Phil's MFA Story

2009-10-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

I'm over here now: philipchristman.com

Funniest thing I've heard all week

2008-10-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of my workshop buddies want to start a comic strip called Fudd Meridian. Elmer Fudd is the Kid, Bugs Bunny is the Judge.

Personally I'd have done it the other way around, but it's still the funniest idea I've heard in a long time.

"A Forest Of Woods"

2008-10-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished James Wood's brilliant How Fiction Works last night--so how funny to stumble across this brilliant, but flawed piece today.

He begins: In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. ... John McCain’s threatened cancellation of the first Presidential debate was the ultimate defiance, by action, of words; sure enough, afterward conservatives manfully disdained Barack Obama’s “book knowledge.” To have seen the mountains of Waziristan with one’s own eyes—that is everything. Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks.

Beautifully said--and true. A persistent Republican strategy for most of my lifetime has been to denigrate knowledge: you see this in the dismissal, typically without evidence, of inconvenient facts as the inventions of "elitist liberals" (I never get over the ridiculousness of this trope, when it comes from people as rich as Phyllis Schlafly or Bill O'Reilly). You see it in what can only be called President Bush's hostility to research (well-documented by Ron Suskind, among many other reporters, and admitted to by the president himself), and in the complacent acceptance of this totally inappropriate trait by Republican operatives and wordsmiths. You can see it in the whole Bush-O'Reilly-Fox News embrace of "the gut," so well satirized by Stephen Colbert.

I'll leave aside the Orwellian idiocy of the GOP use of "elitist" for now. (It's like a sore tooth I can't stop waggling.) I'll just say this: I'm an English teacher, among other things, and the Republican denigration of reading and writing just pisses me right off. Conservatives whine more than any other group of people about how Young people these days just don't know how to spell, and Back in my day we had to learn the proper use of a comma, and It's all the fault of these black kids who say "mouf" and "femily" and can't pull up their pants. And it's these same conservatives who always blame our beleaguered public school system for this state of affairs--and they blame ethnic minorities--and they blame TV (well, even conservatives are right sometimes!)--and I've even seen them blame things like the advance of democracy, widespread literacy, etc. But then they'll turn around and praise the President and his top advisers for being too manly and decisive to bother reading newspapers or forming coherent thoughts. The hypocrisy really galls me. Either language matters or it doesn't. How the fuck am I supposed to teach my students that words matter in this atmosphere? The President obviously thinks they don't.

So, I read this much of Wood's article and I just feel all kinds of love for James Wood. And this is not an uncommon condition for me--he's only gotten better since he left The New Republic for The New Yorker. But then he commits this: The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.

No pun intended, but, Oh, God. The Puritans were the wordiest people ever. (Maybe that's why they're so misrepresented: they left so many long books that it's scary to even think about reading one. Easier to just remember how mean they were when you read The Crucible in 11th grade.) They replaced the medieval we-won't-let-you-read-the-Bible, but-just-check-out-our-beautiful-murals! tradition with a culture of lectures and commentaries and preaching and printed Bibles, of educational institutions where Greek and Latin and (thanks in part to Calvin) Hebrew were taught, sometimes even to women. When he wasn't busy drinking the blood of kittens and shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, bad old Calvin himself praised the sciences and generally evinced all the intellectualism of a vastly learned Renaissance humanist. And as for Jesus and Paul--well, the latter wrote like a maniac. The closest he ever got to anti-intellectualism was to remind the smart to stay humble. (Which isn't anti-intellectual at all. It's the first thing that all the really smart people I've met will tell you.) The former called himself the Word. 'Nuff said.

About American anti-intellectualism. I'm not sure that I believe there is such a thing. There are people who are prejudiced against the conspicuously smart; there always have been such people. (A servant girl mocked Thales because he studied the heavens so much that he tripped on a root or something, I can't remember the details.) British pop culture seems to almost celebrate this kind of person--the proud blowhard. (Archie Bunker was based on a character in a Britcom, or so I read once.) Then there are, as well, people who self-consciously adopt the position that it's bad to think, for one reason or another. Sometimes this is a species of opportunism--as in, I think, Edmund Burke, who found in it a way to dismiss the content of ideas he didn't like. (Human rights? That's the kind of thing that comes from thinking too much--and being French. Better to let custom and habit be your guide.) This kind of thinking would seem to be inherent in Nietzsche. It's totally self-contradictory, and it creeps me out in any form, but there's nothing distinctively American about it (Burke and Nietzsche weren't exactly from Skokie). Some Americans have bought into it (Normal Mailer, the Beats, the hippies), but that's a different thing entirely. Then there's religious anti-intellectualism in its several flavors: the condescending Buddhist who patiently reminds you that logic is an illusion; the cult member who tells you that asking questions is a sign of Satanic influence; and, yes, certain fundamentalists and Pentacostals I've met who operate the same way cult leaders do, telling you that questions are, essentially, evil. I can't speak for other religious traditions, but this kind of bullshit has no place in Christianity. God didn't give us minds so that we could deface and insult them, any more than he gave us bodies so that we could coke them up. Gifts are to be used, not rejected, still less credited to Satan. But, again, I don't know that this is particularly American; and where it exists, it sure as hell ain't Calvinist in any but the most desiccated way.

The War on Phone Sex

2008-10-10T11:08:00.001-07:00

Every conservative I know keeps insisting that the Bush administration only uses its magically supra-Constitutional eavesdropping powers to keep tabs on terrorists. A certain dearly loved relative keeps telling me that, for example, the NSA only starts tapping your calls if you've been intercepted talking to a known bad guy. (This same loved one reads Dostoevsky for fun and can have conversations with you about string theory; yet he once told me that the education budget is bigger than the military budget, and that Indians should be grateful for colonialism. This is what Fox News does to even the noblest minds.)

Just in case any non-conservative believed this line of bullshit, two whistleblowers at the NSA have now admitted what anybody with any common sense could have foreseen: that the NSA mostly listens in on private conversations, between ordinary US citizens, that they know have nothing to do with terrorism. Among many abuses of power, the NSA whistleblowers describe people gathering around to listen to a US soldier have phone sex with his girlfriend.

You may assume that, as a liberal, I'm appalled by this senseless and unnecessary invasion of privacy, but you'd be wrong. I think phone sex needs to be suppressed by every legal and illegal means possible. It's total aesthetic terrorism. Nothing in the universe sounds dorkier than two otherwise-intelligent people carrying on like Henry Miller writing an instruction manual: "Now I'm stroking your left breast, making sure to trace multiple concentric circles around your nipple. Now your mouth has moved to my neck. Oh, baby." Forget it, man. Phone sex is literalism run amuck--the only thing it has in common with creationism. It leaves all subtlety and imagination aside and ignores the power of indirection and metaphor.

I hope this is only the first step in a Republican war on aesthetically offensive things, but somehow I doubt it. After all, look at John McCain's grin ... and that Foo Fighters song ... and Sarah Palin's sentences ...

On a more serious note, will Pres. Obama give up all these magic powers that W. won for him at the expense of our constitutional order? I really want to say yes, but in reality, we'll need to watch him like a hawk. Power's hard to give up. That's something conservatives used to claim to believe, at least when it gave them a pretext for attacking welfare programs.

You've Got To Be Kidding Me

2008-09-23T11:00:00.001-07:00

Republicans in the 1990s: You know who's ugly? Chelsea Clinton! Did you know the White House has its own official dog? Yeah, it's Chelsea Clinton! You know why Chelsea Clinton's so ugly? 'Cause Janet Reno's her father! You know what Bill really wishes? That Chelsea wasn't so ugly! (Ad nauseam ...)

Liberals in the last couple weeks, on hearing that Bristol Palin is pregnant: Huh.

Mike Huckabee, a couple days ago: I just can't believe how these Democrats are attacking Sarah Palin's family! We never did that to Hillary and Chelsea!

No, no, no, no, no!

2008-09-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

No!

Go Dave!

2008-09-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

Now that David Rhodes is back in print, I'm finding that all these other people have read him over the years and wondered what happened to him. (Several comments below, including one from a nice lady with the same name as the hero of The Easter House; also, the Wall Street Journal reporter I talked to last week about the books said the same thing.) It's gratifying to find Ben adn I weren't the only ones. Belated thanks to everyone who has left comments. Go Dave!

Lies Make Baby Jesus Cry

2008-09-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

I've tried to keep an open mind, but it really depressed me to read what some charismatic Christians are saying about Sarah Palin. They're calling her "anointed", as in by the Holy Spirit, because of her bold and confident speaking style.

What about the content of the message, though? Sarah Palin is lying, just plain openly lying, about her credentials as a reformer. She opposed the Bridge to Nowhere after Congress had already killed it; up till then she pursued it as actively as, after its cancellation, she continued to pursue other forms of pork. She was the head of corrupt senator Ted Stevens's 527 organization. She asked for almost two hundred million in earmarks (a lot more than the "none" she is claiming). Now that "change" is cool, she's presenting herself as an early adopter (recall George Bush Sr.'s ill-fated 1992 attempt to recast himself, the incumbent, as the candidate of change). It's kinda like that guy in O Brother Where Art Thou: "Re-form? I got plenty of re-form!"

Of course politicians lie. I'm just saying that it's not something someone can do through the power of the Holy Spirit. And when Pentacostals, et. al., let themselves be so carried away by their liking for her that they claim things like this, it's kind of an insult to God. I would never ever make similar claims for Barack Obama, though I like him as much as I've ever liked a politician. I want him to be President, but I don't think that makes him God's prophet. He's just a guy.

