All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

On giving up

essays, ,

Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there. 

It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter. 

So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included. 

I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now. 

Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!

I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs. 

For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then. 

I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.

Charles D’Ambrosio Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Living Near the Wound: An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio
By Barrett Hathcock

The following interview with Charles D’Ambrosio took place on October 2, 2007, in Birmingham, Ala.

D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of short stories, The Dead Fish Museum (2006) and The Point (1998), as well as two collections of essays, Orphans (2004) and Loitering: New and Collected Essays (2014).

Barrett Hathcock: These days, the vast majority of writers also teach, and because they’re in teaching as a profession, they tend to move around a lot, and I think it’s interesting how people have to move away from where they’re from and how that then affects their writing. They’re moving away to sustain a career and the writing refracts that in some way. But you grew up in Seattle and now live in Portland, and I was wondering how has that return to the west coast affected your writing? Because it seems like some of your stuff is so specifically tied to the west coast, but then some stories, like “Screenwriter” — it takes place in Manhattan . . .

Charles D’Ambrosio: But [it’s] always in the back of my mind. I mean, if I set a story in Manhattan, it’s probably some version of — I’m probably taking the weather. I’m dipping into that palette and putting rain there, and the rain I know is the rain in Seattle.

You know I’ve moved around some. I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and Iowa. Montana. I’ve bopped around a little bit but always for my own purposes, whatever [. . .] they were. I like being in the northwest. I like being close to family. I like being close to the people I know. It’s partly just personal. I have an American life so that means I have a very broken continuity — a fragile relation to my own history. And so the northwest represents the best chance I have of having a deep relation to place.

And also you know on some level, Seattle’s partly my wound. I want to be near it. Whatever that is, and I don’t know what it is, but I find it kind of important and exciting and vivid in a way I don’t find other places. Not to say — I mean, I love other parts of the country. It’s strange being down here because the narrative about the South and the narrative I’ve constructed about my life in America is a very different narrative. It’s western. It’s got a bit of Ellis Island and the Italian immigrant side. That kind of thing. But very different than down here.

Place matters a lot to me though, as a writer and as a person. I don’t know if it’s true or not but I feel like once I cross the Mississippi going west, I kind of know where I am. I lived in New York and Los Angeles, and I have to say that I understand Los Angeles better. I felt more at home. I understand getting in a car and driving two miles for a quart of milk, you know? And Manhattan was very interesting, but it was just too different for me. A place I like to visit but would not want to live there.

[…]

It’s interesting thinking about the South because I don’t know anything about it really outside of books, southern literature, and thinking about Seattle as a place, and place is very important to me, but it’s really because [Seattle’s] sense of place is tenuous because it doesn’t have the same deep history, and I imagine the sense of place in the South could almost be oppressive because of its thickness and the reality of the history.

Thomas McGuane has this quote — Out west you need a shovel to find history. It’s just nowhere available.

[…]

BH: So this is kind of a dork’s question, and the only reason I’m asking is because of “Drummond and Son,” which has so much great writing about typewriters. But and so, well: do you actually use a typewriter?

CD: I do. I mean, I use the computer too. I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that I’m like anti-, but I do. I’ve got tons of typewriters at home nobody wants. The main one I use now is an Olivetti — just like the story, an Olivetti Lettera 32. And actually I got the idea for that story after I’d been to my typewriter repair shop in Seattle getting that one cleaned. I got home and wrote a single-spaced page of notes for a story that I didn’t write for another three or four years but on that typewriter. But the typewriters I have are kind of a 50s and 60s, very usable, portable manual. But they’re not collector’s items so I get them for nothing. The Olivetti I got in Republic, Washington, for $1.99. Pristine. I don’t know why they decided it was $1.99 but they did. And they’re very usable.

BH: On the one hand I think it’s kind of a dorky question, but on the other hand, I think it’s actually really interesting, because I’m curious: How does that affect the actual composing?

CD: You know to me it’s the switching around. I also use a pencil and paper, and a pencil specifically, not a pen. I like the scratchiness of a pencil and the sort of delible quality. It’s not indelible. It’s not being put down for all time. And rather than turn around and erase, I just scratch stuff out. Its lack of permanence actually feels freeing. I do that a lot for dialogue. I like to arrange things with pencil on a sheet of paper, something off in the right hand corner and then down on the bottom — so you have a [spatial] change.

The same is true with a typewriter. I feel like with a computer you get into that left-to-write down into the void, that bottomless void, too easily, and I feel sometimes you think you’re writing but you just fall into word-processing tricks. But with the typewriter, I just roll a clean sheet in and you’ve got to start writing sentences. They’re not there on the page and you get into a rhythm and throw things down, and you don’t back space and delete. If you make mistakes or don’t like the sentence, you have to start writing it again. So I like the work of it.

I think of all those things as kind of layering into a story. A lot of the times if I get stuck, I turn to the typewriter, too. I do compose some on the computer, but if I get stuff, I’ll just kind of turn my back on that and just type and throw out things and not worry about misspellings and all that stuff that the computer tracks for you, but it’s annoying and distracting at the same time.

[…]

BH: You’ve written two collections of short stories and a collection of essays, so my perception of you before I met you was, That’s what he does. He’s a Short Story Guy. But you are now working on a novel and have worked on one previously, and I’m curious if the progression or transition between stories and a novel has been deliberate or simply more circumstantial?

CD: What happened is that I started writing something I realized that it wasn’t a short story. Really, I think among the many mistakes I’ve made over my life one of them was caring so much about the short story. I mean really until I went to an MFA program, I didn’t care about the short story. I had no prior interest in it. But then you’re in a program and the very format of the program is sort of biased in favor of the short story and against the novel or longer things. And you know, I think I maybe a little bit lost sight of my primary interests. I’m not primarily interested in the short story as a form. I never was. But I think I got steered in that direction and maybe that was one of the bad consequences for me [coming from] a MFA program.

[…]

One of the things I’ve done this time around in writing a novel is that I am treating it like I treat short stories. With a short story, I’ll work on it, change it, let it evolve. But I never feel like there’s some truth, some ideal form of that story that I have to be true to. It evolves. It evolves quite a bit. And if I pick it up a week or two weeks or a year down the road and start writing, I let it change in search of the story.

And I think with the [first] novel I kind of froze up and got kind of architectural like there’s some pre-existing form I had to measure up to or find and now I’m treating it more like a story and letting it change.

BH: But do you think the stories are at their ideal form now that they’ve been published and collected? Or is this just the point where they’re like fish and they’re caught and this is how they are?

CD: This is how they are, but some of the ones that I’ve rewritten and rewritten and rewritten off and on over the years, I know that if I had another whack at them, I’d probably start writing and change them again. 

