The Twenties had their roar. The Thirties, the Depression. The Forties, a war.
The Fifties was the Age of Anxiety and the bomb. In the Sixties, the times were a’changing.
The Seventies were the decade of bad clothes and lying politicians.
The Eighties were all about the spread of consumerism and the end of the Cold War.
The halcyon Nineties was a decade of blind luck where about the only thing we had to focus our attention on were Big Bill’s lewd indiscretions in the Oval Office and the infamous blue dress.
So, what has this past decade, which will come to end in a quick month and half, been all about? What shorthand name will historians use to refer to it as?
I propose the 20th Century Decade.
There was a roar, that of those planes on Sept. 11.
We’ve experienced a near depression with the crash of the housing market, banks and auto companies. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do not come close to the enormity of World War II, but it’s also been a decade of overseas conflict.
We’ve had no shortage of anxieties and the election of the first black president is definitely a sign times have a’changed.
The widespread popularity of Crocs is evidence we can still have bad taste in the style department and politicians continue to lie.
Consumerism now runs rampant not just in America, but all over the world.
John Edwards, Ted Stevens and Mark Sanford have shown America that the lascivious behavior of politicians will never seem to end.
In short, the Two Thousands seem to encapsulate a lot of the characteristics of the whole of the 20th Century in ten short years.
The decade began with the Y2K debacle, where all of us waited for the collapse of the mainframes with doomsday-like fascination. Those anxieties were misplaced. We were worried about our digital creations when we should have been worried about Islamic fundamentalists plotting destruction in caves halfway around the world.
Sept. 11 knocked us out of the dreamy days of the Nineties, creating a new reality, thrusting us back into the world we’d been ignoring since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
We know the rest: the Bush Administration, taking down the Taliban, the hunt for Osama, the dubious invasion of Iraq, the lack of weapons of mass destruction, the toppling of Sadam’s statue in Baghdad. The wars now seem endless, interminable. The debate about whether or not it’s all just for oil make it even more complex.
Oil brings us to global warming, or what the conservatives like to call climate change. Bush wasn’t sold on its “truthiness.” Al Gore went up and down on his moving platform in “An Inconvenient Truth” and won a Nobel Prize.
As if this wasn’t enough to worry about, the banks collapsed and were bailed out. Companies like General Motors, who once seemed indomitable, were forced to ask for the same favor.
There were no lack of things to worry about in the Naughty Aughties. Since the Age of Anxiety has already been used up, I also propose the years from 2000 to 2010 should be called The Age of Two Thousand Anxieties.
Hopefully, the new decade will also usher in the use of calling the year Twenty Ten. Enough of the Two Thousand and whatever stuff.
Back in the strange old days of the 20th Century, we never had to utter such a mouthful. Save yourself the two syllables.
This will save us some time in conversation. We’ll need that time in the next decade to deal with even more mounting problems as realities outpace the imagination and history moves at an even more berserk pace.
Soon, we’ll be packing in more than a centuries-worth of turmoil into a decade.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
‘No thought so burdensome you can’t walk away from it’
When something’s wrong, there’s no thought or feeling you can’t walk away from.
Literally. One foot in front of the other, just like grandpa used to do it.
In Chicago, I’d strap on my hiking boots, and would walk all the way from Bucktown to the Hair Wash (The Harold Washington Library) downtown and back, about an eight-mile round trip haul. I also spent hours roaming along Lake Michigan.
Now, I’m on the other side of the lake, but doing just the same thing in Manistee. A lot of the walking I’ve done so far has been in the woods with a shotgun. But I’ve also done my fair share in town. It’s the only way to explore a new place. You can’t really see anything when you’re driving, can’t take in the full details of the landscape.
It forces you to slow down and think at the speed of life.
It’s also a powerful remedy for what ails you. When I’m ambulatory, whatever is clogging up my brain pipes is flushed. Whatever foul shroud hangs upon my head is lifted.
Kierkergaard agrees.
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one can not walk away from it.”
These are wise words to live by.
Just yesterday I walked 45 minutes down to the First Avenue beach in a winding way through neighborhoods I’m still trying to learn. The large old homes west of Maple are humbling to walk past. They are living history of Manistee’s lumber days, or so I read on the plaques.
Down at the beach, I like to poke around on the pier, smell the air, beat my chest, that sort of thing. On my way back, I take the Riverwalk, which is a wonderful amenity for the community. Being next to water is like being under the looming old lumber mansions: the elements that make up the town have the chance to seep in.
I could have gotten none of this rolling around in a car.
On the Riverwalk, I encountered a man who seems to share my enthusiasm for rambling. He is in his 60s. The autumn sun shone off his bald pate. He was coming toward me on the wooden walkway, so I moved over to the side. The man greeted me with a wide smile.
“Great day for a walk!” he said.
I agreed with him so much that I refrained from telling him that his little dog, who scooted and darted around in front of him, was not allowed on the Riverwalk.
“Sure is,” I said.
Still, I say walking shouldn’t be done solely for exercise. Doing anything just to get exercise — jogging, strapping yourself to some machine in a sweaty gym or using a ThighMaster — is kind of corny.
But let’s face it, the health nuts have taken over. They’ve invaded our minds and have made us petrified. You’re going to die if you don’t take vitamins, only eat whole grains and exercise daily in your anaerobic heart rate range.
Well, you’re going to die no matter what. Ask Kierkergaard. Dying was one problem he couldn’t walk away from.
