Blog

Modelo: A Beer for Hyper-Insecure Boys

I mean where do I start with this one?

I don’t need to point out what’s so odious about this one, but can you imagine how insufferable the kind of guy would be who calculates his every move from the time he enters a new bar?

What’s interesting here is that Modelo, a relatively shitty, low-rent beer, has invested some money in an advertising company that employs very smart people to help make it the new Tecate, which seems to’ve become the west-coast PBR owing to being inexpensive and never advertising. So Modelo might not be so smart, but these people they’ve hired? Very smart people. All commercials operate off our fears and anxieties, and nothing scares a twentysomething hipster more than not being cool. Or, more exactly, not being seen by others as cool.

I was always a nerd. I don’t remember how or when I learned that being an adult meant no longer needing to care what other people thought about me, but this is what I had faith in growing up. I understand worrying about whether you smell, or are pretty. But worrying about whether strangers in a bar you’ve never been inside think you have good taste? It’s maybe the definition of the hipster.

More on Teaching and Learning

interleaveContinuing my research into Bjork’s “desirable difficulties”, I found some video interviews he did that summed up a lot of his lab’s research into learning. One thing they’ve studied is the effect of “interleaving,” which means alternating among a set of disparate things to learn rather than learning them in dedicated blocks, one-by-one.

So for instance, they had test subjects learn painting styles throughout the history of art by focusing on 6 works each from 12 major painters. One group looked at and discussed all 6 works from Painter A, then moved on to the 6 works from Painter B, and so on. This was the “blocked learning” group. The other group looked at 1 work from Painter A, then 1 work from Painter B, and so on through all 12 painters. Then another round of new works. This latter was the “interleaved learning” group.

When, at the end of the learning period, each group was given a new set of paintings, to identify from their styles the artist who made them, the second group did better on the test. The group that learned through interleaving better recognized signature styles than the first one did.

But here’s the key thing: Continue reading More on Teaching and Learning

Feedback Helps Performance But Not Learning

william-staffordI’m writing this paper on what neuroscience and cognition can teach us as writers of nonfiction—who, it’s been said, write essays that “show a mind at work” without, from what I can tell, learning much about how the mind even works. A colleague of mine in the psych dept at USF turned me on to the work of Robert Bjork down at UCLA, who developed the notion of “desirable difficulty” as an aid in learning, and today I found his seminal paper on the topic: “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in the Training of Human Beings”.

What I like about psych papers—particularly ones that look at learning and cognition—is how they demistify and take the romance out of what I and my colleagues have a tendency to romance and mystify: our training human beings to be writers.

I read this:

Richard Schmidt and his collaborators … have found that … reducing the frequency of feedback makes life more difficult for the learner during training, but can enhance posttraining performance. They have demonstrated that providing summary feedback to subjects … or “fading” the frequency of feedback over trials, impedes acquisition of simple motor skills but enhances long-term retention of those skills.

Schmidt works on motor skill learning, but Bjork found correlation to verbal learning skills, too. In other words, continuous feedback (like the kind creative writing students get in workshops) feels good and makes the task of learning feel easier, but there’s plenty of evidence that it doesn’t actually help learning.
Continue reading Feedback Helps Performance But Not Learning

The Best Commercial on TV Right Now

It’s this:

I hate commercials. Now that cell phones and the NSA’s domestic spying practices have driven “being dupefully surveilled” up to the top of the list of my greatest fears and anxieties, “being effectively marketed to” is at most a distant second. Still, I hate being effectively marketed to. I like DVRs’ commercial-hopping abilities. But I don’t hop over Esurance’s “Beatrice” ad, because every element is so exquisite.

Let me direct your attention to:

  • All parts of Beatrice’s outfit, particularly the scarf and its knot’s location w/r/t the hang of her bosom.
  • How Beatrice points to her “wall” and then revises that pointing for more emphasis and clarity.
  • The look the critical friend gives the supportive friend after her, “Ooh! I like that one!”
  • The cut on “fifteen percent” that shifts our attentions from the supportive friend to the critical one.
  • The faint gasp heard from Supportive in the wake of Beatrice’s unfriending.
  • The well earned vocal fry on 66% of these women.
  • Beatrice’s continued gesturing during Jim Halpert’s voiceover that broadcasts her pitying attitude toward this supposedly more savvy friend.
  • The piano in the corner at the end, which of course Beatrice can play and perhaps teaches lessons for.

