All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

iPhone Applause

View from the Bandstand

Wherever you go, the phone is there. I was playing a gig at a pool on Memorial Day and someone had their phone in the pool, protected in a specially designed plastic envelope. Even when you’re on the bandstand, the phone is there. Often it’s not yours, but it’s staring back at you, held in the rigid awkward sincere manner of a bar patron attempting to record the live musical performance presently unfolding. This move offends some band members. You’re made to feel even more like a trained animal than usual, which is considerable even under the loosest of performance situations. It happens all the time now, the people formerly known as audience members transformed into cinéma vérité auteurs, a still rock catching the shot on the dancefloor. I can’t imagine the video ever gets shared afterward or even watched again. I think the band is good musically, but rather Warholian in our unfilmability. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps someone more attuned would be able to find solace in the various 17-second clips of the band playing over the years, but my life is too short, and besides, I know I’m just standing there. Cirque du Soleil it is not. 

In an attempt to make the best of the unavoidable awkwardness, I’ve come to think of mid-performance phone videoing as a form of applause, an almost helpless gesture of appreciation. There is still conventional applause, to be sure. But there are rituals around when it is deployed. The phone seems to represent a new kind of applause, a spontaneous overflowing of emotion, a way to memorialize in deed if not in fact, a way of saying, “This is worthy of being videoed.” It’s worth being thrown into the algorithmic seas, preserved and shared, forgotten once caught. This non-phone experience is interesting enough that I want to make it a phone experience, too. I want to shine it through my ever-present prism of meaning. It’s with a type of astounded annoyance that we encounter something already outside the phone anyway. We must put it back in.

After the gig, breaking down the gear, a teenager walked up and said, “Good job playing.” Then he walked off. It’s almost always nice to be complimented, even if it doesn’t make any sense. I am the youngest person in that band by thirty years and I am still old enough to be that teenager’s father. I’m hardly accustomed to anyone telling me “good job” about anything, much less a teenager. I mean, we did fine. We played “Under the Boardwalk.” There was talk of playing “Sea Cruise” but it was never called, just one of those set-break notions that drifts by like a cloud. It sounds more like a phrase I would tell my own children after the completion of some chore. “Good job”? I almost expected someone to then walk up and present me with a congratulatory sticker. It’s so hard to keep living and not become a less funny version of Andy Rooney. 

My middle-aged confusion aside, I still appreciated the compliment. However, it should be noted that said teenager never once recorded us with his phone.        

Roth in Rehab

book reviews, literary lint, ,

I was about a quarter of the way through the Philip Roth biography when the news of Blake Bailey broke. That is, the author of said biography was accused of raping three women and of grooming his 8th-grade female students while he taught at a school in New Orleans in the 1990s. He kept in touch with them, and later, when they were adults in the eyes of the law, he sexually pursued them. The New Yorker has a good explanatory article. And Slate has published an essay from one of Bailey’s former students, as well as a long article interviewing several others. Each new batch of detail is more damning than the last. Norton, his publisher, has pulled the book out of print, the author has been dropped by his literary agency, and I now own one slightly used, copiously annotated ghost biography of Philip Roth, great American writer, dead now almost three years. 

The book is celebrity gossip of the literary sort. After reading it I feel slightly queasy, as if I had gorged on a bag of marshmallows, and that’s completely independent of the meta-narrative of Bailey’s own moral transgressions. The book is stuffed with facts, names, friends, girlfriends, nemeses. The literary game of pin-the-fictional-tail on the factual person is so rigorous as to be exhaustive and exhausting. 

But in the end it’s not a good biography, if by biography we want more than mere facts but a deeper understanding of the person. The portrait of Roth is exceedingly complex — he was a generous friend, a literary crusader, a stand-up comic in tweed, a Hercules of grudges held, as well as an emotional and sexual terrorist — but these disparate counterselves never congeal into a comprehensible whole. Perhaps my desire for a comprehensible whole is a bourgeois affectation that should have been squeezed out of me by the shrieking relentlessness of Roth’s novels, his insistence that we always get people wrong, that life is nothing but a constant parade of getting people wrong. But still I hold onto a smidgen of belief that Roth, as a person, could be made to make sense, at least a little more than what we have here. 

Part of my dissatisfaction with the book is Bailey’s refusal or unwillingness to editorialize about what it all means. There’s very little narrative consciousness here, little if any margin between biographer and subject. The result is almost a collage of quotation and anecdote, mortared together with scant guidance. When Bailey does step forward rhetorically, he blatantly submits to Roth’s view of things. From a footnote: “In most cases I’ve tried to cull only the most telling, pertinent, and perceptive passages in Maggie’s journal, and hence may have inadvertently misrepresented the basic tenor of what is, indeed, a pretty insipid piece of writing.” The consequence of this particular editorial lapse is that we don’t really know if Roth’s first wife Margaret Martinson is, as he would have it, a crazed psychopath, or something more complex and sympathetic. Their tumultuous relationship feels as random and unexplained as a farce. Indeed, Roth’s fictional treatment of the doomed romance in My Life as a Man is more conceptually coherent.

In fine Rothian fashion, the biography is very much a counterlife to previous books, specifically two, the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow and Claire Bloom’s second memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, which describes her fraught relationship with and marriage to Roth.1 Both books represent perspectives Roth wants to refute. The Atlas biography is depicted here as a once-admirable project that went off the rails, poisoned by the biographer’s editorializing and his growing disapproval of his own subject. Roth expends a great deal of energy trying to correct Atlas’s portrait of Bellow. He proposes a long interview with the rapidly deteriorating Bellow, who is no longer well enough to fight the rigorous reputational fight that Roth wants him to. Finally, his corrective manifests as an essay about Bellow’s work, which appears in Shop Talk, his late collection of essays and interviews. 

The Bloom memoir infuriated Roth for the rest of his life. It’s amazing to witness what a grudge can do to a person. In addition to his novel I Married A Communist, his most direct fictional counterpunch to his ex-wife, Roth contemplated publishing a line-by-line rebuttal to the Bloom memoir (“Notes on a Slander-Monger”), but was mercifully and somewhat surprisingly persuaded to stand down. (I say surprisingly because Roth seems to have forced his way in so many aspects of his life that the precious few times he is told no, it’s shocking, a rupture in the cosmos.) 

He selects his first biographer, then-friend Ross Miller, in part because he can control the biography. This will-to-control manifests everywhere. All the para-text surrounding Roth-the-writer proves unsatisfactory to him so that he inevitably takes it over, writing the notes to his Library of America editions, writing his own jacket copy, his own photo captions, and even attempting to rewrite Hermione Lee’s Paris Review interview questions. (She bravely fights back.)

