Is A Clockwork Orange Any Good?

1.

I’ve seen A Clockwork Orange too many times. Which is to say that I’ve seen it more than twice.

2.

It’s important to see A Clockwork Orange more than once. Especially if, like me, you first saw it when you were a teenage boy. God knows your appreciation of the film would be mired in infantilism.

3.

I saw A Clockwork Orange as a teen with a high school pal who’d rented it. We sat in his room and watched the movie, astonished from the start. I remember being impressed that he had a TV in his room with a VCR, which meant he could watch damn near anything without fearing his mother might catch him in the act of enjoying pornography or sensationalistic movies with heaps of violence and murky morals.

4.

We both loved the movie. Or what we understood about it. We’d taken Psych classes and had heard about Pavlov and his salivating dogs. My friend, once we finished A Clockwork Orange, insisted, “No one’s ever gonna make a classical conditioned dog outta me!”

Thus, we thought the movie was smart because it had a thing in it about what makes a person a person, and if you can control a person then are they really a person. Being teenage boys of the 1980s— a time just after, and still informed by, the 1960s’ and 70s’ fashionable pop revolutions— we adopted the movie as a sort of manifesto.

5.

Truth: we just liked the violence.

6.

I don’t doubt that if one is honest they’ll admit that the first third of A Clockwork Orange is more fun than the rest. The visuals are more stunning. But it’s hard not to notice how drab the scenery becomes once Malcolm McDowell’s character Alex is released from prison. Next to the oddball outfits of the Droogs and the décor of the Korova Milkbar, much of the film is ugly. Of course, the entirety of the film is ugly, at least as far as content. But to my teenage head, rape and “ultraviolence” were funny.

Look at these assholes

7.

The second viewing came not long after the first. Nothing to say about it.

The third viewing I don’t recall. Or the fourth. But somewhere around the fifth I started to feel that the movie was simple, stupid even.

Then I read the book.

Somewhat better

I read the book because, despite thinking the movie was simple, stupid even, I wanted to see if the book was better, operating at that time under the impression that books are always better. This is not true, but don’t tell that to a literature hungry young adult. You’ll crush their curiosity.

The book is better, sorta. The book displays a lot of stuff that I’d later come to love, like linguistic play and obscure yet engaging storytelling. Plus, it has a glossary, so the Nadsat language is easier to absorb. But I have to admit that the visuals, at least in parts of the film, stay with me more than anything in Anthony Burgess’s book. Save for one thing: Stanley Kubrick— either because he didn’t read the full version of the book or he didn’t care— cut the last chapter of Burgess’s novel. The last chapter subverts the whole story. Ending otherwise, the movie makes a point about conditioning, but it misses a sly idea from Burgess about the inevitably of change, how time will condition us without outside intervention. Or something. I dunno. . . I just remember being more excited by an extension of the story that the movie ignored. It got me to rethink the movie, which only made it seem sillier.

8.

Maybe it’s because, somewhere around my fifth viewing of A Clockwork Orange, I’d seen Paths of Glory, The Killing, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, all of them directed by Kubrick, all of them 100xs better than A Clockwork Orange. Those movies made this other thing by Kubrick seem like a curiosity, a near miss, an exercise in style without much more behind it. Which is when I started to think that maybe A Clockwork Orange is not a bad movie, or even a stupid one, but a movie to be admired for reasons outside of the edgy bullshit or the easy moral. Maybe it should be viewed solely for its aesthetics. That way, it’s sure to please. Because even those dreary post-prison scenes are fun to look at. At least compared to the shit in theaters these days. I mean, A Clockwork Orange is thankfully short of CGI and spandex superheroes.

No Avengers here

9.

The movie introduced me to Beethoven. I don’t know whether I ought to thank it or not.

10.

I love(d) punk culture. As a dumb teenage boy, I defined punk culture by the music, most of it simple three chord stuff. And angry. Snotty. At times loutish. I didn’t understand that “punk” could extend to cinema, visual art, literature. I thought it was solely understood by listening to The Ramones or the Sex Pistols. Then I heard London Calling by the Clash and realized that punk was not just 3 chord music played by non-musicians. It was attitude, aesthetics, ideas, and, weirdly, inclusion. And politics. But I wasn’t ready for Crass and Suicide and the Mekons, bands that didn’t exactly fit my limited definition of punk. And I sure as hell wasn’t ready to lump the Dadaists in there either.

But A Clockwork Orange was punk. Or at least punks loved it. It’s easy to see why: the style is close to what punks wore. And punks sometimes emulated the violence in the film. Hoo hum.

A punk girl— with a shaved head and piercings and Doc Martens and everything— called the movie “punk rock.” Later, I’d hear her call Sesame Street “punk rock.” She really opened my eyes!

11.

Thinking of A Clockwork Orange as punk both ups my appreciation for the film and lowers my appreciation for punk.

Actually, no. A Clockwork Orange is not punk. Punk is loose. Punk presents the opportunity for mayhem. Kubrick is too controlled, too precise a director. His movie is rigidly ordered shock. If anything, it represents the regimented lives my punk pals eventually adopted as they aged. Or maybe the punk aesthetic was always performative, as coordinated as Kubrick’s film.

12.

They say (whoever they are) that a good work of art is one that you can’t stop thinking about, so I suppose that makes A Clockwork Orange good. But truth be told: I don’t often think about it. I’m thinking about it today because I saw the book on my shelf buried behind some other pocket paperbacks I haven’t looked at in years. Which got me thinking about the movie. Which got me writing about the movie.

That I can’t land cleanly on Good or Bad is a good sign. I’m sometimes suspicious of work that is universally praised. I love it when asshole contrarians shit on Star Wars, however little criticism I have for the franchise (I liked the first two movies when I was a kid and don’t begrudge the world loving the movies and shows and toys). I don’t mind seeing my sacred cows slaughtered. Someone’s negative feelings on James Joyce won’t rob me of the pleasure of reading Ulysses (happy 100th birthday coming up!). I once posited that good art should divide. Anything that plays it too safe can’t be all that interesting. I may not be able to support those statements completely, but I’m not backing too far from them either.

But here’s another thing: A Clockwork Orange seems constructed to divide. As if the filmmaker knew it would offend some audiences and leaned in. Hardly as intentionally shocking for shock’s sake as Cannibal Holocaust, but nevertheless a film that Kubrick must’ve known would cause a stir. And that foreknowledge almost kills it for me. Maybe I’m too punk, too contrarian, too big an asshole, but when I know someone’s trying to ruffle my feathers my instinct is to deny them the pleasure. I see your easy provocation and it bores me.

But A Clockwork Orange is not boring. And I loved it at one point. Maybe my wrestling with it is as much about me and my efforts at a world-weary persona as it is about an imperfect film that seems increasingly callow the older I grow?

Goddamn, the movie exposed something about me! Fuck. . . I’ve no choice but to admit it that victory.

13.

Thirteen films better than A Clockwork Orange:

The Third Man

Naked

Miller’s Crossing

Barton Fink

Au Hazard Balthazar

Time Bandits

Full Metal Jacket

After Hours

I Heart Huckabees

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

The Conversation

Children of Men

Mulholland Drive

Reverse-Liberation: Movies and TV

This one time in the early 2000s, I conned my way into an interview with Jeanette Winterson. If you were to have asked me then, I would have said she was my favorite living novelist (today she shares the title with Ali Smith and Helen DeWitt). One of the things that attracted me to her work was the feeling of freedom and play in her texts, specifically the emphasis on language over plot, the so-called “unconventional” nature of her best work.

When I interviewed Winterson (which you can read here), we got on the subject of the so-called unconventional novel. Something she said has stuck with me all these years (and I’m paraphrasing): The novel, in the 20th century and beyond, was liberated by movies. Movies could handle traditional narratives with rising action and believable characters and recognizable tropes. Thanks to cinema, the classic Victorian novel structure need not always be repeated. We could move on. The camera had liberated painters from always having to do portraiture; the movie camera did the same for the novel. Yay! Here comes Modernism!