So our culture is a contradiction. Television commercials flash cheeseburgers the size of your head (or bigger, depending on the size of your television), tauntingly rotating them around before your hungry eyes.
The next edit then reveals some gaunt looking actor or actress who looks like they’ve been living on paste. If films and television are a projection of our deepest dreams and desires flung up on a screen or lit up in a tube, then we all want to mow through mounds of cheeseburgers and pizzas and yet still looking dashingly svelte.
Ah, but now I’m getting all stirred up and ready to argue, make claims, posit theories and support them. How exhausting.
I think I’ll take a stroll.
Literally. One foot in front of the other, just like grandpa used to do it.
In Chicago, I’d strap on my hiking boots, and would walk all the way from Bucktown to the Hair Wash (The Harold Washington Library) downtown and back, about an eight-mile round trip haul. I also spent hours roaming along Lake Michigan.
Now, I’m on the other side of the lake, but doing just the same thing in Manistee. A lot of the walking I’ve done so far has been in the woods with a shotgun. But I’ve also done my fair share in town. It’s the only way to explore a new place. You can’t really see anything when you’re driving, can’t take in the full details of the landscape.
It forces you to slow down and think at the speed of life.
It’s also a powerful remedy for what ails you. When I’m ambulatory, whatever is clogging up my brain pipes is flushed. Whatever foul shroud hangs upon my head is lifted.
Kierkergaard agrees.
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one can not walk away from it.”
These are wise words to live by.
Just yesterday I walked 45 minutes down to the First Avenue beach in a winding way through neighborhoods I’m still trying to learn. The large old homes west of Maple are humbling to walk past. They are living history of Manistee’s lumber days, or so I read on the plaques.
Down at the beach, I like to poke around on the pier, smell the air, beat my chest, that sort of thing. On my way back, I take the Riverwalk, which is a wonderful amenity for the community. Being next to water is like being under the looming old lumber mansions: the elements that make up the town have the chance to seep in.
I could have gotten none of this rolling around in a car.
On the Riverwalk, I encountered a man who seems to share my enthusiasm for rambling. He is in his 60s. The autumn sun shone off his bald pate. He was coming toward me on the wooden walkway, so I moved over to the side. The man greeted me with a wide smile.
“Great day for a walk!” he said.
I agreed with him so much that I refrained from telling him that his little dog, who scooted and darted around in front of him, was not allowed on the Riverwalk.
“Sure is,” I said.
Still, I say walking shouldn’t be done solely for exercise. Doing anything just to get exercise — jogging, strapping yourself to some machine in a sweaty gym or using a ThighMaster — is kind of corny.
But let’s face it, the health nuts have taken over. They’ve invaded our minds and have made us petrified. You’re going to die if you don’t take vitamins, only eat whole grains and exercise daily in your anaerobic heart rate range.
Well, you’re going to die no matter what. Ask Kierkergaard. Dying was one problem he couldn’t walk away from.
So our culture is a contradiction. Television commercials flash cheeseburgers the size of your head (or bigger, depending on the size of your television), tauntingly rotating them around before your hungry eyes.
The next edit then reveals some gaunt looking actor or actress who looks like they’ve been living on paste. If films and television are a projection of our deepest dreams and desires flung up on a screen or lit up in a tube, then we all want to mow through mounds of cheeseburgers and pizzas and yet still looking dashingly svelte.
Ah, but now I’m getting all stirred up and ready to argue, make claims, posit theories and support them. How exhausting.
I think I’ll take a stroll.
The fight against youth violence: Friend’s Halloween party death reminds us to walk away
You see people at their worst working the police beat.
Going through the weekly police reports, I’m submerged in a world of drunk driving, drugs, domestic abuse and disorderly conducts. And just like every other community, Manistee has its share of violent offenders.
Sometimes they are young people drinking and fighting. Blowing off steam, you say. No big deal, you think. A bar fight’s just a bar fight. Not worthy of our attention.
Well, let me introduce you to my childhood friend, Jay Buck, who died at a Halloween party in Atlanta in 2000 after getting into just such a fight.
I can’t help but think of him with sadness this time of year.
Jay was a slightly-crazed prankster and troublemaker who had been a semi-pro skateboarder since the age of 10. He had moved down to Atlanta from the suburban Detroit neighborhood we’d grown up in when we were in our early 20s so he could skate year-round.
We’d been close friends since we were 9 years old, when I moved two blocks away from him.
He was punk in elementary school, wearing black combat boots that came up to his knees, ripped up T-shirts and a jean jacket with the sleeves torn off and band names like DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles), Minor Threat and The Misfits hand-scrawled on it. He had a tiny, buzzed head and huge ears and rode a skateboard to school every day. For an art project, he even made a life-sized punk rock Gumby complete with a Mohawk who sat perched in his bedroom for years afterward.
I was moving to L-Town (or Livonia) from Bay City, where I was born, and I had never met someone like Jay. He didn’t seem to have many friends at school because of his non-traditional appearance. But I was intrigued.
I was the new kid in the fourth grade and Jay was the first friend I made. We could be alienated together.
Over the next decade, we went through all the rites of passages friends go through in boyhood: first cigarettes, first kisses with girls and first cars.
Admittedly, we got into trouble together more than a few times, but making mistakes is part of boyhood, too.
Though we were friends, I got into my first, and one of my only, fights with Jay, though we were back to being pals a week later.
