Years ago, when I last saw Jay Leno on the Tonight Show more than once every couple of years, I identified what I believed to be the fundamental element of Leno’s monologue technique – the Comedic Fact.
So, let’s say some celebrity’s comedic fact was that they were fat. As you may recall, Oprah previously found herself in this predicament amidst her much publicized weight loss and gain, so let’s use her as an example. (I suspect her comedic fact is now that she’s super rich.)
Leno might start with a “news of the weird” type story that slyly provides the Comedic Fact:
And then the fact is abruptly linked to its celebrity . . .
I knew Oprah was fat and fat people like to eat, but . . . Zingo!
(ps - Leno writers watch your backs, I've got more where this one came from!)
Familiarity is the basis of the comedy, which is of course what makes it the kind of consistent thing you could do night after night. You don’t reveal anything people don’t already know, which they might not like and blame you for teaching them, you reveal things they already “know,” which they might also not like but couldn’t blame you for.
I knew Jackson did wear pajama bottoms to court that one day, and I do tend to associate pajamas with children, but I don’t see what’s funny about th... Oh ho!! Michael Jackson has sex with children, I knew that! Now I know it again in a funnier way!
The Jackson example actually seems to rely on the ambiguity of the Comedic Fact at work here. If Michael Jackson definitely did or didn’t molest children, these jokes would be less clearly in the realm of “safe” humor. But, some ambiguity around Jackson’s actual guilt (which luckily for Leno persisted beyond the end of the Jackson trial) seems to make the “fact” sufficiently palatable. It’s long seemed to me, though, that the ambiguity is a thin cover for the truth (even if I don’t know what it is): Either Michael Jackson had inappropriate sex with children, whose victimization is not a laughing matter, or he did not, in which case Jackson is the pitiable victim his fans make him out to be.
On the other hand, comedy is a tricky thing – often visceral in ways that other modes are not – which makes the declaration “That’s not funny” a difficult one to make stand up. That’s why humor is, I suppose, such a tricky rhetorical mode both to use and to evaluate.
On his weekly broadcast Le Show, Harry Shearer often reviews public apologies (probing the emptiness of that rhetorical form) – and nothing is more regularly to blame for saying things that end up requiring an apology than someone trying to be funny. It’s often amateur comedians who fall victim to this trap (a sherriff trying to be witty during a press conference, a trade group attorney trying to poke fun at his opponents, etc.) but it may be that strictly formal comedic techniques like Leno’s comedic fact monologue are another source of embarrassing mismatches of form and content. Once that machine is up and running, I guess it would be easy not to be able to tell the difference between the Comedic Fact of Janet’s top coming open and Michael’s alleged assault.
I’ll leave you with a quick look at another trouble spot I’ve noted before – attempts to leaven news stories. As I’ve noted, the catchy lede is a rhetorical machine that will spit out whatever you put in. And as this story on tighter US/Canadian border regulations suggests, so is the humanizing “man-on-the-street” closing reflection. A journalism classic, but one not without pitfalls, revealed here as Doug Graham of Linthicum, Md and AP writer Lara Jakes Jordan journalize ‘till it hurts:
The first time I visited Salem, Massachusetts I was with a friend, scouting out a possible field trip destination for a university class on witches. We did the witch tour (self guided) – witch museum, wax museum, gallows hill, the cemetery, witch memorial, and a good number of the kitschy little shops where one could buy key chains with witches on them, shot glasses with witches on them, “floaty” ballpoint pens with tiny witches gliding through a liquid sky. Witches were on everything in Salem – signs for pizza restaurants, ice cream shops, even the Salem Overhead Door company used a witch in its logo.
Some years later I found that’s still true – witches are on everything, including a sign for the Overhead Door Company of Salem. (Sadly though they don’t use it on their website.)
This time it wasn’t witches that brought me to Salem. It was a different friend, scouting out a possible field trip destination for a nineteenth century literature class. We did the Hawthorne tour.
As you might imagine the Hawthorne tour is fairly limited and somewhat more reserved in mood than the witch tour. It includes the Custom House, where Hawthorne worked and the House of the Seven Gables, which Hawthorne wrote about.
At the Custom House, run by the National Park Service, we were greeted by a stalwart and serious looking Park Ranger who instructed us in where we could go, what we could look at. We saw Hawthorne’s desk, his seal, his inkwell and quill. We saw ledgers and other office supplies belonging to other Custom House employees. There was nothing (or very little) about the literary Custom House, Hawthorne’s introduction to The Scarlet Letter wherein the writer, a disaffected government employee, claims to have found the text of Hester’s tale in an upstairs room. The place seems to have been preserved because of its connection to Hawthorne, but that connection is presented at the Custom House as a strangely tenuous one. It was as if, my friend noted, he were to become famous and the cubicle where he once worked were put on display – a stapler, keyboard, waste-paper basket under plexiglass.
At The House of the Seven Gables (one of America’s top ten favorite houses, by the way, coming in around number seven after such places as Fallingwater and The Breakers) we bought our tickets and waited for the 2:30 tour. The guide instructed us not to lean on the walls and we were off. Those who see the House are treated to more information about Hawthorne’s connection to the site and its use in his novel that at the Custom House. Today that information is imparted straightforwardly by the guides who also tell of the rather fanciful way tours used to be run at the House. A long-time tourist destination, the thing to do in former years was to enter through the penny store (Hepzibah’s cent shop in the novel) and play along as though you were a character in the novel. The guides, no doubt, cajoling those unwilling into uncomfortable and one-sided exchanges.
