Berned and Bummed

I’m feeling the Bern.  Honestly, I haven’t been this excited about an election since—well, maybe ever.  When people tell me that this is the most important presidential race in whatever, I tend to think they may be right, though they know not why.  Chances are they think we MUST defeat Donald Trump, that odious slime.  And they’d be right, but, as I assured my students the other day, if the unthinkable happens and that bloviating ass gets elected to the highest office in the land, he’ll probably not last a year.  Being president means working hard, and he is not a hard worker.  He’s just an ego, the unbridled Id of the right wing, a jerk more interested in celebrity than anything else.  He’ll quickly realize that the job he spent so much of his (and other people’s, let’s be honest) money on is not worth it.  Why be president when you can be a reality TV star?  So yeah, he’ll pull a Sarah Palin and quit before his term is over and launch a series of destined-to-fail TV shows and put his name on some ghost written tripe that will sell well in the biscuits and gravy circuit.  And then an adult will take the job.

But here’s the thing: none of the other candidates are much to speak of.  Save for Bernie Sanders, but (honesty time again) he’s likely not going to be the candidate come November.  That will be Hillary Clinton, sadly.  And I write "sadly" because I do not care for her as a politician, though I respect the hell of her, if that makes sense.  She has endured massive amounts of shit in her time as first lady, senator, and Secretary of State.  And she’s tough, tough enough to be president, but still, I see a disturbing similarity between her and Trump: both will say whatever people want to hear.  Hillary evinces a lot more intelligence and restraint in her speeches, but her debates with Sander have made me see red.  When she asked him where he was in 1993 when she was trying to reform health care, implying that Sanders is a newcomer to the scene, her fans probably cheered, ignoring the fact (which five seconds of Googling would confirm) that Bernie was there with her in that fight.  (There's literally a picture of him standing behind her in 1993 as she fought for health care reform.)  But who among her supporters is going to check for that? 

This is slightly better than pandering to the lowest common denominator, à la Trump.  But it’s still manipulating truth to generate enthusiasm.  Granted, Trump’s riling of supporters has resulted in violence and a scary fanaticism that many are comparing to Hitler.  (A bit too easy, I suppose, but if one wants to avoid such comparisons they’d do better than use his slogans and rhetoric.)  But Hillary’s always been a tell-‘em-what-they-want-to-hear politician, and, apparently, what they want to hear is deeply connected to her gender.

Statement of sincere belief: it is completely logical that a woman would assume that Hillary has more awareness of women’s issues than any man, and that this awareness would lead her to take action on issues concerning women.  That makes sense.  But to vote for her out of tribal loyalty seems less defensible.  I have been told that we need to let a woman run things.  No real argument here—I tend to think more highly of women than men—but when some Hillary zealots tell me that any woman would be a more humane leader than a man I have to respond with two words: Margaret Thatcher. 

But as Obama would say, let me clear: I will vote for Hillary Clinton.  I have no real qualms about doing so, even if I am not gaga over her.  And my reasons are the same as all of the Bernie supporters out there: she’s too beholden to big banks and money and I’m sick of that.  But I’m also aware that, in that one capacity, she’s no different than any other politician (save for my guy) and that she’s a hell of a lot better than any of the republican options.  Realizing this, and not being so petty after your guy doesn’t get the nomination (I’m looking at you, Bernie or Busters) is what it means to be a voter in the U. S. of A.  Hold your nose and pull the lever.

***

My first time voting in a presidential election was in 1992.  I was excited to cast my vote for Bill Clinton.  I was only politically aware thanks to R.E.M. records, but that was a start.  In my mind, this was a chance to undo twelve years of Reagan/Bush policies that had demonized poor people, ignored a plague, advocated for unregulated markets, amped up the military to an unnecessary degree, and started the trend that would eventually bring the economy to the brink of ruin.  Bill was going to fix all of that.  He was cool.  He played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show and rocked Fleetwood Mac at his rallies.  A rock and roll president.  New life in the stuffy oval office.  A guy who would keep the interests of the people in mind always.