It was on the playground at recess, arising over a dispute in a kickball game. I told him he needed to take off his combat boots, that they were unfair because he could crank the red, rubber ball father than the rest of us with them. He disagreed. So there we were, ‘rassling, punching and kicking under a tree that served as second base until a lunch lady broke us up.
I didn’t know it then, but I was fighting someone who would die fighting.
I was still in college in Detroit when Jay moved to Atlanta. I got the phone call that Halloween just like many others got the call. Over the years, Jay’s frantic wildness had earned him legendary status at skate parks, parties and punk rock shows all over Michigan.
“Jay Buck was in a fight,” was what we all heard. “He’s on life support.”
The swelling around his brain was just too much; his family had to pull the plug a few days later. The next week, a motley pierced and tattooed bunch filled an L-Town church for his funeral. I was a pallbearer. He was 22 years old. It was a closed casket.
What had happened was this: Jay and his buddies in Atlanta had gone to a costume party for Halloween. Jay was dressed as Dirk Diggler from the then-popular movie “Boogie Nights.” One of his friends had been hit by a car a few weeks before and his head was still bandaged up.
Some fellow named Jimmy Skaggs started making fun of Jay’s friend’s bandages. Unlike me, Jay was no stranger to brawls in the years after our petty skirmish on the playground.
He stood up for his friend. Words were said; a fight ensued.
It only took one roundhouse kick to the head from Skaggs to send Jay to the ground, where the force of the impact to his head rendered him unconscious.
He never woke up.
Skaggs is still in prison, but I can’t blame just him. We have a culture where men think fighting one another is a display of courage and bravery. It is not. It can only lead to a preventable death, not an honorable one.
Now, I can’t help but think about Jay when I look through the police logs and see reports of teens and young men and women fighting here in Manistee. It makes me cringe.
I hope and pray I don’t have to look through the reports after this Halloween and see anything remotely resembling what happened to my buddy Jay Buck.
Or after Christmas, or after New Years.
So, this Halloween, have fun, but be safe. Be brave enough to walk away.
One love.
Going through the weekly police reports, I’m submerged in a world of drunk driving, drugs, domestic abuse and disorderly conducts. And just like every other community, Manistee has its share of violent offenders.
Sometimes they are young people drinking and fighting. Blowing off steam, you say. No big deal, you think. A bar fight’s just a bar fight. Not worthy of our attention.
Well, let me introduce you to my childhood friend, Jay Buck, who died at a Halloween party in Atlanta in 2000 after getting into just such a fight.
I can’t help but think of him with sadness this time of year.
Jay was a slightly-crazed prankster and troublemaker who had been a semi-pro skateboarder since the age of 10. He had moved down to Atlanta from the suburban Detroit neighborhood we’d grown up in when we were in our early 20s so he could skate year-round.
We’d been close friends since we were 9 years old, when I moved two blocks away from him.
He was punk in elementary school, wearing black combat boots that came up to his knees, ripped up T-shirts and a jean jacket with the sleeves torn off and band names like DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles), Minor Threat and The Misfits hand-scrawled on it. He had a tiny, buzzed head and huge ears and rode a skateboard to school every day. For an art project, he even made a life-sized punk rock Gumby complete with a Mohawk who sat perched in his bedroom for years afterward.
I was moving to L-Town (or Livonia) from Bay City, where I was born, and I had never met someone like Jay. He didn’t seem to have many friends at school because of his non-traditional appearance. But I was intrigued.
I was the new kid in the fourth grade and Jay was the first friend I made. We could be alienated together.
Over the next decade, we went through all the rites of passages friends go through in boyhood: first cigarettes, first kisses with girls and first cars.
Admittedly, we got into trouble together more than a few times, but making mistakes is part of boyhood, too.
Though we were friends, I got into my first, and one of my only, fights with Jay, though we were back to being pals a week later.
It was on the playground at recess, arising over a dispute in a kickball game. I told him he needed to take off his combat boots, that they were unfair because he could crank the red, rubber ball father than the rest of us with them. He disagreed. So there we were, ‘rassling, punching and kicking under a tree that served as second base until a lunch lady broke us up.
I didn’t know it then, but I was fighting someone who would die fighting.
I was still in college in Detroit when Jay moved to Atlanta. I got the phone call that Halloween just like many others got the call. Over the years, Jay’s frantic wildness had earned him legendary status at skate parks, parties and punk rock shows all over Michigan.
“Jay Buck was in a fight,” was what we all heard. “He’s on life support.”
The swelling around his brain was just too much; his family had to pull the plug a few days later. The next week, a motley pierced and tattooed bunch filled an L-Town church for his funeral. I was a pallbearer. He was 22 years old. It was a closed casket.
What had happened was this: Jay and his buddies in Atlanta had gone to a costume party for Halloween. Jay was dressed as Dirk Diggler from the then-popular movie “Boogie Nights.” One of his friends had been hit by a car a few weeks before and his head was still bandaged up.
Some fellow named Jimmy Skaggs started making fun of Jay’s friend’s bandages. Unlike me, Jay was no stranger to brawls in the years after our petty skirmish on the playground.
He stood up for his friend. Words were said; a fight ensued.
It only took one roundhouse kick to the head from Skaggs to send Jay to the ground, where the force of the impact to his head rendered him unconscious.
He never woke up.
