Category: Endorsements

Easy:

1. Public U.S. life now has become one of resistance to the federal government’s continually terrible and dangerous policies, and the most convenient and quickly satisfying arena in which to work out this resistance is social media.
2. Social media is a lousy and terrible arena for activism and argument. This is for at least two reasons:
   1. Posts tend toward brevity (esp. on Twitter or in the 600×600 pixel box of Instagram) and few issues regarding national politics benefit from being discussed in brief, which is what cable news taught those of us who were paying attention.
   2. Posts come engineered with the possibility of like- and share-rewards, which reward us not on the content of the post so much as the feeling it rustles up in the post’s viewer, and as such we learn to write posts less with our messy thoughts and feelings in mind and more in terms of how the post will play out to our followers.
3. I get enough information on what is happening and how to resist from the news I read, and I haven’t been convinced that I need this information sooner or more rapidly than I want it.

But I miss it. I miss the Twitter I came to love in Obama’s second term. I miss irrelevant Twitter, and I miss having a place where irrelevance could be given free rein. I get that times are different now, but I reject, I think, the idea that different times call for unilaterally different behavior.

I, too, am worried and insecure about the future, and about the future’s total unforeseeability. I acknowledge that I am the source of these feelings, that they’re mine. Therefore, I’m in charge of deciding whether and how to act on them. The worry I’ve had is that by being irrelevant and silly on social media I would appear irresponsible and ignorant, a kind of head-in-the-sand apologist/Pollyanna. But I’m not in charge of how I’m read, I’m in charge of how I am.

In short: if now’s not the time for jokes then when ever is?

I.
I, along with dozens of online thinkpiece writers, feel that Facebook and Twitter helped sway the election for the worse. Trump trolled the U.S into voting for him, realizing early on that the presidency could be had for a lot cheaper than folks in the past had spent on TV ads. All he needed was to be loud and passionate. When the experience you focus on hourly unfolds before you as mute text in the same font, noise becomes very attractive, even as it’s repellant.

The 2016 election was the most emotionally charged, intellectually bankrupt election I lived through. Emotional charge + intellectual bankruptcy is what gets you mad likes/retweets.

II.
Twitter isn’t any one thing. Everyone builds the Twitter they deserve by following whom they choose to follow. The problem for me is that I don’t know what kind of Twitter to build where reading it will expand my understanding of, or wonder at, the world. These days all Twitter does is make the world feel flatter and less colorful.

It’s a shame. I’ve always preferred it over Facebook because of how I felt the 140-character constraint challenged us to be interesting in fewer words. Also, following is a much less loaded activity than “friending”?kudos to s/he who has the strength on FB to unfriend their actual friends. For people on FB, it must feel weird to be friends in real life and not on FB. But then again the people I’m friends with in real life are different on Facebook. On Facebook, I don’t want to be friends with anyone.

So now I’m torn between using social media as a broadcast medium for these blog posts and other news, and leaving it all in full. I did this once, in 2012. I left Facebook after being an early adopter (back when one had to have an .edu address to join). People were confused and some people were mad. For years after most people assumed I’d unfriended them and blocked or hid in some way. People assumed I did this silent, cruel, passive-aggressive thing. That I had just disabled my account wholly seemed unfathomable.^[&]

III.
What’s great is that right as Twitter has become almost intolerable?today everyone feels impelled to share the same opinion about the VP-elect’s reception at a Broadway musical?it’s also tripled the number of promoted ads I now have to see, all of them autoplay videos. What’s the draw? How would I sell Twitter to a non-user?

It’s an app/website where people share hasty opinions in one or two sentences, without nuance, between flashy vid clips for Hollywood retreads and junk food items. Also a lot of reactions to the nonsense tweets of celebrities and slow-witted politicians.

“Having an opinion is so boring,” one of my closest (real life) friends once told me. He’s in many ways a role model for me, and today he’s in the hospital, and I’m worried about his health. It’s one of the wisest things I’ve ever been told. To me, imagination trumps opinion every time. And nothing kills my imagination like logging on.