[…]

With the short story, no matter how many drafts, I believe man once you write that first sentence, you are in the business of trying to shut it down. That’s how — and even though I write fairly long stories — I’m always thinking, How am I going to get all this in? I start thinking that right away. It’s like a dense ball of gas that just explodes but it’s right there in that first sentence to first paragraph. If it isn’t in that, then there’s no story as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’s partly because in a short story, you feel the whole thing inside you at once. I think a novel you look out, you see kind of a broad feeling, but some of the internal mapping of the story or how you progress from little point to little point is unknown to me, as I’m working.

BH: If you’re thinking about how you’re going to shut it down when you begin it, does that mean you know what the ending is?

CD: No, no. In fact, I don’t like to know what the ending is. Very often you have a provisional ending. You have an idea of a temporary ending. You just kind of erect this idea because you think you’re going in some direction. It usually changes. In fact I sort of have this thing where if I, at a certain point in the writing of it, if I see the ending, then by definition that’s not the ending. It gets eliminated as a possibility. It’s too conscious and I’ll start steering toward it and it’s too arranged. If I can see it that easily, then it’s not subtle enough. It’s not even worthy of being an ending. I have to be a little bit surprised by where it goes.

BH: That’s interesting, because a lot of your endings in The Dead Fish Museum initially frustrated me because of their open, unresolved quality.

CD: It’s one of the questions I pose to myself. There are times in certain stories [. . .] I was purposely doing that and I wondered to myself if that was the way to go. Some of the endings are really open-ended and all the tightness is in the first two-thirds, and then there’s this last couple of pages that are very, very unresolved. I don’t know. Well, life doesn’t resolve itself, but stories are different. But I was right in that place between how little can I do this, how open-ended can I be?

[…]

Am I doing something that’s right within the story or am I abandoning the story’s need? There are two endings to every story. There’s the one that’s the story, the tidy, and you could push it toward a morality, but then there’s the need to resolve it aesthetically and my question is: I don’t care about resolving the tidy moral life of a story, but did I end it aesthetically?

BH: I was curious about the amount of restraint in the stories. There’s no formal self-consciousness, and the prose doesn’t reach for extravagance, though that’s not to say that the prose isn’t beautiful in places.

CD: You know, I would never do that in a short story. For instance in my essays, in my book of essays, a lot of the writing in there is slightly show-offy and people have asked me, Why don’t you write your stories like your essays? And the essays, they’re obviously me in a way, and I’m just stepping out, but in a short story it would just seem undignified.

In the stories, at a certain point only the story matters and everything serves it and I find myself in the latter stages just subservient to what’s there. Like in “Drummond and Son,” at one point in looking over and editing that story it referred to the boys having to put down their dog or give it to the pound, and I had given the dog a name and the dog’s name was Pookie, and it was a little bit of a jokey name and I just kept reading it and thinking, You know what? I’ve got to pull that name out. Because it’s a little joke I was having [with] myself in the moment of composition. I was going to give it a silly name, and I didn’t want any of that story to seem clever or self-conscious. But just a little thing like that. Would a reader ever know? Maybe not. Probably not. It’s just a story. [. . .] I pulled that name out. I knew it was slightly self-conscious. You start serving the story. That’s all that matters.

Flannery O’Connor says somewhere in Mystery and Manners that you kind of have to absent yourself in order to see more clearly the thing that needs to be seen — the writer does.

[…]

In the short stories — if I can make a very lumpy contrast — in the shorts stories, I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face some thing; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays, I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart. So in the short stories, I want have such a deep drive to have things come together, and in the essays I have an equally strong desire to make things fall apart. Whether it’s political understandings or moral understandings that seem readymade and seem too pat or too easy, even by good-thinking people, you know. I like taking on public issues.

[…]

The accent in the essay might be: This is how I figure out what I’m thinking. In a story: this is how I feel out what I’m feeling. Just slightly different emphasis.

BH: I read that your wife is in a band and plays drums, and so I was curious about music and its relation to stories. I think it was in the 2004 Best American Short Stories, the one from 2004 that Lorrie Moore edited and which includes “Screenwriter.” She has this bit in her intro where she says that short stories are similar to songs; they have the same sort of interests in compression and carrying emotion, and I was just wondering if — being married to a musician — do you see any relation between songs and stories or music and stories, or is it a separate animal?

CD: Yeah, you know, I’m so musically illiterate. I can’t hold a tune. I can barely sing “Happy Birthday.” But I always loved music. Short stories are like a song certainly in the writing. I work a long time to get the sound right, and I feel a lot of time until I get that sound right — it’s the sentence by sentence sound — that I can’t go forward in the story, that actually the sound contains a good part of the narrative, and it won’t unlock until I find the note. And also I think short stories, like songs, have an associated feel. That’s me now speaking as a reader. There’s certain stories that I can just turn to even though I’ve read them a dozen times, I want to have that feeling, like you’d turn on some oldies song or some song you’d listen to in college.

For short stories, the experience is different. A friend of mine pointed this out to me. Tom Grimes, a writer and teacher who runs a program down in Texas. He said, I went into class and asked everybody: Who are your favorite characters in literature? And of course people say Nick Caraway or whatever . . . I don’t know. And then he says, What’s common there? Everybody’s like quiet. And he says, None of them are from short stories. Name a character from a short story — No one can. You never can. I mean there are some. Johnny Hake, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” John Cheever. There are a couple that you can name, but you don’t remember them. And that’s not what’s important. And it’s partly the music that’s important, it’s maybe the narrative, but it’s not the character. Lorrie Moore’s a great example in “The People Like that Are the Only People Here” — they don’t have names. You don’t need them for the short story to come alive. We participate, we sync into it in a different way. Just like a great song, you almost don’t need the lyrics.

How to gig outside

essays, View from the Bandstand, ,

First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.

Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.

Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.

Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.

Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.

Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.

Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.

An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.

Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.

If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.

And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.

Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.

If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.

Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.

So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.

What I can’t live without

Product Reviews

I keep waiting for New York magazine to call and ask for my take on the “What I Can’t Live Without” column, but for some unexplained reason they never do, so I figured I would go ahead and describe those items here. 

Birkenstocks. Specifically, the Arizona: the traditional ones, the ones without a heel strap, the ones without fur, or any kind of bling. The ones with strong arch support, cork footbed, and an ugly, European disposition. They take a little while to break in. I’ve probably run through six pair over the past twenty years. I use them until the cork looks like desiccated coral, flaking off on the kitchen flooring. They don’t like getting rained on, and I think there are cork sealant products that I could apply, but I always forget. I don’t intentionally get them wet, but sometimes one is out walking the dog and an early evening thunderstorm pops up, and one is simply up the creek, as the saying goes. I like how the waffle-like indentions in the rubber soles slowly wear away with time. Perhaps this happens equally with other footwear but it’s particularly pleasant with Birkenstocks. Practical, comfortable, ugly, the ideal footwear. Plus, the sight of my uncovered toenails frightens away predators. 

