Wouldst Thou Like to Live Podcastishly?

I like to think of myself as having many talents, but self promotion is not one of them. It makes me feel cringey inside, asking people to come look at some thing I’ve done. That’s why I push (for example) these blog posts out into the world with a minimum of fanfare: ideally, they’ll speak for themselves, and if there’s any value in them people will encounter and discern that on their own.

So I’m stepping outside my comfort zone a good bit in writing this post promoting my other main endeavor at the moment (aside from the endeavor of having a job, looking for a job, doing my own research, and rearing four wild childrens). But I think it’s worth the effort (and the internal shame) of doing it, because I really believe in what my comrades and I are doing with the Readers Karamazov podcast. As we prepare to launch Season 2 (coming next week!), I wanted to offer a few reasons that I find compelling for listening in and also, if you like what you hear, spreading the word.

1. We offer thoughtful conversation detached from the controversy du jour.

If you’ve been following my posts here on my thinking process, you’ll know that I’m allergic to the quick take, the in the moment response that passes for thinking so often these days. The Readers Karamazov resolutely refuses to be “useful” in any immediate sense of that word. We have measured, thoughtful conversations about BIG TOPICS like love, art, and justice, but do so through the lens of lasting literature, such that we’re never prisoners of the moment. We could, I think, grow our audience much more quickly if we pandered to that sense of immediacy and strove for IMPORTANCE IN THE DISCOURSE. But we’re content to tend our little garden, secure in the knowledge that what we’re doing has a lasting significance.

2. We’ll Introduce You to Great Books You’ve Never Read, and Help You Rethink Those You Have

Here’s our list of books for Season 2. How many have you read? I’ve read 5 — Middlemarch, our guiding book for the season, then the three I’ve chosen (The Clouds, Madame Bovary, and the Borges stories), plus Candide. That’s a lot of books I haven’t read! One of the main benefits to me of the podcast is the opportunity to pick up standards I’ve never gotten around to (The Awakening), contemporary classics (Sebald), and even on occasion a book I’ve never heard of (Soul Mountain). The great thing about having three hosts whose tastes differ is that we force each other to read books we otherwise wouldn’t. Last season Karl had Friedrich and I read Trouble on Triton — not a book either of us would pick up voluntarily, but one we had a stellar (so to speak) conversation about nonetheless. And before fate intervened to spare him, Friedrich and I had almost trapped Karl into reading The Warden, a book very much outside his wheelhouse. That’s the sort of fruitful cross-pollination we love.

Whether you read along with us or not (we hope you will!) each episode will help you become familiar not merely with the plot of the chosen book, but what makes it tick: its themes, characters, and quirks. Because we take our time and dig deep, you’ll walk away with the sense that you know the book better, whether you’re reading it for the first time alongside us, haven’t read it but might pick it up, or have reread a favorite.

3. We’re Filling a Particular Niche (and Doing It Well)

As shocking as this may sound, there is not an abundance of podcasts at the moment that focus on literature from a philosophical perspective (there is actually another out there that I’d recommend, Sacred & Profane Love). What makes us extra unique, I’d argue, is that we approach books as literary critics, attentive to form and texture. We don’t just suck out the big ideas from books, we look at the way that form and content work together (or against each other!). But we’re also, all three of us, well versed in philosophy and “big ideas” — this is a podcast hosted by “The Bastard Sons of Hegel,” after all. Books AND ideas; who knew they paired so well (we did. we did).

4. We Don’t Take Ourselves Too Seriously

Though we love literature and ideas, and do our best to dive below the surface to offer thoughtful discussions, we don’t approach literature with any pomposity or self-seriousness. The original impetus behind the podcast was the desire that the three of us — close friends from graduate school — had to just spend time with each other talking about things we care about. We have a solid chemistry (I hope) developed through years of genuine friendship. We also like jokes, and finding the absurdities of any given situation. The result is, on the whole and for the most part, a podcast that will help you learn knew things without boring you. Plus, we have the absolute best intro/outro music in the game, and I’ve been progressively upping the ante in choosing cold opens and outro clips.

5. We Actually Give a Crap about Podcast Production

I spent a long time resisting the podcast world, then dove in a few years back and have since listened to MANY podcasts. Here’s the thing: many podcasts done by amateurs like us — and even some professional podcasts! — sound like garbage. People aren’t using mics, or have really bad ones, there’s tons of conversational filler (umms, likes, etc), and whatever editing exists has been done in the most slapdash manner possible. There’s a podcast (I’ll leave it nameless) whose content I enjoy but that I can barely listen to because the audio quality and editing is so bad.

We’re a small operation here, and far from professional. I’ll go ahead and own up so you can blame me for any problems: I handle all the production, editing, and related duties. And it’s been a learning process (shout out to my friend and former student Jack, whose tech savvy has been a real help in gradually troubleshooting that end of things). But time and sweat have never been the issue; I spend a long time slicing and dicing each episode to make sure only the gold remains, the chaff blown away. And you can tell, I think, the difference between the first episodes on The Brothers Karamazov and the later episodes in Season 1. I’m still improving, still honing my craft, but I put real effort into it, and promise never to unleash an episode on your ears that sounds like barf.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider joining us this season as we make our way through Middlemarch and the constellation of books we’ve clustered around it. I think it will be a fascinating, productive season, even better than the first.

Etudes, Not Essays

Jean-François Garneray’s The Piano Lesson.

Earlier this week I wrote up a list of rules I try to follow in my digital thinking/writing life. The three of you out there who have been faithfully reading this blog might have stumbled a bit at the penultimate guideline on that list, related to holding your fandoms lightly, not making too much of pop culture, etc, a guidelines that made me out to be a living, breathing incarnation of the “Old man yells at cloud” Simpsons meme. And perhaps a hypocrite, to boot: wait a minute, my loyal readers say, isn’t this the guy who wrote a whole post about one scene in a Muppets movie? And blathered on about how awful The Steve Miller Band is? What gives?

On one level, the grumpy answer to give is simply: this is my blog, I write what I want! I contain Whitmanian multitudes, etc etc. But I want to offer a little more justification, one that meshes with my honestly and firmly held conviction that in the grand scheme little of what pop culture produces will matter in a century’s time, all washed away like tears in rain, as some dude once said (I don’t remember who). That explanation, briefly, is that I view my blog primarily as a place for pre-thinking, not thinking itself. As I said in a previous post, thinking is hard, and most of us most of the time will not actually engage in it, but only something resembling it. Here on the blog, then, I make a conscious effort to pre-think in ways that keep me sharp and engaged, so that when I try to set about the actual task of thinking I have my tools whetted and primed.

Allow me to be pedantic for a moment (as my wife will note, the lack of permission never stopped me before). There’s a little etymological tidbit that people who teach writing like to trot out to put their students at ease: WELL ACHKUALLY, we say, “essay” comes from a French word that just means “attempt.” Thus do we essay (usually unsuccessfully) to trick our students into writing something simultaneously worthwhile and yet knowingly imperfect (our students, ever ready to oblige, nail at least one half of that equation). This etymology is 100% true, and “essays” should always be considered attempts at thought. But there’s actually a French word that signifies something pre-essay: the etude, bane of piano students everywhere (or, in my case, cello students with the dreaded Popper - David, not Karl). Etude, in the French, means “study.” In music it is a piece of music, short and technically focused, that aims to develop some facility in the player. Some Etudes break out to achieve the status of legitimate pieces of music in their own right (as I write I’m listening to an album of etudes by a favorite composer, Philip Glass), but most simply exist to fulfill that original purpose, as exercises for the budding student.

That’s how I like to think of my blog posts, especially those focused on pop culture: as etudes designed to help my flex my muscles. But what muscles? For me, these are the muscles of close reading and description, along with perhaps analysis and insight. These are critical critical tools, but sometimes they languish in the back of the shed in favor of overblown rhetoric, political commitment, or any number of things.

One of the most painstaking but beneficial assignments I received in graduate school came in an upper level film analysis class. The task was deceptively simple: take a single shot from the current film under examination, and right a brief but absolutely thorough description of everything in the shot: every aspect of mise en scène (costumes, props, notable makeup, etc); camera placement, as well as any camera movement; and blocking, lighting, etc. From the outside looking in this is a simple task, but once you get inside it you realize just how complex it can be when you actually bother to notice everything. We watch films all the time, but how often do we think about these elements as we go along? Well, now I do, constantly.

If there’s something I’m going to harp on constantly in my posts about criticism, it’s that we spend too little time engaged in this act of description. We strip mine cultural products for their parts, looking to shove whatever meager evidence we gather into our ill fitting mold of choice. We demand that our cultural effluvia conform perfectly to the au courant political and social mores of our tribe, or else we pore like scribes over the newest superhero film for signs of minuscule connection to the 49 other films in the franchise. Such is the state of a lot of pop culture writing today. To receive this mess of pottage, we’ve traded away the ability to notice how films (or shows, or whatever) wriggle under our attempts to vivisect them, how they operate, however teeteringly, as systems in their own right.

So that’s what I’m up to here, just practicing my writerly scales by trying to stop and examine and think about particular pieces of culture. For the most part I won’t try to elevate these exercises by providing some grand scheme or insight; I’ll just be hammering away at the keys of observation, so that when the opportunity presents itself, I’m ready to really settle down and think.

Some Rules for Online Living I Try to Follow

One of the intellectual principles I find it most helpful to live by is the assumption that most people most of the time (myself very much included) have not drilled down into the root problems of any dispute. An especially glaring contemporary example of this tendency is the relative lack of sustained interest in the effects of technology on society in an age of hyperconnectivity. Sure, you’ll get the occasional back and forth between a grumbler and an optimist — “Back in my day” vs. “It’s always been like this, except now it’s better” — but these disagreements do little to really think through the implications of life under technological rule. That’s why I’m especially appreciative of the work of L.M. Sacasas, to my mind the best thinker about technology we have today. He’s not an alarmist, but neither is he a techno-cheerleader; instead, using the deep wisdom of thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, he gets at the heart of how technology shapes and reshapes us.

One of Sacasas’ pieces that has most stuck with me is his “10 Points of Unsolicited Advice for Technology Writers.” It’s brief, snappy, and very insightful about the pitfalls writers face when thinking about tech. It’s a bit of an odd choice for me to like, though, since in general I tend to despise lists of rules about writing. This list is a bit different, I suppose, since it’s really more about thinking than it is about actually writing. Anyway, I revisited this list recently, and as I’ve ruminated on it I’ve started thinking, somewhat laterally, about what unsolicited advice I’d give people, gleaned from my own experience, about how to use the Internet and Internet-adjacent tools.

A few caveats. First, I’m not a tech thinker, though I’m someone who’s spent a lot of my spare time thinking through issues with tech. So these “rules” are largely the result of gradual, careful testing and tweaking. Second, as always with lists like these, these rules are not hard and fast. They’re intended as general guardrails, not ironclad corsets. Finally, these are weighted toward my own preoccupations/uses of social media and the Internet, which tend toward books, culture, etc. If you’re just on the Internet to learn woodworking, God bless you (you’ve made the right choice).

1. Drill down deeper.
As noted above, this is one of the plagues we face today; as with many thinking-related problems, this one isn’t exclusive to our age, but has been exacerbated by social media, etc.

You can apply this rule in so many ways. One application relevant to just about everybody: don’t joyously or enragedly share an article that you haven’t read. Inflammatory headlines have a way of, well, spreading like wildfire. Resist the urge. In a related application: don’t take one article as a definitive rebuke of the other side, or a final bulking up of your own position. Beware of posting tweets or cartoons from other people whose basic message is “It’s simple really, let me tell you why I’m right and the other side is wrong.”

2. You Don’t Need to Have an Opinion on Everything

This flows out of #1, and is perhaps best considered as an especially difficult corollary of that first dictum. Because we’re constantly flooded with information about the world, and because 90% of that information is presented to us as AN ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL THING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, it’s almost a survival tactic simply to adopt the ideas of whichever side we’ve determined is the correct one. But why in the world should your beliefs about economic structures lead inevitably toward a particular opinion on, say, Britney Spears’ issues with her conservatorship (I’m not falling for your trap, Internet, so I’ve deliberately chosen as my example that rare instance of bipartisan agreement)?

It’s not that ideas are not connected; they often are. But if you assume that because “your side” agrees with something, that it’s inevitably correct, then you’ve shut down your ability to think. This gets more complicated when you realize that a general principle, while correct, might not apply to every given situation. That’s why I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s best to be silent on most things (on social media). Realize that most issues, even important ones, are beyond your ability to reason through. Pick up a few issues of special importance to you and take the time to actually think them through and consider them from a variety of angles. Only then should you open your mouth.

3. There’s More than One Way to Be Wrong

Lest you think I’m going soft in my pre-middle age and going in for hippie nonsense about “everybody being right,” let me offer an alternative explanation for why we should carefully consider alternatives to our own point of view: everyone is wrong, most of the time, but someone else’s wrongness might illuminate your own.

Many, many people struggle with this rule on social media. Simply because you can point out the flaw in someone else’s argument does NOT mean that your own position is correct, yet we consistently act as if DESTROYING the argument of an opponent means that we are the winner and have proven our own position. For any problem, theoretical or policy-based, there are many, many more incorrect answers than correct ones.

What, practically, does this mean? It means that we should spend less time salivating over the wrongness of others, and more time refining our own thoughts (which, yes, means testing them out mentally against the objections of our interlocutors). It means being less hasty to assume that people who are wrong are either hopeless rubes or world-historical baddies; it means greater charity toward others and greater skepticism toward ourselves.

4. Avoid the Snark (and the Catchphrases)

Again, a sort of corollary to rule #3. Here’s one that doesn’t come easy to me, a consummate crafter of bon mots. I don’t actually mean avoid sarcasm entirely, but be more judicious in its use, especially when connected to an actual discussion of ideas. Dripping contempt for your “enemies” doesn’t just make them less amenable to hearing what you have to say (though it does do that); it actually shuts off your ability to think about why you believe certain things and reject others. Even on matters where you are fully convinced, you should have in your brain at all times a blueprint of why you have become convinced. Sneering at people occludes this blueprint and lets us off the hook, intellectually. On an unrelated note, the widespread infection of discourse with snark has led to an aesthetic dullness, where true wit has been replaced by a one size fits all mirthless chuckle. (A rule of thumb I try to follow, albeit stumblingly: a little absurdity or snark can be good in relation to abstract ideas or big concepts, but try to avoid making your target an actual human being).

I won’t say too much about the second part of this rule, as I plan to expand it into its own post at some point. I’ll just say briefly that the trotting out of certain words and concepts as a trump card in conversation not only leads to less productive discussions, but also harms our ability to think in subtle ways. Saying that some random quirk of modern life you don’t like is a direct result of capitalism, or claiming that the new idea you just encountered is “Marxism” (and therefore evil), is lazy, slipshod thinking — the sort that both left and right engage in more frequently (and vigorously) than bathing (sorry, sorry, I’m trying to remove it).

5. Keep Your Fandom in Perspective

This one is more culture-oriented. I’m frankly tired of people on both sides of the divide arguing over superhero movies, tv shows, video games, Tik Tok videos, and YA novels as if these corporatized troughs of slop were good for anything other than cramming your maw full of garbage. Wow, you’re really into Marvel movies? That’s fine, but don’t act like it’s a badge of honor, and for goodness sake don’t obsess over whether your favorite franchise has exactly the same politics as you do. And (doubly so) don’t act like your franchise is some grand carrier of unimpeachable aesthetic value.

Again, I’ll have more to say about this in a separate post, but I come from a long line of respectable cranks, of both the left and the right (Adorno, Dwight MacDonald, W.H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, to name but a few), who see in mass culture a cheapening of both art and discourse. I’m a little more forgiving than some, in that I think it’s generally fine to enjoy items of mass culture (and would be a massive hypocrite if I didn’t). But it’s very important to distinguish between those works of art (to borrow a useful distinction from Auden) designed for easy consumption, and those that have to be chewed over. This is not merely a generic distinction — books good, TV bad — though I think certain different media have been shaped toward ends unfriendly toward significance (and so it would be much harder to create a truly important, lasting television show than a novel, though it’s perhaps equally easy to create a disposable tv show and a disposable novel). It’s about the way that all aesthetic products designed for mass consumption have been stripped of value.

Practically, that means not confusing the two. If I’m watching Bob’s Burgers with my wife after the kids are in bed, or finding excellent iterations of my favorite memes, that’s a perfectly acceptable pursuit. I’ll laugh, and may recall a particular joke days later with pleasure. But it’s far from the same experience I have reading Middlemarch (as I’m doing in prep for Season 2 of the podcast). Not everything has to be the same, and sometimes the strain to make what is essentially a consumable product into something serious and important ends up stripping it of the actual pleasures it should convey. On the political/intellectual point: if you’re getting you politics from a tv show or a Twitter meme or a YouTube channel, or you need those media to parrot back your own ideas in order to feel secure, the battle’s already lost. Bail out and start again.