A couple weeks ago I saw a talk and ping pong match between Pico Iyer and Geoff Dyer. They were old friends. English expats who’ve traveled the world. It made for an easy, spacious talk. At one point Iyer (who took the role of interviewer, chiefly about Dyer’s new book White Sands) asked Dyer about something he’d once said: that the worst things a writer could be were earnest and reverent. Iyer felt that Dyer were at times earnest and reverent in his new book. Dyer did a very gentle British scoff, shuddering at the idea. “I would hope I avoided being either of those things,” he said, and then quoted Nietszche’s saying that earnestness is the sure sign of a slow mind.^[a] It’s similar to reverence, which holds the viewer or thinker in a static, deferential position. Why these are bad for writers is that they are atitudes that create boundaries, or hierarchic dynamics Dyer sees the job of the writer being to break down or transcend.

The way I’ve been putting this for years is that I know I can write about something when I’ve got perfect ambivalence toward the subject. I have to both love the thing (taxidermy, standup comedy, my past) and loathe it, or find it distasteful, in order to write my way in.

All this came to mind after writing my post earlier in the week about bitchy book reviews. In making the point about how bitchiness is a useful tool, I think I was somehow iterating Dyer’s point here. I worry that book reviews are too earnest, and that what they do to books leaves them static and dead, like relics.

Dyer went on to propose two things a writer should be instead: loving and admiring. Camus reportedly called these “the two thirsts one cannot long neglect without drying up.”^[b] Loving, Dyer said, as those of us in the audience who were married well knew, leaves all kinds of room for criticism, commentary, disappointment. And admiration, too, keeps the admirer open to inquiry, explanation, and analysis?which form the basis for all good writing.

At any rate, it’s an idea I’m going to keep in mind next time I hear about the new sincerity.

Oh, and Dyer won the ping pong match, though Iyer’s line of people waiting for signed books was much longer.

I.
I think I want bitchy book reviews?or what for a long time (notably by the founding editors of The Believer) has been labeled “snark”?because they’re essayistic,^[1] by which I mean they give you much more about the reviewer than about the thing reviewed. Now I need to figure out how to convince you why this is a good thing in book reviews. Aren’t they supposed to be about the books reviewed?

The answer is yes, but only if a review is what you need to decide whether to buy (or even read) a book. And I don’t know that there are many people out there for whom this is true. Regardless, it’s not true for me. I get recommendations from friends, family, bookstores. I’m attracted to covers, titles, blurbs. I know the author’s work from somewhere else. There are so many ways to decide to pick up a book that the function of a review seems less geared toward promoting a specific book than promoting a certain kind of conversation about books. And, as I hope to get to in more detail later, we should be able to allow any book to endure a conversation about it.

But here is the point I’m making now: Even if I need a review to tell me whether to buy a book, a bitchy, hatchet-job review isn’t going to deter me. In fact, it might make me pay more attention.

I don’t mean “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” so much as there’s barely even such a thing as publicity these days. When so few of the tens of thousands of books released in the U.S each year get reviewed, whatever draws my attention to a book seems worth defending. Bitchiness and snark aren’t the only ways to draw attention (though look at how much everyone loved Pete Wells’s review of Guy Fieri’s NYC restaurant), but a fun thing that happens is that in being unapologetically snarky a review shrugs itself out under the mantle/mantel of having to be authoritative, and suddenly books are a little freer.

