So whiteness is an ethnicity like any other
I think the traditional explanation is that it's not like any other, but rather the undifferentiated norm against which others are measured: that is, saying nothing is the same as saying "white." Absent signifcant changes in the cultural pool, that's going to remain true.
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
I'm curious as to whether that remains the case in Hawaii, a state which is majority-non-white and reportedly somewhat hostile to us honkies. Can anyone speak to this?
this is part of why it was so consciousness-raising to see Richard Pryor in his first concert-videos doing imitations of white people being white.
Deeply embarrassing and cringe-making, and at the same time hilarious, to realize that white was not unmarked, at all, could be observed, could be categorized, pigeon-holed, ridiculed.
Yeah, bracing stuff. Hard to believe it was so long ago, and so little has changed, racially, in America.
I think we should celebrate whiteness in this thread. Ogged's not allowed. Shall we vote on the question of including Jews?
2: "surprisingly" s/b "surprising"
The judgement that the results were surprising was the author's, not mine.
I don't mind / like it when my white friends refer to their whiteness as an ethnicity. Like when we're deciding what to eat, and my white friend feels like eating some bread-based food, like Italian or hamburgers or something, it's fine for her to say, "no, I don't want Vietnamese tonight, I want to eat whitepeople food." It puts white people on the same level as everyone else, whereas if she were to say, "I don't want to eat ethnic food," it would normalize whiteness as the expense of other people(s).
I've never seen the embarrassingness of an affirmation of one's own whiteness addressed in the context of freedom-from-ethnicity as a facet of white privilege
You have to be ironic about it.
I recall that about fifteen years ago the student paper did a wonderful April Fool's story about establishing a white ethnic theme house on campus; it so carefully walked the line of believability that it had me going for at least three paragraphs.
"Shall we vote on the question of including Jews?"
That's funny--I was just going to ask whether we should include the Irish.
So glad to be ethnically Jewish.
Join the Society for Ethnical Culture!
Your particularity, LB, is class and local (NYC).
The trouble with whiteness is that there are many people like LB, except less aware of its anomalousness than she is, who have no particularly awareness of other particularities. I, on the other hand, while just as "white," am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality, and how each sets me apart from "whiteness" in certain ways. Yesterday's Polish immigrant is white, and his grandchildren might be as disconnected from other particularities as LB, but not in the meantime.
Don't other aspects rush in to fill the void left by "whiteness"? Sit down and I'll tell you a thing or twelve about my great home of Texas, and all the funny things that (white) Texans get up to.
molesting the livestock? I love those stories.
No that goes on mainly in Minnesota.
Funny: I'm being asked to participate in a survey about my Texas ethnicity, primarily because Susan identified me on her blog as a fellow member of the great Texas diaspora.
Iranians were the original Aryans (the words are close cognates) so Ogged is white. However, he has to own to his ethnic responsibility for the Holocaust.
If I understand what you're saying, it's a catch-22. If we say "I'm just boring plain old American", we're defining "American" as "white with bad cooking" and anything else as "other." If we say, "I'm proud of being white", we're proud of having... well, bad cooking and we sound like the white pride crowd.
My background is somewhat like LBs. I know we're Sicilian on one side, but it doesn't show up anywhere except the first names of some great aunts. Pittsburghese accent, bad cooking, mushroom soup casseroles. I can make a great spaghetti sauce, but I learned it from my mom who learned it from my non-Italian dad. The other side -- no idea at all really. If I were to say 'I don't have an ethnicity', I think I'd mean nothing more than 'there's nothing that marks me as belonging to a small in-group.'
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
>whiteness is an ethnicity like any other
I think that there are real distinctions within whiteness. I am reading Etnic America by Thomas Sowell and I am becoming more convinced of the lasting effects of ethnity in America. Sowell points out that Irish-Americans disproportunately become lawyers. It also includes stereotypes that I never heard before such as how fun loving German-Americans introduced picnics, dancing and sports to the US. Thank you, fun loving German-Americans.
This book is supposed to be good too, but it is 972 pages long.
It is true that ethnicity is hidden in a way that race is not.
Suppressed bestiality is one of the main causes of various sorts of crippling mental disorder. Often the damaged individual is completely unaware of his or her bestial urges, and the therapist has to push his therapy skills to the max in order to "draw them out". Only then can the healing begin.
We were talking about Albion's Seed here just last week. The lasting quality of the Scotch-Irish mindset in that book made a profound impact on James Webb, explaining to him aspects of his life, culture and attitudes he'd never understood about himself before. He wrote a book about it. He's now running to unseat George Allen, another guy with more in his background than "whiteness" to think about these days.
And sausage and sauerkraut.
"Honky" and "haole" both work for generic-white.
I'm highly suspicious of "Albion's Seed", because it exaggerates the British component. Minnesota and Wisconsin were first settled by Brits, but they were completely overwhelmed by Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, Irish, and a bunch of little niche ethnicities too. Minnesota, though very white, still has the lowest British ancestry of any state.
I have a hilarious image in my mind of George Allen stonewalling persistent reporters: "Again with the Jewish question."
brown people have ethnicites which explain important things about their identities, but white people are just people, and anything they do is a statement of their personal identity
This seems related to the 'fundamental attribution error' of believing the actions of others are indicative of the type of person they are, rather than the result of the specific situation/environment.
Could we tell White person jokes? Would that help?
Q: What do WASPs do instead of having sex?
A: Rule the world.
18: That's it exactly. Exeept that this:
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
Is unrealistic. What, we're going to ban the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Kwanzaa?
8: I know talking about whiteness isn't offensive when it's done in that manner, but it's embarrassing. It sounds too much like white-supremacist vocabulary.
19: Oh, sure there are distinctions within 'white American' -- as IDP says, I'm more a New Yorker than I am anything else. But meatloaf-eating-white-people is as coherent a group as lots of other things that get treated as ethnic groups -- 'Latino' anyone?
I started and stopped and started again. I grew up in a very ethnic community...German, Mennonite, Italian, Poles, Scots...as a rare but undetectably Irish descendant. We were blue-collar/farm but not Nascar. To claim there is a "white culture" distinct from all the subcultures seems to me like saying there is a "Hispanic" culture that blends Mexican-Americans with Brazilians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans.
I am trying, but my "whiteness" doesn't feel like the patriarchy. My meatloaf is not an act of oppression. I don't use Hunt's tomato sauce but Kraft cheese.
But all jokes are white people jokes unless otherwise indicated.
My meatloaf is not an act of oppression.
Except to the cows.
Bob, it does not get whiter than Kraft cheese in meatloaf.
Maybe the solution is to stop talking in terms of group identity completely?
I think this is an extremely white solution.
John Emerson, have you ever read Randolph Bourne's "Transnational America" and the critique of assimilation and the melting pot ideology in it?
I thought Albion's Seed was suggesting that the British Cultures he described explained a great deal about the American cultures which descend from them, whatever the ancestry of the people living in them now. Areas of predominantly foreign settlement, like Minnesota, would be obvious exceptions. An example is the way the late Dale Earnhart, whose name suggests some German ancestry, expresses the Scotch-Irish inheritance better than I do, even though I have quite a bit of that in my background.
Speaking of meatloaf, one of my sister's best friends in grammar school was a white girl. Our moms got to be good friends, and they had something of an unspoken deal: my sister, who loved meatloaf, would go over to this girl's house on nights when the girl's mom was making it for dinner, and in exchange, whenever my mom made lumpia shanghai, she would make an extra plate for the girl's family. The first time I ever had meatloaf, I was in college, and I thought wow, that girl totally got the better end of the bargain.
How was the lumpia shanghai transported to the friend's family's house? Did your sister carry it over after dinner?
I think my mom drove it over. They lived close by.
20: Healing is often required after the bestiality is drawn out. Best to choose your partners carefully.
If we say, "I'm proud of being white", we're proud of having... well, bad cooking and we sound like the white pride crowd.
shoulve've been included in the above, which replied to Cala.
I can't remember where, but just a day or two ago I saw an article claiming surprisingly results, saying 70% of the white people in the sample saw their "race" as having a culture worth preserving.
It was in Time. Surprised me too.
3: I can't, personally, as I was three when I left. But my (oh-so-Scandinavian) looking mother still fumes about how she had to bring my (stocky Japanese, often mistaken for Samoan) father everywhere to get decent service.
I think the white/non-white dynamic was much more of a "snub the oppressors" type thing than a "brown is the new white." But, like I said, it's all second-hand stories.
18, 26, 31: Have to agree with Neil here. But I'm not sure I agree with the premise - I can't think of any non-white people I know* who (non-ironically) talk about how "all Japanese people raise their kids" or anything. And is there a such thing as a typical white holiday custom? Or is it a typical American holiday custom? Christmas in Germany is (or at least was, who knows anymore) demonstrably different from Christmas in America, despite the whiteness of both dominant cultures.
*This is admittedly limited. Asians are, after all, the "model minority."
36. I know it's insult upon injury, but that must've had a small penis.
40: Sure, I'm talking about ethnicity rather than 'race'. The meatloaf-eating ethnicity I'm talking about isn't 'white' in any sense that would include Germans living in Germany -- it's White American.
And is there a such thing as a typical white holiday custom?
White people decorate cookies.
One place I notice this in in Romance writers, who appear to under huge pressure to Anglicize their pen-names. It is funny to go thru hundreds of ttles(don't ask) and never see a Jacewicz or Pellegrino or Grogan.
If the W,M-E background ever becomes sufficiently outnumbered that its members will be constantly aware of their otherness, then it will be an ethnicity. Right now it's a kind of negative ethnicity, because the norm is still based on it.
White people decorate cookies.
Kwanzaa cookies come pre-decorated.
Umm guys... here abouts "Effnick" is the girl in the funny looking traditional costume from the next valley. All white, mind you.
Given that the Austrians were only ever any good at subjugating other "white" nations, until the minor mishap at the beginning of the last century, there is a refreshing robustness to, shall we say, identification with european heritage.
Some, of course, find that unattractive.
Hereabouts, some whites are more priveleged than others. Ask a Sinti.
Heh heh - JP's post reminded me of when I went to a friend's house and they expected me to eat rice with a fork. I came home and told my Mom all about it.
I guess I just have trouble seeing how "typical American" doesn't presuppose white, and if you're going to make statements like "typical Americans decorate cookies" you just gotta suck it up, no? Whereas if you're, say, dancing, and you suck, you can totally say things like "I'm so white" without being an ass.
Maybe it's just that you're allowed to say bad things about being white. (Thinking at work, here, which is not a common occurrence, so apologies.)
I'm not saying ban all ethnic holidays or that ethnicities aren't important. But people do make stereotypes and decisions that are attributed to ethnicities rather than individual's motivation. Why do Asian children do so well in school -- I think there might be a book by that title? How can the Democrats secure the black vote? (White people get to decide, being the implication, but black people vote as a unit.)
I wonder if that increases the us/them dynamic more than a more neutral classification scheme would.
LB: Thanks for posting this. This post prompted me to finish up a post at my own blog that I'd been trying to finish for months.
could some kind soul delete those two misbegotten attempts... i ll go back to lurking now.
