All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

These Little Town Blues

plague journal, ,

New York City is once again the center of the United States. I say once again, but really it’s always the center. It’s always been the true capital: if not the seat of government, then the seat of culture, money, the capital of Capital. It’s always been this way. In fact, New York is the true avant-garde of the country: it gets everything first. And it’s as if the city contains a karmic paradox where, for the price of its centrality to the nation (and to our imaginations), it must suffer first the psychopaths, the opportunists, the terrorists, and now the virus. 

In American literature, this leads to a kind of provincialism. Writers like Paul Auster or Jonathan Lethem can set novel after novel within the five boroughs and still be considered tackling a universal subject, while someone like Willa Cather or Faulkner or Welty or Jim Harrison are considered regional writers. New York is not a region. It is the region. 

Despite these relatively rural gripes even my black box of a heart was warmed by the appearance of the USNS Comfort ship plowing into New York harbor last week. I had read that it was headed that way, but I had no idea what it looked like. I didn’t know it would be white — like a giant metal robo-nurse. My heart swelled at the prospect that perhaps our techno-militaristic stockpile will somehow save us. If we could only breathe through bombs. 

Sometimes it’s beneficial to live in the sticks, relatively speaking. When the social distancing procedures came down, I thought glumly that these measures wouldn’t be that difficult to enact in my own life. Outside the three individuals in my immediate family and the three individuals in my office, I have to go out of my way to incorporate other people into my daily existence. I have to make plans. Any time except for a worldwide contagion this would be a recipe for depression, but now strangely it’s just slightly helpful. 

New York is the dream of rednecks everywhere, according to Saul Bellow. I too once wanted to go there. I applied to its MFA programs but never made it. The very next fall, 9/11 happened, and I breathed a (guilty, shameful) sigh of relief for continuing to ostracize myself down south — to be once again in a place where nothing ever happened. I have been to New York a couple of times, purely as a tourist, and I was amazed at how big it was, the sheer magnitude of people. Not to overplay my country mouse hand, but it’s overwhelmingly larger than my current life. All large northern cities are, but New York exponentially so. The universe of individual consciousness located within just one tall apartment building. Redneck leans head out of cab window, mouth open in wonder like a dog. 

Earlier this year — before all this — I was on a gig where I played “New York, New York” for the first time. I should have played it years ago, but somehow this was my first. One strange twist of fate was that the bass player on the gig was an older friend, and when I was a young whippersnapper, I used to hang out at another one of his straight-ahead gigs, and I would sneak up behind him and shout out a request for “New York, New York,” and without looking up to see who was heckling, he would say, “100 bucks or no dice.” Here in the land of “Margaritaville” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” one had to have some distant threshold of pride. But now we are playing it. 

When preparing, I was struck by how angry Sinatra sounds as he’s singing it. There’s contempt in his voice, bitterness. Surely that predates our own bitterness at playing the tune. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t bitter playing it. I was just glad I got through it without embarrassing myself or steering the band astray as I chopped out rhythm guitar. To be bitter, to really resent “New York, New York,” or NY, NY, one has to experience it more. One has to live it. Perhaps that’s what Sinatra was projecting in his recorded performance of the tune, both an admission of the city’s dominance over him (the implied narrator of the song), and also the song’s eventual dominance over him (the legendary performer), and its dominance ultimately over the culture. Have a city and a song ever so perfectly embodied one another? I don’t know. It’s a hell of a lot heavier than Kansas City.

Who’s Zoomin’ Who

plague journal, ,

Barely a week into online school and my children have done more video conferencing than I have in my entire life. Though I try not to leer in the background as they fire up another session, I can tell they’re already adept. Heck, they already know to mute their line when not talking. 

At least we have the internet, I thought the other day, while staring at a bird hop blamelessly from branch to branch. That’s the first time I’ve been actively grateful for the internet in ages. I don’t feel comfortable making predictions in any direction regarding what life will be like Afterward. But since adults have complained since time immemorial that what students learned in school wasn’t directly applicable to “real life,” this sudden lurch into online shoestring interconnectivity means that the kids have rapidly surpassed even the most utilitarian parents’ wildest dreams.

Not long ago I remember a school administrator discussing typing skills. He said he felt a little sheepish teaching middle schoolers typing when they would just be speaking into their computers within a couple of years. I was shocked. Surely not. The future is great and everything, but surely the kids cannot surpass typing, my most cherished adult-level skill. 

Typing is almost pure pleasure, the closest physical analogue I have to thinking itself. The only other activity that is nearly thought-adjacent might be walking. But then of course it’s difficult to type while walking, so you have to walk back to the house quickly in order to get those already fleeting thoughts down. Writing by hand is also pleasurable, to be sure, but it’s more physically difficult. And then you are left with such a mess. The almost instantaneous amalgamation of near-coherence that one gets from typing is decadently profound. Even crap drafts look good. And it’s not just the physio-mental activity itself that’s pleasurable. (Apple committed hubris when, in an effort to increase its laptops’ thinness, it introduced the butterfly keyboard, which frequently broke. It made typing — on a laptop! its primary mode of input! — more difficult.) Thinking in written language is fundamentally different than thinking in speech. I don’t want to belabor the idea that writing-thought is stronger than speaking-thought (though it is), but that these are two different skills and lead to different kinds of thought. Literature changed, of course, when the typewriter was introduced and then again when the word processor (still such an odd phrase) was introduced, and it will change yet again when our speech can be instantaneously transcribed. (Cue up ye olde anecdote about Henry James’s late period.) I don’t want to stand across the river of language and yell stop, necessarily, but I do want to recognize the private constructedness baked into the very act of writing prose, as opposed to the performative expectations built into the speech act. Perhaps it’s simply quieter, with all of the epistemological complications. Besides, people who talk aloud to themselves are rightly thought nutso.