Skaggs is still in prison, but I can’t blame just him. We have a culture where men think fighting one another is a display of courage and bravery. It is not. It can only lead to a preventable death, not an honorable one.
Now, I can’t help but think about Jay when I look through the police logs and see reports of teens and young men and women fighting here in Manistee. It makes me cringe.
I hope and pray I don’t have to look through the reports after this Halloween and see anything remotely resembling what happened to my buddy Jay Buck.
Or after Christmas, or after New Years.
So, this Halloween, have fun, but be safe. Be brave enough to walk away.
One love.
Manistee, my new home
My life has resembled a gypsy’s the last 10 or so years.
I’ve lived in six different apartments and spent time squatting in my parent’s basement in suburban Detroit between situations.
Each place had its own story.
While attending Wayne State in downtown Detroit, I lived on campus in the Verona Apartments. It was a sprawling place built in 1896 that seemed to not have been updated much in the ensuing years. The wrought-iron elevator sat helpless and non-functioning on the main floor. My roommates and I were on the top floor, the sixth. By the time we reached the apartment door, it was time to take a knee and catch our breath. The folk singer Joni Mitchell lived in the apartment across the hall in the late-1960s. We had to move out before the lease was up because a furious summer storm toppled the chimney, which tore a hole in our kitchen ceiling.
After that, I lived for a year in a walk-up in the Buena Park neighborhood in Chicago. I paid rent at that place working as a parking lot attendant at a nightclub on Chicago’s Southside, a job I quit when some guy tried to wallop me with a road barricade at four in the morning after I got his car towed for parking illegally.
Then, I moved to the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, the historically Swedish area of the city. The apartment was extremely far from the El, and since I didn’t have a car, I had to hoof it a mile and half each morning to catch the train. It took me to my gig working at a bookstore on the Magnificent Mile. I could have taken the bus to the train, but it took longer to wait than it did to walk.
Next was a move back to Detroit. After flopping with the folks for a few months, I moved back downtown into a loft on the river front. It was a basement apartment that afforded me a view of an abandoned field, of which Detroit has many. I used to look out the window and see pheasant running around, one more indication that deserted Detroit is slowly reverting back to nature.
And then I was in Chicago again where, for a few months, I lived on the 17th floor of a high rise right off Michigan Avenue in a studio apartment that was way to expensive but had a phenomenal view of Lake Michigan.
Then, I moved into a carriage house flat in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, which earned its name because it was the area of the city where people raised a lot goats in days of yore. I was on the bottom flat and would sit out on the little wooden porch and watch rats frolic each night about dusk. I lived there the longest, two years.
After a brief sojourn back on the parent’s couch in the basement, here I am, living in Manistee.
The place I’m at is just as colorful. First off, it’s got five sinks. I expected the sink in the kitchen and a sink in the bathroom, but there are also sinks in a bedroom, the dining room and a storage room.
And, yes, they all work. Apparently, the place used to be owned by a religious group who hosted retreats for people who all needed their own sink.
I’ve also noticed that there are a lot of cats in Manistee. What’s up with that? Every time I walk or drive down a city street, a furry little feline is popping out from under a porch or from behind a parked car and darting away.
The other thing I noticed about Manistee is that there are actually kids out playing. This makes me smile.
In the Detroit suburbs, the streets are usually pretty quiet while most kids spend hours a day eating nachos and playing video games or watching DVDs in their houses.
The kids playing on the sidewalks and yards in Manistee reminds me of my own childhood in Bay City, where it was hard for my parents and the parents of friends to get us to come inside when the streetlights came on.
It makes me feel right at home here.
I’ve lived in six different apartments and spent time squatting in my parent’s basement in suburban Detroit between situations.
Each place had its own story.
While attending Wayne State in downtown Detroit, I lived on campus in the Verona Apartments. It was a sprawling place built in 1896 that seemed to not have been updated much in the ensuing years. The wrought-iron elevator sat helpless and non-functioning on the main floor. My roommates and I were on the top floor, the sixth. By the time we reached the apartment door, it was time to take a knee and catch our breath. The folk singer Joni Mitchell lived in the apartment across the hall in the late-1960s. We had to move out before the lease was up because a furious summer storm toppled the chimney, which tore a hole in our kitchen ceiling.
After that, I lived for a year in a walk-up in the Buena Park neighborhood in Chicago. I paid rent at that place working as a parking lot attendant at a nightclub on Chicago’s Southside, a job I quit when some guy tried to wallop me with a road barricade at four in the morning after I got his car towed for parking illegally.
Then, I moved to the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, the historically Swedish area of the city. The apartment was extremely far from the El, and since I didn’t have a car, I had to hoof it a mile and half each morning to catch the train. It took me to my gig working at a bookstore on the Magnificent Mile. I could have taken the bus to the train, but it took longer to wait than it did to walk.
Next was a move back to Detroit. After flopping with the folks for a few months, I moved back downtown into a loft on the river front. It was a basement apartment that afforded me a view of an abandoned field, of which Detroit has many. I used to look out the window and see pheasant running around, one more indication that deserted Detroit is slowly reverting back to nature.
And then I was in Chicago again where, for a few months, I lived on the 17th floor of a high rise right off Michigan Avenue in a studio apartment that was way to expensive but had a phenomenal view of Lake Michigan.
Then, I moved into a carriage house flat in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, which earned its name because it was the area of the city where people raised a lot goats in days of yore. I was on the bottom flat and would sit out on the little wooden porch and watch rats frolic each night about dusk. I lived there the longest, two years.