(And this sort of puts a new spin on this insulting GOP myth that Obama's fans all view him as a messiah.)

I also have nothing but contempt for people who attack community organizers. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a community organizer, for heaven's sake.

What's more irritating is that, when the media subjects Palin to just the tiny bit of scrutiny any candidate deserves, it seems to inflame these same conservative Christians, who then accuse the media of "going after her daughter," attacking her religion, etc. Maybe the gossip mags have gone after her family--I wouldn't know because, being interested in actual information, I don't read gossip mags. What I do read is most of the major liberal journals of opinion--Washington Monthly, The Nation, American Prospect, MoJo--as well as most of the major liberal blogs (Atrios, TAPPED, Talking Points Memo, Matt Yglesias). In all these places people have mostly been restrained in criticizing her religion, reporting on it only as it may affect policy, and peoples' responses to her daughter's situation is: "Poor kid. Hope the media leaves her alone." (That is my response too, of course, having been through something similar when I was her age.)

Finally, while I'm ranting, there's this McCain ad that claims Obama backed a bill requiring sex ed for kindergarteners. Except he didn't. He backed a bill requiring that, where sex ed is already being taught at any level, K-12, it include information about protecting yourself against pedophiles. Mitt Romney supported a similar bill when he was governor of Massachusetts. A lot of communities have 'em, because they don't want kids to get molested. Certainly when I was in kindergarten I got taught about "appropriate" and "inappropriate" touching, not letting an adult touch your private parts, etc. So McCain, honorable POW McCain, is just plain lying too. Obama would almost be justified in running a response ad: "John McCain wants to leave your kids vulnerable to sex predators," or something. They shouldn't, and they probably won't, but ... geez, this is scummy and ridiculous.

McCain/Palin have gotten so dishonest this week that even their ally, Mike Huckabee, is wishing they'd get back to talking about issues. (Another reason why I have a little more respect for Huckabee than for many of his ilk.) It's causing aches and pains in my head.

Slavery in America

2008-06-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

You know, it seems like there ought to be, whaddyacallem, laws against things like this.

2008-06-10T09:07:00.001-07:00

The fact is that I'm just not a very good blogger, as two successive blogging experiences have shown. Lately any writing I've done has been, well, writing, the kind that you hope to slowly shepherd into aesthetic goodness over a long period of time, and then publish somewhere. That commitment will probably continue to make me a bad blogger for the foreseeable future.

But here's a general update: the North Carolina state aquarium totally rules. Ashley and I went there and saw sharks last month. It was awesome.

Also, I read Infinite Jest this semester. It's hard to say what I think of it because the fact is that any book that big, after four or five hundred pages, you just start willing it to be good. On the other hand, the fact that I didn't give up before that point is probably meaningful. By the end, anyway, I was moved and astonished, as I had hoped to be; his eccentric stylistic choices had become part of my own personal map.

Other things I've been reading: Stanley Hauerwas's commentary on the gospel of Matthew has revived my interest in that theologian. (My interest having flagged because, well, the late W. Bush administration years are really not the time when you feel like reading about how much the Enlightenment sucks, liberal humanism is a sham, etc.) In this book, Hauerwas seems to have risen above himself somewhat; the fact that he was writing a commentary on a book of the Bible forced him to state disagreements where, in other books, he might've taken a cheap shot, and it made him say "This is all well and good, but beside the point" about things that he'd normally just dismiss. But he does that without in the least backing away from his most controversial ideas. Actually, one of the things the book did was to force me to remember that the Obama administration, for which I'm desperately and with qualified optimism hoping, will still be "infinitely qualitatively distinguished" from the Kingdom of God.

I've also enjoyed Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum, which is a collection of fake book reviews of books that don't exist. At one point he uses probability theory to prove that human life is technically impossible. Lem has always reminded me of what might've happened if Borges had been really good at math and really into robots.

More on Rock Island

2008-03-05T13:11:00.000-08:00

Not only is Driftless coming out in the fall (see below), but Rock Island Line, the book that made me fall in love with David Rhodes's writing, is up for simultaneous republication (also from Milkweed, and God bless them). Preorder here.

Another upcoming book I'm excited about: Short stories by Chris Adrian. I spent several months hypnotized by The Children's Hospital, a book people seem either to love or hate. For me, it was an ideal novel--characters and situations I found compelling, with the emotional texture and the crazy, it-made-sense-at-the-time illogic of actual human behavior, but which never narrowed themselves into specific topical reference or allegory. For whatever reason, books like that satisfy me the most. (Another example would be One Hundred Years of Solitude, or Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes, which I'm reading now.)

The Novel of 2008

2008-03-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

Here it is, all ready to be preordered: http://www.amazon.com/Driftless-David-Rhodes/dp/1571310592/

For those of you who haven't yet tasted the awesomeness of David Rhodes, here's something I wrote about him three years ago. The last paragraph is hopelessly grandiose, but I don't have time to do better right now:

The Great Lost American Writer

I first heard of David Rhodes because he's glowingly cited in John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist as a young writer with a brilliant "eye for detail," followed by this extended quotation:

The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their grey Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands. They can remember as if just yesterday they had driven by the Montgomerys' brownstone house and seen them sitting on their porch swing, Wilson rocking it slowly and conscientiously back and forth, Della smiling, her small feet only touching the floor on the back swing, both of them looking like cautious, quiet children. Della's hands were so small they could be put into small-mouth jars. For many years she was their only schoolteacher, and, except for the younger ones, they all had her, and wanted desperately to do well with spelling and numbers to please her. Without fail, screaming children would hush and hum in her arms. It was thought, among the women, that it was not necessary to seek help or comfort in times of need, because Della would sense it in the air and come. The old people don't talk of her now but what a shadow is cast over their faces and they seem to be talking about parts of themselves--not just that Della belonged to the old days, but that when she and Wilson were gone it was unnatural that anything else from back then should go on without them.

The passage begins plainly enough--appropriately so, given the kind of people Rhodes is talking about--but then he sneaks up on you: Wilson rocks the porch swing "slowly and conscientiously," both of them looking like "cautious, quiet children." And then the part about the small-mouth jars, which both tells you something about the country culture they're part of and, as Gardner points out, connotes somehow a saintliness and meekness. And then, bottom of the second paragraph, "The old people don't talk of her now but what a shadow is cast over their faces and they seem to be talking about parts of themselves"--a bit of writing so exact it's almost flashy.

Reading this, I thought to myself, "Huh. 'Cautious, quiet children.' That's pretty good. I'll have to read this Rhodes guy sometime."And then promptly forgot about him for a couple of years, until curiosity drove me to look him up in the database of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Which turned up ... nothing. So then I tried looking for him online, first at Amazon and then Google, turning up ... absolutely nothing.

At this point I got curious. I had assumed that the then-“young” Rhodes must have gone on to a successful career indeed—anyone talented enough to attract the attention of the famously tough-minded Gardner must be pretty good. I asked around. Could any of my friends recall hearing of him? None of them did. Had Gardner just made him up? (It wouldn't be the first time--in one of his book reviews, Gardner cites a conversation in which Tolstoy cockily tells Dostoevsky, "You think you know what that bear is thinking, Fyodor. The difference between us is, I know." Beautiful as it is, this snap couldn't have happened, since the two writers never met.) Or was this an example of a fine but somehow unimaginative story writer, a decent craftsman whose well-wrought tales failed to stimulate the public's imagination? Or--most tantalizingly--could this Rhodes guy have actually been really good, yet inexplicably forgotten?

As a child, I once tried to talk my parents into buying a dank, flood-ridden house because it happened to have a secret room in the basement; this same instinctive preference for the unknown and alluring led me, finally last summer, with a larger library system at my disposal, to dig up two Rhodes novels, The Easter House (1974) and Rock Island Line (1975), the novel Gardner cites.

The shock I felt on first opening Rock Island Line is difficult to express--surely it couldn't be this good! From the first moment (the book actually begins with the quotation Gardner cited and gets better from there), Rhodes was writing like a god. His similes and metaphors have the you've-got-to-be-kidding-me aptness that makes you see exactly what he's describing, while simultaneously wanting to clap your hands at the neat violence with which disparate concepts are linked together. His minorest characters are described in devastating over-the-shoulder half-sentences that allow you to know them more deeply than you know your roommates. (One example will suffice: the main character's night-school teacher is described as looking like "he'd made a deal with his soul: Soul, just keep quiet and we'll survive in the back rooms of the world." We never meet that teacher again, but we'll never forget him.) His central characters, meanwhile, are deep, rich, believable; his story is constantly surprising and structurally inventive--it takes an unexpected turn around page 80 and never looks back. His vision is idealistic, affirmative, almost sentimental; it also includes devastation and violence that are horrible to witness. Here, in short, was a novel so gorgeous, gripping, tragic, funny and humane that I can only think of a half-dozen American books from the past fifty years I'd put next to it. And it was hopelessly out of print.

