Blog

Heidi Klum is a Master at Proper Use of the Word “Literally”

From today’s Good Morning America, on at my folks’:

  1. Heidi is talking about a pair of 12″-high gold boots she once wore, I think to one of her costume parties? “With those boots I wanted to take it literally to a higher level.”
  2. Heidi is referring to the Hollywood makeup artist who transferred her face into a mess of faux jewels as part of I think a Cleopatra costume? (I’ve been paying poor attention) using his right hand alone to fix each jewel carefully to her skin: “He worked literally single-handedly for hours.”

Frivolous locutors: Paß mal auf!

Grown-Ass Men are Silly and Full of Anxieties

I rank myself among them.

Last week I tweeted this:

A grown-ass man ≠ half as grown as a grown man is. Or just a man. A man can say w/out weirdness “I’m a man.” Everyone stop saying grown-ass.

It’s been something I can’t stop noticing, the usage a grown-ass man, mostly on TV but also in face-to-face conversations. Cursory googling reveals the usage comes from a Cedric the Entertainer book, so yes: comedy. A grown ass is a funny thing (as a grown assman is, too, see comic), and in all it feels like a funny phrase. My point with the tweet and here with this post is that this need to joke while indicating one’s sexed adulthood is weird and new and silly.

I follow a number of blogs and subscribe to a number of magazines that give me advice on things to buy, use, do, eat, drink, and say that can enhance my manly self-satisfaction. It doesn’t take a gender-theorist to point out how such prissy research into manliness is in itself unmanly, using this weird adverb to reattain the mythos of mid-20thC men as displayed in movies and sitcoms. Men for whom there weren’t yet a lot of products or magazines to tell them how to look, smell, and eat better.
Continue reading Grown-Ass Men are Silly and Full of Anxieties

Nicholas Carr on Reflection, Mirrors, Vanity & Facebook

Social networks like Facebook are also reflective media, but the image of us that they return, insistently, is very different from the one presented by the glass. What’s reflected by the network is not the part of the self “that one can divorce from … the influential presence of other men.” Rather, it is the part of the self that one cannot divorce from the social milieu. It is, in that sense, more “mythical” than physical. We project an idealized version of the self, formed for social consumption, and the reflection we receive, continually updated, reveals how the image was actually interpreted by society. We can then adjust the projection in response to the reflection, in hopes of bringing the reflection closer to the projected ideal. And so it goes.

This feels like a more thorough and smarter way of saying what everyone already says and knows: Facebook is a tool for self-idealization and -curation.

I’m liking Nicholas Carr’s doomsaying blog Rough Type a lot these days. I like the courage of writing on the Internet about the dangers of the Internet’s increasing absorption into our lives and selves. This contrarian wonder is bookmark-worthy.

Daniel Handler’s My New Idol

My clearest memory was visiting the set in a shutdown aircraft factory in Southern California, where they were building the lake. They said, “Here, you can help us make a decision.” They led me into this room where they had kind of giant casserole dishes of water and different squares of cement painted different shades of gray, and they said, “We’re trying to decide what shade of gray to paint the bottom of the lake.” It was the most boring thing I’d ever looked at in my life.

I don’t yet know how to write for kids, but the Handler that comes through in this interview is precisely the kind of frank and humble writer I’d love to become. I should start by not presuming to compare myself with him.

Also awesome about Daniel Handler? He once subscribed to The Cupboard, and then he renewed his subscription.

Very Good Paragraphs

Hot damn it’s a big night for good reading. From Garry Wills’s excoriation of loser Mitt Romney in the New York Review of Books:

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

I could just as easily have quoted the whole post, which does vast impressive things in fewer than 750 words. If a Web editor went through and hyperlinked his claims to articles and studies, this might be one of the best pieces of Web writing I’ve ever seen. Then again, we’ve all got Google. (Tip to Adam Peterson on the find.)

Very Good Paragraphs

This one’s three paragraphs, the ones that end Dan Chiasson‘s great review in the Novermber 2012 Harper’s of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and of slang more generally. It’s a classic approach to an ending—find a way to sub-/invert the fundamental idea lying beneath your subject—but what makes these grafs very good is how they articulate something regarding reading, speech, and writing that describes my life as a user of language in a way I’d never been able to articulate:

Urban Dictionary is endless fun, but most of its raids on the language will almost certainly fail. I wish more attention were paid to language that will not fail, or vanish, or linger in colorful local obscurity. I tire of the notion that everything lively and real starts with the vernacular. If you grew up shy, friendless, and isolated, as I did, you spent more time reading than speaking, and the assumed priority of speech over writing was, in a very real sense, reversed. I still cannot really speak a sentence of any distinction until I have drafted it in my head first.

