All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

One Stab Down

plague journal,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, ma’am.” 

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

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

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

“Thank you so much,” I said. 

“Have a blessed day,” she said.  

And so I did. 

Canon Fodder

literary lint,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote

literary lint

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

Once there was a city

plague journal, ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the Second World

plague journal, ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They never left, did they?”

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

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

Clothes Mask the Man

essays, ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from TikTok

literary lint, , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Kitsch Putsch

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Saturday morning, January 9th. I am bewildered by the insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. It seems at once both completely bonkers and also the logical apotheosis of Trump’s political trajectory. That this was always going to happen doesn’t make it any less shameful.

From the images, articles, tweets, sounds, video, there is a paradoxical portrait of the day. It seems absurd, a kind of playacting. I myself previously compared the QAnon folks to Live Action Role Playing participants. There was an aura of a video game come to life, but at some point during the march to the police-lined fences around the Capitol, the actions crossed the Rubicon from online and peer group projection to actual crime, seditious action, destruction of property, assault, etc. They crossed into reality. And as more details manifest, the insurrection appears less like a camp gesture of disaffected whites and more like what it was: a failed but nearly successful domestic terrorist event. Both elements were present. There was the shirtless Daniel Boone Viking helmet guy and the Delta Force extra, kitted out with his zip-tie handcuffs. The event is both revolutionary kitsch and violent putsch.

Jamelle Bouie has helpfully pointed out that this bothness is often present in white supremacist groups. The Ku Klux Klan wear the ridiculous, pointy hoods and use the designation “wizard” unironically. It’s almost as if extremist efforts must begin as practical jokes that go too far, begin to take themselves seriously. And as others have pointed out online, these domestic terrorists reaped the benefit of not being taken seriously as a general rule.

Sunday afternoon. The relentless gaslighting has begun. Turns out, seeing is not believing. The believers themselves crossed into reality on Wednesday, and their reality and the apostate reality was briefly shared. But now that reality is being transformed into something else, a complicated mass hallucination. Only the blind can truly see: Antifa, cancel culture, big tech monopolies quashing free speech. The believers call for unity but not for responsibility.

Review of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation,

Originally published in issue 47 of The Quarterly Conversation

Novel Spirits: George Saunders Goes Long

In her latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Cynthia Ozick discusses Lionel Trilling, who despite being recognized as an esteemed literary critic of his time — a “figure” is Ozick’s word — had written to himself in his journal that he felt under-accomplished and that the road to a lasting literary contribution to the world was simple: it was the novel or nothing. Ozick deems The Middle of the Journey, the one novel Trilling did complete before his death, a good but not great book, an honorable beginning, but what puzzles her is how Trilling was haunted by the Novel, as a literary category in America. To succeed at the novel was to achieve true success; everything else was just pretending.

Ozick herself has been the victim of similar curses. Before publishing her first stories, before embarking on her career of literary essays for which she is one of my favorite living writers, she labored for seven years on a novel never published, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. She then labored for another seven years on a novel that was finally published — Trust — about which she self-laceratingly brags not one person has actually read all the way through. It was only after getting over this multi-year, multi-novel hurdle that Ozick started to become the writer we begin to recognize today, who did, it must be said, go on to write “successful novels.” But it was the novel as gauntlet, the novel as totem, that cursed her, and seems to curse her still.

We’ve moved past all that, right? We’ve got micro-fictions and flash fictions and autofictions and lyric essays and confessional literary criticism about dildos. Sadly, no. Despite all our new-fangled literary categories, which are often just new names for old things, Parkay for Oleo-Margarin, American literary culture is still haunted by the Novel. It is the monolithic literary form of this country, the category against which all other kinds of writing are measured — a strange thing, because aside from “a prose work of a certain length,” it’s basically impossible to define. There is the persistent myth of the Great American Novel, a book expansive enough to encapsulate our country’s unique breed of idiocy and promise, a collectively envisioned cartoon of what a novel should be. And like American Exceptionalism or home buying as a path to wealth, some myths never die, no matter how crude.