For Roth, no one does it right. And when Miller doesn’t make progress on the biography in all the ways that Roth sees fit and when he seems to harbor some ambivalence about Roth’s “florid love life,” he is removed from his post.2 Roth approaches Lee to write the biography but she has other projects that conflict. (She bravely fights back.) That brings us to Blake Bailey, whose book also fails because it refuses to answer the question that his own book poses: is this authorized biography a worthwhile endeavor or merely a grocery list of score settling? He quite clearly lays out Roth’s agenda for a biographer and so the agency of that ultimate biographer is pertinent. But Bailey never admits to how he’s dealing with the problem. 

That said, if this biography is a counterlife to the Bloom memoir and is meant to resuscitate Roth’s reputation, it fails in that regard, too. Though Bailey doesn’t condemn Roth’s behavior with women, for example, the steep pile of detail is itself thoroughly condemning. (One jilted-lover’s suicide attempt might be an anomaly; three indicates a trend.) One doesn’t have to be a woke social justice warrior of present-day Twitter to find Roth’s behavior repellent. He often spoke of the aesthetic project of “letting the repellent in.” In that he succeeded. 

Roth seems unwilling or unable to have a long-term meaningful relationship with a woman, despite the fact at the end of his life he had numerous female friends and professional peers who admired and respected him. Throughout his endless flings and relationships, he seems to harbor a cursed attraction toward psychologically damaged shiksa women with addiction problems and absent or abusive fathers. He attempts to save and correct these women, but their very own all too human neediness and inability to minister to his own often outsized emotional needs overwhelms him. His first wife Maggie is the template, Bloom the top-shelf version, and Sylvia, the pseudonym used for the woman Roth had an affair with late in life and who was the model for Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, is the parodic white-trash version. The other women — the stable, capable, ambitious, independently minded long-term girlfriends — all leave Roth when he refuses to marry and have children. That they often remained his friends afterward speaks to a mutual magnanimity that goes insufficiently explored in the current book. (It would be so much more interesting to read long interviews with these women where they discuss the relationships at length from their own perspectives.) His relationship with Bloom, in particular, is like watching two black holes attempt to foxtrot, doomed in every way possible. Roth, the celebrated novelist who was accused of being a self-hating Jew early in his career, proceeds to have a nearly 20 year relationship with an actual self-hating Jew, who also happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Star-crossed lovers, indeed. 

There is also an unsettling Humbert Humbertian thread running through the book, noticeable even before the news of Blake Bailey. One of Roth’s girlfriends begins to extricate herself from the relationship when he expresses a worry that he might become attracted to his teenage step-daughter, Helen, daughter of first wife Maggie, as she gets a little older. Is this a Mickey Sabbath-like refusal to be constrained by boundaries or is it a moral blindness to those boundaries, which is then spun into artful debate via forceful lobbyists like David Kepesh and Sabbath? Or is it both? I don’t know. What I also don’t know is the line between this motif in the book and the alleged transgressions of Bailey, who, like a Roth character himself, appears to have been exposed as a sexual predator by the very act of writing a book about another, greater writer who has his own morally suspect sexual history.3 It’s almost as if Blake Bailey is a vicious parody of Roth, and of Humbert Humbert, a predator without the fancy prose style, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. 

“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting” reads the epigraph to the book, a direction from subject to biographer. Does Bailey succeed? Honestly, I started reading Roth’s novels so long ago I don’t have enough perspective to tell. I’m not sure if this book will be useful to anyone besides the morbidly curious. I didn’t necessarily find Roth and his life interesting, oh after about page 400. Even the most florid love life eventually grows tedious. I still find him heroic as a writer because of his relentless dedication, the sheer novelistic work he put in, but as a person he seems rather pitiful. So many lovers and yet so irredeemably alone.

  1. And by “fraught,” I mean totally bananas. 
  2. And by “florid,” I mean totally bananas.
  3. To be fair, Roth was never accused of rape or of grooming underage students, though as a college professor he did pursue his (ostensibly legally adult) female students. Though he doesn’t break any laws as far as I can tell with my civilian eye, he does seemingly pursue any female with a pulse. According to Bailey’s telling, Roth allegedly made two passes at a friend of Claire Bloom’s daughter Anna Steiger, the first when this friend was 21-ish and the second when she was 28-ish. Roth, arguing with the friend the morning after the second occurrence: “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years? What were you then, twelve? What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” Given the present tornado of altercation, allegation, implication, the reader may be forgiven for asking, “Just who is justifying whom?”

Shopping like the angels

Product Reviews,

Product Review: RocknRoller Multi-Cart, model R6RT

You have too much stuff. I have too much stuff. We don’t need any more stuff, and yet, sometimes shopping happens, so here is a product review. I recently purchased the RocknRoller Multi-Cart, model R6RT, and it’s a handy device. In general I am against buying things. I find that the anticipation of buying things overwhelming, a cascade of pleasure, but the actual owning of the things, the unboxing, the set up, the maintenance of the thing, the finding where to put the thing, the dealing with the thing because now it’s in the way of other things, the disuse of the thing, the regret that the thing grows to embody because I didn’t level up to the person I thought I was going to become when I bought the thing, and the resulting corrosion of self-esteem brought on by the thing to be altogether slightly exhausting. It’s easier just to skip the buying part entirely. And yet, man cannot live on brio alone. 

I am a part-time musician, in addition to my regular professional duties, and the calendar has started to populate with gigs again, which is my own personal barometer of where the tri-county area is vis-a-vis the pandemic. (Is this safe? Is this proper? I don’t know. Most of these potential future gigs are outside. Most people I know are fully vaccinated. It seems like we’re on the lip of nearly normal. I don’t want to be careless or callous, but I also want to play, and I’m now one year older, and I miss everyone, even the people I don’t yet know.) So, in an anticipatory burst of consumerism, I decided it was time to buy the cart. I have several friends who use the same cart and sing its praises. Does it seem silly to sing the praises of a utility cart? Perhaps. But if you are in the routine of moving large chunks of irregularly shaped equipment from your automobile across, say, a parking lot through a field to an improvised bandstand under a tree, anything that makes the foregoing less difficult is welcome. Besides, my collapsible two-wheel dolly is getting rickety. I have to position it between the pavement and my chin so that I can unfold its arthritic wheels. It’s important to use objects until they are completely worn out or otherwise so horribly annoying that even the most deranged and neurotic can justify a replacement purchase. Everyone, please welcome my new cart. 

