Just Want to be Free

The best, most comprehensive article I've read yet on the Tea Partiers.

University of Chicago professor Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Review of Books, argues that the Tea Party movement fuses the anarchic impulses of the Sixties counterculture with the economic individualism of the Reagan Eighties. "[The Tea Party movement] is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century," he writes. "It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that."

Fundamentally, Lilla concludes, the Tea Partiers just want to be free: "free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage 'Beware what you wish for.'"

The Sentence is a Lonely Place

A close examination of the sentence, by author Gary Lutz.

Where Are The Black Novelists?

I went to Powell's last night to see Thomas Chatterton Williams read from his new memoir, Losing My Cool. Williams is young (29) and black (like Obama, he is of demonstrable mixed race descent, and, like Obama, he identifies primarily as black). The book was billed as an attack on hip-hop by one of its own. "Williams," its product description reads, "is the first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it powerless."

No full-frontal attack, however, ever emerged in the passages Williams read. Instead, I heard repeated homages to Williams' father--an undoubtedly impressive man; he escaped the repression of Jim Crow-era Texas for a liberating adulthood of literature, eventually coming to own nearly 15,000 books--and a series of reflections on Williams own struggle to overcome the "narrowness" of his hip-hop adolescence. Interesting stuff, but I left feeling underwhelmed.

At home, however, I came across an article Williams wrote a few years back for N + 1 (a magazine I genuinely respect). Entitled "What Have We Who Are Slaves and Black To Do with Art?" (a question originally posed by W.E.B. Dubois in 1926), the piece begins as a review of the biography of author Ralph Ellison, then departs into a discussion of black culture at large. I found the piece much more compelling--and much more subtle--than what I heard at Powell's. Williams' critique seems to be less about hip-hop and more about materialism, acknowledging, as many of hip-hop's critics don't, that the chauvinism, casual violence, and overt greed so often found in rap music have their analogues (and antecedents) in mainstream white culture, as well.

The difference, William argues, is that "whereas white America has produced its William Faulkners, Frank Lloyd Wrights, [and] Ralph Waldo Emersons...to serve as hefty counterbalances to the Lindsay Lohans, Donald Trumps, and John D. Rockefellers...black America is all too skewed in the direction of P Diddy and the vulgar, without the benefit of adequate opposing forces."

More than attacking rap, Williams seems to be arguing for more black novelists, more black poets, more black painters. Which sounds good to me.

Subvert the Paradigm

"'Subvert the paradigm'; so goes the bumper sticker, which has passed now into cultural cliche. In so many ways, though, he has showed me how to do exactly that: to question received wisdom, to insist on my own angle, to view language as a playground, and a playground as bliss. He showed me how to love the words from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin."

David Shields writing about his father. The book, called The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, is worth reading in its entirety. It manages to be both perversely informative (it provides biological data for every stage of human life) and intermittently beautiful (it mingles narrative memoir in with the science).

Photograph: Torn (seasickness)

by Jennifer Lobsenz

Pure Oxygen

I recently unearthed an old collection of Jim Harrison essays that includes, "Poetry as Survival" (not to be confused with Gregory Orr's book of the same name). In this rambling, moving testimony to poetry (of Native American poet Simon Ortiz, he writes, "It is the kind of poetry that reaffirms your decision to stay alive"), Harrison admits that he sometimes "regretted the problems I've  caused my family and myself for refusing to be a poet-teacher: the shuddering economic elevator of the self-employed to whom the words boom and bust are euphemisms; the writer as farm laborer, block layer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, but still thinking of himself as poet...At the very least the life I have chosen, although it always lacked a safety net, made up for the lack with pure oxygen." 

Harrison is, of course, describing the poet's perpetual problem, which is how best to make a living? And, to teach or not to teach?

I think I agree with photographer Robert Adams when he writes that, "Part of the cruelty in George Bernard Shaw's famous aphorism--'Those who can do, and those who can't teach'--is that it fails to distinguish between those without a gift to do something else, and those without the money."

Ultimately, I suspect the decision to find a day job or a teaching job--to join the academy or the market--is often based less on innate artistic talent than simple personal preference. Some people thrive as day laborers while making great art at night. Others who find satisfaction in teaching produce great artworks, too. These are questions that seem to have few universal answers, only specificities.

Photograph: Important Chair

by Jennifer Lobsenz