As a result, my spoken English sounds (to me, at least) very “written” and even stodgy—not because I am aping the upper classes or the British or whomever, but because writing has had to come before speaking. I mention this because it seems to me basically wrong that the language grows only in one direction—from speech to writing—with inclusion in the dictionary representing the crowning achievement for any word that started life in the humble vernacular. People worry about slang making it into the dictionary, but what if the reverse started happening? What if the strangest and most beautiful words in the dictionary spilled out into language, as though the book had sprung a leak? Robert Frost wrote about wanting to “bring to book” speech that had never been treated as worthy of poetry, but Frost himself constantly replenished his own spoken language by reading Milton and Herrick.

Someone should write a book about the persistence of literary vocabulary in our daily speech, and about the social disconnect caused when people are perceived by their communities as having bewilderingly large vocabularies. My guess is that a lot of the informants who contributed to DARE spent time in little rural libraries where they kept big tattered dictionaries on a stand in the reference room. That’s where you used to find the lonely provincial kids who loved big words, and who grew up to be our Langston Hugheses and our Marianne Moores. I hope those kinds of kids still exist somewhere.

Little Caesars Deep Dish Pizza vs Domino’s Handmade Pan Pizza

I can think only of two people I know who would be interested in this taste test. We have too many friends who eat preciously. This household doesn’t exactly eat poorly, but nor do we discriminate. A few weeks ago we tried Little Caesar’s Deep Dish Pizza, with pepperoni, takeout, hot and ready, for just $8. There was general agreement that it was the best pizza we’d eaten in a long time.

Like many delicious things its deliciousness doesn’t grab you visually:

Somehow they nail the crust just perfectly. Crispy on the edges (and every piece gets a crispy edge) and soft and chewy on the inside. If pizza sauces were kinds of Southerners, Little Caesar’s’s would be a touring Floridian. So expect some brashness.

A little while after we put quick runs to Little Caesar’s into the weekly dinner rotation, Domino’s started advertising its handmade pan pizza, with two toppings for the same price—well $7.99 to LC’s $8, which considering this includes two toppings to LC’s one seemed like a better deal.

It’s not. LC’s deep dish measures 9×14 inches, for a total area of 126 inches. Domino’s pizza is round, 11 inches in diameter for 95 total square inches of pizza. Also, LC’s pizza is deeper, but I’m not about to measure volume, okay?

Still, Domino’s’s sauce is way subtler and sweeter than LC’s, but it’s not cloyingly sweet. Also, while it claims to be a pan pizza with “toppings all the way to the crust!”, I found it to only kind of be the case. Lemme try to grab a closeup:

Neither the toppings nor the sauce goes to the crust. (Cheese does, though.) In this way is Domino’s Handmade Pan Pizza just a pizza. But as you can see there’s a classic airiness to the dough that feels very nice when you bite into it. Also that’s good cheese, and enough of it. And if you want to go by nutritional data, it’s a wash. 340 calories, 16g of fat for Little Caesar’s. 300 calories, 16g of fat of Domino’s (which is a lighter portion per slice).

How will our household continue to spend its money on pan pizzas? Little Caesar’s, I think. That I can walk in and unless the joint’s packed grab a box and get right back in the car, that it’s much more pizza gramwise, and that it has the crust it has, cheap-ass pizza wins out over low-rent delivery pizza.

Right? Do we all universally set Domino’s below Papa John’s and Pizza Hut? (I salute you, Pizza Hut, for your lack of an apostrophe!) Isn’t that what its whole new ad campaign presupposes?

A Leftist's Guide to Alabama's 2012 Proposed Amendments

I’ve written before about how much I appreciate ballot endorsements. I do what I can to learn what I can about candidates. But ballot initiatives? Constitutional amendments? They don’t get enough press and are written in arcane enough language that I need help. Help’s been a little tough to find, so here’s how I—a liberal Alabamian—am voting, with the best citations I can find.

