The e-Spi-on Age

"Notes on New Orleans, Identity, and Change" or, "Sehnsucht, Neid, Verachtung -- und eine ganz keusche Seligkeit"

2010-04-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

The more time I devote to this place, the more somersaults I have to perform in staking out the right grounds in defending and defining it. My claim on New Orleans is broad, but my reasons for serving as one of its many apologists are now quite narrow. Am I being crowded out? If so, it is perhaps for the best. The New Orleans I grew up in is one that is mercilessly suspicious of outsiders (my mother probably holds a record in eye-rolling at Chris Rose's references to New Orleans as his "home town"), and it's increasingly rare for me to find myself amongst native inhabitants who are my age. Rarer still is that I enjoy their company; I went to Jesuit and my few remaining ties are mostly through those certain semi-chauvinistic upper-middle classers who hold their reunions at the Bulldog -- the new Bulldog, in Lakeview. People of my demographic are traditionally the ones who retard any progress. When I do my Magazine Street dawdling I often wonder if anyone's tie to this area looks at all like mine. Last of the Mohicans? Not yet, but ask me again at 38, should I make it that far.

It has little to do with the outsiders themselves who have flooded New Orleans since 2006. The ones I know are more committed to transforming the city into a democratic place than I ever was, or indeed more than just about anyone I know who is from here. These new professionals mostly lack the instinctual malaise I see in my own upbringing towards social change, good will and sentiment and all that notwithstanding. Their spirit is infectious, and only after living with someone from Portland, Oregon, say, do I now have the eyes it takes to look at a person or a neighborhood or an institution and say "this is broken and needs to be fixed."

Once seeing this, it now tires me to suffer the barrage of self-congratulation that we natives incessantly dole out to ourselves. On a message board for New Orleans' incarnation of the World Naked Bike ride, which compared to that of many other cities was risibly small and boring (and which suffered oppressive police presence), someone posted "Only in New Orleans!" Yet on the bike front, as on most others, it is not Only in New Orleans -- it is everywhere but New Orleans; in most respects we are not unique, we are not progressive, we are not even noteworthy. New Orleans is not the greatest city in the world; shall I be hung from Lee Circle for my blasphemy?

New Orleans is a city where those who have control are at constant war with anyone seeking to revoke that control and award it fairly. Raise the subject of schools and roads and police and health, and we are at the very bottom, we are a jungle; but even more deeply sits a willful ignorance and animosity towards any outside world who should lack our tolerance for inertia. If you leave New Orleans for other cities with a similar appeal -- yes, other cities' appeals can be similar to our own -- you will be caught admitting that our food is too expensive and not terrifically diverse, that our downtown is a dead area, that our musical venues and offerings suffer from several constraints, and that our gluttony is not so cute when you notice how wasteful it is and how sick it makes us. (May I ever admit my mushy conviction that the world will end in fifty years, New Orleans' disappearance into the Gulf preceding this by ten or twenty?) If a man is tired of London, they say, he is tired of living, and these gadfly complaints may provoke cries that if these are my impressions then New Orleans is simply not the place for me.

But this is my home; can I be the only one who feels squeezed into an impossibly narrow position? Is my preposterous, contradictory assemblage of traits too curious to find a tenable home here or indeed anywhere else, hurricane or no? I am gay, and find it incredibly difficult in New Orleans to meet gay men whose sensibilities at all match my own; the bars here are stone-age meat markets for pretty boys and muscle men, with weak ties to their communities, overpriced drinks served by know-nothing bartenders, and music that is unutterably dreadful. My diet is vegan, the result as much of a gimmick as of any environmental or animal-rights convictions, and this has forced a tectonic shift in my views on New Orleans' food. I ceased drinking alcohol last year after succumbing to something approaching alcoholism -- I've never seen so much alcoholism in any other place, New Orleans may well be the drunkest American city -- and have lost my taste for the continuous party.

