Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 168
August 30, 2014
Dumpster Diving For Posterity
On his peculiar blog, The Other John Updike Archive, Paul Moran documents correspondence and personal artifacts lifted from the author’s trash. In a profile of Moran, Adrienne LaFrance considers how the project “raises fundamental questions about celebrity, privacy, and who ultimately determines the value and scope of an artist’s legacy”:
Moran has kept thousands of pieces of Updike’s garbage—a trove that he says includes photographs, discarded drafts of stories, canceled checks, White House
invitations, Christmas cards, love letters, floppy disks, a Mickey Mouse flip book, and a pair of brown tasseled loafers. … James Plath, who is president of The John Updike Society, says Updike would have been “appalled” and “horrified” by Moran sifting through his trash. But Plath commends Moran for what he did. “If I was in the area, I would have done the same thing maybe. I think he did the world’s best dumpster diving.” Others, like the Updike estate’s literary agent Andrew Wylie, see it differently. “Anything he has is stolen,” Wylie said of Moran. “He was a dumpster digger. And he would steal the Updike’s trashbags every Wednesday … The family takes the situation very seriously. They have certainly tried to get him to stop but he’s not stopped.” …
“It was disgusting, the actual pursuit of it,” Moran told me. “The immediacy made it seem so wrong, but longterm, if you flash back on virtually any major author or historical artist, you would think, ‘I wish I had Mark Twain’s stuff or Andy Warhol’s stuff.’ The only morality, as somebody said to me, is if you could focus more on the culture than the vulture aspect … I just hope that it enhances his legacy.”
(Image of findings from Updike’s trash via Paul Moran)
Imaginary Eats
In a review of Sandra Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination, Bee Wilson traces the history of fictional food:
In a chapter on food in children’s fiction, Gilbert suggests that food fantasies originate in children’s dreams of never-ending bounty. “Lollipop trees and gingerbread houses. Bottles of cherry-tarts mingled with custard, roast turkey, toffee and other goodies. Spoonfuls of sugar.” For most of history, while communities lived in constant fear of the next famine, the culinary imagination was dominated by Rabelaisian excess. In children’s books, we are all still ravenous. We share the hunger of Laura Ingalls Wilder for maple sugar and candy canes. In real life, sugar is now almost as freely available as the gingerbread on the cottage in “Hansel and Gretel,” yet in our bedtime stories it remains a precious commodity. The sweets in the Harry Potter series, whose release coincided with an inexorable rise in childhood obesity, are no less lavish and no less lusted over than those in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
Wilson continues, “The nonfiction food writing now aimed at adults contains somewhat different fantasies”:
Gilbert writes of the “postmodern pastorals,” which, rather than inviting us to indulge in rivers of chocolate, create a fantasy of simple self-sufficiency wherein one never eats anything one hasn’t grown or at least cooked oneself, in an imagined recreation of the lifestyle of great-grandmothers. Now the dream is not of plenty but of scarcity: the make-believe idea that we are still governed by the constraints of the seasons. These utopias allow us to pretend that peaches in summer or squash in the fall still have the same force they once did. What is forgotten, Gilbert suggests, is the uncomfortable fact that many peasant great-grandmothers ate “a monotonous and often dangerous diet.”
Why Are Book Reviews So Boring?
Elisabeth Donnelly wagers that part of the reason “is that the people doing the reviewing are the writers and people in the book industry who are working in a similar genre”:
Book criticism, unlike other genres, is notoriously insular, like a meeting of Harvard men making Harvard plans for world domination at the Harvard club in NYC. … [T]here are too many vested interests for anything but lukewarm praise and a plot summary. (It is why a website like The Talkhouse, which offers “musicians on music” and “filmmakers on film” is clubby, insular, and boring.) And even if a review is critical, it’s only in the context of a discussion of whether or not the quality of the writing is good. But that’s not the only way to judge a book’s merit — or, crucially, its importance.