MAE, about your bumper sticker issue, I can imagine an attachment to inherited values, felt to be under pressure from trends in modern society which the holder is ambivalent about or hostile to. But I can't imagine a respectable way to identify that with "white."
I'm saying, in other words, that some of the alienation and grievance may be justified, but identifying it with "white" isn't
46: Not so sure about that. The Latino racial identity, for instance, is quite popular even in the places where it is dominant. There isn't the same sense of 'everybody is like us, aren't they?' as exists in the U.S.
I think LB had it right in the first place; this is a consequence of the recent racism taboo which has caused embracing 'white culture' to seem like an embrace of privilege rather than of heritage.
Oh, and don't interpret me saying it 'seems like an embrace of privilege' as an implication that it -isn't- an embrace of privilege.
53: I don't know if calling it something different would change the fact that people make stereotypes and decisions that are attributed to ethnicity.
(Sorry to comment and run, will see if the convo's still going after the commute.)
57: Yes, it can be locally dominant, but never loses sight of not being so in the country as a whole. It's when white is clearly not dominant in the country as a whole that the polarities would shift.
I second "I Don't Pay"'s comments in 12.
I'm white, and so don't experience the discrimination that a lot of visible ethnic minorities do. But I still "am very aware of my ancestry, religious background, and nationality" and of ways in which my background sets me apart from mainstream English culture -- living as I do, in England.
Not all visibly white people are entirely of the ethnic and cultural mainstream.
56: IDP, I think you've summed it up well, probably better than I did in my post.
To put a different spin on it: my son's HS 15 years ago was pretty attentive to multiculturalism, at the formal level, at least. So there were various special groups for each minority, but none for the white kids. It all makes sense in the big political picture, but as it impacted actual individuals it meant that one and only one group was left out. Theoretically, of course, the 70% of the kids who were white were dominant in the overall community, and in reality to a considerable extent, but steps were taken to keep the overall community multicultural too.
The real split was by class. Middle-class Japanese- Chinese- and Vietnamese- American counted as white. I'm not sure that there was a single middle-class black in the school, but they would probably count as white too. One middle-class Vietnamese girl born in the US was admired because she went out of her way to help out the new Vietnamese refugees; not all of them did.
I have some difficulties coming to grips with the "lack of irrational detriment = privilege" equation. Probably because I'm basically on the 'wrong' side of the line in so many ways. There are a number of irrational detriments to which I am not subject: I'm not female, not short, not so tall I face discrimination, not 'of color,' not 'ethnic' (ie 'white' but non-Anglo), not illiterate, not handicapped (differently abled?), not poor (or lower middle class), not stupid (most days), not overly religious, not a member of a religious minority, not an abuse survivor, not Southern, not so fat as to draw discrimination, not an employee, etc. I am sorry for none of the above -- those attributes that are optional I have intentionally created -- only that people different from me in any of these attributes have suffered on account of that difference.
And yet there are endless ways that people who want to can say that I'm not one of them, or not good enough. I'm not Hollywood good looking. Not very good at plenty of tasks, from auto mechanics to carpentry. I'm not rich, really. I'm not from old money. I'm a terrible dancer. I didn't (couldn't) go to an Ivy League law school. I don't tell jokes well, and my stories drag. This is just the beginning, of course. McManus has a string of adjectives for me which the reader is free to imagine.
Obviously, I can't (and don't) sit around saying 'oh poor me' -- because I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either. The fact that I can walk through a Metro station un-ogled neither provides me with any net gain (over, say, walking through an empty station) nor does it add to the ogling that a woman walking the exact rout will experience.
Fire away.
Re: 64
I think much of this has to do with (mostly) unanswered questions about how we classify different levels of identity. So, for whatever reason, the fact that you don't tell excellent jokes is on a completely different level of identity than, say, being black. Thus, we feel the latter counts as being underpriveledged in a way the former doesn't. On the one hand, this distinction is obvious, on the other, I'm not sure it's actually coherent; not only that, but you can (as you did) construct examples the highlight the incoherence much more strongly.
Solution to this? I have no clue. Someone else figure it out!
re 16: Texans in New York=Texpat
This is an amusing and exotic identity for New Yorkers. Who, of course, sharing a constricting island culture have no idea how parochial they are.
64: I think it's possible that you may be missing the point a bit.
I am aware that a great many people who have some quality our society fails to value have had to pay a huge price for it. On the other hand, it's not like I've been the one exacting that price either.
Sure. The point of calling something 'white privilege' is that someone who enjoys it isn't, individually, doing anything wrong. They (in this case you, could as well be me) didn't create the system that defines their ethnicity as the norm, and makes everyone else an outsider, and they aren't doing anything particular to maintain it. So it's not not something you should feel guilty about, as "it's not like I've been the one exacting that price" seems to imply. It's just something that's worth noticing, and examining, and doing what you can (as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm) to disassemble where possible.
Glenn, you have no idea how much better my life would be if I told better jokes. I'd be more popular, maybe even a household name. Money, power, groupies, the works.
The point is that I can point to someone who gets something I don't get. They are privileged, hence I am underprivileged. Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards. When I stick up my hand, I get a cab. Not everyone can say that. I think, though, that one would say of this situation that a person who cannot get a cab is 'underprivileged,' and a person who can get one is 'normal.' Given that the goal with this sort of thing is that everyone becomes 'normal' with respect to haling cabs.
s, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm
How that could be anything but a bad idea, I can't imagine.
Unless, to avoid having the term 'underprivileged' become stupid and meaningless, we're going to attach some kind of minimal standards.
I think we already *do* attach minimum standards, those standards being that if you sound like a jerk when explain why you consider yourself underprivileged, you probably shouldn't do so.
(This is a non-specific second person usage of "you," and I don't mean to insult any person in this thread).
I don't perceive 'white American' as a category having enough common characteristics to count as an ethnicity. Regional differences (Texan), cultural (Greek American) , and class overwhelm 'whiteness' in every respect except as compared to blackness. Our Asian-ness, i guess.
How that could be anything but a bad idea, I can't imagine.
A lot of white people might feel more comfortable reinforcing norms if they think they're societal norms rather than ethnic norms. Or in other words, if 'white American' becomes recognized as an ethnicity then white Americans will stop believing that non-white Americans are different because they're stupid.
71: But that's only if you see the world through a white-normative lens. A lot of people accept "Asian American" as an ethnic category, despite the fact that that group contains internal variance on almost every axis that matters to people (language, skin color, religion, food, cultural norms, holidays, etc.). But they are "not-white," and so constitute a discernible group.
3, 40: I think the idea that local people in Hawaii are generally prejudiced against haoles is mostly bullshit. Being haole is a minor advantage in some ways and a minor disadvantage in others but mostly just not a big deal one way or the other. OTOH there are subcultures that don't intersect much with the dominant culture (or what seems like the dominant culture to me), so I don't doubt that others' experiences differ from mine.
I suspect that a lot of white mainlanders think they're experiencing hostility when what they're actually seeing is reserve. There is no shortage of well-off, over-entitled mainlanders who come here expecting to have their asses kissed in various ways, partly because they're spending a lot of money and partly just (IMO) because they're very accustomed to having brown people kiss their asses in ways they're not even aware of. I think there's some tendency to assume that a white person who doesn't have obvious markers of being from here may be one of those over-entitled assholes until proven otherwise. Proving otherwise isn't hard, but if you never try you're likely to continue to be treated with reserve.
Related, and again IMO: many white Americans absolutely cannont stand the existence of forms of status and hierarchy from which they're completely excluded. It bugs the living shit out of some people that a white person coming from the mainland will never be an insider in exactly the same way that a brown person who grew up here can be. To me, BFD, but to some it's horrifying.
re: 71
Yes, I think there's something to that.
Although, I suppose there is the pull of a certain type of 'Norman Rockwell' 1950s bourgeios American whiteness that's found in the media and which, to my outsider's eyes, does seem to specific enough to be a particularly American form of white identity -- even if in reality it was never really shared by everyone, even those who were white and boureios. It's certainly distinct from, say, Englishness or Scottishness (white or otherwise). And does seem distinctly white rather than more generally American.
Right. If CharleyC gets a cab and Random Black Guy doesn't, it might help if the cabbie were perceiving the difference between them as Ethnic Guy I and Ethnic Guy II rather than Normal Guy and Ethnic Guy, if you see what I mean.
and 71: You don't think? There's a hell of a lot of local variation within any ethnicity, but that doesn't mean we all don't recognize Eddie Murphy imitating a white guy, or know what ordering a baloney sandwich on white bread with mayo means.
71: For that matter, the colonial descendents of every country which was colonized by Spain considers itself to have a common heritage. So why can't the colonial descendants of just one country colonized by England have one?
as, for instance, acknowledging that 'white American' is an ethnicity rather than simply a background norm
Part of my worry with this is something like this: I don't have a small ingroupy ethnicity; grandparents did, but I don't. The dialogue here suggests that I should say my ethnicity is 'white American' so I can think of it helpfully as not 'default', but as part of a culture.
But doesn't that run the very real risk of saying 'to be American is to be a white person with no strong cultural ties to another group'? Everyone else is hyphenated, but I'm *authentic* American. This is what's worrying me, and why I suggested that this is the wrong way to go, to think of whiteness as just another kind of ethnicity.
Agree with Cala and Carp, I think. Right now, "white" is far and away the dominant culture in this country. But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm. Make it another "ethnicity" and you'll see people using that distinction to exclude people--in the ways in which there are arguments about whether someone "is really black," or "really Asian." Sub-categories of white--Italian, Irish, etc.--would seem to serve the purpose you want, at least somewhat.
78: See, I see that as the effect of those like you and I claiming to be the default, rather than members of an ethnic group. "White American" isn't necessarily the best name for it, given your concerns -- just "White" makes it sound like a racial, rather than an ethnic group. "Whitebread"? (And of course, the same person can be part of two ethnicities. I have family that's more 'Irish-American' than I am, but not less 'Whitebread'.)
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
But as such, it is a culture to which all people, white or not, have access. You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white. You can be anything you want and lay claim to the last five hundred years of European culture. Because it forms the undifferentiated norm.
I'm not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
I'm not denying that we're no more qualified! Or that we should claim to be the default. It's just that if you say 'what's your ethnicity?' I don't think I have an answer that isn't pedigree (Welsh-French-Italian-German) or wrongheaded ('Midwestern, American') or as serious ('Baloney-eater of Suburbia') as 1000 years of history and traditions.
I don't know about NYC. In DC, the cab driver is stopping for me because he's guessing that I'm not going to take him to a part of town he doesn't want to be in. The joke is always on him, because I'm going someplace even worse -- the near 'burbs. Twice a week at least, once I'm in the cab and we're going, and the driver really figures out where I want to go: I get let off right there. A block away from where I started.
I wish I lived in a world where the cab driver would make no assumption about a black patron. I'm not clear what you think I can do about that -- not ride in cabs? I am not in the same situation as you, LB, with respect to ethnicity: all my life I've known of mine. And it's not generic white, or at least that's not how I've ever understood it. So my acknowledging an ethnicity isn't going to solve anything, any more than my deploring the cab driver who doesn't want to drive to certain parts of DC will.
I guess, to be fair, I have to say that my ethnicity is a background norm because my ancestors came to North America and killed nearly everyone of different ancestry.
