Are We Dumber? (Californication, Nicholson Baker's underpants, Wendell Berry, Atari)

Are we dumber?  It's a question we're asking ourselves all the time now.  I encountered the query most recently in an episode of Californication, when struggling novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) laments the deterioration of the English language represented by such acronyms as LOL, BRB and even BJ.  I'm not a big fan of language policing, and I tend not to worry about the surface manifestations of linguistic evolution.  But the episode got me thinking about the larger question, again: despite the various acoutrements of "developed" economies, are we actually less advanced than previous generations?  Are "advancements" really regressions?  Are we dumber?

Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate.  By the time we matured, we were reacting.  Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal.  Our parents had moved into town, gotten educated, and joined the machinery of a consumer society.  Sure, in many cases, we inherited some of their self-loathing over this--our parents drove us into the country on Sundays and taught us the names of cows.  We visited the family homesteads, where giant combines tilled right to the edge of the still visible foundations of the houses our parents had grown up in.  Then we returned home and went for the high score on Asteroids again.

There's no way my grandparents--rest their souls--could challenge my high score on Asteroids.

We got differently smart.  Smart in irrelevant ways, maybe.  About an hour after watching that Californication episode, I was in bed reading Nicholson Baker's novel, A Box of Matches.  To me, this book is a classic example of advanced human intelligence, when that intelligence has nothing much to focus on:

"I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes.  There are two ways to do this.  Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, 'normal' toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline--distinguished--I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin.  By then I'm ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor.  If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes."

Beautiful.  An elegy for twentieth century consciousness.  Not that there aren't still hold-outs.  For example, Wendell Berry is out there achieving deep understandings of human necessity on a daily basis--trying to wake us up.  But I think that for every Wendell Berry, there are ten Nicholson Bakers--and for every Nicholson Baker, there are ten of me--well-meaning but undisciplined people who are neither smart nor attentive enough to realize the grace we exhibit in just getting undressed.

But who have extremely high scores on several old school Atari games.

Reading Conduit with Tetman Callis and Gordon Lish

As Associate Editor of the best literary magazine out there, Conduit, I am frequently met at my front door by a box of poetry and fiction submissions.  It is my job to fairly ruthlessly cut a box of a hundred or so submissions down to the best ten or twenty, and then pass them up the editorial chain of command.  This process is meaningful to me in myriad ways, and I may, on occasion, use this blog as a space to work through observations that arise out of editing for Conduit.  

Last week, I worked through a box of submisisons in four work sessions--reading about 25 submissions in each two-to-three-hour sitting.  I try to work quickly but carefully, to remain open to my own interests as I work, and to allow myself to pursue tangential energies as they arise.  For example, I often find people's cover letters interesting, and I might take a moment to look up the website of a writer whose personality strikes me in some way.  Last week, a short story submitted by a writer named Tetman Callis really amused me.  I mean, I really liked the story's quirky but well-directed energy, so much so that I wanted to find out who this writer was--Tetman Callis (those of us writing with lame-ass names like "Bill" are inevitably drawn toward the aura of cool-name writers). 

So I put Tetman's story in the "yes" pile (meaning it goes further up the editorial chain), and commenced googling.  I found a gem.  Tetman Callis's website includes a sequence of notes, edited and condensed, taken by Mr. Callis in a 1990 master class on fiction writing given by renowned editor, Gordon Lish (think Esquire, Knopf, Capote, DeLillo, Ford, etc.).  "The Gordon Lish Notes" are epigrammatic--fragmented observations about writing that would make a great daily calendar, really.  Some of Lish's aphorisms are simple: "build your story like you're stacking blocks."  Others are complex reflections on form, psychology, language, etc.  For instance,

"'Always stay on the surface of your object.'  If you dive under the surface, you lose momentum, you loose the bond of understanding you assume with your reader, which bond is that of harmonious prelingual love.  'Many, many ills await the writer who goes under the surface.'  We live in a time when what lies beneath surfaces must remain essentially unknown to us."

Provocative thoughts like these resonate throughout the sequence of notes.  What could Lish mean, here?  We don't understand ourselves?  Have we lost touch with a deeper sense of intuition or purpose?  Are we impoverished?  Or is our surface condition rich, observant, satisfactory?  Perhaps most importantly for a writer, how might an observation like this one drive a story?  In our own work, is there a character whose relationship to surface and depth might be usefully re-thought?  Could we develop plot around this character's attempts to encounter depth, or along the route of his surface explorations? 