The two Salems are indeed very different – the commercialized, glitzy witch Salem and the staid literary and national history Salem. That was made most apparent in the House of the Seven Gables gift shop: the Hawthorne floaty pen, perhaps the most pathetic floaty pen in existence, has a quill and parchment glide past a rough image of the House. (Come on people – marketing!)
Perhaps the two Salems come together at the curiously sinister looking Museum of Hawthorne and Poe, in a little storefront across from the Witch Museum. Alas, we didn’t go in.
And there is, of course, a third Salem, one we will never know … the everyday Salem, where people go to work at dentist offices and at Walmart. What secrets it holds …
Last week, I left for my long-awaited vacation and the journey was a minor disaster. The first leg of my transcontinental flight was delayed by almost two hours, such that I was worried about missing my connecting flight in Chicago. When I got to O’Hare with about 40 minutes to spare, I thought with relief that the hard part was over.
After almost 3 hours of waiting, they let the passengers off the plane so we could stretch our legs. We were told it was the battery pack for some emergency lights that was the problem, but who could say for sure? Another hour or so passed and we were herded back on the plane—that seemed like a good sign. Wrong again. We disembarked a second time and the crew handed us meal cards so we could get something to eat from the nearby food court. A few minutes after I’d gotten my food, the man who’d been sitting next to me on the plane came by and said the flight wouldn’t be leaving til the next morning. This after over 6 hours of waiting. So, off we all went to various hotels with more meal cards in hand. I called a friend and my brother so they could send yet more emails to my husband, who was supposed to meet me at the other end.
This was one of the worst flying experiences I’d had, and I was furious about losing a whole day of my trip. On the shuttle bus to the hotel, however, riding with people from other cancelled flights, I was roused from my self-pity long enough to watch a new United States Army recruit burn off his nervous energy with small talk, while another recruit sat silently, off in his own world. The kid was skinny and tall, his big ears seeming to stick out even more with his recent crew cut. He tried to strike up a conversation with a boy of 6 or 7 sitting next to him (the eldest of three boys traveling with their young mother), asking him where he was going. The question was a way for him to tell the boy and anyone else who cared to listen where he was headed—South Carolina, for boot camp. “Wanna trade?” he asked the boy, laughing. A middle-aged woman sitting across from him, and next to me, smiled in a maternal way, and then she caught his eye and pointed to her wrist. She was wearing about 5 rubber bracelets of various hues (inspired by the original yellow Live Strong bracelet put out by Nike for the Lance Armstrong Foundation) representing various causes, one of them an olive green one with “Support the Troops” stamped on it. They nodded and smiled at each other, and after a few minutes, she asked him where he was from. Kalamazoo, Michigan. He and the guy sitting next to him were going to be training as mechanics.
At one point, I thought about asking him, “what the hell are you doing joining the Army now?” It seemed incredible to me that young men like him, fresh-faced and eager (and naïve? overzealous?) were still willing to serve. I wondered if he was joining because he felt a patriotic duty, whether he planned to make the Army his life, or use it as a means to some other end—a college education, a career, a ticket out of his hometown. But I kept quiet. Something about the young man’s cheeriness made me sad. He seemed so desperate to connect with the people around him, to mark this momentous passage in his life in some way.
The small talk continued in spurts, the young man trying to draw out the little boy with more teasing questions. Turns out the boy wants to be a fighter pilot when he grows up, according to his mother, who expressed vague worries about such a prospect. As we neared the hotel, the middle-aged woman said something like, “as long as you don’t get sent anywhere that begins with ‘I’” to which the new recruit replied that he didn’t think that was likely, and besides, he and the guy sitting next to him were going to be mechanics, so they’d be at the base fixing up the vehicles, not riding around in them. Then he added, shaking his head, “no, I don’t wanna shoot anybody or be shot at.” An understandable sentiment, and one that I happen to share, but an odd thing for a soon-to-be soldier to say out loud, I thought.
This last little exchange made me think that perhaps I was seeing George W. Bush’s dipping approval ratings in action: the supporter of troops hoping that this young man end up nowhere near that unnameable place; the young recruit not wanting to serve his country or his president in that particular way. My hopeful reading of the subtext is of an implicit disapproval of the mess in Iraq, and the acknowledgment that supporting our troops is not synonymous with supporting the cause that’s getting those troops killed. Maybe that's being too optimistic. When we got off the bus and entered the hotel lobby, I headed for the front desk. Rather than getting in line right away like the rest of us, the young man looked around, taking in the details of the Ramada—the neutral, plush carpeting, the upholstered chairs, the hushed atmosphere, and dim lighting. He was impressed, his eyes as wide as his grin, making me think that he’d never spent a night in a hotel—“not bad!” he said. His enthusiasm about this generic airport hotel lobby made me even sadder. Or maybe it was guilt. What to me—a middle-class academic—was a great nuisance, was to this kid a surprising and delightful gift on his last night of civilian life. He was not at all unhappy that his flight had been cancelled. I got to see different parts of the world by saving up and going on vacation, staying at hotels as a matter of course. He got to see parts of the world by saying that he’d be willing to die for his country, even if he wasn’t.