All of this baggage is particularly problematic for the short story writer. I should say the “American short story writer,” since there aren’t many other kinds. The short story, with the requisite Irish exceptions, hasn’t prospered in the same way anywhere else, at least not to become its own codified arena of literature, so that we have several Great American Short Story Writers. Why this form has thrived here and not elsewhere is an interesting topic, but one for another essay. And yet despite this history of success, and despite the infrastructure of support for story writers (and poets!) that exists via the American creative writing complex, the history of the American short story is littered with great writers who aggravated their natural talents by cranking out a novel to satisfy the culture. One can skim the bibliographies of celebrated story writers and see these novels peeking out bashfully, mixtures of literary tokenism and self-imposed self-improvement, as if writing a novel really were like running a marathon — so many hail mary bids to win respect from an absent cultural father.

Novels by short story writers (let’s pretend for a moment that these categories aren’t porous) often feel too long, yet not long enough. One type is like John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, a collection of linked narratives that aren’t independent enough to be stories yet not connected enough to accumulate into a cohesive narrative. It feels like a bag of marbles rather than a marble sculpture. The other type of story-writer novel is the overbuilt birdhouse: a structure with an extreme amount of planning in which not much actually happens.

Which brings us to George Saunders, arguably the preeminent American story writer of our day. This post of pre-eminent, living story writer is like the Presidency. Only one person can occupy it at a time, and sadly that person is usually male. The requirements of this office are not just writing good stories. And make no mistake, Saunders writes excellent stories. This person must be iconoclastic. He must have imitators, and boy, does Saunders have imitators. This is not his fault. He is very successful at his own shtick, but that shtick contains enough easily identifiable characteristics that younger writers — willingly or not — can imitate him. It’s to Saunders’s credit that vast swaths of contemporary American writing look like Saunders’s discards. Many writers have made entire careers out of being Diet Saunders. I’m not going to name names. Just throw in an absurd premise set slightly in the future, a premise that seems to comment somewhat ironically on our late-capitalistic quagmire, throw in some lightly magical phenomena that function as heavy-handed metaphors, and maybe a pinch of moral allegory, all wrapped up in a heart-on-sleeve-be-kind-rewind sincerity, and you’ve got yourself a sub-Saunders story. And I say all this as someone who finds Saunders’s aesthetic terribly alluring, as someone who has written these stories myself. I’m not blaming people who write like Saunders (or not too much, at least). They might have come to it all on their own. Perhaps Saunders is merely the current apotheosis of a certain angle of approaching the world. Or maybe he’s not. But either way, you don’t have to pull a muscle trying to uncover Saunders’s overwhelming influence.

And this influence is not just on prose style. Saunders is thought of somewhat generically as a saint, as someone who exudes a Jesus-like kindness, about whom Joshua Ferris says, “He seems in touch with some better being.” Tobias Wolff says, “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” I have no wish to dispel these excellent thoughts about Saunders’s character, but it’s a little weird how our literary culture turns excellent male writers (again always male) into gurus. Saunders isn’t just the best American writer currently writing stories; he’s the Gandhi of grad school.

But all this adoration aside, Gandhi still hadn’t written a novel. And short story writers who haven’t yet written a novel are treated like spinster women in a pre-war patriarchy: Why won’t they get with the program? What is wrong with them? And so here we are at the beginning of 2017 with Saunders finally walking a novel down the aisle, whether by cultural compulsion or authorial ambition no one truly knows.

Lincoln in the Bardo covers approximately the first 24 hours after the burial of Willie Lincoln, the president’s third son, from typhoid fever. Upon his death, Willie enters a “bardo,” traditionally a Buddhist state between your past earthly life and your next reincarnation. The bardo at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown is a crowded place, full of dead souls who won’t admit to themselves that they’re dead and fear moving onto the next plane; whether this next plane is specifically heaven or hell or Buddhist reincarnation is left mysterious. Willie’s eventual realization that he’s dead and that he should move on from the bardo is facilitated by three ghosts — Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and The Reverend Everly Thomas. These ghosts are our heroes in triplicate and function as narrators of the novel, though narration isn’t quite the right word.