73 -- Exactly. I would never use the term Asian-American to describe someone who, to my knowledge, self-identifies more specifically. It's one of the outermost of the concentric circles of our identities, and too overinclusive for anything other than comparison to non-Asian.
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
The issue is that there are two ways to de-norm whiteness. One is to make it an ethnicity among ethnicities, and the other, which is, I think, America's fitful, unfinished, imperfect project, is to both drain it of meaningful "ethnic" content and make it so malleable that it can incorporate the parts of the other ethnicities that we, as a nation, have all decided are pretty ok. I might have mentioned before the European who pointed out that "white" Americans walk, to the European eye, like black people.
I very much doubt that the "ethnicity among ethnicities" approach can work, because of our historical circumstance: whiteness is still dominant, and trying to mark it off from other ethnicities will end up fixing a particular conception of whiteness that will lose the ability to slowly assimilate what's now "outside" it. That's pretty much the same as killing America, you barbarian.
25: What does a WASP man say after sex?
'You moved - did I hurt you?'
The point is that you and I are no more qualified to be regarded as the American norm than anyone else.
As a moral quality, of course this is right. One can't ignore, though, that what you share with Cala and with me, and I suppose with some others here (but way less than all) is something you also share with a substantial majority of the population.
To pick a different example: People who go to church (or other worship venue) at least once a month, regardless of genetics, are the American norm by sheer dint of numbers.
m not following this -- try it again, if you would? I don't have the sense that most people who think of themselves as black, Hispanic or Asian feel that they have the option to be culturally white, but I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean by that.
In the movie White Men Can't Jump, there's a scene in which the black character tells the white guy that he can't really hear Jimmy Hendrix, because he's white. It's sort of funny, and you hear things like this all of the time. It's even funny if the black guy means it. Jimmy Hendrix--who the fuck cares? Now imagine a white guy saying to some black guy that he doesn't get Shakespeare because "it's a white thing." It wouldn't be funny. Not getting Shakespeare means something more important than not getting Hendrix, and it does so because the dominant culture is white, and what it values most is what is most valuable.
I'm not sure if that's clear. Part of it is that this all seems sort of self-evident to me, so I'm having trouble explaining what I'm thinking.
68: Exactly. We think certain status differentiations are deserved and others are not. I'm just not sure we're entirely coherent in doing so.
Humor affirmative action?
88: I'm not sure I follow. Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about, because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England. On the other hand, I think it's entirely fair to say that I don't get Jeff Foxworthy because I'm not white, and really it wouldn't bother me.
90: "Jimi" is his slave name.
91: I think you're really, really wrong if you believe that people only lay ethnic claim to culture that extends as far back as 1970 (Hendrix's death date). Even if that were so, the number of things produced by the culture since then that are considered important and are produced by white Americans dwarfs the number of similar things produced by non-white Americans.
Also, how can you not get Foxworthy, who is not so much "white" as "Southern" or maybe "Southern white."
Surprisingly, nobody has mentioned the accent, which is basically the delimiter of white Americanhood. Sure, one "can be black, Hispanic, or Asian and be culturally white" but only if one does not speak with a black, Hispanic or Asian accent. And it's certainly not the case that anyone can wake up one day and decide to talk like the people on TV do.
I second ogged's analysis.
[On preview, third.]
SCMT, I'm not saying that ethnicity only extends as far backwards as 1970. I'm saying that telling a black person, "You don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a sensible analogue to your Jimi Hendrix example, because Elizabethan England is as much a foreign place for white people today as black people -- just ask any high school English class.
Humor affirmative action?
The people who work for me laugh at my jokes. That'll have to do.
Saying "you don't get Shakespeare because you're not white" is not a statement about [culture], because presumably a white person of today shares few common cultural attributes with a writer in Elizabethan England.
That distant sound you hear is Mr. Kurasawa rolling over in his grave. This puts me into the SCMT camp, I guess, NTTAWWT, because things like Shakespeare are available to anyone anywhere. There are situations, of course, where pigmentation is going to make all the difference, or facial architecture. Or figure. Culture, though, we can choose to pick up, walk away from, be oblivious to, etc.
Kurosawa. Geez, I even looked it up to make sure.
I don't think I "get" Murasaki Shikibu better than a white person. But, if I had grown up in Japan, reading school primers that quoted her haiku, I might feel better about making that assertion.
So I think SCMT has a valid point, inasmuch as we hear "to thine own self be true" or "a rose by another other name" etc. surprisingly frequently in our everyday American discourse.
May I suggest that Shakespeare, whose work has endured due to its broad appeal, is not the best example?
I also wonder what would be a better example of culture that only white Americans can truly understand, if there is such a thing?
I don't think there is any, but I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk. Everyone understands everything through the lens of their own personal experience, but not sharing an ethnicity with the artist doesn't mean that you can't really understand their works.
(I can't believe I'm actually saying this. This is one of those posts where I thought my thinking on ethnicity was more mainstream than it is.)(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
100, 101 -- FTB can immerse herself in the works of Murasaki Shikibu even today. One need not have been brought up in a culture to embrace and ultimately own it. I'm not saying such a thing can be done overnight, but one is not culturally fixed at 3 or 6 or 10 years old. I cannot imagine that there is an aspect of 'white American culture' that someone not a 'white American' cannot truly understand.
I think of the movie Meet Joe Black. Now the life Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani are living in that movie -- they're cast as white Americans, after all -- is prety distant from that of nearly all of us. I suppose you could distill from that movie some kind of experience that would be utterly alien to Japanese-, Iranian-, or Irish-Americans. Then again, whatever that was would likely be just as alien to LB with her baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread.
To pick up on ogged's 85, anyone who lives in the US can self-identify with the white norm all the way if they want: 'the british burned our capital in the war of 1812.' It might be pretty awkward to hear an African-American say 'we didn't free our slaves until 1865,' but an American descendant of Jewish Eastern European immigrants who came in the 1920s can say this. And when they do, as pointed out in 85, the norm expands.
(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
I'd say this is a way better descriptor for most of the people on here than any sort of Cracker-American attempt. Certainly describes me better than White-American could (though I have been described, much to my chagrin, as The Man by an ex of mine. So I suppose I'm whiter than I think.).
You're probably not wrong with Weirdo-Americans. But I was thinking "getting" Shakespeare was a matter of getting the beauty of the language (hence my counterexample). Which I should have made more explicit.
The Hendrix thing, I think, does make someone a jerk. Whereas I would concede as valid someone saying "you don't get Hendrix cuz you don't play guitar" or "you don't know blues."
Among my problems with perceiving "whiteness is an ethnicity like any other" are the following:
a. There are too many ethnic groups that present as "white", especially in our little moulting pot of the UsA. Within what a "non-white" person might see as "white", there are factions that do and do not see each other as "white".
b. There are waaaay too many class differences that affect such things as "what white people are like, and how white people bring up their kids, or typical white holiday customs" far more than a commonality of colour.
c. Bologna with mayonnaise on white bread? What are you, a Methodist?
Dunno about the rest of you, but I don't see any reason to affirm the colour of my skin. My Norse heritage, perhaps, but that extends more to a hatred of lutefisk, an enjoyment of Julekage and an appreciation of Hardanger embroidery. [And the occasional desire to go to ski resorts and mock downhill skiers.] But, to be honest, I like baklava better, am far more inclined to cook bulgogi than risted laks med kremsaus and the covers on the pillows on my couch were embroidered and purchased in Jordan, where I spent several years of my childhood. And I haven't X-country skied since my first knee surgery.
Do I get that presenting as "white" = privilege in this country? Of course - and believe me, tagging into a store several paces behind my non-white son would have taught me that had I not already known it. I've had sales assistants rush to help me whilst ignoring him, which I find wryly amusing, given that he dresses better than I do* and has far more disposable income these days - they should notice the former and be able to infer the latter. I doubt that it's merely veneration of my cronicity. However, he would receive more and better attention than a "white" person who presented as homeless; economic class trumps "white privilege".
Now I have to run off and make meatloaf, which I shall serve with Wonderbread, margerine and TaterTots, after which Pa and I will sit in our rocking chairs on the porch and read Scripture. Yes, indeedy.
* Him: True religion jeans, $262; A&F tee $29.50; Fossil messenger bag, $180.
Me: Levi jeans from Target $22; tie-dye tee bought at Venice Beach ten years ago $6; 22 year old Coach shoulderbag in need of re-dyeing.
I also think anyone saying "You can't really understand Jimi Hendrix if you're not black" is being a jerk.
It works as a joke because it's so ridiculous. Hendrix, as opposed to many many other artists, is very accessible outside black culture. Monterey, Isle of Wight, Woodstock.
Let's take a moment to think about Little Wing, shall we:
Well she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind thats running round
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.
OK, I'm out. I'll walk to the bus stop rather than take a cab home, to lessen the quantum of oppression in the world by some little amount.
our little moulting pot of the UsA
Gaaak! This stew is full of feathers!
108: That was deliberate; people who have come to the US shed some of the "feathers" of their countries of origin, but not all, and some grow back.
One of the things that I like particularly about the analysis in Albion's Seed is that the author's definition of ethnicity or "folkways" is expansive enough to include a lot of things that most people would probably account for as class markers. In particular, when he writes about the Scots-Irish/'borderer' culture, he's obviously not talking about whatever earl or baron was nominally in charge of the areas those people came from, but rather the broad mass of common people who produced and reproduced the culture. The other thing I've argued is that many of the 'folkways' that are identified as particularly Scots-Irish have come to be present in a broad swath of working-class U.S. culture, regardless of the ethnicity or even the race of the participants.
Regarding the story about white people seeing something worth preserving in 'white culture', there's one version at the Star Tribune (it was, after all, a U of Minn study).
I realize that I'm beating my same old drum here, but I guess it's seemed to me for a long time that the antidote to the null value of whiteness as an ethnicity in this country is class consciousness. Of course, there's some people who take exception to that, at least sort of. But even though I agree with much of Sakai's analysis, as a white person it seems counterproductive to mire myself in more depression. There's nothing pride-worthy in whiteness, to my view, but I can take courage in the example of my working-class ancestors who did so much with so little. There's also the fact, elided somewhat in Settlers that, like me, a lot of white people in this country are the products of a family tree that includes many people of color, despite which we have plenty of white skin privilege today. I guess that it seems fairly hopeful to me that some of my white ancestors were progressive enough to voluntarily start families with freed slaves or their descendents, and I think it's pretty significant that one of the things that made this possible was a shared class identity.
I still can't figure out how my Danish ancestors ate alebrod for breakfast though -- with whipped cream and raisins, too! Yecch!
(Or all you people are weirdos. Weirdo-Americans.)
I think we agree with the diagnosis but are divided on the solutions. But I admit, weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered.
I'd also like to nominate blogger-American.
To pick a phrase from the discussion: the null value of whiteness as an ethnicity
A lot of this null value has to do with German ancestery being, for most of the 20th century, the ethnicity that dare not speak its name.
My grandfather took on an obviously Anglo nickname when he was dating my grandmother because he didn't want to sound like he was Italian.
109: I thought so, but couldn't help myself. Come to that, it's more of a crucible than a stewpot, anyway.
