Let's Get Radical

A decade-and-a-half ago, somewhere in the far reaches of cloudy memory, a friend told me a wonderful story that went something like this: There was a political radical who had come to some unnamed municipality to agitate for the rights of its local black population. However, instead of the usual grist of petitions and protest marches, he embraced more disruptive methods laced with a good dose of humor. One particular action involved purchasing a hundred theatre tickets for an upcoming, nearly always white-only attended play and giving them to members of the black community whom he was then representing. Before entering the theatre building, the group feted itself with a meal notable for its preponderance of baked beans. Needless to say, the event's malodorous results—and the threat of more such actions—changed how the municipality's cultural centers treated its minority populations, namely for the better. I forgot that story until this weekend when I picked up Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, published in 1971 by Random House (under the keen eye of its legendary editor-in-chief Jason Epstein). I didn't realize this story came from Alinsky's handbook for how to stir the political pot until I was over a 100 pages in. Before I even came to story itself, a sneaking feeling that I was in familiar territory had crawled up on me. Ten or twenty pages later, there it was: the scene, the Rochester Opera House in Rochester, New York; the instigator, the famed Chicago community activist, Saul Alinsky, protégé to the great CIO leader John L. Lewis; the bad guys, Eastman Kodak, the University of Rochester, and Rochester City Hall; the cause for all this trouble, the race riots the year before that had paralyzed a city in which the community of stupefied white residents had assumed that, because there had been no such previous riots, all was right in their little world.

But tendrils of unconscious memory were not the reason I plucked the volume off the book shelf of friends whom I was visiting in Chicago this weekend. No, the reason I was intrigued was because of the well-publicized fact that Alinsky's work had served as the primer for Barack Obama's community activism in Chicago—hardly a surprise given Alinsky's long history of organizing in Chicago, including the University of Chicago area, where Obama worked for nearly a decade and has lived for over two.

In terms of sheer efficacy, there has never been a presidential campaign like that organized by Obama's brain trust, David Axelrod and David Plouffe. But many also attribute the training regimen and organizational keenness of the operation to Obama's own experience as a community organizer, the skills from which he reapplied to the many thousands of campaign-focused community organizers his team churned out with such painfully meticulous efficiency.  (The best article ever on the Obama campaign's organization was authored by Zack Exley for the Huffington Post.)

Given the unique character of the campaign, Obama's community organizing background, and the influence of Alinsky's work and writings on Obama, there were not a few conservative bloggers who argued that perhaps Republican campaign managers and organizations ought turn a few pages in Alinsky's book and take notes. After all, Democrats had schooled themselves in the Republican playbook after repeated defeats during the Bush years. Surely Alinsky might shed some light on the wonders of the Obama machine.

Well, it does shed light, but not the kind I thought. At first, my assumption had been that, after a few preliminary remarks, Rules for Radicals would just dig in with a flurry of techniques and tactics—and, to a certain extent, it does. But it does more in ways that I am still digesting. In brief, after Alinsky's prologue, the second chapter lays out the groundwork for an ethics of means and ends that out-Machiavelli's Machiavelli by taking apart the old moral saw that "ends don't justify means." In Alinsky's dictionary, this is the very definition of foolishness. While he makes a noble effort to reformulate an ethics in which "particular ends justify particular means," the 11 rules that he, in fact, assets make it hard see how he hasn't merely updated Il Principe for modern circumstances. Even when Alinsky tries to hem in his "any ends"-"any means" philosophy with such bottom-line provisos of "as long as it does not violate human dignity," it's weak tea, at best. Here are Alinsky's rules, recast in simpler English than the pseudo-mathematical language of the professional philosophers he adopts for no real good reason:

1. The more closely involved you are in the conflict, the less justification of means and ends matter.
2. Ethical evaluations of means and ends depend upon the relation of your political position to them.
3. In war, ends will justify almost any means.
4. Means and end can never be adequately judged in hindsight.
5. The more means available for accomplishing an end, the more room there is for ethical considerations of them.
6. The less important an end is, again the more room there is for ethic concerns.
7. Success or failure is a strong determinant of the ethics of means and ends.
8. The imminence of success or failure, victory or defeat, narrows any ethical considerations of means.
9. The opposition will always cast effective means as unethical.
10. Do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments.
11. Use popular ideas and catch phrases to justify ends.

Here Alinsky liberally mixes the descriptive with the prescriptive, skipping the distinction for the hardened reality, based on his experience fighting large corporate interests on behalf of the underprivileged, that what is and what ought matter little when the rubber hits the road. Alinsky is playing to win, and probably goes even further than Machiavelli in recommending masking one's methods with rhetoric (see rules 10 & 11). In fact, to gain community participation in an action, he shows absolutely no qualms about having supporters do, as he sees it, the right thing for the wrong reasons. For Alinsky, it’s always war, especially when the forces arrayed against you—corporations and their cadres of union-busting lawyers; city halls and their platoons of bureaucrats—will not being giving you any quarter.

Alinsky’s manifesto is a guide to political streetfighting, lessons that were not learned by the Gore or Kerry campaigns but were clearly absorbed by Obama’s. Notwithstanding the seeming noblesse oblige of his campaign—as opposed to the messy bomb-throwing that characterized the McCain camp—it was all a street fight, from beginning to end. Alinsky, for example, recognizing how little real power “have-nots” can bring to bear against “haves,” strongly recommends a kind of ju-jitsu (he has a chapter called “Hoist the Enemy by His Own Petard”) that the Obama campaign took to heart, almost encouraging (yes, encouraging!) the McCain campaign to wallow in its own muck.

Did Obama take the high road in his campaign? He did…and didn’t (see Rule 10 again). All that tut-tutting and wink-and-nod ridicule, as if all of us together couldn’t help but shake our heads at how foolish the McCain campaign acted, was just Alinsky-esque karate chops to the back of the neck as McCain and Palin careened forward with their misplaced drop kicks. Even Machiavelli would have to smile.

Letter from the Bronx

Two Saturdays ago, to little fanfare (save long awaited blue skies and an occasional waft of the WKTU Michael Jackson tribute) the Floating Pool Lady opened for the season. Docked in Baretto Point Park in the Bronx, this swimming pool is just like any other of New York City’s fifty-four outdoor basins – offering two sessions daily (11am-3pm, 4pm-7pm), life guards clad in the Parks Department’s signature orange bathing suits and a cool respite from the summer heat. And yet it’s also different: the Floating Pool Lady, which has commanding views of the New York skyline across the East River, began life as an industrial barge in Morgan City, Louisiana. On her decks are three generations of New York City swimmers. “I grew up going to Astoria” Maria tells me, while my daughter and her granddaughter take running leaps into the cold water. Framed by the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, she watches the girls splash in twenty-five meters of sparkling blue. “We’d also go to Lasker,” Maria’s own daughter remembers. “But Astoria has those nice, shallow parts where the little kids play. Plus you can see the Triboro. I mean RFK.” Indeed the pool at Astoria Park, down the East River to the southwest from Barretto in Hunts Point, is the city’s oldest and largest, built by Robert Moses in 1936 to host the U.S. Olympic Team swimming and diving trials. This summer, both the Floating Pool Lady and the Astoria pool provide free swim lessons, lunch and practices for the Summer Swim Team Championship Meet on August 8th. Both parks also have plaques commemorating the wreck of the SS General Slocum, the steamship that embarked on June 15th 1904 from “Little Germany” up the East River towards Long Island for an annual summer picnic. As the ship passed through Hell’s Gate, it caught fire. By the time it beached at North Brother Island, between Astoria and Barretto Point, more than 1,000 of the 1300 passengers – mostly women and children – had drowned.

