I mean, if you say so: "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell

My first and most enduring reaction to "His Finest Moment" by Tom Bissell, the third story in the 2023 Best American Short Stories collection, is to recall "Post" by Alice McDermott from last year's BASS, and for all the worst reasons. Like "Post," "His Finest Moment" seems to me to be inspired by a type of story that dominated the news for a few years, one that probably every short story writer during that time took on in some way. (Here's my effort.) "Post" was a failure to me because it did nothing to distinguish itself from the thousands of other COVID-19 stories that went out, and Bissell's story, at least on the surface, seem an awful lot like just one of many "Me Too" stories. It doesn't do anything that would make the reader think differently the next time some famous and beloved man is taken down by accusations of sexual assault. It's sort of a formulaic, ripped-from-the-headlines morality tale, full of cliches: the upset and betrayed spouse, the girl about to lose all respect for her father, the plucky and intrepid reporter getting to the heart of the story.

Unlike "Post," it's at least mercifully short and written at a pace where the momentum never slows. It's clearly a paint-by-the-numbers done by a master, but it's still paint-by-the-numbers. I tried very hard to look at this story in some way that would make me understand what Zyzzyva saw in it to publish it to begin with or what BASS saw in it to second that motion by putting it among the year's best, but I have failed. 

The story is about a writer who likes to include morally complicated characters in his novels, although the stories themselves aren't formally complex. The writer ends up mirroring his own characters' moral ambiguity in his own life, becoming a rake. Among his many escapades is one particularly shameful, alcohol-fueled incident involving non-consensual touching and kissing. He knows it's not excusable and he knows there's no way to explain it to his wife or his daughter, although he's trying to in the last hours before the story comes out. Other than a few flashbacks to tell us what he's done and to review how the reporter kept after him until her story was complete, it stays in the moment of the night the story breaks, as he bumbles his way through telling his family what's coming. 

I kept trying to figure out if the story "His Finest Moment" was an attempt to do what its own main character does, to write a morally complex person. But it's not. The night of his assault, which was the "not his finest moment" that completes the thought of the title, he'd just attended the launch of his very successful latest book. "It just wasn't a night he wanted to hear no, in the end." This isn't the Lolita of Me Too. 

"His Finest Moment" doesn't do what the author in its narrative does. It doesn't grant its characters complexity. The author is pretty much a bog-standard cliché of a libertine rake. The author congratulates himself for being complicated, but the text of the story he's in does not. And that's likely the point. The story seems to want to deromanticize the solitary author, depraved in the name of his art. It's the anti-Lolita. The man is a sexual predator and not worthy of ennobling by crediting him with complexity. He might seem complex, but "formally," he's not. 

This treatment of sexual predators kind of mirrors a shift in moderate leftist thinking on this in the last ten years. It used to be that conservatives were the ones to say that if someone rapes a woman, he should be castrated or murdered. Liberals were sometimes wont to say that you had to look at how predators themselves had often been abused or how they had mental illnesses or generally, how it was more complicated than conservatives thought. But liberals have simplified their thinking on sex crimes. They're not calling for castration and the death sentence, maybe, but they are unwilling to let powerful men off the hook when it comes to maintaining their careers in the public spotlight. We've come to accept that there is no excuse for sexual assault. It's not complicated. 

Which--okay. I agree with that change. And I can see that the form of the story follows the function. It's a simple story that tells a simple truth. If this had appeared in the Maryland Literary Review, I'd have thought it was more than good enough to be there and that the writer had a gift for keeping the momentum of a story moving. I'd have hoped the writer had tried other, more ambitious things. But I don't really see this as a great story, one worthy of coming back to over and over. The effect, I think, is supposed to be something like that of all morality tales: by watching the main character go through the painful process of knowing he's destroyed his family and his fortunate career, men should contemplate the wages of sin and not repeat those sins themselves. That's useful, I suppose, but I didn't need a story by a talented author to make me consider this. If I'd ever dreamed of putting unwanted hands on a woman, the last ten years of news headlines would already have scared me straight. (I haven't, by the way. I'm chicken about even approaching women. I've had sex with two women in my life, both of whom I married.) 

This won't go down as one of those BASS stories I really actively dislike, like "Post" or "The Apartment" by T.C. Boyle. It's an okay story, and if BASS editors say they love it, well, if you say so. Maybe the real reason I'm not in love with it is because it violates what Peter Rabinowitz called a "convention of notice." That is, in a BASS story, you kind of expect stories to be packed full of things you only notice after coming around to them again on a second or third reading. Certainly, "Do You Belong to Anyone," the story before this in the collection, met that convention. A few years ago, Mary Gaitskill's "This is Pleasure" met that convention in spades with her MeToo-ish short story. Maybe my whole objection here is nothing more than me being a guy who tries to read BASS in a way where I notice things and then write cleverly about them. A story like this doesn't give me the chance. 

Complicated by ambivalence: "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam

I think it's fair to say that "Do You Belong to Anybody" by Maya Binyam puts a lot of demands on a regular reader, one who isn't heavily invested in literary fiction. It's not that it's terribly hard to follow what's going on, but the tone of the story--which is actually the opening to her novel, Hangman-- isn't one that's designed to make turning the page easy. The story announces early on that it's full of ambiguity, ambivalence, and uncertainty, and the style lends itself to that. That's artistically honest, but it means a retired engineer in Sacramento reading the story for an adult enrichment class might struggle with it. I'm going to argue, though, that although its feeling is kind of similar in places to the infamously self-indulgent and pretentious movie The Brown Bunny, with a traumatized character unable to feel who travels bleary-eyed and emotionless through a landscape, "Do You Belong to Anybody" is a satisfying story. 

Let's start, as I sometimes do when a story hides its own plot a bit, with a very prosaic and artless retelling of the "what" of it. While this might be taking what was done very skillfully and artfully and turn it into something bland, I think that a reader, armed with the simpler history, can go back in and more fully enjoy the verbally richer version.

We've been through worse, people. Hang in there.

The plot reworked for non-English majors

Two brothers, sons of a wealthy landowner, are living in Ethiopia at what I believe is the end of the reign of Haile Selassie, around 1974. Sometime after the takeover of the Derg, the quasi-Marxist organization that replaced Haile Selassie, confiscated their land, one of the brothers, the unnamed narrator of the story, goes to fight them by joining one of the armed groups opposing them, perhaps the Tigray People's Liberation Front or one of the other regional liberation fronts. This brother is captured by the Derg and put in prison to await execution. While in prison, many of his comrades are put to death, and his son is born. His wife brings the son to see the father in prison. The son is named "Revolution." 

Somehow, the fighter brother does not die, but when he leaves prison some time in the early 1980s, he also leaves the country. Perhaps he is too traumatized to remain, perhaps his life is still in peril (the Derg won't be overthrown for another ten years or so)--we aren't told. But he never comes back. For twenty-six years, he remains in the United States, where he drives a taxi cab like so many other members of the Ethiopian diaspora. He also gets remarried. Meanwhile, the brother who stayed out of the fighting takes care of the abandoned son and wife, but he develops health conditions that are hard to treat. The non-rebel brother called the exile brother for years asking for money to help with his condition. Exile brother did not seem to help much. Eventually, the brother who stayed dies, and the exile brother returns to Ethiopia for the funeral. His wife has helped him pack and made all his travel arrangements for him. While on his way to the funereal, he happens to overhear his brother's son retelling his whole story. The narrator's nephew doesn't appreciate the narrator's sacrifices in joining the revolution; instead, he hates the narrator for abandoning his family.

