This article in the Washington Post interprets new census data about the average income of various college majors as a huge blow to the humanities. But it’s not news to anybody that liberal arts majors make significantly less money than engineering or computer science majors. The article completely fails to take into account that people often pursue certain lines of work for reasons other than maximizing their income. People don’t go into nonprofit work, social work, education, journalism or the arts in order to make bank. Their priorities and goals are different than what this article assumes.

Also, why does everyone talk about “English” majors as if  majoring in English were some specific, carefully considered, career-motivated choice? There are so many English majors because English is the default major – if you get to senior year and still don’t know what you want to do with your life, you already probably have all the credits to graduate in English. It’s like majoring in “College.” It’s a Bachelor of Arts in Bachelor of Arts. There’s nothing wrong with that. I was an English major (not that I’m somehow proof of there being nothing wrong with it). But it’s weird to keep reading things about English majors working “outside their field.” What is their field? Reading?

(Image via)

I have some sympathy for Carmen Callil. Her actions are counterproductive, though, because now everyone’s going to be passionately defending Philip Roth’s literary reputation for weeks (well, days) and complaining about sour feminists, when if they’d just given him the prize without any controversy, everyone would have been like, “Roth again? Yawn! Why didn’t they give this one to Marilynne Robinson?”

But I think she just snapped, and we’ve all been there – as a reader, how many times are you told, “Okay. This guy was really messed up about women, but you just have to ignore all the blatant horrifying misogyny, and then, you have to admit, he’s a genius!” It’s constant. And most of the time, because women are great about doing this, because we – and it can’t be said often enough – do it all the time in every form of culture ever, we concede the point. We forgive the constant brutal, graphic rapes and the ‘mothers are manipulative, evil hags’ stuff and ‘I just want to kill my castrating wife’ stuff and the constant reducing of all women to two-dimensional jizz receptacles, and we overlook all that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. If you overlook the 90% of it that’s repeatedly telling us that we better never for a second think we have any power or status in our society whatsoever, it really is an amazing work of art.” (Meanwhile, ask some guys to come with you to see a movie with women in it, or pink somewhere on the poster, and it’s like you’re asking them to lick a public toilet.)

Anyway, eventually every single reading woman (and sometimes, a reading man) reaches that point where she just goes, “That’s it! That is it! I’m done! I do not have to overlook it and admit the genius! I do not have to admit any fucking knob’s genius anymore! I’m done! I am only ever reading stuff by women from now on forever and that’s it! YOU can overlook the dress descriptions and the stupid wedding at the end, and admit that this woman is a genius! YOU OVERLOOK SOMETHING FOR ONCE, DAMN IT!”

And then you have to go off by yourself for awhile and take some deep breaths, especially since you weren’t even talking to anyone specific, but just yelling at the air in front of your face, and you weren’t even reading anything at the moment, but just sitting there, thinking about stuff and seething. Plus, some of your favorite writers are men.

Ideally, you do not throw this tantrum publicly, while you are serving as one of the judges for a major literary prize.

Anyway, we’ve all been there. I can understand how Callil feels, although I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not Roth should have won – I’ve only read American Pastoral (I read it in Vietnam, which I think informed and added to my reading experience¹), and I haven’t read everyone on the shortlist, but most current readers are not all that sad that the days of RothMailerUpdike dominance are ending (although I still plan to get around to reading those dudes some day).

If you ever have a moment of literary despair, it pays to remember that contemporary fiction is absolutely exploding with awesome writers, many of them women. Look at Jennifer Egan! I mean, I didn’t like her book that much, but everybody else loved it, and she won both the NBCC Award and the Pulitzer. Additionally, up-and-coming male writers have finally realized that being entirely dismissive of and confused about half the world’s population rather limits your ability to be a great recorder of the human condition, and literary misogyny is (I really think, though some people will argue with me) on the wane.

Here are some fantastic books I would recommend for anyone who needs a little break from being reasonable and open-minded about offensive content. Not only are these great books about women (I think? Maybe a couple are about men²), but they are not about “women’s issues”. They are not specifically about feminism or stifling marriages or dealing with abuse or anything like that (well, maybe some of them are a little bit, but those are not the elements I primarily remember about them)(and not that there’s anything wrong with books on those topics, but that’s not what we’re after here):

• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Everyone should read this! Why has everyone not read this?)
• Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
• Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
• Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
• Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
• Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (warning: look into this before you read it; it is not for everyone)
• Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Hilarious! Read it!)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
• Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
• anything by Marilynne Robinson
• Any others? What can you recommend in this category?

