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JPH, R.I.P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s on the gig?”

“Don’t worry. He’s a player.” 

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

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

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

“Oh, just someone I know.” 

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

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

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

Thank you for coming. 

Heat Passes

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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.

Note on Advent

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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.

Can walk, chew gum

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When I was in fifth grade and about to join middle school band, the band director at the time was trying to dissuade me from being a percussionist. “Anyone who can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time can play drums,” he said.

Now, being the son of a drummer, this was like being told you came from a blighted people — a hunchback-and-boil–type people. The band director needed trombonists, and I admittedly didn’t have the lip fortitude to handle the trumpet, which I’d been eyeing. I stuck with drums.

But these many years later I still have a hard time walking and chewing gum simultaneously, which is my roundabout explanation for why I haven’t posted any writing here on this international website of text for months and months. I didn’t intend to stop posting (at too long a length, somewhat monthly); it’s just that I’ve been over here chewing on some Wrigley with great intensity.*

I realize no one cares about this. At all. That was one of the painful yet freeing discoveries recently, made in private, worth nothing to no one. No one cares if you don’t update your blog. Consequently, no one cares if you start updating your blog again. You don’t even need a reason!

So here I am, again.

*And by chewing Wrigley I of course mean working on a novel.

D.G. Myers, RIP

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I did not know D.G. Myers personally, and except for a couple of twitter exchanges, I never communicated with him directly. I knew him only via his writing, which I read with steady attention for approximately the past six years. I can’t remember now what link pushed me in his direction, but after reading just a little bit of his literary criticism, I had the singular question that so much good writing throws off: who does this guy think he is?

I was in my first year as a “visiting writer,” teaching various creative writing courses to undergraduates, when I found his A Commonplace Blog, and I was immediately taken — his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the novel, his generosity toward various writers I knew nothing about, his hostility toward political correctness and fashion, his sense of literary standards in a standard-less world. One of his ideas in particular has become lodged within my own life so much that I quote it to myself almost weekly. Here is the long version:

Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the “canonical impulse.” Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.) “When an inability to stay interested in Sappho lasted longer than the parchment she was copied on,” Hugh Kenner says, “the poems of Sappho were lost.” There are many reasons to keep something from being lost, however.

These many reasons cannot be contained by a list of genres, no matter how long it is extended; nor by distinguishing fiction from non-fiction (because there are whole literatures, of which Jewish literature is only one, to which this distinction is an utter stranger); nor by “privileged criteria” like sublimity or irony or artistry or “stylistic range” or “bravura performance” or anything else that can be humanly imagined (because exceptions to the rule will immediately suggest themselves).

Literature is simply good writing — where “good” has, by definition, no fixed definition.

I often want to emblazon that last line in my office — perhaps scrawled onto the surface of my desk with a knife. What it did when I first read it, and what it does now, is relieve me from the narcissism of minor differences that so much contemporary American literature finds itself embroiled within. Is it realism or magical realism? Is this novel thoroughly postmodern enough? Is this “experimental”? Are fairy tales de-facto bad and non-adult? Does this novel contain just the right amount of autobiographical confessionalism? Does this novel attempt to contain all of contemporary American culture? Is this novel new and different according to these obscure criteria?

Furthermore, Myers definition of literature forces me to come up with my own definition of what “good” is — articulate it, defend it, proclaim it, try to manufacture it myself.

I resolved to read Myers book, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, during my first summer break from teaching. It was a revelation. It made what I was doing — pretending to be a Writer, so that I could fund my own attempt to write — historically coherent within the broader institution of American higher ed. I had come to the book with a short, convenient notion of creative writing’s history: that it was begun after WWII and the GI Bill in order to deal with the flux of students, some of whom wanted to be poets and novelists, etc.

Myers wrote that there was an increase in creative writing as a consequence of the GI Bill but that the pedagogy had begun much earlier, at the beginning of the century at Harvard, and was a manifestation of the broader impulses of progressive education: the idea that every student had something to express and that part of education was providing the means and the context to express it. The book also taught me that poetry and fiction, sequestered at the high-art end of the hall, were above neither freshman composition nor literary scholarship. (I heard one senior professor refer to comp once as the “gutter of the profession.”) Freshman comp was the moat you had to swim through to get to the castle of courses that “counted toward the major,” and I had finally made that transition, or so I thought. But Myers showed that in the beginning the courses came out of the same philosophical impulse, and that the subsequent battles were over turf and prestige, and that I should be much less cavalier in my pose of artistic importance. All of us teaching creative writing were merely teaching comp’s kin.

