By Prof. T.

What He Said, or, No Need to Write Another Hipster-Bashing Post, like, Ever

“This little band of bohemians, as grimly single-minded as any evangelical sect, illustrate, by the very ferocity with which they disavow American attitudes, one of the most American of attributes, the inability to believe that time is real. . . Society, it would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people, and experience is nothing more than sensation – so many sensations, added up like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life.”  James Baldwin, “A Question of Identity,” from Notes of a Native Son, 1955 

Dance, Little Monkey

So, there was a little kerfuffle recently about David Simon saying that it’s silly that people spend so much time and effort doing episode-by-episode analyses of shows that are meant to have long arcs. Actually and not surprisingly, he was saying something much more important and interesting, about what happens when you actually try to say something through a cultural medium. Anytime someone talks about political art, there’s lots of hand-wringing about how it can’t be “preachy” or “simplistic” or a “pamphlet” and it has to do more than “preach to the choir.” Well, here’s someone who made a brilliant and genuinely radical piece of art that, even if it got less viewers than Jersey Shore or what have you, became a force in at least a segment of mainstream culture, and among a lot of media/cultural type people who we might think have some sway over how we talk about things. But as Simon notes, what becomes of that? You get a sports reporter asking a fanboy question of a certain fan who happens to be the most powerful person on the planet:

And yes, I understand that the reason for that interview – the precondition under which Obama participated, no doubt – was that it was a discussion of sports.  So, okay, no one needs to bring up a TV drama with the President of the United States for any sensible reason.  And yet at the end, Simmons chose to invoke The Wire.

If he were a hectoring asshole, an argumentative scold, a fucking killjoy, he might realize that he has The Man right there, and that he is at the end of the day acting as, well, a journalist.  So if anything is to be said about that show, well, here is a rare chance to break some ground.  He might swallow hard, seize the moment and say something along the lines of, “Mr. President.  I know you’ve said you’re a fan of The Wire.  Well, one of that show’s basic critiques is that the drug war is amoral.   More Americans are now in prison than ever before, and the percentage of violent offenders in prison is lower than ever.  We are now the jailingest society in the world, incarcerating more of each other than even totalitarian states.  How can we go on supporting this?”

Balls out like that.  Truth to power,  brah.  Get some.

Instead, to use a sportswriting cliché, Simmons choked, throwing up an ugly brick at the buzzer: “Who’s the best character in The Wire?”

So, yeah, the depressing news is that you can make a radical and brilliant work of art that gets some play, and make it entertaining  enough that it’s not dismissed as yet another dreary liberal preachy thing, and people get so entertained they say, hey, chill out, it’s just entertainment. Yeah, you were a reporter, but that just makes your entertainment nice and real. Neat little trick, that:  

Arguments about the taste of the bread or the look of the circuses go on forever, because, hey, Omar is cool and Bunk is funny as hell and isn’t it great when Clay Davis says the word shit.   Yes, it is nice to know that people were entertained.  It’s not that anyone begrudges an audience its pleasure; we wrote the cool stuff and the funny stuff and we enjoyed it, too.   But four years after The Wire is off the air, are we wrong for admitting aloud to other hopes and purposes for the finished work?

Probably some of my non-English major friends would say, well, yeah, that’s the way things go, and that’s why serious people should stick to serious straightforward journalism and activism. But it’s not like earnest journalism doesn’t just as often cause people to say, oh yes, and turn the page – they may not be entertained the way they were with The Wire, but it is similarly pleasure and not a spur to action that motivates them. Right now I’m sitting here typing this with my gorgeous almost-three month old on my lap, and listing to NPR, to reviews of books I won’t have time to read and outrages I won’t effectively combat (though I might toss off a rant about how NPR gets them wrong.)  And there is a reason “art” – however you look at it – creates the sense it might “break through” where the earnest and straightforward fails. Mike Daisey may have given creative non-fiction a bad name, but there’s a reason so many people were drawn to his piece. And obviously there’s lots of reasons why David Simon started writing books and making TV instead of being a full-time daily reporter.

