Category: Reviews

Review: Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal.

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Bowes, John P. Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. (Publisher link)

Though settler colonialism has thoroughly re-shaped Native American historiography in the past twenty years, scholars still tend to view Indian removal as a discrete moment or era in American history–a tragic narrative beginning with the transition from away from the Civilization plan marked by the passage of the Indian Removal Act by Congress in 1830 and culminating in the Cherokee Trail of Tears nearly a decade later. In Land Too Good for Indians, John P. Bowes argues that removal has instead been a central fact in the history of the American republic, rooted in the intertwining contexts of European colonialism and Native politics that preceded its founding, and enduring to the present. To advance this argument, Bowes examines the history of removal in the Old Northwest–the vast territory stretching from Ohio to eastern Minnesota. While many other scholars in recent years have studied the history of this region’s Native peoples, Bowes is the first in decades to take up the topic of removal for its own sake. In addition to shedding new light on removal in the North, Bowes along the way demonstrates the value of this kind of regional monograph in shaping the broader historiographical currents of settler colonialism and removal in the United States. 

Bowes is sensitive to context in his definition of removal, arguing that the complicated process was shaped and mediated by the history of imperial violence in the region and the pervasive rhetoric of removal that accompanied this violence. The book’s two opening chapters explore these themes in depth. In the first, on violence, Bowes explores the imperial clashes that shaped the region before and immediately after the American Revolution, arguing that these conflicts contributed to a belief on the part of American settlers and policymakers that Indians were “savage agents of the British Empire” who could not abide peace [20]. This violence contributed to a rhetorical tradition that linked peace, propriety, and prosperity for Americans in the region with the removal of its Native peoples. American lawmakers responded to this rhetoric by crafting policies and embarking on a series of punishing wars that achieved removal–the subject of the book’s remaining chapters–while the history of violence and ongoing rhetoric of removal continue to leave deep scars on American Indians everywhere. Bowes closes the work with a chapter on the aftermath of removal and its legacy in memory, arguing that the “American era is a removal era.” 

By shifting the terrain, Bowes offers a powerful corrective to the historiography of removal. While the scholarship of settler colonialism has thoroughly unsettled historians’ understanding of early America, there is still much work to be done “on the ground” to understand how settler colonialism as a foundational American political philosophy shaped the nation’s culture and politics. Looking away from the South, where scholarship on the history of capitalism and slavery continues to unearth new layers of meaning in the region’s Native history, forces scholars to re-evaluate the many contexts that shaped Indian policy. That said, some of the scholarship from other regions may have bolstered the theoretical framework that gives this book its shape. Engaging Matthew Jennings’ work on the clashing “cultures of violence” that shattered Native political power in the early American Southeast, for example, might have supported the chapter on violence–especially as we learn more about the myriad connections that drew (and continue to draw) Native peoples together across the continent. Likewise, Ned Blackhawk’s unique treatment of violence as a unit of analysis suggests intriguing possibilities for the argument about violence that forms such an important part of this book. The rhetoric of removal, too, seems an extension–an important and valuable expansion, to be sure–of Francis Jennings’ “cant of conquest.” These minor historiographical quibbles neither blunt the argument nor detract from the contribution this book makes to the historiography of removal and American settler colonialism, however, and scholars of Native history, the early republic, or the Old Northwest will find this book a valuable addition to their bookshelves for years to come.

Review: That One Should Disdain Hardships

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Musonius Rufus, Gaius. That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. (Link to publisher)

Here is a thought experiment to amuse you in quarantine. How long would you stay inside for a million dollars? 

Could you last two weeks? A month? 

Now, how long would you stay inside to save a life? 

If the answer is that you would spend less time indoors to save a life than you would be willing to spend indoors for money, the first century Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus would like a word. “When we see acrobats face without concern their difficult tasks and risk their very lives in performing them,” he asked listeners, as reported in this reissue of a classic translation, “turning somersaults over upturned swords or walking ropes… all of which they do for a miserably small recompense, shall we not be ready to endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness?” If people are willing to go to endless trouble for money, notoriety, or sex, the philosopher wondered, why not for virtue? 

Maybe you will argue that saving another’s life is a lesser source of happiness than receiving a large sum of money. If that is the case, you can stop now. This book is not for you. It is probably the case that there are no books for you and you should just go shopping instead of reading this. If you agree that sacrifice for the greater good of another is worth more than sacrifice for your own fleeting pleasures, you’re already a long way to understanding what Musonius wanted his students to know. This book is for you.

It feels strange to indulge in the reading of stoic philosophy while so many of my peers, friends, and colleagues worry themselves to the core over the stock market and the novel coronavirus, but it is perhaps at times like these that the pursuit of the perfection of reason is most needed. Boethius, for example–that’s another philosopher, who lived much later than Musonius and found himself on the wrong side of a political feud in Theodoric’s court–found strength against certain, terrible death in the consolation of philosophy. Captured and brought low, weeping alone in his cell, Boaethius was surprised to see philosophy enter the room, personified as a woman. After his “nurse” Philosophy wiped away Boaethius’ tears, “I drank in the clear air of heaven,” he exclaimed, and the two conversed until the philosopher-politician’s long night of the soul was over and he could face his Ostrogothic executioner with courage. 