Here’s a phrase Winterson used in that interview that struck me then as funny: “Printed television.” Buy this, she meant books that were doing what TV does, which is to say not challenging the audience, giving them what they want, being fun but disposable once finished, a thing you turn on and off for distraction rather than edification or, dare I say, spiritual fulfillment. Today, this phrase is off the mark, but who’d have guessed that TV would have gotten this damn good?

And it has. There are certainly shows that are not nearly as good as they are popular (The Queen’s Gambit, Lovecraft Country), shows that I find lousy (The Chair) and shows that miss the mark the longer they go on but are rather satisfying (Breaking Bad, Mad Men). And then there’s The Walking Dead, which should have been killed off years ago. There are, as we know, a lot of damn shows. Maybe too many? No, I’ll leave that rant for someone else.

The best of the so-called Golden Era we’re (I think) still living in, in my opinion, is The Wire. The best currently running is Succession. If I had to articulate why I hold those highest, I’d likely resort to a lot of the things people say about art when they struggle to communicate their appreciation: compelling characters and situations, well written, not dumbed down, engaging, high stakes, humor, tragedy, pathos. . . but I dunno. All that, sure, but I just like those particular shows. One thing I can point to is their length. At an hour a pop, 10 episodes a season, Succession is, in comparison to a movie, looooooong. But in that length, there’s more than enough room to do all the nasty, compelling things that show does. How do you cram all that into a 90-minute package?

This may be why I love Succession but never understood Wall Street. Two hours is too quick for me to buy Gordon Gekko.

What really concerns me is the way these shows, and so many more I’ve not gotten around to (Hi, Ozark) have adopted what the best movies used to do. They’ve stopped using the old TV templates. We have quirkier meta comedies like Community and absurd ensembles like Brooklyn 99 and those before-mentioned dramas that are leaps and bounds better than Dallas or Melrose Place. I know everyone loves The Office, but if it did anything of note it was to present a sitcom that avoided the easy feel-good gags of Friends. TV started taking more chances, streaming became a thing, Netflix green lit some oddities that wouldn’t have stood a chance in the 90s, and now we are where we are. If we are indeed living in a Golden Era of TV where it’s possible that the shows today are doing what indie movies in the 90s were doing, that may explain why so many of the movies seem to be action based CGI violence celebrations. The movies have been reverse-liberated (hobbled?) by good TV and can focus on giving people digestible content that goes down smoothly, maximizing profits in the process.

But I don’t have to like it.

I know great movies are still being made. But damn if it doesn’t feel like 90% of new releases feature grown-ups in superhero costumes. I loved my Underoos when I was a kid, but there’s a time to grow up.

Okay, there are plenty of lovely, intelligent people in my life who will balk at my suggestion that perhaps better stories are out there than the ones dreamed up by Marvel (and definitely DC), and they are as right as I am in the sense that this is all very subjective. But smarter people than me (by which I mean, actual film critics) have argued that the dominance of superheroes, dragons, and John Wick action films has an effect on what gets green lit in a landscape where fewer films outside those genres receive attention. The result may be the sort of monoculture that has long depressed me, that we see already in publishing (a topic for a different day). When we’re fed multiple 3-hour Avengers extravaganzas, we come to view anything outside as small. The summer blockbuster used to be a thing reserved for, well, summer. Now it feels de rigueur, the thing one should always expect from a theater-going experience. The quaint little movie with the smaller budget, lack of what were once called special effects (which are now too common to be special), and lesser known faces. . .  that’s for at-home streaming, maybe. I mean, am I really going to leave the couch and drive to the dirty little art house cinema for a movie that may be different than what I’m expecting? And what’s with these subtitles?

I’m fond of a lot of stuff. Highbrow, lowbrow. . . You know where I’m going with this. We’re at the part of the essay where I list my various tastes and proudly proclaim how much I love Miles Davis and Schubert and Pig Destroyer and the Butthole Surfers. I’ll throw the names of canonized classic films like The Third Man and some oddball cult favs like Repo Man at you. (These are my two favorite “Man” movies.) I’ll try to sway you by representing my openness to what one former professor called “Intellectual prime rib and intellectual White Castles.” I’ll make the very true claim that there is a place for both, for all of it, for everything. And I’ll restate my “eclectic” taste in art as a means of establishing my credibility. I like some weird stuff, so I’m no snob.

But how convincing can I be? I’ve already lost a segment of theoretically existing readers by talking shit about Marvel movies (and by refusing to use the phrase “The Marvel Cinematic Universe”). The Marvel defenders I envision would read my words and sharpen their critical knives, for they have practiced their retorts often: The themes in the MCU are universal, the filmmakers are using heroic archetypes to tell real-world stories. I know these arguments, and I believe them. I agree. I’m more than convinced. Buuuuuut. . . that doesn’t mean we only ever have to use those heroic archetypes, right? We can tell those stories a number of ways. They need not always be wrapped in spandex and capes.

The arguments from the fanboy crowd tend to feel strained. I know comic book enthusiasts and writers. I know that they fight for acceptance in a literary culture that devalues them. I know that even calling their books “graphic novels” is not enough to convince the tweed and leather-elbow crowd that the X-Men may provide tragedies on par with the canonized tomes. So I don’t want to come off as the university-bred asshole who doesn’t have time for funnybooks. But in working so hard to make the culture accept what was once derided as “nerd shit,” I wonder if we’re not tipping the scale too much for the superheroes. Has nerd culture become just plain culture?

Maybe, and that’s fine and dandy. But again, there are implications to that normalization.

Another issue I have with the more labored arguments for Marvel, et al. being accepted as part of high culture: The most vocal arguers remind me of the people who try so hard to convince me that guns are necessary and that the 2nd Amendment is unquestionably good. All the massaged statistics and forced logic mask one clear truth: people like shooting things. That’s all. Whatever goofy justifications they weave can’t cover up the one argument I can’t defeat: Guns are cool, so don’t take mine. I don’t agree, but I’d respect the honesty if the 2nd Amendment crowd would summarize their position that way.

When the comic movie defenders tie themselves in knots trying to get me to validate their superhero stories and admit that Iron Man is as good as The Hurt Locker, well, let’s just say that I can see the real argument under all the bullshit: I like when Iron Man blows things up. Don’t take that away!

Okay, I suspect you’ve got this comeback at the ready: Hey, Vince—The Hurt Locker won Best Picture while Marvel movies barely get an Oscar nod, and never for the top categories. So your so-called “good movies” are still nudging out my beloved superheroes. And you’d be right, but. . . really? First, it’s only a matter of time before Oscar and the Motion Picture Academy—never the most progressive institution—catches up to where the viewers are. Second, don’t you love that your favorite movies are not Oscar winners? Don’t you get the same thrill complaining about this that I got when Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas? Man, the Oscars suck. Fucking idiots. I’m more punk rock than you!

Not to mention that art is not always synonymous with mainstream recognition, right? If anything, the box office returns are the real marker of where the culture is, not the award ceremonies that have rarely if ever gotten things right (Driving Miss Daisey beat Do the Right Thing, after all). And the box offices swell whenever a beautiful person dons a superhero costume.

I’ve spent enough time shitting on the movies under the Disney umbrella (which includes Marvel and Star Wars and DC, to name just a few popular content producers). Suffice it to state that my (I grant you, only partially informed) perception is that the Winterson point about a new technology liberating an older one does not seem to be the case when we think of 21st century TV and film. Things seem to have flipped. I don’t pronounce this good or bad, just curious. My real question is: what can we predict about these forms of art? Will movies become heavier on action and lighter on nuanced storytelling? Will TV continue to do what indie films used to and get quirkier and better at representing traditionally marginalized voices? Let’s hope. Because I’m on board for more shows like Fleabag, Reservation Dogs, and Succession. But I can’t summon the energy to go to the multiplex and drop $20 on a few hours of ScarJo in spandex fighting aliens while somewhere in the background a guy in a tin suit flies to space and does something with a hole in the sky or whatever. My couch is a helluva lot comfier, and my kitchen is better than any I’ve found in a movie theater. Fuck it—let the nerds have the cinema. 12 months of action, explosions, tacked on love stories, B acting in front of a green screen, a talking raccoon because, why not? If people enjoy watching a video game they’re not playing, good for them. I think I’m cool with this cultural shift.

