When the Private Sector Funds the Arts

Essays
March 8, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 35 5 min read

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I recently wrote a piece defending the National Endowment for the Arts, a grantmaking organization that represents .001 percent of the U.S. annual budget but is somehow such a drag on the economy that it is now very publicly on the chopping block (along with sister agencies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) for the federal 2017 budget. This move makes perfect sense for Donald Trump the businessman, according to GOP enablers, because if the arts and so-called free expression are so worthy, the private sector will step in and fund them.

As if on cue into my in-box comes the news that the very temple of capitalism, The Mall of America, is initiating a Writer-in-Residence program, giving “a special scribe the chance to spend five days deeply immersed in the Mall atmosphere” along with an honorarium,  food stipend, and housing.

Residencies for artists to create art isn’t a new idea. But this is the first time I’ve seen one that has been offered by a corporation (MOA Holdings, LLC).

coverNormally, residencies are funded by a combination of public funding and private donors and foundations that support the arts. The nation’s oldest residency program is the MacDowell Colony, founded in the early 1900s by composer Edward MacDowell, who noted to his wife, a pianist, that in their summer location on their bucolic farm in New Hampshire, he produced better — and more — music. The MacDowell Colony was born out of the desire to share this experience, and various artists, including writers, visual artists, composers, and choreographers from all over the world travel to Peterborough, N.H., to sleep in communal quarters, eat wonderful food, and work without distraction in a studio out in the woods. Work that has come out of this one place has shaped the American cultural landscape — e.g., Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town there; over the years, the Colony has dispensed this gift of time and creativity to artists as varied as James Baldwin, Aaron Copland, and Meredith Monk. This gift is made possible in part by public funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

When I was starting out as a young fiction writer, the advice I received most often from mentors and editors even before I started getting published regularly was to do a residency. I was working on Wall Street to support myself (so I could live alone in New York City — and write), and attending artist residencies were some of the first opportunities I had to meet other artists.

When I’m lucky enough to get an artist’s residency, as soon as I’m on the grounds, I enter into what I consider a sacred state: an intentional community detached from the outside world, where signal can finally be separated more easily from noise. This paradise for the mind is also free or minimal cost, they sometimes come with stipends for lost wages. One favorite, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, received an NEA grant for Collateral Reparations, which funds a residency scholarship for a veteran.

These residencies are purposeful in their locations; one of them buries its power lines to eliminate visual clutter, another one is in the stunning landscape of Wyoming. The last residency I did, at the Mesa Refuge in coastal California, the sky, devoid of the usual light pollution, had so many stars it was startling; the impressive dark was initially alien — then inspiring — to this city-dweller.

The basic artist residency is a studio, a place to sleep, and food. Composers’ studios, for instance, have pianos (Steinways at one) that are carefully and professionally tuned. Visual artists studios have huge blank walls. Writers’ studios tend to be monk-like in their simplicity: desks, a bed for napping. Ample space to spread out chapters, to group poems. One studio had a wall made of corkboard that looked like a starry sky, punctured infinite times by all the writers who’d been through, pinning up their notes. There are no ringing phones, no drop-ins. Often, no Internet.

It’s in this quiet that dreams swim to the surface more readily, and I am there waiting to write them down, instead of my usual: making mental grocery shopping lists, scheduling appointments, watching the clock.

When I saw the ad promoting a residency at the Mall of America, my first impulse was “I must apply!” See, a bunch of scenes in my novel take place in the freaking Mall of America! It had a nice honorarium ($2,500) for 5 days in residence at a connected mall hotel, plus a $400 food stipend, which is a lot of Cinnabons.

But a quick look at the terms reveals the horrifying things the artist gives up in the for-profit residency: her art.

Regimented by corporate decree, instead of a studio in the woods, “Workspace will be located in a common area space within Mall of America.”

You basically clock in: “The core daily work hours will be 11:00am to 7:00pm.”

And, like being a busy-bee warehouse worker at Amazon.com where bathroom breaks are monitored for frequency and efficiency:  “While the Winner will be encouraged to take breaks from writing to explore the Mall, post on social media, eat and find inspiration, the Winner will need to be physically present at the writer’s desk for no fewer than four (4) hours per day.” Prime one-day shipping waits for no one — why should art?

Inwardlooking-ness, contemplation, stillness has never been a friend to corporations, so:

“The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”

When a business takes over, the artist residency basically becomes its opposite. The protected space of creation becomes a publicity stunt for consumer entertainment. I noted the Mall of America’s Writer-in-Residence announcement was a PR release touted as an “event,” wedged in the website, not even meriting a place as a “Feature Event” like “Clash of the Super Beers” and “Toddler Tuesday.”

What we have here, when for-profit private interests take over, is not an artist residency, but a propaganda-PR content factory (indeed, the content must “be approved by a Mall of America Marketing representative” to not be “contradictory to the Mall of America’s desired presentation of the Mall”).

But even more worrisome is the idea of corporate ownership of an artist’s work: the writer “unconditionally agrees that Sponsor shall be the exclusive owner of all right, title, and interest in and to any and all work product, materials, and content produced by Winner during the MOA Writer-in-Residence.”

I’m not saying art cannot be created by the private sector. But I am saying that it’s unlikely, given these terms — of the work and of the ownership — that few artists I know would consider such a risk. And it’s not as if there isn’t a history of artists producing works for pay: during the Depression, a full 7 percent of the Works Progress Administration’s budget was given over to art, as the head of the WPA acknowledged that artists needed economic relief from the devastation of 1929, like any other workers.

Through the arts, music, theatre, and writers projects, Post Offices were decorated, plays were written. The Federal Writers project created the well-known American Guide series to the states. Some of the 20th century’s greatest abstract painters, such as Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, were kept afloat during the Depression by their employment creating realistic figurative murals for the government. For Willem de Kooning, WPA funding made it possible for the first time for him to concentrate fully on fine art instead of having to do commercial painting.

Do we want a small number of taxpayer dollars — roughly 45 cents per person — helping fund the next wave of important artists? Put another way: should corporations provide us with “work product” — clever, enjoyable, and effective ads for capitalism? Or do we want art off the workaday clock, art that’s been allowed to effloresce into all its beautiful, strange, and disturbing forms?

Put another way: do we want work that explores the void, or do we want “Void where prohibited?

Image Credit: Flickr/Cliff.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Salon, Guernica, Poets & Writers, and The Guardian. Her next novel is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster (when she finally finishes it). She teaches fiction at Columbia and shares a hometown with Bob Dylan.

Essays

Time for Teen Fantasy Heroines to Grow Up

Essays
November 19, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 23 11 min read

1.
Catching Fire, the follow-up to Hunger Games, opens this Friday, and the future of teen fantasy film may depend on its success. When The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones tanked at the box office in August, critics rejoiced over the apparent death of the genre. A few months earlier in March, The Host had also flopped, winning the distinction of being the last film Roger Ebert ever panned. BuzzFeed writer Jordan Zakarin concluded that the “tween vampire jugular is tapped.” In the Atlantic, Gina Dalfonzo suggested that teenage girls nursed on Twilight had finally seen through the hackneyed “Chosen One” story trope, a plot-line that has held its own since the Book of Esther. Writing more pragmatically in Forbes, Scott Mendelson blamed City of Bones’s floundering on bad marketing.

Despite this failure, the actual book by Cassandra Clare was a roaring success, selling more than 16 million copies worldwide. Though the teen fantasy craze may be on the downslope, it is not quite dead; rather, the supernatural romances of Twilight and its ilk have yielded to the dystopian universe of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy. The first film adaptation grossed $691 million last year, and with a fresh crop of middle-schoolers looking for signposts to their own significance, the second installment’s curtain raise is likely to be well-attended.

Though publishers distinguish between supernatural, paranormal romance, and dystopia, these genres all involve an element of fantasy. HarperCollins editor Kari Sutherland told me that since 2010 the company has tripled its number of such titles, which include the wildly successful Divergent and Delirium series. Scholastic, publisher of The Hunger Games, said these books have played an “intrinsic” role in the increase of titles it’s sold in the past five years. Fantasies can be valuable testaments to the power of literature, allowing readers to work out real-world problems in a metaphorical context and encouraging creativity, courage, and self-sacrifice. But it would be a mistake to assume that the same girl who sped through Twilight and Hunger Games will easily find her way to The Martian Chronicles or even contemporary fantasy’s immediate forbearers — works by authors like Tamora Pierce or Robin McKinley. Teens today aren’t genre nerds who only love fantasy. According to Ms. Sutherland, they read these books because it’s what their friends are reading. But how did they become so popular? And what do they have to say — specifically to their young, female readers — about the world?

2.
Before the American Civil War, the idea of writing books for teenagers didn’t cross the minds of American publishers. It was only in the 1860s that popular novels for girls like the Elsie Dinsmore series appeared, featuring saintly, passive heroines whose lives revolved around the home. But a demand also grew for blood-and-thunder romances that expressed an underlying feminine ennui as much as they negatively implicated the women reading them. The heroines of these tales were usually embroiled in a lurid affair between suitors or some other form of love-gone-awry that threatened their virginity.

These women — the evolutionary ancestors of today’s high-grossing teen heroines — were seen to confirm upper class assumptions about the promiscuity of the lower class. Louisa May Alcott’s first story, a psycho-thriller novella called Pauline’s Passion and Punishment, followed a jilted woman’s quest for revenge against a lover who leaves her for a wealthy woman. In 1862, after it was published under the pen name of A. M. Barnard, Alcott wrote to her friend Alf Whitman: “I get ten dollars a page for my foolish little story…money is the end & aim of my mercenary existence I scribble away.” Even after she became a famous writer, Alcott continued churning out pulp fiction for the tabloids. “Perilous Play” of 1869 ends memorably with its heroine exclaiming, “Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!”

