My Thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s Edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s Review of Michael Seidel’s Book

As I start writing this post, I’m about halfway through Stephen Jay Gould’s posthumous collection of baseball writings, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball (W. W. Norton, 2003). At this point the weaknesses of the book have become quite apparent to me: Gould has a habit a reusing the same anecdotes across multiple pieces, the length restrictions of newspaper columns prevent him from fully developing ideas, and the introductory memoir—in fairness, written during the author’s terminal illness—suffers from incredibly stilted syntax.

Nonetheless, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville shines with Gould’s amateur passion for baseball; I feel the pleasure he gets in taking a break from paleontology to wax rhapsodic about his favorite players. It doesn’t quite work when read straight through, but this seems like a pleasant book to dip into and out of for a few minutes at a time.

I first became aware of Gould’s baseball writing while I was preparing to teach a class on sports literature (something that, in a shamefully Gouldian fashion, I’ve mentioned several times on this blog). His essay on DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak during the 1941 season, entitled “The Streak of Streaks,” was included in one of my main source books for the class, Baseball: A Literary Anthology (edited by Nicholas Dawidoff). The essay is among the highlights in Dawidoff’s anthology, and it was one of the last pieces I cut from my syllabus before I had to submit it for approval.

Gould’s focus in “The Streak of Streaks” is on probability, specifically how people have difficulty analyzing things like hitting streaks in probabilistic terms. He cites Amos Tversky’s research on shooting streaks in basketball, which found that the “hot hand” phenomenon doesn’t actually exist: players who make a basket on one shot are no more likely to hit on the next, and players’ “hot” streaks can be predicted entirely based on their overall shooting percentages. Gould doesn’t bring up this research to denigrate athletes’ accomplishments, though. In fact, it serves as the context in which to celebrate DiMaggio’s hitting streak. Gould also cites Ed Purcell’s research on baseball streaks and slumps, and Purcell found that DiMaggio’s hitting streak was the “one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all” (p. 177).

That revelation honestly shocked me when I first read it, as I had regarded DiMaggio’s streak record as a vulnerable one. Beating it would be mighty difficult, yes, but surely a batter just would need to get “hot” for nine or ten weeks. But if, as Purcell found, baseball would need 52 career .350 hitters for even a 50-game hitting streak to be likely (actual number of such hitters: 3), then DiMaggio’s accomplishment is truly incredible. In his characteristically statistical way, Gould finds a way to place his baseball hero into the realm of the divine. As baseball has become ever more analytic, as launch angles and exit velocities and wins above replacement increasingly dominate discussions of the sport, the fact that DiMaggio’s hitting streak is nigh inexplicable becomes all the more important to me: there is still mystery in this weird little game.

I had gone back to Dawidoff’s anthology to re-read “The Streak of Streaks” multiple times. It was only when I got to that essay in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, however, that I learned that the essay was originally a book review. Specifically, “The Streak of Streaks” reviews Michael Seidel’s book Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, which purports to cover precisely that. Had I read the acknowledgments section of Dawidoff’s anthology, which mentions that the review portions of the essay had been omitted, this would not have been a surprise to me. But alas I had not, and I could not help but think: why would Dawidoff choose to cut such a significant chunk of the original piece?

It seems especially strange to make such an edit in a book called Baseball: A Literary Anthology, as Gould’s original review makes a point of placing Seidel’s book in the context of baseball’s literary history. Gould sees Streak as part of a trend of “serious, scholarly books treating baseball as something that might even get you tenure at a major university (as something other than an athletic coach)” (pp. 178-179). It’s as though Gould went out of his way to justify Dawidoff’s efforts over a decade before the anthology came out.

One may argue that removing the book review passages from the “The Streak of Streaks” makes the piece more accessible for general audiences, who are statistically unlikely to have read, or even have heard of, Seidel’s book. Better to leave the intertextual elements for the Gould completionists, no? But if that were indeed the goal, Dawidoff doesn’t fully commit to it, because Gould’s review is also a response to an article by John Holway called “A Little Help from his Friends: Hits or Hype in ’41,” which ran in a 1987 issue of Sport Heritage. Readers probably have as much knowledge of Holway’s article as they do of Seidel’s book—less, even, because Gould devotes less time to summarizing it.

Yet, having now read the original version of Gould’s essay, I do think that Dawidoff’s edits make the piece stronger. For one thing, the review portions include some rather self-indulgent quotations from Omar Khayyam and Alexander Pope, in an attempt to link sports streaks to our quest for meaning in a world dominated by chance. I appreciate the effort, but even as a baseball fan I find there’s something bathetic in Gould’s sincerity here. We are still talking about grown men playing a children’s game in oversized pajamas, and I’m not sure the subject can support a straight-faced digression on Absurdism.

More importantly, Gould’s discussion of probability with regards to DiMaggio’s hitting streak has little bearing on his review of Seidel’s book. Seidel, from how Gould describes his work, seems more interested in placing DiMaggio’s streak in the context of then-current events; Gould likens the book’s weaker passages to “reading old newspapers and placing the main events in order” (p. 179). The most Gould can do to make Seidel’s book relevant to his main point is to say that it “will help us to treasure DiMaggio’s achievement by bringing together the details of a genuine legend” (p. 181), which is about the vaguest praise possible. I do get the sense that Gould enjoyed Seidel’s book, but I get a stronger sense that Gould saw this review as an excuse to publish a different article that he was actually excited about writing.

For comparison, I would look at something like “The Cruelest Sport” by Joyce Carol Oates—which, coincidentally, did make the cut for my sports literature syllabus. “The Cruelest Sport” is a review of two books about boxing by Thomas Hauser, but it begins with a gripping discussion of the aesthetics and ethics the sport. Oates is simultaneously entranced and repulsed by the cruelty inherent to boxing. She spends the first six pages of that review exploring the tension between our humanitarian impulse that wants to abolish the deliberate violence of boxing and our spectator’s desire to see a satisfying, consciousness-crushing KO.

That tension is clearly what animates Oates to write that essay, but what makes “The Cruelest Sport” successful as a whole piece is that the opening discussion ties into the books that Oates is reviewing. The first is a biography of Muhammad Ali, an all-time great performer whose well-being boxing devastated; the second is an account of the grimy underbelly of the boxing establishment that belies the Las Vegas glitz surrounding the sport. Whereas Gould’s statistical discussion of DiMaggio’s hitting streak is at most tangential to the book he’s reviewing, Oates makes a persuasive case that her pet interest is central to the works before her. It’s true that someone like Dawidoff could easily excerpt those first six pages as a stand-alone essay, but they would not be improving the piece by subtracting from it.

It’s not as though I’m disappointed that Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville retained the review elements of “The Streak of Streaks”. That book is meant to be a compendium of Gould’s career work on baseball, so the need to accurately reflect his work ultimately trumps aesthetic considerations. Dawidoff’s anthology, meanwhile, is free of such requirements, and so it can tinker with pieces as much as it likes. There may inevitably be some hubris to that endeavor, but at least in this instance, it works out for the best.

I would love to hear your response to my thoughts on Nicholas Dawidoff’s edits to Stephen Jay Gould’s review of Michael Seidel’s book, if only to put as many brackets around this discussion as possible. What do you think about making cuts to essays for inclusion in anthologies? Do you have a favorite piece of baseball writing that you’re dying to share? Let me know in the comments!

If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to read more of my thoughts on Stephen Jay Gould’s work, I have a very old piece about his essay “Dr. Down’s Syndrome” that might interest you.

And as always, thanks for your time.

Some Thoughts on “How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone” by Brian McCullough

Writing a history of the Internet is almost a fool’s errand. As an entity it’s so diffuse and diverse as to defy summary, and as a topic it’s so broad as to render any sufficiently comprehensive account incoherent. Furthermore, the Internet changes so rapidly that any attempted history risks becoming outdated by the time of publication. For example, Wendy M. Grossman’s Net.wars (NYU Press, 1997) devotes much of its page count to Usenet newsgroups and relegates search engines, then still an emerging technology, to a few off-hand mentions. Within a few years, Grossman’s version of the Internet would be almost unrecognizable to someone who had just gotten online.

It is perhaps wise, then, that in the introduction to How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone (Liveright-W. W. Norton, 2018) Brian McCullough limits the scope of his narrative. “This is not a history of the Internet itself,” he writes, “but rather a history of the Internet Era, that period of time from roughly 1993 through 2008 when computers and technology itself stopped being esoteric and started becoming vital and indispensable” (p. 3). It’s a depiction of an era of the Internet which has come and gone, yes, but one that has the benefit of hindsight. McCullough knows, for example, that Usenet’s direct influence on the Internet Era is minimal, and so he gives it about as much attention as Grossman gives to search engines. The question is what McCullough deems worthy of inclusion.

