Arthur takes a run at being my favorite, as does Village Green, but man, I love Muswell Hillbillies (1971). This Southern rock album about a neighborhood in North London is grimy, upbeat, and sad at the same time, like a lot of art things.
Further, the album cover’s general aesthetic structure somehow looks like the worn-out blazers and sweaters many of the people on it are wearing. Readers, riddle TGR this: Isn’t MH tony and expensive at this point? Regarding this point of contemporary demography, we could use Wikipedia (we did), but it would also help to have human input. Place comments below.
First things first: TGR will keep owning the blogosphere in 2014. Also, once I am back home in California (I’m visiting family in Appalachia now) and have access to my books, there will be a Kingsley Amis-themed post on hangovers, what with New Year’s celebrations being upon us and all. For now, the Reader gives you one of the greatest covers ever, The Slits straight neutron-bombing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in 1979. Yes, it is even better than the awesome CCR version. I knew Eastbound and Down was brilliant when they used this at the end of Season Two.
Enjoy the beats. Stay safe. Use that buddy system. Dress nice. Try not to kiss the wrong person when the ball drops. Or, you know, just drink enough that “right” and “wrong” aren’t words anymore.
Say “country music” to most Americans, especially ones under 40, and the majority will think of the fulsome garbage disgorged by Nashville’s contemporary legion of fake-accented bimbos and hunky cornballs in $500 t-shirts: they’ll think of people like <shudder> Keith Urban. That, or xenophobic losers like Toby Keith.
This is an ironic shame, because, at least in your humble critic’s opinion, American music’s finest lyric achievements come primarily from two genres: hip-hop and classic country. On the latter, think Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash (at least he’s still hip even with people who couldn’t name more than two of his songs), Willie Nelson (just try not getting obsessed with The Red-Headed Stranger), Townes Van Zandt, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Gram Parsons. While modern Nashville industrial country has appropriated many of the outward themes (loneliness, boozing, heartbreak, wandering), it fails to produce the tonal affect of the old masters, the existential grime and grind. Modern country is all surface; the classic stuff is almost literary.
And there is nothing—nothing—without a man I didn’t mention above, Hank Williams. (No, not his idiot Monday Night Football son or lame “punk” grandson.) Williams is rightfully remembered as a sort of hillybilly poète maudit, dead at 29 in the backseat of a car he didn’t own, flush with a cocktail of liquor, chloryl hydrate, and morphine, and leaving behind a slim but astonishing catalog of stone-cold masterpieces. But melancholy as most of his work is, Williams also has a sense of irony. Most country masters do: see, for example, George Jones’s duet with Merle Haggard, “Must’ve Been Drunk (When We Said We’d Stop Drinking).” In “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” the last single he released during his life, which hit #1 on the Billboard Country charts just after his death, Williams plays up the voice of the sad-sack, woman-haunted loser.
However, the ironic humor does not make the song any less chilling. Williams’s irony is not the poisonous, cynical, seen-it-all posture that American culture has assumed over the past few decades, the loathsome “wit” of shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Family Guy. Rather, the irony marks an individual’s desire to find some modest humor in a genuinely terrible situation. It is irony that is heartfelt and naked and human.
So whether or not your fishin’ pole’s broke, the creek is full of sand, and your woman run off with another man, enjoy it. I’ll take Williams over a third of the hacks (cough, Ezra Pound, cough) who get taught in English classes.
While stalking the murky woods of final grading, your humble critic also foraged throughout the Internet, looking for choice edibles. Very local. So with today’s last spasm of energy, let me adduce the following links as evidence that humanity’s existential status is still blinking at “Worth Saving.” They are all about language and how we should take better care of it.
Norman Mailer’s critical fortunes have been on the wane for a while, though an eventual rebound is always possible for any writer whose name rang out during his lifetime. At least in the case of The Armies of the Night (1968), his fictional history/historical fiction/officious monologue about the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, this is unfortunate, because the book contains a wonderful depiction of the poet Robert Lowell, whom he found worthy of overlapping adjectives, “a fine, good, honorable man” whose “grace was in the value words had for him[.]” I love Mailer’s attention to the ethical consequences of language. As he saw it, Lowell always “seemed to emit a horror at the possibility of squandering them [i.e. words] or leaving them abused[.]” I tend to trust Mailer’s judgement on this, because in the same narrative he carefully dismantles the mid-century American version of imperial euphemism (VIETNAM WAR EFFECTIVE AND JUST). Dude spent time in the military and its profanity-rich cultural ecosystem, and guess what? “[A]ll the gifts of the American language came out in the happy play of obscenity upon concept, which enabled one to go back to concept again.” “What is magnificent,” declares Mailer, “about the word shit [sic] is that it enabled you to use the word noble[.]”
Years ago Paul Fussell’s Wartime (Oxford UP, 1989) drew my attention to the shit/noble point. Did you know that Fussell also wrote a slim study of Kingsley Amis? Follow that link to The Anti-Egotist (1994).
