Category Archives: Authors

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, Other Critics

The college football schedule is finally starting to get interesting, so I understand if you ignore my advice and just post up on your couch eating Funyuns. If you are looking for a slightly more refined weekend experience though, may I suggest the following:

  • Check out these amazing illustrations Salvador Dali drew for Don Quixote. The man’s work was so much more than melting clocks. [h/t to the Prufrock Newsletter]
  • Over at Slate, read Joseph Thomas’ account of trying to get the estate of Shel Silverstein to allow him to quote from the author’s works. This is something Ryan and I both know a bit about, as I published a piece on the lengths J.D. Salinger went to guard his personal letters from Ian Hamilton, and Ryan had the misfortune of trying to convince Sylvia Plath’s gatekeepers that a dissertation did not represent a market threat. Godspeed, Prof. Thomas.
  • Jordan Conn wrote a great piece at Grantland about how Oakland looks poised to lose all of its professional sports teams within the next decade. The article ends up being a profile of one of the more unique (for better and for worse) American cities in a time of simultaneous crisis and rebirth.
  • The always insightful Alan Jacobs has a great (and longish) review essay up at Books & Culture about Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge. Jacobs is a serious and generous critic, and while I don’t share his religious beliefs or politics, I appreciate that he spends so much of his time writing for non-academic audiences. More professors need to look outside the tower every now and then.
  • This is (another) shameless plug, but you should check out the Book Review section over at The Los Angeles Review, where I serve as Assistant Book Reviews Editor.
  • And, this [h/t Adam Ted Jacobson, via Gawker]:

Cultural Literacy Redux

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges, Other Critics

I know I bash on the late-1960s morality play that is the “XX” blog over at Slate a lot, but outside of this little pocket of cliched topic sentences in search of evidence, Slate really is a great site. Troy Patterson is a big reason why this is so. Aside from being Slate‘s resident man of taste and class, he also has real chops. He’s the only person at that site (maybe save David Weigel) who I trust to use a term like “Tory” in an intellectually honest way. So I can’t say I was surprised to see that Patterson’s a man who takes E.D. Hirsch’s work seriously.

For those unfamiliar with Hirsch, he’s the kind of academic who would never get a tenure-track job today, even though, as Patterson points out (with an assist from one of this blog’s patron saints, Christopher Hitchens), many states are coming around to the idea that kids actually need to learn content in order to acquire skills. The fact that Hirsch’s concept of “cultural literacy” was ever controversial is evidence of the sad decadence and arrogance of some influential English and “Education” departments since the 1970s, when “theory” came into fashion and substituted Orwellian jargon for intelligence. Now, let me be clear (thanks for that phrase, Obama), most English departments are filled with people who really don’t care about what Derrida wrote (or said, or uttered, or whatever stupid word he mandated that we use). But even many of these people have to pretend like Derrida (or Foucault, or Butler, and…) is responsible for more than like 3 useful pages of ideas. One day this will change, but by then English departments may have specialized and de-literatured themselves out of existence.

In any case, Hirsch was and is a real weirdo: a tenured English professor who cares about teaching more than anything else. And not only teaching, as most profs will defend to the death their right to teach graduate seminars, but teaching K-12. What kind of suicidal English professor cares about kids he’s not actually teaching at the moment? One who understands that he will have to teach them at some point. More importantly, Hirsch is the kind of guy who actually thinks about the world beyond the classroom. While his love of testing and data makes me uncomfortable, if I had to pick a side in the education debate, it wouldn’t take me long to choose his over Dewey’s disciples preaching confidence over competence. Competence breeds confidence in the long run, and Hirsch understood that the best way to help the poor is to give them an education that will allow them to converse with and challenge those in positions of power. This is something David Foster Wallace also understood, and if you haven’t read “Tense Present” recently, go do that right now.

Back to Patterson though. I would have loved to see him extend his discussion of how the internet has changed what should be on Hirsch’s famous list of 10,000 terms/ideas/people/events that all Americans should know to consider how it has changed attitudes toward the value of knowing anything at all. Patterson writes:

Is it too bold to suppose that one must now know 10,000 basic things? Obviously, a lot has happened to general knowledge since the book’s publication, not a little of it connected to what now appears to be a lacuna on Hirsch’s list—a gap that developed between International Monetary Fund and interrogative sentence. The Internet is a force of information inflation, and much of the stuff on the list remains relevant, give or take a few relics and some slang terms (pop the question, bite the dust) now fully embedded in mainstream vocabulary.