At the time, I was too wrapped up in my own immediate problems to give this young man’s situation much thought. And I have no great insights now. But imagining him at boot camp in South Carolina while I sit here, an ocean away, I can’t help but think how insulated we Americans are from the war in that place that begins with “I,” or the wars in any other far flung place that we’ll never see. And though I want to support our troops, I’m not sure what that means in these times, and I feel I have very little to offer to young recruits like the kid who crossed my path so fleetingly. Be safe, the woman on the bus said.
Another earthquake in Tokyo Tuesday –this one stronger than a few weeks ago, but with the epicenter further away, so it didn’t feel as strong. I planned all day to write about that, but later something more interesting and positive happened.
My wife and I walked around the busy evening streets of Ginza looking for a particular udon noodle place we’d read about, and eventually found it on a relatively quiet side-street. The address was nondescript, to say the least –the second floor of a very small, dull-looking office building. But there was a line out the door and down the stairs, so we figured they must be doing something right. We waited in the dull, fluorescent-lit, slightly dirty stairwell, developing a healthy hatred for one particular table that had already eaten when we arrived and was still there chatting when we were seated over an hour later. Some of the people in line in front of us gave up and left. At one point a man who appeared to be the owner or head chef opened the door to let in a couple, looked down the stairwell at the line, and let out a dismayed sigh. A few minutes later he squeezed past the crowd on the stairs to put up a closed sign.
When at long last we reach the threshold of the udon Promised Land we’re standing on a landing outside the restaurant, in front of a glass door through which we can the people who have been taking up a table this whole time. One fellow, who clearly seems to be the ring-leader, smirks. One of the negative things about being a foreigner in Japan is often getting looks that seem to say “Oh you, I know all about you.” The content isn’t always clear, but it generally doesn’t seem positive. So, at this point it seems like torture: we’re watching these people order MORE food while they’re watching us wait and, perhaps only because we’re getting very hungry at this point, I feel that we’re enacting some kind of insider/outsider allegory.
But then things start to look up. To begin with, when the waitress brings these people their next round of food, she brings along with it not only a bottle of oil with hot peppers floating in it but a green shaker of Kraft parmesan cheese. This is inexplicably delightful to me and convinces me, against all reason, that the food will be very good.
The man we’d seen rush by earlier then comes out with two stools, which we take as a nice gesture but we have no desire to sit in the hall. He then immediately returns with two small glasses of a delicious brown beer and insists we take a seat. A moment later he returns to fill our cupped hands with dried shrimp, which I don’t really care for, but . . . they say hunger is best sauce –these were garnished with hunger and gratitude.
Before long we were seated at the counter inside. The man –it is now clear that he really runs the place in addition to doing seemingly everything– brings sake for me and, when my wife declines hers, roasted barley tea for her. This is accompanied by grilled fish cakes and grated ginger. The owner’s English is slowly expanding –he asks where we are from, etc. I’ve been in Japan about seven weeks, eaten almost every meal out, and this is only the second time someone in a restaurant has asked me anything --and the first time involved a fair amount of open hostility, mocking American accents, etc.-- so this is a pleasant surprise. We order two bowls of tempura udon and an appetizer of freshly made sweet-potato chips, which we’d seen other customers eating.
While we’re waiting, the owner, apparently delighted to discover two Americans in his restaurant, brings us a stack of American baseball cards and tells us how much he loves Ichiro Suzuki but, alas, hasn’t been able to get an Ichiro card. He then brings out an Ichiro figurine mounted on a Pepsi bottle cap and a Japanese newspaper with a headline about Hideki Matsui hitting a homerun for the Yankees.
This is all wonderful, but then out comes a business card from a Columbia law professor –for no reason other than to show us that the man was there. At this point we get out our cards as well. He then brings us a magazine called Tokushima Graph, which is about his home prefecture of Tokushima on Shikoku Island –a prefecture of a total population well under a million, pretty small for Japan. He then recalls having been to the United States fifteen years ago for a series of food industry seminars while he was a franchising supervisor: three days in LA, three in Chicago, where he had a thick-crust pizza, four days in New York, where he had hamburgers at “Hollywood Planet.”
While the hot udon we ordered and have been eating is fine, he explains, the house specialties are two cold udon dishes that we should try. I tell him in Japanese that we’ll come back, maybe tomorrow, and he laughs, disappears into the kitchen, and returns with two small bowls of each of the specialties: one a cold thin broth with grated daikon, ginger, and scallion, sprinkled with sesame seeds, the other also cold, but thicker and sesame flavored, almost like a thin tahini, also sprinkled with sesame seeds and tiny bits of scallion, and larger pieces of moist seaweed. What we had ordered was worth waiting for, but these dishes are in a different category and even though we are both stuffed we empty all four bowls.