Dan has mentioned this essay before, so I apologize for repeating, but David Bromwich’s “Euphemism and American Violence,” published near the end of the Bush/Cheney administration, is required reading. It will always be required reading. That crew’s loathsome rhetorical productions will be classroom material for decades. Think about all those lyric villainies. Extraordinary rendition. Coalition of the willing. Axis of evil. Shock and awe. The surge. Even Richard Nixon, coiner of “War on Drugs” and the “silent majority,” can’t touch that swag. Sadly, Bromwich’s text is behind a paywall, unless you have a subscription to the NY Review of Books (duh) or are on a campus/library network that has access. As 2013 ends, let’s recall that we live in a world that is in some ways worse than what the Bush vandals dreamed up, thanks to the Obama administration’s shamefulexpansion of the American security state.
Re: the above: This is your semi-daily reminder that President Obama is not a populist with a cool iPod and a Lapham’s Quarterly subscription, but a modestly progressive, by-all-appearances personally decent member of the USA’s detached elite. In other words, not horrible like Romney, but basically Bill Clinton without the adolescent sexual habits.
At Slate, Rebecca Schuman has a modest proposal: abolish the essay-writing component of content-based or otherwise discipline-specific introductory college courses (e.g. Western History 101, Intro to Great American Words, Philosophy’s Biggest Hits, Musicology for Physicists, et cetera). Instead, she argues, intro classes should base their grading on oral exams, which, she argues, would force students to actually master course material, reduce opportunities for long-winded bluebook bullshit, and consequently make life better for teachers, who wouldn’t have to slog through as much coal slurry. No more papers or essay exams; just answering questions that a real person poses in real time. Paper writing would be left for later classes, where students motivated about their majors would be more willing to put in the labor it takes to produce decent prose. The article has drawn brainlessly awful hate mail as well as thoughtful discussion. It is worth your five minutes. Come on. Slate articles are short, and it isn’t like other experienced teachers haven’t also brought this up. Granted, as a comp instructor who runs a lot of first-year classes, I don’t think it’s feasible to stop assigning papers altogether. In fact, I’m generally skeptical of Schuman’s pitch, if you read it literally and not Swiftianly. When it comes to writing instruction at most colleges and universities, it would be more immediately helpful to have smaller classes, better job security for faculty, and a K-12 system that allowed its best teachers to actually teach kids how to write and read stuff besides Instagram captions and SAT swill.
If you write, edit, or publish in any professional capacity, you are tight with the Chicago Manual of Style, the “Grammar and Usage” section of which is written by Bryan Garner, who also wrote the best usage guide around for contemporary English, Garner’s Modern American Usage. When it comes to that small cohort of English speakers/writers/readers who care deeply (maybe even obsess, kibbitz, spasm, and fret) about grammar and usage, Garner and David Foster Wallace are fellow travelers. (Wallace’s long essay “Authority and American Usage,” published first in Harper’s as “Tense Present,” introduced me to Garner.) The point is, I seriously fucking care about hyphenating phrasal adjectives. The second point is, D.T. Max has a cogent little post on the New Yorker‘s website about DFW and BG. Like Mailer on Lowell, Max emphasizes that Wallace’s bone-deep fascination with English usage isn’t aesthetic snobbery but a form of moral imagination. See above, David Bromwich, or Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
Considering that I’m someone who is always looking for work, it would probably behoove me to be blandly professional on this blog, which pops up in Google searches. On the other hand, I am from Virginia, I admire Thomas Jefferson, and Patton Oswalt is great:
Bang palace! (h/t Dan on this one)
Naomi Baron’s Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford UP, 2008) is germane to everything if you live in an affluent country.
Since TGR didn’t get up a Weekend Beats post, I wanted to post a Tuesday jam. But because I’m on an Amtrak train (no big deal) right now, I can’t access YouTube content. This being the case, I suggest you listen to The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” followed by Trina’s “Pull Over.” They’ll blend, TGR promises. Stay warm for the holidays.
As the frozen moon called North America upon which many of our readers live continues to darken, its daylight progressively emaciated and its nights positively steroidal, your cortex needs food. Here are some links. Take, eat. Stay warm.
Advertisements that use kids to sell grown-up commodities like cars and cable packages are repulsive. Just look at this and this, and try to ignore that sad, green revulsion mushrooming in your chest. “We want more, we want more.” Or don’t, and just take our word for it. An Urban Outfitters ad for cancer-style skinny jeans wouldn’t be much worse.
David Foster Wallace could be a bad TV guest, like many (maybe most) writers. If you tend to consider your words and think about whether the complicated answer you are about to give is plausible, then most TV hosts won’t know what to do with you. But when Wallace sat down with a German station in 2003 the results, which are on YouTube, were riveting. Here is the man himself talking about how pleasure within market societies can be a form of slavery; and here he is admitting how small the demand for serious writing is, compared to the immensity of the American fear of silence; and later homie gets to the paranoid wastage of the Bush years.
