The Square Circuit

neverett

2010-08-16T18:56:00.001-04:00

Compared to Tim Neverett's broadcasts of the Pirates, Bob Uecker's "Just... a little bit outside" (from MAJOR LEAGUE) is gritty realism.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden Boulevard

2010-02-11T22:15:00.001-04:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Thanks, Mayor Ravenstahl! Perhaps we could rename Stanwix St. "Fredo Gonzalez Place"? The Mexican War streets could be renamed Addington, Yoo, Feith, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice!

Hey, Luke: No Honors for Torturers, Please

2010-02-11T21:55:00.002-04:00

It's not a great week for Luke Ravenstahl, probably. During the worst snowstorm in recent memory he's absent, skiing in the Laurel Highlands. And the snow removal in the city is abysmal. My East Side neighborhood is envying Wilkinsburg and Swissvale for, well, pretty much the first time ever, and South Siders are about to take up arms and storm Grant St. Because of the city's absolute failure to provide adequate snow removal, the public schools were out all week, causing countless parents to miss work. But while I'm enraged at Ravenstahl about the snow, that's not what's really got me going about him right now.

General Michael V. Hayden—a graduate of North Catholic High School and Duquesne University—reached the highest ranks of the American national-security establishment, heading the National Security Agency under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. In 2006, Pres. Bush elevated him to direct the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2008, to honor Hayden’s accomplishments, Mayor Ravenstahl posted a “name blade” honoring Hayden at North Shore Drive and Allegheny Avenue--home of Hayden's favorite team,, the Ironers or something like that.

Unfortunately, in so honoring Gen. Hayden, Mayor Ravenstahl has given our city’s approval to some of the most illegal and immoral governmental actions in living memory. General Hayden was one of the leading enablers of President Bush’s campaign to undermine Americans’ civil liberties. At NSA, Gen. Hayden ran Bush’s illegal warrantless-wiretapping program, and at CIA Hayden oversaw illegal kidnapping, detention, and torture. What’s more, Hayden continues to publicly defend such horrific actions. Because of this, the city should rescind this honor given to Hayden and take down his honorary “name blade.”

In 2006 the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was illegally wiretapping Americans’ phone calls without warrants, and several subsequent investigations have uncovered the full and dramatic extent of Bush’s unlawful domestic spying. Hayden’s NSA ran the program.

In his position at CIA, Hayden presided over treatment of detainees that groups from the International Committee of the Red Cross to the U.S. Army have called torture. While he can’t be held responsible for the CIA’s notorious “waterboarding” of terrorist suspects, he has defended this torture method as effective and necessary.

Hayden also oversaw the “extraordinary rendition” program of kidnapping terrorist suspects, and the network of “black site” prisons where prisoners were held incommunicado for years and tortured, in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture signed by President Reagan.

One might argue that only “the worst of the worst,” the most hardened terrorists, were subject to this illegal spying, detention, and torture. However, even a casual examination of the evidence disproves this. Tens of thousands of Americans had their phonecalls tapped and taped, in violation of Fourth Amendment protections, and countless hundreds of thousands (including many Pittsburghers) were subject to other domestic-spying programs: is there anyone, even the most conspiratorial, who thinks that many terrorists lurk among us?

Hundreds of prisoners have been released from Guantanamo, Bagram, and the “black sites” by both the Bush and Obama administrations in recognition of the fact they had been captured, held, and tortured without cause for years. Even the “rendition” program has swept up the innocent: Canadian citizen Maher Arar was taken by the CIA and tortured, then transferred to the Syrian government for more torture before the CIA finally admitted they had the wrong man. Arar is by no means alone.

The public honor that Mayor Ravenstahl gave to Hayden should be about inspiring and motivating us, representing the values we hold as a city. And while the general certainly deserves our thanks for his long service to the nation, this very rare honor should be reserved for those with accomplishments we can all admire. It’s particularly ironic that we bill ourselves as a “City of Asylum,” a city where writers persecuted by their government and exiled from their homes can go for safe haven. In honoring Hayden, we tell these political refugees that in truth we side with the secret police.

Andrew Sullivan, the conservative writer, has argued that our gradual acceptance of kidnapping, perpetual detention, and torture is not just damaging our nation’s image abroad, but chipping away at our very souls. When we honor Hayden, we tacitly give our blessing to our government’s desire to kidnap and torture in the shadows. We tell ourselves that it only happens to “them,” the “terrorists,” the less-than-human, and we refuse to confront the evidence that not only have we kidnapped and tortured human beings, we have done so to innocent human beings. We let fear tell us that we must cede our liberties to the state, and we deny the humanity of those whom the government tells us are our enemies.

I know that’s not what Pittsburghers really want to honor, no matter what Mayor Ravenstahl may think. If you agree, please stand with me and register to speak at City Council’s hearing on this matter, which will take place Monday, March 1 at 9am.

DON'T GET A PHD

2009-12-17T15:16:00.001-04:00

English and foreign-language faculty positions are at their lowest level in 35 years.

the future of books

2009-12-03T23:11:00.001-04:00

New York Public Radio's fun show ON THE MEDIA on the future of books.

TRISTES TROPIQUES

2009-12-03T22:55:00.002-04:00

I've been waiting, in one sense, for twenty years to read Claude Levi-Strauss' TRISTES TROPIQUES, since I was one of the few people (it seemed) in my class at college not taking Anthro 100 and reading it. In actuality, I've been really wanting to read it for a few months, ever since I realized that I'm very interested (in a dilettantey way) in ethnography and anthropology and have been assigning English students ethnographies to read. When he died last month I really wanted to get to it, and finally I was able to because of a long car trip for Thanksgiving.

I don't know what I was expecting. I knew that it wasn't a traditional anthropological monograph and that it verged into autobiography and even belles lettres at times. I've also dipped into Levi-Strauss in the past--some of the structural analysis of myth stuff--and found it very tough going for an amateur. This, though, was utterly engrossing.

I'm struck most by just how clearly Levi-Strauss' book prefigures so many arguments that have come be be commonplaces in the Euro-American left but that in the 1950s, I suspect, were still obscure. A major theme in the book is humans' tendency--no matter what their culture--to use up their environment and move on, leaving physical devastation of the landscape. He describes this through his experience in Pakistan and India, which he identifies as one of the oldest civilizations on earth; through his discussion of the effect of European settlers on the Brazilian coast; and through his discussion of some of the interior Brazilian tribes with whom he lives. It's a kind of environmental awareness that could not have been widespread before the 1960s, I would imagine.

He also situates himself interestingly between Rousseau's "noble savage" argument--which he actually says has been a misunderstanding of Rousseau--and a more cold-eyed vision of what he continually calls, at least in this English translation, the "savages." His arguments of why "inequality" arises (again, here he obviously draws on Rousseau) are fascinating.

weirdest national park attraction

2009-11-12T10:26:00.003-04:00

My nominee: the underground of the Franklin Court buildings in Philadelphia. Franklin Court is part of the larger, dispersed Independence Park in the old part of Philly. Independence Park has the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and several other pieces to it (including one of those "living history" museums where people dress in period clothes and do period things--I love them, but my wife hates them).

Franklin Court consists of several buildings built by Franklin that housed a print shop/newspaper offices and residences. The print shop is quite cool; the rangers man the handpress and show tourists how newspapers, broadsides, and even books were printed back in the 18th century. (A bindery is in the adjoining room.) But things get just plain weird in the building just south of the newspaper office. One enters a remodeled-in-the-1970s doorway and descends a series of ramps deep underground. At each level, there's an attraction: one landing offers a display of period furniture from Franklin's time and of several items he actually owned. Descending again, visitors end up in a kind of underground control room that looks like nothing so much as a Disney's vision of the future, a kind of Surround-o-rama. On the floor is a matrix of Trimline telephones on slender posts. You quickly notice that of the approximately 40 telephone stands, about half lack phones. Picking up the phones, you realize that of the 20 existent phones, only about half of those offer a dial tone.

Accepting that 25% efficiency is probably acceptable in a federal institution, you pick up the phone and get a dial tone. Nice. Then you notice that on the wall in front of you is a list of historic notables--from John Adams to Immanuel Kant to Andrew Carnegie--and corresponding phone numbers. You seem to be in a kind of off-the-standard-grid telephone exchange, because while many of the numbers make sense (Carnegie and Mellon are reached through Pittsburgh's 412 area code and Adams through Boston's 617), others, such as Kant, have only a five-digit number. British personages you must reach by dialing their country code, though.

Picking up a working phone and dialing the number, you hear the hard "brrrrring" that used to characterize American phones but will be familiar to those who've used European phones. After a few rings, you hear the distinctly familiar (to those of us older than 30) sound of a phone being picked up off a hook, and a recording of the personage you called begins.

It's very weird. Why Trimline phones? Why the accurate area codes? Why not upgrade the place now that everyone walking in carries a cell--the rest of Independence Park offers numbers you can call for a recording describing the attraction. I found this subterranean Franklin-land indescribably charming, and it reminded me of the even then dusty vision of the future that Disneyland in Anaheim showcased when I first visited it, in 1976.

writing classes should teach writing

2009-08-25T12:45:00.002-04:00

Stanley Fish's latest opinion piece is very typical Fish: take a complicated thing that academics talk about in jargon, find an extreme position on it from which you can say "everyone else is fooling themselves," and then use superior powers of argumentation to blast apart the opposition. He's great at it, and reading his stuff, whether it's reader-response theory or arguments against teaching writing by using politically charged subject-matter, always makes me think much harder. He's a very smart guy.

But this piece is a straw-man argument. "My grad students, who teach writing to freshmen, don't write well. Their class syllabi show that they are having their students argue over issues rather than practicing rhetoric and grammar. Therefore, I decreed that they must teach only rhetoric and grammar." I don't understand why we can't teach rhetoric and grammar THROUGH reading and responding to and writing about controversial issues. I grant that grad students in particular aren't expert in balancing the two, in making sure that the WORK students produce for the class and the grounds on which they are evaluated must be writing, not understanding of the issues. But they are learning to teach, to fumble their way through achieving that balance. I don't think Fish is prescribing a 1920s-style writing class consisting of drills, but like I said--he loves to take the extreme position, and it's possible that that's precisely what he mandated.

The real problem is that most grad students--hell, many college English professors!--are not capable of teaching "grammar" as I think Fish means the term. Of the 50 people who work for me, and who do a very good job getting students to write more clearly and more correctly and more effectively for an academic audience, I bet fewer than 10 could identify an appositive or explain a nonrestrictive clause or describe a linking verb. Nobody gets that in the public schools anymore, they don't get it in college or grad school (even in ed schools!), so how can we expect them to teach it? It's impractical and really not possible to train them in the basics of English grammar in three pre-semester days of training, so I suppose that incoming TAs could take a year-long "Structure of the English Language and How to Teach It" class.

2666

2009-08-04T13:40:00.002-04:00

I finally finished Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Wow. As many of you know, I am a sucker for the giant, messy, ultimately failed encyclopedic novel, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them. I'm just hoping it sticks with me--like V or GRAVITY'S RAINBOW--and doesn't fade into obscurity because in the end it isn't all that good--like AGAINST THE DAY. I have a book of photographs at home called something like JUAREZ, THE LABORATORY OF OUR FUTURE. It's one of these dystopian projects in which they take pictures of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and argue that all of its nastiness and violence and exploitation is what we're in for. I certainly hope not. Anyway, 2666 feels a bit like that book of photos is percolating underneath every page.

two Pittsburgh beer restaurants

2009-08-03T11:01:00.004-04:00

I don't know about the South Side Works. What I initially feared was that it was going to be "The Grove," a nasty development in central LA near where we used to life. The Grove is a big outdoor mall right next to the Farmer's Market, but it's set up to be a sort of Disneyfied streetscape. It's got a little tram, a fountain, "street vendors," etc. All of this is entirely enclosed, of course; the outside wall running along Third Street is just as ugly as any exterior mall wall, faceless and windowless and giving the lie to the faux-pedestrian-friendliness of the Grove. It's really too bad, because there is a real potential for Third Street to be much more pleasant. It's got a park right there, a Whole Foods and (what used to be, at least) the foulest-smelling K-Mart in existence, and the Grove's other borders are essentially Fairfax and Beverly, two of the most pleasant streets in LA to stroll.

So as we watched South Side Works sprout up, and see the cutesy names for the coordinated parking garages and the streets and pseudo public park next to the Cheesecake Factory, I feared the worst. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten that bad, but there is a massive amount of street construction going on right now that might change things. It's still a pretty contained area--you definitely know you're in a mall kinda place. But there's an escape to the south (across Carson it's the gloriously shabby South Side Flats and wonderful Nadine's) and to the north, the South Side Trail is coming along after being interrupted by construction for several years.

Right along that trail is the first place we went, the Hofbrauhaus Pittsburgh, which bills itself as one of the few foreign outposts of Munich's famed Hofbrauhaus. It's a beer kinda place, but it doesn't double as a sports bar: it's got a series of cavernous areas (quite loud) where people drink liters of beer. There's also several levels of porches and patios overlooking the Mon. We took the boys there a couple months ago, when they were still getting things together. It wasn't at all bad. The beer was excellent, and the food was quite acceptable. It's German food, of course, so it's not all that light. But the pretzels and cheese were perfect, and the sausages and such were essentially what you would expect. Thumbs up.

Sadly, the same wasn't true about another similar place that had received good reviews from the P-G and the Trib. Robinson--that strip-mall area you have to pass to and from the airport--is a desert for restaurants, which is always too bad when you get back from a long flight. I was quite happy to hear that there was one good place out there, and that it wasn't a chain like the craptastic Max & Erma's. But sadly, Bocktown was pretty poor. I hope that it's just getting its sea-legs, because it clearly had ambitions beyond being a TGIF. The menu had some really interesting stuff on it, but let's just make this thing clear: the "pretzels and cheese" plate was literally a bag of pretzels emptied into a basket. They take their beer seriously, and the selection was great, but the food (beyond the pretzels) wasn't. It wasn't awful, but it was just not done well. There was also some sort of serious service glitch, because it took us forever to get our food--45 minutes or so--and by the grace of god or someone we had just gotten the boys new toys that entertained them (potty-training reward for the young one). Bocktown seemed like a good place to go for after-work beers, but I'm not driving to Robinson after work, so I hope there's a clientele out west of town.

fries

2009-07-21T14:28:00.001-04:00

does every article on Pittsburgh HAVE TO mention fries on sandwiches?

RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN

2009-06-27T21:41:00.002-04:00

Several versions of Simon Reynolds' RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: POSTPUNK 1978–1984 circulate around. The UK version is long--almost 600 pages, with a chronology of releases and band foundings--and the US version is significantly shorter. But as far as I can tell, there are versions within versions and a couple editions of each. Having finished the longest version I could get my hands on (the second paperback edition), I can say that I don't quite understand why it needed to be as long as it was. The book traces "postpunk" from, as its title makes clear, 1978 to 1984. Because Reynolds is a rock critic, he's got to set forth some arbitrary landmarks and boundaries, and so his book begins with the breakup of the Sex Pistols (duh) and the founding of PiL (his first interesting choice, but not a very daring one) and ends with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which is a very British choice. I don't think anyone in the US saw Frankie as following in a postpunk line, but Reynolds makes a pretty convincing argument that they did come from that stock. The book isn't as good of a read as I hoped, although the research is great. Three dozen or more stories about bands getting together in England, orienting themselves to punk rock, and either succeeding or disappearing gets pretty repetitive. It was fascinating to read about how the Human League, which have become essentially synonymous with silly 1980s synth rock and big hair, actually came from the projects of Sheffield, England with a very well-developed political project, a kind of Chumbawamba. (But for all of his understanding of English sociopolitical life in the late 1970s, it is amazing that Reynolds calls Cleveland the heart of the US steel industry.)