Our times are not as brutal as Boethius’ times, but these are the strangest days I have ever known. Most of us alive today in the United States were born in a time of extreme cynicism, and most of our institutions glorify the modern meaning of the term–that individuals are motivated primarily by self-interest, and that this is good. We were born as well under the shadow of a strange inversion of ancient cynicism. We were born in the time of greedy dogs. 

Ancient cynics argued that the pursuit of eudaimonia was the chief end of philosophy. Actually, they thought it was the primary goal of humanity. Eudaimonia is one of those complicated words that doesn’t quite have a match in English. The closest we can come to it is happiness, but eudaimonia is not just any kind of happiness. Eudaimonia is the kind of happiness that comes from living the good life, a life of virtue. To get there, ancient philosophers argued, one needed to live the right way–a philosophical life, of course–but what a philosophical life was supposed to be like changed over time. 

Before the stoics, there were the cynics. We don’t have a great match for eudaimonia in English, but we do for cynic. The word comes from the Greek term κυνικός, or kynikos, which means “dog-like.” The cynics believed that one should live free of attachments and, as a result, free of shame. One of the most famous cynics, Diogenes, lived in the market like a dog. He slept in a big jar, is supposed to have defecated wherever he pleased, and masturbated in public. He wandered around carrying a lamp in the middle of the day looking for an “honest man.” We know his type well, I think. Diogenes was a troll. Unlike our trolls, though, Diogenes would choose life over money. Our dogs are greedy. 

Diogenes and the other dogs in the market. Diogenes Sitting in his Tub by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1860)

The stoics shared Diogenes’ belief that virtue was better expressed through action than theory, but held that ethics, rather than asceticism, paved the path to virtue. This book brings together 53 lectures and fragments from one of stoicism’s lesser lights, but Cora Lutz’s 1947 translation still sparkles. Stoic ethics are on fine display here.

Modern readers are likely to find Musonius a bit conservative on one hand, but may be surprised by the topics this man of the first century CE lectured upon. He argued for the sanctity of marriage, railed against abortion, and one even finds–if read in a certain key–echoes of our contemporary debate over children’s vaccines:

“If a father who is not a physician and not experienced in matters of health or sickness should prescribe for his invalid son something which was harmful and injurious, and the son was aware of that fact, surely in not following his father’s prescription he is not disobeying and is not disobedient, is he?” 

“Must One Obey One’s Parents Under All Circumstances?”

On the other hand, Musonius argued that women should be trained in philosophy as well as men. He lectured kings on their philosophical duty. He advocated for a simple, pastoral life. He offered opinions on haircuts, beards, furniture. Philosophy in the ancient world was an all-encompassing domain, a pursuit that Musonius and his counterparts placed on a level above skilled professions, like practicing medicine or piloting a ship.

“men who enter the other professions have not had their souls corrupted beforehand and have not learned the opposite of what they are going to be taught, but the ones who start out to study philosophy have been born and reared in an environment filled with corruption and evil, and therefore turn to virtue in such a state that they need a longer and more thorough training.”

“On Training”

Ultimately, Musonius was concerned with embracing the “true good,” and it is this pursuit which resonates most clearly with me in this plague year. The groaning multitudes on Twitter, on television, on facebook, pull a rhetorical rope back and forth across an ideological divide, twisting every event, every shade of meaning, into tools to aid their political struggle. Who among them is right? I know how I would answer, but the voice of the stoic calls not so fast! “[T]ake the common man,” Musonius inveighs. “[W]hen asked whether he is stupid or intelligent, not one will confess to being stupid; or again, when asked whether he is just or unjust, not one will say that he is unjust.” He continues,

“In the same way, if one asks him whether he is temperate or intemperate, he replies at once that he is temperate; and finally, if one asks whether he is good or bad, he would say that he is good, even though he can name no teacher of virtue or mention any study or practice of virtue he has ever made. Of what, then, is this evidence if not of the existence of an innate inclination of the human soul toward goodness and nobleness, and of the presence of the seeds of virtue in each one of us?”  

“That Man is Born with an Inclination toward Virtue”

Musonius argued, two thousand years ago, that the perfection of reason was the means by which one could water and fertilize these seeds. This slim volume of lectures and fragments may not be the fertilizer you need, but it is a valuable contribution to any philosophical library. 

Discount Movie Review: Thoughtless Violence in Hell’s Kitchen

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                Legend has it that Miami Vice was born when the President of NBC, whom I (unfairly and probably incorrectly) like to imagine deep in the throes of a head-spinning fugue state around 11:30 in the morning on day 3 of a coke binge in the summer of 1984, scrawled the words “MTV Cops” on a sheet of paper and pitched it to a producer. We can imagine a similar scenario playing out in 2016 or 2017. Some producer on a flight from Los Angeles to Shenzhen to make a superhero movie pitch jolts awake from a psychedelic jet lag dream, fumbles for his iPhone, head lightly spinning from a single Lime-a-Rita before the flight, and scrawls “The Departed with women” in the Notes app. The Kitchen is born, and I sit down to watch it on a Tuesday night many months later in a suburban multiplex on the edge of the woods in North Florida.