Spotify. I realize that there is a long list of valid criticisms of Spotify, namely that it pays artists fractions of pennies through an algorithmically rigged application that primarily benefits the already mega-successful. But in listener terms, it’s a revelation. As a kid in the 80s and 90s it was a dream to be able to call any song forth and listen to it at that very moment. I remember driving through rural Georgia in the middle of the night in 2003 on the way to Florida to attend my own wedding when I desperately wanted to hear a new song that I’d heard perhaps twice, only in fragments, irresistibly catchy, and I scrolled through the static-y radio stations for an hour until I found it. Now you can just call it up. If it’s not on Spotify, then it’s probably on Youtube. I realize not everything is available, and I realize that this near-perfect availability is bad for the artists, but what can I do? It’s 14-year-old me’s version of the Holy Grail. Points deducted for trying to use the app while driving, always a pain. I know I should not be doing that. I should keep my eyes on the road, on what’s coming next, but sometimes you want to synchronize your commute to the perfect tune. P.S. that midnight-through-Georgia song was “Hey Ya.”

Google Docs. After a certain word count, it gets a little squirrelly, and I don’t ever do any serious formatting. But for typing words, keeping words, being able to access words on multiple machines in multiple locations, it works. What I hate about software generally is its apparent need to update frequently. Just when I am comfortable with an application, someone somewhere changes it, and it takes me forever to figure out how to replicate my cherished routine. I don’t always want a better design. I just want to live with the original mistakes because by now I am used to them. Those features are no longer mistakes but just the way the world works, the way this piece of hardware or software was put together, how one’s life panned out, and any structural improvement only creates more friction. I use Word less and less now, a shocking realization, as twenty years ago I lived in Word. Now my preferred on-the-machine word processor is the humble Notepad. Yes, that’s right. I am working on a Dell. I used to be able to afford those silver sexy laptops, but then I had children, and now I work in a Dell world. There is no formatting with Notepad, no pages, no sex appeal. But it has two fabulous attributes. It is screamingly fast, and it can be transferred to any other kind of device. (In case my child let’s me borrow their silver laptop.) No, you can’t use italics, but I overuse italics anyway, and besides one should be adding that kind of stuff later. For getting words down in an order somewhat approaching an English sentence, it’s the best freeway. Google Docs has more latency, but the access and the inherent cloud back-up makes it mostly worthwhile. I keep waiting for Google to start charging me money for storing all of those rough drafts, like an abandoned self-storage megalopolis of unfinished dreams, but I keep skating by year after year. Another quality I like is that Docs makes computer work (at least the prosaic kind I do) more independent of the actual machine. I work on my documents and my spreadsheets, and they are saved to a server somewhere, and then I access them again. I don’t want to work on the machine itself. I don’t want to customize. I am not a programmer. Some people are! I am grateful for them. But I want my toaster to make toast, and I want to be able to get to my toast wherever I am. I want to be able to burn my toast or not burn my toast, but otherwise I don’t really want a lot of toast-gradiation leeway. I don’t need predictive toasting. I just want to make the bread browner, toastier, depending on the day. I want to be able to send and receive short bits of text and add and divide various combinations of numbers in peace without having to think of how the machine works, if it’s good for human civilization, or perhaps talking behind my back to the HVAC. Occasionally I want to watch old footage of Little Feat playing “Cold Cold Cold” in Holland and send it to my friend. No, I haven’t binged that new 7-part series. There’s no time for that. I still haven’t finished all those books I bought when I was 24.

Polo Ralph Lauren Oxford-Cloth Button-down. Color: blue, the only color that matters. The perfect shirt, appropriate for any occasion, somehow perfectly sized for my arm length, torso length, progressively expanding abdomen. The perfect meridian of dressiness. Whenever I wear a different shirt, at some point in the day I regret not simply wearing the Polo. 

Icees. As a kid I used to get these all the time. I would get them at the tote-sum, my regional adjective for the convenience store. My wife’s people calls these establishments handy-ways, and routinely cringes at my use of the hickish “tote-sum.” Whatever: it’s the place where the Icee machines lived. I prefer the traditional Coca-Cola–flavored Icee above all else. I don’t go for that blue stuff. And I don’t go for slushies or slurpees or whatever ice-filled liquified candy Sonic is pushing this week. Just a Coke Icee. These days, these days of the expanding man, I only get them when I take a child to see the latest IP iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That cineplex has an Icee machine that actually works — another wrinkle. Growing up, traveling up into the Mississippi Delta to see my ancestors, my parents preferred stopping for a chocolate milkshake at a restaurant called the Pig Stand. They made the best milkshakes, but their milkshake machine was often broken. There is some corollary between the deliciousness of the processed beverage snack treat and the hypochondriac unreliability of the machine that makes it. It’s as if its genius can only manifest every 72 hours. More than once did we stop by the Pig Stand and leave empty bellied. Maybe what was delicious was its own brokenness. Eventually the Pig Stand followed its milkshake machine’s lead and closed permanently, leaving only the bitter aftertaste of nostalgia. Inversely related: the ubiquity of fully functional Smoothie Kings throughout the south correlates to how I find all of their products hopelessly mid. 

Voice Memos. Technology for people who hate technology or are afraid of technology or become so helpless and distracted in the face of options, in the off-chance of dopamine sparks flying. If you give me switches, I am going to flip them in an effort to see what they do and optimize the pleasure of the experience, but then I get so caught up in optimizing the potential pleasure, I never do the original task that I came to do so many moons ago. I am swamped by options. I have 18 tabs open full of articles where I have read two paragraphs each. There is always the potential next best thing if I am not sufficiently trapped or harnessed into the current thing. The voice memo is the perfect recording studio for someone like me: all you can do is record and send it to someone. Perhaps you can edit it? I haven’t figured that part out and please don’t tell me how. It’s linear. It’s got one button. If it sounds bad, you have to do it over. There is no patching available. No punching in. No tracking. I still have a microcassette recorder in my desk, which I used back in college. A great invention. Just enough technology to be useful but not enough technology to be interesting. Put that on a T-shirt. I’ll wear it under my Polo. 

Kolaches. Have you had a kolache? 

20 years of short stories

short stories

I have had a new short story published by the fine folks over at BULL, which is immensely gratifying. This means I have been publishing short stories for twenty years now, a duration of time difficult to contemplate. It’s hard to understand that I am twenty years older much less that I have been doing a single artistic activity, however haphazardly, for that long.

Twenty years ago I imagined I would still be writing short stories in middle age, but I also imagined I would be writing other pieces, different pieces, longer pieces, glossier pieces. Like everyone on the planet, I imagined I would end up in a much different place than I have currently ended up, but I won’t dwell on imagined destinations too long for fear of whining and self-pity.

