U.S.A.: Europe's 3rd World Country

As I type this hurricane Sandy is pounding the east coast.  I'm not too worried about it, but earlier today I noticed my Swiss roommate Christa was.  I asked her about what was making her nervous, and she said:  "The shoddy American infrastructure."

That's right Americans, richest country in the world, we have a crumbling (enough) infrastructure that it concerns Europeans who live here.  

I've realized that Christa talks about the U.S. the way I talk about the 3rd world.  I think Latin American and Africa have a kind of spirit and energy that the U.S. lacks.  She thinks the U.S. has a kind of spirit and energy that Switzerland lacks.  I've been taken aback by the disrepair of the infrastructure in the 3rd word.  She's taken aback by the disrepair of the infrastructure in the U.S.

I love living with her.  Mostly because she a fantastic human being, but also because it's interesting to hear a Western European's perspective on America.  

Here's another one:  she told me that if I was in my 19th year of teaching high school in Switzerland, I'd be earning over $150,000.  

Um, that'd be close to THREE TIMES as much as I'm making now.

It's tough living in this 3rd world country.

"Horseman, Pass By" by Larry McMurtry

I think I’m a big Larry McMurtry fan . . . something I’d never thought I’d say.  I’d always seen those covers of Lonesome Dove, with the ornate lettering and the rustic scenery, and figured it was some hack romantic western. 

Little did I know. 

On my wilderness trip in Montana last year one of my instructors said Lonesome Dove was his favorite book.  And since I had sort of a western spirit going that summer I decided pick it up—and within hours was amidst one of the most absorbing reading experiences of my life.

It reminded me of these Wallace Stevens lines:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.

That kind of merging with a text happened to me only twice before:  with 1984 when I was 17 years old, and then with The Poisonwood Bible when I was 33.  And now I can add Lonesome Dove to the list.  I lived so deeply inside the pages that I found myself running around, trying to find someone who also read it so I could say things like:  “They hung Jake Spoon!  I can’t believe it!  They hung Jake Spoon!!”

Let's say you gave this challenge to any American author:  you have exactly two pages to develop a living, breathing, full-realized character.  Go.  I'd put my money on McMurtry.

So I've concluded McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy are the two best authors of the American west.  Unless there’s another author whose name starts with “Mc” that I can’t think of.

One more great quote that describes my Lonesome Dove reading experience, this time from Jonathan Franzen:

“Here is [a] description of [the] initial engagement with a novel:  ‘I feel a tug.  The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.’”

McMurtry might have a better chance of doing that (for me) than anyone else.

So what about “Horseman, Pass By”? 

Well, it’s very minor McMurtry.  Not too much tugging and gliding.  No serious settling over the sprockets, no summer night becoming the book.  But still some good sentences.  Including this one, which may come haunt me when I’m 80 years old and still unmarried and without property:  

“’It don’t hurt to take a little look around,’ he said.  ‘Just don’t turn into an old loose horse like me.  You’re better off to stop somewhere, even if it ain’t no paradise.  I could have myself, many a time.  I had the chances any man has . . . I guess I was too particular for too long, what’s wrong with me.  I went all over this cow country, looking for the exact right place and the exact right people, so once I got stopped I wouldn’t have to be movin’ agin, like my old man always done.  But that’s going at it wrong.  I shoulda just set down an’ made it right wherever the hell I was.’”

Even in a minor McMurtry novel you get some great passages.  And that's more than enough, as Jonathan Franzen would say:

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.  To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them:  Isn’t this enough?  Isn’t it a lot?” 

Spanish with an Impediment

This evening I spoke Spanish to a woman.  It was really hard to understand her--for a moment I thought it was my rusty Spanish, but then it sounded like she just had a bad impediment.

Turns out she's Brazilian and was speaking Portuguese. 

I'm sure the hundreds of millions of people who speak Portuguese would be glad to hear that, to me, their language is just Spanish with a collective impediment.

80% of My Life

I've realized about 80% of my life has been derived from craigslist. My apartment, roommates, bicycle, you name it.

Thank you Craig, thank you and your list.

"The Homecoming" and "August: Osage County"

What is it about family dysfunction that makes it the obsession of our best playwrights?  Not that it’s a bad thing, since it makes for some great literature (“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” etc.).

“August:  Osage County” is great, well worthy of its Pulitzer Prize.  I’d agree with those who say it’s the great American play of the last twenty years.  As I’ve said many times, “Death of A Salesman” is the best American play ever birthed, but “August” is in the discussion, and that’s high praise indeed.