                It’s hard to talk about The Kitchen. I think all of us gathered in the multiplex on Discount Tuesday this week were extremely aware of the trail this movie is trying to blaze. The stars are badasses, alright? They don’t take any shit. They dominate every man in the film—with the exception of fathers and Italians—and we all love that. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “this gangster movie is good, but what if the wiseguys were women?” then this is probably the movie for you. I loved that part of it. But if you value good films or human life, it probably isn’t the movie for you. Let’s talk about that.

                First, life and death. Like Stuber, which I talked about on Discount Tuesday a few weeks ago, The Kitchen kills with impunity. People die in this movie and nobody really cares. Heads are blown open; dead people are dragged on the sidewalk; bodies are dismembered and dumped in the Hudson River. Spoiler alert: Haddish and McCarthy sniffle for a moment when they kill their husbands, but the audience is discouraged from joining in these brief moments of quiet. Watching these badass women rampage is just too fun, I guess, for the filmmaker or the audience to go and turn the killers and the victims into humans. That would require empathy, right, and who wants to bother with that on Discount Tuesday in the summertime?

                The Kitchen’s failures as an example of filmmaking art follow, in part, from all of this sexy dehumanization. If films are meant to shed some light on the human experience, death should do something. Take the gangster movies that this movie clearly wants to emulate. In The Godfather, benefiting from death makes Michael Corleone into a monster. Each killing in the film’s pivotal seizure-of-power sequence severs him from his humanity and isolates him from his family until, finally, a closing door figuratively seals him within his own personal hell. In Casino, death is a grotesque ritual which so scars the fantasy landscape that the killers operate in the depths of the desert. Death is a reminder of the cruel masters back east, and a consequence of flying too high. Goodfellas treats death like a cruel joke, but the audience clearly understands that Ray Liotta’s character is both hero and heavy. He’s a ghoul.

                You may be wondering: what if all of the people who die in The Kitchen are bad guys? Does that make it OK, like Inglourious Basterds or revenge movies? It might, except The Kitchen isn’t about revenge or redemption, and the bad guys aren’t Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. The “heroes” in this film kill the “villains” in order to become the villains. With the exception of one rapist—killed by a male savior/mentor instead of one of the badass women, it’s worth pointing out, as though some villains are still too formidable for women to handle—we don’t know anything about the small-time gangsters who die in this film except that they’re standing in the way of the “heroes” racing to reach rock bottom. There is a moment near the end of the film—in the nadir of the “dark night of the soul” every screenwriting manual will instruct budding artistes to include in the script—when Melissa McCarthy says that she’s built something too great to give up. I was left wondering: does she mean the criminal enterprise the hero-villains built from theft, rackets, blood, and graft; or just the relationships they made along the way?

                It’s impossible to watch this movie without thinking about its moral and historical counterpoint: J.C. Chandor’s 2014 masterwork, A Most Violent Year. That film takes place just three years later and engages the late-seventies underworld this movie glorifies. It has everything this movie has: crooks, a gritty, desaturated New York cityscape, gangsters, a badass woman, even Hasidim. But instead of cruel, half-baked stereotypes, these are real people, living in a real place. Instead of racing to the bottom like the soulless heroines of The Kitchen, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain struggle to do the right thing in a world that rewards badness. If Donald Trump is the Bizarro Obama, an inverse agent whose entire political program is built on undoing his predecessor’s legacy, The Kitchen is the Bizarro Violent Year. Its nihilism betrays the talents of the performers and craftspeople who brought it to life.

Review: Arbor Labor Union – I Hear You

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Thomas Hobbes was responsible for much of the better-or-worse modernity we have inherited, so it is not too much of a stretch to link an offhand observation in Leviathan to a self-consciously backward-looking rock band from twenty-first century Atlanta. “No man can have in his mind a conception of the future,” he wrote, “for the future is not yet. But of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.” Perhaps this is why the band–whose new Sub Pop release I Hear You sounds like a nineties college band’s interpretation of the psychedelic era, in a good way: like Hum, without the Gen-x introspection, jamming along with dad’s old records–channeled one of Hobbes’s chief interpreters in a recent comment for SPIN. “We hold these truths to be self evident,” the quartet maintains, echoing Jefferson: “This is now music of the modern era. No genre revival. If a voice within whispers ‘Listen’ you must respond I Hear You. As did we and will continue to do.”

But that’s enough pretentiousness.**  I Hear You is a solid album, rich with promise for listeners hungry for a return to the stripped-down grit of rock instrumentation without submitting themselves to the staid genre conventions of punk or (too much of) the self-absorption of post-rock or heavier stoner bands. Arbor Labor Union intentionally refuses to break new ground with I Hear You, but that is the point. As much a response to the glimmering sheen of production that characterizes music today as an homage to psychedelia, I Hear You catalogues a yearning for the material over the digital–as in the band’s write-up about conifer trees and the singing ground, see the * below–and promises to reclaim it by eschewing the last twenty to forty years of music history.

