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.