Digging "Digging"

There I was at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry surrounded by writers from various spots on the globe, all of us finishing a week of craft discussions, close readings, and general merriment.  We were discussing Heaney’s poem, “Digging” and I had to open my big mouth and confess that I never liked that poem.  I felt instant regret.  What the fuck are you thinking?  This is the SEAMUS HEANEY Centre for Poetry.  This is Belfast, Northern Ireland, not terribly far from Heaney’s birthplace.  Not terribly far from the plot of land his father dug up that inspired the poem.  Are you trying to alienate everyone? 

Thankfully, the workshop leader, the talented Leontia Flynn, broke the silence by affirming that, indeed, it’s not a perfect poem. 

“Pens aren’t really squat, are they?” she said, referring to the opening lines: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” and closing ones: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” 

It would be an understatement to say I was relieved. 

In the year or so that’s followed, I’ve thought back to this moment, not with pride.  The week in Belfast reacquainted me with Heaney’s work, inasmuch as I have been rereading him throughout the last several months.  First the selected poems, then all of North (always my favorite) then some of the later collections.  All of this has reminded me that, yes, Heaney deserves all the praise he gets.  The man had an ear unlike anyone else’s, a gift for finding essential phrases and constructing them into damn-near perfect lines.  His work is daring yet restrained, and almost always invigorating.

But “Digging” just never sat well with me.  And why should it?  Not every poem can be gold.  No one poet has produced a flawless body of work.  It’s just ain’t gonna happen.  None of my heroes—Ciaran Carson, C. K. Williams, Medbh McGuckian, Anna Akhmatova, Frank O’Hara, Walt Whitman, Paul Muldoon, and a host of others I could name but I have to stop somewhere—have a perfect track record. 

That being stated, “Digging” seems at times to be Heaney’s most famous work.  When he died, three different people read me some of “Digging,” if not the whole thing.  Though the man wrote so much so well, “Digging”—one of Heaney’s earliest efforts—seems to be the sole poem stuck in the minds of casual readers, many of whom edit anthologies. 

That’s where I first read “Digging”: the second volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  Having kept the book with me after dropping out of college, I used to tote it from home to work and read some bits on the train and on my lunch break.  It was while eating a bowl of potato soup that I found “Digging” toward the back of the anthology.  How serendipitous to be eating potato soup and reading about Heaney’s dad digging potatoes!  I took note of the poem, loving the cleanness of it.  I think I’d skipped several pages and a few hundred years to get to “Digging” so I may have been refreshed by Heaney’s words after so much of the Victorians. 

Years later, when I started to read Heaney with greater interest, when poems like “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” and “Casualty” became known to me, I soured on “Digging.”  A fine poem in some regards, but the idea of Heaney grappling with his masculinity in the face of his father and grandfather’s ruggedness just annoyed me.  “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”  Oh, and why’s that, Seamus?  None around?  No digging to be done anymore?  Too busy are you?  Having worked a collection of mind-numbing, rotten jobs, I was a bit too reactive to any high-faultin’ bullshit about the struggles of the artist, which is what I stupidly took Heaney to be saying.  He compares his pen to a spade and says he’ll dig with it.  Yeah, great.  Write your poems, but we’re hungry here.  Can you maybe also put the pen down a dig a few potatoes while you’re at it?

Of course I was being ridiculous.  My reading of “Digging” was one-dimensional.  I saw it as his means of coming to terms with his ancestry of laborers, a line he could not (would not?) join.  I think “Casualty,” my favorite Heaney poem in some ways, confirmed this when the speaker represents the interrogation of his friend recently slaughtered by a night out at the pub despite warnings of an imminent bombing.

He had gone miles away   

For he drank like a fish   

Nightly, naturally   

Swimming towards the lure   

Of warm lit-up places,   

The blurred mesh and murmur   

Drifting among glasses   

In the gregarious smoke.   

How culpable was he   

That last night when he broke   

Our tribe’s complicity?   

‘Now, you’re supposed to be   

An educated man,’   

I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me   

The right answer to that one.’

