What Our Things Say About Us

Like many conceptual art installations, the Chinese artist Song Dong’s exhibition on the mezzanine floor of the Museum of Modern Art (through Sept 7) has to be experienced in order to be appreciated. Entitled “Waste not”, the exhibit offers literally the entire contents of the artist’s Beijing hutong (courtyard) house, everything that the artist’s mother, driven by the watchword of her generation in China, wu qi jing yong -- “waste nothing which might have some use” – used, recycled and hoarded over the years. Meticulously gathered, categorized and displayed in MOMA’s pristine space, are (just to name a few) stacks of wood scraps, row upon row of rolled fabric scraps, used plastic soda bottles, almost-empty toothpaste tubes, paper bags, soap scraps, Styrofoam packing material, bits of string and yarn, and plastic bags carefully folded into triangular dumplings. Song Dong was born in 1966, just at the outbreak of China’s Cultural Revolution; his mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan, in 1938, during the tumultuous years when China was at war with Japan and changed hands from the Nationalist to the Communist government. Holding onto everything you could was a type of amulet against political uncertainty and shortages of goods. In the text accompanying the exhibit, Zhao Xiang Yuan tells about obtaining soap through ration coupons during China’s bleak years, and drying her soap after each use because wet soap melted away faster than dry. Placed in historical context, it’s easy to see how even an empty soda bottle can have myriad uses, or be traded for something else useful.

We New Englanders are certainly familiar with the concept of waste not want not, traditionally wearing clothes until holes show through, driving cars till their final sputter. I’ve always imagined Eli Whitney as a hoarder and tinkerer – how else could he come up with the idea of interchangeable parts? For me, walking through the exhibition felt eerily familiar, as if I was in my own parents’ basement or some of their friends’ homes. I was reminded of my college roommate who told me that when her Maine grandmother died, they found a box in the attic labeled “Bits of String Too Small to Use.” In the pre-Costco oil crisis seventies, goods were expensive, and we never knew what a winter would bring.

On Editing, Part 2

After staring at The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's epic about the Pacific theater of World War II, on my to-read shelf for over ten years, this summer I've finally gotten around to reading it. Interestingly, it appears to be a first-edition hardcover of the book, though it's in bad enough shape that its value as a collectible is shot (hooray!). Before reading it, I had to reinforce the spine with Scotch tape. Also, it has the name "Glass" written on the inside cover—it was my grandfather-in-law's book, and I say "grandfather-in-law" instead of "grandmother-in-law" because it's hard to imagine too many self-respecting women sitting through a book this long that tells them, over and over again, how horrible they are. I'm only half joking. Except for "The White Negro," The Naked and the Dead is the only thing I've read by Norman Mailer. And, unlike my grandfather-in-law, who—assuming he didn't wait ten or twenty years to read the book after buying it—read Mailer as a hip young writer, the Next Big Thing, I came to Mailer with the outline of his life story firmly lodged in my head. The politics. The pugilism. The woman-hating. I was given to understand that the woman-hating thing came later, in effect—that with The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was crowned one of America's best novelists; both the uneven output and the misogyny that made him an enemy of feminists came afterward. The Naked and the Dead was given a pass, as if it's too bad that a guy who turned out to be such a jerk had written such a great book, and the book's general reputation—and the fact that, as a child, I read over and over again an excerpt from it that appeared in a Time-Life photography book about the 1940s—is the reason I decided to start with The Naked and the Dead, with an eye to perhaps proceeding from there.

I'm now on the closing chapters of the novel, and it's easy to see why it has its stellar reputation. It is a great book for all the reasons that people say it is. It's got a bit of everything. There's action, extremely well-developed characters, some really amazing feats of psychological realism, and, of course, beautiful writing. For me, there's also what feels like a very accurate glimpse into the Army as an organization: the scheming, the petty infighting, the tension between officers and enlisted men, that comes as icing on the cake; Mailer may at his best in this book when he delves deep into the minds of two men who are plotting to humiliate or destroy each other. That Mailer wrote it when he was in his 20s is a bit astounding; that he pulled it off as well as he did, even more so.

What is harder to fathom is how this book got a pass on the misogyny charge that is leveled against Mailer's later work and, of course, Mailer himself. The misogyny in The Naked and the Dead is rampant. Yes, being a book about the Pacific theater of World War II, this is a book about men, and men at their most brutal, conniving, and horny. There is not a woman in sight in the main action of the book, so the long passages in which character after character longs explicitly for a good lay, or reminisces about particularly hot episodes with wives or girlfriends, don't bother me—it's high-school locker-roon talk of a sort that's easy to imagine happening in an army camp. What does bother me is the near constant refrain about "no woman is worth a damn" and the seemingly infinite variations on same, that come out of most characters' mouths; the one or two men who seem to have decent relationships with their wives or girlfriends back home are portrayed as weak, indecisive, or deficient in some way. The misogyny is so thick that it actually makes the book dumber; it feels like a huge blind spot in the author's intellect, and renders suspicious even the most intelligent things that the book says.

You may be wondering why this post is actually called "On Editing." Here's why: While the editors of The Naked and the Dead seemed to be totally okay with Mailer's hateful misogyny, they balked at the use of the word fuck, forcing Mailer to use fug instead. (In the edition I have, they also hypehanated ass-hole, which is neither here or there—just an interesting stylistic choice.) Today, the fug reads as really unnecessarily chaste, though one gets used to it. But it's interesting to me that the editors intervened severely on behalf of a four-letter word (which From Here to Eternity, by the way, got away with, so it's not just a question of falling afoul of obscenity law) but let the misogyny go, because today, those emphases would almost certainly be reversed. It's hard to imagine an editor today giving a damn about the profligacy of expletives in The Naked and the Dead—aesthetically and thematically, they're completely justified. It's also easy to imagine Mailer getting a long editorial note about the book's apparent attitude toward women, something along the lines of, "you know, we'd really like to publish this, but could you turn down the woman-hating a couple notches?" Perhaps that happened then as well, though if so, it's sad to think that's as far as it went. In any case, the final manuscript stands as a fine exhibit of how editorial standards regarding obscenity and moral values have changed in the last sixty-odd years—in response, presumably, to the perceived difference between challenging and offending their readers, a line many editors are always trying to straddle.

P.S. Yes, yes, I'm a giant hypocrite for using Mailer's biography in a discussion of his book when I just said recently that I don't see the point of same. I await your subpoena.

George Selden vs. Roland Barthes

One of the weird things, I've found, about becoming a parent is that people keep saying to me -- this started when I was pregnant -- "Oh, now you'll have the fun of re-reading all your favorite books from when you were little! Won't that be great?" Well, sure. But the thing is, I never stopped re-reading all my favorite books from when I was little. At my bedside table are at least thirty books, but one of them -- it actually lives in the table's drawer -- is a copy of Corduroy by Don Freeman. It's a newer copy I bought at the Foundry Bookstore; my original childhood copy fell apart aeons ago. This is a book that I have taken out every few months to read to myself at bedtime. My husband has gotten used to my showing him some of my favorite pictures to him: "Doesn't he look just so sad??? Poor Corduroy..."

