Robert David Sullivan

Maine as Tea Party Central, gay penguins in libraries, Graceland turns 25

Some stuff to talk about if you end up in a cartoon graveyard this evening:

• Mother Jones and other sites have praised the Los Angeles Times for the "unusually clear and accurate headline" pictured at right ("GOP governors say they have a recipe for recovery/Reduce healthcare aid to the poor and give tax breaks to the wealthy"). It's been less commented-upon that the state of Maine serves as Exhibit A in the story about Tea Party principles being put into action. The "pugnaciousness" of Gov. Paul LePage is one reason, but it can't hurt that the state is blessed with a slogan — "The Way Life Should Be" — that started as a benign tourism marketing tool but can seem rather arrogant when a steamroller-type governor is standing beneath it, as in the LA Times photo. BTW, if Maine and New Hampshire ever merge, the new state slogan can be "Live the Way Life Should Be or Die."


• The American Library Association has released its Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010. No. 1 was And Tango Makes Three, about two gay penguins raising a chick in the Central Park Zoo (not to be confused with the two gay penguins in Pawnee, Indiana, that got married on Parks and Recreation). The ALA lists the most common reasons for challenging the books, and "political viewpoint" is cited for only one book in the Top 10: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which makes the unpatriotic and unashamedly anti-Ayn-Randian argument that a lot of poor people have to take terrible jobs that don't give them much chance to get out of poverty.


• Paul Simon's album Graceland turns 25 this summer, and Nell Boeschenstein has a great essay about it at This Recording. ("We also recognize not just our parents in the words of those songs, but ourselves and our own impending midlives that loiter like shortening shadows on the horizon. ") It makes me want to find a cassette tape of the recording so I can listen to it the same way I did in college, when I was already acting as if I had hit midlife.

Alcocke and Baals stories

Today's thing I never knew, from Jan Freeman's column on euphemisms in the Boston Globe's Ideas section:

Our rooster and weather vane date from the 19th century, when cock became too vivid for polite American discourse. (So strong was the taboo that Bronson Alcocke, father of Louisa May, changed the family name to Alcott.)

If only Harry Baals had this foresight, he'd have a building named after him by now. From ABC News:

When [Fort Wayne] invited people to suggest names for a new government center, thounsands went online to propose naming it after a longtime mayor from the 1930s and '40s.

The hitch? The city is — perhaps understandably — reluctant to honor the overwhelming winner. Officials confirmed to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette this week that they would not, in fact, be christening the building the "Harry Baals Government Center," even though Baals' name received more than 10,000 votes. (The second runner-up didn't even crack 600.)

 

Texas town doesn't want Arabic classes stuffed down its collective throat

The Dallas Star-Telegram (hat tip: Salon) has a snark-bait article about a school district getting flak from parents for considering an Arabic studies program:

Parents at Monday's meeting ranged from supportive to upset, said Willie Wimbrey, assistant principal at Cross Timbers.

"We had people who were animatedly fearful of anything to do with Islam," he said. "Others want their children exposed to everything. Others who say, We teach about Christmas, why not other religions? All cultures and major religions are taught throughout the state."

OK, yes, it's dumb to be afraid of teaching kids about another culture (especially when there's a shortage of Arabic speakers in our military and our intelligence agencies), but what jumped out at me what this quote from a parent:

"I don't think we should spend all our time on one culture," she said. "I think we should spread it around and be fair. I don't like it being stuffed down our throats."

"Stuffed" is a relatively rare variant of the "down our throats" family of expressions that seem to pop up whenever opponents of change find themselves at a loss for logical argument. Usually, something is shoved, forced, or crammed down our throats. But "stuffed" has a culinary connotation that I like. It makes me think of Julia Child forcing something into a tomato or a duck and being very French-by-way-of-Cambridge about it. I think people should start complaining about being "stuffed and trussed" whenever they feel threatened by change, particularly by anything involving gay rights.

Until recently, I was most accustomed to seeing "down our throat" in stories about land development, almost always by people who thought that their community had reached perfection with their arrival — and were stunned and betrayed to discover that local government thought it necessary to welcome other people.*

*Example using my preferred phrase from a WRAL story in 2003 about a neighborhood in famously liberal Chapel Hill, NC, getting in a snit about Jimmy Carter's favorite nonprofit: "We are objecting to Habitat [for Humanity] stuffing a high-density housing project down our throats — one which does not fit with the neighborhood," [Dr. Richard] Surwit said."

Now, of course, throat-cramming is all about the Obama adminstration forcing health care, low-fat foods, and high-speed rail down our gullets. The Huffington Post's Jason Linkens and Ben Craw (!) assembled a video of various politicians and journalists throwing around the phrase; sadly, but I didn't notice any "stuffed" in it.

I'm just waiting for a Tea Partier to extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion and say, "They are trying to shove ObamaCare [or whatever] down our throats, and, by God, we are going to vomit it right back up!"