There is a possibility I have it wrong. There have been many cab drivers' strikes in Addis Ababa, so that's an unreliable way to date the story, but I'm pretty sure about this being generally correct. If so, he's back in Ethiopia somewhere between 2006 and maybe 2010. That would make sense with the "America having some economic issues now" thoughts of the taxi driver the narrator encounters. It's the only thing that fits, timewise. 

Of course, the story doesn't actually ever say it's Ethiopia. It doesn't make any of this simplified version overt, and you'd have to know something about Ethiopian history, as by wild fate I sort of do, to pick all this out. Otherwise, it's just a story about "some place in Africa," which is, unfortunately, the way some critics have read it. One review of Hangman even suggests that reading Ethiopia into it might be counter to the novel's purpose. Which on one level, I sort of understand--the story doesn't name anyone or any place, and seems to invite as much ambiguity about place as the narrator feels about everything. Still, all of the details fit a history of Ethiopia.

Why no names? 

The story's style is aggressively blank. In the first few lines, the narrator violates that time-honored rule of unimaginative editors everywhere and uses passive voice several times: "I...was told"..."arrangements had been made"... "my clothes had been packed"..."jacket...was handed to me" and so on. 

In real life, passive voice is used when we want to hide the subject. For example, if I broke something my mom cared about, and she asked what happened, I might say, "It got broken" rather than "I broke it." There's something similar going on here. It so happens that it's the narrator's wife who's being elided here, because, as we later find, she's the one who packed his clothes and made his arrangements. We might think that the narrator had something against his wife that made him want to keep her out, but we soon find that no names are used anywhere in the narrative. We don't get the name of the country he's going to, the names of any of his relatives, the names of any of the people he meets, not even the name of the former president who founded a charity that operates in Ethiopia (Clinton, I presume). Even the radio does not "care to identify" the occupation of a woman in an accident. 

There is one exception, perhaps. The narrator recalls a story of two women who were his passengers in his cab once. They did not pay the full fare, and when he asked for the rest of the money, one called him the N word. It wasn't his name, of course, and even hearing it confused him, but it was an attempt at a name. In retaliation, he locked one of the passengers in the car and drove her back to where he had picked them up. Almost the only thing that can stir our emotionless narrator to action is to be called by a name, even a name that is not his. 

The narrator prefers a nameless state because a name indicates a specific something, and the narrator prefers vagueness. A name also indicates belonging, and the narrator resists "belonging to anyone," in the term of the title. 

He is, above all, ambivalent. He shows no preferences for one food over another, and is sometimes unaware of his own physical inhabiting of his own body. When the passenger next to the narrator on the plane complains that his own life has been "complicated by ambivalence," he thinks this makes him different from the narrator and, really, from anyone who has to work for a living. The passenger thinks he suffers from ennui because he has nothing he really needs while most people might struggle for a living but at least know why they're struggling. In reality, the narrator is suffering from something similar. 

From ambivalence to preference

There is a break in the ambivalence, however. Once on the plane, the language changes from English to "our destination's national language," most likely Amharic. When a flight attendant asks the narrator what he wants to drink, he can't answer because he doesn't have any preference. She then changes languages and he suddenly realized he wants coffee. 

In Ethiopia there are over forty languages spoken. Most people have at least two languages, one that they speak at home and then the national language of Amharic. I think what has happened is that the attendant first asks him in Amharic, and then when she switches to his home language, maybe Oromo or Tigrinya or something else, he suddenly remembers what he likes. Perhaps the use of the language he grew up with brought back memories from before his trauma, memories that allowed him to find a human inside himself with wants. Soon after, she asks again if he wants sugar, and not only does he say he does, but he finds it "delicious." Later on, when he goes to an Internet cafe, he doesn't even have to wait to be asked to know he wants a macchiato. They don't have it, but at least he knows what he wants. The possibility of overcoming ambivalence is dangled before the reader.  

The four dialogues

Most of the structure of the story is built around four dialogues, three of which the narrator participates in and one that he overhears. In two of the three dialogues he participates in, there is an interrupting narrative. In the first case, it's a movie that the narrator watches on his seat mate's device. In the second, it's the narrator himself recalling a story from when he drove a cab in the U.S. 

Dialogue 1

The first dialogue is with the man on the plane who thinks he's unfortunate to have everything he wants, so much so that he can't even muster lust for his mistress. This conversation is interrupted a few times by the attendant asking about coffee and sugar, and then, after the narrator struggles to sympathize with the man, the man begins to watch a movie on his device. The narrator watches alongside.

It's some type of artsy film about a man who wanders a cityscape asking people if they belong to anybody. He starts by asking people on a street corner, and then he begins to wander the city in search of people to ask. When he runs into obstacles, he just keeps going, finally climbing a building and falling off. At this point, the DVD player goes blank, and the narrator realizes the man next to him is dead. 

There are two things about this movie that stand out to me. First, it's a doubly and even triply indirect or vicarious experience for the narrator. It's a movie, so that's one level of indirectness, as watching or reading any story involves an audience experiencing somebody's else's lived reality. But it's technically the movie of the guy next to him, which he's just watching out of the corner of his eye. Since it wasn't the narrator's choice to put the movie on, he could claim that he's not really "watching a movie" in the way we normally mean it. So if the movie is good or bad or objectionable, it's not the narrator's fault that he chose it. Third, at one point in the movie, the character in it is himself watching a movie, in fact a pornographic one. I suppose this counts as a type of mise-en-abyme, a sort of picture-within-a-picture or art-within-art effect, as when Hamlet watches a play within the play Hamlet. 

The effect of it is that the narrator, who is unable to feel anything, is permitted to feel indirectly through this triple filter. The man who, as his nephew will put it, "pretended...that like an angel he had no relation to anyone," is able to face the question "Do you belong to anyone?" This is a question he's been running from for twenty-six years, and now he has begun, at least indirectly, to confront it. 

When the plane disembarks, people start to offer their condolences to the narrator for the dead person next to him. Maybe they assume that they are related because the flight crew covered up the man's head, so they can't see that these are just two people who happened to sit together. They don't "belong" to each other. In any event, the narrator finally receives the condolences he's had coming to him for a long time, but when they finally come, they are misplaced. 

Dialogue 2

The narrator takes a cab to the bus station and ends up talking with the driver. The driver reminds the narrator of a younger, better-looking version of himself. The driver, like the hero of the movie he has just partly watched, has to navigate a cityscape. Unlike the hero, though, he can't just go through obstacles. Instead, he has to continually go around them in new ways, as the obstacles themselves seem to keep moving. During his conversation with the driver, the driver does not believe the narrator is a cab driver in America, because the driver believes everyone in America gets rich. 