Putting aside the question of whether the band’s effort to reclaim the past is relevant to the present, I Hear You comes as close as any record can to delivering on that promise without succumbing to retro kitsch. “Mr. Birdsong” recalls early grunge, but carefully; subsequent tracks “Hello Transmission” and “Radiant Mountain Road” build backward, linking the opener’s grunge sensibility to the less-restrained garage aesthetic of the seventies and late sixties. “I Am You” carries the union of these styles to a logical, if premature, conclusion in the middle of the album. Reminiscent simultaneously of everything since 1967 and nothing at all, “I Am You” underlines the record’s archival warrant in red ink. It works.

After cresting this psychedelic peak, the album drives gently downhill, back toward the present. Four-minute instrumental “Babel” suggests a more focused method beneath the surface and points—I hope—toward the band’s future. “Belief’d,” “Silent Oath,” and other tracks are better than filler, but the idea is already clear after cresting the peak. These tracks shine light on its musical nuances but illuminate its tidy corners, as well. “IHU,” finally, recalls the droning psychedelia of “I Am You.”

And what of the premise? Countless bands have turned to nostalgia—succumbed to what Derrida describes in a radically different context as “archive fever,” a madness for origins—in an attempt to reclaim that which was bold and bright in rock’s past, and, thus, in their own youth.  Arbor Labor Union transcends crass nostalgia on I Hear You by reinterpreting the past for the present. The result is not perfect—repetition and experimentation sometimes derail the individual tracks—but it is remarkably fresh.

** Want more? From the band’s bio page at Sub Pop: “4 Years ago, in the Peach state of Georgia, there was a mighty green Conifer tree whose limbs were wider than the smile on the sun. From this tree hung many a seed. The tree was home to so many creatures big and small. The most fun of them all was perhaps MR. BIRDSONG. Mr. Birdsong was a single white dove…” and so on, including the line: “if you press your ear to the ground you will find that it too has a sound… and it sings.”

Punk Postures: Overlooking Punk’s Real Lessons

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It didn’t take an advanced degree in the humanities for me to realize that punk rock is a crock of shit. Just a sprained ankle. It wasn’t sour grapes, either, but dedication that broke punk’s fuck-it spirit wide open for me. For years I carried a big Fender bass amp–my only amp at the time, my precious–up and down the stairs to my Dad’s apartment. Every Friday and Sunday in 9th grade when it was time to visit Dad or go back to Mom’s, I dragged the damn thing like an Acme contraption from a Looney Tunes cartoon up those fourteen steep concrete slabs, heaving and cursing the whole way. Later, when I lived in the apartment and played in bands regularly, I lugged that heavy bastard up and down the stairs every other day like a religious ritual. It never got easier, and sometimes it lugged me down instead. But it was a price I had to pay. Asking Dad for a ride, schlepping the giant heavy box, looking like a fool, tumbling down the last three steps and limping for days afterward: far from anarchy, this was work.

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Then there were the hours upon hours I had to spend practicing–an even more exhausting worship ritual than the semi-daily ritual of labor. Play the song; try the technique, again and again; pray the muscle memory remains the next day but keep trying anyway; do it over and over.

All of that work is why I can relate to the gracefully aging punks in The Guardian’s recent where-are-they-now profile, “Never Mind the Bus Pass.” 55 year-old former Alien Kulture bassist Aussaf Abbas knew, for example, that punk rock couldn’t pay the bills, so he went to work as an investment banker and has since “met prime ministers and finance ministers and CEOs of major corporations.” “This was unbelievable for an immigrant kid,” he insists, “who grew up in Brixton in a single-parent family.” One-time Au Pairs singer and guitarist Lesley Woods took a similar path to affluence. “After the band folded,” she explains, “my brain was quite scrambled and I needed to get my mind back, so I thought I’d do something really difficult and started studying law.” While she still “mucks about” with music, her work as a barrister is so intense that she only has time for a few recordings and “the odd performance.” Others in the profile tell similar stories.

The standard punk posture insists, outraged: Abbas, Woods, and their peers are sellouts, shills for neoliberalism. But for most people, music offers work—vast, endless vistas of work—with little more than a token spiritual reward at the end of the day. Investment banking may not be the best solution to the problem, but neither is Higher Education, which attracts an army of refugees from dive bars and touring vans every year. Everyone must negotiate neoliberalism on its own terms, and what choice does anyone have? Only those privileged with money or parents with money, a great deal of luck, or generous friends really have a chance to earn anything more than a few dollars and a few Facebook followers at the end of night. Most need all of these simply to live as a musician. Punk’s outrage and anarchy relies on an ocean of privilege, then. For the innumerable devotees whose parents and friends can’t or won’t support years of work without reward, punk rock’s promise of DIY catharsis is merely palliative. The truth beneath the posture gleams like a shiny nickel reflecting the inverse of the American dream: work all you want, kid. It ain’t enough.

To make matters worse, the posture has only ever been clear in retrospect. In an extraordinary piece in The Baffler last winter, “Punk Crock,” Eugenia Williamson wonders: “As punk pushes into its fourth decade, its rules, aesthetic, and parameters are still murky at best. Does punk retain any meaning at all?” Despite the claims of passionate devotees–like the Noisey Facebook commenter she quotes who argues that “the complex ideology of punk goes way beyond the genre of music–it’s also about not giving a fuck and doing exactly what is authentic to you”–punk is hidebound by an inherent logic based on fictions of lost purity and dying scenes. Beneath the aesthetic, her article suggests, punk was never really there. Its earliest adherents lived like the coke-fueled arena rockers they despised; their descendants have “not only voted for Rand Paul but [are] raising children in a McMansion funded by festival dates.” So much for anarchy.