Did I read reviews beforehand? What am I, some kind of rube? In addition to the personal testimony, I also read scads of internet reviews. To my complex shame, I love internet reviews of objects. I read the Wirecutter more intently than any reasonably balanced American adult should and take its guidance as gospel. But there’s a grain of unease that I have been developing as I click through reviews of products I might buy and some I will never buy. Just what am I doing reading all these reviews? Why do I care? Is this simply a consequence of being able to evaluate an absurd amount of consumer options? When I was younger, I just went to the store and bought what they had. There was no premonition of missing out on all the potentially better products. Now I compare. Actually, it’s even more developed: unless I do a rigorous comparison, I feel as if I am cheating myself, cheating the universe. It’s my duty to compare, to optimize, to purchase the best weed-whacker I can possibly purchase, because, goddamnit, I deserve it, and what’s more, I want to whack weeds with the best possible tool for whacking said weeds. Anything less would be uncivilized. The diligent sifting of reviews feels somehow religious. This is how the angels would shop. 

So, the cart. It’s good. It does what it’s supposed to do. It carries approximately a trunk full of stuff, stacked neatly, in one trip: an entire drumset with hardware, or a reasonably sized PA, or for those non-musicians, about six boxes of Office Depot paper. It’s black with yellow accents and looks like a metal grasshopper. Is the name, RocknRoller Mini-Cart, slightly gooby? It is. Do I feel somewhat like a goober rolling up to the gig in the wake of this conspicuous speciality contraption? I do. Do I feel just slightly like a Blues Lawyer? Yes. But is it the absolute best tool one could use for such activities? It’s pretty dang close. It accomplishes the most important strategic task for the part-time gigging musician: decreasing the number of trips from the car to the venue. Though all my gigs are local, half of my time is spent moving gear from the car or back to the car and coiling various types of cables. The actual musical performance is but a momentary breeze in between, a kiss of wind. 

What makes this cart different is that it’s convertible and extendible. It’s like a Transformer, but more practical. Its resting state is folded up, like a little four-wheeled robot. Its vertical sides fold out, so that it turns into a rigid metal U with wheels. But then, once you unscrew the spring loaded fixers underneath and push in a little metal nipple, the squared tubing telescopes out so that you can have up to 42 inches of loadable space. Bring me your stackable, heavy objects! Word to the wise on that nipple/telescoping bit, you have to push it in before collapsing, which definitely presents the opportunity to scalp your finger. Caution. The sides fold by pulling on a silver braided metal wire that’s encased in plastic. I’m sure there’s a name for this kind of metal twist cord; you’ve seen it. You pull that and the vertical sides suddenly become foldable. Another warning: once you collapse the sides, they aren’t fully secured down. The one folded on top will swing out a limited distance and pop you on the shin if you’re not ginger with it. The cart can also be converted into a more traditional two-wheeled dolly shape, though I haven’t used it as such yet. It’s too convenient as a four-wheeled cart. In fact, when I first got it, I was so enamored with its convenience I wanted to put everything on it: backpacks, the dog, my children. Should I take it to the grocery store? 

There are other models, which mainly differ in the length to which it can be extended or the robustness of its wheels. I thought briefly of getting the model with inflatable wheels, but like the fellows in the office parking lot with the trucks so tall one needs a carabiner to climb inside, that seemed overkill. I can deal with genteel wheels. 

Do I need such a cart? Is it absolutely essential? Do I deserve such a cart? Isn’t there a more productive way I could have spent those hard-earned dollars? Shouldn’t I simply have saved them? Conserved my resources for a potential unforeseen world-changing event? This is the problem with ordering packages. They often come tightly packed with regret. They are really talismans to my own spendthrift ways, mirages of improvement, artifacts of self-optimization, and reminders of my own overfed narcissism. Is all of this really necessary? 

You should try hanging out with me around Christmastime.

One Stab Down

plague journal,

In Britain they call it a jab and that slang has drifted over so that everyone is now posting selfies of their vaccine jab, but it’s not a jab. It’s a stab, and I got my first last Friday. 

Canton, Mississippi, high school, twenty minutes north of town, a place I’d never been. When the vaccines first started, it seemed like a conspiracy of the state visitors’ bureau. The shots were scattered to the distant ghost towns. Explore Mississippi! But not anymore.

I had my paperwork, my confirmation printed as well as saved on my phone, a full tank of gas, photographic identification, a mask, a robot map guide talking to me, and a recent trip to the restroom. I hadn’t been this nervous since dating in high school. I grew terrified of arriving too late.

A National Guardsman checked me in at the gate. Another sat in the bed of a pick-up truck underneath a beach umbrella, flicking through his phone. When I reached his long end of the driveway, he pointed to the line’s entrance. The high school sat inert in the afternoon distance. Our line of cars quickly bifurcated. They seemed long but not epically long. I couldn’t yet see the end point, the shot point, but it didn’t feel too long in that ambient way long lines feel long, like when you amble into a new ride at Disney and you can feel the unseen weight of the line coursing through the tunnels of entertainment structure, the dawning self-knowledge that you’ve just trapped yourself, your entire family, in a line. I’ve heard anecdotes of families going to Disney this spring, since Disney is capping attendance. It’s really something that under normal circumstances there is no real span of time at Disney when it’s not crowded. What a feat of human entertainment, I suppose. “There aren’t even Fast Passes.” That is, you don’t have to buy your way out of the line into a better line, the line above the line. I haven’t fact checked this. This is just the word on the street — on Dad Street. 

It was unseasonably warm even for Mississippi, but I kept my windows down, A/C off, out of some perverse need to feel real air. I find myself waiting later and later each year to roll the windows up and turn on the artificial coolness. I remember as a teenager riding around in the summer night feeling the coolness through my windows, the only time in the summer that it ever got cool. Perhaps I am perpetually trying to recapture that sensation. Is there anything better than riding with the windows down? Perhaps I really am part dog. We made it through a kink in the line and that’s when we saw the nurses. 

Two of them, one for each line. They wore laminated tags that said VOLUNTEER. I wondered if that was to preempt anyone giving them grief. I found it sweet of them to volunteer, borderline foolish, but I was grateful they were there. We were in the parking lot of the football stadium, curling between the high school and the stadium proper. The first guard had given me paperwork, which I dutifully filled out on my steering wheel, making sure to press hard so that the ballpoint pen worked but not too hard so that I wouldn’t accidentally honk my horn. This is how road rage incidents begin, I am sure, the hurried completion of deposit slips in transit. 