This scene with the taxi driver could maybe be seen as another form of mise-en-abyme, because the narrator is seeing himself reflected in the driver. But it's not an infinite repetition, because the narrator has a difficult time getting the driver to see the himself in the narrator. This all has a bearing on the dialogue that nearly closes the story, the one the narrator overhears between two people in which one person, his nephew, argues that history is cyclical. We've already seen a few examples of cyclicality and repetition in the mise-en-abyme of first two dialogues, but perhaps there are limits to the repetition. It's ambiguous, like the narrator is himself when he cannot decide which man he agrees with in the argument.

I've already commented on the significance of the flashback story the narrator tells the driver of is own adventures in taxi driving. It's the only time in the whole story in which the narrator overcomes his ambivalence and takes decisive action. Except, maybe, for re-discovering that he likes coffee and sugar. 

The narrator discovers he has lost his luggage. Does this mean he has been forced to let go of the past he was carrying with him? Will he overcome his trauma and its attendant ambivalence? 

Dialogue 3

The narrator meets an aid worker from the <Clinton?> Foundation on the bus to his destination, which is somewhere many hours' ride from the capital in Addis Ababa. Here, we start to get details of the narrator's life, but even those come grudgingly. He doesn't want to answer the aid worker's questions about his family, but he does mostly because he can't think up a lie. To the reader, his answers might even seem more evasive then they are revealing, but in the final dialogue, the whole story, more or less, will come together, and we will learn that everything he told the aid worker was true.

In the context of the final debate between someone who argues that history is doomed to repeat itself because of human greed and weakness and another man who argues that progress is possible, although difficult and never final, this third dialogue might itself be seen as an argument for the possibility of progress. At the end of it, for one thing, they have actually made it to his destination. For another, he's started to face his past, albeit involuntarily. It's possible at this point that the narrator will be able to achieve some sort of catharsis. Maybe he will meet the family he abandoned at the funeral and make amends? 

The overheard dialogue

But no, it's not to be. Instead, the narrator happens to overhear two men at a cafe arguing about world history, and is forced to listen as his own story is told. It's the second time the narrator has indirectly been told a story, and this one's retelling his own. Cyclical history seems to be reasserting itself, and with it, the narrator also returns to his ambivalence, his avoidance of conflict. He flees the scene just as he is being invited to join the two speakers.

As he leaves, he complains that even if you've already suffered greatly, there's no guarantee you won't suffer more. It's the second time he's worried about guarantees, the first being when he noted that "even a guarantee was unreliable, as anything could happen between the present and the future, including death." 

There are, at the end, nothing but cycles in the story, and even the apparent progress is undone, just as the man scaling the buildings in the overseen movie only ends up falling to the ground. Does the narrator belong to anyone at the end? He's steadfastly refused to name anyone, including his son, his brother, and the wife who arranged his whole trip for him and without whom he can't find his blood pressure medicine. Although he's shown occasional capacity for action, it is eventually swallowed up by ambivalence, or at least "complicated" by it. 

This is, perhaps, the inevitable fate of the person who refuses the "comforts of complicity," as the nephew puts it, who faces "being tortured, or imprisoned, or separated from one's family." The narrator is viewed as a bad man by his family at the end, although he, unlike his brother, did the noble thing in putting the needs of his family above the needs of society. The nephew, rather cynically, holds that sacrifices only matter if they achieve success. 

The funny thing is that if I'm right about the political situation being referred to in the story, the man did have a role in success. The TPLF and its allies did overthrow the Derg. He is visiting Ethiopia more than fifteen years after the fall of the Derg, when the TPLF that overthrew it is already beginning to annoy Ethiopians itself. 

Given that the TPLF (technically, the EPRDF, but the TPLF always dominated the coalition in these days) that played such a key role in liberating the country was beginning to wear out its welcome, it's no wonder sacrifice seems pointless. Given how it seems that human malice always comes back, and how sacrifice never seems to achieve the hoped-for end, how could one not be ambivalent?

Three after-the-fact digressions

I've treated this like a short story, because that's how it appeared in "The Paris Review" and in BASS. I'm sure it takes on a different meaning as the start of a novel, but since I'm reviewing BASS and not the novel, I've treated it the way it appeared. 

Secondly, I comment every year on how many stories in BASS aren't set in America, how they require the reader to have a rather deep understanding of political and geographical settings elsewhere that, frankly, I doubt most readers have. Maybe it's possible to appreciate this story without knowing the exact historical setting, but reading it the way I did made me feel like some of my readings last year, such as the one I did for "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjina Sathian, may have missed the mark. I really doubt that most American commentators do a good job reviewing work set in foreign countries. They'll treat a story that is obviously--to anyone who knows Ethiopia--set in Ethiopia as sort of a generic tale of sub-Saharan African. But that's really because Americans can't tell one African country from another. So I'm very skeptical of professional critics commenting on stories like this. That includes me on many stories.  

Finally, I'd like to note something about coffee. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. If you're a coffee lover and you've never had coffee out of a jebena, you need to correct that right now. I have often been told by coffee snobs that I am not a real coffee drinker because I don't drink it black. But let me tell you, the majority of Ethiopians don't drink it black, either. For the most part, they love to put as much milk and sugar in it as they can. So if any uppity coffee drinker gives you a hard time for seasoning up your gross bean juice, let them know that the real coffee drinkers don't drink it black, either. 

 

Balancing the social ledger: "Tender" by Cherline Bazile

There are at least three meanings of the word "tender" I can think of, and all of them play a role in the short story "Tender" by Cherline Bazile, the first entry in the 2023 "Best American Short Stories" collection. The most-used meaning is more or less synonymous with "sensitive," as in "I twisted my ankle and now it's kind of tender." That's the meaning that gets overtly mentioned in the story, when Eden protests to her best friend Fatima that Fatima is braiding her hair too tight. "You know I'm tender-headed," she says. If Eden--an ironic name if ever there was one, because her life is no paradise--is tender, she's entitled. She's poor-ish, she's an immigrant child in a place where that hurts her social standing, and, most importantly, she suffers physical abuse at the hands of her mother. So that's one meaning. 

The second meaning is related, but in a more positive and active sense. It's the meaning that shows up in words like "tenderness," where it means something like "kindness." Eden is craving this kind of tenderness, and she envies Fatima for her supply of it from a boy they both like and, more importantly, from Fatima's mother. One tenderness the story itself shows Eden is that it does not render a scene of violence for the reader to witness, but in Eden's life, she's lacking it badly. 

The third meaning is one we don't use much in everyday English, but it leaped out to me about halfway through. It's the one that means "to offer," as in "tender a contract offer" or "tender a resignation." After Eden's hair braiding at Fatima's house--which Fatima's mother helps with--is interrupted by the arrival of Fatima's father, leading to an argument, Fatima takes Eden home. Fatima tries to seek sympathy from Eden--to seek tenderness, that is--but Eden doesn't want to give it. Eden refuses to grant Fatima the right to be unhappy with her home life, because, Eden insists, arguments aren't as bad as getting hit. Later, reflecting on this, Eden recalls how Fatima had "gone frigid in the car, how she wanted my sympathy without ever offering hers."

