Author Archives: Dan

Epistolary Blues

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Other Critics

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century, and if you haven’t read it, you should do so as soon as you can. It’s a book about disappointment: the disappointment of family life, the disappointment of consumerism, the disappointment of academia. But more than this, it is about the disappointment that comes from having to continue on living after the death of someone who made you realize that life could be other than midddling. The Professor’s House came out the same year as a book with a similar theme, The Great Gatsby, and I have a theory that one of Cather’s earlier works, 1919’s My Antonia, was where Fitzgerald got his idea to tell Gatsby’s story from the perspective of someone who was both skeptical of and probably hot to bone the novel’s titular subject.

Anyway, as a Cather lover, I am excited for the long-awaited release of some of her letters. The reason why her letters haven’t been made public until now is a fairly predictable: she didn’t want them to be, and so she placed some steely gatekeepers in charge of her estate. Jennifer Howard documents all of this very well in a recent article in The Chronicle, but I was particularly struck by the article’s opening:

In November 1938, buffeted by the death of her dear friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, Willa Cather poured her heart out to her brother Roscoe in a letter. She sent it from the Shattuck Inn in New Hampshire, a spot Isabelle had first taken her years earlier.

“You cannot imagine what her death means to me,” Cather wrote. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through 38 years, as she did. As for me, I have cared too much, about people and about places—cared too hard. It made me, as a writer. But it will break me in the end. I feel as if I couldn’t go another step.”

Let’s table the fact that Roscoe Cather is an incredible name (ideal for someone born in the nineteenth century). The second paragraph sounds like something Godfrey St. Peter, the professor of The Professor’s House, would have said after the death of Tom Outland, the rough but brilliant youth who wandered into his life only to die in World War I. It also sounds like what Nick Carraway is trying to avoid feeling when he puts on his false hard-boiled act at various points throughout The Great Gatsby. Cather and Fitzgerald both understood that caring too much is the source of great art. Any artist who claims not to give a shit about people and places is either fronting to avoid crying in public, or not a real artist. Caring means inviting disappointment to bed down with you from time to time. The fact that Cather tried to hide her letters from the public for so long couldn’t keep those of us who love her work from seeing how well she understood this often uncomfortable twinning.

Talk About Burying the Lede…

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Gee, Wall Street Journal (via Yahoo!), you say the service at McDonald’s is terrible? I wonder why that could be. Maybe it’s because they pay next to nothing to the people who actually seem to understand why their business has problems. From the middle of the article:

Monica George, a McDonald’s employee in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she can understand why customers complain, and that there are frustrations on both sides of the counter. “Let’s say I’m in front at the register and the grill’s not pushing out food quickly enough. So you have to wait on food, and the customer is getting aggravated at you because you’re not giving them the food quick enough, and the grill gets aggravated with the cashier because we’re asking where the food is,” she said.

Ms. George, who says she earns $7.25 an hour, said one problem behind slow service and inaccurate orders is that employees are trained to do specific tasks and don’t always understand what other employees are doing.

Meanwhile:

McDonald’s shares have also rebounded since they took a hit last fall. In 4 p.m. trading Wednesday, they were up 43 cents at $101.49, near their record of $102.22 in January 2012.

Someone’s loving it. Just not the wage slaves who cook the food. Or the people eating it.

Speaking of Non-Majority Rule

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Piggy-backing off of Ryan’s piece, I thought many of you might find this article from The Week interesting. I am not a very good liberal when it comes to gun control, but not because I have any special love of guns. I have only fired one a couple of times, and frankly didn’t get the appeal. The fact that people can talk about “gun culture” is bizarre, and doesn’t square with 2nd Amendment defenders’ claim that guns are simply tools. They’re not. Spatulas are tools, and there is no such thing as “spatula culture.” Guns are something altogether different.

So no, guns aren’t my thing. The reason why I am a bad liberal on gun control though is because I don’t think much of what the government can do will decrease the number of guns in this country or the prevalence of gun violence. By some estimates there are almost as many firearms in America as there are people, and nearly half of U.S. households own at least one gun. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to simply ban most guns and think it will accomplish anything. While I believe that there should be background checks on every kind of gun sale, even this won’t stop the kinds of mass shootings we saw in Connecticut or even Colorado. And that really shouldn’t be our priority. What is needed is a change in “gun culture,” and that starts not with pieces in Mother Jones (although everything written in their article is true, they’re preaching to the choir), but with gun owners like Paul Brandus standing up to the NRA and its minions in government. Brandus writes:

The NRA has also spread the false notion that the Second Amendment was designed to protect you against government tyrants. Unless you’re a constitutional scholar, you’ve probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker. Someone who is a constitutional scholar, Professor Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland, points out that Article I of the Constitution allows militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. If you think the Constitution allows you to rebel against the government, guess what? The Constitution says you’re a traitor. Writes Spitzer: “The Constitution defines treason as ‘levying War’ against the government in Article III and the states can ask the federal government for assistance ‘against domestic Violence’ under Article IV.”