Oh, to be so young and stupid.

By 1996 I was done with politics.  Actually, I was done with a lot of things: school, work, maintaining my health and hygiene.  My brother joked that I would’ve made the perfect OJ Simpson juror since I hadn’t watched a second of the trial and didn’t know who Judge Ito was.  Part of my disengagement had to do with Bill Clinton.  He’d done what any politician will always do: he made promises, speeches, and proclamations; he planted seeds that could never bear significant fruit once he moved to 1600 Pennsylvania.  I was soured when nothing really changed.  So I understand the slacktivists and the Bernie or Bust camp that will avoid voting in the name of disenchantment or cynicism.  But as I told one friend who proudly boasts his political apathy, I tried that in the 1990s and it didn’t work. 

Part of being an adult is realizing that we do not always get the choices we want.  So yes, please do vote even if doing so seems futile.  To misrepresent a little of E. E. Cummings, “An intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects.” Aside from that philosophic justification, not voting ensures that someone will take office you will surely not approve of, someone with the power to nominate Supreme Court justices and further push the culture toward division and fear.

The best way to keep things the same is to do nothing. 

***

Why do I like Bernie?  People ask me that a lot lately.  Most of the people I am in contact with are students, and they love Bernie.  Why not?  He’s advocating free college and they are a few years from facing debt my grandparents never dreamed of.  Anyone can understand their enthusiasm.  But why me?  Well, I guess for the same reason the Trump folks love that blowhard: he’s changing the conversation.  Where Donald’s dunderheads celebrate his lack of political correctness the way assholes will always follow up rude comments with, “I’m just being honest,” Bernie’s smartest advocates will see how our culture can be moved away from Cold War era fears of all things socialist and closer to a European model.  Sanders has rightly discussed Scandinavian societies that have successfully blended capitalism with social programs many of us droll over.  What new parent wouldn’t want a long stretch of paid maternity leave?  Who would turn down government subsidized education and health care?  Of course, that does require raising taxes, but, as many have pointed out, if we change the conversation and stop referring to taxes as punishment and start seeing them as an investment, then we might understand how paying more collectively nets us more individually. 

Of course, that’ll kill incentive, right?  Well, not from what I’ve read.  It seems a hell of a lot easier to start a business in Finland than in the United States.  With all of our bluster about small business and entrepreneurship, we’ve created a wall of red tape sending most innovators toward the cubicle.  And there are ample examples of business that have been started in Scandinavian countries to rival all of ours.  No, there’s no reason, in theory, why democratic socialism wouldn’t work here.  But there’s a reason why it will never happen: to quote Hillary Clinton, “We are not Denmark.”  She’s right, but her rejection of Sanders's ideas reveals the larger problem with her and Trump and Cruz and majority of the country: we think we can’t be anything other than what we are.  So long as we continue to stay inflexibly loyal to questionable narratives about our past, we’ll never break out of failed paradigms. 

Second grand thesis statement of this essay: The United States of America is too far gone for what Bernie Sanders is proposing.  There’s too much money in politics, too many influences, too much corruption, too much waste, and way too much partisan bickering.  When congress refuses to meet with Obama’s Supreme Court nominee—when it goes so far as to fabricate nonsense about a tradition that blocks sitting presidents from doing that part of their job in their last year of office—then it is clear that the division in our country is too deep.  The system is likely never going to be reformed in a way that would allow for the sort of changes Sanders is proposing. 

But why not propose them anyway?  Why not push the culture toward different ideas?  Maybe if we do we can begin to have a real conversation about implementing socialist policies alongside our free market.  But the conversation needs to start for the change to ever occur.  That is why I like Bernie Sanders.  He’s lasted longer in this fight and more noise than other disrupters before him like Ralph Nader or Ross Perort.  Only Trump is his equal in that regard, but Bernie’s noise—love it or hate it—requires serious contemplation. 