II.
Let me give you an example.

Ian Sansom recently reviewed some food writing for the Times Literary Supplement. First up was what seemed like the sort of 83-pager you impulse-buy near a register. “There may be readers out there who are keen to have in one slim volume a recipe for volut? of celery, as mentioned in Bridget Jones’s Diary…” Sansom writes, “but they are either very hungry or utterly indiscriminating.” Next up is a Norton anthology of food writing, co-edited by Sandra M. Gilbert of and-Gubar/Madwoman in the Attic fame. Sansom’s issue with the book is that it is not as comprehensive as it makes itself out to be, and he does his job by pointing out the cultures and eras missing from the anthology, as well as the “dearth of fiction, no drama, and comparatively little on the economics of food production….” Then there’s this ?:

There is also a tendency towards the inclusion of excerpts from the work of American academics and journalists whose primary distinctions and qualifications lie in fields outside the culinary, but whose distinctions and qualifications are loudly insisted on nonetheless, as if tenure at a prestigious liberal arts college or at an Ivy League university might automatically make one an interesting or significant writer on the subject of, say, brunch.

There’s so much luster and loveliness in that “say”. So much dogged disregard.^[2] I hear a voice there and I get a sense of a person. Do I get more of a sense of a person than I do of a book. I might. And that’s okay.

In the next ? he accosts the editors for including their own writing. Then he says, “A book about food that people might actually want to read,” and goes on to lovingly review a gossippy book about celebrity food rumors.

III.
I said that Sansom’s review gives me more of himself and his ideas than it does about the books he’s reviewing. It might not be true. I don’t want to, like, quantify it by measuring column inches or anything. But it’s true that his review shows me mostly (maybe only) how Sansom read the books he was assigned. And this, I think, is terribly important. That his voice and personality are all over the page spares the review from having to be “authoritative” in that vague, untrue way of non-snarky, “fair” or “objective” reviews. He’s not in charge of determining or pinning down the book’s ultimate universal value, he’s in charge of telling you how he felt about reading it. And it’s bitchy and fun and funny and alluring, and it makes me learn all about a book I might not otherwise pay attention to.

Have I now been deterred from this Norton anthology? No. I’d never be attracted to it in the first place^[3], but if I needed such a book, I’d pick Gilbert and Porter’s anthology up. It’s a Norton anthology. And it’s Sandra M. Gilbert. Those names are strong enough to survive any piddling review in the TLS.

Maybe what I’m getting at is the old “punch up, not down” maxim of comedy. But I don’t want to argue that we should only bring bitchiness to the already exalted. Here I’m thinking of Tanya Gold’s beautiful takedown of NYC haute cuisine in Harper’s last year. Per Se is going to survive her review. Thomas Keller is going to survive her review. What doesn’t survive is the fortress of pretense and preciousness that’s been erected around the places she reviews. Sansom’s review does something similar with notions of importance and enjoyment in food writing.

There are lots of ways that books get exalted or revered that are to the detriment of our conversations about books. Snark, bitchiness?in the end I’m talking about irony, which has always been our usefullest tool to pull down cloaks and pretensions. Books are sturdy and complex things. If we worry that a review can hurt a book in any way, then books become things akin to holy relics, which is to say dead.

Having the courage to be bitchy seems to treat books and the whole world of publishing with a kind of loving respect that allows for frustrations and disappointment. The way Pauline Kael treated movies.

Where are the Pauline Kaels of book reviewing?

Awards, Accolades & Publishing
News came in yesterday that Alan Chazaro, a MFA student at the University of San Francisco, where I teach, won something called the Intro Journals Award from AWP. For those outside MFALand, this is an annual series of awards granted by our prof. org.: the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. (Like the MLA but for creative writing.) Every creative writing program in the country is invited to submit one student’s work in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, which then get judged by a single writer. The top 4 students (8 in poetry) are chosen to win publication in a leading journal and, of course, prestige?the idea being that AWP is introducing the world to talented new writers via journal publications.

Two key things:

1. The judging is blind. No names or affiliated schools are anywhere on the manuscripts.
2. A USF student has won an Intro Journal Award every year for the past four years. And we’ve had someone win in every genre.

