Coming Clean

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Ryan under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

While I don’t subscribe, I read Esquire sometimes. But even when the situation is a five-minute wait at Supercuts and I’m just flipping through it, I feel kind of sleazy, because Esquire is gross in multiple ways that matter, all of them tangled such that it is difficult to theorize said grossness. But, a few theses.

First, it’s that the thing is called Esquire, which sounds like an all-schoolgirls wank mag from 1950s Britain. (Hastag, Philip Larkin.) Second, it’s the high-definition postindustrial lifestyle they sell: men’s jeans that aren’t Levi’s and cost $200, beard lube, Dwayne Wade’s bowties, a main-page tab called “Women.” Sometimes the magazine verges on Maxim territory. Third, it’s the embarrassing fact that like a lot of young professionals (stop snickering) I am insecure about stuff like my tie pin and my car, which was built during the first Clinton Administration, and so I read Esquire and worry about my abs.

The rub, at least for this coastal intellectual, is that they employ serious writers like Charles Pierce and Stephen Marche, so you end up reading them even when you aren’t at Supercuts. Come on, they are covering the death of the mighty George Jones like crazy, which is the only way to cover No Show’s shuffle off the mortal coil. They published this little ethnographic masterpiece. They put D Wade in a magazine that sort of reviews a few books from time to time. Esquire was a reasonably serious publication for fifty years during the last century, and it still carries a little of that cachet.

A favorite piece is A.J. Jacobs’s “I Think You’re Fat” (2007), which I’ve used in a number of classes. America’s children love it. Jacobs investigates the fascinating Radical Honesty movement, which espouses the unworkable but compelling idea that even little white lies constitute an existential wimping-out:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Queasy? Me, too. Camus can do, Sartre is smartre, but Blanton is striking and Jacobs makes deft experimental use of the good doctor’s philosophy. Have at it. It will take you ten minutes. You dick.

James Baldwin on “Florida Forum” (1963)

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Ryan under American Masculinity, Authors, the polis, Visual

The video is a bit grainy, and there is some distracting superimposed text, but this is still pretty great. Wearing a suit so on-point that it could have destroyed televisions across America, Baldwin ventures into the conservative bastion of 1960s Miami and talks about the “Negro Problem” in the passionate yet measured, cerebral tones you may recognize from essays like “Notes of a Native Son” and books like The Fire Next Time. Remember when writers could be well-regarded public figures? Remember that? Me neither. Oh well. Enjoy.

Updating the Environment

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Ryan under in the news

Haven’t we all been to beautiful places and asked ourselves, “How could I deface this?” Whether it’s throwing a Starbucks bubble-cup into the La Brea Tar Pits* or putting out your cool yellow American Spirit against a fig tree downtown, Americans like to play with trash, especially when that involves getting rid of it quickly in places where one doesn’t live.

Unfortunately, some garbage gets deified as edgy, radical art.

And you get things like this. No, really, people are scrawling graffiti on ancient trees and spray-painting rocks that modern California’s ancestors inscribed. Good to know.

But as the reporter points out, most normal people are outraged, high-school kids are helping fix the problem, and “‘the rash of graffiti at Joshua Tree National Park defies the trend at parks nationwide, where vandalism has been on the decline over the past decade,’ said park service spokesman Jeffrey Olsen.”

Also, here is a cool book (written by a retired UCSB prof) about why Americans like rugged land so much.

*Well, into the brush at the tar’s edge. But still. The man had on clean shoes and expensive jeans and even though there were dozens of other visitors around, nobody–myself included–said anything. I still kick myself for that.

Alterna-Winning

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Ryan under Other Critics, the polis

You just wouldn’t expect the twenty-first-century GOP to stoop this low.