I got the nurse in red scrubs, masked, long brown hair, deeply tan, warm in disposition. I am positive if I had 90 additional seconds of conversation I could have gotten her to call me “hon.” I live to be called “hon.” I also live for small talk, theatrically holding the door for strangers, earnest disputations about the weather, and dropping by people’s houses. It’s taken the pandemic for me to realize who I truly am. She verified that it was indeed my first shot, that I was not currently symptomatic or otherwise positive, that I was who I said I was. Afterward, she said I would have to wait for 15 minutes in another line, the line after the line, to ensure I didn’t have an adverse reaction. “If you need assistance, just roll down your window and get someone’s attention.” There were tables under smaller, tailgating tents, clumps of bottled water, and what looked like a box of donuts. A couple of other volunteers were milling about, moving by with lanyard immunity. It was like a street festival but with less trash. She confirmed that I wanted to receive the shot in my left arm and placed the checked-out paperwork underneath my windshield wiper. 

My next stop was the tent. But there were two, the first one and then farther down, a tent beyond the tent. I didn’t know which one was the shot tent, or if they both were. We were moving away from the nurses, away from the un-uniformed, into the realm of the Guardsmen. I pulled into the first tent, slowing down, pulling up my sleeve. “Oh you’re good, you’re good, pull on down, the next tent,” the Guardsman said. Inside the tent were several fatigued Guardsmen milling about, sitting, dealing with the paperwork. An industrial sized fan whirred away inside the orderly visqueen. 

I pulled down to the second tent, the last tent. It was farther away. It seemed the farthest point away from the field, the school, civilization. I was two cars back, not even in the tent, when a Guardsman approached my vehicle. She confirmed my name. “You’re receiving in your left arm?” I concurred. She was tall, masked, hair intricately braided but held back in a bun. She wore a gray-green shirt, fatigue pants, and boots. She was muscular. She had the aura of strength. Tattoos snaked down below her short sleeves. I could not tell what they were. She quickly came back with a needle. Wait, I wasn’t even in the tent. She’s going to give it to me now? Already? Aren’t the nurses supposed to give the shots? I had my sleeve rolled up, my arm positioned on the open door frame. “I need you to relax the arm by your side, hold your sleeve up with your right hand. Relax.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

I did as I was told. The shot stung briefly. As a grown up I don’t mind shots. My only requirement is to not look directly at the needle while it’s going in. I just look to the side like a distracted animal. Part of this adult ambivalence is no doubt from being a parent and having to put on a brave face for the children, especially when hauling them to a clinic for their yearly flu shots. I remember taking the babies to get their vaccinations. The doctors gave the shots in their heels, and after a slight delay, the babies screamed indignantly. They were offended that we had taken them from their soft cribs all the way across town for this. 

She was tall, beautiful, masked. She placed a band-aid on my arm. She had the broad shoulders of a person of consequence. She had been transported from a distant land of better physique and vaster organization, sent here to the realm of the sweaty and pudgy to help us find a way to live. I could see into the final tent. More Guardsmen, paperwork, fans. A trash can full to overflowing with syringes, interlocking gears of sheet-checking, shot-administering, moving people through the line. Here it was: the numinous engine of incremental progress, slow but moving, the quiet beat of life drumming underneath the afternoon sun. We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. No faces flinched at my masked face. No one said, “Well those people were in nursing homes.” No one said, “He did have diabetes.” No one said, “Everyone should just live their lives.” No one said, “Do you know anyone who’s actually had the virus?” No one said, “The doctors are saying all those deaths are Covid because they get money.” No one said, “It’s just like the freaking flu.” No one said, “If you’re scared, then wear your mask, I guess.” Girl, there’s a better life for me and you. 

“Proceed to the wait line,” she said. “After fifteen minutes, they’ll let you go.” 

“Thank you so much,” I said. 

“Have a blessed day,” she said.  

And so I did. 

Canon Fodder

literary lint,

Caitlin Flanagan tweeted this question Saturday. Usually, I am able to resist such provocations, which inevitably lead to sincere suggestions, too obvious jokes, and ideological arguments vining down the comment thread. (I know, I know: get off Twitter.) But I was provoked enough to come up with my own sincere suggestions:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The White Album by Joan Didion
The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Short, brilliant, bracing. I think of the detail about Douglass as a boy sleeping in a corn sack, his feet poking out, cracks in them deep enough to hold a pen. A country’s trauma written on his body.

Moby-Dick. Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. Do I think America would be a better country if everyone was forced to read this novel? Yes, I do. That’s just the kind of snob I am. Part buddy-comedy, part opera, part Emersonian sermon, part revenge thriller, elastically plotted, brilliantly written. Putting more sugar into the cup paradoxically doesn’t make the coffee overflow. It just makes the country sweeter.

Huck Finn. Is this novel, published to controversy back in 1884, problematic by today’s standards? Yes. Are those problems emblematic of America as it was in the late 19th century and as it remains today? Yes. Look, no one said being an American was going to be easy. What is going on with the central relationship between Jim and Huck? What is going on with the ending?

The Age of Innocence. You could sub The House of Mirth probably just as easily. And there’s a valid argument to be had between the Henry James camp and the Edith Wharton camp for general milieu. One of those elegant society novels that folds together like a perfectly constructed piece of origami. Despite this, I almost want to counter-nominate anything by Willa Cather.

The Great Gatsby. Another obvious choice, but it’s still a worthy novel, from both a literary perspective and a historical one. Maybe one of the only “perfect” novels, though that adjective is problematic. Its characters’ political and racial grievances are sadly perennial.

Absalom, Absalom! Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. I get it: this is a beastly difficult novel. But, really, is it that bad? Is it any more abstruse than, say, pre-calculus? Besides if it’s not the great American novel (sorry, Melvillians), then it’s at least the greatest southern novel. You could probably sub The Sound and the Fury but I still think this is the better novel, especially if you’re going to force the entire country to read just one Faulkner. What can I say? Sometimes rewarding experiences are inherently difficult. It doesn’t just describe the racial schism of the country. It dramatizes it.

The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick. Yes, this is three books. I was never good at math. Here you have the anticipatory paranoia of the atrocity, the horror itself, and the attempt to reconcile the horror via art afterward. In terms of introducing students to the Holocaust, it’s barely a start, but it’s probably heading in the right direction.

Black Boy by Richard Wright. One could argue on behalf of Native Son instead. However, the memoir is the one I remember as being evocative and piercing, like Frank’s diary in a way, nauseatingly immediate yet terrifyingly foreign.