It is true that one of the best parts of being mother to my daughter is reading to her and watching her learn to appreciate books, though at this point she's most interested in tearing them or standing on them, only once or twice a day actually sitting down and pretending to really read them. (She's good at mimicking the sound of me reading to her, though.) But the idea that I left my children's books behind when I reached the age of 13 or something is just moronic. I can't imagine doing that. I know most people do, but I think it's a real shame. Most people also think re-reading in general is a waste of time, but I don't. Most books are a waste of time; usually my feeling is, You might as well focus on the ones you love, and read them until they fall apart, like my beloved copy of Corduroy.

I did not keep all of my books from my childhood and youth; my family moved a couple of times, and that meant deaccessioning. But I have easily three shelves' worth of books from my own childhood and I do re-read them, some of them very regularly. The All-of-a-Kind-Family books get read usually twice a year (once at Passover, once at the High Holidays; sometimes, okay, at Chanukkah, too). Ronnie and Rosey by Judie Angell (a YA novel) gets read usually once a year; I actually picked up a second copy of it a couple of years ago because my original was just beat. Pippi Longstocking, the oeuvre of E.L. Konigsburg (Father's Arcane Daughter, (George), A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, and About the B'nai Bagelsin particular), and all of the novels by Louise Fitzhugh are re-read at least yearly. Ditto The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, which has to be read in multiple editions because the text changes. Also, the George and Martha stories by James Marshall, the four Mary Poppins books, and a YA novel by Alice Bach entitled They'll Never Make a Movie Starring Me.

All of these are in regular rotation, and I'd take any one of them, any day, over a novel by Philip Roth.

There are children's books which have joined these ranks more recently, such as Beegu and Slow Loris by Alexis Deacon, and the Provensens' Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, which I somehow missed when I was a kid. (My parents didn't believe in farms, I guess.) I am in love with it and have one copy for me and one for my daughter.

I don't understand why people pack up and toss their books from childhood if they don't have to. Why would you want to forget the stories that made you what you are? In college, when better minds (or at least more grade-grubbing minds, I guess) were happily reading moronic texts on literary theory assigned by Paul Fry (I took a class at Yale one summer; boy, was that a bummer), I was re-reading stories that were actually stories, not just pretentious trickery. The Genie of Sutton Place by George Selden is more important to me than anything Gadamer or de Man ever came up with. Let alone Roland freaking Barthes. Between The Genie of Sutton Place and S/Z? No contest.

Harry Potter and the Ignorance

I've been seeing headlines about how Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince made something like 50 trillion dollars just in the time it took me to type this sentence. And 25 trillion more just now. And so on. Curious. Apparently there is series of books about a schoolboy who is also a young wizard. And this revenue-record-breaking film is said to be adapted from the sixth of those books. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson star, along with other, less famous but more established actors, and David Yates directs.

Do I sound detached? Well, listen. I have something to confess to you. And now seems like as good a time as any to say it. I have never seen a single Harry Potter film, nor read any of the Harry Potter books.

You may think this strange given the cultural ubiquity of Harry Potter. And stranger still given that I've been working for several years as a movie critic and a book critic. It is strange. I really don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe it's like living in New York and somehow never managing to go to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, and always saying how funny that is and you really should do it, like when a friend or relative is visiting from out of town so you have a good excuse, but still letting the years go by without actually doing it.

Except it's not like that.

I'm not trying to be funny, or contrary, or crass. It's not a boycott. I can't say that non-exposure to Harry Potter is a personal goal or an explicit priority. But neither, apparently, is exposure to Harry Potter.

I have sometimes wondered how culturally illiterate this makes me, and how much my cultural illiteracy matters. But I’m starting to think that at this late stage I might just have to let it go. I mean, assuming this stage is late. How many Harry Potter books and movies are there? I don't even know. Well, the stage is late in the sense that I'm getting old. I don’t mean old as in, "Damn kids today, with their wizard movies; in my day, we had Star Wars!” It’s more like, “Wow, life really is short, and there really is so much to read and see.” Such as all the stuff that came before Star Wars. I'm still not even halfway through all that stuff.

Anyway, if I change my mind, or find the time, I know Harry will be waiting for me. Making trillions all the while.

Guest Post: How Much of It Is Autobiographical?

This post appears, courtesy of Robert McGuire a freelance writer and college writing instructor who is working on his first novel. He lives in New Haven. I’m a life-long aspiring novelist making my first real attempt to finish a book at an embarrassingly late age. The big insight I needed to get going was the realization that, of all the ways I’ve managed to psyche myself out from writing, the goofiest and most powerful has been anticipating a single question: How much of it is autobiographical?

Any question a writer anticipates during the work is a way of giving voice to internal critics or fantasies of literary celebrity, and both are filthy habits. But the question of autobiography has been especially troubling because, unfairly or not, I tend to perceive it as a way of discounting the work—as if readers might judge something that is merely autobiographical as less legitimate, closer to exhibitionism than art.

Not wanting to get called out for that kind of cheat, I spent years ignoring any story idea where I could see a thin filament connecting it to my own life, which, for a novice writer, doesn’t leave a lot of material to work with. Thus, the late start. Luckily, I finally got to the point where wanting to know if I could finish a novel was more important to me than any paranoia about what people might think of the result.

That doesn’t mean the anxiety and daydreaming go away, so when I’m not working, I’m usually preparing my answer for when Terri Gross asks me if my own parents were like the hot mess portrayed in the book. I’m sure it will come up, because it always does, unless a book is set in the realm of fantasy or in distant history. And maybe even then. As Rabih Alameddine says, “If you write about a colony of rabbits, someone will ask, which rabbit is you?”

And I’m guilty of being on the other side of the question. I once interviewed Ethan Canin by telephone in advance of his visit for a reading, fighting my urge to ask how much of his fiction came from his own life. After I turned in the finished profile, my editor wanted me to call him back and ask what everyone really wanted to know: Which parts are true?

Most of the time I think the question of autobiography isn’t motivated so much by prurience or a desire to catch the author cheating than by a sincere interest. As a reader I know I taste an extra layer of delight when I suspect that the characters in The Sun Also Rises or To Kill A Mockingbird resemble their authors’ younger selves. Sussing out which parts are autobiographical can feel like another way of living in the work, a thickening in the indefinable atmosphere we breathe when we are reading.

But most authors try to squirm out from under the question, and one could publish an anthology just documenting all the ways they’ve tried. One of my favorites recently is from Colson Whitehead respecting his novel Sag Harbor: “Let’s get the boilerplate disclaimer out of the way—I overlap with Benji, and use my summer of 1985 as a touchstone for his experience, but you can’t make a one-to-one correlation between my life and his, blah blah, it’s fictional, blah blah and etc.”

Usually the author’s answer is some version of: “It’s kind of true, in a literal way in some parts, but none of it is really true in the ways that matter.” As a reader, I feel as if they’re holding out on me. But while at work on my book, I’ve gradually come to understand what they mean.

First, I’ve learned that the common metaphor to illustrate chaos theory applies here; when the butterfly flaps its wings great changes result later on. I may start by using elements from a real event, but narrative flow inevitably requires small changes in detail—the season of year, the age of the character when it happened, combining two real people into one character. Those small changes accumulate, so that the consequences and emotional impact of the event start to diverge from reality, which changes how characters will act in subsequent scenes and so on. Pretty soon, the characters lose their resemblance to the live models and they are causing new complications that never happened in real life.

Second, I’ve come to think of my book in terms used recently by Aleksandar Hemon when The New Yorker pointed out that characters in his story collection Love and Obstacles have “a trajectory similar to your own.” He allowed some similarities in the details but asserted, “I compulsively imagine scenarios alternative to what happens to me. To my mind, my stories are not autobiographical; they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me.”