This is a success worth bragging about, and so I have. Here and on Twitter. And it shows a continued track record of excellence: our students’ work wins awards and finds publication while they’re still students here. And yet, as far as I know, USF has never once been ranked in even the top 50 MFA programs in the country.
Continue reading Why Pay for Your MFA?

Finally got around to reading the LA Review of Books’ eulogy on Taylor Negron, who I’ve been amazed by since his turn with Rich Hall in Better Off Dead (pictured, Negron’s on the right). And I came to the following paragraph:

But Taylor was always meant for fabulous things. He was a local boy who grew up, in his own words, ?California Gothic.? His childhood house was in Echo Park, on grounds where the old Mack Sennett studio once stood, and there he watched black-and-white movies with his film-besotted grandmother. He came of age in Glendale during the Charlie Manson era, and he remembers seeing Joan Didion crying at the steering wheel of her green Jaguar ?on Moorpark, below Ventura.? He used to say, ?I remember when the palm trees were short and Tomorrowland was modern.? Taylor was made of Los Angeles ? woven from palm fronds and eucalyptus, red carpet and call sheets. He connected old Hollywood to new Hollywood. He knew Mae West and the Olsen twins. He knew everyone, worked with everyone, and was loved by all.

Something thrilled inside me a bit while reading this (probably the datum on Didion) and I wished more than anything that I knew Taylor Negron. And then I realized that I’d like to know anyone who’s lived in Los Angeles as long as he did. And that’s when I realized I like Los Angeles better than New York, and one way I know this is that I’d much rather hang out with a longtime Angelino than a longtime New Yorker.

Last week Christy Karacas, the creator of what’s become one of my favorite TV shows, tweeted something disconcerting:

THIS SITE IS REALLY HELPFUL: http://t.co/1MgDxhiueX

— Christy Karacas (@ChristyKaracas) July 13, 2015

That link takes you to a post on the best approach to story structure, “from Aristotle to Dramatica” (which from what I can tell is some new potentially trademarked schema for analyzing narrative structure that after this post I’ll read because like maybe it’ll be useful?). Why it was disconcerting is that one of things that’s made Superjail! a new favorite is how awe-somely it seems to disregard story structure.

Summary: The Warden is a manic, possibly magical Wonka-type genius who owns Superjail!, which has a seemingly endless supply of hyperviolent criminals that have to be kept at bay. To do this job, the Warden has Jailbot: a floating superfast robot with any number of weapons hiding somewhere in its fuselage; and Alice: a brawny sexed-up prison guard who readily smashes the skull in of any out-of-line convict. Also there’s Jared, a kind of man Friday/admin assistant. Oh right and there are these Eurotrash alien twins with whiteblond hair and dark unibrows who teleport in and out of scenes and seem to regard Superjail as an arena for their practical jokes and chicanery.

Superjail exists underneath a volcano that is inside another volcano (and yet, each episode, a rockabilly jailbird named Jackknife finds a way to escape). I both want to go there and want never to go there.

* Continue reading On Superjail!

The other weekend my friend Adam pointed out how my worrying over certain problems with tech/media was a kind of conservatism. Tony Judt’s talked about this, how as the Right has embraced free markets and libertarianism more and more it’s become the job of the Left to preserve/conserve certain American values: union labor, environmental conservation, social democracy, safety nets, etc.

What I want to do to feel good is make things, and this is my chief problem with what I mean by “tech” (i.e., phone apps and interactive media): it doesn’t help me create anything. In fact, it encourages the opposite; hashtag games, ice-bucket challenges, even likes and reposts all reward a kind of open conformity. (Adam had fun making fun of me for sincerely calling myself “a child of the 90s”.) One way to respond is with ludditisim. But I don’t want to be that person.

I want to find a way to not shuffle backward into the future, eyes on the sepia-toned past. If I were a filmmaker or photographer, the way forward would be clear. Phone cameras are good now! As a writer, it’s less clear. Everyone’s writing online. A luddite would start writing on a manual typewriter, “to get back to original prose rhythms” or something. One less conservative way forward would be to embrace the medium and write for it better. Like: to develop an aesthetics of the post. Online writing could use a good critic. The problem of course is that everyone’s a critic, and that criticism comes in the form of shares or comments forums.