6. Monitor Your Time

Last for now, but certainly not least. I think most people struggle with time spent online, and understandably: it’s a vehicle for addiction in many ways! There’s no hard and fast rule about number of minutes per day here, other than to say that where you're at is almost certainly too much. The online world is not where we make our deepest connections (though I’m grateful for virtual friends), and it’s certainly not where we do our best thinking or loving or acting. Life online trains us to chase the easy approval, what Auden (him again) called the agreeable wrong.

A few years ago I traded in my smart phone for a flip phone, and it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. I still struggle with being “too online,” but I found that not having a portal in my pocket has helped in many ways. Maybe that’s a step you can take. Or maybe you need an app like Cold Turkey that will block sites for a set amount of time. Whatever you do, take time to be separate from the virtual world, to the extent that you feel its grip on you lessening.

Thought Detours

Last summer my family and I took a vacation to Great Smoky Mountain National Park to celebrate the end of grad school, my PhD, etc. It was the perfect mid-pandemic getaway (minus the wasps haunting our rental house): remote, outdoors, and a timely reminder that nature’s power also comes charged with beauty. While my wife and I tried to squeeze in as many hikes as possible, our four kids found their happy place sitting in a stream piling rocks into little Ebenezers. Once they sat in a stream for a good two hours just happily puttering away with their stones, timetable be darned.

I thought about this yesterday as we took another mini-trip to the Omaha Zoo. The Henry Doorly Zoo is pretty incredible, one of those mega-zoos that would take more than a full day to fully explore (it even has an aquarium inside it). So we made a day of it, even when it meant me force-marching the kids through the doldrums of the afternoon, buying horrendously overpriced lemonade to keep up morale. In the midst of all this, I had reason to remember that Appalachian trip from last summer. In the section of the zoo dedicated to mountain animals from Asia, there’s a little garden with statues of some of the smaller critters you might see in those regions — pikas, pangolins, and others. The kids were quickly disappointed when they realized this was a habitat for statues only, and didn’t contain any live creatures. However, they quickly recovered and had a good time romping around. In the midst of this, our three year old started shouting excitedly, “Look, a roly-poly!” Despite the situation not being what they thought it was, and despite the fact that we have roly-polies by the cartload in our own yard, he was thrilled to find something worth stopping over.

Kids are like this, I’ve discovered after a decade of parenting. They zig when we zag, and find meaning in the small, easy to overlook areas of life. Mundane commonplaces like the lowly pill bug, or throwing pebbles into the water, are for them an occasion for wonder. Thinking about these opportunities for meaning makes me reflect on my own process of thinking. On Tuesday, I wrote a post about the difference between “thinking” and “problem solving,” and some of the barriers to real thought that we encounter. In that post I highlighted time as a necessary ingredient for real thought, and one of the primary reasons for this need has to do with my kids and their approach to the world, in a strange way.

Here’s a hard hitting stock photo to let you know I’m serious about thinking. Photo credit: Tilman Vogler.

As I wrote in my previous post, while “problem solving” involves a narrow focus on the issues right before us, “thinking” takes a more holistic, distanced approach. This means that thinking must be free to wander to places you might not expect. It requires an openness, a willingness to be surprised, to stop in wonder at what you never expected to find but have in fact stumbled over. It requires the ability to revise based on detours, to find that your original itinerary won’t do at all.

I don’t want to make the claim that I’ve done much real thinking in my life, but on occasion I have, at the least, sweated and strained against the constraints of my own limited abilities to at least grope my way toward a real thought (I take great solace in Browning’s vision of Andrea del Sarto, doomed to have a reach that exceeds his grasp, seeing the good but not achieving it). In those moments of highest attainment, there has always for me involved an act of letting go, of a loosening of the reigns on my preconceived ideas.

Here’s a small example. The core “pre” part of writing my dissertation involved simply figuring out which British authors had read some Kierkegaard and what they might have had to say about his work. A lot of my authors fit together fairly well for various reasons, but one was a little more troublesome to work into the paradigms I had erected: Aldous Huxley. Perhaps because he was such an unflinchingly individual writer and thinker, he just refused to be squished into the box I wanted to store him in. At that point I had a choice: abandon Huxley and keep my little worlds, cunningly made, or knock down some walls to make space for him. I’m very glad I chose the latter option; not merely because Huxley’s presence made my work in the dissertation much stronger, but also because reading through Huxley’s later novels and essays has made me a better thinker. His eccentricities have highlighted areas in my thought patterns that need refining, not merely reinforced my preexisting habits.

Whether or not the work I do in my diss (now officially my “book project” for purposes of the job market) achieves the status of real thought, it’s intellectual work I am proud of and can stand behind, in part because my risk taking let me see patterns that others have missed. It’s far from perfect, of course, but it contains something of value because it emerged naturally from the intersection of my own abilities with the material I tackled. And it was stronger than it might have been because I took the time to wander away from my original, tightly held notions, and to go explore detours. Of course, at some point I had to come back from those detours, and indeed, my chapter on Huxley (and Graham Greene) required by far the most revision and reworking of any of my chapters. But that’s a story for another time.

Thinking Is Hard

Two weeks back, I wrote a small sally against the encroaching idea of “critical thinking” in higher education, a concept that threatens, kudzu-like, to envelop the natural environs of academia. As promised there, I want to occasionally circle back around to related concepts and develop my thoughts on teaching and learning into… well, nothing like a theory, but a series of sketches of a better world. In this post I want to talk briefly about some divisions of thought, and the challenges facing those who truly desire to think.

When I posted that previous essay, a friend left a comment on Facebook to the effect that he wouldn’t object to critical thinking being taught in schools if what was taught under that heading actually involved real, critical, logical thought processes. I largely agree with that sentiment — I’ve long been a proponent of required logic classes at the college, if not the high school, level. Simply disentangling good and bad habits of mind feels like the task of a lifetime. But I want to pivot away from that whole realm for now and think about a key difference in approaches to thought. This division I offer is not at all meant as comprehensive, but I find it useful to give myself terms to work with on a provisional basis.

For now, I will distinguish between what I will call “thinking” and what I will call “problem solving”. An overwhelming majority of what gets taught in schools is, I would argue, better classified under the rubric of “problem solving” than of “thinking”. “Problem solving” involves thinking through various immediately given scenarios, troubleshooting them, and devising solutions for their resolution. This process, it should go without saying, is invaluable to human life. It has given us roads, aqueducts, baths, and many other less useful technologies. It is the milieu of the engineer, the techbro, the (to engage in the most disgusting sort of stereotyping) Ancient Romans. Life without problem solving would be largely intolerable.

I say all of this on the front end to clarify that I am not attacking “problem solving” per se, but merely the misapplication of it to areas where it does not belong (most of what I’m doing on this blog falls under the heading of problem solving. When I write a post about the Muppets, or the Steve Miller Band, I hope no one mistakes that for “thinking”). For problem solving excels at tinkering with that which is right in front of it; but it lacks the broader view with which to make sense of the whole picture. This is where thinking comes in. When I play chess (very badly), I operate exclusively at the level of problem solving — reacting to what my opponent has done immediately before. But real chess masters possess chess thought, the ability, even with a blank board, to see 20 moves ahead and plan. (That’s an imperfect analogy, but it will do for now).

Some people throw out the idea that this thought process I’ve described as problem solving is the exclusive domain of STEM pursuits, as in the famous(ly tiresome) quip “STEM can teach you how to bring back dinosaurs. The humanities can tell you why that’s a bad idea”. That’s a pleasing platitude, perhaps, but hardly indicative of the state of the humanities today. Instead, we’ve adopted that same problem solving mentality as many in the STEM disciplines; thinking only narrowly about what’s right in front of us with no broader conception of knowledge. I’m speaking broadly, of course, and I know plenty of people, both professors and former fellow graduate students, who achieved real thought at times. But — and this is certainly the internal struggle I felt during graduate school — so much of the design slants toward narrowness, toward picking at small issues, rather than expanding to a fullness of thought. I think part of this tension comes naturally from the fact that true thinking struggles against attempts to institutionalize it, but there are also design flaws built into our current mode of graduate school that exacerbate these tendencies.

You see the issues inherent in problem solving dominance frequently in politics. An issue gets raised, and someone devises a policy solution (or, increasingly these days, a symbolic solution), but never stops to consider how this policy change might fit into a broader theory of governance. Obviously politics requires some sense of expediency, but take away the brakes of big picture thinking and what frequently results is a solution that is worse than the original problem. This is why political discourse as it stands today tires me out quite quickly: people mistake cleverness for real insight, and think that poking a hole in an opponent’s idea means proving the value of one’s own stance. It’s a limited view made blurrier by the pressures of our demands for instant results (but that’s another post for another time).

What are some of the biggest inhibitors of real thought? Here are a few contenders.

1. Time.

This is perhaps not a fully acceptable thing to say, but good, deep thinking requires time to one’s self, what might have once been called leisure. Of course, such time has always been rare, and critics are right to point out that often leisure time is afforded to only the few at the expense of the many. These days we have at least slightly more equally distributed leisure time, but more and more that fills it, and not nourishing things either.

So I don’t go too broad here, let me stick to graduate school. There are so many demands on a graduate student’s time — teaching, taking classes, reading interminable lists of books — that time for real, leisurely thought often goes out the window. By the end of the day, you’re lucky if you have the energy to read a Grisham novel, let along something stimulating but challenging. And because the guidelines are so firmly in place for most programs, you have little chance to explore lateral thinking that might enrich your own work in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. I was lucky in that my own program in comparative literature allowed me to take courses in anthropology, philosophy, film, even economics — classes that broadened my horizons — but this sort of flexibility seems largely the exception, not the rule.

I recently read Zena Hitz’s excellent little book Lost in Thought. One of my favorite insights from the book was the idea that great thinking often happens while we’re doing something else. It’s like crop rotation: by letting our minds wander as we peel potatoes, or scrub down in the shower, we often stumble upon our most interesting ideas. What would happen if we designed graduate programs (or better, undergraduate programs) with this idea in mind, that everyone benefits from periods of fallow leisure?

2. Teleology

Real thinking has a freedom about it not dictated by the demands of the immediate present. But graduate school of course aims relentlessly at that one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves: a tenure track position, a chance to say something that senior scholars will find really field-altering, etc. That’s why so much “thinking” in these contexts amounts to absorbing bits of theory and trying to carve out an area into which one can jab one’s theoretical spear. That’s not a knock on theory, which can at its best be really insightful, but at its mindlessly repetitive application. It reaches the point where you become suspect if you don’t apply the approved theoretical constructs to your work, even if you can intuit that they have little to do with the proper approach to your material. As someone who works in decidedly unsexy areas of research, that pressure to conform becomes especially irksome.

3. Community

Matt Dinan has an excellent review of Lost in Thought in which he pushes back slightly at Hitz’s tendency to frame the intellectual life as a solitary one and tries to imagine what thinking together looks like. That’s an incredibly valuable insight: thinking, as much as it involves those lone moments of distraction, also emerges through the refining process of conversation. While “problem solving” excels in the world of debate and bickering, “thinking” blossoms most fully in the warmth of generous discussion. This environment does not preclude disagreement, of course, but it presupposes a shared commitment to truth, humility, and generosity.

Again, I was in many ways lucky in my graduate school experience in that I felt very little of that cutthroat competition that you sometimes hear about as the default mode of graduate school. I was even lucky enough to emerge with some dear friends and intellectual companions (two of whom I run a podcast with, ahem ahem). But, I do think that the pressures of graduate school tend to inhibit that sort of intellectual community, in large part because so many people struggle merely to survive. Here again the ideological and disciplinary narrowness can be a hindrance; how many in your graduate cohort are going to challenge you with ideas that are actually interesting and outside the mainstream of whatever your discipline happens to be?

As always, these thoughts should be taken not as some grand pronouncement, but as a humble catalog of my own musings. I’m putting them out here primarily for my own benefit as I stumble through these notions in my own mind, and maybe one day make something out of them. Until then, receive them with a hand as open as the one that gives them. I’ll be busy watching the NBA playoffs, or wrestling with my children, and hoping inspiration strikes in the meantime.

The Miller's Tale, or The Laziest Song in Recorded History

[Quick Note: I keep meaning to return to my actually substantial series of posts on education, learning, thinking, etc., and I swear I will do that soon. But I was on vacation with the family this week and thus did not have time for substantive thinking. So instead you get this}

I have an embarrassing confession to make. Like many responsible adults, I have a bit of a sordid past, and did some things as a teenager that cause me shame to this day. One of the blackest spots on my permanent record, from my current vantage point of wisdom, is my youthly affection for the music of the Steve Miller Band. It’s just one of those things, you know? You don’t set out meaning to bob your head along to “Swingtown” or hear “Rock’n Me” and think “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.” But then you wake up one day and find yourself humming “Jet Airliner” and you can’t tell if it’s ironic or genuine anymore.

Enough about that dark period of my life. I’ve had occasion to think about one Steve Miller Band song in particular of late, because it’s followed me around from warmed over classic rock station to warmed over classic rock station: 1976’s “Take the Money and Run.” For whatever reason DJs with names like Bonedog Grizzle and Big Daddy Gunther still see fit, in this year of our lord two thousand twenty and one, to play “Take the Money and Run” on the radio. While I don’t think it is the worst pop song ever recorded (an honor that could only ever go to John Lennon’s “Imagine”) — heck, I don’t think it’s even Steve Miller Band’s worst (a tie between the walking smirk that is “The Joker” and the New Age teabag insipidiration of “Fly Like and Eagle) — but it is, I’d submit, in the running for the title of laziest song ever written.

In a lot of ways Steve Miller Band is poster child for smug, lazy classic rock. The godson of Les Paul, Steve Miller emerged into this world choking on a silver spoon, and used that accumulated status to… write “Abracadabra,” a song that simultaneously feels like it was churned out by an algorithm and feels like relevant evidence in a restraining order case. Laying aside all the stories about what an absolute d-bag the man is in his personal life, Steve Miller’s songwriting screams “I pooped this out in 30 minutes while noodling around on my guitar.” I don’t know if it’s his milquetoast, downmarket voice or just a total lack of enthusiasm on the part of anyone in the band, but every Steve Miller Band song feels like it was once a vibrant song with a life and a family, but then it got bit by Dracula and has been doomed ever since to roam the world in a state of soulless stupor.

Anyway, back to “Take the Money and Run.” At the level of music and production, I actually think it’s one of the best SMB songs, because it channels that signature “too cool for school” sound into a detached, freewheeling tale of two robbers/lovers, a la Bonnie and Clyde. It’s got a decent (by SMB standards), hummable tune, and some the “Hoo-hoo” vocal work is probably the best case scenario for Miller’s lackluster vocal style. It’s at the level of songwriting craft that the song takes a major nosedive. Mr. Burn’s typewriting monkeys could pound out better prosody that Miller manages in these lyrics, which (no exaggeration) contain 3 or 4 of the worst rhymes I’ve ever heard in a song. More on those in a minute, but I want to start by looking at the overall structure of the song. Here are the full lyrics:

Hoo-hoo
This is a story about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue
Two young lovers with nothin' better to do
Than sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube
And here is what happened when they decided to cut loose
They headed down to, ooh, old El Paso
That's where they ran into a great big hassle
Billy Joe shot a man while robbing his castle
Bobbie Sue took the money and run

Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run
Go on, take the money and run
Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run
Go on, take the money and run

Hoo-hoo-hoo, Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice
He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes
Bobbie Sue, whoa, whoa, she slipped away
Billy Joe caught up to her the very next day

They got the money, hey, you know they got away
They headed down south and they're still running today
Singin' go on take the money and run

Go on, take the money and run
Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run
Oh lord, go on, take the money and run
Hoo-hoo-hoo
Hey, yeah, go on, take the money and run, yeah (yeah)
Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run
Oh lord, go on, take the money and run, yeah (yeah)
Hoo-hoo-hoo, go on, take the money and run, oh lord

Now, according to the YouTube version I just pulled up, the entire song lasts two minutes and fifty seconds. That’s not nearly enough time to write a successful narrative song about two outlaws, even if every microsecond were packed with plot points. But Miller can’t even provide that — nearly ever other line is just “Take the money and run,” padded out with various guttural noises. It’s like he fell asleep watching Badlands and thought, yeah, I could do that as a song, then got distracted by a golf date with his manager or a giant pile of cocaine or something.

You know your song’s construction is shoddier than a suburban McMansion when, within the span of a single verse, you introduce a character (Billy Mack the detective), make the claim that “He ain’t gonna let those two escape justice,” then immediately smash cut to the part of the story where they literally are escaping justice. What exactly is Billy Mack’s purpose in this tale? He does not pore over clues, he doesn’t psychologically bond with the robbers to the point that he lets them go out of grudging respect, he does not give chase to the border. He’s just introduced and dismissed within a matter of seconds.

