Help Me Teach James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

I'm teaching James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to my undergraduate students in my "intermediate" literary journalism class at Dartmouth College tomorrow. My problem: Too many of them loathe this masterpiece. Or, rather, they think they do. That's where I want your help.

A colleague of mine teaches Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in a course on American prose. Students encountering the book as an object of critical inquiry are exhilarated by it. But I've discovered that students here at Dartmouth, at least, encountering the book in a creative writing course, are quick to dismiss it. Every critique they level at it -- overwrought, grandiose, "unreadable," self-absorbed -- is dead on, of course. But there's more, too, so much more.

This is my second time teaching the book. The first time their contempt for it caught me by surprise. This time, I'm planning all kinds of strategies to help them open their minds to it.

This one is crass: I'd like to hear from other writers what Let Us Now Praise Famous Men means or meant to them. I want to highlight for my students the discrepancy between their certainty that this book is "bad" or somehow simply "wrong" and its ripple effect among writers.

So if the book matters to you, or mattered to you, will you comment below or send me a note about how or why at jeff dot sharlet at gmail dot com?

Fetishizing Dialogue

I'm interested in the way the rough shape of an essay can emerge from a set of tweets. Here's one from this morning prompted by a Harvard Crimson editorial criticizing anti-rape and anti-hate protests at Dartmouth College, where I teach.

Harvard Crimson scolds Dartmouth protesters for failing to pursue "dialogue." Student self-repression.

The assumption that "dialogue" solves all problems is profoundly paternalistic -- & naive.

The fetish for "dialogue" above all -- including legit anger & actual inquiry -- is a politics of presumption.

Fetish for "dialogue" assumes those you disagree w/ lack only your insight; assumes they want to "compromise." As if they have no agency.

I hear this from students all time; they forgive bigotries on assumption bigots lack approp "culture." Cant believe hate can be chosen.

David Creech, a religious studies scholar at Loyola University Chicago, wrote: What alternative to dialog do you propose?

Demand for alternative to "dialogue" assumes solutions always at hand. Sometimes whats needed is diagnosis, nt prescription.

Student fetish for "dialogue" a form of technocratic optimism based on free market myth of "exchange" as end in itself.

Creech wrote: Dialog for me implies also listening, the possibility that I might be changed by your insight and experience.

That's great when it's an option. But it assumes a desire for common ground. Which is a form of paternalism.

Creech: Desire for common ground as paternalism... Intriguing suggestion... I will have to chew on that for a bit.

The desire for common ground isn't paternalim; the assumption that others share it is.

Take the example of Uganda's "kill-the-gays" activists. Some assumed they needed dialogue. They thought that funny. 1/2

2/2 because they knew the arguments against homophobic genocide. Knew them & rejected them. Not looking for my "insight."

Defenders of "dialogue" as end in itself see only other option as brutality. They fail to imagine possibility of open-ended problem.

A perfect example of chosen bigotry: Heritage Foundation's Harvard-powered, race-based, anti-immigration "study."

Well-intentioned liberals always ask how we can "educate" haters. Elite haters don't need "education"; they need to be challenged.

Sally Tweets; or, Beating the Essay

Essay: A loose sally of the mind.
--From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, as quoted too often.


From a real review of a real book: "Traces the story of a relationship--or does it? For X, ambiguity is the point." Dude.

& what I mean by "dude" is that talk of "the essay" has devolved into stonerisms.

I'm wary of abstract nouns preceded by articles. "The Essay." "The People." There are people & there are essays. That shld be enough.

Maybe my problem is that I don't need to "essai" to recognize that what I write - "The Journalism" - can never be anything but an attempt.

But what if we did put an article b4 journalism? The Journalism? Wld that make Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, & others ok again?

Robin Hemley, in a recent essay, mocks the essayistic tendency of arranging "facts" gleaned from a google, w/ the pretense of library time.

The pretense of library time shld clue us in to the idea that too much of the current "essay" is style. Sort of bibliographic steampunk.

Like most longform journalists I know, I spend *a lot* of time in the library. If that search is part of the story, great. if not, fine.

But I trip myself up w/ use of "story." Some essayists insist that's conservative. Only if you have a conservative idea of what a story is.

The fetishization of form, *at the deliberate expense of story,* is a greater conservatism. It's the old "Art," plaything of aristocrats.

Christian Lorentzen ‏@xlorentzen
@JeffSharlet Sounds like you're beating a straw man there, bro. Who actually does that?

@xlorentzen You wouldn't understand, you dirty journalist. (But no, not a straw man at all. As an Essai-iste, I refuse to name names.)

Do we need essays to tell us "ambiguity is the point"? We already knew we can never really know. The "point" is to try, anyway. To essay.

To "essay" -- to try -- means to experiment. & yet increasingly the academic creative essay is inadvertent parody. Replication.

Lucas Mann ‏@LucasWMann
@JeffSharlet I think you just need to take your mind out for a good, loose sally.