Ah ha!  Heaney (who I assumed was the speaker of the poem—never assume) was referred to, somewhat tauntingly, as “An educated man.”  Was this the reputation he held among working class associates?  Did he assume the role with pride or with a sort of mild embarrassment?  I ask because I know that feeling.  While not coming from a part of the world anything like Heaney’s, I did grow in a rather working class environment where reading, much less writing, poetry was not something one boasted about lest one get taken down a few pegs.  Look at Mr. Fancy Man!  So maybe I was projecting?  Maybe the mild shame of being “An educated man” who digs with a pen rather than a spade wasn’t Heaney dealing with his issues but me dealing with my own. 

I have long said that one will find what they like in poetry, often what they bring to it.  If you come at a poem with some baggage, you may find that baggage staring back at you.  It’s like that damn tree in The Empire Strikes Back—be careful what you bring into it.  Could all of my years spent disliking “Digging” be the product of my own bullshit? 

Objectively, there’s much to like in “Digging.”  It sounds gorgeous.  Even during my most anti-“Digging” period I was willing to celebrate “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat.”  And what about the second stanza, possibly my favorite:

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Here are the cleanest rhymes of the poem, though they resist perfection.  Sure, “sound” and “ground” are pure, but “down” is off enough to pull us back to the preceding stanza, a slant-rhyming couplet:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

“Thumb” and “gun” are great together.  They have that similarity of sound as well as the visual they create: cocking back the hammer before pulling the trigger.  This sort of playful loose rhyme gets me excited.  Those words... how to find the ones that don’t advertise themselves as rhyme?  That’s the goddamn beautiful struggle.  I’m sure that I missed the approximate rhyme while reading “Digging” for the first time.  I may have noticed the second stanza’s more obvious rhymes, but the first couplet flew past me. 

The subsequent stanzas stop rhyming all together, though I’m tempted to argue for a deliberateness of the line endings, especially in the fourth and fifth stanzas:

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

Taking the last words of the fourth stanza together, we have “shaft firmly deep picked hands” which sounds like a line of poetry itself.  Regarding the next couplet, “spade man” is grand.  A new superhero, perhaps, one whose super power is the ability to “cut more turf in a day / Than any other man on Toner's bog.”

A friend tried to convince me that the digging in “Digging” is metaphorical, and that Heaney is most concerned with the digging one must do when they toil in the life of the mind.  That certainly seems evident in the grandfather’s “Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, going down and down / For the good turf. Digging.”  I was reading it through one lens, my friend through another.  These multiple interpretations are both correct if you ask me, though I’m now happy to report that I’m on Team Digging after all these years.  It’s a fucking great poem.

Still, last week, when buying a used copy of Heaney’s Seeing Things, I had to give an eye roll to the inscription left by the person who gave the previous owner the book as a gift.  The gift giver, Jeffery, wrote in Melissa’s copy:

Christmas 1993 (belated but there nonetheless)

Here’s to happiness and peace on Earth and life-long friendship! Thank you for all of your efforts in helping obtain all 3.

Then Jeffery, that pretentious fop, ended with the last stanza of “Digging” the one that always bugged me.  Ugh.  Is this the only poem of Heaney’s people know?  Have any of them taken the time to memorize a few lines from “Punishment” or “Limbo” perhaps the most chilling poem the man ever wrote?  

Of course there are plenty of people who’ve memorized Heaney poems.  I know a few.  But that won’t stop “Digging” from being the poem that’ll come to the lips of many when they hear the name Seamus Heaney.  And why not?  If that is the case then good for Heaney.  It’s rare that anyone writes one poem worth remembering, much less hundreds. 

Rogers Park, My Kinda Something

It’s been a whopping ten years since I moved to the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.  This is significant inasmuch as I moved a LOT as a younger man and resided in a number of parts of the city, albeit mostly on the north side.  My relatives used to make fun of my vagabond ways, chiding me for their frequent need to update their address books.  Of all the parts of Chicago I’ve inhabited, I’m not sure Rogers Park is my favorite.  It’s just where I ended up.

Seeing as I’m likely staying in Rogers Park for at least a little while longer, and that ten is a good round number, I thought I’d review the neighborhood. 