I find when I meet people who consider “liking books” as an important part of their identity, they’re not always acutely verbal as to the hows and whys of how a book can touch your life, heart, and brain. They’re good, fluent writers, but not good critics. They can enthuse on something for 1000 words, but they can’t get to the actual point: why the book matters, how it could change your life. Naturally, these people are often professional book reviewers, and their requirements when they’re freelancing at the occasional publication is to take what the editor assigns, and then to produce a piece that has some sort of thesis and is smart enough to impress people. … The result is boring, because nobody’s being pushed out of their boxes. When you meet people reading popular fiction, by contrast, you find that they’re excited about their books. They read voraciously. They may not be bragging about it online on a cool site, with photos of their long-lasting TBR pile. But they’re reading.
A Poem For Saturday
Evenings of these balmy August days, while riding my bicycle, I glimpse deer stepping out from the edges of thickets—including fawns and young bucks with delicate horns. This poem by Edmund Spenser springs naturally to mind, although it’s sweetly clear that he had something else on his. It’s one of ninety about his courtship of his wife, Elizabeth Boyle, published in 1595 with his Epithalamion, celebrating their marriage.
From Amoretti by Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599):
Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,
Seeing the game from him escapt away,
sits downe to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds beguyld of their pray:
So after long pursuit and vaine assay,
when I all weary had the chace forsooke,
the gentle deare returnd the selfe-same way,
thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she beholding me with mylder looke,
sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide:
till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke,
and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde.
Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld,
so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld.
(Photo by Jereme Rauckman)
Auto-Admiration?
Jesse Bering reviews research suggesting that not only can people accurately match dogs’ faces to their owners, but also that “our faces also bear an uncanny resemblance to the frontend views of our automobiles.” Participants in a study were given a picture of a car and asked to rank its possible owners on a scale of 1 to 6:
[T]he authors suspected that the judges in their study would be able to match cars
with their correct owners above chance levels. And that’s what they found. “The real owner was in fact assigned rank 1 most frequently,” they write, “and rank 6 least frequently.” This proved true regardless of the subjects’ sex and age. There were an equal number of male and female judges, and they ranged widely in age—from 16 to 78 years. In case the sheer bizarreness of these data hasn’t quite registered, let me put it to you more bluntly: The average person can detect a physical similarity in the “faces” of cars and their owners. …
Implied in these results is the startling fact that most car owners are unwittingly purchasing cars that look like them. If that’s the case, figured [researchers Stefan] Stiegar and [Martin] Voracek, then is it possible that judges can even take it one step further, matching dogs to their masters’ cars? After all, we know now that it’s not a myth: dogs really do look like their owners. And since we choose both cars and dogs that physically resemble us, shouldn’t our dogs and our cars look alike too? Here, frankly, the data just get weird. Nevertheless, they’re genuine. In their third and final study, the authors added 36 portraits of dogs into the mix. Half of these were of purebreds, and the others were mutts. In a twist to the previous studies, a new group of judges saw an image of a car (again, either the front, side, or rear view) and beneath that, six individual dogs. Subjects ranked each dog on the likelihood of its master being the owner of the car shown. Amazingly, the participants were able to pull this feat off as well.
Meanwhile, Laura Bliss considers the oddly human attachments people form to their vehicles:
To many of us, [cars] are beloved, person-like companions. More than 70 percent of respondents to a recent AutoTrader survey were at least “somewhat” if not “very attached” to their cars, with 36 percent describing their vehicle as “an old friend.” In another study, nearly half of all drivers assigned a gender to their cars, and about one-third actually name them.
For many car-owners, emotional attachment can also come hand-in-hand with socio-economic mobility. For example, there’s research that suggests for certain low-income families, owning a car is linked to the ability to live in neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and lower health risks, as well as higher neighborhood satisfaction and stronger chances of employment.
Car-owners often assign human-like attributes to our cars, too. A 2006 study found significant differences between how participants understood their own personality and how they described their cars’. And in that same AutoTrader report, more than a quarter said they felt “sad” when they thought about parting ways with their internally combusting pal.