Relationship ledgers

Eden seems to think sympathy should be reciprocal. It's almost transactional, to use a word now much abused, but which I nonetheless think fits here. Eden thinks not only that she shouldn't have to give sympathy (or tenderness, perhaps) without receiving some in return, but that the level of sympathy one receives should be equal to the level of hardship one faces. Since Eden thinks her life is much worse than Fatima's, she thinks she should receive more sympathy.

Once I realized this, I started to see a lot of other transactional philosophies at play in the story. 

1) Eden's mother believes she could get the best of transactions, that when she calculated what she got for what she gave, she should come out ahead. When her mother sees the scarf on Eden's head that Fatima's mother loaned to her, she says, disapprovingly, that she bets "she bought it for one hundred dollars. I could have found it at a yard sale for five." 

2) The white people in the story show two different philosophies. On the one hand, they believe the world is set up in such a way that needs will be met. That's why they push Fatima and Eden into a friendship (the only two black kids in school are surely meant to be together) and why they also think the mutual blackness of Eden and Chris, the only black boy in school, is "sufficient cause for a wedding." Because life has taught them that most of their needs will be met, they believe the universe works like that for everyone. They have a lot of "of course it's that way" assumptions, and when they calculate the plusses and minuses of social interactions, they do not doubt that they are right. Transactions are not do-or-die for them, because they assume there's enough of everything to go around.

But there is also a sense in which the white kids also believe in retribution for bad transactional behavior. When one white girl confesses to stealing earrings from Walmart, she apes the language of social justice to justify it. "I don't even feel bad about it," she says, because "they treat their workers poorly." 

To some extent, both Fatima and Eden are being influenced by these kids. Whether that influence is good or bad isn't clear, but at the end, I think that at least the results of the first kind of thinking might be healthy for Fatima at least. 

3) Fatima, who has recently taken to courting friendships with the white kids in school, occasionally mirrors their belief in reciprocity: "If someone doesn't give a fuck about you, don't give a fuck about them. Easy." However, her more frequent attitude seems to be that she should give more than she takes. Eden imagines that this is so Fatima can stay ahead in some competition they have going between them. Putting words in Fatima's mouth, Eden assumes that Fatima thinks the reasons she doesn't like having Fatima do her hair is that she "thinks I'm embarrassed because I can't pay her." And we as readers are tempted to believe Eden when Fatima sets up an ice skating party for kids at school and insists on Eden coming, even though it means Fatima will have to pay for it. We assume, with Eden, that Fatima is using her relatively better financial situation to demonstrate power over Eden. 

This assumption is stronger when we realize that Fatima is a good skater, that she is effortlessly gliding around the rink with the boy she and Eden both like while Eden keeps falling down with Chris. We think Fatima has orchestrated the whole thing in order to make Eden feel bad for being poor and to look foolish in front of others. But the ending undoes this whole assumption, both for Eden and for the reader.

What kind of transactional ledgers does Eden keep? Well, she's kind of like her mother, believing she should get more than she gives, but with tenderness, not money. 

Symbiosis

There is a whole other type of transactional model mentioned in the story, one that has a completely different way of calculating gains and losses. It's symbiosis, a relationship in which both parties gain something. It may not be an equal gain for both sides, but both sides get enough to think that they have profited from the deal. Although when it's mentioned, Eden is announcing that she's abrogated the  symbiosis ("I've unhinged myself from our symbiotic relationship"), it's clear that this is what Eden longs for. Moreover, she kind of can't avoid it. When Eden falls on the ice at one point, she looks back to realize Fatima has fallen, too. "What happens to one happens to the other," she muses. "As if our bodies were bound together." Symbiosis here goes beyond simply a mutually beneficial relationship to a more literal meaning of the roots of the word. They are "living together" in the sense that they are almost drawing air with the same lungs. 

If Eden thinks that this symbiosis, this inextricable link, is forced, it's also something she very clearly longs for. The final words of the story reflect this longing, as she imagines having a mother like Fatima's, one who would "have time to do my hair, wrap me in her greasy legs, so that when she moved, I did too." 

The twist (the story kind, not the hair kind) 

Eden doesn't quite achieve this kind of intimacy, this tenderness, but her friend Fatima is at least the key to helping her to realize more fully that she wants it. As Fatima is taking Eden home from the ice skating outing, they stop at Subway. Eden has never eaten there before, and Fatima walks her through how to order in a surprisingly sweet moment. As they eat together, Fatima finally tells Eden what it is that's been bothering her about Eden the whole time. The story opened with Eden announcing that her best friend "doesn't like me much." We are led throughout the story to think the problem is Fatima, but at the end, we realize that Fatima had a good reason not to embrace Eden more fully.

Fatima has just told the boy they both like that her father has another family. Eden thinks she should feel sympathy, but she only feels stupid she didn't already know. When she apologizes at Subway for not having been a good friend, Fatima complains that Eden acts "like me having a bad day is a personal affront to (Eden)." Suddenly, looking back at the story, we can see that Fatima is right. Not everything is about winning a game to Fatima. She simply had her own shit, and with Eden, whose longing for tenderness is so acute she cannot countenance it going to others, she couldn't get any sympathy. It was always a victim Olympics. 

Will Eden be okay?

Eden can be forgiven for not understanding symbiotic relationships, or the way in which tenderness isn't a thing you get more of by failing to give it away. She's learned this from her mother, who is as stingy about affection as she is about paying for head scarves. Eden thinks at one point that it's "easy to feel like it's not a competition when you're winning." Since she's been losing both financially and emotionally her whole life, it feels like a competition to her. But I think there's hope for her. She claims that she's learning from Fatima. In fact, she claims that Fatima is teaching her "everything." The final moments of the story, in which Eden most openly expresses to herself her longing for tenderness and intimacy, are perhaps hopeful. Just as the scene in Subway revealed to the reader that Fatima wasn't really calculating and cold the whole time, it seems to have also opened up other possibilities for Eden in human interactions besides the need to come out ahead. Eden has hopefully gotten the point of her own story. 

Revisiting literary theory twenty years after grad school

Twenty years ago at this time, I was limping to the end of my Master's in English. Although I'd been accepted into the Ph.D. program, by the final semester of getting my M.A., I had already turned them down and wanted only to collect a piece of paper to document the poor life choice going to graduate school had been before heading off in search of the elusive "real job."  

I'd probably gotten into literature in the first place for the same reasons many people do. Literature had offered to me, in the words of Harold Bloom, a chance to "enlarge a solitary existence." Far from enlarging it, though, graduate school seemed to make the solitariness more solitary. At the heart of this was something called literary theory.  

For most people who never get further into literary studies than an introductory survey class in college or maybe even the survey courses of high school, they might think that what literature students do is what your Eighth grade teacher taught you to do when you were reading Of Mice and Men. You read a bit about the author's life, then you read the story, then you list the main characters, the conflict, the setting, and maybe write a few paragraphs about theme. If there's any difference between what English majors do and what high school English students do, most people would probably guess it's a matter of degree. Say, you read a whole biography about the author instead of a few paragraphs, and then you follow up Of Mice and Men by reading more Steinbeck, until you're something of an expert on his work. Then you move on to the next canonical author. 