Really, Tetman Callis's "Gordon Lish Notes" are worth a look for any writer or artist interested in experience, artistic form, the nature of an artist's interaction with the world. 

And yes, Conduit is now accepting submissions.  See the website for guidelines.  http://www.conduit.org/.

"Winning" with Language: Frank Luntz vs. Dobby Gibson

Charlie Sheen is "winning."  So too is Republican strategist Frank Luntz, whose new book about successfully packaging ideas in persuasive language is called Win.  Luntz is perhaps most famous for having engineered the phrase "death taxes" to raise republican ire over previously benign "estate taxes."  Well... maybe "climate change" instead of "global warming" is more famous.  In any case, Luntz is well known for his ability to frame concepts in inflammatory or understated ways, usually to the advantage of right-wing constituencies.

I first learned about Luntz through Frontline's great episode "The Persuaders."  In that program, we see how Luntz uses focus groups and technology to determine which language resonates most with people.  His methods were fascinating, and there's no arguing with the success of his concepts.  Today, Luntz was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and I found his analyses both insightful and bi-partisan--really, anyone could employ Luntz's framing strategies, and Republicans' success with them probably only indicates their advanced degree of organization and... well... ruthlessness in capitalizing on emotional rhetoric. 

The whole program was interesting, but an uncharacteristic personal lapse on Luntz's part was probably the most compelling moment in the program.  In discussing Barack Obama's successful presidential campaign, Luntz asserted that the President "reads a teleprompter better than any Hollywood actor," and that he won the election, in large part, because his public presence was so much smoother than John McCain's.  "Stevie Wonder reads a teleprompter better than John McCain," said Luntz.  When Neal Conan's stunned silence registered, Luntz was left in his own awkward puddle.  "You're not laughing," he said to Conan.  "You're still not laughing."  Very perceptive, Frank.  That's right: you've got to be careful where you make fun of blind people.  It's tempting to conclude that Luntz provided us with a window into his real personality.  Would anyone be shocked if Luntz was dropping Helen Keller jokes in the country club lounge?  I wouldn't.  Would it surprise me if Luntz and his buddies shared a private reserve of chuckles about people of color, women, gays, the handicapped, the homeless, etc. etc.?  No.  It wouldn't surprise me if the key Republican language strategist was, at heart, kind of a dick.  Sorry.

The whole business reminded me why of why I've invested so much of my life in poetry.  It's not that poetry doesn't have its governing conventions, or that poets are never guilty of pandering.  But compared to the cynical arena of pollsters and strategists, poetry is pure as the driven snow (which I just finished shoveling, this March morning in Wisconsin).  When a writer is working creatively, no one is standing over his or her shoulder reminding him to stay "on message."  And in contemporary poetry, where an incredibly wide variety of styles and forms are in play, it's possible for a writer to feel pretty unrestricted.  Sure, I'm aware that there are contexts for that freedom--contexts of language, genre, culture, class, etc. etc.--but there's so little for a good poem to win (in terms of cash, benefits, worldly prestige or cultural impact) that it makes little sense for a poet to fake anything.

I'm so looking forward to hearing Dobby Gibson read at the Pump House Regional Arts Center next Thursday night, March 17th.  It will be great to see someone take the stage on behalf of language's freshest energies.  For an hour or so, it'll be possible to believe that we're really doing something here--something more than harnessing language to our political goals or narrow self-interests. 

From the Poetry Foundation page on Dobby Gibson:
"Born in Minneapolis, poet Dobby Gibson earned a BA at Connecticut College and an MFA at Indiana University. Originally in graduate school to study fiction, Gibson wrote his first poem at the age of 26. He described his defection from fiction in an interview with the online audio archive From the Fishouse: “I eventually spent all my time on my fiction working on beginnings and endings, and began to quit caring about plot and characters and the giant movie set scaffolding that fiction depends upon. One thing that made poetry really powerful and charged for me was that it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing […] I love that feeling of transgression I get from writing a poem.”

Gibson is the author of Skirmish (2009) and Polar (2005), both of which were finalists for the Minnesota Book Award. Polar also won Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawley Award. Of the poems in Skirmish, a Publishers Weekly review noted, “Gibson mixes the language of public discourse, science, TV and everyday conversation in a chatty if bleak voice that is both accessible and satisfyingly challenging.” Gibson’s free-verse poems combine lyric musicality, deconstructed aphorisms, and inventive humor."