The Floating Pool Lady was born out of a fascination with New York’s waterfront, past and present. In 1980, while researching her doctoral thesis, city planner and historian Ann Buttenwieser learned that in the 19th Century the city had fifteen “floating baths” moored on pontoons along the Hudson and East Rivers. The idea was planted for a modern day counterpart. Buttenwieser’s dissertation became one of the definitive chronicles of New York water ways, Manhattan Water Bound (Syracuse University, 1987); this month she will publish Governors Island: The Jewel of the New York Harbor (Syracuse University, 2009). In the intervening decades, Buttenwieser has also helped to shape the city’s recreational waterscape, working for a variety of city agencies on river parks, esplanades, kayak launches, ferries to the ballparks and a Skidmore, Owings and Merrill master plan for the lower Manhattan shoreline.  It wasn’t until 2000, however, that she turned to the floating pool project in earnest, undertaking a feasibility study, enlisting architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld and founding the Neptune Foundation to raise the necessary funds. In 2004, after an extensive search, the Foundation discovered a decommissioned river barge in the bayous of Morgan City. Construction began in nearby Amelia, Louisiana and after some Hurricane Katrina delay the soon-to-be Floating Pool Lady (a moniker also now used to describe Buttenwieser) arrived in New York in 2006 for final outfitting. The floating pool opened on July 4th, 2007 off the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and that first summer hosted 50,000 families.  In its current home in Barretto Point Park Point in Community District 2, it is the only public pool.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is swimming.

How the Kindle Can Save Your Life

A few months ago, my ex-mother-in-law gave me her old Kindle when she upgraded to the new model. The first book I downloaded on it was last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, The Short, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. I finished the book on a roundtrip Metro-North ride to Grand Central.

Now, the strangest thing happened, or rather, didn't happen while I was reading this book. No one noticed what I was reading. Nobody asked me what I thought of the book, whether I liked it, whether I didn't. This was incredibly disorienting, reading in public and creating no reaction. An entire part of my brain that I hadn't even known about shut down -- the part that is self-conscious about what I’m reading, and what people think about what I’m reading.

Call me intellectually vain, a snob. But I'm one of those people who makes snap judgments about you based upon what you read. Sit next to me on an airplane proudly sporting a copy of the latest John Grisham or Nora Roberts, and I will give you wide berth. Clutch a Jhumpa Lahiri or a Malcolm Gladwell, and settle in.

When my ex-mother-in-law gave me the Kindle, she extolled its virtues. She suffers from cancer and needs books that weigh very little. So the Kindle is perfect for her; she could reread Gone With the Wind on it if she wanted to.

Yes, the Kindle is light. Yes, the Kindle is portable. But this is what I consider the most wondrous aspect of it: You can read in public and no knows what you are reading.

- The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism - Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body - The Secret - Getting Things Done

This is a partial list of the books I now have downloaded in my Kindle.

At home, my bookcases are crammed with the classics from Austen to Zola; in non-fiction I love Didion and Derrida (okay, just Didion), but I’ve always had a healthy respect for self-help and how-to books. They have guided me through many a personal crisis. I used to buy these books sheepishly at the bookstore, have to set aside time alone and at home to read them, then hide them in the back layer of my bookcase.

Now, I just read them in broad daylight whenever I want to, whenever the need arises.

At last, reading as it should be: A personal choice. Absolutely private.

New Haven's Union Station's Lavish Display

New Haven's a wonderful place but it is pretty rinky-dink in a lot of ways. If it took itself more seriously, for example, matters relating to public transportation would be taken more seriously. Don't get me started on bus service here, for one thing. (I use the buses all the time, and I'm the first to try to defend them, but my point is, I shouldn't have to think about defending them. I should be able to just... use them, and boast about them.) One sign that New Haven used to be a bigger, more impressive place than it is now -- or a place that cared more about the public's view of public transportation -- is the train station, which is lovely, designed on a grand scale. When I was a kid, the New Haven train station wasn't the building it is now; that building, the original train station, was closed, first awaiting demolition and, then, eventually, renovation. In the meantime, we used this underground, scary, damp-feeling space which has somehow completely disappeared. If you took me there now I wouldn't know how to explain where it was. This is the trouble with memories from childhood; they get hazy. I'm sure many readers of this will be happy to tell me what happened to that piece of crap train station. (Please do.)

You walked in at street level and the whole entrance was this massive ramp down to the waiting area, where there were sad little benches, and then you went up to the tracks, as I recall. I may be mistaken but I remember the ramp having dreary, ill-advised industrial carpeting on it (after a while, the flooring was some kind of equally depressing linoleum). The best part of the whole place was the vending machines, which isn't saying much. Kids always like vending machines anyhow.

The old Union Station (which, Wikipedia tells me, was designed by Cass Gilbert -- woo woo) is a huge improvement over that disgusting place I remember from the 1970s. It's airy, sunny; when you walk on the floors, your snappy shoes make a wonderful, adult "click-click-click" sound. (If you're wearing Birkenstocks or sneakers or shoes that aren't snappy, you just trudge along and miss out on the joy of the clicking.) There's a shoeshine station, which I've always wanted to patronize but have never had a chance to; there's a newsstand. There are a few little sandwich stores, which aren't remarkable but do their jobs perfectly well. My main point is, you come into the train station from the street or from the tracks, and either way, you think, "Huh. New Haven. This is a real place." It's a miniaturized Grand Central Station, and that sounds like I'm being slighting, but I'm not trying to be. It's a marvelous space.

One of the things that continues to make the station so appealing is its arrivals/departures board, which is something of an anomaly in today's LED display world (so my husband, who pays attention to these things, tells me). The board is a huge black and white thing with little panels that flip, like the numbers on the alarm clock my brother had in 1978, changing the displayed information. The panels turn incredibly fast, and the sound they make -- kind of "whp-whp-whp-whp-whp" -- is just awesome. When you're waiting for a train that's running late -- as the Amtrak trains often are -- you can get absorbed in your reading and not worry about missing anything because you know you'll look up when you hear the whp-whp-whp sound: it digs into your head, signifiying "new information on the board, pay attention." Sometimes the information is useful to you, and sometimes not, but either way it's fun to watch the text change. You can see all the names of the cities on the Northeast Corridor whip by, which is cool. You can think, "Well, maybe I'll skip going to Boston and just hop onto the Montrealer instead." (You won't, though, because your girlfriend in Boston would be pissed, and, what's more, you wouldn't have a place to stay in Montreal anyhow.) There's something about that board that keeps one's sense of travel intact in a way that the LED displays of Grand Central Station -- a shame they installed that -- just.... don't.