One could say that How the Internet Happened presents the reader with a twenty-first century update to the great man theory of history, in which tech companies take the place of individuals. Corporations like Google, eBay, and Apple are the ones driving the development of the Internet in this telling of the story, and McCullough lavishes much attention on events such as Netscape’s initial public offering and the immediate reaction to Facebook’s News Feed feature. Given how tech companies can exercise near-governmental control over their platforms, there is more logic in McCullough’s framing than I’d like to admit.

However, a company-centric history of the Internet will necessarily omit many key aspects of the story. Consider the role of the state. While McCullough acknowledges the role of public universities in the development of the first web browsers, the government almost vanishes from the narrative soon afterwards. Beyond the Microsoft antitrust case and the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the state appears as bit player in McCullough’s history. Yet governments surely have a much larger role in the plot; just think of the many legal battles that emerged over Congressional attempts to regulate pornography on the Internet, or the political debates over whether to codify network neutrality into law. Neither topic gets much notice in McCullough’s book.

Alternatively, consider the role of the end users. The Internet has been an absolute breeding ground for new communities, but to the extent that How the Internet Happened concerns itself with such communities, it considers them as a general, almost unified mass: “we” now act a certain way thanks to the Internet. But this rather flattens the unique cultures that sprung up in the various corners of the Web; each site has its own customs, mores, language, and so forth. It’s not as though McCullough interviews individual eBay sellers or Redditors to give a sense of the user experience. The reader much be content with the abstract knowledge that such user communities exist.

I could go on about what is missing from How the Internet Happened, but I’m afraid that I’m reading this book in bad faith. It’s unfair to demand a comprehensive history of the Internet from a single work by a single person—I mean, didn’t I say in the first paragraph that such a project would be doomed? And how can I be surprised that this particular person wrote this particular book? McCullough’s background is in the field of tech start-ups, so of course his version of Internet history skews corporate. It’s for the same reason that Grossman, a journalist embedded in early Internet culture, focused on political and cultural issues surrounding the Internet in Net.wars. “Write what you know” doesn’t just apply to fiction.

And, in fairness to McCullough, he’s often insightful as to how various companies have shaped Internet culture. I found his account of eBay’s reputation system especially compelling. The reputation system, which scores buyers and sellers based on other users’ experiences with them, allows people to gauge whether someone they have no relationship with will prove to be a trustworthy transaction partner. According to McCullough, this system has proven to be quite influential:

This is a key evolution. In so many ways, over the last twenty years, the web and the Internet have slowly trained all of us to get comfortable interacting with crowds and, often, crowds of strangers. eBay was one of the first websites to show that a largely anonymous community, carefully constrained by a few guidelines and regulations, but invested in a system of online reputation, could actually work. Today, this key ingredient of ratings and reputation continues on sites like Yelp and Reddit—and especially on sites like Uber and Airbnb. It’s hard to imagine that the current sharing economy could even exist without the reputation template that eBay pioneered.
Brian McCullough, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, p. 115

McCullough certainly sounds more sanguine about the sharing economy than I am. Airbnb’s history of enabling racial discrimination, for example, shows that the sharing economy only “actually works” in the limited sense of successfully facilitating transactions, not necessarily in the broader sense of benefiting all users. (Again, the author’s background explains quite a bit here.) But at least in a descriptive sense, McCullough’s account seems accurate: we’ve become more willing to trust some rando with a weird username, and there is something inevitably unifying about that.

I feel that’s a microcosm for How the Internet Happened as a whole. It achieves what it sets out to do, and that is to document how tech companies shaped the Internet between the rise of web browsers and the rise of social media. It’s only fair to commend the book for accomplishing that goal. But, at the same time, it’s only fair to ask whether that’s the best goal to begin with.

That’s enough from me on the matter. What are your thoughts on How the Internet Happened? Are there other aspects of the history of the Internet that you believe deserve their own book? Let me know in the comments!

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on historical works, consider checking out this piece I wrote on Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which examines how much biographers should speculate on the psychology of their subjects. And as always, thank you for reading!

Considering Libraries in Their Historical Context

I would wager that most people, myself included, take a rather rosy view of public libraries. They are storehouses of knowledge, knowledge that is free for the people to access. More than that, they are community centers, places where all are welcome to bring their children, look for a job, or just find a quiet spot to read the newspaper. When Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs that the public library is “a model of what a community-run, not-for-profit, public service ought to and can look like,” I can’t help but nod in agreement. Of course, I say to myself—who doesn’t love libraries?

Before you get ahead of me: no, I am not about to argue that libraries are “bad, actually.” I probably wouldn’t even be writing this piece if I didn’t value their place in society. But I think it’s important that we consider that place in society critically, that we ask ourselves about the historical and material conditions that have made public libraries possible.

I recently finished reading Paul Krause’s book The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), an academic history of the 1892 Homestead lockout. A major event in United States labor history, the lockout is most famous for the events of July 6, which saw local steelworkers and agents of the infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency battle for control of the Homestead Steel Works. The ultimate defeat of the locked-out steelworkers signaled the decline of American trade unions, who would not come back to power until several decades later.

So what does labor conflict in western Pennsylvania have to do with libraries? Well, the Homestead Steel Works were the property of none other than Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in history and the benefactor of literally thousands of libraries the world over. It’s common to see Carnegie’s philanthropic efforts as separate from or contradictory to his role as a titan of the steel industry and an embodiment of wealth inequality. According to Krause, however, the story is more complicated than that. Indeed, libraries factor directly into the history of the Homestead lockout.

For Krause, the relationship between Carnegie the robber baron and Carnegie the philanthropist is complementary. It’s not just that the wealth he acquired made his generosity possible; Carnegie could also use the promise of his charitable efforts to justify business policies that were detrimental to workers. For example, as a precondition to building a library for a town, Carnegie required that the employees of the town’s steelworks agree to adopt a sliding scale that would tie their wages “to the fluctuating market price of steel,” instead of “an annual contract that was based on the consistently higher market price of iron” (p. 236). In other words, his plan to enrich the public’s access to knowledge rested on cutting his workers’ wages.

His 1889 dedication speech for the Carnegie Free Library of Braddock makes that plan explicit; Krause quotes at length from a section in which Carnegie addresses the question of whether he had plans to build a similar library in the union stronghold of Homestead:

“Do something for Homestead?” he retorted. “Well, we have expected for a long time, but so far in vain, that Homestead should do something for us.” If Homestead would only do something for him, he would be pleased to build a library there, too. “I am only too anxious to do for them what I have done for you, . . . I hope one day I may have the privilege of erecting at Homestead such a building as you have here; but . . . our works at Homestead are not to us as our works at Edgar Thompson [the steelworks in Braddock]. Our men there are not partners.” The AAISW [Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers], Carnegie continued, had strong lodges in Homestead that compelled him to pay exorbitant wages. “Of course . . . the firm may decide to give the men at Homestead the benefit of the sliding scale which you enjoy. I know that for the success of [the] Homestead works, regarded from the point of view of the capital invested, . . . the present system at Homestead must be changed.”
Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel, p. 237

Reading that part of the speech, I cannot help but picture Carnegie as a stereotypical mafioso, scratching his bearded throat as he offers to do a “favor” for the working class citizens of western Pennsylvania. Viewed in this light, it’s hard to see the libraries that Carnegie built in Homestead, Braddock, and elsewhere as charitable gifts at all. For a gift to be charitable, it must be freely given without the expectation of receiving something in return. At best, these libraries serve as monuments to Andrew Carnegie’s self-regard; at worst, they serve as tokens of economic extortion.

Lest one think this critique is simply a case of historical revisionism, Krause notes that there was significant skepticism and backlash towards Carnegie’s libraries in the late 19th century. First, steelworkers and local politicians understood his libraries as symbolic of his conflicts with labor, which explains why “in the thirty-three years during which Carnegie bestowed libraries, 225 communities turned down his offer,” including over 40% of towns he solicited in Pennsylvania (p. 238). Second, it’s not at all clear that libraries were all that beneficial to the towns where he built them—especially when compared to the wage cuts that accompanied them. Trade unions fought for higher wages, limits on working hours, and job security, all of which are necessary to even hope to enjoy a library. As one steelworker put it, “Carnegie builds libraries for the working men, but what good are libraries to me, working practically eighteen hours a day?” (qtd. in Krause, p. 239)

And all this doesn’t even touch on the shady way Carnegie acquired the land on which the library in Homestead was built. Krause details how Carnegie’s company colluded with the political machinery of western Pennsylvania to purchase the City Farm land for less than half of its market value (land that, perhaps coincidentally, overlooks the site of the Homestead Steel Works). Between the reduced wages of the town’s steelworkers and the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost to municipal governments, one could plausibly argue that the Carnegie Library of Homestead represented a net loss for the region.