The White Album. You could sub Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I suppose, but I find The White Album to be a better book overall. The way the long title essay mixes so many modes, cross-pollinates the personal and the cultural. Are we learning about Didion or the culture at large? Both? Where does one end and the other begin?

The Things They Carried. I am beginning to break a tacit rule: only dead people on the list. I realize not all of these authors have passed, but in general it seems like a canonical list such as this, and most of a high schooler’s literary syllabus, should be made up of dead writers. When else are they going to read the dead people? They can read the fun contemporary stuff outside of class. You know: for fun. Perhaps we can’t learn from the past unless people force us. Anyway, O’Brien: I think this book has become a classic. Students should read the entire book, not just the title story. Aside from being overwhelmingly well-written, an MFA in a book, and aside from the historical importance of the Vietnam War, it’s the metafictional elements that are also important: how the characters create stories, use stories, deploy stories — the manufactured nature of stories. The way the book rewrites itself as it proceeds.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. Saunders thankfully is very much alive and well. And really a better book would be a not yet extant Selected Works. Aside from the humor and the fact that the stories are wonderful, Saunders is on the list because of the way he productively satirizes strands of contemporary American life, the ways the country thinks of itself, talks to itself. One could make the argument that stories such as “Sea Oak” are not appropriate for our nation’s youth, but, really? Have you been on TikTok? I think the teens can handle grandma’s ghost.

Is this list more than three books? Yes. Is this list enough? No. Does this list sufficiently cover the panoramic scope of the American experience? No. Is the list demographically representative enough of America? No. Is this really a good list? No. All would-be canonical lists are inadequate, a blanket that can’t reach all the way to a nation’s feet. There is no list that will ever be good enough. The entire question is deliberately absurd. It should be 30 books. No, it should be 300. But I can’t resist Flanagan’s implicit trolling.

I am not just trying to be vaguely provocative. I genuinely think these are good books that the country as a whole would benefit from reading. For such a list, the books need to capture some ineffable aspect of the history of the country while also equipping the reader, if only slightly, for life as a citizen in 2021. And whatever list one creates is merely a start. It can’t cover everything.

And some of these books are more adult. So what? I resisted the temptation to put Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the list. If you want teens to act more like grown-ups, then start treating them more like grown-ups. Nothing in any of these books is as weird as the stuff they’ve seen on any given episode of The Bachelor. And let’s not condescend to the nation’s youth by failing to adequately describe U.S. reality, either as it is now or as it was historically.

Finally, a high school graduate should not only read these books. This should just be the spine of what she reads. It doesn’t even have to be part of a class. Give the student the last two years. Tell them to read at least six books a year. Come in every six weeks during the school year and talk with a teacher for 15 minutes about the latest book you’ve read, proving via talk that you’ve read it and have some loose grip on why it’s important. You could make them write brief response papers but it would be easier and quicker and less prone to plagiarism if you just made the students talk one-on-one about the book. You could do it during lunch. Why do you think the ash heap is important? Why is Shreve in this novel? Why does Didion catalog the contents of her closet? Etc. and so forth. Push the details. Shove them into the students’ arms. Here. Deal with this.

As might be apparent, I am no high school teacher. I’m no school administrator. I have no degree in education. I taught writing for a short time, but that was years ago. I have floated completely free from the boat dock of American education. I don’t think these books are the only necessary ingredients in a better educated populace but I do think they’re important. The country has been telling itself a story about itself for a long time. We might as well try to listen. And like some weight training instructors, I think the students should be pushed toward muscle exhaustion. That’s what makes muscles grow. Is your average 17 year old ready for Faulkner? Probably not. And that’s one reason it should be on the list. It’s a worthy lift.

Footnote

literary lint

As I get older, and as I continue to write, I change my mind about the value of artistic intention, particularly related to how it was discussed in college. Back then, we said writers made aesthetic choices. Style was the result of the author’s intentions. And to be sure, there is some choice that goes into it. Artists do have free will. But lately I have begun to think that a writer’s style is equally if not more the result of that person’s limitations. A finished book equals these limitations plus whatever the publisher could be persuaded to print. Deliberate aesthetic choice runs a distant third. Perhaps Hopper simply couldn’t paint faces well. Perhaps Rothko struggled with perspective. The tree grows around its infection.

Once there was a city

plague journal, ,

I wasn’t planning on writing about infrastructure again this week, but as of March 5, approximately 5,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi, are still without reliably running water. That’s three full weeks without. And this is an improvement from the nearly 50,000 earlier. Jackson city metro only has about 160,000 people.

The situation has dragged on long enough so that friends outside the state have messaged me to ask if I’m okay — a version of “just what’s going on down there?”

On February 27, Angie Thomas, a famous writer originally from Jackson who still lives here, decried the situation on Twitter :

For over 10 days now, around half the residents of Jackson, Mississippi have not had running water. And nobody is talking about it on a national scale. I am begging the national media to please pay attention. There is a crisis happening in Jackson. If you wanna talk to the people who are on the ground, doing the necessary work then I can connect you to them. People are struggling, and since Jackson is majority Black, poor Black folks are getting hit hardest. But NOBODY is talking about it. . . . For those asking why I haven’t connected with national media people I know — I HAVE TRIED. But sometimes it takes a bunch of folks making noise for things to happen.

In the week since, there has been subsequent coverage in The Daily Beast, CNBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Today Show. From my cursory investigations, it looks as if the Today Show coverage specifically was the result of Thomas’s tweets.

Thomas is correct that there has been little media attention given to Mississippi. This whole time I’ve been much more worried about the situation in Texas, because, yes, it seemed quantifiably worse, but also because it was everywhere on the news. The crisis was broadcast, whereas here it just existed.

There is an echo in this lack of coverage with Hurricane Katrina, where there was a well-publicized catastrophe in New Orleans and a much less well-known catastrophe next door on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s a Rodney Dangerfield problem. New Orleans is the more glamorous tourist destination, home of fond memories, better on camera. When it goes, producers reach for the Mardi Gras B-roll. No one knows where Waveland, Mississippi is, relatively speaking.

So an increase in national news coverage to the plight of the state’s ruinous infrastructure is probably a positive occurrence. It certainly can’t make anything worse. But then there is a cynical part of me, a small, persistent voice, beeping like the run-out battery in a household smoke alarm: nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.