People who know me will snort at this; I am a homebody and am known for not liking to travel And it is true, I like being at home. But every now and then I also like going somewhere, particularly if there is a snazzy hotel involved (I'm big on snazzy hotels), and so I have had some experience with train stations and, yes, even airports. I'm one of maybe three people you'll ever meet who's actually been at the Los Angeles train station, for example. And I can tell you: New Haven's train station is nicer.

But, of course, I am biased.

The Good Will of Books

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press at Yale’s Graduate Club on Elm Street, where we swapped stories from our respective careers in publishing. (I did most of the talking, to be honest.) In the course of conversation, we discussed the state of academic publishing. I had recently completed a research project for an overseas press looking to expand its English-language publishing program in philosophy. Since I had an amateur’s interest in the field and more than a decade in scholarly publishing of one sort or another, it was a perfect project for someone with my inclination. During a tete-a-tete, one item that caught my attention was John’s comments on the state of book publishing in the field of literary criticism. In brief, it is not an area that is doing especially well nowadays. This isn’t to say that it’s on life support. But in terms of raw sales figures—number of units printed and sold—it’s a less-than-ideal area of publication.

Reasons for the decline of "litcrit" sales are legion. Humanities-based book publishing programs have taken a real pounding. The elimination of university press subsidies has hurt, as has the steady migration of scholars to digital venues. Moreover, the overproduction of books in response to tenure pressures has produced a flood of publication that academic library budgets can no longer accommodate. And then there is the ontological problem of scholarly specialization, which automatically limits audience size and book sales.  This tailspin in academic monograph has thrown into question the future of humanities research, begun to reshape criteria for tenure, and obliged scholars to rethink the place the “book” in literary criticism.

Alas, solutions are not legion. Many publishers seem resigned to plodding on, producing works of literary criticism regardless of how much interest there really can be in the culture of the book in Tibet or new interpretations of Paradise Lost.  But even where there is interest--hell, even I'm interested in these topics--that interest will be be nominal at most and fleeting at best. Books of this ilk will take not 2nd or 3rd place on my reading stack; they'd be lucky to take 20th or 21st. Indeed, the fact that I’d have to re-read Paradise Lost before taking on a whole work devoted to a “dramatic reinterpretation” of it makes me queasy just thinking of the required page-turns.

Is it any wonder that literary criticism is on the ropes? And, yet, literary criticism done well can offer true pleasure.  This certainly occurs to me when I look at the litcrit section of my personal library and consider the characteristics that make for a good litcrit read. What matters is not any critic's purported insightfulness or even her work's importance to the history of literary exegesis. No, what stays with me is something different, something crystallized by my recent exercise in slimming down this part of my library.

It is now 15 years since I received my doctorate, and it is unlikely I will ever return to academia to teach or write literary criticism. So when my wife recently demanded that I reduce the size of my library, I decided to rake out the litcrit collection I had amassed in graduate school. Refreshing is the only word I can use to describe the experience. My academic career behind me and none ahead, I saw no  need to retain works that supplied so little satisfaction but had stayed on hand solely for the purpose of teaching or quoting. Now I could forthrightly assess the quality of the reading experience of this part of my collection, no small matter for a discipline excoriated during my graduate days for loose thinking and impenetrable writing.   The standing of works of ostensibly "breakaway" originality, held in high regard then by litcrit professionals, dissolved instantly before a fierce resolve to keep what I had enjoyed and eliminate those academic aspiration had obliged me to have."  Works that were once "hot" now seemed trite, belabored, ostentatious, or overindulged.  I bathed in the freedom of putting front and center new, more personal criteria: readability, narrative drive, force and clarity of argument, playfulness of voice.

So what sailed away to the local Goodwill? My collection of essays by Paul de Man, which, despite their presumptive brilliance, never shined for me as his extended explicationes de text all drove to the same tiring conclusion  that every text is a morass of contradiction, a perpetual shooting of one’s own feet; Walter Benjamin’s essays were also cast overboard, I never having found them all that compelling or even that well written; several of Foucault’s works—which were not even literary criticism but were so heavy-handedly adopted for  litcrit purposes that they ended up in this area of my library regardless—were boxed up, particularly the overlong Order of Things and the unnecessarily abstract Archaeology of Knowledge. Nor were all my rejects of the “theoretical” kind. Ihab Hassan’s Contemporary American Literature, 1945-1972: An Introduction was a rather pedestrian affair as introductions go; Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending was never going to get read; Cleanth Brooks’ Well-Wrought Urn, a series of essays illustrating how “close reading” of poetry ought be done, left this reader's experience of the poems entirely parched; Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature was neither readable nor useful, more a dryly written period piece; Terry Heller’s Delights of Terror, Clayton Koelb’s The Incredulous Reader, Joseph Grixti’s Terrors of Uncertainty were all well written and well argued, but took up shelf space only because of my now long-forgotten dissertation on the American gothic tradition; and then there were the multi-author essay collections on feminist criticism and theory, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and God knows what else.

So what stayed?  Walter Kendricks’ Thrill of Fear, another dissertation source, stayed not only because it offered reasonably good history of the genre in literature and film but also for the pugnacious tone of its treatment of bad horror art. I gladly held onto Mythologies and S/Z by Roland Barthes as examples of original thinking, humorous observation (especially) Mythologies) and truly novel presentation (has there ever been another work of literary criticism like S/Z?). Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? also stuck around for its clarity of prose, precision of thought, and force of argument.  I could not imagine letting go of fine introductory works like  Terry Eagleton’s tour de force, Literary Theory: An Introduction or the should-be-better-known Superstructuralism by Richard Harland.  Literary histories and works of cultural criticism that were compelling in their insight or unique in their approach—such as Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance or Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Lighting Out for the Territory—I also retained. Finally, I do admit a penchant for writers on writing: essays (Language of the Night by Ursula LeGuin), criticism (Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster), manifestoes (For a New Novel by Alaine Robbe-Grillet), memoirs (One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty) or interviews (Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Capote). As works of criticism go, none of these amounts to much. But as commentary by craftsmen on the crafting process rather than the crafted object’s final effect, they are worth something.

All of these titles stuck with me because they interested me as a reader and not as a litcrit professional. And so I wonder if, in the end, this is the direction that literary critics will ultimately have to take to stay in the book—as opposed to the academic journal—business.  Doing so might require setting aside calls to specialize or even theorize and focus more on voice, originality of presentation, quality of writing, force and range of argument, and—finally—on the story their book tells rather than the stories that are the object of their criticism.

Occasional Paper #1: Rudolph Delson Reviews the Official GED Practice Test

This post marks the release of the New Haven Review's first occasional paper; as the title suggests, we expect to put out more such papers, well, occasionally (though we have more in the works right now). Why an occasional paper, you may ask? I answer: why not? In this occasional paper, novelist and essayist Rudolph Delson, a lawyer by training, reviews the Official GED Practice Tests (Steck-Vaughn Co., $21.95). No, it's not mean. And no, it's not smarmy. What is it, then? Download Occasional Paper #1 and find out. And let us know what you think—both of Delson's piece and the idea of occasional papers generally.