Rock Island Line tells the story of July Montgomery. As Rhodes is one of the finest quick-sketch artists since Dickens, it’s both appropriate and wonderful that the hero of his third novel is a minor character from The Easter House (which deserves a blog entry of its own). In barest outline, July is born into an idyllic Iowa home, loses his family in a terrible accident and runs away (still a child) to Philadelphia, where he tries to eliminate from his life all potential painful entanglements. (Among other literary figures, I'd compare him to Juliette Binoche's character in Bleu.) The way Rhodes demonstrates the impossibility of such a project is both highly typical (July falls madly in love) and totally convincing, in that Rhodes delineates young love with an accuracy of observation that you'd expect from a great lyric poet, maybe. The novel's structure is a surprise. Rhodes doesn't introduce his main character for at least fifty pages, giving us sketches of the family's life before he's born, starting with grandparents Della and Wilson. Abstractly, this sounds like a bad choice--shouldn't we cut to the chase? But this is a facile reading, because Rock Island Line is about the fact that we can never truly escape being placed, foreshadowed, backgrounded, and a deep awareness of July's background drives that point home. And also because Della and Wilson, Sarah and John are delightful to read about in themselves.

At this point, I began pestering all my friends to read Rhodes, and among those pestered friends was Ben Barnhart (hi, Ben!), an editor at Milkweed Press and fellow John Gardner appreciator, emergent-churchite, struggling writer, leftie Christian, partner-in-datelessness and general all-around comrade. Ben reacted exactly as I did, and set about trying to get the books' rights. That's still not a done deal, but it's gone far enough that Ben's actually managed to make contact with the guy. Which means he's still alive, and can benefit from reprinting. (So while he's still alive, do yourself a favor and read his books. Then do him a favor and start bugging your local library, forcing him on your friends, etc.)

Rhodes' obscurity is, in the scheme of things, a minor but melancholy fact. How do literary reputations live and die? Certainly I’ll concede that any newspaper, any Amnesty International report, any river near a factory, contain things so depressing that one hesitates to pause over the mere loss of a good book. But those of us who are book dorks--and not without a sense of guilt, a furtiveness apt to construct highflown excuses for itself (see for example the rest of this paragraph)--find it hard to live without the assumption that books, as well as people, deserve a kind of stewardship; that in justly appraising a book, we do life itself a kind of honor.

(Postscript: Ben's and Milkweed's efforts have indeed borne fruit. Ben and I drove to Wisconsin in the summer of 2005, a few months after the above was written, and hung out with David Rhodes and his wife Edna, who turned out to be absolutely lovely people. Ben talked Milkweed into picking up the rights to RIL and, in the process, landed an entire new Rhodes novel, the one linked to at the top, Driftless. I've seen only bits of an early draft, and those alone were enough that I've been anticipating this book for three years.)

Suppressing Voter Turnout Via Rain Dances

2008-02-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have heard about the little GOP caucus that wasn't this weekend. (Big irregularities, suspicious discrepancies, etc.) The state GOP chair responsible for all this nonsense is a fellow named Luke Esser, and somebody dug up a sample of the thoughts and opinions of this gentleman on the useful arts of voter suppression, from a college-newspaper piece written in 1986:

Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.

Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.

Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.

The only means of persuasion left available to us are Acts of God, who we know is exclusively on our side. I’m talking about seriously inclement weather. I want Biblical floods and pestilence. I will settle for rain, sweet rain. The deadbeats won’t even go out in the rain for their welfare checks (they send one of their social workers to pick it up). There’s no way they’ll vote if it’s raining.

Yeah, those activist judges.

To be fair, I wrote some pretty stupid things in my college paper, too (viz: someday online printing will remedy the publishing industry's overuse of paper!), but I don't think I ever wrote anything that could rival the elephantine wrongness of this.

Yes, it's twenty-two years old, and yes, it's half-joking. But should people who think voter suppression is both appropriate and funny really be chairing the state branch of a major political party? And when the culture of a major political party encourages the advancement of people whose idea of a "cute comic persona" is "Hi, I Loathe Democracy!"--well, should anyone be surprised when these same folks can't even run an election fair to the party's own members? That's my point. Even the GOP deserves better leadership than bozos like this.

Edward Yang, 1947-2007

2008-02-01T14:07:00.001-08:00

In 2000 Edward Yang made my favorite movie of all time, Yi Yi (A One and a Two), an utterly beautiful, funny, and profound film that I wish I could crawl inside of and never leave. Yang tells a sprawling, multi-character, multi-generational story with such Olympian grace and efficiency that only slowly, with mounting delighted awe, do you realize how complex it is.

I've been wondering ever since what he's been up to--and when Criterion (or somebody) will get around to releasing a few of those earlier works of Yang's that I know only, like those tantalizing lost Shakespeare plays listed at the Stationer's Registry, by name: Mah-jong, A Confucian Confusion, A Brighter Summer Day, The Terrorizers, Taipei Story. (This last one, especially, sounds like both a tribute to Ozu's Tokyo Story and, perhaps, a dry run of Yi Yi, a film that showed Taipei to better advantage than I've ever seen any other movie do with any other city.)

I just happened to Google him this afternoon and learned, to my surprise and sorrow, that he's spent these last several years struggling with colon cancer, a struggle which he lost last summer, on June 29.

The last few times I saw Yi Yi I found myself being overtaken by a response that has nothing to do with Yang's brilliance as a storyteller or poet of the camera. I found that I'd missed the characters, as you miss particularly vivid and lively people, and that seeing them again for the first time in a year or two made me feel old, melancholy. I suppose it'll be worse next time, now that I know I am no longer sharing the same planet with this man.

Over the years I've wondered if Yang-Yang, the nine-year-old hero of one strand of Yi Yi's story, isn't a sort of stand-in for the director himself. There's the name, of course. But more importantly, there's the almost-too-cute-except-it's-played-straight subplot in which Yang-Yang starts taking pictures of the backs of peoples' heads. "You can’t see it yourself, so I’m helping you," he explains to his baffled elders, as he hands them Polaroids of their bald spots. Is this some oblique version of Edward Yang's own origin story, an explanation as to how he (or any artist) discovers his vocation to see for us what we can't see for ourselves? It's certainly a fitting self-commentary for this film, which sees so much more of life, and sees it whole, than most of us ever will.

(Totally secondary comment, unsuitable for a eulogy: Why the hell did I have to learn about Edward Yang's death from a chance Googling? It'd be one thing if he still lived in his native Taiwan, but he'd been in California working on a cartoon with Jackie Chan, for pity's sake. It should've been front-page news in every major city. Every artist on earth should have been mourning his passing. Banks should've closed early. Flags should've hung at half-mast while squirrels and little bunnies chittered sadly and hung their heads. Etc.)

Give Money To Barack, If You Wanna

2008-01-31T15:16:00.000-08:00

I kind of hate even doing this, but: the Obama campaign is on some huge push to try to get 250,000 donations during the month of January (i.e. tonight--at midnight the coach reverts to a pumpkin). They were at 235,000-something when I donated a moment ago. Anyway, if they reach that figure tonight it would probably be good for at least the bottom of tomorrow's news cycle, and, well, at this point any news items that suggest "Obama is resurgent!" will help a lot in the increasingly close Super Tuesday races. (He's gaining on HRC in one state after another! He just needs that little extra push ...) Obama is a candidate for whom the appearance of electability is almost uniquely important. Lots of people really want to support him but they won't unless they think other people will; as they do so, more people become willing to take a step on faith rather than holding their noses and supporting the "inevitable" Clinton. So even one positive news story could make a real difference.

So now would be a great time to donate.

If you like him. If you agree with me. If you want him to be the next President.

If you don't, that's totally cool.

Politics is boring

2008-01-16T12:42:00.001-08:00

What we all really want to know is, which Buffy villain does each Republican contender most resemble?

Conditions in Guantanomo are too good, sez Iowa GOP upset winner

2008-01-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

Nevermind: He's a creep!

Prisoners = Football

2008-01-05T09:48:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking more about the results in Iowa and trying to analyze my own response to them. I'm with the commenter below (Matt Post, is that you?)--I really, really like Barack Obama. I like him so much that I begin to mistrust and second-guess my own reaction and wonder if I'm succumbing to some idiotic, idolatrous messianic narrative. I deeply believe that we need to look to God and to ourselves and only secondarily--heck, hundredthly--to our politicians for the solutions to our problems.

But aside from everything else, I guess the reason I love Obama is because he seems genuinely capable of getting people to remember that--and sometimes you do need an orator, a visionary, to give us back the things we all know with the colors refreshed a little.

Meanwhile, I read up more on Huckabee to make sure that what I wrote below (about him being my favorite among the people whom I'd never, ever want for President) wasn't, well, stupid. One of the most persistent attacks that I found against him was that he released the convicted rapist Wayne DuMond not only after, but as a result of, a concerted (and dishonest) right-wing effort to paint DuMond as a victim of Clintonian authoritarianism. The rightists had alleged that Clinton, as Arkansas governer, denied parole to DuMond, a "Vietnam vet with no prior convictions" (but actually he had several), because he had been accused of raping Clinton's cousin (but actually Clinton recused himself for this very reason). Huckabee let him out on parole, and he raped and murdered again. Now some leftists are not only suggesting, but declaring as if it were certain, that Huckabee, as governor, released DuMond simply as a "screw you" to the departing Clintons. There's no proof of this that I'm aware of. (Their other suggestion, that Huckabee was biased in DuMond's favor because of DuMond's claimed conversion to Christianity, seems a lot more likely to me--but, again, our current President wouldn't even be swayed by that in his decision to not only not prevent Karla Faye Tucker's execution, but to mock her after the fact. There are degrees of creepiness in the world.)