Yet I am not straight-edge, not punk, and not an anarchist (at least not yet). Unable to grow or repair anything, I am the opposite of DIY. I resist scenes and labels in an age dominated by identities formed around a single trait. I literally do not know how to dress myself anymore, and second-guess each haircut and shave -- will my appearance make me this, or that, and cut me off from these and those? I have no tattoos nor piercings, and never will. The music I enjoy is opera, primarily, though I bristle at socializing with the city's other opera 'patrons.' Popular culture remains in my mind something different from and inferior to high art. I am not an athlete but have grown fanatical about fitness and health; still the sight of gratuitous muscles that can only be acquired in a gym turns my stomach. I speak German with fluency approaching that of a native, in a city chock-full of German influences -- that are today indistinguishable from the rest of its mélange. To pursue a career in German, for which I've spent the last eight years of my life training myself, I would have to abandon South Louisiana (as have several members of my family already). My favorite writer is Thomas Mann, who opposed democracy as a form of government kicking and screaming until he saw the Nazis coming. The only people I know who still read books are academics, who do nothing else. After eight years in college I have grown disgusted with American unibusiness, but am in an intellectual coma without other sources of engagement and interaction. I remain stubbornly priggish despite a long effort to reform. Parting entirely with my Catholic upbringing and mores is something I refuse to do, though I cannot articulate the reasons why. Finally, I am a virgin, a curiosity I've as of yet been unable or unwilling to repair. Maudlin as at may be, I would describe myself as very lonely.

This is the point in my roster where what's personal becomes a gobbledygook of finger-pointing and stones thrown at the world around me; could New Orleans and its inhabitants possibly be to blame? There must be some Oz where I'd find fulfillment. Or is it merely my own failure to be open, patient, diligent, and above all humane towards my surroundings? I know more people, and more interesting people, in New Orleans than I did a year ago, and these are typically the new arrivals drawn to reforming our famous 'brand name.' If they are not natives who can pronounce Carondelet or Burgundy correctly and inconsistent with the Francophone names of surrounding streets, I should be able to cut my losses. If they cannot tell me how they've witnessed Decatur evolve from a dead strip of warehouses into a string of good shops and venues, who cares. These things are of peripheral importance. Paradoxically, the clearer New Orleans' faults become to me, the deeper my understanding of it is and the closer I feel to its inhabitants. The sense that I have lost -- New Orleans is a city of immense and permanent loss -- abates in importance, if not in strength. I suspect I am here for the long haul. Whether I'm going down with the ship?

Book Review, Snark by David Denby

2009-11-10T21:29:00.000-08:00

Best way to kill a blog: not write, even when you're inclined to, and then wait until you're no longer inclined to.

Best way to kill a blog 2: publish a too-long review of a book you're certain no one you know has read.

Here goes anyway:

David Denby, one of two film critics for the New Yorker, recently published a book called Snark. I saw him on C-SPAN discussing his tract and was immediately delighted: someone was taking on the anti-everything aspects of popular intellectual culture. So I bought his book, read it, and was left somewhat upset. I should have expected it from a typical New Yorker writer -- an extremely intelligent, well polished analysis of something just un-mainstream enough to make me feel like I was being a cultured badass, with attacks on the American neo- and theo-cons ranging from peripheral to vociferous, but with no real attack at what's at the heart of the matter. I made my way through his at times exasperating and at times spot-on book, and I don't think that he's entirely correct in his ideas about why and how we talk to (or more importantly, about) each other in this vast internet realm of links and tagging and occasionally text.

The book's main focus should immediately piqued our interest, since the nature of what's increasingly discussed on television, in print, on the internet, on the radio, etc. (and, alas, by all of us amongst ourselves) indicates that we are turning into an idea-less culture. Our society now implicitly and aggressively discourages discourse. For every televised hour of PBS-level coverage of reality (bread-and-butter journalism, news magazines, round-table discussions), there are 100 hours of schlock, of hype, of divertimenti that are overtly hostile to reality. This to me is the biggest plague on our collective public attention. But snarkiness, as Denby defines it, seems merely like a symptom of this disease.

Still, I think the book is provocative in its conclusions -- that the public discourse is increasingly void of civility, conviction and cool-headed information -- and it should be taken very seriously.