As far as I can tell, Reynolds' most important act of critical judgment was in deciding what to exclude and what to include and what to count as the main gene line of "postpunk." Unlike what an American-oriented critic would do, Reynolds puts synthesizer music at the very center of the postpunk family tree, sprouting from PiL's early records. Because of this, a lot of music that I never considered "postpunk" in any but a chronological sense is at the heart of Reynolds' story: the Human League, for instance, are key players here. Reynolds excludes from his story hardcore and the early 1980s punk revival, seeing them as irrelevant. It's an interesting story, very indebted to the post-Velvet Underground cult of artiness. But I don't think he mentions the Jam at all, and Elvis Costello is outside of his purview. Were they too derivative of pub rock? Dunno.

plotting in puerto vallarta

2009-06-25T14:27:00.001-04:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

naipaul and menand

2009-06-14T22:24:00.002-04:00

Although I finished it several weeks ago, I'm still not sure what I think about V.S. Naipaul's A BEND IN THE RIVER. He's one of those authors that I'd heard a great deal about, essentially all of it wildly positive, but still didn't know much about even after reading one of his classics (A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, which I read about five years ago). A recent and very sensationalistic authorized biography of Naipaul caused a commotion in the book-review press, as the biography dwells on Naipaul's taste for rough sex and his often brutal and generally callous treatment of the women in his life. None of this was an entirely new story, of course, as Paul Theroux had already written extensively about what a bastard Sir Vidia is/was, but to have this in an "authorized" biography was pretty delicious. Anyway, apart from all of the gossip I'd always heard that Naipaul was one of the great stylists in English and that if his politics weren't so uncongenial to the project he'd be the great postcolonial writer. (His novels certainly document the fragmenting of the old colonial order, but not in the celebratory way that lefty postcolonials prefer.) I had slogged through MR. BISWAS without it making a great impression, but since A BEND IN THE RIVER is considered Naipaul's greatest work I tried it out with my last Audible.com credit.

Like MR. BISWAS, it wanders and meanders and doesn't feel particularly tightly plotted. Huge events occur during the novel, and the main character (Salim) observes them from his unimportant position, and they determine Salim's development, but it's hard to say about this novel "this happened, and it led to this, and it ended up this way." Salim is an Indian Muslim from the Indian trading diaspora, here in southern Africa (an unnamed nation but most critics see it to be what used to be called the Belgian Congo and then Zaire). He leaves his "cosmopolitan" coastal city for a city in the interior where he buys a general-store business. The city in which he lives waxes and wanes with the nation's fortunes; over the course of the book the foreigners who give the city culture and money are driven out by "bush" people during decolonization, then return when the nation normalizes, then start to leave again when the Big Man leader (likely modeled on Mobutu Sese Seko) begins to rile up those "bush" people. It's a fascinating look at a little-known group of people and at a predicament I'd never thought much about.

After that I quickly sped through Louis Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, a kind of heavy-hitters lineup of mid-19th-century American intellectual history: Dewey, Holmes, Agassiz, Peirce, William James, and many others make appearances. Menand is a New Yorker writer and he brings that blessed clarity to this book, but even at that I'm such a philosophical illiterate (and lazy reader of this book) that I couldn't quote back at you Menand's explanation of what "pragmatism" actually is. Oddly enough, I did start to understand why statistics was such a breakthrough by reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB.

G-20

2009-05-30T21:43:00.002-04:00

The G-20 meeting in September will happen in Pittsburgh. Did the reporters have to laugh when Gibbs announced it?

chicago and bicycles

2009-05-30T21:21:00.002-04:00

After spending just a few minutes in Chicago last week, I was amazed at how many cyclists were on the streets. Granted, it was a beautiful day when we arrived, and it was a Sunday, but the place looked like Portland (the most bike-friendly city I know). And Chicago, unlike Portland, isn't all that natural a bike city, I wouldn't think. I was genuinely impressed. Turns out Mayor Daley is a big booster of bicycles, and pledged "to make Chicago the most bicycle-friendly city in the United States." He might not be there yet, but especially on the North Side it's pretty remarkable.

In Pittsburgh, things aren't anywhere near as good. There is a Bicycle/Pedestrian Coordinator in the mayor's office, and a plan that is underway to make the place more friendly to bikes, but two major culprits, I think, will make things more difficult here even than in car-oriented places like Chicago. First of all, there's Pittsburgh's general yahoo attitude toward bikes. Yinzers don't like bicycles and don't think they belong on the streets. Now this is pretty much a universal attitude in the US, at least outside of college towns and liberal utopias like Portland and Seattle, but that doesn't make it any easier to combat. Second, and this is particular to Pittsburgh, I think that our geography makes it more difficult to designate bicycle spaces on city streets. The streets are narrow and winding and hilly, and it's hard enough to get around here that people would scream and yell if a lane of traffic was taken away. They've done this in various places--Liberty Blvd in Bloomfield, East Liberty Blvd in East Liberty, and Beechwood Blvd in Squirrel Hill--but there's little enforcement of the parking regulations (especially on lower Beechwood). It's a good step. The city also created bike lanes on Forbes between Dallas and Braddock, the stretch through Frick Park where drivers regularly exceed 50 mpg, but on the westbound side the lane disappears at the entrance to Homewood Cemetery, leaving cyclists nowhere to go, and it's even worse eastbound, where the lane is narrow as it nears Braddock and the buses veer right into them. I give Ravenstahl credit for making this a priority, but I still think he can do a better job.

Now when will they extend the bike trail on the left bank of Mon from where it ends short of the Glenwood Bridge past Sandcastle? It's about parking.

ducklings

2009-05-27T21:01:00.001-04:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

a belated post from an April trip to Boston for the marathon--the boys at the Public Gardens. Fortunately, Pack was back.

harry potter at the Science and Industry Museum, Chicago

2009-05-27T20:59:00.003-04:00

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millennium park

2009-05-27T20:59:00.001-04:00

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the bean

2009-05-27T20:58:00.001-04:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Millennium Park, Chicago: the "Cloud Gate."

SAG HARBOR

2009-05-20T08:18:00.004-04:00

I went to Colson Whitehead's reading of an excerpt from the then in-progress SAG HARBOR about two years ago, and then like many other people I read another piece that appeared in the NEW YORKER a few months back. I loved both of the chunks, and I think it goes beyond just really thinking I'd like Whitehead personally. I've read all of his previous books and, like most people, my favorite has been his first, the inventive and restrained THE INTUITIONIST. JOHN HENRY DAYS felt like it got out of control, and APEX HIDES THE HURT, I read it just after I read THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE by Jonathan Lethem and it just fades next to that huge novel so I barely remember it. But even in his books that I didn't like I never had the feeling that he was running dry (as I feel these days about Franzen). More like that he was waiting for his Big Novel to come to him, the continuation of the promise he showed with THE INTUITIONIST.

While SAG HARBOR isn't that book it's a very interesting detour. Most writers don't wait until their fourth novel to write the disguised autobiography they profess to avoid but tend to produce; they eject that as their first. Whitehead, though, waited until now to write his personal coming-of-age story. What's more, and what's I think a bit daringly postmodern, is that he chooses to write his coming-of-age novel not as a novel but as a kind of fictionalized memoir. I can't imagine this book appearing in the pre-memoir phase of American writing (let's say before THE LIAR'S CLUB), and I can't help thinking that Whitehead is trying to comment on the prevalence and the growing mannerism of the American memoir. It's also post-Frey: unlike James Frey (who, of course, famously turned his own drug problem into an epic and wrenching conversion narrative that I still like, that I still think loses very little in having been shown to be fictionalized), Whitehead doesn't heighten the tensions and intensity of his autobiography to make it more like good pageturning fiction; instead, he dials it down, making his novel more like aimless reminiscence. It's not plotted, and it's not even particularly character-driven. It's a series of long set pieces about setting, about a time and a very specific place and the consumer products and vocabulary and folkways that typified that setting (a long-established black upper-middle-class section of Sag Harbor, Long Island). The novel's conceit is that this neighborhood is a sort of "green world" for the kids, whose parents often leave them to their own devices during summer weeks while they work their professional jobs in New York City. They get in trouble, but with nothing more serious than a BB gun. The book's strengths are its laid-back yet carefully observed tone and Whitehead's constantly serious and charming concern with language and dialect and the interaction between a dominant language, a dialect of a marginalized group, and the linguistic adventures of a small group of people suspended (by virtue of race, class, and education) between the two.

richard chen

2009-05-05T22:42:00.002-04:00

Richard Chen Pittsburgh closes. They blamed it on the economy. Bland food not mentioned in their explanation.

AMERICAN RUST

2009-05-05T21:40:00.003-04:00

The first third of Philipp Meyer's AMERICAN RUST is great. Really great. (Even the POST-GAZETTE's editorial page agrees.) The novel begins with the big incident--one of the characters kills someone who is menacing his friend--and the rest of the book recounts the ways that several characters deal with the aftermath of the crime and its discovery. The two central characters (Isaac and Poe) are polar opposites: one (Isaac) a very smart kid who decided, due to tough family circumstances, not to take his sister's route and escape their dying hometown via an Ivy League scholarship; the other (Poe) a high-school football star from a "broken home" who is destined never to amount to anything. The other characters we follow--including Isaac's sister, Poe's mother, the town police chief, and Isaac's father--respond to Isaac and Poe's actions.

As most reviews of the novel have noted, the real main character of the story is the town itself, an invented Monongahela Valley town called Buell. Meyer--whose dust-jacket photo and copy plays up the whole tough-guy writer thing--has certainly done his research and has, at least is the book's acknowledgments are accurate, spent significant time in the region researching. I wouldn't have known the Mon Valley from the Loire Valley until moving here, but after passing through it and meeting many people from there I've learned a great deal. It is one of the great dying industrial regions of the country: today it's a string of smallish towns that used to host massive steel and coke works but now feature mostly boarded-up storefronts and an aging, crime-plagued population. A great deal of publicity, over the last year or two, has come to John Fetterman, the young mayor of Braddock, PA, one of the hardest-hit towns, but it's such a massive area with a relatively large population that one guy with a pretty good idea for revitalizing a bit of one small city can't do it all.

Anyway, Meyer's evocation of the Mon Valley is remarkable. It all FEELS right--but of course, how could I know? The problem is that later in the book the town looms in the background but takes up less of the foreground. Isaac goes on the lam and ends up in Michigan; Poe spends some time in jail. I found the Poe-in-jail sections the weakest portions of the novel, episodes seemingly lifted, unaltered, from that HBO show OZ. There's a huge suspension-of-disbelief problem with the novel, in that the killing that sets the plot in motion could easily be sold as a self-defense act (which it was), but the two characters involved seem never to have thought this through. I think that this is Meyer's way of stressing the fatalism of Poe and Isaac, but I didn't believe that with Isaac (who even before the killing is running away to start a better life).

Structurally, the novel is told in short stream-of-consciousness chapters whose narrative style varies according to the character. The characters' consciousnesses as represented by Meyer's prose lose their distinctiveness as the novel moves on, except for Isaac's: his is so heavily indebted to Joyce's technique in delving into Leopold Bloom's mind in ULYSSES that I kept expecting to hear Isaac think about "Plumtree's potted meat" or little Milly. Meyer tips us off to his recognition of the debt early on, when Isaac's sister picks up a copy of ULYSSES. Although it's a tough feat to pull off, and Meyer does it quite well, in the end I kept feeling like it was an exercise in stylistic imitation--an MFA workshop activity.

boston marathon

2009-04-24T20:51:00.002-04:00

Finished the Boston Marathon on Monday. Although I trained hard for it, harder than I've ever trained for a marathon, I failed to achieve my goal time, which itself may have been overly ambitious. I'm not a particularly experienced distance runner, and I was trying to break three hours. But I did manage to set a "PR," or a personal record, for the distance, and of course to better my time from the last marathon I ran (Scranton this fall).

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what happened. I was going great for about the first half, and was almost exactly on pace to achieve my goal time. Warned not to go too fast at first and burn my legs out, I avoided doing that. But at about mile 16 or 17 my quadriceps began to tighten up severely. I've never had cramps in my legs, but it felt like that was coming on. I struggled on for several miles, even taking an occasional walk break (ten or twenty seconds) and stretching out my legs, and by the time I hit Heartbreak Hill I was moving relatively well again, although with great pain. Finally, once I entered Boston and passed Boston College with all of its cheering undergrads I was able to draw some energy from the crowd and from the nearness of the finish line, and ran at a good pace for the last two miles.

Boston was different than I thought it would be. I've done two huge big-city marathons before, including New York, and I kind of thought Boston would be like those. Oddly enough, even though Boston is similarly large and prestigious, it felt much more cobbled-together and homey. The New York marathon is an amazing feat of planning and with almost no exceptions the crowds are huge all the way along the course. It is a one-hundred-percent professional product. Boston, on the other hand, is equally well-planned but has a different feel to it. I've been thinking about it and I think the difference is that Boston seems well-loved: by the runners, by the organizers, by the small towns through which its course passes, and particularly by the city of Boston. NYC's was an enormous spectacle but there was a bit of that feel of "love" lacking. I thought for a minute that it might have been because NYC was so massively sponsored and corporatized, but Boston is equally so. I might also be mistaking "loved" for "product of New England thriftiness and mistrust of spectacle."

I'm making some decisions now. I've now done what many recreational runners strive for and never reach: running a marathon, and qualifying for Boston. I've also logged a very respectable time in a marathon, one that put me in the top ten percent of finishers at the most important marathon in the world (the Olympics excepted). So now, do I give it up? Do I try again to break three hours, this time on a less challenging course like Chicago? Do I take a few years off? Or do I charge back into it? I'd like to run marathons in all of the cities in which I've lived, which still leaves me three, and I think I probably will run Pittsburgh if it happens again next year, even if I don't actually train hard for it. I don't know. Frankly, I'm still feeling the aftereffects of this marathon, which was harder on my body--my thighs in particular--than any race I've ever run.

swordfight

2009-04-13T11:19:00.003-04:00

swordfight
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

lacrosse

2009-04-13T11:19:00.001-04:00

lacrosse
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

another great present was a set of toy LAX sticks.

easter presents

2009-04-13T11:18:00.001-04:00

easter presents
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Richard Chen Pittsburgh

2009-03-30T21:29:00.002-04:00

Somewhat disappointing visit to the much-ballyhooed Richard Chen location in East Liberty this weekend. It wasn't terrible by any means; it was just not up to our (lofty) expectations. We ended up both getting the prix fixe dinner, which was probably the error: those are never a restaurant's best dishes and (as we all learned from KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL) they're usually a way to dispose of an overstocked item. Anyway, it was a four-course meal for $38, which is really reasonable, and included two appetizers, an entree, and a dessert. The appetizers were the best part: we had a salad that was unremarkable in itself but had a fantastic dressing, with a heavy horseradish bite, as well as a soba-noodle salad that was excellent. The second appetizer was a kind of beef-noodle soup, not really pho but an approximation of it, and quite respectable spring rolls. All quite good. The problem was the main courses; I had a sort of beef and pepper stir-fry and she had salmon, both of which were just fine, and well-cooked, but surprisingly bland. Actually, really bland. The desserts were odd: a chocolate pudding thing and then mine was--literally--Rice Krispy treats made with a Japanese lemon. Disappointing.

two great things I learned today from the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

2009-03-30T12:07:00.004-04:00

1. From Freeman Dyson's review of physicist Frank Wilczek's book THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING: one of my favorite expressions (and inviolable principles for operating in the world), "it's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission," is also known as "the Jesuit Credo." Who knew?

2. From Dan Chiasson's review of John Ashbery's COLLECTED POEMS, 1956-1987:

Cliché was originally a typesetter's term for those plates devoted not to individual letters but to phrases so common that a slug was molded for them.

and more...

2009-03-17T13:57:00.001-04:00

Two short story books: Stuart Dybek's classic THE COAST OF CHICAGO and Mary Hood's HOW FAR SHE WENT--two 1980s classics that are now, according to my MFA friends, absolute staples of the MFA curriculum. In subject matter they couldn't be more different; in style they were quite similar. Hood's collection is set in the small-town South and inevitably it made me think of the canon of Southern women short-fiction writers: Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Bobbie Ann Mason. They combine many of the common concerns of the Southern short story, particularly the conflict between the panoptic nature of the Southern small town and the dark secrets held within a family. The title story, "How Far She Went," is probably the most famous, about a grandmother protecting her slutty granddaughter from marauding bikers, and to my mind it was the most successful.