Meanwhile, left-wingers are attacking a right-winger for releasing a parolee. That's very troubling to me. Obviously, there are people so dangerous that they must be sequestered--in a country this big, probably many such people. On the other hand: our society is already staggering under the weight of a prison-industrial complex that keeps a lot of potentially redeemable people locked up because: (a) TV has us secretly convinced that every convicted criminal is a demonic Rob Zombie villain who likes to eat kids' brains for fun; (b) Starbucks, McDonalds, Wal-Mart and many other corporations save money by using prison labor and thus have an interest in "the expansion of the corrections industry," i.e. keeping the places filled; (c) guards' unions have the same interest and have been known to scuttle perfectly logical legislation to cut down on the number of nonviolent incarcerated offenders; (d) there's always semi-conscious racism and classism (though the first wouldn't have applied in DuMond's case). And if we want to live in a society that isn't Draconian, we must accept that parole committees, and governors, etc., will make errors--and that these errors may have lethal repercussions. In a free society, sometimes psychos will walk the streets. That's the reality. It's possible that Huckabee is sincere enough in his Christianity that he's actually realized this and governed accordingly. (I don't know enough about his record in such cases to say--and nobody I've read seems to have examined it. They've just adopted a right-wing framework of "Hey, we can tag this guy as soft on crime!" and added a twist of conspiracy/gotcha theorizing that would be a lot more convincing if we were talking about Karl Rove. That's what I'm complaining about.)

Liberals are the ones who should be reminding us of all of this. So for them (us) to assume the worst about Huckabee's decision in DuMond's case without stronger evidence than I've seen so far is troubling.

What links all this with Obama is that ... well, read what Yglesias has to say about the Clinton campaign's new strategy. Apparently, they're planning to complain about his "extremely progressive record as a community organizer" (heaven forfend) and "... his liberal voting record on criminal defendants' rights." (My emphasis.) His most famous accomplishment in the latter area was a bill requiring videotaped confessions from criminal suspects--a move by which he aimed to curtail beatings and forced confessions. In other words, he was protecting an utterly elementary human right. (By the way, he also got recalcitrant Illinois police forces to sign on--what was that about "politically inexperienced"? This is the same force that teamed with the FBI to murder Fred Hampton in his bed. I think Obama just may be an effective coalition-builder after all.) And the Clinton campaign aims to attack him for that, make him out to be a naive liberal who wants to give lollipops to rapists. In a Christian country, we'd protest against such a use of prisoners even if most of 'em were evil psychopaths--let alone in the case of a prison system where a huge chunk of the population is best described as "black guys who got caught with the same amount of drugs that get a white guy sentenced to rehab."

I just went from "unexcited" about Hillary Clinton to "peeved."

I Heart Iowa

2008-01-04T09:23:00.002-08:00

I'm more or less ecstatic about Barack Obama's Iowa win. (I'm also happy about John Edwards's second place finish.) I hardly dared to hope.

But that's not the subject of this post. The subject is that I'm also surprised to find that Mike Huckabee's victory over Romney, et. al., is agreeable to me, though I think Romney would be a better candidate for liberals (because we could crush him like a grape), and though I would never, ever want Huckabee to be president. (I worry about what would happen to gay people under a Huck administration. I worry about women's health under a Huck administration, especially that of third-world women; the United States has, under Bush, thrown money at fruitless abstinence education abroad when what's needed is AIDS prevention.) But it's wonderful to see the Uncle Moneybagses of the GOP, the people who've spent decades making religion a central part of the modern presidential campaign, the people who've schooled every TV news anchor in the art of asking stupid religious "Gotcha" questions, in an absolute rage because a genuine evangelical Christian rained on their parade. What sweetens the deal considerably is that Huckabee is less enthusiastic about war and more enthusiastic about school than any of them--that he rebuilt Arkansas's school system in part by acting like a Democrat. He also supports a mandatory cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which is not enough, of course, but it's a helluva lot more than any other Republican in the race is ready to do (with the exception of John McCain). He sounds more like one of us sometimes: "We ought to be moving rapidly towards energy sources that don't have a greenhouse-gas effect. Aggressively set the goal that within a 10-year period, we should move away from a fossil-fuel culture to one that has alternative energy resources." And, finally, though many people seem convinced he'd push our country further in the direction of a fascist theocracy, his rhetoric is (mostly) free of the demonization requisite to any such effort; I've never heard a statement of his in which people like myself were explicitly identified as "the enemy," while I've heard little but from Bush et. al.

Some of the political sites I read are less encouraged by last night's events. At The Nation, John Nichols is calling Huckabee a hypocrite because--get this--he's using different campaign literature in New Hampshire. (Fewer crosses.) No shit? How sneaky. I'm sure the voters of New Hampshire will be taken in by this subtle and fiendish ruse. After all, it's not as if Huckabee's baptistry is well-known; certainly it's not like the central issue in all coverage of his campaign or anything. It's not like he's never asked about it by reporters who might more fruitfully spend their time asking him what he'd do about global warming, or the disproportionate imprisonment of black males for nonviolent drug offenses, or whether he maintains a higher opinion of habeas corpus than George W. Bush. (All of these are "Christian" issues and will remain so despite many Christians' lack of interest in addressing them.)

Also at The Nation I see Jessica Valenti criticizing Huckabee for his "patronizing" attitude toward women:

Just this past weekend Huckabee said, "I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor...I think you don't punish the woman, first of all, because it's not about ... I consider her a victim, not a criminal."

Now, you have to love that Huckabee assumes abortion providers are men (I suppose that makes it easier to paint them as taking advantage of poor widdle women), but even worse is the assumption that women don't realize that when they get an abortion, they're getting an abortion.

Now, there's no denying that this position is patronizing, and I'm sure Huckabee has many other views about women so scary they'd scrape white off rice. However, considering that Huckabee is pro-life--that he assumes the killing of a fetus is the murder of a baby, an assumption many sentient life forms make, quite a few of them without being motivated by hatred of women or fear of icky wombs or whatever (in fact, many such people are women!)--this position is also a good deal more humane than the only other possible position for a pro-lifer, which is that both doctors and patients should be punished when an abortion is performed. Better patronization than jail time, or fines.

Let's be clear: I'm not endorsing his position. I think that if abortion were illegalized tomorrow the result would be a lot of dead mothers. It would also mean a lot of rape victims, women who can't physically sustain a pregnancy, and other "official exceptions" having to make their way through a bureaucracy that would probably be staffed by unsympathetic men looking for a reason to screw with them. (Just because I don't believe that pro-lifers are all braindead misogynists, as Katha Pollit says, doesn't mean that there are no such examples.) I can just imagine some John Ashcroft type looking up from some poor woman's Application To Terminate Pregnancy For Medical Reasons and saying, "Have you prayed about this? I think God wants you to die in childbirth." No, thanks. Making abortion illegal and making it rare are not the same things.

All that said, however, in this case Huckabee is still morally ahead of many of the people in his party. The GOP is full of people who will vote for a "pro-life" candidate in order to get those evangelicals on board, because they know that under any circumstances, their daughters will always be able to terminate any undesirable pregnancies. It's also got at least some people who would like to throw women who try to have abortions in jail, where presumably their children will be well taken care of.

I think that Huckabee's popularity is an encouraging sign, all told, given the bottomless nastiness of the Bush administration and the species of Republicanism that supported it. I think the odds on his ushering in a fascist theocracy are low (though I'd not rule it out!) while the likelihood of Giuliani's ushering in a fascist police state are pretty good. We were closer to fascism four years ago, when Republican elites praised the "realness" and "wholesomeness" (blood + soil) of those Red State "Real Americans" who "support the President," than we are today, when Republican elites show their always-thinly-veiled contempt for the Midwesterners who've thrown themselves behind Huckabee--and Obama. Add to that that contempt for evangelical Christians, such as we saw plenty of during last night's news coverage, is almost always partly about class.

There are things to criticize Huckabee for and a million reasons why he shouldn't be president. But that makes it all the more important that the criticism leveled at him be reasonable and fair, rather than this kind of tendentious bullshit.

And PS--one last reason not to be downhearted: I think Obama would kick Huckabee's ass in a general election.

Debbie's New Book

2007-12-29T07:16:00.000-08:00

Debbie Blue's second book comes out January 1. This is important because Debbie Blue is an amazing writer, someone who revolutionized my own reading of the Bible, and--in an all-too-rare coincidence--a wonderful person. For an example of how she rules, see here. For more examples of how she rules, but from the pulpit, look around here. For examples of what a great gal she is, you'll just have to move to Minnesota and start attending House of Mercy and offer to buy her a cup of coffee at the Black Dog (if it's still there)--all of which are practices I would commend to anybody.

The first Sunday I lived in St. Paul I went to House of Mercy because of a girl I thought I might have a crush on (results were inconclusive). Debbie preached that week and, in half an hour, she not only answered theological questions that had plagued me for years at that point (she didn't answer them conclusively, of course, because they were theological questions, but she answered them well enough to give my anxious self some breathing room), she also did what only one other clergy person has ever been able to do for me--made me imagine for half a second that John actually meant it when he wrote, "For God so loved the world."

N+1 and Our Lowered Expectations

2007-12-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

A proposal: at some point, treating readers with courtesy and intelligence--i.e. treating readers as if they know at least as much as you do--became a sin. It got renamed "pretension," "namedropping," "irrelevance," (funniest of all) "elitism."

I bought the new N+1 yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course I didn't agree with every opinion expressed or enjoy all the fiction and poetry, nor did I expect to. But I appreciate the magazine's focus on global warming, its commitment to new writing, its thoroughness, and its brashness. It's among the only publications out there that doesn't treat me like I'm stupid.