Sally Tweets; or, Beating The Essay. http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2013/04/sally-tweets-or-beating-essay.html …

I teach, students decide

This anonymous student evaluation, essentially comparing me to a hallucinogen, is probably the best review I'll ever  receive:

You will find yourself at the end of the term, lying in bed, delirious from eight hours of sleep out of the last seventy-two, floating in a moment of clarity. A moment when everything he ranted on about -- bodies, liberation, time, entertainment, wit -- puzzles together. 

 

Literary Journalism on Women at Work: A Too-Short List

Today I'm looking for literary journalism, or creative nonfiction, or lyric essays -- or mutant journalism -- on women at work. I'd like to add some of these pieces to a syllabus for a creative nonfiction course I teach at Dartmouth College called "Whose Story Is It?" For one section of the course, I want writing about ordinary people writing. Not memoir; writers going out into the world and trying to account for what they find. What they tend to find, when it comes to work, is men. There are notable exceptions, but not enough. So I'm making a list. It's very short so far. What can you add?

Katherine Boo, "Swamp Nurse"

Katherine Boo, "The Churn" (factory worker)

Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls

Edwin Dobbs, "The New Oil Landscape" (dirty water hauler)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

Wendy Ewald, Magic Eyes

Sonia Faleiro, Beautiful Thing (bar dancer)

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (hoodoo practitioner)

Sarah Jaffe, "Trickle-Down Feminism" (valuable critical essay on work)

Tracy Kidder, Among Schoolchildren (teacher)

Jeanne Marie Laskas, "Joy Ride" (truckers)

Jeanne Marie Laskas, "G-L-O-R-Y!" (NFL cheerleaders)

Sarah Leonard, "She Can't Sleep No More" (Silicon Valley)

Mac McLelland, "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave" 

Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating

John McPhee, "Travels in Georgia" (biologist)

Susan Orlean, "The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup"

Jeff Sharlet, "The Rapture" (new age healer)

Jeff Sharlet & Peter Manseau, "Crestone, Colorado" (witch)

Diane Simon, Hair

Maureen Stanton, "Good Guys" (nuclear plant painter)

Sallie Tisdale, "We Do Abortions Here"

Take Care of Your Teeth, Catherine Treyz, 2013

Every now and then a writing student delivers a paragraph so so simple but rich that it could be a short story unto itself. All the more remarkable given that my students are studying the nonfiction genre I call mutant journalism. Here's one from a student named Catherine Treyz, describing a bus ride to the next town over from Hanover with concision that'd be the envy of Ben Hecht:

The bus started and I opened a pack of gum. A woman turned around and told me, "Take care of your teeth. I lost mine during rehab--opiate addiction." Her lips formed what I perceived as a smile. Her bottom lip practically tickled her nose. She turned back around and re-entered the larger bus debate about the weather. Then a man bit into an apple. "Take care of your teeth," she said.

Small Town Mutant Journalism

I'm thinking of organizing my spring term course in creative nonfiction/literary journalism/mutant journalism around writing about a nearby town. So I'm thinking about some books for the syllabus, books about towns and small cities, books about people in a place that's neither rural nor urban nor suburban. Narrative, immersive work, not history or formal scholarship. Below is a list from my shelves. I'd be interesting in hearing recommendations, of books, longform narrative journalism, and documentary film.

"Kid Cannabis," Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone (via Jonathan Ringen)
Couer D'Alene, Idaho

"Escanaba's Magic Hours," Tom Bissell, Magic Hours
Escanaba, Michigan

Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger
Odessa, Texas

Hometown, Peter Davis
Hamilton, Ohio

Dogtown, Elyssa East
Gloucester, Massachusetts

Cold New World, William Finnegan
New Haven, Connecticut

The Great Plains, Ian Frazier

Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene
McIntosh County, Georgia

"Dr. Don," Peter Hessler, The New Yorker (via Matthew Shaer)
Nucla, Colorado

"Midnight in the Garden of East Texas," Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly (via Max Linsky)
Carthage, Texas

Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston
Eatonville, Florida

Home Town, Tracy Kidder
Northampton, Massachusetts

The Other Side of the River, Alex Kotlowitz (via Anna Clark)
St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan

"The All-American Bank Heist," by David Kushner, GQ (via Max Linsky)
Monroe, Washington

Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy
Black River Falls, Wisconsin

The Undertaking, Thomas Lynch
Milford, Michigan

"The Acme Corporation," Alec MacGillis, Harper's
Acme, Michigan

Class A, Lucas Mann
Clinton, Iowa

Blessed Assurance, A.G. Mojtabai
Amarillo, Texas

Dakota, Kathleen Norris

Down at the Docks, Rory Nugent
New Bedford, Massachusetts

The Right Side of the River, Roger Pinckney
Daufuskie Island, South Carolina

"The Heart of Football Beats in Aliquippa," S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated (via Max Linsky)
Aliquippa, Pennsylvania