Dybek's COAST OF CHICAGO also boasts one very famous story, "Hot Ice," which concerns street-savvy kids in Chicago with a friend in jail and a story about a frozen body that they carry around (the story, not the body). Dybek's book felt very of-its-time to me--I read a ton of short fiction in the 1980s and Dybek certainly was influential on many of those writers but I think he was also influenced by them--even Ray Carver, whose subject-matter is quite different.

so many books gone by

2009-03-16T22:49:00.004-04:00

and I've blogged about none. Busy few weeks. A return, and very successful, research trip to Fayetteville (no ice storm this time, but a very fun basketball game and eighty-degree temps on the last day), the CCCC convention in beautiful San Francisco, and a two-and-a-half-year old who now sheds his pajamas after bedtime, hoping to be helpful by changing his own diaper. Fortunately he only got as far as smearing himself with diaper cream and didn't succeed in getting that particularly ripe pañal off. Now it's home for about a month; next trip is the Boston Marathon in late April.

I'll start with THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Aleksandar Hemon. This was an Audible.com purchase, and as I mentioned in my post about NETHERLAND I find the experience of listening to a book to be qualitatively quite different than the experience of reading one. NETHERLAND was particularly odd, as I listened to long stretches of it while freezing in a dark, unheated hotel room in powerless Fayetteville, drifting in and out of sleep, so it all seems a bit dreamy. I've taken, in fact, to putting on the earbuds and turning on an audiobook when I can't sleep. But most of THE LAZARUS PROJECT I listened to fully awake, and in fact it was my companion for almost the entire twenty-mile Spring Thaw race in North Park.

Oddly enough it's got the "historic present" structure that another audiobook I listened to, Junot Diaz's THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, uses--it switches back and forth between events in the present and events in the past, the connections between which are implicit (that is, the narrator never makes them fully clear). The "present" in this case is present-day Chicago, where Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian refugee who writes a newspaper column, decides to write a book about the killing of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant, by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. Fascinated by the story, Brik decides to use fellowship money to travel (with a friend, a fellow Sarajevan named Rora) to the Ukraine to research Averbuch's story and the history of the 1903 pogrom that sent him to the US. Alternating with Brik's story is that of Lazarus' sister and a friend of his, who deal with the police, the "respectable" Jewish community in Chicago, and the roiling discontent of the city's anarchists as Emma Goldman comes for a visit.

The book was a critical success, and was a National Book Award finalist. But, like NETHERLAND, I thought it was only a partial success. Brik is a much more interesting and appealing character than the similarly dislocated and expatriated van den Broek, and unlike that previous book I didn't feel like the author was trying to write a different story and hang it on his main character. The parallels between Lazarus and Brik are pretty clear without being utterly contrived, and the character of Rora--like Chuck in the other novel--is vivid and energetic, providing a nice contrast with the sluggish, in-their-own-headness of the protagonists. The contrast between the kinetic energy of the flashback sections in LAZARUS and the present sections, set in a Ukraine-Romania of today where everything is rotting both physically and morally--made me want to spend more time in 1908 Chicago.

THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY

2009-02-21T10:05:00.003-04:00

When I read, just now, on a book-blogger's post that Philip Hensher's THE NORTHERN CLEMENCY was "immensely long and hysterically dull," I did a bit of a double-take. At 600 pages it's long, but "immensely"? Please. And "hysterically dull" is a cute, oxymoronic little turn of phrase, and as I was telling my wife nothing really happens in the book, but to call it "hysterically dull" is a bit, um, hysterical.

The novel is a very leisurely portrait of two families in the Pittsburgh of England, the northern steel town of Sheffield. One family--the Sellers--moves up to Sheffield from London when the father is sent to run an electrical plant in the north, and their neighbors, the Glovers, are Sheffield natives. One reviewer described the families as "lower middle class," but I don't really buy that (although he probably knows the English class system better than I do); both fathers are white-collar managers. Anyway, it's one of those expansive, watch-a-group-of-people-through-their-lives-and-as-they-are-affected-by-larger-historical-events books, with several (at least 12) main characters. Nothing particularly happens in the book: none of the characters really achieve what they want to achieve, and what mostly comes out after observing these people through twenty years of history is just how un-epic most of our lives really are: we want our lives to work out in particular ways, and we have dreams, but they don't work out, and other stuff happens, and we never become all that (forgive this awful MBA word) 'impactful' in the world. But even though we aren't significant in the world, we aren't necessarily unhappy, or unfulfilled. The closest to a tragic character in the novel is Tim, youngest son of the Sheffield natives, who is cursed with a nasty personality and deep-seated obsessions. When the book opens he's consumed by his obsession with snakes, an obsession that is then transferred to Sandy, the London-turned-Sheffield neighbor. Tim later becomes a student radical, spending his days reading Marx in the public library, and we see him as a peripheral character in the Orgreave riot of the 1984 English miners' strike. In the end, he gets a Ph.D. and begins teaching at the local university, only to rekindle his obsession with Sandy (which ends farcically).

I certainly didn't find the book "hysterically dull," although nothing really does happen. I couldn't put it down, in fact. It reminded me not of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, as one snarky reviewer said, but of 90% of Zadie Smith--especially ON BEAUTY and WHITE TEETH without the wacky climax. And in that, I suppose, it's reminiscent of E.M. Forster, Smith's acknowledged master. The novel is incredibly British and I know that I missed a ton of references, especially to the dialect and folk customs of northern England and the subtle differences between London and Sheffield. It doesn't, though, as Updike often did, fall prey to the name-dropping as a way to establish its time--we don't hear about the character's funny period clothes or the pop music of the day to center us in time.

NETHERLAND

2009-02-14T09:18:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, when it comes to a "serious" book about New York, it's very difficult to tell by reading America's more prominent book reviewers whether the book is actually any good. Such reviewing luminaries as the NEW YORK TIMES and NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS and the NEW YORKER (am I sensing a theme?) are based in New York, of course, and a very significant percentage of major reviewers also have chosen to live there--for obvious reasons. (It's still a hell of a book town, and used to be the center of the publishing universe.) So I've had many experiences of reading or buying a book with a New York theme that was rapturously reviewed in several publications, only to find that the book was... meh. THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN. LUSH LIFE. Even GOTHAM. Native New Yorkers assume that their city is the most important and interesting place on earth, of course, and people who choose to move to NYC frequently do so because they believe the same thing--or they come to believe it after living there for a while. So I shouldn't be surprised if reviews of New York books get a 20% reviewer's premium. (I need to remember this if and when I write a novel.)

Joseph O'Neill's NETHERLAND came in at the top of a lot of "Best Books of the Year" lists last year, and I finally got around to reading it; or, more accurately, listening to it. (I got it off Audible (thanks Dad)). It quickly got a reputation as the great 9/11 novel, even though 9/11 happens off camera and it's really about the emotional resonances of living in post-9/11 New York. It's kind of a dual story: it's narrated by a Dutch banker (or, I suppose, a 'commodities analyst') whose English wife has decided to leave him and return to London after 9/11, clearly but never explicitly identified as the cause for her departure. Hans van den Broek, the banker, is cricket-mad, and falls in with the most interesting character in the novel, a Trinidadian hustler named Chuck Ramkissoon, who is wheeling and dealing to create a top-level cricket facility in south Brooklyn. The novel is told in a series of flashbacks from the time that van den Broek learns of the discovery of his friend Ramkissoon's body in the Gowanus Canal.

I'm not going to blame my feeling that the book was disjointed and wandering entirely on O'Neill. I did listen to it, and not only does my mind wander at times when listening but I did fall asleep--repeatedly--throughout the book. (Being read to has that effect on me.) So I might have missed some things. But I'm pretty sure that the book jumped through time constantly, which is not necessarily a fault, but van den Broek was such a boring character, such I guy that I didn't particularly care about, that the combination was bad. I felt that O'Neill really wanted to write Ramkissoon's story but felt the obligation to stick with the "marriage affected by 9/11" story. I can see why the New York critics loved it, though; it does have a magnificent feel for what they would probably call the "unknown" New York--the New York of immigrants in the outer boroughs, and the encounter of one immigrant (privileged van den Broek) with the more traditional stratum of immigrants always present in the city.

Like I said, New York critics loved the book, and it has its virtues. O'Neill knows the city and has exhumed, or exposed, the cricket scene there, which is quite original. He's also a very impressive stylist. But scanning some non-American reviews (such as this one from the GUARDIAN) I see that not everyone is as rapturous about this novel as the NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES, etc. To wit:

Perhaps stories of striving immigrants and America's ambiguous promise speak to New York reviewers on frequencies inaudible to outsiders.

That's putting it charitably.

ice skating

2009-02-08T14:43:00.001-04:00

ice skating
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

his first time, making him now more experienced than me.

gingerbread house

2009-02-08T14:42:00.003-04:00

gingerbread house
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The gingerbread may have been stale, but not the candy. Not too stale, at least.

sledding

2009-02-08T14:42:00.001-04:00

sledding
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

School on a two-hour delay: we made use of the time.

research trips

2009-01-29T10:30:00.003-04:00

The South isn't always as South as one might think. My wife was envious that I was coming down to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to research in the Fulbright archive at the U of A this week, and presumably to escape the 6 inches of snow predicted in Pittsburgh. But when I got here, the worst ice storm they've ever seen hit, and not only was the university entirely closed the whole time I've been here (making this trip a complete waste), the hotel I was in had no power: no heat, no light, no hot water, not even doors that could lock. (And they tried to charge full price for the rooms, which was especially galling.) Yesterday, because of a general power outage all over the city, only two places were open (a coffee shop and a Qdoba) and I'm so grateful to them for providing heat and food. Going home a day early today, because the university is closed through the week. Wasted trip, and I'll have to come back.

NIXONLAND

2009-01-25T09:41:00.002-04:00

I was introduced to the concept of "ratfucking" by a friend of mine at USC, who enlightened me to the fact that my old employer in downtown LA served as the venue for the apprenticeships of some of the most illustrious political operators of the 20th century. "Ratfucking" was the term of art used by USC Young Republicans for the dirty tricks they used in student elections, and that they then brought to the eager attention of President Nixon. Donald Segretti, HR Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, and others attended USC and explored some very clever means of undermining their opponents. And "ratfucking" is the core of the final section of Rick Perlstein's recent book NIXONLAND, a book that I received for Christmas (thanks, Brad and Sandy!) and just finished.

As I've mentioned before, I think I've become so accustomed to academic histories that I get impatient with popular history, even very expansive ones like Perlstein's. (Odd to get impatient with popular writin and not with academic writing, which is often so tedious as to be a parody of itself.) I don't quite understand Perlstein's project. It traces Nixon's rise from the Hiss case to just after the 1972 election, when the Watergate investigation began to close in on the White House, but as Perlstein makes clear this is less a biography of Nixon (and he is very snotty in several instances towards Nixon's psychobiographers) than it is a discussion of the rise of "Nixonland," the self-described oppressed Silent Majority, that, Perlstein's thesis seems to be, Nixon created and gave life to as a voting bloc. Perlstein's basic conceit here is that Nixon's world fell into two categories: Franklins and Orthogonians. These terms came from Nixon's time at Whittier College, where the "Franklins" were a club of social strivers, the intellectuals and privileged ones--the club Nixon couldn't join. In response, Nixon formed the "Orthogonians," a club for the ordinaries like himself, middle-class and working-class folks who felt snubbed by the Franklins. Perlstein stretches this metaphor out throughout the book: Nixon's constituency were always Orthogonians, and his enemies--Alger Hiss, Adlai Stevenson, the media, Jews, Hollywood celebrities, etc.--were Franklins. Orthogonians had always been around, but Perlstein argues that Nixon gave them a voice: resentment. This was not NATIONAL REVIEW, Buckleyite conservatism, this was the roots of right-wing talk radio: duplicitous, anti-intellectual, both fawning of and resentful of power, and forever enshrining a mythical Past when Things Were Better in its rhetoric. Oddly enough, the death of this Orthogonian cycle in our history (lasting from 1968 to 2008) was the ultimate Franklin, George W. Bush.

It's not a sociological study because Perlstein's research isn't really grounded in much empirical fact about the changing feelings about these groups, or even who these groups were. It's not a biography of Nixon, and it's not a history of America 1948-1972 because so much is left out. Instead, I see this book as in many ways (and perhaps unknowingly) influenced by one of the dominant strains in literary study: reception theory. Much of what Perlstein does that is so effective is to transport the reader back into those times and to recount particularly what reading the newspapers of the day was like. He's spent a great deal of time at the Museum of TV and Radio watching the broadcasts of the 1968 and 1972 conventions and the important speeches, and shows how even the commercials of the time reflected the growing Franklin-Orthogonian conflict. But Perlstein skims over the surface of history far too much for my comfort. Nowhere does he go particularly deeply into any single event or episode; most of the time he describes how a typical American, getting news from the papers and TV, would have understood the event, and then perhaps he adds a few tidbits about the central figures involved. I contrast this to the absolutely brilliant popular histories written by J. Anthony Lukas (a writer that Perlstein credits several times, and who I suspect is one of Perlstein's heroes). In COMMON GROUND in particular, Lukas deals with the Boston busing controversy in intricate detail, from the point of view of almost a dozen participants. I wonder what Lukas would have done with Perlstein's project--I suspect he would have chosen one particular incident (Chicago 1968, I suspect) to use as his lens through which to examine the growth of Nixonland.

Perlstein's writing is also a bit precious for me. I've just been reading Carlyle's FRENCH REVOLUTION and Perlstein's "writerly" prose isn't as obnoxious as that, but he does have a tendency to use sentence fragments. Which are used intentionally but not well. He also likes to string sentence fragments together in a kind of list-crescendo. That irritates the reader by the way they call attention to themselves. That make me wish that Perlstein's editor had told him that he sounds like he's utterly persuaded of his own importance. And that give this generally balanced and credible study a touch of histrionic rhetoric that I could do without.

Refashioning

2009-01-08T11:10:00.002-04:00

Pittsburgh, model for municipal transformation. Rather than us being the next Detroit, should Detroit become the next Pittsburgh?

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES

2009-01-07T13:40:00.003-04:00

I can't remember where it was, but recently someone--was it in Slate or Salon? one of those things I constantly read--made a snarky but pretty accurate comment about how there's really only room in the U.S. for one Latin American writer at a time, but that that writer will be universally recognized as a genius, everyone will start reading him/her, and all other Latin American writers will be forgotten for the duration of that one's reign. This began with Garcia Marquez and then moved on to Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende, and so on. Now, of course, the ruling Latino is the late Roberto Bolaño, a cosmopolitan Chilean. Bolaño was relatively unknown during his life; he started what is by most accounts a very minor movement called "infrarealismo" in Mexico City in the 1960s, spent a good deal of time in Spain, and ended up dying young, at 50, a few years back. THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES came out in the US about two years ago and it's been a big hit. I think that one reason so many readers like him is that he's a different kind of Latin American writer, one who not only rejects the dominant practices (mysticism, magical realism, and a fascination with the country and the rural world) of the "Boom" but explicitly attacks, through his characters, the way that the Boom's writers came to dominate the literary world back home.