Just who is this news being broadcast to? The rest of the country might perhaps be struck with a dagger of sympathy for the situation in Jackson, but they’re not going to actually do anything. Well, that might be incorrect: Thomas sent links to aid organizations and churches who are delivering water to people, so in all actuality that might result in cash in the hands of people dealing with the immediate effects of the crisis. So I’m tripping my cynical alarm too quickly there. But in a slightly more telescoped view, that’s a temporary act of goodwill. Unless those people move to Mississippi, get on the city council, come up with a plan to completely revolutionize the city’s water infrastructure (and hey, come on down! please!), the attention isn’t going to fix the problem.

Is the audience ourselves? By which I mean the people already living in Jackson? Perhaps. And that might make us feel better, feel less alone, feel understood, but this is a symbolic victory rather than a structural one. The city needs physical change. The pipes are literally broken. And that state of decrepitude persists independent of how the citizens feel about how the rest of the country sees them. Positive vibes won’t change the material situation.

Will the national coverage shame our city leaders into effective action? Perhaps. I don’t know. I have a hard time measuring the incentives of shame any longer in this post-Trump era. But the infrastructural problems are so vast and so old that it feels overdetermined to spend one’s energy shaming those currently in office, an easy out for our angst. In reality it’s a shame spread over hundreds of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t fix the problem for decades. Instead of shame perhaps we should pass out bondo and duct tape.

I admit that I have no idea how to fix the problem. I am just observing. I am just typing. I am attempting to describe the situation. I am trying not to complain. I choose to live here. On the one hand it’s good to have more people in the country understand what’s happening and on the other I know that there are people working on the current problem with dedication and diligence. But my point is that it’s a larger problem, one that will outlive this weekend’s news cycle, this weekend’s moment in the jet stream of sympathy. And it’s a problem that needs more than a temporary, emergency fix. Sometimes I think the entire city should just start over. We should recognize that civilized life is simply not viable on this plot of land. The city should pack its bags, leap frog over the suburbs, and start a new city a little further up the highway. Lord knows there’s enough wide open space. We could leave the ruins of the old city as a monument to our century of mistakes. But then, perhaps the leap away has already happened, and the people like me still living in the city are the dupes. The escape, the rebirth, has already happened. Didn’t you hear? We’re living in the ruins already.

Welcome to the Second World

plague journal, ,

Is the United States the greatest country in the world? What does a question like that even mean? Greatest by what measurement? Largest GDP, most acreage, greatest in supply of personal freedom? Greatest in terms of human potential? 

This is one of those questions that’s difficult to litigate and mostly a distraction. Regardless of the United States’s placement in the hierarchy of statehood excellence, I think it’s more applicable to realize that living in the U.S. is like living in a Second World country. In school we learned about the First World, and we did mission trips to the Third World, but now U.S. reality seems stuck somewhere in between. Everything is both terrible and great, if not simultaneously then in lurches, like a car popping in and out of gear. 

I was going to make this observation in relation to the pandemic, or perhaps the election of a manifestly unfit crazy person to lead the executive branch, or perhaps the seeming helplessness of the country’s richest state to mitigate annual apocalyptic wildfires, or perhaps the first transfer of executive power that entails a body count, but I didn’t want to rush to judgment. I didn’t want to be unfair or overly critical of my beloved country ‘tis of thee. I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free, and also subject to rapid collapse of the basic studs of infrastructure at the most predictable occurrences, while everyone stands around screaming at each other over ginned-up cultural garbage. But then the cold snap arrived and my state of Mississippi, along with several others, were dunked head first into historically extreme temperatures. It began with videos showing snow at the Texas-Mexico border — huh, would you look at that? — and now there are rolling blackouts across that wild west, because the Texas power grid cannot keep up with demand and is having to ration care, so to speak. Whether this occurrence is the result of frozen windmills or Texas’ weird deregulated power grid depends on your side of the culture wars, unfortunately. (Who could have predicted that World War III would turn out to be a culture war? And who knew it would be this annoying?) I don’t know anything about Texas politics or energy infrastructure, so I won’t even daydream aloud about it. But this is a failure of civilization and to justify it via economics or personal responsibility or however is to turn one’s back on the entire notion of civilization. It’s as ridiculous as the rolling blackouts in California in the vain hopes that fallen power lines won’t start another horrible fire. It’s an inability, or a refusal, to take care of ourselves. And it’s shameful. 

Of course at the same time, everything is also great! A vaccine was developed, approved, and began to be distributed in less than a year, destroying the previous record and, from all appearances, still happening a little on the slow side. MRNA vaccines to my untrained ears sound like miracle drugs. And there are two of them — and that’s just in the U.S.! There are others in the world, which will hopefully be approved in the U.S. posthaste. 

Around the end of last year, there was a rapid string of amazing science news, in addition to the vaccine news: protein folding, SpaceX launching, approval of a cultured meat that does not rely the slaughter of animals, the first implementation of CRISPR, the discovery of new quark particles, and a discovery of what might be the oldest extant example of figurative cave art. (It’s a pig, naturally.) Just this week NASA landed a new rover on a dry lake bed on Mars and it’s sending back sound and images. It’s even tweeting, for the love of God. And that’s just on top of all the normal great American stuff: barbecue, Bandcamp, bagels, and the shiny little computer in my pocket, more useful than a pocket knife, more distracting than a bag of heroin. 

I realize not all of these examples are purely U.S.-based. Such is the (welcome, appreciated) nature of globalization. And I know that the U.S. is not the best country in dealing with the coronavirus but also not the worst. It’s somewhere in the middle — in a muddle, in the mud.

And being in the middle is fine, I guess. You can’t always be number one. But what bothers me is the mismanagement of basic competence, the surrendering of civilization. What I want really goes beyond basic infrastructure to redundant infrastructure. I want backups. I want everyone to be prepared. I want due diligence to become a national mantra. I don’t know if you solve this via the market or via the state or via some third stream my brain can’t imagine at the moment, and really, I don’t care. Arguing about method is a culture war quagmire, a bog unto the status quo. I just want us, as a country, to deal with fairly predictable problems in a more effective way. Wildfires, floods, drastic swings in temperature, even pandemics. These are not new inventions. These are not un-considered problems. I will admit that I have a technocratic leaning and a small desire to give up a smidgen of my freedom for some ruthless efficiency. (Chik-Fil-A, anyone?) But I just want the trains to run on time. Or really I just want the trains to run without hopping the track and plowing into the adjacent countryside while everyone does the savage dance in front of the wreckage. 