He’s gazing down on what’s important here, but perhaps it’s too mixed up and awful for him to really get into. I know that feeling. For the last few years I’ve had students sincerely question why they should have to remember (let alone memorize) anything, as the internet will always be there for them as a handy outboard brain. Thankfully, some of my students look horrified when they hear a classmate say this, but the fact that this scene keeps playing itself out is worrisome. I tell them that the internet is not going to be there for them when they’re having a conversation with some smart guy/gal who might be able to give them a job. If they don’t know (or have to look up cultural references on their iPhones) mid-conversation, s/he ain’t going to be impressed. This obviously isn’t the only reason why remembering stuff is important, but if the fact that a job in an increasingly awful and bifurcated economy might hinge on it won’t sway people, I don’t know what will.

And people accuse us humanists of being romantics…

Stir It Up: Rebecca Schuman Lands Some Punches

Posted on by under Authors, education, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

Back in April, Rebecca Schuman published a piece on Slate titled “Thesis Hatement.” (Come on, lulz: low-hanging puns can be great.) Dan actually mentioned it as part of a “Saturday Links” blast. Despite the fact that it is sane, reality-based, and urgent without being shrill, “Thesis Hatement” caused a lot of Slate commenters (including a fair number of academics), to go batshit. She addresses the haters in a delightfully acidic response on her blog, Pan Kisses Kafka, which is part of the rapidly emerging “postacademic” community. (Post-acad stuff from other writers here and here and here and here, for starters. And also a recent piece RS wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education).

Given the seething response the essay got from some quarters, it bears repeating that Schuman’s piece is a humane, valuable polemic. I re-read it today as I sat in my studio apartment, just after I paid this month’s student-loan bill, in fact. (Back when I started graduate school I actually believed insane bullshit like “Student-loan is good debt.”). Her work is based on personal experience but is not narcissistic or even all that autobiographical. It is precise and witty. And it underscores some dreadful things that any reasonable person (even many tenured Boomers!) with a functional knowledge of US academic culture would have a difficult time refuting: that the present labor environment at too many American colleges and universities puts terrible psychological and social demands upon too many faculty, especially younger PhDs and graduate students; that it offers little material incentive for facing these challenges; and that it trains the tormented not only to accept their torment as a professional duty, but to view any escape from that torment as a personal and professional failure.

A bummer, I know. So here is a picture of Iggy Pop vacuuming his living room. Cheer up, y’all: it’s the weekend.

Good Reviews: More like “Back to DERP”

Posted on by under Authors, Good Reviews, Other Critics, Reviews

Esquire is gross. We’ve covered that. Not many texts are more ephemeral than book reviews in Esquire, except maybe reviews in Esquire of recent books by Tom Wolfe; the neo-Social Realist ones. And yet although nothing Tom Wolfe, Esquire, or the General Reader does matters, Benjamin Alsup’s compact but weirdly patient, vicious disposal of Wolfe’s Back to Blood (yeesh, the title) is worth your bytes and clicks. A fundamental thrust:

[. . .] There are no characters in Back to Blood, only caricatures, cartoonish stereotypes that are little more than reflections of their sociocultural contexts. The Cuban cop who loves his pastelitos. The preppy reporter with all the right credentials. The Hialeah honey with a heart of gold and a pussy like a papaya. In Back to Blood, Wolfe comes across as a white guy explaining brown people to a room full of white guys. Sure, he burns pages giving his readers access to these characters’ interiors, but once he’s given you the sociological stats (age, gender, race, occupation) there’s really no need for it. Anything Wolfe tells you about what his characters are thinking are things you could’ve guessed from the jump.

We want your weekend to prosper. We don’t want you wasting time with shitty art. So believe us when we say this, y’all: If it ever comes down to white urban writers, you are better off (you are fantastically well-off) with David Simon or Richard Price (or Tom Wolfe from before 1980).

Just Stop

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

Jonathan Franzen is the second best essayist of his generation, just behind David Foster Wallace.* Amanda Hess is the 12,067th best essayist of her generation, so you can imagine the tenor and quality of her burn on Franzen over at “XX,” Slate‘s answer to a question Jezebel never asked. Sure, Franzen should get some ribbing for his long, fist-shaking Guardian article about how just about everything sucks now (even though he’s basically right). But that ribbing shouldn’t read like a drunk-text written by a college sophomore three weeks into her first Media Studies class. Hess writes:

Literature’s preeminent dude-bro took out his frustrations at a girl he “decided” not to have sex with (isn’t that how it always happens!) by fantasizing about old women destroying their bodies as they scrounge after his discarded fortunes. Franzen writes that he learned to overcome his youthful anger when he became a novelist, and was moved to empathize with other humans in the service of great literature; “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not” is the “mental work that fiction fundamentally requires,” he now understands.