You're all welcome to become Apostromericans.
101- Updike? Auchincloss? Cheever? Irving? How accessable are these to non WASPs?
A Belgian acquaintance says that he learned that the U.S. was like a tossed salad, with all the different ethnicities remaining distinct but mixing well together or something like that.
c. Bologna with mayonnaise on white bread? What are you, a Methodist?
Is there something wrong with that? </ruffled feathers> Actually, yes, on Dad's side of the family.
A Belgian acquaintance says that he learned that the U.S. was like a tossed salad
I was also taught this, alongside the "melting pot" metaphor.
Leech, that's funny; I was thinking of citing Updike as a culture-bound author. But that just means that he's very much of his culture, as much as or more than any non-white author; it doesn't mean non-WASPs can't enjoy him. (And I find Cheever very accessible.)
If there's any truth to the "You can't understand X because you're not Y" (and I think it's limited), Y has to be something much smaller than 'white people'. Is every single white person equally privy to the world of Whit Stillman in a way that black or Asian people aren't?
(121, me too.)
We Americans are all about the salad-tossing.
64:"McManus has a string of adjectives for me which the reader is free to imagine."
'Capitalist running dog' is the one size fits all purpose tool.
Golly, is everyone imagining me lurking outside the blog with a paint gun? I want to become a verb.
it doesn't mean non-WASPs can't enjoy [Updike].
Anyone can enjoy Updike, once they learn how to make the M of receptivity—with their minds.
Anyway, given a suitable rate of intermarriage and a few generations, we'll all be a nice brownish shade (better for surviving global warming anyway) and nobody will care which line of ancestry was responsible for the family meatloaf recipe.
I've never read Auchincloss, but the idea that one must be a WASP to understand Updike, Cheever, or Irving is laughable. For that matter, the idea that you have to be X, where X equals any type of person, spirit, critter, or thingamajig, in order to understand decent (or even not so decent) writer Y is frankly stupid. Unless you can't get a translation.
In other words, Weiner with exclamation points.
I don't really think there's such a thing as culture that people "can't understand" because they're X/not Y. I think it is possible for literature to speak especially to certain experiences that are tied to your racial/class identity, be it underprivilege or overprivilege (which is worth squat when it comes to literary understanding or appreciation, IMO).
To answer my own question I think that The Simpsons, by design, speaks to the white-American identity thing in this way. It's interesting that the show is popular all over the world -- I can't imagine how many of the jokes would translate well -- but I think this is tied up in the white-American-as-somehow-universal phenomenon we're discussing.
"weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered"
We hippies in the 60s divided the world into "straights" and "freaks". Freaks included most minorities, if not all, but especially cultural minorities.
John Varley in the 70s divided his future culture into "Republicans" and "Democrats", meaning much the same as above. Just saying.
I want to become a verb.
Bob already is a verb. Your work is done.
and ogged's 85 was very good, as someone who came late to the thread
103, etc: The Jimi Hendrix example is a terrible example. All through his career and even today, he's was/is more listened to by white people than by black. One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
My Tex-Mexican American nephew in law identifies with John Wayne. He's a retired military lifer. He also identifies with his family and ancestors, but he's an Army man from Texas.
One station in Portland, OR, published its 900-song playlist for a promotion, and he was almost the only black artist on the playlist.
Pretty much typical of classic rock/AOR; incredibly white, with Jimi as the token. I thought that the use of Hendrix was kind of a copout in the movie; if it had been about Sly (with reference to There's a Riot Goin' On) that would have stung. Of course the movie was written and directed by a white guy.
Jimi really wasn't the token. He was a real crossover. He played white-people hippy music, really, though he built on his R&B background.
Some of the interviews with him and onstage tapes show that he really didn't believe what was happening and felt very weird about it. Of course, he hadn't exactly parachuted into the middle of Updikeland.
I liked Updikes first short stories when they came out, but when I look at them again they seem horribly overwritten. He was always struggling with the Lake Wobegon problem: how do you write about a place where everything is arranged to make sure that nothing ever happens, and where nobody ever talks about it if something does happen to happen.
His first novel continued the struggle with that problem, writing about boring, annoying people who live boring lives, except that his short-stories were about his teen years when his characters didn't knwo yet how boring they were. The people became more boring still when they matured. I lost interest right there.
I would happily eat Danish Beer Soup. I may even save the recipe. It sounds like a great way to take care of the stale beers that don't have cigarettes floating in it.
it's not true that just anyone can enjoy updike, because updike is an irritating misogynist shithead. fine, I'll just come out with it, because I'm tired of living a lie: I'm a UHA, an updike hating american. cheever, on the other hand, is good.
it's not true that just anyone can enjoy updike, because updike is an irritating misogynist shithead.
That's the subtext of 125, as I understand it.
I don't think I've ever read any Updike. Instincts: impeccable!
The problem is deeper than that, because I like Philip Roth fine and am, in fact, capable of being an i. m. s. myself. As far as I can tell, every single on of the big late fifties - early sixties novelists was an i.m.s.
I've read a couple of Updike short stories. Distinctly meh.
SB, are you going to have a subtext explaining blog now, too?
As far as I can tell, every single on of the big late fifties - early sixties novelists was an i.m.s.
This is about what I was thinking. I read Bellow thinking, dude, you're a genius, but what the fuck's your problem?
I assume that would be located directly beneath text's blog.
Aaaaaand I'll be banning myself.
Stub, if memory serves, you haven't made me laugh yet, but I appreciate your knowledge of the local lore and customs.
are you going to have a subtext explaining blog now, too?
Yes*.
*No.
147: Yeah, there's a link to it on standpipe's blogroll.
It's like in the Pullman books. Everyone has a blog—even in our own world—but not everyone knows it's there.
I don't rememebr signs of i.m.s.-ery in Ralph Ellison, who has always been my favorite. Probably not in James Baldwin either, but he was a little bitch. Can't remember William Styron; never liked his stuff much.
I don't remember much of anything about the portrayal of women in Invisible Man. There may have been some misogyny there.
One of the very first things I read on the internet was a collection of Ellison's letters. Really beautiful stuff. I haven't been able to find it again.
152:I think I remember more, and there is.
Read some Updike, and then a collected Cheever stories, and was very much impressed. Never liked Roth; loved early Bellow:consider this a "some of my favorite writers point". Irving really bores and irritates me. Two Waspy(?) writers not yet mentioned, and shame on y'all:Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler.
One important (?) "white bread" author not mentioned yet:Stephen King.
Come on, we were talking about i.m.s writers, not writers per se.
I don't have a blog. I have a frozen fish.
What's the difference between being meaningfully Irish from Queens and meaninglessly Irish from Queens?
Three.
It's like in the Pullman books. Everyone has a blog
Mine is a stoat.
Nobody cares anymore, but I'll come out and say it: I like Updike. Sure, he's written some turgid, silly crap, but it's only because he's willing to take chances, and because, early on, publishers decided to print up any old shit he had handy. So, sure, a book a year, and several short stories, and some of it is going to suck.
Rabbit at Rest? Sucks. Seek My Face? Sucks. But The Centaur? Better than anything anyone here will ever write.
And the Garrison Keillor comparison? Inapt! Inapt I tell you. Updike likes to write, primarily, about people who sleep around in surprising ways. So, sure, that has it's limits, but if not completely transgressive, neither was it comforting in its time.
Hmm. Maybe I misunderstood this "Lake Wobegone" problem comment. Updike's got his flaws, but if one wants to fight a real mysoginist shithole, one should just focus on pushing Hemingway out of the academy. He's almost gone already, and that's probably fair.
or, you know, he was probably even a misogynist shithole.
disgrace and exile, now, for text.
The Garrison Keillor comment only really applied to his first book, "Pigeon Feathers" which I liked at the time. But to me, boring people who screw around are still boring.
I ended up believing that for his first novel, "Rabbit Run", Updike visited a prostitute as part of his Research, hopping off every minute or two to scribble down notes. And also that the sex was injected to spice up the boring lives of boring people.
However, I never did read the 47 novels he wrote after "Rabbit Run".
64: when I had similar conversations, I've said--I don't think we should feel at all guilty, I think we should feel lucky.
My subculture is urban/suburban white liberal, I think.
Not caught up on thread, but the problem with "white" as an identifier is that it was basically invented to enforce racism. Even if one doesn't cling to specifically Irish or German traditions, your whiteness ain't my whiteness: the whiteness of, say, the great lakes really is different from the whiteness of the southwest. And anyway, "white" really just means "western European-American," sorta kinda. Meatloaf is like a bastardized version of vaguely western European food in the same way that the hard shell taco is a bastardized version of Mexican food, no?
64, 68, 84, 87, 98, 99, 103, 107
Been thinking about this thread, Charleycarp was unusually loquacious tonight. Nobody else seemed to notice, or maybe the rules say you pretend not to notice. I, I just wanted to come back and read them again.
I read the comments and I see this brown face looking across a table at me, but that probably isn't what it's like at all.
What about Heller? Something Happened is one of my favorite books, out of the subset of books I've read that I have not read in the past 20 years. Wait -- that's wrong -- I reread it 12 years ago and it was as good or better the second time around. The narrator is the archetypal IMS. But Heller? He seems to be presenting the narrator's head as a fucked-up one, one the reader should not aspire to occupy. And now I'm flashing on the scene from Catch-22 when the psychotic soldier (his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope) murders a prostitute when she demands payment. But I can't remember if that scene was treated the same in the book as it was in the movie. So anyway: what about Heller?*
* Also, Vonnegut. I can readily believe him to be irritating and (reluctantly) misogynistic, but a shithead? I think not.
"(reluctantly)" doesn't quite capture what I was hoping for it to.
Updike wrote a short story called "The Chaste Planet"—science fiction, believe it or not, concerning little pickle-shaped aliens from Jupiter.
I must admit I've never gotten into Updike, even though his subject-matter is close to my experience. Did anyone else see AWB's piece about deciding it was ok to detest him? An act of self-liberation.
I know what people mean by the misogynist streak in American literature, by men, going back at least to Mark Twain, but remains important to me. I was in Petoskey, Michigan a few weeks ago, the setting for many of Hemingway's early stories, and was moved to start reading and thinking about them again. Talking with friends, I've found we share a lot of feeling for them, out of the academy or not.
166 - Surely correcting the spelling mistake and explaining the Hendrix joke to LB shouldn't count against my daily quota. I'm just sorry I went for Little Wing (influenced by the Corrs' version no doubt) while the example that fits the thread better would have been Bold As Love:
Anger he smiles, towering shiny metallic purple armour,
Queen Jealousy, Envy, waits behind him,
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground.
Blue are the life-giving waters taking for granted
They quietly understand.
Once happy Turquoise armies lay opposite
Ready, but wonder why the fight is on.
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love,
But they're all bold as love.
Just ask the Axis.
My Red is so confident,
He flashes trophies of war and ribbons of euphoria.
Orange is young, full of daring,
But very unsteady for the first go round.
My Yellow in this case is not so mellow,
In fact, I'm trying to say that it's frightened like me,
And all of these emotions of mine keep
Holding me from giving my life to a rainbow like you.
