All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

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.

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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

plague journal,

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

plague journal,

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.

Time Hex

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Sometimes I think about not wearing a watch. Sometimes in fact I don’t wear a watch. But mostly I wear one. I feel odd without it, naked, though I’m obviously not naked. I thought about communicating this to anyone I met in a given week, and thinking of no one who actually wanted to hear me moon about this topic, I have decided to tell you, dear reader. 

I am currently wearing a Timex Weekender 38mm Fabric Strap. Before this it was a Casio Men’s Digital Illuminator Sport Watch in navy blue, a Target find and my preferred watch. But the rectangular bitlet strap-holder broke. I keep wearing these vestigial devices though I, like everyone else on the planet, also carry a little supercomputer in my pocket, a remote control for life, a psychological fidget spinner. I also stare at a clock located on my regular computer at work. And there is a clock in my car. And there are multiple clocks around my house, not synchronized but close enough. I’m never without the ability to check my time. Why should I keep wearing a watch? 

For some men, it’s a piece of jewelry, covert or not. I’m fascinated by high-end watch culture in the same way I’m fascinated by snake handlers or scientologists; there is a belief system there that I recognize but don’t follow. Spending several thousand dollars for a watch that you have to hand wind seems bizarre and potentially reckless, even though I adore certain outmoded forms of technology whose relevance seems purely sentimental (hello, typewriter collection). I mean, the watches look good, if a little big. There’s also strange terminology which I admit I don’t understand. Bezel? It’s like when photographers talk about bokeh. What? I realize these are actual terms, but they give off the whiff of nonce words, secret passcodes kids invent for the game of the day. Or simply boys being boys. 

I do not wear a smartwatch and I take an absurd amount of pride in this. Their presence on my contemporaries is steadily increasing. It’s an object that began as an avant-garde class marker and that quickly devolved through ubiquity to a marker of civilization, a declaration not of money or advanced taste but of reasonableness. It’s just what people wear. It’s the fleece jacket of wrist-wear. But I can barely function as it is with my little supercomputer singing sweetly in my pocket. I don’t need to know anything that a smartwatch could tell me. I realize it could keep track of my heart rate and notify me that I’m not moving around enough, to which, duh. Part of me wants to keep the watch, qua device, and do away with the smartphone. Checking work email away from work was a Rubicon I didn’t know I was crossing lo those so many years ago. And now there is always a social trap one could check; they fill so quickly! And now texting people is so woven into my daily existence that the thought of not having a good texting device seems unthinkable. Device-less, I would surely be less addled, but I would be lonely. Or lonelier. Or even lonelier. 

So I wear a watch but with the effortful thriftiness of wearing a cheap watch. It is convenient to check the time so relatively inconspicuously. You can fish the phone out of your pocket to check the time during a conversation, but it signals you’re bored and want to look at your phone rather than continue the conversation, which may be true, but still. Whereas looking at your wristwatch, while insulting, is somehow less insulting to your fellow conversationalist, speaking at least in current terms of the evolution of our personal technologies. 

Part of this affection for cheapness is that I’m hard on watches. Briefly in my twenties I wore a Karim Rashid–designed watch from Alessi. It was a single band of chocolate brown polyurethane that housed a raised, square-ish time piece that contained hands but no numerals. It was like a stylish miniature piece of furniture on my wrist, a small gesture toward the Design Within Reach standards that were still yet out of my reach. It was once glancingly admired by a dentist and self-professed watch guy. But I slowly destroyed it by clipping the face against doors, drawers, cars. I am clumsy, unaware of my bodily proportions; I regularly pinball through jambs. Even my current low-profile Timex gets whacked weekly. And then there is the wrist sweat, the slow corrosion of being exposed to my body’s excreta. After a week in the Mississippi heat my watch smells like Satan’s jockstrap. Dear Hodinkee, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly. 

Perhaps my ambivalence has to do less with my crippled sense of fashion or my showy sense of thriftiness and more to do with my sweaty grasp on time itself. By which I mean the concept. I know enough about time management to know that I am terrible at it — as if time were easily organizable and not in fact fluid, always expanding or contracting with no attention to one’s dominion. Time changes with the activity. You try to save time, you try to capture it, blowing air into a balloon, and you come back an hour later, and the balloon is geriatric on the floor, its face wrinkled. That time you saved was no good floating around unused. It’s worse than an opened champagne bottle. Time flies, yet feels interminable. Is there anything slower than a bad play? But go on Twitter and an hour vaporizes. The brownies are burnt. I have some place I need to be. Is it over already? I am constantly 5-7 minutes late to everything and yet I hate waiting around for stuff to start. I’m always cramming more tasks into those small envelopes of time prior to departure, time I realize too late I should have used for driving. It’s called a deadline because it functions like miniature death. Remember there were goals you wanted to accomplish before you died? Way back when you did not think you were actually ever going to die, but now that you’re old enough to have a fleeting notion on your own mortality, you’re too tired to remember what they were, much less do them. There’s no time for that. You’re worn out. It’s time to go. Lunch hour was supposed to be a half hour ago. Perhaps I don’t want to wear a watch because I don’t want the constant reminder of how time whips me. 

I realize this is all totally meaningless, and yet these are the kind of branching thoughts I chew throughout my day. Plus there is the desire to simplify. There is so much detritus that can’t be avoided (papers home from school) or won’t be shunned (Twitter), so much physical and mental lint, that any personal kind of trimming of the sails makes one feel, makes me feel, slightly more intentional about my progress through what is admittedly a fairly unintentional landscape. Maybe Tuesday would feel better without a watch. Would it even still feel like Tuesday?

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

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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.