What is snark? Commentary -- largely web-centered commentary -- that goes straight below the belt without much or any intellectual rigor. Vitriol. Except it's a different flavor of vitriol, for it stems from the educated classes -- from those of whom it was once culturally expected to traffic in niceties, formalities, and to endorse a certain civil template for all public discourse. When William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal throw punches each others' way after sparring vigorously but politely, that's a gentleman's agreement. When Cheney tells Patrick Leahy, on the Senate floor, to go fuck himself, that's a kind of snark.

And when Wonkette the political blog, or Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, e.g., sit in the back row of the class and says snide things about all the candidates in the classroom, attacking any social vulnerability instead of discussing facts and merit, that is the worst snark of all. Snark might have tipped the scales against John Edwards, whose candidacy in the primaries had the best hope of encoding at least a whiff of real progressiveness into the Democratic platform (I still view Obama as a center-right politician).

Snark is largely about the trivialest of priorities: appearing cool. Cool people don't wear their convictions on their sleeves. Cool people make you-know-what-I-mean jokes that require one to skip the subject matter and go straight to derision. Snark is anti-sincere -- the climax, perhaps, of 8 years of Bush dominance. Remember when mocking Bush was passé, when it was uncool to decry the president because everyone already hated him? I've encountered many too-cool-for-school mumblecore types who reacted to an anti-Bush comment with an ambivalent 'Duh.' I suppose being vocally anti-Bush went out of fashion sometime around 2005.

Maybe it's impossible to broach this subject and keep your scale manageable and your pronouncements modest, as Denby appears bent on doing. But the issues raised are so intricately linked with the state and nature of culture -- and all the baggage and hand-wringing that the term 'culture' term engenders -- that the book's 120 pages begin to appear thin and flimsy. It's thus strange that the author has no qualms framing snark into a legacy of Juvenal and other ancient poets (one is instantly delighted that at least someone is still affording the Classics the occasional modicum of attention and reflection, even if Denby's links sound stretched in the end), but isn't willing to look our own society squarely in the face, not even in the midst of his criticisms, which range from humble to finger-wagging in a single breath. One of Denby's other books is an important, deeply thoughtful look at the origins, nature and content of our literary canon, a knotty and huge topic indeed. Why can't Snark be similarly grand in scope?

What do I mean when I say that Snark isn't getting to the heart of the matter of what's wrong with the emerging American discourse in the internet age? Well, here's a story.

There's something David Foster Wallace observed about youthful supporters of then-centrist John McCain as he covered the 2000 Republican primary race between McCain and Bush, and I'll never forget it. Anyone remember the McCain of the 2000 race, and how young people felt about him? I don't mean to slight Obama and the significance of his youth support, but plenty of 20-somethings were just as excited about McCain as their 2008 counterparts were about Obama, and, as we easily forget, for many of the same reasons: a "post-partisan" politician, one who inspires us to conceive of our nation as a shared project in which we all have a stake and responsibility. The reason we've forgotten that version of McCain is that he never existed; his maverick status has been discredited; he tried to sell us Sarah Palin, the war in Iraq, and government-by-corporations. Suddenly the Keating 5 is back on the narrative of his career, not just fighter-piloting and pragmatic America-loving.

So how did McCain come close in 2000? Wallace wrote that young people today are so inculcated with the insufferable efforts of people trying to sell them something that they have come to take it for granted, that instead of fighting against the ubiquity of talk-to-your-doctor-about-whether-Lipitor-is-right-for-you, a fight that would require infinite energy and some radicalism, we merely incorporate it, live around it, buy into it and ignore it as we see fit. And when a huckster politician comes around, the immediate instinct is to tune the motherfucker out just as one tunes out "Dude, you're gettin’ a Dell!" and the blandly attractive hoodlum around our age who is trying to get us to eat another 1000 calories at Taco Bell at one in the morning by parroting some generic version of the words that we use and the way that we dress.