But I'm, yeah, I'm bold as love,
But I'm as bold as love.
But I'm as bold as love.
Just ask the Axis, he knows everything.
I'm divided on Updike. A lot of the time I have a visceral reaction against him, partly because he does seem so wrapped up in his own assumptions in a way only a white man could be (and you get the idea that he views other cultures as special interests). But Rabbit Run (not his first novel) is obviously quite a book in one way or another. Some of his stories are great, and most of them seem to have a moment of illumination, though often surrounded by dubiety.
I agree with 165; there's just no good reason for solidarity with all other white people. And there can be good reason for solidarity with all other black people, even though the blackness of different areas may be different in the way the whiteness of different areas is.
136: I don't think the fact that Hendrix's music fits in means that he's not a token, as the only black person played by classic rock radio.
172 -- Testing your fix?
Hey, (partially) English-descended people! Get a load of this.
Hey, (partially) English-descended people! Get a load of this.
I think that golden oldies / classic rock radio would rather have no tokens at all, but they can't leave Hendrix out because too many old stoners are in their audience, and Hendrix (with Zep a couple years later) wrote the book on stoner music.
The real tokens I remember on that 900-song list were one song by BB King (Thrill is gone), one song by Otis Redding (Dock of the Bay), maybe one song by Aretha, and one song by the Chambers Brothers (Time). These songs just came along at the right moment and got airplay. No Sly Stone, almost no Motown, no James Brown, maybe one thing by Ray Charles IIRC, no Marvin Gaye IIRC.
There was a peak of cultural integration around the Sly Stone era. Prison guards were alarmed when black-white communication began in the prisons, because divide-and-conquer was their game. Classic Rock was a resegregation of the 1967-70 demographic. (Golden Oldies, I think, is the older-yet demographic).
176: The fit between language group and biological ancestry is very weak in a lot of places.
Hemingway's early stories
Much, much better than the novels, and if the man will have a serious literary reputation it will have to owe to the short stories, not to the macho image.
the only black person played by classic rock radio
Lenny Kravitz?
the Chambers Brothers (Time)
Is that the one where they shout 'time' over and over, at slowing and speeding tempos? I heard that on classic rock radio too, didn't know who it was by or that they were black. Also sometimes heard "I Got You."
I hated Hemingway in high school.
Also, in support of 165, there was a time when white people from the wrong part of Europe weren't really white or good candidates to be good Americans: too Catholic, too drunk, too prone to fighting, too dirty, too swarthy, too whatever. The U.S. survived.
In high school, we read The Old Man and the Sea. Unintentional self-parody.
That article linked in 176 is very interesting.
weirdo-American is a class I hadn't considered
Paul Fussell called them "Class X" in Class. Meaning, basically, what's called the "creative class" these days.
his name? Not sure but somebody will remind me I hope
Aarfy?
The Hendrix remark works as a joke, as someone else points out, because among African-American musicians at the time, Hendrix was probably most receptive of the styles of "white" rock and roll. It probably isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that it's very white to imagine that appreciating Hendrix (of all people) provides any special insight into the "black" experience (something I did believe as a little white boy).
But as "white" music goes, Country has it all over. I love a lot of Country Music--even some of what passes for Country these days--but never has a genre of music been so defined by its "whiteness" or so unreflective on the circumstances that made it so.
I assert my moral right to be identified as the author of #185
Fussell's book had some good insights, but is my least favorite of his books. Better is Benjamin DeMott's, which I forget the exact title of.
Arfy is right. Pipe-smoking would-be-tweedy navigator. One of fascinating things about Catch-22 is the matching of personalities to ratings: Pilot, Navigator, Bombardier. There really were psych. tests for that, and personalities did run to type.
The macho image is what has made him outre, that and his many personal flaws, and some pieces of very bad writing. But many of Hemingway's short stories are really much better than anything being written today. So it's a shame.
IDP: Thanks for the link, but as a (partially - about 70%) English descended person, I shall treat this with extreme scepticism until I've read a discussion somewhere more specialised. Too many unanswered questions for my taste. [Extended rant deleted on preview].
Better than anything anyone here will ever write
better than anything being written today
This is totally the book version of "Like she'd ever sleep with you."
I would have thought the reevaluation of Hemingway, to give him a proper, qualified place, had been largely done and assimilated long since. It amazes me to find people still reacting to the grotesque reputation of the 50s, people not yet born when the view we're presenting here was developed and disseminated.
180: I'm out of touch, but Kravitz is way late for classic rock. Maybe's there's a later demographic format.
181: Yes. All black except the drummer. The tempo-change gimmick combined with the lyrics is stoner-cosmic.
191: After reevaluation comes rediscovery. Hemingway's woundedness was what annoyed me. I think that Ralph Ellison wrote something about it. Also, he failed to acknowledge the no-relationship principle.
This is totally the book version of "Like she'd ever sleep with you."
Totally. My reaction to "anything anyone here will ever write" was "Wait, when did this become the going standard of comparison?"
The 176 link refers to the period before 2000 BC. There were several migrations to the British Isles before that time (these were the Stonehenge people. The Celts only came ~600 BC. The Romans estyablished a foothold ~100 BC, but didn't resettle. The Anglos-Saxons cam ~600 Ad, and the Norse 800-1100 AD.
The gist of the article is that after every stage, the original population remained numerically dominant. This means cultural change, probably by violent elite-replacement, possibly by gradualist infiltration and acculturation. But not mass migration and extermination. ("Elite replacement" implies that the invader genes were from males rather than females.)
The Basques have always been the prehistorical anomaly in Europe. The peoples of the Caucasus are also non-Indo-European. The genetic significance of this is unknown to me and may be very slight, after thousands of years of intermarriage.
re: 194
If my memory serves, Cavalli-Sforza's work suggests something similar about the vast majority of Europe. That is, in most invasions it's been elite-replacement plus cultural transfer rather than wholesale population transfer. With the western edge of europe least affected by population and gene transfer and the south eastern edge of europe most affected. The argument in that article would largely fit with that.
Q107, the hard rock station in Toronto, never played any black artists during their regular shows, but on "Psychedelic Sundays" they would play anything by Hendrix, anything by Sly, "Time" by the Chambers Brothers, "Spinning Wheel" by Earth Wind and Fire, and "Freedom" by Richie Havens. And that was about it.
Who wrote the novel about two swinging couples having mid-life crises around the time of the Nixon resignation? Was that Updike?
Somebody who should not go unmentioned when people are compiling lists of IMS authors: Norman Mailer.
197: Another writer who retains value for me despite bales of crap.
I read Herzog many many years ago and thought it was appallingly misogynist. Then later I thought maybe I was being uncharitable, because it is true that when I was younger I sometimes had difficulty separating the views of the characters from the views of the author. But someone mentioned Bellow as an IMS upthread, so perhaps my first instincts were right.
Sure. I'm not saying I despise his work, though much of it fails to be worth while.
The Executioner's Song for example is a great book.
194/5: Matt is right, as far as I remember. I picked on the assertion of Germanic affinities for the Belgae to illustrate methodological suspicions rather than to refute the whole shebang. But it's a very vexed area. I saw a thing I can't find on line which said that genetic evidence for the Germanisation of Britain suggested that the indigenous people were assimilated in some areas, enslaved in others and massacred in yet others.
Which is what you'd expect really. The Anglo-Saxon chiefs didn't arrive with an occupation strategy in their pockets (no change there, then). They arrived piecemeal, and they responded to events on the ground, to balance of forces, to opportunities, etc. A bit like the Europeans in the Americas, in fact.
197: I was amazed/appalled when Mailer called himself "Aquarius" in "Of A Fire On The Moon." What an ego/what a talent/what an ego!
"This is totally the book version of 'Like she'd ever sleep with you.'"
In both cases, ogged, the comment is deserved.
I like the work of some of those guys, above all Roth, but then I do have IMS tendencies. I have special reasons for disliking Updike -- some kind of deliberate limpness and banality, plus overwriting, plus preciosity and pretension.
Name-dropping again: as a HS student regarded as promising (ha!), through another promising youth who was a family friend of his (and is now a second-rank neo-con), I met Bellow and his then-wife, probably Glassman.
The Wife was willowy, blond, elegant, and an effusive hostess. She also gave me the creeps. This was my first intimation that I wasn't going to make the big time, I suppose, though I didn't realize that at the time.
At some point I concluded that Bellow was financing each divorce with a novel about the previous divorce. I was already fragile, I suppose, but this perception probably was a factor in my eventual no-relationshp policy.
BTW: Is there a name for the school of novelists which includes Updike, Roth, Heller, and tangientially Mailer? Is my impression accurate, that these authors are in a category together?
More specifically, whenever one claims that a celebrated writer does not deserve said celebration, one's argument relies, implicitly on one's ability to read and interpret works. I'm not sure that any of the self-asserted debunkers here have made a very strong case.
Who wrote the novel about two swinging couples having mid-life crises around the time of the Nixon resignation?
Are you talking about "The Ice Storm"? That was by Rick Moody, who is of the post-IMS generation.
re: 202
That Prospect article specifically responds to that claim re: Anglo-Saxon 'genocide'.
206: I don't think so, unless you are simply talking about a particular "generation" of novelists. It seems like the Jewish novelists of that generation are not put into the same school as the non-Jewish novelists.
207 makes sense. There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
206: I wouldn't put Heller in a category with the other three, but that isn't based on more that the other three bore me in vaguely related ways, and I think Catch-22 is a great book. Never thought much of any of the other three.
post-IMS generation
IMSism is a phenomenon that transcends generational distinctions.
I think Catch-22 is a great book
You are obviously correct in this matter. But have you read Something Happened?
There's a lot of posts in this thread that follow the irritating "(Incredibly famous and talented artist/writer/musician)? I never really got into him. He's overrated." pattern that you often hear from college sophomores.
It's true that sort of criticism tends to be bogus -- I tend to assume that if I dislike something that's generally acclaimed, it's because I'm not getting it or don't have a taste for it, rather than that it objectively sucks. On the other hand, "Like you could write anything better," is a completely irrelevant comeback. I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such.
I read them as expressing taste, impressions, and reactions to reputations. Every one of these guys, except Heller, has written a great deal and been widely, often wildly feted. I've gotten something from every one of them, least from Updike, the first voted off my island, but no one writes that much at the highest level. In the words of another invaluable IMS, "listen not to the teller, but to the tale"; Herzog's a good book, with a wonderful, passionate and solipsistic personality at the center of it.
213: I may have -- I picked up a number of the rest of his books a while back, and none of them made any sort of impression on me.
There's actually a story not yet told about the sexual politics of 1955-1965. Fear of homosexuality was pervasive, therapists and ideologues were already present in force, and insinuations homosexuality was used as a weapon by macho men against less-macho men, and then finally hyper-macho men were accused of overcompensation and latent homosexuality. This was all at a high, formal, official level, not just gutter talk.
It filtered down to the high schools where the teachers kept an eye out for suspect guys and tried to help them. It was worse for the actually-gay, of course, but every guy was targetted.
As a result gross heterosexuality became more or less an obligation, except that good boys were also still expected to be chaste.
All those writers played that game. And then the game changed twice in 10 years, first with the hippie thing (wimp macho) and then with women's liberation.