Photo of ObamaCared turkey from Muffet. Creative Commons license.

"Banned in Boston" was no joke

The newest issue of CommonWealth magazine is now out, and it includes my review of Neil Miller's Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil.

It's hard to believe now, for much of the early 20th century, Bostonians had to go to New York to get copies of the latest novels that the American intelligensia was chattering about (including An American Tragedy and Elmer Gantry). An excerpt from my review:

At the height of its power, the extralegal Watch and Ward Society, the impetus behind the book-banning craze, could more or less single-handedly pull books out of circulation in Boston, without any kind of judicial review—helped by a broadly written obscenity law at the state level, which the Society was instrumental in enacting. Area booksellers acquiesced to the crackdown, perhaps tired of seeing their clerks arrested for selling titles they often knew nothing about. Beginning in 1915, a committee consisting of three booksellers (always including downtown’s Old Corner Book­store) and three Watch and Ward members examined new books and decided which ones would be sent down the memory hole. “The general public knew almost nothing of what was going on,” writes Miller. “The names of banned books were never announced, and such books were never reviewed or advertised…. It was if they never existed.”

Could such a system ever be revived in Boston or elsewhere in the US? Almost certainly not, if only because bookstores are fast becoming extinct. The prudes would have to go after online booksellers and e-reader suppliers like Kindle instead. Maybe they'll try, for the sake of the children.

 

First, kill all the EVERYONE

The Globe's Joan Vennochi had some good observations on Sunday about the insane political strategizing going on in Massachusetts this season, but her lead had a phrase that might be ready for the graveyard:

With apologies to Shakespeare: first, kill the political consultants.

A mere hour or so after I read Vennochi's column, I saw a post on Ta-Nehesi Coates's blog titled "First, kill all the pensions," on the currently hot topic of education reform.

Now, sometimes a writer is so miffed at a particular social group that a literary allusion to mass murder seems like the only way to get his or her point across. But overuse has drained this phrase of pretty much all its power. Here are some other examples that a quick Googling turned up, along with excerpts that each try to justify one more use of the cliche:

"First, Kill All the School Boards," Matt Miller, The Atlantic, January 2008:

Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.

Who cares what you're reading?

Several bloggers are debating whether the Kindle and other electronic-book devices are ruining "conspicuous consumption." Kindle user Matt Yglesias laments:

I’m going through Infinite Jest, as are a lot of people this summer, but I can’t visibly display the book on the Metro or around my house.

Conor Clarke translates:

[Yglesias] doesn't get to show the rest of the world that he's reading such a hefty, ponderous tome.

But isn't conspicuous consumption, no matter how banal or useless the products being exhibited, a benign way to encourage human beings to interact with each other? A sizable share of the conversations I've had with strangers on trains and buses, in cafes, and while standing in line for something have been sparked by the reading material in my hand. People see me reading, say, Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia and ask, "How is that?" or "What is that about?" or "Have you read This Is Your Brain on Music?"

I'd say that almost everyone who starts a conversation over a book title is polite and engaging. (People who disapprove of your book generally keep quiet about it.) And many of them wouldn't start a conversation at all without the book as an ice-breaker. Posting your favorite novels on Facebook just isn't the same.

McTruthiness

McDonald's is crying over the Oxford English Dictionary's inclusion of the word "McJob." From the Financial Times:

The UK arm of the fast food chain is starting a campaign to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word “McJob”, a term the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”...

“We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day,” wrote David Fairhurst, chief people officer in northern Europe for McDonald’s, in a letter seen by the Financial Times seeking support for the petition. “It’s time the dictionary definition of “McJob” changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

Labels: Copyright

David Sedaris, big fat liar

In the first issue of the new, improved New Republic (not available online unless you have a subscription), Alex Heard gently takes David Sedaris to task for inventing dialogue, fabricating characters, and putting himself in situations that weren't as dramatic as he makes them out to be. "His work is marketed as nonfiction," Heard writes, "and there's a simple rule associated with that: Don't make things up."

For example, Sedaris really did take guitar lessons from a little person (he uses the insensitive term "midget") when he was 12, but in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris gives the teacher a different name and apparently makes up a story about the teacher freaking out because he thinks that young David is making a pass at him. Heard figured out the real teacher's name and tracked down another former student to poke holes in Sedaris's account. He did the same with Sedaris's story about staying at a nudist camp, figuring out the real person behind a fake name and asking eyewitnesses whether the real person would have actually said the stuff that Sedaris's made-up person said. The answer was no -- but how many fans believed that anyone actually confronted Sedaris, then a Manhattanite, with "You're all just so sophisticated sitting in your little cafes and looking up at the Empire State Building while the rest of us lie around in haystacks smoking our corncob pipes?"