The Essential Creepiness Of DFW Fandom, Ctd
An 11-year-old DFW superfan recreated Infinite Jest with Legos:
[English professor Kevin] Griffith and his son [Sebastian] had the idea to “translate” Infinite Jest into Lego after reading Brendan Powell Smith’s The Brick Bible, which takes on the New Testament. “Wallace’s novel is probably the only contemporary text to offer a similar challenge to artists working in the medium of Lego,” they write, grandly, on their website. …
Sebastian didn’t read Infinite Jest himself. “Let me be clear – Infinite Jest is not a novel for children,” says Griffith. “Instead, I would describe a scene to him and he would recreate it in a way that suited his vision. All the scenes are created by him and he then took photos of them using a 10-year-old Kodak digital camera he received for a present long ago. I think that having the scenes reflect an 11-year-old’s perspective gives them a little extra poignancy, maybe.”
The caption for the above image is from page 409 of Infinite Jest: “Clipperton plays tennis with the Glock 17 held steadily to his left temple.” Meanwhile, Matthew Nolan looks for lessons from DFW about why American men aren’t playing the sport better:
Wallace’s discerning tennis essays and fiction made it clear that elite tennis players cannot simply be manufactured through training by academies and player development programs. The fact that there are aspects of success that go beyond the academy helps to explain why the current top 20 players in the world represent 14 different countries, and almost all come from different training backgrounds. The recent success of junior male players, like U.S. Open Wild Card Noah Rubin from the training facility run by John McEnroe (another Wallace favorite), will excite Americans, but enthusiasm needs to be tempered with Wallace-ian recognition of the nature of the game. Wallace would not likely have lamented the state of American men’s tennis but instead would have probably sympathized with the ongoing struggles of all players, regardless of national origin. Likening tennis to life itself, a veteran player and coach in Infinite Jest respectfully sums up the game: “It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.”
(Image via Brickjest)
Map Of The Day
Reed Jordan spotlights our schools’ racial segregation:
Despite our country’s growing diversity, our public schools provide little contact between white students and students of color. We’ve mapped data about the racial composition of U.S. public schools to shed light on today’s patterns at the county level. These maps show that America’s public schools are highly segregated by race and income, with the declining share of white students typically concentrated in schools with other white students and the growing share of Latino students concentrated into low-income public schools with other students of color.
In every state but New Mexico and Hawaii, the average white student attends a school that is majority white. This is unsurprising for large swaths of the Northwest, Great Plains, Upper Midwest and Northeast, which are home to very few kids of color. But even in diverse states like Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York, few white children attend diverse schools.
On Learning New Things
It turns out that Ta-Nehisi Coates spent the summer just down the hill, at Middlebury College where Sue and I both hang our hats. In the summer Middlebury’s famous language school–which makes students sign a pledge that they’ll only speak the language they’re studying all summer–takes over the campus, and this year Mr. Coates was studying French. And studying the act of learning something new, which is an easier process to see (if not to do) past a certain age. His stay resulted in a brilliant essay in the new Atlantic, which has a lot of smart things to say about race in America, the inequality of influence in our culture, and the smugness with which white people caricature African-American attitudes towards education. I, um, learned a lot reading it, and look forward to re-reading it more than once. (It’s also a subtle and persuasive follow-up to his groundbreaking piece on reparations earlier in the year).
Politics aside, it also describes the learning process with wit, rigor, and a kind of joy that makes one want to (as soon as the Labor Day weekend has passed) go out and work hard to learn some new thing!
One afternoon, I was walking from lunch feeling battered by the language. I started talking with a young master in training. I told her I was having a tough time. She gave me some encouraging words in French from a famous author. I told her I didn’t understand. She repeated them. I still didn’t understand. She repeated them again. I shook my head, smiled, and walked away mildly frustrated because I understood every word she was saying but could not understand how it fit. It was as though someone had said, “He her walks swim plus that yesterday the fight.” (This is how French often sounds to me.)
The next day, I sat at lunch with her and another young woman. I asked her to spell the quote out for me. I wrote the phrase down. I did not understand. The other young lady explained the function of the pronouns in the sentence. Suddenly I understood—and not just the meaning of the phrase. I understood something about the function of language, why being able to diagram sentences was important, why understanding partitives and collective nouns was important.
In my long voyage through this sea of language, that was my first sighting of land. I now knew how much I didn’t know. The feeling of discovery and understanding that came from this was incredible. It was the first moment when I thought I might survive the sea.
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