But squeaky-clean domestic romances remained the more socially acceptable reading choice until the turn of the century, when publishers like The Henry Altemus Company concluded that “girls as well as boys love adventure.” The Stratemeyer Syndicate published 85 new girls’ series between 1910 and 1920 starring young women who played basketball, drove cars, helped the poor, solved mysteries, and even made movies. Most of all, they went to college. The historian Jane S. Smith has noted that less than four percent of college-aged American girls attended university in 1910, “but it was a rare heroine of fiction who did not take a room on the campus green, where she studied biology and Latin, drank cocoa with her kimono-clad chums and upheld the school traditions with moist-eyed fervor.”

These books captured the spirit of the Suffragettes, who in 1913 marched on the Washington Mall to demand women’s equality. The popular Ruth Fielding Series (1913-1934) was about an orphan living with a mean uncle who disapproves of her desire for a future outside the home. Smart and ambitious, Ruth works hard in school, goes to college, wins a film-writing contest and even starts her own production company. In book #15, Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound (1919), the narrator explains, “Marriage was something very far ahead in the future, if Ruth … thought of it at all.” When Ruth’s boyfriend Tom proposes in book #19, Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence (1922), she feels that “to do as Tom wished would utterly spoil the career on which she had now entered so successfully. Tom, like most young men in love, considered that a girl’s only career should be a husband and a home…she wanted to live her own life.”

It’s ironic, as Smith has noted, that bettering one’s self through college or career fell out of focus in teen fiction not long after women got the vote. By the 1980s, suburban dramas in the vein of Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitter’s Club predominantly reigned.

3.
One night in 2003, Stephenie Meyer had a dream about vampires and woke up the next morning to begin writing the first Twilight book, a nearly 500-page tome. Within five years the first Twilight film appeared, launching a franchise, and by extension, a phenomenon. Though girls devoured the series in cinematic and print form (I once saw a first edition at Half-Price Books valued at $600), critics spared no kindness on its 17-year-old heroine, “Bella” Swan:

“Neither [Edward or Bella] has much personality to speak of.”
— Salon
“[Bella] is not only hard to identify with but positively horrifying…”
— Entertainment Weekly
“It’s hard to say which is more difficult to swallow: Bella’s perpetually low self-worth, or the fact that all the other characters are obsessed with her…young readers are left with the image of a girl who discovers her own worth and gets all she ever wanted, by giving up her identity and throwing away nearly everything in life that matters.”
— National Review
“…the overall effect is a weird infantilization that has repellent overtones to an adult reader and hardly seems like an admirable model to foist upon our daughters (or sons).”
— Washington Post

And a final, damning rebuke:
“You can’t get away from a strange paradox. Women are using their regained power over the picture house to trash their hard-won independence. What mysterious creatures they are.”
— The Guardian

Branding youth culture as obscene or degrading is old hat — and teens don’t care. After the first Twilight film, Bella (Kristin Stewart) became a de facto role model for young women — the instantaneous object of their envy, praise, and imitation. The internet was rife with articles and YouTube videos instructing girls how to dress like Bella, apply their makeup like Bella, and, most frighteningly, act like Bella. In one video, a girl earnestly advised viewers to be “clumsy and accident-prone.” Clothing brand BB Dakota even replicated for mass production the jacket Bella wore in the film. Bella singlehandedly set the stage for an army of similar teen heroines that came after her — ones who share more in common with Alcott’s Pauline or even Elsie Dinsmore than Ruth Fielding. In fact, the sting of Twilight intensifies when one compares the book to Girl of the Limberlost (1908), a young adult novel authored by Gene Stratton-Porter and published a full hundred years before Twilight premiered in theaters.

Both Elnora Comstock, author Gene Stratton-Porter’s 16-year-old heroine, and Bella Swan are Cinderella archetypes. Twilight opens when Bella moves to the leafy town of Forks, Washington to live with her dad, since her mom is preoccupied doting on a boyfriend. Elnora’s father is dead, and she lives in rural Indiana with her mother, a grief-stricken tyrant. Each, in their own ways, are loners. Though friends flock around Bella at school, she tells the reader, “I didn’t relate well to people my age… Maybe the truth was that I didn’t relate well to people, period.” While Bella may feel like an outsider, Elnora is one. Snubbed for her old-fashioned clothes, she becomes a pariah on her first day of high school and eats her lunch alone. Both girls also spend their time wandering the woods near their homes. Bella’s activities in the lush Northwest forest involve chasing around her love interest, a vampire named Edward Cullen (or more often, joyriding on his back). Elnora works quietly in the swampy Limberlost, where her own father drowned, collecting rare moths to sell so she can buy schoolbooks and save money for college.

But at the heart of Twilight lies something else almost more sinister than its treatment of romance. The more Bella submits to Edward’s charms, the closer she gets to the end of her human life and the beginning of her undead one. Coupled with her disinterest in the outside world, her desire for Edward becomes a death wish — fulfilled when she is finally bitten by him and becomes herself a vampire. If this sounds twisted, remember that it’s the ending that most Twilight readers hoped for. This hunger for death is countered in Limberlost not only by Elnora’s resilience against life’s blows but also by the forest’s own struggle to survive industrialization. Like Edward’s deadly effect on Bella, Elnora’s foraging in the Limberlost threatens it. A family friend warns her, “Each year you will find less in the swamp, and things everywhere will be scarcer.” By the time she graduates high school, the forest is not what it used to be. Still, Mrs. Comstock, who owns a large swath of the land, refuses to sell it to developers. Life pushes back against destruction for the conservation of a fragile but crucial habitat.

To a modern reader, Limberlost is sentimental, almost saccharine, and though it encourages independence it ultimately bows to the conventions of its era when, towards the end, Elnora reveals her perception of being a wife: “I understood that to mean that he desired me to keep him a clean house, serve him digestible food, mother his children, and give him loving, sympathy, and tenderness,” she says. But in a time when few women went to college, Elnora’s ambition was a brave push into new territory, inspiring readers with aspirations for their own futures. What hope did Bella inspire?

4.
The author Lauren Oliver credited her inspiration for the dystopian teen romance Delirium to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote that all great books were about love and death. Throughout literary history, these twin subjects have been the core of many great novels (Anna Karenina) as well as many bad ones. As Twilight demonstrated, teen fantasy authors have taken up these themes with a special fervor, but no one has handled them as ruthlessly as Suzanne Collins in the Hunger Games Trilogy.

Writing in Salon, critic Laura Miller has praised Katniss Everdeen, Collins’s strong-willed 16-year-old heroine, as an improvement on Bella:
Bella Swan is clumsy and largely helpless, a rescue object for Edward and Jacob… Katniss is a tough and competent woodswoman and sharpshooter. Bella is willing to give up everything — her family, friends, previous life, even her humanity — to dote on her beloved Edward for eternity; Katniss sacrifices herself for her mother and sister.
Indeed, Katniss has far more in common with Elnora. She also spends her days in a forest, hunting not moths but meat to sell on the black market. The resemblance between the two is uncanny. Like Elnora’s father, Katniss’s father is dead and her mother also emotionally invalid; just as Elnora inherits her father’s grace with the violin, Katniss has her father’s rich talent for song. Both characters struggle to survive in a dangerous environment. Thieves have overrun Elnora’s forest and warn her to keep out; her father’s bones, we are told, rest in the swampy pool bottom where he drowned. Yet somehow the Limberlost’s dangers don’t overwhelm her. Katniss’s post-apocalyptic home of Panem terrorizes her. Food is scarce; mutant birds and insects threaten; and hunting is a crime penalized by death  As punishment for a past rebellion, each of the nation’s 12 districts sacrifices two “tributes” to compete in an annual reality show where the winner is the last one alive.

Here, dystopia reaches into every corner of life — even love. Along with a boy named Peeta, Katniss represents her district in the 74th annual games. Though Katniss never had romantic feelings for him before the Games, she pretends to return Peeta’s affection in order to “give the audience something more to care about,” and it’s this complex brand of romance that becomes her main tool for survival. Critics have applauded Collins for subverting standard romantic hooks, but this faux love story actually draws many Hunger Games fans, who debate aggressively online over the respective hotness of Peeta and Gale, Katniss’s childhood friend. Though Katniss eventually becomes a hero, up until page 156 of the first book, her internal struggles revolve around her conflicted emotions toward Peeta and Gale, not on the ethical dilemma of having to kill people. In chapter 10, Peeta — who faces the same pressures as Katniss — tells her that his goal is to stay true to himself, even until death: “I’m more than just a piece in their Games… Don’t you see?” Katniss replies, “A little… but who cares, Peeta?”

Dystopian novels are provocative avenues through which readers can explore and even question their civic relationship to government, but Collins’s series fosters an especially grotesque worldview. The words “dead,” “dying,” and “death” appear more than 300 times in the series. In Catching Fire, Katniss and Peeta are again chosen to compete in a special edition of the bloodbath. When Katniss is wounded, the authorities nurse her to life because a quiet, private passing would be a loss for them. Later, Katniss resolves to kill Peeta “before the Capitol gets to choose the agonizing means of his death.” As Mockingjay opens, she stumbles through the bombed-out landscape of District 12, tripping on human skulls and breathing in the ashes of the dead. When the couple finally defeat the Capitol, their victory feels pyrrhic at best. With most of their families dead (and Katniss’s initial sacrificing of herself for her sister rendered pointless), they marry, and nightmares haunt them always. Readers are left to untangle the book’s intimations about the real world for themselves. They may wonder: if the world really is that hopeless, what’s the point of striving for anything at all?