After a brief sojourn back on the parent’s couch in the basement, here I am, living in Manistee.
The place I’m at is just as colorful. First off, it’s got five sinks. I expected the sink in the kitchen and a sink in the bathroom, but there are also sinks in a bedroom, the dining room and a storage room.
And, yes, they all work. Apparently, the place used to be owned by a religious group who hosted retreats for people who all needed their own sink.
I’ve also noticed that there are a lot of cats in Manistee. What’s up with that? Every time I walk or drive down a city street, a furry little feline is popping out from under a porch or from behind a parked car and darting away.
The other thing I noticed about Manistee is that there are actually kids out playing. This makes me smile.
In the Detroit suburbs, the streets are usually pretty quiet while most kids spend hours a day eating nachos and playing video games or watching DVDs in their houses.
The kids playing on the sidewalks and yards in Manistee reminds me of my own childhood in Bay City, where it was hard for my parents and the parents of friends to get us to come inside when the streetlights came on.
It makes me feel right at home here.
Another Nobel unknown: The prize shouldn’t be like a Literary Olympics
Before the announcement that our Premier Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize exploded like a stick of Alfred Nobel-invented dynamite and shook the world, the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced.
Herta Mueller was the big winner of the most distinguished literary award in the world.
Ever heard of the Romanian-born German novelist?
That’s what I thought. She’s never had one of her books picked by Oprah for a book club and she hasn’t written a fake memoir. Of her 19 books, only four have been published in the U.S.A.
Leave it to the committee to once again overlook a dazzling roster of American writers to choose an author for the Nobel Prize in Literature who’s virtually unknown outside Europe.
They’ll pick our president for potentially promising potential promise — and for not being His Excellency W. Bush — but not one of our literary giants.
I’m not trying to bully you, Herta Mueller. I’m sure your novels dealing with the brutal Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu are illuminating, it’s just such a narrow subject.
American’s have always thought big, and pointed to the fences in literature, from Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of The White Whale to Holden Caufield’s desperate search for authenticity.
The prize shouldn’t be like a Literary Olympics, but by picking the small and obscure, it diminishes the meaning of the prize, which in turn decreases literature’s place in our lives. Instead of expanding our lives by chartering our collective worldly imagination, diminishing the prize proves true to to what John Updike, who would have been a prime candidate had he not died earlier this year, said about what literature has become in our culture, a “pleasant backwater.”
It’s too late for Updike, but other American writers who should be considered in the future are Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates, all some of my personal favorites.
It used to be that we revered writers who changed the way large swaths of the world felt about and approached life, whether it be politically, socially, morally or emotionally.
That’s something all of our winners have done, from the last American writer to win, Toni Morrison, way back in 1993 to Sinclair Lewis, the first American winner, in 1930. In between were such luminaries as Eugene O’Neill, 1936; Pearl Buck 1938; T.S. Eliot, 1948 (asterick! Though born in St. Louis, Eliot defected to England as soon as he could and became a British citizen); Big Willy Faulkner, 1949; Ernest Hemingway, 1954; John Steinbeck, 1962 and, my personal idol, Saul Bellow, who won in 1976.
And then there are great American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac and Flannery O’Connor who didn’t win. And these are just a few picked at random.
Not that I expect my column to get translated to Swedish and distributed to the committee, for what it’s worth, I think it’s time they get their snooty noses out of Europe and start sniffing out American writers again.
At least one person with some actual pull agrees with me.
Peter Englund, a permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, told the Associated Press that the Nobel had become too "Eurocentric,"
"In most language areas," Englund said, "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."
Englund replaced Horace Engdahl as the academy's permanent secretary in June (ah, those crazy Swedes with their same-looking names.)
Last year, Engdahl told the AP that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and that American authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."
As our world culture becomes one culture, that opinion seems a bit narrow, just like their choice.
Herta Mueller was the big winner of the most distinguished literary award in the world.
Ever heard of the Romanian-born German novelist?
That’s what I thought. She’s never had one of her books picked by Oprah for a book club and she hasn’t written a fake memoir. Of her 19 books, only four have been published in the U.S.A.
Leave it to the committee to once again overlook a dazzling roster of American writers to choose an author for the Nobel Prize in Literature who’s virtually unknown outside Europe.
They’ll pick our president for potentially promising potential promise — and for not being His Excellency W. Bush — but not one of our literary giants.
I’m not trying to bully you, Herta Mueller. I’m sure your novels dealing with the brutal Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu are illuminating, it’s just such a narrow subject.
American’s have always thought big, and pointed to the fences in literature, from Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of The White Whale to Holden Caufield’s desperate search for authenticity.
The prize shouldn’t be like a Literary Olympics, but by picking the small and obscure, it diminishes the meaning of the prize, which in turn decreases literature’s place in our lives. Instead of expanding our lives by chartering our collective worldly imagination, diminishing the prize proves true to to what John Updike, who would have been a prime candidate had he not died earlier this year, said about what literature has become in our culture, a “pleasant backwater.”
It’s too late for Updike, but other American writers who should be considered in the future are Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates, all some of my personal favorites.
It used to be that we revered writers who changed the way large swaths of the world felt about and approached life, whether it be politically, socially, morally or emotionally.