As we all know from school, democracy is important to America. But as you might also know, if you had a good history teacher, anti-democratic wankery is as American as apple pie, too. Jonathan Chait puts it lucidly in a recent edition of New York (one of the cool city’s cooler mags):

The tradition of expanding the scope of American democracy commands all the retrospective historical glory. But the counter-democratic tradition—a concerted advocacy not of dictatorship but of restraints to prevent the majority of citizens from exercising political power—runs just as long and deep. It runs through John C. Calhoun, the titanic nineteenth-century theorist who defended the rights of the white South against the growing majority in the North. (“The first and leading error … is to confound the numerical majority with the people, and this so completely as to regard them as identical.”) Our history books record the arguments of the crusaders for voting rights for women and blacks and overlook that they were, necessarily, arguing against something. Women’s suffrage, warned former president Grover Cleveland in 1905, would “give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich.” In 1908, New York City tried to suppress voting by Jews (who held notoriously left-wing views) by limiting voter registration to Saturdays and Yom Kippur. It took a hotly contested constitutional amendment in 1913 to allow people nationwide to vote for their senators, who previously were appointed by state legislatures.

American history has always tugged back and forth between a more pure democracy and some constricted facsimile thereof. “In the very long run, to be sure, we have become more democratic,” Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar has written, “but there have been numerous moments in our past when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.”

Nice of a journalist to know a lot about history. Hey, kids: take that little seminar where the professor makes you write a 25-page paper. You might end up a contend-uh.

Your Sunday Rage

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Ryan under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Decaying middle-class incomes? Fewer and fewer jobs that pay a decent wage for hard work? Higher and higher health-insurance premiums? (Or maybe your job just disappeared altogether, along with that great HMO coverage.) Sure does suck to be you, American worker, even if you toil in a sector that is supposedly run by good-hearted Prius owners.

But hey, at least you can admire the gated communities going up on the edge of town, browse Stanford’s website (they’ll even let you take an online course), maybe cruise the Whole Foods parking lot and try to guess which shoppers buy what percentage of their grocery list there, knowing that at least a few of your betters are doing just dandy.

Here comes the LA Times to cheer you up some more. From a Sunday feature story with a somewhat euphemistic title, “The Tougher Workplace”:

Employers once wanted long-term relationships with their workers. At many companies, that’s no longer the case. Businesses are asking employees to work harder without providing the kinds of rewards, financial and psychological, that were once routine. Employers figure that if some people quit, there are plenty of others looking for jobs. […]

The workplace is even tougher for the millions of Americans who have lost the security of a steady paycheck, as companies rely more on temporary staffing agencies. Temp jobs used to be a gateway to permanent employment. Increasingly, they have become a way of life. About 25% of the workforce is temporary, according to research firm Aberdeen Group, up from 17% in 2009.

Woah, slow down, Upton Sinclair! You could take the glass-half-full angle, and see this as an economic environment where workers are given the opportunity to explore creative employment pathways they didn’t even know existed. One man’s untreated chronic illness is another man’s steroidal profits.

For more on the brave new neo-liberal paradise we’re slouching toward, check out this great new documentary.

“Things We Do Not Say”

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Ryan under Authors, education

One of the things I’ve noticed about my writing students, especially the first- and second-years, is that most of them aren’t very good at detecting irony (e.g., recognizing that Joan Didion isn’t sentimentally extolling the virtues of the Central Valley in “Notes from a Native Daughter”) or spotting clichés. With respect to the latter solecism, they are quite good at noticing and fixing the crud in a sample paragraph that I give them after saying, “This excerpt has clichés in it that you should try to address.” But when it comes to their own writing, in-the-nick-of-times and unforgettable moments and in-today’s-societys start to slip in. This is a problem even for most of my brightest students, and many of the students I teach are very bright.

No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that freshmen and sophomores are freshmen and sophomores. A few months ago I was digging through some old college papers that I’d stashed in my parents’ basement after I’d graduated, and most of those that I glanced over were awful. Just lame, pompous, hasty, Olympian nonsense that I tossed in the garbage. I used a lot of damn clichés–often high-minded ones, but still clichés that probably made my professors wince or laugh. (“Garcia Marquez’s political eco-narratives are truly moving works of art.” No, really, I wrote that and showed it to another adult.) When you are 19, you are an idiot, even if you do think of yourself as a Reader.

