Category: Very Good Paragraphs

Haven’t done one of these in a while. This one’s from Gary Greenberg’s stunning review of Charles Foster’s Being a Beast and other recent learning-from-animals books in the Jan 2017 Harper’s (cutting the first sentence as it’s mostly gluework from the prior ?):

…As civilization fails to provide sufficient balm against our loss, as its costs become unbearable for more and more of us, the world’s stink begins, by comparison, to smell like fresh air, and devolution begins to seem attractive?or at least attractive enough to inspire three books on the subject in the same publishing season, which, it is hard not to notice, was also an election season, one in which Americans cast off reason in favor of passion. In its terrifying aftermath, the yearning at the heart of these books for a return to instinct takes on a meaning, and an intensity, their authors could not have intended. Some people will step off the evolutionary ladder into a realm where they can ramble with dogs or goats or badgers, and claim that they’ve become more human in the bargain. But some may land where wild instincts rule. A dog, lest we forget, will gleefully rip your pet cat in two, a billy goat will fuck whatever doe he can get his hooves on, and a fox will eat all your chickens in a heartbeat and call it a perfect day. They will be remorseless for the pain they cause. But at least they can’t be accused of giving up on themselves or one another.

This is some expert-level criticism, not only capable of finding ties among three books (on admittedly related subjects) but to set these books’ concerns amid our own, those arising out of the times we’re finding ourselves confused by. It #resists, in today’s parlance, by looking past the partisan narratives we see retweeted every day in favor of its own reasoned understanding of who and where we are.

From Benedict Carey’s How We Learn, which is the best collection I’ve found of recent (and historical) findings in cognitive science that explain how our brains work and how we might treat them better as a result. This bit specifically is Very Good because of how it articulates a problem with beginning writers that I’ve noticed but never been able to characterize before:

When I was in high school or college, trying to write an essay or research paper, I was forever looking for someone else’s thinking to rely on. I would hunt for some article written by an expert that was as similar as possible to the assignment. This perfect “model” essay never existed, or I never found it, so I’d end up stringing together quotes and ideas from the articles and books I had looked through. If someone else said it, I figured it must be insightful. In my defense, this isn’t all bad. When looking into the emergence of Christianity in ancient Rome, we should know who the experts are and what they think. The problem is that, when we’re embarking on a research project?especially when we’re younger?we don’t necessarily know how to identify those intellectual landmarks. Often, we don’t even know they exist. Through high school and much of college, I remember longing for someone to tell me how to proceed, sinking into a passing, tentative frame of mind, a fear of embarrassment trumping any real curiosity or conviction. The result was that I rarely consulted the wisdom of the one thinker I had easy access to: myself. I was so busy looking for better, smarter opinions that I had trouble writing?or thinking?with any confidence.

The solution Carey gives comes from a teacher named, no shit, Ronda Leathers Dively. Instead of assigning 6 short papers, she assigned one long one, with 5 short response papers to 5 different kinds of sources toward the semester-long project. Students then gradually got immersed in their topics and became scrutinous experts on the source material out there.

When it came time to write the paper, they were comfortable thinking on the page.

Ronda Leathers Dively!

From Andrew Hacker’s piece on tech workers in the 9 July 2015 New York Review:

Contrary to such alarmist demands [from Obama et al that we need to add more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates], Falling Behind? makes a convincing case that even now the US has all the high-tech brains and bodies it needs, or at least that the economy can absorb. Teitelbaum points out that “US higher education routinely awards more degrees in science and engineering than can be employed in science and engineering occupations.” Recent reports reinforce his claim. A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, only 5.4 million were working in those fields, and a good question is what they do instead. The Center for Economic Policy and Research, tracing graduates from 2010 through 2014, discovered that 28 percent of engineers and 38 percent of computer sciencetists [sic!] were either unemployed or holding jobs that did not need their training.

