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Poets Are Smarter

Spent the night on a good-sized sofa stretched along glass-fronted BILLYs full of poetry books. In the morning, I read this:

I cannot go on
restricting myself to images

because you think it is your right
to dispute my meaning:

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

I show it to my friend Peter, whose copy of Glück’s The Wild Iris it is, and I wow at it. “I’m stealing that,” I say, pointing at the final two lines. “Somehow. Might be a good epigraph for something.”

“It’d be a good epigraph for something about comedy,” he tells me.

Poets! They’re like drum sanders; you should be able to rent one out.

No More Essays, Only Assays

When will I tire of disparaging the essay and its etymology? Maybe about when I hit the bottom of this box of wine I bought last fall. In the treacly meantime I’ve got this new word found on Wikipedia while running a link chain off from opioids. From Wikipedia:

An assay is an investigative (analytic) procedure in laboratory medicine, pharmacology, environmental biology, and molecular biology for qualitatively assessing or quantitatively measuring the presence or amount or the functional activity of a target entity (the analyte)….

And from the OAD:

1. determine the content or quality of (a metal or ore).
• examine (something) in order to assess its nature: stepping inside, I quickly assayed the clientele

This is what I want to claim to write now, not essays but assays, in that I always feel more analytic than attemptful when I put nonfiction down on a page, and also that I should at last admit that despite my major in film studies and my minor in art history I’ve historically been far more excited and inspired by scientists than by artists; and despite being an artist myself and not a scientist I have this unscientific faith in the idea that the more I can do with my art what scientists do with their science the closer I’ll get to that god I keep not believing in.

At any rate, I don’t know heads or tails of what assaying means to, say, pharmacologists (and the general process as Wikipedia spells it out is a mess written by nerds who never learned parallel structures), but from what this half-drunk, moving-box-bleary idiot can tell it’s a matter of isolating the specific thing you want to analyze (i.e., the analyte) from its general environment or substance, and then activating or amplifying that thing’s essence in such a way as to measure or characterize it.

So how an assay might work is such:

  1. Isolate the thing you intend to discuss (i.e., your analyte) from the things it is not, exactly.
  2. List or describe what makes your analyte something worthy of your reader’s time and consideration.
  3. Convert, as Wikipedia says, the quality of your analyte “into a detectable signal generally involving some method of signal amplification, so that it can be easily discriminated from noise.” Here’s the rub: how to convert a subject into some amplified signal, and how—as Wallace puzzled over in —to write somewhere outside of [total] noise? (The dull answer, I think, to this? Use your writerly voice.)

And as it is such, so also, as such, will it be unto you. And I know what some of you are thinking: this kind of open experimentation with form and structure is part and parcel of the plain-old essay, to which I say, “I know. I’m equally tired of talking about the essay’s black-holeish swallowing of all forms.”

Also what I’m tired of? Like: how come every time we essayists find an external form to use in the putting together of our stuff and ideas, we need to set that form front-and-center and make it somehow even titular? (Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” I’m looking in your direction. Ditto several Monson things I’ve run across.) It’s fun and often gloriously productive to find an external form to use in the drafting of one’s eassay, but must we always show our work?

To borrow from similar stuff my pal Seth has been tweeting today, writing your essay behind your found form is like masturbating in a park to show everyone how good you are at it.

—

(BTW: Any for-reals scientists working occupationally on assaying who might be looking for a gleeful, passionate acolyte to ask a ton of interruptive questions about everyday things you take for granted, hit a brother up.)

Riskless Business

Some new thoughts on the essay, this time in . Naturally I’ve got some qualms. I’ll try to keep them brief.

I’ve pulled this little trick before, but here’s a modified paragraph:

There is certainly disagreement on the wobbly matter of what counts as [a poem] and what does not. I have generally found that for every rule I could establish about the [short story], a dozen exceptions scuttle up. I recently taught a graduate seminar on the topic and, at the end of the course, to the question “What can we say of the [novel] with absolute certainty?,” all of us, armed with our panoply of canonical [narrative] theories and our own conjectures, had to admit that the answer is: “Almost nothing.” But this is the force of the [lyric]: it impels you to face the undecidable. It asks you to get comfortable with ambivalence.