Toward the end of the meal the man gives us his card and we realize that the restaurant is named after him: “Sakata,” the last syllable written in kanji, the first two in kana. When my wife asks if she can take a picture of him, Mr. Sakata insists we go out onto the landing so that we can take a picture in front of his shop sign. Once we’re all outside, he goes back inside and returns to the landing with a customer to take a picture of the three of us. Finally, my wife is able to take a picture of just him.
In many ways this is a typical travel story, but in the context of so many weeks of little interaction beyond “please,” “thank you,” and “pay at the register” –at a time when being an American abroad can be awkward or worse-- it was refreshing, almost magical. When Mr. Sakata recalled his culinary experiences in Chicago and New York, I tried telling him that American food has gotten a lot better over the last fifteen years, but it quickly became clear that he wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. He was reliving his America, a place where, he recalled, Patrick Ewing plays for the Knicks, and Michael Jordan plays for the Bulls –a place where people eat pizza and hamburgers. It was almost enough to make me nostalgic for a time when such things were the major motifs of America's image abroad. The simplicity of that place and time never really existed, of course, but Mr. Sakata clearly had a wonderful time when he was there and wanted us to have one in his Japan. We did.
Following up on my promise last week to keep moving towards a grand unified theory of contemporary China (which I am of course unqualified to produce), here are a few more thoughts for the mixer:
1. Obviously, things are changing very fast there, as the entire country girds itself for the 2008 Olympics. Around Beijing and Tianjin, where most of the events will take place, these changes are radically altering public space. Their major effect is to isolate public space from any encounter with unmodernized (un-Westernized?) Chinese culture. American travelers to China in 2008 (the Olympics begin, auspiciously, on August 8, so 8/8/2008) will find China, I think, very familiar in its unfamiliarity: the toilets, the roads, the ratio of parks to skyscrapers, the hotels, the taxis, all feel like they could be anywhere. This progress--which has in many cases meant real advantages for Chinese people--comes at the cost of "local" color--it seems unlikely to me that any traveler who does not speak Chinese will be able to eat where ordinary (middle- and working-class) Chinese people eat, sleep where they sleep, or even peer, with whatever curiosity, through the windows of their homes.
I am suspicious of "developmental" tourism and of the demand that the undeveloped world remain as it is so that Americans can enjoy seeing the authentic spectacle of poverty, and so I am not sure this is an enormous loss. Or rather what is being lost in Beijing is what has already been lost in Paris, in New York, in London, and in the world's other major tourist cities, each of which exists as it were in two spaces simultaneously: the New York composed of tickets to Letterman and a Broadway show, a trip up the Empire State Building, a visit to the 9/11 site, and a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty has little to do with how most New Yorkers experience the geography of the city. In this sense Beijing's modernization has to do with an increased ability to manage and separate the tourist city from the quotidian one, an ability that is a function of increased modernization (the complete redevelopment of the airport, new taxis, new subway lines, etc.) but which is, in some sense, ontologically prior to it.
2. I continue to be amazed at how non-sexual Chinese pop culture is--or rather, at how non-sexual it feels to me. I experience this difference--which indicates just as much about the United States as it does about China--most often in two arenas: first the complete absence of direct sexual expression in pop lyrics (which are for the most part very "romantic," whether sung by men or women) and in pop music (which is very much keyboard-driven, and absent of any of the more penetrating, head- and body-shaking rhythms of American rock, hip-hop, or pop). And second the degree to which "childishness" in dress (by which I mean, I think, a fairly stringent absence of sexuality, again) extends well into and even past the teenage years. I was astonished last week to find out that one of my cousins-in-law was 18: I had thought, based on her clothes and the way she carries herself, that she was 13 or 14 years old.
3. The most bewildering thing I saw in the last two weeks was a young white man working as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant. The place did cater to a fairly wealthy clientele (which in China means lots of foreigners), and he did speak English, so you can imagine he was hired on for his language skills. Nonetheless, it was the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese working at that kind of job--a type of job reserved, incidentally, largely for young women who have come to cities from the countryside, because the wages are so low. What was he doing there? Friends I asked immediately suggested he was doing "research" of some kind, which gives you a quick sense of how difficult it is to imagine that he was working there because he needed the job or the money. Presumably this is a sign of things to come--though, as I suggested last week, the shifts in the Chinese government's policies on immigration and work permits would seem to contravene any possibility of its ever happening. Historically, the CCP has frequently allowed for the unofficial breaking of certain laws before their official revocation, a policy that allows for changes to be tested while still being subject to an eventual governmental crackdown, and I find myself wondering if that's what was happening here. Or maybe he was just doing some research.
4. Imagine, as a writer, being able to say anything you'd like but not being able to write certain things. Imagine that your entire career, and the careers of everyone around you, depended on the fact that you could write whatever you'd like, as long as you don't criticize the government directly. And imagine that everyone knows this, but that this knowledge is itself one of the things you can't write about or discuss in certain kinds of public situations (though you can speak about it with friends, or even in classrooms).
It is hard for me to fathom being an intellectual under such circumstances, which are those under which most Chinese intellectuals work.
But then I remember that a Brooklyn College professor recently had to drop out of the running for a position as department chair after it was discovered he'd insulted religious people on his blog. And then I read on the website of Campus Watch (a conservative organization devoted to "monitoring Middle East Studies on campus) that "American campuses are crawling with pro-terror professors," find that Alan Dershowitz has accused Columbia University of supporting terrorism, and see that Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) has argued that a recent joke by Bill Maher "borders on treason" (treason being legally punishable by death), and I wonder.