But most of my students don’t read much, just like most Americans don’t read much, just like many other cultures don’t read much. Now, I am skeptical of anybody who claims that there was some golden age of mass reading (have a look at the literacy rates in Russia when Dostoevsky was alive, in Britain when Tennyson was humming, in the U.S. when James Joyce got onto the cover of Time). In any era, you can find intellectuals bemoaning the state of the public readership. However, you will have a hard time finding a high-school or college teacher who thinks that many of hir students are reading serious texts on the reg. (I’m willing to bet that stands even if you venture into Yale or Amherst or Reed or wherever. I went to a snooty school and it was true there.)

Effective writers read a lot. By getting what Martin Amis calls their daily diet of words, they continually develop an intuitive familiarity with the rhythms of the language they work in. There is no way to write well without reading voraciously. A brilliant charlatan who can’t be bothered to read other people might be able to present a surface gloss that is appealing in small doses (Helloooooo, Vice staffers), but non-readers don’t produce work that is worth reading a second time. Sorry. They don’t. You do not have to read Literature alone. But you have to read something besides status updates and threads on Reddit. You have to read stuff that has gone through the hands of editors and proofreaders. You have to know what pro text looks like.

So the plague of not-reading means that a lot of students are helpless when it comes to grasping and enjoying the textures of a good piece of writing that isn’t selling a product or a tidy idea or mere sensation. It means that many of them flail around in shallow, platitudinous thickets when they draft their own stuff.

But so many genuinely want to become better readers and writers. As a start, or one form of a start, I find that it helps to give them concrete lists of common flubs, misconceptions, and banalities, the kind that appear in any reputable style and usage guide. Students appreciate that level of editorial specificity, as well they should, because these are the kinds of crib sheets that actual writers and editors use every day.

So, from the Washington Post, there is this list of phrases and words that are verboten because they have become disgustingly bland through overuse. I know that some educational theorists think it is useless to give students a roster like this, but in the real world, the place where professional writers operate, this is one of the ways things get helped along. No, you can’t turn a whole writing class into a carnival of Helpful Lists, because perusing a list does not a writer make, but it does help to imitate the professionals who know how to remain on guard against blemishes like “tightly knit community” and “hot-button issue” and “lifestyle.” Enjoy.

InVincible

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Ryan under American Masculinity, sports

I long ago quit arguing with people who think that watching/playing/knowing anything about professional sports is dumb, just like I long ago quit arguing with people who think that professional sports are more important than books, film, painting, politics, and all the other stuff that gets repped on Arts & Letters Daily. If I did still argue with the former group of boring dweebs, I would just repeat, “Vin Scully Vin Scully Vin Scully Vin Scully.” I would keep telling my interrogator to go listen to that man call five minutes of an LA Dodgers game. To not even look at the TV if they couldn’t stand it. To just keep the volume on low. To use a radio if they want to feel good about not buying into high-def capitalist bread-and-circuses. To just listen.

Here is Vin Scully in 1964, looking like he’s ready for Don Draper to polish his shoes (because VS is a real person who exists in the actual world):

Now it’s 2013 and we have Twitter and wi-fi and stuff, and he is still going way more than strong. When he started calling Dodgers games, the team played in Brooklyn and Harry Truman was president; at 85 years old, he still calls games by himself: no second or third commentator in the booth, as is the case with almost every professional sports broadcast on earth. Just hours and hours of a fundamentally slow-paced game, with one guy working to keep you interested, and game after game, year after year, he remains the most compelling, mellifluous, learned, humane, quietly swaggy voice in American sports.