The novel is split unevenly between two modes. One mode consists of occasional brief chapters of historical quotations, creating an assemblage of primary sources. These historical clippings give a window onto the context of the time: the depth of the Lincolns’ grief over the death of Willie, the fact that a state dinner was held at the White House on the night immediately preceding Willie’s death, and the growing national rage at the carnage of the Civil War. These historical bits are mixed in the much larger soup of the second mode: Willie’s time in the bardo alongside its many infuriated guests. This portion of the novel, its majority, is rendered like the dialogue of a play, where different ghosts show up and tell their stories or comment on the action (Bevins, Vollman, and Thomas being the most frequent participants). Of course these ghosts, in fine Saunders fashion, are a bit wacky, and are in states that reference how they died. For instance, Vollman, who died the day he was to finally consummate his marriage to his much younger wife, wanders around the bardo with an enormous erection, while Bevins, who committed suicide after being thwarted by his illicit gay lover, is a constant mushroom of sprouting jealous eyeballs. Etc. The result is a goofy parade of souls, each inflamed by the injustice of no longer being alive and eager to tell his or her story. There’s Eddie and Betsy Baron, the foul-mouthed worst parents ever; Lt. Cecil Stone, a racist, antebellum Yosemite Sam; Thomas Haden, a dutiful and docile slave during his life, now consumed with rage at his complicity with his own subjugation; and the Bachelors, a set of three men racing about enjoying their freedom and raining down hats of all styles on anyone who gets in their way. The result is a kind of Richard Scarry’s Busytown of the Undead.

Here’s what happens. The just-deceased Willie arrives in the bardo and is discovered by our three main ghosts as well as many others. Later that same day, the day of Willie’s funeral, Abraham Lincoln returns to the cemetery to see his boy’s body one last time. Frustrated that his father is talking to his “sick-form” rather than him, Willie enters his own dead body, and hears the words his father utters through his tears. The ghosts, when they enter the bodies of the living, can’t quite “possess” them in this novel, but they do feel all of their sensations, as well as the entirety of their past. It’s during this exchange that the elder Lincoln tells his son that he will return again to see him, which is why afterward Willie refuses to move onto the next plane. This is particularly bad because children were not meant to remain in the bardo, even more so than the adults, and Willie is soon ensnared in a concrete-like carapace composed of the faces of grievous sinners (baby killers, incest committers), from which our trio must repeatedly free him. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not entirely clear what’s going on.

Word comes that Lincoln is still on the cemetery grounds, so Bevins and Vollman race off to find him, enter him, and try to convince him to return to the chapel where Willie is interred, which will somehow persuade his son’s ghost to move onto the next life. Finally reunited in the chapel, Willie enters his father and realizes that he’s actually dead and announces this to the ghosts surrounding him, much to their shock and dismay. It’s the one thing none of them wants to admit. With this, Willie moves onto the next realm, the arrival of which is always described the same way: “Then came the familiar, yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matterlightblooming phenomenon.”

The result, as you might have intuited, is one extremely goofy book. The novel isn’t bad per se, but it’s a decidedly lumpy reading experience. In part it’s highly enjoyable, a kind of Saunders-does-Dante romp. The book, with its copious white space and snappy dialogue and hardly any detailed narration, reads quickly enough, though it seems to take forever to get anywhere. The gears never really catch to achieve that coasting downhill feeling.

The most effective parts of the novel are when we see President Lincoln grieving over his son. Perhaps my reaction was a little too personal, but as the father of small children, I found these sections almost intolerably moving. Here’s a moment of such grieving from when Bevins and Vollman enter Lincoln in their attempt to persuade him to return to the chapel:

          First time we fitted him for a suit.

