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Very Good Paragraphs

From the introduction to John Limon’s Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, a book I’ve got electronic access to through UA’s web site, but which seems so strong by like page three I’m going to have to just buy a copy and tear it up, highlighteringly:

The one-sentence version of the theory of this book would state the claim that what is stood up in stand-up comedy is abjection. Stand-up makes vertical (or ventral) what should be horizontal (or dorsal). [. . .] The conclusion of the [Lenny] Bruce essay [which opens the book] is that “stand-up is the resurrection of your father as your child,” which approaches the same point from another angle. What I took as the essential Lenny Bruce moment is the joke (if that is what it is) that concludes “I am going to piss on you” and provokes, at one performance, seventeen seconds of boisterous laughter. What struck me is how phallicly aggressive Bruce was able to make this infantile threat, so that he appeared to the audience as punishing father and naughty son in rapid oscillation, just as his audience had to vibrate (this vibration seems to me the essence of laughter) between terrorized child and permissive parent. The abject gets erected and mobilized in the place of the phallus. To “stand up” abjection is simultaneously to erect it and miss one’s date with it: comedy is a way of avowing and disavowing abjection, as fetishism is a way of avowing and disavowing castration. Fetishism is a way of standing up the inevitability of loss; stand-up is a way of standing up the inevitability of return.

Damn!

How I’ve Spent My Summer Vacation

Movies watched since the tornado hit (in order of my remembering that we watched them):

  • Defiance
  • Hereafter
  • The Green Lantern
  • Nanny McPhee Returns
  • The Social Network
  • Skyline
  • Secretariat
  • How Do You Know?
  • The Royal Tenenbaums
  • Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One
  • Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
  • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
  • Sleepy Hollow
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
  • The Egg and I
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
  • Tron: Legacy
  • The Tourist
  • Bandits
  • The Town
  • Louis CK: Hilarious
  • Thor: 3D IMAX
  • Santa Claus is Coming to Town
  • The World is Not Enough
  • No Strings Attached
  • Black Swan
  • Kentucky
  • The American
  • Bridesmaids
  • Rushmore

  • easily one or two other gems I’ve forgotten, which should tell you something about these gems’ inherent luster

Also, season one of Southland, the bulk of Dexter’s fifth season, and we rewatched all of Downton Abbey with friends. Cable/internet still out. I bought an internet phone and we also bought a cheap antenna, but it only gets ABC and the CW. Oh and WVUA/ThisTV which is somewhat of a revelation.

Two of them made me cry.

A New Prayer for Egotists

I don’t know what it is that I do well,
But whatever it may be,
I know there is a libertarian who does it better than I do.
I know there is a fraternity member who does it better than I do.
I know there is a straight person who does it better than I do.
I know there is a Penn State graduate who does it better than I do.
I know there is a Floridian who does it better than I do.
I know there is a Comcast executive who does it better than I do.
I know there is a Hummer lessee who does it better than I do.
I know there is a Ke$ha fan who does it better than I do.
I know there is an evangelical who does it better than I do.
I do not know these people by their names,
But I know that I am often nothing special.

Very Good Paragraphs

From Kalefa Sanneh’s review of recent reality-TV criticism in the 9 May 2011 New Yorker:

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” [Brenda R.] Weber writes [in her book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity]. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

Tornado

We didn’t have any tornado helmets. It was something Neal’d heard in passing on the news broadcast, something our friend Erica had mentioned on Facebook in response to my update, “Tornadoes again. TORNADOES. AGAIN.” We’d had tornadoes in Western Alabama just two weeks previous—another set of warnings a week before that. All told, three times since we’d moved here from Nebraska the sirens had wailed around town. In Nebraska we knew to get to a basement. In Tuscaloosa, no one had basements. We had no rooms without windows, and now we had no tornado helmets.

It wasn’t the sirens that made us take cover. It was the sky Neal saw as he opened the door and stood on our little brick porch. “Can you see it?” I asked. We could see only it, the tornado filling the sky to the west. Debris soaring two hundred feet in the air. The black mass it all swirled around looked to be at the end of our block.

We shut the door. Neal found a wooden wastebasket and our sturdiest stockpot, and we sat, girded Tweedledumly under blankets and housewares, on the floor outside our bathroom. Overhead what sounded like a Panzer growled and grumbled. It lasted only twenty seconds, maybe thirty, those seconds filled with loud plinks against the windows and siding, as though a whole mess of fifth graders were egging our house.

Then it was over, the rumbles replaced by high swishy winds. “Do tornadoes have eyes?” I asked. Another ten seconds. “I don’t know,” Neal said. “I’m going to go look.”
Continue reading Tornado

Lorrie Moore on Memoirs

She’s a smarter writer than everyone, so when she takes on this sort of thing we’re all smart to listen.

