Weekend Beats: Gold-Plated Doors on Thirty-First Floors

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

Gram Parsons went hard, as in making-even-the-Rolling-Stones-worried hard, and his death at 26 from a flood of morphine and booze wasn’t any more surprising than what happened to Dylan Thomas and John Bonham. It isn’t Romantically complex and fitting when gifted human beings die young: it’s just dingy and awful, because when it happens, we all lose a layer off the thin armor that helps us get through this hurr vale of tears.

Modernity’s archival capacities do provide some comfort. Here is “Sin City” (1969), which Parsons recorded with his band The Flying Burrito Brothers. The guy spent his brief career twisting up the conventions of American honky-tonk, but his best work honors that genre’s blend of good times, Protestant guilt, and chilling melancholy.

Topical Verse: The Dog Days

Posted on by under sports, Topical Verse

Ryan and I have long argued that Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season should be a federal holiday. But baseball’s popularity isn’t what it was even thirty years ago. There are many reasons for this: the steroid scandal, the strike of 1994, new technologies that have made watching other sports on television a lot more exciting, as well a general ratcheting up of our need to be “entertained” every second of every day. Baseball isn’t “entertaining” like basketball or football, though I’d argue both of those sports are less wildly exciting than people claim. How many two-yard runs up the middle can one watch? And how many Milwaukee Bucks games get the adrenaline raging?

Baseball is now seen by many as something past its prime, especially as football games are the most-viewed programs of any kind each week. But this way of valuing a sport misses the point. Football’s season is only 16 games, whereas the baseball season stretches out for 180, if you include the playoffs. Its rhythms are more like our own lives: we must get up, go to work, go home, and find joy where we can. Maybe people look to sports for something other than dailiness, but I have always loved the slow pacing of baseball. It fits into my life perfectly. I can duck in and duck out, have it on in the background while I do other things, give it my full attention as the bases load and anticipation builds. I don’t want to sound like a D-list academic in a Ken Burns documentary, waxing poetic about a game in 1912 I never saw, but the folks who talk almost gleefully about baseball’s “demise” are missing out on something important, and something uniquely American.

In honor of August baseball, here’s the A.E. Housman poem “To An Athlete Dying Young.” Maybe baseball needed to die in the 1960s for people to really appreciate its virtues. I’m glad it’s still going out there every day though.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

 

Link

Cash Flows (in the classroom)

Oh, hi there. Here is a dispatch from the Department of “When Teachers Talk About the Pay, They Aren’t Being Greedy, Just Honest About a Destructive Institutional Reality,” in conjunction with the Foundation for the Seemingly Obvious Fact that Treating Highly Skilled People Well Makes Them Even More Productive, with editorial assistance from the Council on DUUUUUURRRR, Ya Think?

Sometimes a situation gets so dire, you cite something Dave Eggers wrote in 2011.

Make That Paper… Or Two

Posted on by under education, Life of the Mind, Other Critics

I recommend you read this little post by Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor at Shimer College (which sounds like an awesome place, by the way). The following paragraph sums up Kotsko’s point, and it’s something Ryan and I have been saying to each other for years: most grad students have some skills that could be useful in the private sector, but few actually figure out a way to make use of them there. Kotsko writes:

In terms of making this work, you first need to think about the skills you have as a grad student. You have research skills. You have writing skills. You are basically an information processing machine. You hopefully have some language skills. Depending on your discipline, you might also have some advanced math or stats skills — in any case, you probably know how to use standard office software better than the average office worker does. You’re almost certainly anal-retentive when it comes to grammar and usage. These are things that don’t take any pre-existing special skills, and there are plenty of companies that need help with all of that. (And if you do have pre-existing special skills like programming or web design, then that’s just another advantage.)

Kotsko goes on to suggest that grad students make two resumes, one of their private sector work, and one of their academic work, as both spheres are irrationally hostile to what they think happens in the other, thus somehow tainting the mind of the person who has strayed beyond the borders of either. A lot of grad students I knew did something like this, but most still touted their academic credentials and work on their non-academic CV. They shouldn’t have, at least not in the language of academia.

