Category Archives: American Masculinity

Hat Rules

Posted on by under American Masculinity, sports, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

The golden age of the fashionable American male hat has been over for a long time.  Sorry, nostalgists.  By “fashionable,” I mean hats that are plumage, and which aren’t worn as a necessary part of one’s work (e.g. farmers still wear hats, so do construction workers, as do baseball/softball players).  For a while there, every prole got to have something that used to be the prerogative of aristocrats and royals: articles of headwear whose functional assets are secondary to their aesthetic effect.  But by the late 1960s, in the developed West, few young or middle-age dudes from the white-collar and educated classes donned hats when going to work or a party.

As things stand today, if you are under 70 and wear any sort of retro hat—a bowler, a fedora, one of those “newsy” tongue-like woolly things—you look like a dick.  Trust me, you do.  Even hipsters quickly relinquished their fascination with undersized fedoras (R.I.P, 2006-2008), although these do remain popular with entry-level alts.

However, one type of hat has been tenacious.  This is the baseball cap (which needn’t actually bear a sports logo).  Dudes still try to rock it during sit-down dinners.  At the bar.  In class.  Seriously, the other night I walked by Opal (an expensive restaurant in Santa Barbara) and saw a 30s-ish guy wearing a Yankee fitted on a fucking date.  Even a Red Sox cap would not have been OK at all.  This indecorous dorm-life shit has got to stop.  I love baseball caps in moderation.  But there need to be some contemporary guidelines.  Think I’ll volunteer to write some.  And since I don’t feel capable of theorizing female hat rules, I will restrict my comments to my gender.  Here are 12 tenets worth considering:

1.) If you are under 23 years of age and/or an undergraduate in college and/or terminally ill, congratulations.  Wear one all you want.  Otherwise the following rules apply.

2.) No caps at work, unless you have a job where a cap is immediately useful (i.e. construction or professional baseball).

3.) If you are sitting down and eating at the same time, you may not have a cap on.  A female family member should have told you this anyway.

4.) You really shouldn’t wear a cap to a party, unless said party is outside on a sunny day or taking place during a rainstorm.  Otherwise, Spaceship You emits a spectrum of bro-vibe which doesn’t entice most women, not even young ones from California.

5.) Even if you are under 23 and in college, you can’t wear any cap to my classes.  Not even a Sox cap.  Sorry, bro, but I already let the sweatpants & surfboard pass.

6.) Caps may be worn to sporting events whether you are a participant or an observer.  Same goes for outdoor concerts, but be aware that caps still aren’t considered very hip, so if you’re wearing one in Prospect Park or wherever don’t expect the girl with the Lisa Simpson tattoo to come strike up a conversation.

7.) NO NEW-ERA FITTED CAPS FOR ANYONE OVER 30.  Not even if you aren’t white.  Grown men should confine themselves to unstructured fitted caps like this one:

8.  If you wear glasses you look better in a cap than a guy who doesn’t (at least according to a girl I once dated).  Get some fake lenses if you want to tart up your style.  I also suggest a blazer.  Counterintuitive, I know.

9.  If you are venturing outside within an hour of waking up, you may wear a cap.

10.  Caps are (sort of) OK while running errands.

11.  You are not allowed to own more than 5 caps.

12.  Baseball caps are cooler than basketball caps, which are cooler than football caps.  This rule applies only to the aestheto-cultural appeal of the cap, not to the sport itself.

13. Don’t make rules about stuff like caps.  What are you, illiterate?

-TGR breaks these rules all the time

Go West, Young Man

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, the polis, Visual

From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, the Western was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the United States.  The genre is vast, comprising Buffalo Bill’s turn-of-the-century roadshow, cowboy poetry, good and terrible fiction for both boys and adults, widely reproduced photos & paintings & woodcuts, advertisements (especially ones for cars), political campaigning (Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan both loved bullshit about the glorious frontier), TV shows, and films.  Lots of academic studies have been written about the various cultural functions of the Western–i.e. what it tells us about how different kinds of Americans conceptualize American identity—but by far the best and most accessible is Jane Tompkins’ West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford UP, 1992).  Tompkins is that excellent kind of professor: she combines a historian’s erudition with a literary essayist’s verve.  In other words, Tompkins will entertain the hell out of you while also teaching you a whole lot.

Tompkins organizes the book by dividing the first half into chapters that each focus on a key Western theme or icon (Cattle, Indians, Horses, etc.) and then devoting the latter to chapter-length discussions of major Western texts (e.g. Louis L’Amour’s famous–and quite good–novels).  You can probably stick to the first part of the book without missing much.