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My own decade-long encounter with cathartic do-it-yourself anarchy was far from revolutionary. I repeated the upstairs and downstairs rituals of labor and repetition later, for example, when I was still a dropout working at Walmart by day and playing the bass by night in a band that pretended it could barely bash out the chords to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That had been the appeal of the band, actually, when I tried out: their unapologetic badness. They had posted a to-hell-with-it ad for a bassist on Craigslist citing their inability to play but their desire to try anyway. I replied. Everyone was better than they had claimed, of course. They had performed the rituals too. So within a week I was lugging another huge bass amp up three flights of stairs twice a week to the drummer’s apartment across the street from the University of Florida. We called ourselves “Surprise Blowjob”–SBJ for short–and played a few shows over the course of a weltering Gainesville summer before going our separate ways. We joked about “punx” with one breath and rented a practice space with the other; paid for recording with one hand (well, one of us did: Thank you, Ryan, if you read this) and burned our own CDs with the other. We booked shows when we weren’t practicing; drove to Jacksonville to play for 15 people. I designed stickers and merch; stayed up a few nights after work to design a website. And then it was over. A new semester, job hunts, and grad school were looming for the students in the band. They left. Other bands were calling me. Like the individual rituals of labor and repetition, the group ritual of band-building has to be repeated like a rosary. Friends and strangers come and go from the devotee’s life.

SBJ_sticker_page

I packed and unpacked, carried and setup my amplifiers, my gig bags, my cables and pedals in and out, up and down, through every change. I understand now that these rituals of individual dedication and group support were the only authenticity punk rock could offer. Everything else is just an argument about aesthetics.

Pretend–Tapestry’d Life

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At some point in your life, someone will try to tell you that noodling jam bands, wispy art rock, odd time signatures, and unstructured song-writing are more rewarding—in their intelligence, you see—than the more pedestrian pleasures for which most of us line up at the trough, week after week, to consume like barnyard animals. And sometimes they will be right.

I’ll give you an example. There is a moment in the middle of “Epitaph” on King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King that is sublimely transcendent. Under the right circumstances, it can carry you away, making apparent all of the pain and promise of the sixties in one brief chord progression. I have been moved by “Epitaph” and inspired by the entire album since a too-young age, probably twenty years. But such moments are ephemeral. In the Court of the Crimson King marked the one moment when King Crimson was a coherent band, rich with ideas; 1969 was one of only a few moments when “art” rock could move into the “real” world, “Epitaph” one of only a few songs capable of translation in that world.

Pretend’s Tapestry’d Life is nothing like In the Court of the Crimson King, but it comes close at times. It offers no era-defining moments or spine-tingling chord progressions, to be sure. But it’s not bad, either. The opening track “Wrapped in Fantasy” is cerebral and interesting, firmly planted upon the ground–unlike most other songs of its kind. All of songs are similarly grounded, and all are rich with ideas. “Patternless Tide” is a wandering yet promising reflection, but it kicks off a long series of introspections during which the band points in countless interesting directions but seems to complete few ideas. “Doors” is a reward for the patient listener in the middle of this long experiment, but its rewards, too, are ephemeral and easily forgotten. Tapestry’d Life is heavy with promise but its rewards are sparse.

The problem lies in the genre itself. The boundaries of ideas are rarely so apparent in the pulpy paperback music most of us enjoy. In pointing to new ideas, Pretend–like most “post-” whatever bands–also point squarely at their own inability to realize them. The result sounds like a band straining against its own limitations as it attempts to deal with complexity—which does not make for a satisfying rock album, but is not without its rewards.

You can pick up the album here.

On the American Road: Hotels of North America

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Like many young Americans longing for autonomy, I was once transformed by On The Road. It is a book rich with adolescent delights: an uneasy balance between navel-gazing and catharsis, a few tantalizing moments of prurience, a restless tapping of the foot, a bantam pulse. It was a book I could wear like a jacket or ponder closer to the skin, and I never looked at the highway, the bus station, or the dented stainless sheathing of passenger rail cars with quite the same gaze ever again. The road cuts through the heart of my imagination.

As important as On The Road has been to my life, though, I have only read it twice. The first time, I was somewhere in the middle of junior high, fumbling my way through a dog-eared Viking critical edition. I remember the used paperback well—unlike my first dog, oddly, or my first beer. It was spare: a deep and stolid yellow, embellished merely with a line drawing of a viking ship in an oval frame at the bottom of the cover that could have equally been the sly Ulysses’s trireme plying the wine-dark sea. I read it sitting on the curb waiting for the school bus or lying on the twin bed in my bedroom, the neighbors just fifteen feet away—their whole lives separate from mine in our whimsically-named subdivision, equal but separate in a way that Kerouac and his cast of intrepid boddhisatvas would have misunderstood as thoroughly as I misunderstood them.