When I was younger and was in writer school, we of course wrote short stories, mostly out of pedagogical convenience. It strikes me that almost all of the aesthetic statements you can make about short stories simply come from the fact that they are in fact shorter than other forms. It’s that simple and that complicated. This lends the notion that you graduate from stories, but I never graduated, and now I don’t think that one does graduate. Of course, if you prefer different modes of writing, different lengths, you do those, and while there are a couple of other modes that I have attempted, I maintain a fondness and comfort with the short story, a devotion to it. Essays and nonfiction are enjoyable but difficult; their lack of structure, a common-practice conception (even by the non-literary) of what an essay is, means that one must almost re-define the mode’s limits each time one writes a new piece. You have to establish the terms of engagement. Whereas everyone, or almost everyone, thinks they know what a story is. And while you, the writer, might not wish to write according to those generally held conceptions, you can then write against them, or bob and weave around them. Everyone’s purported understanding is a useful net to hit your literary ball over. This is also different from poetry, where the only remaining net is perhaps the convention of line breaks. The problem with poetry is that currently it’s only read and practiced by the True Heads. And the Heads always have their own language; that’s how you prove you’re a Head. Plus with nonfiction there is the autobiographical element, how much personal information to include, if any. Nicholson Baker once talked about the protective moat of fictionality. And Lorrie Moore has talked about the necessary re-cooking of fiction writing. The ingredients change once the burners get going. It seems like people lose the joy of make believe as they get older. I can feel it in me, the middle-aged desire to start reading military history or some such, and I have to fight against it. I have to remind myself to imagine the What If and not content myself in the What Was.

I have written two complete novels, both still unpublished, and both drove me crazy. Writing a novel is like cleaning a house where each morning there is yet another room that didn’t exist the night before, an endless mansion proliferation of furniture polishing. Stories are one room, perhaps a little pinched, perhaps over-furnished, but with knowable dimensions. Novels seem to be about time, the time depicted within them as well as the time spent reading them and writing them. Whereas short stories maintain a brevity of spirit like a song or a sprint; you can always see the end, imagine it, feel it coming; the end is baked in the beginning, a hint of cardamom. And they are more lifelike in that life is only understood briefly, in refracted glimpses, not in long comprehensible stretches.

Now, I imagine I will keep writing stories for the next twenty years. Everything else I’m not so sure. I don’t know if the stories will be any good, and I don’t know if I will be able to get them published, but I know at least that it’s an act I can actually accomplish — sporadically, sometimes sloppily, sometimes less than my desired abilities. But I can do it. There’s comfort in running still.

JPH, R.I.P.

Uncategorized, ,

What follows are two texts written for my father, an obituary and a eulogy.

1.
James Pollan Hathcock died Sunday, February 20 of complications from lung cancer. A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, February 24, 2022, at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church with visitation beginning at noon.

He was 71 years old. Born in Cleveland, Mississippi, on June 19, 1950, he was the second son of Charles Tillman and Clara Pollan Hathcock. He graduated from Cleveland High School in 1968 and Delta State College (now Delta State University) in 1972, where he majored in accounting. After graduation, he moved to Jackson with his wife Patricia Holmes Hathcock to play music professionally. A lifelong drummer and singer, he played music full time for most of the 1970s, most notably with the group Lock, Stock & Barrel. He became a Certified Public Accountant in 1980 and earned his Master’s in Business Administration from Mississippi College in 1982. After working several years in the accounting, insurance, and software industries, he and business partner Jim Meadows founded Compensation Insurance Services, an endeavor that braided together these areas of expertise and which still operates today.

Known as “Jim” by his professional peers, “Jimbo” by his friends and family, and “Bobo” by his two grandchildren, he was predeceased by his parents and brother Charles Tillman Hathcock, Jr. He is survived by his wife of 52 years; his son Barrett; daughter-in-law Katie; and two grandchildren, Stella and Carter. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be made to Stewpot Community Services and Habitat for Humanity’s Broadmoor Initiative.

2.
Good afternoon. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Barrett Hathcock. I am Jim’s son. When he asked me to give his eulogy about a week before he died, I initially demurred. Dad, that seems . . . difficult. 

“Oh, you can do it. You’re much more stoical than me. If I were up there, I’d be blubbering like a 7th-grade cheerleader.” 

As you might know, my father could be very persuasive. 

So here I am, endeavoring to give you an idea of what he was like without blubbering. I will now do my best to read from my prepared text without making eye contact with any of you. 

For the first several years of my life I was convinced my father was the tallest man that had ever lived. The years since haven’t totally corrected that impression. He was seemingly always the tallest man in the room, especially if you measure height by the power of a person’s voice, by the force of his personality, by the quality and proliferation of his jokes, his monologues, his sayings, his stories. He was a monument of conversation. He was a mountain of pithy, colorful expressions, most of which I cannot repeat in a house of worship. 

Example: If I had a head a hair like that, I’d be President of the United States. 

It didn’t really occur to me until I was much older and saw him in a professional context that my father was a character — larger than life, and not just to me but in general, like Paul Bunyan, except instead of Babe the Blue Ox, he was often accompanied by a drumset.

This character was known by many names. James, Jim, Jimbo, Bobo. Each name signified a different context, a slightly different neighborhood of peers. He was James P. Hathcock officially — on the checks, on the diplomas. 

Professionally he was mostly known as “Jim.” Perhaps you know that I moved back to Jackson eight years ago to take over the business he started in the early 90s with his partner, Jim Meadows. Working with him brought me a whole new arena of father knowledge. When I began, my learning curve was essentially vertical. It struck me a couple of months into my apprenticeship that my father had fashioned the perfect job for himself. First, he was the boss. Second, and more important, it was essentially an insurance bookkeeping job, a distinct kind of professional animal with its own claws and stripes, which tended to scare away the uninitiated. But the other half of the job, the softer skill, was the need to explain the job, how this particular breed of insurance accounting behaved. And at this he was exceptional. Whenever I describe the intricacies of my job at a dinner party (back when we had dinner parties), I can always sense my conversational partner looking just over my shoulder, scanning for the closest available wine. But my father made residual market pool administration riveting. He made it vital. And he could do it at a moment’s notice. He was like a fine German automobile but instead of going 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, he could go from essentially asleep to full explanatory aria in 4 seconds, and you were entertained. He told the history of the Mississippi Workers Compensation Assigned Risk Pool to more people than I’m likely to ever meet in my life, and they remembered what he said, laughed at his jokes, and were generally grateful for the experience. 

My father had a particular method of stapling paper. It had to do with whether the document was meant to be understood in portrait or landscape, and he stapled the papers so that the staples lined up. He would show you how to do this, and when you didn’t listen and kept stapling in your chaotic, Devil-may-care, English-major way, he would correct you and show you again and illustrate the superiority of his staple-aligning method, and he would keep doing this until you would awake in the early morning hours, sleep disturbed by staple-addled dreams of workpapers left askew, and you would get to work early so that you could make sure it was all just a dream.