So let’s enjoy the Bern before it flames out.  And let's start having a real conversation that sheds bullshit talking parts and party loyalties.  Let's grow up, already. 

Love Is

Coffee and grapefruit juice in the morning

A double espresso

Fizzy water

Whiskey at night after a long day

A bottle of Guinness while cooking with mi esposa 

Homemade meals, especially salmon and asparagus and roasted red potatoes

Lox on a bagel

The Sound and the Fury, The Master and Margarita, The Obscene Bird of Night, Belfast Confetti, Vilnius Poker, The Color of Summer, Written on the Body, Three Trapped Tigers, Finnegans Wake, 2666, Senselessness

Much of the poetry of Ana Akhmatova, Anne Carson, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, Maurice Riordan, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Cesar Vallejo, Nicanor Parra, Vicente Huidobro, Mina Loy, Philip Larkin, and E. E. Cummings

About 1/5 of the poems of Frank O'Hara

All the books of Kurt Vonnegut

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Women and Factotum by Bukowski and not giving a damn that I still love Bukowski when my academic cohort would tell that doing so is wrong

The beguiling madness of Antonin Artaud

All the books in English of Sergei Dovlatov and the hope that more will be translated

Shane MacGowan’s banshee wail

Drunkenly singing along to "Left of the Dial" by The Replacements

Standing in front of a room of bored college freshman and thinking: “Okay, get ready, goddamnit”

Pizza

The Melvins song “Boris” and Tom Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Twa Corbies” as done by Boiled in Lead

The Mekons

Writing a book I never imagined anyone would want to read and then publishing it and hearing nice things from people, even if it embarrasses me

Writing another book that I can’t imagine will ever become anything

Editing old poems and realizing that I am the shit

Making lists

Grindcore

Jazz

The Boredoms

Used bookstores

Chicago, save for the times I hate Chicago 

New Orleans

Vancouver

Mexico City

Chiapas 

Paris

Lisbon

Taipei

Tunis

London

Bar hopping on 95th street in Oak Lawn, IL with my friends and my brother  

Walking down Central Park West during a frigid January in NYC with mi esposa and thinking of John Coltrane

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Calvary and The Guard and the presence Brendon Gleeson brings to films

David Thewlis doing the best acting possible in Naked

The opening credits sequence of Twin Peaks

Quoting The Big Lebowski and annoying people in the process

Much of the sketches of Monty Python, Mr. Show, and SCTV

The Third Man, which gets better with each viewing

The Butthole Surfers

Breaking Bad

Miller’s Crossing

After Hours

Bongwater (the band, not the actual water)

The later poems of W. B. Yeats

Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”

Reign in Blood by Slayer

“Whiskey in the Jar” as done by Thin Lizzy

Italian food, Japanese food, Thai food, Mexican food, Indian food

Eating dinner with mi esposa

Taking long walks with mi esposa

Drinking with mi esposa

Watching shitty movies on cable with mi esposa

Reading books with mi esposa

Sleeping next to mi esposa

Throwing a ball and my perfect dog running for it, barking in anticipation, never tiring of this

RIP My Oddest Friend

A good friend died recently.  As Vonnegut wrote: so it goes.  And I knew it was coming.  Last time I saw him he was in a bad way, which is to say he was worse than usual and usual was quite bad.  Bedridden, unable to use his hands for much, constantly uncomfortable—I joked that he had become something out of a Beckett play.  And it was the sort of joke that he, a literary man, might have liked had it not been about him. 

I stopped going to see him around Thanksgiving, which makes me feel guilty.  But I was convinced that my visiting was causing too much confusion for him—last time he had no idea what day or time it was and seemed genuinely scared when I told him it was Wednesday at 4:00 PM, not AM.  Maybe I convinced myself it was best to stop going, but stop I did.  And then he died. 