And I don’t even know, so many more! Those are just the ones I happened to think of, that I’ve read recently. So never feel like you have to read Philip Roth, and never feel like you have to not read Philip Roth, either. Read everything! There’s enough great stuff out there for anybody in any kind of mood, is all I’m saying.

(Image via)
__
¹I know, aren’t I tiresome?! If we were at a party, you would have just spotted someone you had to go talk to over there.
²Actually, two of these books (Atmospheric Disturbances and Novel About My Wife) are about men searching for their mysteriously missing (and not actually missing) wives. Weird!

I have two friends who both posed for figure drawing classes in college, and this is what they said of the experience:

Friend 1: “It’s very humbling, because you drop your robe and nobody comes in their pants, or proposes to you.”

Friend 2: “It’s very self-confidence building, because you drop your robe and nobody vomits, or runs out of the room screaming.”

These are two very different people.

__
Image via.

I don’t think I fully appreciated Aimee Mann before, but I sure do now.  @#%&*! Smilers might as well be called “Songs For a Plateau.”  I’ve been listening to it all week. 

Semi-related, if there’s one thing my generation seems to have proven, it’s that the best possible way to ensure a person will be totally worthless is to give them limitless options.

As this article points out:

There is a vast gap between fashion and style. Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself.

And

Style is also one part personality: spirit, verve, attitude, wit, inventiveness. It demands the desire and confidence to express whatever mood one wishes. Such variability is not only necessary but a reflection of a person’s unique complexity as a human being. People want to be themselves and to be seen as themselves. In order to work, style must reflect the real self, the character and personality of the individual; anything less appears to be a costume.

As anyone who’s ever tried to wear something too advanced for them knows, you can’t fake style that doesn’t belong to you. Nothing looks sillier than a person dressed in a way that makes them self-conscious and uncomfortable. I knew early on that I would not do well in outfits that needed to be managed, and in shoes that required an adjustment in pace. I might look silly wearing flip-flops with a cocktail dress, but believe me, I look far stupider trying to mince around in heels like I mean it.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I’ve been setting up my room, and it occurred to me that, with each move over the years, the way I design my living and working space has more and more conformed to a certain, specific style, regardless of the differences in the actual rooms themselves (which differences have been vast). I like clean surfaces, a good deal of floor space, blues and greens, and stacks of things. I do not like anything small, decorative or incidental. I don’t have knick-knacks, or pictures on the walls.  There is almost nothing in my room that doesn’t have a daily, utilitarian purpose. It’s fascist-chic.  But at the same time, I do choose my useful objects with aesthetic qualities in mind.

Here’s designer Nikolay Saveliev (via Kottke):

 I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read. Even my cat has to figure in there somehow. It’s a meticulous thing to maintain, but probably comes from the fact that I’ve discovered mostly everything through music, whether it’s ideologies, writers, artists, designers, cultures, subcultures, or other music. So it’s easy to tie things back into your work, as long as you keep your eyes and ears open, and maintain a healthy dose of critical thought.

Um, okay.  But actually, I think that many of us structure our lives this way to some extent, without being fully conscious of it. You design a personality in the same way you design your look. You pick and choose your political and religious philosophies. Choosing not to decorate a room can be as much a nod to one’s style as decorating it. I design my eating habits to match whatever goals I’m working on at any given time. I live in Williamsburg, land of dressing the part: you can’t be a starving artist if you look flush and fed, so everyone wears rags that accentuate their willful anorexia. Their slight waistlines reflect their genius (possibly in a more literal way than they’d prefer).

One big benefit to creating and adhering to a fully defined personal style is that it helps us easily weed through the massive amount of options that are available to us in every respect. Walking into a department store can be a dizzying horror of over-stimulation . . . unless you know you only wear black shift dresses, or only wear certain labels, or have a system whereby you purchase one kicky garment per month for the precise amount left over after you’ve met your expenses. Picking a book can be overwhelming, unless you narrow your interests to World War II and Catherine the Great, or vow never to read literature by contemporary authors, or only read comedies or mysteries. Style works as a sorting mechanism. If someone refuses to read Harry Potter no matter how much you assure them they’ll love it if they just give it a chance, it’s because it’s not a part of their self-defined style. It doesn’t fit.  Maybe they’ve decided they don’t do children’s literature, or fantasies, or anything that everybody’s currently into, and if they admit the possibility of liking this one exception, they have to alter their entire criteria, and that’s a whole big thing. 