I read, over break, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and although it was a slog at times, relatively plotless, overall I thought it was very strong. It's a kind of oral history of a Mexico City literary movement, "visceral realism," led by two students, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Beginning with a month's worth of diary entries of a young man who is joining the movement, the book consists largely of putative oral histories, taking the story from the time of the diary to the present, of various other people's encounters with Lima and Belano as the two poets wander from Mexico City to Managua to Tel Aviv to Barcelona. Bookending the novel is the final section, further diary entries from the young man, taking up the story precisely where he left off. In the end, the visceral realists go north, to the small desert towns of Sonora and Baja California, looking for a poet from the 1920s who was the initial inspiration for visceral realism. Because I get tired of realism, I really enjoyed the intricate narrative structure of the book. At times in the middle of the endless oral history section I found my attention drifting, but I suppose this is part of the point: Belano and Lima are rootless, and the job of the reader is to pick up, from the voices of the people whom they meet, what is motivating them so we can proleptically understand the significance of their quest to find Cesarea Tinajero, the desert poet.

sabbatical plans

2009-01-05T12:19:00.003-04:00

I'm on sabbatical, officially, starting today. So far I don't see the difference: I'm at work, at my computer. I don't have the nagging sense that I need to be writing a syllabus, though, so I guess that's one difference. The combination of sabbatical and New Years makes me want to make resolutions, and I have a few: more conscientious eating and food preparation (for the children too), parenting changes, and of course writing a book. Ahh, that.

the santa vigil

2009-01-05T11:19:00.001-04:00

P1010291
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Christmas eve... cookies ready.

jockey's ridge

2009-01-05T11:18:00.001-04:00

P1010386
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Although it was very cold and windy, Jockey's Ridge State Park was a huge hit--the biggest sand dunes on the East Coast. Great for climbing.

the lost colony

2009-01-05T11:17:00.001-04:00

P1010440
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Friday we checked out Fort Raleigh, the site of the original "lost colony" of English settlers. We wanted to go on board the Elizabeth II, a replica of the ship the colonists came on, but it was closed until mid-February. Too bad. A lovely day, though, as you can see.

steamer basket

2009-01-05T11:13:00.001-04:00

P1010410
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

We spent last week in an enormous house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Three stories, pool room, the Wii we got for Christmas, the beach, a hot tub... very nice. One night we got a "steamer" at the seafood shack--crabs, shrimp, clams. The boy, ordinarily a pretty picky eater, tried it.

thanksgiving reading: 2

2008-12-09T18:43:00.002-04:00

After THE AGE OF WIRE AND WHATEVER I read Robert Cohen's THE HERE AND NOW. The blurbers compare Cohen to Roth and Bellow; I suppose they have the "urban Jewish novelist, slightly humorous" box to fill and Cohen certainly fits into that one. It's a slight story: a secular Jew meets an orthodox couple on his way to a wedding in Houston; the gregarious and friendly orthodox man invites the protagonist over for dinner and attempts to be accelerating what isn't even yet a friendship; we end up finding out (SPOILER ALERT) that the man is infertile (and thus, as a childless man in the orthodox community, inferior) and is trying to create a situation in which the protagonist will impregnate his wife. It's a light read, but pleasant.

While I was reading the other books I was listening to Junot Diaz's BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, which I really liked. Diaz is one of the hot young fiction writers--he was in a GRANTA "40 Under 40" issue at some point and is now quite well-known. Most of the talk about this novel has centered on the fact that although Diaz is kind of a hipster urban writer, WAO is about a nerd, a fanboy D&D geek. But it's also in what a recent reviewer of another novel (I think I read this review in the NYTBR, but I can't remember) called the "historical present": mostly in the present time, but with a significant component of the past narrated in the present. In this case, we hear about Oscar's mother's and grandfather's time in the Dominican Republic, both of which end tragically and violently. Clearly, what Diaz is doing is illustrating the ongoing presence of the viciousness that Trujillo brought to (or brought out of) the Dominican Republic. But I liked the shifting narrators and the "code-shifting" between hipster New Jersey English and español dominicano.

thanksgiving reading: 1

2008-12-02T11:34:00.003-04:00

vacation. Nice time to catch up on the reading. Even better when a bunch of cousins happily play with the boys--and seem to really like it!

Because of a game set of cousins, the boys had playmates almost constantly, which allowed me a bit of time to read. First up was Ben Marcus' THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, a novel foisted upon me by a writer friend when I was dismissing "realist writers" and complaining that not enough people were trying experimental stuff. Remind me not to do that again. THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING is indescribable. It's written in a kind of nineteenth-century natural-history language, as if it were a series of small vignettes and lexicons of a strange world. It's not a novel, nor a short-story collection. Probably the best way to think of it would be as a Borges novel, or a Coover/Barthelme hybrid drained of all humor and life, but even that doesn't really describe the thing. It is strange and decentering, I will grant that. But it's also almost entirely antiseptic and alienating--not in the Borges way of making us think "hey, I'm watching a play!" but in a "wow, this thing is strange and unappealing and won't end." Well, that's not really true: it's short and a quick read, which is definitely a virtue in a book as humorless and lifeless as this. Interestingly, I think Marcus is quite talented, and his influences that are in evidence here (Borges, Coover, Barthelme, but also Beckett and Robbe-Grillet and even the Objectivist poets like George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky) are all people whom I admire. I'm interested in seeing what Marcus might do next, because this feels like an experiment or a tryout of a new technique.

what I learned at MSA

2008-11-16T22:04:00.004-04:00

The tenth conference of the Modernist Studies Association, one of the two professional groups I belong to and am at all active in, was held in Nashville this weekend. Most of the work presented was, of course, on modernist art and literature, and I heard a ton of great papers (and at least one mostly baffling keynote, by the luminary Fredric Jameson) on things like Surrealism, Gertrude Stein, Kantian ethics, Pynchon, etc. This is my favorite conference and although the panel I submitted was rejected I decided to go to attend one of the “seminars,” a small-group discussion wherein up to a dozen scholars of all levels submit very short papers on a specific topic and then get together to talk freely for about two hours.

As most of the seminars were already closed by the time I got around to deciding to go, I settled on the seminar on “Modernism and Copyright,” which sounds deathly boring at first—even to a literary scholar—but ended up being absolutely great. I read Paul Saint-Amour’s fantastic book on the history of copyright as well as less academic books such as Siva Vaidhyanathan’s COPYRIGHTS AND COPYWRONGS and Lawrence Lessig’s THE FUTURE OF IDEAS. The seminar discussion was great and I was by far the least prepared, as most of the other scholars there had advanced research projects on the subject and I am just starting to think of how issues of copyright might impinge upon my own current project, on the use of modernism as cultural propaganda in the Cold War.

More valuable, though, than the seminar itself was the way that it got me thinking about intellectual property in a number of ways and thus to go hear what people were saying about it. The last panel I went to featured two law professors—Steve Hetcher and Robert Spoo—who were conducting a “roundtable” discussion on copyright and intellectual property issues for scholars. Because of the now-famous James Joyce estate problems,

(basically, Stephen Joyce, who controls the estate, hates scholars and anyone who would “misuse” Joyce’s work and so refuses to grant permission to scholars to quote from unpublished Joyce materials, and is even reputedly destroying some material so that scholars will never be able to use it. Robert Spoo told of meeting Stephen in Zurich and asking him if he’d destroyed some letters between Lucia Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and although Stephen did not respond his wife mimed tearing up sheets of paper)

and Valerie Eliot’s well-known refusal to let scholars quote from unpublished T.S. Eliot materials, scholars are getting very cautious about using these materials—not just from Joyce or Eliot but from anyone. Publishers, too, both of books and journals are encouraging writers to minimize any use of materials for which they could be sued, and require authors to clear the permissions themselves. (I’ve had to do this.)

On the scholar level, Spoo and Hetcher simply said that scholars shouldn’t knuckle under. Fair use tends to be upheld, they said, and although publishers shy away from “cease and desist” letters and to pass that hesitance on to authors, it’s rare that these letters, when defied, become lawsuits. Spoo added that federal circuit courts have been increasingly willing to interpret free use expansively, and to really endorse one of the four “tests” for fair use—whether the original work that is being used/quoted is “transformed” substantially (in which case it’s fair use). Furthermore, Hetcher said that courts also like to consult the prevailing standards of the community, and so if the scholar community were to band together and simply assert that their use IS fair use (as long as that could be justified), courts would weigh that against a plaintiff’s claim of copyright infringement. The flip side of that, they both said, is that when scholars defer to the demands of publishers and copyright holders they establish a similar kind of precedent that lawyers and judges can point to.

The MLA has convened some sort of a task force on copyrights and permissions for scholars. Amen to that: it sounds as if they are trying to come up with something, like the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' policy on the use of film clips in teaching film studies, that will become a "community standard" or "typical practice." I'd like to see--hell, I probably should initiate--some sort of similar thing not for publishing but for teaching: how much can we use in class course readers? I don't think the Kinko's case is the last word on it.

blogs and journalism

2008-11-03T22:30:00.002-04:00

I've not been blogging at all because, first, I've been swamped at work, and second, because I've been so deeply immersed in "real" blogs because of the election that I've just decided that I can't compete. Kos, Talking Points Memo, the Atlantic and American Prospect blogs, they are just magnificent.

But I've also just started to watch the final season of THE WIRE on DVD. Although a plot summary is probably too much to bother to provide, one of the central themes of the season is the decline of the newspaper industry, largely as a result of the consolidation of ownership of newspapers. Large companies such as Gannett, the Times company, and (particularly) the Tribune company own numerous papers and many of these companies are publicly owned, thus putting pressure on management to increase stock prices, which in turn requires constantly increasing earnings. As many people have pointed out, this tends to manifest itself in severe cutbacks in staff and the closure of bureaus. All old news.

David Simon, the creator of THE WIRE, was a reporter for the Baltimore SUN for many years, covering the crime beat, and his anger at the corporate management of the newspaper is so dominant in this strain of the story that it begins to grate. A corporate suit managing editor, clearly pressured to 1) win prizes and 2) cut costs, pushes a simplistic series of stories aimed at snatching an easy Pulitzer. Our hero city editor (played by Clark Johnson, who created Meldrick Lewis of HOMICIDE, one of my favorite TV characters ever) resists this, telling the suit that these simplistic stories are, well, oversimplified. Caught between them is a young reporter, eager but a bit lazy in terms of doing the actual legwork of reporting--in the first three episodes he appears to have actually made up parts of stories, Jayson Blair-like. But the suit loves the eager young reporter, whose easy stories and pithy quotes (Simon clearly feels) capture the new ethos of the corporate press: emotional, easily digestible, and banal. The new guy refers to a graybeard as "deadwood" as the managing editor cuts staff, and then gets shown up by this graybeard.

Okay, so that's not the point. The City Editor obviously represents all that is good and pure and lovable about journalism; he even jokes about H.L. Mencken. But what I find striking about his character is his absolute devotion to accuracy. In one scene, he corrects a reporter's use of the verb "evacuate;" in another, he asks very perceptive, pressing questions of our eager beaver that quickly call into doubt the accuracy of the story; in a third, he shows how he has cultivated reporters who have a deep knowledge of all of the tiny details of the lives and careers of even minor players in city and police politics. He's journalism at its best. The corporate suit is a corporate suit, and the eager beaver is a quick learner, immediately seeing how the lax standards of his paper are an advantage to him.

What this made me think about was the purpose of journalism versus the purpose of blogs. In the latest issue of THE ATLANTIC, Andrew Sullivan--a writer whom I don't particularly like, and not only for his former water-carrying for the conservative movement that would like to see him put into a sexual-orientation-reeducation camp--writes about why he blogs, and he celebrates the immediacy of blogs. But as I watch Simon's character of Augustus Haynes (the city editor), for all that I realize that he is an utterly idealized version of journalism as an absolutely crucial part of a democracy, I ask what we will lose when this model of subsidized fact-checking is lost. I love the work that TPM did with the attorney-firings scandal, and blogs have certainly broken tons of stories ('macaca,' 'cling to religion and guns')that probably would have gone unreported. But blogs are an even more immediate version of TV news, and I'm sure we all have experiences of watching the TV news, especially during a very intense breaking story, just get so much wrong in its desperation to get every fact/rumor/speculation on the air instantaneously. There's a place for everything; I'm just very concerned that the role of the newspaper (waiting a few hours, even, to check on facts and let a story develop) will disappear as newspapers, with their enforced wait times, turn into journalism on the web, which can fall prey to the temptation to get every "fact" (no matter how specious) online as soon as possible.

vader and maul hayride

2008-11-01T13:57:00.001-04:00

vader and maul hayride
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Sith Lords at the petting zoo, looking for a lamb possessed with the dark side of the force.

vader and maul and jackolantern

2008-11-01T13:55:00.001-04:00

vader and maul and jackolantern
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

the Halloween costumes.

Pittsburgh and the recession

2008-10-23T11:58:00.002-04:00

Interesting TIME Magazine article about Pittsburgh here: the take is that Pittsburgh, having been floored by an earlier, likely even more profound economic crisis, is in a great position to survive during and even thrive after this one.

AGAINST THE DAY

2008-09-25T09:42:00.003-04:00

In some ways it's appropriate that I was in the home stretch (the last 400 pages...) of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, AGAINST THE DAY, when I heard that David Foster Wallace killed himself. Wallace, of course, was heavily influenced by Pynchon, and in my last post I noted that his first novel was almost a rewriting of THE CRYING OF LOT 49. A lot of us are still processing Wallace's death, starting to re-read his novels and such. I was tempted to drop Pynchon for some Wallace I haven't read yet (BROOM OF THE SYSTEM is staring at me) but I really had to finish the Pynchon before I move on to the mini-autodidactic-course on copyright I need to complete before my November conference.

I'm glad I chose to finish AGAINST THE DAY. I don't know how many people have read it; it sold a bunch when it first came out, of course, but it's one of those 1000+ page doorstops that people buy and don't read. Then, of course, when one picks it up, it's not strictly speaking an easy read, or, in fact, in any manner of speaking an easy read. Fortunately, it's not MASON AND DIXON, which I found almost unreadable.

MASON AND DIXON's problem was also one of its great strengths, and is in my opinion the greatest strength of AGAINST THE DAY; that is, both novels (and here I am attempting to channel both Pynchon and Wallace's style) are masterful reconstructions of the prose styles and vocabularies of their time periods. Eighteenth-century prose is for most of us difficult to wade through, and even its great masters (and here I'm thinking of Johnson, Boswell, Addison, Steele, etc.) at times grate on modern readers because it's just hard to give them the attention they require. Pynchon is a great mimic but not a master, and so reading MASON AND DIXON was like listening to endless recordings of average musicians playing great jazz tunes: I'd rather have the originals.

Probably because the late 19th century and early 20th century are closer to us in sensibility, AGAINST THE DAY is a much easier slog, although it is a slog at times. I'm also much more familiar with the vocabulary and typical sentence constructions of the time, and I found myself consistently amazed at just how deeply Pynchon must have immersed himself in those voices. He's always had a reputation for being almost TOO knowledgeable about whatever he's writing about--some people suspect that these are collaboratively written, because no one person could know so much detail about so many diverse things--and this novel, or at least its use of 19th century prose style, isn't going to put those doubts to rest. I think, though, that Pynchon is actually one of the great stylists (unlike Wallace, whose style I don't particularly like, and who I think just got sloppy and undisciplined at times) but in a high-postmodern mode. I loved the voices of the Traverse family, the frontier anarchist bombers who all speak in a kind of laconic, Hollywood Western-speak that's at the same time KNOWING about the fact that it sounds like Gary Cooper or John Wayne.

It's probably not of any use to describe the plot. I couldn't, anyway. It's even more complicated and overpopulated than GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, and is held together primarily by its scope and by the few characters--the Traverse family--who are at the center. As always with Pynchon, there's a physics plot, this time involving light, "phosgene," and dimensions beyond the fourth; there's also a truly global setting moving from the Mexican revolution to pre-WWI central Asia to Venice to Colorado to the stratosphere. And of course there is the deep knowledge of strange, generally forgotten bits of world history, generally involving colonial encounters and clashes of national groups. I guess the plot, if any, centers on the Traverses. Webb, the father, is involved with the anarchist faction of the unionization movement among Colorado miners in the 1890s, and eventually Scarsdale Vibe, a sort of Carnegie/Gould/Morgan/Frick figure, has him murdered. Two of Traverse's children set out to avenge his death; another child, who showed talent in theoretical mathematics, has been sent by Vibe first to Yale and then to Germany to study and eventually to work for Vibe; and Traverse's daughter ends up living with one of the murderers. There are over a hundred major characters, of course, so this only begins to describe the book.