Trolling around on the web last night, I was reminded again that I'm about the only person who feels this way. For some litbloggers and literary pundits, hating N+1 seems to be a badge of virtue, as hating Al Gore was for political pundits in 2000. Many commentators complain about the journal's "maleness," because it was founded by four men, which to me is like petitioning Radiohead to replace, say, Jonny Greenwood with, say, Kim Gordon. If it is easier for four men to get the funding for a new, small-time publishing venture than it would be for four women, then plainly that reflects badly on the grant-givers of the world, not on these particular four men. Such criticisms make sense when they're applied to a major, mainstream journal of opinion with high circulation (a large-city newspaper or The New Yorker), not a tiny literary journal. But besides that, they publish an awful lot of fine writing by women, from Emily Votruba on boxing to Elif Batuman's compulsively-readable-if-horribly-wrongheaded attack on American short fiction. I'm not sure what else you could ask for, except maybe a Mark Greif sex change. (Nevertheless, this issue actually makes some people so angry that I actually read a comment on The Elegant Variation in which the writer fantasized aloud about shooting Keith Gessen.)

Other people simply seem to hate the "New Yorkiness" of the journal's references, advertisements, etc. This reaction I can understand, but again, I'd rather attack a patronage system that ignores the existence of active literary cultures in the Midwest, Southwest, etc. than begrudge the natural provincialism of writers who live in New York.

But the one criticism everyone seems to agree on is the journal's "elitism," and this is what bugs me. What can it mean in this case? People call Pound an elitist because, in his literary and critical writings, he makes overt anti-democratic arguments again and again. N+1 has argued for--well, let's just look at the latest issue: an extension of the franchise to sixteen-year-olds; full funding for public education; giving tenure credit to college professors who work with secondary and elementary students. The editors praise Amazon.com's customer review-function and wonder aloud whether concern over global warming may result in an anti-democratic "politics of fear" on the left. A long essay considers the history of the cubicle, and ends up--as per usual, in these pages--by calling for the revivification of the labor movement. At some point someone writes about the need to weaken the Presidency and strengthen Congress. The magazine's politics are utterly democratic, small D. That's not something you see a lot of anymore--perhaps because all the real democrats are under suspicion, from the true elitists of the far right, as, you guessed it, "liberal elitists."

I don't know what it is about the magazine that is supposed to be elitist--and I'm afraid that peoples' real problem with it is that the writers use big words, refer frequently to books they've read, and generally demand a certain degree of readerly attention and care. In a world full of Slates and Salons and Maureen Dowds, of journalists so desperate to be "relevant" that they end up doing culture criticism that's in its way just as bullying and authoritarian as the worst of Mort Adler or Harold Bloom--"Here's what you will be caring about in '08," note the imperative--I can just see how treating your readers like grownups might be seen as "elitism." You're refusing to let marketers and demographers tell you what to value, and in our culture, perhaps that's become so threatening that it actually looks like arrogance--rather than elementary self-respect, which is what it is. (I have a friend who confessed to me several years ago--he really was embarrassed--that he didn't watch TV anymore. He was afraid to tell people so, "because I know how horribly elitist that sounds." The culture had actually made him feel guilty for not wanting to watch TV.)

I just spent twenty minutes in the car listening to some guys on NPR argue that--get this!--some environmental activists make unreasonable demands on people! No kidding! Personally, I don't know why grownups would need to spend twenty minutes arguing about the fact that any movement will attract strain-a-gnat-and-swallow-a-camel types. I thought that was common sense. But it's easier to yack about that than, I suppose, actually try to reason out what it is that the global climate crisis demands of us.

But personally, I don't like being treated like I'm 12. I'd like to be part of a cultural conversation that addresses people as if they were capable of making tough ethical and political decisions for themselves, rather than distracting them with toy paradoxes--"Al Gore has a big house! He uses a lot of carbon!"--while the real decisions are presumably made elsewhere. I like to read things that respect my intelligence--and yours. For that reason, I will continue to read N+1.

Last Papers Graded; Everything Turned In

2007-12-14T08:16:00.001-08:00

Thank God that's over. Here's to next semester.

Speaking of M. Robinson ...

2007-12-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

YAYYYYY!!!!

And Open Letters, a monthly literary e-journal I've been enjoying for some time, presents an intelligent consideration of her work that (a) really gets the ways in which her essays and fiction are connected without (b) devolving into sophomoric hero-worship, which seems to be the only tone I can sustain on this subject.

What I'm Buying Myself For Christmas

2007-12-07T11:04:00.001-08:00

Wow, who knew they made T-shirts that speak for me?

eMusic Rules, Vol. II

2007-11-29T19:03:00.000-08:00

Television, The Blow-Up
Television's two studio albums, Marquee Moon (1977) and Adventure (1978) (I ignore the self-titled reunion effort of 1991 because ... well, I didn't like it), aren't available on eMusic. That's too bad, because this really is a case of a well-regarded cult band you've always read about whose music, once you get your hands on it, completely justifies the hype. Marquee Moon is one of the most beautiful albums in the history of rock; it has the instant melodic approachability of the great folk-rock groups of the '60s (it especially reminds me of the jangly, early Byrds), but with an angular momentum that more than justifies the label "punk," though it also brings to mind John Coltrane. The only form in which their stuff is available on eMusic is this semi-official live recording, released in 1982 long after the group dissolved. The quality of the recording has always been something Television fans lament--the show was clearly awesome, but what remains to us is like looking at a slide of the Mona Lisa on a ViewMaster the dog chewed. Still, my copy of Marquee Moon is scratched to hell and I can't afford to replace it today, so it's nice to hear highly muscular renditions of that album's title song and "Little Johnny Jewel."

Tom Ze, Brazil Classics Vol. 4: The Best of Tom Ze
Tom Ze was the crack-brained version of Tropicalismo, the early-70s psychedelic-tropical-topical musical movement he pioneered along with Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso. He is the craziest of a crazy bunch. He uses typewriters as a rhythm instrument and sings advertisements for his own music: "Come on, buy this record/It's a very patient work." On one song he just goes "Hey" over and over again. And it's all fabulously entertaining--in fact, though it's heresy to say so, I enjoy him a bit more than I do Os Mutantes, the most widely-acclaimed of the famous fraternity.

Pere Ubu, "The Fabulous Sequel"
This is off the veteran Cleveland new-wavers' third album, New Picnic Time (1979). It opens with a bunch of basses jerking around and a drunk man bellowing the following words:
It's MEEEEEE AGAAAAAAAAAIN!
HEY HEY HEY IT's it's ME AGAAAAAIN!
If you need any other recommendation, then plainly your nervous system isn't fried enough for life in this century.

Feel the Zeel

2007-11-29T16:49:00.000-08:00

My dad makes his TV debut (the segment labeled "marketing campaign, 11/26/07") in a report from my parents' local Faux News affiliate. He's the good-looking one with the cool name. Go, dad!

This week's homework

2007-11-20T08:08:00.001-08:00

I've greatly enjoyed the results of James Woods's move to the New Yorker--and not just because I enjoy not having to ever read the New Republic again. When he was working for the TNR you hardly ever saw him do anything but a mixed review of a new book, but already since October he's written brilliant appreciations of the Psalms, Philip Roth, and Tolstoy.

Wood praises at least as well as he criticizes--that's one of many differences between him and nearly every other book-reviewer I can think of. (John Leonard praises a lot, but he's boring then. He's even boring when he criticizes.) Polemic is like nuclear power: it presents itself as an easy, cheap, nearly-infinite energy source, but then it leaves piles of waste around. When I read Wood on the late style of Philip Roth, for example, or whatever, I actually learn a great deal about how good fiction works. He seems as able to be moved to eloquence by eloquence as by bad writing. It's like he's constructing little stories about how the imagination responds to genius which are themselves genius. Nobody will ever convince me that good essay-writing, such as he does, is less imaginative than any other kind of literature. Sure he uses other works of art as the occasion for his own, but, well, that's true of any novelist or poet, too (Aeneid responds to Homer which responds to lame early Trojan battle epics which probably respond to Gilgamesh ...)

2007-11-17T16:27:00.001-08:00

I'm so glad that the Daily Show archive (beta version) is finally up. As I procrastinate on various term papers, I'm revisiting all sorts of classic Colbert/Carrell/Cordry moments, but the video I'm happiest to see again is of a clearly anguished Jon Stewart delivering his first opening monologue after September 11.

Jon Stewart, of all people. Who would've thought that Adam Sandler's glib, smartass costar in Big Daddy would turn out to be one of the few genuinely necessary public voices in our "low, dishonest decade"? Who would've thought that a comedian would respond to September 11 with a speech that, in its ragged way, approaches nobility? And why does it still seem saner and gutsier than almost anything said on the subject by a politician or journalist of note? I cried years ago, watching it for the first time, and I cried again just now re-watching it.

You know all this talk about "These guys are criminal masterminds" ... it's a lie! Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys--these firefighters, these policemen and people from all over the country literally with buckets, rebuilding: That's extraordinary. And that's why we've already won.

Yeah! We're Number 48!!!

2007-10-26T10:54:00.001-07:00

Reporters Without Borders ranks us at #48 worldwide in their annual survey of world press freedoms.

YEAH AMERICA!!! WOOOOOO!!! Our press is the 48th freest in the world! Bite us, Togo and Mauritania (#s 49-50)!