What I assume, You shall assume

I recently heard that one of my old students fell into a conversation in which my name was brought up. Apparently, he really split everyone’s sides by recalling, “Ms. Moncrief totally has an unhealthy obsession with Walt Whitman!” And that was all he remembered, and all he had to say of the eighth grade.

This child was one of my brighter darlings, with a mind and a mouth faster than mine—and most of his peers. He was frantic and quick-witted. (Once when I turned my back, he threw his shoe at me; it landed on my desk and his face went white. He said in the most adult and caring way, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”)

Something other than the smart-alecky tone of this response got to me. You always hear that teachers who follow their passions are the best teachers. But this makes me wonder. When I taught this guy, I was obsessed with Whitman, I suppose it’s true. These kids were a young thirteen and I assigned them to read the whole of Leaves of Grass. That’s 52 poems and over 30 pages in our Norton anthology. I photocopied every poem and made each student his or her own packet! We memorized many of the poems, we wrote Songs of Ourselves! We played, “What would Whitman do?” What was I thinking?! AND, I never told them about Whitman’s homosexuality, because I figured it wasn’t that important for them to know. (I am not sure what my logic was there. They figured it out themselves. How you ask? Well, does this give it away for an 8th grade boy?

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray.

I fear I ruined Whitman for them. I fear I was like one of those gift giver types—hovering over you as you open a gift, smiling down at you with an open mouth, ready to gasp and clap and say, “Isn’t it just great? I mean, isn’t it perfect?!” My own joy of reading got in the way of letting others have joy too. That seemed like a beautiful failure. “The mystic anomalous nights, the strange half welcome pangs, (and) visions” that I had in discovering Whitman maybe need to be my own private meditation. As for my old student—he’s off to China, nearly fluent in Mandarin. I heard of him that he’s “settled down,” but hope he hasn’t really settled down. And, well, at least he forgot all my other unhealthy obsessions.

Natural Storytellers

My son Sam is an early riser. For the first 16 months of my his life, give or take a month, the day began in the same way. I’d get up with him at 5:30 or 6 (or, on lucky days, 6:30). I’d turn on the radio, make coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal, bundle my son, bundle myself, pour the coffee into a travel mug, strap on a harness used for tethering babies to people, and walk out the door. Judging by the looks of people on the street, I looked like a vagabond who had raided an orphanage. Twenty steps down the street, I’d realize I had left my coffee at home and, depending on the grayness of the sky or some other arbitrary measure, I’d go back and get it or make a beeline for Fuel, a small coffeeshop where they knew me and knew my son.

As he got older and the seasons changed, we introduced some variation. I stopped bundling both of us. He started riding in the stroller. I frequently planted him in a raised bed while I planted seedlings in our plot in the William Street Community Garden. Snacks became paramount to the success of the adventure. We went to Willoughby’s (big mistake with a baby when you’re facing off against the early morning rush hour), Moka/Koffee on Orange/Bru, Koffee on Audubon. Sometimes I remembered my coffee. Sometimes he ate croissant. We took long walks to marvel at the Quinnipiac River drawbridge in Fair Haven, or to marvel at the view from the Leitner Observatory, or to try out a distant and fabled playground.

There was one part of every day that did not vary during that time. There’s a man who lives on our street who I believe is a natural storyteller. We saw him every day, either in front of his house or in the garden or on the next street over. Because of him, I suspect there must be dynasties of storytellers, passing the storytelling gene from generation to generation, each new iteration changing and adapting the same stories. That isn’t to say they don’t have to work at it, but in these families I imagine a high premium is placed on telling the right story, at the right time, in as few a words as possible.

He’s known my son longer than anyone outside our family. I don’t know anything about him but his stories, and they’re kind of incredible. His stories stick: They bounce around in my brain and surface in my thoughts frequently throughout the day. He greets us with “Hello good people” or something similarly benign, and then he starts telling. The first one I remember well is the day it was particularly windy, and as we made our way down William Street he joined us and walked for a while. “Did you hear what happened in Washington?” he asked. He proceeded to tell me about a man who was walking his baby, in a stroller, along a river. The wind, he said, was so strong and so fierce that the man had to fight hard to finish the walk. But in the end, the wind won: The man and his son were blown into the river and disappeared, and they still hadn’t found him. “Okay, good people!” he said cheerily. “Have a great day! One day we’ll all serve Sam!”

As he left, I wondered it nature overtake us while we’re out in the world, just trying to have a normal existence. All day, I thought about strollers blown away by the wind; tornadoes taking away our children and our parents; waves rising up from Long Island Sound. I thought how the telling of the story seemed so effortless.

One time, the time it began to occur to me that he might not be the best company for our walks, I asked him how he had come to New Haven. He said that his probation officer was transporting him from Stamford to Hartford. They were handcuffed on the train, he said, but when the train pulled into Union Station in New Haven, his probation officer was asleep. He reached over, stole the key to the handcuffs, and escaped the train. Once inside the station, he ran in John DeStefano. The two of them chatted amiably; by the end of the conversation, DeStefano had offered him a job with the city, working as a counselor with recent inmates who had been released. Don’t worry about the probation, he said, I’ll take care of it. And ever since, Sam’s friend had been working in the prison system in New Haven.

I was both enthralled and disturbed by that story. I had known our neighbor for months: At what point do I start avoiding him in the morning? Do I have terrible judgment in the company I keep? What was his crime? He really does work for the city, and very well might have been on probation, but did he really know DeStefano? What was his connection to the way everything works?

My favorite story was about our neighborhood. We were walking down Lyon Street, and our friend pointed out the chimneys. He said he had worked on restoring most of the chimneys on that street, that I wouldn’t believe how many of them were on the verge of toppling. It’s barely safe to keep walking here, he said. Immediately I conjured up an inner movie, in which a whole block of houses just started crumbling, from the top down. He laughed and laughed to himself, and I asked what was so funny. He told me that when they renovated the house I’m living in, an opossum had been living in the basement; the first time they lit the pilot light, the opossum caught fire and made a beeline for the natural gas tank. (I was a little surprised at how well he knew the layout of our basement.) They caught him, doused him and expelled him. Don’t worry, he said, that opossum (of fire!) doesn’t live in your house anymore.

He then pointed to a house and said that many families of birds had been living in its chimney, but the new owners didn’t know. The first time they fired up the furnace (lit a fire? I don’t remember now), the flames ignited the nest, and the nest ignited the birds, and the birds came flying out of the top of the house. He opened his arms and fanned out his fingers, saying the sky was full of burning birds. That had happened so many time he couldn’t remember, he said. A house renovation, a pilot light, a furnace, and voila! Burning animals are running down the street; burning birds are filling the sky. It made our neighborhood seem dangerous but at the same time mythological.

I feel happy to live on a block where the oral tradition is alive and well, where stories circulate and grow. On the other hand, it’s time to move. We’ve got another kid now, and I’m tired of having to scan the nearest playground for rusty lighters and broken vodka bottles before I let Sam scramble. I don’t want to wonder if my walking companion, no matter how talented a storyteller he is, is a walking manifestation of my bad judgment. My New Haven street may not be the best place to raise a kid – indeed, most young families in Wooster Square eventually migrate to Westville or Whitneyville.