Things don’t get better (in fact they get much, much worse) when you zoom in from the panorama of the song’s structure down to the level of line by line composition. Let’s go ahead and start with the most infamous lines of the song, concerning the aforementioned Billy Mack:

Hoo-hoo-hoo, Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
He ain't gonna let those two escape justice
He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes

Steve Miller’s dedication to “rhyming” in the most listless way possible is almost admirable here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the sort that insists that rhymes be “perfect” to be good; some of the best rhymes in pop music are near rhymes at best. But to metamorphose your rhymes so rapidly from line to line — to craft four lines in a row that should ostensibly rhyme, where none of them in question actually rhymes with any of the others? In a songwriter with more personality and elan, say a Randy Newman, one would be tempted to see this as evidence of a sort of meta-commentary on songwriting and its lack, or something. But this is Steve Miller, so it’s both just and (sadly, given the alternatives) even charitable to assume he said, “Welp… Texas. facts is… justice… taxes… good enough. Now back to admiring my own reflection.”

The rhymes, though especially egregious, aren’t even the only miscues in these four lines. Basic scansion itself comes into question: because he’s packed too many syllables into the first two lines, he then has to draaaaaaag out his singing of the third line to an absurd degree. It’s grating on the ears. And, given that line two features the redundancy of “just exactly”, such Gumbyesque line contortions are completely unnecessary.

Let’s jump back slightly earlier in the song to another great series of failed rhymes, one that gets a bit overshadowed by Le Affaire de Billy Mack: Miller’s decision to rhyme “El Paso” with “hassle” and “castle". Now, I actually think rhyming “hassle” with “castle” approaches a state of cleverness, especially since it involves the use of a colloquial phrase that twists in interesting ways (a man’s house is his castle). Yes, considering this rhyme clever does require skipping over the inconvenient fact that Miller describes the murder of a man in his own home as “a great big hassle” (that Millerian touch again). But still. Compared to the rest of the song it’s a rhyme worthy of Shakespeare (or at least Vachel Lindsay). Unfortunately you can’t appreciate that rhyme because paired with it you get the ear thudding “El Paso.” I’m not looking for true genius here, just something competent. American place names that rhyme with “hassle” and “castle” are a bit hard to come by, for sure, but why not just pivot? “Vassal” suggests itself as an appropriate rhyme to pair thematically with “castle.” But no, Miller just had to talk about “old El Paso” (not without first stretching his line out again with an utterly useless “ooh”). One suspects this reference is less an evocation of the wild west and more a throwaway reference to a barely tolerated brand of Tex-Mex foodstuffs. Good one, Steve.

This image has about as much relevance to my point as the fine city of El Paso has for Steve Miller’s song. (Photo by Mw007)

Occasionally I’ll get frustrated with a student’s sloppy work because I know it represents a fraction of what they might be capable of with a little effort. Try harder, I’ll implore them, because I know you can make it better. But, to be honest, on rare occasions I’ve run across students who seem constitutionally incapable of trying harder: they’ve gotten so set in their ways that it would take an Archimedian lever to move them. The Steve Miller Band reminds me of those students. I’d like to believe that they were capable of a less shoddy song than “Take the Money and Run” but, given their track record, I honestly don’t know. Maybe, in a way, that makes “Take the Money and Run” the perfect SMB song. Feed every scrap of SMB music into a supercomputer, and it very well might puke out “Take the Money and Run.” Hoo-hoo, indeed.

Dissents of an Ending

A still from the Soviet television version of Lord of the Rings, featuring what I can only assume to be Gollum?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book by J.R.R. Tolkien must be in want of a shorter ending. Maybe we can blame Peter Jackson here, whose interminable film of The Return of the King, with its solid 5 or 6 endings, was merely a warm up for the utter desolation wrought on us all by his three part version of The Hobbit (or, there and back again, and again, and again). I daresay I’ve been guilty of harboring this thought myself, both at the beginning AND end of Lord of the Rings. Couldn’t Tolkien just hurry things along a bit? Do we really need a whole chapter on the hobbit proclivity for mushrooms? Or a chapter just detailing the celebration after the final battle?

To my surprise, I found myself feeling quite differently on my most recent read through. Just yesterday I finished reading the trilogy to my three oldest children (10, 8, and almost 6; the three year old would occasionally wander in and scream at me not to read that boring stuff, though I did catch him chanting “One Ring to rule them all” to himself one day, so it can’t have been entirely wasted on him). The experience of reading a great story out loud to your children is everything they say it is, even if you have to stop every two minutes because your almost six year old wants to know the definition of a word, or is asking who just said something.

Anyway, this time around I found myself savoring every little bit of Tolkien’s ending, and not just because I didn’t want the experience to be over. Tolkien is not a great prose stylist, as many have noted before me, but he is a great craftsman, and the level of detail he pours into the ending of Lord of the Rings serves an important purpose: it brings home that this story is not merely about cosmic battles between good and evil, but about the ways in which lives and societies feel the reverberations of decisions they (often) had no hand in. In fact, I’m not sure how the pernicious untruth got started that Tolkien has a simplistic, almost Manichean view of the world. His deep attachment to myth? (But the old myths themselves are far from simplistic, especially those of the North that Tolkien knew best). His legion of subsequent acolytes, who took the forms he used and hammered them to a fine point? (But that’s hardly his fault).

Reading through this time, after a career in graduate school where my advisor was an expert in literature of World War I, I couldn’t help but be struck by the deep resonance of the end of Tolkien’s book with the aftershocks caused by the war he served in. Obviously Tolkien despised allegory and repeatedly denounced any attempts to make his books read as such, but I’m not talking about anything so strong as allegory: I’m talking about a deep sense of loss, felt in the bones, a scarring of both individuals and the lands they inhabit. Frodo returns from the war carrying some internal burden; perhaps not quite what Tolkien would have known as shell shock and what we would call PTSD, but a deep malign impression made on him by the long carrying of the ring. Even Sam, ever cheerful, feels a profound lack. Near the end, he finally has the two parts of his life he feels complete him: a marriage and family with Rosie Cotton, and the presence of Frodo. But then Frodo must leave, for the sake of his own peace, and Sam is left a half-person, something even Frodo acknowledges.

The land itself is no less ravaged, which is why Tolkien gives us not one but two chapters about attempts to restore it: first in Isengard, where the Ents labor to undo all the industrial evils of Saruman’s regime, then again in the Shire, where Saruman has attempted to repeat, in a faint echo, his ravaging of the land. In both cases, but especially in the Shire, Tolkien carefully shows the gradation of evil at play: an instigator in Saruman, but also enablers carried along by vanity (Lotho) or simply fearful inertia (the Shirriffs of the Shire). He also emphasizes that the harm done to the land cannot be instantly reversed — that destruction takes far less time than restoration. In this Tolkien shows his deeply “conservative” nature, in the original sense of that word: the facile progress of Saruman, ill conceived and ill carried out, has swept away both the natural beauty of the Shire and the long forged solidarity between its inhobbitants.

I think this desire to show the aftermath explains why Tolkien takes so long to wrap up. In his hands, it’s wrong to think of the quest of the ring as a journey there, to some discreet point where some final heavy action takes place to end the struggle forever. Instead, it is always a journey there and back again, so he follows the Hobbits as they reverse their trip, step by step, all the way back to the Shire. Along the way they must honor the dead (most notably Théoden, king of the Mark); take note of the deep bonds that have been broken; and try to envision a future where those bonds might be repaired.

That’s why the charge of moral simplicity has never made sense applied to Tolkien, however well it might describe those writing in his wake. With perhaps a few exceptions, no one is beyond either temptation or redemption. Frodo, for all his courage, would not have thrown the ring into the fires willingly; in the end the ring mastered him, and only Gollum’s unlikely intervention saved the day. Likewise, till the very end Gandalf and Frodo hold out hope that Saruman, once wise but twisted by years of power, might be brought back into the fold, be taught how to use his insight and influence once more for the cause of justice. Even the “simple” people of the Shire, remote from the main theater of battle, feel that dividing line of good and evil run shuddering through their own hearts. Those who choose evil, like Ted Sandyman, of course fall prey to Saruman’s empty promises, but, viewed from another angle, he merely works upon the envy and pride already present within them.

Lord of the Rings is far from a perfect work. But neither is it a thing disconnected from real life, or tangled up too much in its author’s arcane musings (okay, maybe once in a while). Sometimes Tolkien is accused by his critics (or praised by his fanboys) for writing stories that lift us up out of real life, that bear little relation to our world of pragmatic concerns, moral compromises, and so forth. I think a careful, close attention to his actual words, especially his endings, shows that this is simply not true. He might write about elves and dwarves, but his central concerns are decidedly human.

The Most Embarrassing Moment in Muppets Movie History

A few weeks ago I watched 2011’s The Muppets with the kids; it was the first time I’d seen it since a little after it came out. It was… fine? Mostly pretty good, and I think that, on the whole, it does a good job capturing the spirit of The Muppets (as best you can when you replace the immortal Jerry Juhl as writer with Jason Segel). I will say that, though he does a decent job as writer for The Muppets, Segel as actor is pretty distracting in his supposedly starring but really supporting role, because, even though he’s game in a lot of ways for the trademark Muppetian silliness, his face, stuck in a perpetual smirk whether he wills it or no, really undercuts the message (co-star Amy Adams, for whom expressions of wonder and openness come more naturally, fares better, while villain Chris Cooper absolutely knows what he’s doing, sneering and hamming to great effect).

But, right in the middle of the film — in fact in a pivotal turn of the plot — the film drops a gigantic turd of a scene on the audience. It’s so bad, and has remained gnawing at my mind in the time since, that I’ve decided that it has to be the worst, most embarrassing scene in Muppets film history. I want to explain why at some length, but first, a few caveats.

1. I’m only counting theatrical release films. I haven’t seen many of the made for TV films, but the one that I remember most vividly, the truly execrable 2002 film It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas has at least ten scenes more damaging to the memory of the Muppets than this one. Thankfully, no one has seen this film, and it shall henceforth be consigned to flames of woe.

2. There’s maybe one scene in a Muppets film that comes sort of close to being as painful to watch as this one I’m about to describe. That’s right, it’s the Muppet babies scene from Muppets Take Manhattan which, objectively speaking, is probably the weakest Muppet film (though I retain a strong sentimental attachment to it). Here that scene is, in all its horrifying glory:

I come to bury this scene, not praise it. But still, as “cringe” as this scene is, it has at least two things going for it: it features an original song (even if it’s a bad one), and it at least in some sense conforms to the traditional Muppet aesthetic (which always risks tipping over into cringe in its flop sweatty, do anything for a smile ethic).

Alright, enough caveats. Here’s the scene:

Now, you might be thinking, on first watch, “This? Worse than Muppet babies???” But even though, on the surface, this scene seems mediocre at worst, it’s actually (cue dramatic music) A COMPLETE BETRAYAL OF EVERYTHING THE MUPPETS STAND FOR. Or something. The montage-y bits here are fine, actually — Kermit’s list of failed “celebrities” lacks a little bite, but some of the other bits are fun, especially the Swedish chef torching his refrigerator. It’s the other components of the scene that make it so awful (and no, I’m not even talking about the appearance of Beauregard, that absolute failson of a Muppet whose presence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a scene to be considered the Absolute Worst Muppet Scene of All Time).

What makes the scene awful, then? It starts with the ears. Music montages are a time honored Muppet tactic — think of the all timer from The Muppet Movie, where Kermit and Fozzie trek around to “Movin’ Right Along.” That scene is a classic in large part because of Paul Williams’ and Kenneth Ascher’s bouncy original song, which in both music and lyrics captures something significant about the Muppetian aesthetic: that slightly corny, eager to please feel, the willingness to go in any direction, however absurd, for a laugh.

The Muppets, by contrast, chooses to utilize, in what should be a pivotal emotional scene where the Muppets reclaim their old home the theater, one of the laziest, most predictable needle drops in history: Starship’s “We Built This City on Rock and Roll.” The first problem here is that it is not an original song. Part of the charm of a Muppet movie is hearing the goofy, weird songs that get written for it, ones that usually evoke Jim Henson & co’s large debt to musical theater. Obviously The Muppet Show featured mostly covers (who has time to whip out a banger like “Mahna Mahna” every week?), but I’ve always felt that the best cover songs from the show were those that tapped into old timey vaudeville classics, or did something strange to contemporary hits, such as Muppaphone them. Otherwise you end up with, well, whatever the hell this is.

(The Muppets features two covers near the end meant to evoke the original show, during the fundraising telethon to save the theater: a barbershop [literally] cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a chicken-warbled cover of Cee Lo’s F(orget) You [unfortunately not renamed “Cluck You”]. They’re both… fine).

Again, though, the films themselves have shied away from using pop music. Muppets from Space is the exception here, as it features no original songs and largely outsources its soundtrack to 70s funk hits (including an opening sing along to “Brick House”). But at least songs like “Shining Star” and “Celebrate” are, you know, cool.

Here we get the worst of both worlds. The filmmakers had already gone to the trouble of hiring the great Bret McKenzie (one half of Flight of the Conchords) to write original songs for the film, and while none of those songs will live on in collective memory like “Rainbow Connection” (though “Man or Muppet,” which won the Best Song Oscar, does a nice job bridging the gap between Muppets and Conchords), using an original song here would have been much more appropriate, and memorable.

That’s the other thing: even if you can excuse using a pop song here… why this one? Did Segel and director James Bobin get temporarily confused and think they were programming music for a Dreamworks animated film about sassy talking stress balls? “We Built This City” is the Sacramento Kings of rock songs: a Northern California product so forgettable that you never think of it, but one that brings great pain when you do. Starship should be grateful that Train hails from their neck of the woods, and wrote a song as bad as “Hey Soul Sister,” otherwise “We Built This City” would be in strong contention for worst song ever by a Bay Area band.

It’s such an utterly uninspired choice of music. They’re saving their theater, dammit, not sitting around in the dentist’s office! The scene cannot recover from this. Not that it tries very hard; there are some other really awful choices going on here. One is the decision to, at key points, cluster all the Muppets together center stage and have the camera spin around them. I realize that 2011 was near the height of Glee fever (Gleever?), but come on. The Muppets are simple folk, and have no need of spinning cameras to highlight their togetherness. In addition, why are the Muppets constantly shown looking up reverently at the ceiling, as if they gazed upon the Sistine Chapel? Why the cheap gravitas? You know what builds real gravitas? A touching original song! Also, I guess we need to talk about that moment when Amy Adams goes for the high note, huh? That’s when her willingness to just go for it turns sinister. Amy Adams, a great actress by all accounts, mugging it up like your aunt doing “Don’t Stop Believin’” at singles karaoke.

All in all, I know this is a small moment in the long, illustrious history of the Muppets. But this intellectual property, which means so much to so many people, has changed hands repeatedly over the years, as they’ve proven popular, but not quite popular enough (something The Muppets tries to address, in its defense). With all the bouncing around, there’s been a shocking amount of consistency: I don’t think any of the 8 feature films are anything to be ashamed of, though some are better than others. But there’s always the risk, when properties move from owner to owner, and different creators try their hands at revamping a classic (especially one so closely tied to one man, Jim Henson), that something gets lost in translation. Thankfully this scene does not bring the whole movie tumbling down around its head, like Samson leaning on the rickety pillars of the Muppet theater, but it should stand in memory (if it must) as a warning to future would be Muppetteers: do better. This city is built on felt and dad humor, not rock and roll.

Against "Critical Thinking"; Or, the Disastrous Divorce of Form and Matter

From time to time, I might post some brief reflections on the decade plus I’ve spent teaching, at both the high school and college level (not to mention the time I spent giving private cello lessons, mostly to younger children). I want to do this mostly for my own sake — this is my blog, after all — in large part because I find myself, more and more, at odds with the prevailing winds of education.

Today I want to briefly sketch my objection to one of the supreme clichés of contemporary education, namely that of the importance of “critical thinking,” a phrase usually deployed in contradistinction to an education that emphasizes learning facts via memorization. Students, the story goes, don’t need to spend their time absorbing dates and names and places (to take the example of history class); what they need is to develop skills that will let them critically evaluate whatever material they encounter in life. Sometimes this is paired with the suggestion that such a training will disrupt an outdated form of education rooted in factory style, one size fits all education, whilst also preparing students for the global realities of our technology driven future. Most important of all, this emphasis on critical thinking will teach students how to think, not what to think.

I don’t have the space here to thoroughly dissect or rebut these sentiments, but I do want to offer some reasons I find them misguided. But first, a confession: I have, at points in my pedagogical career, leaned into this preference for “critical thinking” over fact learning. Because of this, I actually have a good deal of sympathy for the motives most educators have when they call for this overthrow of facts by “skills.” Having passed through the fires of the fad, though, I know there are some serious problems with it.

1. Historical distortion and unintended consequences.

It’s simply not true, as many “critical thinking” advocates argue, that fact learning and memorization are products of an education system tooled to meet the needs of industrial capitalism. In fact, as Thomas Pfau pretty brilliantly details in his book Minding the Modern (read it if you have the spare time to down a dense, 700 page work of intellectual history), the gradual drift of intellectual life over the last 1000 years in the West has been toward deracination, a detachment of learning from life. Pfau is mostly concerned with the divorce of reason from will, but I think his analysis ports fairly well onto the division between facts and skills or, as we might call them, matter and form. Even if not: memorization has been a critical component of learning for, well, as long as humans have taught and learned; it’s simply inaccurate to ascribe a concern with memorization to a desire to create industrial drones.