I agree there are benefits to all this instant video chatting. My kids can see their teachers and buddies quickly and at scale. For a generation that never really made phone calls, they seem useful. Perhaps this social lacuna we’re experiencing will bring back the old-fashioned phone call, long thought outmoded, but like typing perhaps still useful. I remember phone calls in 8th grade that consisted entirely of me and my interlocutor listening to each other breathe. This was called flirting. 

I was on a video chat the other day and I became distracted by the small pane filled with my face. Is this what people see of me every day? This guy with the giant forehead and pore-ridden nose? Is this how I appear? One benefit of a day without video conferencing is that I go through vast stretches of time without being confronted with the burden of my own face. That’s not to say that I’m not vain, self-conscious, peacockish when given the chance, a gaping wound of ego constantly starved for attention. It’s just that I’m a little less these things when I’m not confronted twice an hour by my own face. 

We’re besotted with faces already anyway. The emotions of entire nations tip on the demeanor communicated by the national equivalent of a conference call. Speaking extemporaneously in an entertaining manner is no way to run a country. And hopefully school won’t devolve into a CNN panel discussion, the teacher just an emcee, a sheep in Wolf Blitzer’s clothing. Prose is a more efficient means of information transmission. It’s more difficult to create. (So much easier just to talk and talk and talk.) But it blesses the reader with perspective, time, and silence. And it weeds out some of the bullshitters. 

I heard my son talking to a computer the other day. “Google Silver Surfer,” he said. 

“Type it in!” I hollered from the other room. “Practice your spelling by typing it in!” 

When I made it around the corner he looked at me like I was crazy.

Disaster Reading

plague journal, ,

The first book I read this past week, the week when the world seemed to change, was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. It was another one of those paperbacks forgotten on my shelves for years, bought somewhere along the road of bookworming life. I fully intended to read it, but unless one hops into a book immediately after purchase, the book has to ferment for a while, until the right circumstances of life obligation, mental weather, and raw will power coalesce to make the endeavor appear attractive again. And for some reason, this week was the week for Empire of the Sun.

The novel is a fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a child during WWII, his idyllic life in the international settlement of Shanghai disrupted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the settlement’s subsequent invasion by the Japanese army. After spending a couple of months scavenging through the wreckage of Shanghai, separated from his parents, Jim, the protagonist and stand-in for Ballard, is apprehended and sent to live in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, where he stayed for the next three years until the war’s end. 

The book, soaked in death and deprivation and the rapid dissolution of civilization, is paradoxically a delight. Despite everything he has lost, Jim is rarely sad, rarely anxious. He is constantly resourceful and wily in his relationships with the grownups around the camp but also genuinely compassionate. He is somehow both entirely ruthless in his quest for another sweet potato and genuinely altruistic toward others. Perhaps the most morally interesting aspect of his character is how he admires the Japanese airmen, hoping to be one of them someday, and how by the end of the war he has become rather good at existing within it. He is entirely apprehensive about the end of the war because he has come to enjoy it. This echoes one of the central lessons of Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried, which is that war is horrible and yet also the most exciting experience possible, so that regular civilization afterward is a nourishing boredom. Perhaps it’s because of this competitive excitement that all war literature (and especially all war film) ends up being pro-war, no matter how noble its original intentions. Anything that dramatizes war helplessly glamorizes it at the same time. In this way someone like John Updike is one of the strongest anti-war writers because of his lifelong refusal to narrate it. He refuses to grant it his attention. 

I began reading the novel thinking it was a barely fictionalized version of Ballard’s own experience as a boy, a belief that grew shakier with each subsequent paragraph. After some Googling, I learned that the novel really is much more fictionalized. Though Ballard spent time in the camp at Lunghua, he never lost his parents. This is not a small revision. It’s Jim’s orphaned status (he is reunited with his parents at the end) that is the real inciting and exciting premise of the novel. All good children’s stories begin by eliminating the parents. It’s the doorway that leads to true adventure. 

This much wider fictionalized margin results in a more interesting book. It’s a novel that feels life-like. That is, it contains the almost random tugs and diversions of real life. It doesn’t communicate its architecture or themes overtly. It’s much more rangy than the movie version. Naturally, one might say, since most movie versions are much more structurally clearer than their novel source material. But still, for a novel it feels looser, almost journal like. There are even parts that are plainly dull, where the sense of adventure fades, where the plot, such as it is, circles back on itself. The reunion with his parents, his one goal throughout the novel, one which seems more and more unlikely, is oddly anticlimactic; they don’t appear on stage to do anything at the end. The plot satisfaction that their return might deliver is obscured by Jim commanding his old chauffeur, now re-employed, to drive him out to Lunghua one last time. The most convenient narrative tying up of loose ends is Jim’s quick reunion with Dr. Ransome. Ransome had been his chief mentor in the camp, in competition with Basie, the amoral and interestingly effeminate trickster figure who first takes Jim under his powdered wing near the funeral docks of Nantao. Their quick reunion, as Jim returns to the camp after wandering around the outskirts of Shanghai prior to the full arrival of American troops, is the most conspicuously convenient portion of the narrative. But even this is not given the full strings treatment. Paradoxically, where the plot would seem to yearn for Spielbergian rushes of music, Ballard draws back, skates on, moves to more interesting territory. It’s a strikingly unsentimental novel. 

Yes, yes, yes, but why now? Why this week, a week in which I have been unable to concentrate on anything more fully formed than the latest disaster headlines and the accumulating vapor of my own anxiety? Why read this novel now and read it with a sustained attention I’m rarely able to summon for anything else? 

