Book Review: The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

We own little real estate in the small towns of our psychologies but two central ironies of modern life, like the post office and police station in our minds.

First, we think better of ourselves than we should.  That's an understatement, perhaps.  Second, we think we know ourselves, but we don't.  Donald Antrim's stories play on these ironies like a San Francisco busker on an two-stringed erhu, sawing away at the awkward and self-defeating behaviors that resonate from our overestimation and ignorance of self.
Sometimes the effect is comic, as in this description of the genesis of an ill-fated outing in "Pond, With Mud."

     He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o'clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground.  Immediately following the zoo's inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony - or relatively soon after, to be more precise - strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you'd never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo's future was in question. The time for a visit was now.

Now, the faulty logic at the paragraph's end does give us a chuckle, but it also gives us pause when we recall that the man will be visiting the zoo "with the boy in tow."  Yet the details Antrim assembles generate an air of exaggeration that accentuates the humor: the incinerated chemical plant, animal cruelty at a zoo, embezzlement.  Antrim's stories stand out from the trend among modern fiction writers to torture their poor creations precisely because he grants them some lightness to accompany the characters' unbearable being.  The situations - grim, somewhat shocking - seem not so dark because of the dark humor Antrim wraps the plot in, like organ meat in clean butcher's paper.

In "Another Manhattan," the simple act of bringing flowers for his girlfriend at a restaurant date creates such abominable little tragedies that we feel for the poor sap who thinks flowers can fix relationships.

     He parted the curtains.  "Pardon me," he said to the people seated near the entrance.  Long- and short-stemmed flowers alike had snagged on the drapes. ... Jim spun left then right, enshrouding himself - and the bouquet - within the folds of drapery fabric.  There followed a flurry of petals.  The rose thorns came loose; the bouquet's topmost stems sprung free. ... "You're bleeding," Lorenzo told him.  Jim saw the blood spotting Lorenzo's handkerchief.  Lorenzo said, "You have a lot of scratches.  You look like you've been in a fight with some squirrels or something." ... He explained to Lorenzo that the flowers were a gift for Kate ... He clutched the vase.  His pants were wet from water that had sloshed over the rim.  Water stained his shoes.  He could see tiny snags marking the sleeves of his overcoat and the front of his suit.  How frustrating, after having labored so hard to avoid the thorns.  His clothes would have to go to a reweaver, he thought.  Then his thinking disintegrated into bitter resignation.  Everything he touched was ruined.  The flowers were almost destroyed.

The scene plays like something out of Chaplin - indeed, most of Antrim's antiheroes smack of the Little Tramp, drained of any sentimentality.  The antagonist in each story is none other than the man himself, the woman herself, and they all end up sounding like the Apostle Paul:  "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

Antrim is also a master of the storytelling craft. specifically in his use of details that make an entire world real for his readers.  In the title story, the main character starts out his debacle with a simple garbage run:

     ... he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection - it wasn't a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics - that he'd kept since he was a boy.  He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he'd come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.

How perfect a string of beads: the artwork, the infidelity, the comic books, a collection that is actually a pile, a forgotten childhood, a dusty search, a box of bullets.  In two complex but ordinary sentences, we see deeper inside this man than he sees into himself.

And that, ultimately, is the hypothesis of these stories: if we comprehend these people better than they know themselves, are we the same way?  Do the people we know see through our masks?  Are we all a bit like the emperor who was so sure not only of his clothing, but of his superior intelligence, while the children stand by laughing at our ridiculous bareness and barrenness?  Can we not see beyond our noses because of that shimmering emerald light in the air?

Book Review: Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson

No one does bitterness and scorn quite as well as old white guys, and no old white guys are so well equipped to express their discontent as college professors, hurling scrolls of invective from their ivory towers.  For most of this book, Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education, Mark Edmundson does his pitch-perfect impression of the angry old white professor dude, but, then, the tone turns and becomes unexpectedly tender and personal.  For a short while.

Edmundson's main gripe is with what his beloved liberal arts university has become in the modern age.