The historical irony here is that it is actually the emphasis on “critical thinking” unmoored from a grounding in received knowledge that prepares workers for life in industrial capitalism and, now, the post-industrial world of “knowledge work”. What better to prepare people for a world of replaceable parts and interchangeable workers than an education that has about it not the barest whiff of specificity? Think of it this way: the ancient bards who could recite from memory both The Iliad and The Odyssey carried within them something grounded in the specificity of culture, time, and place — they were in some important sense untranslatable as figures in their society. A person who’s been taught how to butcher up a Wikipedia page into its constituent parts to extract the “main points” of the Civil War, or the tufted titmouse, or the evolution of navigation instruments, can be shifted around from place to place, a frictionless cog in a vast machine.

2. Intellectual malpractice

In the end, the bigger issue I have with “critical thinking” focused education is that it produces students who are slick, clever, and unwise. I’ve taught many of them, especially during graduate school, since my institution drew from an elite undergraduate base. These students, I’ll say again, were unfailingly clever. They knew the exact rhetorical and intellectual moves to make to show me that they understood, were in the know, had critical thinking etched into their skulls. Unfortunately, the form this took most often was this. I’d present a text of some sort. Instead of absorbing and discussing the text holistically, these critical thinkers would find pressure points in the text, then move to show how the text represented some (usually bad) ideology. Ironically enough, given the mantra that critical thinking teaches students how to think, not what to think, the answers always came out roughly the same. The performances of thinking evinced by my students carried with them the slickness of repeated practice. Without the resistance given by the stubbornness of facts that won’t budge, that refuse to be moved by our cleverest appeals to the “right way” of thinking, these students merely engaged in a pantomime of thought, where the end was utterly visible from the beginning.

What’s especially awful about this style of “learning” is that it produces cynicism in students. “Critical thinking” that always produces the same results leads to students who understand how to game the system, know full well they are doing so, and hate themselves and the system for it. It’s too broad a statement to say that this cynicism and rote performance is true of all elite education in the contemporary moment, but it does seem rampant enough that its malign influence has spread widely. Whatever else can be said of the Classics department at Princeton announcing recently the dropping of any language requirement for their major, it does their students a grave disservice by severing them from the specificity of the languages which they would require facility with in order to really understand that which they study. I love reading The Iliad in English, but I know in doing so I get 1/100th of the nuance I would from reading it in Greek.

Obviously there’s also danger in the opposite extreme, the learning of facts without thinking, matter without form. But let’s not pretend our students are in any danger of that at the present moment. What’s needed is a re-invigoration of form by matter, an infusion of facts and specificity. Such an infusion would make education more difficult, for both students and teachers. But, as my wife and I have found as we home school our kids, children are in fact quite good at memorization, and take to it easily, whether it’s Latin grammar or facts about whale sharks. The absorption of facts en masse stimulates them to wonder and excitement, not dreariness. And such memorization, while it can’t stand as the final goal of education, can act as a foundation on which to build — and without which building would be foolish indeed.

Why Are There So Many Books about Writers? (Plus: A Shameless Listicle)

A photograph of American novelist William Dean Howells at his writing desk.

As I attempt to hack away at the dreaded work of turning my dissertation (HEY THANKS FOR ASKING IT’S ABOUT THE IMPACT OF SØREN KIERKEGAARD ON TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LIT- HEY WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING???) into a book that some academic press might take a chance on publishing, I’ve been engaged in the thoroughly pleasurable work of reading a bunch of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, by the great British philosopher turned novelist Iris Murdoch. Currently I am reading her 1972 novel The Black Prince, whose protagonist, Bradley Pearson, is a commercially unsuccessful but artistically uncompromised novelist (in contrast to his protege, who has taken the route of going mainstream). This conceit of an aesthetic rivalry between novelists got me thinking about just how many great novels there are that feature writers as central characters.

It’s a little strange, if you stop to think about it, but from the beginning of “the novel” in the West, the form has been tied into concerns about reading and writing (see Quixote, Don). But while early examples of this concern seem to focus more on reading (again, DQ, but also novels like Northanger Abbey and Madame Bovary), many more recent novels explicitly revolve around writers and their worlds. Again, a bit strange, considering that writers hardly make for outwardly interesting characters, at least in their work. Is it mere vanity that brings authors back again and again to writers as characters? That could be part of the equation — certainly the stereotype of the (especially male) author reveling in his own sense of genius has at least some origin, however tenuous, in reality. But I think there’s more to the story. Despite the lack of activity that writers experience in their jobs, there’s a furious mental activity at play in the work of writing (unless your name is Dan Brown) that fits nicely in with the novelist’s concern with ideas. Though of course there are a million different ways of interacting with and incorporating “ideas” into literary work, most novelists who write what might be classified (in extreme short hand) as “literary fiction” have at least some interest in philosophical notions of one sort or another, which gets reflected in the tendency to read widely beyond the realm of fiction. Murdoch, as a philosopher-novelist, is perhaps exemplary in this, but it’s true to one degree or another of many writers.

This is perhaps why there are fewer novels that feature other types of artists as protagonists. Sure, you get the occasional book about painters or sculptors, even on very rare occasions books about composers, but these pale in comparison to books with author figures. Here’s my hunch (very much just that): visual and musical artists — whether this is fair or not — are seen as creating in a way more inscrutable than that of writers, almost a sort of ex nihilo, ecstatic genius creation. That is to say, you have to work harder to connect the dots between formal philosophical ideas and a painting, or a building, than with a work of literature where those ideas may become hashed out more explicitly. So, writer-characters become a way to work out not only the author’s thoughts about literary creation, but about ideas more broadly writ. (Side note: this might also explain why there are a decent number of novels which take as their focus professors, literary critics, and the like). In the wrong hands, this becomes dull mouthpiecery. With a real craftsman at the wheel, though, the results are more promising.

Here, then, is a roughly chronological list of a few favorite books of mine — in no way a comprehensive compendium — that focus, in one way or another, on writer figures. For the purposes of brevity, I’ve stuck to novels that feature fiction writers in primary or important roles (which leaves out great novels about journalists, like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or great novels about poets, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, as well as great novels about sundry non-fiction writers, like several of Aldous Huxley’s novels). I’m also not commenting on the several books I’m currently reading that fit this mold. Also, to be completely arbitrary, I’m leaving off James Joyce, whose two Stephen Dedalus novels (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses) are exemplary, but who you can go read about anywhere.

New Grub Street, by George Gissing

New Grub Street is an oddity on my list for several reasons, the primary one being that it’s a book that actually focuses on the economic lives of authors as much as their interior, intellectual lives. Gissing, a late Victorian writer who never achieved the success he might have hoped for, writes in full venomous mode here as he dissects the cutthroat world of English letters. The first of several books on this list to feature rivalries between writers, New Grub Street focuses on the contrasting fates of Edwin Reardon, a principled but unsuccessful novelist, and Jasper Milvain, an opportunistic, shall we say money grubbing (sorry) journalist who succeeds by aiming firmly at the lowest common denominator in his writing. Gissing’s tale has its share of Victorian melodrama, but is especially notable for the acidic bitterness that threatens to corrode the very pages of the book.

At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien

At Swim-Two-Birds, the loopy, brilliant debut novel of O’Brien, has too long existed in the shadow of Joyce, a hero of O’Brien’s. But the book, though it exhibits similar flashes of bravado as Ulysses, really exists in its own world of circular logic. The main character, a college student, lounges about, skipping classes, drinking stout, and working on his novel, a book about a novelist who aims at total control over his characters. When the characters, who include cast offs from genre novels (cowboys et al), refugees from Celtic myths, and a pooka, get wind of this dictatorial control, they revolt, and put the author on trial. Events only get more complicated from there, as the whole book bends back on itself like a (Gordian) Celtic knot. This is such a funny, complicated book that it’s hard to believe that O’Brien later disowned it as juvenile trash (but that’s a story for another day).

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

The capper on Greene’s “Catholic” period of novels (which started, with a bang, with Brighton Rock, which itself begins with the murder of a journalist), The End of the Affair is, I think, Greene’s greatest achievement as a novelist. Maurice Bendrix, the mildly successful novelist at the book’s heart, must sift through the evidence to find out why his deceased lover left him years before. The book becomes, despite its brief length, a twisted, complex exploration of suffering and faith, with enough literary flourishes to definitely show that Greene, far from a mere plotter of great plots, knew how to write beautiful sentences as well.

Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark

Spark has several novels that fit this list, and I almost went with her debut The Comforters, which is a bit more explicitly about writing, but I decided that that book was perhaps too similar to At Swim-Two-Birds in some of the metafictional moves it makes. So instead I went with my favorite Spark novel, which focuses on a group of elderly Brits who begin to receive strange phone calls reminding them that they must die. One of these characters, Charmian, is a former novelist whose memory has started to fail, and Spark peppers in many great lines about the novelist’s art of observation and writing, including one that might stand as a sort of maxim for her work as a whole: “The art of fiction is very like the practice of deception”.

Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess

There’s so much going on in the bonkers Earthly Powers that it’s a bit misleading to think of it as merely a book about writing, since it’s also about everything else in the world: cults, Catholicism, the post WWII political landscape, and so much more. But at its heart sits Kenneth Toomey (supposedly based on W. Somerset Maugham), a middlebrow novelist who lives through many of the most significant events of the twentieth century. With plenty of winks at other writers (including a great, dark in joke about Ulysses), Earthly Powers not only centers on a writer, it features an author, Burgess, writing at the height of his creative powers.

Mao II, by Don DeLillo

In comparison to some DeLillo novels, Mao II feels luxurious, almost decadent in its slower pace. But even though it lacks some of the kineticism of, say, White Noise, or the panoramic sprawl of Underworld, the novel is sharp in its observations of the life of a writer. Bill Gray, the ne plus ultra of the reclusive literary genius, must emerge from his self imposed exile to participate in the wider life of the world. DeLillo uses this emergence to think about what the value of literature is, exactly, and when writers must stop being merely writers and act as full human beings. The result is by turns wry and heartbreaking.

The Information, by Martin Amis

Amis is notable on this list because he also wrote one of the great novels about film, his earlier book Money, based loosely on his own failed stint in Hollywood. His novel London Fields also deftly explores the mind of the author, but I’m focusing here on his fullest exploration of the topic. In The Information Amis sets two characters against each other, the successful author Gwyn Barry and his less successful frenemy Richard Tull. Tull, whose consciousness centers the novel, gradually succumbs more and more to envy, and the book does an excellent job portraying both the agony of creation and the mind-warping effects of jealousy. Highly recommended.

This is, of course, a brief, preliminary list, and one that betrays my biases as a scholar of British literature. But it’s a start; I’d be happy to hear from others with their own items for the list.

Vive la difference

On top of all my other various reading endeavors, for research and for pleasure, I’ve been enjoying two very different books lately. One, my “bathroom read” (don’t judge) is Klara and the Sun, the newest novel from recent Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. The other, my audiobook du jour, is Charles Portis’ The Dog of the South. The two novels make for an interesting pairing (not to mention trio, with my read of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time still ongoing) because they go together like milk and pickle juice.

Ishiguro, who wrote what I consider to be one of the few novels (Remains of the Day) that can be described, on a technical level, as flawless, writes in simple, controlled language about characters who, on the whole, can be described as buttoned down. Remains of the Day focuses on a tight lipped butler serving near the end of the British empire, and with Klara and the Sun he’s now written two books which feature not quite human protagonists, with all the mechanistic style that implies. His writing never feels monotonous, because he turns his simplicity in surprising directions; his book The Unconsoled might be the only successful homage to Kafka ever written. But, again, control is the optimal word here: his sentences are tight, his sense of overall narrative completely reigned in — an almost clockwork author.

Contrast Ishiguro with Portis, a practitioner of “Southern literature” best known for True Grit, his Western with an uncanny use of old timey dialog. There’s a wildness to Portis’ writing, both at the sentence level and the architectonic level, that’s tremendous fun to grapple with. Ray Midge, the bewildered protagonist of The Dog of the South, must travel that direction down from Arkansas to “British Honduras” to retrieve his runaway wife (and his car), and at every turn he encounters absurd characters and events that make him exclaim, repeatedly, “Why, I couldn’t believe it!” Portis has more than a dash of the raconteur about him, spinning out improbability after improbability. Conversations take turns that blindside the reader, and even within a single sentence you are liable to wind up by the end quite far from where you started. Portis loves “bullshitters” as characters (he’s a bit of one himself), and he’s happy to follow them as they careen wildly off the beaten path. [Side note here, but this is one reason The Dog of the South makes for a great audiobook, especially in the hands of a capable narrator like David Aaron Baker: it’s feels like a tall tale being told on your grandpa’s porch]

Reading these two books simultaneously has driven home for me the deep pleasures involved in consistently reading different types and styles of writing. My life would be less rich if I had decided, at age 20, that I only liked the Ishiguro school of stripped down, clean writing, and had no time for the Portisy detours and delays. The reverse would be equally true. Literature isn’t ever only one thing, for one purpose or with one ideal. It is multifarious, variegated, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say, brinded. One of the deep pleasures of hosting a podcast with two other people whose taste overlap my own, but only imperfectly, is that I have had a chance to read and discuss works that stretch me, sometimes to the limit. Karl’s pick Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton, with its dense mathematical references and chewy syntax, is not a book I would seek out on my own, but I’m glad I read it. Others might feel the same way about Friedrich’s choice of The Warden, with its windy Victorian sentences, or even my wildcard selection of Euripides’ The Bacchae, perhaps the strangest of all Greek tragedies.

It would be a strawman, I think, to argue that there are tons of people out there that think you should only read one school of writers, though occasionally you’ll see passed around lists of commandments for writing provided by successful authors that do suggest a particular style, usually the Hemingwayesque stripped down aesthetic (for what it’s worth, the people I follow on Twitter, where these things circulate, usually roundly condemn these narrow edicts). But I do think that more subtle pressures exist that nudge us toward a sort of conformity in our reading habits.

One of these pressures is, simply put, chronological snobbery. We, raised in our current moment, favor the lean style that comes at us from all angles, both from the propulsive prose of airport thrillers that, judging by bestseller lists, are the sorts of books most read by the American populace, and, in a different key, from the ruling potentates of contemporary “literary” fiction, that MFA house style learned so well by the bandana’d bros of the world. Not that this writing comes carbon copied, of course. There are differences between authors, but these are like the different tasting notes of wines grown in the same region with the same grape varietals: shades, not worlds, of difference.

Put another way: people could stand to read more Victorian literature (and no, I’m not just saying that because Season 2 of The Readers Karamazov builds around George Eliot’s Middlemarch). Even though the idea of writing a Victorian novel in the present day seems absurd, there’s still plenty to learn from reading in that style. And of course it’s worth noting that that blanket term hardly captures the sheer variety on display. What hath Dickens’ London to do with Hardy’s Wessex? By reading deeply in other time periods, from ancient epic to medieval mystery play, we gain a sense of uses and goals of literature other than those we are accustomed to. One tiring tendency that does crop up on Twitter in endless waves: a person insisting that you stop reading X white, male author (usually David Foster Wallace) and instead read Diverse Authors (TM). While reading diverse authors is in fact a good, the authors these firebrands want you to read are usually drawn from the same small pool of contemporary writers. No one’s suggesting you go out and read Frederick Douglas’ autobiography — and more’s the pity.

Another related subtle pressure comes from the world of Internet writing in which we so enthusiastically immerse ourselves. There’s a deadening sameness to this Internet prose, a mix of hectoring earnestness with blank irony, that threatens to anesthetize us as readers to the sheer variety of language. Whatever you think of Freddie deBoer (if you think of him at all), he’s been very good on this aesthetic point of late: there’s too much sameness in the vast morass of online content aimed at the vaguely educated, upwardly mobile “intellectual” set of American life. The same sets of rhetorical moves, the same bland “humor.” Call it the Marvelfication of discourse, if you like: just as with the endless supply of Avengers films, we’ve been trained to expect the same set of stimuli, with the same conditioned responses.

What does it take to break out from this deadening prison? It takes, in part, an openness to real difference, a recognition that the styles of writing we personally favor do not comprise the sum total of quality literature. It takes a boldness in risking reading something we don’t like, that we are put off by, in order to expand our tastes.

Maybe, in world where getting another person to read any book can leave one feeling like Hercules confronted with the Augean stables, it feels like “small beer,” as Auden would say, to try to convince those who already read to read more widely. But I think it’s a worthwhile task, not least of all because, hey, you’re already reading, so maybe you’re amenable to reading more. And, as of this writing, the people with the most power to shape our culture from the top down still pay at least lip service to the power of reading, but they also tend to prescribe and proscribe from a very narrow reading list. I’m not generally one to subscribe to theories about literature making us better people — in fact I detest particularly the idea that it can make us more “empathetic,” a word tied inextricably to particular contemporary ideologies regarding what literature is and should be — but I do think there is value, even if only the value of aesthetic and intellectual stimulation, in trying different things. If more people read, say, the prose of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, we might have clearer thinkers, readers, and writers on our hands, because his prose can help us think through and correct our own lack of clarity and precision. And if more people read (actually read) Don Quixote, we’d have a richer, more expansive sense of the surprise on which humor hinges. And that would be, at the very least, not nothing.

