Kristopher Jansma's Blog, page 14
May 8, 2013
Mother's Day: The Royal Pinkie
Joshua sleeping peacefully.
Last week I called my mother at 4 AM, near to tears, for the first time in a long time. I was standing on the corner of Union Street and 5th Avenue in Brooklyn in my pajamas, my wife Leah and newborn son Joshua in the idling car next to me. It was our first night home from the hospital, and things weren't going well. I must have seen parents do this on TV: drive a newborn around in their car seat until they settled down. We’d tried it out of desperation --- an excuse to get out of our tiny apartment where we feared he’d wake our neighbors. But our son was not lulled by the potholes of Park Slope, and the neighbors could probably still hear him from five blocks away.
February 6, 2013
LITERARY ARTIFACTS: The Ginsberg Collaborators
First Blues by Allen Ginsberg
On a Wednesday night late in January, half a dozen known-associates of the late activist-poet Allen Ginsberg gathered at the Housing Works Bookstore on Crosby Street to read anti-government poetry and perform live, radical music to a room packed by dissidents both young and old, who were quite literally hanging from the rafters. It wasn’t so much an anarchistic rally as it was an exuberant and peaceful celebration of Ginsberg’s life in poetry and song. But it was hard not to be stirred by the lawless spirit of the Beats while in the presence of some of Allen’s greatest collaborators
February 4, 2013
Review: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
The Believer - February 2013
Check out this month's issue of The Believer for my review of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce, as illustrated by François Vigneault of Portland-based Scout Books.
[Click here to read it at The Believer's website]
Or pick up an issue at bookstores nationwide!
January 7, 2013
Elmore Leonard & "Justified"
Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Credit: James Minchin/FX)
FX’s hit series “Justified,” which returns on Tuesday for its fourth season, has been hailed as groundbreaking for its complex, moral storytelling, its modern-Old West setting of Harlan, Ky., and for its lawman hero, Raylan Givens, perpetually wearing a white cowboy hat and played with no small amount of charm by Timothy Olyphant.
But the show has been quietly breaking another kind of ground these past few years. Both the character of Raylan and the world of Harlan come from the pages of master crime-writer Elmore Leonard, who created Givens as a secondary character in two novels about Miami from the mid-’90s, “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap.” It wasn’t until 2001 that Leonard wrote the story “Fire in the Hole,” which made Raylan the star and sent him back home to Kentucky. This story became the basis for the pilot episode of “Justified” in 2010.
Elmore Leonard & "Justified"
Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Credit: James Minchin/FX)
FX’s hit series “Justified,” which returns on Tuesday for its fourth season, has been hailed as groundbreaking for its complex, moral storytelling, its modern-Old West setting of Harlan, Ky., and for its lawman hero, Raylan Givens, perpetually wearing a white cowboy hat and played with no small amount of charm by Timothy Olyphant.
But the show has been quietly breaking another kind of ground these past few years. Both the character of Raylan and the world of Harlan come from the pages of master crime-writer Elmore Leonard, who created Givens as a secondary character in two novels about Miami from the mid-’90s, “Pronto” and “Riding the Rap.” It wasn’t until 2001 that Leonard wrote the story “Fire in the Hole,” which made Raylan the star and sent him back home to Kentucky. This story became the basis for the pilot episode of “Justified” in 2010.
December 21, 2012
True Stories: A Christmas Story
Here is my fondest holiday memory: my mother and my
sister and I are hunkering down on the old, brown couch in our wood-paneled TV room;
my father is in the recliner beside us, channel surfing for some Christmas movie
we can all watch. We don’t have cable,
so the options are limited, usually to a Claymation Rudolph or Charlie Brown
Special. But that year, miraculously he comes
across the 1983 film A Christmas Story.
As the narrator guides us back into suburban Indiana
in the 1940s, we all watch in delight as Ralphie (nine-years-old,
blonde-haired, and bespectacled, just like me) presses his face against the
window of Higbee’s Department Store in mute desperation for an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model BB rifle with a
compass in the stock (and this thing that tells time). My father chuckles as Mr. Parker enters his crossword
contests and wages war against the exploding furnace. My mother shrieks happily as Mrs. Parker squeezes
Ralphie’s younger brother, Randy, into his red snowsuit, and my sister giggles
as the boy sobs, “I can’t move my arms down!” and falls into the snow. We all laugh like we’ve never laughed at
anything before, all the way to the movie’s end.