It’s got in 30 seconds the same richness of detail dudes in magazines fawn over Wes Anderson features for. Every time it comes on I sit up in my seat, leaning forward the way I imagine Sontag did in the second row of a movie theater.

(Or was that Pauline Kael?)

Very Good Paragraphs

From Jonathan Dee’s shrewd and unassailable review of the new Updike biography in this month’s Harper’s. More of a review of Updike and his career. Sadly it’s for subscribers only:

If there’s a category-buster in Updike’s vast oeuvre, it’s the tetralogy of Rabbit novels, which on its face is both realistic and nonautobiographical. Updike, in a foreword to the Modern Library collection of these works—which trace the life of a former high school basketball star turned car salesman, from disillusioning, rebellious young adulthood to material success to death—described Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom (I have always hated the condescending obviousness of that last name) as “incorrigible—from first to last he bridles at good advice, taking direction only from his personal, also incorrigible God.” But what strikes one now, reading across Updike’s oeuvre, is how similar Rabbit is, in the end, to Piet Hanema or Richard Maple or Henry Bech or other Updike stand-ins. He trivializes rather than embodies his era’s struggle with expanded freedoms by using them to grant himself moral immunity from the consequences of fucking whomever he likes. Characters don’t have to be likable, of course; but the off-putting aspect of Rabbit, Run isn’t that it’s about a man, worshipped in his youth for his natural talent, who doesn’t question his own droit de seigneur in abandoning his pregnant wife and young child to shack up with a local floozy (whom he treats with contempt) because he is bored; it’s that Updike—who later wrote of the “heavy, intoxicating dose of fantasy and wish-fulfillment” that went into the writing of the novel—proposes that he’s telling a story about America, not a story about Updike.

Boom! What’s great is how this review is more than a refutation of some common pro-Updike arguments, chiefly the “Say what you want about his misogyny, the man wrote some beautiful sentences” defense. Later Dee does some fair and smart quoting to show that Updike’s sentencing was often (as it so often is with writers) a way to use art and artifice to shirk more moral duties, to give himself license to avoid having to delve more sympathetically into his (female, usually) characters’ psyches. Rather than settle for refuting the Updike-as-lyricist defense, he makes a smarter claim: “It makes him seem like a more interesting and instructive writer, if not necessarily a better one, to understand his profligate [lyric] gifts not only as a strength but as a weakness.”

Boom!

Watch Old Spice Turn Moms into Witches

Let’s begin a series of posts about TV commercials. Have you seen this Old Spice one?

I’m impressed by how smart it is. Here we have a bunch of moms with long skirts hanging out in a tree. One is weeping a rain of tears. She sings a minor-key A/A/B/A dirge lamenting her son’s new sexual prowess. It’s the exact kind of tune witches would chant in the woods around a cauldron. Listen again:

Old Spice isn’t nice
and it comes with a price.
My boy, Garret, chose to wear it
now he can’t help but entice.
All these ladies, all these women
are up on him like lice.
As a mother I condemn new
body spray from Old Spice.

More than the easily won, consequence-free attraction from hot models slightly older than you, what’s alluring to teen boys (I speak from experience) is knowing that you’ve both vanquished your mother while also retaining her undying love. It might be the key fantasy of adolescence.

This commercial’s a lot less fun than the ones where moms, like, slither across the floor and up on the furniture while singing a kind of power anthem about Old Spice’s ability to kick up the sexness vis-a-vis one’s son, but I argue that it’s way more psychically effective. I wish I’d written it.

My Mother Told Me, According to My Mother

1.
I just logged in to my blog service’s Dashboard, and I skipped over the option for it to “Remember Me”, which seems an indication that I and my blog service have fallen out of whatever relationship we had with each other back in the sunny days of January when I was blogging like once a week!

At any rate, I’m typing this from Fairfax, Virginia’s own 29th Parallel Coffee & Tea, which is in the strip mall by my sister’s, just down from a mattress store and a 7-11, and which specializes in the kind of slow, thin-streamed poursover I’ve somewhat solipsitically assumed were only an artifact of the Pacific Northwest. These kind:

20140606_135544

But I’m not having coffee, I’m having a pot of tangerine ginger tea that I don’t so much enjoy as feel all right about drinking now that my acupuncturist has told me ginger is a smart food to put in my body so’s to assuage certain digestive troubles I’ve been having for a long time. I drink tea and have an acupuncturist and I do yoga once a week. What’s my name?