In comparison to Collins’s dark tale, Daniel Woodrell’s noiresque Winter’s Bone — whose 2010 film version also starred Jennifer Lawrence — seems strangely light. The fact that the novel, published in 2006, was not marketed to teenage girls is almost — but not quite — surprising. Its heroine, 17-year-old Ree Dolly, shares many similarities to Bella, Katniss, and Elnora. Living in the Ozark woods and hunting squirrels to feed her family, she also searches for her father, a meth cook who has gone missing. If he doesn’t turn up for his court date, her mother and siblings will be forced out of their home. There is no romance here; Ree mostly dreams of leaving the Ozarks and joining the Army. But in the end, she preserves her family home by confronting her father’s death in its most horrifying physical form. When the film version came out in 2010, David Edelstein noted in New York Magazine, “For all the horror, it’s the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer…” New Yorker critic David Denby called Winter’s Bone “one of the greatest feminist works in film.”

5.
Literature may not be about easy answers, but some of the best books bring some level of clarity to the reader within their nuanced explorations of the world — even if that clarity means that they find the answers are grayer than they thought. The problem with Twilight and Hunger Games is that while operating in a seemingly black-and-white world they actually infect their readers with chaos: Twilight by exploiting its audience’s desire to completely escape reality, and Hunger Games by cementing its readers’ fears that there is nothing beyond the darkness.

The value of books like Girl of the Limberlost and Winter’s Bone is that while acknowledging the world’s ugliness, they carve a path of resilience the reader can follow. Though many teen readers lead average, suburban lives, they live in an information age rife with anxiety. Their social worlds, artificially reorganized online through social media, are open to endless bullying. Threats of nuclear war, environmental destruction, and domestic terrorism loop continuously on the nightly news. AMC — who owned the venue in which the Aurora shooting occurred and in whose franchises many fans will line up to see Catching Fire’s premiere — now runs a cautionary commercial about how to act in the case of such a catastrophe. In the midst of these uncertainties, let alone the hormonal depression from which many already suffer, the fashion and beauty industries fuel the pressure to look and act perfect.

In her article, Dalfonzo wrote, “It might be that, far from wanting to watch other kids save the world time and again, kids would like to watch them just being kids.” But  kids don’t just want to watch kids being kids. They want to step into the shoes of ordinary kids doing extraordinary things. I asked David Levithan, Scholastic’s vice president and editorial director, whether such books might be a way for girls to escape the real world. He explained that most successful fantasy literature is actually deeply relatable to the reader: “The themes (survival in Hunger Games, unrequited love in Twilight, etc.) are completely real even if the situations are not.” Within this milieu, authors as influential as Meyer and Collins have the opportunity to inspire their readers toward greatness, but they squander it miserably. Neither Bella nor Katniss have dreams that transcend their current situations.

Yet, in the famous words of Tolkien, not all who wander are lost. Louisa May Alcott may have written sensational vampire stories, but she also wrote Little Women, a classic I first read in middle school that taught me I could do or be anything, and that my uneventful life was filled with meaning. I’m not betting on Meyer or Collins to create her, but I’d like to think another Jo March might still be out there.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 23 11 min read
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Essays

What Harry Potter Knows

Essays
July 14, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 25 8 min read

1.
This is one of those weeks in which everyone talks about Harry Potter, and in which it’s tempting to be that writer, you know that writer, who does the jaded contrarian take on it all.  There would be some grounds for it.  At times like these, the force of Pottermania can feel like an eclipse, blocking out the light of sense and reason.  Try to engage someone in a serious conversation about the merits of the movies this week, and you’ll see what I mean.  Even professional critics have always trod softly around these films, generally thumbing them up.  But you can excavate hints of ambivalence from even the most positive reviews, when they do things like call The Sorcerer’s Stone “fun and harmless” (Salon) or note that The Half-Blood Prince; “opens and closes well” (Ebert).

Caveat emptor: when I have watched the movies, it’s usually been at home, so that I can keep my finger hovering over the fast-forward button, skipping from one transcendent glimpse of Alan Rickman to the next.   (That voice, that voice!)  Even when one did upend my expectations – like Alfonso Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban – much depended on my private image of Cuarón in the enemy territory of a boardroom, raising his fists at the Hollywood suits, insisting that Hermione must wear that pink hoodie as a matter of Art, Beauty and Truth.  In other words: I fed my enthusiasm with a parable about the liberation of the creative class, and not so much the movie itself.

But this is a week in which I keep wondering what I’m missing by being, well, like that.  The easy money for a critic is to rail on about the corporate pablum of the monoculture.  But on some level people do want their Potter-inspired tears, it truly means something to them.  Hollywood PR flackery is at best only a partial culprit.  Most of the people who will arrive at the movie theatre in nervous anticipation this Friday night are not mere automatons of a capitalist machine.  Listening to them on the news, in all the endless End Of An Era pieces, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the depth of the longing in their voices.  It’s like the memory of something very good is just beyond their reach, and the movie promises, if vaguely, to remind them of it.

There is something bittersweet and even, I know, I know, we shouldn’t use this word anymore but, sacred in that.  Something we should be less afraid to acknowledge.  Glib analysis of the means of cultural production is comparatively comforting, I know, because dollars and cents are concrete, things we can put in a spreadsheet, calculate out, close the file on.  But just because the ink dries up when we go to set this other thing on paper doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

See, the great mystery of Rowling’s skill is that she just knew how to elicit this kind of attachment.  We can talk about this in litcrit-approved terms, if you like.  The usual line is that the Potter books are storytelling in the old vein, stuffing their readers so full of plot they haven’t a moment to consider anything else.  There’s a truth to that: I do not think of Rowling as a “good writer,” exactly.  Her skills are better classified as imaginary, which I, for one, don’t think of as a consolation prize.  (The imagination is a good chunk of the distance between writing good, lasting fiction and writing criticism on the internet.)  There’s a wide and often mysterious abyss between the transporting power of Rowling’s ideas and her ability to set them down in language.  And let’s not overstate the dichotomy between the where, what, why and how of a story, and the way it is written; trip over too many bad sentences, too much stiff dialogue, and all the Fawkeses and Pensieves and Rooms of Requirement will be lost to you, no matter their other powers of enchantment.

But all those observations explain very little, because I’d bet you know those references.  Because even if you are an excessively cerebral, overly verbal, altogether too critical person (like me), you probably lived the cliché, and on at least one, and perhaps several, nights in the last ten years, stayed up til four a.m. devouring all of this imperfectly articulated fancy.

2.
There is the element of age to consider.  I am actually a bit older than the generation who actually grew up with Pottermania.  I only remember hearing of the series around the time Goblet of Fire came out, which would have made me 21 that first very late night.  And even to 21, adventures composed to appeal to 11 through 14 seem a bit naive, a bit, you know, young.

But I keep thinking of this: a few years ago I was at a dinner party, where the particular cross-section of my friends in attendance was decidedly bookish in character.  They were of the I-have-a-corporate-job-but-also-an-English-degree type, prone to direct all casual talk to reading (past, present, and future).  The ferocity of their quasi-literary posturing can be surprising, sure, but it’s just that the rest of the life they’ve built is predicated on the irrelevance of something that once meant so much to them.  (The sincerity of that hunger is what keeps these people from seeming pretentious to me, if you’re wondering.)  At one point in the conversation people began comparing favorite books, by which they seemed to mean books that had been integral to the way they saw the world, to the way they understood things.  And I remember suddenly developing an enormous interest in the (bad) wine, drinking rapidly to keep from talking seriously, because the prospect of saying something tipsy and silly was less embarrassing than reporting the actual truth.

Which is that there is no book in the world that has had quite the effect on who I am as L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.  In imagining the epitome of beauty, my mind still defaults to violet eyes and alabaster brows.  I find myself unreasonably susceptible to falling for jerks because my paradigmatic suitor was one who first hinted at his love by way of calling her “Carrots.”  Whenever I do cringeworthy things in my life, which is to say every day, the Mrs. Rachel Lynde that book installed in my psyche intones anew: “Anne. Shirley.  You are HEEDLESS and IMPULSIVE.”  (Forgive the italics, another Montgomery indulgence.)

But I know, as well as you do, that in dinner party conversations like that one, some such pedestrian book is not The Right Answer.  I have loved my copy of Anne to literal pieces, the spine cracked and fragile, the edges of the pages grass-stained from the backyards and parks I used to read in before I grew old enough for bars and coffeeshops.  But I know it is not a “literary masterpiece.”  So the inner buzzer sounds, do not pass go, try again.  Once more, with Roberto Bolaño or A.S. Byatt or David Foster Wallace, please.

Isn’t it funny that this is what happens to us?  That even if you love books, if you start to dedicate your life to them, a light goes out, somehow.  You come to know them with your brain rather than your soul.  Maybe it’s just one more sad example of how you’ve grown up.  And I know, I know, in some ways these books aren’t just “un-literary” – there are parts of them that are flat-out dishonest, sentimental, destructive.  It’s not that all those endless lessons on technique I’ve internalized aren’t right, strictly speaking.  But it isn’t the least bit of hyperbole for me to say that as an adult who is a voracious reader, I know that I am going to spend the rest of my life not quite managing to love a book the way I loved Anne, to read it the way I did the first, second, thirty-fifth time.  I know that the rest of my reading life is just a thinly-disguised effort to forge a path back to that, but I’ll never get there.

So I admit that when I read Harry Potter, the main appeal of it is how it tries to reach me the way Anne once did.