From Justin E.H. Smith’s “The Joke”, an essay from the April 2015 Harper’s:

It is exceedingly difficult these days to call attention to the dull-minded policing by academics and online activists without being ridiculed in return as a frightened, ignorant old man who bemoans “political correctness.” We do not wish to be assimilated to those old duffers who wear Hawaiian shirts and do not understand why we can no longer call a dame a dame, and so we avoid worrying in public about the phenomenon. We stop ourselves even when we find that our peers have begun half-rationalizing the assassination of cartoonists on the basis of a glancing judgment that their drawings were racist, a judgment that rests only on the overt content of the images, generally without any translation of the French captions, without any consideration of context or pragmatics, and without any concern for the relationship of any individual cartoon to its creator’s body of work. In this age of visual illiteracy, of perfect tone-deafness to satire, the murders get cast as a blow not against freedom of expression, against subtlety, nuance, and laughter, but against racism. So, the thinking goes, adieu.

The essay’s opening, of which this graf is a part, ends with a comment about “the false presumption that humor is but one of the minor protectorates of freedom, when in fact humor is freedom itself, or at least freedom’s highest expression.”

This, for the record, is precisely the problem I had with Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Despite her continual uses of humor, she argues in the book that there are some topics that are too serious to be joked about, without ever considering that their utter seriousness is what obliges us to make jokes. This seems to be the faulty line of thinking behind those protesting the PEN Awards. The second we decide something is out of bounds for humor, we are in its thrall.

Of course, I’m not the first person to make this argument. Subscribers to Harper’s (which means all of you, right?) can read the whole piece here.

I downloaded an ebook app to my phone now that I’m not flipping through Twitter when I have toilet- and elsewhere-based downtime. These days I’m going through the Mary Roach Best American Essays anthology, and yesterday in my chiropractor’s office I came across this gem, about a carp-catching festival for avowed rednecks in Bath, Illinois:

Tall cottonwoods, ash trees, and maples shaded the shore, which was rutted black mud firmed up in places with heaps of new sand. Crushed blue-and-white Busch beer cans disappeared into the mud, crinkling underfoot. Aluminum johnboats, some camo, some not, lined the riverfront in fleets. Fishing costumes involved headgear: army helmets, football helmets with face guards or antlers or buffalo horns, octopus-tentacle hats, pirate bandannas, Viking helmets with horns and fur, devil hats with upward-pointing horns, a hat like a giant red-and-white fishing bobber, a Burger King crown. Competitors had their faces painted camo colors or gold or red or zebra-striped. Bath, Illinois, was first surveyed by Abraham Lincoln, and on August 16, 1858, while campaigning against Stephen Douglas in the race for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech to a large crowd in Bath. He took as his text the New Testament verse “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” One hundred and fifty-two years later, the Confederate-flag halter tops mingling with the American flags among the tournament crowd would have puzzled him; likewise, the pirate flags.

Would love to make research fire the reader’s mind up like this. And also be funny.

The whole story is here.

This paragraph showed up in Kiese Laymon’s title essay from his collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America precisely at the moment I needed it to:

This isn’t an essay or a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and sift all this into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.

Would that every essay took such a step. You can read the whole essay here.

I’m teaching some Montaigne essays next week. Reread this passage today, from his “On the education of children”:

Be that as it may; I mean that whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist has painted not a perfect face but my own. Anyway these are my humours, myopinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.

From Screech’s superior translation. The maddening fact of becoming a creative writing teacher after getting a creative writing degree is that too few of us in graduate CW programs are taught how to teach—creative writing in specific or even just students in general. You have to do a lot of extracurricular work amid your harrowing first job, lest you end up treading the same water you saw your otherwise occupied professors tread.

Also this: I never learned in grad school how to do the work of writing things and more importantly how to enjoy it. How to enjoy the perseverance needed. So again: how do you learn to teach what you yourself weren’t taught? Montaigne: I’m an honest, open model, not a teacher.

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!

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.

From George Packer’s piece on Silicon Valley’s forays into political activism in the my-birthday edition of The New Yorker (I’m behind):

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty tears old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

Mostly it’s impeccably timed.

From Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”:

All of Harlem, indeed, seems to be infected by waiting. I had never before known it to be so violently still. Racial tensions throughout this country were exacerbated during the early years of the war, partly because the labor market brought together hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared people and partly because Negro soldiers, regardless of where they were born, received their military training in the south. What happened in defense plants and army camps had repercussions, naturally, in every Negro ghetto. The situation in Harlem had grown bad enough for clergymen, policemen, educators, politicians, and social workers to assert in one breath that there was no “crime wave” and to offer, in the very next breath, suggestions as to how to combat it. These suggestions always seemed to involve playgrounds, despite the fact that racial skirmishes were occurring in the playgrounds, too. Playground or not, crime wave or not, the Harlem police force had been augmented in March, and the unrest grew—perhaps, in fact, partly as a result of the ghetto’s instinctive hatred of policemen. Perhaps the most revealing news item, out of the steady parade of reports of muggings, stabbings, shooting, assaults, gang wars, and accusations of police brutality, is the item concerning six Negro girls who set upon a white girl in the subway because, as they all too accurately put it, she was stepping on their toes. Indeed she was, all over the nation.

Awe-some.

Yet another example of Willa Cather nailing the experience of living in the Plains. From her letters (as quoted in Hermione Lee’s piece on them in the New York Review):

“Bigness” is the subject of my story. The West always paralyzes me a little. When I run away from it I remember only the tang on the tongue. But when I come back [I] always feel a little of the fright I felt when I was a child. I always feel afraid of losing something…. I never can entirely let myself go with the current; I always fight it just a little…. It is partly the feeling that there are so many miles—wait till you travel ’em!—between you and anything, and partly the fear that the everlasting wind may make you contented and put you to sleep. I used always to be sure that I’d never get out, that I would die in a cornfield. Now I know I will get out again, but I still get attacks of fright.

Boldface added on a sentence that in its syntax makes in my heart a thrumming go on.

From Paul Bloom’s essay on the amoral results of empathy in the 20 May 2013 New Yorker:

Newtown, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, was inundated with so much charity that it became a burden. More than eight hundred volunteers were recruited to deal with the gifts that were sent to the city—all of which kept arriving despite earnest pleas from Newtown officials that charity be directed elsewhere. A vast warehouse was crammed with plush toys the townspeople had no use for; millions of dollars rolled in to this relatively affluent community. We felt their pain; we wanted to help. Meanwhile—just to begin a very long list—almost twenty million American children go to bed hungry each night, and the federal food-stamp program is facing budget cuts of almost twenty per cent. Many of the same kindly strangers who paid for Baby Jessica’s medical needs support cuts to state Medicare programs—cuts that will affect millions. Perhaps fifty million Americans will be stricken next year by food-borne illness, yet budget reductions mean that the F.D.A. will be conducting two thousand fewer safety inspections. Even more invisibly, next year the average American will release about twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and many in Congress seek to loosen restrictions on greenhouse gases even further.

The piece can be summed up to this, in the graf that follows: “If a planet of billions is to survive, however, we’ll need to take into consideration the welfare of people not yet harmed.” Also: people whose names we don’t know and whose faces we never see on television. A solid argument. Go read it here.

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.

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.

From this piece in the Guardian on the joys of anthropological writing, written by Will Self, who is becoming every time I read or read about him my total literary crush.

I probably reread Lopez’s book about every couple of years. Arctic Dreams is a more or less perfect example of a tendency in my reading towards what can only be described as “comfort savagery”. Lying abed, in the heart of a great, pulsing, auto-cannibalising conurbation, the supply chain of which girdles the earth like the monstrous tail of some effluent-belching comet, I find descriptions of how I myself might have lived before the great grainy surplus of the agricultural revolution curiously heartening. After all, what does any kind of reading provide for us if not the opportunity to exercise imaginative sympathy? Others may prefer to will themselves into James Bond’s dinner jacket and Aston Martin DB4, but I’d rather slip into a !Kung hunter’s penis sheath and heft his hunting spear.