In the old days, when the university was a quasi-churchly institution, the professors largely called the shots. ... But in the new university all this changed.  Now the professors were the people who gave the grades, period. ... anyone who revered them for their wisdom or wanted to emulate them was tacitly understood to be half-cracked (x).

As you'd expect, Edmundson is a university professor, and he dislikes his loss of prestige and power, to put it plainly.

Who's to blame?  The easy demon: society.

To me, liberal arts education is as ineffective as it is now ... [because] university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crudely, ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images (6).

Well, then, we only need reverse the prevailing trend of American culture over the past three generations.  And a nice little book like this (ranked #396,984 in sales on Amazon) might just turn that tide (See?  I can be sarcastic, too!)

But Edmundson also blames the university itself, which in America (as we do all know) has become nothing more than a diploma mill where those who pay their tuition bills receive credentials in exchange, which they can then parley into money-making careers.  Still, he holds out hope for those little pockets of genuine education secreted throughout the country.

If you want to get a real education in America, you're going to have to fight ... against the institution that you find yourself in ... you'll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occasionally even to piss off some admirable people (52).

His pastiche of the "corporate city" type of university, bent solely on commerce and credentialization (yes, not really a word, but Mark will get the joke), is worthy of Mencken:

Universities that have made themselves into corporate cities are not hard to spot.  Most of the students - and many members of the faculty - are buzzing from place to place, always feeling a bit self-important, always feeling a bit behind, like that poor rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (107).

And the values they promote stand for similar biting review:

Why is excellence a bad word?  It's not, in and of itself.  But people around universities who use it are people who want to talk about worldly distinction without talking about ethics.  Excellence means we're smart, we're accomplished, we're successful - and we can be these things without any obligation to help our fellow human beings. ... Why is leadership so bad?  In itself, it's not.  But what people usually mean by a leader now is someone who, in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all of the values of the people who are in charge (109).

But no one falls in line for harsher rebuking than the students themselves, in whom ever positive qualities betray an underlying stupidity.

... the reason that the kids are so open and appealing is that they're innocents.  Their naiveté is what's beguiling.  And part of what creates that innocence is ignorance.  They don't go from place to place pressed to the ground with the burden of the past - in part because they don't know much about that past (101).

Keep in mind that we are talking about college students at a prestigious university, "kids" who aced AP history courses, and Edmundson's depiction of them as grinning buffoons is all the more damning.  These "kids" are incapable of any intellectual discourse altogether.

It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that students immersed in the manic culture of Internet and Adderall are conditioned not to have (45).

So culture, the moneyed university, and the ignorant, complacent, drug-addled students have turned higher education into a sham, in Edmundson's view.

Then - and I know I've made you wait a while for it - the book turns.  Edmundson recalls the high school teacher, Mr. Meyers, who woke him from his unintellectual torpor and taught him that education is an act of rebellion.

Before Meyers arrived, I never rebelled against the place, at least not openly.  I didn't in part because I believed that Medford High was the only game there was.  The factories where my father and uncles worked were extensions of the high school; the TV shows we watched were manufactured to fit the tastes for escape that such places form; the books we were assigned to read in class, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Good Earth, of which I ingested about fifty pages each, could, as I saw it then (I've never had the wherewithal to check back into them), have been written by the English teachers, with their bland, babbling goodness and suppressed hysterias (122).

Perhaps Edmundson's students, whose laptops are no longer welcome in his class since he discovered they were watching booty-shaking videos and emailing during class rather than taking notes, are a reflection of his younger self?  Maybe they see his book choices as he saw his teachers'?  Shockingly, this possibility does not occur to Edmundson.  But if, as he posits, education is an act of rebellion, then his students are rebelling effectively, against him and his worldview.

Verily, Edmundson seems to turn his firehose of vitriol on everyone but himself.  While on the cusp of self-discovery he backs away and returns to his comfortable weapons of sarcasm and high dudgeon, facetiously advising the imagined straw man of a new humanities professor:

... students believe it is up to the teacher to describe the book so appealingly (to advertise it, in short) that later in life, given leisure, they might have a look.  The summary and description should be carried on in a diverting way.  There ought to be copious reference to analogous themes and plots in recent popular culture.  Jokes ought to be offered at the expense of at least some of the characters, preferably all. ... In no event should the instructor hint that the author or the characters in the book are in any way superior to the students who have condescended to encounter them (145).