          Thus thought the gentleman.

          (This did the trick.)

          First time we fitted him for a suit, he looked down at the trousers and then up at me, amazed, as if to say: Father, I am wearing grown-up pants.

          Shirtless, barefoot, pale round belly like an old man’s. Then the little cuffed shirt and buttoning it up.

          Goodbye, little belly, we are enshirting you now.

          Enshirting? I do not believe that is even a word, Father.

          I tied the little tie. Spun him around for a look.

          We have dressed up a wild savage, looks like, I said.

          He made the growling face. His hair stuck straight up, his cheeks were red. (Racing around that store just previous, he had knocked over a rack of socks.) The tailor, complicit, brought out the little jacket with much pomp.

          Then the shy boyish smile as I slid the jacket on him.

          Say, he said, don’t I look fine, Father?

          Then no thought at all for a while, and we just looked about us: bare trees black against the dark-blue sky.

          Little jacket little jacket little jacket.

          This phrase sounded in our head.

          A star flickered off, then on.

          Same one he is wearing back in there, now.

And here is the moment when Lincoln first visits the chapel and Willie becomes so frustrated that his father can’t see him that he enters his own dead body:

The lad threw one arm familiarly around his father’s neck, as he must often have done, and drew himself in closer, until his head was touching his father’s head, the better to hear the words the man was whispering into the neck of the —

Hans Vollman

His frustration then becoming unbearable, the boy began to —

Roger Bevins III

The lad began to enter himself.

Hans Vollman

As it were.

Roger Bevins III

The boy began to enter himself; had soon entered himself entirely, and at this, the man began sobbing anew, as if he could feel the altered condition of that which he held.

The Reverend Everly Thomas

As the quotation illustrates, when Devins, et al., speak, it’s sometimes their speech and sometimes straight narration, and at other times even reported speech of other characters present on the scene and presumably capable of talking on their own. The effect is something like a Moises Kaufman play, a collage of voices, and while this can be quite powerful on stage, here the device often makes for awkward reading. Who is speaking and why? Plus, the way the attributions are handled, with the speaker’s name given after what’s been spoken, and the rapid back-and-forth between our three narrators — though not so much between each other as between themselves and the reader — render the who question mute. It doesn’t seem to matter, and this reader let the individual narrators bleed together in his mind with no apparent side effects.

Another effective part of the book is the mass possession of Lincoln’s body, which is an attempt to keep him from leaving the chapel. Our three heroes call for help and the ghosts, excited by the presence of a living being walking around, jump into action. “What a pleasure,” Bevins says. “What a pleasure it was, being in there. Together. United in common purpose. In there together, yet also within one another, thereby receiving glimpses of one another’s minds, and glimpses, also, of Mr. Lincoln’s mind. How good it felt, doing this together!” This moment of joyous unity — this “serendipitous mass co-habitation” — removes the remaining scars from their recently departed lives. (Vollman loses his erection; Bevins has a normal number of eyeballs, etc.) In a way the bardo, outside of Lincoln’s body and its magnetizing purpose, is a kind of libertarian hellscape, a compendium of self-interested ghosts spouting their self-justifying narratives.

At the end of the book, the specter of history infiltrates the narrative, more so than the contextual primary source quotations sprinkled throughout. Lincoln’s final visit with his son’s ghost and his possession by the bardo’s other ghosts imbues him with a sense of resolve regarding the Civil War and how to win it. He walks away realizing it’s a fight that must be won at all costs, despite its guaranteed, immense bloodshed. Willie’s death in a way represents all of the young soldiers who have died. This moment of resolution ends with a great huzzah to the optimistic promise of America, worthy of an Obama speech, where “all of that bounty, was for everyone, for everyone to use, seemingly put here to teach a man to be free, to teach that a man could be free, that any man, any free white man, could come from as low a place as he had . . . might rise, here, as high as he was inclined to go,” as opposed to “the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly . . . and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think they had not only grown it, but picked it, and invented the whole idea of fruit, too.” I didn’t intend to finish reading this novel on the last day of Obama’s presidency, but that’s what happened. There I was, the day before King Baby was sworn into office, reading about liminal states and the need to face one’s fear and go into the light, children. But by the time you read this review we will all have jumped the fence of that particular bardo, where no Tangina can save us.