That is my memory of Christmas, 1991. When, the following year, Christmas
approached, it was all that I could think about. Each day I scanned our six channels
fruitlessly for the movie to come on. Finally
I begged my mother to drive us to rent it so that we could all watch it
together again. “What movie is this?”
she asked, as I tore it off the wire shelf at the video store. “It’s rated PG. I’m not sure this is
going to be appropriate.”
I howled. “No!
Last Christmas, we all watched it!
Remember?” My mother did not, but
she acquiesced, and that night, I chased my father and sister back into the TV
room and pushed the tape into the VCR, delighted to repeat what had become, in
my memory, one of the greatest nights of our lives.
But I heard my mother groan as the movie began, and
Ralphie and his classmates greeted their teacher, Miss Shields, with grotesque
joke teeth in their mouths. This groaning
grew louder when Ralphie’s friend Flick triple-dog-dares Schwartz to stick his
tongue to the flagpole – and then abandon him in a panic. “What is
this movie?” she muttered, as poor Flick returned to class with his tongue in
bandages. I was sure it would all come
back to them soon enough, and I pleaded with her to keep it on.
Only, the troops grew more and more listless as the family
on TV sat down to dinner, with Randy sculpting his mashed potatoes and moaning
poems about not wanting to eat his meatloaf.
And when his mother invited him to stick his face directly into his food
like a “piggy”, my own mother had had enough. “Turn this off!” she finally demanded.
I did not understand. How could this be happening? I screamed for them to leave it on and begged
my sister to tell them that she remembered…
just a year ago we had all loved this movie! Huge grin on her face, my sister shrugged
her shoulders, as if she hadn’t the faintest clue what I was talking about.
To his credit, my father held off a little longer, until
Mr. Parker’s big contest prize at last arrived.
But I knew by then that I was doomed.
My father, who left the room uncomfortably whenever there was more than
three seconds of kissing in a movie, was not going to like what came next. Mr. Parker extracted the sultry, iconic leg-lamp
from the box – with its fishnet stocking and high-heeled shoe – his “eyes
boggled, overcome by art.” My own
father’s eyes boggled too, as he frantically jammed at on the power button on
the remote. We never finished the movie
and I was sent to bed.
This great amnesia would continue to vex me as I
grew up. I kept expecting that the
memory would eventually be dredged up from their forgetfulness, but it never was. Instead, each time we came across the movie
on TV, my parents remembered only the day I made them watch that “horrible”
movie.
Today, I have come to accept a different version of
events, despite my still-sure memory. Far
more likely than them forgetting the film entirely, is the reality that I must
have watched A Christmas Story alone
in the TV room that first year, probably while my parents were entertaining
some co-workers in the living room and my sister was already in bed. Probably I knew I was watching something I
shouldn’t, and so I somehow convinced myself that it was all OK, and that I had
not broken the rules at all. I dreamed
up this story about watching it with full familial approval, to everyone’s rhapsodic
joy. Somehow this fiction became so real
to me then that I expected no danger whatsoever the following year, when I plunked
everyone down to watch it with me “again”.
To date, my family has never sat down to watch A Christmas Story again, though twenty
years have gone by and many things have changed. My parents have cable, and more than one TV,
and we’ve long-since broken the R-rating barrier. My father can even (mostly) sit through the
long make-out scenes on each week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Still, I’ve
dropped the fight. I don’t think they’d
like the movie any more today than they did then.
When I watch it again now, the gritty backdrop of
1940s Indiana reminds me very little of the pleasant 1980s New Jersey where I
grew up. I think I can see what my
parents saw back then: a movie about a place far more similar to Illinois and
Buffalo where they had been children in much tighter times, plagued by the hard
realities that they had worked hard to leave behind, and which they
optimistically hoped to shield us from for as long as possible.