But I always wonder what to do with a story that has (almost) no characters to cheer for, no one to like, no one to connect to.  No protagonists whatsoever.  It leaves you feeling a little bleak and empty, though it’s always great art.  I’ve felt this “hating every character” most acutely in the movie Election.  No characters to cheer for but a great movie for that very reason.

Something similar happens with my students; they’ll come into class and say they hated the story they read the previous night.  And after some prodding, I realize what they mean is that they hated one of the characters, a character so fully-realized that hatred was a possible reaction.  Which means the students are actually saying “I read a story in which a character became so human that I had feelings of resentment which I usually reserve for real people.  Thusly, it was a pretty amazing work of art to provoke such a response, and I can now consider said response more thoughtfully and then grow as a person.  Thank you, dear English teacher, for all that you give us to read and for all that you do.”

You’re welcome students.

"Eat and Run" by Scott Jurek

Since I was looking for a little inspiration for my triathlon coming up this August, I picked up Eat and Run by ultramarathoner Scott Jurek.  What’s an ultramarathoner you ask?  Someone who runs races longer than a marathon.  As in 50 miles.  Or 100 miles.  Or 150.  Or 165.

Yes, there’s a small group of athletes who run races that can last 24 hours.  People actually do this.  Ever get a second wind when running?  These guys get fifth and sixth winds.  Ever get bored running?  These guys get bored and then they hallucinate and then they return to sanity and then they find transcendence and then they swing back to boredom.  At that’s just the first 50 miles.

But the message you get in the book, over and over again, is this:  you are physically capable of far, far more than you think.

Last summer signed up for a long wilderness trip with NOLS.  It was a 100 mile trek in 14 days (twice as fast other trips) through the Wind River Range in Wyoming.  On day 3 I got sick.  Really sick.  Diarrhea, chills, aches, the whole bit.  That feeling where you just want to crawl under the covers, curl up in the fetal position, and moan yourself to sleep.  But I couldn’t because I HAD to hike up mountains and ford rivers and cross sheets of ice with 30 plus pounds on my back.

It sure seemed inconceivable when I got sick on day 3.  But it was entirely possible. 

I hiked all the miles, I finished the trip, finally got better on day 13, and if I had needed to, I could have gone further.  It was only a mental block that made me think I couldn’t.  It is only a metal block that makes you curl up in your bed when you’re sick, thinking you couldn’t move for anything.

I’d always heard that marathoners “hit the wall” at about 20 miles.  That means their body becomes overly fatigued, their legs turn into rubber, and their final 6 miles seem all but impossible.  I THOUGHT it was a scientific phenomenon—something that would happen to anyone if they pushed their bodies that far.  But these ultramarathoners blow that notion out of the water.  They run 6 or 7 marathons in a row.  Hitting the marathon wall is just a state of mind everyone has come to believe in—a mental limit but not a physical one.

Here’s the quote from William James that starts Eat and Run: 

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”   

  

Truth.  Like Robert Frost wrote, “The best way out is always through.”

How often do we come up to an obstruction and back off?  I worry that it's more and more tempting to bail these days.  I'm pretty sure my high school students back off all the time.  A challenging reading assignment?  Back off and check Facebook.  Complicated calculus problem?  Back off and see if you have any text messages.  Difficulty organizing your history paper?  Back off because YouTube is calling again.

Every year I tell them I have a great concern about their young lives: that they'll  never feel the rich pleasures of reading and writing because they never worked through the difficulties to get to what’s on the other side.

But back to my triathlon.  I’ve been logging two, three hours of workouts lately.  And if you do that five days in a row, you really start to wear down.  Now when I start my swim/bike/run, I’m already spent.  But that’s what’s supposed to happen—that means I’m getting into shape because I’ve brought the obstruction closer . . . I’ve got some of that going through to go through.   

(But it better happen within the hour ‘cause a new episode of “Louie” is on.)

"Shipbreaker" by Paulo Bacigalupi

Shipbreaker is a young adult dystopian novel written by Paulo Bacigalupi.  His collection of short stories (for adults) titled Pump Six is the best science fiction I've read in a decade.

So what about Shipbreaker?  It's better than Hunger Games.  There, I said it.

Hunger Games is overrated.  

There, I said another thing.

Hunger Games is derivative, recycled, imitative.  If you're a fan of dystopian sci-fi, which I am (I've got anthologies), Hunger Games is a tired and entirely underwhelming book.

So why do people like it so much?  Because most people don't read dystopian books, or sci-fi for that matter.