Dinty W. Moore (let’s hope there’s a relation but I doubt it) over at the calls her thing absurd and writes it off as “memoir bashing.” He’s upset that Lorrie Moore seems (anti-Shieldsly) to prefer novels, to assume that stories about real people would be better told in the novel form. But he’s missed the point, I think. See here, from Moore’s review (my emphasis):

Though [such reportage-based info as] epidemiology and public policy might disrupt the poetry of bereavement, a reader can long to see eloquent tears made useful. Memoirs often exist precisely for this reason—and their improvised form allows for accommodations of this kind without intruding on any narrative magic. Certainly [family members] remain engaging subjects deserving of the deep imagining, revealing design, and solid construction of heroines in good prose fiction, but real life is messy and sometimes gracelessly crowds out an enduring story, something no memoir reader necessarily expects. Advocacy of a certain kind can be a memoirst’s muse and companion and in any case is not a guest that will ruin the party. Even Nabokov’s canonical Speak, Memory does not give us the brilliantly vivid and coherent dreams of his novels—because it simply can’t.

In short, memoirs aren’t lesser than novels, they’re nonfiction. And novels are fiction. And while “the gold standard” (as Lorrie argues) for memoir may be the novel’s “subtle characterizations and rich and continuous dreamscape,” nonfiction as a directly intimate form doesn’t so much disallow continuous dreamscape, as it makes continuous dreamscape feel like coloring with only one crayon from the box.

Imagine writing a novel where everything was made up, but done so exclusively through dialogue. Like a radio drama, say. It would be a bad novel, because lesser.* Novels can get so quickly and thoroughly into people’s interiority. So with, Lorrie Moore argues, the work of nonfiction that hinges too fully on straight narrative. We can talk with our readers. We can show them some research. We can connect—frankly and out loud—the lives of people we love among grander landscapes and fuller social concerns. Novels, prissily, won’t abide such business (unless Tom Wolfe’s doing it). Shouldn’t memoirs, if we’re to see them as a form of their own, embrace it?
—
* Okay, yeah, I read Nicholson Baker’s Vox, too, so I see the inaptness of this analogy.

Reviewing Books on the Web. Can’t We?

I’ve been thinking today about book reviews. The Atlantic thinks they’re no longer as relevant as they once were, and everyone’s been complaining since the Nineties probably about diminishing pages of newspapers’ books sections.

Who cares where books get reviewed, right? And I used to care how thoroughly books got reviewed, like wordcount-wise, but I’ve stopped caring. Who cares how long a book review is?

Okay I still do. Most folks are doing it wrong. Bookslut’s reviews are longer than the site’s name is bad. Too long, I think, given the site’s layout. The Daily Beast’s features on books are perfectly lengthed, just under 1000 words, for the kind of reader I turn into when my laptop’s on my lap. A browser. A Web browser makes me a word browser, and call me petulant but I won’t sit and scroll through multiple pages while the TV is on.

Daily Beast’s straight reviews, though, are of no use. Under 150 words, lighter than the new Kirkus Reviews. More ad copy than review. NPR’s are quite good. I’m happy about NPR’s book coverage, especially because it prints an excerpt from the text right after the review.

I’m looking for more good online book reviews. I want to start writing them. Here are some axioms:

  1. The purpose of a review is twofold: to assess a book’s success or failure with respect to its central aims, and to connect a book’s work to the work of all books before it.
  2. Reviews serve a purpose to readers by informing them of books they may want to read.
  3. Reviews should be published where readers will read them.
  4. If readers are reading off computer screens more than the newsprint or gloss of periodicals then that’s where the reviews should be.
  5. Reading online begets a different kind of reader, or the same-old reader with a different kind of attitude.
  6. Writing reviews meant to be read online requires a different kind of writing process. (Corollary to this axiom is a feeling I have that most online reviews are composed in MS Word windows and not, say, .php blog-post input windows, and that this shows in the writing and is a chief problem.)
  7. A book can be critically and thoroughly assessed in under 500 words.

Hell, let’s make it 400. Anyone able to point me to good under-500-word book reviews online is a new best friend of mine.

Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

The basic premise of Judt’s great book is that the West is in a very bad way and this is because of its ever growing inequality. The rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. The solution is a retooling of the conversations we have around public policy.

He’s for social democracy. Social democracy is not socialism, mind. The latter is an old-timey notion that tried to displace capitalism for some other regime. Social democracy, Judt argues, uses capitalism as a means to address the “hitherto neglected interests of large sections of the population” (229). It’s basically how the U.S. operated from like 1939 to 1980.