At one point, a local publication called Rogers Park the most diverse neighborhood in Chicago.  The consensus cited a near equal mix of Caucasians, African-Americans, and Latinos.  This was celebrated.  Of course, I’m all for diversity, but—to echo a bit of Walter Benn Michaels’s ideas without making this an either/or—diversity is not enough.  A healthy mix of cultures is fantastic, but it’s not like they always get along.  When I moved to the area, I was told which parts were the ones to avoid, where this gang resides, which bars are hotspots for the other gang, where the college kids hang out, where the hippies congregate.  Anyone who knows Chicago knows that we’ve long been a segregated town, and Rogers Park is not different.  More diverse than Lincoln Park or Austin, sure, but here we’ve got a segregated neighborhood within a segregated city.

But we are diverse.  One can walk down Clark Street and find tacos, tortas, burritos, and tacos.  Sheridan boasts a used bookstore, a small café near a Starbucks, and a few bars, one of them a slashie!  A new microbrew pub just opened, along with a few trendy restaurants that seem nice.  I wouldn’t know.  These days, my favorite place to eat is my kitchen.  It’s the one place in America where bacon isn’t served on everything.  The walk from the train to my apartment brings me in contact with students from the university and the private school that, in the last decade, have both swallowed up a chunk of the neighborhood.  I look forward to 2027 when the area is renamed Loyola-Waldorf. 

Rogers Park is a patriotic neighborhood.  This 4th of July was as rowdy as ever with just as many idiots blowing things up.  I don’t know that I heard as many gunshots as last year, but maybe I’m less skilled at distinguishing between pistols and fireworks than I thought.  After July, one doesn’t hear so many bangs and blasts, but our commitment to our city and country remains strong.  At one point, we boasted more bloggers than any other part of the city.  Almost all of these blogs were political in nature and run by conspiracy minded weirdoes, angry cranks, or just those wonderful vigilantes armed with police scanners and fuckloads of weapons. 

I should note that sweeping generalizations about my ‘hood are likely bullshit.  I know this, as I live on a particular street that is perhaps unlike any other in the area, thus I ought to assume that life on, say, Farwell or Howard or Lunt might be unique.  But if I look at my street as a sort of microcosm of Rogers Park, I can make a few assumptions and declarative statements.  So let’s take the dog for a walk and see what my street has to offer.

Up the block is a house with a porch swing, as if this were fucking Georgia.  To make matters stranger, the man of the house likes to sit on his porch swing and play the banjo.  This might be charming, but the guy seems to know only a few notes and chords.  That or he’s practicing his scales at a snail’s pace.  Either way, it makes for dull listening.  He’s no Earl Scruggs, but we all have to start somewhere.  Until recently, the woman across from him would practice her violin.  If one were to walk past at the right time, they’d be privy to a war of the instruments, a sort of free form avant-garde piece for banjo and violin. 

While walking my dog, I often meet other dog owners.  Some of them are also parents of human children.  Plenty of families on my street.  And college kids.  Before 8:00 PM, the street can feel like a sort of small town with kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalks and riding bikes recently liberated of training wheels.  After 9:00, the scene shifts to a college party with the requisite marijuana smoke and inane chatter.  Almost all of the apartments and homes are adorned with vegetation, some of it purposefully planted and cultivated.  Urbanites do love their postage stamp lawns.  Sometimes they get their lawns fertilized for free courtesy of dog owners with lax attitudes regarding cleaning up after their pets.  Over the years, I’ve gotten good at spotting dog shit, a skill acquired after more than one shoe got soiled and had to be hosed off. 

My street has its share of wildlife.  I’ve spotted raccoons, opossum, a bat, a falcon, and many oddballs shuffling home after a night out.  Rogers Park may be ground zero for oddballs, actually.  Slightly touched, I call them.  Like the guy who walks down Sheridan with his pants around his ankles, angrily cursing at... well, I’m not sure.  Life?   The barflies at Bruno’s and Cuuneen’s; the shuffling, crushed residents of assisted living homes; the bearded, aging hippie who partied a little too hard in the ‘60s and sits in The Coffee Shop singing and laughing at his acid flashbacks; the whack-job on Columbia who told me my dog was the devil; I love them all.  Except when they piss me off.