Let's say there's someone who has NEVER eaten candy.  Then one day you give them a 3 Musketeers bar.  They eat it and say "This is amazing!  It's so sweet!  A blast of sugary, delicious flavors . . . I love it!"

3 Musketeers is NOT a great candy bar.  It's hardly in anyone's top 10.  But if you've never had candy, you might really like it.

Or let's say there's someone who has NEVER heard rock and roll.  Then this someone hears a song by a second-rate hack band like Third Eye Blind.  The first-time listener might say "This is amazing!  The guitars are distorted!  There's so much energy and noise.  I love it!"

No, you do not love Third Eye Blind.  Their song is tired, derivative, recycled.  You love the idea, promise, and possibility of rock and roll.

So I ask you, fans of Hunger Games, did you really love that book, or did you the idea, promise, and possibility of dystopian science fiction?

(If you want, you can also take everything I've written above and replace "Hunger Games" with "Harry Potter," and "science fiction" with "fantasy."  Enjoy.)

"The Anxiety of Influence" by Harold Bloom

It's a giant in the annals in literary criticism, arguably the most influential work in the field in the last 50 years.

The premise?  That all poets face an anxiety of influence when they develop as artists.  Meaning all authors have a precursor who influences their work--and whose shadow looms large over all of their own production (thus the anxiety).  What is an author to do?  What if you're a short story writer and have been awed by James Joyce all your life?  What happens when you sit down to write your own short stories?  How do you start when you know they'll never be as good as his?  How do you develop your own voice and style when you know there's no surpassing your greatest influence?  How do you dare to do something different (or "swerve" in a different direction, as Bloom would say) when you know the best of the best wouldn't have made such a move?

I think anyone who grows strong in a field faces the anxiety of influence.  When I started teaching, I had a mentor named Mr. Harber (the subject of some of my earliest posts) who was and still is the smartest man I've ever met, and the best teacher I'll ever know.  How do I deal with his long shadow?  Would I ever imagine doing something differently than he would have in the classroom, knowing he was the best of the best?  But does that leave me as his eternal disciple, never to come into my own as an educator?  Would I always just try to be like Mr. Harber, but of course always fail to do so since I'm not him?

Some artists never do escape the influence of their precursors.  The Black Crows will always be a 4th-rate version of the Rolling Stones.  The play "Fences" by August Wilson, good as it is, is still in the shadow of the grandest of all American dramas "Death of A Salesman."

So what's an artist to do?  Arbitrarily try to do something different?  But doing something different just for the sake of being different rarely becomes good art.  So what about unabashedly ripping-off your influences and call it an homage?  Doesn't sound like the purpose of art to me.

What to do?  Thus the anxiety.

Maybe you just don't give up.  Maybe you just rip-off your precursor so much that you get bored with it and your mind finally gives you the right "swerve."  Maybe you do something different just for the sake of being different, and therefore your art is bad and unauthentic for awhile, but you do this "different" art over and over again until it becomes natural and you slowly claw your way to something authentic.

Mr. Harber was my mentor for the first two years of teaching.  I've now taught 16 years beyond that in about six other places . . . so maybe there's something in my teaching that's now my own.  Maybe I've made some of my own rightful swerves.  Maybe.

"The Third Throne of Heaven" by Denis Johnson

More than thoughts on Denis Johnson's work, here's some thoughts on poetry.

Is it just me who thinks that poetry can save the whole world?  Or at least that the experience of poetry is synonymous with the experience of life itself?

Poetry is hard.  Life is hard.  Poetry is mysterious.  Life is mysterious.

As Wallace Stevens said:

. . . A more severe
more harrasing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
of poetry is the theory of life

Or as my great poetry teacher Joanna Klink liked to say at the end of her emails:  "take care of your poetry and take care of yourself, which is the same thing you know."

It's too bad that hardly anyone reads poetry books for pleasure anymore.  It teaches you a lot.

When I read though the Denis Johnson book of poetry, I liked 10 out of the 128 poems.  Roughly one out of every 13.  Those are low odds, but it's worth it.  (Once again, poetry is like life:  1 out of every 13 dates you go on is a good one, 1 out of every 13 days of teaching is a good one, 1 out of every 13 songs you listen to is a good one, etc.  It's a reminder to keep slogging through all that doesn't work for you, because it's the only way to get to what finally does.)

Poetry mysterious, and we need a lot more of that in our world. Sitting in the mysterious, in the unknown, in the transcendent, in what can't be defined--that's what we crave.  But these days we like to quantify and mechanize and measure everything (this is why high school English is so unpopular), and we're paying a high psychic price for it.