The second time I read Kerouac he left a deeper mark. I was nineteen and working in a door factory, going through the first period of serious reading in my adult life. It was a mass market paperback for a letterpress life. I woke up in that year or two at 4:30 AM to catch an early ride with my friend and his dad in the dark, enclosed back of his pest control truck; onto a bus on the westside of Jacksonville, Florida at 6:10 for a forty minute ride downtown, weaving through the suburban warrens of the New South city; off into the cold morning and through the mostly-abandoned streets on foot to the warehouse on Harper Street by 7:00. I remember one morning in particular when I read and walked at the same time, my eyes dodging back and forth from the page to the road as I weaved in and out of the outstretched ends of trailers backed up to loading docks in order to avoid traffic. I slipped the book into a back pocket as I climbed the stanchions of a flat railroad car stopped on the tracks. Up and over and down again, onward to work breathing steam in the riverine cold with the book in one hand and a time clock in the other. Hemmed in by necessity and bad decisions, however, I could only mimic Kerouac’s perambulations in my morning walks. I could not leave it all behind. I did not have the imagination.

Similar to my experiences reading Kerouac, narrator Reginald Morse’s life in Hotels of North America reveals its meanings through the places in which it unfolds. Morse is not a traditional narrator, or a reliable one. Instead, he reveals his story piece-by-piece, in memory, through hotel reviews on the fictional travel website rateyourlodging.com. Morse’s story is as tragic as it is germane to the first decades of our century. From brittle affluence in investment banking and a salacious love affair through pathetic ruin to a sort of rebirth through nomadic scamming and motivational speaking, Morse’s online screeds track the tensions underlining the end of the American century and mimic the twilight howls of the white American male. Like myself as a young man riding the bus and climbing over railroad cars, Morse is not in control of his own growth. The hotels in which he lives and the people and ghosts and regrets with which he shares them mark his experience in ways that Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx would have scorned.

Morse is in control of his story, however, in ways that Sal, Dean, and Carlo—stuck behind the pale glow of the headlights and between the yellow and white lines of the highway—could only envy. Morse offers his reflections in a seemingly random order: jumping from year to year and place to place. This is a form of power for Morse, who writes like an erudite and professional reviewer instead of a motivated amateur. But the flaws in this construction rapidly make themselves known. Morse’s language plods at times like a walrus on the beach; his faux professionalism quickly gives way to bold explanations of scams and crude sex acts. Though his story unfolds through a slipshod collection of reflections rather than a linear narrative–like Jay Gatsby glancing into some of his rooms as his own story begins to spiral out of control—Morse is as compelled to recount his failures as his readers are to arrange them into some sort of order. These are the kinds of spaces and identities the Internet encourages us to create: grand palaces of erudition or experience, beauty, and worldliness that are nonetheless bound to ourselves and limited by our own weaknesses.

It is unfair to compare Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America to On The Road, but one cannot read Moody’s tragicomic portrait of postmodern isolation without indirectly reading Kerouac. Roads and margins, isolation and self-absorption run through the heart of both. But where Kerouac’s protagonist Sal Paradise is firmly in control of the narrative–a uniquely postwar optimism that could find the shining possibilities even In vagrant idol-worship–Moody’s protagonist Reginald Morse reflects an inverse experience. Presented with the ability to tell his own story through online reviews, he is instead locked into the trajectory of his own failure. Sal Paradise could turn the relentless order of the road into an order of the self; Reginald Morse uses the chaotic tools of the digital age to offer an indefinite and unreliable self-portrait. Both are powerfully evocative of their times. Sometimes Hotels of North America is underwhelming in its yearning for accessibility, yes; and George Saunders is undeniably the master of this kind of individualistic prose, indeed. Yet this is a small novel with large ambitions. It achieves almost all of them.

Buy Hotels of North America or find it in your local library here.

Punk Rock Hometowns: The Red Owls — Do You Feel Any Better? EP

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The Red Owls' Do You Feel Any Better EP Cover

“Everywhere, New York” is not a hometown. Neither is “South Florida” or “Orange County,” “The Research Triangle,” nor any of the other city limit-defying amalgams of suburbs, strip malls, and asphalt that most of the Americans I know call home. We live in less durable mental categories: states of mind; places connected by experience; places that feel alike.

Punk rock is one such place. More than just sound, punk rock is a network of sensibility. It is connected by performances and commodities, structured by claims on legitimacy. Its boundaries, like it or not, are as well-defined as those between zip codes: shows, vans, DIY, scenes.

The Red Owls claim “Everywhere, New York” as a hometown. I buy it. The lines connecting The Red Owls to other New York bands on the punk roadmap are too dark to ignore. Fans of Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, and Bayside—especially Bayside—will appreciate the yin and yang balance of polished veneer and rough-hewn materials The Red Owls strike on Do You Feel Any Better?, while those troubled by the mainstream accessibility of these bands can take comfort in The Red Owls’ DIY ethic and upcoming appearance at The Fest in Gainesville.

At the same time, “Everywhere, New York” seems to miss the boundless appeal of this music. The opening track, “Bad Advice,” would be equally at home on EPs by bands from more tropical climes. The connection with Paper + Plastick Records (and Less Than Jake) founder Vinnie Fiorello is apparent on this and the third track, “Party Lines.” Both are as much expressive of the irreverent spirit of Gainesville chill-punk as the album’s other two tracks, “Do You Feel Any Better?” and “Chaser,” are of the rust belt’s anxious energy.

