Robert David Sullivan

David Sedaris was my best friend for one afternoon

We’re coming up to the 20th anniversary of my friendship with NPR favorite David Sedaris, which led to one of my most-read pieces of writing: an interview that appeared in the February 1997 issue of the “One in Ten” gay-and-lesbian section of the Boston Phoenix (both, alas, extinct). I spent a winter’s day with Sedaris, starting at his SoHo apartment and accompanying him as he visited a taxidermy store and went food shopping (at different places).

The interview happened just as Sedaris was getting extremely popular, after he read his memoir of being a Christmas elf at Macy’s (“SantaLand Diaries”) but before he switched his focus from short pieces of fiction to short pieces of autobiography. He invited me to visit after I sent a rather obsequious fan letter (full text below) in the fall of 1996.

I can’t find his invitation—it was definitely handwritten, not digital—but I remember thinking that it was a golden ticket. Here was a chance to buddy up with someone who was part of the literary scene, the gay scene, and the New York scene. A triple threat! I got even more swell-headed after Sedaris was friendly enough to spend so much time with me on that day in New York.

Oddly, I never subscribed to Life magazine

Sometimes I wish I had wasted more than half of my adult life on something fun instead of television and magazines.

If you’ve read my blog, you know about the television. Here are some magazine subscriptions I remember:

The Advocate (the gay newsweekly), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, American Theatre, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Boston magazine, Christopher Street (a long-gone gay literary magazine), Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Men’s Fitness, Modern Photography (since consumed by Popular Photography), Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic, New York magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Psychology Today, Reason (to bone up on libertarianism without having to read Ayn Rand), Rolling Stone, Utne Reader, Vanity Fair, Washington Monthly, the Weekly Standard, Yankee, and Z (“dedicated to resisting injustice”).

There was a magazine about Apple computers in the mix, but I forget the name. There was also Unzipped, a magazine about gay pornography as opposed to a gay pornography magazine. (You can justify any salaciousness by disguising it as sociology.) When I was a teenager just outside of Boston, I also subscribed to the Village Voice, mostly for movie reviews, and that’s the publication that aroused the suspicions of my father about my sexuality, because it kept putting stories about gay rights and AIDS on its front page.

Bedtime reading: Scott Stossel's “My Age of Anxiety”

As if I’m not stressed out enough, I made Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety part of my springtime reading. Perfect for bringing up regrets and uncomfortable memories just before bedtime.

Stossel, an editor at the Atlantic, weaves history and science with an autobiography of constant terror. My Age of Anxiety made me thankful that my own anxiety hasn’t involved the physical symptoms that caused Stossel to spend trips to Europe running from bathroom to bathroom, to panic over a clogged toilet in the Kennedy Compound, and to spend a day writhing on a floor trying to cure his fear of vomiting.

I’m not so proud that my way of dealing with anxiety-provoking situations is to avoid them.

Stossel keeps taking plane trips even though they terrify him, he accepts public-speaking engagements even after the multiple times he’s bailed out mid-performance, and he’s gone after jobs that with stomach-churning levels of responsibility. Stossel is weak, sweaty, and “on the verge of convulsing” while standing at the altar at his wedding, but I marvel that he made it there at all.

Ohio gets swearing title, Massachusetts gets off the phone

The maps below come from the advertising firm Marchex, which analyzed 600,000 calls to customer service departments over one year, counted up some unspecified profanities, and declared Ohio — which plays a big role in choosing our presidents, for fuck's sake — to be the most foul-mouthed state in America. (The maps were first posted to Buzzfeed, then the Atlantic Cities had fun with them.)

The swing state of Ohio not only produced the most swears (one per 150 conversations, which seems like a chickenshit amount), but the fewest instances of "please" and "thank you."

Flannery O'Connor: The first HBO showrunner

Jim Shepard's essay in The Atlantic about the conclusion of Flannery O'Connor's unforgettable short story "A Good Man Is Hard To FInd" got me thinking about contemporary TV series in which the hero (more often, anti-hero) isn't allowed to change too much.

He focuses on what a criminal ("the Misfit") says about an old lady near the end of the story: "She would have been a good woman ... if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life." Shepard's interpretation:

... He's not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He's saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don't stick — or they don't stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

Shepard does not mention television, but I like the above passage as one way of explaining the structure of shows from The Sopranos to Wilfred. Many of these shows have complex characters who experience flashes of insight, or epiphanies, only to revert to the same flawed behavior that they've been demonstrating since the beginning of the series. One can see this as a limitation of TV, and it's one reason I don't like to compare long-running shows like Mad Men to novels. They are really closer to short-story collections, with characters learning the same lessons over and over but in ways that illuminate different aspects of the human experience.

This repetition is not necessarily a flaw, not if Shepard is right and our irrationalities keep returning to wipe out the enlightenment we might experience when faced with a gun.

BTW, you can read the comments below Shepard's post for a spirited literary debate. (He seems to have gotten a couple things wrong about O'Connor's story.)

HT to Andrew 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 (no longer online):

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.”

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