As likely as not you will end up eating the Taco Bell, but you don't really believe in it, of course, somehow it’s something of a joke that you’re there, and if it’s not a joke you have to swallow a bit of your dignity before you can proceed to the food; if somebody sincerely asked you whether you enjoyed that Grilled Stuft Burrito, whether it was well prepared and whether the ingredients tasted fresh and blended together well, you would stare at him as if he were from Mars, wonder if he was channeling Samuel L. Jackson’s “tasty burger” speech from Pulp Fiction before he murdered you. (The incongruity between the circus-clown brand culture we constantly endorse, and our affectations of cool, is put on the table like never before in that scene, and it's one of Tarantino's best.) Is it any wonder, then, that, if you even vote to begin with, you support a candidate who inevitably promises “leadership,” paired with “courage,” promising to “fight for your values,” but that you don't dare discuss any platforms at any length, platforms about which you’ve been presented with less than ten minutes of sober information?

And, of course, any utterance in culture that seems to penetrate this surreal vacuity wins immediate credibility and appeal, whether deserving or not – a phenomenon like South Park prefers to proffer in turn its own surreal vacuity instead of any alternative rooted in any belief bigger than oneself – but calling everyone a douchebag in snickering self-defense is hardly a healthy way of living. The dadaists would be delighted: everything is a joke now, sincerity is scorned. News is palatable only in comedy form, the nutritional value of our mass media’s offerings has reached a junk-food nadir. Our music taste is for the naughtily absurd. We wear t-shirts that serve to present our identities, but the statements on them declare nothing but jest. Irony and sarcasm are no longer distinguishable. Surface, it's the new substance!

From the beginning of the book, you can tell Denby is trying to cement the coining of his pet term for something nearly as vast as a zeitgeist (snarkiness, as he would have it, though the word is oddly narrow and grating, especially when libel, calumny, character assassination, and childishness would serve equally well), and his insistence on such a silly word seems ill-fated. But it has sparked some discussion, and to the extent that this discussion can reflect on Denby's claims thoughtfully, adopting the appealing ones and abandoning what's most tenuous about the book, it has proved so far a successful and important endeavor. Snark is not at all a bad book.

Hostility to earnest conviction and discussion has permeated all classes; Proust's society elite may have been proto-Snarks (in Du côté du chez Swann, Swann says all his heady words with jesting protestations, lest anyone get the impression that he was actually arguing a point), but nothing matches the insipidness of twenty-something liberal hipsters who while working towards $100,000 diplomas use their status updates as a forum for mocking Michelle Obama's election night dress. Nor is the case of the class that historically would have revolted any less revolting; how can someone focus on his abysmal hourly wages when VH1 snags his thoughts instead with jokes about jokes about people who are jokes? David Foster Wallace asked in 2000 whether McCain might be an antidote to this snarling, shoulder-shrugging helplessness in the face of Important Issues, but by the end of his article appeared doubtful and melancholy. (This is the part where I make a clever joke about his having killed himself due to others' snarkiness.)

Denby's book has Obama as a backdrop, with a dose of optimism that Obama may have been 2008's antidote: perhaps his civility and directness will stem our (often justifiable) cynicism about politics and foster an understanding of the importance of a thriving, thoughtful public sphere. And the book's reflections about the role of the internet in exacerbating the scope of dangerous ad hominem attacks are very timely, very smart, and very important. If Denby doesn't use his narrow book to try grandly to update the diagnosis of society as a spectacle, if he doesn't excoriate the fraudulence of ditty-driven materialism while referencing academic anti-capitalist debates, one has to say "oh well" and read the book for what it's worth, which is still a great deal.

I'd enjoy discussing snark, to whatever extent you think such a phenomenon truly exists, and what instances of popular/intellectual culture are snarky.

Blog Hard

2009-10-27T19:02:00.000-07:00

The first post: account for the name, manifesto-style.

1. The 'e' is self-evident. Plus, an American friend went to Spain this summer, and returned with a stray 'e' at the beginning of assorted words (e.g. eSpain, eSpanish, eTC.). The eFfect was eHumorous.

2. "Age of Precarious" was already taken.

3. As a committed statist whose skin crawls at the mention of tax cuts and the loss of personal liberty, I want the government in my life. I want to walk amongst fellow citizens and know that their stake is my stake and that the terrain we share is a combination of the respected private and the well-fostered public. Respecting the private leads towards anti-corporatism, not the opposite (watch how publicy subsidized the private sector is!). Nursing the public means putting business in a position to serve the state, which is an administration of the collective. The proper balance of private and public is to my mind the main challenge of sustaining an industrial nation-state (in the long-term; the unbalance in the U.S. is what makes us big, and topsy-turvy). I attempt, and fail, to always factor in the pursuit of that balance in what I do, say, and think.