If there’s anything to take away from this post it’s this: we have got to stop insisting the essay is special in its unclassifiableness. Or even interesting in same. That the essay has no set form is about as interesting and characteristic as saying it’s written in prose.
Continue reading Riskless Business

New Review of The Authentic Animal

Kind words on the whole from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Readers may find that Madden’s genre-blending approach to taxidermy makes for an uneven book. Some of his personal digressions are tedious, while other side trips are fascinating. Generally, though, Madden’s prose is a joy to read; some passages strike me as poetry: “Every animal dies. Taxidermy is what comes next.”

And Madden’s claims about taxidermy are almost always thought-provoking. Most memorably, he argues that taxidermists are among our most fervent animal lovers: “A taxidermized animal is a remembered animal, a memorialized animal, and something memorialized is something loved.”

It’s been a common critique: rambling, digressive, uneven. I wouldn’t know how else to write a book. Or, well, that’s not true. Like: what book on taxidermy needs chitchat on the Dave Coulier-co-hosted America’s Funniest People or 250+ words on Camper Van Beethoven CD longboxes?

Mine did, turns out. This stuff is easy enough to identify and cut out of any manuscript. I never really gave it much thought as to why it got there in the first draft and stayed in through the end, but if I had to defend it today (and I know I don’t), I’d point to how the nonfiction I want to write reflects the writer’s thinking process so’s to induce such a process in his reader.

Digressively is how I think. Here’s something else I’d argue: same as everyone.

I’m Moving to California, Part 3

Dr. Robert E. Witt, Chancellor of The University of Alabama System, announced the following this afternoon:

“I am pleased to announce that Jo Bonner will join The University of Alabama System’s senior leadership team as Vice Chancellor for Government Relations and Economic Development on Aug. 16.

“Jo’s extensive government experience and outstanding economic development record make him ideally suited for this important new position.”

Dr. Judy Bonner, President of The University of Alabama and sister of Rep. Bonner, responded with the following statement:

“I am very pleased that Jo will continue to serve the state of Alabama in this new capacity with the UA System office. Certainly, his experience and expertise in the area of government relations and economic development will be invaluable as he works with all three campuses to enhance the quality of life for all Alabamians. On a personal level, I am very proud of him, of the contributions he has already made and the work he will accomplish in this new position.”

The Greatest Event in Television History

[This is a blog post about a thing on Adult Swim few people may even know anything about. Just as a warning: you might not care about what follows.]

It’s an Eggersian title, TGEiTH, and similarly steeped in irony. Not necessarily cloaked in it. To get everyone excited about a thing that in the end wasn’t exciting whatever TGEiTH entailed was cloaked instead in secrecy. Turns out it was a 15-minute highly ironized behind-the-scenes documentary about Adam Scott and John Hamm filming a shot-for-shot remake of the Simon & Simon opening credits.

I’m 35 and if I’d ever heard of this show I’ve never seen so much as a clip of it.

I don’t get it. I guess the idea for Adult Swim (out of whose key demographic I’m days away from falling) was that the mustaches and period costumes would be enough for the kids to laugh at. And maybe if I were in my 40s like Scott, Hamm, et al., I’d be able to watch and go like “Oh yeah, that’s totally how that opening went” in my head. Then I laugh from the delight of recognition?

What’s not interesting: this is all such dull easy 90’s-style irony. What might be: this 90’s-style irony is charged in TGEiTH by our post-millennial-style celebrity worship. A shot-for-shot remake of a 1970’s TV show’s opening credit sequence is not inherently funny. Not any more than the sequence itself is, campily, through the lens of 30+ years of developing TV sensibilities. But such a remake starring the guy who plays, on basic cable, a tall alcoholic child in the 1950s who looks all right in suits? Not yet, but it helps.

There’s a kind of cool-kid clubbiness to TGEiTH. It’s like watching the hammy team captain get laughs during the spring musical because everyone knows him outside his costume. Cameos by Megan Mullally, Pauls Scheer and Rudd help. What I’m saying is I think most of the allure of this thing is in watching cool, good-looking, A-list funny people hang out and be silly together. It’s not a gross desire per se, but there is something gross in “Also Starring MEGAN MULLALLY” serving as a joke.