When I picked English as my major as an undergraduate (my fourth major in my first four semesters of college), I think that's also what I assumed it was. I guessed that you took survey courses up to the 300/400 level, when you started zeroing in on the authors you liked the most and got to take whole courses in them. But that whole time, I assumed that reading seriously meant mainly reading for things like setting, character, narrative arc, theme, and maybe, if you wanted to get a little crazy, trying to demonstrate how the work reflected social beliefs of the time of its creation. 

Theory ruins Eden

Imagine my shock, then, when I took a 300-level course in Baroque literature that spent far more time talking about Saussure, Derrida, de Man, and Foucault--theorists who wrote from the late 19th century to the late twentieth--than it did talking about, say, Pedro Calderon or other writers from the actual Baroque period. We got passages from these theorists that had been extracted from larger works, and I often could only vaguely guess what they were talking about. Maybe it was because I needed to read the whole work instead of just an extract, maybe it was because it was in translation, but it seemed like they were either making up words on every page or using words in ways I didn't recognize. 

They seemed to be saying that language was so slippery that nobody could ever really understand each other, but also that language was so iron-clad it could be used as a tool of the oppressor. To the extent I could understand them, it seemed like the things they said were either intentionally provocative and false--early versions of internet trolls--or so obvious, I didn't understand why they went through all those mental gymnastics to arrive at such commonplace conclusions. My professor, in any event, seemed to think this stuff was the most fascinating thing she'd ever encountered, and she looked at literature not for plot, structure, and theme, but for all the circumlocutions of language these theorists claimed made up all human discourse. 

It seemed to me like reading literature for everything except the reasons that made it worth doing in the first place, but once I became aware of theory's existence, I realized it was all over the study of literature. In fact, anyone who was considered a serious scholar was only talking about theory. Emotionally and cognitively engaging a text on a human level was the height of squareness. 

Because everyone seemed to treat it with so much seriousness, I tried to learn about it. My undergraduate school didn't have an "Introduction to Lit Theory" course, so I tried reading books about it. One I remember actually finishing was Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction. Someone had recommended it to me, and really, there weren't a whole lot of other choices. Eagleton was a Marxist, and he gave the entirety of the history of literary theory from a Marxist perspective, which meant it wasn't always a very unbiased way of learning about what some schools of theory believed, but I at least found Marxist approaches refreshingly grounded. They were about something in the real world I could understand. To this day, I'm still much more sympathetic to Marxist theory and other social-minded theories, such as gender theory or queer theory or Afro-American theory, than I am to the linguistically-oriented Continental theorists. (Of course, to the extent that some socio-centric theorists rely on the language centric ones, I hate them, too.) 

What I privately imagine every deconstructionist theorist looks like

I understood enough about literary theory by the end of undergrad that I did okay on my English literature specific GRE, which was about half theory and half actual literature, but I never felt comfortable with it. In grad school, I often felt unprepared for what we were doing. What annoyed me most was that I didn't really believe most students who were aping the language of theory understood it any more than I did. I thought they were using buzz words the way people in my job now do, to cover over their own inadequacies and as a substitute for real thinking. But I also knew I wasn't a master of the subject enough to call them out. Grad school was a mix between workshops where I wrote stories (which I could no longer write in a natural way, because theory had made me question what a story even was) and literature classes where we mixed theory nobody understood with literature nobody had time to read because we were too busy trying to learn theory. 

I had to decide to either keep diving deeper into something I suspected didn't really have anything to it at the bottom, or I had to start all over in life. I chose to start over. I think I made the right choice. From what I know of what happened to literary theory after I left the academy and the "theory is dead" cries that went up a few years after I'd gone away, I might have been just a few years ahead of my time.

Return to theory

In the last few years, though, I've sometimes wished I had a little more grounding in theory. I've now written over 100 entries in this blog analyzing short stories, along with a few on novels, movies, or TV shows. Anytime you're trying to examine what a text is doing and how it's doing it, you're kind of delving into theory. Yes, I can get by with my kind of cobbled-together half understanding (and I even sometimes tell myself this is an advantage as I try to be a bridge between an academic reviewer and an everyman reviewer), but I still think I'd benefit from having a better grounding in theory, even if I mostly reject it. 

Ten years after leaving grad school (which is now ten years ago almost to the day), I decided to start writing fiction again. When I did, I tried something I'd never actually done the whole time I'd been a literature/creative writing student: I read a few introductory books on writing. It certainly helped. So I'm doing the same thing now with theory. Since I never had an "Introduction to Theory" class, I'm slowly putting myself through one now. I'm piecing together my own introductory course, one that might take me up to a year to complete, since I'm doing it on my own time and with huge, competing intellectual priorities interrupting. I've been at it about a month or so, and I've already made a couple of discoveries that I think are useful:

• I've learned that my own, private way of thinking of literature as a replacement for religion isn't really original. Matthew Arnold saw "the great works" as a way of replacing religion, too. Arnold, however, didn't think of this replacement as a private matter, like I do, but a public one. He was concerned that as religion was losing its ability to keep society together, British society would fracture. He proposed inculcating the newly emergent middle classes into the same sort of literary exposure the upper classes had already been doing. By directing their tastes and moral sensibilities, Arnold hoped, the upper classes could maintain their influence. It kind of worked. This is also the birth of what we now know as English literature. There's a reason all that study of plot, character, and theme appeals to me so much and scratches such a similar itch to the one religion used to: because it was designed to do that. It's always good to understand that the ideas one comes up with have probably been thought by someone else, and it's also good to be able to place one's own beliefs in history. I realize my preferred approach was originally meant to be used as a tool of political conservatism, and I therefore am a little bit more circumspect about it.
• Speaking of realizing other people think the same things you thought you came up with on your own, I was already, by the end of grad school, trying to sketch out my own response to language-centric theories that emphasized the futility of communication. I now realize that there was a school of thought all along that was building a philosophy similar to what I was coming up with on my own, except much better. It's called neo-pragmatism. It's favored by a lot of scientists who bother to think about these things, and it particularly appeals to me. One of my books for my self-made theory class is by Richard Rorty, high priest of the school of neo-pragmatism. 
• I've also reconsidered my ideas on the intent of the author in relation to the intent of the text and the intent of the reader. Peter Rabinowitz, in particular, has given me some useful vocabulary to think of these things, such as the "authorial audience" and his focus on the importance of conventions in reading and writing. These things will probably subtly change my approach to stories.

Best American Short Stories comes on in a week. I'm going to try for another year of tackling all twenty stories in it. Looking into my medium-term future, I'm eligible to retire in a little over five years. With the way prices of everything are going up, I doubt I'll be able to retire, but it'll be there as an option. In retirement, I might want to make criticism my main outlet (along with my own writing, of course). If so, I kind of need to fill in some gaps in my education in the meantime. The end of the canon as the basis of literary education was very freeing, but it meant that I kind of spent a lot of my time in school doing whatever I found interesting at the time and not getting enough exposure to influential writers I really should know. 