When an accountant reviews these stapled workpapers, that person signifies their approval by initialing the upper right corner. So my father’s initials — JPH — were everywhere. But it didn’t mean that he had just “looked” at a spreadsheet. It meant that he had “tied it down.” Without getting too inside baseball on you, you can think of accounting like docking a boat. Every number has to be tied down; a number on one document has to be verified by another document. They must agree. So, much like a boat you don’t want to float off into the reservoir, you have to tie that sucker down, and my father could tie down a workpaper like none other, so that no matter what kind of afternoon storm came along, that boat was not going anywhere. It was verified, it had been thoroughly examined, and he had staked his honor on it, exemplified by his initials. My metaphor breaks down a bit here, because my father generally loathed boats, but you hopefully get my point. He once quipped that he could tell you the journey of every penny that had ever entered the MS Assigned Risk Pool, and he was right. I can show you the workpapers. They are filed neatly in a drawer under his desk, initialed each in the right hand corner. Perhaps his true business name was not “Jim” but JPH, because that was how he communicated I WAS HERE. It was the signal that he had blessed that piece of paper with his fantastically meticulous attention.  

He was Jimbo on the bandstand and to his friends and family. There are so many songs that are inextricable from my father’s voice, songs I know logically, now in my adulthood, were first sung by other performers, but still in my primordial memory they are my father’s songs, first sung by him, only really ever sung by him. 

He played his first gig when he was 15 and kept performing until just this past summer. Though he didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, he might as well have, so complete and instinctive was his talent. He was asked by a bandmate later in life how he knew what to play, how he knew where to put the emphasis. “Where else would you put it?” was his answer. Like an athlete, he wasn’t particularly good at describing what he was doing, but when the game started, he knew what to do. He loved to perform. He loved to be on stage, so much that he never really left the stage. He was always performing to some degree. He loved having an audience, and they loved him in return. And he loved surfing the wave of that mutual affection that somehow manifests on certain nights halfway through the second set. He would say if you want to be a gigging musician you had to learn to love the feeling of being shot out of a cannon and not knowing where you were going to land. This got abbreviated in later years to the phrase “learn to love the feeling,” uttered when the prospect for onstage chaos reached a boiling point, and he did love that feeling, no longer a discomfort but a sense of ease within chaos — a resilience and flexibility in the face of life’s unknowability. 

The one musical sin that my father could not abide was musical ambivalence, an unwillingness to commit on the part of a performer, any kind of laziness or lack of sweat, a performer just going through the motions. He wanted all performers to exhibit a James Brown-level of devotion, whatever the genre or instrument. He abhorred tentativeness in all matters but especially behind a drumset. 

The highest achievement, as a musician, was to be known as a player among players, to be recognized as a peer by other musicians, even ones who you didn’t regularly play with — especially those. This was the ultimate validation, more permanent than an audience’s fleeting enthusiasm. 

“Who’s on the gig?”

“Don’t worry. He’s a player.” 

I was 13 years old when my father got sober, and he participated in Alcoholics Anonymous for the rest of his life. He talked to me a lot about getting sober and how it had affected him, but congruent with the “anonymous” part, I know little of his AA community. I don’t know what name he went by in AA, whether it be Jim or Jimbo or something entirely different. And that’s as it should be. But I do remember two details. 

When he first got sober he would attend AA meetings on Saturday mornings, this in addition to the daily meetings. All I knew was that he went to AA meetings all the time, which was in itself odd because my father was a committed non-joiner. Anything larger than a quartet was a sport or group that he was uninterested in. But he miraculously became an enthusiastic participant in his sobriety and in AA. And I remember those early Saturday mornings when he would come home singing — joyously strutting through the backdoor, singing for all the life he had left to live, 10:30 on a Saturday morning. I’m still gnawing on breakfast and watching cartoons, and here he is reborn in middle age, unambiguously happy. 

The other AA memory I have is going out somewhere with him, out to eat, running an errand, anywhere, and how he suddenly knew everyone on the planet. He was always sociable, but this was another level. He would cock his head and nod at someone passing by or quickly shake someone’s hand, no conversation, just a mutual recognition. “Who was that?” I’d say. 

“Oh, just someone I know.” 

He was suddenly but forever baptized into a quiet brotherhood spread across the city, a network of sobriety monks who had heard every crazy ass story one could tell, and had told a few themselves, and who had somehow developed biblical levels of patience. I don’t recommend that everyone here become an alcoholic, but I do recommend everyone find a group of recovered drunks that love you as pitilessly and relentlessly as that group loved my father and as he loved them in return. 

To my two children he was known as “Bobo.” It was one of those accidental toddler renamings, courtesy of my daughter Stella. Despite being a talker and having many names, my father didn’t have nicknames. He was not one to be mocked. Only a granddaughter could get away with renaming him Bobo. My father also wasn’t ever goofy, and yet he became so with his grandchildren. Who is this strange person, who used to be my father, now going by a silly nickname, and playing on the floor, and singing to a baby? This is simply how fathers turn into grandfathers. 

No doubt this is an incomplete portrait. I only have a son’s view of the monument. I haven’t told enough stories or I haven’t told the right stories. But trying to describe him to you without taking the next three weeks of your time is like trying to paint the Grand Canyon on a postage stamp, destined to be mostly incomplete. I know you have your own Jimbo stories. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. So I ask that you go forth and tell those stories. It’s what he would have wanted, and through telling those stories about that unique character also known as my father may he continue to live. 

Thank you for coming. 

Yet Another John

literary lint, ,

When I was in my twenties, I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of the Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike, and I resolved to read one of the novels each year. I got through the first two before becoming distracted by life, but this winter, for some unknown reason, I pulled the thick book down and finally read novel number three: Rabbit is Rich. 

I found it astounding. Perhaps it had simply been too long since I had read an unashamed American realist novel, but it seemed like Updike at his best. Yes, I am aware of the myriad criticisms of Updike: relentlessly prolific, old fashioned in his political and sexual views, his protagonists entirely oversexed, etc. All of those criticisms could still be lobbied at Rabbit is Rich, but as a chunk of fiction, as an installment in the broader panorama of Harry Angstrom’s life, it’s exemplary. Like the other Rabbit novels, the third volume functions as an almost-instant retrospective look at the American decade just passed, and that decade’s excesses, inhibitions, and sins become embodied in the characters. 

All of which is great, but what I was impressed with was how effortlessly he seemed to pull off the regular old novelisms: the set pieces, the implacable situational conflict, the behavior of characters that’s simultaneously evocative of time/place/personality and also plausible — significant but not screamingly so. The novel feels both richly descriptive of a lived American reality and also richly imagined as a fictional landscape, and this ratio of observation and invention is controlled throughout. I realize these are merely characteristics of a well-done, old-fashioned realistic novel, but as someone who has intermittently attempted to do that very same activity, to see it pulled off with this level of apparent effortlessness is astonishing. It’s like watching an Olympic athlete flip and twist across a padded floor, their hummingbird breathing at the end nearly hidden by their beaming smile. I understand enough about novel writing to know how hard it is to do what he’s doing without it seeming hard. Perhaps I’m just a bad novelist. It’s possible! But still: I’d kill to be able to write like this. 