2.
On the plane over I read (in its entirety! in addition to watching three Portlandias!) Donald Antrim’s memoir, The Afterlife, which is both about the death of and dedicated to his mother. He spends lots of time throughout citing certain family-history data in something she once told him. But like get a load of this sentence that opens a paragraph toward the end of Part III:

My mother told me that the storage facility in which S. had deposited his Frederic Church—I had, I realize now, come to think of the painting as belonging to S.; and, with this in mind, and on the strength of hearsay evidence transmitted through channels that I knew from long experience to be unreliable (S. and my mother), had come to regard the painting as a genuine Church—the storage facility, as I was saying, was, according to my mother, very badly damaged.

It’s exactly the sort of exquisite Byzantine mess I like in a sentence’s form, but look also how that mess extends to its content. Twice therein we’re told this information came from his mother, before and after the long em-dashed appositive which explains that information (i.e. “hearsay evidence”) coming from his mother should be understood as unreliable.

The move’s rampant. I just flipped the book open to page 53 at random and found: “At the age of fifty-two, he died. My mother told me later that his weight had dropped precipitously, that he’d turned yellow, that, at the end, he’d bled through his skin.” Antrim could just as easily drop that “My mother told me later” bit and serve up his information as the reliable narrator we’ve long by now presumed him to be. But he pretty much never does.

Is this move a shirking of reliability on his own part? Are we to assume that anything preceded with “My mother told me” might be untrue? Or is this a kind of default self-policing regarding facts or moments Antrim thinks are testing our belief? Or maybe it’s a way to keep pushing his mother on the page, which makes sense given the project as a whole.

I didn’t love The Afterlife as much as I loved its sentences. I did appreciate its structure: seven parts that don’t follow chronology and cohere only in terms of the narrative voice and cast of characters. They’re not even all about his mother. It was great, but it was clear to me by the time I got to the end that anyone born after 1970 who tried to publish this book would be encouraged if not forced to do so as essays. I don’t have the book jacket on my library copy, but it’s great that there’s no clarifying subtitle anywhere in the book. That it’s allowed to just be a book.

3.
Because without question my anxious mother (who has a tendency to put the “mother” in “smother” [I kid!], and who knows I’m back in Virginia but won’t see me for another five days) had assumed from its title that this blog post was about her, I’ll apologize for any confusion here. Sorry, mom. See you soon. Stay tuned, four other readers, for a lot of blog posts in the coming days, most of them about television commercials.

Enterprising New Idea for Music Types

This morning, I realized that what I needed was an app or Web engine that could recommend new music to me based on old music I liked back when it was of use to the music industry for me to like it. Because it’s rare that I hear guitars in new pop/rock music today, distorted ones at least. And I like distorted guitars. Surely someone’s using fuzzboxes?

I imagine it’d go like this. The app or site would prompt you to fill in the blank:

When I was young enough to be marketed to, I loved…

And then it would use algorithms or something to figure out what the closest present-day analogue is:

Now that you’re older, the album the kids are listening to that you might also love is…

But then you have to trust the algorithm, and what little I know about tech people and big data tells me I might not want to, that I might go When I was young enough to be marketed to, I loved…

Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West

And it would then go Now that you’re older, the album the kids are listening to that you might also love is…

Imagine Dragons

So be careful, enterprising tech people. Don’t recommend that I listen to Imagine Dragons. And get on it. Why not? Yesterday I was followed on Twitter by an app I can download to help schedule my office hours and other student meetings. Why waste time on voice mail or email trying to arrange a meeting? Why try to diminish my interactions with students which can’t be mined for data?

The saddest part of it is that I couldn’t even sign up if I wanted to. They’re currently “overloaded with requests.”