The best part is that we're getting beat by Nicaragua (#47). You all remember the 1980s? Legwarmers, Gremlins, Freddy Kruger, sunglasses at night? Another important trend of that decade was our government throwing millions of dollars at a vicious gang of crooks, rapists, and torturers ("the moral equivalent of the founding fathers," Reagan called them) in order to help them win control of Nicaragua. Nicaragua was then ruled by Daniel Ortega's Sandinista party, who won a 1980 election with something like 79% of the popular vote. But Ortega was a socialist, so we had to keep supporting the kidnapping, nun-raping, nurse-assassinating, child-executing, barbarian Contras, because they were going to "free" Nicaragua from these awful socialists who (despite their comparative restraint from nun-raping and nurse-assassinating, etc.) would surely turn the country into a mini-USSR.

Now Nicaragua's got a freer press than we do. They also faced an election last year, in which the popular vote went to ... this same Daniel Ortega*. One of Reagan's "totalitarian" enemies presides over a country with a freer press than we have. Someone call Alanis Morrisette.

(*None of this is to make a saint of the somewhat creepy Ortega himself, of course.)

Is Harry Potter an Episcopalian?

2007-10-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

Did anyone else notice how we learned that Harry Potter is a Christian the same weekend we learned Dumbledore is gay? (Please excuse the MTV News links; they were what came up first. And where else can you read such priceless headlines as "Kid Rock arrested after Waffle House scuffle"?)

J.K. Rowling, a Church of Scotland member, has been reluctant to talk about her faith extensively before, but Book VII makes the Christian parallels as explicit as they ever were in the Narnia books, and in discussing them she starts to sound more like Frederick Buechner than like the Satan apologist some people still consider her: "The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot ... On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes--that I do believe in life after death. It's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

That may not be the kind of ringing endorsement that gets people on "The 700 Club," but it's pretty close to what most Christian writers and artists actually say when you ask them what they believe. Madeleine L'Engle, Linford and Karen, Kathleen Norris, Annie Dillard, and Buechner himself, on back to Dostoevsky with his "furnace of doubt"--they burn and they flicker and they almost sputter out, and then they burn again. "It preoccupies me a lot," she says. Good stories shaped by such preoccupation have done more for my faith than anything else.

And the very same weekend she lets us know that the HP books take place in a Christian universe, she also tells us that (though it's not at all spelled out in the book) Dumbledore experienced same-sex attraction as a young man. This is a woman who knows how to make enemies. Everyone who ever thought she was a shill for Satan is now feeling vindicated; but now all the anti-religionists who'd like to slap C.S. Lewis out of the canon of classic children's books are going to hate her too. "Why, here I thought she was writing fun children's books that promote trust, self-sacrifice, and courage--but in fact she was just writing Christian propaganda!" they'll say, totally oblivious. I look forward to reading the outraged responses from Phil Pullman and Christopher Hitchens. Actually, I look forward to ignoring them.

Meanwhile, Rowling has reminded lots of people of something that I think the news media forgets: some of us believe in Jesus, and resurrection, and also would be happy to attend church with DumbleD whether or not he likes him some wizards. Kudos to her.

Signed Pauline Kael

2007-10-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

I just grabbed a couple things at the annual Graduate English Association booksale. As I was checking out, my friend John started looking through the ancient, battered copy of Pauline Kael's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang I was purchasing, and discovered a near-illegible inscription on the inside cover. He read: "I ... hope ... it ... gives ... you ... more ... pleasure ... at ... the ... movies ... Pauline ... Kae--Holy shit! This book is signed!"

I threw my check at the guy before he could jack up the price.

Signed Pauline Kael, bitches! I intend to hold this over Ben Barnhart's head (because I'm still jealous he has For Keeps and I don't). (Even though I'm the one who sold it to him.) (At a price so exorbitant that it represented more charity on his side than mine, I might add.)

Me in Print

2007-10-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Whisky for catching this: Books and Culture finally posted my Cormac McCarthy essay.

Over the Band

2007-10-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I got my vinyl of Trumpet Child, and it was the disappointment that I expected. The last part of that sentence really sank in this time: I now expect to be disappointed by Over the Rhine albums, after years of buying them as close to the day of release as I can afford to. I think I'm giving up on them.

Why, you ask, am I giving up on them? Four words, gentle reader: "Don't Wait for Tom." See, Trumpet Child is supposed to be OtR's "tribute to Americana" album (which is kind of like going to the North Pole and saying "I've got an idea! Let's have cold weather up here for a change!"). And so they decided to have a tribute song for Tom Waits on there. What a cute idea, right? We'll call it "Don't Wait for Tom" (get the double-entendre?) and work in as many three-word references to his lyrics as we can. Actually, a few of the phrases aren't bad, but ... the whole thing just feels so B-side. It's like they're trying to approximate the awesomeness of Tom Waits via inverse suggestion. Do what you do well, not what someone else does badly.

Some of the songs are very pretty indeed, and I'm sure I'll end up with my one or two favorites. But when an artist reaches in and rearranges your emotional geography, when they teach you what it actually means to be taken out of yourself, it's hard to resign yourself to "Well, this is pretty." It's like trying to be buddies with someone you had stormy, tempestuous sex with two weeks ago.

I get obsessed with bands and lose my critical faculties; I start to tolerate violations of my Personal Irony Threshold. (The P.I.T., as I've surely explained before, is the point where another person's utterance becomes unintentionally funny/cringe-worthy. Mine is highly sensitive. This is both a bad and a good thing, but there's nothing to be gained from letting your favorite band elbow their way right past it four, five albums running.) OtR will always be my favorite band, but I'm going to let them drop off my radar for awhile. I'm sure their current music has just as much hard work and honest feeling behind it as does Good Dog Bad Dog, and that Trumpet Child is going to matter to some people a lot, but I'm not that person. I'd rather listen to Tom Waits.

Franky Teardrop

2007-10-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

Also in this week's Nation is a review by Jane Smiley of Franky Schaeffer's new memoir, Crazy for God. Franky Schaeffer is, of course, the son of Francis Schaeffer, Line-of-Despair-Man, the most popular Calvinist thinker of the '70s, the guy who cobbled together a coherent (if one-dimensional) theory about the drift away from God in modern art and literature and established a cool-ass literary/intellectual drop-in commune in Switzerland, L'Abri. If you grew up fundamentalist during the '70s and '80s and showed any intellectual curiosity at all, sooner or later someone would try to get you to read Schaeffer's The God Who Is There. For people like my father (and me, before I stopped being a fundamentalist), Schaeffer offered a way to show your less-bookish co-religionists that art and culture mattered--albeit only insofar as they had an effect on peoples' worldviews. Nevertheless, Schaeffer remains a controversial figure because of his (still-debated) influence on the mainstream Christian Right movement of the '80s and '90s, as well as his (still-debated) influence on underground, creepy, stone-the-gays-and-Wiccans theocratic movements.

Franky Schaeffer is his famously-rebellious son, who has joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. Jane Smiley is a novelist, perhaps a good one (I haven't read any), and an essayist--a shitty, snobby one.

Smiley writes with her usual thousand-feet-overhead contempt for evangelical Christians of any kind. For example, she says of visiting L'Abri in the seventies:

They put us up for two nights and engaged us in conversation for three days. I felt only mildly uncomfortable at first, but then I happened upon an earnest conversation between some quite normal-looking young men about "Satan," in which "Satan" was a being or a person actively attempting to undermine the best efforts of these guys to live a "godly" life. I admit I was shaken. I think I said something on the order of "You've got to be kidding," and when they professed their sincerity, I began to wonder what sort of place I had stumbled into.

Yeesh, Jane, a lot of people believe that, and some of them even have opposable thumbs.

Smiley also uses the phrase "organized religion" to allow herself to be wholesale dismissive in a way no novelist should even want to be. Her parting shot is: "Francis Schaeffer's failure was that he didn't learn, from the very cultural history that he loved, the simple historical truth that tribalism and damnation are what organized religion does best." Yeah, that and soup kitchens, and free schools. Not to mention most of the art and culture that F. S. is here scorned for not interpreting properly. When people use the phrase "organized religion" I start inching toward the door. "Organized religion" as opposed to what? Being "spiritual but not religious"? Those people are at least as dogmatic, and as predictable, as Christians or Muslims are. Being not religious at all? Sounds nice, except that it's impossible, if "religion" just means "one's fundamental, never-provable convictions about who and what we are." Everybody's got those beliefs, including Richard Dawkins, and everybody learned them from somewhere. The phrase "organized religion" insists on a distinction that's hard to maintain.

Anyway, Franky, the son of Francis, who began all this, has written a memoir, and apparently it's fairly damning. He writes about the family's strict Calvinism as a sort of mental torture (Yawn--nothing new there) and describes the leaders of the then-nascent Religious Right
this way: "In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement." Not surprised at all; go peruse the Positive Atheist list of scary Pat quotes. His mother comes across as a truly twisted creep (I'll spare you the details). His father, meanwhile, is--brace yourselves for the surprise--tormented by doubt. (Smiley doesn't seem to understand that wrestling with doubt is something religious people expect to do.) "The very Italian Renaissance paintings and sculptures that Francis denigrated (in comparison to Northern European Reformation works) in Escape From Reason were the ones, according to Frank, that he loved the most and could not stop visiting," Smiley writes.

If this last bit is true, it's a decent illustration of why Francis Schaeffer's whole project fails. And this is why Schaeffer always got on my nerves, even when my dad tried to present him to me as an example of why artists and writers had a logical place in fundamentalism. Schaeffer always presents works of art as meaning one thing, which we can then evaluate as being a good or a bad idea. But in fact great art--scratch that--any art that's halfway interesting always means many things at once. It can't be reduced to a message. Schaeffer's method treats artworks as if they were mere envelopes for propositions, as if nobody had ever read to him Samuel Goldwyn's famous joke: "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."