But hey, time passes. Things change. I’ll miss the natural storyteller on my block when we go, and I’ll probably always think of him when the wind blows so hard I wonder if it’s going to whisk us away.

Whither Home?

I was away for three weeks in June, and for two of those weeks I was away not only from where I live, but from the internet. In a sense, separation from the internet was the more telling separation -- I know more people available to me online than I do in New Haven, to say nothing of the people I ‘follow’ (or stalk?) on Facebook. While away, I visited all my ‘homes away from home’: including three of my four siblings’ homes in Delaware, one of which is the house we all grew up in, where my mother still lives. I also visited my stepson and his family who live a bit west of Philadelphia -- Philly is where we lived when he lived with my wife and I, and where our daughter was born. And I got over to rural New Jersey where a longtime friend (a Philly native I met in Philly) lives with his family and writes -- and where I am an honorary “Uncle Donald.” And I made it down to Rockville, MD, outside DC, where my sister-in-law lives and where my mother-in-law is now in an assisted living home, which I visited for the first time. The main reason I went away at all was to visit the shore in Ocean City, MD, where some version of my family has gone to unwind in June since we were all kids together, and where my parents spent their honeymoon, and where there was no internet connection, which helped to emphasize the feeling I have down there anyway -- that I’m in some perpetual version of my youth, either the late ‘60s when I first went there, or some memorable teen visits in the late ‘70s, or those years in the ‘80s when it was all about my daughter.

All of this is to introduce the thought which I’ve had before, when returning ‘home’ to New Haven, this town I’ve lived in for ten years (moved here from Hamden when our daughter went off to college in Baltimore), and frequented for five years before that (after moving to CT straight from grad school): I’m hard-pressed to say what makes this place my home other than the fact that I live here -- at some distance from all the people I’ve known longest. My way of life and general outlook seems a continuation of grad school, which is to say, transient, not in for the long haul, expecting to go elsewhere, someday, and only hoping ‘there’ won’t be worse. And that feeling, I think, is sustained by the fact that the population of New Haven, as I experience it, is tied to Yale and recurrently transient: students, grad students, junior faculty are here for awhile and move on.

Yet, while in this limbo (working on long term writing projects and at ‘teaching gigs’ tends to sustain a certain disconnect from my surroundings ... maybe even requires it?), I have become accustomed to New Haven, even though I consider myself barely a resident. There are places I frequent, and which I like seeing -- Willoughby’s, Yorkside, Book Trader, Labyrinth, Odd Bins, Anna Liffey’s, Cutler’s, Mamoun’s, Rudy’s, Royal India, etc. -- but I seem never to move much beyond the familiar grooves worn by making my way, mostly on foot, to the orbit of that big educational concern in town, which I refer to affectionately, or not so affectionately, as the Mighty Fortress.

When I’m back in the environs I hail from, I’m always glad to know I’m only passing through. Much as I like seeing everyone, it’s good to know I don’t really live there. And I can think of one event, a few years ago, that made me realize that I actually have a kind of relation to New Haven. It was the closing of The Rainbow Café, and at the time I wrote:

We rely on such places as providing identity for what "our town" is, and for providing us with a renewable sense of who we are as their steady patrons. You are where you eat, and where you shop? Something like that.

Realizing the place was pretty new when I first went there and that it was now gone, it seemed to matter that I'd outlasted a business.

So, a question to any long-standing or native New Haveners reading this: what do you consider to be definitive aspects of New Haven ... the kinds of things one shouldn’t miss while living here? Or: what's a change you've seen in your time here that had some effect on you?

Kindle a book, light my fire

I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, "More books." When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me ("fiction, psychology, sports" — something like that), but clearly wasn't keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I'd have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself. When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I'd ever seen. Put another way: he's a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I'd seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers' catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.

It wasn't just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily "literary fiction," with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.

I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store's Architecture section. It's called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it's by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I'm nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.

In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.

Farrah, Farrah on the Wall

Farrah Fawcett is dead. Let those of us who were young in the seventies observe a moment of silence. And noting this journal’s preoccupation with hair (vide Oppenheimer posting, “We Partied Like It’s 2009,” May 18, 2009) and my own hair being of “urban legend” (ibid), I could not let this occasion pass without paying personal tribute to the “Farrah-do.” Growing up in Hamden during the seventies, I sported the Farrah-do, first at Sleeping Giant Junior High (now a condominium complex) and then at Hamden High School. I’m convinced that it was this hairstyle that saved me from social suicide, helped bridge the internal “town versus gown” issues I had as a Yale faculty brat at my school, and finally, paved the way for my college years at Harvard.

A lot from a single hairdo, I know. But what a ‘do. Tousled, cascading layers. A sexy, casual, windswept, just-got-out-of-bed look. Farrah smiled down at us from that poster with that mane. And every girl worth her salt had to have that ‘do. For me, a Chinese girl with hair and parents as straight as a grove of bamboo stalks, achieving that look was no easy feat.

First, I first had to convince my mother -- who ascribed to the general zero-sum notion that any attention I paid to my looks took away from my attention to my studies -- to let me have a perm. She only relented on Rave, a home perm that gave soft loose curls. Then, we found an inexpensive hair cutter in to give me the actual layered haircut, which I had to style to perfection each day. With my own allowance, I bought a hairdryer, a curling iron and a set of hot rollers. After trial, error and much practice, I learned the hot rollers worked best on me. So, every day before leaving at 7:20 a.m. to catch the school bus, I plugged in hot rollers and did my hair: three medium-sized rollers for the fluffy top and two wings, and three large rollers for the back. If I had time, I added the flip with a small-barrelled curling iron.

The only other Asian girl in my class, Elly Tanaka, also a Yale faculty brat, kept her hair straight. She liked to flip it around a bit. Shiny and black, it looked okay, but having the Farrah-do was a universal ice-breaker, an automatic “I’m-okay-you’re-okay-because-we-share-a-hairstyle” with the non-faculty brat set at my school. Janet Gallo, the most popular girl in our junior high, also sported the Farrah-do, which she achieved each morning by using a blow-dryer and round hairbrush (we discussed this one day).

There was no mirror for Asian women yet in the public media. No Gong Li, no Sandra Oh, no Ziyi Zhang. The only person I saw who looked remotely like me on television was Mrs. Livingston from “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” So, for me to emulate Farrah Fawcett was just as far-fetched as any other role model.

At first my parents fought me, preferring that I try to get in a half hour of piano practice before the school bus. But eventually, they gave up, and instead began to take notice of my dedication and perseverance with my hair-do. I knew they finally understood who I was when my mother asked me the summer after senior year, why don’t you learn haircutting so that you can earn pocket money at Harvard?

This is how I ended up studying at the Gal-Mar Academy of Hairdressing, Nails and Beauty in North Haven alongside aspiring hair technicians and beauticians. I’ll always remember the morning, Miss Julie, who owned the place with her sister, Miss Gail, had us gather around a willing student guinea pig, to teach us the Farrah Fawcett cut, or as it’s known in the trade, the long-layered feathered shag. We learned how important it was to section the hair carefully, to keep the hair hold perfectly elevated and to shift the cutting line. Then to cross-check each side of the head against a spot in the center to make sure all the lengths were even. Finally, to use the point-cutting technique to feather the hair ends and give it a softer look. Voila, Farrah.