But at age nine, in that PG movie, I saw the first
glimmers of a childhood beyond Disney films: an anti-nostalgic Christmas, where
yellow-eyed bullies like Scut Farkus lurked behind the crooked fences and the
neighbors’ smelly hound dogs threatened the daily peace. Where parents squabbled and children behaved
badly in the “jungles of kid-dom”. Where,
ironically, the long-sought after Little Orphan Annie decoder pin reveals
nothing but an advertisement for Ovaltine.
These were realities I was already becoming aware of. Unlike Ralphie, I had never had my mouth
scrubbed out with soap, for I had never said the F-word. I did not, then, even know what the F-word was, but I knew that there were words
out there that I could not, should not, must not say.
My parents might be relieved to know, however, that
I never saw much of them in the Parkers – hot-tempered and grumbly and a little
dense. Maybe just a little, in the scene
where Ralphie’s mother downplays his fight with Farkus to Ralphie’s father, or
when the father later steps in to defend his son from the “pink nightmare” of
the bunny costume Aunt Clara sews him as a gift. Only in those well-meaning protections did I
see a little glimmer of them.
“Did you get everything you wanted?” Ralphie’s
father asks him, after the presents have all been unwrapped.
“Almost,” he answers. Despite not getting the gun he longed for, he
seems at peace in his parents’ arms on the couch.
“Almost, huh?
Well, that’s life,” his dad replies.
“Yup,” Ralphie agrees, happy enough.
It’s only then that Ralphie’s dad points out the
unwrapped gift hidden behind the desk.
It is, of course, the coveted, official Red Ryder carbine-action
200-shot range model BB rifle with a compass in the stock (and this thing that
tells time).
Sometimes I still wish that my parents had watched
this far into the film, so they could see this great kindness, which is not
erased by the subsequent irony that, in his first time out with the gun,
Ralphie very nearly does shoot his eye out, exactly as all the adults had
predicted.
December 19, 2012
LITERARY ARTIFACTS: The New Curiosity Shop
Just across from the New York Public Library’s brightly-lit gift shop is another kind of shop altogether: a windowless room full of dark-grained wood and locked glass cases containing priceless treasures. High up on the shelves are ships-in-bottles, stuffed blackbirds, model windmills, and tomes of mysterious origin. Silent patrons wander up and down the aisles, peering behind velvet curtains and opening tiny doors, revealing only they know what.
This modern-day cabinet of curiosities is the “Charles Dickens: The Key to Character” exhibit (now until January 27th) and the display cases are filled with defining images of Dickens’s beloved creations: there’s scrappy Oliver Twist, in an 1837 watercolor; there’s old Samuel Pickwick chasing his hat across a pencil drawing; little David Copperfield on a 1920’s dust jacket; decayed Miss Havisham in her wedding dress; and in a colored etching, with all his greatest expectations, Pip looks back over his shoulder as he leaves home.
To see them all in one place is to be astounded at the sheer number of indispensable characters Dickens dreamt-up, as well as their staying power in our literary imagination after more than 150 years.
[Read the rest here at Electric Literature!]
October 24, 2012
LITERARY ARTIFACTS: You Say You Want a Revolution? Zines at the Brooklyn College Library
Pop quiz. Which great thinker and important cultural revolutionary wrote the following?
[image error]“We are caught within the gears of a system that is primed to generate loss, trauma, and grief while leaving us scrambling and struggling for the resources and social supports we need to process this grief. To claim our grief—to claim that our relationships with each other matter—within this climate of isolation and denial is itself a radical act.”
Was it Gertrude Stein or Marcel Duchamp? Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin?
No, those would be the bold words of Kathleen McIntyre, in the second issue of The Worst: A Compilation Zine on Grief and Loss, which I found not in the back of St. Mark’s Bookshop or some anarchist café, but in the new Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection.
Armed with nothing more than scissors and glue, the zinesters represented in the collection seek nothing less than the deconstruction and redefinition of every element of our society—gender, race, sexuality, capitalism, history, the Internet—and they’re prepared to undermine your dearest assumptions, one photocopied page at a time.