Hoopers and Bloopers (Or: Did Jon Lovitz Ruin Newsradio?)

Lately, here and there, in my very spare time, I’ve been watching episodes of The Critic, the short lived animated show created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss in the wake of their legendary time as showrunners for The Simpsons. The Critic never achieved similar status, ending after two seasons (indeed, the show’s longest legacy is the appearance of its main character on a crossover episode of The Simpsons, an act apparently so outrageous it prompted series creator Matt Groening to do something he’s never done again over 20+ subsequent seasons full of turkeys: take his name off the episode). But so far (4ish episodes in) it’s a solid show doing some interesting things, one with a charming, vintage New Yorker aesthetic.


When I started planning this post, I wanted to write about one aspect of the show’s comedy, it’s tendency — now commonplace, but pretty rare at the time — to engage in cutaway jokes. As I started thinking through my ideas, though, another plan slowly took over and since this blog is a place for ridiculous ideas, I’m rolling with it. I still plan to post a follow up exploring the show’s use of cutaway jokes in the near future, so think of this post as a sort of cutaway post from that one — back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

The major reason it has taken me so long to get around to The Critic, despite my abiding love for the Jean/Reiss Simpsons run, is a simple one: I have a strong distaste for Jon Lovitz, the voice at the center of it all. In The Critic Lovitz voices Jay Sherman, the titular film critic who balances his film snob’s distaste for the cinema he must sit through with his sad sack demeanor in all aspects of personal life. It’s a perfect role for Lovitz in many ways, but that can’t erase for me Lovitz’s great sin: he ruined Newsradio, the greatest live action 90s sitcom (sit down, riled up Seinfeld dirtbags. Relax and sip a nice glass of Gewürztraminer for your nerves, Frasier stans).

Now, that’s a little unfair as a blanket statement. Following the tragic murder of Phil Hartman after Season 4 of the show, there’s little chance that Newsradio would have ever gotten back to the heights it reached in its third and fourth seasons. Indeed, even the departure of Khandi Alexander partway through Season 4 threw off the perfect balance of the show (more on that later). It’s also hard to fault Lovitz for wanting to step up and honor the memory of Hartman, one of his closest friends. But in the end it’s hard to deny that Lovitz wrecks good chunks of Season 5, and that the show would have been better off with no replacement for Hartman rather than Lovitz. It’s not just that no one could replace Hartman; it’s that Lovitz has the sort of comic persona absolutely at odds with what made Newsradio work. I’ve thought a lot about why this is the case, and I think I’ve finally come up with the perfect way to explain: via the NBA.

Because I spent 9 years of my life in Tulsa, Oklahoma just as the Oklahoma City Thunder were getting off the ground, and because that time coincided with my childhood team, the Detroit Pistons, sliding into infuriating mediocrity (hastened along by LeBron James ripping out their hearts in the playoffs), mature Asher is a fan of the Thunder. As such, I spent most of my adult life cheering on Russell Westbrook through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. I LOVE Russell Westbrook. Love. Full stop. Cannot convince me otherwise and I will fight you if you hate on him love him. But I also know, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, that his game has proved highly divisive. People love to hate him for what he’s not, and at times it becomes easy to do so because, for all his wonderful traits, he’s not a flexible player: it’s his way or the highway. This is a comment many smart people have made since he’s been on the move to other teams. You really have to build your team around Russ’ strengths, or otherwise he’s just sort of dead weight out there, because he’s electric at the things he does well, but he can’t just slot into other roles.

My Russ fandom has helped me grapple with Jon Lovitz, because I think, in the end, they are similar in this regard, even if polar opposites in other ways (body types, fashion sense, etc). In the right role (say, as a schlubby, snobbish film critic) he’s incredible, his large personality and distinctive (yeah, let’s go with that) voice absolutely bringing the laughs. But he’s not a flexible comic presence - he’s too large and grandiose for that. Like Russ, he’s a bit of a black hole, sucking all others toward him. Again, in a Lovitz-centric vehicle like The Critic, that really works. But it’s death in a context like Newsradio, which at its best was exquisite as an ensemble comedy.

That’s the secret sauce of the great run Newsradio had. It’s not just that it had great characters, which can be said of all great sitcoms. It’s that the characters all played off of each other in particular ways, such that the show was always building to great moments of chaotic climax. Every cast member had an important role in that balancing act; Dave Foley as Dave Nelson kept the energy tamped down as long as possible, Stephen Root as Jimmy James would come in at key moments and punctuate the proceedings with an upping of the chaos stakes, and so on down the line. Even the weaker actors on the show, those with more limited range (looking at you, now infamous Joe Rogan) fit perfectly into their roles (in Joe’s case, the role of physical precarity, as the meathead electrician who made every part of the set wobble with uncertainty thanks to his DIY fixes). That’s why losing Khandi Alexander (an impeccable physical comedian, as well as an archly dry balancing presence for Hartman) altered the chemistry enough to make the episodes without her just not quite as good.

But Alexander played a smaller role in Newsradio than Hartman (that is, in fact, why she left — she was unsatisfied with the material she was given, a sometimes fair criticism given her incredible talent). Hartman, as arrogant news anchor Bill McNeal, made the whole ensemble click. He was, most of the time, the primary chaos agent, conspiring against station manager Dave, winding up pathetic lackey Matthew (Andy Dick), and just generally stirring the pot. As good as Hartman was an an individual comic presence — that voice! those eyebrows! that strut! — his real value lay in his ability to act as a connecting piece between the various other members of the ensemble. He, in fact, made those around him better, and could shimmy himself into whatever tight comic space was required.

In that way, Phil Hartman was somewhat like the Kevin Durant to Lovitz’s Westbrook — a mind-bending talent who was content to take what was given, and to slot himself in wherever needed. For all the interplay between Russ and KD, the Thunder were always Russ’ team in fundamental makeup, with KD there to fill gaps. You can’t imagine Russ moving seamlessly onto the Golden State Warriors the way KD did (largely, and at least on the court). Hartman had something of that chameleon quality about him, even as you never forgot who he was. He kept the ball moving, comedically.

Lovitz is not like that. He drains the energy when he’s onscreen in Season 5. The zippy give and take grinds to a halt so that Lovitz can do his schtick. It’s not that he’s not talented, it’s that he doesn’t make sense in that context. Again, imagine putting Russ, who has to have the ball in his hands, in the midst of the “beautiful game” Warriors, constantly making that extra pass. Oddly enough, Lovitz’s stubborn comic persona explains why he works pretty well as a guest star in his two Newsradio appearances before Season 5 (playing different characters each time). In Season 4 opener “Jumper” he fits especially well, because, as a man who threatens to jump from the WNYX building ledge, he’s literally playing a character who negatively affects the gravity of the show. The whole episode is about the struggle between his singular will and the elasticity of the Newsradio cast members. With that struggle foregrounded, he’s able to do his thing while the others go about their business unimpeded. But folded into the DNA of the show, he just deflates what makes the ensemble special.

Let’s take another angle. Lovitz has something of a “look at me” quality that’s similar to Russ. With Westbrook, every rebound, every drive brings home to you the existential agony of human existence; you’re seeing him engaged in a Sisyphean struggle against the world. With Durant, you frequently forget he’s even on the court, only to glance up and see he’s poured in 30 points. It’s the same with Lovitz and Hartman. Between Lovitz’s looks and his voice, he takes up space on screen, and his whole demeanor is built around his onscreen “neediness”. He’s also of the “flop sweat” school of comedy, such that you never forget how hard he’s working to get a laugh. While you never quite forget that Hartman’s there, and he carries something of that same smarmy bravado from role to role (to put it in Simpsons terms, Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure are distinct characters, but definitely cousins), he manages to make his comedy feel effortless, or perhaps rather detached, a greatness existing outside himself.

I’m glad, then, that I’ve been watching The Critic, because it has revealed to me just what a great comic presence Lovitz can be. As a Russ fan, I know nothing is more irritating than people who jump at any opportunity to trash his game, to chime in loudly with a “well actually” anytime someone dares praise him. And Lovitz really is great anchoring his own show, where his quirks are thoroughly explored and he can ham it up to his heart’s content. But I also know I’ll never quite get over his role in adding insult to injury by taking one of the great sitcoms, already rocked by tragedy, and making me wince as I watch it, like I’m witnessing Russ launch up a 3 pointer with 20 seconds left on the shot clock.

The Pleasures of Realism

And we’re back! (Sort of). No promises, but I’m hoping to start writing here a little more; primarily, shorter posts that will form a sort of commonplace book of stray thoughts for me. Now that I’m done with my PhD (and, at the moment, on summer break), I want to give myself a little more structure for thinking and writing about what interests me. This format might end up looking like a lot of posts like this one: short reflections on something I’ve been reading. We’ll see. I’m also planning to use this space to cross-promote (or at least cross-think) for The Readers Karamazov, the podcast on literature and philosophy which I help host.

One of the most stressful, yet oddly pleasurable, seasons of grad school for me was the qualifying exams stage. Given the quirks of my program, situation, and adviser, I ended up doing the equivalent of an English department exam in about half the usual time; with the result that I read about 180 texts related to 20th Century British literature (as well as “Global Contemporary Catholic literature,” my comparative subfield) in about 6 months. This meant lots of cramming, to be sure, but also a whittling down of my reading list to the barest bones, with the result that there were a number of fairly important books I had to leave off. 20th Century British literature is such a grab bag, encompassing not only modernism and post-colonialism (the two towers of the discipline) but also my chosen but oft-ignored subfield, the nebulously named “mid-century literature.” This field comprises a few well respected authors (including my number one queen Muriel Spark), but also a number of authors who have fallen into obscurity (hello C.P. Snow), disgrace (what ho, Kingsley Amis), or both. Many of these authors, often the men, have been tarred with the label “conservative,” either for their political views, their aesthetic views, or some combination. In the capsule retelling, these nogoodniks took up the mantle of “realism” to beat back the dual dangers of literary experimentation and social liberation.

I have little interest in addressing the political aspect of these criticisms, other than to say that it should be possible for someone to hold, for example, the two following convictions without experiencing much internal angst: a) Kingsley Amis was a bigoted ass but also b) a screamingly funny novelist who could write the hell out of a sentence. But the first charge, the aesthetic, sticks in my craw, for a few different reasons. I want to address these reasons briefly, with reference to what is, to me, the biggest gap I had on my reading list, one that I’m just beginning to fill: Anthony Powell’s expansive 12 novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve only just picked the series up, having finished the first novel and started the second (Side note: I’m reading them in the wonderfully tacky edition available through my institution’s library: a quartet of trios, three novels in one, marketed seasonally [Volume I: Spring] and bedazzled with the sort of nature photography you’d see in a glossy magazine ad for Newports).

A Dance to the Music of Time perfectly embodies these mid-century stereotypes. The novels follow a small coterie of young British men through the interwar period in Britain. A consummate work of realism, it is well crafted, almost painstaking in its sentence construction. But at the level of plot it’s relatively sedate (at least for now — the plot may pick up as we approach World War II). And, while very interesting and well written, it can hardly be described as experimental (again, at least so far). And, of course, politically it’s hopeless, judged by the usual metrics literary critics apply: centered on wealthy or wealthy-adjacent men with ample leisure time to explore themselves and the world they inhabit.

Part of the problem in evaluating realism, I want to suggest, lies in scolding it for what it is not, rather than appreciating what it does well. So, no, you won’t find rhapsodic flights of fancy in Dance, either of the daring modernist sort or the preciously aesthetic sort favored by the MFA style. And you won’t find revolutionary politics, either. What you will find is a scrupulous, hesitant exploration of concepts of human motivation and relationship — you know, the boring stuff.

The poet W.H. Auden liked to refer to art as a mirror. Against the purgative notion of art, which insists that it must elicit strong emotions, good or bad, from the spectator, Auden figures art as instead “a mirror in which the spectator sees reflected himself and the world, and becomes conscious of his feelings good and bad, and of what their relations to each other are in fact.” For Auden, art is “transformative” only in this very narrow sense: that the reader or watcher or listener learns to see himself or herself more clearly in the reflected light of the artwork.

Good realism provides something of this mirror effect in the way in which it shows us the the reality underlying the surface of human motivation. The other day I posted the below image of an excerpt from A Question of Upbringing (the first novel in the series) on my Twitter feed, and joked that it described perfectly the character of many graduate students:

This is the great advantage of the realist tradition, especially in a novel written in the first person (and with a narrator who hopes to become a writer, to boot): the text can act as a gradual sussing out of motivations and characters. Sometimes omniscient realist novels — especially, perhaps, Victorian ones — are accused of being too neatly worked out, but I find this generally to be a gross slander. Dickens, Eliot, et al are also interested in gradual discovery, not proclamation from on high. Part of what makes good realism good, then, is the sense of discovery it enables, in the reader no less than the narrator. Jenkins, our narrator here, thinks he understands the character of his collegiate peer Quiggins, but realizes after further investigation that he mistook one character trait (academic seriousness) for another (a sort of aimless chatter).

This investigative sense can elicit derisive laughter, as in the example above, but it can also draw forth more complex emotions. Take this brief excerpt from the beginning of the second book, A Buyer’s Market, where Jenkins describes the relationship his parents had with a Bohemian artist:

”Although no doubt they rather enjoyed his occasional visits, my parents legitimately considered Mr. Deacon an eccentric, who, unless watched carefully, might develop into a bore, and it would not be precisely true to say that they liked him; although I believe that, in his way, Mr. Deacon liked both of them.”

So much delicate emotion comes packed into this sentence. On first pass, the reader might merely laugh at what is, after all, a humorous mismatch of emotions. But dig deeper and you experience a rush of sadness: who has not experienced the devastating situation of realizing an inequality between how much you like someone and how much they like you? Seeing from the outside lets us clarify our own experiences because we feel that pang less acutely when it happens to a character than when it happens to us — but feel the pang we still do.

I want to end this brief essay into realism by swerving from Anthony Powell back a century to Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, a book Friedrich and I discussed in great detail in the final episode of Season 1 of The Readers Karamazov. The Warden is another book that perfectly captures the unexpected pleasures of realism. It’s a book where the big conflict centers on the scintillating matter of the possible misuse of church funds. I can hear your heart racing from here. Furthermore its central character, the Rev. Septimus Harding, has none of the charisma or bravado of a typical literary hero. He is a meek man, a cautious man, a scrupulous man. But because Trollope so skillfully applies his literary vision to the story, we dig deep into Harding’s inner life and see crystallized there a perfect example of internal struggle.

Worried that he gets more money than he deserves from his sinecure as “warden” of a retirement home for poor men, Harding struggles with what he must do in the face of public mocking and private doubts. He knows that his son in law, the blustering Archdeacon Grantly, could make his external troubles go away by pursuing the case with overbearing zeal, but Harding demands something harder: the ability to clear his own conscience. Considering the Archdeacon, Harding knows that “He would find no sympathy there for his doubts, no friendly feeling, no inward comfort.” I love this sentence to death, in large part because it shows us, in real time, the investigative process of realism. Notice how Trollope gradually drills inward to deeper feelings: “sympathy” is a relatively distant emotion, “friendly feeling” closer in, “inward comfort” the most intimate of all. Trollope subtly guides us to the heart of what matters to Harding: that the people around him would know his innermost states and support him in his goodwill.

Like every genre, realism has its good examples and its bad examples. Bad realism gets caught up in useless minutiae, or else presents inner states in a way that purports to be real, but in fact distorts that reality. But good realism, of the sort found in Powell and (at least this) Trollope, carefully excavates the inner workings of the heart and mind. In a world that sometimes threatens to reduce each individual to the bluntest summary, it’s useful to have works of literature that reveal to us the multiplicity, the play of human inwardness.

The Worst Pop Songs of 2016

Friends, it's been a hell of a year. Mostly in bad, bad ways. But you know what else was bad, in a glorious, redeeming way? 2016's pop music, which chugged along as reliably as ever, full of forgettable hooks and risible lyrics. In a year when politics turned upside down and cherished celebrities died in droves (I started writing this on Tuesday, and 5 minutes after I wrote this sentence, I learned of the deaths of both Carrie Fisher and Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, which for me is probably the saddest death of the year, though mitigated a bit since the man was 96), pop music was there for us in its comforting mediocrity, lulling us into sweet numbness with its lukewarm-oatmeal aesthetic.