Rogers Park boasts a healthy immigrant population.  Specifically, I’m thinking of the Eastern European men who congregate at Starbucks to drink endless espressos, chain smoke and chat in their native tongue.  They may not be oddballs, per se, but they are a community, one that seems impenetrable, as do most of the insular societies within the neighborhood.  I once met a friend at the bar formerly known as Jarheads.  We were happy it had reopened, though the old owner, a marine who ran the bar for other veteran marines, was no longer in control of things.  In his place was an preternaturally patient woman who let some of the new regulars hurl peanuts and insults at her.  Shortly after that display, a rival gang strolled in.  The bouncer—a scrawny kid in way over his head—did his best to insist that one group sit at the east end of the bar and the other stay west, but that distance proved too short for comfort, especially considering my drinking buddy and I were in the middle.  We'd wandered in where we didn’t belong.  But we stayed for another round, then got out before the tensions boiled over.  A narrow escape from a scene that was not ours. 

But you know what—it could’ve been our scene if we’d gone back the next day.   We might’ve become regulars.  It seems possible.  It’s just a matter of showing up.  However gritty or dangerous, Rogers Park is open to you.  We’re not Canaryville; we don’t shun outsiders.  Rogers Park is welcoming.  Still, the gentrification isn’t necessarily embraced. 

On that: I didn’t grow up here, so it’s not for me to bemoan the changes the area has undergone.  I’m more an amused viewer of the banter between long-time residents and the condo owners who, after their first summer in the neighborhood, realize Rogers Park has problems.  Then they take to Facebook groups, blogs, and Twitter to complain about the crime.  I’m always curious to know if they bothered to do a minute’s research before buying.

Then there’s the New 400, a movie house for those on a budget.  Of course, you get what you pay for—no stadium seating here.  But the place does serve drinks, which is helpful in the summertime when the movies inevitably suck.  Watching leather-clad men and women pretending to be comic book heroes is certainly a lot easier with a few whiskies. 

Of course, no discussion of Rogers Park would be complete without mentioning the beaches.  Ah... the beaches.  A wonderful expanse of sand, water, and sky perfect for long walks and laying out during those short months when the weather permits such indulgence.  I tend to stick to beaches near my part of town, as the closer one gets to Howard, the weirder things get.  I believe a sheep’s head was found on the far north beach.  I’m leaving that area the hell alone.  I can deal with the noise and sex workers and dealers and other urban realities packed tightly within that bit of the city on the edge of Evanston, but a decapitated animal’s head is too much for this citizen. 

Oh right— the Heartland Café.  I used to have issues with that place.  The food has gotten a lot better, but my first trips were a disappointment, partially due to the wait-staff that were pained to do their job in the face of their greater artistic callings.  Yes, you’re a painter/actor/musician/poet/sculptor, but since you’re currently wearing an apron not spattered with paint, could you get my fucking sandwich?  I was also annoyed when the Café asked for donations after admitting that they don’t understand how banks work and have mismanaged the place for years. But, again, that’s not been the case as of late.  The new chef is a lot better than the last one, the staff is friendly and helpful, and the business seems to be doing better.  After moving here, I quickly came to understand that the Heartland Café is a landmark, a long loved treasure here in the center of the neighborhood.  It represents a certain element of the area, the politically charged, leftist, soy and incense element.  I dig all of that, save for the incense. 

But I would be remiss if I didn’t state again that my favorite place to eat food, drink tea, and swill booze is my apartment.  It's also my favorite movie theater and library.  So long as it stays in Rogers Park, so will I.  Sadly, it’s a private spot that only lets in a few privileged individuals.  We’re a bit exclusive.  Sorry.   

13 Thoughts on This is Not a Rescue

1. Emily Blewitt is a wonderful Welsh woman (that’s alliteration for those who care).  I had the pleasure of meeting her in Belfast when the two of us were workshopping poems.  Hers stood out.  I knew she had a book slated for publication, so I asked her to send me word when it was published. 

2. I don’t do this often.  I’m not exactly competitive, but, to borrow from Morrissey, I hate it when friends are successful.  I suppose jealous is the right word, though I’m really only jealous when people publish books ahead of me and their books are not good.  If a good writer gets something in print, well, I can only be jealous of their talent, not their success.

3.  Emily Blewitt is certainly a good writer.  A damn good one.  I’ll even call her a poet, which is a word I have a bit of trouble with.  It seems one has to earn that title.  She’s earned it.  I knew as much when I read her poems last year at the workshop, and this was further confirmed when I read This is Not a Rescue, her debut collection. 