At the same time, thank God Schaeffer was around. I know from talking to people that he gave cover to a great many kids similar to me--people drawn to art and literature and ideas, in a religious milieu that simply didn't encourage these things except as propaganda. So did Franky, for that matter. In the eighties he wrote a book called Addicted to Mediocrity which I read many, many years ago, and which argued that art was (if not quite sacramental) of greater importance than it ever was for Pat Robertson, and which excoriated the chintzy Christian-bookstore culture of that era, too. I've been unimpressed with the book every time I've returned to it, but at the time I first read it, I felt as if I'd been given permission to go ahead and be a filmmaker. (That's how long ago this was--filmmaker, and not writer.) He and his father both gave a lot of young fundamentalists some badly-needed permission, a good cover story: they gave those things to us so we could flourish under them until we realized that these things needed no apology.

I probably won't be reading Franky Schaeffer's book. It contains many personal details, including information about his parents' marriage that I don't want to know. (Ewww. The only thing grosser than a memoir that touches on Francis and Edith's sex life is a sex manual written by Tim and Beverly LaHaye.) I'm tired of the sell-out-your-family memoir trend, really tired of it. (I think of Rebecca Walker, whom I had to read in a women's autobiography class, and who not only publicly disses her mom and dad, but also her girlfriend's child whom she helped raise. The kind of memoir in which the author's own callowness is presented as if it were deeply revelatory.) Still, I feel a weird sort of affection for him. I want to say, "Thanks for the support."

Best Thing I've Read This Week

2007-10-03T10:29:00.001-07:00

Amazing Rick Perlstein essay in this week's Nation. Apparently, now that most people agree that Iraq is the new, unwinnable Vietnam, a bunch of historians are coming along to claim that Vietnam was totally winnable, except that all the criticism kept us from winning it. Two of the most popular of these books actually make blatantly contradictory claims--one says that it was winnable up till '65, the other that it was winnable after Westmoreland was replaced with some Petraeus-like new general. But somehow the books are being taken together as proof that, well, somewhere in there, Vietnam must've been winnable, and it must've been those liberals who made us lose.

Go read the whole thing; he rips the guts of their arguments. The essay is an invaluable study of how bad information, which is easily shown to be wrong, can still get out there in book form with a bunch of high-class blurbs on its back and become part of the cultural narrative about "history."

WTF?

2007-10-02T12:11:00.001-07:00

One of my officemates just mentioned that a student wants to write a paper arguing that we should use the KKK to do border patrol.

My Sister Has a Blog

2007-10-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

My sister has a blog. Everybody go over there and say encouraging stuff. (She thinks her writing isn't awesome, but it is.)

The Joys of eMusic, Vol. 1

2007-09-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

I joined eMusic in June and ever since I've felt like a mullet fancier at a Darryl Worley concert. It's heaven. I thought I'd quickly list a few of the more bizarre masterpieces I've happened on:

David Porter, Victim of the Joke? An Opera
You might could call this album Stax/Volt's answer to What's Going On?--an ambitious concept album released around the same time as Marvin Gaye's masterpiece, by a man who was Isaac Hayes's frequent songwriting partner. It's inward-looking and romantic where Gaye's album is a piece of social critique (except that this distinction is utterly spurious, as Gaye himself makes clear enough when he sings "Father, father, we don't need to escalate" and you know he's speaking to the man who eventually shot him). Porter's album is probably not as "socially significant." It's not as high in cultural relevance or beta-carotene or whatever. But it's aged just as well, if not better. That's a lot to say for an album that has skits, for heaven's sake. We begin with the spirited "If I Give It Up (I Want It Back)," which is just begging for seductive mix-tape usage; he also covers the Beatles' "Help" without embarrassing himself. Then there's "If You Have to Sneak (You Have to Sneak)"--love the use of parentheses in these titles. Then the woman starts cheating on the songs' protagonist (which really shouldn't surprise him, given the immediately preceding title, but this guy's as innocent of self-knowledge as any Saul Bellow hero) and we get the gorgeously, luxuriously lugubrious "I'm Afraid (The Masquerade Is Over)" and "Storm in the Summertime," which are both way too long, and not nearly long enough. At some point he sings that he's so sad he should just dress up as a sad clown and be sad. (It's something like that.) And there he is on the album cover art, dressed up like a sad clown. This album is just as wonderfully surreal as that little vignette implies.

Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice, Rip It Up: The Best Of ...
One reads about Orange Juice (melodic postpunk, Glasgow, same time as Aztec Camera, blah blah blah) but never hears them. I did know one Edwyn Collins song--"Never Met a Girl Like You Before" (think Empire Records, ca. 1994-5)--and it made me not want to download anything here, but the genre's important to me (short-lived melodic post-punk bands), so I caved and went for the five or six Orange Juice songs on here. They fucking rule. Especially "A Sad Lament," which is exactly that, and the title song, "Rip It Up," which is so good that Simon Reynolds chose it for the title of his history of this period (Rip It Up and Start Again).

The Go-Betweens, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
See, the Gobees are on eMusic; that really should be enough to send any sane person there. Especially since the one GB album demonstrably better than this one--16 Lovers Lane--is available too. (16 Lovers isn't my favorite album ever made--that honor belongs to Over the Rhine--but it's certainly in the top ten, and I think it's the finest pop album of the 1980s. Is that endorsement enough?)

The American Song-Poem Anthology
I read about this on Pitchfork years ago and have lusted for it ever since. Do you remember how in the very early 1980s, in the classified ads at the backs of comic books, there would be ads from this company that would promise to set your original words to music? You send 'em your "poems" and a check, and they send you an honest-to-goodness record of studio musicians singing your words. Well, somehow Bar/None Records got ahold of some of these. They will fuck up your brain more than an entire case of Robitussin, and there's no hangover.
A representative sampling:
"Can a government
Be competent?
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Can a government
Be honest?
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Can a government
Be truthful and open--
The thirty-ninth president
He has spoken:
Jimmy Carter says yes.
Jimmy Carter says yes."
(From "Jimmy Carter Says Yes.")
Now why is that not an all-purpose hipster catch phrase, and this album an ironic party favorite on the order of the Langley School Music Project? Search me. Keep in mind, that's not a campaign song. Some poor sap wrote those words down in a moment of Whitmanian effusiveness and then mailed it in for recording, simply to fulfill his own creative prerogatives. And the song comes just after the equally Virgil's-Fourth-Eclogue-idolatrous "Richard Nixon," a clear literary aftereffect of the Republicans' "Southern strategy." (The poet is thankful that Nixon "brings to us his heritage/a thing of priceless worth." He might as well have said "He'll get tough on those damn n****rs.")
This album also includes "I Like Yellow Things," "Rat a Tat Tat, America" (between this and "Nixon" you have an entire genealogy of Repub-rock), "Maker of Smooth Music" (you can just hear one of your more musical street alkies serenading the ladies with this one), "Pinch Me," "Blind Man's Penis," and "I Lost My Girl to an Argentinian Cowboy." Mute inglorious Miltons, every one.

Trumpet, Child

2007-09-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

I just bought the new Over the Rhine album (a month late). Paste says it's their best album ever, which is Paste-language for "Look, a new OtR album!" They said that about Films For Radio (um, no), Ohio (NO!), and Drunkard's Prayer (OH FUCK NO YOU ARE KIDDING ME). I love all those albums in my own way--well, no, I won't even pretend to love Drunkard's Prayer, but I love at least a third of Ohio ("BPD," "Long Lost Brother," "Suitcase," "What I'll Remember Most," "Jesus in New Orleans," and a few others), and I definitely love Films For Radio, even the overproduced parts, even the songs that make you feel (what you feel even more on subsequent albums) that this band has figured out how to make an "OtR" song and is just repeating themselves. (John Donne meets Lucinda Williams meets Red House Painters, maybe.) There aren't as many teeth marks on these songs. Or there are and I don't see them--I have enough faith in L&K to almost assume it's that. I don't know how else to say it.

Please, OtR, don't disappoint me this time.

A recurring dream has me figuring out, all at once, how to play a certain stubborn, difficult song on the piano so that it'll have exactly the impact coming from my fingers as it does on record. Last month I dreamed I was hanging out with Bethany Antoon and Nate Kemler and suddenly I knew how to play "Circle of Quiet" perfectly. On waking up I realized that I was in love with a band that stopped existing almost ten years ago (a year after Good Dog, my favorite album ever made, and the same year as Besides, which off-loaded some "B" material that later albums don't equal--just compare the Ohio and Besides versions of "Bothered" ...)

Recent good read

2007-09-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

James Wood likes Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms.

I have a man-crush on James Wood. Also on Robert Alter. I'm so glad to see Wood writing for The New Yorker, because now I don't have to read the New Republic at all. Thank God, that'll save my blood pressure. Another week of their spineless centrism would've killed me.

My Senators Don't Support the Restore Habeas Corpus Act

2007-09-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

... So I'm going to call them. Maybe you should call yours. More info here.

Workshop #1

2007-09-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I got most of the responses listed below--all from the one guy who basically let me know in advance that he hated the piece. Other people had very helpful things to say, or they had suggestions that were respectable and interesting, if at odds with my own intentions for the piece.