It’s not your fault that you don’t know this. How would you know to wade through a giant appropriations bill from 2011, or to sift through the Constitution’s fine print? And it is this — your lack of knowledge — that the NRA and its toadies on the Hill are banking on. One of my favorite quotes from the father of our Constitution, James Madison, comes to mind: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”

As with everything, culture matters. The NRA claims to speak for all gun owners, but it doesn’t represent even a majority of these people. Not even close. And yet the NRA seems to determine how both sides of the gun control debate talk and think. The left gets itself in a tizzy every time Wayne LaPierre says anything, which is exactly what he wants. The NRA feeds on a collective sense of powerlessness that many people feel. If liberals really want to decrease gun violence in America, they’ll stop overreacting to everything the NRA does, stop demanding legislation that won’t accomplish anything, and start building a culture where kids are better educated, more employable, and less likely to buy the bullshit the NRA is selling.

Fabulous

Posted on by under American Masculinity, guides and nudges, in the news

Fifty years from now, people will likely consider Steven Soderbergh the best American filmmaker of his era. While he hasn’t also written, shot, edited, and produced all of the over thirty films he has directed (slacker), his contributions to both mainstream and independent cinema so far outpace most of his contemporaries that the Academy should probably just give him the Lifetime Achievement Award now. The fact that he is retiring from feature filmmaking is a cultural bummer. However, he is leaving us with one final feature that may hint at a new direction in his career. Behind the Candelabra is a biopic about Liberace starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon that is going to be airing on HBO because it was deemed, according to Soderbergh, “too gay” for any studio in Hollywood to give it distribution. That sounds like the punchline of a particularly blue Borscht Belt joke, but it’s apparently true. My hope is that that this move by HBO means they will give Soderbergh a TV show on the network, as his talents seem well-suited for what TV has become in the last few years. It would be a shame to simply lose such an artist to posterity.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, guides and nudges, in the news, Other Critics

Here’s a weekend reading/viewing list for your edification and pleasure:

A Moment of Heresy

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, education, in the news, Other Critics

If the point of a positive book review is to get the audience to want to read the book under discussion, then Robert Dean Lurie’s brief piece in The American Conservative about the new Selected Letters of William Styron  does its job admirably. As much as I find myself disagreeing with many of the political points that get made in TAC (Pat Buchanan is the king saying something totally sensible about why we should avoid war, only to follow it up with an appalling xenophobic or anti-gay screed), I appreciate that it still bothers to publish aesthetic criticism. Given that the magazine’s brand of conservatism is more Eliot and Burke than Romney and Ryan, this makes sense. Still, it says something about the state of our political discourse that one is shocked to find a website or magazine that discusses public policy also talking about Darkness Visible (one of the best books of any kind ever written) and the puffed-up preening of Styron and Mailer.

But The American Conservative has recently gotten something much more important right as well. Tom Pauken, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, wrote a piece in January denouncing “No Child Left Behind” and the culture of standardized testing it has spawned. We are all familiar with these mind-numbing, bogus tests that create perverse incentives all up and down the academic food chain. Right now 35 teachers in Atlanta are under indictment for fudging their students’ results because the higher the students score, the more teachers (both good and bad) keep their jobs or make more money. As bad as the War in Iraq and the financial meltdown have been, No Child Left Behind might be the most damaging legacy of the Bush years.

But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand what is really wrong here either. It’s not testing per se that’s the problem, but that we have educational tunnel-vision. Whenever I hear Barack Obama talk about how we need to send more kids to college because people with college degrees earn more money, I cringe. If it is this simple, why don’t we just mandate that all colleges simply let in anyone who applies? A college degree is supposed to signal to employers that you have done something hard and are therefore a good candidate to complete difficult tasks in the future. But what if everyone has college degrees? What then?

What is needed is real reform at the K-12 level, something everyone seems to acknowledge, but never actually happens. Too many people have said too many things they can’t take back without losing face or money or power, and so kids keep going through this ringer of irrelevance, racking up accomplishments or failures that ultimately tell us very little about who they are and what they could be. Tom Pauken’s solution might strike some as retrograde, but it’s actually similar to the approaches in many other western democracies whose education systems outperform ours by most objective and subjective measures. He writes:

We need to allow for multiple pathways to a high school degree. One academic pathway would emphasize math and science. Another, the humanities and fine arts. A third would focus on career and technical education. All students would get the basics, but there would be greater flexibility than under the “one size fits all” existing system which pushes everyone towards a university degree.