As usual, I listened to way too much of it (the things I do for you people). What's glorious about the songs that stuck out to me this year as the worst of the worst is the way they seemed to fall into stereotypical narratives thrown around in the world of pop music. So instead of a numbered list (though I will designate the final song as the worst of the year), I'm presenting them this year with a title attached to each to explicate its place in a pop music geography that, no matter how much the sounds change, remains suspiciously static. These songs are all listed as being released in 2016, and in general they are those that I discovered via Top 40 Radio; I may be a masochist, but in a lazy way, and I'm not going out of my way to plumb the crappy depths of subgenres like country or metal. I also have no interest in trawling through MySpace to find the actual worst song of the year, which was likely written by a teen garage band from Sioux Falls with a name like Cannabus Stop! So, without further ado:

Justin Timberlake - Can't Stop the Feeling!

The narrative: Pop star who sells out and produces an unbelievably irritating song for a major motion picture. 

I'll say up front that I'm a secret(ish) admirer of Justin Timberlake, who consistently creates impeccably produced, undeniably catchy pop songs. And I'm not surprised that Timberlake, who lends his voice to the Trolls movie, would also step in to provide an upbeat sonic confection to slap onto the soundtrack.

What baffles me about this song is this: Timberlake is the proud father of a small boy. You'd think that would make him sensitive to the concerns of parents, who regularly have to deal not only with being dragged to subpar animated films to get their kids to shut up for a few hours, but also the songs churned out from those films, scientifically designed to be screamed over and over again by young, tone deaf voices. (Remember "Let it Go"?). So why, why, why would Timberlake inflict this monstrosity of a song on the world? It manages to combine the utter catchiness of Timberlake's oeuvre with the earbleed-inducing stupidity of, well, all children's music. What's extra strange is that it keeps the basic format of a Timberlake song (I'm gonna get you on the dance floor and sex you up with my sexy body) and runs it through the PG scrub filter, in such a way that the resulting lyrics are somehow more creepy than they would be otherwise. Gems like "All those things I shouldn't do/But you dance, dance, dance/Ain't nobody leaving soon so keep dancing" sound like they should be coming out of a loudspeaker at a North Korean labor camp. 

(Special note: the video I've chosen for this song is not the official music video - rather, it's the "GoNoOdle" workout (?) video for kids. Nothing else seemed to capture the glitter-and-poop aesthetic of the song so well)

Meghan Trainor - Me Too

The Narrative: Musician who disastrously tries to swap out their signature style for another, even worse one.

When Meghan Trainor forcibly crowbarred her way onto the national pop scene a few years back, she did it via a "sassy" approach to body positivity and a misbegotten affection for doo wop. Her "hit" "song" "All About That Bass" melded these two traits together into a Frankenstein of a song that was, all in all, a little too bland to be truly offensive, but a few good notches below listenable.

All I can say for Trainor's 2016 hit "Me Too" is that it makes me long for the halcyon days of "All About That Bass". To paraphrase the great Walter Sobchak, say what you want about the tenets of faux doo wop, at least it's an aesthetics. Trainor has here traded in her somewhat distinct (however lame) sound for a factory approved, heavily technologized monotone. It does her no favors.

As for the lyrics, well, I get that she's presumably trying to poke fun at her celebrity status here, but the result is so toothless it couldn't slurp down a bowl of creamed corn. Seriously, this is a song about celebrity so anodyne it makes Nickelback's "Rockstar" seem like it flowed from the pen of H.L. Mencken. The most irritating thing about the lyrics is the fact that the song can't even nail down its tenses properly: "I thank God every day/That I woke up feeling this way". Hand that sentence to a high school English teacher and watch their head explode as they try to parse it. A consolation prize should be handed out to the couplet "My life's a movie - Tom Cruise/So bless me baby, achoo", truly a masterwork of blurting out the first thing that comes into your brain when in a lyric-penning session.

I will admit though, I'm pretty jealous of that giraffe hoodie she's wearing in the video. If that's the sort of thing celebrities get to wear with impunity, sign me up.

American Authors - Go Big or Go Home

The narrative: awful white men inexplicably get a second chance.

Look, if you are reading this blog post, you are presumably a sophisticated, web savvy person, so I don't want to insult your intelligence by assuming you haven't already seen the video of the greatest sports press conference of all time. But, it's relevant here, so here's our man in Havana Dennis Green to set us up:

 

No other video can adequately sum up how I feel about American Authors. If you know me well, you probably know of my long running feud with this band's turd of a 2014 single "Best Day of My Life" (second in intensity on my list of feuds behind only my vendetta against Jai Courtney), which is the song equivalent of a #blessed selfie. Look, I guess I'm not too surprised that we didn't instantly relegate American Authors to the realm of national embarrassments never to be spoken of again, like Warren G. Harding or the Macarena craze, but I am disappointed.

And here they come again, only two years later, with a song which seems utterly indistinguishable from "Best Day of My Life". Paean to YOLOing? Check. Godawful banjo? Check. Lead singer with the most smug, punchable face this side of Milo Yiannopolous*? Check and check!

At the same time, I have to admire American Authors for their complete dedication to crafting songs as devoid of content as possible. I've written before about the plague of vagueness in songs, but these guys are spearheading the effort to make such vagueness an art form. They are the avant guarde of the local craft inanities movement. Spend a few minutes analyzing lines such as "I gave the dice a roll/And then we lost control/You know we're lucky that we survived" or "It's getting crazy/We're gonna do some things that we won't forget" and then tell me honestly that the lyrics to this song couldn't have been written by a Van Wilder promotional Bro Phrase Generator. Shame on us, America, shame on us.

*If you don't know who this is, count your blessings, and please, please don't look him up.

Twenty One Pilots - Heathens

The narrative: indie act breaks through, becomes immediately insufferable.

Look, all power to Twenty One Pilots, who spent a good number of years touring and building a fan base before finally breaking through this year into the mainstream. I haven't absolutely hated the several songs they have had chart this year, but there's something about their sound that just sticks in my caw. Thankfully they released "Heathens" as a part of the Suicide Squad soundtrack, so I have a convenient receptacle into which to channel my disgust.

Full disclosure: I haven't seen the Suicide Squad movie (I'm not that much of a masochist), but from everything I've seen or heard it appears to be the celluloid incarnation of a Hot Topic Store. If that's true, then "Heathens" is the sweaty, pimply cashier manning the Hot Topic register in his "I Hear Voices. They Don't Like You" t-shirt. The only bright spot about the song is that it appears to be built entirely around a sample of a bullfrog letting loose its barbaric yawp in the Louisiana bayou.

Seriously, this is the sort of song that comes across as profound to teenagers who wear the same Slayer shirt day in and day out, until a nice crust has built up around the armpit area. And why not? Lyrics such as "Just because we check the guns at the door/Doesn't mean our brains will change from hand grenades". Whoah, dude, are you telling me that you are seriously disturbed and that your brain works differently than others, so much so that you must compare it to an explosive device? Too deep for me. I bet that you're so strange that faces come out in the rain, too, right?

I love that the end of the song involves the person being addressed throughout, and told to stay away, joining up with the group - BECAUSE THEY'VE BECOME STRANGE TOO. Given that the true fans of Twenty One Pilots (many of whom are presumably unhappy that the washed masses have decided to like them as well) call themselves the Skeleton Clique, this feels appropriate. Like Juggalos, but somehow less interesting, Twenty One Pilots fans are true believers - normies need not apply.

The Worst Song of the Year

Goo Goo Dolls - So Alive

The narrative: rock has beens return from county fair duty for one last shot at glory, instead produce drivel.

Look, I'm not sure I can scientifically measure the terribleness of every song this year, so perhaps "So Alive" would get edged out by another song if the process were more rigorous. But here's why I gave it the edge: not only is it absolutely terrible, it certainly feels like the least necessary song of the year. It has been 18 years since Goo Goo Dolls released "Iris", their only song to really leave its mark on the public consciousness. Who was begging for another round of plain oatmeal from one of the blandest acts in pop music history?

Yet here they come, saddling up for one more ride. Even though they're getting to old for this hit... making scene, they've bravely saddled forth to save us from the perils of actually memorable music. And so they bring us "So Alive" a song destined to be played on loop at anesthesiologist offices, accountant conventions, and any other gathering spaces where those in charge can't risk the mood turning mellow - they don't want things to get that out of hand.

I would analyze some of the lyrics, but I'm afraid staring at lines like "Breaking down the walls in my own mind/Keeping my faith for the bad times/Get up, get up, stand like a champion/Take it to the world/Gonna sing it like an anthem" will put me to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Oh, sorry. Where were we? Oh yes, "So Alive". Remember two slots ago when I talked about the YOLO aesthetic of "Go Big or Go Home"? Well, "So Alive" is what happens when that aesthetic gets drained of any spark of energy. It's a kid who's been put on Ritalin even though what he really needs is a few laps around the backyard. It's the sort of song you would hear in a movie montage about conformity - be it in the Soviet state of the halls of a high school - and think, "Now that's a little too on the nose for a music cue". It's the "punt on 4th and 1 in your opponent's territory" of songs. But maybe that's what we needed in 2016. In a year of craziness, perhaps we just needed a song to slowly drain all feeling from our bodies. Thank you, Goo Goo Dolls, for numbing our pain just a little with your mediocrity.

A Scrupulously Scientific Ranking of (Almost) All the Pixar Films

I try to avoid making too many pop-culture related lists, for my own health and that of those around me. But I had a special request from a friend to provide my ranked list, with brief commentary, on every Pixar film. In this day and age, it isn't too surprising to have seen all of Pixar's output, especially since they only release one film a year and have enough cultural cachet to be considered an event studio. Still, I have seen them all; well, almost. Here now, without further ado, is a full ranking.

Not Ranked: Cars 2

As I said: almost all. I've actually heard a few dissenting voices from people whose taste I generally trust, but it hasn't been enough to motivate me to check out what almost everyone else considers to be the worst Pixar film. One of these days I'll get around to it, for the sake of completion, but... not yet. (I have seen a staggeringly awful shorts compilation called "Mater's Tall Tales" which I think counts as adequate penance for my sin of omission).

Tier 4 - Take 'Em or Leave 'Em

16. The Incredibles

Consider the gauntlet thrown down. I know many people who rate this among Pixar's best, but it has always left me cold. Sure, it has great voice work (it's never a bad idea to have Holly Hunter around) but, honestly, the whole thing feels a bit by the book. It's fun, but not much else. And director Brad Bird already directed his superhero masterpiece five years earlier, with the far superior (and much less slick) The Iron Giant.

15. Cars

Is there anything notable about this film other than it continuing the fine tradition of having great actors play their last roles in animated films? In that category, Paul Newman's turn here is a good bit above Orson Welles in the Transformers movie, but a good bit below Jimmy Stewart's classic turn as Wylie Burp in Fievel Goes West. Again, an uninspired story can't be overcome by good voice acting. Though it is far, far superior to its recent remake, the bland Robert Downey, Jr. dramedy The Judge. (Seriously: I can in no way advocate you watching The Judge, but if someone forces you at gunpoint, pay attention to how it's a subpar ripoff of Cars).

14. Finding Dory

Sadly Pixar's most recent effort is one of their (wait for it) most forgettable. I really wanted to get invested in Dory's search for her parents, but the whole movie felt shoddily constructed by Pixar standards; shaggy, but not in a charming way. I don't generally buy the charge that Pixar wrings cheap emotion from its films by preying on the insecurities of parents, but yeah, that fits the bill here.

13. Brave

People seemed really disappointed in this one when it came out, perhaps because the weight of expectations on it as the first Pixar film with a female protagonist were so great. Sure, the film's troubled production history leads to some unevenness, but it's definitely not a bad film, and it takes more chances than the films I've ranked below it. The real problem comes in comparing it (unfairly, I know) against other vaguely Celtic/Hibernian animated films that had come out around the same time. Compared to Tom Moore's The Secret of Kells, to choose the best of the bunch, Brave feels singularly uninspired.

Tier 3 - The Good

12. The Good Dinosaur

For some reason this film failed to connect to audiences when it came out, and while it's not a masterpiece, I think its relative failure is a bit unfair, and thus it stands in my mind as one of the most underrated of Pixar's films. Sure, the story beats are fairly familiar, with a father son relationship at its core, but the film zags where many zig, and includes some of the strangest scenes Pixar has ever put on film. Plus - and I know this isn't everything - the film is stunningly gorgeous.

11. Up

Let's get this out of the way first: Up has the most moving, heartbreaking opening 10 minutes of any animated film, ever. It's a masterclass in compressed storytelling, one that will endure as one of Pixar's high points for a long, long time. But that doesn't excuse the rest of the film, which fails to live up to that opening. It's amusing and diverting, and sometimes touching, but it also involves too much flab and folderol to be one of Pixar's best.

10. Toy Story 3

The third and lowest ranked entry in the Toy Story saga suffers from the reverse problem that afflicts Up. The film wanders through some amusing hijinks but then, out of nowhere, takes a dark, brilliant turn and becomes a meditation on mortality, featuring talking toys. It's quite a transformation, and saves the film from being a forgettable mediocrity.

Tier 2 - The Really Good

9. Monsters, Inc.

Every film remaining on this list is one I would recommend without reservations, anytime, anywhere. They have a little something extra that elevates them above what's come before. In the case of Monsters, Inc., that could be one of several things. It could be the killer chemistry between John Goodman and Billy Crystal (who for once uses his extremely punchably persona for good, not evil). It could be the sneaky-great emotional core of the film, the friendship between Goodman's Sulley and Boo, the young girl he befriends. It could even be Randy Newman's crackling score. At any rate, Monsters, Inc. manages to be one of Pixar's more entertaining films while still hitting the emotions hard.    

8. Wall-E

I think it counts as a huge plus in Wall-E's favor that I've only seen it once - when it first came out - but I've still ranked it this high. In many ways Wall-E feels daring, from its wordless opening half hour to its willingness to imagine a society bent out of shape, almost irredeemably, by human greed. In my memory the social commentary gets a little heavy handed in the second half of the film, which keeps it from climbing higher on this list, but it's still an achievement well worth celebrating.

7. A Bug's Life

Chances are good that you don't remember much about A Bug's Life. Sandwiched in between the first two Toy Story films, Pixar's second film has been unjustly lost to history. A clever retelling of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, A Bug's Life shows Pixar's early potential for taking weird premises and having fun with them. The insect world gives the film an endlessly fascinating palette to work with, and the studio uses this to great effect. I might be a little biased in its favor due to the presence of Dave Foley, but this is one that's well worth a re-watch if you haven't seen it in awhile.

6. Toy Story

Ah, the one that started it all. Having rewatched Toy Story not too long ago, it's really remarkable how much of Pixar's future success lies in the blueprint of this film. Strong emotional relationships (here both vertical, between toy and owner, and horizontal, between toys); moments that capture the sad wonder of childhood; and of course lots and lots of humor that hits its mark. Though the studio would go on to make better films, their first one still feels special.

5. Monsters University

If putting The Incredibles last is my most controversial low ranking, I suspect this will be my controversial high ranking. I'll just go ahead and say it: Monsters University is Pixar's most underrated film, and in some ways their most grown up. People seem to have gotten distracted by its genre trappings (oh no, a campus comedy!) and ignored the ways in which the film digs beneath the cliches of that genre to make a startlingly adult film about failure. The basic lesson (not everyone can succeed at some things, no matter how hard they try) is deeply counter-cultural, and utterly refreshing. Huge plus thanks to Randy Newman's peppy marching band score.

Tier 1 - The All Timers

4. Finding Nemo

Ok, maybe I am predisposed to have this film wreck me in ways that others aren't. As a father of three small, precious children, and a natural worrier, I immediately connect to Marlin's anxieties about his son. But beyond this emotional center, there's a whole lot to love about Finding Nemo. One of Finding Dory's biggest mistakes was to move largely away from the ocean setting (opting instead for a marine preserve). But exploring the ocean lets the animators' imaginations run wild, and cook up some of the most fun set pieces in any Pixar film. The whole movie feels infused with a sense of wonder at the vastness of the world.

3. Inside Out

I'm not a fan of the "Pixar slump" theory, the idea that in the last decade or so the studio has been largely down on its luck (relatively speaking), with films that are fine but nothing special. However, it's easy to believe that narrative when the "bounce back" film is as good as Inside Out. By exploring the inside of a human person, Pixar came up with one of the few spaces vast and mysterious enough to rival the ocean as a playground. The film plays its combination of emotions for many laughs, but also argues for the essential need for sadness in human life. Combined with Monsters University it's almost as if Pixar was working as an agent of good against the shiny personal-improvement-industrial-complex. All to the good, I say.

2. Ratatouille

Now here's a surprise. The first time I saw Ratatouille, I thought it was pretty good, but nothing special. Only on multiple rewatches has the film unfolded for me and revealed its intricate layers (like a good croissant). In some ways Pixar's most meta film (all about the joys and struggles of creating art), the film tackles criticism, pleasure, and natural ability with verve and gusto. It provides endless sensory delights, from the colors to the lovingly designed shots of food to Michael Giacchino's flawless score. Set your jaw firm and do your best to resist, and I bet you'll still walk away feeling refreshed about life.