After learning about just how his libraries came into existence, I certainly take a more cynical view of Carnegie’s philanthropy; I see the man less as someone torn between noble and acquisitive impulses and more as someone who served the public good merely incidentally. (I say that as a beneficiary of his legacy: I earned my undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University.) Yet I cannot deny the fact that those libraries remain a benefit to the public. Last July, I wrote a short post about the theft of rare books from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The news that those books had been stolen and sold for profit enraged me, and I stand by that sentiment. Libraries belong to us—even when they’re imposed on us.

If there’s any takeaway I’d like to offer on this, it’s that no institution is pure, even an institution as noble as a public library. They are all subject to the social, political, and economic systems that produce them. Just be aware of that history, and maybe use the library’s resources to understand it better. Case in point: you can find a copy of The Battle for Homestead at the Carnegie Library of Homestead. What better use of a library card is there than to learn something critical about that library’s history?

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. In particular, how do we properly engage with a public institution like a library when we’re aware of the troubling history of how it came to be? I certainly wish I had a definite answer for that!

If you’d like to read more of my musings on libraries in their broader context, I’ll point you to this piece I wrote on the OCLC Library 100 list, and what that list tells us about literature and society. And as always, thank you for reading!

Classics Club #3: “Wonderful, Wonderful Times” by Elfriede Jelinek

First things first: Wonderful, Wonderful Times is a deeply unpleasant book. Elfriede Jelinek’s 1980 novel (translated from the German by Michael Hulse) is a tour through the various depravities of 1950s Vienna: unmotivated crime, unenthused sex, unrepentant Nazism, and so forth. I do the vast majority of my reading on the bus these days, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so self-conscious about reading a book in public. Granted, I do have something of a moralistic streak that’s been bubbling up on me of late, but Wonderful, Wonderful Times is so unrelenting in its grime that it borders on the lurid.

To take just one example: there’s a scene in which one of the main characters allows (encourages?) a man on the tram to grope her so that her friends can filch his wallet. That about sums up the book’s moral universe: even the victims are perpetrators, and vice versa.

Despite all that, despite one’s natural revulsion at the novel’s content, I find myself agreeing with Richard Eder’s assessment in the Los Angeles Times, in which he detects in Jelinek’s work “a hint of delicacy and lyricism” and “a measure of perverted innocence.” I attribute a fair amount of this effect to Jelinek’s narration, which blends every character’s dialogue and inner thoughts into a single voice that almost tears itself apart from its own incoherence, but it’s more an artful melange than a morass of text. It takes a few sections that get used to it, yes, but there’s something mesmerizing in watching it unfold speaker by speaker. But even more than the prose style, it’s Jelinek’s character crafting that gives the novel its odd beauty.

Wonderful, Wonderful Times tells the sordid stories of four young adults in post-WWII Austria. At the novel’s center are Rainer and Anna Witkowski, a pair of twins from a middle class family with ties to the Nazi power structure that their abusive father remains proud of. Rainer is self-styled poet who builds his life around the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, a young man who envisions himself as the leader of a revolution of thought as he paraphrases other people. Anna, by contrast, is a promising student and musician given to prolonged periods of absolute silence, when she’s not lashing out with absolute rage. Joining the Witkowski twins are Sophie Pachhofen, a rich athletic girl with tons of fight and nothing to actually fight for, and Hans Sepp, the son of a Communist activist who longs for Sophie’s sort of luxury. Together, these four have made it their job to terrorize the streets of Vienna, because what else is to be done?

The novel opens with the four in action, beating the living daylights out of a random passerby out for a late night stroll. The assault is already underway, which has given the narratorial voice enough time to start pontificating on the nature of violence. “Particular courage is required,” the voice informs us, “if you are to scratch a man’s face while he is looking full in your own (though he cannot see much since it is dark) or indeed try to scratch his eyes out. For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for” (p. 7). The reader is forced to accept the nature of this novel from the first paragraph: its characters will aim for your eyes, will try to extinguish your soul and whatever hope you may have for it. In its sheer bluntness, the opening assault functions as an initiation rite, signalling what you’ve agreed to read.

For the first third of the novel, the prose and the luridness were enough to pull me along, past scenes where Herr Witkowski forces his wife to pose for pornographic photos and scenes where Anna initiates sex in a school bathroom with all the passion of ticket-taker. But while I had been initiated into the circle of these characters, I still felt like I was at more-than-arm’s distance from them. They were more intellectual constructs than people, more forms of pointless rebellion than rebels. The turning point for me happened at a different point of initiation, when Rainer decides it’s time to officially initiate Sophie into their little band of mischief. The four protagonists head out into the Vienna Woods to engage in some old-fashioned animal cruelty:

What distinguishes the group from other groups who are out and about dressed for a ramble is that they are not dressed for a ramble, but instead they are carrying a basket containing a sack tied shut. There’s an amount of scratching and whimpering going on inside the sack. This is because there is a cat in it. They caught the cat. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason is a character who wants to drown his cats, and so today they are planning to drown this cat too, though this cat also has a right to live. Rainer says that he himself has an equal right to non-existence, just as this cat does, the cat which he is going to assist on its way to non-existence before it can count to three. The cat has its suspicions. Hence the brouhaha in the sack.
Wonderful, Wonderful Times, p. 88

Here is where I started to see that “perverted innocence” that Eder mentioned. Take out the part about trying to drown a cat, and what you’ve got is a scene about four young adults enjoying a nice day out in nature, looking to recreate something from a novel. They seem like overgrown children here, play-pretending with something that will, in fact, have consequences. More than anything, I’m reminded of Tom Sawyer’s role in the final chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, cooking up an absurdly elaborate plan to rescue Jim from a shed inspired by all the adventure novels he’s read. Never mind that Jim is a human being and not an excuse for a quest; never mind that “this cat also has a right to live.” The perverted innocents will let nothing get in the way of their fun, for what is fun is serious business.

The cat-drowning attempt is also the point at which the romance elements of the novel begin to center themselves. Rainer is in love with the Sophie, Anna is in love with Hans, and because fate is cruel, this whole initiation is what drives Hans and Sophie into a romantic pairing. Throughout the scene, events highlight the divide between the Witkowskis and their friends. One example: whereas Sophie and Hans are at ease traipsing through the forest, Rainer and Anna “are not altogether in their element. Their lungs are rattling. They have none of that fitness and stamina” (p. 91). When the scene ends with Hans kissing a soaked and bleeding Sophie, the narrator bothers to point out the obvious: “This little scene leaves two people satisfied and two unsatisfied. It is always like that in life. Fifty-fifty. Which makes things fair” (p. 93).

The remainder of Wonderful, Wonderful Times, it often feels, tracks the fallout from this initiation scene, as Rainer and Anna struggle to win back the objects of their affection. What once appeared to be, to use the title of Eder’s review, a “cuckoo Clockwork Orange” turns into young adult novel. The characters’ concerns suddenly seem much more teenage: worrying about university, trying to escape parental influence, and of course how to resolve these overlapping love triangles. Several times, as some aspect of this heightened high school drama gave me pause, I had to remind myself of where this novel started, i.e., with our heroes engaged in a for-kicks beatdown.

Rather than lowering the stakes, though, the result is that Jelinek has a chance to give her characters greater depth, to turn grotesques into people. We see that Rainer’s penchant for philosophizing everything is a smokescreen for his cowardice and his self-doubt. We see that Hans, the one who has entered the working world, wants to define himself in opposition to his mother’s quixotic fight for social democracy is an increasingly consumerist Austria. Anna in particular comes alive in the homestretch, as she struggles with her personal demons and gets to experience one of the novel’s few moments of ecstasy before everything is taken away in an explosion of violence. There’s a possible world where she’s the relatable, troubled heroine of a contemporary young adult novel, and what I wouldn’t give to see what exactly that world looks like.