This is a common sense approach to preparing young Texans to be college-ready or career-ready. It is time to end this “teaching to the test” system that isn’t working for either the kids interested in going on to a university or for those more oriented towards learning a skilled trade. Let’s replace it with one that focuses on real learning and opportunities for all.

In the past, when public frustration hit the boiling point, the testing establishment would simply roll out a new test with a new acronym and promise that the new test will fix everything. That is why, from 1991 to the present, the acronym of the Texas standardized test has gone from TAAS to TAKS and, now STAAR.

It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Education today is a sick combination of the worst kinds of conservative and progressive ideologies. It’s the same shit in a new box, sold to us by people who stand to lose a lot if anything actually happens.  And so nothing changes.

I imagine that Tom Pauken and I would agree on very little.  Again, he was the head of TEXAS Republican Party, for Christ’s sake.  Still, humanists of all stripes need to come together and wrench education in this country away from the technocrats, especially when they are doing everything in their power to make education a business devoid of human subtlety and emotion. Standardized multiple-choice testing has been around for years. Computerized writing analysis is knocking on the door. If we do nothing, those of us who actually care about educating complicated and whole human beings will find ourselves begging for change outside of the house we used to own.

Speaking of Narcissism

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges

Just a quick dispatch from the higher ed front-

The other day I was talking to my upper-division social science writing students about how humanities and social science departments feel pressured to justify their places on university campuses. What this has led to is both fields trying to be more like the hard sciences.  This has been disastrous for the humanities, as “theory” and identity politics have supplanted reading and writing as the discipline’s core. As for the social sciences, by demanding to be taken as seriously as the big bully on campus, they’ve only made their own efforts look like cheap imitations of the real thing.

I’ll have more to say about how humanities departments have destroyed themselves in due time, but that’s not what I want to do now.  What interested me was my students’ reactions when I used the term “navel-gazing.” Most of them laughed. When I asked why they were laughing, a young man (who seems bright and serious) in the front of the class said that he had never heard that phrase before, and that seemed to hold true for most of his classmates. This shocked me, as it is a phrase that I feel like I run into quite often in book reviews, political discussions, and take-downs of particularly out of touch cultural figures. I’ll spare you a sermon about what this incident says about what college students are and are not reading. Instead, I will paste some of the entries from the OED on this and related phrases below, as I find them fascinating. I particularly like the reference to Los Angeles. Feel free to accuse me of navel-gazing.

navel-gazing n. = navel contemplation

-1959   Canad. Jrnl. Econ. & Polit. Sci. 25 242   Contemporary Americans are inclined to regard such activities as navel-gazing, and to be more interested in the practical utility of models and specific operational techniques.
-1972   Publishers Weekly 10 July 27/2   David Obst has no monopoly on national navel-gazing.
-1990   Independent 27 July 19/6   Navel-gazing has taught these men and women to accept that there has to be someone in authority for the firm to work.

navel-contemplation n. meditation or contemplation, esp. of a self-absorbed, complacent, or profitless kind

-1921   D. H. Lawrence Let. 2 May (1962) II. 650   Your Nirvana is too much a one-man show: leads inevitably to navel-contemplation.
-1974   Times 27 June 18/3   To fight off the navel-contemplation mood induced by our move of office.
-1986   Q Oct. 76/1   Writing with these musicians has forced Simon to look up from navel-contemplation towards the open sky of entertainment.

navel-contemplator n. = omphalopsychite n. at omphalo- comb. form ; (also more widely) a person who indulges in navel-contemplation.

-1856   R. A. Vaughan Hours with Mystics I. vi. vii. 300   They call these devotees Navel-contemplators.
-1986   Financial Times (Nexis) 11 Apr. i. 19   We are in Los Angeles where the sun shines, the night life sparkles, and navel-contemplators of the world unite.

omphaloskepsis n. (also omphaloscepsis)  [ < omphalo- comb. form + ancient Greekσκέψις inquiry (see scepsis n.)] = omphaloscopy n.

-1925   A. Huxley Those Barren Leaves v. iv. 366   The flesh dies… And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis.
-1952   H. Ingrams Hong Kong i. 22   The British saw London as the world’s capital. Omphaloscepsis has always been one of the world’s troubles.
-1983   Verbatim Summer 23/1   Presumably, one arrives at game theory through omphaloskepsis.

omphalomancy n.  [ < omphalo- comb. form + -mancy comb. form; compare French †omphalomantie (1752), omphalomancie (1868 in Littré)] divination by the navel, esp. the art or practice of divining the number of future children a woman is to have by counting the number of knots on the umbilical cord of a baby born to her (obs. rare); (in extended use) the art or skill of predicting or estimating numbers of people (rare).