August 16, 2012
Literary Artifacts: The Bibliophiles Move
Last month, my wife Leah and I decided to bite the bullet and move to the distant shores of Brooklyn. I’d lived in Manhattan for nine years, and she for seven, during which time she had worked in publishing and I was an MFA student, then a writing professor. Meaning that, in the span of time since we’d first carted up our modest collections of college books, our library multiplied considerably.
Excited by the prospect of saving on rent, my wife and I signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment across the East River, about the size of our old place and in proximity to another good bookshop. Only later did we stare up at our five overstuffed IKEA bookshelves, remembering what an impediment our literature collection could be in a relocation: more cumbersome than our bulky kitchen appliances, our box-spring, even our couch, which did not technically fit through our front door.
I got out my measuring tape and my calculator. All told, we had 606 inches of shelved books, or 50.5 feet. To that, I added another 174 inches (or 8.83 feet) of books that were piled in various other places in the apartment: by the foot of the bed, under the nightstand, on the coffee table, inside the entertainment unit, and in various bags in the closet. I decided to not worry about the additional four boxes of books that I keep in my office because there is no room for them at home. Our grand total came to approximately 65 feet of books in our 650 square foot apartment.
July 31, 2012
Late Great American Fakes: Jonah Lehrer
Early Monday afternoon, the popular neuroscientist and author Jonah Lehrer resigned from his post as staff writer for the New Yorker, in response to a scandal over falsified quotes in his latest book, Imagine. I watched the news, almost as it broke, in the form of a series of tweets from Reporter Julie Bosman of The New York Times, quoting the full text of Lehrer’s resignation in seven under-140-character snippets:
"Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about six Bob Dylan quotes in my book IMAGINE. / The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, / or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. / But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan's representatives. / This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said. / The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down. / I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker."
I wish that my head had been inside an MRI machine while I’d read each tweet, mapping my neuron pathways in red and blue, so that Jonah Lehrer could explain what was happening inside my brain.
“See, here’s your fusiform gyrus, recognizing the words: ‘improper’, ‘panic’, ‘lie’… and here’s your DLPFC and your midbrain dopamine neurons expressing a discrepancy between your expectation that I was trustworthy and what you’re reading now… in other words, here is where you’re surprised that I lied. This sets off your pituitary-adrenocortical system, causing anger which is going to struggle against the whole pre-frontal cortex, which is associated with logic and reasoning…”
This is the clear, colloquial way that Lehrer has written and spoken about the inner-workings of our brains since 2007, in three bestselling books, a column in The New Yorker, and as a frequent guest on WYNC’s Radiolab. Publishing his first book, Proust is a Neuroscientist, at the age of 26, Lehrer had a unique vision of the potential within the emerging study of the brain, using it to examine the minds of great artists from Whitman to Cézanne to Woolf.
It would have been easy, no doubt, to use modern neuroscience to minimize the giant accomplishments of these artists – to argue perhaps that old Walt just had a hyperactive hypothalamus which aided his sense of rhythm. But Lehrer instead examined how verses in Leaves of Grass like “I sing the body electric” actually prefigured neuroscience by a hundred years. Lehrer argued that through artistic contemplation Walt Whitman was able to intuit things about his own nervous system that microscopes would not uncover for decades. Lehrer writes, “Modern neuroscience is now discovering the anatomy underlying Whitman’s poetry. It has taken his poetic hypothesis – the idea that feelings begin in the flesh – and found the exact nerves and brain regions that make it true… the mind stalks the flesh; from our muscles we steal our moods.” With this light, poetic style of his own, Lehrer’s eight analyses in Proust illuminated a place where the divided paths of art and science could come together, so that each might inform the other.
Lehrer has been called a prodigy, a polymath, and a genius. Indeed, it is rare that someone his age can speak so eloquently and knowledgably about such a wide range of topics, writing equally well about the intricacies in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the aspects of corticofugal feedback in the brain – and all in the same breath. Students of mine have invariably responded well to Lehrer, even those like myself who have very little background in science. A good teacher, like Lehrer, shows you why you should care, neither talking down to you, nor over your head.