Methland, Nick Redding
Oelwein, Iowa

"Looking for a Ghost," Wright Thompson, ESPN.com (via Matthew Hunte)
Alcorn, Mississippi

Killings, Calvin Trillin

"The Secret Sharer," JoAnn Wypijewski, Harper's
Jamestown, New York

"A Boy's Life," JoAnn Wypijewski, Harper's
Laramie, Wyoming


Documentaries:

Brother's Keeper, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Munnsville, New York

Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple

My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin (via Anne Mette Lundtoffe)

Wisconsin Death Trip, James Marsh

Black River Falls, Wisconsin

Nimrod Nation, Brett Morgen

Watersmeet, Michigan

Roger & Me, Michael Moore

Flint, Michigan

Vernon, Florida, Errol Morris



Suggestions?

Torture, differently considered

My former colleague Angela Zito, an unorthodoxly radical media scholar at NYU, dismisses the liberal complaints about Zero Dark Thirty in favor of a deeper -- and more intriguingly appreciative -- reading:

The film’s “realism” lies elsewhere, buried deep in its own materiality on the screen.  I found it confusing to watch at an intimate level, at the level of the eye.... we’re sharing the experience of the characters who cannot grasp without great difficulty the vast amount of information they must sift through, much of which is images: the plot hinges on the misinterpretation of a photograph of a person. It conveys the reality of their lives through the reality of the materiality of the image itself in our digital age—distortable, manipulable, grainy, foggy, overwhelmingly too much.

"On Not Enjoying Zero Dark Thirty," at The Revealer.

The Revealer's current editor, Ann Neumann, has filed one of the most gripping and artfully constructed essays on a boring subject I can imagine at Guernica. By "boring" I mean a subject I'd normally avoid: forced feeding. But trust me -- you read "The Longest Hunger Strike" not just for what it says about torture (a theme of my digressive reading today, apparently) but also for the way Ann makes characters out of talking heads, vivid images out of phone conversations, empathy out of wonkery, and a terrifying, compelling, and perhaps necessary story out of this most gruesome of topics.

Here's a related post I wrote for The Revealer back when I was its editor: "Making Torture Beautiful."

Digressions, 1/13/13

Searching for a certain kind of popular criticism to send to a student as an example, I found something more interesting right at home on Killing the Buddha: my pal S. Brent Plate's essay on suburbs and God (also, Arcade Fire and Douglas Coupland).

Caleb Crain's New Yorker obituary for (of?) Aaron Swartz, the activist who committed suicide while facing a felony prosecution for hacking JSTOR academic articles to make them available to everyone.

A short tabloid article about Courtni Webb, a high school student suspended for writing a poem about understanding Newtown killer Adam Lanza's rage and sense of powerlessness.

Instead of Working, 1/11/13

"Ektachrome," by "David." This is a story, or maybe a prose poem, or maybe just a hallucination, at a site called Cowbird. I guess Cowbird is a "platform" -- anyone can post a picture and a story, which sounds pretty simple. The art, as always, is in the arrangement.

I also read David's story "Stings."

Then, since I'm on a panel on "The Dangers of Self in Writing about Religion" at the Associated Writing Programs conference -- a conference, I have to admit, I've been proud not to attend before now -- I looked up my fellow panelists. The organizer, Jeremy B. Jones, I already knew, or knew of, through his writing for Killing the Buddha. Here's one called "Silver Trumpets." Then I read this good bloody Jesus mountain poem "Hem," by Jessie van Eerden, and "The Day I Met Hillbilly Jim" by Josh MacIvor-Andersen.

Later, a blip from current Modern Language Association president Michael Bérubé, on how an English major might enable you to become a general or a titan of finance. In response I wrote the following to a colleague:

"Humanities majors scored quite well; business majors did not." This is what it really comes down to, right? But I don't suppose we can insult our colleagues.

Which is too bad, because as the article makes clear, "Business" doesn't need to bash the humanities. Its assault is implicit. Which raises the question of how we can make a case for the humanities without responding to the assumption that's been put in place. The best we can do is to say, weakly, that English can also be useful out in the world. That is, if you really don't want to study econ or gov, or you're a scientist or a general with a whimsical side. We're moving English from a deficit major to a third-best, and third-best in a contest defined by the terms of "business."

I'm all for it, because that's what we can do now, but I think we need to shift the terms from scientists and generals to the most logical end of an English major: writers, artists, and scholars. And let students know that if they don't do well enough in their English major to become Toni Morrison, they can always fall back on number crunching and be rich. Seriously -- I meet these people at readings all the time, middle-aged lawyers and doctors and businesspeople working away at a mystery novel and haunting readings in the hope that some writer can anoint their manuscripts -- plenty of them bring them to the event -- and return them to the English major they abandoned. That's what they say: "I studied English in college, but then..."