4.  The title poem is striking.  I mean, kicking off a poem (and a book) with “I want to tell you that it will not be as you expect” is a smart move.  Aside from asking the reader to catch up, which is to say, asking them to engage, a line like this is a sort of meta announcement to abandon expectations.  Whether or not this was intentional, the effect on this reader was to subvert any assumptions I had about the book, the poem, poetry, and whatever else was going on with me when I sat down to read.  And while the poem goes on to be nothing as meta as what I have stated above, it’s images allure.  I was in, but “How to Marry a Welsh Girl” only further pulled at me. 

5. “How to Marry a Welsh Girl” does not too heavily lean on the accumulation of things, which is good.  I love making lists and using concrete things as a means of creating a scene.  Tom Waits once wrote of this over-attention to detail.  He likes songs that tell you exactly how many cigarette butts are in the ashtray.  In this sense, how could I not adore:

“...For dowry you take what you can,

get what you’re given: the chapel, prolific sheep, jackdaws, circling

hills and black mountains, the usual ropey singing

at the pub they don’t speak English in, cheese and pickle

cocktail sticks, pasties, corned beef.”

When she gets to the act of carving a lovespoon, I had to find out if this is indeed a thing.  (For those who are, as I was, unfamiliar with this custom, go look it up for yourself.  It’s more than worth a google.) 

6. An editor once told me that my poems rely too much on listing.  Blewitt does this with a deft hand.  Damn her.

7.  “The Walking Wed” is clever.  It created a sense of dread with its wedding as zombie apocalypse concept that also brought a giggle, though re-readings make it seem less clever than accomplished.  I hate clever poems that have little to offer aside from a simple idea, usually a joke.  And I love jokes.  I love humor in poetry.  It’s an undervalued thing to throw into a poem, but so many clever poems feel empty, a joke strained.  Thankfully, this is not one of those poems.

8.  Weddings are nice, right?  They pop up in this book, sure, but the sensuality of “Navigation Points” is a nicely balanced shift from the spectacle of weddings to a private intimacy:

“You lower your long dark lashes

just once: to trace your route

across my skin.

Those moles, you say,

fine points for navigation.

You’ll map my constellations, you explain,

know me anywhere.”

I’ve seen poems that go a bit overboard with the sort of thing.  I’m no prude, but there’s a line between sensual and dull.  It gets crossed easily by lesser poets. 

9. Furthering the love poetry is “Lines” which has a moment that makes me wonder if Blewitt (or the speaker of the poem, as there’s no guarantee that the speaker is Emily Blewitt, though readers tend to assume that a poem is always presented by the poet, forgetting that dramatic monologue is a thing) is being sincere when she speaks of loving her lover’s receding hairline “as it shows me more of you.”  It reminds me of poems men have written to their beloveds, the ones teeming with hyperbolic details about the perfections and imperfections of the female body.  Those of us who’ve tried honeydripping in the past might, with a poem like "Lines," get a sense of what it’s like to receive the woo rather than be the pitcher.  While I’m confident this role-reversal was not Blewitt’s intention, I nevertheless found this small detail interesting.  Note to self: go back to your old love poems and reconsider the Nerduaesque bits.

10. As the reader (well, this reader) gets deep into the collection, an idea of the book’s concerns begins to form.  And then a pair of poems—“Sometimes I Think of Chapel” and “Forgiveness”— thwart our certainty.  All those lovely poems, those weddings, those tender moments, those funny subversions of Jane Aust3n and The Walking Dead (and, later, Star Wars, but we’ll get to that) are gone now as we shift to the theme of past trauma.  The mother, who removes her daughter from the chapel where just one damn stanza ago everything seemed so innocent, prays: “let her never learn to kneel”; the speaker channels her parents:

“I am my mother’s daughter. I forgive

the man, my grandmother who let him in,

who called my mother a bloody liar

years later”

This forgiveness boils into vindictive punishment before we’re permitted the relief of looking away. 

11. These themes make a fine stew.  Allusions to literary (Jane Austen heroes in “Devouring Jane”) and popular culture (“The Walking Wed”) find their ultimate expression in “Boba Fett and the Sarlacc,” a Star Wars reference I was happy to see, for a change.  A fine poem, though rereading it this morning reacquainted me with the preceding work “The Couple Opposite” which, in its opening lines, called to mind Rear Window before the real magic of the poem did its thing.  Being an artist is akin to being an extrovert in the sense that artists have something strange within them that demands that they share (sometimes over-share).  But what does it mean to be a reader?  Perhaps we’re the ones looking at the couple through the window, watching their odd performance, making judgments and getting all giddy over the special effects.  This is likely a poor reading of Blewitt’s poem, but it gave me pause.  Any book that can—even accidentally—move me to consider such theoretical bullshit about the role of the reader and writer is worthy of praise.