I'm also looking into moving the blog to another platform, maybe Substack. I picked Blogger years ago because I'm lazy and it was easy, but I've often regretted that choice since then. I'm no less lazy now, so I might still never move it, but I'm going to force myself to at least do some half-assed looking around.   

"Born in the USA" is fine to play on the day we celebrate the USA being born

Last year about this time, a friend of mine told me about how he was prepared to go to war against the DJ playing tunes for his neighborhood's Fourth of July celebration. The DJ had played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," at the celebration the last few years prior, but for this particular celebration, my friend said had had enough. If the DJ was going to play the song again, my friend was ready to lay into him about how he had obviously never listened to the words to this song, because if he had, he would know it wasn't a patriotic song celebrating America, but a "song about how America was a piece of shit." (Those might not have been the exact words, but they were words to that effect.) Luckily, the neighborhood association intervened, and the song was not played. 

Was my friend right? Is "Born in the USA" a protest song? Is it critical of America, so much that it ought not to be played during the celebration of our nation's birth? On one level, of course he's right. Although many listeners have--perhaps hearing only the chorus and the jubilant guitar refrain--misinterpreted it as a straightforward celebration of pride in being an American, that's not at all what the song is about. It's a song about a Vietnam veteran, returned from war, now finding no work and no future. He is musing about the friends he lost in Vietnam, the pointlessness of military action there, and perhaps the failure of the American dream, at least for him. "I was born in the USA," he thinks, but what has that done for me? 

If it's not a patriotic song, it's certainly been misunderstood as one. A lot. President Ronald Reagan praised the song, apparently thinking, as many of my friends did when I was eleven, that the song was really nothing more than someone shouting out that he was born here because he's just so gosh darn proud of that fact. I'm sure it's played at 4th of July celebrations all over America, and while people who've actually listened to the verses might raise an eyebrow, they probably get why it's being played. Springsteen himself has joked that he was glad people misunderstood the song, because it helped make him rich. But he's also played alternate versions of the song that remove the triumphant guitar motif of that even take away the chorus, focusing instead only on the story of the veteran and his trials. 

What I'm not saying

One could make the classic argument that because protest is American, a protest song is therefore patriotic, because it's respecting the American right to protest. I think that's a valid argument 364 days a year, and certainly my friend wouldn't argue that Springsteen shouldn't have the right to sing this song. I'm not even sure my friend thinks it's a bad song, only that it's not appropriate for a Fourth of July celebration. Let's say I agree with him. Criticism can, of course, be not only consistent with patriotism, but an outright patriotic duty. Springsteen apparently wrote the song after interacting with Vietnam veterans' groups, who very much faced situations like the ones described in the song when they came back from the war. In 1984, many of them were still struggling to put their lives together. Of course, Springsteen should write a song about that. But it's legitimate to ask if the one time a year we're supposed to celebrate the country is the right time to play it for large audiences. The Fourth of July is perhaps the last public celebration we have in which we jointly express our common heritage as fellow citizens. So perhaps it matters how we express ourselves at these celebrations. 

Instead, I'm saying this...

So I'm not arguing that protest songs or songs that call attention to flaws in society are inherently "patriotic," at least in a way that makes the fit for the Fourth of July. Patriotism, or love for one's country, is something I think I'm inherently suspicious of. It's in the same intellectual neighborhood as nationalism or provincialism. If it's better than those, it's in the sense that a healthy patriotism will remind us that we have a duty to the society we live in. As fiercely individualistic as our society is, we cannot ignore the welfare of our country without all of us suffering. We all have a duty to work for the common good of all. A good patriotic song, the kind that ought to be played on the Fourth of July, will strengthen that sense. 

And here, I think the masses might have the right instinct when they think of the song as patriotic. No matter how much people might ignore the lyrics, I doubt most people are unaware that the song's first words are "Born down in a dead man's town/the first step I took was when I hit the ground." So they at least know it's a song about someone who's been through the school of hard knocks. And I think this is part of the appeal the song has for them. For most Americans, achievement of the American Dream is a little bit elusive. We are all subject to macroeconomic and macropolitical ebbs and flows over which we have no control. When "Born in the USA" came out in 1984, my family was always worried that the steel company my father worked for might lay him off. If it had, my life would have been very different. We've had recessions and pandemics and wars. All of these have affected some people in ways that derailed their dreams and their connection to society. 

And yet, most people are still proud of being American in some way. I think that the persona of the song is, too. The textual evidence from the melody and the chorus, which is belted out with so much gusto, is a little too strong to be overruled by the harsh realities of the verses. In a sense, the persona of the song is saying, "I've been through some serious shit as a result of where I'm from, but it's also made me who I am, and so I claim that as my own. I belong to it and it belongs to me." 

It's not unlike the spirit of a lot of rap songs that both criticize black urban life but also can be sentimental or strangely proud of the realities of that life, because it's what has made the rapper who they are. There are a million songs in this vein, but Nas's "Memory Lane" comes to mind as one good example. To use a lesser-known but more local (to me) example, Tate Kobang is a Baltimore rapper who never pulls punches when describing life in Baltimore, but who also gushes with love for the city. None of these rappers pulls punches when describing the life they grew up with, but they also freely express love for home. They are fiercely "patriotic" about their hometowns. 

That's what "Born in the USA" is. It's a patriotic song for the rest of us, the ones for whom the American Dream is not working out like we'd hoped. As the guy who just moved back in with his parents when his start-up folded during COVID restrictions looks around on the 4th, he might see people for whom the American Dream is working, and he might feel like America isn't for him. He might hear a more unproblematically patriotic song, like Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American," and wonder why everyone seems to be ecstatic about the American experience except him. "Born in the USA" is for him. Whatever Springsteen might have intended, the audience gets a vote about what songs mean, too. Audiences have heard a song about a man for whom being an American did not mean a life of privileges, but he still seems to enthusiastically claim his heritage as an American. They have responded to it. They have felt unexpected joy in the song and in their country. They have felt themselves awakened to the promise of America even while hearing of its failure. They have even felt "patriotism," by which I mean they have a sense that they owe something to America. They, like I, hear the song and perhaps think that if it came to it, they'd be willing to die for this leaky, jury-rigged, held-together-by-duct tape of a republic. 

If most people, or even some people, react to the song in the same way, then it's probably worthy of being played as background to some burgers and beers and fireworks once a year. 

Polar Art in the age of Polar Politics: How Disney made a shit movie and knew exactly what it was doing

I've never liked Bud Light. I don't drink beer much, and when I do, I usually have to pick something a pure beer drinker would turn their nose up at in order to enjoy it. But we bought some Budweiser recently. It might never get drunk. That's because even though I'm not entirely on board with every talking point from the trans-rights camp, I thought the Budweiser boycott was so over-the-top and so disgusting, I had to help offset the costs Budweiser had incurred somehow. 

Of course, I'm never going to drink enough Budweiser to make up for the loss of its core customers. If you'd asked me a year ago if I'd lament the market loss of Budweiser, I'd have said no. I don't think it tastes very good, and I've never been able to understand why it's the default American lager. I also was never going to be able to support the NFL enough to make up for its loss of fans when some defected over the choice of players to kneel during the national anthem. The cost to the bodies of players makes me an ambivalent fan, and I never watch much other than the playoffs, even though I think football itself is a very compelling game.  