In other words it was basically a good workshop. I'm grateful. The insecure inner raving wasn't necessary. In fact I'm a little disappointed in myself for caring so much about the possibility of loss of face.

The one slash-and-burn response basically crossed the line into personal disrespect. (I'm not sure that he meant to do so, but he did.) However, this person and I obviously have next to nothing in common, and I probably shouldn't be worried about it. No matter what, the essay needed lots of improvements, and a couple peoples' advice will probably lead to direct improvement. So far this method seems to be a helpful one.

First Workshopping

2007-09-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

A guy just apologized in advance to me for how harshly he plans to critique my first workshop piece tomorrow. It's a personal essay about general anxiety, and it's meant to be persuasive, to address misconceptions I think people still have about anxiety. Thus it necessarily talks about a lot of things at once. I think these folks are expecting more of a memoir.

Here's what I'm guessing I'll hear the most:

1) "This felt like five pieces to me. Maybe if you just separate every different thing you talk about ...?"
2) "Your sentences are too long. You lose the reader's interest. This is a TV culture, man! In the nineteenth century maybe people had time to follow these big ol' wagon trains, but I could barely keep up. Blah, blah, blah. Not everybody's a grad student, you know. [As if I could ever forget.] Blah, blah, blah. ..."
3) "Give me more of the ex-girlfriend."
4) "Give me more of the fundamentalist childhood."
5) "Give me more of ... [anything but the stuff I really wanted to talk about]."
6) "Give me less about politics [in an essay one of the purposes of which was to show how anxiety is a natural response to the political life we've made for ourselves]."
6) "I feel like you're arguing too much [in an essay that has clear polemical intentions from the beginning]."
7) "I really love this bit on page X. Maybe you could build more around that? [And, by implication, discard everything else.]"

I suck at blogging!

2007-09-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

I just suck at blogging! This is the second consecutive blog that I've done a great job not posting on.

To defend myself: School has been intense. I'm taking three lit classes per sem. instead of two, and my students seem more easily bored than my Marquette kids were. (I'm enjoying them anyway. But man, do I miss some of my MU students, especially the ones who write Big Lebowski quotes and dirty words on my evaluation forms. "Nothing is fucked here," indeed.) And I had to write a memoir last week. I get workshopped on Thursday. I have no home Internet and the gas to my oven kept getting cut off. You get the idea.

I'm scared--productively scared. When we went around the room in my creative nonfic workshop and told who we were and what we'd done with our lives, I thought, I am the least interesting person in this room. I feel like I have to be on my game. It's nice.

At night, I watch "Simpsons" episodes, or Godzilla movies.

It's not a bad life, as long as we don't nuke Iran.

2007-08-29T08:42:00.001-07:00

Do Americans Read?

Read this. I found it oddly encouraging.

The Uses of Bad Literature

2007-08-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

What's the difference, psychologically, between being in an MFA program and just being a guy who writes all morning before work? That is to say, Why bother?

One reason to bother, it seems to me, is that you're sending yourself to what amounts to a three-year art camp, with little direct payoff in terms of employability. This forces you to take your desire to write a little more seriously. I wrote during the two years of non-MFA grad school that I just finished, and I wrote a little less when I was a homeless shelter worker, and a lot less before that, in the valley of the shadow of my twenties. But to the world, during those times, I was always doing something else--volunteering, studenting, subbing, floundering. Now I've got nothing else. If I don't at least get a start on writing something good during the next three years, I can't say "Well, I was so busy teaching, you know ..." All I can say is "Man, I fucked that up."

So the little email I got from USC last April, saying "You're in, kid," doesn't make me a better writer. But it does light a fire under my ass.

Fires under your ass can be great, or they can give you a blistered ass. These first weeks in South Carolina I've felt displaced and confused, and looking over the writing I've been doing all summer I feel like I might as well have just written my name backwards a thousand times. That is when it's helpful to have a bad magazine story or two laying around.

This weekend I bought the Atlantic summer fiction issue. This is all the short fiction the revered East Coasty magazine publishes all year now, and so you expect to be blown away, but I'm halfway through, and aside from a typically competent effort by John Updike, I haven't been. The prose of many of the stories is pedestrian, flatly descriptive, like this blog entry. An entire story about two Catholic priests passed in front of me without a single metaphor that rearranged my sense of reality, without a single musical sentence.

I went back and looked at some of the work I've been doing. It's page after page of shit, but there, on the third page, was one nice metaphor, glinting. A few pages later there was a sentence that was only two or three hours' work away from being nicely arranged. And this is just the first horrible mess of a pre-draft!

So if you write, I'd urge you to find a mediocre magazine story--best to have it be from Atlantic or Harpers or the New Yorker, someplace you and I could never hope to appear in--and pin it over your desk. It'll regulate that fire under your ass, keep it at roasting but not scalding temp.

On Getting Up at the Buttcrack of Dawn to Write

2007-08-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

My life is marked by two simultaneous, seemingly irreconcilable tendencies: I regularly, though with frequent backslidings and interruptions, get up at 5AM in order to write. And I am lazy.

I read about writers who work at night and I sigh with envy. To sit up till near-dawn, as James Baldwin is reputed to have done, or from 10PM till 3AM, as Michael Chabon does--there is something sexy about living your life on a schedule like that. You imagine that people who do their most productive work when everybody else is sleeping must be transgressive in other ways. They must certainly be having more sex than you, probably during the very times when you, you poor productive sap, are doing laundry or prettifying the lawn--all those chores that seem to extort us into doing them, that nickel-and-dime us to death. And of course there is the folk association of early rising with cheerful hard work, preparedness, ants vs. grasshoppers, etc., and the further folk association of these things with capitalism, gloom, iron cages, and poor John Calvin, our goateed scapegoat. I think these associations are mere voodoo sociology, but I live in this culture too, so on some primitive level I buy them, so the night worker becomes the furtive rebel against capitalism, advertising, forced cheerfulness, neighborhood associations, the PTA. You imagine a shadow population of night writers, linked in silent Pynchonian resistance. All you have to do to join them is to stay up late, behavior well within the range of any 12-year-old, and certainly easy enough, you'd think, for an anxiety-prone melancholiac.

However, I can't do it. The thought of working all day, then coming home and working some more, is just intolerable. Up late writing, I get brain-fatigue and forget perfectly simple words, like "fatigue," like "I." Also, I get googly-hearted and sentimental at night, and my night writing sessions have usually ended with me tearing up over my laptop, singing along with old Go-Betweens and Tom Waits albums and shuffling through the photos in my head. Nothing wrong with that, but why complicate it with writing?

Meanwhile, afternoons are out. In the afternoon people think they have a claim on you; they sidle up to you and say, "Mr. Christman, I don't understand this assignment," or "Phil, let's go get coffee," or "Your balance is overdrawn," or "Three million Darfuri need you to sign this petition right now!" And you go along with it, because, yeah, they do have a claim on you. Daytime is one big collusion, in which I, too, instinctively participate. When it gets to be much past 9AM I start inching toward the door, whether or not I have a reason to. Locking yourself in a room at such a time is counterintuitive. If it were a choice between writing in little fragments of afternoon time, and not writing at all, I'd choose the former, but the prospect is daunting.

Getting up early is a brutally easy, elegant solution to all these problems. Nobody buttonholes you at 5AM, and your brain is less likely to get up and walk away. You tell it to write and it obeys you. It has no other other options, it being, after all, 5AM. Learning to wake up at that hour is a pain, of course, but once you do it it's like riding a bicycle. Even now when I fall out of the habit it only takes one miserable day to snap back in. Coffee tastes better at 5, and when I have to face the world later on--when I have to teach or go to church--I can feel like I've got a secret, as if I just spent several hours at a communist cell meeting planning to sink a boat. And finally, I'm obsessive-compulsive--if I fail to do the first thing on my agenda for the day I start feeling that the whole day is ruined. If I get up at five, I feel like I've earned bonus points simply by getting out of bed, and the gravity of minor failures weakens considerably.

But when I try to explain myself, I sound like I've turned into a Student Council president. I sound like the Prodigal Son's older brother, that sad-faced, virtuous pain in the ass. I got up at 5AM to write, I say, and it sounds as if the next words should be and then I made myself an oat-bran muffin from scratch. I jogged, meditated, journalled, and flossed. I always use coasters, and I love my supervisor. Would you like to see how I've organized all my memos?

Worse, I sound more virtuous and strong-minded than I am, and start feeling like I've represented myself falsely. To get a whole picture of how hard-working I am (not), you need to factor in all the days when I don't get up at 5AM, when I half-ass it for a few hours at most. You need to factor in that I can spend whole days watching "Buffy," and that these days tend to warp the days adjacent to them, so that I can fall completely out of discipline for a week. You need to factor in the obsessive-compulsiveness, mentioned above, which makes getting up early to write actually easier than trying to wrench a day when I've gotten up late back into shape. My weird working habits are a compromise forced on me as much by my own weird personality as by the circumstances of my life.

Of course I get tired of waking up at the buttcrack of dawn in order to write. Sometimes, as I get ready for bed, I think of the person somewhere who will sit up till midnight with a glass of wine, watching the Daily Show and Colbert. But then I remember that I'm not allowed to drink a lot of wine, and I don't have cable anyway. That is to say, the regime of minor self-denials would probably continue under any imaginable circumstances. (Michael Chabon writes at night because he's taking care of kids all day.) Life is compromise, and it's time, not the laundry, that nickel-and-dimes us to death. It helps to be reminded of this.