I recognized in that answer my own impulse to write. I may use elements of my own life, but the purpose is more like the opposite of telling my story—not to reflect reality but to make it come out differently. This is another way of getting at the obvious but hard-to-accept difference between real life and fiction; to get fiction, you get to and actually must impose resolutions that real life never permits. That’s what makes narrative so attractive and, paradoxically, so tempting for readers to confuse with real life.

Mainly, I’ve come to sympathize with the puzzled responses authors have when they’re asked the autobiography question because the more I work the more it seems so much beside the point. I’m reminded of a favorite scene in The World according to Garp. The struggling young writer (based on Irving?) practices his craft by telling his wife stories in bed at night. After one fantastic tale, she asks in delighted shock: Is that true? Did that really happen?

But like Melville's Bartleby, no matter how many times she asks, he only has one response: Which part didn’t seem true? Garp’s only interest is in improving on anything his audience isn’t convinced by. He wants to create something so powerfully honest that it’s assumed to be autobiography. Which parts actually are autobiographical is the least interesting thing about it.

Let's Get Radical

A decade-and-a-half ago, somewhere in the far reaches of cloudy memory, a friend told me a wonderful story that went something like this: There was a political radical who had come to some unnamed municipality to agitate for the rights of its local black population. However, instead of the usual grist of petitions and protest marches, he embraced more disruptive methods laced with a good dose of humor. One particular action involved purchasing a hundred theatre tickets for an upcoming, nearly always white-only attended play and giving them to members of the black community whom he was then representing. Before entering the theatre building, the group feted itself with a meal notable for its preponderance of baked beans. Needless to say, the event's malodorous results—and the threat of more such actions—changed how the municipality's cultural centers treated its minority populations, namely for the better. I forgot that story until this weekend when I picked up Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, published in 1971 by Random House (under the keen eye of its legendary editor-in-chief Jason Epstein). I didn't realize this story came from Alinsky's handbook for how to stir the political pot until I was over a 100 pages in. Before I even came to story itself, a sneaking feeling that I was in familiar territory had crawled up on me. Ten or twenty pages later, there it was: the scene, the Rochester Opera House in Rochester, New York; the instigator, the famed Chicago community activist, Saul Alinsky, protégé to the great CIO leader John L. Lewis; the bad guys, Eastman Kodak, the University of Rochester, and Rochester City Hall; the cause for all this trouble, the race riots the year before that had paralyzed a city in which the community of stupefied white residents had assumed that, because there had been no such previous riots, all was right in their little world.

But tendrils of unconscious memory were not the reason I plucked the volume off the book shelf of friends whom I was visiting in Chicago this weekend. No, the reason I was intrigued was because of the well-publicized fact that Alinsky's work had served as the primer for Barack Obama's community activism in Chicago—hardly a surprise given Alinsky's long history of organizing in Chicago, including the University of Chicago area, where Obama worked for nearly a decade and has lived for over two.

In terms of sheer efficacy, there has never been a presidential campaign like that organized by Obama's brain trust, David Axelrod and David Plouffe. But many also attribute the training regimen and organizational keenness of the operation to Obama's own experience as a community organizer, the skills from which he reapplied to the many thousands of campaign-focused community organizers his team churned out with such painfully meticulous efficiency.  (The best article ever on the Obama campaign's organization was authored by Zack Exley for the Huffington Post.)

Given the unique character of the campaign, Obama's community organizing background, and the influence of Alinsky's work and writings on Obama, there were not a few conservative bloggers who argued that perhaps Republican campaign managers and organizations ought turn a few pages in Alinsky's book and take notes. After all, Democrats had schooled themselves in the Republican playbook after repeated defeats during the Bush years. Surely Alinsky might shed some light on the wonders of the Obama machine.

Well, it does shed light, but not the kind I thought. At first, my assumption had been that, after a few preliminary remarks, Rules for Radicals would just dig in with a flurry of techniques and tactics—and, to a certain extent, it does. But it does more in ways that I am still digesting. In brief, after Alinsky's prologue, the second chapter lays out the groundwork for an ethics of means and ends that out-Machiavelli's Machiavelli by taking apart the old moral saw that "ends don't justify means." In Alinsky's dictionary, this is the very definition of foolishness. While he makes a noble effort to reformulate an ethics in which "particular ends justify particular means," the 11 rules that he, in fact, assets make it hard see how he hasn't merely updated Il Principe for modern circumstances. Even when Alinsky tries to hem in his "any ends"-"any means" philosophy with such bottom-line provisos of "as long as it does not violate human dignity," it's weak tea, at best. Here are Alinsky's rules, recast in simpler English than the pseudo-mathematical language of the professional philosophers he adopts for no real good reason:

1. The more closely involved you are in the conflict, the less justification of means and ends matter.
2. Ethical evaluations of means and ends depend upon the relation of your political position to them.
3. In war, ends will justify almost any means.
4. Means and end can never be adequately judged in hindsight.
5. The more means available for accomplishing an end, the more room there is for ethical considerations of them.
6. The less important an end is, again the more room there is for ethic concerns.
7. Success or failure is a strong determinant of the ethics of means and ends.
8. The imminence of success or failure, victory or defeat, narrows any ethical considerations of means.
9. The opposition will always cast effective means as unethical.
10. Do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.
11. Use popular ideas and catch phrases to justify ends.

Here Alinsky liberally mixes the descriptive with the prescriptive, skipping the distinction for the hardened reality, based on his experience fighting large corporate interests on behalf of the underprivileged, that what is and what ought matter little when the rubber hits the road. Alinsky is playing to win, and probably goes even further than Machiavelli in recommending masking one's methods with rhetoric (see rules 10 & 11). In fact, to gain community participation in an action, he shows absolutely no qualms about having supporters do, as he sees it, the right thing for the wrong reasons. For Alinsky, it’s always war, especially when the forces arrayed against you—corporations and their cadres of union-busting lawyers; city halls and their platoons of bureaucrats—will not being giving you any quarter.

Alinsky’s manifesto is a guide to political streetfighting, lessons that were not learned by the Gore or Kerry campaigns but were clearly absorbed by Obama’s. Notwithstanding the seeming noblesse oblige of his campaign—as opposed to the messy bomb-throwing that characterized the McCain camp—it was all a street fight, from beginning to end. Alinsky, for example, recognizing how little real power “have-nots” can bring to bear against “haves,” strongly recommends a kind of ju-jitsu (he has a chapter called “Hoist the Enemy by His Own Petard”) that the Obama campaign took to heart, almost encouraging (yes, encouraging!) the McCain campaign to wallow in its own muck.

Did Obama take the high road in his campaign? He did…and didn’t (see Rule 10 again). All that tut-tutting and wink-and-nod ridicule, as if all of us together couldn’t help but shake our heads at how foolish the McCain campaign acted, was just Alinsky-esque karate chops to the back of the neck as McCain and Palin careened forward with their misplaced drop kicks. Even Machiavelli would have to smile.

How the Kindle Can Save Your Life

A few months ago, my ex-mother-in-law gave me her old Kindle when she upgraded to the new model. The first book I downloaded on it was last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Short, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. I finished the book on a roundtrip Metro-North ride to Grand Central.