Maybe you find that a strange thing to say.  I wouldn’t argue with you that the Anne and Harry Potter books are worlds apart in diction, tone, setting.  Anne’s milieu is anti-magical, its animating spirit best stated as the well-scrubbed Canadian practicality of your favorite great-aunt.  Meanwhile, Harry rarely cracks a book in the Potter series, much less seems to want to write one.   But there is one important sense in which the books are kindred spirits, as Anne would say.  Annes and Harrys – and their intended readers – are people with whole lives of possibility before them.  They do not have cars and mortgages and 401(k)s.  If they are acquainted with certain grim facts of life – are orphans – the promise of more disappointment, or even just of the status quo, does not yet seem the only thing that life could hold.  Annes and Harrys belong to a time in one’s life when living is a glass you’ve yet to fill.  When you can be a writer if you just want it badly enough.

Perhaps most importantly: when it is still dimly possible that on any given afternoon a giant will sweep you away from your ugly little life and inform you that you are the savior of all Wizardkind.

3.
The kind of critics who find all human joy suspicious use accusatory tones when they call this sort of thing “escapist.”  Here, for them, is a bit of realism: I can still tell you, without looking it up, that The Deathly Hallows was released on the 21st of July, 2007.

I was then living in New York, working at a corporate law firm.  A friend of mine was in town that month, visiting her boyfriend.  Uncharacteristically, she kept cancelling our appointments to go out.  But I thought very little of it, because I was too busy contemplating the corner I had backed my own life into.

Then one morning her boyfriend sent me an email at work: “I am at the hospital.  S. is sick.  Please come.”

A thing you wouldn’t know, if you’ve not much personal experience with medicine, is how breathtakingly uncertain everything can be.  How many procedures are “exploratory.”  How much time you’ll spend waiting for an answer that amounts to, “We just don’t know.”  How the wrong thing to do is to hope that they will say that they have located the problem, that they have a plan to fix it, that they will hold off the siege of the illness in the following well-defined and concrete list of ways.  The best thing you can expect is to have the strength to expect nothing.

It was in such a context that it was determined, after a number of days, that the thing they would try to do for S. was a procedure with a fancy name that, to you and I, translates as cutting into someone’s skull.  It was determined that this would happen on the morning of the 21st of July, 2007.

That morning, her boyfriend and I took a walk around the West Village.  It was very sunny, which offended for the obvious reason and also because neither of us had slept much.  Over the past few days he and I had talked each other out, so we said little.

We got coffee at one of those shops where they make designs in the foam.  The barista made me a heart.  I was not in the mood.  I took a sip, dissolving it.

Then I saw all those credulous people lined up outside a Barnes and Noble, and I remembered what day it was.  When the store opened, I bought the book.  And then we went back to the waiting room.

I had not read anything longer than a tabloid magazine in days, but I got about halfway through before they wheeled her back.  And told us everything had gone well.

This was the climax of the story, the return, the recovery.  But I admit, a bit shamefully: it took my eyes a moment to focus, looking up.  I didn’t come directly back.  But the next breath I took, out there in the real world, was that of someone surfacing after a long stretch underwater.

And some of you will call me a credulous, sentimental fool, but maybe reality had been too much for me.  When I got to the end of the book, which was that day or maybe the next, I don’t remember, but when I got to that part of Harry’s death-dream where:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry.  “Is this real?  Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth does that mean that it is not real?”

There’s no less embarrassing way to say this: I wept.

But whether it was for Harry, or Dumbledore, or for the child I used to be, who was once comforted by such pretty nonsense, I could not tell you.

See Also: A History of Magic: A Children’s Librarian Reflects on Harry Potter, and Offers a Post-Hogwarts Syllabus, Dreaming of Hogwarts and Hunger Games

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 25 8 min read
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35 comments:

  1. Ah, Mall of America… ! *Shudder*. It was 1995 and I had returned to the US, with First Wife, after 5 years in Europe, to get First Wife a Green Card. I had saved enough for us to live for about 18 months (staying at a friend’s house near Lake Calhoun) but, as it turned out, I *had* to get a job (any job) in order to get her the Green Card…

    Cut to: Payless (emphasis on the first syllable) Shoe Source, in the Mall of America. Quite an adventure. The only thing more impressive than the fact that the M.o.A. is so big that it has its own weather (moisture in the upper atmosphere, under the roof, condenses and you get sun showers) is the weight- capacity of the elevators: it seemed as though the average American had gained an average of 150 pounds in the five years I’d been gone.

    I was writing quite a lot, so I was an *unofficial writer in residence*, but, if polemic is a minor literature, polemic against the patrons of the Mall of America is even worse. I didn’t get my Muse back until First Wife got the Green Card and we escaped to Southern California, where she took (like a duck to Exxoned water) to the basest elements of So Cal life. I got *so* many (scars and) stories out of that… but… I digress…

    It goes without saying that any piece of writing, coming out of a corporate sponsorship, that, miraculously, happened to be *actual Literature*… would not be deemed “appropriate” by the sponsors. Unless, of course, you’re talking about a corporate sponsorship in a hemisphere that doesn’t contain a shopping Mall so big that it has its own weather.

  2. One of America’s greatest failings (beyond the transformation of its armed forces into the world’s most well-funded terrorist squad and utter inability to fathom universal healthcare) is its total disinterest in funding the arts, which is what every other Western nation does. The arts cannot be easily monetized like war, healthcare and now education, though, which is why bureaucrats mock its role in society. Pathetic.

  3. “The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”

    You could make a case for this aspect of the week as a sort of performance art opportunity, although my recollection is the Mall wants to exercise control over what the writer has to say for the big “almost real time” screen. So what this is not is a residency or a fellowship, and the copyright aspect is exploitative in the extreme. I have entertained doomed hopes that the Mall would reconsider its terms. If other prospective benefactors ( a word that, alas for me, inevitably conjures Mr Brocklehurst) are inclined to set up arts funding, I hope they will look to organizations like Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell etc for guidance.

    For all the disdain directed toward the mall, with fair terms I believe this could be a great opportunity. So many public spaces (malls, train stations, hotel lobbies, public libraries) are ideal places to work and draw on the environment and fabulous people-watching opportunities to create. Look at the hordes of writers hunkered down in coffeehouses or applying for the Amtrak residency.

    Thanks for writing this piece, I am going to click on through to your NEA article.

  4. beamish13:

    What facts do you have to back that up? What’s the evidence that in the US there’s less public and private non-profit support for the arts than in, say, Germany or the UK? Keep in mind that states and local municipalities have their own programs for funding the arts, that private non-profit and charitable institutions (McArthur, etc.) have gigantic budgets, and that a lot of funding is done through publicly-funded universities.The NEA is but a small fraction of support for the arts in the US. The US has hundreds of literary magazines, and practically all of them are publicly-funded in one way or another. How many does Sweden have, per capita? Got numbers?

    Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life. As a result, their writing is sterile, solipsistic, limited. There are many young writers nowadays who have never had a real job precisely because there’s too much support.

  5. “Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life.”

    There’s a tricky balance to strike. Too much support (aka coddling) and decadence sets in. Too little or no support, on the other hand, means little or no writing gets done.

    When I went through a phase of working long hours at physically-demanding jobs (eg house painting or deck-building), all I wanted to do, after getting home from work, every day, was eat directly out of a pot, read, pass out, groan up out of my dreams before the crack of dawn, stagger off to work, repeat. The first few months of that I was able to get writing done on the weekends, but, as I discovered, after more than a year of this routine, it’s as though the accumulated hours of back-breaking just pile up into a black mountain of bleakest Reality, looming derisively over the twee golden fantasy molehill of Writing. Any sane Writer, in these circumstances, starts questioning the point of the practise.

    In other words, it’s not just the fantasy on the page that matters; the Writing Life itself requires a safe space in which to nurture the primary fantasy that Writing *matters*, that it’s a legitimate thing for an adult to do with her/his time. Especially in a pathologically materialist culture. A *bit* of support from the Government (in any concession to the notion that Culture is a serious pursuit) is both a necessary easing and a nod of assent.

    I lived in Stockholm, for a while, at the turn of the century and I met some unknown Writers there who were supported by the Gov with the solicitousness you’d expect to be shown to scientists developing advanced weapons systems, which did wonders for those Writers’ self-confidence. This is especially important if the work being done by a Writer is not *commercial*; the so-called Free Market may indeed support the efforts of the (slick) commercial talent, but the Weirdos, experimenting with the Challenging and Difficult, definitely need subsidies from *somewhere*.

    I never got (or applied for) grants/stipends/retreats but I moved to a city in a country where Literary Culture is still discussed and debated on prime time TV and where the rents/ groceries/ discos are cheap and one doesn’t feel a fool for Writing. Which is all I need, really. I have (Weirdo) readers and a sense of the usefulness and *sanity* of the practise. Perfect.

    People expect “real Writers” to keep on writing, regardless, but I don’t think it usually happens that way. Youthful Enthusiasm catapults one onward to 20-something Inspiration and thence to 30-something Endurance shading to Sheer Cussedness… but then what?

    If a few crumbs from Gov saves the endangered species of the talented, forty-something, Weirdo House Painter/ Writer, I’m all for it. Because *those* voices are going to be more interesting, as you point out, for having lived a bit.

  6. By the way, I can’t get over the fact that a published novelist is writing sentences such as “This paradise for the mind is also free or minimal cost, they sometimes come with stipends for lost wages.” None of my eighth-grade tutees would dare send a sentence like that across my desk.