The Messy Chair

An uneasy feeling from the jump: the school looks too much like schools in movies and TV shows. Ivy League despite assurances from the writers that this school is fuuuucked up! Basement level ivy league or some such joke. Everything is so perfectly dignified and picturesque. And then the star of our program, the wonderful Sandra Oh, removes the first in a series of bad jokes that will surely bring a smile to anyone who thought Chandler Bing was funny: a nameplate that reads “Fucker in Charge of You Fucking Fucks.” Must’ve taken the writers weeks to nail that one.

Immediately after that lame joke, we see Oh sit at her desk. If you’ve ever seen a dumb sitcom, you’ll know what’s going to happen next. But no, this is supposed to be a smart show about smart people, right? They won’t. . .  Nope, they did it. They tossed in a broken chair gag. I’m not the biggest stickler when it comes to lazy metaphors, but c’mon.

The concerns of Sandra Oh and her floundering English department ring sadly true, even if their depiction leans heavy on boilerplate. The politics of running a department, the ridiculous demands of donors, the capitulations, complaints, egos, and attitudes—it’s all here, often convincingly so. I mean, David Duchovny as guest lecturer? Seems plausible. Old guard professors scrambling to maintain relevance? Yep. New professors kissing ass for tenure? Oh yeah. Reactionary students? Well, you knew some of the cancel culture debate would make its way in.

What bothers me most about The Chair is the facile way in which it deals with what often seems the most important battle in our contemporary culture war. There is much to say about cancel culture. The Chair seems to critique it as a bunch of rabid, scandal hungry students who misunderstand their professor’s dumb joke and make it a cause, a chance to yell and virtue signal and ask questions in true cable news fashion (not letting one answer, bulldozing ahead with their agenda). While The Atlantic, in a shockingly positive review of The Chair, praised the show for not taking a side, I found the treatment of the issue kind of pointless. Are we supposed to root for the professor (more on him in a minute) who is obviously not the Nazi the students make him into, or are we supposed to side with the students who are justifiably concerned about the white supremacy that is baked into so much of our society, certainly academia?

In other places we see the students riffing on the absence of women in Moby-Dick, not to mention the American literary canon. The students sing/rap about this, to the delight of their young, female, black professor and to the chagrin of the dinosaur Melville expert who laments to his wife that he used to walk those halls as a giant. So I guess I’m supposed to feel bad for Bob Balaban’s aging prof when his wife offers spousal comfort before asking him to don adult diapers. No, I’m supposed to root for the struggling up-n-comer played by Nana Mensah who will get screwed by Balaban, her older peer (who, of course, would never see a woman—much less a woman of color—as a peer). Both, apparently. And that’s okay—I never need clear cut good and bad guys, but the pathos the writers attempt to give Balaban are meager, certainly not enough to get any viewer to see him as sympathetic. So why even try?

I’m happy to see a show aim at tough targets and even opt for ambiguity. Balaban is not such a bad guy? Oh wait, there he goes torpedoing poor Sandra Oh. He’s a shit after all. And what about the character played by the always fantastic Holland Taylor? Looked over too often, never went up for full professor, sidelined by patriarchy and sexist Rate My Professor reviews, struggling to get out of the basement (writers Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman have certainly seen Office Space), struggling to make kids understand that Chaucer is “a badass,” and possibly cultivating a romantic relationship with an IT guy, though that subplot (like others) goes nowhere. Much like her character, this talented actress is given brief moments to shine, then put aside or used as a prop to move the main action along. Is this a meta move? No, that’d be giving The Chair too much credit, for even though it may invite praise for being “smart” the story is anything but. Smart people lobbing the easiest T. S. Eliot quotes about, sure, even a few casual references to Lacan, but much like Frasier was a standard comedy about smart people, The Chair is not as smart as one may think. It’s shockingly banal.

Perhaps I’m not the one to comment on what constitutes a strong female character. I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer as much as the next person, but the slew of post-Buffy ass kicking fighting fuck toys (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Caroline Heldman) seemed anything but feminist. Sure, they fight men and are strong, though their strength is measured in ways crafted by patriarchy (violence). Maybe some can dismiss the scores of basement trolls jacking off to the heroines’ perfect legs and asses in those tight leather outfits (dress sexy for you, not him), but those badass female characters always felt like half-measures. Similarly, we have what should be a badass star here in Sandra Oh, who has proven to be pretty badass in Killing Eve. And, to be sure, she has badass moments in The Chair, but they feel too little, too performative. She’s tough talking, but bends way too much to Jay Duplass’s character. We’re supposed to feel frustrated that she has to yield to the demands of the machine she’s both leading and fighting, but then we have some half-assed romantic story? Might as well be a plot from Syd Fields. And that “fucking fuckers” name plate? Actually, it’s perfect for this show: easily obtained, purely symbolic, and, again, a watered-down joke only fast food culture finds hilarious. It is also a gag, much like The Chair, unworthy of Oh.

Sandra Oh’s character Ji-Yoon has her moments, and if the show succeeds anywhere it’s in demonstrating that myriad challenges a woman of color faces in an absurd job like department chair, especially of English. The show rightfully points out that the field is hemorrhaging students and fighting for its existence now that college has been equated with job training. And the show nicely details the wheeling and dealing one must do to make the machine creak along, as well as the ways in which idealism can take a few hits along the way. I felt sincerely bad for Oh when she had to consider optics, cultivate allegiances, and sacrifice desires. I believe the job is far worse than The Chair makes it seem, and that’s saying something. That Oh (spoiler) is ousted by the old men under her simply because they feel their time on campus is at a close, well, that sucks, but when Oh names Taylor as her successor, thwarting Balaban’s ambition for the gig, we’re supposed to see that as a victory, I guess. The stalwart Chaucerian got out of the basement and got the recognition she deserves. So it’s a happy ending? Maybe, but there are loose threads aplenty. Oh was nearly out of a job entirely after sorta kinda gagging a student from speaking about a scandal. Then she’s forgiven by what we are made to understand are unforgiving young people, all simply because she is no longer on top, no longer chair, just a lowly professor. Now there’s a message! Oh’s Ji-Yoon keeps her job and lectures passionately on Emily Dickinson, which is all she ever really wanted to do, apparently. Never mind the chair position. Who needs institutional power when you can stay in your lane?

If the badassery of the leading woman is complicated, the mopey cliché that is our leading man is crystal clear. Maybe it’s because I am a frequently scruffy, mildly disorganized, occasionally intoxicated lover of Modernism and Samuel Beckett that Jay Duplass’s character made me wince. Because I hope to god I’ve never been the cookie-cutter asshole he is. Recently widowed, the “rock star professor” gets away with being a prick and is only pulled from his funk by a woman and her adorable daughter (another prop that is half-heartedly given a story of her own, but who cares?). If you’ve seen Barton Fink you might remember the old screenwriter’s dilemma: dame or kid? Which do we saddle the leading man with? Remember what Barton Fink says: “Both, maybe?” Remember the movie producer’s worried look?

Come to think of it, why is Jay Duplass even in this thing? Why bother with a (barely) sympathetic man? Just ditch his character. He’s not developed, perhaps because there’s nothing to develop. Of course, I’m willing to accept the argument that, after years of being used as satellites and sex objects in male-driven stories, women creators are having their revenge by writing shitty one-dimensional male characters. I guess that’s equality? No, it’s not—I expect more of the women wresting control from us men. We’ve done crap jobs. If you’re up to bat, and you should be, it’s not enough to phone in a character like Prof. Dobson. Again, don’t bother—just focus on the women. They’re far more interesting.

But no, Duplass bumbles along, sport-coated and unshaven, occasionally spouting some professorial lines about Camus and Pavese and, for some reason, he innocently gives a Nazi salute in class, which get filmed and goes viral and costs him his job. But the kids got it wrong—he’s no Nazi, just a tired caricature of a young English professor/lit bro. His interest in Beckett and Modernism is supposed to do all the heavy lifting, and it, sigh, does. We see his existential depression as a given. Those gloomy Modernists! And then there’s a dumb red herring in the form of an adoring student who we’re sure wants to fuck him but really only wants him to read her novel. Yet another prop picked up and too quickly put down.