Heard does get at something that makes me sad when he notes that "nonfiction is bankable in ways that fiction is not." I would add that Sedaris is lucky to be in bookstores at all when the humor genre is practically extinct.

Most bookstores do have humor sections, usually next to "puzzles and games," but they're full of comic strips and cartoons, books of lists and short jokes, and the occasional title by James Thurber or by Sedaris. There are about 10 sudoku books for every book of comic essays. (I didn't actually count them, Alex Heard.)

I have seen Sedaris's "memoirs" in the fiction section, and I wonder whether bookstore clerks are doing it out of kindness, so he doesn't have to sit next to the transcribed stand-up acts of Tim Allen and Dane Cook. But a lot of his books simply disappear after they leave the "newly released" table.

My favorite humorist is Calvin Trillin, but his ouevre is usually dismembered and scattered all over the bookstore. His hilarious books about food are in Cooking, and his one novel -- the wry Tepper Isn't Going Out -- is in Fiction, as if it's the most important thing he ever wrote. A few months ago, I was looking for About Alice, a tribute to his wife, who died in 2001. The book is sweet but very funny, and typically Trillin. Failing to find it at Borders, I did something that I do about once a year: ask for assistance. The clerk finally located the book in the Self-Help section, Death & Dying subsection. Just the place for a humor book! If About Alice is a Death & Dying book just because it's partly about how its subject died, shouldn't half the store's novels and most of its biographies be in that section?

Disclosure: I interviewed Sedaris once and was totally charmed. We talked a little bit about my writing, and the overnight success advised, with complete sincerity, "You should get something published in The New Yorker. They pay very well." And I didn't have to make that up.

Labels: books

David Sedaris gets naked

I was lucky enough to send David Sedaris a fan letter (not email) just before he became one of the most-sought-after interview subjects in pop culture. He sent back a warm note and was agreeable when I got uncharacteristically pushy and asked for an in-person interview. The result was an afternoon with him in his Soho apartment and at various stops in his neighborhood. The full interview ran in the Boston Phoenix in February 1997. Here is an excerpt:

The 40-year-old Sedaris is short, but nothing else about him is elflike today. He's unshaven and dressed in shades of gray and black. His compact New York SoHo apartment will never be mistaken for Santa's Village; nor does it resemble a typical A-lister's abode.

For one thing, there are dead animals everywhere, including a stuffed squirrel atop a stereo speaker, two examples of "some kind of fruit bat" affixed to the wall, a lamp with a base made out of four deer hooves, and a condensed turkey (just the head welded to a foot). The showstopper is a set of four little Boston terriers, each only a few inches tall, peering out in mild alarm from two glass cases, the kind one might use to display souvenir shot glasses from Las Vegas.

"I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, `I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'

"I got a lot of good things for Christmas," he continues, pointing toward a feathery object on a perch near the ceiling. "Like this baby ostrich. My cat doesn't mind the puppies or any of the rest of it, but he hates this ostrich. Twice I found it on the floor with teeth marks on it."

I suddenly notice the large white cat, apparently sleeping, sprawled out on a chair. Dennis was one of the 42 cats the actress Sandy Dennis left behind when she died a couple of years ago, and Sedaris renamed him after his former owner. I don't ask what will happen to the cat's body when his time comes.

James Thurber vs. Dave Barry

One of my first book reviews, in 1995, was of a James Thurber biography for the Boston Phoenix. Thurber was one of my childhood heroes, which shows you how many friends I had as a kid. After the review ran, I got an indignant postcard from Dave Barry in which he said he had no choice but to use the phrase "I'm not making this up" to let his readers know fact from fiction. This was before the "fabulist" scandals involving nonfiction writers like James Frey and Augusten Burroughs, which eventually nicked humorist David Sedaris. So Barry had a point, but I still think humor reads better without the "this is exaggerated, this is not" signposts (and I defended Sedaris on this point).

An excerpt from the Phoenix review:

Today's most popular humorists may work in the vernacular, but they share little else with Thurber. Bestsellers by Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, and Ellen DeGeneres retain the staccato style of their stage performances. The publishers of these books could help us out by sprinkling throughout the text little battery-operated laugh tracks (just like those electronic greeting cards that sing "Happy Birthday" when you press a button). And though most of these comics echo Thurber's "little man" persona, trying to cope with bull-headed authority figures or the baffling behavior of the opposite sex, we still sense the confidence of people able to bare their souls in public and not hide behind the printed word.

Even humor writers who didn't start out on the stage now adopt the ironic distance of a Letterman or Leno. Dave Barry constantly winks at the reader in the same way David Letterman smirks and plays with his tie to get a laugh when a joke falls flat. For instance, Barry likes to insist, sarcastically, that he is "not making this up" in particularly fanciful columns. Thurber invented half the stuff about his family in My Life and Hard Times, but he had the sense not to go on about it in print.