Now, the strangest thing happened, or rather, didn't happen while I was reading this book. No one noticed what I was reading. Nobody asked me what I thought of the book, whether I liked it, whether I didn't. This was incredibly disorienting, reading in public and creating no reaction. An entire part of my brain that I hadn't even known about shut down -- the part that is self-conscious about what I’m reading, and what people think about what I’m reading.

Call me intellectually vain, a snob. But I'm one of those people who makes snap judgments about you based upon what you read. Sit next to me on an airplane proudly sporting a copy of the latest John Grisham or Nora Roberts, and I will give you wide berth. Clutch a Jhumpa Lahiri or a Malcolm Gladwell, and settle in.

When my ex-mother-in-law gave me the Kindle, she extolled its virtues. She suffers from cancer and needs books that weigh very little. So the Kindle is perfect for her; she could reread Gone With the Wind on it if she wanted to.

Yes, the Kindle is light. Yes, the Kindle is portable. But this is what I consider the most wondrous aspect of it: You can read in public and no knows what you are reading.

- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism - Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body - The Secret - Getting Things Done

This is a partial list of the books I now have downloaded in my Kindle.

At home, my bookcases are crammed with the classics from Austen to Zola; in non-fiction I love Didion and Derrida (okay, just Didion), but I’ve always had a healthy respect for self-help and how-to books. They have guided me through many a personal crisis. I used to buy these books sheepishly at the bookstore, have to set aside time alone and at home to read them, then hide them in the back layer of my bookcase.

Now, I just read them in broad daylight whenever I want to, whenever the need arises.

At last, reading as it should be: A personal choice. Absolutely private.

What I assume, You shall assume

I recently heard that one of my old students fell into a conversation in which my name was brought up. Apparently, he really split everyone’s sides by recalling, “Ms. Moncrief totally has an unhealthy obsession with Walt Whitman!” And that was all he remembered, and all he had to say of the eighth grade.

This child was one of my brighter darlings, with a mind and a mouth faster than mine—and most of his peers. He was frantic and quick-witted. (Once when I turned my back, he threw his shoe at me; it landed on my desk and his face went white. He said in the most adult and caring way, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”)

Something other than the smart-alecky tone of this response got to me. You always hear that teachers who follow their passions are the best teachers. But this makes me wonder. When I taught this guy, I was obsessed with Whitman, I suppose it’s true. These kids were a young thirteen and I assigned them to read the whole of Leaves of Grass. That’s 52 poems and over 30 pages in our Norton anthology. I photocopied every poem and made each student his or her own packet! We memorized many of the poems, we wrote Songs of Ourselves! We played, “What would Whitman do?” What was I thinking?! AND, I never told them about Whitman’s homosexuality, because I figured it wasn’t that important for them to know. (I am not sure what my logic was there. They figured it out themselves. How you ask? Well, does this give it away for an 8th grade boy?

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.

I fear I ruined Whitman for them. I fear I was like one of those gift giver types—hovering over you as you open a gift, smiling down at you with an open mouth, ready to gasp and clap and say, “Isn’t it just great? I mean, isn’t it perfect?!” My own joy of reading got in the way of letting others have joy too. That seemed like a beautiful failure. “The mystic anomalous nights, the strange half welcome pangs, (and) visions” that I had in discovering Whitman maybe need to be my own private meditation. As for my old student—he’s off to China, nearly fluent in Mandarin. I heard of him that he’s “settled down,” but hope he hasn’t really settled down. And, well, at least he forgot all my other unhealthy obsessions.

Whither Home?

I was away for three weeks in June, and for two of those weeks I was away not only from where I live, but from the internet. In a sense, separation from the internet was the more telling separation -- I know more people available to me online than I do in New Haven, to say nothing of the people I ‘follow’ (or stalk?) on Facebook. While away, I visited all my ‘homes away from home’: including three of my four siblings’ homes in Delaware, one of which is the house we all grew up in, where my mother still lives. I also visited my stepson and his family who live a bit west of Philadelphia -- Philly is where we lived when he lived with my wife and I, and where our daughter was born. And I got over to rural New Jersey where a longtime friend (a Philly native I met in Philly) lives with his family and writes -- and where I am an honorary “Uncle Donald.” And I made it down to Rockville, MD, outside DC, where my sister-in-law lives and where my mother-in-law is now in an assisted living home, which I visited for the first time. The main reason I went away at all was to visit the shore in Ocean City, MD, where some version of my family has gone to unwind in June since we were all kids together, and where my parents spent their honeymoon, and where there was no internet connection, which helped to emphasize the feeling I have down there anyway -- that I’m in some perpetual version of my youth, either the late ‘60s when I first went there, or some memorable teen visits in the late ‘70s, or those years in the ‘80s when it was all about my daughter.

All of this is to introduce the thought which I’ve had before, when returning ‘home’ to New Haven, this town I’ve lived in for ten years (moved here from Hamden when our daughter went off to college in Baltimore), and frequented for five years before that (after moving to CT straight from grad school): I’m hard-pressed to say what makes this place my home other than the fact that I live here -- at some distance from all the people I’ve known longest. My way of life and general outlook seems a continuation of grad school, which is to say, transient, not in for the long haul, expecting to go elsewhere, someday, and only hoping ‘there’ won’t be worse. And that feeling, I think, is sustained by the fact that the population of New Haven, as I experience it, is tied to Yale and recurrently transient: students, grad students, junior faculty are here for awhile and move on.

Yet, while in this limbo (working on long term writing projects and at ‘teaching gigs’ tends to sustain a certain disconnect from my surroundings ... maybe even requires it?), I have become accustomed to New Haven, even though I consider myself barely a resident. There are places I frequent, and which I like seeing -- Willoughby’s, Yorkside, Book Trader, Labyrinth, Odd Bins, Anna Liffey’s, Cutler’s, Mamoun’s, Rudy’s, Royal India, etc. -- but I seem never to move much beyond the familiar grooves worn by making my way, mostly on foot, to the orbit of that big educational concern in town, which I refer to affectionately, or not so affectionately, as the Mighty Fortress.

When I’m back in the environs I hail from, I’m always glad to know I’m only passing through. Much as I like seeing everyone, it’s good to know I don’t really live there. And I can think of one event, a few years ago, that made me realize that I actually have a kind of relation to New Haven. It was the closing of The Rainbow Café, and at the time I wrote:

We rely on such places as providing identity for what "our town" is, and for providing us with a renewable sense of who we are as their steady patrons. You are where you eat, and where you shop? Something like that.

Realizing the place was pretty new when I first went there and that it was now gone, it seemed to matter that I'd outlasted a business.

So, a question to any long-standing or native New Haveners reading this: what do you consider to be definitive aspects of New Haven ... the kinds of things one shouldn’t miss while living here? Or: what's a change you've seen in your time here that had some effect on you?

Farrah, Farrah on the Wall

Farrah Fawcett is dead. Let those of us who were young in the seventies observe a moment of silence. And noting this journal’s preoccupation with hair (vide Oppenheimer posting, “We Partied Like It’s 2009,” May 18, 2009) and my own hair being of “urban legend” (ibid), I could not let this occasion pass without paying personal tribute to the “Farrah-do.” Growing up in Hamden during the seventies, I sported the Farrah-do, first at Sleeping Giant Junior High (now a condominium complex) and then at Hamden High School. I’m convinced that it was this hairstyle that saved me from social suicide, helped bridge the internal “town versus gown” issues I had as a Yale faculty brat at my school, and finally, paved the way for my college years at Harvard.