But Franzen is less enthused about the prospect of other humans actually responding to his stories—or, God forbid, telling their own stories without the aid of Franzen’s refined literary filter. Since Franzen came into this world in 1959 and human communication promptly went to hell in a handbasket—by the way, does that make Jonathan Franzen one of the horsemen of his own apocalypse?—people who do not look like Jonathan Franzen have leveraged the explosion of literary outlets to publish their own writing, tell their own experiences, and gain voices in the conversation. (Jennifer Weiner has already filed her response to Franzen’s essay in The New Republic, in a piece entitled, “What Jonathan Franzen Misunderstands About Me.”) But Franzen fails to draw any connection between the segregated swimming pools of his youth and his own ability to “find my place” as a writer in the long tail of that old world. Franzen briefly acknowledges the diversity argument just to knock it down. He expresses disappointment with the literary magazine N+1, which he says “denigrates print magazines as terminally ‘male,’ celebrates the internet as ‘female,’ and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.”

If Franzen had published his wistful German train station anecdote today, the “penny-pinching old German woman” could tweet evidence of Franzen’s insufficient tip; the hot girl could tell the world how their interaction really went down in an xoJane IHTM. That doesn’t mean that writers today have lost the ability to seriously explore the human condition. It means that a much wider and diverse group of humans now has the power to inform privileged literary voices like Franzen about what the conditions are actually like on the ground.

Honestly, I don’t even think Hess knows what she’s trying to say here. Cliched “he’s a bad tipper” Reddit posts and the just pathetic “please, somebody validate me” tripe of the reality TV/blogging/vlogging/TVlogging-sphere are not “conditions on the ground.” They are cries for help from people who can’t deal with the fact that the world hasn’t recognized how special they are, not literary criticism. Jonathan Franzen couldn’t care less about folks tweeting at him, let alone second-rate pop-feminist blogs saying that he does. But as Jennifer Wiener has made clear, there are second careers to be had griping in Franzen’s wake.

*For the record, I think Joan Didion is probably the greatest essayist of any generation.

Topical Verse: Be All That You Can Be

Posted on by under Authors, Topical Verse

It is either comforting or not at all comforting to know that Silicon Valley didn’t invent the temple of life-hacking, the ruinous belief that one might perfect oneself and master existence: to know that this conceit is much older, basically post-Enlightenment modernity’s favorite way of doing things. Perfected under American Protestantism, given a cozy sheen by the techno-progressivism that emerged from Western research institutions after World War II, and now distinguished by a frantic strain indicative of life’s realities after the Great Recession, the only difference is that now there are more media platforms for spreading it. Dr. Oz and Bill Gates are winning the game. Why aren’t you? Get thee to a library, and check out some Horatio Alger.

Artists have done their bit of pushing back. Wallace Stevens put his shoulder to the wheel with “The Poems of Our Climate” (1937-1942), which emphasizes that a life of “complete simplicity,” an existence stripped of all ambiguity and uncertainty and longing, would be pretty awful. Or rather, striving for a life like that is awful, because only a lunatic would try to get it.

I.
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II.
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Topical Verse: Summer

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

We’re officially in the dead of summer, and it feels like it here in southern California. Actually, it has felt more like summer in Louisiana here in L.A. for the past couple weeks. Just gross and humid. Still, I realize that most people in America have it much worse, so for today’s topical verse I’ve chosen a poem that celebrates both summer and place, William Blake’s “To Summer.” If you haven’t read much Blake, go to your local used bookstore and hunt around until you uncover an edition of his poems that also contains some of his etchings and drawings. Then, find your nearest pleasure garden, post up under a good shade tree, and read until you fall asleep nestled up against summer’s bosom. This is what this lazy weather is for, folks.

To Summer

O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitchedst here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o’er the deep of heaven: beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:
Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.

Our bards are famed who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.

Topical Verse: Detroit

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

In honor of Detroit’s totally depressing and, according to Keith B. Richburg, entirely predictable bankruptcy (take heed, California), here is an offering by former U.S. Poet Laureate (and perpetual Detroit and Fresno Poet Laureate) Philip Levine. This selection comes from his later work, and if you haven’t read his more famous verses from the 1960s, especially “They Feed They Lion,” you should. Like Jim Daniels, Levine’s subjects are often working class, and his observations aren’t always politically correct. But his work is true and public, like the best rap music. We need more poetry like this right now.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.