The show is a mess, but a fun mess. For all the shit I’m complaining about, I wasn’t bored. It’s a sloppy bit of distraction I enjoyed between drafts of my syllabi for the coming semester. And while it offered no real ideas that couldn’t have come from a USA Today article on cancel culture, it didn’t exactly preach either. These days, I’ll take half-baked comedies over sanctimony. But my concern is that the show is being seen as more than it is. It’s being rewarded for not taking a side, which seems stupid. Too often in socio-political discussions, I’m told to consider both sides, as if all perspectives are equally valid. Sure, that’s the ideal, but when one side is objectively loony, both-siding is just plain wrong. And I have no answer to the cancel culture debate, just feelings that are as complicated as The Chair kind of recognizes them to be. But the debate is given less attention than it deserves. We’re meant to sympathize with the misunderstood dude who gave a Nazi salute and shake our heads at the overreactions of the students. And while I would hardly classify Duplass’s salute as sincere, there is a point here: the tenured asshole should’ve known better. His misguided attempt at addressing the issue with what quickly becomes a mob of angry students is born of belief in the power of truth and open discourse, honorable ideas that the show wants us to think are under threat by our snowflake culture. I think. I dunno. . . I’m not sure how to read this subplot. Maybe that’s the point. That ambiguity would be fine were the rest of the show not beholden to old tropes and stereotypes. But hey, it kept me from seeing horrifying images of Afghanistan or thinking about environmental catastrophe for a few hours.

Failure is the Only Option, or: 2,806 words on my difficulty using words

1

This essay is a failure. Because all essays are, if you subscribe to a certain theory of writing as a failed attempt to express ideas, thoughts, emotions, all that ethereal stuff we’re tasked with expressing. Or not—maybe you’re into repressing that shit.

I used to tell my students that “essay” means “attempt,” which I hoped would help them relax when asked to do some writing. Dream on!

Having an Instagram account and not a real idea of why, I’ve followed many a hashtag, among them #samuelbeckett. As a result, I’ve seen plenty of photos of the ultra-photogenic writer, as well as countless uses of this quote from Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Beckett’s “Fail better” is often used to make people feel good about fucking up. The larger quote usually comes accompanied by motivational poster imagery: flowers, sunrises. . . one expects a cat holding onto a rope will pop up at any moment. Hang in there, Baby, and fail better!

All this sunshine runs contrary to my reading of Worstward Ho, a text that seems to want its reader to reach for the bottom. But who cares about authorial intent? Clearly not the Silicon Valley gurus who’ve hijacked Beckett’s words.

2

I am not one to use the Beckett quote in either the overly simple Fuck it, let’s jump into the abyss sense or in the manner of the startup tech bro. Mostly, I try not to use it, as the quote is so divorced from its source that it’s in danger of losing whatever meaning it may have had. (Ironically, this loss of meaning may be in line with Beckettian ethos. Sam has his revenge.) I do think often, though, of another quote from Beckett: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

Of course, as Art Spiegelman pointed out, Beckett said those words.

There’s the rub: to express ideas, we need language, even when the idea is that language is both a mere attempt (often a failure) and an assault on silence. This seems the kind of Zen contradiction monks might meditate on, and I’ll not go too far down that road, but suffice it to state that Beckett was onto something. Language solves as many problems as it creates. At least we hope it does.

3

All this is a long way of introducing my real topic: my inability to express my feelings about visual art without sounding like a ninny. Inspired by my Facebook post of a painting by Remedios Varo that I shared along with the proclamation: “My favorite thing about not studying visual art is that I lack the words to convey why I like the stuff I like. And I like Remedios Varo,” it was suggested (Hi, Billy!) that I try to write about an art form outside my wheelhouse. I’ve studied literature and writing; I’m an autodidact when it comes to film and music—in short, while hardly an expert, I feel capable of discussing literature, film, and music. But not painting.

I love visual art. I have favorite painters (Francis Bacon, Ivan Albright, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Gertrude Abercrombie, the before-mentioned Remedios Varo). The Art Institute of Chicago remains my most beloved spot in the city. I love the big dead Jesus renaissance stuff. I love the conceptual pieces that piss people off. Dadaism still excites me. I’ve defended that big all-black canvas called “Painting” against claims of “Well, I could do that.” Rothko’s blurry red cubes? Love ‘em. Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture? Applause! And I even love the hazy Monet paintings, all but those damn wheat stacks. Mexico’s muralists, Russian propaganda posters, Italian Futurism. . . all of it wonderful! I love it all (except Primitivism— fuck that colonialist condescension).

But that’s about all I can say. If I look at the Varo painting I shared on Facebook and try to explain why I like it, I fail. First stabs at forming a recognizable idea are aimed at the technique, as if I know anything about that. But I can see deliberate brushstrokes, shading, attention to what light does to a human form. Clearly Varo is adhering to some traditional representation even if she juxtaposes dreamy surrealism— the caged moon and celestial meat grinder. I immediately make a connection to the work of René Magritte who wanted to be a surrealist but wasn’t going to stop painting men in hats. You can melt some clocks or you can proclaim a perfect looking pipe is not a pipe. There’s more than one way to skin an oboe.

So, I’ve stated my love for specific artists and movements, and I’ve done a very small amount of thinking/writing about the Varo painting. None of this would get published in Artforum, though, would it?

4

My inability to properly articulate my appreciation for visual art bothers me not a whit. I’m not so thoroughly academic as to dissect art to the extent that its parts are laid out neatly for my understanding, but considering I teach composition and the occasional literature class—and that I’ve written two books in a sort of “Look at me! I’m a writer!” gesture—I do recognize some of what’s going on in a piece of printed material. I often wonder, Why did this writer do this? Why resort to an easy metaphor? Oh, this is a fresh approach to internal dialogue. But isn’t this paragraph bordering on purple prose? Oh wow, haven’t seen that before. Look at this deliberate lack of punctuation—someone thinks they’re Kerouac. I was listening to a podcast the other day where the important man being interviewed failed to name Neil Postman as the source of three of his ideas, and it drove me fucking mad. I’m not the most widely read dude, but I read as much as I can. I like recognizing references, seeing the progression of thoughts and the signaling back to past works and concepts, and yes, spotting when podcast guests fail to credit their obvious influences. I like to know about books and writers and have something to say about them. And all of this. . .  I guess I’ll call it “training” has (thankfully) not robbed me of the pleasures of the well-written book, story, essay, or poem, but I do admit to having enough of an understanding of what’s under the hood to see what a writer’s doing.

I have no such insight when it comes to visual art.

I’m not a musician, but I fuck around on guitar. I took lessons in high school and played in garage bands and even in front of people at parties, but my skills never evolved past basic chords and scales. Still, when I hear some rock songs, I know what the guitar player is doing. I know enough to talk, often pompously, about why some guitarists are overrated (looking at you, Clapton) and who I think are the best alive (Robert Fripp and Andy Summers). I can invoke the Aeolian and the Phrygian modes and smile when people talk about Jack White’s genius all the while silencing the part of me that wants to say, “Fuck that guy—listen to Greg Ginn or Jim Hall or fucking Django Reinhardt!”

But with visual art. . .  there’s still the magic of not understanding. I don’t know much about craft, and whatever history I’ve studied is limited. Because I don’t really care about the academic side of it all— I just love the stuff I love, probably because I don’t always “get” it. Or I get something, but that something eludes perfect description.

Okay, here are a few thoughts from two movies:

In an underrated movie from the world’s most overrated filmmaker (and big time creep), Woody Allen’s Another Woman contains a scene where Gena Rowlands’ character meets Mia Farrow’s in an art gallery. The Farrow character is weeping at the sight of a Klimt painting. Rowlands’ character, an academic, tries to tell the crying woman that she ought not to react that way— this is from a very happy period of Klimt. The academic is attempting to stifle a sincere emotional reaction to a work of art. Why? Because the academic’s big brain knows about the painting, whereas Farrow’s character is simply reacting. How often does this sort of thing happen? Are we trained by, and as, academics to detach? Possibly. I’ve met people who’ve said that grad school made them never want to pick up a book again. I know English majors who graduated and never read anything other than the occasional celebrity memoir. I made it out of grad school with my love of literature intact, so it’s not like all of us suffer such a fate. Still, there is something to this example from Another Woman, the emotional confronted with the cerebral, that sticks with me. What has Rowlands’ character, with all her erudition, lost? Is there a Gena Rowlands and a Mia Farrow in my head, always battling it out? Do I too often dry the honest tears of my inner Farrow and let Inner Rowlands go on talk talk talking?