Right? Maybe I’m just down on people playing themselves playing other people for laughs. Maybe I’m just confused that such winking self-reference can still find a loving audience. No way would TGEiTH exist without its star power, and now Adam Scott’s doing another one in a few weeks, co-starring Amy Poehler.

What’ll it be this time? Scarecrow and Mrs. King?

Was Lieben die Deutschen?

Die Deutschen lieben ganz vieles!

So this was a thing we’d do in 8th grade German I class, taught by Frau um … who knows. The actual East German Frau teaching German at Herndon Intermediate School in 1991 and not the—Frau Griffith!

Her name was Frau Griffith!

At any rate, Family Guy had a thing last week about a show where a German man approved a series of named things by saying “Das is gut,” which I shouldn’t have to translate. It reminded me of this thing we’d do in 8th grade German I class. Frau Griffith would go: Also! Was lieben die Deutschen?

This means: “Okay, now! What do the Germans love?”

And we’d answer in a kind of list. Here’s the list:

  • Wandern
  • Blumen
  • Kaffee und Kuchen
  • Frische Luft
  • Bier
  • Schokolade
  • Ordnung

(i.e. hiking, flowers, coffee and cake, fresh air, beer, chocolate, and order. ORDNUNG!)

A question that was never asked = Who among earthlings doesn’t also love these things?

2013

It’s been a bad-news year. It’s been a great newsyear, which usually amounts to a bad-news year. You all know why. As I’ve slacked on the output on this blog of late, I want to do a personal 2013 recap thus far.

JANUARY
I was in Boston for the MLA conference, interviewing for only one job. One job I didn’t end up taking. The trip wasn’t a bust, in that I got to spend a day looking through the Bill Dana Comedy Archives at Emerson College, which was maybe the most urban campus I’ve ever seen. A set of buildings along one stretch of downtown Boston. The library was on a certain floor of a certain building. The archives a certain set of rooms on the floor above. A fruitful visit. Plus I got to stay with my friend Jay and meet his wife and stepdaughter. The rest of the month I sat on the couch and ate poorly while playing the guitar and singing off key. N was staying with family in South Dakota, applying and interviewing for jobs in Omaha. I remember nothing else of the month, other than going gluten-free for two weeks with no noticeable effects to my digestive health or energy. I probably drank too much.

FEBRUARY
N came back, just after his birthday, having not found a job in time to retain his many professional trading licenses. It was a dark time. This was the very inevitability we’d worried about for months, the one that drove me to the job market in order to give us some options other than stagnation. I was flown to the campus for the MLA-interview job. I was flown to San Francisco. The former place was too remote for N to find work. The latter place too expensive for us to afford. UA’s faculty-in-residence program, which I interviewed for last summer and got far along in the process of, put itself on hold, making our plan of using free housing to save up enough to buy a house fall completely apart. It was a dark time. Then I got one job offer, and then I got another. Then job negotiations revealed a way to afford living in the Bay Area. By the end of the month we made a decision: I’d take a job in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. We’d move this summer to California.
Continue reading 2013

A Thing I Didn’t Know I Wanted Until I Saw That It Existed And Now I Want Only To Have It

Did you know that John K(ricfalusi) of Ren & Stimpy fame sells original caricature portraits? Like this!

Or this one!

If you got me this for a birthday or Sukkot or whenever, I’d want one with me either mixing cocktails with a rude appendage made windowpane shiny, or wearing a crossword puzzle as a diaper. And let me remain handsome.

Ending All-Natural Peanut Butter Woes

Oh good grief.
Sugar is of nature, but adding sugar to peanut butter is, it seems, unnatural. We’re trying to cut down sugar use in this house, so we’re buying the kind of peanut butter consisting of merely peanuts and oil that comes in a tiered chemical preparation you have to stir to enjoy. And then either you continue to stir each time, or you store it in the fridge where eventually it becomes an inch of gritty oilless plaster it’s hard to spread on much of anything other than the hottest slice of toast.