Despite the novel’s echoes with our current national trauma, I miss the humor of Saunders’s earlier work. There are no zombie grandmothers screaming “show your cock!” here, and the moments that are obviously intended to be humorous come across as mostly goofy. This also might be a personal preference: funny writing is great; goofy writing is not as great. There is a fine line between them, one that I’m not wholly capable of defining. I apologize for lapsing into know-it-when-I-see-it-ism. In the Saunders’s stories, the jokes have teeth. But this feels more like an extended Saturday Night Live skit, characters paraded onstage one after the other. They’re amusing but they’re not bruising. 

In hindsight, Saunders’s main talent — of his many talents, let’s be honest — is how he reduces his worlds via (paradoxically) ramping up various twenty-first century phenomena. He’s able to do so much with so little because it’s grafted onto our shared experience. His stories are only slightly off from reality. And while the predicament of the ghosts is interesting and occasionally moving, one nears the end of the novel wanting them to get on with it.

Finally, despite Saunders’s enthusiasm for the bounty and potential of America and the felt resonances between his historical novel and our present time, I feel a little cheated by his retreat into the past. One hates to trot out Henry James’s old imperative that the novelist deal with the “present, palpable intimate,” but we’ve had plenty of writing about Lincoln. What we need is eyes on the now. Now that he’s satisfied the cultural obligation to produce a novel, perhaps Saunders can return to focusing on his satirical short stories. Lord knows we need to see what kind of story Saunders will write when life itself has turned into a Saunders story.

Review of ‘B & Me’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in issue 39 of The Quarterly Conversation

B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
By J.C. Hallman

There’s a conspicuous history of books that simply should not work: books that, when described, sound like surefire failures, or simply bad ideas, books that any sober acquisitions editor would shake his head authoritatively over. There are also books that should simply not work at the conceptual, blueprint level. Something about their intellectual architecture just can’t be right, simply cannot provide support for the proposed building. But then of course these books do work, and then one spends the rest of the afternoon walking around delighted and confused.

Books like U & I by Nicholson Baker, a book-length exercise in “memory criticism,” where Baker traces Updike’s influence on his own writing life while studiously not actually re-reading any of Updike’s books. Or books like Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s book that procrastinates away from writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, which then of course becomes a very funny explication of and homage to D.H. Lawrence. Now we must add to this trickster pile J.C. Hallman’s B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, which reads like some gene-spliced combination of the two, a description which, I confess, makes the book sound like no fun, but if you can quit raising your left eyebrow long enough and get a few pages in, it’s about the most fun reading you’ve experienced in years.

And thank the good sweet lord for it. Please no more post-apocalyptic allegories about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of environmental catastrophe, or historical epics depicting moist, psychological tenderness inside the trenches of WWI, or memoirs of conveniently Aristotelean personal transgression, or thousand-page landfills of prose written by and about sexy Nordic men who are never not photographed not smoking. Give us something messy and unfilmable and weird and slightly embarrassing. Give us J.C. Hallman. Instead of some artfully rendered enactment of cultural sensitivity that flatters my own sophistication, Hallman has written a book that’s both enthralling and unnerving. Praise be.

Instead of tracking Baker’s influence upon him as it has accrued throughout his life, which was Baker’s modus in U & I, Hallman tracks his interest in Baker from the moment he begins reading him. “What needed to be done, I’d been saying, what no one had ever done, was tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize that there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them.”