There’s a good chance I’ve seen Monster’s Ball, but all I remember is that a guy on death row sketches people and says, as criticism of the camera, that it takes a human being to see a human being. This may be why I react more strongly to painting than photography. This may be why I respond to the art that I respond to, even if it’s not portraiture: a painting is a human’s unique view of something rendered carefully through a process I don’t really understand, made available to all for their engagement or lack thereof. But through that rendering, something more than the subject is revealed.

If we believe—and I do—that writing exposes something about the writer (shattering the myth of objectivity), why not use the same idea to understand visual art? Not a mind-blowing concept I grant you, but this is where my head is, where I might start to articulate my love for Varo, Bacon, Albright, and all the other artists I admire. Each of these painters would see a shared subject differently. Their art is a form of communication, of the subject and of themselves. Which is why I love their work, but also why I grapple to communicate that love, being trained since birth to use words in a way that, honesty, feels criminal the older I get.

5

Here goes:

I turned 50 recently. No big deal, really. If reaching the half-century mark did anything it was to remind me that I don’t give a fuck about birthdays. And I’m in better shape—physically and mentally— now than I was at 25, so I find it hard being weepy about “getting on.” Nevertheless, I’ve not escaped all of the existential thoughts that come with this “milestone.”

A lot of my thinking lately is on the impossibility of language, the before-(inadequately)-mentioned ideas born of a mangled reading of Beckett and my own simple-headed view that language is a con.

At risk of pissing off potential readers, especially fellow writers who know better than to use the 2nd person POV, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been struck wordless by a work of art? Because I have.

The first time: after watching Mike Leigh’s film Naked in 1993 at the Three Penny on Lincoln Ave. My friends all wanted to talk about it. I had no words. The movie was that devastating. And I found myself annoyed at these people who felt the need to immediately examine the movie, to have an opinion—the “correct” opinion. Fuck me, can we just take a minute to let it all sink in, to process the feelings the movie conjured? Can I pause and come to grips with my own complicated reaction? Forcing words felt wrong, stupid.

The first time I saw Ivan Albright’s That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) at The Art Institute, I was again silent. The person I was with made comments. Look at the attention the artist paid. Albright used brushes trimmed of all but two of their hairs to get some of the tiny details. He was meticulous, you can see. Blah, blah, blah.

Still my favorite painting, I can’t say much about That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door) except, well, that it’s my favorite painting. Maybe deciding on words to describe the painting would ruin it? There’s magic here, people. Why the fuck would I want to kill that?

In his intro to Anne Sexton’s Transformations, Kurt Vonnegut shared a story about quitting teaching when he realized it was criminal to explain works of art. He’d been tasked with lecturing on Dubliners and found, as he was in front of a room of students, he had nothing to say. Not because he disliked the book, but because, again, it felt wrong to reduce such an achievement through whatever lecture he’d planned. One might say this is a cop out, but I get it.

Which brings me to another example of the difficulty of discussing powerful works of art. Roger Ebert reviewed 2001: A Space Odyssey and used plenty of words, but I only remember his quote from E. E. Cummings “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing / than try to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.” The idea being that Ebert was happy accepting the mystery of Kubrick’s film, recognizing that over-analysis would kill the magic. Sometimes you have to leave the stars alone and just appreciate how beautiful they are.

Years later, when 2010: The Year We Make Contact was released for reasons I’ll never understand, Ebert referred again to the Cummings poem and said that the unnecessary sequel tried to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

But here’s the thing I’m just now understanding: Ebert used a poem to discuss 2001, and again in his review of 2010. He may have been speaking to the problems with over-analysis, but he still USED WORDS.

Which sorta brings me back to the point of this section of this essay: I’m losing my faith in words. Ebert didn’t— motherfucker kept writing to the very end. And Vonnegut, despite his wordlessness regarding Dubliners, wrote plenty, even later in life when he seemed more interested in his visual art. Critics abound— no one, be they learned or ignorant on their subject, is shutting up anytime soon. And maybe they shouldn’t. (Maybe?) Even when we feel speechless in the face of beauty, truth, or whatever the hell it is about a work of art that challenges, we should likely try to say something. I mean, we can’t just go, “Uh. . .  wow. . . like. . . whoa.” For fuck’s sake, I pass myself off a writer and I can’t write about this subject? Really, Vince. Fuck off, dude. And what’s this shit about the failure of language? It’s been working pretty well for a lot of years, the exact number you could easily google but you’re too lazy and, fuck it, you’re flowing now, aren’t you, adding words words words to this already long (2,558 words, as of this moment—whoops, it’s grown to 2,567) essay, flowing and spouting and writing and thinking and feeling compelled to share these thoughts because it’s soooooo important that it all be shared and that you land on some terra firma in this otherwise abstract clusterfuck of a blog post like it fucking matters and anyone gives a goddamn.

Sorry. I can get a little combative with myself.

Perhaps the best I can do is conclude that however much I write, and regardless of the hours I might spend thinking about this stuff, I’ll never really feel comfortable with my ability to state what I feel about many subjects, not the least of which is visual art. I mean, do I really have anything important to say on the things I feel comfortable discussing? No, not really, but has that stopped me from flapping my gums? Nah. So I can live with the failure. Because what would be the point of succeeding, anyway? If one were to actually say the perfect thing about a painting or book or song or whatever, they’d win the game. No point thinking about it anymore. Where’s the fun in that?

6

Best art criticism I’ve ever heard came from my boss at the bookshop where I worked in the 1990s. He summed up his appreciation for the Dadaists and Surrealists this way: “They looked at the Impressionists and the shit that came before and said: ‘Blow it out your ass!’”

CDC Mask Guidelines: What's Allowed?

The CDC’s latest guidelines suggest that it is safe for the fully vaccinated to suspend mask wearing in most circumstances. Of course, one cannot be sure who has been vaccinated and who has not, not without some sort of vaccination passport issued under strenuous oversight. Lacking such verification or any federal edict, municipalities are being left to decide for themselves how they will use these guidelines to make policies. Despite the city-by-city hodge-podge, there are some agreed upon regulations. Here is what each American needs to know regarding when to go without a mask in a public space:

If you have been fully vaccinated, you may go without a mask if your last name cannot be used as an adjective.

Groups may gather without masks so long as the amount of people in the group does not add up to a prime number.

If you read something on Facebook about vaccines, you are now a medical doctor and know whether or not to wear a mask.

If you’re aware of only your own healthy body, and don’t know or care about the immunocompromised, you can go without a mask the same way you’ve gone without awareness that people unlike you exist.

If you adopted a shelter dog during the pandemic, you can pat yourself on the back. Oh, and wear a mask in stores, maybe?

Jogging or biking without a mask is permitted, so long as you know that you’re going to die one day like everyone else.

Writers who’ve penned their own King Lear during the pandemic are likely immune to Covid and self-criticism, thus they may go maskless.

Doctors, nurses, and all frontline workers should continue to wear masks when appropriate and are allowed to each punch one anti-vaxxer in the face.

Anyone who injected bleach into their veins is dead. They may go without a mask.

It is recommended that Joe Rogan wear his mask inside his mouth.

Masks are required at indoor establishments, especially bars and restaurants. All food will be blended and liquified to facilitate consumption through a straw that can easily be slid under a mask.

If you’ve created a fake vaccination card, congratulations: you’re smarter than the rest of us. You may do as you please.

M95 mask wearers may continue to shame cloth mask wearers.

You’re allowed to go maskless even though… I mean, have you looked in a mirror lately?