I walked out of Gal-Mar with a certificate for haircutting only – no color, no perm – but I set up shop out of my dorm-room bathroom a couple afternoons a week, and ran a pretty lucrative business of haircuts at $7 a piece, often $10 with tip. Guys from the rugby team would come, and some daring girls for their version of the Farrah-cut. Other people stopped by and stayed a bit, and often the whole occasion became quite social.

Today, one of Charlie’s Angels is Lucy Liu, a Chinese girl who wears her long black hair straight down her back proudly. I have two daughters with beautiful straight hair in its natural state. That is how I wear mine too, now. But I will always have a soft spot for my Farrah-do of youth.

Farah Fawcett died. She didn’t pass away.

Today, my Yahoo home page informed me of the news that Farah Fawcett “passes away.” No thank you— she DIED. Euphemisms be gone. What next: “Farah Fawcett goes to Jesus”? Or, in weird John Edward (the psychic) New-Age-speak, “Farah Fawcett passes”? It’s sad, people, very sad. I miss her. But that’s no excuse for tawdry euphemism. She died.

Thank you, Fearless Critic. An eater in New Haven loves you.

For years, working in bookstores here, I wished there was a decent guide to the restaurants in New Haven. I knew I wasn't really qualified to put one together myself, but it was so obvious to me that New Haven deserved better than the Zagat guide to Connecticut, which in my opinion is totally worthless. Then Robin Goldstein and Clare Murumba came to the rescue and published The Menu, which was about 95% dead on. I was an instant fan and bought many copies to give as gifts; when I worked at Atticus I sold literally hundreds of copies to grateful eaters.

The authors moved away, and I felt bad that the odds of a third edition seemed slim. It was, I suspected, just one of those things: person comes to Yale, does something really cool in New Haven, and then leaves. We've all seen it happen.

So imagine my joy when a few days ago I was poking around online looking for reviews of a downtown restaurant and I came across a website that was called Fearless Critic. One look and I knew it was Robin Goldstein at work. Further investigation indicated that a new guide to New Haven restaurants was out there -- how had I not known about this? (Well: this is what I get for leaving the bookstore game.) Completely thrilled, I sent Robin a message telling him how excited I was to discover this, and I now have my paws on a copy of the Fearless Critic guide.

And let me tell you it is a blast.

Please: if you're someone who likes to eat, and you spend any amount of time in New Haven, get a copy of this thing. It's in bookstores downtown, it can be (ahem) ordered online. I'm not going to get all uppity about where you buy it; just buy it.

On vengeance and fallenness

As I write this, the hour is late, and I’ve just seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I prefer to call it TROTF, because that sounds funny when you say it aloud. In print it doesn’t look so funny. It looks more like the abbreviation for one of those anxiety-inducing, soul-destroying, opportunity-preventing standardized tests. By comparison to which, the movie is quite enjoyable. Otherwise, though, it’s exhausting. So if I seem a little punchy, you’ll understand why. The summer’s second loudest movie about giant robots to date, TROTF does at least have the advantage over Terminator Salvation, and everything else, of being the first stupidest. To make it, the dubiously distinguished Wesleyan University alumnus Michael Bay pointed many restless cameras at Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf and the computer-rendered shapes of several confusingly configured machines, then blew a bunch of stuff up.

Does saying these things make me seem old and spiteful? I’ll have you know I’m squarely within the TROTF target demographic. For I, like many of my kind, was a child of Hasbro. In fact, without Transformers toys, I don’t know what my middle-class Clinton boyhood would have been like.

Probably better socialized, for starters. During the transition from grade school to middle school, the Transformers became a wedge issue when a friend who’d outgrown me--or maybe just wanted to seem to have put away childish things himself--let it be known with derision that I still played with them. Well, it hadn’t occurred to me to stop. Anyway, I can’t remember if the stigma took (uh, it’s not like I’d been cool to begin with), but I know the betrayal stung.

And so to him I now say: Yeah, well, the joke’s on you, dude, because now Transformers is an enormously lucrative motion-picture franchise and a worldwide sensation--and plenty of people our age are still playing with them.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say again to a certain young woman, wherever she is, that it was indeed rubber cement she found on my desk that one day in fifth grade--not, as she so reprovingly suggested, boogers. That false accusation still incenses me. For what does a man have if not (his memories of Transformers and) his reputation? To think that I’d have left my own boogers just lying right there on my desk. No. I’d have eaten them. Duh.

But I digress. It’s late. I’m punchy. Back to TROTF, and the joke being on my former friend.

No, OK, you’re right: The joke still is on me, because for all my emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations, I somehow lacked the presence of mind back then to imagine a future in which emotionally retarded proto-adolescent fixations would sustain 144 minutes of moviegoers’ attention, plus a few more minutes of mine, too long into the evening thereafter.

Had I known better, and played my cards right, maybe I could have met Michael Bay while he studied at Wesleyan and my father taught there, then written my own loud, long, stupid Transformers scripts and sold him those. Then I’d have the last laugh, and I dare say it would be an even more satisfying laugh than the one I get by saying “TROTF!” aloud to myself at the kitchen table in the middle of the night.

Midnight Picnic

By Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press, 2009)

Bram pulls into the parking lot half asleep and the crunch of gravel under his tires becomes the crunch of bone. Something screams.

The old deerhound that lives at the bar—it’s pouring tonight and he didn’t even see her.

That crunch.

He gets out of his dented Pontiac, hunches against the downpour. He doesn't want to look. It's 3:30 A.M. and the bar is dark. No light to see by except the Pontiac's headlights, ghostly cones of white slashed by rain.

He kneels to look under the car.

Nothing.

"Baby!" he yells, getting up. "Where are you?"

Movement off in the darkness, on the other side of the car. The deerhound, dragging herself away. She looks less like a dog than a man in a dog suit, huge, crawling across the gravel. He goes to her side.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,"—his voice splintering—"Hold on, let me look."

The damage is catastrophic; the dog will die.

Not quickly, though.

These are the opening paragraphs to Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, a short and terrifying book that I read a few months ago now and just can't get out of my head. The plot follows Bram, an aimless young man living in West Virginia who finds the bones of a murdered child. Hours later, the dead child finds Bram and asks him to help avenge his death. What follows would be, in the outline of the plot, part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.

I don't use the word terrifying lightly. As anyone who's been to a bad horror movie knows, scaring people is not easy. Do it wrong and it's boring, or maybe just kind of disgusting, or worse, unintentionally funny. (That the line between horror and comedy is so thin and blurry is one of the reasons, I think, that the comedic horror movie has blossomed into such a delightful genre.) Do it right, though, and you tap into the fear that early humans must have felt when the sun went down and it began to rain, and they were huddled in a group under a tree that did not provide shelter, and they knew that predators were coming for them. For me, the first two-thirds of The Shining do that (though not the final third, which becomes boring); perhaps all of 28 Days Later and much of Clive Barker's stuff does, too.