We all enjoy constant and easy access to such an abundance of information and culture now. The challenge today is choosing what to consume and what to skip. All Them often say that the population is getting stupider, but I think the opposite is true, and, as this (cheering, if long) article proposes, the level of the dialogue has really gone up:

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. . . . Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

I read an article (somewhere, some time ago..in The New Yorker, maybe?) that discussed how much more sophisticated television shows have gotten. Sure, there are a number of dumb ones, and quite a lot of formulaic ones, as well, but shows such as The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, etc. are unprecedented in their complexity, requiring viewers to retain and recall a great number of fully-developed characters enacting multiple storylines, which proceed at differing paces and occasionally overlap and inform each other in complicated ways.

I don’t know why it’s so often said that the web is making people stupider. I can hardly see how people in general can help but grow more and more sophisticated as we all have greater and greater exposure to…well, everything.

Sort of.

But then again, perhaps we’re all generalists, dabblers and fakes. Whereas there used to (by which I mean, you know, back then) be fewer intellectuals (by which I mean people who spent a good deal of their time reading, thinking and writing), those intellectuals really dug in. They were all equally familiar with an agreed-upon canon, they had classical educations. Maybe now there are more people who are somewhat interested and a little bit knowledgeable about a great many things, but the standards of deep and specific scholarship have declined, along with the number of serious scholars. Or not – I’m not basing any of this on actual data.

Here’s one challenge to the above article:

Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we’ve learned-that we’re cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.

Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you’ve got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.

(via Readerville)

I’m not one of those cheerleaders that believe reading in itself is somehow a wonderful intellectual activity, regardless of the literary content of the material. Is reading the back of a Cheerios box a more intellectual task than watching Citizen Kane? Likewise, I wouldn’t say that reading (or watching or listening to) something you’re completely unable to truly comprehend is a worthwhile way to spend your time. I remember reading Animal Farm in ninth grade, before I had any knowledge whatsoever of political theory or Stalinist Russia (although not all of my classmates were so woefully ignorant), and I got nothing out of it at the time, even though I was able to successfully fake comprehension.

But at the same time, intellectual curiosity is desirable in and of itself, and if that intellectual curiosity is only born of social trends, well, so much the better. If society is making it trendy to be smart, well-read and verbose, isn’t that preferable to honoring thinness, stupidity and purchasing power? And if most people don’t possess a great amount of in-depth knowledge about very many things, isn’t it better to know something about some things than nothing about anything?

I hope so.  If not, I should really stop writing this blog.

“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”

Here’s a link to Wallace’s great Atlantic article about talk radio hosts.

And here’s a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon college.

The 1000+ page Infinite Jest is infinitely worth it, but I understand most people don’t have as much free time as I do.

Wallace left a wonderful body of work behind for us.  His death is terribly upsetting.

UPDATE:  McSweeney’s has a lovely thread of remembrances of Wallace.

My personal discovery of Wallace’s writing is kind of funny, so I’ll tell it here.  My first year in Chicago, I was in a bar with two friends, and we met these two guys from Alaska.  One of the guys really hit it off with one of my friends, and they ended up dating for a couple months.  The other one began casually dating my other friend.  One night a few weeks later, these boys invited us all down to their house, which was at the very bottom tip of the South Side of Chicago.  Somebody’s parents owned the house and were letting them live in it free of charge, but it was weird that they lived there, and anyone who’s spent much time in Chicago will know immediately why.  At any rate, it was far, far, far away from our stomping grounds, and the night of the dinner, we all drove down there in my friend’s car.

When we got down there, the guy dating my friend (in the more casual of the two relationships) greeted me with a giant hug and launched into an excited recap of various authors and films we’d discussed at the bar when we first met.  I had barely gotten through the door before he’d foisted two books and a DVD on me that he just knew I’d love, and I just had to read and watch them and let him know what I thought, and he was so glad I’d come, and did I like pasta, because he had cooked.