I don't know why the following lines from Denis Johnson work for me, but they do.  And I don't want to know why--because if I tried to break down the reasons, the magic would disappear.

From "The Risen"

How sad, how beautiful
the sea
of tumbling astronauts,
their faces barred
and planed and green amid
the deep

From "The White Fires of Venus"

The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
the bayonet:  gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.

From "What This Window Opens On"

among the trembling organs
of a captured bird

A book called "The Keep" by Emily Wilson is another great example (for me).  I read through the book, not really getting it, not really resonating with anything . . . and then one poem, for some unknown reason, grabbed me (making the whole book worth it):

"Radical Field" Emily Wilson

We have tenuous edges. 

We have striated hides. 

Glandular black ribbons all
inside us,
pelagic and sweet. 

We have reservoirs you can't see. 

The caribou move
through us beyond
numerous. 

One of the cortical
adumbrations,
one of the ferns. 

Our heaviest metals accumulate. 

We wouldn't dream.

Some Stuff I've Been Reading

"Fences" is the Pulitzer Prize winning play by August Wilson.  Very, very good.  Not quite "Death of a Salesman, " but then again, nothing is.

"Good Old Neon" is a short story by David Foster Wallace, one of my all-time favorite authors.  It was like visiting an old friend.

"Words Like Loaded Pistols" is a tour through rhetoric over the centuries (subtitled "Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama").  A couple thoughts about this one:

The book makes you think "damn words, you powerful!"

But most importantly, the book reminded me that writing and words can be a joy, can be toys for adults.  We usually think of writing as a hassle--as in "I have a great idea and this image in my head, and now you expect me to write it all down?"  We think words are just the delivery system for what's in your brain, and you can never quite capture your thoughts adequately in words, so the whole process is a frustrating failure.

But that's not how it has to be.  Words don't need to be instrumental, they can be their own goal.  What if you weren't try to deliver anything?  What if you were just playing?  When a kid plays with blocks, he's not actually trying to build a house to live in, he's just playing.  What if words were just toys to play with?  What if you wrote with no goal except to have fun?

And all fun, by definition, includes disdain for results.

More on "The Year of Living Biblically"

Say you're a secular progressive atheist (meaning you live in Cambridge, MA) and you want to attack the Bible by referencing all the crazy rules and anti-gay comments therein.  Well, A.J. Jacobs has done the culling for you.

Where to begin?  How you can't wear clothes of mixed fibers?  How you can't sit in a seat if a woman who is menstruating recently sat there?  How you should only eat fruit from a tree that's at least 5 years old?

There's more.

1 Corinthians 14:34 says women should stay silent in church.

There's a series in Exodus about how you can treat your slaves, i.e. you may beat them as long as they can live one more day afterwards, if you pluck out his eye you must set him free, and if he's a Hebrew he must be freed in six years (but if he refuses to be free you must drill a hole in his ear with an awl.  Actually, just a reference to an awl would have been weird enough.)

Matthew 5:27-28 says that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery.  (Isn't that what the advertising industry is trying to make us do 99% of the time?  How Christian is capitalism after all?  How many businessmen are also avowed Christians?  I wonder how those same Christian CEOs would defend themselves against Matthew 19:21:  "Jesus said to him, 'If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor . . . '" )

And the anti-gay ones:

Leviticus 18:22 says "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."

Romans 1:27 says "The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

Oh Bible, you silly.

The Uses of Not Knowing

Let's eavesdrop on Nietzsche for a moment:

"Forgetfulness is a property of all action."  The man of action is "without knowledge:  he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what his behind him, and only recognizes one law--the law of that which is to be."

True dat.  

If you work in an institution of some sort, institutional memory can inhibit your new idea.  But if you can discard the past, then you can do something new today.

In The Lonesome Dove Captain Call call knows about not knowing:  "It wasn't rational to think of driving cattle over eighty waterless miles, but he had learned in his years of [rangering] that things which seemed impossible often weren't.  They only became so if one thought about them too much so that fear took over."

Or as Mark Twain wrote, "To succeed in life you need two things: ignorance and confidence."

Or best of all, Han Solo's answer to C-3PO as they head straight into an asteroid field.  C-3PO cries "Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!"

To which Han replies "Never tell me the odds."

"The Year of Living Biblically"

This is the second book I've read by A.J. Jacobs, the first being "The Know-It-All."  It's a pretty popular book, a best seller in fact, and it looks like we can expect something from him every few years.