And I would never, ever have dreamed that there'd be a time in my life when I'd end up feeling obliged to defend Disney. If I were asked to think of a stereotypical evil corporation, Disney might be near the top of my list. Not because they're part of a conspiracy to usurp power from world governments, but because they own damn near everything in entertainment and that's just not good for people who want good art. But here I am in the two thousand and twenty third year of this here Christian era, having no choice but to root for them in the mother of all stupid feuds, because...well, I guess because Disney is more on my team now than the other guy down there in Florida. 

A shitty movie I'm forced to root for

I went to see the new Little Mermaid last week for a birthday party. The parents booked a theater. I myself have no idea why Disney has been cramming live-action (and by "live-action," I mean almost entirely gaudy CGI) versions of its 90s hits down our throats. Well, I mean, of course I know. It's--to use a phrase nearly a million people on the Internet have already used--a cash grab. (Most of these references differ only in which adjective they attach to "cash grab"--joyless, soulless, cynical, etc.) I really like the parents, though, so we went. There was also, as I'll get into below, another reason to go. 

I haven't seen any of the other recent remakes, so I was willing to at least give this one a shot, but it was worse than I feared. Very early on, I pulled out my phone to look up how long the run time was. It's 45 minutes longer than the original. By fate, my former spouse was a fan of the 90s Disney movies, so I'd seen the original many times. I'm not going to say I loved it, but at least you could say that what it did, it did concisely. 

I don't really want this post to become a review of Little Mermaid, but here are some things I hated about it:

-The CGI was awful. Somehow, Disney spent 250 million dollars making this thing and managed to make it look like an adaptation of a play that only had three sets in the original production. They didn't know what to do with all that money, and it shows. The people barely look human--or mer-human-- in the underwater scenes.  

-There is very little interesting visual development of the underwater world. For example, during Ariel's first big solo (which doesn't finally appear until like 20 minutes of the movie have gone by, even though it's the setup for the whole conflict), rather than get a lot of wide visuals that both develop the underwater world and give the audience a sense of the breadth of her ambitions, we get an endless series of face closeups. We get it. She looks wistful. Show us something else. As it is, that scene is classic tell-don't-show fallacy. 

-The frequent dark shots were strange. The big number, "Under the Sea," is almost the only color palette we get under water that's not incredibly dark, and then it's over-the-top garish. Ariel no longer comes from a happy world that's troubled by the Sea Witch. She comes from an oppressive world, and it's a wonder why it took falling in love to get her to leave. (I'd include a photo here to show what I mean, but Disney terrifies me, so I'm not going to even try for fair use of their photo.) 

-Did we need Eric to be developed? Part of the reason the show is so long compared to the original is that they decided to develop both Eric, the prince Ariel falls for, and his world. In fact, we see a lot more about the island he comes from than we see about Ariel's underwater world. But one of the things I like about the original is that it's a gender reverse of a lot of children's stories, in which the prince rescues the maiden. Often, the maiden has no real voice, personality, or agency. It doesn't matter what they think, because they're there to be saved. In the original movie, it's the reverse--only Ariel's interior life matters. It was a woman's story talking to women. I can see why someone thought it necessary to let us know why Ariel falls for this guy so much that she's willing to risk it all, but there was far too much bloat with the additions. 

-Sight gags that were just flat. 

Colorblind casting

I also don't want this to be a post about colorblind casting. If you've never heard of this term, feel free to Google it and lose the rest of your day reading about it. It's a big topic, certainly beyond me to do it justice. There are plusses and negatives to it, and it's not just conservative reactionaries who hate it. There are a lot of liberal who aren't fans, either. That's not surprising, because most liberal thought has moved away from espousing color-blindness as a model for racial equality, even though when I was a young person, color blindness was the "woke" position. En Vogue's "Free Your Mind" encouraged us to "be color blind," for example. It's strange to me that there are conservatives who object to colorblind casting, because it probably fits their proposed solutions to racial strife more than it does liberal solutions. 

But because there were people objecting to Ariel only on account of the fact that she was played by black actress and singer Halle Bailey, liberals were pushed into a position of having to defend the show. As a Vox article pointed out, it was pretty similar to what happened with Amazon's Tolkien-ish cash grab "The Rings of Power." (One thing Americans did not pay enough attention to, by the way, was how much Asia resisted a black Ariel. American public discourse probably does not give our country enough credit for not being the most racist place on the planet. But I digress.) 

For the record, I think colorblind casting does make sense in some cases. There have been some critics who particularly opposed it in the musical "Hamilton," but I think there's a case for that being the right venue for it. "Hamilton" isn't a period piece. It's a musical that's somewhat farcical, albeit still very serious. It's an interpretation of the meaning of America through song. That belongs to all of us, so if you want a black actor to play Jefferson, do it. The same thing with Shakespeare. Our local Shakespeare company has an all-black troupe. It also often casts women or non-binary actors in male parts. Cool. Great. Don't care. It's our common cultural possession. There's room for traditionally cast performances and non-traditional ones, too. As long as somebody is still performing Shakespeare, I'm happy. In "Rings of Power," we were (sort of) in Tolkien's legendarium, which is now nearly as much of a common cultural heritage as Shakespeare, so colorblind casting makes sense there, too. The show sucked, but not because it had black dwarves. Dwarves aren't real, so there can't be a "wrong" color for them. Also, one of the real problems reading Tolkien is how often "black" is used as a synonym for "evil." I have no problem with an activist attempt to mend this flaw. 

Intentional and absent-minded uses of color

In "Little Mermaid," I think we're in about the same place we are with "Rings of Power." Mermaids aren't real, so there's no wrong color for them. In fact, I kind of liked that all of Ariel's sisters were different races. Since they're supposed to be from the seven seas, it would make sense that each of them has a different outward appearance that mirrors the different qualities of the oceans of the world. Good. 

But "Little Mermaid" is kind of a story about prejudice. Ariel's father's prejudice toward humans is a direct cause of all the conflict. So maybe it wasn't right to use colorblind casting? In Eric's human island world, he is a white adopted child of a black mother who rules the island. There are a mix of people of color and white people in the island's society. There's nothing wrong with this, but maybe "Little Mermaid" is a story that called for a more intentional use of color in order to heighten the themes relative to prejudice going on. Maybe the mer-people should have been mostly people of color and the land people mostly not? Or vice-versa? 

It's not of great importance to me. It's a made-up world, so really, they can cast whoever they want anywhere they want, but in the case of an already sloppy movie, colorblind casting felt more like yet another sloppy detail rather than something intentional. The movie's overall inattention to color made it feel like its use of human color was also not terribly thought out, either. 

However, once there is a backlash specifically aimed at Bailey merely for being a black Ariel, I feel like I have to forget all the reasons I hated the movie and defend it, because as dumb as it was, anti-woke online campaigns are even dumber. Bailey is a very talented singer and and a beautiful young woman, which is about all that's required to play the part. There were ninety-nine reasons to object to the movie, but that wasn't one. 