Amendment 1 – YES
This vote [i.e., as it’ll go below, a YES vote] will continue to fund the Forever Wild Land Trust another 20 years. Endorsers include the Left in Alabama blog, the Alabama New South Alliance (and sister group the Alabama New South Coalition…hereby ANSA/C), and funnily enough, the NRA (presumably people will be able to hunt there). The Tea-Party aligned Conservative Christians of Alabama oppose, because it’s spending probably.

Amendment 2 – SURE
Yes vote will raise the amount for any bonds the state issues to $750 million. Gov. Bentley says it’s jobs. No one’s really coming out against it.

Amendment 3 – YES
This vote makes a landmark district in one specific county, but more importantly it’s the sort of amendment to vote YES on in order to keep pushing the message that this state needs home rule desperately and like we in Tuscaloosa and other counties probably shouldn’t be voting on this stuff. Even the Tea Partiers are on board.

Amendment 4 – NO
The controversial one. This vote [i.e. NO] would prevent our state’s constitution from saying “nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as creating or recognizing any right to education or training at public expense.” In short, voting NO asserts the right to a public education for all. Hence the Alabama Education Association saying vote NO. Also LiA. The ASNA/C says to vote yes (as of Oct 11), otherwise we’ll leave in some racist language, which makes us look bad. But like no way is it that only thing in the state or the constitution (to say nothing of this constitution itself) that makes us look bad. See here for a more detailed discussion.

Amendment 5 – YES
Another home-rule amendment. According to the Mobile Press-Register, the Prichard Water Board members make way more money than they should, which voting no here would help them keep. Everyone endorses except the members of the Prichard Water Board.

Amendment 6 – NO
A NO vote is an endorsement of the Affordable Care Act (which the independent Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly shown ) and leaves it applicable in the state. The CCoA wants you to vote yes, if that’s any surprise.

Amendment 7 – NO
Such a vote will leave union elections as they are. Fellow NO voters include the AFL/CIO, LiA, and the ANSA/C. The CCoA says to vote yes, thus giving employers more influence over how (or whether) their employees form unions. Like amendment 6, this is another state’s-rights attempt to stop recent progressive legislation passed on a national scale, namely the union-endorsed Employee Free-Choice Act.

Amendment 8 – NO
Another controversial one. A NO vote will leave legislators’ pay and pay policies where they are. Here’s how the Dothan Eagle has it broken down:

Supporters [i.e. yes voters] claim the amendment will lower the salaries of state elected officials and keep expenses under control.

Opponents say the bill could actually increase the amount of money legislators make due to extra expense claims.

Supporters include the two GOP legislators who proposed the amendment and the CCoA, because it undoes a pay raise the now-long-gone Democratic majority passed a few years back. Opponents include the ANSA/C. What little I know of the once-in-power Democrats is that there was some corruption and cronyism, so even though I feel that forces that long predate me are at work here I’m going with NO. Anyone able to chime in below please do.

Amendments 9 & 10 – YES
These votes will do little to change actual legislation in the state regarding businesses and banks, but they are a baby step toward constitutional reform. (More details at the Anniston Star.) Endorsed by LiA and the Alabama Constitutional Revision Commission. ANSA/C inexplicably oppose these amendments. The CCoA are, adorably, against #10 because it does away with the gold and silver standards.

Amendment 11 – NO
Or yes. Another home-rule amendment. I say no because I’m wary of prohibiting any future tax. ANSA/C also say vote no. CCoA says vote yes.

Local Amendment 1 for Tuscaloosa County – NO
This amendment wants to prohibit a future tax and I don’t want to prohibit any future tax. CCoA wants you to vote yes.

Links to Endorsements, etc.
Dothan Eagle’s summaries. (Amdmts 1-6; amdmts 7-11)
Alabama New South Alliance / Alabama New South Coalition
Left in Alabama
Conservative Christians of Alabama

A full list of all 11 amendments can be found on Ballotpedia.

Shitty Wretched Bad Paragraphs of Bullshit

From some dumb article on Lifehacker:

Even though I really enjoy writing, I despise proofreading and editing. Like to the point where I rather just not write at all so I don’t have to deal with the proofreading part. Nothing kills my flow more than having to re-read what I just wrote 1000 times.