  7. It’s really easy to rip on the “Megamall” – the jokes practically write themselves – but for lifelong Minnesotans like myself the mall we love to hate is an inextricable part of our lives. My father worked on the construction of the original mall; decades later I worked on another project there. Camp Snoopy, the original amusement park, was better than it needed to be; I’ve probably ridden the many iterations of the Log Flume more than any other ride at any other park. I’ve been to the mall for birthday parties, stoned-teenager movie viewings, a prom dinner (inexplicably), a crazy long night with my wife in the 4th floor bars; I’ve seen the wide-eyed wonder of my children as they gaze upon marine life at Underwater World; I’ve played hooky from work to build a stuffed animal with my oldest daughter on Toddler Tuesday; I’ve been baffled by the size of crowds on a random Tuesday morning in April. I remember the enormous Sam Goody and the memorabilia shop on the first floor (home to the most expensive retail space in the state) and the island-themed restaurant on the 3rd.

    So, sure, the Mall is capitalism run amok – it doesn’t have its own weather (lol Steven) but it does have its own zip code. Yet the Mall has employed tens of thousands of people over the years. Hearty Minnesotans may sneer at the suckers who do their Christmas shopping there (so expensive) yet almost all of us have made a last-minute trip there (if you can’t find a gift at the Mall…) It is an incredibly diverse place, which makes it the premier place to practice the fine art of people-watching. It draws visitors from around the globe (Japan in particular, for reasons I haven’t quite nailed down), which is the only place in Minnesota that can claim that.

    All of this is to say that there are GREAT stories to be written about the Mall. Some sort of “oral history” project would be fascinating. An hour of people-watching in the Rotunda or one of the food courts would provide inspiration for a terrific short story or three. The labyrinthine back-of-house areas – loading docks, mechanical spaces, administrative offices – would be a terrific setting for a murder mystery. It’s too bad the Mall folks are viewing this purely from the PR lens. By giving a solid writer a true residency, there’s no telling what would come out of it – but like the Mall itself, it could not avoid being interesting.

  8. Toad!

    I found the place lethally-tacky (and embodying everything wrong, and environmentally toxic, about the “Biggest is Bestest” approach), though maybe it became a domed Greenwich Village, c. 1966, after I left…

    …but I *did* get one really useful experience out of it: riding to work one morning, I sat behind a couple who began chatting about what they’d do with the money if they won that week’s Bigass Lottery. It was a long ride, and by the end of it, the chat had become a vicious verbal punch-up, with the lady of the couple changing her seat, the two each then muttering solo, at opposite ends of the bus, for the rest of the ride. Because the gentleman had declared “If I won that money, I wouldn’t give *any* of it to *you*.”

  9. Steve, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling it some sort of hidden paradise by any means – again, the vulgarities are so obvious they need not be mentioned. My only points were 1) the place is a major part of the culture of the region, like it or not; and 2) there are plenty of great stories to be told from there.

  10. Toad!

    Were you stationed out in Bloomington or closer to St Paul/ Mpls? If the latter (depending on your vintage; I bet these places are long gone) ever have a “Red Earth Breakfast” at the Seward Cafe? Or buy records at Positively Fourth Street (or OarFolkJokeOpus)? Feeling some guarded nostalgia…

  11. It appears that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, just don’t get it. The problem with taxpayers funding NEA, NEH, and CPB is that these organizations ARE the “propaganda content factories” that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, are so concerned about. If they were not, already, off-the-chart-left-leaning, they would not be on the chopping block. The potential demise of taxpayer funding for NEA, NEH, and CPB has nothing to do with President Trump’s business acumen. It has everything to do with NEA, NEH, and CPB being the propaganda content factories the left.

  12. Frank:

    More broadly, the problem with taxpayers funding the arts is that once you fund something with your tax dollars, you feel (rightly) that you have the right to control it. Remember the “Jesus Piss” scandal in that museum in Brooklyn about a decade ago? The left whined about censorship and religious coercion, but the right had a valid point: what right do you have to offend me using my tax dollars? Use your own money to do so.

    But the left doesn’t get that. It wants public funds AND the freedom to do with them what it wills. Tax dollars with no strings. And that doesn’t work.

  13. “And that doesn’t work.”

    Well, not under America’s current grid of guiding principles. This is an except from William Osborne’s “Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill”…

    “As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.

    “Germany’s public arts funding, for example, allows the country to have 23 times more full-time symphony orchestras per capita than the United States, and approximately 28 times more full-time opera houses. [1] In Europe, publicly funded cultural institutions are used to educate young people and this helps to maintain a high level of interest in the arts. In America, arts education faces constant cutbacks, which helps reduce interest.

    plus

    “In its purest form, America’s neo-liberalism would suggest that cultural expression that doesn’t fit in the marketplace doesn’t belong at all. For the arts, the alternative has been to maintain a relatively marginalized existence supported by gifts from corporations, foundations and the wealthy. A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves. This philosophy is almost diametrically opposed to the tradition of large public cultural funding found in most of Europe’s social democracies.”

    http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm

  14. This seems like a response to my earlier comment asking for evidence, not to my later one. My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. Lee demands that tax dollars be taken from taxpayers and given to her, but she’d be the first to complain that the same taxpayers who gave her the money want her to do with it x rather than y.

  15. “My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. ”

    Not sure why that should be axiomatic… if the tax payers *understand and value* Culture (in the sense of The Arts). If the TPs think Culture is just another grouping of commodities and/ or services, that’s a deeper problem than the lack of funding for it. And they often do. And it is. There’s more to Life than money and more to the notion of Value(s) than quid-pro-quo transactions, no?

    Not that I want to go around and around on the topic (I know the ideological divide is unbridgeable in either direction), I just wanted to register another POV for the sake of any residual American Bohemians out there, in hiding, reading this, tremulously, in some attic with a secret entrance… (laugh)

  16. Steven:

    You’re babbling, and I’ve no idea what you’re saying. My point is very simple: those adults who want to live with their parents have to live by their parents’ rules, no matter how foolish these rules may be. Lee wants the public to fund her art, but she won’t have the public regulate or control her art. She wants to have it both ways. She can’t. So let her get a real job, or let her take that Mall of America residency.

    This is why the right wants to cut the NEA: it’s not the money but the principle. Conservatives don’t want spoiled brats to take taxpayers’ money and then whine that their writing space isn’t quiet enough, especially when many of these conservatives are blue-collar workers who actually earn a living the hard way. If I were working in a factory 40 hours a week and then had to read Lee complaining about the inhumanity of having to clock in for a writing gig at a mall, I’d be calling my congressman immediately and ask him to axe the NEA.

    Besides, all that whiny “I need a safe, quiet space, complete with a stipend, so I can write” nonsense. What delicate flowers these MFA kids are! Let them work for a living. I’m not saying they have to go all out Eugene O’Neill or George Orwell and eat the wallpaper, but it won’t hurt them to earn a buck.

  18. Liam,

    Your arguments are boring and fatally unoriginal. You seem to belong to that group of people whose intellectual arsenal consists of about six buzzwords (such as “delicate flower”, “real job”, “safe space” – you forgot “snowflake” “politically correct” and “libtard”) which you rearrange to build whatever windmill it is you are chasing. This is why arts funding is necessary – critical, independent thought is important!

  19. Liam, I didn’t want my tax dollars to support the war in Iraq, or the massive expansion of the prison system, but they were used for those things and will continue to be funneled into similarly morally bankrupt enterprises whether I like it or not. So I’m comfortable with you inadvertently funding a painting or a novel that offends your sensibilities to the tune of two cents a year.

  20. Liam,

    As a writer, please direct me to all this sweet free money you speak of. I want to never work again!

    Oh, right. This is just bullshit you’re making up. Guess I’ll move back in with my fambly!

  21. I’m sorry, toad, if my reasoning is not up to your standards, but perhaps you could still try to understand my point, which so far has cruised over your head: public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached. And if I may return the favor, “give more money to the arts” is itself somewhat boring and unoriginal. Perhaps “This is how more money would make the arts better” would be more interesting and original, but I’ve yet to see anyone make it. Care to try?

    Coulier: the free money I speak of is the money Lee wants the federal government to give her, the money that is supposed to save her from the horror of the mall residency.

    anon: my sensibilities, you may be surprised to note, are very similar to yours. But you don’t fix one giant evil–military and war–by sniveling about a far smaller evil not getting bigger.

    I urge all of you to take a look at the situation in Israel if you want to see what happens when artists clamor for state funding and the state says, “Here’s the money, and here are the strings. Knock yourselves out”. Google “Miri Regev” and you’ll see the NY Times article on the first page. This is exactly what you people are bringing us to: the arts serving the state and its wars, nationalism, racism, and militarism.

  22. Liam

    “public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached.”

    This is just demonstrably false. I don’t know how to help you better understand this. For an introductory list of artists who have benefited from public funding, I would start with reading this article, particularly the 3rd to last paragraph.

    However, I think you would best benefit from a formal understanding of the NEA, specifically its grant program for writers. https://www.arts.gov/grants I suppose if submitting an application and, if selected, a few progress reports are “tight strings”, well, then, we have different definitions of “tight strings”.

  23. toad:

    The wind of condescension you keep breaking my way rings somewhat odorless when it comes from a commenter who consistently fails to understand what amounts to a very simple argument. No, the strings attached are not the application forms, but thanks for the informative link. Now take out that stick and read about Miri Regev and her attempt to subvert art to the service of nationalism, etc. It happens there and it could happen here, and it will if the NEA here is as strong (read: well-funded) as the Ministry of Culture is over there. Strings, see?

  24. Liam,

    So, let me get your “very simple argument”: the culture minister in a foreign country is a nationalist, which means if an analogous American cultural agency, which is .002% of the budget and on the chopping block, becomes too powerful (which it never has in its entire existence, no prominent politician has ever cared about, and no one is clamoring for anything different), the writers lucky enough to receive modest grants from this agency (who are by your own admission all lazy lefties) will be forced to churn out nationalist propaganda?