There’s a lot more in Wonderful, Wonderful Times that deserves scrutiny, particularly the character of Herr Witkowski and how he and what he represents factor into the moral rot that helped birth our protagonists. (Let’s just say that the line “After 1945 History decided to begin again from scratch and Innocence, after much hesitation, forced itself to take the same decision” [p. 94] is just dripping with evil.) But I think I’ll leave things there, and simply encourage you to seek this one out—at least those of you who can stomach this sort of novel.

Those are my thoughts, but what’s your take? Does a novel like Wonderful, Wonderful Times hold any appeal for you? Can you think of other works which explore this sort of “perverted innocence”? Let me know in the comments!

If you’d like to see what’s on the horizon for my Classics Club challenge, you can view the master list here. And if you’re interested in more general thoughts on the classics, I recently wrote about OCLC’s Library 100 list, which you can read here.

And, as always, thank you for reading!

Classics Club #2: “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Last Tycoon is a novel that resists coherent discussion, for one obvious reason: it was never finished. F. Scott Fitzgerald died well before he could complete his story of Hollywood romance and industry politics, or even finish conceptualizing it (the narrative point of view, for instance, is something of a mess). Fitzgerald did have extensive notes on how he envisioned the novel progressing beyond what was written, but because The Last Tycoon is still visibly a work-in-progress, I wouldn’t consider those notes to be authoritative.

Thus, when it comes to something like evaluating a character arc, the unfinished nature of the work presents some challenges for the reader. As an example, I’m going to look briefly at Episode 17, the latest section of the novel that Fitzgerald was able to write, and try to figure out where that leaves the novel’s protagonist, Monroe Stahr. As we’ll see, the fact that The Last Tycoon ends where it does may give the reader a much more sour impression of Stahr’s character than they may have gotten in the hypothetical completed version of the novel.

First, some context: It’s the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the young widower Monroe Stahr is a successful studio executive. One day, during an earthquake, he sees a woman on the studio lot who looks exactly like his deceased wife. He eventually meets the woman, Kathleen, and starts up a halting relationship with her. However, Kathleen is engaged to a man who will be arriving in town shortly. Stahr doesn’t believe that Kathleen truly loves her fiancé, and thinks he might have a chance with her. But at the very end of the penultimate (existing) episode, Stahr receives a telegram from Kathleen that reads: “I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE” (p. 118).

Stahr thus begins Episode 17 heartbroken, which is not a great state of mind to be in for this particular scene. He has a meeting with two people: Brimmer, a man who wishes to organize a labor union at Stahr’s studio, and Cecelia, the daughter of Stahr’s business partner and the one who arranged the meeting between Stahr and Brimmer. (Cecelia is also the novel’s narrator, which makes her the Nick Carraway to Stahr’s Jay Gatsby, if Nick Carraway weren’t an objective observer and instead had a lifelong crush on his subject.) Emotions would be running high in this situation as is, but Kathleen’s telegram has just complicated matters further.

The meeting starts of tense but cordial, and even though the two men have drastically different views and goals, they seem to like each other. They laugh at each other’s quips, and are capable of recognizing each other’s strengths. But even if the meeting were to end with mutual understanding, it almost certainly could never end with an agreement. Stahr, as Cecelia says earlier in the novel, carries himself like an “oracle,” someone who “must be right always, not most of the time, but always—or the structure would melt down like gradual butter” (p. 56). If Stahr doesn’t want his studio to unionize, then as far he’s concerned, that’s that. As amiable as Stahr is, he is accustomed to getting his way, not just in business matters, but in personal matters as well.

This is why Kathleen’s telegram wounds Stahr so: he’s apparently misjudged the relationship between Kathleen and her fiancé. (Cecelia has a flash-forward in this section that suggests things were a little more complicated than they have may seemed, but Stahr never learns any of that.) He more or less played casting director is pursuing Kathleen in the first place: she was perfect in the role of his wife, in multiple senses. It must have look fantastic on paper. But it was all for naught. The telegram proves that he was wrong, and as a consequence he’s been denied the chance of romantic fulfillment. It’s the most direct challenge to his self-image that Stahr faces in the novel.

Stahr carries all that into the meeting, and while up to this point he’s kept that disappointment in check, it starts to burst forth once the three of them go to a restaurant for dinner and he starts drinking. Cecelia is particularly perceptive of this shift. Upon seeing Stahr down three cocktails in quick succession, she tells him, “‘Now I know you’ve been disappointed in love'” (p. 124). Stahr tries to deny he’s even been drinking, but it’s a rather ineffectual deflection. When he starts bragging to Brimmer about how friendly he used to be with the studios directors, Cecelia compares his spiel to “Edward the VII’s boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe” (p. 125). She doesn’t yet know the full story, but she can sense that Stahr is clinging to a rosier version of himself.

This is especially ironic, because the version of Stahr we see in Episode 17 is easily him at his most repugnant. He refers to Brimmer as a “soapbox son-of-a-bitch” and starts bashing the various directors he’s worked with over the years (p. 125). And the more that Stahr drinks, the worse it becomes:

Stahr ordered a whiskey and soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-so’s and none of it mattered to him because he had lots of money—it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company—maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him and what he said didn’t change that but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted to see Stahr as sort of technological virtuoso and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen.
“The Last Tycoon,” p. 126 (emphasis original)

The fact that Cecelia, who is as close to an unreliable observer-narrator as one can get, feels the need to reevaluate her perception of Stahr tells us how far he has strayed from his normal presentation. Granted, for as boisterous as Stahr has become, he’s still capable of self-reflection, as we see when he explains to Brimmer his relationship with screenwriters:

“I never thought,” he said, “—that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me—because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans—I’ve heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don’t say it’s right. But it’s the way I’ve always felt—since I was a boy.”
“The Last Tycoon,” p. 126 (emphasis original)

Stahr understands, on some level, that a writer’s brains don’t in fact belong to him, that for all his power he cannot use to people to perfectly serve his ends at all times. But, alas, there is no epiphany or change in direction forthcoming. The group then heads over to Stahr’s house (but not before Stahr, to Cecelia’s disappointment, stops for another drink along the way), where Stahr decides to pick a fight with Brimmer. Brimmer backs away, but Cecelia realizes it’s not of fear: “There was an odd expression in his face and afterwards I thought it looked as if her were saying, ‘Is this all? This frail half sick person holding up the whole thing'” (p. 128, emphasis original). Stahr persists, though, and then Brimmer promptly kicks his ass.

That one, little question—”Is this all?”—captures Stahr’s collapse so completely. There’s a kind of revulsion in that question, a mixture of pity and contempt that speaks volumes to the gap between Stahr’s self-perception and reality. I had a similar feeling towards the end of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, when Augustus literally collapses trying to buy cigarettes at a gas station, or in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, when Clifford stubbornly tries to power his motorized wheelchair through the muck. With all these characters, in watching them desperately try to do something that might not be worth doing, I felt some unease, some uncertainty as to how to process things. My sympathies had to battle my disgust, which is why, in the case of all those novels, those are the scenes that have lingered in my mind the longest.

Of course, neither Green nor Lawrence ends their novels with those scenes, and Fitzgerald almost certainly had further plans for Stahr. But that disastrous meeting is basically the last scene in the book as written. Augustus and Clifford get some sort of dénoument afterwards, even though neither of them is protagonist of their respective novels. But unforeseen circumstances robbed Stahr (and the reader) of any closure. His arc ends unnaturally, at its lowest point, and that’s what we must carry with us.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on The Last Tycoon in the comments below. I’d also be curious about what you all think of the sense of pity/disgust I’ve described feeling towards certain scenes. I’ve thought about those scenes from Green and Lawrence a lot of the past few years, but I’ve never been certain what to do with them.

If you’d like a preview of what’s to come in my Classics Club project, you can access my list of fifty books here. As of writing this post, the only other book I’ve tackled so far is W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand, which you can read more about here.

And, as always, thank you for reading!

Classics Club #1: “The Dyer’s Hand” by W. H. Auden

For a number of reasons, I knew that I wanted to start my Classics Club project with a look at W. H. Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand. For one, of all the books on my list, it’s the only one that I’d read any part of; during the first semester of my MFA program, I had to read several essays from the book and then write poems inspired by them. For another, as a work of literary criticism, I thought that The Dyer’s Hand might provide a high-level view from which to consider the rest of the books on the list. And for a third, it just happened to be next on my queue regardless.

But while I was reading it, I found it difficult to settle on a direction to take this post. After the first three or four essays, I thought about comparing Auden’s fragmentary style to the philosophical inquiries of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but then Auden’s style became more streamlined and structured as the collection went on. I thought about comparing my thoughts on various artworks to Auden’s, but let’s just say that he’s seen Don Giovanni infinitely more times than I have. And I thought about discussing the Ariel/Prospero distinction he mentions in his essay on Robert Frost, until I remembered that I wrote such an essay in grad school and decided I didn’t want to repeat myself.