A lot from a single hairdo, I know. But what a ‘do. Tousled, cascading layers. A sexy, casual, windswept, just-got-out-of-bed look. Farrah smiled down at us from that poster with that mane. And every girl worth her salt had to have that ‘do. For me, a Chinese girl with hair and parents as straight as a grove of bamboo stalks, achieving that look was no easy feat.

First, I first had to convince my mother -- who ascribed to the general zero-sum notion that any attention I paid to my looks took away from my attention to my studies -- to let me have a perm. She only relented on Rave, a home perm that gave soft loose curls. Then, we found an inexpensive hair cutter in to give me the actual layered haircut, which I had to style to perfection each day. With my own allowance, I bought a hairdryer, a curling iron and a set of hot rollers. After trial, error and much practice, I learned the hot rollers worked best on me. So, every day before leaving at 7:20 a.m. to catch the school bus, I plugged in hot rollers and did my hair: three medium-sized rollers for the fluffy top and two wings, and three large rollers for the back. If I had time, I added the flip with a small-barrelled curling iron.

The only other Asian girl in my class, Elly Tanaka, also a Yale faculty brat, kept her hair straight. She liked to flip it around a bit. Shiny and black, it looked okay, but having the Farrah-do was a universal ice-breaker, an automatic “I’m-okay-you’re-okay-because-we-share-a-hairstyle” with the non-faculty brat set at my school. Janet Gallo, the most popular girl in our junior high, also sported the Farrah-do, which she achieved each morning by using a blow-dryer and round hairbrush (we discussed this one day).

There was no mirror for Asian women yet in the public media. No Gong Li, no Sandra Oh, no Ziyi Zhang. The only person I saw who looked remotely like me on television was Mrs. Livingston from “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” So, for me to emulate Farrah Fawcett was just as far-fetched as any other role model.

At first my parents fought me, preferring that I try to get in a half hour of piano practice before the school bus. But eventually, they gave up, and instead began to take notice of my dedication and perseverance with my hair-do. I knew they finally understood who I was when my mother asked me the summer after senior year, why don’t you learn haircutting so that you can earn pocket money at Harvard?

This is how I ended up studying at the Gal-Mar Academy of Hairdressing, Nails and Beauty in North Haven alongside aspiring hair technicians and beauticians. I’ll always remember the morning, Miss Julie, who owned the place with her sister, Miss Gail, had us gather around a willing student guinea pig, to teach us the Farrah Fawcett cut, or as it’s known in the trade, the long-layered feathered shag. We learned how important it was to section the hair carefully, to keep the hair hold perfectly elevated and to shift the cutting line. Then to cross-check each side of the head against a spot in the center to make sure all the lengths were even. Finally, to use the point-cutting technique to feather the hair ends and give it a softer look. Voila, Farrah.

I walked out of Gal-Mar with a certificate for haircutting only – no color, no perm – but I set up shop out of my dorm-room bathroom a couple afternoons a week, and ran a pretty lucrative business of haircuts at $7 a piece, often $10 with tip. Guys from the rugby team would come, and some daring girls for their version of the Farrah-cut. Other people stopped by and stayed a bit, and often the whole occasion became quite social.

Today, one of Charlie’s Angels is Lucy Liu, a Chinese girl who wears her long black hair straight down her back proudly. I have two daughters with beautiful straight hair in its natural state. That is how I wear mine too, now. But I will always have a soft spot for my Farrah-do of youth.

Farah Fawcett died. She didn’t pass away.

Today, my Yahoo home page informed me of the news that Farah Fawcett “passes away.” No thank you— she DIED. Euphemisms be gone. What next: “Farah Fawcett goes to Jesus”? Or, in weird John Edward (the psychic) New-Age-speak, “Farah Fawcett passes”? It’s sad, people, very sad. I miss her. But that’s no excuse for tawdry euphemism. She died.

Thank you, Fearless Critic. An eater in New Haven loves you.

For years, working in bookstores here, I wished there was a decent guide to the restaurants in New Haven. I knew I wasn't really qualified to put one together myself, but it was so obvious to me that New Haven deserved better than the Zagat guide to Connecticut, which in my opinion is totally worthless. Then Robin Goldstein and Clare Murumba came to the rescue and published The Menu, which was about 95% dead on. I was an instant fan and bought many copies to give as gifts; when I worked at Atticus I sold literally hundreds of copies to grateful eaters.

The authors moved away, and I felt bad that the odds of a third edition seemed slim. It was, I suspected, just one of those things: person comes to Yale, does something really cool in New Haven, and then leaves. We've all seen it happen.

So imagine my joy when a few days ago I was poking around online looking for reviews of a downtown restaurant and I came across a website that was called Fearless Critic. One look and I knew it was Robin Goldstein at work. Further investigation indicated that a new guide to New Haven restaurants was out there -- how had I not known about this? (Well: this is what I get for leaving the bookstore game.) Completely thrilled, I sent Robin a message telling him how excited I was to discover this, and I now have my paws on a copy of the Fearless Critic guide.

And let me tell you it is a blast.

Please: if you're someone who likes to eat, and you spend any amount of time in New Haven, get a copy of this thing. It's in bookstores downtown, it can be (ahem) ordered online. I'm not going to get all uppity about where you buy it; just buy it.

On vengeance and fallenness

As I write this, the hour is late, and I’ve just seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I prefer to call it TROTF, because that sounds funny when you say it aloud. In print it doesn’t look so funny. It looks more like the abbreviation for one of those anxiety-inducing, soul-destroying, opportunity-preventing standardized tests. By comparison to which, the movie is quite enjoyable. Otherwise, though, it’s exhausting. So if I seem a little punchy, you’ll understand why. The summer’s second loudest movie about giant robots to date, TROTF does at least have the advantage over Terminator Salvation, and everything else, of being the first stupidest. To make it, the dubiously distinguished Wesleyan University alumnus Michael Bay pointed many restless cameras at Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf and the computer-rendered shapes of several confusingly configured machines, then blew a bunch of stuff up.

Does saying these things make me seem old and spiteful? I’ll have you know I’m squarely within the TROTF target demographic. For I, like many of my kind, was a child of Hasbro. In fact, without Transformers toys, I don’t know what my middle-class Clinton boyhood would have been like.

Probably better socialized, for starters. During the transition from grade school to middle school, the Transformers became a wedge issue when a friend who’d outgrown me--or maybe just wanted to seem to have put away childish things himself--let it be known with derision that I still played with them. Well, it hadn’t occurred to me to stop. Anyway, I can’t remember if the stigma took (uh, it’s not like I’d been cool to begin with), but I know the betrayal stung.

And so to him I now say: Yeah, well, the joke’s on you, dude, because now Transformers is an enormously lucrative motion-picture franchise and a worldwide sensation--and plenty of people our age are still playing with them.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say again to a certain young woman, wherever she is, that it was indeed rubber cement she found on my desk that one day in fifth grade--not, as she so reprovingly suggested, boogers. That false accusation still incenses me. For what does a man have if not (his memories of Transformers and) his reputation? To think that I’d have left my own boogers just lying right there on my desk. No. I’d have eaten them. Duh.

But I digress. It’s late. I’m punchy. Back to TROTF, and the joke being on my former friend.