Do I think our current situation and the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific are comparable? No, I don’t. And I think that’s in part why the novel was so alluring. It’s an escapism into the pure Known. All of the disaster that Jim witnesses and experiences is so visible, so easily comprehensible. Hunger, the loss of one’s parents, the constant threat of death by hostile forces — all terrible, but here, in this book, it makes sense. Whereas current American life does not make sense. We are living through an absence of sense, of concrete detail, of a stable narrative or narrator. We are in the land of as if. We are in a gap space of waiting to see what might happen, or at least at what scale events might happen, how bad it might get. And that unknown void is filled by the imagination (or, at least, by my imagination), and the result is horrifying. Each morning I awake and experience an ever shortening splinter of time where I am unaware of our new unreality. And then I remember. And then in the time it takes me to rouse myself and do some proactive domestic chore, I imagine all the horrible events that might happen: who might go to the hospital, who might die, how long this island-like life might last, what epoch-like economic tumult might transpire, what unvisited tributaries of calamity exist downstream. The mind is a terrible weapon. Anxiety is a kind of auto-immune disorder of the imagination. The ability to envision what might happen is mercilessly accelerated, so that one is paralyzed by all the proliferating mental possibilities. In fact, so much of my life doesn’t happen, because I am terrified of what might happen. I spend my days swinging between feeling utterly ridiculous and utterly terrified. In between I wash my hands. 

Notes on ‘Moonglow’

book reviews, literary lint, ,

I’m happy to report that I have a review of Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow in the inaugural issue of the Hoxie Gorge Review.

The review is the result of a friend recommending the novel to me. Somehow I had gotten into my 40s without actually ever reading Michael Chabon, despite his work being semi-ubiquitous. For a short period, it was almost a kind of literary cultural truancy to have not read any Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, and Whitehead.* (Rough guess: this moment perhaps ran from around 1996 until 2008.) But now I’ve finally broken the seal. Here are some leftover notes.

I was intrigued by how WWII and the Holocaust were used as a device in this novel. I have another friend in a book group and it seems that all of their novels have something to do with WWII and the Holocaust. That is, the novels rely on WWII in some large expositional way. The books get their narrative or moral momentum somehow from the war, even if the books aren’t otherwise about that historical event or time period. I am of course generalizing massively and will shirk the duty to cite actual books here. (This is just a general feeling, dig?) Sometimes I have the snarky half-thought: It would be interesting to read a contemporary American novel that didn’t use WWII as a source of exposition.

Freud and WWII: one could argue that these are the hidden engines in the postwar, American novel, the first as an explication for any character’s motivations, and the second as history’s Big Bang: the atrocity from which all characters and family histories spring. I am exaggerating, naturally. I fully well realize that WWII was a cataclysmic historical event; I am not trying to diminish its actual historical importance. But the way it is used as an Allen wrench of explanation in so many contemporary novels is astonishing. It steadily drives past the main street of historical dutifulness and enters the suburb of helpless reflex. It begins to feel like a curse of contemporary narrative — a hex key indeed.

Regarding the overwhelming narrative legacy of Freud, see contemporary children’s movies. No one character is ever intrinsically a jerk. They are a jerk as the result of some childhood trauma. It’s a device that’s used jokingly but taken seriously, perhaps the most dangerous type of device because it means that screenwriters — if that’s who we could pin this on — believe in it. Humorous use of backstory is recognized as a device, hence the jokiness, but it’s still routinely, desperately deployed, as if it’s the only explanation for why people misbehave. Turns out Iago was once left out of dodgeball. Furthermore, these explanatory backstories often become movie sequels themselves. It’s a kind of narrative cancer, these endlessly replicating tentpole explanations. Stories never finish. Nothing is ever whole. Each new movie simply a software update.  

The surprise in Moonglow is that the grandmother is not simply a Holocaust survivor but someone who appropriated the biography of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother is a grand trickster figure. She tells the young Michael stories while shuffling a deck of tarot cards — grandmother as fortune teller/author.

While I had my quibbles, I definitely think this is an interesting use of WWII/the Holocaust. It’s certainly not invoked one-dimensionally, though, to be sure, the scenes where the grandfather is in the battlefield strike me as the most generically filmish. They remind me too much of Wes Anderson. The details seem chosen too much for their innate quirkiness. (For example, as the grandfather makes his way through post–D-Day invasion France, he’s attacked by a man with a bow and arrow. And the preacher who provides him shelter just happens to share all of the grandfather’s non-invasion related astronomical interests, etc.) All the details seem cute in an overly symmetrical way. Rather than existing as artifacts from the world of these characters, the details seem chosen to alleviate some inner need for alignment within the mind of the creator. I realize this can be a legitimate artistic mode, but it tends to leave me cold and it seems to suffocate the possibility of actual drama. Perhaps my disagreements with Chabon’s choices for the WWII bits are a consequence of simply having seen too many films and TV shows about war, so that unless I am confronted by a raging hellscape of verisimilitude, I don’t really believe any of it. Or perhaps this narrative trail is just so well worn that it’s hard to make the sites look interesting again.

In a way Chabon’s use of WWII is a recognition that the war functions as a narrative trope. There is a John Barthian or perhaps Paul Austerian black hole in the center of the novel: the grandmother is not a clean embodiment of 20th-century horrors but a kind of narrative mirage. Part of my beef with the novel is that the narrator’s discovery of this mirage doesn’t seem to have any consequence, so as a reader I am uncertain what to make of it. Is it one of those self-referential gestures who’s central point seems to be It’s all make believe! or Isn’t make believe wonderful? or Aren’t we all tremendously silly for believing such a thing as this very novel?! I have always hated gestures like this — not self-referential moves in and of themselves but moves that seem to exist for the primary purpose of calling attention to themselves.

For me of course the ur-text of self-referentiality is “Duck Amuck,” the cartoon where Daffy Duck argues with and is tormented by his creator, who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. The cartoon starts as a joke, turns into a riddle, and ends in a black hole. The joke is that Daffy has beef with his creator. The illustrator is a cruel master preventing Daffy from doing his show. The fundamental revelation of any kind of self-referential move within a narrative is to remind the audience that all of this is chosen, placed, controlled and not in any way natural. The riddle is the revelation at the end of the cartoon that Bugs Bunny is the illustrator — the master of Daffy. This makes a kind of cosmic sense, since Bugs is the central trickster character in the Looney Tunes cartoons and slyly controls all of the other sub characters, who are always made into fools because they think they can control their own destinies. The black hole part is the infinite mirror reflection inherent in the idea that all of the animated characters are the projection/illustration/creation of another animated character, that the entire series is occurring within Bugs’s mind or as the result of Bugs’s controlling, artistic will. But then, who has created Bugs? Who is the illustrator’s illustrator? Once you have peered downward there is no end to this spiral staircase.