I’d be curious how many cops or politicians watched The Wire, and whether it impacted their thinking. Closer to home, it made me think about my own profession, teaching somewhat differently. I’d like to think that if nothing else, it’s some kind of counter-programming to the relentlessly pro-lock ’em up drumbeat of just about every other cop or lawyer show on TV. It’s not impossible to imagine it spurring some people into action, and having a kind of cumulative effect with other forces pushing towards a more open debate and change. 

On the other hand, I read somewhere recently that The Good Wife had been called “the new Wire.” Here’s a show basically about a bunch of rich lawyers and their rich lawyer problems of every once in a while having guilt about letting people off, because on lawyer shows it’s defense attorneys who are supposed to feel bad about themselves, never the prosecutors. It’s enough to make one imagine Simon pulling a full-on McLuhan. In any case, the man knows a thing or two about pushing a form, and it’s a treat to see blog writing that pushes outside the normal point and click.

Small Moments in Gendered Parenting Advice

It’s the little things: from a list of “unnatural” barriers to healthy sleeping patterns, from Marc Weissbluth, MD:

– Mothers have to work outside the house, miss playing with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.
– Fathers or mothers have a long commute and return home from work late, want to play with their baby, and keep their baby up too late at night.
I’m sure it’s very reassuring to all working fathers out there that they can’t actually miss their babies like moms do, they just want to play with them, and that this can’t just happen after a regular day at the office, or even a twelve hour day, but only if the have a long commute. I guess if Betty hadn’t bought that damn house in Ossining, and lived in that swank Megan-pad with the kids, he would have been the perfect father!

Not-That-Much-Shorter Jonathan Franzen

“No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did.” Exhibit A: she had a secretary type her shit! Silly girl? Doesn’t she know that’s what wives are for? Unless you’re Kerouac and write shit that types itself! And not only that, Wharton was a rich white lady who shared the prejudices of rich white ladies of her time! Unlike every other writer in the American canon who are all perfectly non-racist, non-snobby humanitarians, and migrant workers to boot! But wait, perhaps we could consider that a ladynovelist born in 1862 might have faced some kind of struggle? What could that possibly be? Something that rhymes with -ism and starts with s? No, silly, it’s that she was uggo! But she was an uggo and made a bad marriage – which has never happened to a beautiful woman, ever! Marilyn Monroe and Betty Draper married their perfect men and lived happily ever after: true fact! And then she had a passionate affair in her forties, but eww, gross. But sadly, unlike migrant workers, who of course dominate the American canon, so much do Americans “sympathize” with them, no one likes or sympathizes with uggos! Uggo ladies, that is. I mean, duh. Uggo for a male novelist just lends poignancy to the novelist/protagonist’s desire for young and non-uggo ladies, who are of course metaphors for life, death, and being seventeen. Nevertheless, definitelynotalady novelist Jonathan Franzen has taken the time to write a few pages about her best novels, and decided that she overcame being a stuck up uggo richlady by writing well about some beautiful but damned ladies. Which was a great way of getting narrative revenge on the beauties! I guess uggo men write so they can fuck beautiful women, and uggo women so they can stick it to them more metaphorically.

Yes, I’m a month or so late on this and many others did a good job of taking him down. (This is probably the best.) Since I became a mom, not only do I fail to sleep when my baby sleeps, or leave the dishes until whenever, I can’t give up my habit of trying to read every New Yorker straight through and in order, no matter how much farther I fall behind. Some ladynovelist probably has something interesting to say about what this says about my clinging to an illusion of control over my life, and my refusal to avoid reading things that will annoy me, but she’s probably the kind of ladynovelist whose books are on Oprah, and so it probably wouldn’t be interesting to the Great American Novelists who write about much more Universal Themes like suburban adultery.


Mad Madness: Predictions Editions

Lots of predictions! But first a rant and a prediction that’s really a wish:

I’ve written before about the show’s treatment of Carla and show runner Matt Weiner’s “that’s the way it was” defense of the lack of black folks on the show. He’s said something similar a couple of place leading up to the new season. I agree that there’s something powerful in letting your heros be on the wrong side of history, showing how racism and indifference to Civil Rights pervaded the culture, not just some easy villains. But this must be cold comfort for black actresses and actors when so many “prestige” projects are “period.” I remember reading something back when Shakespeare in Love was up against Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture saying, isn’t it interesting that we find these settings so “profound,” the ones where blacks don’t exist, so excluding them is just historical accuracy? (Obviously there were blacks in WWII, but not in the same units with whites, so you get a totally white film if I’m remembering correctly.) But given the parameters, just because a culture marginalizes someone doesn’t mean you have to. Weiner doesn’t want to let us off the hook by creating a parallel sixties where African-Americans are welcomed into advertising. Fine. But since when is the show actually about advertising? Isn’t it really supposed to be about outsiders? A number of people have pointed out that the very first episode begins with a conversation between Don and a black waiter, with Don asking if he would ever change his brand of cigarettes. Shilling stuff is who Don is; being on the other end of the sell is who the rest of us are, especially outsiders. It’s a promise that the treatment of race on the show has yet to fulfill. So my prediction that’s actually a wish would be for a full episode that’s all about what happens to Carla after Betty fires her. We could see her own family, and how they react. Perhaps she has a teenage son or daughter who has been politicized. We could see Carla look for a new job, interact with her family, friends and neighbors, and catch sideways glimpses, Mad Men style, of what she’s actually thought about the Drapers all these years, perhaps revealing a secret of theirs along the way that we’re left to figure out.
And bring back Paul and Sheila while you’re at it.
Onto the predictions:
– At the start of the new season, Don is still married to Megan, but things are already bad. Fixing his Clio was all well and good, but once things go bad such shoring up starts to look desperate. We seem first flirting with a new (blond, now that the wife is brunette) mistresses or love interest; that he’s still married is a reveal the way his marriage was in the first episode.
– Betty will play a very minor role throughout the season. At some point she tries to make a play to get back into Don’s good graces and bed: his marriage makes him more attractive to her, along of course with the trials of being Mrs. Henry Francis. Talk about being on the wrong side of history: the guy’s a Rockefeller Republican.
– At the same time we’ll get to see more of Sally. How wonderful an actress has Kiernan Shipka turned out to be? We’ll mostly see her with Don and Megan. She’ll start to turn on Megan, but we’ll also continue to see just how profoundly she hates Betty.
– An obvious one, but nonetheless: Roger threatens to expose that he’s the father of Joan’s baby (already born as the season begins), but then kicks it. (If this weren’t already an obvious prediction, given the end of his story arc, after Mrs. Blankenship died in episode 9 last season, Roger said he didn’t want to die in the office.) Expect some awkward toasts and references to Sterling’s Gold and the very welcome return of Mona and Margaret.
– Shortly thereafter, doctor rapist kicks it in Vietnam, but through some stupid drunken accident rather than in combat. Joan is quietly and discretely relieved, and with good reason: being a single mom is better for Joan’s work life than being a married mom would have been.
– Peggy continues to kill it for the ungrateful boys of SCDP, and necessity forces them to let her go beyond panty hose into some of the big stuff they reach for to replace Lucky Strikes: booze, cars, maybe even an airline. But her job keeps causing problems with her an Abe. This is more of a dilemma for her now than before, as Vietnam and Joyce have likely furthered her politicization, but it’s still no choice: she’ll choose the job.
– Burt Cooper comes back, with or without his testicles.

What Happens to Academics on Leave

You have a dream that you meet a friend and he’s headed for a conference with important people having important discussions and you say you’re not going but you will wander through the book fair, and then you are doing just that, and the book fair is infinite and gleaming like the Dubai airport in your recurring dream, but before you look at a single book you run into another friend, who tells you she’s just been talking to a certain important author who, unlike other authors you’ve written about, plays a definite role in your unconscious. She tells you that this author has had good things to say about a book about him that you’re supposed to be reviewing. (This part is true – you’re supposed to be reviewing this book, and you partly want to make this deadline and partly want to take some symbolic stand by not working on your leave and/or by being to enraptured with your baby to be able to.) But the part about him liking it rings false for all the obvious reasons. You ask your friend how it was she was talking to this certain important author, and she says, well, we were eating scrambled eggs. Of course they were. Then you hear some whimpering and it takes you a few minutes to realize it’s not coming from the book fair but from your actual baby in his crib at the foot of his bed, yanking you back into the world Inception-style. You go to get a glass of water and are momentarily thankful that the world does not miss you.