No, OK, you’re right: The joke still is on me, because for all my emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations, I somehow lacked the presence of mind back then to imagine a future in which emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations would sustain 144 minutes of moviegoers’ attention, plus a few more minutes of mine, too long into the evening thereafter.

Had I known better, and played my cards right, maybe I could have met Michael Bay while he studied at Wesleyan and my father taught there, then written my own loud, long, stupid Transformers scripts and sold him those. Then I’d have the last laugh, and I dare say it would be an even more satisfying laugh than the one I get by saying “TROTF!” aloud to myself at the kitchen table in the middle of the night.

So, Iguana be a citizen?

My friend Molly and I were strolling through East Rock Park last Saturday morning. Not unlike the joggers and the church picnickers, we were thinking about life and what it felt like to live it on that sunny morning. We were happily yammering away when in the middle of the path, in broad daylight, unmoving and prone was a four-foot long iguana. There was a man standing next to it and looking down at it sadly. Closer, we realized the iguana was really hurt. I mean really hurt; as in, he reared his head when he was prodded, and opened his big mouth to hiss a silent hiss of dying. His guts were in his mouth. The poor thing was busted up near dead.

The man on the Blackberry was Justin of Friends of East Rock. He had already phoned the police and was on hold with animal control. Molly and I took turns getting closer looks at the lizard, at once morbidly curious and frightened.

Justin looked at us and said earnestly, "I have to go to a meeting. I've called the police…" And with that, we were charged with responsibility, immediacy, and yes, citizenship. He left us and there we stood guarding the dying iguana. Thus began a Saturday morning taste of real community.

A man walked up with a baby boy, came and checked out the iguana, told us it was supposed to be green, not the jaundice it was. We wondered together if it had been dumped, already hit by a car, or if a Parks and Rec. truck had run it over. The cynic in me thought it had been hit then put in the middle of the park to be found and buried. The half-full woman in me believed it had been living happily in the park for months, and upon reaching for a far-off branch, had fallen from the tall oaks above us.

The man with the baby offered to stay with the iguana while Molly gathered sticks to weigh down a make-shift trash bag shroud for the thing. I went to houses around the park knocking on doors, asking if anyone was missing a pet iguana. I interrupted a woman mowing her lawn, explained the story, and she told me that she was certain none of her neighbors to the right of her had a pet iguana. But the people two houses down, who knew? She didn't really know them. At another house, a man came to the door while on hold with the telephone. "I hope you aren't missing an iguana," I greeted him. He was happy to report he wasn't and was so kind to then ask the operator to hold while I filled him in on what was going on in the park.

And what was going on in the park, as I now looked back to see Molly amid a small and curious crowd, was in the business of community. Some sixth graders came with their bikes and their father. Turns out they were from my school, Foote School. Turns out they were coming from an alderman's party. Turns out the man with the baby wants to run for alderman. Turns out the local poet Alice Mattison and her husband Ed came to see what was going on. Her husband is a former alderman.

Then, the policeman arrived and declared, "The Green Iguana is not native to this park." At first I thought no shit, and as he talked it was clear he was familiar with reptiles; he's got a few snakes as pets. He reckoned the iguana was kept by some ignoramuses who dropped it in the park and that then a truck came by and squashed the thing. He went to check on the iguana under the glad bag and when he poked it, nothing happened.

It didn't move. It was dead. It had died just there. It was alive and then it was dead.

He picked up the body, and folded the thing in, and the thing arced at the bottom of the trash bag.

People's faces were all sad. We were all sad for this poor alien, this poor orphan, and this poor untold story of a living thing.

And that was it. We used the bathroom, and kept walking down Orange street feeling like we belonged to something bigger than ourselves. And that the charge of respecting a helpless living thing, no matter how random and bazaar, brought people out of their own lives, and brought us together. Iguana community like that, don't you?

Classics I Hate

When I was in the midst of receiving my doctorate in American literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center, I made my obligatory pilgrimages to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. My first was a doozy. I vividly remember a panel I attended on canonical and non-canonical works, where such well-regarded scholars as the incendiary Houston Baker and the all-too-conservative James Tuttleton duked it out over the Western canon and the validity of the "classic." Both trotted out their respective arguments and in the many years since I have come to take stock in the merits of the two sides. There is definitely room in the canon—whatever that is—for new work that need not labor in the shadow of Melville and Emerson or even the critical sensibility that placed them at the top. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way to regard all published works of literary fiction on par with one another in terms of quality or even critical interest. Charles Dickens is better than Stephen King, just like Stephen King is better than John Saul, who is really not much better than anyone. Now we can argue about what we mean by better, but if we take as one aspect of it my second criterion of "critical interest"—worthiness and worthwhile-ness for critical examination—then, yeah, Dickens is better than King. There is more to say about Dickens' work than there is to say about King's, and on multiple fronts, too: historical, economic, linguistic, sociopolitical.

So, in my mind, there are such things as classics, although I don't much love the term and the baggage it carries. Classics presumably point to works of quality that support that much more critical interest than other works. And this raises, in turn, an issue I have become quite fascinated by: classics I hate.

The hated classic finds its antithesis in the guilty pleasure, which in today's world is hardly a source of shame. Hell, my wife is more than happy to talk about her preferences for American Idol—even though she was less vested in this year's selection of Kris Allen—and I can freely admit my penchant for old Kung Fu movies and Firefall's "You Are the Woman" (please don't hit me). There are many who happily boast a passion for various species of bad art. I have friends who love Z-movie vampire flicks. My sister thinks Dumb and Dumber is one of the greatest comedies ever made. I had a boss who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously. There is even circulating a much-talked-about documentary on the "best worst movie" ever. Need I go on?

However, we tend to be more circumspect about how much we dislike great art. True, it is easy enough to confide among friends our gut feeling that Giacometti's sculptures seem childish or Verdi is a bore. But put us in a room of intellectual peers or, even worse, acknowledged superiors, and suddenly it becomes a more vexing matter. We still may not like Giacometti or Verdi, but try justifying your response without sounding entirely solipsistic ("What can I say? It doesn't do a thing for me"), all of which seems to raise important questions about our response—and those of our peers. What do they know that I don't? Is it a question of unacknowledged personal immaturity? Or is this classic just another example of mass hysterical bad judgment? (It's been known to happen.) Or perhaps questions of taste really are relative and Stephen King can be as good as Charles Dicken—Heaven forfend!

With bad art, I suspect we're allowed to indulge our innate solipsism. Why am I willing to overlook how crappy old Kung Fu movies are? The escapism, formulaic storytelling, acrobatic choreography are all psychological creature comforts of the circus and childish wish fulfillment. But why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? It's dull, dull, dull, and I'll take the The Blithedate Romance over it in a heartbeat. So what the hell am I missing?

This is not an insignificant question. As a former college teacher, I was constantly placed in the position of rebutting student charges of dullness, an eternal source of frustration that seemed little more than the response of the lazy mind. In my struggle to teach students how to appreciate works by Conrad, Austen, Poe, Blake, and innumerable others, this response surfaced again and again as an ever-elusive combatant whom I could never quite grasp and pin down.

So why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? Why is my memory of it hardly a pleasurable one? Why has this novel never moved me in any way whatsoever? These are all questions that deserve a better answer than "I'm sorry but it's just a dull read." After all, I am more than willing to tolerate the lengthy mood settings in Joseph Conrad or the fine needlepoint psychological excursions of Henry James. I know The Scarlet Letter is a classic; I can even sense it! But there is radical disconnect, one that flummoxes any attempt at quick explication.