Needless to say, my friend who was dating him was less than pleased.  It was a terribly awkward, uncomfortable evening, and I couldn’t escape, because they lived South of where all public transportation stopped.  I finally caught a ride back with another guy who’d been there (who then insisted I stop off at a bar for a drink with him, realized he had no cash, and rushed me out of the bar because he was running out on the check…which I did not find out about until several weeks later).  Meanwhile, back on the South Side, my friend ended things with the book-lending guy that night.  My other friend (the one in the more serious relationship) had a messy breakup months later, and so we all fell out of contact with both those guys.  I kept running into the non-book-lending one, and he would tell me that I really had to return his roommates’ property, but then he wouldn’t call me or have his roommate call me…anyway, I still have all that stuff today.

What does all this have to do with David Foster Wallace?  Well, one of the books was Infinite Jest, and it sat, huge and mostly ignored, like the Bible or the OED, on a dusty shelf in my apartment…until one long, bleak, lonely, sad winter, when I finally cracked it open, crawled into it, and fell in love.

I took a poetry class in college wherein the professor went on and on about the way poems looked on the page, the shape of the thing. What were we, calligraphers? If you have something to say and you’re a painter, show it to me visually. But if you’re a writer, freaking write it! Don’t put a precious little fucking flipbook in the middle of your novel, don’t put one word on each page for a time, don’t make the paragraph look like a cat when you turn the book to the side. How trite and cute can you be? I can’t believe real critics have any patience for this kind of nonsense, but sickeningly, it seems to be increasing every year. What’s next? Music boxes that play when you flip the pages? A small hologram? A scavenger hunt? A free toy in a hollowed-out space in the middle? A plush bunny on the cover with a squeak in its tail? Come the fuck on! If you can’t blow my mind with your prose, you won’t make up for it in doodles. And the hell with you for wasting my time.

And yes, I liked House of Leaves (although I don’t consider it revelatory or anything), but it is the exception that proves the rule. And I realize graphic novels are growing in importance and popularity, and eventually there might be bleedover and to enforce a stern boundary between novel-novels and graphic-novels will be pointlessly rigid and fusty. But I’ll adjust my ideas about that when I see it. Meanwhile, I don’t want to read the free verse horridness painters from a decade back were fond of scrawling across their canvasses in metallic gold paint pens, and likewise, I don’t want a toy or a bauble in text form from a writer.

And lest I be misunderstood, my issue with all this is not its novelty, but its meaninglessness.

Ahem. Even beyond the alienating concrete poem bit of stuff in the middle of The Accidental, I didn’t particularly care for the book. I just felt it tread over a lot of really familiar territory without adding anything much. I didn’t take away any truth or insight into the human condition. But apparently, people loved this book. It was short-listed for the Booker and had mostly good reviews.

I did really enjoy the passages in Astrid’s point of view, the family’s 12-year-old girl. The family is staying in a rental house, and at the beginning of the novel, Astrid spends a lot of time trying not to touch any of the surfaces of the house, or anything in it, because she’s disgusted by the idea of all the people who have used the house before them. She arranges a sheet over the bed before lounging on it, she tears bread from the middle of a loaf rather than use a knife and so forth. I can attest to the accuracy of this portrayal; I spent a ton of time in childhood trying not to touch anything. And actually, I never really grew out of it. Even as I backpacked across Asia, I had my rituals.

I was talking to a friend about this the other day. My friend was saying something about hygienic restaurant conditions, or something to do with food. And I said that I have no squeamishness about food and don’t really stress about the conditions in which it was prepared, because, even though I know that people not washing their hands and then handling food transfers diarrhea around (hence traveler’s tummy), and even though that’s disgusting if you actually think about it…well, really, all that happens is you maybe get a little sick for a day.

I said that I really have more worries in the tactile realm – that I don’t like to touch surfaces.

And then I suddenly realized how freaking crazy that is. I mean, I always knew that my obsession over not touching anything wasn’t rooted in any actual germaphobia, and had no real base at all – that it was rather just a general feeling of squirmy discomfort. It’s just that some things you have to touch are gross, the way you find some foods gross – it’s not that you think they’re dangerous; it’s just that you don’t like them. But I never thought about how nuts it is to put any old thing inside my body, but obsess about things touching the outside of my skin. Not to put too fine a point on it, but apparently, I would rather eat feces than sit in them.

Not that the realization did away with my baseless phobia, but I thought it was worth remarking on.