I was completely stuck, until I happened upon a discussion that has apparently been raging across the internet: the state of the negative review. It’s a topic that the book-blogging community raises frequently (see, for instance, this post from Krysta of Pages Unbound), but of late the topic has come up more in the popular press. In recent months we’ve seen Kyle Paoletta decry the overly-celebratory nature of TV criticism for The Baffler, Rob Harvilla contemplate the role of the take-down in the age of social media for The Ringer, and sci-fi author John Scalzi defend the virtues of the pan on his blog. And I found all this fascinating in the context of The Dyer’s Hand, because if high-brow W. H. Auden were to walk into this conversation that’s been going on, he’d actually be the most skeptical of the negative review’s value.

In the first essay in The Dyer’s Hand, entitled “Reading,” Auden says that a critic ought to perform at least one of the following tasks when discussing a work:

1) Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2) Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3) Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4) Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5) Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6) Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
The Dyer’s Hand, pp. 8-9

Looking closely at this list, one can conclude that Auden doesn’t really see aesthetic appraisal as a vital role for the critic. Auden’s ideal critics should provide context, draw connections, share discoveries, and reveal truths, but it’s not clear that they should provide up-or-down judgments as to whether a book is good. The task which comes closest here is the second, and even there, it would seen that Auden wants the critic to go in a specific direction: to show that a work is better (or perhaps just more interesting) than the audience had given it credit for. He does not advocate that critics tear down works which they believe have been wrongly praised.

Indeed, throughout “Reading,” Auden is skeptical of the notion that writing bad reviews serves any purpose, and he addresses either directly or implicitly some of the common arguments in favor of the practice. An obvious argument would be that writing a negative review will persuade readers not to waste their time on a given work. But Auden reminds us that even a negative review acts as publicity and keeps a work in the current conversation. “Had Macaulay never written his review of Robert Montgomery,” he writes, “we would not today be still under the illusion that Montgomery was a great poet” (p. 10). Instead, Auden would have advised Macaulay to remain silent on the matter, allowing Montgomery’s work to fade into obscurity.

I’ll admit, I find this argument to be Auden’s weakest, or rather the least generally applicable. Being a poet, Auden naturally has poetry on his mind as he’s writing this essay. Even by the standards of book publishing, the poetry market is incredibly small; one could probably count on one hand the number of people making a living solely off revenue from writing poems. There aren’t any big marketing campaigns to smear the latest chapbooks across the public consciousness, so reviews are basically all the advertising a poet may get. Thus, if their collection is terrible and no one wants to review it, then it will almost certainly be forgotten for all time. But the same rules don’t apply to Hollywood films and popular TV shows. The machinery supporting those cultural products is so large and powerful that there is little chance of them simply withering in the darkness.

But at other points, Auden’s critique of the negative review seems not only reasonable, but also insightful. For example, he takes up the notion that one must critique bad works of art, lest those works inspire artists to make even more inferior pieces. The problem with that argument is that influence doesn’t necessarily work like that. Those who make bad works of art often draw inspiration from masterpieces; they simply lack the skill or vision to duplicate their forebears’ successes. Think about how many terrible student films come from kids who fashion themselves the next Quentin Tarantino or David Fincher. “The more powerful and original a writer,” says Auden, “the more dangerous he is to lesser talents who are trying to find themselves. On the other hand, works which were in themselves poor have often proved a stumulus [sic] to the imagination and become the indirect cause of good work in others” (p. 10). That last point rings especially true for me: I find I have far more success in writing when I use mediocre poets as a model, rather than trying to write something like Milton or Dryden.

This is not to say that Auden sees no value in the take-down. First, he concedes that in practice, critics often can’t just refuse to review a bad work. The terms of their employment may require them to write something, and if they can’t stay silent then they’ll at least be honest. Second, Auden still believes that the “corruption of the language” should be “continually publicly attacked,” but even then he says the true culprit is not the work in question but “the misuse of language by the man-in-the-street, journalists, politicians, etc.” (p. 11). But that’s about as far as Auden is willing to go in this essay. Personally, I’d carve out a larger space for the negative review. In particular, the belief that one should connect a work “to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.” requires that a critic call out harmful or dishonest artworks when they encounter them, lest we pretend the realms of art and life are somehow separable. And the more prominent a work is in the culture, the more harm it can do, and the less compelling Auden’s arguments seem to become.

It will be interesting to see whether I can, or whether I should, keep to the spirit of Auden’s position for the rest of my Classic Club posts. At the very least, I always want to keep those six tasks he listed in mind when writing a post. I’m certain that I’ll dislike at least some of the next forty-nine books I read for this project, but whatever I write about them should have some substance beyond mere vitriol. It may be true that, as Auden claims, [o]ne cannot review a bad book without showing off” (p.11). But I’m sure one can do so without just showing off.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on The Dyer’s Hand or on negative reviews in the comments below. If you’d like to get a sense of what’s on the horizon for my Classics Club project, you can access my list of fifty books here. And as always, thank you for reading.

The Perils of Point-of-View in Writing Biographies

On this blog, I’ve dedicated a lot of energy to dissecting bits of what I consider to be solid writing, in posts where I’ve highlighted the literary techniques contained within a passage or a poem and argued that they are what make the piece a success. But there’s an important caveat to that sort of discussion that I don’t think I’ve addressed before: there are no intrinsically good techniques, only techniques that are good in some context. If this blog is to be at all useful in exploring writing, I believe it needs to acknowledge that, sometimes, writing can be sterling in the abstract but flawed in a given situation.

To that end, I’d like to look at a passage from the first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, a book which in general is written in a perfectly fine if utilitarian manner, but at one dramatic moment adopts a far more lyrical prose style. The moment in question comes after Eleanor confronts her husband Franklin about his affair with her former secretary, Lucy Mercer, and offers him a divorce. It’s one the emotional low points in Eleanor’s life, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Cook would choose this part of her subject’s narrative to indulge in some rhetorical flair:

He made promises, provided explanations. This “golden boy,” this vibrant “apollo” who charmed everyone he met, now directed all his influence and charm toward his wife. He would never see Lucy Mercer again. Did he apologize? Did he explain? Had he been engaged in a long-overdue emotional rebellion—against being a mama’s boy who always did the right and proper thing; who condemned all departures from the proprieties of his class and culture; who had mocked his half-brother’s son’s love for a socially unacceptable woman and blamed Taddie for his father’s death; who at the young age of twenty-three had taken on the responsibilities of a wife and home? Well, he had erred. Washington was so full of temptations; he had been trying out his new power, his new independence, for the first time in his life. It was a flamboyant, fatuous time. And it was over. He cared about his wife; he loved her. He was sorry he had hurt her. There was so much at stake—so much to do, and to do together. (p. 231)

If you put this passage in a bottle, if you consider it in isolation, it’s rather impressive. In fact, you could probably give this paragraph to an AP Language and Composition class and have the students tear it apart as an exercise. The aim of the passage is to place the reader in FDR’s mind as realizes that his affair has been exposed, and every device that Cook uses serves that goal. There’s the mixture of short paratactic questions (“Did he apologize? Did he explain?”) with looping hypotactic ones (“Had he been engaged…”), both of which highlight Franklin’s excited mental state. The use of anaphora (“who had always…who condemned…who had mocked…who…had taken…”) calls to mind the great persuasive speeches of history, only here it’s directed inward, as though FDR wishes to convince himself of his good nature. Even the insertion of a discourse marker (“Well, he had erred”) is indicative of a mind at work. These devices are not especially advanced or obscure, but there are undeniably effective at achieving Cook’s end here.

But that only raises the question: is that an end worth achieving?

Let’s talk about point-of-view for a bit. We’re perhaps more accustomed to thinking about point-of-view in fiction. Fiction writers, after all, have a great deal of freedom in choosing a POV for their stories. They can use an omniscient narrator, moving from one character’s perspective to another’s, or even describing events outside of anyone’s perspective. They can adopt a quasi-objective, reportorial stance, as in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” Or they can restrict themselves to a single character’s POV, whether in first person or a limited third person. As long as the writer is consistent with regards to POV, they have almost limitless options.