That’s something all of our winners have done, from the last American writer to win, Toni Morrison, way back in 1993 to Sinclair Lewis, the first American winner, in 1930. In between were such luminaries as Eugene O’Neill, 1936; Pearl Buck 1938; T.S. Eliot, 1948 (asterick! Though born in St. Louis, Eliot defected to England as soon as he could and became a British citizen); Big Willy Faulkner, 1949; Ernest Hemingway, 1954; John Steinbeck, 1962 and, my personal idol, Saul Bellow, who won in 1976.
And then there are great American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac and Flannery O’Connor who didn’t win. And these are just a few picked at random.
Not that I expect my column to get translated to Swedish and distributed to the committee, for what it’s worth, I think it’s time they get their snooty noses out of Europe and start sniffing out American writers again.
At least one person with some actual pull agrees with me.
Peter Englund, a permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, told the Associated Press that the Nobel had become too "Eurocentric,"
"In most language areas," Englund said, "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."
Englund replaced Horace Engdahl as the academy's permanent secretary in June (ah, those crazy Swedes with their same-looking names.)
Last year, Engdahl told the AP that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" and that American authors were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."
As our world culture becomes one culture, that opinion seems a bit narrow, just like their choice.
Start your grousing, Manistee
I’m planning on casting and blasting my way through the weekend.
For those not in the know, cast and blast is what those of us foolish enough to have fly-fishing and bird hunting as hobbies do in October, when the salmon and steelhead run during grouse and woodcock season.
Cast to the steelhead and blast at the birds.
It’s also inherent in the phrase that I’ll be merely casting to the fish and blasting at the birds.
It’s not called “land and kill” just because it makes a catchy rhyme.
Regardless of what’s in the creel or game bag at the end of day, I’ll know I’ve had a more fruitful time than wasting away in front of the TV.
I grew up hip deep in the great fly-fishing streams of Michigan — the Au Sable, the Pere Marquette, the Fox and, yes, the Manistee — mostly getting snagged on the trees lining the banks thanks to a sloppy cast and a wandering mind. But the time spent in the outdoors was limited mainly to a few weeks in the summers.
Growing up near Detroit, northern Michigan’s mighty rivers and woods were hours away. Now that I’m living in Manistee, they’re right in my back yard.
I’m finishing up my fourth week as a reporter here at the News Advocate. It was a job I eagerly pursued in large part because of its location in the North Woods.
I’ve spent the majority of the last eight years on the other side of Lake Michigan in Chicago, spending too much time looking up at skyscrapers and dodging buses and crowds.
The only current I saw wasn’t on the slow-moving Chicago River, but the throb of traffic on Michigan Avenue at rush hour.
About the only thing worthwhile I caught in Chicago was Meredith, who attended the same grad school and was just as eager to move up to Manistee when the opportunity arose.
We went out for a weekend hike soon after we got to the area. We’d both been stuck in the city for years, and it was great to be able to get out and do something other than have too many drinks with friends or go to a movie on those precious two days between work or school.
We went to the Manistee River Trail scouting for grouse. Meredith had never seen one and wanted to see what I’ll be fool-heartedly out shooting at in the coming weeks.
It was a lovely walk, but we were skunked.
The week after that, we went elsewhere, which will remain nameless (a wary grouse hunter never reveals birdy areas). We walked for an hour and didn’t see anything. Then, that always-startling, heart-bursting sound filled our ears, the whirring-winged flight of the ruffed grouse.
I didn’t have my gun, it was still with all my other earthly belongings in my parent’s downstate basement.
But I got it now, along with my rod and a pen.
Which brings me to my point. In the coming weeks, as the News Advocate deepens its commitment to the community by offering even more local coverage, we will be introducing an outdoors page each week in the sports section.
Manistee County offers much more than fly fishing and bird hunting, and I intend to cover as much of it as I possibly can each week.
For those not in the know, cast and blast is what those of us foolish enough to have fly-fishing and bird hunting as hobbies do in October, when the salmon and steelhead run during grouse and woodcock season.
Cast to the steelhead and blast at the birds.
It’s also inherent in the phrase that I’ll be merely casting to the fish and blasting at the birds.
It’s not called “land and kill” just because it makes a catchy rhyme.
Regardless of what’s in the creel or game bag at the end of day, I’ll know I’ve had a more fruitful time than wasting away in front of the TV.
I grew up hip deep in the great fly-fishing streams of Michigan — the Au Sable, the Pere Marquette, the Fox and, yes, the Manistee — mostly getting snagged on the trees lining the banks thanks to a sloppy cast and a wandering mind. But the time spent in the outdoors was limited mainly to a few weeks in the summers.
Growing up near Detroit, northern Michigan’s mighty rivers and woods were hours away. Now that I’m living in Manistee, they’re right in my back yard.
I’m finishing up my fourth week as a reporter here at the News Advocate. It was a job I eagerly pursued in large part because of its location in the North Woods.
I’ve spent the majority of the last eight years on the other side of Lake Michigan in Chicago, spending too much time looking up at skyscrapers and dodging buses and crowds.
The only current I saw wasn’t on the slow-moving Chicago River, but the throb of traffic on Michigan Avenue at rush hour.
About the only thing worthwhile I caught in Chicago was Meredith, who attended the same grad school and was just as eager to move up to Manistee when the opportunity arose.
We went out for a weekend hike soon after we got to the area. We’d both been stuck in the city for years, and it was great to be able to get out and do something other than have too many drinks with friends or go to a movie on those precious two days between work or school.