Here’s the problem, as he paints it: the decline in social democracy since the postwar period (accelerated by Reagan’s top-first policies) has resulted in just one section of the population getting its interests met: the superrich. Let’s call them Satisfied Americans (this is my term, obviously). We could call them the not-poor, but let’s call the Satisfied Americans.

They’re not you. You’re not one of these people.
Continue reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

Very Good Paragraphs 6

Another one from The New Yorker. Do I read anything else? I mean what a bore. Actually, I do. I’m reading Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land which is cap-I Important and full of very good paragraphs. I’ll post one when I’m done.

Here’s something from Evan Osnos’s “The Grand Tour”, about the recent rise of Chinese tourists in Europe:

The Grand Tour has been a tradition of newly rich countries ever since young British aristocrats took to the Continent in the eighteenth century, picking up languages, antiques, and venereal disease. Once the railroad arrived, in the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of Britain’s ballooning middle class followed—”lesser men with less fortunes,” suddenly free to “tumble down the Alps in living avalanches,” in the sniffy words of Lord Normanby, the future British Ambassador to France.

Lord Normanby!

Very Good Paragraphs 5

Well, I was going to post one from Ramona Ausubel’s “Atria” from the 4 April 2011 New Yorker, but every paragraph was very good. Every single one. Damn, it’s such a good story. So instead, we have to go with this paragraph in the Adam Gopnik essay, “Get Smart”, on recent books looking at computers and A.I., which paragraph is also very good:

[The author of one book]’s central point is that the Turing bots that work best, whether produced by a computer or shaped by a mind, have to be, or fake being, dynamic. The best test of their humanness is not how smartly they offer answers but how quickly they interrupt, get distracted, compress information into slang codes, rely on “uh”s and “ah”s. Intelligence is an affect engaged in an activity. It flits between the empty spaces as much as it takes place in the exchanges. If a teen-age boy says to a teen-age girl, “I was, like, wondering, if, like, you’d like to, like, go to that, uh, thing at Jacob’s?” and she says, “Uh, well…” it’s bad news. But if she says, “Well, um…” it’s promising, and if she says, “Yeah, like, funny, because um…” it’s the best news of all. Prefixes and tics and characteristic mannerisms are richly coded with information. The two best Presidential communicators of recent decades had distinctive vocal prefixes that did a lot of their talking for them: Ronald Regan’s “Well…” meant “Despite your attempt to antagonize me, I’m still going to appeal to plain old placid common sense,” while Obama’s “Look…” means “Forgive me if I sound impatient, but if you actually examine the facts in the case you’ll see I’m right.” One marker assures Capraesque cheer the other, Spockian certitude. And it’s hard to make either understandable to a machine.

3eanuts: A Recapitulation

In other recently-shared-on-Facebook news, back at the end of last month I linked to 3eanuts, which tramps through Garfield Minus Garfield territory by removing Schulz’s final panels in order to wallow in the angst built in the first three.

Facebook friends—well, actual dear friends the Madej’s (say /MADGE-ee/)—leapt to Schulz’s defense, arguing that such a site as 3eanuts wasn’t just heretical, but neglected the way some of the full 4-panel strips equally wallowed in angst. I said “Good grief” and but look at the strip I read in the barbershop today, unfindable online and so rendered through always-exciting dialogue-only transcription:

PANEL ONE
(Linus is at the fridge while Lucy is at the table with some kind of food it’s impossible to make out.)
Linus: “What I think I’ll do today is take some money out of my college trust fund and go buy a dog.”

PANEL TWO
Lucy (at table): “You don’t have a college trust fund.”
Linus (now possibly at table, too? or maybe still standing): “I don’t?”

PANEL THREE
Linus (now, yes, definitely sitting next to her at the table): “Please pass the grape jelly.”
Lucy: “We’re all out of grape jelly.”

PANEL FOUR
Linus (head resting dejectedly on palm, elbow on table, in that classic Schulzian pose): “How can anyone not have a dog, a college trust fund, and grape jelly?”

End of strip. Amazing, right?

Loving the Dictionary, Part 2

Looking up “echt” today to see whether or not we’d assimilated it from the German, and thus whether or not I needed to, in my clunky plain text writing window, surround the word with asterisks. Mac’s built-in New Oxford American’s textual examples have been written by some kind of mad poet:

echt |ekt|
adjective
authentic and typical : the film’s opening was an echt pop snob event.

Echt pop snob!

Getting There

You have no incentive to believe me, but as per my recent resolution to work on memorization here’s where I am so far with the Cheever passage. From memory:

We admire decency and we despise death, but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night, and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale’s cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can’t find a comparable experience…

I originally misspelled “nightingale” but otherwise: got it. Eighty-five words down, one hundred ninety-six to go.