But Midnight Picnic's particular brand of scare reminds me most of David Lynch, who, at his best, pulls horror from simple elements—lighting, sound, costume, a good line, clever camera work—capturing with eerie effectiveness the experience of having a very bad and extremely compelling dream. Antosca's own use of such dream logic is the best I've come across in a long time. There are a few missteps—at one point, about halfway through the book, Bram interrogates the dead child in a way that very nearly breaks the spell—but here I'm just quibbling. I could give you passage after passage of the images and conversations that engrossed and frightened me, but I don't want to ruin them.

Also, and most impressively, Antosca manages to give his story what many horror tales never even reach for: heart. Yes, Midnight Picnic is scary. But it's also, keenly and unexpectedly, touching and tragic; for underneath the ghosts and revenge is another story about a boy looking for his father, but not being quite ready for what he finds.

So, Iguana be a citizen?

My friend Molly and I were strolling through East Rock Park last Saturday morning. Not unlike the joggers and the church picnickers, we were thinking about life and what it felt like to live it on that sunny morning. We were happily yammering away when in the middle of the path, in broad daylight, unmoving and prone was a four-foot long iguana. There was a man standing next to it and looking down at it sadly. Closer, we realized the iguana was really hurt. I mean really hurt; as in, he reared his head when he was prodded, and opened his big mouth to hiss a silent hiss of dying. His guts were in his mouth. The poor thing was busted up near dead.

The man on the Blackberry was Justin of Friends of East Rock. He had already phoned the police and was on hold with animal control. Molly and I took turns getting closer looks at the lizard, at once morbidly curious and frightened.

Justin looked at us and said earnestly, "I have to go to a meeting. I've called the police…" And with that, we were charged with responsibility, immediacy, and yes, citizenship. He left us and there we stood guarding the dying iguana. Thus began a Saturday morning taste of real community.

A man walked up with a baby boy, came and checked out the iguana, told us it was supposed to be green, not the jaundice it was. We wondered together if it had been dumped, already hit by a car, or if a Parks and Rec. truck had run it over. The cynic in me thought it had been hit then put in the middle of the park to be found and buried. The half-full woman in me believed it had been living happily in the park for months, and upon reaching for a far-off branch, had fallen from the tall oaks above us.

The man with the baby offered to stay with the iguana while Molly gathered sticks to weigh down a make-shift trash bag shroud for the thing. I went to houses around the park knocking on doors, asking if anyone was missing a pet iguana. I interrupted a woman mowing her lawn, explained the story, and she told me that she was certain none of her neighbors to the right of her had a pet iguana. But the people two houses down, who knew? She didn't really know them. At another house, a man came to the door while on hold with the telephone. "I hope you aren't missing an iguana," I greeted him. He was happy to report he wasn't and was so kind to then ask the operator to hold while I filled him in on what was going on in the park.

And what was going on in the park, as I now looked back to see Molly amid a small and curious crowd, was in the business of community. Some sixth graders came with their bikes and their father. Turns out they were from my school, Foote School. Turns out they were coming from an alderman's party. Turns out the man with the baby wants to run for alderman. Turns out the local poet Alice Mattison and her husband Ed came to see what was going on. Her husband is a former alderman.

Then, the policeman arrived and declared, "The Green Iguana is not native to this park." At first I thought no shit, and as he talked it was clear he was familiar with reptiles; he's got a few snakes as pets. He reckoned the iguana was kept by some ignoramuses who dropped it in the park and that then a truck came by and squashed the thing. He went to check on the iguana under the glad bag and when he poked it, nothing happened.

It didn't move. It was dead. It had died just there. It was alive and then it was dead.

He picked up the body, and folded the thing in, and the thing arced at the bottom of the trash bag.

People's faces were all sad. We were all sad for this poor alien, this poor orphan, and this poor untold story of a living thing.

And that was it. We used the bathroom, and kept walking down Orange street feeling like we belonged to something bigger than ourselves. And that the charge of respecting a helpless living thing, no matter how random and bazaar, brought people out of their own lives, and brought us together. Iguana community like that, don't you?

Seidel'd

One of my more interesting reading experiences last fall was provided by Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga (2006). I don't know much about Seidel except he's rich, was born in 1936, published his first book of poems in 1962, and didn't publish another book until 1979. His Collected Poems, 1959-2009 was released a few months ago. I'm hoping to dawdle through it this summer. Whatever we expect a poet to show us, it's rare that he shows us a lifestyle to which only that elusive 5% of the population with 37% of the wealth are accustomed. In Seidel's case, as in "Barbados," there is an outrageous tendency to be as rancid as anything he might witness. Poets with political axes to grind do, of course, give us glimpses of brutal acts and consequences to jar us out of our literary complacency. But Seidel somehow seems to suggest that all he's grinding is his pencil, to make it sharper. Whatever the outcome of the chaos we live in, he seems to shrug, I was there.

But what makes his writing so hard to fathom is its childlike simplicity. Or, rather, its simplicity is so arch, so tongue-in-cheek, so craftily artless, that one always waits to be slapped or jabbed by the inevitable line that arrives with all the specific, precise density -- drowning in acid -- of Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot when they suddenly drop the right phrase into its inevitable place.

Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row, And Mr. Hall, the head cutter. The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so. One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer -- what a show!-- Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets. London once seemed the epitome of no regrets And the old excellence one used to know Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow. --"Kill Poem"

Yeah, and "a savage servility slides by on grease." To me, the echoes of Lowell's "Skunk Hour" dance through a poem that strikes me as a Charles Bukowski poem for an uncannily different demographic. But Bukowski came to mind while reading Seidel, not only for the "fuck you if you can't take me" ethos that these poems exude, but for a sense of the poem as the only possible response to a life of this tenor. Once your lines become this spare, they spare nothing.

But look at how the diction does whatever it wants -- the beautiful balance of line 3 ends with that hanging "utter" that is itself pretty damned utter. And then the "what a show!" interpolation in a flash makes speaker and poem as cartoonish as anything -- or at least as any inconceivable commercial for Ducati racers(!) could be. Then the "matched exotics" of "egrets" and "regrets" so funny and so baldly bad, as we veer into "the old excellence" that ends with a line worthy of Lowell and an image that suddenly brings in the death and blood that lurks so smugly behind all our diversionary tactics. Gee.

What I like about Seidel is the way he plays our banalities back at us, but first subjects them to a sea-change that causes the acrid brine of his own peculiar vision to cling to them:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger. But this young woman is young. We kiss. It's almost incest when it gets to this. This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger. --"Climbing Everest"

What is said is what anyone commenting on how the rich old court the fresh young might say -- but it would be said in a wagging finger way, or at least with mockery of the jaded, fading oldster trying to ignite himself via youth. But Seidel says it with a kind of rueful surprise at being the oldster accepted by youth in his "hunger-for-younger." In other words, it's not jaded at all, but almost charmingly surprised by the mores of "almost incest," where the words "consensual, national" do the job of making both old and young part of a machine that operates simply because it operates. "My dynamite penis / Is totally into Venus" Seidel quips, the intonation of youth appropriated by age to make the sex act partake of "the moment" as, we tend to think, only youth can. The insinuation of the poem -- that such sex acts, like that Ducati racer, are grandiose acts of death-courting -- never stops asserting itself after that first verse of foreplay, and each joke gets a little edgier, stripped of any self-satisfaction, but gripped by the vanity of vanitas, which is to say that being vain is a vain endeavor, that the grave is grave, and that "the train wreck in the tent" is addicted to all the tender mercies he can get.