Emphasis his. Spoken—I mean, written—like a true hack.

Very Good Paragraphs

This one’s from Acocella’s review of Banville’s new one in the 8 October 2012 New Yorker. The paragraph turns to Banville’s ickiness in terms of personality, which isn’t why I think it’s very good. Banville can be whoever the hell he wants if he continues writing such sentences as “Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?” But look at what happens with time in this graf, the way Acocella runs through an event twice to kind of cross-list it in separate categories:

For some people, Banville is not a defender of art but a cold fish. His arrogance is legend. When he received the Booker for “The Sea,” he declared, in his acceptance speech, that it was “nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.” Soon afterward, he uncharacteristically tried to mitigate the offense. All he was trying to say, he explained, was that “there should be a decent prize for real books,” by which he seems to have meant heavily crafted, highbrow books like his own. That way, he figured, more publishers would buy such books, as opposed to what he called the “good, middlebrow fiction” that the Booker judges favored. This explanation, needless to say, made everything worse. [Ha!] As he tells it, he despises even his own work. His novels, he said to Belinda McKeon, in a 2009 Paris Review interview, were to him “an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than anyone else’s, of course, but not good enough for me.” In 2005, he reviewed Ian McEwan’s novel “Saturday” in The New York Review of Books, and called it “a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous” book—a judgment that was met with considerable indignation in many quarters of London’s literary world, where McEwan is widely respected. In was later that year that Banville won the Booker, and honor that, under the circumstances, annoyed a lot of people. Then came his remarks on the middle-brow fiction being produced by his colleagues. Banville recalls that when he was young he had few friends in the literary world. By the end of 2005, he no doubt had fewer.

It ought not go unreported that my original transcription ended with the sentence, “By the end of 2005, he no doubt had a fever,” which might be better, Joan.

Music Critic vs. Record Reviewer

I.
Okay the easiest job for a critic is to be a judge on a cooking-based reality/game show. That, next to record reviewer, is the world’s easiest job. Music critics, looking as they do at macro levels of the artform, work harder. I mean, looking at how one thing fits into a continuum or context of many historical things (which things include our communal lives and time) takes hard and long thought and (we hope) a way with words. I have a friend who is a very good and esteemed music critic (who is, I should say, in my opinion, too generous toward pop and with whom it’s been too long since I’ve hung out), and knowing her impels me to make this distinction between critic and reviewer. Hell: it’s a distinction everyone’s already made before me.

II.
Here’s what passes for publishable record reviewing in the mostly abysmal Rolling Stone:

Rhythmically flimsy, despite guitar and synth tracks that flash back to “Raspberry Beret”, this apparent one-off offers Eighties nostalgia to match the new mini-fro Prince is rocking. The song is a tale of a suburban girl colliding with a guy who believes in “jazz, rhythm & blues and this thing called soul.” They live screamingly ever after, but the purple mountain majesty faded long ago.”

III.
The problem with most criticism is that the proportion of work done by the critic to work done by the criticized in so infinitesimally fractional that it feels almost from the start like a paltry waste of time. What I should stress here is that the above blockquote is the review of this new Prince track in its entirety. I don’t know how Prince works these days, but no way did this reviewer work half as hard as Prince did. Sure, it’s a track review, not a record one. But it’s easily 60 percent the length of what RS lends to most new records.

IV.
Two grand points to make in this post. One is that, in the end, shitty reviews do the service they’re meant to of telling me new records are out. Will, for instance, the new Corin Tucker Band album live up to the awesomeness that’s been the Wild Flag record? And when will I run out to buy this new Band of Horses record? Two is that I have this very smart music critic friend whom I need to interview on the worth of the record review in a post iTunes era. Ann, if yer reading, let’s you me and my voice recorder grab a drink sometime.

Obvious Things – Interviewing Ray Lewis

[The start of a new feature on this blog it’s anyone’s guess I’ll keep up on a regular basis. “Obvious Things”. It stems from advice better writers have fed to my ears and eyes over the years, most recently from Pixar’s Emma Coates: “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.” I’m a loose tramp for the obvious idea. I welcome it right on in. Invention for me is a list-making process of weeding out obviousnesses, in the hopes that through dogged force I can find something interesting to say.

This week: obvious things to ask Ray Lewis, should I get the chance to interview him a la Visa & the NFL’s contest.]