See, his astonishing longevity aside (85!), Scully’s style (it is hard not to write “Vin’s,” because that is what any baseball fan would say when talking about him) of broadcasting is what makes him an honest-to-God cultural treasure. Most sports talking heads are idiots. Anyone who has ever suffered through Tim McCarver (baseball), Jon Gruden (football), or–ugh–Reggie Miller, the congested, brittle ex-jock who stinks up TNT broadcasts (basketball), can attest to that. But even if the sports commentariat weren’t clogged with the mental equivalent of Applebees franchises, the intensely tan, blow-dried Scully would still reign.

This has a lot to do with the pace of baseball, which you might call a tense languor punctuated by moments of fierce geometric action. Someone who can tell compact stories and make perceptive observations but who also knows when to shut up is priceless for a baseball fan with a functional brain.

First of all, he expertly handles the basic structural aspects of a baseball telecast. That is, he continually provides contextual information a viewer might enjoy or need (like where on the field a player’s hits tend to land, or how double plays work) and crucial narrative guidance: the man’s between-innings spiels are often pithy masterpieces, and he can even make an ad for Sprint sound dignified.

More broadly, his rhetorical style and range of knowledge are informed by a kind of open-minded, good-hearted humanist curiosity about the world that is increasingly rare in narcissistic, smartphone-addled America. Scully might relay an anecdote about Arnold Palmer’s favorite clubs, eulogize some knuckleballer from the 1930s, paraphrase Keats, make a weird comparison between hitting a baseball in cold weather and punching a wall, or wax philosophic about tattoos (using puns), but his style is also structured with silent pauses and genuine exclamations of joy. He comes across as a beguiling older neighbor–even if you’re fifty–without mocking, bemoaning, or expressing bitter confusion about contemporary baseball culture. 300-pound Dominican guys with heavy ink don’t spook him: the worst the young bucks incur is a “Whatever gets you through the night” and the trademark chuckle that is hokey but sweet. At the same time, he does not go in for the canned, bombastic masculinity that ruins most broadcasts. (MIKE, THAT’S HOW YOU HIT IN THE N-F-L!)

He links midcentury coastal America with 2013 Los Angeles, for fuck’s sake. Samuel Johnson says that the worst thing a writer can do to hir audience is bore them. If you are a baseball sophisticate, Scully does not ever bore you, and he usually teaches you something new about the game and its history; if you’re a newbie, he won’t lose you. He sounds like baseball.

This can’t go on forever. It probably won’t go on for much longer. I’m not even a Dodgers fan. I root against the Dodgers much of the time. When Vin goes–whether he retires before dying or not–I will cry some. Not kidding.

Can’t Keep a Good Blog Down

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Ryan under guides and nudges, in the news

All blogs go to heaven. Some come back from the dead.

Maybe God was like, “You have too many awesome posts left in you. Get back in there.” Maybe the rent was too high or it was crowded; maybe the co-op rejected your application. Maybe your book-length commentary on the later work of 2 Live Crew didn’t get posthumously picked up by that East Coast publisher, the one with the free bottled water, and you were steamed. Maybe you finished graduate school and decided this was more fun than a whole lot of academic life. Maybe you like the idea of running a website despite having no knowledge of basic coding or visual design or marketing.

My “maybe” is somewhere in there toward the end. In June of 2012, I finished a PhD in English; soon thereafter I remembered that keeping TGR updated was one of the most pleasurable aspects of my entire grad-school tour. That said, I don’t plan for this iteration of the Reader to be a solo job.

In the short term, The General Reader will be entirely online, and a small group of authors will produce it. It won’t have any sort of mission statement, genre affiliation, or well-defined lump of topical concerns, beyond the general aegis of Arts and Culture. And I mean generous: if you ever thought, “Man, wish there was a place to read about American literature, mid-shelf wines, rap music, sports, climate change, US and world politics & current affairs, yoga pants, gardening, urban planning, lyric poetry, YouTube comics, furniture, exercise regimes, Calvin and Hobbes, and midcentury film,” a crew of over-educated, plaid-shirted amateur genies just rolled up at your front door. No big deal. We do this for free.

Tell your friends.