1. Toy Story 2

Well, here it is. It seems inevitable in some ways - a safe, boring choice for the best Pixar film. But what can you do when the obvious choice happens to be the best? Not only the greatest Pixar film, but probably the greatest sequel ever, it improves on the initial film in every way. It manages to be a thrilling adventure film while never sacrificing the emotional weight (seriously, the scene where Jesse the Cowgirl sings about her old owner will wring tears from any but the most heartless monster). The central choice Woody faces - to be safe, or to be loved - is one of the most basic questions about human existence. And all this from a  film that was originally supposed to be a cheapo, direct to video sequel. Sometimes life goes contra the plan, and thank goodness for that.

And A Little Child Shall Lead Them

If you spend, well, any time on the Internet, it's probable that you've encountered the particular joke format "I wish I loved anything as much as X loves Y". It's a pretty good, flexible construction for when people or animals or rocks or whatever seem to have a disproportionate affection for something. Usually it's a trivial comparison, like "I wish I loved anything as much as Kel loves orange soda," or "I wish I loved anything as much as the kitten in this video loves the spoken word poetry of Gil Scott Heron". I've been ruminating on it recently in a more serious vein, though, thanks to my son.

Like most five-year-olds, he has various enthusiasms that seem to shift depending on mood. He's been super into construction, and dinosaurs, and various other young kid obsessions. Recently, though, he has invested himself in a more complete way than he has before, this time in the plight of endangered animals. He has labeled himself an "animal studier" tasked with protecting endangered species, be it from hunting, habitat destruction, or anything else. He has jumped into this fascination with both feet, which has led to some unintended consequences for our family. Many days he will go on and on about a particular endangered species, or mourn one already extinct (he's very sad about something called a golden toad). At times it's easy to start feeling like the author of this article (Warning: strong language).  

But then I witness the depth of his conviction, and I'm really moved. He recently celebrated his fifth birthday, and a week or so after the fact, he told us, out of the blue, what his birthday wish was: that he could save all the animals from going extinct. His convictions have not just caused internal change, though - they have radiated outward to affect the way we live as a family. A few months ago he discovered that orangutans were endangered, thanks in large part to habitat destruction. He then discovered that this habitat destruction is intimately tied to the palm oil industry, which cuts down huge swaths of the Indonesian rain forest in its insatiable quest for the golden droplets of oil.

My son became very concerned, especially given the huge number of items at every grocery store that use palm oil as a cheap alternative to other kinds of binding agents. He began to research things that had palm oil, and soon produced an ultimatum: our family could not, in good conscience, continue to eat palm oil. No Oreos. No processed peanut butter. And - despite the very great sacrifice involved - no Ritz crackers. This last item caused no end of consternation, even tears, as he loved using them to make "My famous peanut butter and jelly cracker sandwiches". But, though it hurt him to do so, he gave them up willingly for the sake of the orangutans.

You might think that a five year old would quickly forget this dictum, but for some reason it has stuck, and we have been palm oil free for several months now. He's drilled us hard to remember, and we always check the labels of food when we're out shopping. He's even indoctrinated his sister (age 3) so that she can be the watchdog when he's not around. Again, I want to emphasize the sheer number of packaged products these days that feature palm oil; this has been a major change to our shopping habits.

In spite of the inconvenience, I'm incredibly proud. Not just at his diligence in keeping up the boycott, but in his initial love for animals that led him to this sacrifice (he's not quite Abraham, but peanut butter cracker sandwiches are a pretty big deal for a five year old). It really does make me wish I loved anything as much as he loves animals. I mean, I think I love him, and his sisters, and his mom, and my various other family members and friends, that much, but what else? I can't think of too much. I tend to be a detached person, weighing things in the balance. Henry Adams' line from The Education of Henry Adams about how "He never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players," resonates a great deal with me. Though there are advantages to my habit of detachment, it can too easily become a prison of my own making.

So I need these period shocks to my system, reminders that life requires real attachment, real love. Even though I get cranky about missing certain foodstuffs, then, I'm happy to be led by the example of my son. On our recent trip to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, he learned about the threat to the Great Lakes from Asian carp, which have already invaded the Mississippi River to devastating effect. As I write this he's busy drawing diagrams to figure out how to block the access of Asian carp to Lake Michigan. This after he spent the whole car ride home bringing the subject up every two minutes. Like all holy fools, he can be a bit insufferable, but it's mostly proof of a conviction deep enough to make me feel guilty about my own inaction. I hope he never stops loving deeply, and helping me do the same.

Summer Reading Recommendations (For People Who Hate Summer)

At this point the summer reading recommendation post has become as hallowed a national tradition as other perennial summer activities, like telling your wife you put on sunscreen even when you didn't, or pretending to be interested in baseball. I thought I would mix mine up a bit, though, and write a reading recommendation list for people (like me) who don't like summer. Because let's be honest: summer is the worst season. Don't blame the messenger, it's just statistics.

What follows are a list of books I thought would make for exceptionally terrible beach reading (though, to be fair, every book makes for terrible beach reading because you constantly have to adjust yourself to hold the book up right, and sand is always getting in between the pages, and on top of everything else you have to be at the beach to do it, and the beach is like summer on steroids, so...). It's a melange of things I've read recently or not so recently, but they all come with a stamp of approval. So sit back, turn the A/C up as high as it will go, and grumble about kids getting off your lawn as you hunker down in the basement with one of these classics.

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy

This book hits all the right notes for summer haters. First off, it's set not only in England (already a place inhospitable to the truly warm) but more specifically on Egdon Heath, a location that brims with ancient doom and gloom. People light so many bonfires in this book, you'll think the sun never comes out, blessedly. Plus Thomas Hardy has the perpetual feel of a crotchety old man, even though he wasn't even forty when this book was published. Everyone knows that crotchety old people are the mortal enemies of summer, so embrace this tale of doomed love, quixotic educational systems, and reddle (it's a type of natural red dye) and fight off even the cheeriest of summer days.

The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark

Nothing says summer like vacation to your favorite spots. For we ugly Americans, Europe has a special lure during the summer months, when we fancifully imagine we can dodge the awful heat and pick up some culture along the way. Lise, the protagonist of Muriel Spark's acidly funny dark comedy The Driver's Seat, opts for a different sort of tourism, one less conducive to the desires of the Italian Tourism Board (for starters), as well as the basic dictates of good taste. Lise goes shopping and generally dallies around as she waits for an expected companion, and the book rushes toward its disturbing climax, which will instill in you a firm desire to lock yourself in your room and let your passport expire.

Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset

Summer is a time for light reads, for mindless page turners, and nothing says breezy reading like a 900 page trilogy about Medieval Norway! Undset's patient (some might say glacial) descriptions of the richness of medieval life are the perfect antidote to the hustle and bustle of summertime, and as a bonus the books contain one of the saddest parting scenes in all of literature. Choke back some tears so you don't blotch the sunscreen you aren't wearing and blanket up as you read through a tale as frostily refreshing as a slow slog through a Scandinavian blizzard.

Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney

Who doesn't have fond memories of visiting the family farm, making hay with Uncle Verner and milking the cows at four in the morning? Hopefully you, because that sounds like a terrible fate, and no amount of rah rah local foodie propaganda can outweigh the disheartening spectacle of stepping in every cow patty on the farm (Uncle Verner probably arranged them like that on purpose, the jerk). For those with mixed feelings about farm life, Seamus Heaney's first poetry collection will give voice to your ambiguity. Heaney's often touted as a poet close to the land, but he displays a real uncertainty in Death of a Naturalist about the supposedly idyllic countryside of Northern Ireland in which he grew up, and the legacies foisted upon him by his farming predecessors. Best enjoyed with the most artificial food you can find.

The Present Age, by Soren Kierkegaard

Ultimately summer is about forgetting your troubles, kicking back with a tasteless lager, and giving in to the relaxation all around you. This is a large part of why summer sucks. Swim against the tide by struggling against the inanity of your fellow humans, courtesy of that gloomy Dane Kierkegaard. This essay loses marks for not being as punishingly labyrinthine as most of his other works, nor quite as melancholy (both musts to set the anti-summer mood), but I'm picking this because of its relentless insistence on the crumbling of society, and what to do to stop it (go into hiding and lob truth bombs at people). This should give you the right supply of bile to stay angry at your neighbors as they shoot off fireworks at midnight a full three weeks after the Fourth of July. Plus it features an extended metaphor about ice skating, so it will fill you with hope that winter might, despite all evidence to the contrary, arrive one day soon and spare us the continued vagaries of summer.
 

Three or Four Reasons I'm Glad I'm Converting to Catholicism

In just under two weeks, after sundown on Easter Saturday at this year's Easter Vigil, my wife and I will be received into the Catholic Church, and our children will be implicitly received as well. This still feels like a strange decision, and will likely blindside some of you reading this post (though we've told those closest to us, this counts as the first public announcement of the fact). I have approximately zero interest in laying out our reasons for converting. First of all, they are complex and would take a great deal of time to explain. Second, there are so many rampant misconceptions about what Catholicism does and does not teach, that discussing thorny doctrinal issues seems counterproductive in this context. Third, I want to do my best to avoid public criticism of the strains of Protestantism that have been my home for so long, and to which I still owe so much. Last, and most frankly, the decision is so personal, in many ways, that I just don't really feel like sharing it here on my blog.

What I offer instead, then, is a list of reasons that I am glad to be joining this strange, sprawling, holy mess called the Roman Catholic Church. These should not be considered motivating factors, but added blessings on top.

1. The Communion of the Saints

One of the biggest misunderstandings Protestants have of Catholicism is the matter of "praying to" the saints. The practice would more accurately be called "praying through" the saints, as every prayer said in this way is in fact a request for intercession, an asking of the saint to pray with us before God. Viewed in this light, the practice is in fact a marvelous one, a way to actually practice the belief in the communion of saints, joined not just across geography but across time. Just as I grow closer to my friends when I ask them to pray for me, so too do my petitions draw me closer to those who already taste of glory.

There's another aspect of this as well. Much more than Protestantism, which tends to demand that Christian practice look roughly the same for everyone (if only at the level of intensity), there's a wonderful variety that comes from the Catholic insistence that anyone in good standing counts as part of the church. That guy who looks like a burned out Super Mario sitting in front of me barely moving his lips during the hymn? Yep, still a Catholic. Some excel more than others (hence the saints), but all participate, no matter how poorly.

2. Science, but not Scientism

I really appreciate the Catholic Church's approach to science and religion, which is one of integration, not antagonism. For those of us Christians who believe in, say, evolution and climate change (to take only the two most contentious scientific matters in the country at present), it's refreshing to be in a church that explicitly endorses the knowledge and benefits conferred on us by scientific research. [I want to note here, for the record, that as misguided as I find Christians who deny evolution, especially those who cling to young earth creationism, I also have a lot of sympathy for them. Adopting a position on any issue is always complex, and I definitely don't think Christians who deny these things are, say, stupid, just probably considering a different set of contexts that gives them certain blindspots. I am decidedly less charitable to those who deny climate change.] Though certain sectors of (in particular) "evangelical" Protestantism are grappling with these issues in honest ways, as a whole Catholicism is far ahead of these churches in this regard.

On the flip side, the Catholic Church is also one of the most vocal proponents of limiting the conclusions we draw from science. In an age where many think that to be able to do something is the same as to be justified in doing something, it's important to stand firm against the more destructive impulses of science. Especially as Silicon Valley talking heads rush to embrace improper uses of technology, such as transhumanism, it's important to accept science while still advocating for ethical conduct. Along with this, it's important to remain critical of the lack of nuance some proponents of science adopt, to guard against what William Blake called "single vision, and Newton's sleep". Here I speak as much as a defender of the humanities as as a Christian.

3. Criticizing the Machine of Modernity.

Here's where I get a bit weird, so forgive me (my wife is already rolling her eyes). It would take me too long to elaborate here what exactly my social and political views are, in large part because I take my cues from those outside the traditional limits of contemporary discourse. Long story short, I am deeply distrustful of "modernity", where that term represents an unmitigated belief in the progress of humankind (especially through technology). At the same time, I have no patience for nostalgia or a desire to return to the past (which is both not possible and, most likely, not desirable). To sum it up: every age is terrible, and every age is wonderful.

The challenge comes from navigating our age's challenges, using the best facets of the past and tradition in new ways. For all the hoary stereotypes to the contrary, Catholicism has shown in the past century to be remarkably adept at this, maintaining its core of beliefs while generously engaging the viewpoints of a pluralist society. Several of the most important interpreters of modernity in the 20th Century have been Catholic, including three I hold in especially high regard, Marshall McLuhan, Rene Girard, and Charles Taylor. These scholars (and many others) represent an attempt to elucidate where we stand and where we might go from here.

In resisting the corrosive effects of late capitalism (yeah, I said it), Catholicism has at least some of the correctives necessary, especially a strong emphasis on communal effort. Catholic-driven political movements like distributism and Dorothy Day's worker movement point out alternatives to the dead end social imaginary of the (completely, unrestrainedly) free market.

4. The Arts

Let me say from the start that many of my favorite writers and artists have been strong, committed Protestants [I'm using this specific phrasing to avoid setting up a false "Protestant bad, Catholic good" dichotomy. It should go without saying that many of my favorites are also committed Jews, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, etc]. To take but two contemporary examples, two of my favorite writers of the past 50 years, Marilynne Robinson and Frederick Buechner, are both Protestants of the liberal American reformed tradition. 

And yet. I still feel the strong pull of a tradition that includes writers like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh. There's something that animates fiction written by Catholics, even questionable or lapsed Catholics (like Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo) that just feels special. For all their similarities, Catholicism and Protestantism do have pretty different views of the world, and those differences cannot help but come across in the art they create. To paint in a broad brush, there's more room for the unexpected in Catholic aesthetics, for the moments that only address faith in a sideways or attenuated fashion. That's important to me as someone slowly tinkering away at an unabashedly obscene satirical novel. 

The same goes for music, visual art, and (perhaps most especially) film. As someone who is especially prone to aestheticism, I have actually been on my guard to avoid romanticizing the artistic aspects of Catholicism that appeal to me (it helps that our parish church, which we attend, has very plain architecture, and music that emphasizes the worst aspects of 70's and 80's "praise hymns". Helps keep me in check). Nevertheless, it would be useless to deny the appeal of this facet of Catholicism. That's as it should be, I think, since we humans worship with our whole being, sensibilities included.

So these are some reasons I feel at home where I am. Far from the whole story, but it's what I'm willing to share for now. As I hope I have emphasized above, this change, while big, does not mean that I have turned into a basher of Protestants. Whatever problems I see in the Protestant project, it has been my home for a very long time, and I can never forget the many blessings it has brought me. And believe me, I enter the Catholic Church severely aware of its problems and limitations. But, in spite of it all, I come. I'm confident that this is as it should be.
 

The Worst Pop Songs of 2015

It's the most wonderful time of the year: the end, where culture critics spend every waking moment trying to fine tune lists of their favorite stuff from the past year. My own top 10 film list will be out later this week, but I wanted to make time to hand craft another favorite list. For the second year in a row, I am proud to present the worst pop songs of the year. I spent far too much time this year listening to top 40 radio, just so I could make this for you. A few self-imposed guidelines:

1. Only 2015 songs eligible. When in doubt, I go with the date listed by Google. (Congratulations, George Ezra! Despite your song "Budapest" boring a hole in my head - and I do mean boring - for much of this year, it has been spared the axe thanks to a technicality of dates).
2. Only mainstream songs that received top 40 radio play. This is both ideological (I don't want to beat up on the thousands of shitty but powerless bands that slopped something up on Bandcamp this year) and practical (for the sake of my sanity). It also means that, aside from the inevitable bland crossover hits, you won't find much rap, country, or "hard rock" on the list. It is what it is.
3. Only one song per artist.

Before I get to the main countdown, a few category awards for songs that couldn't quite make the final cut.

Worst Collaboration (Cross Generational Category)

Iggy Azalea and Britney Spears - Pretty Girls

What happens when the world's most irritating rapper teams up with a washed up teen idol? Apparently the answer to this question is: a half-assed, atonal tribute to popular girls that sounds like the bastard offspring of an NES game soundtrack and a Gregorian chant CD. It also features the lines "Is it true that these men are from Mars?/Is that why they be acting bizarre?", presented without comment. If there's one glimmer  of hope amidst the trash wasteland of 2015 pop music, it's that the listening public knew enough to take a hard pass on this song, which quickly faded from the rotation of my local station and vanished from the cultural conversation, leaving only traces of what might have been.

Worst Collaboration (Spitting on the Grave of a Legend Category)

Charlie Puth ft. Meghan Trainor - Marvin Gaye

All it took was seven words to ruin my life forever: "Let's Marvin Gaye and get it on". This is a triple whammy lyric. Not only does it verb a noun - a proper noun! - and coin a new, terrible euphemism for sex, it also drags poor Marvin Gaye through the mud. By all accounts the man had a troubled life, even by celebrity standards, and a tragic death, and now he has to suffer the indignity of becoming fodder for the gentle-spanking sex life of some 18 year old babyface? Worse than that, it's likely that for this upcoming generation the name Marvin Gaye will only make sense in the context of sweaty high school dances spent trying to grope their significant other to some terrible mewing duet. There was a time of innocence, before Charlie Puth's "Marvin Gaye", but that time is no more.