The Soft Lunacy Postscript II: Forever Incomplete

During yesterday’s run around the neighborhood—a function of my (sometimes wavering) resolve to stave off physical decline—I passed a Little Free Library. As I often do, I stopped to see what was inside. I expected I’d leave with zero, as these things are typically full of kids’ books or weather-beaten paperbacks too moldy to bring home.

But not that day!

Well whaddya know—volumes IV, V, and VI of the Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw with Prefaces. And in great shape! I have a few odd volumes from the collection at home, which I’ve kept since the 90s when the used book shop I worked for went out of business and I snagged a lot of treasures. The store only had three out of six volumes, but I was happy to have the hardbacks, being a fan of Shaw’s Man and Superman and thinking I’d read some more of the guy.

I cut the run short and took the books home, hoping (because I couldn’t remember for sure) that I had volumes I, II, and III on my shelves. After all these years: a complete set!

But no. Those old books are gone. I’ve checked and rechecked and checked again, but the only volumes from the Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw with Prefaces in my apartment are the ones I just dragged home after an aborted jog. Because, of course, I sold the other volumes in 2016 when I got rid of 2,000 of my books because I was sad and because keeping things seemed stupid. I don’t know why I decided that three volumes from the Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw with Prefaces weren’t worth keeping. I’d had them for nearly 20 years. And sure, I’d not read every play in those three odd volumes, but I’d read some. And there’s still time to read more. Because books are an investment in future reading, even if that future is decades away.

I look at volumes IV, V, and VI. Beautiful. I very much want to keep them, even if the collection in my library will again be incomplete. Maybe I’ll find volumes I, II, and III in a Little Free Library in 24 years. Maybe then I’ll have a complete set. Or maybe I am fated to never have all six volumes in my library. Maybe it was decreed by the book gods that my collection forever be piecemeal.

By the way, a full set of the Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw with Prefaces is going for $280 online. Fuck me.

On Teaching Comp and Digressing

Not even 30 pages into this book, Useless Miracle by Barry Schechter, and already there’s a bit about a university professor who, as punishment for speaking against his department, has to teach “all comp for a year.”

I suspect this is not Schechter disparaging the instruction of composition so much as painting realistic characters, but I’m pissed off anyway. University professors, especially the ones at big schools like Northwestern (hi, Barry!), view teaching composition as a lowly practice unworthy of their PhD’d selves, they with so much more to offer young minds. As the famous anecdote goes, the newly hired English professor is likely to say: “I didn’t spend six years learning old English to teach comp!”

I teach composition. I also get to teach other courses from time to time, literature courses of my own design. But I’ll confess: I’m not a great literature instructor. There’s so much to say about the texts I choose to inflict on my students, yet I realized again last semester, somewhere around midterm, that explaining works of art— to quote Kurt Vonnegut— is criminal. I don’t explain them so much as offer context and try to create dialogue, even if it does often devolve into what each student thinks the books mean. Well, at least what each student willing to speak thinks the books mean.

There are better ways to teach literature, I know, and on my best days I do okay, but years of teaching composition have changed the way I think about teaching anything. Or ruined me for other courses? Maybe. Hard to say, and if I’m grappling with my thoughts here you’ll forgive me, but that is exactly what I try to get my ENG 101 students to do. Forget trying to have your ideas in mind before you put pen to paper (er, fingers to keyboard). The essay is a means of finding out what you think. Writing is discovery.

But who wants to read that?

That’s the thing: we’re used to reading finished thoughts, not ideas in the process of forming. And sure, editing and revision are essential to writing, as is solidifying ideas. But maybe there’s something behind the teaching of comp, or at least this aspect of it, that should be more permitted and practiced: the admission that our ideas are lumpy and in need of polishing. But they can’t be smoothed and polished until we articulate them. And often they will remain flawed, ideas we’re likely to refine (or jettison) with some maturity and experience. But I seem to exist in a world that insists one have their thoughts perfectly formed, and that these thoughts be defended forever and ever, amen. How does one evolve if they’re never wrong?

Anyone familiar with Montaigne knows that the essay as we too often understand it now is not exactly what good ol’ Michel was practicing in the 16th century. Students tend to think that their writing must always be “correct,” by which they mean grammatically flawless, but also, not far behind mechanical worries, they believe they must have a perfect argument. They see their task as just that: a task. They have heard me and others like me drone on about audience and purpose. Then we tell them to make a claim, support it. Then we challenge the claim because we want them to understand that counterarguments, properly addressed, will strengthen their theses. We use the word “thesis” interchangeably with “claim” and “argument” until they can’t decide if these words are synonymous. Probably not, but it’s too late in the semester to ask for clarification.

The idea of the essay as a mess does not register. And I can’t exactly tell my students that essays are, by their nature, messy. At least not good essays. Revealing that belief, and it is my belief, would be tantamount to permission to dash off some piece of crap and demand an A.

What I can do is tell them that essays, at least in their initial stages, can and should be messy, by which I mean that they should represent the messiness of human thought. Does anyone really know what they think about any given subject, news item, social trend, or work of art? Not without considerable thought, often the result of considerable reading. Assuming not everyone spends their quiet moments in deep contemplation, not with infinite podcasts and playlists vying for attention, the best way to begin to start to maybe know what one thinks is by writing those thoughts down. In comp we call this “journaling” because we can’t call it essay writing. And the journals usually become the more sophisticated essays, but, again, the lesson is that the essay must be a perfected thing with unassailable evidence backing every claim. And sure, I want to read essays like that, but I know they come after essays like this. And I know that essays like that are often the result of the digressions in essays like this, avenues of thought that only arrive in the moment and, when ignored, vanish.

For fuck’s sake, where’s the risk in a perfectly executed essay?

To be clearer (let’s hope): I prefer to think of essays as conversations, dialogues rather than monologues. The possibility exists that the essay I write today will be challenged by someone else’s ideas. The chance that I’ll then revise my ideas is more than likely. I change my ideas all the time. Why? Because I know that these are merely my ideas in the moment. But how would I (or anyone else) understand them were they not written down? And how would I write them if I was too afraid of being wrong?

Marc Maron has a bit in his standup special Thinky Pain where he discusses his habit of not preparing. He says that he doesn’t like preparers, that when one boasts of their preparation he thinks, “Well you’re a coward. Where’s your sense of adventure?” He then justifies his fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants style this way:

“In my mind, if I don’t prepare and I pull this off, I’m a fucking genius! And if I don’t pull it off. . . Eh, I didn’t prepare.”

This sums up my teaching style. I like to enter the classroom with an idea of what’s going to happen, but I prefer the moments of spontaneity, the organic moments of connection with students when they offer something to the mix that alters whatever plan I had. On good days, this reminds me that I love teaching comp, for composition works the same way: have an idea and be ready for it to take you someplace else. Go with the changes. See where they bring you. Back up and move away from the dead ends. Steer confidently into the whatever. Sounds like bullshit motivational poster slogans, but I believe digressions can lead to interesting places that allow students to have more of a sense of belonging in the classroom. I mean, sure, my job is also to keep things on track, and I don’t tolerate irrelevant tangents, but a little venturing outside the plan can be good. If I really want students to be the co-creators of the class, then I have to be open to some level of digression. Maybe that’s not the right word. . . Maybe I need one of those cute academic phrases, the kind that twist the English language and sound both important and ridiculous, something like Guided Departuring.

This is a long way back to where I started, where I wanted this to go, but so goes the digressive essay.

(Speaking of: go back and read Montaigne. The guy was certainly fond of digression. I wonder what a contemporary comp teacher, much less an editor, would’ve said about Of Cannibals.)

Is comp derided because it’s thought to be lesser than, say, Gender and Class Politics in Harry Potter? Are survey courses somehow a notch above comp, thought likely a notch below Eschatology in Contemporary American Novels Written by David Foster Wallace? Are we basement dwellers of the Ivory Tower deluding ourselves when we claim that composition offers more flexibility, malleability, and freedom than courses taught by the more accomplished faculty? We might venture such a claim, even have our colleagues nod in assent at the faculty parties, though they’d likely chuckle and look at each other knowingly once we’ve headed to the cheese plate. Oh, Vince. . . let him believe what he needs to believe. Poor bastard.