While she spends a good deal of time demonstrating how popular conceptions of the West, most of them produced and consumed by white people, tend to minimize or erase altogether the incredible complexity of American history, largely by ignoring the perspectives of Native Americans, Spanish/Mexican colonists, black settlers, and Chinese immigrants, her main argument is that the Western is all about policing gender roles.  Westerns became popular at exactly the same time that the U.S. was becoming an industrialized capitalist empire, which made it difficult to maintain the longstanding image of Americans as courageous settlers who battled the wilderness and converted it to a rural, farm-based, Christian pastoral.  In particular, it was especially hard for American men who now tended to work in factories or white-collar office jobs to think of themselves as powerful, tough-talkin’, pragmatic individualists.  The Western responds to this panic about gender by offering a simplistic, consoling story in which men are quiet heroes and women are nurturing companions in need of male protection.  Her implicit point is that many of our nation’s cultural formations are about exactly the same thing.

So if you like history or are at all interested in the byzantine origins of “American” identity, check this out.

-TGR

The Weekend’s Difficult Men (Man #1): Richard Hugo

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Book Recommendations, Pooms/Poetry

Even if he hadn’t written some of the better American poetry of the 1960s and 70s, Richard Hugo would be remembered by literary history for a number of reasons. Maybe only as a footnote, but still, a long one. He was one of Theodore Roethke’s students at the University of Washington. He co-founded Poetry Northwest. He taught at the famed Iowa MFA program. He was a friend and fellow-traveler of poets like William Stafford, Carolyn Kizer, James Wright, James Welch, and A.R. Ammons. And, perhaps most importantly, he taught creative writing for nearly two decades at the University of Montana, helping turn that MFA program into one of the finest in the country.

But luckily for readers of English, he happened to write a number of wonderful books of poetry, plus a crime thriller, a fine collection of autobiographical essays called The Real West Marginal Way, and a justifiably still-famous rumination on the art of poetry, The Triggering Town. His collected poems (titled Making Certain It Goes On) and Selected Poems are both available from the usual places, as are the prose books.

A word of caution, I guess: Richard Hugo is a very good poet, but he isn’t a great poet. He’s not in Whitman’s or Bishop’s league.  (It’s kind of like the difference between, say, Patrick Ewing and Michael Jordan.)  Mainly this is because Hugo has one fundamental tone, from which he departs only very rarely, and which adjectives like “depressed,” “bitter,” “despairing,” “morose,” and “elegiac” (that’s probably the best and most charitable one)  describe only half-adequately. You’ll see what I mean if you decide to read him; it comes across even if you only look at the half-dozen Norton Anthology pieces. It is most certainly NOT because he writes a lot about one loosely defined region of the United States, the Northwest (comprising both the Upper Plains and the Pacific region). You see, he still sometimes gets typecast as a “regionalist,” which in the lingo of American lit teachers tends to have lame, unfair connotations of “minor” or “fringe.”

Hugo’s major theme–as distinct from his emotional tone–is the impossibility of finding a stable, legitimately happy home in America. He was a white man from the improbably named White Center, at the time a gritty working-class suburb of Seattle; his father ran out on the family when Hugo was a kid; he had a terrible drinking problem; he suffered lifelong trauma (what would now be called PTSD) from his tour as a B-17 navigator in World War II; he constantly lamented his perceived failures with women*; he never really seemed to accept that by middle age he had become a respected American writer; in short, he always thought of himself as a schlemiel, and this fundamental theme gets articulated in a consistent pattern of settings. Wrecked or abandoned towns after the gold-mining industry failed. Cruddy villages in Italy. Failing small farms. Dive bars. Rivers near the Pacific. Fishing. More dive bars. Long car journeys from desolate hamlet to even worse (Hugo is the great American poet of the highway). The scenes of Indian massacres and humiliations, and the white liberal’s consequent, and justified, guilt. The austere natural environment of Montana and Washington.

*Regarding his sexual neurosis: this is where and why H. occasionally slips into adolescent self-pity, which in turn borders on misogyny and sometimes results in genuinely creepy passages about women who “wronged” him. You might want to steer clear of these poems, which are scattered throughout his corpus.

As for his style, Hugo is prosy, insofar as he mimes the voice of someone talking / confessing directly to you, but he also mixes in buried and half-rhymes, the occasional delicious stretch of iambic pentameter, and a lush profusion of image that most novelists don’t risk going after. His images are severe, though, and he rarely ventures into blowsy John Ashbery territory. It boils down to this: Hugo demonstrates the poetic utility of both free verse and metered verse–he reminds the reader that these things aren’t anathema to one another, that in fact they can be mixed in the same poem.

Hugo is essentially a confessional poet, writing with the same general attitude as Plath, Lowell, and Berryman. By this I mean he talks about himself and his small world a great deal. Personal memory is what fires him. He bares his heart, whether you want to hear it or not. But he is different from those poets in a crucial way, because unlike them he always connects the story of his existential despair (pardon that phrase) to wider and, from most people’s point of view, more important problems like environmental devastation, economic collapse, and the long, long history of Native American genocide. Hugo is a poet for American outcasts and underdogs; if you’re one, or were one, chances are you’ll empathize with him, and maybe even like his poetry, whether you came up in rural Nevada, the South, Harlem, East LA, or wherever.