Let me clear: I would rather be a professor here than there, and I think that the American situation is unquestionably freer in terms of political speech than the Chinese one. But it is also clear that lots of people in our culture--many of them on the political right--would be happier if the situation here were more like the one in China.
A followup to E Wesp's post on trading classrooms: a month ago I had an idea for a new television show called, you guessed it, "Extreme Teaching." Possible challenges: the competitors get handed a novel they've never read five minutes before class begins and have to lecture; competitors have to teach an entire semester of a language they've never studied (this is my personal dream, though no one will--rightly--ever let me do it); competitors have to prepare students for a test in a subject they haven't studied... and so on. As you can see I'm kind of stuck: most of the ideas I have involve either cutting down on preparation time or teaching unfamiliar material (I've left out Survivor-style ideas like teaching while eating bugs or bungee-jumping, etc.). But I'd watch that show a few times.
I’m pleased to report that my preparations for a teaching position at a new school have come together to produce that most precious of commodities: the premise for a new reality television show. Yes, if you’ve read the title of this post, you’ve guessed it – Trading Classrooms. And if you’ve heard of television, you’ve guessed the basic concept of the show.
The possibilities are endless and endlessly predictable:
Hey fancy Harvard professor, go teach at this community technical college!
Brush up your Boston accent, community college professor, you’re off to Harvard!
You may be able to teach part-time working students, but let’s see you teach those liberal-arts smartypants! . . . And vice-versa. And so on.
Like most reality television shows, I guess, there’s potentially something legitimately compelling about the concept. The shift of locale and students could end up revealing some fascinating things about the expectations that structure teacher-student relationships.
If, for example, the Harvard professor’s course were too “hard” for students at a less prestigious school – what would make it so. Class-based preparation in high school or other college-level courses? The nature or volume of work demanded out of the classroom? What alterations or restructuring would be needed – if any – to make the Harvard class a success in other schools?
Such a program could test a variety of other distinctions that structure the way we tend to think about schools and teachers. What happens when the beloved small liberal arts college professor trades his or her 20 person classroom for a 250 person lecture hall? How do different backgrounds in research play out as professors trade in their familiar surroundings for schools that have vastly different research expectations for their faculty?
But, realistically, I think, we’d be more apt to get a weekly shorthand version of the variety of teacher stories we already know. (Though as S L Kim reminds us, that’s not really all that bad an outcome.) Who’d be surprised when, in episode one, the Harvard professor goes to the community college and learns some valuable lessons by teaching students who live in the “real world.” (For God’s sake I hope he doesn’t try to connect to his new students by “rapping” part of his lecture . . . . . . Phew.) The students, resistant at first, discover that the professor is wise – maybe demanded more of them than they were used to, which was a good thing in retrospect. . .
I hadn’t intended my new creation this way explicitly, but it turns out that Trading Classrooms is about class. (No, the other kind.) Which makes it, as far as my somewhat limited experience goes, like every other reality show in that respect. On one hand, I suppose that means I’m on the right track as far as my burgeoning TV producer career. On the other, I actually think I understand more clearly than I did before a standard question one teacher might ask another (especially on a job interviewee evokes a sense of interest in his or her prospective employer): “What are the students like at your school?”
A recent AP story summarizes the findings of a team of mathematicians who studied and then modeled human courtship behaviors. In the model, a man would give either a “worthless,” “valuable,” or “extravagant” gift to a woman, and then their reactions were scored. The value of the valuable gift, items like diamonds and appliances, is primarily monetary. The extravagant gift isn’t necessarily expensive, rather its value is in the experience. Examples the story gave were “dinner at a fancy restaurant, tickets to a Broadway show or a moonlit serenade.” The worthless gift seemed to be something of no positive value either monetary or experiential. Something like … I don’t know … maybe a set of napkin rings.
What they found was that the extravagant gifts scored highest for both men and women. The mathematicians’ interpretation was that the extravagant gift signals to women that “they have found a strong and committed mate,” while men are reassured that they have “avoid[ed a] gold-digger by giving only gifts that have no intrinsic value.” All in all, a pretty grim interpretation of courtship both for its reductive set of human values and the curiously gendered interpretation.
But I’d been thinking about gifts before reading about this study, mainly because so many of my friends and family have summer birthdays. When the time comes to give and receive, I’m often haunted by the unhappy lesson of an undergraduate anthropology class – that gift-giving is an act of aggression. I certainly see what they mean, how gifts can indicate status, how they can incite expectations of reciprocation. With this in the back of my mind, it makes what’s an already fairly fraught exchange a bit worse.
A friend and I had been talking, on my birthday, about gifts. I told her that I was hoping my sweetie would figure out the one little thing I wanted (something that would fall into the mathematician’s extravagant category), and figure it out without a hint. Not at all fair – I know. But there was something (narcissistic?) about the gift-giver knowing me so well as to divine my untold desires that would’ve been a gift in itself. Then we started talking about cut flowers (hint!) and she suggested that the best gifts were excessive, something you might want but wouldn’t necessarily get for yourself.