Gore Vidal, Calder Willingham, Truman Capote, and especially Tennessee Williams were the flaming queens of the time. The others we've been mentioning were the baseline of normality.
So anyway, why am I weird? There's more, but do you need more?
216 -- That's a little worrisome -- my purely personal take on SH (filtered by 12 years' separation) is that it's one of the most deeply affecting, memorable books I know. Might have to take this consciousness in for a tune-up, change the oil, check the ignition.
208: Googled it, and it was called Memories of the Ford Administration and it was indeed written by Updike.
I must have been desperate for reading material to pick up a book with that title.
209: Matt, I know what he asserts. But plenty of other people have done genetic work that comes to different conclusions, to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why I said I'd like to read an analysis of his work in a professional or semi-pro journal. In general you'd expect significant genetic continuity even if you were looking at fairly large scale replacement, simply because iron age people just weren't as efficient at genocide as we are.
As you probably know, there's a historian called Walter Goffart who's attempted to demonstrate an elite replacement model for most of the western Roman empire in the 5th century, using legal and economic data. It would be very interesting if you could find gentic evidence to support this, but I suspect it's too soon to open the pop.
"I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance, but I can certainly point out the lack of literary value inherent in such."
This smells a bit like the unathletic sports fan who harps just a bit too much on the flaws of his favorite team's athletes. I think that's a bit disgraceful, though ogged may disagree.
John's right about the currents. I may be mistaken, but I think Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men deals with this sympathetically, as in my opinion she always does. As an aside, let me say that if you actually read feminist authors back in the seventies, instead of going on second-hand media accounts and cafeteria posturings, it was easy to be sympathetic and feel positive about the project.
Some of Mailer's own musing, in The Prisoner of Sex and Marilyn, was worthwhile to me.
Text (passim): These may not all be considered judgements, but they are part of the process by which it is decided what lasts and what doesn't. From 1950-1980 there must have been 1000 American novelists that serious people (some of them) took seriously. Probably by now 200 of them are still read much. (Vance Bourjaily? Calder Willingham). 50 years from now it will probably be ten or so. My vote (excluding survivors like Hemingway and Faulkner) would be: Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, maybe Roth, maybe Malamud, maybe Heller.... I'm sure I've forgotten a few.
One problem Bellow, Heller, Roth, Styron, Bourjaily, Mailer, Updike, and others have is that a template is detectable: a young man's struggle with his father, first sexual experience, and tortured romantic relationships. Even James Baldwin almost does this.
I don't know about Pynchon, "Dhalgren", Gaddis, etc. A whole different ball game and I haven't liked them.
My point, Emerson, is that a reader with a little humility might question his or her own centrality to the winnowing process you so aptly describe.
221: Seriously, do you think you have to be able to do better yourself to be able to criticize? That just seems loopy to me.
Try it in the visual arts. I can't draw at all -- I'm literally at the stick figure level. I couldn't create any of the works of Whasisname Kinkade, The Painter Of Light (TM). Is it unseemly of me to think or say that they're crap? Because I don't see why it should be.
OFE: Thanks, Goffart looks very interesting.
Perhaps not the Painter of Light, who is more or less a figure of ridicule. But for you to declare, "Geogia O'Keefe is Teh Suxx," yes, I think you'd have to demonstrate some knowledge and critical skill to convince anyone that statement reflects more on O'Keefe than on yourself.
I don't think I could write a competent Harlequin Romance.
They send you a detailed style guide; you could totally do it. But they only pay some piddly sum, like $200 a book.
Also, if we can't trash-talk the canon on a blog, where can we trash-talk the canon? I hate Milton!
You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
LB, I've got no problem with a person expressing disinterest in an author. I doubt I'm that crazy. But strong criticism requires some back-up, is what I mean, or I get irritated and start insulting people.
I'm starting to make a big deal about a small point, another sign that I should get on with my exile.
Text, it's a pretty democratic process. After a point people stop reading and talking about X. And basically, the decision is not done in a serious thoughtful way. At a later date, some are revived because of the efforts of influential and persuasive individuals.
I remember a number of authors still talked about a lot when I was young, who I never hear about any more at all. Most of them will probably never be revived.
I think that to the degree that a novel can be thought of as generic, it will be forgotten when the genre becomes passe. Exceptions would be extremely masterful, perfect examples of a genre, and probably those which have something a little different or extra.
From the American XIXc non-specialists read Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, Poe.... These weren't very typical of the many fiction-writers of that time.
Stephen Crane? JF Cooper? Ambrose Bierce? Washington Irving?..... I don't know any more.
Ooh, I forgot my substantive criticism of Updike:
For Updike to have one female character, in the first Rabbit book, think of Rabbit's cock as "like an angel's sword" is a bit much. For him to do it again in the second one is totally ridiculous.
you don't need the ability to make a table in order to abuse a bad one, but you need to know what a bad table is. Otherwise you are only revealing your ignorance.
I don't think you have to be better than the Someone in order to criticize Someone's work, but I agree with text that in many cases, stated dislike of a celebrated artist is more about finding more rarified air than any particular reason. That performance at the Met? Good enough for the plebes, but the true connoisseur scoffs. This fine piece of literature? Oh, I've read dozens just like it and honestly, darling, it just bores me to tears.
I always prefer honest reactions, freely felt and offered. And as Emerson points out, a lot of this stuff won't be in any canon anyway. Much of the reputation of these writers was always marketing, and I'm glad people are willing to judge for themselves.
I think that a pretty good case against Updike has been made. I could probably take care of Mailer and with a little research. Bellow is a tougher nut to crack, but I find the guy incredibly annoying and have no intention of being fair to him. He'll have to survive without any help from me.
I think that literature is an discretionary, optional, involvement, and whimsical rejection is the reader's prerogative. Making it a serious professional responsibility in the universities has been a disaster. The Crooked Timber / Valve people drive me nuts with their ponderousness.
It's like the PC debates about whom you should be attracted to.
Thesis: all sex sucks. We should just go shoe shopping instead.
I actually quite love hemingway. gaddis, eh. isb all the way. he really is a talented writer, and he has a kind of compelling paranoid appeal, but I got to a point about 3/4 of the way through jr when I just couldn't take the female characters any more and threw the book against the wall and never finished it. it's funny, I much prefer the more or less total absence of female characters, as in a war story, or if not total absence then functional absence, as in a war story where they briefly visit a brothel or flirt with some girls. the world of men, their anxieties and bullshit--even a very misogynist writer can depict that with feeling and interest. but if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character, like the tragedy and the satyr play got all mixed up, or it's like a baroque painting into which a few obscene pencil sketches have been inserted. here you have the (male) actual characters, differentiated from one another, with believable interior lives...and there you have dolls of pure exterior, shiny swelling surfaces, empty eyes, and something stipulated to be interior when they are clearly nothing but badly made automata tottering around the place, falling in love with the deserving or undeserving, handed out like party favors at the end. the author offers up his total inability to imagine what it is like to be a woman on a big silver platter hopefully labelled "mysterious femininity" and feels sure we'll fall for it. fucking pisses me off.
You're baiting me, FL, aren't you? Nice try.
241: Yes, very much so. A lot of my reading has fallen into the 'functional absence of women' category you describe, and as you say, it's much, much less irritating than books that purport to portray women and then don't.
22: I haven't read through this whole thread yet (I'm working on it) but I did want to say that I think that Fischer was planning to write histories of the other European cultures who colonized the U.S., but he never got around to it.
There is one paragraph in Albion's Seed where he says that New York's Dutch heritage meant that it was willing to tolerate much more extravagant displays of wealth and more inequality than would be permissible in certain parts of the country.
I keep hoping that he'll finish the series, but I think that he worte a book about banking in the Renaissance instead.
Has anyone said that so-and-so is a bad writer?
perhaps the concerns about masculinity emerson alludes to above have something to do with it, but I find this kind of thing more annoying in novelists from the 50s and 60s. I feel like it was recent enough in time that they should have been able to know better. also, I know people who were alive then, so it seems more personal to me. like, this could be a real actual old dude, totally incapable of recognizing my basic humanity.
236: You have to have some sort of theory, which can be implicit, to which you can refer your criticism. But you don't have to spend long years at the feet of Terry Eagleton to get that. A bit of intelligence and experience will usually do. I'm sure LB is well qualified. Dr Johnson certainly was.
237: Very true. I knew a guy whose publisher decided his manuscript should be a best seller, and one of the ways in which they defaced it to this end was to bring in a Specialist Ghost Writer of Sex Scenes. Which must come close to being the worst job in the world outside of the mining industry.
The early Swedish contribution (the foundation of Delaware) has been criminally neglected -- and of course many of those so-called "Swedes" were actually Finns.
Clownae, have you read Good As Gold? What's fascinating about that book today are all the thinly-veiled caricatures of people who made up the proto-Neo-Con set, the Podhoretzes, Kristols, Kissinger, etc. In fact, Heller kept a thick file of clippings by or about those people while writing GAG. I remember his notes on them being fairly scathing. How I wish Heller were alive to write about them now.
I'm going to sleep; 'night everybody. keep it real. perv on hermione for me.
Isn't "I don't like things that suck" an adequate critical theory?
Damn. I've been wrong all these years.
if it's a long book and it has actual female characters in it it becomes impossible to ignore that upon the stage of the book are strutting and fretting two very different kinds of character
This is true, but it is a high bar, too. Who writes novels in which both male and female characters are presented with equal persuasiveness? I guess I could go for the Henry James (speaking of Mighty White Writers) of Portrait of a Lady or Washington Square. (And even then, maybe he's persuasive because he's not portraying women but ladies, i.e. class is trumps in that particular identity sweepstakes.)
If the Armageddon Christians can be Likud philo-Semites, why can't people like me be Woody Allen / Philip Roth / Joseph Heller philo-Semites?
If 237 was to 233, I don't think they were even sex scenes. More like, the women are sitting around pensively reflecting on how Rabbit's cock is like an angel's sword.
249 -- No, I was just thinking about how I've only read two books by Heller and I count both of them among my very favorites. (Well I also read Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man but I will not hold that against him.)
Who writes novels in which both male and female characters are presented with equal persuasiveness?
Eliot, Woolf, Austen, Pym... I'll try to think of some Americans.
John, I'm with you all the way on that. If you read, e.g. NYRB, most of the critics in it (not the mainstream writers who are paid pity money to scratch each others' backs) work on exactly "I don't like things that suck". But they've paid enough dues to have a reasonably sophisticated idea of what does and doesn't suck. They have never written a tragedy, but their opinion of one will determine whether it runs for more than a week, *and there is nobody better qualified to do so*.
252: I'm a huge Trollope fan, and I think his women are often as real as his men. They are bound by and internalize their insane society, and the author judges them by its standards, but they have the same sort of interior life and motivations that the male characters do.
256: Heh. I thought of making that comment and then decided against it.
Emerson (239): "The Crooked Timber / Valve people drive me nuts with their ponderousness."
We like to think of ourselves as like an angel's sword that way - a bit much, that is. (I misread Weiner's comment, a bit further up, and thought to myself 'I never use 'like an angel's sword' to mean 'a bit much'. But henceforth I resolve to make the attempt.)