For Christmas, I received a newer novel: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I was in my 30s when I broke down and finally started reading Franzen’s novels. I had read his essays, a less intimidating backdoor into his oeuvre, but The Corrections received so much praise when I was in grad school that I studiously avoided it. As if I were picking sides in the Twilight saga, I was devoutly team DFW. But finally I broke down and read Freedom and then the floodgates opened: The Corrections, then Purity, and now Crossroads. In the meantime, Franzen has become a metonymy for the sins of postwar American male literary success. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. Something about his public persona and his success annoys a certain kind of online literary young person, and the result is that every time he makes any kind of public utterance, or every time he publishes a new book, there is an endless amount of commentary about how wrong Franzen is. And I partially sympathize: he can be insufferable, humorless, at his worst a kind of deliberate troll regarding environmental issues. He’s the kind of person who thinks he’s got an excellent sense of humor. Is this the kind of person he really is, or is this just how he comes across in the pinhole understanding we have of him via his nonfiction writing and his interviews? 

My answer is another question: who cares? Having a strong opinion on Franzen’s latest media utterance as a replacement for actually being well-read is unhealthy. Sorry. It would be easier to be a literate person if they removed the blurbs, the fetching author photographs, and the online interviews, the noise pollution of publicity. Until that day, we have to be more rigorous in our attention. The author is not dead, but it’s sometimes easier to pretend he is. 

What I care about is the fiction, where all of his faults and excesses coalesce and reverse into a greater rhetorical artifact. It must be said: Franzen is an exceptional novelist. Is he essentially an old-fashioned realistic novelist according to generally acceptable terms? Yes. Are there a conspicuous number of tried-and-true novelistic plot conventions in this latest novel? Namely, accidental pregnancy, psychological breakdown, drug use as character revelation and plot instigator, similar use of crisis of faith? Yes. One thing is sure: he’s not writing fragmentary autofiction that questions its own status as a work of linguistic artifice. What he’s doing instead is much simpler and much more pleasurable: a double-decker sodbuster of a family saga. This is obviously Franzen’s forte. And sections of Crossroads succeed as powerfully as any other novel of his that I’ve read. The novel-length first section, “Advent,” is remarkable. The novel concerns a pastor experiencing a midlife crisis, his four children, and his wife. Everyone except the youngest child (10) is barrelling toward a reckoning, and it all collides two nights before Christmas in a suburb of Chicago in 1971. Updike’s brand of routine excellence also manifests here. Franzen’s ability to juggle multiple plot strands and make it interesting and relevant and pull you along, so that it feels less like you’re reading and more like you are succumbing to some tidal undertow of events, is overwhelming. I would kill to be able to write like this. He doesn’t have the same level of prose as Updike, whose mission it seemed was to describe everything on the planet in his eloquent high-def style. At times, that style is perfect for what is being described, and at times it’s awful, insufferable, tasteless. Though I understand this criticism of Updike, I am sympathetic because it seems essentially instinctive. He’s got this Paul McCartney–like helplessness before the staggering plenitude of his own talent. The dog will always roll in the stink; it’s how he proves he’s alive. Franzen’s prose is different and has changed since The Corrections. It’s less fussily aware of itself as language. It’s clearer. It doesn’t dance as hard as it used to. It’s not particularly voice-driven, either in terms of its author’s own constant God-like baritone, or in terms of a more Faulkner-like deep-character ventriloquism. It’s more of the transparent window pane rather than the swirling disco ball. There are nice phrases, to be sure, but one rarely slows up attentionally to ponder them. But at the same time it’s not cliched. It’s not sloppy, it’s not breezy, and it’s not filmic. He’s not a benign prose stylist in this novel. And that middle ground is itself incredibly difficult. Though I don’t agree with Martin Amis, that a good novel is exemplified by a long marginal line of excitement drawn down the page cheering on each innovative utterance (moderation in all things, Marty), I do enjoy the shock of new language. But this goal of sentence-level innovation is often antithetical to moving a novel along, to submerging oneself in the novelistic dream of the characters. In Crossroads, the dream is everything. 

Does it get a little rickety, plot-wise toward the end of the first section? Yes. Does it feel a little too much like a P.T. Anderson movie where everyone’s storm of pain happens to rain on the same exact evening in a way that seems a little too conveniently dramatic? Yes. Does the novel ultimately hinge on a couple of characters’ deeply held beliefs that remain unpersuasive to this reader? Yes. Are the primary members of the Hildebrandt family all weirdly destructive moral absolutists, none of whom have a restraining thread of common sense? Yes. Pastor Russ’s break from his family’s Mennonite faith, his love of Navajo culture, his difficulties with his own faith all seem slightly less than convincing. He has an orientalist fascination with “authentic” blues records, an affectation which is lightly ironized at one point in the novel. But his larger infatuation toward the Navajo people, which seems like a deeper version of the same search for a more authentic culture distinct from his own, doesn’t have any irony attached to it. Perhaps I am just misreading. Likewise, the novel-binding affection between Clem, his oldest son, and Becky, lone sister, seems rather baffling. At the end of the first section, which essentially occurs over one long day, there are so many confrontations and crises that they lose emphasis. Like a group of streakers at a football game, it becomes difficult to distinguish which revelation sprinting across your field of vision is important. In its attempt to braid together so much narrative information, one loses a sense of proportion. But then, who said novels were about proportion? That sounds like the griping of an envious short story writer. 

Aside from the complementary excellence between Updike and Franzen, there is an interesting plot device parallel in both novels: they both are primarily concerned with a middle-aged patriarch’s adulterous fantasies. In each there is a focal point for this fantasy. For Rabbit, it’s Cindy Murkett, the youngest wife in his country club golf set. For pastor Russ Hidlebrant, it’s Frances Cottrell, the foxy, young, widowed parishioner. Though of course there are many other elements, the wished-for consummation of this desire forms the spine of the plot, and the night of reckoning coincides with (and metaphorically seems to bring about) a crisis with their sons. In the case of Rabbit, his hoped-for rendezvous with Cindy doesn’t happen. The climactic wife-swapping-in-the-islands gambit lands him instead with Thelma Harrison, who it turns out is as obsessed with him as Rabbit is with Cindy. He awakens the next day post-coitus (yes, exhaustively described) to find out that his son Nelson has abandoned his own just-married and very pregnant wife back in the States. For Russ, he manages to bed his infatuation (in the the most depraved and pitiful and ick-worthy of circumstances), which coincides with his son having a cocaine-abetted psychological breakdown (plus some fire). Of course the sons’ crises refract the patriarch’s self-absorption and excesses. Though both novels hail from more liberal, more gently Protestant neighborhoods, this essentially simultaneous retribution strikes me as remarkably Southern Baptist, as plot devices go.

To further complicate matters, the novels also share marriages that endure in spite of the wayward husbands and wives. In each, both spouses are conflicted, adulterous, or at least adultery-adjacent. Neither split but are somehow stronger despite being each other’s rusty foil for most of the novel. There is a strange resilience to their antagonisms, as if the antagonism between husband and wife strengthens their bond. These chronicles of wayward females and libidinally distracted men somehow transmogrify into odes for marriage. It echoes an observation from the real world: That many long-term successful marriages are opaque, unknowable accomplishments, like obelisks appearing in the desert. At the right angle and distance the marriages almost seem like cults of two. The most surprising part of each novel in the end are the portraits of these conjugal cults — cults that exist at the center of the family island, beating the drum of civilization. 