What are you waiting for?  Start Googling him. Read what comes up. And consider buying a Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.  If you want to keep your library light, this is a book you need.

-TGR

Rapper Spasms

Posted on by under American Masculinity, mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

Because you need a laugh, because we all need a laugh, I give you .gifs of popular rappers . com. WARNING: this link contains radioactive levels of humor & may cause scream-laughing. Walter Benjamin is right that film lets you look at human movements over and over and over. Why would we want to do that?  Because it’s funny as fug! I’m not the first person to notice that: such repetition is part of Henri Bergson‘s theory of comedy, for instance. And this site is obviously an oblique homage to Benjamin. And to Punch and Judy. Looney Tunes.  Beckett’s novels, too. Have a good weekend, ya’ll.

-TGR

PS BEAT DUKE

Great on Depression

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Book Recommendations, Other Critics

The New Yorker has two very good book critics, James Wood and Louis Menand, both of whom teach literature at Harvard.  Unfortunately, only one of them is routinely interesting (being interesting and being good* as a critic are two different things, as you realize if you read a lot of criticism and book reviews).  This would be Menand, who has a cool essay out which surveys some recent books on psychiatry / psychology and the problem of depression.  His main contention is that difficulties in defining the best methodologies for mental-heath treatment are closely connected to the enormous complexity of depression, which remains at best problematically defined and understood, despite the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of human beings and has garnered decades of attention from the best psychological thinkers and practitioners around (also some of the worst).  Trust me, you will like this, whether or not you’ve ever dealt with The Noonday Demon.

-TGR

* By “good,” I mean whether or not someone accomplishes the book critic’s basic task of explaining what a text is generally about and convincing some readers that they might like to read it.  Interestingness has mainly to do with the writer’s voice / style / poetic verve / whatever I’m no theorist.

How male was the “American Century”?

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

Writing for The Guardian, in preparation for a new BBC radio series on U.S. literature called “Capturing America” (soon to debut, I guess), Mark Lawson ponders the influence of the generation of American novelists who reached adulthood during World War II, who ascended to fame in the 1950s and ’60s, and who held their star-posts until recently, until old age and death caught up: Mailer, Heller, Bellow, Roth, Updike, Salinger, and others.  Lawson provides a pretty good overview–and I stress “overview” (it is after all a newspaper article)–of the last half-century of American letters, and his understanding of the current core debate among critics and scholars (How accurate is it to frame a cadre of mostly male, mostly white writers as the leaders of national literary culture?) is nuanced.  Viz.,

This triumphalist but nostalgic position holds that these writers took advantage of their nation’s geopolitical power – and a media culture and bookstore customer-base which regarded serious writers ­seriously – to create a superpower of the pen to match the financial and military clout of the US during what became known as the American century.

The counter-argument is that this army of old soldiers was very male and masculine and white in its concerns – tempered only by a grudging, late admission to the halls of fame of writers such as Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates – and that the standard narrative of 20th-century American literature is partial and distorted. This case is made persuasively in Elaine Showalter’s recent book: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Literary history is impossibly messy and almost always contentious (celebrating some people means not celebrating others, or at least not celebrating them as much), and so this debate is unwinnable, really.  But even if you don’t believe that Bellow, et al. constitute the “greatest generation” of American writers (and personally I don’t even think there is such a thing as any “greatest generation,” not ever), it is hard to write off the achievement of books like Herzog and The Catcher in the Rye, and you will probably find Lawson’s apercu fair and sophisticated, which is impressive, given the short format he’s working in.

He also works in the usual worries about The Death of Serious Literature–

Updike, in [his] last interview, reflected on having twice been pictured on the cover of Time magazine, part of the nation’s honours system, to mark the publication of Couples in 1968 and Rabbit Is Rich in 1982. Now, the novelist who takes that prize is Dan Brown. And so the changing of the guard in American fiction is arguably not just generational but cultural: the large, interested readership who lined their shelves with Updike’s Rabbit Quartet, Bellow’s Herzog, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and other bestsellers of serious literary merit had perhaps migrated to the quick-read thriller and the confessional memoir.

–without sounding like a hysterical pessimist.  Literature will keep getting written, and, as long as our educational system doesn’t totally collapse (50/50 odds?) people, at least some people, will keep reading it:

. . . intelligent literary culture will adapt to the new conditions of the marketplace and may be revived, as the country always has been, by immigration. The Jewish-American, Irish-American, ­African-American and European-­American writers of the great postwar generations may be followed by authors who are, say, Indian-American (Jhumpa Lahiri, left, with Unaccustomed Earth), Dominican-American (Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) or Korean-American (Chang-rae Lee, whose novel The Surrendered, published this spring, extends the nation’s rich war literature by treating the ­Korean war from an Asian perspective). With these books and others, a new phase is beginning.

Kinda pat, but true.  And by the way, if you haven’t done so yet, you really, really need to read Oscar Wao.  Diaz is the troof.  Happy reading,

-TGR