Example, would it be like an angel's sword if I brought donuts, given that I'm not a troll. (Do only trolls have to do that?)
Pat Barker's men, Prior — the man who says I don't pay — and Rivers, are very real to me. Prior's girl, Sarah, makes a remarkable contrast with the girlfriend in Farewell To Arms. I'm using this example to keep subject matter and period close.
But it's much easier to write with that kind of insight today. We're standing on the shoulders, etc.
And Pynchon, sometimes.
given that I'm not a troll
We'll be the judge of that, John.
Not directed at your 233, MW. But pretty much all sex scenes suck. Here's a lovely novel, but oh to sell it we have to rip off some bodices, back to the lovely novel, but now they want each other more and here's the oral sex!, back to the lovely novel.
The sex scene at the end of The God of Small Things is good.
I often like David Lodge's sex scenes. Which skew talky.
Much as I hate to admit it, I'm going to need Standpipe's subtext explaining blog. Just what did he mean my M receiving? Is IMS and unfogged coinage or a more generally known term? If the former, where did it first appear?
Cala in 237: Thesis: All sex scenes suck.
As editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh established the Bad Sex Award for the worst description of sex in a contemporary novel. It was intended to "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
This article from the Guardian provides some stunningly bad examples. They include excerpts from the winner's and some of the other nominations.
Stephen King writes some very convincing sex scenes.
Burroughs has worthwhile sex scenes, ones which are not thrown on top of the text for marketing purposes.
but now they want each other more and here's the oral sex!, back to the lovely novel.
This is hilarious, but what the hell books are you reading, Cala?
I'll try to think of some Americans.
There is of course a locus classicus for the argument that American writers are especially bad on this point, and I have the feeling that I've made this reference before so forgive me if I repeat, but Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, develops this argument, building on the essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey."
It pretty much described every piece of fiction written ever that has a sex scene. In support: the Onion , of course.
I think funny sex scenes would be doable.
William Burroughs' sex scenes are good propaganda for the no-sex-no-relationship ideal. I doubt that anyone ever said "Boy! I want to go do that myself!"
Example, would it be like an angel's sword if I brought donuts, given that I'm not a troll. (Do only trolls have to do that?)
It's not yet demonstrated that you're not a troll, John.
276 -- fine; but we're looking for "good" sex scenes here, not "titillating" ones.
277, meet 264. (That's how the kids say it, right?)
Emerson, have you considered that you could have been a happy monk, instead of a cranky old man?
Also: I'm a big fan of the chapter of Gravity's Rainbow that deals with Katje and Gottfried while they are still living with Blicero; but I don't remember if the quite titillating sex acts alluded to therein actually get their own scene, or just are part of the stream of consciousness.
The protracted sex scene involving Katje and Pudding takes high marks in the "most uncomfortable thing I've ever read" contest.
279: You're on the list too, ogged. Don't be so sanguine.
279 Yes, but I believe in communion in both kinds, so I can't be a Catholic.
Monks can be crankier than me, anyway. Like penguins, they're not as pleasant as they seem in cartoons.
(I think there may also have been a more conventional sex scene with Jessica and Mexico, and that it was well-executed and fit in nicely with the story. But I may be making this from whole cloth.)
Slol, while you're here, what's your take on the "Europeans don't do American Studies" meme, mentioned by Drum and others?
I didn't see the post, but off the top of my head I'd say it's about as meaningful as most generalizations involving "Europeans".
268: Serendipity: "M of receptivity" comes from Updike's entry in the Bad Sex contest.
Hilariously but predictably, I always find the sex scenes excruciating to read and skip over them as quickly as possible.
Slol, I think IDP is talking about this.
Well, there's this and things like this as well as this and this and this.
I don't have data on actual postholders throughout Europe, but see e.g. this.
So I'm initially skeptical of the claim. And even if it were true, that person for person there are fewer permanent, postholding Americanists in Europe than Europeanists in America, we should consider that there are lots of programs---the Fulbright is the best-known---that continually deluge overseas universities with visiting Americanists from America.
I'm not surprised at your opinion and thought MY's skepticism was well-taken. But as to the Fulbright deluge, remember we also send many a Mormon missionary over there too. How many people do the Fulbrights reach? In times of stress, such as Vietnam and now, are they tainted?
Well, my point was that the Americanist teaching duties in many a European university are outsourced to visiting Americans. My own anecdotal experience is, no, visiting American scholars aren't tainted (yet).
I thought I left a comment about the M of receptivity. Here we go again...
I'm very amused that this shows up on the first page of google hits.
This isn't an M, it's a W. That makes all the difference.
Not directed at your 233, MW. But pretty much all sex scenes suck. Here's a lovely novel, but oh to sell it we have to rip off some bodices, back to the lovely novel, but now they want each other more and here's the oral sex!, back to the lovely novel.
I read a sex scene once; it gifted me with the knowledge of the word 'manroot'.
I will never find a written sex scene enticing in any way ever again.
max
['It's just so wrong.']
he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.
Paging whoever it was who said that I didn't give good reasons for my feelings about Updike.
Em, we've located one bad passage. I'm sure there are more, but no, cutting and pasting it here does little to convince.
I'm afraid we're in the rotten egg zone here. I'm not going to eat the whole egg, sorry.
That kind of overwriting and preciosity is what I couldn't stand when I went back and reread stuff I had liked the first time around, 40 or so years ago.
By all means, don't eat any egg at all, but you'll forgive me if I don't think your lack of appetite does much harm to Updike's reputation.
Gah, I think the passage is stupid too, and prefer spare writing. But the guy wrote a lot more than that paragraph.
The Offspring liked to read Hemingway in high school for no other reason than Hemingway's style somehow wiggles past his reading disability.
However, his comment on reading The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber was 'Did this guy Hemingway have some real heavy problems with his masculinity?'
His summation of Catcher in the Rye: 'What a complete spoiled rich kid whiner - didn't he know there are kids out on the street taking drugs and shit and giving it out so they can eat?'
Updike can turn a lovely phrase here and again, tho' I suspect his sex scenes are tainted by the embedded WASP fear of losing control. Similarly, New England Espiscopalians are primarily concerned with social do-gooding and good manners and distrustful of an excess of faith.
[On the subject of Protestants: LB: Years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend who lamented that our respective spouses, both raised in Jewish households, had lots of ethnic dishes to reminisce about, whereas he, a Massachusetts Methodist, had only bologna sandwiches on Wonderbread with mayonnaise.]
Text, you're just wrong. I'm sorry you like Updike, but that's not my problem. No good writer could write that badly, and other stuff of his has the same overwriting problem -- the topics are usually just less lurid. It was the same kind of thing I hated in Rabbit Run (which did have an overwritten sex scene in it to boot.).
You seem to be saying that there's some correct and justified way of dismissing crappy writers, and that my way of doing it no good -- and, I suppose, unprofessional, naive, and unsystematic. But there isn't.
I think that Updike's reputation is in serious trouble, for exactly the reasons I've given (though not because of my opinion, obviously), and his problems will get worse as his writing becomes less timely.
Updike-- like myself, Bach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hamsun, Ibsen, Flo Ziegfield, Jeff Bridges, Rita Mae Brown, Dana Carney, Steve Jobs, Dennis Rader and many other great honkies, and unlike Garrison Keillor -- had a Lutheran upbringing, but except for Rader, we all feel that he represents our heritage badly.
Emerson, what I'm suggesting is not that crappy writers should not be dismissed--far from it--but rather that you don't know what you're talking about. You don't.
You think "overwriting" is a problem? It can be. But it hasn't been for Nabokov, Faulkner, or Thomas Mann--all of which are guilty. You think good writers can't write badly? Name a good writer, and I'll find you something bad.
I enjoy punchy comments, Emerson. It's not your punchiness that I object to. It's that you have nothing at all to say, other than to express the same boring prejudice over and over again.
What, you don't like Updike? How very interesting of you.
If you guys get into a fight about John Updike, I'm going to love you both forever. Deal with it.
But aren't you guys answering two questions? Text seems to be looking at whether there's something worthwhile in someone's writing, and Emerson seems to be asking whether someone belongs on the list of enduring greats. You're going to get very different answers.
Can we all come together over hating on Louis de Bernieres? Have I ever repeated this sentence here before?:
"The cloth hardened like cardboard, and stiffened into adamantine inflexibility."
Umm, could I get a cite or link for 296?
Google bad sex awards updike -- some paper (I think the Guardian but I'm not dead sure) gave the passage a Bad Sex award last year.
There is lots of good writing in lots of books that nobody reads. Updike is destined to be unread. Unlike Nabokov, Faulkner, or Thomas Mann.
or just scroll upthread.
I'm now motivated to fight for ogged's love, but I think his analysis of our disagreement is more or less correct. I'll concede that much of Updike's writing will soon be forgotten, if it hasn't been already. I suspect that Rabbit Run will stay in print, and know that in the best of all possible worlds, The Centaur would be rediscovered in a few years.
And you might find a short story here or there in a high school anthology of 20th Century writers. But yes, they won't be celebrating the 100th aniversary of Couples anywhere.
For me, I come at this as someone trying to write stuff, and I stand in awe of many writers, despite their flaws.
It's in Updike's Villages from 2004. Amazon doesn't have it scanned, unfortunately, but the excerpt is easy to find. Here's a reference that doesn't take its inspiration from the Bad Sex Writing award.
On Amazon I noticed that people who bought Villages also bought I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. Did they just buy it because they heard it was about a young girl's sexual awakening or something?
joeo, I suppose I should envy your grasp of future literary trends.
I guess that reference is inspired by the Bad Sex Award, but I meant that it was written before that passage was nominated.
Really, we shouldn't be holding something the guy wrote in 2004 against him. He lost his stuff ten years ago.
Anyone read that Terrorist book? I'm guessing not.
Text, there are reasons to admire Faulkner and Nabakov. Nabakov was Updike's model, I suppose, but Updike fell short. Updike's prose is unendurable, and there's not much else there. Lame suburbanites dressed up as centaurs -- did Mann, Nabakov, or Faulkner ever do anything that silly?
If someone else wants to disagree and give reasons for their disagreement, I can deal with that. But that's not what you've been doing. You've been saying that my dismissal of Updike doesn't meet your high standards for professional-quality dismissals of crap, rotten-egg writers. You've said, as far as I know, nothing about Updike.
I could do a much better job on Updike, but in order to do that I'd have to spend hours and hours reading stuff I can't stand, and I'm not going to do that. For me he's a rotten egg. Apparently not so for you, but you've failed to state your reasons.
Rabbit, Run is the only Updike book I've ever truly liked, but on that book alone I'd say he's got a lasting reputation as a fine American writer. In it he keeps his religious themes and ideas about national decline under control -- they work with the plot, they don't dominate it. What we know in retrospect to be his rather icky sympathy for the icky Angstrom is ambiguous in the book. And the race and gender awfulness is true to the period.
How many really fine books does someone need to write to get a lasting reputation?
Nabakov was Updike's model, I suppose
What?
I am very enviable.