I will be the first to admit that it is not normal for it to get this cold in Mississippi. I will also be the first to admit that thus far I have been extremely lucky. I still have my power, though the power company has sent out warnings of potential blackouts. I still have running water, though the pressure has gone geriatric. But having running water during a cold snap shouldn’t be a matter of luck. We pay a price for living in a society, with our taxes, our bills, and our behavior, and as a result we secure a form of civilization. We fabricate it together. Besides, if I wanted to live according to survival of the fittest, I would move to the goddamned woods. 

Just after Trump was elected, I went to a reading by the British writer Geoff Dyer. He had just come out with his book White Sands and was being interviewed by Richard Grant, another British writer, who had moved to Mississippi and written a successful memoir about that weird experience, Dispatches from Pluto. At one point in the back and forth, they said that many of their friends had suggested they would be leaving the U.S. now that Trump was president. 

“You know, many of them said the same thing back when Bush got elected.” 

“They never left, did they?”

“No, they didn’t. I guess despite everything it’s still a pretty damn good country.”

And then these two Britons, both having found a measure of fame and comfort in the U.S., laughed and laughed.

Clothes Mask the Man

essays, ,

Another day and I’ve got to decide what to wear. It’s the first of many mini crises of my own making, obviously not an actual crisis but enough of a pain that it takes decisional energy. It’s not just an outfit. It’s a representation of myself to the world. It’s enough of a speed bump in my morning that it invites self-analysis. You’re going to wear that? Again? 

As a child I wore a uniform. First through fourth grade, I wore a white polo shirt and navy pants. Then, for fifth and sixth grade, I wore a strict variety of pastel polos (pink, blue, lime) with khakis. Finally in seventh I was able to wear normal clothes, and I remember the terror of having to tight-roll my jeans in the then-correct manner. Back then the jeans to have were the Girbaud brand, which had an alluring label right on the zipper. You could tell who was wearing the right jeans by glancing at their crotch, an adolescent detail which seems a little too symbolically on the nose. 

Now of course I’m purportedly an adult and free to wear what I want. Whenever there is a social function (back when there were social functions) and I ask my wife what I should wear, while staring into the void of my closet, she gives me the Look. It’s a look of primordial exhaustion. It’s admittedly a dumb question because I always wear the same thing, a personality trait that’s conveniently sanctioned by being a male. I can wear the same outfit over and over and no one notices, comments, or cares, whereas being a female, at least according to my admittedly inexpert anecdotal research, entails a much more fraught relationship to clothing and context. Except for perhaps weddings and funerals, I can basically wear this same ensemble every day for the rest of my life. 

That ensemble being khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. I have essentially been wearing the same outfit for twenty years. Sometimes the shirt is blue-ish. There is often a plaid or check pattern, but it reads as blue. And okay, there are a couple of non-blue shirts in the closet. I have an orange plaid and a red flannel, but these minor deviations underline the relentless sameness: button down and pants. It’s the slightly more adult version of my school uniform. 

And yet, every morning, I think good lord, what am I going to wear today, even though the spectrum of choice is so narrow as to be meaningless. All of it matches, as if anyone cares. All of it is the same level of moderately decently presentable. It’s as if I have subconsciously chosen a uniform in order to alleviate the anxiety of dressing but every morning I somehow forget.

I will be the first to admit that the reason I am attracted to uniforms is because they lessen cognitive load. Here I’ll name check that President Obama anecdote about how he only wore grey or navy blue suits in order to lessen his then-momentous decision making itinerary. I don’t have nearly that amount of decision making to do in a day. Obviously. And I am aware that absolutely no one on the planet cares what I wear to type on my Dell except for myself. And so this is a non-decision decision. And yet. Whenever there is an article about a writer or celebrity or just some public person who wears a uniform, I am eager to read it and access their gestalt. I am a sucker for any kind of simplifying system. The writer Molly Young for a while only wore white. She said it made her look like a large glass of milk and that getting dressed each day was like assembling an easy piece of Ikea furniture. I read this nodding sagely while also thinking: that last bookshelf took me four days. Tom Wolfe rather famously wore all white, but I think even in these polarized times we can still agree that Tom Wolfe was a pretentious clown. The writer Gay Talese doesn’t wear a uniform per se but always wears tailored suits. But his father was a tailor and Talese was born in 1932. Of course he wears bespoke suits. It would almost be a sacrilege not to. The suit as uniform is tempting, an even more formal, even more adult, in some ways easier uniform than what I have helplessly devised. But suits are too out of fashion as far as regular everyday wear. I’m not a banker and even the lawyers now wear those weird leather shoes with the glued-on white sneaker soles. One wants to wear a uniform but one doesn’t want to wear a costume. The distinction seems to be a set of clothes that doesn’t adversely trigger my self-awareness reflexes.

Shouldn’t I be wearing something different? Shouldn’t I try harder? What are other people wearing? Maybe I should just dress as if I were George Clooney. But this is ridiculous. George Clooney is beautiful and I am not. He can wear anything. Insert the conventionally beautiful person of your choosing. My point is that people like Clooney can get away with wearing ridiculous stuff. It’s like when Brad Pitt grows a gnarly beard. Instead I should investigate what the sharply dressed but average-looking people are up to. But in this sense, too, we are a polarized nation. We have the beautiful people and then we have the average masses, unimpeachably wearing leggings and jeans and some sort of shirt thing because it’s comfortable and easy, and what are you, some kind of big shot? Just put on your jeans and grab that pizza. There is another population, the intentionally well-dressed, the forum-goers, the guys who know what “worsted” means, the fellows who have particular thoughts about the differences between the 511 Last and the 65 Last. These guys go from being well-meaning and detail-oriented to stricter than a military cotillion in about three paragraphs. Fashion, which might be the most blatantly arbitrary of signaling environments, quickly becomes codified. And it turns into dudes talking evangelically about gear, which is just Dad Shopping.

(Sometimes I think that the majority of our current problems in the world are caused by the existence of internet forums. The Gamestop bubble and the Capitol riot could be thought of as examples of forum-logic bursting into the real world. Or the “real world,” if you prefer.)

It’s not that I don’t want to be noticed, thought well of, admired for my good taste and sophistication. It’s not that I don’t want to be appreciated. It’s not that I am un-vain. I am as self-absorbedly preening as an adolescent moonwalking with a selfie stick at Disney. But I am also painfully self-conscious. I remember the first time I heard a recording of my speaking voice. I’ve never fully recovered. I admire people who can dress well, trying hard without seeming to try hard. I admire them the same way I admire people who can juggle or do higher level math. What I want really is the most absurd control freak fantasy. I want to be noticed but on my own terms.