Another way forward is to find stuff of the present that’s new and original and championing it, then extrapolating what makes them good and new and applying it to one’s own work. Like Dali reading Freud or Warhol growing up in Pittsburgh. Two things come to mind here: The Comedy of Josh Fadem and The Art of Superjail!. Since online aesthetics^[*] are telling me that this post is already too long, I’ll touch on why each of these is new and important in separate posts to come.

When I was younger and saw stuff like this I’d leap out of my seat to point out what was false and corny about it. Now when I look at stuff like this I think, Good for them for having made something new without dredging up something old and laughing at it.

Like: can’t you just see a comedian-filled shot-for-shot remake of this going viral, tiredly?

I can think of a variety of answers.

I. Your Students
Or their parents. If you are the kind of MFA student who has to teach writing or other courses to earn your tuition remission, then it’s the tuition money from your students that, for the most part, pays for you to be there. What does it mean when your students pay for you to do whatever you’re doing for 2, 3, or 4 years? What sort of duty or obligation do you have to those people?

II. Foundations
There’s lots of private money in the MFA game. Sometimes this is clear. At Alabama there was all kinds of Truman Capote money floating around. Also the McNair Foundation. When foundations pay for your MFA it’s like you’ve got a patron. What is it like to have, in 2014’s job market, a patron?

III. You
There are plenty of people who don’t get private money to fund their degree, or who don’t teach courses paid for by their students, and who thus have to either find the money to afford their education, or take out loans and make plans on how to pay it all back. These people pay their own way. What does it mean in a democracy for someone to pay his or her own way?

Despite what they say about lunch there are lots of things to get for free, and more and more these days I’m thinking that an MFA degree might be one of the worst of them. The strings attached, you see, are like spider silk: you don’t even see anything until you walk face-first into them, and then they’re stuck on you.

At stake here, or maybe just at question, is the writer’s obligations. If it should be to anything but the writing itself, to what, then? To whom? If the MFA is understood to be the start of a career, what does it mean to start that career owing it all to yourself?

I had two models in mind when I had to start writing the ending to the taxidermy book. One was Eggers’s Frisbee-throwing soaring prose at the end of A Heartbreaking Work, and the other more pressing influence (my book’s practically dripping with it) was Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, with its incantations of black and blacknesses. I guess I wanted a huge buildup of feeling, and then a kind of slap in the face. I’m proud of it, the ending, but I don’t think I want to write those kinds of endings anymore.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this stuff in terms of songs on records. There are songs that are Grand Endings. Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” for instance. Most of Bill Callahan’s final tracks. I interviewed him once, Bill Callahan, and he admitted to being proud of his sequencing on records, and though I don’t think I’ve ever said a bad thing about the guy I’ll say his sequencing is a bit too spot on. It’s so stuffily perfected, like a short story in a literary journal that comes from someone’s MFA thesis.

What’s weird is that Callahan’s got worse at this over the years (cf. Julius Caesar‘s “Stick in the Mud” to Apocalypse‘s “One Fine Morning”) while Radiohead seems to’ve gotten better. This whole idea came to me while listening to Hail to the Thief‘s “A Wolf at the Door” which is a shockingly good final track. It ends the record like a leaf blowing quickly off screen, as opposed to a slow pan skyward or a slow fade to black.

Another model ending: the final shot of Grey Gardens, Little Edie’s face spinning out of the frame. I’m hoping to write more endings like this, ones that sneak up on you and leave you bereft of something. Endings that, if they were a poem, wouldn’t even signal to listeners at your reading that it’s time to sigh audibly.

The best final track ever sequenced is the Pixies’ “Brick is Red” off Surfer Rosa.

In related news, I’m a big fan of the Irish goodbye.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.