So for now, I am without answers; someday I hope to offer better ones. Until then, let me turn it over to you: Which classics have you found to be an utter failure in your experience as a reader?

The street where I live . . .

I have been thinking about turning this article I wrote about my street, West Rock Avenue, into a book, and so I have been doing a lot of reading about urbanism, town planning, and architecture. Basically, I am trying to figure out what makes some streets livable and others not. A good deal of the literature — by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell — boils down to this: don't depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them. This small-town mythology is one that I am particularly susceptible to, having grown up in a neighborhood that had many of a small town's virtues. And I find myself, as I read these books, falling prey to an unfortunate smugness, as if growing up on streets laid out on an easily navigated grid, with houses on quarter-acres instead of large lots, is the only way to have a happy childhood.

But that can't be right. For one thing, this mythos runs contrary to another important American mythos, the rural farm. I don't think many of us would want to say that children growing up in the countryside, learning to milk cows by their parents' sides, are unhappy. Nobody thinks that that's an uninspiring or despairing way to grow up. And, to be fair, the writers I'm reading aren't reacting against that way of life, which may be dying out; they are reacting against suburban sprawl, which until recently seemed poised to dominate the American landscape.

But what of that suburban sprawl — especially those cul-de-sac developments that have proved so popular in late-20th-century construction? Can one have a happy childhood where there are no sidewalks, where it's too dangerous to ride a bicycle, where there are no secret passageways behind garages or corner stores at which to buy candy?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate children's capacity for self-mystification. I suspect that most children, at least most of those who grow up middle-class, and sheltered from anything too abysmal in the family's home life, look back at their early years with a certain sense of awe and wonder. Those lookalike houses in Del Boca Vista Estates are not lookalike to the children inside them, who know which house has the best video-game system, which kid has the dad who makes the best forts with the dining room table and some blankets, whose parents go out late and don't hire a babysitter (all the better for watching verboten TV channels).

On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that suburban life of this kind can lead to bad things: obesity, too much time in the car, fewer friends, less play. And teenagers—forget about it. If they can, they flee to the city. Or at least the curious ones do.

But what I don't have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life — Langdon's book, Duany et al.'s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place — there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.

I want the other side of the story. Ideas, anyone?

Bernard Wolfe: Anyone? Anyone?

Though New Haven is rich in intellectual history and, as a corollary to that, has a small place in literary history, one hears little of writers who've actually lived here. By writers I mean not writers who had to take teaching posts to get by but writers who grew up here and went on to Great Things (or even Greatish Things), or who just happened to wind up living here. It does happen. Sometimes. One of my parents is a huge sci-fi/fantasy fan from way back and so I grew up in a household that had ridiculous numbers of those cheap mass market paperbacks with lurid covers. I did not inherit the sci-fi/fantasy gene, so I was and am uninterested in this stuff, but there's one writer in that genre who fascinates me: Bernard Wolfe. Wolfe's stuff came to my attention maybe ten or fifteen years ago. It's not that I was so interested in his writing but I was intrigued by his writing career. He wrote a number of novels, and his subject matter was all over the place. His best known novel -- and a book that is, I understand, a sort of classic in the field -- is called Limbo. I'm sure if you like this kind of stuff it's great; I've tried to read it twice, been bored to tears each time, and don't expect to ever get through it.

But Wolfe wrote a lot of other stuff, too. He wrote a classic of jazz lit -- co-wrote, really with Mezz Mezzrow -- Really the Blues -- and he wrote a Hollywood novel (Come On Out, Daddy); he wrote political novels; and, as one can glean from the title of his memoir, Confessions of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer, he wrote pornography. It was this book that I read from cover to cover, and which made me wonder: What the hell?

Because it turns out that Bernard Wolfe was a townie. The guy grew up in New Haven. Went to Hillhouse. Went to Yale -- an unusual thing for a Jewish guy of his generation. He graduated from college and was sure that he'd kick some ass in publishing only to find that no one would hire him. So he started out writing porn. (His being a Trotskyite was probably an issue, too, but what can you do.) He had worked as Trotsky's bodyguard, at one point. But he became a real literary figure in his day, and published many works which got reviewed by, you know, professional book reviewers. The New York Times Book Review knew who he was.

So how is it that no one I've talked to around here knows anything about him? Back when I had daily contact with literary geeks of many stripes, I would ask, periodically, "So tell me what you know about Bernard Wolfe." And I'd get very little back. People of a certain generation recalled the name, and that was pretty much it.

Even if Wolfe was just a hack, wouldn't you think that his name would be mentioned more often in New Haven? I mean, as a famous hack? Let's face it, this is a town that will grab desperately at any straw that seems like it'd be good p.r. ("We got restaurants! Boy, do we have restaurants! We got some damn good restaurants! No, don't go over there.... come over here, where there's some good restaurants!"). You'd think maybe that places like, oh, I don't know, the New Haven Free Public Library, for example, might have some Bernard Wolfe stuff sitting around. Well, they've got a copy of Limbo. That's it. The Institute Library has a copy of The Magic of Their Singing, which is Wolfe's take on Beat culture (and pretty entertaining at that). Yale, of course, has tons of stuff, but most of it is in the Beinecke (i.e. not circulating), and I think was mostly given to the place by Wolfe himself (though I may be wrong on that point). They have some of his papers, and I've read them, but it's a spotty collection. It's like the guy evaporated shortly before he died, leaving almost nothing behind. Spooky.

So come on. There's more to this. Wolfe was obviously something of a wonderful maniac in his day. Why don't we know more about him? There was clearly a bunch to know... and I, for one, would like to know it.

So Which Was Your Favorite?

At New Haven Review, we'd like to hear from you about your favorite essay, story, memoir, whatever... Commenting is easy, so please just a line or two on what you liked most and why!

On Editing, Part 1

A couple of days ago, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the New York Times website ran a fascinating piece about the iconic photograph of the so-called tank man—the man in the white shirt, holding what look like shopping bags, standing defiantly in front of a column of approaching tanks. The Times, quite justifiably, calls it "one of the most famous photographs in recent history." Thing is, unlike many other famous photographs—Robert Capa's "Death of a Loyalist Soldier" comes immediately to mind—there isn't just one of them. There were a lot of photojournalists covering the event that day, and as a video of the confrontation between the tank man and the tanks shows, the incident lasted long enough for several photographers to capture essentially the same image. The Times piece has the recollections of four of them: Charlie Cole (who was working for Newsweek), Stuart Franklin (Time), Jeff Widener (Associated Press), and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah (Reuters). Each photographer is given several paragraphs to explain how they took their pictures, what was happening around them at the time, and what happened afterward. David Nickerson, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me a link to the New York Times piece; we are friends from college and are always emailing each other newspaper items with snarky comments attached (this piece is written with Prof. Nickerson's generous consent). As we talked more about the piece, two themes emerged, about both the event itself and the apparent personalities of the photographers. But really, we were talking about editing: how our perceptions of a thing are shaped by every word we read about it and every word that is left out.