    Are those winds ringing stinky yet?

  25. Where did I say that all NEA grantees are lazy leftists? You’re incapable of arguing like an adult, so you make things up. You’re angry, so you shoot in all directions without reading the comments you’re responding to. I’m sorry, but your dispirited artist’s frustration is not my fault

    Have a nice weekend.

  26. “Let them work for a living”

    “Earn a buck”

    “Delicate flowers”

    “Get a real job”

    “Spoiled brats”

    “Whine/whiny”

  27. My childish point is that NEA funding, and taxes in general, do not work the way you claim they do, and that your “aggressive arts funding leads to increased militarism” white-hot take is not a danger to this country. Have a nice weekend.

  28. You know, toad, I’m in such good mood this morning that I’m inclined to be nice even to you, and even after you’ve collected sentence fragments that were targeted at specific individuals and assigned them, on my behalf, to all NEA grantees.

    Whatever. I woke up today and discovered in my mailbox a note that my play had been accepted for production, even though I wrote it over nights, with airport-grade earmuffs to combat ambient noise, and with the horror of the visual clutter of power lines staring at me from across the street. So on this lovely Saturday* morning, I say, can’t we all just get along?

    Now, have a REALLY good weekend. I know I will.

    * Us working people assign a special meaning to that day. Ask around.

  29. I know a lot of people who work Saturdays; it’s not a special day. Liam, you romanticize too much.

  30. Liam, congratulations! Do tell where and when we can see your play.

    I must say, old chap, you are obsessed with work. You would be shocked to know that I, too, have a job. It’s really quite amazing, eh? Two people, with jobs. Not only that, I also manage to write in my free time, without a view, a thousand miles from NYC! It’s perfect! I don’t want or need any grants or residencies. I suppose the only difference between you and I is that I don’t expect a medal for it, and I don’t presume that my circumstances should apply to everyone else.

    Anyway, I’m off to seek out some “workers” with whom to discuss the concept of “Saturday”. I’m humbled by how much I have to learn. Cheers!

  31. @Steven Augustine

    “A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves.”

    And where is it different? Osborne’s analysis makes for good paper and lousy policy, conflating as it does, artistic production with artistic performance.

    More “full-time opera houses” by a factor of 28? Means what? That America, not Germany, is the home of “conspicuous consumption”? That “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing” as long as it’s opera? Or, to the point, that the world is in paradigm shift as a result of the cultural influence of German opera? Soldiers laying down their weapons because of the the 21st century equivalent of the Ring Cycle?

    We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache. We don’t even need to look.

    It’s all capital, art-loving friends. The only difference: who’s laundering the funds. Britons launder theirs through the National Lotto – 40-billion pound sterling per annum to be sure St Martin-in-the-Fields never fails to perform Bach at Christmas. Germans put the squeeze on poor EU relations to make sure every province has an “opera”. And Americans do what they do and still manage to lead the entire world (save China, who, admit it, is pirating American production) in books published. Are any of these models – indirect public tax, direct public tax, hybrid – ideal? The question should be more pragmatic: where is the good writing coming from? The era-defining visuals? The groundbreaking sound?

    ***

    Private residencies are a great thing, if you can lasso one, but the MoA residency sounds like a trainwreck. “The artist is given time to ‘social network'” and “scroll his work on a big screen in real time”? I live in the land of government funded art, and my experience is that THAT system attracts “artists” who are as adept at sniffing out grants as they are mediocre at “making art”. Liam has a point: you MAKE somebody contribute to support the arts, he’s going to assume some aspect, albeit tiny, of “the patron”. Under those conditions, the threat of self-censorship is ever lurking, and any artist who says it’s not at the back of his mind is fibbing.

  32. @Il’ja

    I’m not going to formulate a point-by-point rebuttal of an interrogation of someone else’s words (what’s in it for me?), the gist of those words being: a little more of America’s fiscal War Budget could and should go to support The Arts… I think it’s more useful to compare the America of the near, and almost-near, Past, to its Present, regarding the topic. Also, if we cast the net of this discussion too broadly (re: Capital, Capitalism, Capitalismitis and the CIA) we’ll ignite one of those raging off-piste fests, familiar from the days of yore (and is this topic/thread really worth that…?)

    (sidebar: Liam only has a point to the extent that Reaganite Reactionaries like Liam cowed the NEA into being the shriveled organ it is today, but read the excerpt, below, for more on that…)

    So, let’s focus on the controversial idea of Gov support for the Arts (however dirty the support-money is) and look back at the good old days, before the Reagan Revolution declared ketchup a vegetable and High Culture a drug in need of stricter regulation:

    “The NEA was a fundamental part of democracy’s expansion. Its Literature Program had two distinct but overlapping goals: to sponsor more exciting, experimental writing and to democratize the field of literary production. The fellowship program, founded in 1967, was the most important means it used to achieve both of these aims. Agency administrators recognized that writing fiction or poetry requires resources—time, money, childcare, travel—that few citizens could afford.

    “As poet and program director Carolyn Kizer put it, the fellowships to individual writers—totalling $205,000, roughly a quarter of the Literature Program’s budget in 1967—were designed to “buy time.” As Kizer’s words suggest, the NEA de-commodified time, granting it to writers who needed it most. Grant winners with dependents received more money than those without—this was especially important for women, who were often saddled with domestic work. Between 1967 and 1971, the NEA sent talent scouts around the country, looking for writers who might not have access to the traditional avenues for publication. “Discovery Grants” were awarded to these unknowns, including a young West Coast fiction writer and poet named Raymond Carver. With these efforts, the NEA reshaped literary production, transforming the conditions under which talented citizens lived and worked.

    “These state-funded writers, many from marginalized populations, experimented with literary form. The inaugural class of fellowship winners, who received two-year grants in 1967, included two socialist-feminist fiction writers, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. A former Young Communist, Olsen in particular revolutionized the writing and teaching of literature. Her fiction and essays about the American working class married unconventional, modernist form with radical leftist politics. In the years before and after she received the NEA grant, she clamored for revised university reading lists and increased financial support for women, writers of color, and members of the working class. She called these would-be writers the “silenced people” who, “consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life,” rarely had time to produce creative work. How much great writing, she asked, has been lost to history? The NEA shared Olsen’s concern with amplifying historically silenced voices, just as it shared her belief that these voices would speak—would write—in radical, resonant ways.

    “For the NEA, this ambition led it to seek and support writers who lacked market appeal. In addition to granting fellowships to individual writers, the agency funded small, independent presses and avant-garde literary journals. When the agency compiled an anthology of American writing in 1968, it drew largely from the “little magazines,” literary journals that published work by young and unknown writers. One reviewer commented approvingly that the anthology mainly included “non-commercial” work, by fledging writers and by controversial figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). The NEA provided writers with several different ways of circumventing the literary marketplace, freeing them to write fiction and poetry that was difficult, politically radical, or both.

    “Despite its penchant for niche literature, the agency flourished during the 1970s. The number of grants awarded increased each year, as did the money for each creative writing fellowship. By October 1977 the agency’s budget had increased from $2.5 million to nearly $124 million, thanks largely to the politicking of chair Nancy Hanks. During these same years, the government provided direct grants to some of the nation’s most contentious and innovative writers, including John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Ishmael Reed. The literary climate favored experimentation: the decade also saw the publication of Toni Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye, a novel that used wordplay to critique racist standards of beauty, and the rise of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an avant-garde, politically leftist movement that challenged the conventions of lyric poetry. Though the era had its share of battles (the deputy chair once had to visit the offices of forty-six members of Congress to explain why a seven-letter poem deserved $750 in public funds), the 1970s were a high point for the NEA and for experimental literature as well.”

    So far so good… until the good times hit a wall when, essentially, during the ’80s and ’90s…

    “the NEA met with increased resistance to its grant programs. The agency came under siege for funding (often indirectly) formally challenging, politically radical art by feminist, queer, and non-white Americans. With the support of fellow politicians from his own party, Republican Senator Jesse Helms launched a multi-year campaign against the NEA, charging it with funding “obscene” art by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Karen Finley. The controversies surrounding these artists as well as several performance artists prompted the agency to experiment with a short-lived loyalty oath. More importantly, these difficult years led to the elimination of all grants to individual artists—except for grants to writers. Today, the NEA still awards $950,000 in individual fellowships for fiction, poetry, and translation, all of which are drawn from diminished public funds.”

    Even worse, in time:

    “Castigated by the right for its irrelevance and indecency, scorned by the left for its cowardice in the face of prejudice and supposed philistinism, the NEA has lately turned to the market for guidance and started placing a few safer bets. In its first decades, the agency served as a literary bellwether, funding unknown writers, often at early stages in their careers. Though it still funds such writers, it also funds successful writers, who receive their NEA grant after winning major awards or writing bestsellers; such winners were more rare in the 1970s. Recent grant winners have included Jonathan Franzen, following the publication of his prize-winning and best-selling The Corrections; Cristina García, after she wrote the National Book Award nominee Dreaming in Cuban; and Jhumpa Lahiri, who, by the time she received her fellowship, had already won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, a book that sold 15 million copies worldwide. Lesser-known writers still dominate the awards list, but the presence of writers like Franzen insure the agency against charges of idiosyncrasy.

    “Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists who may never find market success, or who may not even desire it. On the whole, today’s writers are less materially secure than those of previous generations. They are more likely to be saddled with student debt, from undergraduate as well as graduate education. They are less likely to find day jobs that provide enough income to pay off loans, never mind to support creative work. The “hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life” has only gotten harder today, when healthcare, housing, and other essentials have become unaffordable for many.”