Better than any recent release, Do You Feel Any Better? outlines the contours of punk rock. Members John Collura, Sean-Paul Pillsworth, and Justin Meyer—currently or formerly of The Ataris, Nightmares for a Week, and Anadivine—strive to “[add] a healthy dose of new life to this nostalgic genre.” While they point in new directions on this EP, only time and a full-length release will tell whether they follow the road forward. As it stands, Do You Feel Any Better? feels like the hometown I know and love.

Buy the EP here.

Straight Outta Compton and the Historian’s Dilemma

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“Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.” – Bertolt Brecht

Straight_Outta_Compton_poster

What is it that historians do?

On the one hand, they must tell The Truth. This means reading, watching, listening to, tasting, smelling, or touching every bit of evidence they can find, weighing them against each other, and then putting it all together into a faithful account of the past. Which is pretty much what they do. But on the other hand, because they are humans, living in this noisy and contentious world, historians always have some axe to grind. History means something, they maintain. And besides killing readers with boredom, history without meaning would be useless. It would just be a list of things that happened. Everything that ever happened. So historians have to make the past mean something, too. This means throwing some evidence out, maybe pointing at other evidence that might not seem important and saying, “there it is! The Truth!” Figuring out what to keep and what to ignore is a real dilemma. Nobody will agree. This, in short, is the historian’s dilemma: making choices without appearing to make choices. Making claims about today by appearing to make claims about the past.

This is contentious stuff. Most academic historians have long taken postmodern subjectivity for granted, attempting in turn to do the least harm by pulling into their work as much evidence as possible, from as many opposing voices as possible. Their readers, however, are impatient with both the problem and the solution. Most readers tend to see the past as immutable—as a story just waiting to be uncovered—and the documents required to tell that immutable story as mostly self-evident. Rather than complications of interpretation, readers see challenges of comprehension and accessibility. Knowing where to find documents and how to translate their archaic prose is challenging enough, they claim. With this arcane knowledge, historians should have no problem interpreting what they find and telling The Truth. Efforts on the part of academic historians to incorporate alternative sources, to include an abundance of notes, or to challenge their readers with theory are routinely derided. Amazon reviewers often savage academic books for being too detailed, too unsure—too boring—while school boards argue that they are too interesting, too provocative or heterodox for students. What is a historian to do?

It is clear that Director F. Gary Gray and the producers of Straight Outta Compton faced the historian’s dilemma. Compton is a film obsessed with its own history, as though viewers are listening to a deep conversation between Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and their own reflections in the bathroom mirror about where they’ve been and how they got there. Gray offers is an exceptional rendering of those conversations, replete with outstanding performances from a fairly green cast—anchored by Paul Giamatti—and a workmanlike attention to detail.

Too bad it doesn’t have much to say.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time—the late 1980s, a time increasingly shrouded in pre-Golden Age mystique—it was rough in the Los Angeles ghetto. A group of young black men were making their way through the hard times, honing their talents (or courting an early grave) in obscurity despite the efforts of the police state to break their will or end their life. One day, the group of young men decided to do something about their obscurity and formed a rap group. It wasn’t very difficult to record a hit single, but it was even easier to find a manager who could sell their talents to a record label after they did. They were immediately successful. A bunch of rock-star stuff happened, the group of young men got into a fight, and then the rap group split up. Two of them were immediately successful after the breakup; one wasn’t. A bunch of other stuff happened. The now-unsuccessful one ended his relationship with the agent and then, right before staging a comeback with the still-successful young men who used to be part of his rap group, succumbed to AIDS. The other young men cry and reflect.

That’s pretty much it. One does not get an honest sense of the struggle involved when obscure young black men build a career out of sheer talent and provocation from the very heart of the American nightworld. Police violence, for example—such a prominent part of the film’s first two acts and in the real-life NWA’s meteoric rise to fame—simply disappears in the third act. Gone. Manager Jerry Heller’s treachery is only vaguely outlined. Less vague, perhaps, are the hints of cultural and social tension between the fairly affluent Heller and the rappers he represents, but not much. Dr. Dre and Ice Cube’s success is not vague at all, however. Both easily sidestep the belligerent malfeasance of entertainment capital: Ice Cube by obliterating obstacles with a baseball bat, Dre by rolling over them with a steam-powered Suge Knight. Eazy-E alone struggles with the system. One-by-one, the fragments of late twentieth-century failure pile on E’s shoulders: friendships broken by bounced checks, a heartbreaking series of moves back toward the underclass, and, finally, the cruel denouement offered by HIV and AIDS. These are Eazy-E’s problems, though, and don’t belong to his friends or the viewer. None but E are complicit in his fall from grace.*

These are tragically missed opportunities. Unfortunately, Straight Outta Compton takes the easy way out of the historian’s dilemma: mere narrative; evidence without meaning. The narrative itself is solid and entertaining, absolutely, but the whole is dissatisfying. By refusing to answer or even pose deeper questions of meaning, the filmmakers leave it up to viewers to formulate their own questions and answers. Is this just another touchstone of American consensus, another tired affirmation that we, too, can be successful if we are talented and hard-working enough to overcome adversity? Perhaps. Or is there something else here, some covert meaning in the filmmakers’ refusal to pose these questions? Maybe that too. Eazy-E is a remarkably tragic figure, after all.