I don’t know whether thinking of gifts as excessive takes away or reduces the aggression that may be implicit in gift-giving, or whether it allows us to downplay the computational scenario where “accepts gift with no intrinsic value” equals “not a gold-digger.” But, if it does … well, happier birthdays.
I have spent this summer trying on my new administrative wings (and webbed feet) as one of three assistant directors of the writing program (expository, not creative). My official appointment began July 1, but I’ve been working on and off since late May. So far, so good. I’ll still be teaching half time, so it’ll be interesting learning to balance the roles of teacher and administrator when the school year begins. Moving from full-time faculty to part of an administrative staff is like being allowed backstage or in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. Whether you’re hired as a sous-chef or the head chef, you’re now privy to a lot of information that is inaccessible to the front of the house. This is especially true in our program, where faculty positions, though renewable, are not on the tenure-track, so there isn’t a service component that would involve faculty members in the regular administrative tasks, like hiring, of a traditional department.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
--Robert Frost “Mending Wall”
At a time when we are repeatedly told that the world is flat, that words, images, and ideas can be sent from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else with the click of a button, and that nation states are a thing of the past, walls–actual, physical walls and barriers— would seem to be a thing of the past. The “fall” of the Berlin Wall in 1989 increasingly seems to represent not just the end of Soviet Communism, but the beginning of a New World Order characterized by globalism. Small matter that when the first official celebration of German Reunification took place less than a year later many were wearing t-shirts that proclaimed in Berlin dialect: Ick will meine Mauer wieder ham! (I want my wall back!).
I had the opportunity this past week to visit perhaps the most famous wall of them all, the Great Wall of China.
Even the most jaded of travelers would have to agree that it is an impressive site. However effective it may or may not have been at once keeping people out of China, it now brings people in.
Personally, I’ve never tried to invade China, but I suspect that if I did I would get a great deal more trouble from the highway toll booths than from the Wall. For the moment, however, the toll booths seem happy to lay down their arms at the site of a tourist bus.
So, China is going global. Perhaps we should be grateful that Ronald Reagan never asked Deng Xiaoping to tear down the Great Wall, because that would have taken a great effort and have been a terrible loss to world culture. In its own way, however, the current function of the wall as a site of an increasingly global tourism does say something about the transformation, not to say the “fall,” of Chinese Communism.
But what does it say? Some hear the message that slowly but surely China too is joining the World. What more proof do you need than the 2008 Summer Olympics? Clearly there is something to this. But I saw a lot of other walls in China as well. Barriers on the medians of major roads to discourage the decidedly unmodern habit of Chinese people to cross them wherever they please. And lots of construction walls around what used to be neighborhoods but will soon be grassy open spaces, high-rises, or perhaps Olympic villages. A lot of eggs are being broken, but it isn’t yet clear what kind of omelet is going to be made from them or how many people it is going to feed.
The official opinion of the Chinese government and the majority of Western observers will be that this is progress, while the liberal counter-view will lament the loss of traditional architecture and ways of living. I myself am a skeptical about the character-building virtues of communal toilets and so on, but there is no denying that while some are being transplanted to newer, more modern digs, and happily so, others are suffering great, even life-destroying loses from these changes, including finding themselves homeless.
In the 1978 film Superman: The Movie, Gene Hackman, in an unforgettable performance as Lex Luther, explains to his arch-rival Superman, played by the late Christopher Reeves, his plan to detonate an atomic bomb on the San Andreas fault, plunging the California coast into the sea and leaving behind a new West Coast of previously low-value desert that he, Lex Luther, has been buying up. Luther’s father once told him, he explains, stocks may rise and stocks may fall, the value of anything and everything will change, “but people will always need land, and they will pay through the nose to get it.” Lex succeeds in his plan and Superman is only able to triumph in the end by reversing the orbit of the earth and turning back time.
Short of someone with an unconditional commitment to the good of mankind and that particular superpower coming along, we will have to continue to accept the difficulties of living in a world in which we all need land, in which we all take up space, drink water, and breathe air somewhere other than in cyberspace. In the meantime, walls will continue to do what they do, some becoming sites of history and collective memory, some keeping out the riff-raff, improving traffic flow, or reinventing Israel.
I'm writing this from China, where web access has been spotty at best, a combination of weird hotels and smoky internet cafes making it far less pleasant than usual to spend time online. And so alas, dear printculture readers, the best I can do this week (and more than likely next) is a few scattered ideas. But I promise the definitive statement on today's China, in which I'll bring together the complexities of the global economy, the movements of capital, and cultural transformation in an easily digested package of three or four hundred words, sometime later...
In the meantime:
1. Anyone wanting to deduce some measure of the historical changes in China since 1949 could begin with the life of my mother-in-law, whose bullheaded movement forward in the face of technological and economic change means that she has a lot of great stories to tell. Last night, she remembered with some pleasure her first visit to a Western-style movie theater with the family. As the lights went down and the film began, she shouted, "Turn up the lights! It's too dark in here!" The kids were of course mortified, and she, convinced it was just too damn dark for normal people, walked out, never to return--she's never seen another movie in a theater. She tells this story with great pride.
2. Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the first person of non-Chinese descent will call him- or herself "Chinese" (I am excepting the handful of American Maoists who stayed here through the Cultural Revolution). This will have been an effect of the fact that it is now possible for people who are part of the global business class (most of whom are of European descent) to spend their whole lives in China--there's enough infrastructure here now to support that, at least for the length of a working life (it's not that clear to me that a businessperson spending his/her whole life here wouldn't retire back "home"). That means that the children of these workers will be able to grow up here from birth to college (right now college is possible but I imagine most such children will study in the West). The "Chineseness" they acquire will presumably be a partial product of high-end global diplo-business culture (which embassy kids live today), but they will share it in common with the millions of Chinese who can now afford to live, work, eat, and send their kids to school with the West's elite. Whether this cultural Chineseness will affect political Chineseness at all is, from this prophetic perspective, fairly doubtful. But we'll see.
3. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote "it is absurd to think of a purely objective prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a programme for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. ... Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in every prediction." That goes for #2 above, of course, but I thought of it first two weeks ago when I sat next to a man at dinner whose knowledgeable and pessmistic take on current global politics included the blithely delivered announcement that he believed that European Muslims would in the next 20 years be subject to a second Holocaust.
4. A fun thought experiment: you are told you are going to die in 10 minutes. The only thing you're allowed to do is write. What do you write? Same question for 10 hours, and for one year. Surprisingly, for me the hardest one is 10 hours: beyond writing notes to loved ones (which is what I'd do for the 10 mintues), I can't think of anything good I could do with that amount of time. My answer to the year question is, at least right now, that I'd write the methods book I'm saving for my 40s.
I don’t like baseball, but I kind of wish I did. Having moved near enough to Boston to be in Red Sox territory, baseball is a big deal in my new home town. It would, of course, have been better to hop on that particular bandwagon last year, before rather than after the conclusion of the Babe Ruth curse, but in any event I’ve sworn a friend and Yankees fan that I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox. As I mentioned up front, this is hardly a burdensome promise to keep inasmuch as I’m pretty indifferent about the entire sport.
One of the things I like least about baseball is what I also most admire about it. After investing a few hours is watching or listening to a game, all you’ve witnessed is one win or loss out of 162. In other words, that game in and of itself is meaningless. Those “crucial” wins at the end of the season are only crucial because the team lost an equal number of meaningless game three months earlier.
The season only gains meaning by accretion in a logic that seems democratic enough to put something behind baseball’s role as America’s pastime. Not so much democratic as the dream of universal fairness, but rather the nuts and bolts political imaginary that makes democracy work. It is the logic of the vote – each vote by itself is meaningless, but . . .
And, to get back to my ruminations from last week on the value of paying attention, it’s the logic of the obligations of the press and the people. Criticism of the press as it exists today is warranted for a lot of reasons, but it doesn’t speak directly, I think, to the importance of understanding awareness of the world’s events as every bit the obligation voting is.
It’s true that as the quality of journalism declines there is a danger that the desire of people to be well-informed could be circumvented, as people feel they’ve done all they can but still don’t know anything useful. That would actually be a good problem to have, but it doesn’t seem to be the one we’ve got. As polls like this one from the 2004 election suggest, the problem is rather that a lot of people haven’t mastered the level of information provided by the television news or presidential debates. See in particular the sections titled “But Tennesseans not all that issue savvy” and the should-I-laugh-or-cry gem “Many favor positions inconsistent with their candidate.” To say that the debates are worthless because the candidates simply repeat stock policy statements assumes that the audience couldn’t benefit from hearing some policy statements repeated to the point that they could correctly associate them with the candidate they plan to vote for. (I can imagine reasons why pollsters would be reluctant to do so, but tying opinion to objective tests of knowledge seems like a useful bridge between the providers of news and their audience.)
Moreover, it would be hard to claim that there’s anything more than a niche interest in better journalism until a basic level of news proficiency is more widespread. The difficulty is that the reward for the effort it takes to gain that level of knowledge is the ephemeral collective reward of the ballot cast. It’s a leap of faith that requires a sense of obligation to others or to the basic idea of collectivity, the leap of faith that promises – I’m only guessing, since this one’s a faith I don’t feel – fans that that 1 out of 162 win in April is actually going to mean something in October.
In Slate’s Cranky Gardener series, there’s only one gardener who really lives up to the title. Granted, it’s been some time since Bradford McKee’s “Hack Job: How Clueless Weekend Gardeners Mistreat Their Plants” first appeared in the online magazine, but every now and then I recall it and recall it with, I should add, a little bit of wonder.
Rather than directing his ire at the relatively safe targets the other cranky gardeners choose (squirrels, the weather), this guy lashes out at the very person who may well represent the core of his readership… the weekend gardener.
Take the captions that accompany his side-by-side visual examples of good and bad pruning, or as the teaser puts it, “the many depredations people commit around the garden”:
On the owner of a forsythia: "The owner of this sad plant prunes off the top each year, taking a page from a developer’s handbook to suburban landscaping, which says that all plants, regardless of their natural growing patterns, should look like gumdrops."