Despite Franzen’s role as despised Literary Man, the novelist he currently reminds me of is yet another John — John Irving. He also wrote plot-stuffed, continent-spanning, energetically goofy novels that are essentially unputdownable if one submits to them. (Thank God Franzen avoids bears and wrestling.) I’m not saying it’s the highest aesthetic achievement in the bookstore (though all ranking is bunk), but it ain’t nothing either.

Covid Resolutions

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For Christmas I received Covid. It even came a little early — in the twilight of Christmas Eve, while watching a holiday movie. I spent the week in between Christmas and New Year’s getting through what appeared to be a mild case of the omicron variant. We all got it in my household, passed around like eggnog. We are all vaxxed and boosted as much as currently allowed, and we all seem to have come through to the other side okay. Thank you for asking. 

It was an odd experience, like a mean cold, not as bad as the flu, but a handful of days that ended in chills, that ended in me banishing myself to the guest room bed where I soothed myself with multiple comforters and Netflix. Though I am not the most diligent or focused of creatures, I hardly ever give myself over to binging shows. In my mind it’s an activity that you only do when you’re sick. Or it’s an activity I only do when I’m sick. (What I do when I’m well, apparently, is scroll through Twitter before snoozing on the couch.) I experienced a scratchy throat, an occasional cough, copious snot and sinus pressure, and the aforementioned chills, which were the most conspicuous element, seeming to indicate a low-grade fever flare up in the nighttime. I would awake in the morning from my comforter cave in sweat-dampened T-shirts. Now, two weeks later, I have been released from captivity. I still have some snot and a lower voice, and I’m tired a lot. This could be from Covid. It could be from the feral hours we kept as a family, trapped at home yet freed from any regular schedule. It could be a window onto Long Covid, that obscure fear beyond fear, just another vista to be anxious about. Is it Long Covid or is it just getting older? Are you depressed or merely sad? The only answer is another question.  

If New Year’s Eve is Drunk Night for amateurs, then New Year’s resolutions are like astrology for non-millennials. The threshold of a new year seems significant. Everyone acts as if it were significant. But it’s not. It’s just another day, another week, another slow roll through the seasons. It’s the beginning of winter. It’s the season when you can see the squirrel nests in the trees. It happens every year. There are some jobs where year-end is important — in accounting, for instance. Cut-offs are important for contracts and insurance policies, where an artificial demarcation of a span of time is necessary and useful. But in your life, it’s just another year. The only true closing of the books is death. 

And yet still, during that week of listless scrolling and watching, I kept thinking: maybe this year I’ll be different. Not resolutions, per se. Nothing that concrete. Only that I would be a better person, stronger, more disciplined, less apt to fall asleep on the couch while reading Twitter, someone who took his vitamins, went to the gym, resisted carbohydrates, lifted with his legs, all that stuff. The truth is I don’t save my life-changing exhortations for year-end. They are perennial, persistent shouts to self. And while I would like to be a completely different person (if just for a little while), I would be happy for one or two almost microscopic changes, if not to improve my life then to prove to myself that change is indeed possible, and that I am not the equivalent of a human locomotive, only moving in one direction when moving at all. 

One thing getting Covid has done is improve my mood. After 21 months, it finally happened. I look at the colored map of the United States on the New York Times website each morning. It’s growing more and more purple as the omicron variant burns through the population. Perhaps this will be the final fire that can move us toward endemicity or normality or something at least different than succeeding waves of anxiety. Emptied of despair, perhaps we can withstand winter. Winter has recently been a season simply to get through. It’s the trudging part of the year. I think part of this attitude was triggered by living in a slightly colder climate with small children. They’re sick all of the time and it’s too cold to take them outside anyway. But it’s hardly ever cold in Mississippi, not really. And the kids are older, heartier. It’s mostly a season of dampness. So instead of projecting — next season will be better! — instead of always anticipating improvement just around the corner, I wonder if I can just enjoy January. It sounds ridiculous. But the panic attack of the holidays is over, we have lived through the plague, or at least the current iteration of the plague, life has continued on, thankfully; perhaps I could burrow into something like appreciation. I know this sounds like a desperate bid for optimism or joy, but I am running out of topics to be worried about. Or perhaps I’m just bored by them. They seem exhausted. I am exhausted. It’s like the websites that you continually visit even though you long ago stopped receiving any thrill by reading them. Why do I keep going there? Is it simply because the browser autofills the URL? Close those tabs of despair! Find something to do with your time besides make yourself feel bad. And don’t wait for astrology — the one true date where your resolutions will be aligned. If you need cosmic order, just go back to church. It’s less embarrassing. 

Dare to be optimistic

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Here are a handful of headlines from a single website, the internet arm of a once glamorous, still respectable glossy magazine: 

Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive
How Easily Can Vaccinated People Spread COVID?
Parents Still Have a Thanksgiving Problem
The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants
What Collective Narcissism Does to Society
You’re Boosted! Now What?
The Pandemic Is Still Making Us Feel Terrible
America Has Lost the Plot on Covid
Why Are We Microdosing Vaccines for Kids? 
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall
The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now
Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right
Why Are Americans Still — Still! — Wearing Cloth Masks?
Did Pfizer Peak Too Soon?
We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic
Fully Vaccinated Is Suddenly a Much Less Useful Phrase
‘Post-Vax COVID’ Is a New Disease
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter
Sorry, a Coronavirus Infection Might Not Be Enough to Protect You

Brought to you by The Atlantic, or as it’s now known: Slate for Middle Managers. Whenever I am feeling just slightly optimistic, about either the state of the world or the slow Nothing-like progress of the plague from one county to the next, I visit the Atlantic’s website to have my mood brought down a register, or several. Did I read all of these articles? No. I am not that masochistic. Are the headlines the same as the articles they tease? No. The headline writers are a different breed than the actual article writers, meaner, kept in captivity, fed only when they achieve the day’s required click-rate metrics. Headline writing has always been a combination of a striptease and a poke in the eye, but the Atlantic headline writers have ventured into a new realm of insult provocation during the pandemic. Over and above the content of the underlying stories, it seems like the Atlantic headline writers really want you to feel terrible, feel guilty for your relative level of safety, and feel anxious about the state of the pandemic. They’ve become the shrieking hall monitor of the national mood. If the primary rhetorical mode of the Right-leaning Fox News network is aggrievement, then the corollary for the Atlantic, more Left-leaning or perhaps just more BMW-leaning, is anxiety. The first tells the viewer: they think you’re a rube and they’re coming after you. The second tells the reader: you’re doing pretty good and it will never be enough. 