The reason that fiction writers have such freedom is that fictional worlds are entirely of their own creation. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for example, the narrator can spend one chapter in Dorothea’s mind, then one in Lydgate’s, then one in Mr. Casaubon’s, and so on, without fear of being inaccurate to the facts of the narrative, because there are no narrative facts as such. The whole story exists as it does solely because George Eliot wrote it that way. But imagine if Middlemarch were literally, as the subtitle has it, a study of provincial life? Suddenly the narrator’s movement from one person’s mind to the next would seem a bit more suspect. The reader would be compelled to ask, “How does she know any of this?”

In Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, Ursula K. Le Guin notes that improper shifts in point-of-view are the problem that she encounters most often in unpublished (and even published) writing. That fact on its own did not surprise me when I first read Steering the Craft a few years ago, as it lined up with my own experience in writing workshops. What did surprise me was that Le Guin had found that the problem extended beyond novels and short stories:

It’s a problem even in nonfiction, when the author starts telling the reader what Aunt Jane was thinking and why Uncle Fred swallowed the grommet. A memoirist doesn’t have the right to do this without clearly indicating that Aunt Jane’s thoughts and Uncle Fred’s motives aren’t known facts but the author’s guesswork, opinion, or interpretation. Memoirists can’t be omniscient, even for a moment. (p. 70)

Le Guin frames this defective handling of POV in essentially moral terms: “A memoirist doesn’t have the right to do this.” If a fiction writer mishandles POV, the result is simply a weaker, more confusing story. If a nonfiction writer mishandles POV, the result may be straight-up dishonesty. “To use limited third person in factual narrative,” Le Guin goes on to say, “is to trespass, pretending you know what a real person thought and felt” (p. 71).

Cook isn’t writing a memoir, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that she has the same responsibilities that Le Guin assigns to memoirists. In fact, in her case those responsibilities may be even more pressing. When we read a memoir, we know that we’re getting a personal, edited account of real-life events, that we’re getting only one perspective on the complications of life. But when we read a biography, we expect the author to maintain objectivity, to follow where the facts lead and not to step beyond them.

Reread that passage from the Eleanor Roosevelt biography in this light, and you’ll start to see places where Cook strains against the limits of what can be known about FDR’s mental state after Eleanor’s offer of divorce. The rhetorical questions, which before sounded like an attempt to imagine FDR’s thought process, now sound like a way of sneaking in unfounded speculations without fully committing to them. They suggest that FDR may “have been engaged in a long-overdue emotional rebellion” without providing concrete evidence to support that claim; indeed, Cook follows it up with just further suppositions. In this brief digression into FDR’s mind, Cook has breached the biographer’s contract with the reader.

Yet, in all honesty, I can’t condemn Cook wholeheartedly for this trespass. See, FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer is a momentous event in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, as any discovery of infidelity would be, but it’s an event lacking much in the way of documentation. Cook says that Eleanor “wrote of that time only obliquely, and in code” (p. 232). References to the affair in her correspondence are scant to say the least, and her memoir devotes just a passing thought to the moment of discovery described above. (Even memoirs with consistent POVs, it is worth remembering, are not 100% factual accounts, either.)

This leaves Cook in a quandary regarding the Lucy Mercer affair. She can either stick to what the documentary record and interviews with Eleanor’s surviving acquaintances reveal, and say less than what the affair would appear to deserve; or she can speculate beyond what those limited sources have to say, sacrificing strict accuracy in the hopes of obtaining a perhaps unobtainable truth. This is not a choice that I find enviable, but is the choice that a writer in Cook’s position must make. I think either decision could be justified, but one must accept the consequences in either case.

But what do you think? Are there any cases you can think of where a biography has benefited from the sort of POV shift we talked about here? Is it ethical for a biographer to make such a shift in the first place? Let me know in the comments!

If you’re in the mood for something more thought on biography, here’s a piece I wrote last month about Frank Brady’s biography of Bobby Fischer, which looks into the duties we owe to abjectly awful people. Or, if you’re looking for more on point-of-view, here’s a post on Luisa Valenzuela’s “The Sin of the Apple,” a story that can teach us how to write from the POV of inanimate objects.

And, as always, thanks for reading!

Recent Publication: Review of “Not Elegy, But Eros” by Nausheen Eusuf (The Hopkins Review)

Eusuf Review

I’m happy to announce that my review of Nausheen Eusuf’s debut poetry collection Not Elegy, But Eros (NYQ Books, 2017) has just been published in the most recent issue (11.3) of The Hopkins Review.

Special thanks must go to David Yezzi, for encouraging me to try my hand at a poetry review; to Katherine Sharpe, for her patience as an editor; and, of course, to Nausheen Eusuf, for writing this wonderful collection.

Rather than leaving you with an excerpt of the review, I’ll quote the beginning of “Selfie,” one of my favorite pieces in Eusuf’s book that, alas, I did not have the space to talk about in the piece itself. I hope this will encourage you to give Not Elegy, But Eros a read.

excerpt from “Selfie”

If self’s the man, she’s the wife
who follows, shadow-faithful
through your twilight haunts
and midnight jaunts, who knows
your revels and your despair,
your zits and your stomach pits…

Not Elegy, But Eros is available through the publisher, NYQ Books, as well as through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. If you’d like to read my full review of it, you can subscribe to The Hopkins Review.

Play the Hits, But Play Them Slant: On Steven Hyden’s “Twilight of the Gods”

I used to read a lot of Steven Hyden columns when I was in high school and undergrad. I’d look forward every month to him and Genevieve Koski debating the merits of various Hot 100 songs for The A.V. Club’s “This Was Pop” feature, and I immensely enjoyed some of the essay series he authored, such as Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? (The A.V. Club, 2010) and The Winners’ History of Rock and Roll (Grantland, 2013). The way Hyden gracefully ties together basic rock history with his personal experiences, growing up in small-town Wisconsin and developing a fascination with classic rock, always appealed to me. After all, I felt I could relate to that story. I, too, was from a kid from the boondocks who became infatuated with the culture of the recent past.

However, I stopped keeping up with his work after Grantland, where he was a staff writer, ceased publication in 2015, and so I wasn’t aware that Hyden was still writing until I came across Brooke’s review of Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (Dey Street, 2018). Seeing that review triggered some warm memories for me, and I immediately put the book on my to-read list.

Hyden Still, I went into Twilight of the Gods with an uncertain feeling, not because I didn’t know what to expect, but because I was fairly sure that I did. How much of the book, I thought to myself, would be brand new (or at least, new-to-me) insights and arguments, and how much would be reworded or repeated versions of past columns, ones that I had already read for free? That’s really something one must keep in mind when reading any book by a columnist: the possibility that you’ve literally read this all before.

Reprinting older material in a new format is, I want to stress, not necessarily a bad impulse. A contemporary short story collection may consist entirely of pieces first published in The New Yorker, but having a single volume of stories is certainly less cumbersome than tracking down a dozen random back issues of a magazine. And the ways an author orders and revises those stories may illuminate certain themes or connections among them that reading the stories in isolation would never reveal. Twilight of the Gods, I felt the need to remind myself, could do much the same for Hyden’s music writing.

With that as preamble, I’m going to ask two questions of this book. First: to what extent is Twilight of the Gods a rehashing of Hyden’s previous work? Second: in what ways does Hyden repackage that material, and do those methods improve the experience of reading it?

Question 1: What Have We Seen Before?

According to the book’s copyright page, four of its nineteen chapters contain direct reprintings of previously published material: three from The A.V. Club and one from Uproxx (which comes from that period after I’d lost touch with Hyden). That was actually less than I’d expected, and I only noticed one of them during my read-through: the chapter entitled “Keep On Loving You,” on 1970s and 1980s “corporate rock,” which reuses a large portion of his essay on REO Speedwagon’s 1981 album Hi Infidelity. I might use this as evidence that Hyden has good taste in his own work, as I’d rank that article among the best pieces he’s written. If Twilight of the Gods accomplished nothing else, I would still be glad that it helped preserve a solid piece of writing.

Of course, a writer can repeat themselves without doing so verbatim. Some sections are technically new pieces of writing but bare striking resemblances to earlier works. A good example is the Aerosmith section of the drugged-out rocker chapter, “Draw the Line,” which reads like a slightly condensed version of the band’s part in The Winners’ History of Rock and Roll. The two versions hit all the same beats: Aerosmith starts as a band famous for their party-ready music and their drugged-fueled creative process, who fall off for several years before they embrace sobriety and professional songwriters and attain even greater commercial success, serving as an exemplar of society’s changing attitudes towards drug use and artistry. Both versions even go out of their way to mention how getting Aerosmith concert tickets is a plot point in Dazed and Confused. The expression of the ideas differs, but the substance is mostly the same.