I realize that I have strayed a bit too far into bong-logic turf now, but such is the consequence of self-referentiality within any kind narrative art. To this artistic impetus, one wants to say, we get it. It’s make believe. We accept the premise that this is all happening in a book (or a movie or up on a stage or in a painting). We understand the invisible handshake inside the transaction. Repeatedly underlining this point, no matter how eloquently, will only grow tiresome. (See, e.g., the endings of most Nabokov novels).

In Chabon’s defense, Moonglow doesn’t go Full Referential. But it’s far from straight mimetic realism. For that I am grateful, and it’s that middle-distance aesthetic ambiguity on this self-awareness spectrum that has stayed with me the longest and has given me the most to think about afterward. Now on with the show. 

*Full disclosure: I regret to say I still have not read any Whitehead.

Heat Passes

Uncategorized, ,

It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity, Mary Karr jokes in The Liar’s Club. This cleverly updates the commonplace trope uttered by myself, uttered by everyone, here in this godforsaken hellscape of the modern South. It’s the heat and the humidity and the stupidity. I’m writing this on October 1, where the high temperature in Jackson is forecast to be 97 degrees. The humidity has slackened somewhat over the past couple of days so that it it’s not as face-punchingly hot as it has been, but it’s still terrible: no rain, no wind, a Lynchian stillness, a kind of weather paralysis that lasts way past sunset. Even the bugs are too stoned by the heat to make much racket. The only sound is the intermittent industrial donkey kick of compressors. It feels like a kind of plague — a heat that passeth all understanding.

The internet is for complaining and here I am complaining about the weather.

Life circumstances put me in the Midwest last weekly for a brief 24 hours, and it was blissful: 73 degrees with low humidity and a breeze. Though my meager anecdotal memory is no significance in light of the statistical evidence and projections for climate change — or what we called in my childhood global warming, which was never considered a hoax — it does seem hotter now here in my homeland as a middle-aged adult. When I was growing up, summer was of course a brutal slog, but there were regular afternoon thunderstorms. The humidity went somewhere, was up to something. The heavy clouds rolled in every afternoon, a cumulative resentment, and waited until about three o’clock to enact their revenge upon the morning. A dry August was a rarity. But now it’s a regular occurrence, and the pestilence drags on through September, half of October. It’s a song that never ends until, perhaps, November. What this means for future inhabitation in the ArkLaMiss is a question for people smarter than I. I know all the azaleas and hydrangeas and Japanese maples are going to die. The prospect of a well-watered lawn will become that much more extravagant. Perhaps it will turn to desert. In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin talks about the wisteria vine outside Miss Coldfield’s house blooming for the second time that summer. But now nothing blooms for the second time. It just hangs on, wilted, desperate for a little axial tilt.

Meanwhile the interiors of the buildings hum along at 72 degrees. It’s a class distinction universally applicable throughout the South that the more prestigious and wealthy a building and its inhabitants, the more intensely cold the air conditioning will be inside. This is always most conspicuous on college campuses, where the business schools Yeti out in their super modern digs while the English departments grow mold from all that trapped wet heat. They’re always the buildings slated for renovation one day. (Separate but related: At one school the English classes were held in rooms where the acoustical ceiling tile hung bulbous and stained, allegedly supporting decades of guano. In another, the science departments were literally underground, kept out of sight like a weirdo uncle.) I am of course grateful for air conditioning, but I still keep a sweater handy year-round.

I keep thinking I will adapt, that I won’t walk outside and panic at the level of heat, and scuttle quickly to my car, moving from one industrial oasis to another. But each year I must work through my shock, collar strangers at the post office, try to talk out my anxiety. Some intensely serious daily heat we’re having out there, huh? It seems like as one enters middle age, one should be less concerned with the weather, not more. And yet I’ve got three weather apps on my phone, and I’m eyeing a fourth. I keep thinking I should get one of those special radios. Don’t even get me started on tornadoes, which at this point in the distended summer would offer a welcome breeze at least. Even without the apocalyptic premonitions of global warming, I am a weather worrier. What will the next change be, and for how long, and should I have cleared out the gutters more thoroughly? But here, now, instead, in the roadkill days of summer, the lack of change is its own kind of terror, a kind of heat feedback, an overhead hair dryer from hell. It feels trivial to discuss yet there it is, everywhere and always.

Notes on Didion’s Notes

literary lint, ,

There is a genre of writing one might label “Sneering at the South.” A Charles Simic essay, first published in The New York Review of Books years ago, is exemplary. A writer who is from and lives elsewhere visits the South, rides around for a few days, writes down what he or she sees. Typically, they see a lot, but it’s a kind of invisible sight. There is precious little activity, but within the lethargy there is the amber-frozen freak show of the South, site of moral decrepitude, site of the country’s sins, left to fester and skew, where Puritan religious signage grows like weeds and the self-rationalizing monologues function as a kind of witnessing. The narrator of this journey is a quietly appalled reporter. The underlying rhetorical question is, “Can you believe this place?”

Joan Didion’s book South and West is one such book, though it’s an odd book to be sure, not really a book qua book, but an agglomeration of notes. The first section of 107 pages contains notes she made during a visit to the South with her husband in the summer of 1970. She thought that it would lead to something, but it never did (except this incidental volume). The second, much shorter (and much less interesting) section is about California and the environment surrounding the Patty Hearst trial. (This second section is less interesting mainly because there isn’t enough of it.) In other words, it’s a non-book book, or the kind of book that only famous writers with long distinguished careers get to publish — a book of scraps.

