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Peter Taylor has a story titled “A Wife of Nashville” where on the second page its narrator reveals this about her relationship with what she in the Depression-era South calls “Negroes”: “I don’t care anything about them any more than you do.”

It’s such an amazing thing to say, about anything really. First is the terrible confession/admission. The bit that reveals the speaker to be self-involved and generally awful: I don’t care anything about it/them. Normally I’m not much interested in listening to or being around people who readily admit this—unless what’s not being cared about are the tweeted photos of congressmen or certain TV personalities’ inability to talk extemporaneously to the media without getting a whole mess of things wrong.

I mean, who wants to be such an ignoramus? But then there’s that incredible second part, where the listener becomes indicted and implicated in the general lack of caring that one could see as being the way the world works. It’s like saying: I don’t care any more than you do—and do you really care yourself or do you only care in theory enough to police the equal or greater caring of others?

Think of the ways you could wield this on the self-important!

• I don’t care about the environment any more than you do.
• I don’t care about animal welfare any more than you do.
• I don’t care about taxidermy any more than you do.
• I don’t care about you any more than you do.

And then how also it sort of retroactively spares the speaker the shame admitted in the utterance’s first part. How it almost uplifts the speaker: I care as much about it as you [claim to] do!

It’s a sentence that starts to identify the speaker as insufferable, which then through forced self-scrutiny ends up identifying her as unimpeachable. It’s like word magic.

Here’s a classic one, from Didion’s “On Self Respect”, that I’m finding it important to reread these days:

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

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.

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!

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.

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

From Vollman’s “Homeless in Sacramento” in the March ’11 Harper’s:

I sometimes seek to categorize whatever freedom it is these people have that I do not, a freedom that I also do not want. I don’t know whether they wanted to work and couldn’t, or chose not to work, or needed or expected anything. For their part, the only need most of them expressed to me was this: a place from which nobody would move them. Could it truly be that they had everything else they required? They were healthy, watchful, and at ease with what you or I might consider discomfort. You will quickly see that I am foolish to try to describe them or their surroundings at all, since these changed more rapidly than I with my homebound concerns could follow.

Spoiler alert: Bella doesn’t die in the end.

Fun fact about vampires: their joints are made of socks full of quarters.

Oh, good! No sex before marriage girls. It’s the Edwardian way.

Amid all this senioritis, it’s nice to see Bella and Edward take a whole weekend to bone up for the big Econ final, and kudos to the producers for having the courage to set it unironically to a music montage.

That’s just the sort of thing that’s going to help you excel in that science major, Bella!

All this white makeup. The near-nude boys of color. Paging Dr. Said.

Some kids get all the best men’s wear.

(From the pretty-great Fuck Yeah Men’s Wear blog.)