More Vanity and More Despair

So, this is what I’ve been up to. Of course, there’s an infinite amount to say about this, all of which is far too much and too overwhelming and too wonderful to give shape to just now. So for now I’m writing about easier things. Sadly, motherhood has not insulated me from the freak show that is the Republican primary, but distaste is a lot easier than love. Hence, Callista Gingrich.

During the 2008 election, I was reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife, which revolves around a fictionalized version of Laura Bush. It was an odd thing to be reading at the height of Obama mania. At the end, there’s a “twist”: she didn’t vote for him. On some level because she didn’t want to be First Lady, but also because in her sensible librarian way she thinks the other guy is more qualified. When she thinks about all the decisions the Bush-like character has made, she tells the reader, hey, I just married him, you all elected him. It’s a funny moment. It’s also one that from a certain point of view could be seen as a kind of liberal fantasy, with all the flaws therein, an extension of the old knock against Pauline Kael not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon: the liberal feminist novelist can’t imagine anyone who would vote for Bush, not even his wife. But Sittenfeld can’t really explain why she married him either, except suggesting his sexual prowess from some scenes I’m still trying to get out of my head and which prevent me from recommending the novel to anyone in good conscience.

 
Another funny moment comes when the Laura character describes the low point of being first lady: the book she writes under the “pen name” of the first pet. It’s a little unfair since as far as my google-fu can tell, she’s penned only her memoirs and a children’s book. Her mother-in-law, on the other hand, is the author of “Millie’s Book as dictated to Barbara Bush,” while Hillary Clinton has Dear Socks, Dear Buddy Kids’ Letters to First Pets to her credit along with Living History and It Takes a Village. It is of course beyond unfair to think this all says anything about these women; I’d wager that none of these were their ideas and that they spent no more than a few hours on them, and even if this weren’t the case, so what?
 
Still, I’ll cop to a curious fascination with the literary output of First Ladies and those who aspire to be First Ladies, which is how I ended up with a copy of Callista Gingrich’s Sweet Land of Liberty, a romp through American History with Ellis the elephant, on my shelf. I started thinking about Callista after reading this brilliant profile by the always-brilliant Ariel Levy. I remember talking about it when I was in the hospital and a friend was flipping through the then-new issue. When I got to it a few weeks later, I thought, have I already read this? No, that was the profile she did of Cindy McCain the last time around. You have to hand it to these women: god knows it takes a lot of something to do what they do on the campaign trail: as Levy notes, they have to gaze adoringly while listening to the same stump speech over and over.
In Wild Man Blues, Barbara Kopple’s documentary about Woody Allen touring Europe with his jazz band, we see Soon Yi taking care of his laundry and keeping the outside world at bay. It’s a bit of a shock, given everything, to see her acting as a sort of mother figure to him. You get the same feeling reading about the third Mrs. Gingrich. When Sean Hannity poses and unwelcome question, she “raised her eyebrows slightly and replied in the implacable tone of a kindergarten teacher scolding a six-year-old.” The sentiment seems to extend to her husband: “The woman is always the grown up,” her husband is quoted as saying. “No matter what.” No matter how much younger she is, presumably. It’s been said lots of times before, but it’s always stunning to hear this stuff from the traditional values crowd. Not that we feminist man-hating types never roll our eyes at stereotypical Peter Pan stuff, but we almost always have the good taste not to do it in public about men we supposedly love, let alone ones we’re holding up as great leaders.

What I’ve Been Up To

“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!


Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!
– William Blake, “Infant Joy”

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

Feeling Sentimental

Apparently we pregnant types are supposed to be sentimental. Every other blogpost on the pregnancy part of Babble is about crying at the cotton commercial or something. For better or worse, I seem to be the same cynic I’ve always been.