Myers didn’t take away my gargantuan level of self-satisfaction at being a visiting writer, but he did build a lot of context under my feet, and he made me a better teacher. I began to tell every student who approached me about going to graduate school to read Myers’s book. It’s one of those brief, historically stuffed books that makes sense of an entire cultural phenomenon and relieves the amnesiatic MFA vs. NYC debates of most of their self-puffed importance.

If he had only written that one book, I would have reason enough to be grateful toward Myers, but I had the regular appearance of his prose to contend with as well. Lord knows I didn’t agree with all of his literary judgments (no patience for or inclination toward DFW), or agree with his politics (extremely conservative), or agree with his religious beliefs (Orthodox Judaism), or not think that at times he was just being cranky (which of course I am never), but the cumulative effect of reading his prose over several years was unambiguously inspiring. I began to read him the way I have come to read the essays of Cynthia Ozick — as a balm and a provocation. When I am feeling down, either about the literature I’m reading or the literature I am trying to write, I go to Ozick and now Myers to be reminded why I’m doing what I’m doing, and to see an eloquent encounter with literature in action.

Not only was Myers’s writing motivational and provocative in its discrete installments, he was also a model of how one might write today. As a professor who stood in opposition to almost all of the directions of contemporary academic scholarship, and as writer who had written for various publications but who was eventually fired from his blog and regular review slot at Commentary when he published “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” after the 2012 presidential election, and as someone who in his last year did not have his teaching contract renewed at Ohio State, so that he became a teacher without a classroom — as all of the institutional contextual girders that supported his regular writing fell away — Myers still continued to write. He showed what one person with a library card, a Blogger account, and an internet connection can accomplish.

And what did he accomplish? Well, he became a permanent fixture in my literary sensibility, and he did the same for several other writers out there currently working. You don’t have to do much detective work to find a wide swath of contemporary writers and academics who read Myers avidly, who not necessarily agreed with him but recognized the excellence he embodied.

Myers wrote that “the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature” was manifested in the “moral obligation to write well.” What’s so burdensome about this obligation is that it must be born every time you set down a sentence. But Myers bore that burden as if it were a blessing.

He died last Friday after living with prostate cancer for several years. He was married and a father to four children.

A re-design is afoot

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Sometimes I endeavor to explore the magnitude of my own ignorance. Hence, I have started to fiddle with the look and feel of this website. How should one tweak the most obscure corner of the Internet?

The previous theme for this site was a riff on the Marber Grid, a graphic design schema used in the old Penguin paperbacks, and I admired its thorough bookishness. But this current and most likely temporary theme is “responsive,” in the lingo of the day, which means it will fluff your pillow and serve you tea no matter what kind of screened device you use to visit A Public Address System.

We’ll see how it goes. Progress will no doubt be almost invisible. Which is all for the best, because I think I pulled a muscle in this last iteration.

The Portable Son Pre-Order

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The Portable Son by Barrett Hathcock

I happy to report that my upcoming story collection The Portable Son–about which I will increasingly make myself a nuisance–has recently received a starred review by Publishers Weekly. To read the review in its native web state, go here. But since it is so compact I’m just going to paste it all here:

Peter Traxler is missing something. Ever since he left his family, his friends, and his adolescence behind in Jackson, Miss., he’s feeling lost. Despite the outward appearance of success—job, acquaintances, girlfriends—Peter is melancholy, his thoughts returning often to the past: “cotton diving” with his best friend Jeremy; sexual encounters with the local girls; the loss of his father and its impact on his mother; teenage angst bubbling over into semiviolent outbursts. His connection to his old friends is growing weak and distant; “when you’ve been on party manners with so many people for so long, it’s hard not to growl,” he says. Hathcock’s captivating debut collection of nine closely linked stories reads much like a novel. While many take place in the 1990s, the powerful Mississippi setting often feels akin to the American farm culture of the 1950s (at least until Jeremy dresses up like Ricky Martin for Halloween, or Peter’s Dad watches Nash Bridges on TV). The ghosts of the Old South are present throughout, even while the main character’s struggles are distinctively contemporary. It’s all here, the awkwardness of reconnecting with childhood friends, the impossibility of integrating your youth with your adulthood, the longing for home when home is a time and not a place: Hathcock writes haunting, unforgettable stories.