    ******

    The entire article is interesting reading. The main point being: things weren’t always this way (this awful way), and Gov support of The Arts, handled tastefully (without an eye to The Bottom Line), can be a very good thing. Yes, American Civilization was once so advanced that they could decouple the notion of State Sponsored Support for the Arts from the Philistine requirement that the supported Artist becomes, therefore, a hireling of some sort. The monies involved, after all, were just crumbs from the table.

    https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/who-pays-writers-welfare-state-literature

    PS “We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache.”

    The last time I attended the Opera, here, in Berlin, at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans; maybe a third couldn’t have gotten into a mid-level nightclub in Chicago, the way they were dressed. Cultural differences.

  33. “…at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans…”

    When a ticket for Tannhäuser at the Berlin Opera goes from 53€ to 169€ the fact that half an audience is in jeans – dressing down or cheap signalling? – tells us, in comparison, very little.

    What the left, (yes, I’m among it) doesn’t seem to grasp in this flareup over .01% of the budget comes across in both your cursory dismissal, i.e. “Cultural differences” and the article’s assumption that statements like “Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists…” should just be accepted as fait accompli.

    Who needs it most? What does a “politically radical” writer sound like in 2017? Is it the same as in 1980? Who determines this? Has the environment of private arts funding / retreats / etc. improved or worsened since Reagan et al. took the knife to it? A writer who leans to the right should just shut up? Put down the pen because this is not intended for you? The particular taxonomy of this is getting dangerously close to a course of events that I think we both agree is unacceptable. But the perception is out there that the Left is unaware of how shrill, how fascist, how bankrupt it has begun to sound exactly because of issues like this one.

    To make this practical: WHICH of the following do you think Trump would appoint to head the NEA? Rush Limbaugh or Toni Morrison. And do you think that appointment would legitimize the work of the NEA? Would we be happier if he appointed Rush and then put $10B into the Agency?

    We are in agreement. That a nation with a $14T budget should ignore, or worse, attempt to commoditize, the humanities is disgraceful. Where we disagree – I assume – is that the bourgeois-flavored models of arts funding in Europe’s social democracies provide much, if any kind of workable example to follow.

  34. Clearly, anyone interested in seeing Opera cheaply in Berlin should consult me before consulting you, Il’ja; here’s one quick reference, slightly dated (2011):

    “Deutsche Oper:

    The West Berlin opera is a mammoth black box of acoustic wonder. Nosebleed seats are €14, and as the theater is much bigger than the other two, you may actually struggle to see everything from up there. Students under 30 get 50% off all tickets one week before the performance, and pay no more than €13.50 one hour before performance.

    Extra cheapo tip: Sometimes your opera ticket doubles as a public transportation ticket from and to the theater, so check the fine print on the ticket. If you have Berlin Welcome Card, you also get 25% off certain tickets at all of the three operas.”

    more recent info:

    “If you are under 30 years old and are planning on seeing several productions during your visit, you should invest in a Classiccard, a wonderful scheme that costs 15 euros to sign up for an annual membership. It entitles you to the best available seats at any of the three opera houses and various other orchestras and musical groups (the Berlin Philharmonic is the notable exception) one hour before curtain at the evening box office for 10 euros (again, cash only). 1 ticket per Classiccard unless a special offer is on.”

    “If you are sadly not 28 years old or under, you can still get into the Philharmonie either with a Podiumplatz, which is a seat on the onstage bleachers in back of the orchestra, or a Stehplatz, which is standing room. Of the two, the podium seats are easier to score, but they aren’t offered when a choir or extra-large / usual instrument ensemble is required. They go on sale at the beginning of the week for that weekend’s concert series (typically the same program will be given on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and cost 16 euros.”

    How much does it cost to see the “Hulk vs Thor vs Trump” movie in Manhattan…?

    But, back to The Topic; here’s an article, from 2014, that doesn’t mention Opera:

    “Culturally Impoverished: US NEA Spends 1/40th of What Germany Doles Out for Arts Per Capita”

    “1. Germany: Germany’s cultural budget was approximately $1.63 billion USD in 2013. According to Ian Moss, research director of Fractured Atlas, Germany’s art funding in 2007 equated to roughly $20 per German citizen, which “dwarfs the 41 cents per red-blooded American provided by the NEA. What artist wouldn’t want to live there?” Moss told Huffington Post.”

    http://www.alternet.org/culture/culturally-impoverished-us-nea-spends-140th-what-germany-doles-out-arts-capita

    ****

    The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are Expat Artists, enjoying the superior conditions, for Artists, over here.

    Even my health insurance (which is *amazing*) is special health insurance for Artists; incredibly cheap, with access to absolutely topnotch care (our Daughter, who was born in a high-tech birthing salon hot tub, before we all spent the night in a private birthing suite, cost me no more than the equivalent of 200 dollars being born, including months of birthing classes and a follow-up house call from the doctor!). This is not an abstract or hypothetical debate, for me. I lived (all over) the US my first 30 years, and I’ve lived in several countries in the EU thereafter, and the reality of “State Sponsorship for the Arts” in the US has to be examined through the dirty lens of the US’ Gulag (or cattle farm) mentality when it comes to the 99%.

    Not that creeping NeoLiberalization isn’t trying to degrade the rest of the West to the same Feudal standards….

  35. But to circle back to the question of private sector funding for the Arts, and the M.o.A.’s generous (and typical) offer to some lucky Writer to be a sideshow attraction at one of Mammon’s bloodiest Colosseums for a working week…

    ““The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”

    How could writing, produced under such conditions, be anything other than cat shit in a sealed baggie on a hissing radiator?

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Essays Sport

The Problem with Sportswriting

Essays Sport
August 6, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 12 10 min read

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

—    Janet Malcolm

Writers are always selling someone out.

—    Joan Didion

Don’t ever make a friend in this business, you’re only going to have to fuck somebody in the end.

—    Jim Murray
1.
The open secret about Grantland Rice, America’s ur-sportswriter and the namesake of Bill Simmons’s omnibus sports/pop culture website, is this: he wasn’t a very good writer. He wrote a lot, and so was ubiquitous. His personal record, as recorded in Frank Deford’s Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter, amounted to 50,000 words over the nine days of the 1912 World Series. Rice labored, Deford tells us, under a 3,500-word daily quota over his 53-year career.

With some 17 million words to choose from, it’s not really possible to say whether the lead to his story on the 1924 Army-Notre Dame football game is the “best” thing Rice ever wrote, only that it’s the most quoted:
Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley, and Layden.
As a young sportswriter aiming at literature, I was under the impression that Rice had a bead on the target. He was the first capital-S Sportswriter, the first commentator-as-personality. He was popular, but not because he was a good writer.  As Deford puts it in his memoir:
Perhaps the idea was to make mere games seem more important or artistic, but for whatever reason the writing grew more florid and rococo… Jonathan Yardley… wrote that old-time sportswriting was “like a bad dream by Sir Walter Scott.”
In Rice’s defense, it’s probably not possible to publish 17 million words and not engage in a certain amount of linguistic inflation. But that inflation has plagued the profession ever since, and it’s evident in each of the books considered here. In fact, I will now posit a corollary to Godwin’s Law, which holds that: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Stockman’s Corollary: as a sportswriter’s career progresses, the probability that he will needlessly invoke Nazis also approaches one. The “needlessly” goes without saying, or should. But each of the three writers here — Jim Murray, the daily journalist; Frank Deford, the magazine feature writer; and John Feinstein, the bestelling author — eventually invokes some aspect of the Hitler war machine.

Jim Murray was 4F in World War II and so spent the war scrambling up the ladder in his early newspaper gigs. As Ted Geltner assures us in Last King of the Sports Page: The Life and Career of Jim Murray — his biography of the Los Angeles Times columnist who, at the peak of his popularity, was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers — Murray tried more than once to sign up, but Uncle Sam wouldn’t let him.

In 1963, in advance of the first Sonny Liston–Cassius Clay fight, Murray predicted that the bout would “be the most popular fight since Hitler and Stalin — 180 million Americans rooting for a double knockout.” OK, pretty mild and pretty funny. And, Geltner argues, a representation of the two fighters’ general unpopularity with the establishment. But, after Clay’s conversion to Islam — and name-change to Muhammad Ali, which Murray waited more than a decade to honor in print — Murray compared Ali’s Fruit of Islam bodyguards to “the Gestapo in blackface.” Which is pretty gratuitous, and not a little racist.

But let’s give Murray the old “man-of-his-time” pass — his was a jauntily jingoistic generation, one that for all its faults produced the indisputably good outcome of stopping Hitler — and move on to Frank Deford.

You may best recognize the genteel Deford as the honeyed voice behind more than 1,500 sports commentaries on NPR’s Morning Edition. Throughout Over Time, his memoir of working for Sports Illustrated and other national outlets, he manages to keep a healthy perspective. “I can’t for the life of me, for example, imagine that any run-of-the-mill young person will want to read the old stuff I’m writing about now.” This he tells us once we’re more than a third of the way through a bunch of the old stuff.

Deford, too, falls victim to Stockman’s Corollary, with a throwaway line in a paragraph about how he works best by himself: “I just can’t grasp how two people could write something well together — collaboration, they call it, which always makes me think of weasels collaborating with the Nazis. I guess you have to have the right personality to be collaborative.” That’s right, you have to be Lieber/Stoller or Marshal Petain.

But among the writers under review, John Feinstein — avatar of conventional wisdom, perpetrator of sub-competent prose — takes the cake (as he might say) for not only fulfilling the corollary, but being the biggest hypocrite.