4. Some sort of scam-resembling credit-counseling/student loan collection agency has my personal telephone number, which I'm pretty sure it found through Facebook, and now calls me daily despite my feeble protests.

5. I'm a paranoid schizophrenic.

6. One of the above statements is false.

My hopes for this blog are to talk about all sorts of different topics, without falling victim to self-obsession. I've spent a long time resenting blogs and bloggers, somewhat cattily so. Now I'm a copycat.

Major impetus to try my hand at blogging Number 1:

The DAAD (Deutscher Akademiker Austausch-Dienst, or the German Academic Exchange Service) gives a goodly sum of money to students and organizations for the purpose of studying in Germany -- a great example of a Big State using public money for public good, with immediate and tangible benefits. They've twice turned me down for major scholarships I assumed I was certain to receive. And their website hosts several blogs written by students they've awarded money. In a moment of snarkiness I read several of them, with intent to lampoon. And indeed, each blog was more about the individual and his or her personal world than about anything larger. Wie, bitte? Ze German government vill pay me to talk about myzelf? Ausgezeichnet! It must all be very flattering. How readily we let vanity get the better of us!

David Brooks reported in the New York Times today ("The Fatal Conceit") that 94% of college professors polled considered themselves above average teachers. Though it should be noted that I couldn't disagree more with his conclusion, which is that the state is not to be trusted with the management or regulation of much at all.

Then finally I came across a single DAAD blogger (Griff Rollefson, with "Der Angriff" -- get it?) who actually talked about the topic the DAAD had lugged him across the Atlantic to study, instead of his bowels, the emoticon settings of his friends' status updates, and how the weather had made him drowsy. His observations about music and urban/immigrant music culture in Germany in the last twenty years are very interesting.

So thanks, Griff, for setting the bar higher than belly-crawling. Writing this is admittedly selfish, since it's the act of composition that's cathartic and not the idea of scores of readers.

Major impetus Number 2 (closely related to number 1):

I hosted two twin couch surfers from Norman, Oklahoma recently and was quickly struck by the difference in their values to my own, especially as concerns sincerity and openness as opposed to irony and snarkiness (an entry on snark, à la David Denby, is sure to follow soon). I.e. the twins fron the Midwest were sincere and open, and I, attempting urbane, found a terrifying number of my utterances to be insincere, in fact quite negative. This made me feel like garbage.

Once, in the car, I was telling them a story about the weather in August in Munich, and the story involved my having seen an open-air performance of Hamlet in the Brunnenhof of the Residenz. (I delighted in name-dropping.) The crux of the story was that the production was terrible, unwatchably stupid.

"Oh yeah? What was it about it that was so bad?"

I found myself scrambling, being forced to talk about content, being forced to anchor my criticisms in arguments. (Once upon a time I considered going to law school.) I made it out alive -- mercifully I remembered Polonius' name -- but the twins proceeded to tell me me about a good production of Hamlet they had seen, and about what it was that made it good, and what it was that moved them, and what it meant to them.

I nodded politely, playing along well enough, but realized, with a rock of horror in my stomach, that I had lost my interest in discussing what's at the heart of a topic in favor of dipping my toe in the periphery.

How can we resist the Spectacle, resist the once-directly-lived turning into mere representation (Guy Debord)?

Major impetus Number 3 (closely related to impeti 2 and 1):

I lean increasingly hard towards alcohol, cannot manage to sit before a desk for the purpose of composing fiction, have not worked hard in over a year, and find it difficult to reach out to the very people I suspect I need to be surrounded by.

Major impetus Number 4:

To have a chance to throw around phrases like "Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui."

("We do not want a world in which a guarantee against dying of hunger comes at the risk of dying of boredom.")

Old hat for old Sit-fans and '68-ers, but for me, a layman at nearly everything (is a blog a ticket out?), it is appealing as it was in Freshman English seminars.