Commerce, politics, and art

A movie like this from a company like Disney ought to unite right and left in our contempt for it, just like liberals and conservatives ought to both agree that Budweiser does not taste good or that Chik-Fil-A has amazing service or that the NFL produces a great product but at a heavy risk to its players. In our political environment, though, even banal choices like our beer become part of political team sports.   

Disney isn't stupid. Although franchises like the Avengers were cleverly middle-of-the-road in their politics, the company realizes that when it remakes its old movies, there is going to be hate from someone. So they make their choice. Production of Little Mermaid began long before their fight with the governor in Florida, but from here forward, their feud with DeSantis has essentially made it for them. They picked the side that tends to watch more movies. Conservative Christians haven't been letting their kids watch Disney since long before the company first gave health care to same-sex partners of homosexual employees. So if they must choose, that's their choice. 

My lifetime saw the rise in literary theory of the notion that there is no apolitical art. Even the choice to be apolitical is a political choice. This might be true, but man does not live by the bread of politics alone. Art is a primal human instinct, a reaction to the million inexplicable strange realities of existence that affect us all. Art has also always lived under political stress, from wars to censorship to famine. The current political environment, though, has given us a system in which it is increasingly difficult to market art without a clearly identifiable political belief system to sell it to. The insistence that everything is political has effectively made art, race, and politics the servants of commerce. Have an opinion about police treatment of black people? Great! No matter what the answer is, we know what to sell you!

Moreover, this arrangement of commerce and politics encourages a kind of art in which shibboleths to the intended audience are more important than the art itself. Whereas "Hamilton" had colorblind casting and was excellent, "Little Mermaid" had colorblind casting and was terrible. So was "Rings of Power." But it didn't matter. These were art decisions made by committees who saw success in one place and tried to imitate it. When they failed to grasp what made it work the first time, they cried foul, knowing it would force half the public to back them. 

Everyone ought to be able to agree that Amazon and Disney are two greedy companies that made garbage products, but because anti-Woke proponents just couldn't control their racism, it made their political opponents have to change their opinions of the products, at least in public. If people really hate seeing people of color cast as characters they've always thought of as white that much, they ought to at least wait to speak up until after they've seen the product. If it's as bad as "Rings of Power" or "Little Mermaid," the crap product will do their work for them. Decrying a fictional creature being played by a person of color, however, just triggers a political survival instinct and means that people like me are going to go out and buy a ticket--along with some movie-related merchandise for the birthday girl--when we might have otherwise stayed home. From Target, just for good measure. 

Writers born and writers made

A friend recently told me a story about his son's cross country team in high school. His son one was of a core group of runners on the team who had worked hard, taken special lessons from coaches brought in to help the team, and gradually brought their times down incrementally throughout the year. About halfway through the year, a kid of Ethiopian heritage joined the team. He'd never trained and hadn't really ever worked out in his life. In his first race, he blew away the team. 

I know people aren't entirely certain there's a genetic reason Kenyans and Ethiopians win nearly every long distance race, but it seems pretty hard to exclude genes as a big part of the story. Certainly, this kid, who was born and raised here and so never got a chance to develop his lungs in the elevation of the Rift Valley, didn't benefit from the other reasons often suggested for why Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. He must have had genetic advantages. 

It reminded me of an editorial that made a bit of a splash a few years ago, in which a former MFA instructor "finally told the truth" about MFA programs now that he didn't teach at one anymore. The big thing I took away from reading it was that the guy felt that writers were either born with a special something or they weren't, and even in MFA programs, most weren't. You had to be born with it and then develop it early or you were never going to have the stuff. He did admit that you could have the stuff and not develop it if you were lazy, and you could be born without the stuff and still put out something decent if you worked hard, but generally, you had to be born with the right neural wiring and then follow up with the right kind of upbringing.

Assuming we limit the editorialist's comments to "high art" fiction, I can't deny he's wrong. I don't think he's right if we are talking about general novel writing. Science fiction writers who are experts in fields of science often write good fiction without having worked their whole lives at it. Same with mystery, crime, fantasy, and romance. But with literary fiction, when I read the smartest lines by an Elizabeth McCracken or Emma Cline or Mary Gaitskill, I think yeah, there's no way I could do that, no matter how long I work at it.

That leaves me wondering. My friend is a big believer in nature being a stronger element than nature in success in life. I've lived most of my whole life, though, believing the opposite. I don't think you can do anything if you put your mind to it, but I do think that if you work at something, you will almost always get better at it. And I think that the difference in success in life for most people is simply putting in more than the minimum effort. Maybe that's because I've been around a lot of government employees in my life, so I've become used to the idea that putting in effort will make you stand out, but I've seldom seen hard work go to waste. I'm a big believer in the idea that if you work hard, it will pay off. It may not pay off with everything you hoped it would, but it will pay off.

Is that enough to keep going on as a writer, though?

That's reassuring for most things in life, but writing is something I want to be one of the best at. I want to be in The New Yorker. I want to be good enough that I could live off being a writer. I want to be remembered for what I've written. I want what I've written to be a comfort to people struggling with life. Anything else is a failure. And at my age, it's a pretty good bet I'm going to end up a failure. 

But the odds are that I was never going to be good enough. Maybe it's because I started too late. I didn't really develop a focused interest in literature until my 20s, and then I had a family, and I didn't get to serious writing until 40. More likely, though, even if I'd started earlier, I'd never have been good enough. Writing isn't unique in this, of course. Plenty of people who get started on things find out halfway into childhood their dreams will never come true. Writing is just different from sports in that it allows you to harbor fantasies a lot later in life. 

A lot of writers I know who've had even less success than me tell me they keep going because if they quit, they don't know if they'd be able to keep living. I guess a lot of us are doing things we never imagined we'd be doing for a living, and one way to live with that is to keep telling yourself you've got something else secret going on the side. I'm a little too honest for that, even if lack of honesty might make me happier. 

I don't think it's really possible to live happily. I think it's possible to live for a purpose, and that purpose will keep you centered and fulfilled. But when the thing I'd like to be my purpose isn't really possible, then what does one do?

Writing as fuck-you

When I was an evangelical as a young man, I used to believe that if it weren't for God, there'd be no point to life. I wondered why non-religious people didn't all kill themselves. Then I became one. The best I could come up with in the meantime was to continue living as an act of defiance. If I'd be put into a meaningless universe, I could continue living and acting as though life did have meaning, if nothing more than as a fuck-you to the mad fate that had placed me here.

Over time, I replaced defiance as a raison d'etre with writing as a purpose. If I'm never going to achieve what I'd like to as a writer, though, then maybe it's best to combine the two ideas. Continue living and writing, even though writing is a continuously meaningless act, out of nothing less than defiance. I wasn't born with enough talent? I started too late? Still going to keep writing. 

The meaning now has to change. It can't be that I'm trying to be Melville. That's gone. It's not going to happen. But I can try to get better. It's disappointing, of course, to have to lower my expectations so much. The good news, though, is that the desire to get better isn't a pipe dream. It's nearly a law that if you work at something, you will get better. Even if there are cosmic speed limits in place for everyone based on things they can't control, nearly everyone can also push just a little bit closer to those limits if they just keep at it.