Beyond arguments and insights, Hyden has a habit of reusing anecdotes outside their original context. For example, that Hi Infidelity article mentioned above opens with a bit about Hyden’s mother excitedly confusing R.E.M. with REO Speedwagon, but that doesn’t appear in the corporate rock chapter. Instead, it’s included as an aside-within-an-aside in the chapter about live albums, “Hello There (Live at Budokan).” The book is peppered with moments like that: brief flashes which would only draw attention if, like me, you had no life seven years ago and reread Hyden’s columns like they were about to go sour.

From all the above, I’d say that, to someone familiar with Hyden’s previous work, Twilight of the Gods will definitely sound familiar, but the experience of reading it won’t be completely redundant. Whether that’s enough to make the book worth a read is up to you—and if you’ve never read Hyden, I suspect it’s wholly irrelevant.

With that out of the way, let’s turn to the more interesting question.

Question 2: How Has It Been Repackaged?

Let’s start this section off with the macro-level, and get the book’s major misstep out of the way. Hyden structures these otherwise loosely-connected essays around Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monomyth, or hero’s journey. The book is broken up into four parts, each of which is named for a section of the hero’s journey, from the start of their quest to their moment of transcendence. In practical terms, this means that each section’s essays roughly touch on the same theme: one section will talk about the roots of the classic rock, another about the decadence and corruption associated with it, another with the format’s decline in popularity, etc.

For the record, I tend to find the popular usage of Campbell to be rather tedious in the best of times, but in the case of Twilight of the Gods it actively weakens the book by asking the reader to look for a progression that doesn’t exist. Hyden knows that explaining classic rock is too messy a subject to fit into this sort of straitjacket, and for all the personal moments in the book, they’re not focused enough for the collection to be a work of self-revelation. It is true that Hyden often wants to highlight the quasi-spiritual aspects of being a classic rock fan, saying he was drawn to “the mythology of it, which satisfied the part of my psyche that demanded connection to a vast, awe-inspiring reality.” But there would simpler ways of conveying that notion than halfheartedly gesturing towards some hero’s journey.

I think Hyden would have done better to keep the connective tissue linking the essays to a minimum, because his quiet callbacks to earlier pieces can be pretty powerful. The best example is from “Keep On Loving You,” right as he closes out the REO Speedwagon section, where he refers back to earlier essays about his teenage passion for the classic rock staples in a moment of empathy with his mother:

My mom would never describe Hi Infidelity in these terms, but I think REO Speedwagon for her represented a more down-to-earth version of the rock mythos. As a kid, I was attracted to larger-than-life rock stars with exaggerated personas rooted in decadent mysticism. I longed to go on a misty mountain hop and venture all the way to the dark side of the moon. But my mother was too experienced to buy into those silly, pie-in-the-sky fantasies. What she longed for was more mundane but in a way no less fanciful—a decent guy who was earnest about love. That’s why Hi Infidelity made her heart sing. Her notes might have been off-key, but they were true.

Importantly, this closing paragraph is not part of the original piece of Hi Infidelity. It’s the sort of insight that Hyden probably had previously come to, but which didn’t fit in with that first conception of the piece. In the context of a broader account of classic rock, though, Hyden has a justification for making that link between mother and son in the text itself.

Even within individual essays, Hyden finds ways to refine points he has previously mulled over, finding new significance for them in the context of classic rock’s complete story. The most explicit instance is in “So Bad,” in which Hyden directly quotes his essay on the “five-albums test.” In a long parenthetical to that essay, he also defines the concept of a “good ‘bad’ album,” an album from a genius-level artist which is interesting precisely because of its relative badness. (As a long time fan of Neil Young, I am overly acquainted with this sort of record.)

Twilight of the Gods isn’t the first time that Hyden has returned to the “good ‘bad’ album” concept; he ran with it a bit further when discussing The Rolling Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You. But in both those earlier articles, one can sense Hyden feels stymied. He has this idea about “good ‘bad’ albums,” but hasn’t yet figured out why anyone should care about it. (Indeed, the Tattoo You piece starts with Hyden expressing surprise that no one had latched onto the idea in the comments for the five-albums test article.) It’s not until he gets to this book, this personal history of classic rock, that he finds the importance behind this pet concept of his—it’s central to being a younger fan of older music:

It’s the only way to discover “new” music if you’re into classic rock—you must dig into the albums that people tell you that you won’t like, and you must listen to them many, many times until you find a way to like them. Because you will inevitably tire of Pet Sounds, and when that happens you will come around to Love You and marvel over the daffy synth sounds in “Johnny Carson,” and speculate over whether Brian Wilson’s state of mind makes this song an intentional classic or an act of unintentional “outsider art” brilliance. Over time, you might even convince yourself that Love You is better than Pet Sounds—but, really, it’s just that liking Love You is more interesting, because music critics haven’t told you how to feel about it for fifty years. Love You doesn’t contain better music than Pet Sounds, but it does offer more in the way of discovery and surprises.

As a writer, this is the sort of thing I wish every big project would give me. Putting together a collection should not merely be a means of presenting previously written material. It should be a means of figuring out what the author wanted to write in the first-place, but couldn’t figure out until now. That Hyden is able to do so in Twilight of the Gods makes me both envious and hopeful.

On the whole, Twilight of the Gods isn’t a revelation for someone who has previously read Hyden’s work, but, lackluster superstructure aside, it’s a chance to see Hyden’s writing as the best version of itself, a place to see thoughts which were still works-in-progress or presented incompletely as the tight statements on music they were meant to be. It’s like listening to a bunch of Fleetwood Mac demos, and then hearing their polished versions on Rumours. They may ultimately be the same songs, but the compiling and revising has made them sparkle just a bit more.

* * *

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this and want to read more pieces which straddle the line between review and analysis, you might like to read my thoughts on A Journey Through Tudor England by Suzannah Lipscomb.

On Paratext: An Essay Near Knowing

Note: This post is an imitation of the style of essay found in Brian Blanchfield’s book Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat, 2016).

On Paratext

Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source

The first context in which I heard the word “paratext” spoken aloud was, of all things, a speedrun. For his contribution to Summer Games Done Quick 2018, FoldableHuman (a.k.a. Dan Olson) played through the notoriously bad survival-horror game Amy. Whereas most speedrunners, based on the limited sample of such runs I’ve watched, focus their commentary on the mechanical aspects of playing the game quickly, FoldableHuman made his run a presentation on the narrative and thematic aspects of the work. Notably, during a tedious-to-play-through segment of Chapter 3, he took the time to discuss how the game’s title character, a young girl who the player-character must shepherd through a sudden zombie apocalypse, is coded as being on the autism spectrum. Amy’s autism is not explicitly mentioned in the game itself, though her in-game behavior may suggest it. Rather, one finds evidence in the game’s paratext.

Paratext—that which is around the text, above and beyond it—refers to the collection of ancillary texts which frames the main text, which attracts and transitions the audience into it. Sometimes the paratext is attached to the text itself, as in the title of a poem, or a video game’s packaging. Other times it’s disconnected, obscure, even private: an advertisement, say, or the artist’s personal correspondence. In the case of the Amy speedrun, FoldableHuman cites the existence of marketing materials and interviews with the developers as evidence that the title character should be understood as being on the autism spectrum. As such, it is fair to criticize the game for how it depicts people in that community—its paratext invites that discussion.

Since watching that speedrun, the word “paratext” has been on my tongue a great deal. There are two reasons for this, I suspect. The first is that I find “paratext” to be a fun word, a word which at the same time evokes the fantastical and the mundane. On the one hand, it calls to mind such words as “paranormal” and “parapsychology,” terms which suggests worlds and ways of knowing beyond everyday experience. After all, one must often dig beyond the naked text to find the paratext. On the other hand, paratext has a certain “parenthetical” quality to it. A phrase enclosed by parentheses is implied to be digressive, expendable, interesting as trivia but not essential to the main argument. The oddity (the paradox?) of parentheses is that, by their visual appearance, they call attention to what they’re supposed to close off. We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but if covers were pointless would publishers bother including them?

The second is that I want to write an imitation of the style of essay found in Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. Among the devices which Blanchfield uses frequently, especially at the beginning of essays, is meditating on a word, discussing its etymology and drawing out its implications. I feel that to write a successful Blanchfield imitation, I need a suitable word, and “paratext” is the best that I’ve come up with. It’s semi-obscure, and even better, I think that acknowledging paratext would have some thematic resonance with Blanchfield’s book.