On the owner of a pyracantha, who appears to be, judging from the house in the background, the same unfortunate owner of the gumdrop: "When you lose interest and quit pruning, the plant winds up looking ghoulish, like a tree hung with concertina wire for the holidays, à la the example on the right."
On the owner of a certain unkempt privet: "If you’re not up for the maintenance, opt for a chain-link fence."
My question for this writer – whence the venom?
Maybe it’s professional. The boot-camp style is popular as a form of instruction. And he does seem to really feel for these plants who are variously described as suffering from human maladies of suffocation, starvation, even baldness.
Maybe it’s personal. That all the pictures seem to be taken in the same neighborhood, some even in front of the same house, makes it seem as if the writer has an axe to grind with his own neighbors… (he does seem to have some inside information – “the owner of this sad plant prunes off the top each year.”) Each photo includes enough visual evidence that the landscaper, as well as their neighbors, can identify the outed offenders. I mean, it’s hard to imagine outrage like his being entirely impersonal.
The thing that keeps irking me though is the slight classist tinge to his complaints. Lined up, the concertina wire, the chain-link fence, the police tape (another mistreated forsythia), somehow even the gumdrop (more populist than a lemondrop?) start to paint a picture of the bad end of town.
And maybe I just feel too closely the indictment leveled by the cranky gardener. Having recently leased a smallish plot of crabgrass, two oddly placed hostas and a house that springs solely from an outcropping of mulch – I do long for the Seussian whimsy of the gumdrop shrub.
In a typically brilliant meta-move during his personal golden age of comedy, Steve Martin would come on stage and announce “It’s really great to be here!” As any performer would, he then walked toward the other side of the stage, but after repeating: “It’s really great to be here!” would add: “It was great to be over there, but now it’s great to be here!”
After a week in Kyoto full of the ups and downs typical of foreign travel, I am surprised to find myself feeling a sense of something like a homecoming upon returning to Tokyo –a place I had never been until recently and where I know no one. To some extent this is just a predictable quantitative degree of difference: trading the unfamiliar for the slightly less unfamiliar. And a large part of it is being connected again (though briefly) to friends and family through the umbilical cord I am using to post this. But it is also a testament to the powerful effect of first impressions, to the inappropriate but undeniable sense of propriety and identification one feels after getting one’s bearings in a new place.
In the brief moment between the end of the Cold War and the start of the New World Order I lived in Berlin. Before that, the night I first arrived in Berlin as part of a week-long field-trip, I went with a group of fellow undergrads to a café near Savigny Platz and at the end of that week, during a conversation with a friend over pizza in a restaurant just a block or two from there, decided to move to Berlin when the study-abroad program in not-yet former West Germany ended the following week. While the area is generally unremarkable, I continued to feel a special fondness, even a sense of home, whenever I passed through there in the year that followed. There’s a nice bookstore, where I would browse but couldn’t afford to buy anything; a good art house theater, where I saw Gus Van Sant’s first film Mala Noche, and it’s not too far a walk to the Italian restaurant where I first had tiramisu, which, since I had grown up in a place that missed the yuppie revolution, was a minor revelation. But I never lived there and all told didn’t spent much time there compared to the places I lived, worked, shopped, pub crawled, or watched the Reunification celebrations and protests, yet it continues to be one of the first places I think of when I think of what is now the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany.
I don’t remember at what point in the course of our relationship my wife and I became conscious of the fact that we tended not to travel like other people. While we do certain things that appear in travel guides, in many ways, we realized, we acted as if we were living in the place, even if visiting for just a few days. More precisely: like we were living there and having a day out on the town, but nonetheless if, for example, there was a famous zoo and a minor museum, we chose the latter because, well, that’s what we do. We spend entirely too much time in cafes, tend to have a meal bought at a grocery store, and walk when we could see and do more things if we would embrace more efficient means of transport. As if we were trying the place on for size, even with no intention or even desire to stay for long or to return.
In the past two weeks I’ve been through an earthquake, caught the edge of a typhoon, and, due to an ATM situation not worth explaining, lived two days on about twenty dollars in a fairly expensive cash-only country. Back on the umbilical cord something inspired me, for the first time, to get an account and download a song, an old favorite: Talking Heads “This Must Be the Place.” My introduction to Talking Heads was the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, which I saw at the one art-house theater in the city closest to the small town where I grew up. Although I’ve been to that city many times since, I haven’t been back to the theater, but when I think of that city, it’s still the first place I think of.
To consider legislating weight control—the problem I have set myself to thinking about here—requires honestly considering the ways weight, and, more to the point, fat, works in American culture. Here personal experience clarifies things for me: A few years ago I lost about sixty pounds (more or less by eating less and exercising more), but until I was 30 years old I spent most of my life being what other people called “big,” what I thought of as “fat,” and what my mother occasionally referred to as “obese” (the ugliest word in the language). For me the major emotion associated with fat is rage—that is, a kind of anger tinged with humiliation, the kind of anger that comes from and represses but can never repress enough the humiliation from which it stems. Now, when I see overweight people, I am often overcome, not with sympathy, but with anger, with contempt for their weakness and their inability to control themselves. Such reactions are, if not insane, then certainly irrational, and I wish that I didn’t have them. But I do, at least in the first instant, before the conscious comes in and civilizes me.