It is easy to predict future literary trends. Here are the nytimes hardback bestsellers:
1 THE THIRTEENTH TALE, by Diane Setterfield. forgotten
2 THE BOOK OF FATE, by Brad Meltzer. forgotten
3 THE MEPHISTO CLUB, by Tess Gerritsen. forgotten
4 RISE AND SHINE, by Anna Quindlen. forgotten
5 JUDGE & JURY, by James Patterson and Andrew Gross. forgotten
6 DARK CELEBRATION, by Christine Feehan. forgotten
7 RICOCHET, by Sandra Brown. forgotten
8 THE GUY NOT TAKEN, by Jennifer Weiner. forgotten
9 THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud. forgotten
10 THE AFGHAN, by Frederick Forsyth. forgotten
11 WORLD WAR Z, by Max Brooks. forgotten
12 A SPOT OF BOTHER, by Mark Haddon. forgotten
13 ONLY REVOLUTIONS, by Mark Z. Danielewski. forgotten
14 AFTER THIS, by Alice McDermott. forgotten
15 FOOL ME ONCE, by Fern Michaels. forgotten
All those egg and sex comments remind me of the first sentence of a manuscript that came into the slush pile at a publication I worked for: 'The sun was a turgid egg yolk in the sky, dripping its tumescent beams upon the earth below'. The editor had put it on the wall of every reader's cubicle to remind us of the horror, the horror.
"Rabbit Run" was the book that turned me off Updike. Poeticizing Rabbit didn't work. (A long stretch -- but Genet did a little of that too, overwriting about rather crappy people. But he had the mystique of criminality helping him).
And yes, unless they're written by or about someone I've met or seem to be a fun way to kill time (Vonnegut), I do judge books almost entirely on whether I think they're able to compete with the classics.
I'm not convinced by the argument that Updike won't be read. I just don't think the academy is that predictable—or reliable. Do people believe, today, that Hemingway is destined to be read? Different answers from different people, and radically unlike the answers you'd have expected 30 years ago. Really, is Willa Cather destined to be read? Her subjects and treatments are no more—and perhaps far less—relevant than Updike's, yet she's read and even taught.
Emerson, I don't think you really need to be engagd with on this. I mean, you write "Lame suburbanites dressed up as centaurs," but have you even read The Centaur? I don't think you have.
And you ask, did Faulkner, Nabakov or Mann ever do anything so silly? Hell yes they did. They each played with conceits. Faulkner wrote some awful stuff. I'm guessing you've not read that either.
You may not like it, but the default position in this debate is that Updike is a fine writer. He probably published too much. You live and learn. I don't particularly care to convince you of the fact that he's a good writer. Rather, I pity and scorn you for your ignorance.
I don't want to list for you the reasons I like Updike. It would be tedious, and others have already done it, and better. He's not my favorite writer. I merely want to express my irritation with you. You don't know what you're talking about. Few people do, but then, they don't insist on it quite like you do.
FWIW it's Nabokov. And I'm still mystified by the idea that he's Updike's role model.
302: Then you should take solace in the fact the Updike's been an Episcopalian for the last 30 years or so. They're a lot less dour than Lutherans, IMX. Especially Norwegian ones.
I disagree with the default position, not for the first time in my life. A lot of the old defaults have changed over the years, and I expect this one to do so soon enough too.
Really -- default position? That reminds me of the grad student who refused to tell a friend of mine what he thought about the movie they'd just seen "until I've read the reviews".
I marvel at your unwillingness to say a good thing about the guy. Perhaps I should find someone you'd more willingly deign to speak to to present the anti-Updike position, so Updike will have a defender here.
Ah, well, okay. But I realize we're well beyond substantive discussion here.
I do believe I read something by Updike praising Nabokov in the most absolute terms, and Updike's prose style, if nothing else, seems Nabokovian.
Dourness is cool with me, though.
And no one caught the Dennis Rader joke. Not funny, I guess.
Slol, what did the Times say? Not registered.
Vogon poetry, as generated by spambots: Ah, that irritable Andis Flat Iron unfittingly lambaste around a turgid egg.
It's Anatole Broyard, writing in 1975:
As I see it, the relationship between Updike and Nabokov might be described as "there but for the grace of God go I." The implacable archness, the gratuitous word games, the lepidopterous frivolity, the sense of the author's ego breathing down your neck, in Mr. Nabokov's fiction are potential faults that John Updike has increasingly repressed or brought under control in his own work. It must be nostalgia for his avoided vices that impels Mr. Updike to call the author of "Ada" and "Pale Fire" "the best-equipped writer in the English-speaking world."
So slolernr- if you don't like Updike, I gues that means you're not "white".
319: I wouldn't be surprised if McDermott or Messud made it (actually I'm not quite positive I've read anything by Messud).
Huh, Danielewski wrote another book.
322 reminds me that Death Comes For The Archbishop is a terrible book, which is not to say Cather was a bad writer.
Death Comes For The Archbishop is a terrible book
You're letting your personal distaste for autoerotic asphyxiation cloud your judgment.
335: Is he? I read a hundred or two pages of House of Leaves and found it interesting.
House of Leaves was fun in a certain way, but it really fell apart whenever there was text sufficient that the reader's action could be called "reading" and not "flipping around." It's such an obvious gimmick he's got, he's nearly innoculated himself against accusations of gimmickry, but not quite. I also felt like he cribbed an important point from Kierkegaard's "The Seducer's Diary" (from Either/Or).
OK, this is true crap. It's not the embarrassing sex, it's the banana and the yam, so plainly saying "look! I am writing about teh exotic culture!"
Ok, here's the thing about Updike: he thinks one can write pretty sentences about one's cock. He's wrong there.
Damn it, don't make me defend this cashew banana shit all night.
And all those fucking adverbs! Why am I forced into defending that passage? Yes, that's shitty writing.
I didn't see any adverbs. I even double-checked with my groping snout of desire. Are we still talking about the cashew banana shit?
yeah, I'm an ass. They're plain old adjectives, but all the same, "warming" and "yeilding" need to go away. The whole passage needs to go away.
and no they're not fucking gerunds, they're used descriptively.
now I need to go away. maybe Updike will show up in the thread to defend himself.
Yeilding definitely needs to go away, as it is not a word.
and no they're not fucking gerunds, they're used descriptively.
Quite right, they're gerundives.
Also, "bursting with weight" is the very face of the Left today.
None of you rabble is white, as far as I'm concerned.
I suppose you could consider them participles in some sense, but they're being used as adjectives.
348: It's about time someone realized who the little bitch around here really is.
Updike, why do you need all the metaphors for talking about your cock? You've put me in a bad position here.
I suppose you could consider them participles in some sense, but they're being used as adjectives.
Double-you tee eff? You're the linguist, I suppose, but I always learned that participles were verbal adjectives. (Double-checking my forgotten Latin with that most to be consulted source, wikipedia, I see gerundives defined as verbal adjectives as well, but also the claim that English doesn't have any.)
In particular, your "but" seems to imply that participles aren't verbal adjectives at all.
Explain yourself!
All right, all right, Ben. You are the true one and only little bitch.
I hate you all. And especially John Updike.
361: Somebody is not making the M of receptivity.
Participle: verbal form used in nominal contexts.
Gerund: noun derived from a verb.
Gerundive: adjective derived from a verb.
The difference is slippery, and may not be useful at all.
What I meant by "but" was that they may well be participles, but calling them gerundives is more explanatory because it means they are by definition adjectives, whereas "participle," pace you, does not generally contain that implication.
pace everything I ever learned in Latin and German classes!
WTF? "I have seen you." Is "seen" an adjective there?
Die angemalte Wand; meus errans oculus. "Angemalte" and "errans" are participles, and adjectives.
I never said participles couldn't be adjectives, just that they don't have to be (which is what I took you to be claiming, perhaps erroneously).
I wish I could remember the awesome explanation of why, in the first gerundive example wikipedia gives, it's "cupidus Carthaginis delendae est" and not "cupidus Carthaginem delendae est", and other things involving participles, gerunds, and gerundives, that this fellow once gave in a class on Latin prose.
However, I can't. But I still have a book on Latin prose composition, maybe there's something interesting there...
"The Gerundive is a Verbal Adjective of the Passive Voice". Well I was about to conclude that myself. "Desirous of Carthage being destroyed."
The term may be used slightly differently in regard to Latin and English. Its referents in the two languages are certainly different.
341:Ok, here's the thing about Updike: he thinks one can write pretty sentences about one's cock. He's wrong there.
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and
limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
Bob, do you mean to refute or support 341?
And is that from Rabbit at Rest? I listened to that on tape. It wasn't my most advisable book on tape purchase.
My most advisable book on tape purchase was Prince Caspian, which I procured at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in South Carolina, on a Spring Break road trip. On this particular version of Prince Caspian, actual children acted out the dialogue, rather than just having one voice read it, and they were very, very loud. Oh how my friends thanked me!
"softly laved"
"buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow"
"the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower"!!!!
I haven't been following this debate, but, Jesus Almighty, that's terrible.
It's Ulysses, you heathens. I've never managed to finish it but that's a great passage. (Softly yellow is the limbs.)
yes, it's really quite bad. but I think we underestimate how hard it is to be a good writer when editors keep accepting whatever you've written uncritically, and write you big checks. and you get old. He's not the first writer to have fallen apart.
But I feel we're being sort of unkind. If you want to be unkind to me, I've earned it, but what did Updike do to you, personally?
One should probably preview. I still maintain it's a bad passage, taken out of context.
Look, Weiner, you gentile, do you really want to defend a passage that tries to describe what is clearly a jaundiced corpse as erotic?
If you attend closely to the claim of text's that Weiner failed to italicize, you will see that it concerned "pretty sentences about one's cock", not "erotic sentences".
It's neither pretty nor erotic. There's probably lots in Ulysses that could be characterized as bad writing in an undergrad writing workshop. But obviously there's something there.
It's also possible that undergrad writing workshops, marvellous though they are, assume a certain lack of genius among the students.
I don't mean to imply that they're marvellous at all.
Yeah, I was joking.
Although I'm not trying to bash the teaching of writing to undergrads; I really do think that even the worst writing workshops have the benefit of getting people to *think* about writing as a craft, which is a good thing.
382:Good grief people. It is a Bloom fantasy with some authorial intrusion, and it is intended to be florid (it is the "Lotus-Eaters" section), lazy, and fucking funny. If it looks like bad writing, it is intentionally "bad".
It is not merely "good writing" it is genius.
B, I don't mean to bash it either. Or anyone. And certainly not Ulysses.
Bob, I think we agree. The passage looks pretty silly all by it's lonesome. I am no Joyce expert, and barely limped my way through that book. No surprise here that it's intentionally silly. Lots of times, "bad writing" is really quite good writing.
and yes, I just wrote "it's" for "its." yes, I should go on exile.
For anyone still reading:the first and most important rule of Joyce reading comes from a Joyce quote:"What does it all mean?"
"It's meant to make you laugh."
I am serious when I say that every word Joyce put on paper was intended to be funny. He was desperate, he was insane. He was relentlessly ironic, the cruelest and most compassionate of men.
"Every word" includes that "oh so beautiful heart-breaking" final passage from Dubliners, "snow falling of the living and the dead" which is quite comparable to the above from "Lotus Eaters"
florid, sentimental, self-pitying, pretentious...funny...
and heart-breakingly human.