We went to the Manistee River Trail scouting for grouse. Meredith had never seen one and wanted to see what I’ll be fool-heartedly out shooting at in the coming weeks.
It was a lovely walk, but we were skunked.
The week after that, we went elsewhere, which will remain nameless (a wary grouse hunter never reveals birdy areas). We walked for an hour and didn’t see anything. Then, that always-startling, heart-bursting sound filled our ears, the whirring-winged flight of the ruffed grouse.
I didn’t have my gun, it was still with all my other earthly belongings in my parent’s downstate basement.
But I got it now, along with my rod and a pen.
Which brings me to my point. In the coming weeks, as the News Advocate deepens its commitment to the community by offering even more local coverage, we will be introducing an outdoors page each week in the sports section.
Manistee County offers much more than fly fishing and bird hunting, and I intend to cover as much of it as I possibly can each week.
My headline-free head
Two weeks with no television has been a peaceful respite from the daily bombardment of the aural senses that is cable news.
I suppose when I do have access to ye olde idiot box, I could tune out, stay away from those infernal grouping of channels lumped together in nearly every basic cable package: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. I could always arrange a perpetual loop of “Green Acres” re-runs on DVDs to smother and dull those lobes of the brain that thirst for an endless feed of gossipy, political trash talking.
But I don’t.
Like many, I get a kick out of becoming outraged, which is about the only emotion most “news” programs seek to elicit these days. They pose big, outrageous ideas that are easy to understand for some, and just as easy to hate for others. Regardless of where their allegiances are on either side of the aisle, the pundits create their own heroes and villains. The important issues of our day — the economy, health care, military involvement in the Middle East — become fodder for what amounts to comic-book entertainment for viewers.
These issues, though, involve real people, not action-movie casualties. Government and the media that reports on it should serve the people, not rile their emotions the way entertainment does.
But for the past two weeks, I’ve been luxuriously out of the loop. In the transition of moving my living operations to Northern Michigan from downstate, I’ve suddenly found myself without TV. Subsequently, I’m carting around a head empty of the screaming headlines and talking points of the day.
Where I’m staying, a lovely old house in downtown Frankfort, is equipped with two unusable televisions thanks to the recent switch to digital. It’s regularly a vacation home, which means its where couches, coffee makers and comforters spend their golden years. The televisions are from the 1980s. They have faux wood exteriors, no remote controls and obsolete rabbit ears poking up from their backs. One of them even has the dial you crank by hand, a fond memory from my childhood. They sit unplugged, dark and quiet, on old tables and stands.
For much of the time throughout my transition, I also haven’t had access to the Internet, nor do I have a newspaper waiting on my doorstep each morning (though, coming from the Detroit area, there hasn’t been a daily paper waiting on the porch since winter.)
The vacation was nice, but once a news junkie, always a news junkie.
After getting started as a reporter here in Manistee, I was once again plugged into the headlines, some of which I learned of by that old news-disseminating system — word of mouth. So, for my first column here at the News Advocate, I’ll consider the few that pop immediately into my head.
Apparently Kanye West again garnered publicity for doing something mean and ridiculously ludicrous at the MTV Video Music Awards (boring), Patrick Swayze is dirty dancing on clouds (sad), an elected member of Congress publicly called our Commander in Chief a liar (stupid) and a young conservative ‘activist’ released videos of himself dressed up as a pimp and walked into ACORN offices with a girl dressed as a prostitute (hmm).
For those who haven’t heard the story, the two young activists walked in to ACORN offices with a hidden video camera and asked for advice on how to legitimize their “business” and disguise their identities with the government.
The ACORN workers gave them the advice and were fired for it.
It was a big outrageous idea posing as having something to do with how we run things. It got people talking and created action: various federal agencies are continuing to sever all ties with ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform now.
Not many had heard of the organization — whose mission is to advocate for families in low to medium-income neighborhoods, from housing to voter registration — until the 2008 election, when the McCain campaign complained of voter fraud for signing up non-existent people.
It’s the type of organization that’s a hero for liberals and a villain for conservatives.
The conservatives would do away with all such government-funded organizations so they can sit in their ninth-hole bunkers, clutching their golf clubs and rifles, waiting for a Christian Armageddon while swilling gin tonics.
The liberals would sell their Birkenstocks and Suburus just to give more money to any sketchy, bloated and corrupt organization that claims it’s helping feed the children or save a rare gnat from extinction.
But that’s not the point.
What I would like to talk about are the tactics employed by these kids.
It was tacky, tasteless and racist.
James E. O'Keefe III, 25, a Fordham MBA student from New Jersey, is the guy dressed as a ‘Snoop Dogg-like’ pimp’ in the video. He walks into an ACORN office in Washington D.C. (the only video I could bear to watch on YouTube) where two black women sit behind the counter. His get-up portrays a caricature both beloved and reviled in the black community — the pimp. Mr. James O’Keefe the Third may as well have walked into the offices with black face on.
But all he and Hannah Giles, the minister’s daughter who played the prostitute, were only pimping their beliefs.
They came into an organization that vowed to help people asking for it. While the women were wrong for giving tax-evading advice — and properly let go — O’Keefe the Third and the Minister’s Daughter made a mockery of their own nascent political beliefs.