But these are quite interesting scraps. Previously, in my younger years, I was awfully defensive whenever one of these sneering at the South pieces arrived. I was put out for years — years — over that Simic piece. Don’t even get him started. But either I’ve mellowed or the Didion scraps are really that good, because I found myself genuinely enjoying her notes. Does she say anything particularly new about the South? Not really. She hits all the points that everyone else seems to hit — the relentless heat, the seeming absence of anything to do, the hair, the sports, the weird voodoo billboard religion. She captures the post-integration mindset of the white middle class in a couple of wonderful monologues, where she just lets people go on and on.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

“He had the smooth, rounded face of well-off New Orleans, that absence of angularity which characterizes the local genetic pool.”

“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken.”

“Before the doctor came in a nurse took my history, and she seemed not to believe a word I said. While I waited in my white smock I began to see it through her eyes: A woman walks into a clinic, a stranger to Meridian. She has long straight hair, which is not seen in the South among respectable women past the age of fourteen, and she complains of an injured rib. She gives her address as Los Angeles, but says the rib was injured in a hotel room in New Orleans. She says she is just ‘travelling through’ Meridian. This is not a story to inspire confidence, and I knew it as I told it, which made meeting her eyes difficult.”

“In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”

“We had drinks, and after a while we took our drinks, our road glasses, and went for a drive through town. Mrs. Evans had grown up in Grenada, had been married once before, and now she and her second husband — who was from Tupelo — lived in her mother’s old house. ‘Look at all those people standing around in front of that motel,’ she said once on the drive. ‘That’s a cathouse,’ her husband told her. We went out to a lake, and then to dinner at the Holiday Inn, this being another of those towns where the Holiday Inn was the best place to eat. We brought our drinks and a bottle in with us, because there was no liquor served, only setups. I am unsure whether the bottle was legal. The legality or illegality of liquor in the South seems a complication to outsiders, but is scarcely considered by the residents. At dinner some people were watching us, and later came over to say hello to the Evanses. They introduced us as friends from California. ‘We were wondering where you were from,’ one of them said.”

“We stopped at Walker Percy’s in Covington, Louisiana. We sat out in back by the bayou and drank gin and tonics and when a light rain began to fall, a kind of mist, Walker never paid any mind but just kept talking, and walking up to the house to get fresh drinks. It was a thunderstorm, with odd light, and there were occasional water-skiers on the black bayou water. ‘The South,’ he said, ‘owes a debt to the North . . . tore the Union apart once . . . and now only the South can save the North.’ He said he had not wanted to see us in New Orleans, at Ben C.’s, because at Ben C.’s he was always saying things he would not ordinarily say, playing a role. [Ben C. is the well-off New Orleanian of the first quotation above. — ed.] Greenville, he said, was a different kind of town. He had spent some time in Los Angeles once but could not face it. ‘It was the weather,’ his wife said mildly. ‘The weather was bad.’ ‘It wasn’t the weather,’ he said, and he knew exactly what it was.”

She begins in New Orleans, meanders around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, wanders up to Birmingham, back tracks through Mississippi and the Delta. There is no plot, no argument, no newsworthy event. There are merely small towns passed, observations collected, strings too short to use. These really are notes. Perhaps my appreciation grows out of a change within me. Perhaps I agree with these sneering at the South pieces more than I did when I was fresh out of college. Or perhaps rather than full on agreement, the observations serve as thrilling little whippit blasts of confirmation. Particularly here, the condescension inherent in the sneering pieces is subdued. She’s not overtly judging. She is just glamorously, serenely observing. One can almost see the expensive sunglasses.

Perhaps it’s the laconic precision of her prose. One wonders if Didion, as a person, was a difficult travel companion — astringent, hyper-particular, compulsively judgmental when confronted with the flux of travel — because her prose, conversely, is so precise and controlled and chilled. There is a moment when she puts her clothes in at a laundromat and goes to buy a cup of ice, and as she chews on the ice walking back, I thought: this is the perfect metaphor for Didion’s prose. It hurts your teeth, but it’s oddly refreshing.

Even though she’s describing the atmosphere from the summer of 1970 — almost fifty years gone now! — much of what she observes would still be accurate. James Fallows has a series of articles in The Atlantic that talk about industry finally coming to Mississippi, a topic many of Didion’s interlocutors go on and on about. Things are always on the verge of getting drastically better. Another evergreen topic is a strange defensiveness about being from and/or living in Mississippi (not that I myself would ever participate in this defensiveness, heavens). One wonders how much has really changed, aside from the obvious — the internet and slight political progress. Reading this book often makes present southern reality feel not historically distant but more like Back to the Future II. It contains the same plot and the majority of the same actors but the costumes are slightly different. The shoes now lace themselves but the same old complexities remain.

Note on Richard Ford

book reviews, literary lint, The Quarterly Conversation, , ,

I’m happy to report that I have new review in the world — of Richard Ford’s memoir from last year Between Them: Remembering My Parents — though to be honest, it’s an awfully long review, so perhaps this qualifies as one of those “review-essays” like the ones they run in the NYRB, a size and level of seriousness I’ve always coveted. Anyway, I was surprised to see Ford come out with a memoir for reasons I explain in my review, and so it was rewarding to do some full-contact chin-scratching over the book.

Typically, when I review a book, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the author — what he or she might think of what I am writing. This is not to be callous to their feelings. It’s just that book reviews, and especially the kind of review-essays that I try to write when I can pull them off, are not directed at the authors themselves. As a piece of writing it’s not really for them even though it’s in dialogue with or is riffing off of something they have written. It’s instead, of course, for the strangers out there who didn’t write the book but who might read it, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s aimed toward the sidecar oeuvre of literature about literature. Though it seems less romantic in a movie kind of way, there is a thriving body of literary commentary, some of which is more rewarding than the primary sources it purports to explicate (see, e.g., my beloved Cynthia Ozick on almost anybody). And really, more than anything, this is the distant bucket I am trying to pitch my little critical ping pong ball into — my Grand Prize Game of literary commentary.