Judging by Ooga-Booga, Seidel is an acquired taste that I'm on my way to acquiring because his poems confront me in a way that the poets I end up living with for awhile do. Bring on those Collected Poems.

Classics I Hate

When I was in the midst of receiving my doctorate in American literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center, I made my obligatory pilgrimages to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. My first was a doozy. I vividly remember a panel I attended on canonical and non-canonical works, where such well-regarded scholars as the incendiary Houston Baker and the all-too-conservative James Tuttleton duked it out over the Western canon and the validity of the "classic." Both trotted out their respective arguments and in the many years since I have come to take stock in the merits of the two sides. There is definitely room in the canon—whatever that is—for new work that need not labor in the shadow of Melville and Emerson or even the critical sensibility that placed them at the top. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way to regard all published works of literary fiction on par with one another in terms of quality or even critical interest. Charles Dickens is better than Stephen King, just like Stephen King is better than John Saul, who is really not much better than anyone. Now we can argue about what we mean by better, but if we take as one aspect of it my second criterion of "critical interest"—worthiness and worthwhile-ness for critical examination—then, yeah, Dickens is better than King. There is more to say about Dickens' work than there is to say about King's, and on multiple fronts, too: historical, economic, linguistic, sociopolitical.

So, in my mind, there are such things as classics, although I don't much love the term and the baggage it carries. Classics presumably point to works of quality that support that much more critical interest than other works. And this raises, in turn, an issue I have become quite fascinated by: classics I hate.

The hated classic finds its antithesis in the guilty pleasure, which in today's world is hardly a source of shame. Hell, my wife is more than happy to talk about her preferences for American Idol—even though she was less vested in this year's selection of Kris Allen—and I can freely admit my penchant for old Kung Fu movies and Firefall's "You Are the Woman" (please don't hit me). There are many who happily boast a passion for various species of bad art. I have friends who love Z-movie vampire flicks. My sister thinks Dumb and Dumber is one of the greatest comedies ever made. I had a boss who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously. There is even circulating a much-talked-about documentary on the "best worst movie" ever. Need I go on?

However, we tend to be more circumspect about how much we dislike great art. True, it is easy enough to confide among friends our gut feeling that Giacometti's sculptures seem childish or Verdi is a bore. But put us in a room of intellectual peers or, even worse, acknowledged superiors, and suddenly it becomes a more vexing matter. We still may not like Giacometti or Verdi, but try justifying your response without sounding entirely solipsistic ("What can I say? It doesn't do a thing for me"), all of which seems to raise important questions about our response—and those of our peers. What do they know that I don't? Is it a question of unacknowledged personal immaturity? Or is this classic just another example of mass hysterical bad judgment? (It's been known to happen.) Or perhaps questions of taste really are relative and Stephen King can be as good as Charles Dicken—Heaven forfend!

With bad art, I suspect we're allowed to indulge our innate solipsism. Why am I willing to overlook how crappy old Kung Fu movies are? The escapism, formulaic storytelling, acrobatic choreography are all psychological creature comforts of the circus and childish wish fulfillment. But why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? It's dull, dull, dull, and I'll take the The Blithedate Romance over it in a heartbeat. So what the hell am I missing?

This is not an insignificant question. As a former college teacher, I was constantly placed in the position of rebutting student charges of dullness, an eternal source of frustration that seemed little more than the response of the lazy mind. In my struggle to teach students how to appreciate works by Conrad, Austen, Poe, Blake, and innumerable others, this response surfaced again and again as an ever-elusive combatant whom I could never quite grasp and pin down.

So why do I hate The Scarlet Letter? Why is my memory of it hardly a pleasurable one? Why has this novel never moved me in any way whatsoever? These are all questions that deserve a better answer than "I'm sorry but it's just a dull read." After all, I am more than willing to tolerate the lengthy mood settings in Joseph Conrad or the fine needlepoint psychological excursions of Henry James. I know The Scarlet Letter is a classic; I can even sense it! But there is radical disconnect, one that flummoxes any attempt at quick explication.

So for now, I am without answers; someday I hope to offer better ones. Until then, let me turn it over to you: Which classics have you found to be an utter failure in your experience as a reader?

The street where I live . . .

I have been thinking about turning this article I wrote about my street, West Rock Avenue, into a book, and so I have been doing a lot of reading about urbanism, town planning, and architecture. Basically, I am trying to figure out what makes some streets livable and others not. A good deal of the literature — by people including New Havener Philip Langdon, whose A Better Place to Live has given me a whole new outlook on what makes a space a happy one in which to dwell — boils down to this: don't depend on cars. People are happier when they can walk to see neighbors, ride their bicycles, and live close enough to their neighbors that they know them. This small-town mythology is one that I am particularly susceptible to, having grown up in a neighborhood that had many of a small town's virtues. And I find myself, as I read these books, falling prey to an unfortunate smugness, as if growing up on streets laid out on an easily navigated grid, with houses on quarter-acres instead of large lots, is the only way to have a happy childhood.

But that can't be right. For one thing, this mythos runs contrary to another important American mythos, the rural farm. I don't think many of us would want to say that children growing up in the countryside, learning to milk cows by their parents' sides, are unhappy. Nobody thinks that that's an uninspiring or despairing way to grow up. And, to be fair, the writers I'm reading aren't reacting against that way of life, which may be dying out; they are reacting against suburban sprawl, which until recently seemed poised to dominate the American landscape.

But what of that suburban sprawl — especially those cul-de-sac developments that have proved so popular in late-20th-century construction? Can one have a happy childhood where there are no sidewalks, where it's too dangerous to ride a bicycle, where there are no secret passageways behind garages or corner stores at which to buy candy?

I don't know. On the one hand, I don't want to underestimate children's capacity for self-mystification. I suspect that most children, at least most of those who grow up middle-class, and sheltered from anything too abysmal in the family's home life, look back at their early years with a certain sense of awe and wonder. Those lookalike houses in Del Boca Vista Estates are not lookalike to the children inside them, who know which house has the best video-game system, which kid has the dad who makes the best forts with the dining room table and some blankets, whose parents go out late and don't hire a babysitter (all the better for watching verboten TV channels).

On the other hand, there is empirical evidence that suburban life of this kind can lead to bad things: obesity, too much time in the car, fewer friends, less play. And teenagers—forget about it. If they can, they flee to the city. Or at least the curious ones do.

But what I don't have are good sympathetic non-fiction books about life in suburban sprawl. For every book critical of that way of life — Langdon's book, Duany et al.'s Suburban Nation, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place — there seem to be exactly zero books about why it can be pleasurable to grow up in spaces that are, after all, safe, predictable, and quiet, which are all good things.

I want the other side of the story. Ideas, anyone?