The man was my oddest friend and I have known some oddballs.  He was my boss at the bookshop, the inspiration for a character in my book, and my friend in the sense that he seemed sincerely happy to be in my presence, an honor considering he disliked a lot of people.  He gave me a job at his store and another after it closed.  We swapped drinks, books, and jokes in the hours when we weren’t working on his eBay enterprise.  We combed the resale shops of Chicago in search of items to sell online.  We rarely found gems though some did emerge from the muck of soiled clothes and board games missing half their pieces.  We frequented the Red Lion and other bars of Lincoln Avenue that have either closed or been reborn as something he’d have no use for.  All things considered, he was a good friend.  Over twenty years my senior—only a few years older than my parents—but we closed the generation gap somehow.  Might’ve been the drinks.

There are eulogies out there better than this one.  And I have no right, really, to make some grand statement about the man.  I feel I knew him well but I’m not family, just a guy who met him at a time when my life was topsy-turvy in a way that I’ve mined for publication and some barroom stories.  He watched me go from barely able to pay rent to gainfully employed, from punk kid who thought he knew everything about books to English instructor who knows he has no real idea about anything.  And he teased me about my job, speculated that the task before me was enough to drive any sane person to drink (he wasn’t wrong).  But I think he was proud of me in a weird way.  He seemed to keep his kids informed about my life, just as he informed me about them.  

The week before I left the bookshop, I had new clothes on.  I’d just come from a job interview.  He knew it and he reminded me of what Thoreau once wrote: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”  I always keep that in mind when shopping in department stores or eating in upscale restaurants.  He wasn't one for fashion, usually opting for shirts he found at the thrift store worn for completely unironic reasons.  His favorite had a picture of a cow on it and read: Wisconsin, land of beer farts and cow shit.  


He was by no means a snob, yet he wouldn't suffer fools gladly.  He was sophisticated in his thinking and more curious than most people I've met.  He read a lot of books and was fierce in his opinions.  James Joyce was shit.  Hemingway overrated.  Woolf, Melville, and Faulkner were all that mattered.  He had no interest in literary trends or reading whatever was supposed to be the right book.  The right book was up to him.  And he was adamant in his literary beliefs, to the extent that he'd judge people based on theirs.  Once, at the Red Lion, a fellow drinker looked at the back cover description of my copy of The Man Without Qualities.  "Sounds dull," the patron said.  My friend's response: "It is if you're a simple shit."  


There are a lot more stories like that.  Some are in my book, some in my head.  I'll not go on, and anyway I might be among the few who'd find the tales amusing.  A lot of people didn't respond well to his gruffness.  But I did, even if half the time I was uneasy watching him kick a customer out of the store or tell someone to fuck off.  Waiting in line at the post office would set him off and I'd be the one to have to smooth things over with the clerk.  In fact, I was essentially hired to be the pleasant side of the store after he got too tired of the people on Clark Street.  This could be taxing, but I was willing to be taxed.  We can't always expect our friends to be what we want.  Sometimes we just accept them for who they are, but I suppose not all of them are worth the effort.  God knows I've cut people out of my life for less than my old employer put me through.  But, for whatever reason, I loved the old bastard.  I always hate when people say that the dead are in a better place, but anywhere is better than the nightmare he was living in during those last years.  Rest in peace, old friend.  

Star Wars and Caligula, or: Too Old for Camp

I get it.  I was once very into Star Wars, too.  That was 1977 and I was six.  When The Empire Strikes Back came out, I was at my peak obsession.  And while I was very excited to see whether or not Han Solo survived being frozen in carbonite, I had a sense, while watching Return of the Jedi, that the movie was bad. 

What happened?  Most of the same effects and all of the same characters were represented.  Sure, the presence of little muppets in a forest planet was pretty lame, but I could have overlooked that so long as Han was cool and sly, kissing on his buddy’s girl and Chewy was kicking his usual amount of ass.  But even those elements started to seem dull and silly.  What was going on?  I think I was growing up.