That being said, I did think momentarily of what Ford would make of my review because the memoir at hand seems to be so revealing, though not in ways one typically encounters in a contemporary memoir. There are no scandalous confessions of sordid family drama. This ain’t Mary Karr. This ain’t The Surrender. And yet it’s still revealing, again for reasons I explain in the review. And to level criticism at the book skates almost too closely to leveling criticism at him, which of course I didn’t intend to do in the review. It’s just: the book is personal.

Plus another reason I was more aware of Ford’s imagined reaction is that Ford has established a reputation for reacting strongly to negative reviews of his work. When Alice Hoffman wrote a negative review of his novel The Sportswriter, Ford’s wife took a copy of Hoffman’s latest work out back and shot a hole in it. And then Ford shot a hole in it. And then he mailed it to her. (“People make such a big deal out of it — shooting a book — it’s not like I shot her,” he’s said.) And then when Colson Whitehead wrote a negative review of Ford’s story collection A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times, Ford spit on him at a subsequent literary party, calling Whitehead “a kid.”

One might — might — chalk this up to a more youthful impatience with public judgment (if one were being so charitable as to pull one’s back out), but then in 2017 Ford published an essay in Esquire where he both recounted these incidents and said he feels the same way now that he did then: “I realize that how I feel about my bad treatment is only one compass point among several legitimate ones. But I can tell you that, as of today, I don’t feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review, or my response.”

Furthermore, and even more damning, he expresses a total misunderstanding of the function of criticism:

Whenever I think about reviews of my books, I usually only think about the bad ones — the ones, again, that drive readers away, take bread out of my children’s mouths, devalue half a decade of honest effort, steal money out of my pocket, and cast a dark shadow over my future … I wonder if those bad-review writers would do it if they knew the chain reaction they’d set in motion. If they would, then they deserve what they get both here and beyond. I wouldn’t want to know too much about these people’s personal habits — how they treat their spouses and pets. I know, I’m way too sensitive.

Aside from being simply wrong, this is amusing because I don’t think Ford has any children. He has boasted on several occasions of choosing not to have any. (Sample quotation: “I hate children.”)

For a more detailed analysis of why his opinions about book reviewing are wrong, read Steve Donoghue’s take.

The literary feud info isn’t really in the purview of my review of his memoir, which is why it’s not included there, and why I am riffing on it here in this little note. I’m not interested in adjudicating every author’s interpersonal failing — casting stones in glass houses and all that — but this behavior is shameful, both morally and intellectually. All of which is to say: I don’t think Ford would like my review very much, though of course it’s much gentler than many others he’s received. That is, I don’t think my review is spit-worthy.

Despite all this, Ford still has composed many interesting textual documents, one of which is his essay “In the Face,” which was originally published in the New Yorker way back in 1996. It was subsequently reprinted in the following year’s Best American Essays, where I first encountered it. I wish I had a copy at hand because it seemed like such an interesting explication and exemplification of a mode of male thought vis-a-vis violence. Would it shed light on this feud stuff? Perhaps, but I’d have to locate my New Yorker subscription log-in credentials to find out for sure.

Another piece of nonfiction by Ford, which I’ve just now discovered in assembling this note, is an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine eons ago, where he chronicled his trip down the Mississippi River with Stanley Crouch, the novelist and jazz critic — yet another person who also hates bad reviews of his work. (He slapped his reviewer Dale Peck after coming face to face in a restaurant. What is it with these people?) Anyway, I have printed it out to read over the weekend, like the fogey I am. It’s pitched as a modern-day reenactment of Huck Finn, which sounds like one of those ideas only a roomful of trapped magazine editors would love. But given the two participants, it’s worth investigating. Here is the Crouch essay. And here, just now discovered (the internet really is amazing) is a letter-to-the-editor in response to both pieces by none other that Pat Conroy. Whoo-boy.

Finally, being a Jackson, MS, native who has returned to live in the city here in middle age, I got a tremendous kick out of a particular portion of the Ford memoir. When he was a teenager, Ford’s father got the itch for life in the suburbs. This being the 1950s in Jackson, they cruised north of town to look at the treeless scrub brush of new lots and barely finished houses down by a crook in the Pearl River. They looked at houses in neighborhoods with dubious names such as Sherwood Forest, Audubon Park, etc. I enjoyed this immensely because I live in Sherwood Forest. In fact it’s the neighborhood I grew up in, or one of them at least. And what to Ford back in the ’50s was a backwater, almost the country, to me in the mid ’90s was an old neighborhood, with established oak trees that rained down their terror of leaves each autumn. Now, when I take my kids north of the city, out past Madison, to visit friends, those are the houses with small, leafless trees and new un-moldy brick facades and yards still carpeted in their original layer of sod. At the end of the cul-de-sacs one’s sure to find the raw red clay of some radiologist’s future dream home. But I live “in the city.” So the burbs are just as contingent on time as anything else. Wait around long enough in any one spot and you become established.

Notes in the Bardo

book reviews, ,

I’m happy to report that I have a long review of the George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo in the latest issues of the Quarterly Conversation. In it I express many thoughts and feelings, not just about Bardo in particular but about the demilitarized zone between writing short stories and writing novels. I had so many thoughts and feelings that here are some fragments that didn’t make it into the review.

###

It’s an American cultural truth universally acknowledged that you can spend a lifetime writing brilliant short stories and be all but ignored — by publishers, critics, readers — while one mediocre novel with more soft spots than a week-old pear will make people’s heads turn. It takes a short story writer 40 years of highly praised work and an 800-page collection to garner the same level of attention that a garden-variety, 400-page, family melodrama receives. It makes no sense. Pile it upon the pyre of garbage that makes no sense.

The Novel is the Stanley Tape Measure of literary categories — the measurement by which all forms are measured.

