A collection of ways to distract yourself from your friends and lovers this weekend.
Be sure to check out Kobe Bryant’s unintentionally hilarious Facebook screed that he wrote while hopped up on painkillers after tearing his Achilles tendon in a game against the playoff-bound Golden State Warriors. My personal favorite line is “This anger is rage,” which sounds like the title of a Sharon Olds collection.
If you enjoyed watching Peep Showby yourself last weekend, I suggest you follow it up by ripping through Whites, another English comedy about the hilariously inept. It ran for only six episodes, but each one is brilliant. It stars a bunch of people you might recognize from other shows (Sherlock, The IT Crowd, Peep Show, Jonathan Creek), and it was written by Peep Show‘s Super Hans!
Are you an aging hipster who decided not to go to Coachella because the thought of being out in the desert for three days surrounded by twenty-year-olds is revolting? Fair enough. However, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the music. YouTube is running live feedsof many of the acts all weekend. It’s like being there without all the dust and vomit.
These articles aren’t exactly new, but Steven Hyden’s “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” series at Grantland is fantastic. You may not like the bands he profiles (Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Metallica, Linkin Park, and The Black Keys), but the fact that they all became and remain popular has something to tell us about the popular art marketplace over the last forty years. Not everybody loves a winner, but at least we remember them.
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.
You just wouldn’t expect the twenty-first-century GOP to stoop this low.
As we all know from school, democracy is important to America. But as you might also know, if you had a good history teacher, anti-democratic wankery is as American as apple pie, too. Jonathan Chait puts it lucidly in a recent edition of New York (one of the cool city’s cooler mags):
The tradition of expanding the scope of American democracy commands all the retrospective historical glory. But the counter-democratic tradition—a concerted advocacy not of dictatorship but of restraints to prevent the majority of citizens from exercising political power—runs just as long and deep. It runs through John C. Calhoun, the titanic nineteenth-century theorist who defended the rights of the white South against the growing majority in the North. (“The first and leading error … is to confound the numerical majority with the people, and this so completely as to regard them as identical.”) Our history books record the arguments of the crusaders for voting rights for women and blacks and overlook that they were, necessarily, arguing against something. Women’s suffrage, warned former president Grover Cleveland in 1905, would “give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich.” In 1908, New York City tried to suppress voting by Jews (who held notoriously left-wing views) by limiting voter registration to Saturdays and Yom Kippur. It took a hotly contested constitutional amendment in 1913 to allow people nationwide to vote for their senators, who previously were appointed by state legislatures.
American history has always tugged back and forth between a more pure democracy and some constricted facsimile thereof. “In the very long run, to be sure, we have become more democratic,” Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar has written, “but there have been numerous moments in our past when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.”
Nice of a journalist to know a lot about history. Hey, kids: take that little seminar where the professor makes you write a 25-page paper. You might end up a contend-uh.
Sam Lubell’s short piece about Dodger Stadium in The Los Angeles Review of Books does a great job of explaining why so many of us who aren’t fans of Lasorda’s boys (that’s still how I think of them) love watching games at Chavez Ravine. Go Giants.
Here’s a link to the Hulu page for Peep Show, the greatest comedy ever to air on television. If you haven’t seen this show, tell your friends to fuck off this weekend and watch every episode.
You should read or reread this 1956 interview of William Faulkner that Jean Stein conducted for The Paris Review. It’s when Faulkner coined his famous “own little postage stamp of native soil” phrase. Dude was so great. He was also apparently a thunderous lay, according to his girlfriend. For a nice roundup of Faulkner’s sexploits, go here.
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.
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 TodayShow. 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…
It’s no secret that the American university has become a terrible, exploitative economic model, in which ever-rising undergraduate tuition and an ever-growing pool of cheap non-tenured academic labor (adjunct profs AND Ph.D. students) are being used to fund privatized defense & telecom research, athletics programs, and massive, risky investments in things like hedge funds (yes, universities are big players in the investment market which nearly destroyed the U.S. economy over the past decade). If you thought the academy was all about educating citizens, you are in for some nasty surprises.
One of the most trenchant critiques of this is Bob Samuels, a professor at UCLA who also works as a top-notch education journalist. You can see a brief TV interview with him here (it’s from “Democracy Now!”); during it he explains his basic critique of the nation’s university system, particularly the “public” schools within it. He also writes a superb blog called “Changing Universities.” Its focus is the beleaguered, mismanaged University of California system I am lucky enough to call my professional home for now, but the arguments he makes are germane to all colleges and universities in the United States. If you’re in college, or have been, or have a child who is going there, or are thinking about graduate school, or just got a graduate degree, you should be reading him. The system is rigged, but it isn’t fucked. There is still time to change this.
It is almost certainly accurate to say that in both the U.S. and Britain there is roughly the same ratio of reasonably educated, cosmopolitan people to dull, parochial ones (the kind some pedants still call “philistines”). Hugely disparate population sizes aside, there is probably an even richer variety of cultural activity in the U.S., which is, after all, one of the most ethnically, geographically, politically, and socially heterogeneous countries on earth. We haven’t been a backwater colony for a long time, and all one needs to do to silence any haters is point to someone like Emily Dickinson or Miles Davis. Sure, American culture exports a lot of shit. So does any culture. The British are the reason we have reality TV.
So why do many Americans, myself included, continue to assume, almost instinctually, that British people are somehow wittier and more articulate and better educated than we are? This is especially true of our reactions to English emigres, but Irish and Scottish accents are also redolent of cool. What is it about the national accent that seems posh (to use some British slang), even when it comes to dialects that in England are associated with the lower classes? Why does a vulgar dumbass like Simon Cowell have any cultural cachet?
Apparently this stereotype irks Britons, too, at least according to Andrew Sullivan, the (British-born) philosophy PhD who edits the great Daily Dish and writes for a ton of American and European outlets. However, he also argues that there’s some useful truth to the whole thing: impolite English outsiders have historically provided critical, alternative views of U.S. culture. Go here to see what he has to say. It’s a Times (of London) weekend commentary bit, which means it’s short enough to read while you eat a cup of yogurt or smoke a cigarette.
The General Reader 