Imagine, his latest book, continued further down the joined-path of art and science, in search of the source of inspiration and the roots of creativity itself. But as writers Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist at The Millions pointed out in an early review, Lehrer’s ideas seemed to be getting ahead of the science, as he argued points that did not quite seem to be in evidence, like that creativity was the main feature separating us from the animals. They felt, too, that he stretched the findings of various studies towards conclusions that they could not quite reach. But Lehrer responded to these criticisms within hours, patiently engaging the two writers in a polite debate throughout the rest of the day. He did not succeed in fully addressing their concerns, but he spoke in great detail, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, as usual.
A stark contrast now, four months later, to the clipped language Lehrer used in his admission of guilt in fabricating the Bob Dylan quotes, which has prompted Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to immediately cease shipping new copies of Imagine and to stop selling all e-book versions. David Remnick of The New Yorker has confirmed Lehrer’s resignation, saying, “This is a terrifically sad situation, but, in the end, what is most important is the integrity of what we publish and what we stand for.”
Remnick and the New Yorker had chosen to stand by Lehrer just a month ago when other allegations surfaced that Lehrer had plagiarized his own work in several blog posts. The duplications were quite extensive, and Lehrer apologized for not having clarified his repeated use of his own material. At the time it seemed like these might simply have been ill-advised shortcuts, made by a young writer overwhelmed by his work. I even imagined (no pun intended) that he might have cut the old material and pasted it into his notes, and then in a flurry of handling other details, forgetting to go back and fix it. I even made myself believe that he could have done this multiple times without realizing, even as I knew it was much more likely that he’d gambled on getting away with leaving it as is, thinking that no one was likely to notice.
Now we know that there were far bigger shortcuts he was taking, but worse, we know that as he explained himself to his readers and to The New Yorker, he must have known that these larger lies were still out there. He could have taken that chance to come clean about the wholesale fabrication of the Dylan quotes, but he either arrogantly believed he could conceal the truth or he feared the consequences too much to own up to them.
Even now there is something vaguely disingenuous about his statement. He says he received an email from Moynihan, in response to which, he “spoke” lies in a “moment” of panic – as if he’d verbally blurted out something untrue without thinking, when presumably he had whatever time he needed to consider and write out his full response. Perhaps this, too, can be clarified. Or perhaps as time goes on and other reporters look in deeper they will uncover even larger lies. Because Lehrer wrote about research done by others, it is doubtful that any scientific data got misreported or totally falsified to create links where none existed, a la Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent links between Autism and vaccines. But if Lehrer was willing to put words in the mouth of a legend like Bob Dylan, then it is not hard to imagine he might have gone “the full Stephen Glass” and completely invented sources or anecdotes. The full truth will, most surely, come out in time.
The final section of Proust was a Neuroscientist is titled “Coda”, a well-suited musical reference, and he begins it with a quote from American philosopher Richard Rorty, “To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth.”
It is a fitting reminder to us now that we should not dismiss everything that Lehrer has brought to the table, simply because he lied and cut corners. We’re all too inclined to do this, though I’m not sure why exactly. We might need an MRI to find the neurological source of it, but literature has long understood the deep distrust sown among men by even the smallest lies. That “tangled web that we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
We are inclined to hone in on one small deception and dismiss the rest entirely, even when the rest can be verified independently, as in the recent case of Mike Daisey, who went to China and uncovered gross working conditions at Apple’s factories. In an effort to make it a more compelling story, he unfortunately, lied on the radio about some of the details. This gave many listeners a pretext to ignore the majority of his report on the dozens of other human rights violations that were true.
Jonah, where is the part of my brain that lights up when the little boy who cried “wolf” gets eaten?
Lehrer writes in his Coda about the necessity for the two cultures of art and science to come together into an “expansive critical sphere” which will help us to better understand both the universe of matter and the universe of thought. He writes, “What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth.”
That there are multiple truths out there is a difficult concept in both modern art and science, and this can even lead us to fool ourselves into believing that in an age of uncertainty and mystery, the truth has no bearing. In fact, the confusion of our age makes the truth only more important, and I suspect that Lehrer knows that.
Lehrer breached our trust, and for that we are right to be skeptical. But we ought to bear in mind that the truth is always mixed with mistakes. In his conclusion to Proust, Lehrer quotes the philosopher Karl Popper, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is grope for the truth even though it is beyond our reach."