To start with the title, that omnipresent example of paratext, the book is called Proxies and subtitled Essays Near Knowing, both of which suggest something that can only be approached indirectly, or partially. “This book will be exploratory,” the title tells us, and we may see the paratext surrounding it as a guidebook, a map, for that exploration. Moving to the book as a physical object, we find a rather minimalist display: the title and the author’s name in white text, printed on a black field. No cover image, no exciting typeface—this is a book where language, and by that I mean pure language, has primacy over the visual, or the visual rendered through text. (I’ve been tempted to include some visuals in this blog post—a picture of the book, an embed of the archived Amy speedrun—but to do so, I believe, would violate the spirit of Blanchfield’s work.)

Turning Proxies over to the back cover, we find the kind of paratext I most associate with poetry collections and literary prose: the blurb. Blurbs from critics or established writers are a standard part of book marketing, but my preferred genres raise the blurb to a vacuous artform. The literary blurb attempts to canonize a given book through sheer grandiosity, as though every collection were the First Folio and every friend and former teacher tasked with writing one, Ben Jonson. My senior year of undergrad, I complained to my thesis advisor about the blurb-industrial complex, and as a result he lent me a copy of Nick Demske’s self-titled collection of quasi-sonnets, whose sole blurb is a generic commendatory letter from Paul Ryan, Desmke’s representative in Congress, on winning a poetry prize. I have to assume Ryan never read the book, though most blurbs are so generic, who’s to say that’s not the case from writers as well?

Personally, I’ve stopped reading the content of blurbs. I merely skip to the attribution line now, and use my knowledge of the blurb-writers’ own works as a proxy for what the text in question will be like. If Brenda Shaughnessy likes a book, my thought process goes, I might enjoy the book; if Graham Foust likes it, I should stay away. In the case of Proxies, Blanchfield received a blurb from Claudia Rankine, the poet behind Citizen: An American Lyric, which I first read for an informal book club while at Johns Hopkins; Maggie Nelson, whom I have heard of but have never read; and two others whose names were wholly foreign to me. Not the ideal line-up of writers for me to make a judgment, but Rankine’s name may have sold me on Proxies had I come to the text naively. Whereas the cover design draws my attention to the book’s language, Rankine’s endorsement primes me for a book of social engagement, one which will be sympathetic to or in the voice of marginalized groups.

Further down the back cover, one finds the name of the publisher: Nightboat Books. For a giant publishing house, the presence of the name means very little to the reader; it’s hard to say what exactly the HarperCollins brand means. For small presses, though, there’s more often a distinct house “style.” In the case of Nightboat, the name signifies a level of formal inventiveness and academic density. I’ve had a mixed history with Nightboat’s catalog. On the one hand, I greatly admired Jill Magi’s Labor, which combined poetry with prose narratives and instruction manuals to comment on the contemporary state of the academic worker. It was a book I pulled at random from the Hopkins library stacks, and I’ve considered finding it to be among my happiest accidents. On the other hand, I found Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue to be needlessly opaque, a work whose whole text reads more like paratext. I read it for the same book club for which I read Citizen, and I contributed nothing to that particular discussion. I’m certain that had I done so, it would have come out as little more than frustrated rage.

At certain moments, in hindsight, I suspect my hostile reaction to Kapil’s work was grounded less in aesthetics than in my own insecurities. I was the youngest member of our cohort at Johns Hopkins, the one person who came straight from undergrad, and I feared at the book club that I was also the person least versed in contemporary developments in poetics. While I had read some late 20th- and 21st-century poetry in writing workshops, almost all the poetry I had studied in a critical context was early modern: Chaucer, the Renaissance dramatists. Kapil’s book demanded a fundamentally different background to understand it, perhaps, and it is so much easier for readers to blame the book than themselves.

Nightboat tends to publish authors who the Johns Hopkins English Department would invite to give poetry readings. I was a student in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, whose taste in poetry is traditional, canonical, formalist. The English Department, on the other hand, prefers that which is contemporary, subversive, experimental. At least, so go the stereotypes. I’m told that there is a rivalry, if not outright hostility, between the two departments, although just about every interaction I had with the English department, faculty and students both, was at least cordial and oftentimes friendly. Indeed, I knew one of the English doctoral candidates from my time at Carnegie Mellon. (To a certain, the grad students in both departments had to get along, as we shared a common workspace.)

It was at one of the English Department poetry readings that I first became aware of Proxies. In effect, if not in fact, this was the primary paratext that brought me to Blanchfield’s work. It was a Friday in late October 2016, right after our readings class for the week had let out. (Indeed, my colleagues and I had to hustle downstairs and down the hall to make in on time, because our class ran long.) The room was pretty packed compared to the other readings in the series, and in my opinion the crowd’s presence was more than justified. Blanchfield’s presentation was engaging, but natural, never self-consciously performative. His choice of essay to read showcased the breadth of his powers as a writer, offering something to audience members of all aesthetic stripes. I dare say it was the best reading I saw while at Hopkins, certainly the best out of the English Department.

In one crucial sense, though, the reading was a disappointment. The event was advertised as being a poetry reading—even reading the text comes with paratext—but it seems the people in charge of booking writers for the series neglected to tell Blanchfield that. He did what writers are wont to do at such events: read from the book he was trying to promote. To the extent that was his goal, it worked. In the parlance of the book blogging world, Proxies immediately went onto my TBR afterwards. Had I been a fan of his verse, I may well have been put out by that turn of events. But then again, if what is delivered is engaging, who cares about the packaging? Paratext is merely suggestion, not a contract, right?

The place where the concept of “paratext,” as I’ve been discussing it, feels most relevant to Proxies is also the place where I’m least certain the term applies: the introduction laying out the project. The conceit, or less charitably the gimmick, of Blanchfield’s book is that all the information presented in each essay is based solely on his memory. He makes no use of search engines to find facts; he doesn’t return to books to verify how he paraphrases their points. (To paraphrase, that is, to speak around what has been said.) Instead, he includes a lengthy section at the back of the book called “Correction,” where he corrects whatever mistakes he subsequently finds in the essays, for instance, how he attributes Plato’s mistrust of poets to Aristotle.

Is that introduction paratext? I’m not certain. An introduction does constitute part of a book’s front matter, alongside (para-) such elements as dedications, epigraphs, and the table of contents: all clear instances of paratext. But that page-and-a-half of preamble is so integral to understanding the essays as a collection that deeming it above, beyond or around the main text doesn’t capture its significance. Or is the correction section the truly integral part of the text, and the introduction merely the explanatory link between the essays and the corrections? I’m alas a poet, and one not especially fluent in literary theory. I’m not qualified to discuss these topics. I have just used the format of Blanchfield’s essays to give myself permission to do so.

In fairness, I’d argue that’s also what Blanchfield’s essays do for the author himself. From their titles, their paratext, one might assume his essays are technical and detached. They have names like “On Propositionizing,” “On Abstraction,” “On the Leave.” And, true, many start out that way. But those high-minded concepts are really entry points, permission, to discuss more intimate matters. “On Frottage,” the piece he read at Johns Hopkins, begins with an exploration of queer sexual terminology before transitioning to his life as a gay man in 1990s New York, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. “On Peripersonal Space,” my pick for the collection’s best essay, uses the title concept as a metaphor for Blanchfield’s formerly tight, now strained relationship with his mother.

I’ve done nothing quite so bold or naked here, though I believe thinking through this piece has allowed me to reflect on my time at Johns Hopkins. I find myself at a transitional point in my professional life, and I’m still unsure of how to process everything that has happened in the past few years. (Certainly “On Dossiers” has scared me off of pursuing academia, at least in the near term.) Perhaps I have latched onto paratext over text because it represents the point before commitment, the last experience before actual experience. It is the perfect element for someone who is only “near knowing” at time of composition.

Correction.

In FoldableHuman’s Amy commentary, he does not use the exact word “paratext,” but rather its adjectival form: “There is no direct reference to autism in the game, but there are paratextual references to it. It was used in interviews, in promotional materials for the game. The developers did highlight this aspect of it.”

In addition to the title, subtitle, and author’s name, the front cover of Proxies also includes, in small print and curly brackets, the phrase “a reckoning.” Neither the other paratextual elements nor Nightboat’s website indicate that this phrase is an additional subtitle. Rather, it appears to serve a similar function as the phrase “Poems” or “A Novel”—identifying the genre of a work while suggesting it possesses an aura of literary quality, the sort of paratext that brings not the reader, but a particular kind of reader, to the text.

According to Goodreads, I first placed Proxies on my to-read shelf on October 7, 2016, which would hardly qualify as “late” in the month.