-1652   J. Gaule Πυς-μαντια 165   Omphelomancy, [divining] by the navell.
-1892   New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon,   Omphalomancy, the prophesying of the number of future children a woman will have according to the number of knots on the navel-string of the child born.
-1987   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 93 210   The last chapter is a brief exercise in omphalomancy, an estimate of intellectual progeny in leading roles.

The Culture of Narcissism

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, guides and nudges, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

So I am not a fan of Amanda Marcotte’s work, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Or in this case, close. Once.  Recently, Slate‘s resident “everything can be reduced to sexism” pundit wrote a post about why we shouldn’t find the video of the doofus asking Kate Upton to his prom charming, but yet another example of how the patriarchy teaches young men to be whistling cartoon wolves in zoot suits bent on total female subjugation, if not death. For Marcotte, this is just another brick in the wall of “the overall culture of male entitlement.” Well, she’s right about this episode revealing entitlement, but it has little to do with gender. This entitlement is the logical result of social networking culture’s amplification of one our shittiest human tendencies: our sense that we have any right to dictate how others feel about us. Genitals shmenitals.

To make this story all about patriarchal ills, Marcotte does not mention that this video proposal/demand has been directed at male celebrities too. Justin Timberlake was asked via YouTube to attend a Marine Corps ball and, unlike Upton, he agreed to go with his fan(atic). Now, maybe he actually wanted to do this, but if he didn’t, he really had no choice. If Timberlake had said no, he would have gotten slammed as anti-military, out of touch, and probably sexist for rejecting a woman with the “courage” to subvert gender norms by asking him out. In this sense, the stakes were a lot lower for Upton. No one really likes teenage boys, except maybe their mothers.

But I actually give Kate Upton a lot more credit than most celebrities who get put in this position. By (too) nicely saying no she reminded us of something we seem to have forgotten about as a culture. Just because you have Facebook and Twitter and follow celebrity accounts maintained by PR flacks does not mean you are actually friends with the people you worship. And no, you aren’t as worthy of their attention as they are of yours. They don’t pay to see you do anything. They don’t Google sexy pictures of you. They owe you nothing. And yet we applaud when some kid puts another human being in a really awkward spot in order to feed his own ego. Honestly, his parents should be ashamed. But I am sure they aren’t.

This sense of feeling like the objects of our affection owe us reciprocation is neither gendered nor new. The Greek gods and goddesses were constantly raping or turning the people they loved into animals or plants in order deal with the burn of rejection. Carrie Underwood had a hit song about fucking up some dude’s car for possibly cheating on her (listen to it, it’s all about things he’s “probably” doing). Obviously, I think it’s better that people don’t cheat on one another, but even in a committed relationship there is a limit to what we can do to those who disappoint us. If he cheats on you, Carrie, leave him. But leave his truck alone, you psychotic loser.

I recently finished reading two novels, Jeffrey Eugenides’s great The Marriage Plot, and Graham Greene’s middling England Made Me. Though published about 80 years apart, they are both about how, whether we want to admit it or not, loving someone else can often be a very selfish act. All three of the main characters in Eugenides’s book use each other to not have to admit their own selfishness. They are bright, urbane, and enlightened (Ivy Leaguers, dammit!), but they are terrified of being alone because then they’d realize that they are basically sad assholes. They want to be wanted and need to be needed. Most of us do, really. Greene’s book focuses on fraternal twins, a man and a woman, who are so in love with themselves that they try to sabotage each other’s relationships in order to preserve the possibility that they might make Quentin Compson’s deranged incestuous fantasies come to life. It’s not as creepy as it sounds because the book just isn’t, aside from a few incredible passages, very good, but watching the twins interact is about as comfortable as biting down on tinfoil.

If Eugenides and Green are warning against the dangers of self-obsession, this Kate Upton story is an example of how our social networking culture just encourages it. Far from being called out by an adult world with a sense of decency, this kid who asked her out was cheered on in his self-aggrandizing debasement by millions. He was on the fucking Today Show. No wonder kids are leaving college barely any smarter than when they arrive. Why work hard and take yourself away from fun when there’s a whole world (wide web) out there just waiting to make you a celebrity? All your friends are there. There’s Jay-Z, and A-Rod, and Marco Rubio, and Amanda Marcotte, and Kate Upton, and that kid who asked out Kate Upton…