There is plenty more Wallace material on YouTube and for cheap on the usual book-buying sites, so do your brain a favor and stop watching Glee or reading Twitter or buying linen scarves or whatever, because as long as people read English, people will read Wallace. Chances are that reading him will make you at least a little happier. He’s consistently on the aesthetic and thematic level of his gregarious, crowd-loving forebears (e.g. Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Pynchon, Rabelais, Dostoevsky), which is rare enough; most writers are just lucky to occasionally do something comparable to what an influential presence did. He’s one of those writers whose work gives enormous pleasure to a lot of well-read people. As such, anyone who dismisses his work outright (which is very different from saying that you don’t personally like his work*) is likely a pedant whose opinions aren’t worth listening to. Samuel Johnson is right: if a book is long esteemed, it is good, to the extent that we can ever define “good.”
Unfortunately we live in a USA where writers have to remind people that public colleges should be free for Americans prepared for college-level work. A democracy must be seriously deranged if its members have trouble with that principle, but many Americans are only OK with spending public funds on simultaneous trillion-dollar wars in multiple theaters. This means that the USA has some serious problems, given the current national acceptance of five-figure in-state tuition bills and leagues of alumni who carry five- or six-figure debt loads. But that shit has a righteous foe in Sarah Kendzior, whose work you should follow. It is great: sarahkendzior.com. American higher-education systems may have gutted their faculty (the loan racket helped), but many of the castaways are vicious writers. Have hope. TGR is roping together some logs in the ship’s wake.
High art is not always pleasant. (Just ask anyone who has looked at a Francis Bacon.) I say this because someone recently put together a file of every “YEEAH-UUH!” that Metallica’s frontman James Hetfield has ever barked, snarled, rasped, or sneered. Though conceptually beautiful, it might drive you insane after 45 seconds. Seriously, don’t listen too closely unless you are already a metalhead.
* I don’t like Austen, just as I dislike Woolf’s novels (besides Mrs. Dalloway), but I wouldn’t pretend that either isn’t worth reading for a person wanting to know more about the canon.
Dear y’all, remember that if you like what you have seen on the General Reader, you should follow us on Twitter, where our handle/nom de plume/call sign is @General_Reader. Sure, the blog is expansive, but you should just see what we do with 140 characters (basically Sontag).
This is your semi-daily reminder that if you want to see what works best in schools, look at what people arrange for their children when money is no object. Over at his Just Visiting blog, John Warner notes the curious gap between the prep-school education that Bill Gates and his children enjoy (small classes taught by well-paid experts who emphasize serious books and lots of writing) and the kind of education that Bill Gates would like most everyone else’s children to enjoy (corporatized curriculum production, online classes, standardized testing, more standardized testing). Unfortunately, unlike most people with extremely stupid ideas about how teaching human beings actually works, Mr. Gates has many billions of dollars to pour into America’s ongoing effort to dismantle the remnants of its public-education system.
The same holds true at the college level. The Obama girls are not going to Ohio State or NOVA; they will matriculate at Stanford or Amherst or someplace comparable. Thomas Friedman might love MOOCs, but his daughters attended Yale and Williams, respectively.
There is a deep scumminess to how American economic and cultural elites (including many left-leaners like Gates, Obama, and Friedman) expend enormous amounts of capital on maintaining intimate, bucolic academies where the students read Dostoevsky and ponder Hume alongside tenured professors who make a decent salary, then turn around and assure the rest of us that twenty-first-century America has no time for small classes or the humanities, not if we are going to Win the Future, to quote Mr. Obama.
UPDATE: A better title for this post might be “Small Classes for Everyone! (Whose Parents Have the Capital).” As a humanities partisan, my instinct was to emphasize that side of the issue, but you could easily extend this to science and math classes. To reiterate, look at what elites procure for their children from preschool through college: small classes in schools where teachers have the freedom to design challenging, rigorous, creative, reading- and writing-intensive curriculum for their students. It works. Few if any affluent education “reformers” would send their kids to institutions that do otherwise. Reform is only reform if it is committed to small classes for every child.
We hope that wherever you’re spending the holiday, the weather is crisp but not frigid; the afternoon’s sky is interesting; the drinks are abundant (pro tip: try not to have more than 15); the cuisine is fatty and starchy and meat-oriented; the sticky pre- and postprandial greens are smoking; the NFL games are on, because you rarely get to see the Raiders play their special brand of boring, hapless football on national TV; the family is hale and hearty; the traffic stays tolerable; your jeans remain unstained by gravy. And whether or not you face a Sunday comedown, enjoy this Tom Waits joint, which, like the Donald Justice poem we posted earlier, comes from sweet 1973.
The General Reader 