  1. Why are you so goddamned terrible?
  2. Are you worried about losing brain functions via concussion?
  3. Or have you already lost brain functions?
  4. Was it from a concussion?
  5. Do you think you make too much money, especially given the unemployment rate these days?
  6. Have you read and did you enjoy Poe’s “The Raven”?
  7. Can you tell me a little bit about why not?
  8. Is “Ray” short for “Raymond” and if so, why not “Raymond Lewis”?
  9. You’re only three years old than me, almost to the day, but why do you seem so much older?
  10. Do you think that your being good at sports helped you get off easily with a misdemeanor plea in the Lollar-Baker stabbing deaths case of 2000, and during your 12-month probation did you go ahead and drink anyway because like why not you’re in the NFL?
  11. Why do you think the Ravens haven’t been to the Super Bowl since?
  12. Is it something the matter with you personally? Or are you more interested in placing blame elsewhere? Where, exactly?
  13. Shouldn’t your favorite color be brown/various browns and not purple? That is, weren’t you lying to that little girl in your Visa commercial?
  14. Do you even know that girl’s name?
  15. My name is Dave. Do you like it?
  16. I don’t have many black friends. Are you available?
  17. I’m gay, does it show? Are you in the market for a gay friend?
  18. What I’m saying is, even after some of those earlier questions, could we right here set up a kind of quid-pro-quo situation re friendship that would just dump all the world’s salt in the wounds of every actual NFL fan who didn’t win the contest I did win?
  19. Did you see Dark Knight? How aren’t you like Bane, do you think?
  20. What’ll it take to get you to admit right here that you voted for Romney?

George Eliot, George Eliot – On Moral Writing

I.
Spend enough time in a creative writing program and you’ll pick up the idea that Middlemarch is consistently chosen (by those who choose) as the greatest novel ever written. It’s not true. My favorite thing that Jane Smiley wrote in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is that Middlemarch is merely the “most novelish of novels.”

II.
Merely is a poor choice of adverb there, in that being the most novelish of novels is no mere feat. What it means, what everyone points to when they talk about Middlemarch‘s greatness, is the way its plot’s engine is driven by the ever-developing interrelationships among a set of people in a specific place. I have only a vague recollection of the workings of this. Though my records show I wrote a brief but thoughtful paper on the novel almost six years ago to the day, too little of it’s stuck with me after finishing.
Continue reading George Eliot, George Eliot – On Moral Writing

Tasty Banana Nut Muffins with Wheat Germ

So I’m a baking blogger now, okay? Which means I get to spread poorly reported, single-sided accounts of standup comics going off book.

This recipe is adapted from America’s Test Kitchen’s banana bread recipe (kudos to Food 4 Wibowo for collecting), the genius of which is how it makes a reduction of thawed-banana juice to inject flavor without getting the dough too wet. These muffins are healthy and delicious. They’re the best things I’ve ever baked I think.
Continue reading Tasty Banana Nut Muffins with Wheat Germ

Feature-Length Readings

Reading Alex Ross’s review of the 6-hour production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch in the Sept 10 Style Issue of The New Yorker—which opera has a movement where string musicians play while up in helicopters—I started to wonder what a 6-hour literary reading might feel like.

Like a 12-hour root canal you say and har har har. I’m as vocal as the next guy on the importance of short readings, themselves comprising the reading of several short pieces instead of one long one, and of course it has something to do with attention. A reading is not a visual performance—which is a strange thing to realize because neither’s a lecture or a standup set, but audiences thereof gladly sit still for an hour or more. Lectures have slides, often. Comics clown. They also look their audience in the eye, whereas a poet stares mostly at his pages.

Another problem is the problem of attention, which a reading demands much of, uninterruptedly. Poetry readings will always win out over prose ones in this regard, because when you get distracted by thoughts of dinner or a pretty face or that dumb idea you’ve been working on for improving your overall appearance, you can just keep a pleasant look on your face until the poet ends, your fellow audience members sigh knowingly, and finally after some self-amused patter the poet starts a new one right up. The way some stories and essays get written? Zone out and miss one paragraph and you’ve lost the whole darn thread.

And that’s in the end the problem: few to no book writers (only Sedaris comes to mind) write for a live audience of listeners.[!] We ask book writers to read aloud to live audiences the way we might ask sopranos to publish their penciled score notations. No reading is ever fully successful because it’s an inherently ersatz form.