I boxed up all my actions figures and let the Millennium Falcon gather dust.  A few years later, I gladly sold all my Star Wars toys to a high school buddy who started a nostalgia museum in his bedroom.  And I stopped thinking about Star Wars.  It was easy: the movies were barely mentioned, rarely replayed on TV or theaters, and assigned to the back room of my memory.  They were pleasant reminders of my childhood, not unlike a slew of late 70s/early 80s TV shows and movies.  It wasn’t until Kevin Smith made Clerks that I remember anyone really geeking out about the films as if they were magically transported back to their six-year old selves. 

I blame Clerks for making Star Wars nostalgia cool.  Or maybe it was cool but I didn’t know it.  Or maybe it was cool in the underground fringes that have become the foreground of our culture thanks to the internet’s ability to simultaneously give everyone a voice and lessen our collective attention span and, thus, our ability to critically evaluate culture.  And before anyone gets all uppity with their grad school applications of theory to explain how a piece of pop culture can be intellectually fulfilling and socially relevant—I know all this and am I sure you are right.  But I also find the driver behind the hype over The Force Awakens to be a little depressing. 

I admit it: I have not seen the film.  So I cannot criticize it.  But I can criticize the culture that surrounds the film.  (Criticize not being synonymous with denigrate.)  I don’t understand the pre-ordering of tickets or the waiting in line for hours in costume to see the film.  And this is from a guy who actively geeks out in other ways.  I bought three copies of Bolaño’s 2666 when it came out in English.  I own over 20 copies of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  I have sat through horror movie marathons and camped out for concert tickets.  I’ve pre-ordered music from my favorite bands without hearing a note.  I understand the inclination to commit to a brand, but I also know that life has a lot to offer.  Why is it that Star Wars gets so much attention?  It’s not a bad series of films (at least not the first two) but are any of them really that good?

I don’t wish to assert that my art is better than yours.  I’m not trying to be elitist here.  I have plenty of room in my cultural diet for sci-fi (when it’s good) and horror and even, occasionally, fantasy.  I like The Walking Dead (most of the time) and still think Time Bandits is a great film.  I’m a Monty Python nerd.  I obsessively listen to stand-up comedy and rewatch Mr. Show on YouTube.  I can slip into the nerd fray with ease.  But I cannot get it up to care about Star Wars.  Not at the age of 44.  It’d be like playing Dungeons and Dragons again. 

****

Since writing the above paragraphs, I’ve seen the Star Wars movie.  It’s pretty good.  The plot is fine thanks to the lack of intergalactic trade negotiations or whatever was bogging the prequels down.  And there’s action aplenty, old heroes popping up throughout, and a new droid to love and merchandise.

But I still think the movie is hardly worth seeing more than once. 

My bigger issue today is with Susan Sontag.  Specifically, “Notes on ‘Camp’” which is really all I know of Sontag’s work save for a short article on feminine beauty that seems to confuse my ENG 101 students.  No, wait—I’ve seen other essays and articles, but her most serious work (“Against Interpretation” and the entire On Photography) has eluded me.  “Notes on ‘Camp’” is a biggy, though, a classic.  It has been hailed as such by friends and foes alike.  I’ve only read this essay once, so forgive me if my memory of it proves faulty.  I could reread it in preparation for this post but, frankly, the idea of doing so bugs me.  I don’t want to grant Sontag’s ideas on camp the respect of reconsideration.  Not because she was wrong or that the essay is bad or that camp is a bad thing lacking any credibility, but because I am tired of camp; I’m no longer amused by kitschy crap that academics like Sontag have managed to convince me is legitimate art.  Even horror films, which I used to go through like Kleenex, repel me. 

My wife and I have had many dates centered on leaving the house and paying hard earned money to watch people eviscerated by an enigmatic psycho.  Every Halloween we spend hours in an uncomfortable movie house in the name of camp.  But I seem to be at the age where such forms of entertainment, however giddy they once made me, seem crass and stupid.  Witnessing CGI bloodbaths and lame-brained ghost stories is a tolerable way to whittle an evening, and some of these movies do still manage to shock in ways that feel inventive and even worthwhile, but more often I feel cheap after letting these films do to me what I knew they were going to do.  I’ve let them have their way with me and, even if I sort of enjoyed the experience, I inevitably feel worse about myself after.  The post-movie trip back to the car is my morning walk of shame. 