They think that by using radical tactics akin to what The Left did during the Sixties will give The Left a taste of their own medicine, that a Jerry Falwell meets “Jackass” premise will get more young people rallied behind their cause.
But all they did was humiliate themselves, the ACORN employees and the federal government.
There are better means of political change than humiliation. Malfeasance and skullduggery should always be exposed — and I’m glad they cracked ACORN’s nut — but I implore this new, cool Conservative Right movement to take a look at the rigidity of the ideas they’re out there theatrically defending. Take a different tact. These are our lives, not a movie or TV show.
Maybe “Green Acres” is the place to be after all.
I suppose when I do have access to ye olde idiot box, I could tune out, stay away from those infernal grouping of channels lumped together in nearly every basic cable package: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. I could always arrange a perpetual loop of “Green Acres” re-runs on DVDs to smother and dull those lobes of the brain that thirst for an endless feed of gossipy, political trash talking.
But I don’t.
Like many, I get a kick out of becoming outraged, which is about the only emotion most “news” programs seek to elicit these days. They pose big, outrageous ideas that are easy to understand for some, and just as easy to hate for others. Regardless of where their allegiances are on either side of the aisle, the pundits create their own heroes and villains. The important issues of our day — the economy, health care, military involvement in the Middle East — become fodder for what amounts to comic-book entertainment for viewers.
These issues, though, involve real people, not action-movie casualties. Government and the media that reports on it should serve the people, not rile their emotions the way entertainment does.
But for the past two weeks, I’ve been luxuriously out of the loop. In the transition of moving my living operations to Northern Michigan from downstate, I’ve suddenly found myself without TV. Subsequently, I’m carting around a head empty of the screaming headlines and talking points of the day.
Where I’m staying, a lovely old house in downtown Frankfort, is equipped with two unusable televisions thanks to the recent switch to digital. It’s regularly a vacation home, which means its where couches, coffee makers and comforters spend their golden years. The televisions are from the 1980s. They have faux wood exteriors, no remote controls and obsolete rabbit ears poking up from their backs. One of them even has the dial you crank by hand, a fond memory from my childhood. They sit unplugged, dark and quiet, on old tables and stands.
For much of the time throughout my transition, I also haven’t had access to the Internet, nor do I have a newspaper waiting on my doorstep each morning (though, coming from the Detroit area, there hasn’t been a daily paper waiting on the porch since winter.)
The vacation was nice, but once a news junkie, always a news junkie.
After getting started as a reporter here in Manistee, I was once again plugged into the headlines, some of which I learned of by that old news-disseminating system — word of mouth. So, for my first column here at the News Advocate, I’ll consider the few that pop immediately into my head.
Apparently Kanye West again garnered publicity for doing something mean and ridiculously ludicrous at the MTV Video Music Awards (boring), Patrick Swayze is dirty dancing on clouds (sad), an elected member of Congress publicly called our Commander in Chief a liar (stupid) and a young conservative ‘activist’ released videos of himself dressed up as a pimp and walked into ACORN offices with a girl dressed as a prostitute (hmm).
For those who haven’t heard the story, the two young activists walked in to ACORN offices with a hidden video camera and asked for advice on how to legitimize their “business” and disguise their identities with the government.
The ACORN workers gave them the advice and were fired for it.
It was a big outrageous idea posing as having something to do with how we run things. It got people talking and created action: various federal agencies are continuing to sever all ties with ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform now.
Not many had heard of the organization — whose mission is to advocate for families in low to medium-income neighborhoods, from housing to voter registration — until the 2008 election, when the McCain campaign complained of voter fraud for signing up non-existent people.
It’s the type of organization that’s a hero for liberals and a villain for conservatives.
The conservatives would do away with all such government-funded organizations so they can sit in their ninth-hole bunkers, clutching their golf clubs and rifles, waiting for a Christian Armageddon while swilling gin tonics.
The liberals would sell their Birkenstocks and Suburus just to give more money to any sketchy, bloated and corrupt organization that claims it’s helping feed the children or save a rare gnat from extinction.
But that’s not the point.
What I would like to talk about are the tactics employed by these kids.
It was tacky, tasteless and racist.
James E. O'Keefe III, 25, a Fordham MBA student from New Jersey, is the guy dressed as a ‘Snoop Dogg-like’ pimp’ in the video. He walks into an ACORN office in Washington D.C. (the only video I could bear to watch on YouTube) where two black women sit behind the counter. His get-up portrays a caricature both beloved and reviled in the black community — the pimp. Mr. James O’Keefe the Third may as well have walked into the offices with black face on.
But all he and Hannah Giles, the minister’s daughter who played the prostitute, were only pimping their beliefs.
They came into an organization that vowed to help people asking for it. While the women were wrong for giving tax-evading advice — and properly let go — O’Keefe the Third and the Minister’s Daughter made a mockery of their own nascent political beliefs.
They think that by using radical tactics akin to what The Left did during the Sixties will give The Left a taste of their own medicine, that a Jerry Falwell meets “Jackass” premise will get more young people rallied behind their cause.
But all they did was humiliate themselves, the ACORN employees and the federal government.
There are better means of political change than humiliation. Malfeasance and skullduggery should always be exposed — and I’m glad they cracked ACORN’s nut — but I implore this new, cool Conservative Right movement to take a look at the rigidity of the ideas they’re out there theatrically defending. Take a different tact. These are our lives, not a movie or TV show.
Maybe “Green Acres” is the place to be after all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