Old Goals

Long-time readers (!) of this blog might recall that back in 2011 I tried to work on memorizing some prose passages. I meant to start with Cheever’s opening paragraph in “The Death of Justina”. Today is the first day I’ve been able to recite it in full from memory. Here, to practice, though you’ll have to trust I’m neither peeking nor copying and pasting:

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect, as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one’s purest memories and ambitions, and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome—up two steps and down three—one entered the library, where all the books were in order, the lamps were bright, where there was a fire and a dozen bottles of good bourbon locked in a cabinet with a veneer like tortoise shell whose silver key my father wore on his watch chain. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. 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.

The idea, I guess, is to know certain writing by heart, in all that this idiom connotes. I’m in love with the way this paragraph moves. I love its leaps and grounding returns. Maybe I’ll glean something from it subconsciously, but mostly I just like having it close when I need it.

Next up for memorization is this gem from Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”:

Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

339 words to Cheever’s 280. See you in 2018.

Very Good Paragraphs

From “The State of Nonfiction Today”, the opening chapter in Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell, a piece whose insight has saved me from having to write at least two different essays so far. This graf comes right after a lengthy one summing up George Steiner’s “Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought”:

I’m not trying to be more demoralizing than necessary. My point is simply to suggest that in the larger culture, as well as in the specific subculture of nonfiction, we may be moving away from the complexities of thought or consciousness for understandable if ignoble reasons. If thinking on the page makes us sad, why do it? If all those semicolons, ideas, and oppositional clauses slow us down and keep us from the more tactile pleasure of sense details, speedy dialogue, and cinematically imaginable scenes, get rid of them!

On @midnight

atmidnightI.
@midnight is a show on Comedy Central that combines the worst characteristics of two things I enjoy—standup comics and Twitter—in a way that with repeated exposure I’d be forced to swear off both. I watched one half of one episode, featuring the great Rory Scovel and, one of my favorite comics, Jon Dore, and I couldn’t finish. This post will briefly get at why.
Continue reading On @midnight

“The Snowdon Song” ? Tony, Caro & John

Old British folk song. Apparently Beach House covered this song and called it “Lovelier Girl” because of the U.S. being what it is among young folks in the post-millennium, and when I found chords for that cover online I was excited and then played them and they’re wrong. Not just different-key wrong but like, there are from what I can tell no minor-seventh chords anywhere in the song. But who knows what else Beach House did with this unassailable great.

So the recording I have is off on the tuning, and there’s all kinds of melodic lines being plucked that are beyond my capabilities, but here’s the basis for the song in the hopes a better player than I am can build off it.

Forgive misheard lyrics, though I stand by that weird line in the chorus.
Continue reading “The Snowdon Song” ? Tony, Caro & John

Why I Don’t Teach Revision

13641974Short answer: I never learned how to.

Long answer: I never learned how to teach anything, really. Most collegiate teaching begins as stabs in the dark by people who believe they can do but don’t yet know how to get others to do. But while I eventually picked up how to teach, say, scene or voice or character or structure, any assignments, texts, or exercises to get students to think about revision have escaped me.

Also, there’s no time. Requiring students to conceive, write, and revise a full-length essay within the 15 weeks of a semester is yet another instance of the academy doing its best/worst to fit the messy idiosyncrasies of writing processes within its arbitrary timeframes and practices. It’s practice that will be unuseful not only in their other classes[*]
but also in their careers, should they go on to be writers.

Within 15 weeks, amid other assignments and work to focus on, the messy, idiosyncratic process of revision defaults to what Carol Bly calls “literary fixing”, i.e., showing in that scene more than you told in the first draft, or keeping the point of view consistently close to the central character, or making sure you don’t leap into the present tense without warrant.

Here’s the thing about teaching this kind of “revision” in the academy: it’s really good at getting students to practice technique. What it’s not good at is articulated well in Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s Good Prose, one of the better books on writing I’ve read in years:

I remember in college reading [Fitzgerald’s] The Last Tycoon and studying a note that he left in the manuscript: “Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don’t look—rewrite from mood.” I reread those lines so often, trying to understand them, that they stuck in my memory. Fitzgerald knew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you’ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you’re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story. If Fitzgerald had been advising a young writer and not himself, he might have said, “Rewrite from principle,” or “Don’t just push the same old stuff around. Throw it away and start over.” In any case, a lot of learning how to be edited was for me learning the necessity of this second kind of rewriting […].

My emphasis. Revision as it’s taught in the academy—often meant to be performed over a number of weeks based on whatever consensus one’s peers came to in workshop—isn’t just unuseful practice, it’s detrimental to the most important part of the process: figuring out the essential thing you are trying to do. This is markedly different from figuring out how to improve what you’ve done.