I ought to define camp, since my idea of it is probably contrary to most people’s, certainly to Sontag’s.  And I should also note that Sontag was indeed a top-notch critic and fierce intellectual.  I don’t need to have read much more than the handful of articles to know that.  I mean no disrespect to her legacy, but I have that same feeling lately with her as I do about Beckett: Waiting for Godot and Endgame are fantastic, truly important plays, but fuck if I hate the experimental theater Beckett’s work inspired.  And it is hardly fair to lay all blame on Sontag for the slew of dissertations on Star Trek, but I have to start somewhere.  May as well be with her since so many people have cited her essay on camp as a game changer. 

Back to the definition.  Camp: sometimes fun overly theatrical or sensationalistic entertainment that willfully upends traditional notions of beauty and, in doing so, attempts a discourse on the true elements of art and the elitism of the so-called canon.  The example I wish to begin with is the 1979 film Caligula. 

I can recall the first time I sat through Caligula.  More memorable is the time I took a college friend to the midnight showing of the legendary piece of shit.  We sat front row center and watched the fucking, fisting, and beheadings.  What fun!  Until it wasn’t.  The first twenty minutes we—the entire audience—laughed.  An hour in, some tittering was heard.  By the ninety-minute mark, no one was amused.  My friend was begging me to go.  He’d had enough.  “Let’s bail,” he said.  I protested—we’d paid money to see the movie.  We should finish it.  His response: “I’ll pay you to leave with me now.” 

I was resistant to leaving because enduring the repulsive movie seemed necessary, as if by doing so I could better measure something within me.  Who I am is who I am in response to Caligula.  And at the age of twenty-two I wanted to be a person who found trash fun, who knew about B cinema and defended it in an intellectual way.  But I was full of shit.  I was just into the gore and the sheer audacity of it all.  It appealed to me the way Japanese noise artists like Merzbow appealed to me.  It was a middle finger to elitism.  There was no way for me to realize just how elitist I was being by insisting that we stay to finish Caligula, how I was asking my friend to join me in the small group of select individuals who were ready to call this art. 

Caligula, for the record, is so bad it barely qualifies as trash, though it does have Peter O’Toole so that elevates it.  A movie that is similarly repugnant and admired is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the 1975 Passolini film my movie buff friends tell me is important.  I think they defend the movie by insisting it’s about the sickness of popular entertainment or the depravity of art or something, but frankly I found the film simultaneously dull and gross.  Better, in some ways, than Caligula but still nasty and not as shocking as Cannibal Holocaust, a movie that is at least honest in its sick, exploitive nature.  No script by Gore Vidal, no top-notch actors struggling to justify their participation, no shit eating masked as political statement— just ugly people doing ugly things for an ugly audience.  Recently, a quasi-remake of Cannibal Holocaust, The Green Inferno, has been made by a director known for bringing the cinematic pain.  Five years ago, I’d have gone out of my way to watch it but today I cannot imagine viewing a second of the thing.  The prospect disgusts me.

I don’t think this is a sign of my maturation.  I’m still not the type to shun trash in favor of canonized art.  I do see the value in a lot of what some might dismiss as junk.  Dawn of the Dead (the original, though the remake is pretty good) is one of my favorite films.  As is Rosemary’s Baby.  As is Angel Heart.  These are movies full of gore and scares and, in the case of Angel Heart, crazy sex that results in blood pouring from a hotel ceiling.  But these films have something going on that elevates them, though naming that quality is difficult.  I’m guessing most people don’t try.  They simply enjoy a good flick.  Gore for gore’s sake.  But I can’t help but think of Sontag when I watch some of these films or when I read a pop novel that has been praised by academics or when I see ironic T-shirts on the backs of my students.  Or when Batman, Iron Man, and Star Wars not only dominate the box offices but also thesis papers.  We have raised trash to the status of art in the name of camp. 