Even books that are thrown together and simply labeled novels garner more acclaim than prose classified as anything else. It’s essentially neurotic. For example, you can see the yearning grasp for status in the label “nonfiction novel” that Truman Capote applied to his book-length reportage In Cold Blood (though, to be sure, that alleged work of nonfiction contains plenty of fictional wiggle) — this from a writer who never wrote a successful novel.* Of course I’m not counting Breakfast at Tiffany’s, at most a novella, which can be otherwise defined as a piece of literature publishers won’t publish as a stand-alone book.

Often what’s missing in these story-writer novels is the crucial ingredient of time; not enough of it passes. Whereas stories distill moments from a life, which is why they are hard to remember afterward and harder yet to use in larger cultural conversations, novels gain strength as they gain pages, enough time passing to show the gears of fate or character grinding out its pattern. Think of how the multiple generational narratives in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! overlap in a way that feels accidental and yet utterly unavoidable. This might be one of my favorite feelings a novel can generate. Obviously, there are many others. But the expansive treatment of time helps the novel work its magic, or a type of magic. Novels end up creating their inhabitable worlds not so much by overbuilding them with characters and information, as the short story writer is wont to do, but just by letting time pass. Think of One Hundred Year’s Of Solitude, and how that town feels like a known place simply because so many fictional feet have trod through it as the pages pass by. It’s a kind of sleight of hand. Think of Lolita, when the word “waterproof” is uttered at the end, and the reader’s attention-over-time is either rewarded or tested, and the unseen pattern emerges. Maybe a novel is just a prose work that contains more than one season. As I write this list, exceptions fly toward my face like asteroids.

Why do story writers feel pressured to write novels? Why is the novel so dominant? I don’t know, but I suspect the reasons are fairly plain: money, for starters. There is a splinter of a chance that people will actually buy your novel. After all, people once read them! And they still might turn them into movies, or an extended Netflix series, or whatever new entertainment package they’ve invented before I publish this. Second, and relatedly, it was the genre of the heyday of mass literacy, a historical coincidence we will never be able to forget. They didn’t line up on the docks of New York to hear about the death of Bulbasaur. Finally, novels are like milk jugs; if they reach a certain size, they contain their own handles; novels are simply easier to talk about, can be picked up and passed around a culture, can be used for all manner of misunderstanding. Meanwhile the short story sits inert, implacable, and glowing. The novel’s trickster shadow, never to be fully caught and sown back on.

I’m mixing my metaphors. And I sound like an old man.

It’s a little weird that our most popular shorter contemporary literary genres are the graduation speech and the advice column. The former has now become how we recognize deep thinking writers and the latter is now a legitimate way to build a body of work. It’s like a more soulful op-ed column. All of which is fine, I guess. What do I know? But are we that starved for love and instruction that these are the greatest hits of the age? Have we been that abandoned by our parents, figurative or otherwise? Rather than another novel, it seems like what we all really need is a big hug.

They won’t publish a novella as a standalone book but they’ll publish a graduation speech, each sentence blown up like a billboard slogan.

These thoughts are just practice swings before stepping to the plate. Overworked but underbaked taken as a personal aesthetic.

All of these fragments come from a short story writer who’s been thrashing within his own drafty, overbuilt novel for longer than he’s willing to admit, and who has become desperate for explanation as to why novel-writing is so consistently defeating. He’s hoping it’s not simply a failure of imagination.

*Other Voices, Other Rooms is a mess. Sorry! The Grass Harp is too much a book for children, and Answered Prayers is unfinished. There’s nothing more judgmental than a novelist working on his novel.

Note on Advent

Uncategorized, , ,

Parishioners at my church were asked for Advent reflections, which are being emailed around each morning as we march toward Christmas. The following is my contribution for week three, and in the internet-driven and slightly self-indulgent desire to log every piece of writing published in any way, no matter how tiny, I am posting it here.

****
We’ve entered the season of paradoxes. It’s the time of year when we celebrate everything shutting down, the long grey trek before springtime renewal. And though in the South all of our reactions to a potential change in temperature are mostly gestural, the leaves still turn. The change still happens. It’s the time of year when we bring a green tree inside our house and light it up to compensate for the growing darkness outside; it’s the time of year when we celebrate nature’s impending hibernation by talking about a baby being born in a barn; it’s the time of year when we pretend an obese lush breaks into our houses to give presents to our children. It’s beloved but absurd, holy but chintzy, overwhelmed with sacredness and alcohol, equal parts childish greedy joy and adulthood’s cultivated disappointment, an annual season of overdoing it in every direction. And this excess of meaning is embedded within the Christmas holiday itself; it both means too much and not enough. It’s spiritual and materialistic, pagan and Christian. And it annually tests our capacity for ambivalence and contradiction.
 
And I personally am not looking forward to it. This year has already outdone itself in the paradox department, as far as I am concerned. We live in a Bizarro World, where friends you know and love behave in ways totally antithetical to human decency. Where a third of the population isn’t paying attention and the other third has lost its ability to discern good from evil, even in the most cartoonish of forms. This fall I’ve made a harvest of being appalled at my fellow man, and now look at my overflowing cornucopia: rage, disappointment, vague loss of faith in our shared decency, doubt at my ability to effectuate change. These ingredients don’t make much of a meal, or make me much fun to be around.
 
And yet, the paradox of society — of living in semi-steady cordiality with large groups of people who annoy you to no end — must continue. How do I live through not just the paradox of changing seasons but the paradox of this particular season? How do I meet the seasonal obligation to love everyone with my whole mind and my whole heart and not yell at them like the traffic I think they are? Aren’t these people the least in the kingdom of heaven? Or is that me?
 
I can recognize the oncoming paradox of our shared existence, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live through. But live through it I must, because the days are getting shorter no matter how I feel about them. Days are like that. We’re all about to be stuck inside this winter darkness together. Who’s going to plug in the lights?
****

In hindsight, my contribution seems a little strained, overdetermined with unseen expository baggage. But rather than re-write it for this blog post, I’m just going to riff a little more, try to aerate the waters a bit.
 