Early in One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game, the author’s bloated account of his various publishing successes, Feinstein shows himself standing up to Bobby Knight. This was during Feinstein’s reporting of his book A Season on the Brink, for which he spent the 1985-1986 season as an embedded reporter with Knight’s Indiana University men’s basketball team. That book was a wild success — and Feinstein dedicates a full 150 pages or more to its development and publication.

Feinstein was about three weeks into his “Bloomington sojourn” when Knight fired off a quintessentially crass crack at the reporter in front of his team: “‘You know, John,’ Knight said. ‘There are times when I’m not sure that Hitler wasn’t right about you people.’” Not funny at all, but then Knight is a dirtbag who choked his players, so this sort of crack seems entirely in character. Feinstein explains that he didn’t confront Knight in front of his team, because the coach would only have escalated things and refused to back down. So Feinstein waited until later than night:
…Knight and I were again in the car en route to a speech, and it was just the two of us.

“I gotta say something to you,” I finally said. “Because if I don’t I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think you know I have no problem with you making jokes about me being Jewish or liberal or whatever,” I said.

“In fact, you’re really good about it,” Knight said.

“I think so,” I went on. “But I gotta tell you, Bob. Hitler wasn’t funny. Not on any level.”
Fair enough, and true enough, and Knight backs down and comes as close as a solipsistic asshole can come to apologizing. But the reason I quote that scene at length is not to show that Feinstein was a man of principle — possibly endangering his unprecedented access to this hothead basketball coach to rebuke him for a crass remark — but to show instead that he can be breathtakingly un-self-aware, not to mention a hypocrite.

In this case, 350 pages after he’s admonished Knight, he tells us about an incident at the Los Angeles Open golf tournament in which “the people in charge of security had tried to tell Larry Dorman of the New York Times and I that we couldn’t walk inside the ropes without a camera, even though we were wearing armbands that said, ‘media—inside the ropes access.’” This was eventually sorted out, but Feinstein “ended up telling the guy in charge that he and his men were a bunch of ‘brown-shirted Gestapo stormtroopers.”

You know, to smooth things over.

In light of this newly-discovered corollary, every sportswriter would do well to read the letter Jackie Robinson sent Jim Murray. They were friends, and, despite his early animosity toward Ali, Murray had lobbied to get Satchel Paige (who spent most of his career in the Negro Leagues) into baseball’s Hall of Fame and the PGA player Charlie Sifford into the Masters golf tournament. But, when Murray invoked Robinson’s name in a column that derided the efforts of some civil rights activists to get African American Olympians to boycott the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City — and compared the boycott, in passing, to Hitler’s insults of black athletes in 1936 — Robinson wrote an eloquent rebuke, the final clause of which should be stamped on every sportswriter’s laptop: “Olympics occur periodically. Justice must be practiced every day, and none of this has the faintest relationship to Hitler.”

2.
The most infuriating thing about Feinstein’s book, aside from its reading like a first draft (he tells us of someone’s disease that was “degenerative and kept getting worse,” or of the 1986 World Series: “People forget that the score was tied at that moment. …Buckner did not lose the World Series for the Red Sox, a fact many, many people forget.”), is his utter lack of perspective.

This is a sportswriter’s problem generally — great ones like Deford and Murray often transcend it. Feinstein almost never does. It’s not coincidental that Feinstein dropped the “brown-shirted Gestapo” line on a security guard (which is not even accurate: the Brown Shirts and the Gestapo were two different groups), he loathes security guards. There are no fewer than six instances in this book of Feinstein’s confrontation with gatekeepers at various venues.

An example, taken almost at random, emphasis mine:
I’ve had bad experiences with security guards around the world, but never more so than in Chapel Hill. Once, when I walked over before a game to say hello to Dean Smith, one of them started pushing me away until Dean saw what was going on and waved the guard off. Rather than just let me go as he had been instructed to do, the guard — who had to be a hundred — said, “You’re lucky Coach Smith was here.”

To which I replied — always calm when confronted — “You’re lucky I didn’t knock you into the fifth row.”
It’s a stunning failure of empathy. It doesn’t occur to Feinstein that this low-paid senior citizen was just doing his job — keeping people off the court. Furthermore, there’s a tincture of “don’t you know who I am?” in this reaction, and that’s what really grates.

Because, consider: what if Tiger Woods had done that? Or Kobe Bryant? Feinstein would be one of the first baying hounds on Charlie Rose to tell us that these athletes don’t know how good they’ve got it and they don’t care how many little people they step on, and that if it weren’t for the fans they’d be nobodies. Someone might remind Feinstein that if it weren’t for the security guards keeping everyone else out while he gets unrestricted access to players and coaches, he might not have a career.

In his way, Feinstein is a sort of modern Grantland Rice. He’s prolific (Deford calls him “‘the Woody Allen of sportswriting,’ because, just as Allen annually produces a new movie, so too does John somehow manage to write a major book almost every year,” which is a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever seen one). He’s also a hypocrite. Rice admitted that he wanted to build his subjects into heroes (see, for instance, the aforementioned “four horsemen” of Notre Dame’s backfield). And yet Rice also decried the perverting influence of money on athletics — money which had entered the game thanks in no small part to his mythmaking.

Late in this book — perhaps he figures no one will read this far; I didn’t want to — Feinstein admits to outright hypocrisy: “Since eleven years have passed, I can now reveal that for all the complaining I’ve done… about game times being changed for TV, I was responsible for a game time being changed…” Feinstein was researching his book The Last Amateurs, on The Patriot League, a scholarship-free, NCAA Division I athletic conference. Basically, he wanted to attend two games on a certain Saturday, one was at noon, one was at two p.m., and the venues were two-and-a-half hours apart. So, he asked the Holy Cross athletic director to change the time of its game with Lehigh. And, because Feinstein was by this time a perennial bestselling author whose book was sure to give the Patriot League and its schools unpurchasable publicity, the two teams acquiesced, and Feinstein — the reporter who was observing a typical season in the Patriot League — got his way. “You should be ashamed of what you did,” an assistant women’s basketball coach tells him. “I wasn’t ashamed and it was well worth the effort.”

Worth it for whom? I wonder. This is the heart of Feinstein’s hypocrisy. On one hand, he tells us that a young Andre Agassi reminded him of a “young Tiger Woods… everything he did was with one thing in mind: how will this affect my ability to make money.” On the other hand, the use of his heavyweight reputation to push around a couple of small-conference athletics programs leaves his conscience undisturbed. I wonder if that schedule change affected his ability to make money?

Deford, who left Sports Illustrated in the early ‘90s to head up the all-sports newspaper The National (an oral history of which can be found at Grantland), made Feinstein his first hire in that ill-fated endeavor. And yet, he has a refreshing candor about certain aspects of his profession: “Besides, everybody genially accepts that a considerable portion of popular American sports — college football and men’s basketball — is an outright fraud…” It’s unfortunate that this passes for a bracing assertion in sportswriting, but it does. Deford qualifies this by referring to himself in another context as “the piano player in the whorehouse.”

In this he’s more in line with Jim Murray — who, Geltner claims, was Deford’s first target hire for The National; Murray turned him down. Murray admitted near the end of his career: “I covered the circus. I felt privileged to have done so. …Sure, I helped keep the hype going, the calliope playing. I can live with that. It’s what I am.”

Both Deford and Geltner tell of that calliope player at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when Magic Johnson interrupted a brusque official to say “The great Jim Murray is here, and he didn’t get to ask a question.”

John Feinstein would kill for that kind of recognition. Literally, I mean. He would kill seven security guards. But no, Murray and Deford possess a self-awareness about their professions that Feinstein does not. That is, that the most interesting stuff in the sports world has to do with its stories, not its scores.

I would like to say that all sports fans know that, but we do not. For evidence, I turn to the letters page of the July 30 Sports Illustrated. One C. Fred Bergsten from Annandale, Va. has written in to respond to a book excerpt the magazine ran on that 1992 Dream Team. Here’s the letter:
With all the hype of the 20th anniversary of the Dream Team… most fans are forgetting that there were two squads, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that could have given the Dream Team a run for its money had their countries not dissolved just before the Barcelona Games. The Soviets were the defending gold medalist from the 1988 Games, and Yugoslavia was the ’90 FIBA world champion. It is a tragedy that colossal matchups among the three basketball superpowers never occurred in ’92.
Yes, the tragedy of the Yugoslavian civil war was not Srebrenica, it was that the reigning FIBA champs didn’t get a shot at the Dream Team.

Let’s close with a proper world-historical perspective. As Danny Boyle’s History of Britain tableau unfolded at the Opening Ceremonies of our present Olympics, as the workers of the Industrial Revolution literally rolled up the sod of pastoral England, I was put in mind of lines the truly great columnist Red Smith wrote the last time London hosted the games, in 1948 — and in the aftermath of, y’know, actual Nazis.

But, writing of those Opening Ceremonies 64 years ago, Red Smith both described them and put them in perspective:
The torchbearer dashed up into the stands, brandished his torch on high and dropped it into a tall concrete bird bath…

The crowd made with the tonsils. It was hokum. It was pure Hollywood. But it was good. You had to like it.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Bonus Link: The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)

Essays Sport
| 1 book mentioned 12 10 min read
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Essays

Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard

Essays
July 29, 2021 | 1 book mentioned 1 14 min read
The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to be forgotten.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 1 14 min read
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Essays

Gertrude Stein: Unlikely Comp Teacher

Essays
April 14, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 2 10 min read
Gertrude Stein’s writing isn’t, on the face of it, a style we’d traditionally encourage in college. But why? Doesn’t it uphold the tenacious inquiry we ask of collegial adults? Doesn’t it allow for play and interest? Doesn’t it make claims?
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 2 10 min read
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