To be fair, there's MUCH more to hate about this song than just the opening line. Not content to sully Gaye's name, the piece also apes his style - sort of. This is dollar store Motown of the sort that Trainor - to whom I regretfully gave a pass in last year's edition of this list - trades in constantly. Here, though, we not only have to suffer through her milquetoast voice, we get the added pleasure of Puth's Boy Scouty crooning.

Key Lines: Aside from the opening assault, the song also features gems like "It's Kama Sutra Show and Tell" and "I'm like a stray without a home/I'm like a dog without a bone". Which, WINK.

Worst Euphemism for Sex (Non Marvin Gaye Desecrating Category)

DNCE - Cake by the Ocean

 2015 marked the glorious return of a pop persona absolutely no one wanted back, Joe Jonas. WIth his new outfit DNCE (fill in that first vowel yourself - I'm going with "U") Jonas managed to, well, annoy the hell out of me, for starters, and also introduce a neologism that hopefully no one adopts: "Cake by the Ocean", apparently a malapropism of "Sex on the Beach", but one ripe with disgusting possibilities.

Home of the most confection-based lyrics this side of "I Want Candy", "Cake by the Ocean" forces its metaphor at every turn. Who could forget Jonas' plaintive cry when he pleads "I'm going blind from this sweet sweet craving"? Who could fail to be moved internally (likely in the bowel region) by his description of his lover as he finds her "Licking frosting from her own hand". The true stroke of genius, though, is DNCE's decision to end the song with Jonas literally just listing out types of cake, as reality bends back on itself and parody becomes impossible: "Red velvet, vanilla, chocolate in my life/Funfetti, I'm ready, I need it every night". Poetry in motion, my friends. (Special bonus for the song including a truly obscure culture reference in the line "I'll be Didd and you be Naomi". I'm ashamed to say I had no idea what this meant; thankfully Genius was there to inform me that "Naomi Campbell and P Diddy dated briefly in 2002". Who says kids these days have no sense of history?

The Top 5(+) Worst Songs of the Year

5. X Ambassadors - Renegades

Can we all agree that the worst trend in pop music of the last 5 years has been the ascendancy of the sensitive, clapping male hipster band? With a sound like the reject pile of open mic night at the local brewpub, and the vocal prowess of a weakly brewed batch of tea, these bands get by on their "searching" lyrics and a patina of grungy DIY style.

After the repeated assaults on our senses by bands like The Lumineers and Mumford & Sons, X Ambassadors has apparently been sent to finish the job. They have all the hallmarks of a crappy SCMHB, including lyrics that aren't really lyrics ("Hey hey hey, hey hey hey" - acceptable if and only if you are a Fat Albert tribute act), lots of clapping, and an attitude of vague discontent with consumer society.

Here that coalesces into a tribute to "renegades", those crusty outsiders who protest society so much that they enact radical social change by growing beards, making their own kombucha, and writing songs that Raffi would denounce as a bit too simplistic. The best thing about this song is that the verses are only four lines long, just enough time to engage in insubstantial dreck like "Long live the pioneers/Rebels and mutineers/Go forth and have no fear/Come close and lend an ear". No, seriously, that's verse 2 of this song, not something I picked up out of a Treasure Island random phrase generator. 

The icing on the cake, though, the line that absolutely sealed this song's presence on my list, is this doozy, which happens to be verse 3: "All hail the underdogs/All hail the new kids/All hail the outlaws/The Spielbergs and Kubricks". Because nothing says outlaw more than one of the most respected directors to ever work inside the Hollywood system, one often derided (incorrectly) for his slickness and lack of depth. Kubrick I kind of get (but even he's not exactly John Cassavetes) but picking Spielberg for an example of a renegade is like saying Michael Jordan is your favorite baseball player. It's not technically a category error, but it might as well be.

4. Halsey - New Americana

For a good chunk of the year, all the songs on my main list were by male artists. While this didn't bother me in and of itself - I take much more satisfaction out of bashing my own gender than I do any other - I was a bit worried that some MRA rando would stumble on this list and start harassing me as a self-hating man. So I'm glad I discovered this truly terrible song, one that transcends gender to reach a state of universal crapitude.

The last few years have seen a rash of thinkpieces in newspapers and magazines wondering just what is wrong with those millenials, anyway? Imagine if all the specious arguments from those pieces gained sentience and decided to become a song - that's Halsey's somnambulent "New Americana". Sporting a sound that can only be described as "sub-Lorde-esque", Halsey monotones her way through this train wreck of lazy references and smug self-satisfaction.

Given how few ideas the song actually puts forward, it's kind of impressive how much banality it achieves. The chorus is a perfect example of the Mad Libs style of cultural reference that stands in for any actual substance in discussing America's rising generations: "We are the New Americana/High on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana/We are the New Americana". Nod to a contemporary news event that "proves" how "superior" the new generation is to those that have come before? Check. Reference to two of the most obvious, least interesting cultural influences on said current generation? Check.

If "New Americana" is an opening salvo in the coming inter-generational wars, then I'm turning traitor and signing up for team old.

3. Imagine Dragons - I Bet My Life

I have a long running joke with myself about how terrible Imagine Dragons is. Their usual sound reminds me of what would happen if you shoved an acapella group into the transporter from Cronenberg's The Fly. 

Artist's rendering of the aural characteristics of Imagine Dragons.

Still, what's genuinely impressive about their newest hit song, "I Bet My Life", is how different it is from the other works in their ouvre. It isn't many bands that could change gears so dramatically, from cyborg light metal to SCMHB, and still have the ensuing result be just as dull as their other work. This takes dedication, folks.

At the (shriveled, barely murmuring) heart of the song lies a dilemma. The singer spends most of his time talking about how he has let everyone down but how he had to escape home, but then pivots in the chorus to saying "So I, I bet my life/I bet my life, I bet my life on you". What's troubling here is not so much the excessive, simplistic repetition (that's to be expected), but the word "so" itself. Not to try to analyze Imagine Dragons by the laws of logic (puny restraints they long ago left behind), but "so" implies some sort of logical connection between what comes before and what follows. I think what they really want to say is "But". Even by the end of the song the singer still seems defiant ("Don't tell me that I'm wrong") but in need of affirmation. No one tell Imagine Dragons that this isn't how life works - I would not want to dry up the creative spring that gushes forth with gems like "I've told a million lies, but/Now I tell a single truth/There's you in everything I do". 

2. Omi - Cheerleader (Felix Jaehn Remix)

By sheer accident, both this year and last the number 2 slot on my list has been occupied by a song that has both reggae pretensions and an odious sense of gender politics. [Special note: I slotted in Nick Jonas' abominable "Jealous" to tie with "Cheerleader" in this spot, only to discover that it was in fact a late 2014 release. You've escaped this time, Nick Jonas, but I have my eye on you]. In defense of Omi's "Cheerleader", it does not begin to approach the levels of badness of last year's "Rude". The sort of casual objectification of women that takes place in "Cheerleader" seems to spring from Omi's "impish boyishness"; that is to say, he appears stuck in 9th grade. This is a man, after all, who sings the lines "Cause I'm the wizard of love/And I got the magic wand". HUGE WINK.

The most offensive thing about "Cheerleader" is its infectiousness, in both senses of the word. Unlike, say, the auteurs behind "Rude", Omi and his remixer at least understand how to thread together an earworm melody, but it's one that will work itself inside of you and then explode, ruining every inch of your innards with its awful bounce. This is the sort of tune that will haunt you for years, working itself out in night terrors and daytime flashbacks. I suspect it's like the monster from It Follows, and will chase you until you either kill it, or spread the disease on to someone else.

1. *TIE* Fall Out Boy - Centuries and Fall Out Boy - Uma Thurman

At this point, if you carefully read the guidelines above, you should be scratching your head. Didn't he say only one song per artist? Yes, that's true my friends, but I have a reason for my tie at the top. The philosopher Leibniz proposed something called the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles, which states that if two objects have all features in common and those cannot be distinguished from each other, then it can be assumed that they are the same. I propose a corollary: if two songs by the same artist have the exact same level of crappiness, can we really separate them in our minds?

I think that, technically speaking, I was in the target audience when Fall Out Boy became a thing back in the early 2000s. Thankfully I had my head buried in the sand of classical music at that point, and never really explored their vast catalog. Therefore, I'm not qualified to weigh in on how much these new songs betray the spirit/sell out the sound of the first iteration, etc.

What I am qualified to weigh in on is how utterly terrible both of these songs are. And whoo boy, are they bad. Let's start with "Centuries", which already seems fated to become a constant anthem on sports broadcasts for the next 10+ years (in totally unrelated news, I'm putting a ten year moratorium on my watching of sports broadcasts). On the surface it claims to be about going down in history, but I suspect it's actually about using language in such a way that it becomes meaningless. Take these lines: "Some legends are told/Some turn to dust or to gold". What, exactly, does this mean? How does a legend turn to dust?

Here are some other lines from the song, presented without comment (because, really, none needed). " Mummified my teenage dreams/No, there's nothing wrong with me/The kids are all wrong, the story's all off/Heavy metal broke my heart". Ok wait, I know I said "presented without comment", but I just wanted to note, for the record, what a shame it was that heavy metal didn't also break Pete Wentz's vocal chords. And again: "Cause I am the opposite of amnesia". But you both spring from the same source: a heavy blow to the head.

  Meanwhile, "Uma Thurman" goes its own way to the darkness, the blackness, forever, adopting a terrible faux surf rock sound to pay homage to Quentin Tarantino, his leading lady, and utter nonsense. It feels fitting to me that the final ending point of QT's rotten corpus lies not in the dozens of 90's direct to video Pulp Fiction knock offs, but in an even more embarrassing place, this bland pastiche drenched in flop sweat.

Here Fall Out Boy moves from poking holes in the logical construction of language to leaping into the stratosphere of chaos, formless and void. Take the four lines that masquerade as Verse 2: "The blood, the blood, the blood of the lamb/Is worth two lions but here I am/And I slept in last night's clothes and tomorrow's dreams/But they're not quite what they seem". I defy you to make sense of these lines. They're like the Putnam problems of contemporary pop music.

At least those lines do not seem to be packed with explicit reference to QT's collaborations with Uma Thurman. Much of the rest of the song plays like an extended in joke, with nods aplenty to Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. It's the sort of smirking, pandering garbage move that allows Fall Out Boy to signal their hipness, while actually condemning them to irrelevance. 

What the song shares in common with "Centuries" is its commitment to praising the singer's miraculous powers. Here he sings "I can move mountains/I can work a miracle, Work a miracle". And indeed, in one sense he's right. "Uma Thurman" and "Centuries", taken together, represent a transcendent badness, a sort of anti-miracle. This is Buckner boot bad. Butt fumble bad. Dan Brown bad. With talent as small as a mustard seed, Fall Out Boy has moved the mountains of contemporary pop music into the sea of their own sinkholing sound. May we all drown in the delicate, delicious seafoam that arises from the splash.

Stockholder's Quarterly Report

I thought it would be nice, for those of you who read and support my work (thanks, all two of you!) to write a little reflection on what has been a busy semester - though you wouldn't know if from the lack of posts on here. Sorry!

My main pursuits have remained academic, of course. This semester marked the halfway point of the coursework section of my PhD, meaning that I am now 1/4 of the way done with my program. Assuming I finish on time, of course, which always happens in humanities PhD programs. Always.

I had a fun but busy semester, which included my first work as a TA, learning Danish, and writing a master's paper, on top of work for three classes (not to mention life, which includes three young children -- one an infant -- plus all sorts of other goodies). All that work meant I wasn't able to give quite as much to each task as I would have liked, but things turned out alright in the end. Here's a brief summary of the four papers I wrote this semester, each of which I liked in its own way.

For my Master's Paper I had to take a previously written seminar paper and expand it from 20 to 30 pages. I took the paper I wrote for my class on Joyce's Ulysses -- about reading that novel through the lens of the Old Testament, rather than Homer's Odyssey -- and added in a theoretical framework based on the ideas of the great French critic Rene Girard. It would have been better with more polish, but it turned out alright.

For my Book History class I wrote about this odd series of books, the Childhood of Famous Americans (a stack of which I just happened to have sitting in my house from my own childhood). I tried to read them alongside the Progressive Education movement of the Early 20th Century. It was an odd, stretching experience, but I was mildly pleased with the end result.

For my class on the Literature of World War I I wrote a paper examining the idea of aristocratic comedy of old age in certain WWI-adjacent texts. I looked primarily at Joseph Roth's monumental novel The Radetzky March, but also Jean Cocteau's novella Thomas the Impostor, Robert Graves' memoir Good-bye to All That, and the Soviet comedy film Lieutenant Kije. I had a lot of fun writing this, and I thought it turned out pretty well.

Probably my favorite paper, though, came in my American Film Genres class. I looked at two films that seem pretty unconnected on the surface: Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Raoul Walsh's gangster film White Heat. I tried to argue that they represent different stages in thinking about the problems of technology, with Jesse James representing the fear that technology will inhibit freedom of movement, while White Heat moves on to consider the problems of technology that constantly monitors movement. It was a blast to write, and not half bad.

In the midst of all this academic work I managed to crank out a few other things as well. My work as Film Critic for the Columbia Daily Tribune continued apace, in what turned out to be another great year for film. My top ten list will be up just before New Year's; if I have the time, I'll do a supplement here to fill in some gaps (performers and such) that my limited word count for the paper necessitates.

I also had a big first for me this semester, actually a double first. I had my first real, legitimate book review published, and that occasion also marked my first print appearance in the pages of Books & Culture, a magazine I greatly admire. The review's been out since November in print, but due to the nature of the magazine, it has yet to go up online. It should be up in the next few weeks, and I will make sure to link to it. On top of that, I wrote an online only piece for the Movies section of Christianity Today in which I wrote some reflections on laughing at characters in documentaries. 

So that's a wrap for my fall, from a writing perspective at least. But there are some exciting coming projects that I want to tease a bit. First off, I'll be doing a book review for a really cool publication of a book by someone I really admire, so we'll see how that goes. It won't be out until the Summer, so hold your breath until then. Or don't. Probably don't.

Most exciting at the moment, though, is a duo of articles I will have coming out in January at an online only publication that I have loved for many years. I can't say more than that at the moment, but I'm excited by these pieces, and the prospect of writing more for this particular publication. 

Though I make no promises, I'm also hoping to put up a few pieces here in the next few weeks, things I don't think I can sell to anyone but want to write, regardless. On top of my film piece, look for the following this holiday season: my second annual list of the worst pop songs of the year (definitely happening); a review of a new album by a friend of mine (that will NOT be making an appearance on the worst pop songs list! (almost definitely happening); and a list of my 10 favorite symphonies (happening, assuming I can finally narrow that sucker down).

God Bless you all in this season, whatever you happen to be celebrating. Thanks for reading. As an early Christmas gift (or a very late Chanukah one), here's some culture I've consumed this fall that I've loved:

Books:

Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March. One of the great novels of the 20th century, I now firmly believe. Hilarious, heartbreaking, wistful, wry; all in equal measure. Simply stunning.

Martin Amis - The Information. Just finished this, my second novel by the acerbic Englishman. It's rip roaringly good: biting, laugh out loud funny (in a literal, not metaphoric way), and utterly insightful into the life of writers.

Muriel Spark - Memento Mori, Territorial Rights, The Bachelors, Girls of Slender Means. Spark is quickly becoming an obsession of mine, and each of these shows why. She has the wit of Wodehouse and the depth of Graham Greene. Of the four, Memento Mori is the best, an absolutely daft romp through old age and conceptions of death. But Girls of Slender Means is not far behind. So, so good. 

Films:

I won't pick any 2015 films here (you can just wait for the list like everyone else), but here are a few older films I discovered.

Leo McCarey - The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow. Somehow McCarey has been lost a bit in film history, overshadowed by other studio directors like Hawks and Capra, but he's an absolute master. Take these two films, very different from each other. The Awful Truth is a corker of a screwball comedy, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunn in top form. Make Way for Tomorrow, meanwhile, might be one of the saddest films ever made, a mortgage melodrama that clearly served as inspiration for Ozu's more heralded Tokyo Story (which you should also see, if you haven't). I always attributed the genius of one of my favorite films, Duck Soup, primarily to the Marx Brother's manic energy, but I've clearly been giving short shrift to McCarey, who directed it.

Preston Sturges - The Palm Beach Story. Speaking of screwballs, this has to be one of the best, most bizarre examples of that genre ever put on film. Crackling with energy, bursting at the seams with invention, it's Sturges on top of his game.

Bruce Robinson - How to Get Ahead in Advertising. After seeing this, I commented that it was the most me film ever. Two months on, I stand by that comment. Here's a film - part satire of modern business, part body horror - that manages to condense most of my philosophical preoccupations into one uproarious film. A must see.

Once more to you: peace! Stay safe, and do good work.