One of the guiding texts of this small bit, and of my thoughts about Christmas these past few years, has been Adam Gopnik’s book Winter: Five Windows on the Season. It’s a collection of speeches he gave for the 2011 Massey Lectures put on by the CBC.
 
The guiding light here is of course the lecture on Christmas, where Gopnik details its modern transformation over the past 150 years. Before reading this book, and generally before having children, I was steadily growing to despise Christmas. I won’t list the reasons. They were not particularly original; feel free to supply your own. This dam of cynicism was broken first by children, whose enthusiasm is irrepressible and contagious. Their enthusiasm is not just for the annual raining down of presents but also for the high theatricality of the whole season. To them, Thanksgiving is fine, family and a big meal and a TV parade, but Christmas is fun. It accrues excitement as it moves along, like a giant snowball of wonder, and the theatricality pervades every aspect of their lives. This moves in contradistinction to my own holiday feeling that Thanksgiving is the grown-up holiday, the logical, rational, mature holiday. If we can dispense with the grade-school Puritan Thanksgiving origin myth and culinarily outmoded turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce, then Thanksgiving is great. A couple of days to stop time and attempt to appreciate one’s historically absurd first-world bounty. No prayers, no religion to fight about, above all no gifts to contaminate the symbolism, just a shared meal, a brief respite of community.
 
(Of course, if we really want to improve Thanksgiving, we should introduce some restrictions: no stuffing, no travel, and your nuclear family must eat with strangers. No extended sub-family reunions, and you must make the meal with these strangers. The main problem with Thanksgiving, as with all holidays, is the encrusting of tradition, which always kills the germ of fun in the end.)
 
But what Gopnik’s book taught me was how the children were onto something, namely that Christmas feels fun to them in part because it’s such an emotional and symbolic mess. Gopnik unpacks the mess: Santa is a clear descendent of the Saturn figure in Saturnalia festivals from ancient Rome; cultures throughout history (especially in cold climates) marked the winter solstice with trees and lights; our modern conception of Santa Claus primarily derives from Thomas Nast cartoons. Coincidentally, and interesting given our current historical situation, Gopnik points out that the Nast cartoons of Santa were quite similar to his caricatures of Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall infamy. So, our contemporary notion of Santa is also at the same time a caricature of unrestrained capitalistic corruption. Stick that in your war on Christmas.
 
The other bit that bothers me about Christmas is the desperate yoking together of the Christian birth of Jesus narrative with the elf-driven night of debauchery. (One might call this the fundamental bipolar quality of our contemporary Christmas.) This yoking together manifests itself via the relentless literalization of Jesus, which begins with Christmas and reaches its apotheosis with Easter, with people acting out the Stations of the Cross, and passion plays, and extreme, Mel Gibson-style sadistic descriptions of violence. Forget the presents under the tree; this is the childish part of Christmas, this blind heedless baby talk. At times it feels like everyone needs to go back to school: the surface stuff is not what the Bible is about, or not only what the Bible is about. It’s like a quality quiche: the good stuff is what’s on the inside. There are layers of meaning, for pete’s sake. Getting caught up in the literal surface details, in the quality of the hay in the manger, in aspects that are completely unverifiable in terms of history, misses the point. Perhaps my Unitarian slip is showing too forcefully here, but God talk makes me queasy.
 
My other main beef with Christianity — you’ll have noticed by now that I am not a deep religious thinker — is the relentless Protestant emphasis on belief. So much time is spent trying to coerce people into believing all of this stuff. What about the old-fashioned utilitarian value of showing up and doing good? Or just actively avoiding doing bad? Let’s save fewer souls and fill more sandbags.

Anyway, that’s the religious disposition I was coming from when writing this bit, moving away from hating Christmas by recognizing its culturally mongrel and incoherent nature. And then, of course, the Disaster occurred, and you see the result. About that Disaster, I don’t have anything else yet to say, nothing worth printing at least. I’m still looking for someone to plug in the lights, or hoping to acquire the ability to see in the dark.
 
I’m not sure if any of this rambling has clarified my Advent reflection. But nonetheless it feels good to blog about it. Worth remembering, that: blog’s an ugly word but a good feeling.

Bass guitars & Barry Hannah

book reviews, essays, ,

Update #1
It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s time for a new essay. Consequently, I’ve got a new essay out (or is it “up”?) at The Collapsar. It’s called “The Bass Guitar as a Mode of Being,” and it’s about that wonderful activity of playing the bass guitar. You might think there’s not much to say about playing the bass, but you would be wrong.

After the essay went up, a friend notified me of this old Kids in the Hall bit, which I hadn’t seen before (which is probably for the best; their jokes are better than mine).

And then, last week New Yorker writer Matthew Trammell had a piece about the musician Thundercat, and Trammell has some interesting things to say about the bass as well.

And finally, finally, though I am not in the market to acquire a new bass (sadly), if I were, and if I were dishing out bass-buying advice, I would first watch this video and then I would buy one of those Sire basses.

Update #2
I’ve also got a review in the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation. It covers Michael Bible’s novel Sophia, which I enjoyed, and which I sorted into the long line of literature that trails Barry Hannah. As a premise for the review, I argue that there is a Hannah tradition now. Hannah seems like one of those writers whose large, almost overbearing influence isn’t acknowledged in current literary criticism, while being constantly acknowledged among writers. Though perhaps there’s tons of discussion of this and I’m just not reading in the right places.

There wasn’t room in the review to mention Padgett Powell, but he is the preeminent Hannah writing today, perhaps even eclipsing Hannah himself. His sentences are beautifully ugly and create their own vernacular; he manages to write eloquently without slipping into a fussy, overly self-aware mode of high writing. I don’t know how he does it. It sounds like someone speaking but not in any way anyone has spoken before.

Another stray thought: the original Hannah was probably Beckett.

P.S. Adam Dorn is awesome.