I was inspired to teach by teachers I liked. Some of them were comp teachers. The best of them, a guy named Southard who worked for the community college I, directionless, landed in, seemed to be having a good time. He saw me reading a Kurt Vonnegut book before class and then decided to use Vonnegut as the basis for the day’s discussion. Improv in the classroom. When I realized “These guys make this shit up!” I was indescribably happy. They’re winging it, just like me! That made me feel a part of the class more than any rote lecture.

Of course, Southard wasn’t completely improvising. But I liked the spontaneity he cultivated. Southard did stick to the important stuff. He talked about the ways we write, the reasons we write, the discovery possible when we write, and sure, occasionally, the ways we have to write. Sometimes we have to write because a teacher is making us write, and they will have expectations, they will ask that the way we write resemble the way they write and the way their teachers wrote, and don’t forget your MLA formatting. But I only remember the fun the guy was having. Can’t say all my teachers were that footloose and fancy free.

This essay is getting too loose.

Okay. Just walked my dog and now, coming back recharged, I’m ready to sort through the rest of my feelings on. . . What’s the topic again? Oh right, teaching comp.

Maybe the reason teaching comp is seen as a punishment or a lowly state within the academy has to do with the impossibility of the task. There’s no way to teach someone to write other than make them write and offer feedback on the writing, how I experience what they wrote—more importantly, how the students’ peers experience it—and what good habits I’ve cultivated over the many years of trying and failing to put words in a logical, pleasing order. But the end is almost always the same: the students pass my class and go on to bigger challenges that I can’t prepare them for. Not in 16 weeks. The best I can do is remind my students that writing is about practice. Unending practice. They’re writers for the rest of their lives. It gets easier, sorta. Their writing will get better the longer they keep writing. My class is a launching pad, a place to take time to make messy essays and then knock them into some kind of shape, and, equally important, to sort through their thoughts and draw on their perspectives. And sure, we go over the discipline of writing, the multi-draft process, the need for care, the attention to mechanics (eventually) and the consideration of the reader. But my class is a luxury. The time we spend on essays is not time they will have in other classes. We slow down, focus, evaluate, revise, reevaluate, re-revise, reflect. Other classes ask for finished products without the same slow, communal approach to composition. And then these instructors have the gall to ask me why their students can’t write.

The impossibility of the task, again, is baked into the comp class. But, more deterring to the careerist academic, comp requires grading freshman papers, which, most of the time, do not make for fun reading. The profs don’t want to waste their precious headspace on half-baked arguments and entry level scribblings. They want big, heady papers on the big, heady concepts they teach. The Semiotics of Oral Sex. Post-Humanism and the Novels of Don DeLillo. That sorta thing. Evaluating ENG 101 writing would be beneath even the fledgling English prof. And once they get tenure? Forget it.

The bigger schools force comp instruction on graduate students. Want that PhD? Get ready to commit yourself to some unpaid labor— the worst labor you’ll ever endure! In the process, the schools pass on the belief that teaching comp is shit work, something one does out of duress, nothing a serious academic would ever deign to do, not if they want to show their face at the next faculty function. The more beneficent faculty members tell me I’m “doing the lord’s work” and offer mock admiration. Okay, not all of them; superciliousness and tenure don’t always go hand-in-hand, and I know many of these comments are born of good intentions, but when I hear them (and I do) I can’t help but bristle.

The problem is simple: instructors, all of us, have the responsibility to teach students how to write. Step one being recognizing that the task is difficult, but so are most things worth fighting for. If they understand that my classes are introductions, that the students who leave ENG 102 are still developing writers— if they understood that WE’RE ALL STILL DEVELOPING WRITERS— then they’d: 1. stop complaining to me that their students can’t write (to which I always want to respond: Well, they’re your students) and 2. stop patronizingly thanking me for my service.

Admission (upon review of the previous paragraphs): I’m jealous of the English profs. They have higher degrees than I do. They have specialized understandings of topics in literature, whereas I’ve approached my studies like a salad bar— bites of phenomenology and reader-response criticism, a few scoops of formal poetry, big helpings of Silver Age Russian and 20th Century Latin American lit, way more Irish literature than I’ll ever fully digest, a bit of the Harlem Renaissance for dessert. They have tenure (some of them, the rest are fucked); I’m forever on the non-tenure track. And yeah, they have more respect in some circles, but the more I think about it (which I’m doing by writing about all this) the less envy I feel. I mean, it’s not like the English professors are especially valued by many of the administrators who’d place their courses first in line for budget cuts. Students will always need writing teachers. I get a mix of all majors in my often-packed classrooms. Can the instructors of Hermeneutic Analyses of Gertrude Stein and Lady Gaga say as much?

Sorry— this isn’t a competition. If I’m making it one, perhaps it has something to do with the way I’ve been made to feel by others in my professional orbit. And, again, I like teaching comp. It offers a lot of room to design courses around pet themes, provides an important micro-focus on writing, incorporates emerging scholarship, embraces contemporary topics, and is dependent on student interaction and activities that are more engaging than straight lecture. And if I love it this much, why did one throwaway line in Barry Schechter’s new book piss me off so much? Maybe because Schechter is satirizing true feelings of academics? I dunno. . . so far, the book seems less pointed in that direction. Maybe I recognize what I already know but don’t always consider: there’s a totem pole, but even so, being lower on it doesn’t have to be bad so long as you like where you are. And I do. I mean, a few extra bucks would be nice, and maybe some support from colleagues. But maybe, much like the poets I know who lament their insulated community while doing everything possible to alienate potential readers, we’re doing this to ourselves, relishing our underdog status, lashing out at nothing, penning digressive multi-paragraph essays in response to a small moment in a novel that is really not interested in trashing composition instruction.

Damn.

Well, if ever there was a representation of my exploratory approach to composition, and my tendency to make micro moments into macro concerns, it’s this essay. But I do feel better having gotten all this off my chest. Whew. Stretch. What’s for lunch?

The Soft Lunacy Postscript: Every Four Years

 In 2016 I sold a bunch of books. Like, 2,000. This made a small dent in my home library, the thing I’ve been building for most of my adult life like it was the damn cure for cancer. Like it was the cure for something less tangible. The cure for my occasional ennui.

We all need a hobby, I suppose. I have two: collecting books and writing things that, most of the time, never make it into print. The stuff that does tends to embarrass me. This hardly stops me from writing and trying to get the stuff “out there.” After it’s “out there,” like a drunk, I wake up the day after and feel the need to apologize.

The result of 2016—which many of us felt was a nightmare—was, along with the deliberate loss of many books, the first draft of a manuscript. It took two more years to get this sad sack account of losing my dog and selling my books and reevaluating my relationships into some kind of publishable shape, and in 2019 The Soft Lunacy was released.

Since 2016, my wife and I adopted a new dog. Then we moved into a new apartment one door from the last, because I just can’t seem to leave this block. I weathered a few other setbacks and kept myself as optimistic as I am capable of being.

What else? Oh yeah. . . we elected a narcissistic manchild president and a virus (the response to which the manchild president has bungled so spectacularly it almost seems planned) has killed (as of this writing) around 333,000 people in the U.S. of A., my country, the one I’ve been told my whole life is the best in the world. We do love our bullshit, don’t we?

It’s pointless to bitch about anything other than sickness, death, unemployment, or small business closings in 2020. Honestly, I can’t complain about much. I am not ill (knock wood) and I have a job and have been able to work from home since March. I am happily married. I have no children to homeschool. I am rarely bored at home. I like it here. The dog forces me to take walks, and my wife is insistent that I not become a total shut in. I’m managing small bouts of exercise and trying to eat well. I’ve even slowed down on booze. And, after decades of collecting, I have plenty of books to read. It’s like I’ve been planning for this pandemic since my teens, stocking up on printed entertainment in case the grid goes and the electronic devices fail.

Here’s a complaint anyway.

Last weekend, I was relaxing on the couch with J R by William Gaddis and a cup of Earl Grey and my dog on my lap. The reluctance to move my pup, who was sleeping peacefully and looking so adorable I couldn’t bear to disturb him, kept me from getting up to urinate. Eventually I had to attend to the needs every creature must address. I got up to piss.