I won’t ever wear a Rolex watch, not because I don’t like wildly fancy things or think one shouldn’t spend money on such, but because wearing such a noticeable device would give me fits. It would be like wearing a bat signal of personal wealth, taste, and sophistication. What I want, I’ve decided, is the equivalent of the Honda Civic of everything, not too hot, not too cold. Think of it as normcore as a way of life. When normcore became a brief fad, I believe it meant young, fashionable people wearing white sweatpants and Reeboks ironically. But immediately I felt it as a system after my own dadland heart. I don’t want selvedge denim, shell cordovan double monk straps, a Pappy Van Winkle neat, a Porsche 930, a Klon Centaur. I want the Honda Civic of tennis rackets, running shoes, beers, refrigerators, sweaters. There are too many choices and the differences between them are small enough to be essentially neurotic. I just want the mild-mannered, generally reliable, historically trustworthy choice that I can choose and then run until the wheels fall off, not out of some larger sense of thrift but because using said object until the wheels fall off forestalls yet another painful decision matrix of existential despair. Sing me those 501 Blues, deliver me the Dell Inspiron, the Bass Weejun, the Gibson Epiphone. Mr. Coffee makes it fine enough for me. 

But perhaps my uniform is more like military fatigues or camouflage than I’ve realized. A uniform that’s meant to blend me into my current background. I am not in the jungles of Vietnam or in the Kuwaiti desert. Obviously. I remember when soldiers started wearing the seemingly pixelated tan camouflage. The current background I’m blending into must be generic male with job. It’s a corporate jungle of parking decks and overbuilt planters, VPNs and magnetic identity cards. Read the runes in the whorled cubicle wall. I have been conscripted but in ways I can’t fully perceive. The uniform both is and isn’t a representation of my true self. Today it’s cold and I am wearing a sweater over my blue shirt. There is a man riding a horse swinging a polo mallet embroidered over my left breast. The fact that this grey sweater has this icon is both meaningful and not. I myself have never cared much for horses. 

Learning from TikTok

literary lint, , ,

One problem that results from an academic study of the artistic discipline you want to pursue is that you tend to think of yourself in the third person. Or at least I tend to think of myself in the third person. That is, you end up more focused on artistic effect than you do with artistic process. And that’s because artistic effect is something that can be meaningfully studied. What kind of book is this? What kind of choices have been made in terms of narration? What are the consequences of those choices? Does this book succeed? How do these choices, this success or lack thereof, relate to other books this author has written? Other books that her contemporaries have written? Etc. These questions aren’t bad. They aren’t wrong. But they lead toward a certain neighborhood: the gated community of sorting and judging, categorizing and ranking. The Moons of Jupiter was Alice Munro’s best book. My top three Munro books are . . .

Again, it’s not that these thoughts are wrong, but they are less helpful if what you want to do is write books, as opposed to only read/judge them. There is the old Picasso joke: “When art critics get together they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” It’s a simplistic joke and potentially apocryphal but it contains a buried truth. Once again I have found a pithy quotation that I will ruin by yammering about it for a thousand words.

The difference is approaching a work of art via its effect, via its larger societal and artistic impact, and the other is approaching a work as a project that above all else has to get finished. This kind of study tempts you into thinking that the writers themselves thought of their work in this historically significant way, when in reality they were people often pinched by circumstance just trying to get the draft done. This is one way that reading biographies of writers can be instructive. You see all the crap, all the life, they trudged through. You see the compromises made, the relationships destroyed, the jobs sought, the rent due. Of course the danger of this kind of reading is that biographies helplessly hero-ify their subjects. No one wants to spend 400 pages and ten years writing about a person they don’t end up admiring. So the heroic victory of the books always comes in to save the day. But details about the early grit years are often instructive.

To get prescriptive: The thinking about the writing, the thinking of oneself as a writer, must not overtake the actual writing, the laying of the bricks. You’ve got to build that wall. Later generations can come and tell you how worthless it is, or not.

There is a lady on TikTok who for some reason is rehabbing a beaver. It is emphatically not a pet. She is a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist and this beaver was found as a baby, and because beavers stay with their parents for a long time, it needs care before it can be an adult in the wild. Like the Picasso quotation, I don’t want to debate veracity. I just want to talk about her TikTok videos. She videos it building dams around her house. He accumulates domestic detritus and creates dam-like agglomerations. And then he goes outside to a little pond on her property and makes slightly more real dams out there using limbs and twigs and household objects that for some reason seem necessary. He then sleeps in her shower stall. His favorite found household object is a toilet plunger. The accumulated videos are uncanny, odd, adorable. When the lady discovers a new proto dam, she says he’s learning how to be a beaver. Which is totally ridiculous because he is a beaver. He doesn’t need to learn how to be what he already incontrovertibly is. The dam building is instinct. He does it because of some primordial genetic force that’s propelling him to chew and gather and adjust crap with his teeth in order to divert water.

And yet, this instinctive daily piling up does have the effect of practice. He’s doing what he does in the limited circumstances he’s got available. Perhaps being a beaver is more of a collection of activities than an identity. He learns how to be a beaver by doing the actions that have come to be understood as beaver behavior.

Is he any good at it? Is he practicing for the One Big Real Dam he will write one day? Or is he just building the daily dam because that’s what beavers do? Does it even matter? He wakes up, eats whatever she’s feeding him (mostly sweet potatoes?) and then gets to work damming. He’s not practicing so much for the big one (the exam at the end of the semester) as he is building because that’s what he does. There’s no linear improvement. The beaver doesn’t have a Blue Period, and this newest dam is not a comment on the foregoing history of dams, and it does not in any way interrogate its own “dam-ness.” (Not that any of that wouldn’t be interesting.) There might be some linear improvement but it is an almost accidental byproduct of doing the same task repeatedly day after day. Of course the dams will get better. He can’t help that. But the improvement is not really the goal. He simply likes building dams. He feels compelled to build them. All the non beavers and all the beavers who didn’t build the dam can stand back and admire and critique (these gestures being the same) and rank. And perhaps even this beaver will one day pause and reflect. But if her videos are any indication the beaver is sleeping or off to the next project behind the couch.

Perhaps this is not an entirely helpful analogy. One wants to write well. One wants to produce literature, however one defines that nebulous term. One wants to improve. One wants to produce the kind of writing that excited the writer himself way back when. Remember the good old days? All those papers that received a grade. One wants to be good. Otherwise what’s the point? These are all valid concerns. But they are second order concerns. Or they should remain second order concerns, lest you drive yourself mad with evaluation. The first order concern is learning how to be a beaver.