Although I found it difficult to follow, at times infuriating in its aimlessness and shapelessness, and aggravating because of Pynchon's inability, rivalling Larry McMurtry's, to write a convincing female character, I enjoyed almost every moment of reading this novel. In his old age Pynchon has, as I mentioned before, taken his always impressive talent with sentence-level style and become in my opinion one of the great stylists, able to operate in several different registers (including, always, the postmodern and ironic) simultaneously. And as much as I love Wallace, this is where I'm saddest that he's gone. Seeing Pynchon's evolution, I want to be able to see if Wallace could do this, because of his one register--the postmodern and ironic, the self-aware and encyclopedic and fearful and sad--he may be the greatest master of all. I think he could have done that well with others.

RIP DFW

2008-09-14T20:50:00.002-04:00

David Foster Wallace is dead, apparently a suicide by hanging.

Foster was a creative-writing professor at Pomona College but his greatest fame, of course, was as a writer--a novelist, journalist, essayist and short-story writer. His 1996 INFINITE JEST sparked an almost infinite number of title-inspired bad jokes about its length (almost 1100 pages) and the fact that over 10% of the novel consists of footnotes. He started out as a Pynchon imitator and many critics have noted that his first novel, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, is essentially a rewriting of THE CRYING OF LOT 49. He developed his own voice with his short story collection GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR but when INFINITE JEST came out, and then was shortlisted for the National Book Award, everyone began to know his name. He might be most famous for INFINITE JEST but certainly his most-read writings are three journalistic pieces: "Consider the Lobster," commissioned by GOURMET as a piece about going to a Maine lobster fest, I think, and ending up as a philosophical meditation on cruelty to animals; "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," a magazine piece about taking a cruise appearing originally in HARPER'S; and "Up, Simba," a ROLLING STONE profile of 2000-era John McCain that needs to be reread, at least for those of us (like Wallace) both in love with and quickly, deeply tiring of irony as an approach to the world. This last essay slobbers all over McCain, fully buying the "Straight Talk Express"ness of it all and basically making the argument that the 2008 McCain campaign is making, albeit with loads more cynicism: pay no attention to those hard-right views, McCain is really a good guy and will reform things.

I'm not going to write about Wallace's technique, his arch postmodern voice that covers a deep yearning for authenticity and meaning (in this, he's like a MCSWEENEY'S writer without the fetishization of childhood), or his apparent unwillingness to take constructive editing suggestions. (Can you imagine what a great 700-page novel INFINITE JEST could be?) Several other writers in the NEW YORK TIMES, SALON, and elsewhere have done so.

I "met" Wallace at a reading he gave at Book People in Austin, Texas, in 1997. He seemed nervous and uncomfortable, hiding behind a shock of hair that he used as a prop, flinging it out of his eyes. He read a very painful section of INFINITE JEST about a man with a terrible cold who has been bound and gagged, and who is suffocating because he can't clear his nose. Unlike some other writers I've seen read (Martin Amis, for instance), Wallace didn't seem to feel that the attention of the crowd was his due; he could have been in a graduate workshop as a student, not the prof. After the reading he asked the audience where he could pick up some UT gear (he said he liked to collect college apparel). I got him to sign my paperback copy of INFINITE JEST and exchanged brief pleasantries with him; later that summer I found a first edition of the book and rued not having that for him to sign. Mercenary.

Several years later I was interviewing for a position at Illinois State U. and learned that he was teaching there. I was very excited to meet him at my on-campus day but he didn't come to my talk. I learned that he was in the process of leaving ISU and moving to Pomona at the time. Disappointing. I didn't get the job, anyway.

It's a cheap observation to make that it's not terribly surprising he did himself in; any reader could easily conclude that he was manic-depressive (bipolar?) just by reading Wallace's prose. That's probably too easy. I'm sure there were all sorts of problems in his life. It's been a while since he wrote anything important, and this was probably the cause. It's sad. I'll miss having him as a voice on the literary scene.

kings of renn fest

2008-09-09T07:37:00.003-04:00

kings of renn fest
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

it's hard to figure out how the pirate hat works.

pittsburgh renaissance festival

2008-09-09T07:37:00.001-04:00

pittsburgh renaissance festival
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

this is getting old

2008-09-09T07:25:00.002-04:00

According to Merriam-Webster online, a "straw man" is "a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted."

According to David Brooks this morning, Obama

needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin’s faith and family. Many liberals claim to love working-class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant.

Can anyone--anyone?--please point to one "liberal" commentator who acts that way? I mean, anyone since NEW YORKER film critic Pauline Kael said in 1972 that "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."

nominated by acclamation

2008-08-27T21:24:00.001-04:00

I think this is the greatest thing I've seen in American politics since I've been alive.

THE DARK KNIGHT

2008-07-30T11:15:00.005-04:00

I don't really talk about movies in this blog because, well, I don't really see movies much anymore, what with two small children. We do have a Netflix subscription and use it frequently, but because of the multitasking way we watch our DVDs--both of us working/surfing on our laptops, going to the kitchen, going upstairs to help a restive child fall asleep--I don't feel like I've immersed myself in a film when I watch it at home. I really tried a few months ago, when I took out David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, but I just don't think I'm able to focus on a film unless I'm in a theater (and even then I have to be reminded not to use the Blackberry). So I don't want to write about these films the way I write about books because in a sense it's not fair; unlike books, films don't receive my full attention when I see them on TV.

(Interestingly, this isn't the case with TV shows that I take out and watch--I give full attention to THE WIRE, THE SOPRANOS, WEEDS, whatever it is; or, rather, I find it much easier to give them full attention. There must be a series of cinematographic and screenwriting tricks that a TV director uses to focus a home audience's attention that a movie director doesn't need to use.)

But after seeing THE DARK KNIGHT this week I just can't resist talking about the movie: not because the film itself was great, or horrible, or anything--it's a summer blockbuster about a superhero, enough said--but because WALL STREET JOURNAL writer Andrew Klavan argued that this film is a 150-minute panegyric to George W., down to the similarity between the Batsymbol and the Current Occupant's middle initial. Predictably, my liberal blogs have screamed about this silly reaching of the Bush dead-enders for cultural relevance. Isaac Chotiner in the NEW REPUBLIC almost choked with disbelief, and the generally shriller Huffington Post attempted to rebut the argument that Bush = Batman by arguing that because Batman willingly accepts that he MUST become an outlaw to save Gotham, this proves that Christopher Nolan and the film are arguing that Batman's "enhanced" tactics of crimefighting and civil-rights violations were wrong all along.

The problem is that the WALL STREET JOURNAL is right.

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror.

In the film, Batman is confronted by the Joker, who is explicitly contrasted with the cartel of mafia gangs (ethnically stereotyped as sharp-dressed Italians, threatening African Americans, and swarthy lowbrowed Southeastern European) that used to be the city's nemeses. The Joker represents an entirely new paradigm of villian: he is nihilistic, an "agent of chaos," pleased to bring evil for evil's sake and with no larger "goal" besides death. It's hard for me to see this as anything but an allegory for the post-Cold War period, when the "old" villains of Communism, dangerous but predictable and organized, have been supplanted by the "evildoers" of terrorism, whom conservatives consistently describe as being motivated simply by hate: "they hate our freedoms," "they love death." The Joker = Al Qaeda, and the Joker's ability to inspire the crazies of the city to join him and die in the process mirrors the Al Qaeda copycat phenomenon.

As with Al Qaeda, there is no negotiating with the Joker, for he doesn't want anything except the aftermath of the chaos he brings. (This notion, that Islamic terrorism is fundamentally autochthonous and self-perpetuating rather than a response to material conditions and a drive for particular goals, is most frequently advanced by those who use the term "Islamo-Fascism.") And because he is so unpredictable, so alien to the ordinary laws of human motivation, Batman and his allies (Gordon, the head of Major Crimes, and Harvey Dent, the paladin-like district attorney) must fight the war in new ways, using deception and the violation of people's civil liberties. As Dick Cheney said on September 16, 2001,

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will."

The people, naturally, clamor for this. Terrified and stupid, the populace of Gotham needs to be directed and protected by a Strong Leader--or, rather, a leader-cadre divided up between the admirable figurehead of Harvey Dent (in whom the People Put Their Hopes) and Batman, the man who is willing to get his hands dirty, making the sausage, doing the things that have to be done but which can't be exposed. These leaders know that they will ultimately return to the citizens their pre-Joker freedoms, but during the state of the emergency (Terror Alert Red) they need to do things that they can't disclose. At one point, Batman figures out how to make every citizen's cellphone a kind of microphone and sonar imagery device all plugged into his central console, so that he--or his faithful lieutenant, Lucius Fox--can engage in simultaneous surveillance of every phone conversation and text message and have images of every point in the entire city. Fox is at first reluctant to wield this power, but Batman assures him that there is a safeguard against its irresponsible use: Fox's own conscience.

I can't see how anyone, liberal or conservative, can see this as anything but a justification for the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (warrantless wiretapping) and the "Total Information Awareness" initiative. The safeguards that had been in place (FISA courts) are no longer operational; we need this information NOW because there is a ticking bomb; you can trust us not to violate your liberties because we are good Americans.

The movie even sanctions torture. It's horribly violent, and although it doesn't engage in the stylization of violence typical of the Wachowski Brothers movies (V IS FOR VENDETTA) it makes it clear that even though the Joker desires violence and death (like "terrorists"), that can't stop us from using it for the greater good.

The final tentpole of this argument is the portrayal of Batman as a combination of Bush and Cheney. Like Batman and Bruce Wayne's military-contractor corporation, macho, martial, Bush on the aircraft carrier in his flight suit is the embodiment of American military power and the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile Cheney, hidden in his undisclosed location, devises the strategies behind the scenes that will keep us safe. And while the population initially embraces, and even dresses as, Batman, as things get tougher the fickle public changes. Batman, though, knows that the fight must continue, that he must stick to his convictions even as the short-sighted citizens agitate for his arrest and sacrifice. In the end, after making clear to his team that he will be the scapegoat for the death of Dent, he is hounded from society. How satisfying Bush must find this! The hero, steadfast even when his fans turn against him, will never stop protecting us from evil, even when we are too foolish to understand that his extraordinary tactics are for our own good?

Or, as Klavan puts it,

Doing what's right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

Left and right, all Americans know that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry. We don't always know how we know these things, and yet mysteriously we know them nonetheless.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

That's real moral complexity. And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day.

I think Nolan's been unmasked.

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN

2008-07-13T17:03:00.002-04:00

Probably because he edits the very hip, very New-York-in-crowd journal n+1, Keith Gessen's first novel ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN got a ton of press and got blurbed by the best in the New York in crowd. n+1 is a pretty serious journal and is, I believe, trying to resurrect the good old 1950s days when little intellectual magazines in New York were the center of American intellectual life. I wish them well on this, and it's nice to see that they've embraced the Web and aren't such antiquarians to insist on print only. Gessen's novel is a first novel, and as I've mentioned a bunch of times on this blog first novels are for the most part fictionalizations of the author's formative experiences. Gessen's is no different, although he appears to have split himself into three characters--Mark, Keith, and Sam. Each one is a wannabe intellectual of a sort, and two of them are former athletes (which is a nice nod to John Irving, I think, in a way that keeps the novel from being too SERIOUS). The plot... well, there isn't much. Each of these three nice young men is tortured; each sees the great events of the world through the lens of their own personal life (Mark is the most interesting, I think, and gets the most pages; he's a grad student at Syracuse and interprets the events of his romantic life as having cognates in the Bolshevik/Menshevik split); each is totally unaware of his own self-involvement, which as my wife says all twenty-somethings are entitled to be. The book can't decide how ironic it wants to be, though. Sometimes Gessen clearly makes fun of his characters' self-involvement, but at other times if there's irony or distance there I don't see it. The book's main flaw, though, is that the characters just aren't distinct enough. Which one was dating the sex-advice columnist? Which one was from Maryland? Which one played football, and which hockey?

Gessen reminds me a bit of Stephen L. Carter, another pretty well-known intellectual who has become a fiction writer. Their novels feel like what they are: creativity produced by a person whose real job is to analyze creative works. They are smart and accomplished, but after all that a bit by-the-numbers, lifeless.

We are in the Great Smokies this week, staying in a cabin located between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. The park itself is spectacular and we won't have a chance to see much of it at all because it's so huge. Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, though, that's a different story. Pigeon Forge is hands-down the ugliest strip of tourist traps I have ever seen, and the fact that the dominant ethos here is patriotic/Southern/"down-home"/evangelical just makes it all the more icky. Nonetheless, it's Dollywood today.

birthday donut

2008-07-07T09:57:00.003-04:00

birthday donut
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Boy #2 turned 2 on Sunday, and the request was for birthday DONUTS, not cake.

sparkler and safety measure

2008-07-07T09:57:00.001-04:00

sparkler and safety measure
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

July 4th is a great holiday for kids, and sparklers are good for little ones. But it's important to be SAFE.

cop

2008-07-07T09:56:00.001-04:00

cop
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

LEGACY OF ASHES

2008-06-23T19:14:00.004-05:00

The first purchase I made with my Christmas-gift subscription to Audible was Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, LEGACY OF ASHES. It certainly won its share of recognition--the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, and one of the "Best Books of 2007" on countless national lists. It deserves it. There is no shortage of books on the CIA, and in fact Weiner makes that a constituent part of his thesis--American conservatives have lionized the agency and leftists across the world have seen the agency as the very embodiment of evil in the world, but (Weiner argues) this is due to a grave misunderstanding. We think, he says, that we only know about their failures (Bay of Pigs, the Afghan mujahedeen "blowback", the Guatemalan and Salvadoran disasters, and the "slam dunk" Iraq intelligence) and that their "successes"--whether we see them as sinister or inspired--remain secret, but, Weiner insists, the reason that the only things we know about are failures is because that's pretty much the only thing they've accomplished. Weiner draws on all of the previously published sources in his book, but he also accessed a bunch of materials that were declassified only in 2006 as well as interviewing almost every principal in the story. (He was a NEW YORK TIMES national security reporter, so that helps in getting people to return your calls.)

Weiner's thesis is, of course, that the CIA has been a failure from the beginning, due to infighting, bad decision-making, a lack of understanding on the part of the executive branch, and, probably most important, due to the rivalry of the intelligence-gathering services of the Defense Department and the National Security Agency, which have tried constantly to undermine CIA. Weiner is surprisingly sympathetic to the agency, almost to a fault at points, but his criticism doesn't spare the agency's shortsightedness. It's Presidents who don't know how to use the agency, though, that he really attacks. George W certainly is the worst of these, and Weiner starts with the Nixon administration to show how Cheney and Rumsfeld developed their hate and mistrust of the agency back in those days, but Weiner faults everyone for not understanding the agency. George H.W. Bush is perhaps the least culpable of these in Weiner's eyes--he ran the agency briefly and gained a great deal of respect for its work, probably another reason behind Rumsfeld and Cheney's orientation against CIA. If there's one worst figure in this book, it's probably Bill Casey, who ran the agency under Reagan. He was, according to Weiner, a precursor to the current Bush administration, for rather than trying to learn from facts he selectively heard only those facts that confirmed the things he wanted to believe--or, rather, had already decided were true. People with facts that didn't confirm his preconceptions were ~~terrorist~~ Communist sympathizers. One thing I learned from this book that surprised me was just how gung-ho of a covert enthusiast Bobby Kennedy was--JFK considered having him run the agency, and throughout RFK thought that covert actions, assassinations included, weren't being used enough.

retaking language

2008-06-17T20:36:00.002-05:00

Why am I not hearing more about the irony of a group calling itself the "Liberty Counsel" opposing gay marriage? Conservatives have been way too successful in maintaining ownership of that word.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

2008-06-05T09:53:00.004-05:00

Most anyone who is interested in the subject of American cities or urban planning or Robert Moses or the "urban blight" of the 1950s and 1960s not only knows of Jane Jacobs' classic DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES but assuredly knows its thesis: diversity is good; central planning tends to screw things up; segregating the functions of a city (commercial, transportation, residential, civic, cultural) will damage each of them; cities are complicated organisms not apt to respond well to simplistic theories of how to improve them; the "Radiant City" or "Garden City" or Le Corbusian towers-in-a-park are abominations and antihuman. Okay, I not only get that, but I couldn't agree more.