Maybe well bred opera audiences can sit still for three uninterrupted hours, but I’d be happy working on devising a reading that could last the 90 minutes working-class moviegoers are capable of relinquishing. And not a set of three 30-minute ones, either—one author’s own intermissionless ninety minutes.

Problems/thoughts/strategies:

  • The reading would have to be both episodic and arc-ful, like a play. Scenes and acts and a finale.
  • A printed program might be in order, so that audiences would be always grounded in the course of the evening, able to follow along with its progress. (Sarah Vowell’s dad pencilled a check on the program next to the title of each piece her high school band concluded, getting ever closer to the concert’s end.)
  • No audience would sit 90 minutes for an unknown, and therefore it’s the duty of our Kings, Chabons, Orleans, and Pinksys to pioneer this new form, the way Griffith led the way for Murnau.
  • Voicey stuff has to reign. Orchestra concerts are, save for the wavings of bows and batons, not a visual performance either, but we follow along because it pleases the ear to do so. Voicey need not mean dialogue-driven, or even overly stylized. But perhaps what I intend here is to argue that a piece that gets read aloud should at some point in the drafting be written as a piece to be read aloud—i.e., with an ear toward the way it’s going to sound in the room’s back row.
  • Performing writers might want to take a voice lesson or two. Or, better, yet, MFA programs can build this into their curricula.
  • All that said, without an intermission, it might be advisable to share the stage. Bring another writer up to read dialogue lines voiced by opposite-sex characters. Read a piece written with/for instrumental accompaniment. Let sound happen for a while, any way you can. It’s ninety minutes. There’d be nothing to rush. Think act breaks. Audience participation. That portion of the evening where the writer indulges in crowd work. What might previously composed crowd work look like sound like?

Keeping our readings light and short seems to acknowledge that as an art form or even just a performance they’re inconsequential. And we writers tacitly agree: the page is the thing. But as advertisements for what’s on (or what could be on) those pages, readings are little more than pots of piss. That’s a sentence that’s not so much true as fun to type, but what I’m wondering here is whether whatever’s hurting of The Written Word can be healed through a retooling of our live performances, our in-the-flesh interactions with our audiences.

Anyone with other suggestions are invited to add them in the comments. Folks interested in staging such a reading—in Tuscaloosa or elsewhere—can get in touch (honest) via peopleoughtnotreadforthislongoutloud [at] davemadden.org.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This post has a fever, maybe, and the only prescription is more analysis of what This American Life is up to.↵

Very Good Paragraphs – Hat Trick Edition

Yes, Harper’s, while edited by a woman, will never win any VIDA-based gender-balance-on-the-contents-page awards. Really, probably never. It’s maybe worse than the New Yorker in this regard. Of 23 credited names in the October 2012 issue, 3 are women’s. Even the Cox-Rathvons, 50 percent female, seem to have been absent from the Puzzle page.

But still it’s a really great magazine, with great and smart critics, two of whom I want to quote from here. First up is The Cupboard’s own Joshua Cohen, from his review of Jed Perl’s Magicians and Charlatans. Actually, it’s just Perl himself, a paragraph Cohen opts to quote in full, in a discussion on the ever-faddish union of high and low in art:

There are, however, essential differences between garbage then and garbage now. They are distinctions that would have been perfectly clear to Sontag and Kael, who had always taken for granted the significance of traditional artistic values, and who both, late in life, pointed out that they had never meant for camp or trash to trump old-fashioned quality. Pop Art and “Bad” Painting, in any event, were self-consciously ironic; they depended on the existence of a standard that was being mocked or from which one was registering a dissent. Irony, even in the whatever-the-market-will-bear forms that it often assumed in the 1980s and 1990s, was generally accompanied by at least the afterglow of a moral viewpoint. The artists were mocking something. They had a target. This is what has now changed. Laissez-faire aesthetics makes a mockery of nothing. Even irony is too much of an idea.