The result is the lifecycle of readerly affection, from first covert glance, to first date, to first consummation, to the inevitable blown-out elastic of routine. And these romantic/sexual metaphors are not mine. They’re all Hallman’s. In fact, the crisis that precedes Hallman’s interest in Baker is a depletion of his enthusiasm for literature as an endeavor — as something to write, or to teach, or to read. He’s worn out from his teaching job and lost his mojo, and he feels intuitively that Baker might hold some funky tonic that will rejuvenate him once again.

One of Hallman’s complaints with the teaching of literature is how it’s an inherently artificial approximation of the readerly event — sexual discussion as opposed to sex itself, which leads him to a book-long extended metaphor of reading as intellectual arousal, which sounds a lot more outlandish than it is. What he’s doing, on the one hand, is returning “creative writing” back to its original, life-giving, Emersonian grind party, where reading is a randy Whitmanesque erotic throwdown. What he’s also doing, more cleverly, is tying this Emersonian idea to Baker’s writing, specifically his “sex books,” the trilogy of novels consisting of Vox, The Fermata, and House of Holes, which some critics consider essentially porn and a waste of Baker’s talents and which others consider a whale of a time. (I’ll confess that I’m in the talent-waster camp, though Hallman has made me reconsider my position mightily.)

One of the amazing things Hallman does in the book is tie all of Baker’s work together at the microscopic, or Bakerian, level. For instance, he shows how holes have been a pivotal motif throughout all of Baker’s book. (Holes!) He does the same thing for washing machines, or anything with a centrifugal force, as well as sunbeams, and music, and stopping time, and punctuation. If you’ve read Baker, you know that much of his alien charm is connected with his ability to stare at everyday objects with a mad intensity and report that intensity back to you in language that defamiliarizes the mundane. He’s like a roving MoMA exhibit in prose. Escalators simply aren’t the same after you’ve read Baker — same with drinking straws, vinyl records, footnotes, sprinklers, ereaders, peanut butter jars, radio dials, liquid crystal displays, spoons, metrical poetry, etc. What Hallman does by reading Baker chronologically and supremely intensely is annihilate all categories from Baker’s oeuvre and see it as a complementary whole.

The result is a multifarious critical biography of Baker, who comes across as a shy, nervous, fundamentally happy author who is hijacked by two intellectual crises, both born from civilization’s inability to appreciate detail. The first crisis is the duplicity of unnecessary technological innovation at libraries (with its concomitant amnesia toward history and willfully blind bureaucracy), which culminated in the polemic Double Fold, about the conspiracy of libraries around the country to move from technologically secure paper books to dubious and buggy microfilm. The second crisis, both personal and literary — the distinctions here also annihilated — is the Iraq war, and the awakening of Baker’s latent pacifism, which leads both to Checkpoint, the novel-in-dialogue of one Baker-like stand-in convincing another Baker-like stand-in to not assassinate the president. Hallman convincingly argues that the book is an argument on behalf of pacifism, despite the fact that most of the reviewers at the time wildly misread the book in a rose-colored jingoistic rage — “a kind of high-water mark in the history of reviewers getting it wrong.” The other book that comes out of Baker’s aroused pacifism is Human Smoke, which is a collage of quotations taken from primary sources that purports to show that WWII was not inevitable, that the persecution of central Europe’s Jewish population was not a surprise, and that this war, despite the hazy mists of nostalgia, was in no way a “good war” waged by the “greatest generation.” 