Indeed, Edmundson's greatest enemy appears to be the professor who does exactly thus, who tolerates a lowering of intellectual standards and embraces the familiar demon of pop culture.  He openly acknowledges his need to demonize.

Every essay on education needs a villain.  There has to be someone or something preventing the liberal arts from being the world-changing enterprise we all suspect they can be.  And I suppose so far I have supplied a few (203).

Ah, yes, Professor, you have supplied a few villains.  But I'm giving your book a C+ in that you propose no other hero than yourself, and you, Professor, cannot save education because education does not need saving.  Popular culture has always been a bane of lowbrow, mindless entertainment, but it is the intellectual's job to elevate these things by seeking to understand them rather than dismiss them, to write about baseball like Roger Angell, to write about Madonna like Camille Paglia, and to write about drug addicts like William T. Vollmann.

So I'll answer the book's question: Why teach?  We teach because we believe in deep thinking and the power of deep thinking and writing and reading to change the world in lasting, positive ways.  And we realize that we cannot do so by ourselves, and so we teach to train an army of thinkers - not to spurn and scorn them as dimwits, but to grab them by their souls and give them a good drubbing, saying, "Wake, sleeper, wake!  Wake and see what the world truly is!  See what you truly are!"

Book Review: Notes from the Internet Apocalypse by Wayne Gladstone

An internet apocalypse isn't really an apocalypse, is it?  I mean, think about the book of Revelation:

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

Now, that's an apocalypse.  But the worldwide loss of the internet - especially as this novel conceives it, without any effect on international commerce - would primarily mean - as this novel conceives it - a loss of mindless entertainment.  But wouldn't we treat it like an apocalypse?  Our first world problems comprise a sort of daily apocalypse (my favorite is "My inflight movie was longer than my flight.").

Nowadays (I feel the curmudgeon rise within me, just using the word "nowadays" ... mmmmm ...) we can't just say something pithy.  We tweet it.  We aren't just proud of our children.  We post their accomplishments on Fakebook, uh, I mean, Facebook.  We can't just make a nice dinner for our family.  We have to post it as food porn on Instagram.  And I judge not, or at least I chuck the first stone at myself (which is just as difficult as it sounds) - I participate in this online solipsistic egofest.  But, hey, I mean, like, hey.

So the main joke of this novel is how people would adapt to a world without Reddit and Twitter.

     Tobey took a step closer.  "First of all," he said, "I resent the implication that making up funny one-liners about how fat Jennifer Love Hewitt has gotten is not a real job.  But more important, are you serious?  Being a desk jockey for the Workers' Compensation Board?  That's a real job?  Judging from the amount of beer in your fridge and the fact that you're wearing jeans on a Tuesday, I'm guessing you haven't been there for a while." 

     "I'm working remotely," I lied. 

     "Working remotely or not even remotely working?"  He smiled. 

     "Wow.  That's a good one." 

     Tobey was the best two-paragraph blogger there ever was. 

     "I know.  I just wrote that.  And now it makes no sense because there's no Internet."

That's just it.  What is the point of being clever if not to be appreciated, and to be thus valued by the largest audience possible, which has evolved to become a main function of the online world.  Remember when the internet was new and everyone was flush with how it would change our lives?  But no one predicted that LOL cats would rule and 6-second stop-motion animations on Vine would be hailed as high art.  But this is the world we created, and we are stuck with it.  Probably.  Unless the internet stops working (or is stolen, by the government, of course).

Right.  Which brings me back to this book.  Three unlikely comrades go out in search for the internet as if it were a thing to be found.  Which is the point.  The internet is not a thing. In a sense, it's nothing.  But here I am blogging about it.  On the internet.  Or blogging about the book (print on paper) about the internet on the internet.  The snake chokes on its tail and takes a selfie while doing so (without hands, quite a trick).

Do they find the internet in the end?  I don't know - does it really matter?