Jose Saramago’s The Double did not annoy me with any gimmicks, and I did walk away from it with, I felt, greater insight into the human condition. It’s commonly advised that, if you’re not “into” a novel by 100 pages in, you should put it down and start another. I have read quite a few books, however, where I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not until I finished the very last page. Perhaps these are books that don’t so much reflect how I see the world, as explain in a complete and compelling way how the world appears to someone else (the author). So, while I don’t hook into them immediately, by the time I come to the end, I feel satisfied. The Double is one of those books for me. And the same books that I can’t figure out if I like them or not until I finish the last words are generally those about which I cannot articulate what I liked, so I have nothing else to say about this.

The Times on Thursday devoted a column of type to the ensuing controversy and Jackson’s apology for what the newspaper called his “critical and crude” remarks, which included the bitter charge that Obama was “talking down to black people.” But it left readers completely in the dark about the crude part. The Washington Post was slightly less squeamish. It said Jackson suggested “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

(via LL)

The column also summarizes the Times’ various decisions about such matters in the recent past. It’s surprising to me that a newspaper would be squeamish about direct-quoting expletives. Regular readers of this blog (and those who know me) will not be surprised to hear that I don’t put a great deal of effort into avoiding the swears. I feel like focus on nice language is a cosmetic fix to problematic thought. Words don’t offend people. People offend people.

For example:

At the 1988 Republican National Convention, when George H.W. Bush was running for president of the United States, future president George W. Bush was asked by a Hartford Courant reporter what he and his father talked about when they weren’t talking about politics.

Bush’s answer: “Pussy.”

And on the other hand, here are some entertaining examples of how you can make something totally innocuous seem nasty by censoring it.

The ability to be explicit is essential to getting at the real, objective truth:

. . . truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.

(via 3QD)

Language evolves along with what it’s describing – the world is continually changing, albeit gradually:

Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different.

(via 3QD)

But really, when is everything not different? I don’t know where people come by their fixed standards for how life is supposed to be. I suppose most people think the way things were in their particular childhoods is some eternal truth for how the whole world ought to function throughout all time. And of course, what they’re remembering is not the world at all, but the peace of being a child.

–

More things I don’t understand: on Jean-Luc Godard:

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers – the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” – became an intolerable gasbag.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been watching a lot of French films without comprehending anything about them, and I’ve heard film buffs scoff at the type of person who says they love Godard, but it turns out all they like is Breathless. So, um, well…the only Godard film I like is Breathless.

Apparently, the Brits are worried that they prefer dumb books:

At a Royal Society of Literature debate in March, Clare Alexander, president of the Association of Authors’ Agents, criticised a literary culture in which ghostwritten celebrity books, misery memoirs and Richard & Judy endorsements have “tainted publishers’ minds”. Contrasting the current British non-fiction bestseller charts with the more high-minded titles on the New York Times list, she said, “We have the stupidest bestseller list in the world at the moment.”

Wow. I can’t believe the U.S. actually made the U.K. feel insecure about its reading habits.

And to round out updates on the arts:

Canadian copyfighter Howard Knopf has suggested (presumably with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that recording artists whose music is played by torturers in Gitmo are owed performance royalties.

(via Majikthise)

Hang in there, Guns N Roses.

We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom.

(via 3QD)

–

Better, a roundup of art reflecting desolation, worlds without people and post-apocalyptic cityscapes:

This new ruin romanticism is especially evident in the Flooded London imagery, rendered up by Squint/Opera (the firm behind the visualisations for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, via Archinect – what could be the emotional motivation behind their fascination with rendered ruins?). The imagined ruin has always existed – they have been a staple artistic subject for centuries. Only the focus used to be on abandoned civilizations, the perceived hubris of the ancients. In contrast, the virtual ruination of the modern era is self-imposed schadenfreude, with all the damage and joy turned inwards. It is a feeling made universal by the internet, where planning catastrophes and architectural missteps are all lovingly chronicled and catalogued.

When I Am Legend came out, New York was briefly plastered with posters of Will Smith and his dog, walking briskly down a completely empty city street.  Commuters gazed upon the posters with wistful sighs.

Last night, the boy next door who’s been learning guitar, held a little concert just outside my window.  He went through the entire White Album, and his group of friends was very encouraging of his efforts.  If I woke up tomorrow and found myself the last human on Earth, I think I’d be alright with it.  (And I wear contact lenses, so.)