But this book is not just an explication of Baker’s work. The literary analysis is embedded within a narrative of Hallman’s own journey as a writer, from one location to another, all in the company of his partner Catherine, who is his lover, his confidant, and his foil. The book chronicles the arc of their love as well, sometimes in visceral detail. His love for Catherine mirrors his love for Baker; the two arousals are intertwined. There is no separating bookish love from romantic love or sexual love — they are all hopelessly mixed — and in showing the reader this hopeless mix, Hallman re-solders literature to the fuse of life. Hallman doesn’t just analyze Baker or explicate how the books work. He dramatizes his reading of them and his discovery of how they work, how they are all connected. Book marketing jacket copy is always claiming some new novel is a “literary thriller,” but what Hallman has written is actually literally a literary thriller: it’s a thrilling depiction of him chasing the rabbit of his interest through Baker’s books. How will he put it together? How will the next book rub against the grain of his lived experience? Hallman has covertly written one of those “this is why we read” books, except you will actually want to read his version, because rather than arguing that literature is good medicine or a token of cultural prestige or even just a whole lot of fun, he convinces you that literature is a fundamental facet of life, as requisite as sex, and he convinces you by showing you. “That’s what we should be when we read,” he says at one point, “a precise point of prolonged and intense sensitivity, caught in time and reading.”

If I have one complaint about the book it’s that even though we get plenty of biographical data about Hallman and Catherine, I still feel oddly uninformed at the end. There are moments where the details of their sexual goings on are amply offered, but their relationship remains opaque. The result is a paradox, which has become a frequent trope in much current creative nonfiction. That is, there is a shameless sharing of information, usually sexual activity, and yet there are wide elisions of character. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets had the same mixture of sexual frankness and utter opacity. Reading these books I feel like I’m watching some premium cable Sunday evening program: plenty of distracting flesh but very little inner life. For instance, Catherine awakens in a rage one night over the prospect that Hallman isn’t staying on his side of the bed. She seems hysterical and the relationship feels as if it’s at a boiling point of aggravation. Just what is going on? Hallman escapes to surreptitiously read Baker. But this nocturnal provocation never bears fruit. It just sits there, narratively inert. Likewise, the couple moves from their urban apartment to a former bed and breakfast located in some unspecified rural location because Hallman has acquired a new teaching job, and the general impression is that Catherine hates it there. But why exactly? (Is she teaching there also? What specifically about the place is so bad? And just where on earth is this place? And why so sketchy about seemingly pertinent details?) And at the end of the book, they decide to move to Brooklyn. (Brooklyn!) It seems as if Hallman has given up teaching, but it’s hard to say because the biographical details taper off rather drastically, and so there’s no narrative explanation to why they are moving, what has happened with their careers, and how their various inchoate psycho-romantic complications have resolved themselves, if at all. Are they now equitably sharing the bed? They seem happy at the end of the book, after visiting Baker in person; in fact they seem happy as a consequence of seeing Baker, an apotheosis of their Baker-fueled love — and an apotheosis for the book we’re reading. But, aside from a convenient metaphorical parallel, one doesn’t really understand the true nutritional density of their happiness.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly literal here, but I feel slightly cheated by all of the biographical build-up throughout the book. Perhaps this is one reason why the parts where Hallman is reading and interpreting Baker are vastly more interesting than the biographical bits, even the sex parts. (Perhaps this says more about me than about the book under consideration, but after the initial impressive Emersonian metaphor, the harping on the sex stuff gets slightly boring.) In short, it feels like a cheat, like a tease, like the personal information from Hallman’s life is used as a decoy, as a hook into the analysis of Baker, and then discarded, which is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that some of the information is deemed worthy of communicating to the reader (e.g., their bowel movements in Paris) but other information is not. It raises the expectation that we should care about these characters as people, and then all of the detail that we feel we are owed narratively is withheld from us. In the end, Catherine is opaque, and Hallman, for all his forthrightness, still seems selectively inclusive, which is fine. I mean, these are people out in the world. They have their own lives. They don’t have to tell me everything! And yet, I was given the false impression that they were telling me everything.

My own narrative greediness aside, this is a wonderful book, a brave book, which would still succeed even if you’ve never read Baker. To read Hallman read another writer, to participate in the arc of his infatuation, is a delight: it’s what dissertations should be, or as Hallman has it, literary criticism should be “a public display of affection.” In losing his manners and displaying his affection, he makes reading thrilling and necessary. Nick should be proud.