Next up, with two great grafs, is cranky old Bill Gass (which I have absolutely no license calling him), from his review of the new collection of Orwell’s letters:

The procedure Orwell adopts for his writing goes like this: find a social class (but the hunt should be among workmen, farmers, or outcasts, not the white-collar), insert yourself into that class, lead your daily life the way they do, dissolve what you learn into notes, and serve the result to the public. Your claim upon their attention will be this: The resulting text will be more detailed, correct, and informative than the competition’s—traveler’s reminiscences, tourist guides, memoirs, and other autobiographical equipment—because you are interested only in the “unfortunate,” because you want to reform society, not to enjoy the countryside or celebrate your good old life among the cannibals. Do you wish your readers to shed a tear over the impoverished condition of the exploited, or over your description of their plight? If you were really going to tell the truth about what you found along the way you would first have had to grow up among the crop you wished to harvest, which clearly you cannot accomplish. You would have to unknow things—how far in meters it is to the next town, Plato’s Symposium, the average life span of a lobsterman, Lawrence of Arabia, the cost of a pair of shoes in the desert. Oh, that last your subject may also know—perhaps you share something after all—but will you know how it feels if one day he has a pair that fits?

This, in a mostly adulatory review. Here’s its end:

In addition to social connections of a pragmatic or idealistic kind, there is a third way of understanding the relations of individuals to the state. It was first demonstrated, as far as I can calculate, by Socrates, when he refused to avoid his death penalty and escape Athens. We need to see society as an extension of ourselves, an invisible part of our anatomy that assists us every day without dominating us and that, like our own arms and legs, we tend when injured, and whose welfare we consider at all times. The relation resembles that of a violinist to his instrument—useful but more than something useful, cared for like an esteemed friend. If such a part of us fails, we do not discard it for a peg leg, nor are we fired from our job because we cannot play hopscotch. We may be a disposable member of the symphony, but our violin is us to us. The relation is sometimes—oh dear—called love.

These days, Harper’s may as well rename itself Doom-and-Gloom Pieces That Each End with Paragraphs Exhorting a Return to Social Democracy and Humane, Reasoned Discourse Monthly. Each one makes a good case, preaching as they are to this choir blogging about the same urgent thing. But here—because amid metaphor? because alongside great books?—is where I think it hits the homest.

Helpless Feelings

The thing about feeling helpless in the face of rich people’s ever-increasing influence over policy decisions in this country is that there are more of us than there are of them. I mean: they’re the 1% and we’re the 99%. But there’s another problem: the 1% are really good at spending their money on making the 99% bend to their will.

It helps to keep those 99% uninformed, uneducated, and unwilling to see itself as a single socioeconomic bloc with shared interests worth voting toward. It’s why, on this one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’m glad people in New York are still chanting Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out! in Zuccotti Park. Listen closely to their messages and OWS transcends left-right divides.

A little under a year ago, a friend of mine complained that OWS was so hypocritical—a lot of unemployed people spending their time protesting instead of finding jobs, much less making them. I had to explain to him that this wasn’t the point exactly, or even the case. That employed people were part of OWS. That people had left employment to join OWS. That instead the fury was over the federal government’s readiness to forgive Wall Street’s criminal activities with enormous bailout checks, while the middle-class were being asked to accept closed libraries and post offices, aggressive home foreclosures, and increasing student-loan debt without any hope of government assistance.

“Oh,” he said. “See, nobody’s really explained it like that.”

I didn’t even do a good job. Politics—particularly when it gets into fiscal policy—tends to cloud my head with abstract notions and make it tough to see the right path as a voter. I can’t be the only one. It’s why cable news and party affiliation is nice—they can do the thinking for you. But everyone knows now this is a dangerous way for a 21st-century U.S. citizen to behave. That being an informed citizen—an adult, really—takes hard work. It’s why I’ve been very happy for Left in Alabama this last week. They’ve got opposing viewpoints to weigh, for one thing, most of which with sourced links to follow. I’ve felt less alone and worried.

Most Alabamians know we’ve got a weird one-issue election Tuesday the 18th. The state is asking its citizens to vote on a new constitutional amendment[a] allowing it to take from the Alabama Trust Fund $145 million a year, for the next 3 years to spend on Medicaid, prisons, and other pressing budget needs.

I’m voting no.

Normally I’m for deficit spending, especially on social services, but Alabama has been cutting budgets to education so much that it ranks first in the nation in education cuts. Its perennial cuts of budget apportions to UA has caused repeated tuition hikes, transferring the costs of an educated public from the government we elect to students and their families.