12.  The book concludes with a very nice poem, “One in Three Billion,” that, while bringing us back to themes of motherhood, chimes on another theme in the collection: animals.  Anyone who’s ever visited my site or spoken with me at all knows that I’m a bit nuts for dogs, though this is a recent lunacy—it took having a dog of my own to unalterably make me a person who must have a pet.  I don’t talk as much about my cat (rest in peace, old man) but he was my first pet and damn if I didn’t feel for him, and for subsequent pets, the sort of love and responsibility that I assume rivals parenthood.  At the risk of pissing off all of my friends with kids, let me stop qualifying things: I am father to those creatures.  And, thus, “One in Three Billion” touched me.  A beautiful closer. 

13.  I feel compelled to state that my extolling of This is Not a Rescue is not coming from a bias for the author, my acquaintance.  She lives in Wales.  I reside in Chicago.  Were it not for Facebook, we’d likely never communicate, and if the book sucked, I could easily pan it and ignore whatever hate messages came my way.  And I would have little trouble writing a less than enthusiastic review if the book merited one.  But it doesn’t.  I almost wish it did, because, again, jealousy.  But I’m happy to write of the book’s quality, the dazzling poems, the clever ones, the eerie ones, because I’m happy to see a debut collection this strong.  I read a lot of poetry and I don’t love it all.  But I believe in poetry the way people believe in god.  It’s the finest of literary art forms.  That is, when it’s done well.  It is also one of the lowest, messiest, most irritating art forms imaginable.  Poetry can be elevating or dispiriting. Or dull.  Or extraordinary. Or just okay.  To even attempt to write a poem is humbling.  To read one as good as the best of This is Not a Rescue is humbling as well.  There is much to admire in this collection.  And that makes me goddamn happy.  If only Emily Blewitt had published a rotten book.  It’d be so much easier to write this review.  If only she’d published a fair book.  I’d have found a way to not write this review.  But she had to go and publish a strong, stunning book.  And so I had to write this review. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death, 32 and Looking Not a Day Older

Every semester that sees me teaching freshman how to avoid comma splices, among other pressing matters, I assign one reading that continues to excite me: “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” by Neil Postman.  It’s a speech Postman delivered before a room of theologians as the 20th century was coming to an end.  There is concern at the start of his talk about the rush of technology that has begun to seem beyond what many thought possible only a few years prior.  I mean, yeah, cellular phones and computers were around in the 1980s, but who among us cared about that junk?  (Okay, a lot of people were interested in these gadgets.  My stepdad, for one.  He always had a computer in the house, even those primitive keyboard-and-screen-in-one clunkers from Radio Shack, though all I remember doing with it was running a program that filled the screen with whatever dirty word I found funny at the moment.) 

But in 1998, when Postman made his speech, the internet was a thing we were only beginning to allow into our everyday lives.  I recall my distrust—it seemed to me that the so-called information highway was more a way to get cheap ego validation and play with toys.  And I was right, of course, though I was neither the first nor the last to state as much.  But I was converted once I got an email account and realized that it would improve my life inasmuch as I no longer had to speak to people on the phone.  God bless email. 

Whatever trepidation I may have had about the fast moving tech the rest of the world was so excited about, Postman was less fearful and more critical in the even-headed manner that seems lost on my students.  They tend to see his speech as an attack on tech from an old man who died before Snapchat, so what did he know?  One student defended tech in her response essay by writing on the wonders of Tinder, but I digress. 

Postman was not a technophobe.  He merely understood that technology is, in his words, “a Faustian bargain.  Technology giveth and taketh away.”  Meaning that for every advantage that we gain with new technologies (speed, access to information, connection to people), we lose something (focus, decorum, connection to people).  This is not exactly unique to technology, as all that is added to our world exacts some sort of price, but it is a salient point that seems lost on the tech zealots who see every app as a means of “making the world a better place.” 