One of the changes that needs to occur in humanities and social science graduate programs (the sciences are better at this for pretty obvious reasons) is advisors coming to grips with the fact that most of their students won’t become tenure-track professors. This has always been the case, but people still act like all of their young (and old) charges are going to work as “academics.” This fantasy leads advisors to almost never mention that grad students pursue work other than adjunct teaching, save maybe for volunteering at politically correct non-profits. Folks who work in the digital humanities are better about this, but even they don’t often tell their students how important it is to cultivate non-academic professional relationships, build marketable skills, and MAKE MONEY. This has to change soon, or else many grad programs and the people they churn out will insulate themselves out of existence.

Weekend Beats: Brick James Games

Posted on by under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

Even if you’re dealing with a fascinating, appalling affair like the American drug wars; even if you’re digging into the under-appreciated criminal side of things; you need a demonically inventive lyricist to make the day-to-day business of slinging weight seem to be interesting, let alone a rhapsodic practice. (That, or you need David Simon’s creative team.) Not because Drugs are Bad (although some of them are), but because Modern Business, even a violent, fluid modern business like selling lots of drugs, is fundamentally boring, at least to most people who care about what lyricists do in the first place.

Coastal-Intellectual-Approved, and working over the beat from Mobb Deep’s “Cobra,” here is a since-disbanded band of bandits, the Re-Up Gang, which includes Pusha T and Malice from Clipse, one of the greatest hip-hop duos American civilization has yet produced. Most of the 2005 mixtape it’s from (We Got it 4 Cheap, Vol. 2) is worth bumping in your Civic.

You can stop listening around 3:45, because that’s when Pharrell shows up to remind everyone that he has never been able to rap. The track also contains the usual strains of paranoia, brutality, profanity, and nihilism that rap music about the drug game usually does. Otherwise it might not have been as good.

Topical Verse: Back to School

Posted on by under Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

The end of my summer is only a couple days away, so in honor of the return of the school year, I give you Tony Hoagland’s “America.” It describes a feeling all teachers have had: dismissing something a student says only to realize that you actually agree. All teaching is learning, but it’s easy to forget this on bad days when the class in front of you seems to exist only to make you feel ignored. You can’t let this diminish the respect you give your students’ ideas though, because you were once that precocious, jaded, vague, insecure, or pretentious student, and you’ve probably changed a lot less than you’d like to believe.

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

 

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

 

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

 

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

 

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

 

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

 

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

 

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

 

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

 

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

 

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

 

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

 

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

 

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

 

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

 

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

 

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

 

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

Summer Reading

Posted on by under guides and nudges, in the news

This list from BuzzFeed of the 65 books (why 65?) you should read in your 20s is a few months old at this point, but I thought it worth sharing. I have been out of my 20s for over a year now, and the end of that decade did coincide with some pretty big events in my life (finished grad school at 29, got engaged at 30), but I don’t think this had much to do with my 20s winding down. It’s just how it happened to play out. Being 31 doesn’t feel intrinsically different from being 28, so I’m not sure why this list is limited the way it is. Perhaps they actually mean that you should read these books in your early 20s, but even that is dubious. The point is that books change as we age, and this is why rereading is important. Not a radical idea, but maybe you only first realize this in your 20s because you’re finally starting to make decisions on your own. And all of this is predicated on being privileged enough to avoid having your adult life start at like 16 in a coal mine. The ennui of the college-educated is gross, but it’s something a lot of BuzzFeed readers (myself included) know well, so I guess that’s what this list is really about.

But for god’s sake, if you’re going to make of list of what post-college drifting 20-somethings should read, how can leave off the greatest post-college drifter novel of all time? I’ll simply give you a telling passage:

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous
little flirtation is over.”

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated,
like ghosts even from our pity.

After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of
whiskey in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nick?” He asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No . . . I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a
new decade.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some great and surprising picks on this list. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy is incredible and wildly underread. If more people read it because of this listicle (such a gross term), I am fine with it.

So I guess I’ll throw out a question: What books do you think are missing from this BuzzFeed list?