Also, Governor Bentley has led the state to pass an expensive, unhelpful immigration law which has been more even more expensive to defend in courts. He’s OK’d billion-dollar tax breaks for companies while trying to cut public health care to children. And he’s scheduled this election—which costs us $3 million—on an errant Tuesday in September, rather than waiting 40 days to put it on the November ballot.

Which citizens share—not in theory, but in practice—these priorities? Republicans (at least in Alabama, though the case can be made) are the party of fiscal irresponsibility. And from what all I’ve read, it feels like voting yes tomorrow is a way of endorsing this irresponsibility. I don’t want to vote on a bailout for our state legislators to continue this junk budgeting.

And I don’t buy into the scare tactics.[b] If the amendment doesn’t pass, no official will want to be held responsible for closing nursing homes and freeing prisoners. They’ll be forced in a special session to rethink the budget. This is not an emergency, for which we need to draw from our trust fund. This is a manufactured political moment, where the party in power doesn’t want to work on a fair budget for the people.

Here: I’ll let this Left in Alabama post say it clearly:

If you like the way things are in Alabama, a “yes” vote probably makes sense. If you believe the people have the power to force the system to make changes, vote “no.” Left to itself, Montgomery will preserve its status quo approach forever, but the Legislature has given voters an opportunity to send them back to the drawing board and demand they find a better way next Tuesday.

Voting happens in your standard voting place. And you do not need a photo ID to vote (bank statement, utility bill, passport…click here for the full list). That nasty vote-suppression law doesn’t go into effect until 2014.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Not, in essence, a big deal. Outsiders should check out our constitution’s Wikipedia page for more.↵
  2. The language of the amendment calls us to vote “to prevent the mass release of prisoners from Alabama prisons, and to protect critical health services to Alabama children, elderly, and mothers”.↵

Scenes from the Dentist’s

At the end of the cleaning, KELLY, the dental hygienist, hands DAVE a clear vinyl pouch filled with standard dental supplies.

DAVE: Oh yeah, I wanted to ask you, this um … Glide, the Glide floss? Do y’all recommend that over the regular, like chunky waxed old-style floss?

KELLY shakes her head.

DAVE: Does it matter?
KELLY: Personally, I don’t like it. When I use it it just slides out too easily. I don’t think it gets, you know all the stuff out.
DAVE: So this isn’t like an endorsement of the product?
KELLY: We just get a whole box of ’em. Lemme see if we got any of the other kind.

KELLY disappears.

===

DAVE gets three different impressions taken around the segment of his mouth where he’s got a tooth hole from an implant, waiting to be filled with a crown. The epoxy tastes unpleasant, like latex taffy. CHERYL, the dentist’s assistant, pulls the last bit from his mouth.

CHERYL: You’re done!

DAVE gets up and collects his things.

CHERYL: Can I get you anything to drink?
DAVE: …
CHERYL: We’ve got Mountain Dew? Pepsi?
DAVE (laughing): What? Really? Don’t those rot your teeth?
CHERYL (marking something down on DAVE’s form): Well not one.

Presently, the two walk down the hall toward reception. DAVE spots a Keurig.

DAVE: Oh, actually, could I get some coffee?
CHERYL: Doesn’t that stain your teeth?

Scene.

===

Touché, madame. There is something decidedly Southern about these exchanges. I mean: these people are professionals trained in reputable places. Too-slick floss is better than no floss at all; and besides it’s just a sample. Also: they know what soda does to teeth. But Jesus, Dave, it’s one soda. Yankee Dave says he can’t believe a dentist would keep non-diet sodas on hand. The people at his dentist’s say he’s being uptight.

I’m not infrequently accused (verbally or otherwise) of being uptight down here. Most often, I refuse to yield on my inherent rightness. Today, though, I’m happy to.

Very Good Paragraphs

From David Samuels’s profile of Obama in this month’s Harper’s:

He is living rent-free in an building historically occupied strictly by whites, fighting his battles and taking their money, yet in all this he is invisible—and he knows it. He is invisible because people refuse to see him. What they see is a reflection, in mirrors of distorting glass—a figment of their imaginations. He knows that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play, yet his sense of the limits of that role have caused him to overstay his hibernation. He is heir to a habitual and sometimes crippling sense of constraint that is partly his fault and partly ours.