A.J. specializes in immersion journalism, of which there are countless examples these days (guy saves his garbage for a year and writes a book about it, woman eats only local food for a year and writes a book about it, guy eats only at McDonald's for a month and makes a documentary about it, etc.).  

Heck, I've even done it with some students of my students: web.me.com/thelastpintaturtle/Voluntary_Simplicity/Home.html

So what is A.J. Jacobs up to this time?  In "The Year of Living Biblically" he follows the Bible literally for an entire year.  That means the good stuff, like doing unto others, and the crazy stuff, like not sitting in a seat if a menstruating woman sat there.

And what do I think? 

It's . . . fine.  Mildly good.  And mild in general.

First, he's can be funny, in a non-threatening kind of way.  At one point he writes about a religious charity looking for a publicity boost, and they get one "when Bono and his sunglasses joined the cause."  Or later, when he talks about Exodus 23:19, which orders us to not boil a young goat in the milk of its mother, he writes "I think--with a little willpower and a safe distance from farms--I can make it for a year without boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. . . . [W]orse come to worst, I could boil the baby goat in its aunt's milk."

But why wasn't I too impressed with the book?

First, as much as I hate to say it, immersion journalism is beginning to play itself out.  You might have new idea for your stunt, but doing a stunt in the first place is no longer original.  When I hear of the next new immersion journalism idea, I'll probably just shrug my shoulders and think, "Oh, right, I guess no one's done that yet."

And immersion journalism can seem a bit like a cheat to me.  It's as if the plan is to throw yourself into some crazy circumstances, and then crazy things will happen to you, and then you just report the craziness, and your writing will therefore be compelling.  I had this suspicion about my creative writing thesis, which was largely about my time in Tanzania.  Even if I don't excel at writing, I did see Masai men eat the raw eyeballs and drink the raw blood of their livestock.  And that content alone provides its own vivid imagery, no matter how I string the words together.  But what if the prose itself had to carry the day?  Tell James Joyce to write about two men meeting for a drink, and he can have one of the best short stories I've ever read.  He didn't need eyeballs or blood to pull it off.

But second, and more importantly, I find the book just too accommodating.  Jacobs doesn't want to rock any boats, doesn't want to make any extreme claims, doesn't want to do anything except make sure everyone gets a fair shake and their due respect.  That's good and admirable, but I'm not sure it makes for powerful writing. When accommodating everyone you never quite say anything new, or anything memorable.  Henry David Thoreau (who's time at Walden might be the first real immersion journalism, or still the best literary stunt I can think of) wanted to "brag as lustily as a chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."  But when it comes to a hot topic like religion, Jacobs does no bragging, steps up to no roosts, and makes sure all of his neighbors sleep well into the morning and wake up of their own volition before he might speak with them.

But Thoreau-esque authors take the opposite approach.  Here's the opening line from an essay by environmentalist Derrick Jensen:  "Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam."  That's a sentence I remember.

Which means I may have to defend the Sean Hannitys and Bill O'Reillys of the world.  They are on their own roosts trying to wake up their neighbors (but their ideas just happen to be very, very wrong).  Even though their views are reprehensible, I'll still give them a few minutes of my radio time very now and then, because at least they working with an edge.  They'll make me angry, but know I'll have an emotion to feel in the first place.

And the mild-mannered Jacobs might be a part of a bigger trend.  Here is Professor Mark Edmunson's description of his current undergraduate students at the University of Virginia:

An air of caution and deference is everywhere. When my students come to talk with me in my office, they often exhibit a Franciscan humility. "Do you have a moment?" "I know you're busy. I won't take up much of your time." Their presences tend to be very light; they almost never change the temperature of the room. The dress is nondescript: clothes are in earth tones; shoes are practical -- cross-trainers, hiking boots, work shoes, Dr. Martens, with now and then a stylish pair of raised-sole boots on one of the young women. Many, male and female both, peep from beneath the bills of monogrammed baseball caps. Quite a few wear sports, or even corporate, logos, sometimes on one piece of clothing but occasionally (and disconcertingly) on more. The walk is slow; speech is careful, sweet, a bit weary, and without strong inflection. (After the first lively week of the term, most seem far in debt to sleep.) They are almost unfailingly polite. They don't want to offend me; I could hurt them, savage their grades.

It's also good description of the authorial voice in "The Year of Living Biblically".  Jacobs never changes the temperature in the room--but I think I read in search of those temperature changes.