Suffice it to say that my students—being young and not really able to remember a time before smart phones or laptops—see this speech as an assault on their way of life.  I try to defend Postman because I happen to agree with his speech, but I am biased.  I’ve long thought his voice was among the most rational ones that see television and computers as being less than the miracles they are often thought to be.  At the very least, he saw them as more complex.  And while people have been bad mouthing TV for generations, few saw the problem from Postman’s point of view.

Which brings me to Amusing Ourselves to Death, the 1985 book that will forever be associated with Postman’s name.  Similar to Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” idea, Postman’s critique of “Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” will forever be his biggest claim to fame.  And Rightfully so!  Amusing Ourselves to Death is a now a whopping 32 years old and showing few gray hairs and next to no liver spots.  Sure, some of the focus seems dated only due to the tech saturation that has caused us to spend more time in front of the computer than the television, though, of course, the two have begun merging into one.  Netflix, you seductive bastard.  Aside from a few details that date the text (references to “Dallas” and “Cheers”) nothing seems older than a day, provided one sees Postman’s discussion of television as applicable to the streaming services and YouTube.  Which I do. 

The most relevant chapters in Amusing Ourselves to Death have to do with the format of TV news and our political process, the former being predicated on short bits of information followed by equally short bits of information interrupted by commercials and scored to emotionally manipulative music, none of it delivered with any sort of real analysis or time for reflection.  When we receive info via the nightly newscast, we get mere drips from an iceberg.  The format is not meant to engage us critically or to illuminate the stories, just deliver them in an entertaining way.  The reason why is that, according to Postman, TV, like all technologies, has a philosophy that favors certain things over others.  And TV favors entertainment, even when it’s pretending to inform.  Who wants to think when watching the tube?  Now, if you ask me, the other issue here is the problem with capitalism: everything is a commodity, including information, thus the imperative is to make profit.  And the news, divorced from the music and the attractive smiling idiots on camera, is boring.  At least when compared to the rest of TV.  The newscast was once expected to lose the networks money.  The news was seen as a public service, not entertainment.  Oh, those must’ve been the days!

As for the second relevant chapter I mentioned, the one having to do with the political process in the age of show business, Mr. Postman’s words have never before seemed so germane.  What he reserves for Reagan (in one interview he noted the irony—and the lack of public awareness of this irony—of Reagan, a man who seemed to both say nothing and contradict himself at will, being labeled “the great communicator”) is more than applicable to the tweeter-in-chief currently residing in the White House.  But lest I digress into a Trump bash-a-thon, let me remember that the Postman’s criticisms—that political discourse is a sideshow when it is done on TV and, thus, politicians are rendered inarticulate and/or ineffectual—apply to every presidential candidate of my lifetime.  I was born when Nixon was president.  We all know of the debacle that was his debate against Kennedy, to which he blamed the make up man.  And he was right to do so, for, to paraphrase Postman, to be a politician in the era of TV is to be akin to a celebrity—you must look reasonably normal if not attractive.  No fat presidents since Taft.  God knows FDR would never have been elected were the pubic to have seen the ravages of his polio.  My grandmother, god love her, had a difficult time voting for Kerry over Bush because she didn’t relish the idea of looking at Kerry’s droopy face for the next four years. 

Postman’s point about the manner in which television has degraded public speech, information, political and religious discourse, and even education (he saw “Sesame Street” to be of more of a threat to our culture than “Dallas”) was spot fucking on.  And it remains so in the era of social media and memes.  Is there any more obnoxious means of making a point than a meme?  When I mention this to people—particularly those younger than 30—they roll their eyes and counter that memes are funny.  That’s all they’re meant to be.  And I agree— they can be quite amusing, but a large segment of the public is currently sharing (not to mention creating) memes that seek to make sociopolitical statements.  While they probably would, if pressed, use the same justification (“C’mon, get a sense of humor”) they are essentially proving the points Postman made over 30 years ago: we are gleefully reducing everything to entertainment.  And some things shouldn’t be entertaining.  They should be considered important or vital or necessary or lovely or fulfilling without garish dressing.   There’s nothing wrong with the Oscars or sit-coms or even memes, but when our politicians and spokespersons have to take to these mediums because the public will not engage in essential civic processes otherwise, there’s a big problem.  But hey, we’re all amused.  The decline will be chock full of yuks.