Jacobs' book, read now almost fifty years after publication, is particularly interesting for Pittsburghers, for Pittsburgh is one of the cities that she has clearly studied. Just to mention a couple of the times she discusses the Steel City: in a section about how cities that segregate their cultural districts away from downtowns and residences so that the residents thus need to drive between the two (and park both places), she points to the "new civic center" (i.e. Mellon Arena) as a place far enough away from downtown that people have to drive between the two. She also discusses the Gateway Center development by Point State Park as an example of "Radiant City" design (i.e. towers in a park) where the open space isn't used, as opposed to Mellon Park, which is heavily used during the daytime hours. She has quite a few very insightful things to say about Pittsburgh's failings in terms of urban redevelopment and planning in the 1950s and 1960s, and she doesn't even mention the mass displacement that followed the construction of the Civic Arena and the subsequent gutting of the lower Hill. Read in conjunction with the recent NEW YORK TIMES article on how Pittsburgh is "adjusting" to its aging population, it's an eye-opener about mistakes made in the past and their current ramifications.

the beach

2008-06-04T20:12:00.001-05:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

They loved the beach much more than I do (I am averse to the beating sun). Lots of running into the surf up to the ankles, squealing, and then running back.

the trio

2008-06-04T20:11:00.001-05:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The boys and their cousin.

Puerto Vallarta reading

2008-06-04T19:21:00.005-05:00

We just returned from a very successful week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where we used my parents' time-share and were accompanied by my sister-in-law and her daughter. The three kids LOVED playing in the pool and on the beach, and apart from the fact that they ate an enormous amount of junk food and didn't get anywhere near enough sleep they were great. And contrary to my fears, I was able to even get some relaxing in (it's usually pretty difficult when chasing around a very busy toddler and his affectionate/rivalrous older brother). In fact, I read FOUR whole books! Two barely count; they were very short little mysteries by one of Mexico's leading genre writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo II: SOME CLOUDS and NO HAPPY ENDING. They're clever and full of local color (Taibo knows Mexico City well and captures it vividly if much more concisely than another local-color genre writer like James Lee Burke) but neither had all that much besides that--the plot was pretty cursory, and the scenes of violence perfunctory and excessively stylized.

After Taibo I decided to postpone my reading of Arendt's ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (I've finished Part I and needed a break) and took on one of the first English-language novels, Henry Fielding's JOSEPH ANDREWS. I like Fielding quite a bit, and I like novels from that period, from before people really knew what the novel should be. I was concerned when I read that many critics feel that JOSEPH ANDREWS bears a great deal of resemblance to DON QUIXOTE, because frankly I find that book incredibly boring. I know that plot in novels is a bourgeois convention, blah blah, but when I try to get through the plotless prose works like Cervantes or Rabelais I just can't do it. But Fielding is different (because he was a dramatist as well? maybe). TOM JONES is, of course, brilliant and very intricately and teleologically plotted, but it's also really funny and really willing to go off on digressions. JOSEPH ANDREWS did definitely have more of the whole DON QUIXOTE, picaresque structure/nonstructure to it, but its constant themes really worked. The introduction to the novel (I read the Penguin edition) said that the real theme of the novel was charity and the hypocrisy of a purportedly Christian society that doesn't hold to charity, but I actually felt that the novel was much more about the obligation of hosts to guests--a deeply classical theme, in keeping with the novel's deeply classical learning (embodied, of course, by Pastor Adams).

THE DANCER DEFECTS

2008-05-27T10:05:00.002-05:00

David Caute's doorstop book THE DANCER DEFECTS is one of those books that I have to read for my current scholarly project. Its subtitle is "The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War," and Caute has really done his research. He covers most of the important artistic "struggles" between the Soviets and the Americans/West from 1947 to the 1980s, and is particularly good with his overviews of things like the Soviet film industry (although his synopses of Soviet films do tend to go on a bit), the defection of Nureyev and Barishnikov, the use of Abstract Expressionism as Western propaganda, and the drama scene, especially in East Germany and Russia in the 1950s. It's not an academic book and thus isn't particularly grounded either in a theory of history (which is okay) or in a particularly sophisticated understanding of the competing philosophies of art in the two worlds. But as a collection of research that I would never have been able to conduct, it's invaluable. In one of his only forays into academic debate, Caute strongly takes issue with the lefty critics of the 1970s and 1980s (Cockroft, Kozloff, and Gilbaut in particular) who argued that the CIA "adopted" Abstract Expressionism as its preferred form of cultural propaganda and then made all of the US's cultural propaganda modernistic/abstract. He persuasively shows that that wasn't true, and it was especially untrue in the period (1947-1955) that the lefty critics point to. After 1956, he grants, American art sent abroad by official bodies was dominated by abstraction, but in the period preceding that, he very persuasively argues, there was relatively little avant-garde art, and people such as Andrew Wyeth, not Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman, were the international face of American art. Rather than the government, Caute says, it was foundations and the wealthy who were sponsoring this art--MoMA and the Rockefellers, for instance. I like this argument that he makes; it's important not to simplify and to understand that there are great variations among those with cultural power in this field. The CIA, the USIA, the State Department, universities, and foundations were all doing similar things but there were very important divergences among them. And while the CIA's small interest in art and culture (which has probably become disproportionately famous because of the Congress for Cultural Freedom scandal) did tend to back modernism and abstraction, we also need to keep in mind that many of the other cultural-diplomacy efforts undertaken by State and USIA and Ford and so on were NOT devoted to modernism.

Seviche

2008-05-14T21:33:00.002-05:00

Several weeks ago--after commencement--we wanted to go out with some friends to a NICE PLACE, someplace new, someplace grown-up, someplace where we didn't have to worry about high chairs or slow service or chicken-fingers-versus-mac-and-cheese. We'd been hoping for something downtown, not only because it was close after the ceremony but also because we all want to THINK that Pittsburgh's downtown is an attraction. I had wanted to go to Seviche for a while, in fact ever since we went to the Sonoma Grille with friends and noticed that their appetizers were superior to their meals and then soon after that noticed that the owners of the Grille were opening a new place, dedicated only to "small plates" (how San Francisco) and to Latin small plates at that.

So it was with both cautious anticipation and also that constant dull proleptic throb of "what precisely is going to suck here tonight?" that we came to Seviche the other night. And fortunately, we left pretty damn satisfied. It's a total pick-up joint, which is funny for those of us married with little kids (how far away is that scene?), and my only real complaint is that they don't take reservations and they don't have a "list" for people arriving: you just wait for someone to leave, and then pounce. This policy of course privileges the obnoxious alpha males in the world, but hell--it's a pick-up joint, so they are already the target audience. We did manage to land a table outside. The food was really quite good, both ambitious and tasty, and fresh as well, which is uncommon around here. The pulled-pork empanada thing (in a deep-fried, butter-soaked pastry) was just great, and although I would have preferred slightly larger portions of the ceviches they were, taken on their own merits, excellent. We had just about everything on the menu between us, and it was all quite good.

As we left, one of our dinner companions noted that as things started to get really hopping there, about 10pm, and as the cars started pulling up and the valets got busy and the past-their-prime barflies started to show up, that this little corner of downtown Pittsburgh started to look "like Baltimore." On one level, it's not a great comment on the city that one is surprised that things are as lively and vibrant as... Baltimore. But on another, I know what he's talking about.

terrible idea

2008-05-07T20:17:00.002-05:00

All-you-can-eat sections at PNC Park.

Nine Mile Run

2008-05-07T20:01:00.002-05:00

I'velived here now five years, and have taken hundreds of runs in Frick Park. I watched the city and the Army Corps of Engineers stabilize the Nine Mile Run creek from where Braddock meets 376 to where Forward passes under the parkway (the so-called Big Bend Wetland area). And I've always wondered whether or not one could follow the Run all the way to where it must inevitably empty into the Mon. Inspired by a friend who followed this route last week, I did it today. It's pretty fascinating, and at some point I'll take a camera. After the Big Bend area at Forward Avenue, the creek plunges between Squirrel Hill and Swissvale. There's a rough trail following the right bank of the creek for most of the distance, but it disappears at times and at other times because of erosion it's almost impassable. After following the creek for about a mile, I ran into a couple of fishermen, harvesting minnows from the creek with a drag net. I was horrified at the very notion of eating something out of Nine Mile Run, but the fishermen assured me that they were going to use the minnows as bait to catch bass and muskies from the Mon (not much better in my mind). A quarter-mile after that the path utterly disappeared, and I had to scramble up a very steep bank about twenty yards and over a chain-link fence, where there was a path, which eventually dumped onto Old Browns Hill Road and down. Very cool. It would be nice if the city or the county would create and maintain a little path along there, but it's also charming in its feral state.

judt and hajdu

2008-05-05T20:42:00.004-05:00

Two funny names with J's. Pronounce or not?

Tony Judt's recent article in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS is one of the best things I've read in a long time. Basically, his argument is that Americans haven't really experienced war, and so for all of our self-righteous pontificating about how we "saved France's ass" (a trope so overdone and Limbaughed that it's become its own metareference on the Jim Rome show, a sort of performance of the angry American) our willingness to go to war or at least rattle sabers comes not from our great experience and success in conflict but from our absolute LACK of the experience of war on the home front. The amazing statistic here: the USSR lost over ten million civilians in WWII; France lost several million noncombatants in the two world wars, as did Germany and Italy; the United States lost 2000. That is unbelievable.

David Hajdu has been making the book-tour rounds for his recent THE TEN CENT PLAGUE, a history of the 1950s-era hysteria about the threats comic books posed to American youth, but he made his fame with POSITIVELY FOURTH STREET, a joint biography of Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, which I just finished. It's a solid book, grounded on a massive number of interviews (including one amazing "get" with Thomas Pynchon, which Hajdu conducted by fax), and Hajdu does a nice job of keeping the stories largely separated and thus making their intersections stand out--Baez and Dylan, of course, had a long-term romance, as did Mimi and Richard. I had no idea that Joan Baez had such success when she was so young, but that she was also so insecure about her relationship with her sister, whom she saw as being much more beautiful than her (an insecurity, of course, much stronger in someone 19, 20, 21 years old). The portrait of Dylan is pretty much what one gets from a portrait of Dylan: "I'm not there." Hajdu cherry-picks some great quotes from Dylan in his 1965-66 strung-out period, quotes where he is just cruel and dismissive of Baez, Fariña, and others such as Phil Ochs. (Hajdu has his own dismissive quote about Donovan, who in my mind deserves the snotty comments.)

John Yoo and tenure

2008-04-17T10:14:00.004-05:00

Who are these leftists and lawyers calling for Berkeley to fire John Yoo? What are they thinking? This logic appears to come from the same place as did Hillary’s vote on the Iraq war—“I’ll give them this authority, and I’m CERTAIN it’ll never come back to bite me in the ass.” To recap: John Yoo, the Justice Department functionary who wrote what have become known as the “torture memos," now has returned to his “happily” (this sneering adjective tends to accompany calls for his dismissal) tenured teaching post at Boalt Hall, Berkeley’s law school. While working at Justice, Yoo sketched out, in what is both repugnant and faulty reasoning, an argument that the Bush administration has since used to try and immunize themselves from legal punishment for torturing prisoners. It’s the old “in a time of war, no law applies to the commander-in-chief” argument that the administration has been using since 2002, and basically Addington and others in the OVP wanted someone in Justice to provide them with an ostensibly “outside” legal opinion sanctioning what they wanted to do. Yoo, providing a model of independence that would later be taken up by Fredo Gonzalez, was pleased to serve.

I’m not a legal expert and thus I rely on the good work of those, such as Glenn Greenwald, who have pointed out that Yoo’s actual scholarship is pretty shoddy; he was acting entirely as an enabler to policies that were going to be pursued anyway. (If anyone’s a “little Eichmann” here, it’s Yoo.) I’m happy to hear that Yoo is back at Berkeley, in fact; he’ll do less damage there. Notwithstanding my disgust at Yoo’s puppy-dog enthusiasm to provide legal justification for the President’s right to crush a small boy’s testicles, I have been quite surprised by the vehement calls by many on the left for Yoo’s job. Their argument, as I understand it, relies on two claims: 1) Yoo has the right to make whatever arguments he wants, but his legal advice has led directly to a “culture of torture” perpetuated by the Administration, and this—ideas leading to objectively repugnant acts—transcends the latitude of “academic freedom”; 2) (and this is Ezra Klein of THE AMERICAN PROSPECT speaking)

“tenure doesn't protect those with unpopular ideas, it just makes them harder to fire, and thus raises how unpopular an idea has to be before it merits termination. So on the one hand, firing someone with crackpot notions about tax cuts paying for themselves isn't really worth the trouble. On the other hand, if, say, Greg Mankiw called for the extermination of the Jews tomorrow, Harvard and MIT would direct their physics departments to come together and create a time machine in order to help them fire Mankiw last week. The question with Yoo isn't whether he's protected by tenure, but whether his claims are so self-evidently unconstitutional, and so morally odious, as to make firing him worth the trouble.”

I’m not sure what Klein is arguing, besides “Yoo’s ideas are REALLY awful, and this should override his guarantees of academic freedom.” Klein appears not to understand either what tenure is or the history of threats to tenure in this country. (The National Lawyers Guild have a different, and I think slightly better argument, which is that Yoo should be disbarred, which I believe would then exclude him from teaching law.) Boalt Hall Dean Christopher Edley posted a good statement on the issue, pointing out that

“Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here is the relevant excerpt from the "General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees," adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents:
Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015].”

Good.

But what’s particularly disturbing to me is the scary blindness shown by any leftist who wants a tenured professor fired because of his or her beliefs. Just two years ago, David Horowitz was peddling his “Academic Bill of Rights” here in Pennsylvania, a smokescreen for ideological tests for profs (which would result in the exclusion and firing of most professors who tended to the left). The primary argument that the right makes about academia is that its faculty is out of the mainstream, that its ideas don’t reflect general societal consensus in America today, and that it is a haven of lefty ideas. Ward Churchill was a wonderful figure for them—scary, loudmouthed, insufficiently respectful of a national wound—but it is very clear that people like Horowitz would be happy to clean the leftists out of universities, using criteria based on the political views of the faculty. Use these criteria to fire Yoo, open this door, and I foresee a time when every last Marxist in every last English department at every last state university will be looking for a new job.

I graduated from two schools that ran leftist professors out during the McCarthy years, so I’m sensitive to this. And I am as furious at Yoo, and as hopeful that the Bush administration will face war-crimes charges, as anyone. But attempting to accomplish this by undermining academic freedom is a gravely misled way to show our revulsion at what Yoo helped create.