In short: ANPB has two problems that make it not worth buying:

  1. Stirring is a pain and a mess and ends up with spilled oil dripping down the jar.
  2. One can’t get the same creamy consistency through the jar the way you can with some classic JIF.

This requires a twofold solution:

  1. When you get the jar home, turn it upside down so it rests on its lid for a day. Then stir on day two—you’ll find that half the job’s been done for you.
  2. After use, store it on its lid in the fridge.

The goal is to keep the oil, which rises, heavy at the bottom of the jar. It’s never been the case that I’ve had too-gritty PB at the top of a jar using this method, but if you did it’s easy to dip down into the depths and draw up the liquid you need.

I didn’t even get this off Lifehacker. No, I’m not the first person to come up with this plan. But that Wired guy doesn’t take care of the storage problem. And this method’s a lot better than—good lord—mixing PB in a separate bowl.

I’m Moving to California, Part 1

Subject: A Message from the Dean of Students
Date: April 9, 2013 4:26:57 PM CDT

Faculty and staff,

Bama Students for Life will be sponsoring a display from the Genocide Awareness Project on the Quad on April 10 and 11. The display includes extremely graphic anti-abortion photos. Students who are upset by the display should be encouraged to contact the Women’s Resource Center or the Counseling Center.

Dean of Students

Embarrassed by the Internet

This idea’s been festering for a little over a year now. I’m ready to (hastily, between classes) articulate it I think.

Young people (i.e., people my age or younger, people who grew up using the Internet in at least high school) are embarrassed by the Internet, or by our constant use of it, our continual reliance on it, our generation’s identification with it.

Sure: it’s embarrassing. The internet is as stupid as it is useful.

The way this embarrassment gets expressed is fascinatingly by co-opting the language of people who aren’t good at the Internet.

When my students and some friends talk about the Internet, they—all of them, almost exclusively—talk about “the Interweb” or better: “the Interwebs” (referring to that moment when Bush referred to “the Internets” in the 2004 debates). I observed a student’s class where he made a tumblr for the course and called it “English 200 blawg”. This is the same thing. A blog for a class is an embarrassment. But if you can spell it or refer to it in a way that is consciously wrong or malapropistic, it’s like this signifier to the party of the second part that you are aware of how embarrassing it is to be talking once again about the Internet.

Adults just say “blog” and “the Web” and “the Internet”. They remain only objects, with way less significance. This isn’t about irony so much as it is about utility and self-doubt. It’s either pure humility, or the performance of same.

(I said it’d be hasty.)

A Couple Reviews of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff

Nonfiction’s older than the English language, but it’s when I go hunting for scholarship on book-length works of narrative nonfiction that I remember how—as far as the academy is concerned—the genre is young and new.

Check out how these two articles on The Right Stuff open. These are initial sentences.

From Charles S. Ross’s “The Rhetoric of The Right Stuff“, pub’d summer 1981 in The Journal of General Education:

Not to be confused with the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who borrowed the name of his most well-known book, Look Homeward, Angel, from Milton, Tom Wolfe is a New York journalist who has been publishing books with catchy titles since his Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby appeared in 1965.

And here’s Spencer Brown, reviewing TRS alongside three other NF books for The Sewanee Review in 1980:

If pressed to find a trait common to these four dissimilar writers, I should point to their sophistication, their being very With It.

It was The Right Stuff that lifted Tom Wolfe into his current station, but putting aside the “Lemme tell you about this weirdo of the moment you’ve probably never heard of” presumptions, there’s a kind of nervous hand here. Or an uncertainty of how to get going.

Every other week I’m shown links to articles online about how PhD school is worthless because no one gets tenure-track jobs. It’s untrue. People get these jobs every year. I’d say one bang-up plan for one’s doctoral studies would be some critical work on contemporary nonfiction, because like it’s easier finding sympathetic online reviews of Jonathan Franzen novels than it is anything anywhere on nonfiction books.

But then again: why would anyone bother studying this when there are fewer English departments in the country interested in hiring in this field than there are sufferable Jonathan Franzen memoir pieces in The New Yorker since, oh, the Clinton era?