In the bathroom, midstream, I could hear something. Something like a waterfall. I looked down. No, it wasn’t coming from me, despite being in the act of emptying my bladder. This was bigger than any watery sound I’ve ever produced. This was. . . coming from the next room? I’d better investigate. Of course, having downed two cups of black tea that morning, my bladder wasn’t so quick to empty, no matter the level of urgency with which I told myself to hurry the fuck up.

In the back room of my apartment, a second bedroom we call “the study” as it houses a good chunk of my library, water was pouring in from the windows and ceiling. A lot of water. A rainstorm isolated directly above a couple hundred stacked books. Ignoring the obvious “How is this happening?” question, I scrambled to save the books, quickly realized many were beyond saving but others, those stacked below the top, might be salvageable. Of course, there being numerous stacks, I had to save the more important books first. This being the closest thing to a Sophie’s Choice I’ve ever experienced, I can’t say I acted with anything other than pure instinct. Save The Recognitions by Gaddis—I’m deep into J R and I might want to read the other fat, challenging Gaddis novel someday. Oh shit, all the Salman Rushdie books are getting soaked. There’s no saving The Satanic Verses—fuck, it’s now unreadable. Khomeini has his revenge at last.

I got every damn book out of harm’s way before calling my landlady and asking What the hell? Based on the description of the water’s manner of ingress, she determined it had to be coming from the outside back steps where she has a hose coiled outside her door. It’s been cold in Chicago, and her husband, after trying the hose and discovering the flow was frozen, forget to turn off the water. The weather warmed that morning, and the hose started working. Who knows how long it took for the relentless shower to flood the back wall and penetrate the windows and overhead light fixture? What does it matter—the damage was done. Close to two hundred books are now mildew stinking, warped trash.

The majority of my library is in the living room with a good chunk shelved by the front door and a lot of poetry in the dining room. These are the most cherished books in my collection. Those in the study are hardly what we used to call the déclassé books, more the ones I needed to put somewhere. Not the ones I was getting ready to read anytime soon. All the Bulgakov and Joyce and Flann O’Brien and Beckett and Vonnegut and Italo Calvino and Kafka and Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson and Cabrera Infante books were in the living room. Most of the books published by Dalkey Archive, NYRB Classics, Open Letter, Archipelago, and Melville House were in the living room as well. (Yes, I organize my books by publisher as well as by author.) Some of the better art books were spared. But I lost signed copies of some of my friends’ books. And some gems were hidden in those stacks. When you’re sitting on 6,000 + books, you forget what you own. Sorting through the damage, I rediscovered a few books that I should’ve read by now or would’ve loved to keep. And some books were special to me. Sure, I can replace my destroyed copy of Les Chants de Maldoror, but this is the copy I bought in 1996 after fighting with the bookseller who responded to my request to hold the copy with, “You sure you’re gonna come back for it?” a question so obnoxious I complained. The owner overheard me sparring with the clerk and smoothed the situation by offering me 10% off. So yeah, I can get another copy, but this one conjures a memory.

The memories we attach to books (among other items) are what makes them special. I tried to convey this in The Soft Lunacy. Each chapter was inspired by a book or a literary idea, some underpinning to connect the wayward tales of drinking and fucking up along the lines of what Sergei Dovlatov did in The Suitcase. When the book was finally published, I was happy that— to the best of my ability— I’d made some kind of case for my obsession. And I felt like I could put all the pain of 2016 behind me.

2020 has been worse. Not for me, exactly, but for others, for the country, the world. I’ve managed to stay more than sane in my near isolation, only venturing out when necessary and trying very hard to minimize direct contact with humans. Again, I’ve been fine, but I’m well aware that the year has been rough for a lot of people. There are those who’ve lost family and friends and livelihoods. And then there are those who are not dealing well with decreased social interaction. And there’s been plenty of social unrest for legitimate reasons, not to mention plenty of protest over absolutely silly misunderstandings of the concept of “freedom.”

My hope— and I am not alone— is that we come out of this time better than we were before. Maybe “hope” is the wrong word. I don’t really think this will happen. Cynical again, but the powers that be won’t let go of that power willingly, and if we want to remake society so that it is more equitable, and reform our governing entities so that they are better prepared for true crisis, we have to do a lot more than we are willing to do. That I just deleted “capable” in the last sentence and replaced it with “willing” is a sign of hope, albeit a small one.

It took a pandemic to demonstrate exactly how precarious our hyper-capitalist society is, how close we’ve always been to ruin. Anyone ready to take a good long look might’ve told us this, but why look when we’re all enjoying the spoils? What’s that? Not all of us enjoyed those spoils? Well, sure, but we’ve always been good at ignoring them.

Whether or not we reform capitalism, the police, the government, our system of educating people— really most of the way of we live our first world lives— is yet to be seen. Again, I doubt anything permanent will occur. We tend to forget easily, so as soon as the party starts up again we’ll be back to living outside our means and accumulating for the sake of accumulation and blaming immigrants and the poor when things collapse. But let’s hope not. Prove me wrong, America!

As for my accumulation, I’ve spent the last four years buying books at such a pace I’m well on my way to replacing the 2,000 I sold in 2016. My recent loss of 200 hasn’t hurt too much. If anything, it’s caused me to revisit the question that kicks off The Soft Lunacy: why do I collect these damn things? In the book, I suggested that collecting is a form of control in a chaotic universe. I’m still of this opinion, though why collect books? They take up space, are a pain in the ass to move in bulk, and the titles I haven’t read are a cause of shame, glaring at me from the shelves. It’d be easier to collect coins or stamps. But I’ve always wanted to be surrounded by books, to sense the possibilities in the unread titles, revisit favorite stories and poems, bask in the aesthetics of bound pages, relax in the comfort of these products of intellectual toil. And while this recent setback has reminded me that these objects are vulnerable, the permeance of a book is still a cherished thing, especially in 2020 when so many trusted institutions are going belly up. Stalwart businesses, restaurants, movie theaters, cafés. . . vanishing in the wake of a pandemic our leaders were ill-prepared to face.

Capitalism took it on the chin this year. At least the kind of capitalism I was raised to believe in, the kind that rewards hard work and industriousness and small businesses and independent spirit. Instead, we see that the only behemoths will endure, not to mention triumph. Bezos made out like a bandit in 2020. The little neighborhood bar around the corner? God, I hope that survives. Those indie bookshops that got me to move to the north side? Praying for them.

I did a lot of my book buying this year online. Not wanting to give Bezos a buck more than I had to, I went directly to publishers’ websites. Here are a few:

https://archipelagobooks.org/

https://www.mhpbooks.com/

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

https://www.ndbooks.com/

https://www.openletterbooks.org/

https://www.nyrb.com/

http://deepvellum.com/

I also shopped using these local bookshops’ websites:

https://pilsencommunitybooks.com

https://www.unabridgedbookstore.com

https://www.semicolonchi.com

https://www.open-books.org

https://www.semcoop.com

https://www.powellschicago.com

https://www.volumesbooks.com

My money went directly to publishers and bookshops. And yeah, Bookshop.org is a great alternative to Amazon, but if you really care about helping struggling small businesses, why go through a third party? Why allow any of your money to go to an intermediary?

Buying books became a mission to save indie stores and small presses. I was going to buy books anyway, but now I had a more concrete justification for my soft lunacy. Whatever works.

That 2016 was a lousy year and that 2020 was lousier, and that one year saw Trump ascend to the highest office while the other saw him knocked from it, is not lost on me. 2016 ended on a sour note, at least for those of us who see the president as the representation of the worst qualities of the United States of America. And yes, he’s leaving office, but his defeat came after a long, ugly, stupid fight after four long, ugly, stupid years. I can’t help but see this recent loss of books as (pun warning) bookending this weird time in my life and my country. Perhaps this is the way things will be for now on. Every four years I’ll shed some books and the world outside my door will be strange. God, I hope not. I hope for stability and wisdom and quiet speculation and civil discourse and rational thinking and emotional highs and lows born of joy and sincerity rather than knee-jerk reactions and fear. I hope for what books represent and demand: patience, curiosity, engagement, insight, adventure, ambition, knowledge, challenge, reward. More of that, please, on paper and saturating the collective culture.