Of course, there’s a lot of suggestibility when it comes to talking about emotions. If I were being paid to blog about being pregnant and how I felt about being pregnant I would probably attribute a lot of things to it that I don’t when I’m just going about my life. Which is why I was interested to find a link to this article, from New York magazine. Now, you might think that reading an article with the subtitle “Why Parents Hate Parenting” might be a bad idea for a 39-week pregnant lady, sentimental or otherwise. But it’s a strong article because instead of falling into the normal lifestyle carping (singles are happier! no marrieds! no parents!) she sets out to solve the seeming paradox of why studies have consistently found parents less happy than those without kids although almost no parents would say this. A lot of it is what you’d expect: parents are in denial, parents expectations have become too high, etc. But the real meat comes at the end, when she demonstrates how, like always with such studies but is so rarely mentioned, it really comes down to the questions being asked. When you ask moment to moment things, like, do you have more stress, of course parents say yes. But when you look at more existential questions, like feelings of loneliness, parents come out as less depressed. One of the parents are less happy people doesn’t buy it, because life is actually experience as series of moments, not as what we make it in reflection. I’m not so sure. I’ve always been fond of what Annie Dillard says, that good days are not hard to find, it’s good lives, and that a day spent reading is not always a good day but a life spent reading is always a good life. People like to tell aspiring creative types or whoever that you have to enjoy every part of the process, the doing, not just the having done. But the process sucks lots of the time for almost everyone. So if we are not so happy moment to moment, but construct ourselves that way in retrospect, is that really such a failure? “Being in the moment” may be a balm against anxiety, but does it take us away from where the meanings are – in where we’ve come from and where we’re going?
So I was thinking about this and thinking maybe I’m not so unsentimental after all, and then I came across Philip Levine’s wonderful poem “You Can Have It” in Rita Dove’s new anthology, and thought especially about these lines:
. . . We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctor’s appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, diveres licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
Like any good feminist, I’m skeptical about nostalgia. The nostalgia here totally takes me in, but mostly because it’s for a time before my birth. “Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Radio Days” are my favorite Woody Allen films. It’s as impossible for me to imagine commemorating 1994 the way Levine commemorates the year he turned twenty. It’s as impossible as imaging my kid at twenty in 2032(!) Maybe my youth was just less textured and nostalgia-worthy than Levine’s. But Levine’s nostalgia goes hand in hand with its impossibility. The past as we imagine it, his 1948, his being twenty, is as if it never was, unless he wills it back, give it to us, who were never there. It’s a construction, but just maybe it’s not a lie, the way I always thought it was. Life may be a string of moments in which the average parent is more unhappy and stressed, but it’s also the string of moments who trail behind, as equally unfixed as any vibrating present the happiness gurus could imagine.

Vanity and Despair

So I was so absorbed by Downfall, the 2004 Hitler’s bunker movie and father of the father of internet memes, that I subscribed to London Review of Books just to read this amazing review by Bee Wilson of a new biography of Eva Braun.
Before watching Downfall, I hadn’t thought of Braun as much more than a Woody Allen punch line. As Wilson tells it, she was a throughly apolitical person, enamored with Hitler from their initial meeting when she was seventeen. She took endless photos of their life together, and mostly wanted the same things any younger mistress of a powerful man might want: more time, more attention, nice clothes and nice parties. As Wilson notes, she didn’t fit the Nazi’s propaganda of the selfless self-sacrificing wife and mother, but her apparent sentimentality and complete lack of self-reflection make her very recognizable. How different is gleefully cheering for your man and clinging relentlessly to the idea of your relationship, with all the photos to prove it happened, from being any kind of functionary? Sentimentality is the ideology, just like the bureaucracy was for Arendt.
Looking at the reviews of Downfall it was funny to see echoes of the tired debates about whether or not art should “humanize” Hitler or other Nazis to help us understand “how such things happen,” and whether viewers need to be reminded that the Nazis being portrayed were really, really bad people. The whole thing is particularly funny when film critics take this on, as if any three hour film could “explain” anything. Shoah is nine and a half hours and it only works because it sticks to its own dictum to describe rather than to explain. Anyways, Arendt had the last word on this a long time ago.
“Vanity and despair” was a phrase Robin Morgan once used to describe the dominant subjective conditions of patriarchy. Reading about Braun is particularly unnerving because there’s so much vanity and not enough despair, at least not until the bunker. I didn’t know before seeing the film that they got married 36 hours before they killed themselves together. Guess the apocalypse is one way to get a commitment. It makes me think of the end of Shaun of the Dead, when the main character laments having to kill his zombified mother, best friend and girlfriend in the same day. “What makes me think I’m taking you back?” the on-again off-again girlfriend asks. “You don’t want to die single, do you?” he answers. Wilson ends her review by noting that she may have also been trying to persuade him to have children, posing him for pictures with the children who came to call. But charm and sentiment only got her so far.