WILLING

2008-04-16T19:24:00.003-05:00

After hearing his interview with Terry Gross on FRESH AIR, I immediately put in a request for Scott Spencer's WILLING. I knew nothing about Spencer, and I only learned from the radio program that Spencer had written the novel ENDLESS LOVE (on which the Brooke Shields film was based--but Gross was quick to say that the novel was SO MUCH BETTER than the film) and also A SHIP MADE OF PAPER, which I'd heard of but never read. The novel is a first-person narrative from the point of view of a 37-year-old freelance writer/loser whose girlfriend cheats on him and who "lucks" into, through a magical uncle, an all-expenses-paid, $135,000 two-week "sex tour" of Nordic countries. Avery Jankowsky, the narrator, is a self-pitying, self-deluding creep, and the majority of the meat of the novel consists of the nerdy, nebbishy Jankowsky's interactions with the hypermasculine members of the sex tour. Jankowsky lucks into a very lucrative contract to write a book on this tour, and so he spends most of the tour telling himself that he's just there to stealthily take notes for his book and NOT to take part in the sex aspects of the tour, but of course his resolve crumbles. It's a short book, and Spencer utilizes several pretty seriously contrived plot devices to move the story along (some of which don't really go anywhere). I found the novel pretty disappointing, in the end. The prose is magnificent: Spencer is an effective stylist, but in constructing Jankowsky's voice Spencer really shows his talent: Jankowsky is a writer, and judging from the narration of the novel and one excerpt of his writing a pretty good one, and I ended up surprised that Jankowsky wasn't more successful given the really sharp observations he makes. This, of course, plays back into character construction, underscoring the fact that Jankowsky's failures aren't due to lack of talent but rather to character flaws (which are on full display in the novel). As a character sketch it's great. But as a novel that one is drawn to because of its sensationalistic plot and setting, it's kind of a failure. We want more: Spencer must have done his research into this sordid world, and into the vilest kinds of testosterone-fueled behavior that capitalism can enable, and we just end up wanting more of this.

Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead

2008-04-13T20:32:00.005-05:00

How long have they been having shows there? It seems like I'd never heard of the place, and now I've been to two shows there in a week. Monday last I saw Spoon, a band I used to see when I lived in Austin and when they were a very different sort of combo--a kind of Pixies-influenced, spiky, nonmelodic band. Good, but very different. They're slick and successful now, with their songs on TV shows and ads (and Britt Daniel, Spoon's frontman and leader, did the music for the film STRANGER THAN FICTION), and their show was a little less than spot-on. They are tight, very tight, but there wasn't the energy I remember from their Hole in the Wall and Electric Lounge days. Last night the wife and I went to Homestead to see the New Pornographers and Okkervil River, the last of which is, oddly, another Austin band. The show was a nice mix. We came a bit late and missed Okkervil's opening song, but the next three or four were a bit lifeless and pretentious at the same time, with singing that seemed inspired by the Cure's Robert Smith. Wailing. I was unimpressed. But they then played "John Allyn Smith Sails," with its outro from "Sloop John B," and all of a sudden they were a rock band. Melody is a good thing to include in your songs. From that point they were truly on. A Sonic Youth-style noise/feedback freakout followed, and the rest of the show was energetic, urgent, and connected to the audience. New Pornographers followed; my wife, who isn't all that familiar with them but likes them, remarked that they were a "bit NPR" (she was referring to their "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" stage banter but it's not a bad description for the music in general); I retorted that they were Canadian, which them forced us to think about the fuzzy difference between the two cultural categories. They were really tight, much like Spoon, but at the same time more relaxed, more willing to try to make a connection with the audience. For me, what made their show so much better was the low end: the drums and bass were way out front and powerful, while Okkervil's low end was weak. They played all of their great little power-pop songs, including "Sing Me Spanish Techno," which I think is one of the best singles of the last ten years.

The hall, though. It's a beautiful room with lots of period details, and the stage is small and intimate (both bands looked to be playing on a high-school stage), but it's not a great place to see a rock show. The seats are wooden and very uncomfortable, and the rows narrow. And, you might say, who sits and listens to a rock show? Well, a Pittsburgh audience, or at least some of them. And us. We sat in the front row of the balcony and were strenuously forbidden to stand up (because of the low railing, we assumed). The acoustics aren't good, either. Pros: small and intimate; good sight lines; a beautiful building in an interesting and historical town; a good booking agent, apparently, because the lineup of shows is impressive. Cons: uncomfortable; bad acoustics; sedate.

My favorite venue in town remains Club Cafe. That's a fantastic room. And for larger bands, Mr. Small's Theater in Millvale.

give me twenty

2008-04-10T22:45:00.002-05:00

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Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The baby just wanted to try pushups on the plaza ground.

Frida Kahlo: Ninja

2008-04-10T22:44:00.002-05:00

HPIM0891
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

A couple of weeks ago we took a family trip to Philadelphia, in the process getting coveted tickets to the Frida Kahlo retrospective (great--crowded--best not experienced with squirmy small boys). But the boys enjoyed the magnificent plaza in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art much more than anything inside (even though I did try to tell the baby about the greatness of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even").

memoirs

2008-04-05T21:28:00.003-05:00

Reading memoirs about addiction, I was telling my wife, feels in some sense like watching reruns: most of them have pretty much the same elements, told in the same order. Horrifying tales of degradation and desperation; hitting bottom; false starts at recovery; resistance to the 12-step program; acceptance and a recognition that sobriety is tenuous. This doesn't in any way invalidate those stories, or make them trite; they continue to be moving and fascinating. (I watch A&E's Intervention weekly.) So I found Nic Sheff's TWEAK pretty much a replay of James Frey's famous A MILLION LITTLE PIECES (yes, yes, I know, "except that it's true," or at least we think, until the time we find that Sheff altered some things...). One difference is that Sheff, for all of his false modesty, really isn't much of a writer. He's certainly not much of a stylist, and apparently Ginee Seo Books isn't spending much money on copyediting, given the grammatical errors in the prose. Sheff's story is, predictably, shocking and horrifying, sad and pathetic, and in the end hopeful.

His father's much more famous (and well promoted) memoir, BEAUTIFUL BOY, is a different matter. It's the father's point of view on Nic's story, prefaced by long stories of Nic's upbringing, his parents' divorce, and the dad's perspective on what drove Nic to drugs. It was much tougher to deal with, just because the prospect of seeing either one of my boys in Nic's situation is terrifying.

The third memoir I read, Shalom Auslander's FORESKIN'S LAMENT, was by far my favorite. Auslander is a frequent contributor to THIS AMERICAN LIFE, and I love his pieces on that show, but his memoir is a tour de force. It's hilarious (and the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook, and it was read by Auslander himself, really helped--although his voice doesn't rise to Sedaris level in terms of really adding a dimension to the prose, it's on that scale).

teacups

2008-03-24T21:26:00.002-05:00

IMG_3830
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The best thing to say about the teacup ride was that nobody vomited. Actually, it was the least strife-filled moment of our Disneyland day.

the pink gun

2008-03-24T21:25:00.002-05:00

IMG_3836
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

This one was a NIGHTMARE at Disneyland until he got the toy he was promised. Resolution: next time, he gets the toy up front, and then we have a decent time afterwards.

MIckey/Obi-Wan

2008-03-24T21:24:00.004-05:00

IMG_3856
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

I hadn't realized until this trip to Anaheim that Disney had arranged a merchandising deal with George Lucas. This Mickey Mouse-as-Obi-Wan -Kenobi doll set me right. Boy #2 just LOVED it, and his brother picked it out for him.

Los Angeles, Lucques, etc.

2008-03-24T20:17:00.003-05:00

LOS ANGELES magazine--a rag that I generally pay no attention to--just named Lucques, on La Cienega and Melrose, LA's best restaurant. I saw this when the wife and I stopped at the outdoor newsstand on Fairfax near Canter's and I perused the issue. Why I decided to look at this magazine was that we were just walking back from Lucques, where we had dined on Friday night, and the cover announced the rankings of the "25 Best Restaurants in LA."

I haven't been familiar with LA restaurants for about five years, since we lived there, and so I can't attest as to whether Lucques is LA's best restaurant. But it sure was the best place I've eaten for years. Damn. I had the suckling pig, which I was initially concerned would be served whole, with an apple in its mouth. Rather, it was served as a kind of pulled-pork cake, topped with crackling skin. The waiter assured me that it was cooked in a pit on the property for eighteen hours and then something else was done with it before serving. I don't care what they did with it, but it was brilliant. Now, I don't know that it needed to be quite as spendy as it was--it was truly pulled pork, Carolina or Tennessee-style, and I could have gotten equally good stuff in Spartanburg or Durham, I'm sure--but in L.A. it was just brilliant. The wife had the vegetarian dish--a mushroom lasagna--which was very tasty but soupier than it needed to be.

I've also never had a $14 martini. Now, it was a damn good martini, absolutely. And it's fun to be out in the big city, and all, but $14? Oy. What made the drink worth it was the snacks that came along with it: olives and roasted almonds accompanied by extra virgin olive oil and coarse salt. They were just fantastic.

Good spring-break trip to LA on the whole, although the boys were sick throughout. Disneyland was awful (although my sister-in-law got us in to "Club 33", which made the trip worth it. Very, very strange.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD

2008-03-15T07:40:00.004-05:00

After his big success with THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, which is legitimately a great book, Michael Pollan's editors (including the legendary Ann Godoff) have evidently rushed him to get another one out there to capitalize on his "heat." IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is a slim little thing, rehashing many of the points made in THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, but that doesn't make it not worth reading. If the structure of the DILEMMA was a "natural history of four meals," examining how food gets from the ground/hoof/wing/lab to your table, DEFENSE is much more of a manifesto. "Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants," he says on the cover and throughout the book, and that turns out to be recommendation that the book leads to.

He starts, though, with a genealogy of "nutritionism," the idea that foods can and should be reduced to, and understood as, nutrient-delivery systems. This way of thinking about food began as a way to understand how we should eat, but as Pollan points out it is a system of thought peculiarly well-suited to an economy in which large food companies make most of their money by taking cheap raw materials (soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice) and processing them, adding value through this processing and packaging: resulting in what he calls the "Western diet," in which the vast majority of calories come from processed starches and meats. Nutritionism tells the public that these high-starch foods (and Pollan believes that the vast majority of processed foods are precisely that--starches from seeds, with chemicals added for flavors) can be made "healthier" by tinkering with their chemistry--adding a vitamin here and there, or a mineral, or a bit of fiber on top of what is all essentially the same processed starch. Nutrition science agrees with this, saying that to make food healthy we just need to adjust the proportions of molecules in it. Food, in this formulation, becomes fuel and nothing else.

Pollan rejects this, first by saying that the constant paradigm shifts about what is the basic sin in our diet (Fat! Saturated fat! Carbs! Trans-fats! Cholesterol!) result from the fact that we can't understand how nutrition works if we look at foods as nutrient-delivery systems. He of course alludes to the "French paradox": how can they eat everything we think is bad (butter, eggs, wine) and still be healthier and skinnier than we are? And why do people (such as Aborigines in Australia or Inuit in Greenland) with diets we'd ordinarily find to be horribly deficient NOT develop the kinds of diseases that they do end up developing--diabetes, heart disease--when they adopt the Western diet? Pollan argues--and here he comes very close to the good parts of Bill Buford's HEAT--that there is a deep cultural knowledge embodied in a culture's folkways of diet; trial and error over millennia have shown cultures how best to take advantage of what their particular "habitat" has to offer, both in terms of energy and in terms of health.

I think the most interesting, although ultimately depressing, thing he argued in this book was that even when we try to eat "mostly plants," we could be losing out if we're getting those veg at the supermarket. The vegetables grown industrially for supermarket sale, he points out, are generally the species with the greatest yield. That is, the species or variety of broccoli, beans, celery, or what have you that the supermarket carries is of the one species that grows biggest and fastest with the least investment of food, and these species have fewer "nutrients" than other varieties, which by growing longer produce more of what makes them good and which by sending down deeper roots suck more of the good things out of the soil. (Organic veg, of course, are better, because by being grown in organic soil they grow in a medium in which there is more good stuff to extract.) So, in addition to his tripartite slogan of how to eat better, he'd probably also add "Buy those plants at farmer's markets. And if they're organic, so much the better."

THE NINE

2008-03-11T20:08:00.002-05:00

Just finished Jeffrey Toobin's THE NINE, a personality-driven history of the Supreme Court since the Reagan years. Toobin writes on legal affairs for the NEW YORKER and is a TV talking head, so his take on many of these issues has become pretty familiar. Basically, the book argues that the Rehnquist court got more and more liberal over its history, largely because the most conservative voices (Scalia and Thomas) were either so bombastic or so extreme that they could never really dominate and because Rehnquist himself was a much better leader in an administrative rather than an ideological sense. So although for a while eight of the Justices were Republican appointees, the court kept moving to what Toobin sees as the left. This happened because the intellectual and practical center of the court became Sandra Day O'Connor, whose country-club Western Republicanism started to look more and more like liberal Republicanism. Her legal philosophy, according to Toobin, came from her experience as a legislator in Arizona: she was always looking to split differences, compromise, get things done, rather than to make the sweeping decision that would overturn precedent. And because of this moderation, she was able to get the other moderates (Souter, Kennedy) to go along with her for the most part, and they tended to side with Stevens and Breyer and Ginsburg, because the other side was so extreme. He argues that things continued to get even more liberal up until the time that O'Connor and Rehnquist left the court essentially simultaneously, bringing Roberts and Alito to the court--Justices whom nobody doubted would side with Thomas and Alito most of the time. How did this happen? Toobin traces the genesis and ultimate success of the Federalist Society, the reactionary legal organization born around the time of Reagan's ascension largely in response to the utter domination of law schools by the left. By the time Bush II took office, the Federalist Society had 40,000 members and it essentially became the sole source of personnel for Bush II legal jobs, from the Justice Department to the courts to the White House.

It's a smart book and, much like a New Yorker article, focuses much more on personality than on nuts and bolts. But Toobin is good with the context of landmark cases like Casey, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Lawrence v. Texas. It's a profile, not a scholarly book (not that I WANT a scholarly book on this topic).

the ethical implications of FAST FOOD NATION

2008-03-10T11:48:00.003-05:00

I had a class of freshmen read Eric Schlosser's FAST FOOD NATION last week with several aims--looking at how a single argument comes out of a wide variety of sub-claims; examining how very vivid facts and anecdotes are used to create emotional appeal and bolster an argument whose logic is at times shaky; diagramming how his sub-claims are necessary for his larger claim but themselves rest on shaky logic at times; describing how his totalizing view of the "Fast Food Nation" and its component parts and genealogy relies on an ethical claim that he doesn't give audiences the chance to reject. But the students enjoyed it--I could tell from the buzz in the room beforehand that they were struck by his descriptions of the slaughterhouses, working conditions, etc. (Only of my students had worked at anything that could be considered a "fast-food" place, Panera, which I found interesting--I've taught at places with what one might euphemistically call a different student demographic, and in some of those classes almost half of the students had worked at fast-food joints.)

We discussed the book and the students focused on many of the issues about how the "fast-food nation" affects what Schlosser paints as the least powerful: the McSerfs, the slaughterhouse workers, the franchisees, the small family farmers, the local businesses and suppliers. They were horrified at the stories of the injuries suffered and the argument that the fast-food nation concentrates power up. And of course they were grossed out by the stories of, as Schlosser indelicately puts it, "shit in the meat."

When I asked them whether the book had in any way changed their attitudes about eating in fast-food joints, they all looked blankly, like this question was a non-sequitur. When I prodded them, three gave variations on "well, it's unlikely that I'll get sick--sure, there's a chance that I might get E. coli, but the odds are against it." One gave a kind of fatalistic response: "well, yeah, Schlosser makes this seem really awful, but every industry is like this--just look at coffee." And the rest just continued to look blankly. It was amazing to me: immediately after expressing their horror, and even anger, at all of the injustice of the "fast-food nation," their only ETHICAL response was either fatalism (which I can understand) or what might be seen as narcissism--"how does this affect ME?" The "news-you-can-use" approach.

But then I came into class the next day and thought about it. Schlosser talks about how Upton Sinclair, lamenting the way that his pro-socialist novel THE JUNGLE achieved nothing he wanted and instead spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act, said "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach." And I think there's a little to this in Schlosser: he wraps up his argument with his discussion of how food-borne disease is spread more easily by the industrial production models of the fast-food nation, and includes heartbreaking stories about Shiga toxins and dead children. And this serves, partially, to overwhelm the rest of the argument (which is really about "how does the fast-food nation affect others") and emphasize instead "how does this affect me"? And students, and readers, aren't stupid: they know that although there are a few spectacular cases of contamination, and that even if there really are 500 annual cases of E. coli-caused death in the US, this represents a tiny chance of THEM actually being at risk.

ben stein

2008-03-10T08:29:00.003-05:00

I've heard of Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Sugar... but "Big Science"? From the NYT this morning:

Shortly before he was to attend a screening in January of the documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which is about alternatives to the theory of evolution, Roger Moore, a film critic for The Orlando Sentinel, learned that his invitation had been revoked by the film’s marketers.