Yes, I understand the past 1.67 years has been a veritable disaster along every metric one could possibly conceive, and I understand that various glimmers of progress or hope or improvement are highly contextual and that circumstances are not better for some people. But as of mid-November, there are some solid signs of progress in the continental United States. Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 have been finally approved. Boosters are widely available. Two new antiviral therapeutic treatment drugs are approaching emergency use authorization. If you are an American parent with school-aged children with potentially immunocompromised grandparents, the viral probability statistics that invisibly govern your life have just become much more favorable. If you have perhaps been threading the needle of normal, it just got easier to darn the socks of civilization. Of course, if your children are still in the eating-with-their-fingers demographic, then your life is still not normal. And yes, I don’t know if we as a society will ever return to a pre-pandemic normal. No doubt we will fall into some new kind of normal, equal parts fear, paranoia, Facebook science (sorry, Meta science), slightly more wizened knowledge of our shared infectability, and TSA-like security theater. Will I always wear a mask in the local grocery store? Will I do it to protect myself and my neighbor or will I do it to hide my frown? Too soon to tell. 

I will admit that I was feeling good at the beginning of the summer, an optimism that was crushed by the delta variant. I had heard of a potential timing danger with regard to the vaccine rollout, that the vaccines, despite being widely available and effective, would not be taken up by a large enough portion of the population, so that a more virulent mutation would develop and spread, which is essentially what happened. Thankfully, the vaccines are still effective against this variant, but there are even more sick and dead than there should have been post Easter 2021. Three cheers for America, the best of all possible worlds.

But then life got weird again, just in time for the kids to go back to school, and concurrently, the Discourse Machine, or the Despair Machine, or the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call our ongoing online virtual media sidecar to life, chugged a Four Loko and got busy. Life is not yet normal. Cue the headlines above. I realize Covid has not made the progression from pandemic to endemic, but conditions have improved, and there is a horizon glimmer of further improvement, like an undulating oasis. And I find myself daring to feel optimistic, or perhaps I am just daring to tire of despairing, tired of drilling down to see the 14-day percentage change in case loads in my tri-county area. I went to a small concert two weeks ago, my first since Before. And I’m planning to go to another. These events are not without risk, but then nothing I do is risk-free. I am always weighing, measuring, even when it’s subconscious. I’m not trying to be careless, but I am trying to care less. Because I’m 600 days older and death is not an abstraction.  

And the metaverse makes me feel bad. It wants me to feel bad. It wants me to worry, despair, feel anxious, Read More, and Share with my Friends. The metaverse wants to spread. Perhaps the delta variant wasn’t the viral mutation I needed to worry about.

Place of Safety

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I try to avoid the discourse. Writing online has for the most part turned into a game of takes, and the stakes of the takes are always rising. Who can write the fastest on the scandal floating through the air that day? Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already living through a takes pandemic. They go viral, after all. 

But here I am anyway, conscripted briefly into the culture war. At least I’m not writing about that kidney-donation-short-story-litigation disaster. 

I was talking with a friend about what books could still be assigned to students and whether certain books, though historically significant, were now so far out of intellectual fashion that they should be replaced by better, different, more appropriate books. We were talking high school, that is, students who are still deemed children. But then, concurrently, out popped articles about Bright Sheng, the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, who was teaching a music composition course on opera in which he showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in which Olivier portrays the hero in blackface. His students were “shocked” and quickly expressed their dismay to the powers that be. As a result, Sheng has stopped teaching the class and has written two public apologies. 

I don’t want to argue for or against Sheng’s showing of the film in his class. I don’t know anything about music composition, opera, various versions of or depictions of Othello, or the history and implications of blackface, aside from the obvious contemporary point that it’s connected to race relations in America and is thus absolutely radioactive in current polite society. What was Sheng’s pedagogical reason for showing the film? Should he have used a different depiction to better prove his point? Should he have provided a more thorough scholarly context for it? Should he have simply “known better”? I don’t know. I do think that a professor’s selection of course materials is a specific site of pedagogical dominion and an implicit articulation of importance, and that the course itself becomes an arena to debate the very inclusion of its own material. To use Shakespeare as a convenient example, any Shakespeare course, aside from its more top-level focus, is on a sedimentary level an argument that Shakespeare is worth studying and these works in particular are worth studying. Do you agree? Well, by the end of the course, if you’ve done the reading and participated in the class, you should have a fully developed opinion. But aside from that kind of 16-week long digestion, I don’t know if Sheng is right, wrong, careless, careful, or not. Perhaps I’m being too English major-y. I tend to take the teacher’s side in these matters under the assumption that the teacher chose the material on purpose, and it’s their class. I don’t question the tools my plumber uses when he’s working on the pipes at my house, because I don’t know anything about plumbing, and I want to be able to flush my toilet again, and as a result, I operate from a premise of respect toward the plumber.

What I am more interested in is a quotation from one of the students: 

“I was stunned,” [freshman Olivia] Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.” 

Here I would like to stand on firmer argumentative ground: the college classroom is not a safe space, nor should it be. I mean, it should be a safe space in the way that all societal spaces should be safe; you should be safe from assault, battery, etc. But that is not the sense in which the student uses the term. The college classroom should not be a safe space for the students’ feelings. 

An important premise: the college students are purportedly adults and present of their own volition. But after that caveat, did seeing this movie hurt the students’ feelings? Impinge on their sense of propriety? Jump the tracks of a contemporary political taboo? Offend their decency? It doesn’t matter, because their feelings are not to be spared in the college classroom.* Why are they attending college? To learn an academic discipline? To obtain the credentials to get a job and secure a middle-class adulthood? To be immersed in the best of what has been thought and said? Whatever their reason, anytime that students learn about a discipline, they will be necessarily exposed to the history of that discipline, and by virtue of it hailing from the foreign country of the past, it will not comport with their current view of the discipline or society as a whole. Of course the students were shocked. They should be shocked. The film was released 56 years ago — three of their lifetimes. It’s so far out of current performance fashion that it now seems odious to the wide majority of society, and yet covering your eyes and insisting that the professor not show that movie does not make it go away. The bogeyman of the past is still out there killing innocents. Ignoring past cultural artifacts that are now deemed offensive doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t obviate why they were deemed important in the first place. Ignoring Olivier in blackface might make you feel more comfortable in the present moment but it does nothing to address current racism or to understand past racism. All it does is prolong one’s own ignorance of what actually happened. “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear” is no way to learn. It’s difficult to learn anything without having your feelings hurt, because learning is a form of conflict. And you only win that game if you do the reading. 

When I lived in Alabama and tornados were a routine part of existence, the weatherman would come on the screen and say, “It’s time to go to your place of safety.” This was a handy new euphemism for basement. It sounds poetic and cozy but it also makes sense. And for tornados, it’s accurate. When the storms are descending on your street, you can better protect yourself by getting to that un-windowed hallway. But intellectually, there is no place of safety from the ravages of the past. Of all the lessons an 18-year-old composition student might learn, this one could be the most valuable. 

*Their feelings are important, but they are less important within the context of the classroom.