Am I wrong? The novel died last year, and I think it died the year before that, too. Why isn’t the academy—and let’s not all piss on the academy, where many smart and hard-working people make their livings—moving on with the rest of us?

Wednesday Night Time Passery

It’s a staycation spring break y’all. The only possible reason that we should have three bottles of three different brands of spiced rum is that … why do we have three bottles of three different brands of spiced rum and no workaday whiskeys in this house on staycation spring break?

I imagine college kids are swallowing gallons of rum and coke this week. Why not make your boyfriend use his superior palate to decide Which Spiced Rum We Sha’n’t Run From?

Here you’ll see, in alphabetical order, what we have on hand. Captain Morgan 100 Proof Spiced Rum ($21.99), The Kraken Black Spiced Rum ($19.99), and Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum ($17.99).

There’s a marked difference in color with the Kraken (hence “black spiced”) and a subtle difference with the others.

Like davemadden.org/blog’s some kind of resource.

I gave them, blind, to Neal, as I’ve got my grandmother’s palate. Neal liked

  1. The Kraken
  2. Sailor Jerry
  3. Captain Morgan

That is to say, he liked them darker to lighter, and lowest proof to highest. I tasted them unblindly and agree. The Captain hurt my throat, the Sailor was the easiest, but the Kraken had the most interesting mouthfeel.

Cue Japanese pornographers. Now I get to kill off a few of these cans of high-octane Coke in the insulated cups our onetime realtor handed us one wishful afternoon. Thanks, Donna, Neal, various Zeuses!

Very Good Paragraphs

From “Statements and Poems” in the collection of poet William Stafford’s writing on writing, Crossing Unmarked Snow

Each [essay] is a miracle that has been invited to happen. But these words, after they come, you look at what’s there. Why these? Why not some calculated careful contenders? Because these chosen ones must survive as they were made, by the reckless impulse of a fallible but susceptible person. I must be willingly fallible in order to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.

Very Good Paragraphs

From Sam Anderson’s email profile of Anne Carson in the Times:

I was e-mailing with Carson on the occasion of the publication of her new book, “Red Doc >” (that angle-bracket is, yes, a part of the title: “Red Doc >” was the default name Carson’s word-processing program gave to the file, and she stuck with it). “Red Doc >,” too, is arguably not poetry. Most of the text runs like a racing stripe down the center of the page, with a couple of inches of empty space on either side. This form was also a result of an accident with the computer. Carson hit a wrong button, and it made the margins go crazy. She found this instantly liberating. The sentences, with one click, went from prosaic to strange, and finally Carson understood — after years of frustration — how her book was actually supposed to work.

I just like how this suggests that maybe Carson’s chief gift is being really bad at her computer.

The Personal in "Personal Essay"

Sometimes it’s like O, CNF Nation, will I ever get on board?

I’m on board with the exercise memoirist Jill Talbot sketches out —forcing students to write a segmented autobiographical essay so as to then force them to fill in the spaces between segments they felt initially impelled to overlook. But either my stomach rolls or my eyes do at this:

While they wait, we read personal essays—artful renderings of vulnerability and honesty that create an intimate connection between a writer and the reader—essays that give us permission to be who we are…

Maybe artful renderings of vulnerability and honesty aren’t the last things I look for when reading a personal essay, but they rank somewhere after semicolons and defenses of Taylor Swift’s career. In CNF Nation, personal means emotionally raw and psychically vulnerable. We’ve got Lopate (quoted in Talbot’s thing) to thank:

The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is asked to forgive the essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor. Some vulnerability is essential to the personal essay. Unproblematically self-assured, self-contained, self-satisfied types, will not make good essayists.

That’s from The Art of the Personal Essay, and no one else’s introduced so exhaustive an anthology. What I hear: “Because it is honest and because it is personal, I will expect your sympathy while I write in a self-absorbed fashion.” It does way more to win me over.

In what environments are our students not being given permission to be who they are? Who is unable these days to find the time and space for writing about the self? There’s a urgent world out there of other more interesting people. Once, yes, we were connected to others via our navel, but we’re grown-ups now. How else?