune to the poison of American race relations. No one says anything when the first black president in the history of a republic built in part on slave labor addresses the NAACP on the hundredth anniversary of their founding and offers them what others have called “tough love,” saying that there are no excuses anymore for the position of black people in the United States. I'm not saying that this ought to be the story, but damned if it shouldn't at least be a story. No one says anything because too many of us think the President is right for the wrong reasons. So that too many of us-and by “us" here, I mean “white America”-feel justified in locking our doors when we drive through a bad neighborhood—and by a “bad neighborhood,” I mean a “black neighborhood.” We feel justified for thinking that black kids could do fine in inner city schools if they just buckled down and worked a little harder. And we feel justified in resenting affirmative action, Wise Latinas, O.J. Simpson, all of which we know as the race card.

It’s perfectly fine for Obama to talk about his mixed race heritage inasmuch as it makes us—and by “us,” I mean “white America,” or “AOL users”—feel good about ourselves. People have talked about this aspect of his background and personality ever since he gave the Keynote address at the 2004 DNC, and probably before that. But if he makes a statement that doesn’t even really address race—keep in mind he didn’t say the Cambridge police acted “like racists” but simply that they “acted stupidly”—we (and by “we” I mean “white America,” “AOL users,” and “Bill Cosby”—throw a fit. Because it reminds us of what we so desperately do not want to be true. Life is hard enough, even for the average white middle-class AOL user. It's hard. No one wants to imagine that it could be harder for anyone else in this country. No one wants to feel that he's had some kind of unfair advantage, especially when he has done honest work all his life and still has trouble making ends meet, or keeping his marriage together, or whatever. So in a situation like this we are reminded that the way things are is still contaminated by the way things used to be, and that the way things used to be is all too often the way things still are. And thus, if you hold nationally prominent elected office in this country you can be many things—creationist, global warming denier, known adulterer, even Jim Traficant—but you cannot be both black and angry. Even irritated.

When I was teaching high school, I used to tell my students a sort of parable (and when I say “parable,” I am indeed comparing myself to Jesus Christ, who voted for Nixon). Let’s say your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather had a beautiful watch. In the family for generations, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted, Indiglo, everything. Let's say someone stole it, and then handed it down to their grandchildren, and they to theirs, and so on. Meanwhile, no one in your own family ever got to touch the family heirloom that should rightfully have been theirs. Instead, they have to see the other family wearing it, knowing full well (even if the other family doesn’t) that it had originally and justifiably belonged to them. Wouldn’t you, I asked them, feel pretty angry, and think you deserved the watch back? Yes, they would say, of course. Then I would exlain my metaphor, and they would get angry with me. They'd point out all the flaws in my example. “That’s not what happened to them,” they would tell me. And they’re right. It isn’t.

--Dave