This is my first book, so I am slowly learning the cruel art of publicity. For instance, when this review came online early last week, I set my shirt collar on fire and ran around my neighborhood screaming joyful gibberish. But then someone told me I should just go post it on Facebook already, which I did. And now, a week later but eons in Internet time, I post it here. Please stay tuned for remarkably out-of-date updates on the book’s progress in the world and whatever else comes my way.

News you can use: Book will out at the end of November. Available at Barnes and Noble.com and Amazon.com and at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS and Burke’s in Memphis, TN.

But if you like to be ahead of the game, the book is available for pre-order right here.

Is there a neat independent bookstore in your town where you would like to buy the book? Is there a book club that might like to read the book? Please let me know.

 

 

Losing Faith with Fiction

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I have been mulling over the news that Philip Roth no longer reads fiction. In a profile in the Financial Times, there is the following exchange:

As we talk, Roth is perfectly courteous, perfectly charming, perfectly defended. Half a century of celebrity, since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 brought him money and a turbulent kind of fame at the age of 36, has made him a master of the polite no-go sign. The conversation I’d longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.

“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”

How so?

“I don’t know. I wised up … ”

And with those three words he gave me a long look from those fierce eyes and then a significant glance at my notebook, as if to say: that’s what I want you to write down.

So what did he wise up about? On a superficial level, and probably long ago, about the inadvisability of giving anything away when answering journalists’ questions, that’s for sure.

Aside from this moment, the profile is otherwise redundant. All of the information has been so thoroughly catalogued before that the accumulation of words seems unnecessary. No wonder that this statement by Roth received the most attention. But aside from this fleck of gold in an otherwise dry creek bed, the statement seems, if not declared, at least edited to be supremely tweetable. That is, mildly scandalous, gnomicly brief, invested with the shelf life of organic yogurt. And it dutifully sprouted its week’s worth of online mold.

But I’ve kept thinking about it because I think, in its truncated outlandishness, it so disregards Roth’s actual writing. He may no longer read fiction; he may in fact find reading fiction a waste of time. (Geoff Dyer has a great line somewhere where he says that all men eventually only read military history.) This statement actually isn’t that much of a surprise. In interviews over the past several years, as Roth has become an old man, Roth’s said that he’s rereading the classics, perhaps for the last time. A premonition of death seemingly haunts every move he makes–the books he writes, the ones he reads, the plots of his novels, etc. So one doesn’t really expect for Roth to have an informed opinion on that story collection by Miranda July, or the amount of depth to be plumbed in Téa Obreht’s novel.

(Incidentally, I have’t read either of those authors either, but I feel the atmospheric contemporary pressure to have done so.)

But the statement seems to negate what he has done with this life, the way that the news Salman Rushdie is going to work on a TV show and that he thinks TV can be panoramic and sociological in ways the novel no longer can (old news, that), somehow seems to negate the very validity of fiction.

But Roth’s fiction is thoroughly devoted to the fictional, to the idea of the fictional. Or to be more clear: his works are all about making stuff up and about characters who make stuff up, or read books and try to live according to those books, and suffer because of the miscalculation. So much of his mid-career work (the three novels and one novella that comprise Zuckerman Bound) are about the life of an accidentally celebrated author. And his late work takes on various American totemic myths and braids them with individual lives. And one of his best books, The Counterlife, is all about lives re-writing each other, except here it’s not new characters corrupting other characters, but the same characters re-written in multiple ways. The book is a novel bursting into several different novels, characters playing out different versions, different fates. That is, his fiction has been primarily dedicated to this kind of energy, a character’s ability to fictionalize. All of which is a long way of saying that Roth himself may no longer read fiction but the fiction he’s actually written is argument enough for fiction’s value. And not just because it’s “good” fiction, but because the novels argue on behalf of the inescapable need for people to fictionalize. It’s metafiction in the deepest way. It’s not the lighter John Barthian side of fiction, purely investigating the structural conventions of narrative.

I would say that Roth treats fiction on a religious level if he hadn’t stated so clearly that he considers God himself the most supremely harmful fiction.

Reptile Time

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Here is Michael Chabon, substitute blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic, blogging about blogging:

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels—TNC was talking about Gatsby last week, Fitzgerald’s a prime example—configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

That’s wonderfully said, methinks.