Sometimes, what you’ve done isn’t worth the trouble. Throw it away and start over. If you insist on keeping it, knowing this distinction between the kinds of rewriting is your best bet. Also: make your own schedule.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This is something composition teachers refuse to stop insisting. The idea behind teaching revision is that it teaches students that writing is a process not a product, and while this is true for writers who get to set their own deadlines it’s not true for those who don’t, and it’s very much untrue for students who have, say, 4 major papers to write over the course of the term in one class alone, each of which papers has to be scheduled amid assignments for three or four other classes. And given the nature of writing assignments in classes that aren’t Comp 101, this kind of careful revision process won’t, I’m convinced, result in a better grade. Better to teach students how to think critically and write clearly, which is hard enough of an endeavor to waste their time on “radical revision” practices that are presented as universally applicable but—if we believe anything about the writing process—can’t possibly be so.↵

Out with a Bang

diagram136Woke up this morning to find that the latest issue of DIAGRAM went live, putting my essay, “A Rapi I Wroteii“, out into the world. It’s not the first piece I’ve published online, but it’s the best one. The essay’s about a real-life rap I really wrote back in college. I was especially glad DIAGRAM took the piece, not only because it’s maybe the best online magazine out there, but also due to the attention editor Ander Monson pays to diagrams, coding, and the physical form of digital texts.

You’ll see that the essay uses footnotes. I annotate the rap text and therein lies the essay’s bulk. Pale Fire on a smaller scale, but more importantly less narratively progressive. I’ve never been sure about this piece. When I’d read it through it felt paltry at the end. It doesn’t work very well as a piece to read through start to finish. I think it works best to read the rap as a whole, and then read it again, following to each footnote when it comes. Then back to text and back to footnote and on and on.

Endnotes would be the only way to get it to work on the page, in, say, an anthology. But endnotes that got their own page. Ideally, some whiz would code up a Flash-based thing wherein the footnotes would perform as pop-up windows, only one of which could appear at a time.

I can’t say that J. Nicholas Geist’s Infinity Blade review was an influence, but I will say I wish I’d’ve thought of its form, and that I’d like once again to write an essay that works better on the screen than on the page, that taps into the Internet’s absorptive powers, and not just its distractive ones.

MacBook Pro Superdrive Won’t Load Disc — Weird Solution

A service post; maybe Googlers will find it. I had this problem a while back on my late-2010 MacBook Pro. I’d insert a disc and it wouldn’t recognize there was anything to load. None of the fixes I found in online forums did the trick. One day it suddenly fixed itself on its own. Or, more specifically, something I did made the Superdrive function again.

Well it’s been malfunctioning for a couple months now and I couldn’t figure out why. Then I did this:

  1. I wanted to make sure a Firefox Add-on was working properly, so I did Tools > Add-ons and they opened in a new tab.
  2. I noticed a number of my add-ons were waiting for a Firefox restart.
  3. I clicked “Restart Firefox”.
  4. I heard my Superdrive make a little whir, as though it had just ejected a disc.
  5. Excited but incredulous, I put in a DVD and it played immediately.

So maybe try restarting Firefox through your Add-ons tab and see if it helps? For what it’s worth, here are the Add-ons I use:

  • Adblock Plus
  • BarTab Lite
  • Coupons at Checkout
  • DoNotTrackMe
  • Download Status Bar
  • DuckDuckGo Plus
  • feedly
  • Flash Video Downloader
  • Flashblock
  • Greasemonkey
  • Xmarks

Why do I feel as though I’ve just shown you my underwear drawer?

On Selling Out

blackman-selloutMaybe you noticed the opening sentence of my last blog post? It’s an ad. I got paid to write that sentence and link it to a Web-based proofreading service. Word-for-word, it’s the most money I’ve ever made as a writer in my entire life. I need money these days. My and N’s flights to Virginia for Xmas came to more than $1000, and then there’s presents, and so I dithered on whether to accept the invitation to sponsor one of my blog posts only because the teen I once was told me to. I never listened to him seriously.[1]

I wouldn’t trust a Web site to proof my copy the way a doctor wouldn’t run to WebMD for advice. Proofing copy’s maybe the one thing I feel trained to do. I can’t recommend the service, having never used it. When I pasted into the window of its homepage the opening paragraph of a forthcoming article of mine, which graf already got OK’d by my editor, it found 3 spelling issues, 1 issue of commonly confused words, 1 issue of wordiness, 1 use of the passive voice, 2 issues of punctuation within a sentence, and 3 issues with the writing style. I need to sign up for a trial to see precisely what these issues of style and wordiness are, but I’m not about to.

