Category Archives: Book Recommendations

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.

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…

The Bigger They Are

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, in the news, the polis

The  erstwhile warlord of Liberia, Charles Taylor, who helped drench several African countries in blood during the 90s, is finally going down: he’s on special U.N. trial at The Hague.  (It even involves Naomi Campbell.)  A psychopath whose army specialized in child slavery, mass murder (via machete), gang rape, forced prostitution, theft of money and land and diamonds, and sometimes–supposedly–cannibalism, Tayler was also a fantastic thief, and stashed millions in various tricksy places, just like a good dictator should.  If you would like to read a few great essays about the things that were happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the middle of the previous decade–and you should, because you live on this planet too–check out Denis Johnson’s non-fiction collection,  Seek.  Available on your Kindle or lap.  Great novelists often do a great job with terrible events.

-TGR

Sunday Poet: Kay Ryan

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Reviews

Earlier this year, Grove Press released The Best of It, a compact, gorgeously designed selection of poems by Kay Ryan, the California-born and -based writer who was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006 til 2008. She is one of my favorites, and I’m hardly the only person who feels this way: Ryan is one of the few American poets who actually moves enough units to make some kind of a living from verse (although since the 1970s her day job has been teaching literature at a community college in northern California). But popularity alone is hardly a reason to spend time with her. Luckily there are lots of other reasons.

She draws a lot of comparisons to Emily Dickinson, which is only partly fitting. Like Dickinson, Ryan writes short poems (rarely more than one page) with abbreviated lines and a complicated mixture of internal and line-end rhymes. Her sense of music sets her above most contemporary U.S. poets: prosy free verse has become American poetry’s dominant format over the past fifty years, but Ryan’s style evokes an older lyric tradition. While her verse isn’t as regular as, say, Auden’s, it still clearly demonstrates the pleasurable contributions sound makes to sense (or “content,” if you like), and her ability to incorporate patterned acoustics into clipped lines is, like Dickinson’s, astonishing. Try writing a compact poem that rhymes and scans without sounding like a bouncy-bouncy nursery rhyme; it’s really, really hard.

But Ryan is far less cryptic than Dickinson. While it wouldn’t be correct to say that her lyrics offer messages, homilies, or tidy themes, each text does develop and play with a relatively coherent moment of thought. Her preferred method is to take a small scene or object–say, a flamingo or an empty room–and use it as what T.S. Eliot would call the “objective correlative” for whatever the poem is reflecting on. In her work physical environments are simultaneously real material places and psychological climates; the given world is an invitation to & a space for thought and emotion. Here is a poem called “That Will to Divest”:

Action creates

a taste

for itself.

Meaning: once

you’ve swept

the shelves

of spoons

and plates

you kept

for guests,

it gets harder

not to also

simplify the larder,

not to dismiss

rooms, not to

divest yourself

of all the chairs

but one, not

to test what

singleness can bear,

once you’ve begun.

Her lines are usually a couple beats longer than this, actually, but “Divest” gives you a sense of how she works. Short enough to read during your lunch break or while you’re waiting for friends to show up at the bar, Ryan’s poems make you uneasy and happy at the same time. Like the poems of anyone who’s any good. Dig her.

-TGR

Action creates

a taste

for itself.

Meaning: once

you’ve swept

the shelves

of spoons

and plates

you kept

for guests,

it gets harder

not to also

simplify the larder,

not to dismiss

rooms, not to

divest yourself

of all the chairs

but one, not

to test what

singleness can bear,

once you’ve begun.

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

Martin Amis, “Success”

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, Reviews

Do you sometimes read books? Are you a youngish male? (Bonus points for being the kind likely to feel vaguely sympatico with the main dude in Greenberg.) Do you ever complain about sex issues or your job? About class?  Like a drink? Have a sense of humor? Do you have at least a light liberal-arts education (including self-education)?

Then may I suggest Martin Amis‘ cruel, despondent, hilarious short novel Success? It’s a book about co-dependents who despise each other, and who are both vile, funny, self-obsessed human urbanites. The angst of writers like David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, and Junot Diaz is unimaginable without Amis; he is the bridge between their voices and the realist comedy exemplified by Graham Green, Kingsley Amis, Dickens, Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, and Charlotte Bronte. (Though Bronte isn’t a true realist. Plus, you would need to talk about Rabelais and Henry Fielding and D.H. Lawrence, who is unintentionally funny. Of course Samuel Beckett, too.  Especially him. Anyway.) Success is a book to read if you fancy yourself cosmopolitan in that coastal Anglo-American hip way but also enjoy ironic perspectives on the foibles of said lifestyle. Amis is a novelist for the end of parties, also the beginnings of them and the middles.

 

Heidegger vs. Nazis vs. Heidegger Fans vs. People Who think Heidegger was a Nazi (espisode one million)

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Reviews

It’s a fact: Martin Heidegger was a good silent citizen under the Nazi regime–a full, tenured academic toady, to be honest.  And there are some creepy rhetorical resemblances between his notion of Dasein and the Nazis’ blood-and-soil vocabulary.  Still, was he really a crypto-fascist?  DUNNO.  I like Heidegger.  Am I a bad brain?

Anyway, a heavyweight French academic, Emmanuel Faye, of the University of Rouen, has waded into the scrum, and he doesn’t like what he found.  Having studied a lot of unpublished Heidegger, Faye concludes that H’s thought—his bizarre, polyvocal, poetic thought—has a lot in common with totalitarian ideology.  I will probably never read Faye’s book, recently published in English translation by the Yale UP, and which is subtly titled Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, but I did check out this review from the Times (of London) Higher Education supplement.  It is troubling stuff.  But I still like Heidegger.

-TGR