Trash has always been fun because it’s trash.  Once it became art, it may have lost something essential.  I know this post-modern idea of cultural omnivorism came before her, but Sontag’s essay on camp really seems to have done a fine job of convincing a lot of academics that anything and everything is fodder for intellectual discourse.  And they’re not wrong, but I worry lately that I live in an era where fun, pulpy works of trash are elevated to a status on par or above the canon.  And while we’re on the subject, fuck the canon.  I’m not one to subscribe to the idea that there are classics that are unimpeachably great and important and that they ought to be the only books we read and teach, but I feel like this reaction against the canon has resulted in the seesaw tipped too far in the opposite direction.  I’m happy to read both Carson McCullers and Anne Bannon in a class on American women writers, but I won’t pretend that Bannon’s books are good.  I am sure they are important to a lot of people, but my interpretive community sees them as badly written pulp.  Fun, sexy, cool, and maybe worth reading, but not as good as “The Ballad of the Sad Café” goddamnit. 

You can guess that I said as much in class and that my views were called elitist.  Maybe they are.  I’m just interested in a good story, good writing, good art.  And my definition is my own; it doesn’t need to be yours.  Still, I do wonder if combatting the elitism and all the other isms involved with the canon has brought us to a place where we define the worth of a book by its politics.  Camp is the ultimate anti-elitist art, appealing to the politically marginalized.  And god bless it.  Camp is escapist fun, tawdry at times, silly at others, always entertaining, but rarely—to me—fulfilling. 

My main gripe comes in the form of hating the movies of Quentin Tarantino, though I’m sure I’ve felt this sense of unease when defending my love of Faulkner to a colleague who dismisses his books as elitist literature penned by a dead white guy.  As I disassembled my library, I saw plenty of elitism represented.  There are a lot of canonized writers, some members of what I call the sub-canon—that nebulous place where one is still literary but not as universally revered as Shakespeare—and a few genre exercises that I’ve kept for whatever reason.  I did sell a lot of the camp, though.  All the Fantômas books are gone.  A couple old ghost story collections as well.  Most of the crime books, though I kept a copy of Swag by Elmore Leonard because a friend gave it to me and I feel bad selling it.  I saved My Dark Places by James Ellroy and sold his novel Black Dahlia because I stupidly decided that the former, being nonfiction, was worth keeping over the piece of invention.  I ought to have cut them both, or kept them both, but my imposing of a distinction on them is a form of elitism.  I can’t keep a good old-fashioned mystery but the true crime book stays? 

I am willing to admit it—I am elitist.  I have no time for crap.  I define good work in my own way, but my definition clearly privileges the cheesy horror films of Roman Polanski—I love The Tenant—and rejects the genre mash-ups of Tarantino.  But Tarantino is widely celebrated by cinephiles and the bloodshed, cool dialogue, and hip retro feel of his films all but ensures the kids will love him.  And there are those who tell me I ought to let go of expectations and just enjoy a fun night at the cinema or a page-turner.  Maybe, but it strikes me that a theory is not necessary in order to enjoy pop art.  No one has ever needed persuading to watch reality TV, but it takes some convincing to get a lot of people to read a Russian novel.  Genre books, trashy cinema, campy delights have been legitimized but in doing so we have told people to strive no higher.  Maybe that isn’t the way it ought to be.  Maybe we ought to do like my junior year high school English teacher and assign Stephen King and Charles Dickens.  The post-modern concept of inclusivity shouldn’t equal ignoring the so-called classics.

I’ve been trying to fill in gaps in my reading lately.  Joyce, Melville, Sterne, Musil—reading these writers is a way of making up for what I feel is the neglect of some allegedly important books.  And it’s mostly been fun (imagine that!) though it doesn’t seem like it to the people wondering why the hell I would spend my winter break with Moby-Dick.  Netflix beckons and really this is The Golden Age of TV, didn’t you hear, Vince? 

How about this: I’ll watch Jessica Jones if you read Finnegans Wake.