Look, I recognize that this online proofreader and other such sites are where we are in the world: individual outsourcing. The city I live in is the global center for people making sites and apps that other people can use to take care of such time-consuming tasks as finding a parking spot to learning driving directions. It’s maybe the opposite of a DIY culture. Rather than build your own Web site, you can have a blog. Rather than put together your own photo albums, you can use any Photo-sharing service. Rather than self-publish and distro a zine, you can post on social-media apps and rack up followers. No wonder knitting and pickling got so big around the time Facebook and Twitter did: our phones do everything for us now. Ours is a DNY culture.

More than my framed longbox of the Reality Bites soundtrack, this post is branding me as a child of the Nineties. Growing up, the worst thing I could imagine anyone being was a sellout, which while historically as slippery to define as ironic I understood as performing inauthentically for monetary gain. Abandoning one’s principles when it’s personally advantageous to do so.

What I want to do to end this post before it gets tedious and preachy is to ask a question. I don’t have enough readers to warrant a response, so I’ll go ahead and let it be leading. Has the participatory Internet (a.k.a. Web 2.0) turned us all into sellouts?

Or has reality television? Has anyone made famous via viral DIY videos ever turned down a book or TV offer in order to stay true to his or her vision? No. Because I don’t think there’s any cultural pressure to do so.

The final question is what’s the new selling out? What’s the new worst thing a person can do these days? My money’s on Not Be Funny. If there’s any cultural pressure I feel here, where we are in the world, it’s to be clever, to make jokes, to entertain.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Apologies to friend and correspondent Michael Martone for beginning a post about his great self-titled book with an ad.↵

Michael Martone’s Michael Martone

I use Grammarly for online proofreading now that my 11th-grade English teacher, Ms. Hines, unfriended me on Facebook.

michaelmartoneLast night I taught this book, which is a collection of Contributor’s Notes that Martone published in various journals. All begin the same way: Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. From there, anything can happen. Sometimes he goes to enroll at Indiana University, which is true. Martone did go there. Sometimes he gets work as a ditchdigger, or turns into a giant insect. As far as I know Martone didn’t do these things. I taught the book in my Narrating Nonfiction course. Students initially found the book annoying. One student’s library copy has “rambling, annoying” marked in the margins. My students were also confused by what the book was doing in a nonfiction class. FC2, the publisher, event labels the book “fiction” on its back cover.

This post is going to try to explain how, even in the thick of wildest fabrication, Martone’s book is a work of nonfiction.
Continue reading Michael Martone’s Michael Martone

Very Good Paragraphs

From Lauren Collins’s piece on chilis in last month’s New Yorker food issue, which piece I wasn’t going to read because I’m not historically interested in capsaicin, but it’s been writing like this that’s kept me going. Look at how this graf moves!

Chiliheads are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.) Chili growing is to gardening as grilling is to cooking, allowing men to enter, and dominate, a domestic sphere without sacrificing their bluster. “I can’t remember eating anything spicy before the parrot came along,” Fowler, a big man with a brushy mustache, told me, in July. The chili world is full of garrulous, confiding, erratic narrators who say things like “before the parrot came along.” In Fowler’s case, the parrot belonged to his father’s brother. “Uncle Jim wanted another parrot, and his wife said, ‘Nope, you’ve got a parrot, and that’s it.’ So he made up this story that my dad wanted a parrot, and next time he visited us he brought one.” The parrot, named Murphy, came with a chili plant. (Birds can’t taste capsaicin.) Fowler quit fishing and started growing habaneros in his bedroom. Soon, he had left his job as a Web designer and founded the Chili Pepper Company, through which he sells seeds, sauces, powders, and products such as Kiss the Devil, a mouth spray made with chili-infused alcohol. “You can have just a little bit before you go to the gym, to get your endorphins up,” Fowler told me.