But then again, maybe not. Ultimately, one must ask: what is the argument? I don’t know. Straight Outta Compton doesn’t have the answers.

* And maybe Jerry Heller, but, again, the details are hazy.

Go Set a Watchman and the Moral Economy of Tumblr

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go-set-a-watchman-US

“It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading.” – Arlette Farge, Le Gout de l’Archive

This is about Go Set a Watchman, but it is also about the internet. That the two should be somehow married the way they are is tragic, but Watchman was born six decades late: in a time when the demands of fast relevance, immediate content, and quick messages have supplanted the mechanical assurance of newscopy or the tortoise-paced calculation of magazine reviewers for which it was intended. So the internet is what we have. Let’s start there.

The internet isn’t a thing, of course, apart from time. It is in time, of it. And in case you haven’t noticed, the internet right now is obsessed with reactions. MFW and TFW gifs pass over Tumblr like inflationary currency. Instead of Washingtons and Franklins, Minions and ogres and Nickelodeon stars from the Nineties rule over the vast fiefdom with a nuanced vocabulary of eye rolls, blank stares, facepalms, and raised eyebrows. Half-a-million people subscribe to /r/reactiongifs on reddit, upvoting everything from politics and culture to “MRW when I fart and enjoy the fragrance.” Youtube is a hotbed of reactions as well. 9,000,000 people have watched children react to rotary phones. 7,000,000 have watched kids listen to the Beatles. And more than 4,000,000 people—including me—have watched 7 year-old Evan try to explain a typewriter in “KIDS REACT TO TYPEWRITERS.” “It is basically like a computer,” Even tells us confidently, “all except it doesn’t have a screen. All you do is type out messages.”

This summer, the part of the internet that deals with books sounded a lot like Evan trying to explain the typewriter. “It is basically like a sequel,” the bloggers and freelance reviewers told us about Go Set a Watchman. I’m paraphrasing here. “Except Harper Lee wrote it first, before Mockingbird. And it feels icky.” This kind of treatment works well for superhero movies and video games—which, by sheer dint of numbers, are the most meaningful cultural products for most Americans right now—but it just doesn’t work for a novel written in the 1950s. Yet, for months before Watchman’s release, the biblionet rocked back and forth between anticipation and shock. Was Harper Lee exploited? Is Atticus Finch really a klansman? Is there a third manuscript out there somewhere? A producer grabbing the film rights to a Hobbit-esque movie trilogy for the NPR crowd? Driven by this never-ending hype train, Go Set a Watchman set sales records at HarperCollins.

But To Kill a Mockingbird is not a franchise. Go Set a Watchman is not an installment in that franchise. Atticus Finch is not a superhero.  Nor is Watchman a rejected draft. To treat it as such is absurd. Watchman is a completely different book.

It is brilliant. Where Mockingbird offered readers the kind of complications they could understand—bad racists, wrongfully accused innocents, children coming-of-age—Go Set a Watchman offers the more intractable frustrations of adulthood: good people who happen to be bigots, the guilt we feel by association, and the inevitable crush of aging. To Kill a Mockingbird was the book that the United States needed in 1960. As Americans struggle with many of 1960’s problems in 2015, Go Set a Watchman may be the book we need now. Lee’s meditation on coming to terms with the things we cannot change vibrates with the kind of life, humor, and wit that the square-shouldered Atticus Finch of Mockingbird might not understand. More importantly, it points readers toward the kind of empathy he would understand. Good people say and do and believe disagreeable things. We should not condone them—Scout Finch does not—but we cannot always write them out of our lives, either. The urgency of this message in a time when Americans seem violently divided yet again suggests that Watchman’s message is every bit as important as that of Mockingbird.

It is just more frustrating. Like Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman challenges us. Some booksellers have offered “refunds and apologies” to customers, advising, “we suggest you view this work as an academic insight rather than as a nice summer novel.” Parents in Colorado changed their son’s name from Atticus to Lucas after reading the book. “When the new book came out,” they told a reporter from People, “we just felt like, this does not at all encompass the values that we want for our son to have and know.” Even the editors of the Chicago Tribune were challenged. “We can’t reconcile the change either,” they wrote, “as much as this elder Atticus might illustrate the way people’s views ebb and flow through life…. With so many real-life characters tumbling off their pedestals (Bill Cosby comes to mind), why knock such a noble literary hero off his?” And so on. Indeed, the merest whisper of Atticus Finch being anything other than what he was in the eyes of his six-year-old child in the depression is enough to send adults in the twenty-first century stomping straight for the exits.

Go Set a Watchman is authentically challenging. For readers trained to read the frugal moral economies and straightforward story lines of franchises, the split-second impressions of reaction gifs, or the predictable binaries of the internet’s never-ending culture wars, Harper Lee’s mid-fifties manuscript is perplexing. “Unlearning” the simple—and total—demands of hashtag morality can clear the confusion. Harper Lee’s difficult questions call for nothing less. Thankfully, her prose makes it easy.