The tank man is a compelling figure partly because he's anonymous. His back is always to the photographer, and to this day, as the Times piece pointed out, his identity and whereabouts are unclear. This may seem almost impossible to believe: His showdown with the tanks was the middle of a wide street in broad daylight, witnessed apparently by hundreds of people, many of whom, even at the time, knew they were witnessing something extraordinary. But look at the recollections of the four photojournalists of what happened to the tank man immediately after he stopped the tanks:

[Cole:] Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. [Franklin:] He then disappeared into the crowd after being led away from the tank by two bystanders. [Wah:] Four or five people came out from the sidewalk and pulled him away. He disappeared forever.

Was it two bystanders or four or five? And what led Cole to think to think that they were security officers? (Were they?) Right from the start, the stories of eyewitnesses to the scene don't square—and these are journalists at the top of their game, people who are much better than most of us at getting the facts right. At this point, my editor brain kicked in. Surely the editor of the Times piece noticed the discrepancies. Did they ask the photographers any follow-up questions? Wouldn't you just love to get the three of them in a room right now to sort this all out? (Presumably this documentary does something like that and more.)

Meanwhile, Widener's piece doesn't mention what happened to the tank man after he took his picture at all, which brings us to a more delicate matter. As Prof. Nickerson pointed out, Widener's account of the actual taking of the picture is very different from the accounts of the other three photographers. Cole, Franklin, and Wah recall mostly what was happening around them—who was there, what they were doing. In their accounts, they're photojournalists doing their jobs, but their concern for the tank man's safety, not to mention the safety of themselves and everyone around them, is evident. Cole even finds time to take a wider view:

As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart [Franklin; apparently they were standing next to each other, which accounts for the similarities in their photographs —ed.] and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

Now look at Widener:

I loaded the single roll of film in a Nikon FE2 camera body. It was small and had an auto-exposure meter. As I tried to sleep off the massive headache that pounded my head, I could hear the familiar sound of tanks in the distance. I jumped up. Kurt/Kirk [a college kid who's helping them and whose name Widener never quite caught —ed.] followed me to the window. In the distance was a huge column of tanks. It was a very impressive sight. Being the perfectionist that I am, I waited for the exact moment for the shot.

Suddenly, some guy in a white shirt runs out in front and I said to Kurt/Kirk “Damn it—that guy’s going to screw up my composition.” Kurt/Kirk shouted, “They are going to kill him!” I focused my Nikon 400mm 5.6 ED IF lens and waited for the instant he would be shot. But he was not.

The image was way too far away. I looked back at the bed and could see my TC-301 teleconverter. That little lens adapter could double my picture. With it, I could have a stronger image but then I might lose it all together if he was gone when I returned.

I dashed for the bed, ran back to the balcony and slapped the doubler on. I focused carefully and shot one … two … three frames until I noticed with a sinking feeling that my shutter speed was at a very low 30th-60th of a second. Any camera buff knows that a shutter speed that slow is impossible hand-held with an 800mm focal length. I was leaning out over a balcony and peeking around a corner. I faced the reality that the moment was lost.

In comparing the four entries (in their entirety as they appear in the piece, not only in what I've excerpted here) it was easy for me to think a few uncharitable thoughts about Widener. He seems more concerned with his camera equipment than with what's happening to the people around him. Most tellingly—or so it would seem at first read—at the point in his narrative where he might tell us what happened to the tank man, it seems that Widener was actually looking at his camera, noticing that the shutter speed was too low. In the Cole, Franklin, and Wah accounts, the man appears as a man; in Widener's, he is an element of composition.

But then my editor brain kicked in again. Was I really being fair to Widener? After all, my opinion of his account was formed, first, from comparing it with the other three accounts. Without the other three accounts right next to his, the idea that Widener was more preoccupied with his photograph than the subject of the photograph might never have occurred to me. Widener's piece might even have struck me as funny and refreshingly candid—the story of a man trying to do his job in trying circumstances.

Then the real doubt started to creep in. As a editor, I should know better than to think I'd even read all of what the photojournalists wrote (let alone what they would say if I were to be fortunate enough to have dinner with them). Perhaps Widener's piece had a lot about the tank man himself, but it was redacted due to concerns about the length of the piece overall. Perhaps the other three had a lot more talk about the gear they had, but Widener's gear talk was better, so they left Widener's in and cut the rest out. All these pieces had been through the editing mill (one editor? Two? Three?), and they were edited (presumably, and no matter how invasively) to make the piece as a whole as tight and coherent as possible, while sacrificing as little of the authors' voice and intent as possible. But no edit is made without giving up something; the question is whether what you're giving up is worth what you get in return. And there's no predicting how people will read the final product: Maddeningly, wonderfully, some readers respond to even the most straightforward text in ways that surprise even the most careful writers and editors.

In every published text, in the passage from thought or experience to writer to editors to reader, perception piles onto perception, subjectivity piles onto subjectivity, and the original thing—the truth, or the closest thing we have to it—is buried under layers of reconsiderations, rewordings, and manipulated grammar. It sounds like a bunch of postmodern claptrap, I know; but it's the nature of the job. And twenty years later, we have these stories of what happened in Beijing that June 4—or May 35, as some call it to avoid censorship from China's government—but we still don't know who the tank man was, or where he is today.

We Shouldn't Should Teach Creative Writing

When I saw Louis Menand's "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing be Taught" in this week's New Yorker, I cringed, sighed, and devoured the article right at the kitchen table. As one of the many MFAs and teachers of Creative Writing, I am intimately and darkly interested in this topic. Turns out, Menand's piece is more of a review of Mark McGurl's new book called The Program Era, in which McGurl focuses on fiction writing programs in relation to the Marshall Plan and Post WWII Literature. The article wanders through some sound investigations and is full of surprising statistics.

Oddly enough, Menand has nothing to say about poetry programs except, "I don't think (undergraduate) workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that others make." He recalls his days at college where " all we were required to do was to talk about each other's poems," and that it "seemed like a great place to be."

My experience at NYU did indeed help inspire a type of care for "made" pieces, and graduate school was a great place to be. But studying in a Creative Writing Program did a lot more than simply inspire in me a compassion for other writers. To think that MFA programs are as Menand writes, "Designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a published poem," is convenient for his argument, but not entirely accurate. (But not one Creative Writing Program student was interviewed for the article -- also convenient.)

Many of my MFA colleagues came to the program having already published poems and essays in widely circulated journals and magazines. Many programs require their students to take at least two Theory or Critical courses for the degree. Some programs have a language requirement; some have a study abroad requirement. But all programs (that are worth their salt) will certainly compel a student to do more than only "require" students to talk about other students' poem. Many of my teachers: Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine would bring in poems as models for the class, and would conduct mini lectures on that poem's strengths, allusions, or patterns. We were apprentices more than we were a gaggle of "twelve-on-one group therapy" goers.

With the increase in MFA programs and graduates, as is the law of supply and demand, the cache of the degree has worn off. Yes, but questioning whether or not Creative Writing should be taught, or if it should exist in the realm of the Academy, seems like a hackneyed old pitch. (Didn't Dana Goia go there already?)

The volte for me though, is that Menard's article contains within its title the word "should." Would the New Yorker publish, "Sight and Vision: Should Painting be Taught?" or "Stories upon Stories: Should Architecture be Taught?" or even "Eat Your Cake too: Should the Culinary Arts be taught?" I don't think so. How and why is writing held to a different standard? Is it that ultimately we don't as a nation really consider writing to be an art form? That we can't understand that painting, buildings, and poems can all narrate humanity-just through different media?