“Well, you already invited me,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I’m going to go.”

So Mr. Moore traveled to a local megachurch and planted himself among a large group of pastors to watch the movie. In it, Ben Stein, the actor and economist (and regular contributor to The New York Times) interviews scientists and teachers who say that Darwinism gets too much emphasis in the classroom and that proponents of the theory of intelligent design are treated unfairly.

There were nondisclosure agreements to sign that day, but Mr. Moore did not, and proceeded to write perhaps the harshest review “Expelled” has received thus far. The film will open April 18, but has been screened several times privately for religious audiences. Mr. Moore deplored what he perceived as “loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts” and accused Mr. Stein of using a “Holocaust denier’s” tactics.

Which, of course, was exactly the reaction the moviemakers were hoping to avoid by keeping mainstream critics out.Mr. Stein said in a telephone interview that he had not read Mr. Moore’s review, but that “being compared with a Holocaust denier is nonsense,” adding, “This guy is extremely confused.” He said he decided to participate in the project because “there’s just a lot of people who don’t believe that big science and Darwinism should have a stranglehold on academic life, and they have been waiting for a voice.”

Yes, I am SO tired of Big Science thinking that only THEY have a right to be heard in university science departments. Shouldn't the people decide what's true? Why have speculation, opinion, superstition, hearsay, religious conviction, and moronitude been EXPELLED from science classes? And seriously--we all know, and Mr Stein just reminds us of this, that facts and reality themselves have a well-known liberal bias.

Here's Moore's review. It's sharp--as a rhetorical analysis I'd be proud to see one of my students write it.

the realist novel

2008-03-06T09:00:00.005-05:00

By the time I was studying "postmodernist" fiction--the late 1980s--its generally cited epitomizer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was cited far more often than he was read. Not only have I never read him, but I remember no classes that I took or heard about in many years of schooling in literature assigning his works. Yet the critics always refer to him as the inventor of the "nouveau roman," the new novel, the form that utterly rejected 19th-century realism and that was purported to be the new wave. But of course, these new novels weren't fun to read; they were made for graduate students and comp-lit departments.

Robbe-Grillet died last week, a sad event that has predictably led literary critics to "reassess" his achievements, and the assessment is generally pretty pessimistic. The "nouveau roman" was a gimmick, a theory much better left as theory than as practice; Robbe-Grillet won't last, and, in fact, hasn't even lasted until today. The corollary to this rule is that the realist novel, with its 19th-century heritage, has become hegemonic. In the most hostile formulations, the novel is seen as essentially a realist form, suited for the bourgeois reader. The only difference between the 19th-century novel and today's literary novels is that since World War II, the bourgeois are much less concerned about the stability of their social position (looked down upon by the aristocracy, threatened by the roiling urban proletariat), their dominant position in Western society is unquestioned, and thus their pet form--the novel--is much more inward-looking, psychological, and concerned with intra-bourgeois relations rather than cross-class relations. Short stories are the same way. Our great writers of the day almost all practice some variety of the classic bourgeois realist, psychological NEW YORKER story mixed with the 19th-century realism of Dickens, Gaskell, James: Zadie Smith, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud etc. If the precise reproduction of reality in "fiction" is the goal here, is it any wonder that the memoir is on such a roll? And that memoirists who fictionalize are so viciously reviled?

a thought--this insistence on pure facts in memoirs, I think, has some roots in our general unease with the political establishment's happy, if denied, embrace of postmodernism, of the idea that "facts" themselves are relative, just narratives--that scientific fact, whether it be evolution or the link between abortion and breast cancer or global warming or the actual number of people killed and dollars spent in this senseless war in Iraq, are just points of view, things to be debated and given equal time and treated as rhetoric.

Here Ron Suskind's great NYT Magazine piece (17 October 2004) needs to be quoted again: "The [unnamed Bush White House] aide said that guys like me [the reporter] were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''"

When facts are denied or derided by our president, when we have a president who has made it clear that expertise and research are of at best equal value to, and frequently worth less than, passion and religious conviction, it's no wonder that people want to grasp onto facts somewhere, and maybe this is why James Frey's pathetic little embroideries have taken on such importance to pop-cultural arbiters like Oprah, who seem to spend relatively little time and outrage on the Bush administration.

But in an interesting if perhaps too glib article today in Salon.com, Stephen Marche argues that experimental novels got a bad name because of Robbe-Grillet and his insistence that HIS experimentation is the only valid kind of experimentation for the contemporary novel. Unfortunately, novel-readers didn't like the "nouveau roman" and didn't like being told that they were wrong for liking realism. Marche says that novels have always been experimental--he cites TRISTRAM SHANDY, of course, for this, but also ROBINSON CRUSOE and GULLIVER'S TRAVELS--and that 19th century realism is less the natural form of the novel than one style that managed to attain an exceptionally wide audience. And I agree. Even in the heyday of Robbe-Grillet, experiments in the novel that have proven much more appealing to audiences were occurring in Latin America--Garcia Marquez, Puig, Clarice Lispector, and so on. I also see, as does Marche, a strain of contemporary fiction that draws upon the more playful experimentation of the Latin American writers of the 1960s. I look to Jonathan Safran Foer (whom Marche cites), but also to Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, even Dave Eggers as writers who can return a little playfulness and a little modernist sophistication to the novel.

return

2008-02-29T20:52:00.002-05:00

Wow, I haven't updated this for a long time. You'd think that dreary, homebinding winter would make one WANT to spend time on the computer, blogging, but apparently that's not the case, judging from the radio silence here. I do have some excuses: a book MS had to be finished, two demanding classes with smart students who deserve lots of feedback on their writing; the ongoing project to spruce up our house, and so on. I do have some stored-up opinions:

Barry Bonds should not come back and play for the Pirates. Even if he played for the league minimum. As my wife can tell you, I get suckered in every year, thinking that maybe this will be the year the Bucs ne suckent pas. I have a distinct lack of even that doomed enthusiasm this year. And boy, would the presence of Barry kill any good feelings this town has for the team.

John Dos Passos' MANHATTAN TRANSFER is a very easy book to skim through and ask of yourself, "and why is this a 'classic'?"--which was my opinion after reading it last fall. But as I learned while teaching the book, it really rewards a careful reading. There is much more going on there than I initially saw.

Ikea furniture is very versatile and cool looking in the catalog. Putting it together is unbelievably rational and intuitive, and the manuals are the greatest examples of clear communication I've seen in that genre. But it's time-consuming, hard on the hands, and that crappy, heavy particle board leaves no margin for error.

And I've now made my peace with voting for Obama. My first candidate was Kucinich; then I decided I was an Edwards man; then I agonized forever about Clinton v. Obama. And given that I don't see any really significant difference between the two in terms of policy, I have to vote on who has the best chance of beating McCain...

--side note: why are we talking about "having a chance to beat" a Republican, this year? what happened to the death of that party? why are we not able to nominate the proverbial ham sandwich and still beat the representative of the party that gave us warrantless wiretapping, torture, extraordinary rendition, the discrediting of science, environmental and labor laws written by corporate lobbyists, the "women's health" office staffed by antiabortion, anticontraception fanatics, and so on? this is ludicrous! is it fear, is it our certainty that we'll always be losers, or is it real?--

...and that appears to be Obama. Sorry, Hillary. Love you, love what you stand for. We just can't lose this one. Not after 2004.

FOIA ombudsman

2008-02-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

After many years, Texas Senator John Cornyn and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy were able, in the FY2008-9 budget, to allocate money for a FOIA ombudsman--someone to whom citizens could appeal when their Freedom of Information Act requests didn't get answered in the specified 20 days--when they hear nothing for, perhaps, 20 years. Finally, on New Year's Eve 2007, Bush signed a bill that authorized this position.

But then he didn't, burying an elimination of the position in the Commerce Department budget, released on Feb. 4. Cornyn--a right-wing Republican who up until now hasn't seen a thing Bush did that he didn't luuuurve--and Leahy are trying to get Bush to change his mind.

It shouldn't shock anyone that the Bush administration wants to close off citizens' access to government records; this has been the M.O. from pretty much day one. (Innocents, we thought it was just about denying access to Iran-Contra records naming his daddy. If only we'd known then that he has no problem undercutting George H.W., that this position came from a philosophical stance that citizens have no right to know what the gov't does or why.) I heard about this only today, and it hits home: I'm on the verge of having to sail into FOIA territory, as I'm doing research in Cold War-era CIA and State Department records, and all I hear from people working in this field is Don't Count On It.

Here's a letter from "OpenTheGovernment.org" to the House Appropriations Committee on the subject.

It took over a month for anyone to notice this had happened. The damage from this Administration will be with us for decades--and it'll take years just to find out what they've done, much less the ultimate effects of those acts.

waterboarding

2008-02-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

Dahlia Lithwick rocks:

The only thing the Three Mikes [AG Mukasey, National Intelligence chief McConnell, CIA Director Hayden] did know beyond a reasonable doubt was that the legality of water-boarding has nothing to do with international treaties, secret legal memos, acts of Congress, or their personal interpretations of same. The claim on which they were all perfectly clear is that the legality of future torture will be determined by the president and the attorney general as the occasion arises. It will not be measured by any objective standard of conduct but will turn on "the circumstances" surrounding them (in McConnell's formulation) or the value "of the information you might get" (in Mukasey's). It will be a secret decision, made using shifting, subjective standards, for which neither the torturers nor the legal decision-makers will ever be held to account.

This is not simply the theory of a unitary executive at work; this isn't the notion that the president makes the law, and acts of Congress are legal elevator music. This vision of executive power is that the law not only emanates from the president but also ebbs and flows with his hunches, hopes, and speculations, on a moment-to-moment basis. What we are hearing now from senior Bush administration officials is that if the president thinks someone looks kinda like a terrorist and the information sought from him seems kinda worth getting, it will be legal to torture him. And it's legal no matter who justified it, regardless of the supporting legal doctrine, because, well, the president just had a feeling that the information would prove valuable.

That's not an imperial presidency. That's the kind of presidency Yahweh might establish. I'm sure there's some law professor out there who can make the legal argument that executive power in wartime encompasses even the reckless guesses and impressionistic whims of a single man, as they arise. At which point, that too will become an "open question" on which "reasonable people will differ." And the dance will begin again.

first haircut

2008-02-07T17:41:00.001-05:00

first haircut
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

19 months, 1 day.

chair nap

2008-02-07T17:40:00.001-05:00

chair nap
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

the boys and I stayed home today. The older one insisted that he did NOT need to nap: this was what I found ten minutes later.

michael berube

2008-01-31T21:09:00.001-05:00

Last week I got to hear my all-time favorite blogger, Michael Bérubé (blog since retired, alas), speak on "Whatever Happened to Cutural Studies." Basically, he was sketching out the general argument about cultural studies that's been going on since, well, since it started: are the products of pop culture always and necessarily only the carriers of capitalist, consumerist ideology (i.e. is their meaning determined by their PRODUCTION), or can pop-cultural artifacts and products carry diverse or even oppositional meanings because of they way people make use of them (i.e. is their meaning determined by their CONSUMPTION and RECEPTION). Marxists versus postmodernists. Bérubé comes down on the second side of this, and spent much of his time talking about how Robert McChesney and Thomas Frank are sharp writers but get this question all wrong.

It was exciting to be there--not for the celebrity aura that he has, because an academic "celebrity" these days doesn't really carry that kind of aura anymore, that's so Duke 1980s. No, it was the excitement of being in a room where people were really going to hash over ideas. And that's truly what happened. Berube spoke for more than an hour and took questions, at length, for another hour, but I never started fidgeting or feeling that he was running out of interesting things to say. Some of the things he covered: cultural studies, McChesney, Frank, Stanley Fish, the Social Text/Alan Sokal flap of about 15 years ago, creationism versus scientific anthropology, astrophysics concepts that I don't remember, the Mackinnon/Dworkin antipornography campaign, 1980s indie rock, the future of the internet, the effect of political blogs, and several other things that slip my mind. He's definitely enamored of his own intellect, and not at all hesitant to talk about all of those things for two hours, but the fact is that he's got the goods and so I don't mind.

bleedy mcstitches

2008-01-22T22:03:00.001-05:00

bleedy mcstitches
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

Friday morning, we're harried and time-crunched getting out of the house. A scream from the front door, and we find Boy #2 lying on the floor with blood all over his face. We get him cleaned up, stop the bleeding from a big ol' cut on his forehead, bandage him, and send him in to daycare. Two hours later, daycare calls; the cut has opened up and he needs to go to the doctor, who sends him to the ER, where they stitch him up.

Then, we go out for a movie Saturday night. The babysitter calls halfway through; the boys have bumped heads and Boy #2 has a nosebleed.

So, now we call him Bleedy McStitches. But, as you can see, he takes it all in good humor.

Melanctha

2008-01-17T11:21:00.000-05:00

It's definitely interesting--an attempt to make narrative voice reflect both Cezanne's painting techniques and the way motion-picture film looks when it's not being projected--but Gertrude Stein's story "Melanctha" is really, really racist. Wow.

THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG

2008-01-10T11:13:00.000-05:00

Is it possible to start out a post on Norman Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG without mentioning that it's a doorstop? Even in paperback? 1056 pages, in my edition. Fortunately, it reads quickly. I decided to read it after Mailer died last November; most obituaries seemed to argue, or actually stated, that THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG was Mailer's best book. I've read a few of his books--THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM, and I think something else. I remember that THE NAKED AND THE DEAD was impressive, but again I was 19 when I read it. Then I began to run into 1960 and 1970s refugees who either passionately loved or passionately hated Mailer. For me, he was one of those just slightly kitschy figures from the recent past, like Linda Ronstadt or Henry Kissinger (the famous naked centerfold of whom was framed in one of my parents' friends' dens back in the 1970s--I'll never forget that image). I knew he was famous, and I knew what he looked like, but I didn't know that much else about him.

I becmae interested in THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG several years ago when I went to the Guggenheim to see the installation of Matthew Barney's masterful/ludicrous "Cremaster 2", which includes a great deal of thematic material relating to Gary Gilmore and his execution. But I never got around to reading it until this Christmas.

It's pretty great. First, although Mailer is a NY/NJ guy to the core, and it would have been understandable had he not "gotten" the intermountain West, I found his deep and sympathetic portrait of the life of various lower-middle-class people in Utah to be utterly believable and truthful. I could recognize Western places that I know--southern Oregon, for instance--in his picture of Utah, and I also found his description of daily life in a Mormon-dominated community to ring true. (I grew up in a town with a very large LDS population and had many Mormon friends growing up.) I was also impressed by his ground-level portrait of the workings of the justice system, a feature that became especially telling to me as I read the last two hundred fifty pages while sitting in Judge Borkowski's courtroom in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, waiting to get called for a jury. (I didn't.) I found myself less interested in all of the machinations about various journalists and TV producers obtaining the rights to Gilmore's story, interviewing him, trying to get him to open up. I guess in the end, thirty years later, it seems like that whole debate is pretty irrelevant: Mailer told the story, wholly and comprehensively, and nobody else could have conceivably done it better. (I haven't seen the film, by the way). And finally, Mailer's portrayal of Gilmore himself is stunning: he's as completely visualizable as any character I remember reading for years. (Again: of course, Mailer had 1050 pages to do this.)

(I'm trying to watch a Swedish film, TOGETHER, about a 1970s commune while I write this, and I can't help but subconsciously compare the events of THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG with what's going on in this film, which takes place only a year before. I'm mostly getting the images in the film, because it's subtitled--I don't speak Swedish--and I'm looking at the computer screen, not the TV screen.)

shoulder ride

2008-01-02T22:20:00.003-05:00

shoulder ride
Originally uploaded by Mantooth

The cousins were a big hit with our boys, too.