Oldie/Goodie

Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? Or is a populist elitist? Is there really much difference between Marcus and Franzen? This East Coast-East Coast Literary Rap War reminds me of the Far Side cartoon in which a lone penguin, suffering in a crowd of millions of exactly similar penguins, rises and shouts, “I just have to be me!”

Sherman Alexie
Seattle, Wash.

We Are All Poor

Yesterday, over on Facebook, I linked to a couple stories about corruption among the Republicans’ ranks. It was (is) the usual thing: state governor decides to weaken the collective strength that makes union workers work in unions, does this in the name of budget deficits, then gives an $80K+ job to a campaign donor’s son who never finished college; and a CEO starts a nonprofit to raise his company’s profile, giving $35K of its raised funds to organizations in need and $262K to the privileged daughter of a reality TV star slash former GOP VP candidate.

I’ve been calling it robbing from the poor to pay the rich, and I recognize the dangers in the neat abstraction. “The poor” and “the rich” are ideas and not people, even though it’s true in this country that actual people are very very poor while others are very very rich. I’m trying to argue we’re all poor.
Continue reading We Are All Poor

Lord, I’m Coming Home to You

What is waiting for me on my doorstep when I get home from the bar?

Past the flannel planes and blacktop skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbriar, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in the morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Yes! From the New Oxford American Dictionary: “invaginate: be turned inside out or folded back on itself to form a cavity or pouch.” My weekend is full, folks. And then this is how they’ve presented the author bookflaply:

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion, and the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award, and was appointed to the usage panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the Engligh Language. He died in 2008, leaving behind unpublished work of which The Pale King is a part.

Damn it! Damn it!

Tweeting as a Writer, and Blogging

Here’s J. Robert Lennon, whose blog, Ward Six, written with his wife, Rhian Ellis, is a routine landing spot in my browsing:

Listen carefully here, writers, because this is important. Content. Do not post reports on how many people came to your reading or what nice things book reviewers said about you. This is called bragging and it makes you look like an ass. People will read your books not because you’re telling them how much people like you, but because your writing is worth reading. So, on the internet, give them more of that. Give people more of yourself.

It’s great advice, generally de rigeur at Ward Six. But it gets at something I’ve reconciled over the past months. Here’s what I’ve worried: Is this blogging and now Tweeting and Facebook updating not just a self-indulgent practice as a person, but also a waste of time and creativity as a writer? Or maybe it’s been more like: This kind of writing isn’t “real” writing, but is that a problem and should I stop it?

The answer for both I’ve come to is No.
Continue reading Tweeting as a Writer, and Blogging

Lately I’ve Been Thinking about Memorization

Lately, I’ve been thinking about memorization. There’s that Foer book that’s climbing the charts. There’s that cell phone I have to which I’ve outsourced the memorization of every phone number in my life save N’s and my parents’. And there’s the final oral exam I assign to most of my undergraduate creative writing classes, where I make them tell from memory a story 100 years old or older. They go to the Bible, Grimm, Greek myth. The idea being to force the essence of narrative into their brains. Sure, they forget these stories by the end of finals week, but it’s a gesture.

I know, from memory, a few things. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (easy) and the obvious, shorter W.C. Williams poems. Certain passages of Prufrock. I know the 23rd Psalm, still, from Bible camp back in sixth grade (but I don’t know the Lord’s Prayer). I know this, mispelled: Continue reading Lately I’ve Been Thinking about Memorization

New Taxidermy Series: “Mounted in Alaska”

Remember when TLC was going to run a taxidermy special, which it then scheduled to air March 10 and then for whatever reason tabled for who knows when?

Well now the History Channel (which is weirdly trying to brand itself as, simply, “History”—as though the network were some sort of televised embodiment of all that’s come before us) has jumped on the taxidermy bandwagon with, wait for it, Mounted in Alaska (mountedinalaska.com was bought on Valentine’s Day this year, but nothing there as of yet). The network ordered 15 episodes, premiering April 7.

I don’t have cable. I’ll have to steal it from the Internet.

Russell Knight’s the central character of the show. I’ve never heard of him; not that I’m any sort of expert. Looking at his Web site’s pics it seems the guy does a lot of bears. Which may explain why taxidermy‘s Wikipedia page (an utter fucking wreck, pardon my French, which is a post for another time) claims the following:

Taxidermists seek to continually maintain their skills to ensure attractive, life-like results. Many taxidermists in the USA use bears, though some use creatures such as snakes, birds and fish.

Um, no. Really? No. Or well: fine, but now define many. That deer doesn’t appear anywhere on this page means the whole thing’s a dumb hilarious mess, like Michelle Bachman wanting to be U.S. president.

But Knight’s in Alaska, so natürlich he mounts bears. Ten bucks says there’s a moose in the premiere.