H. L. Mencken finally canonized

One of my favorite authors is finally getting the Library of America treatment. It's about time!!!

In this election season, we would be well to remember this, one of my favorite Mencken quotations:

"Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

Steve Martin's Boring Autobiography

I am in the middle of reading Steve Martin's autobiography, Born Standing Up, and I am having a hard time getting through the darn thing. I think I've figured out why. It is not very well written.

Yes, I know, I'm an English teacher, so I will be accused of being nitpicky about books. Yep. Sure am. I expect published writing to be good, and this wasn't.

Yes, it has its moments of humor: "I was in awe of the red-bearded Mike, who seemed so confident in the divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums."
and
"I was excited to learn that we were now living in the Age of Aquarius, an age when, at least astrologically, the world would be taken over by macrame."

Aside from the one-liners, it also has a wonderful description that captures what made his standup so great. The following comes about 3/4 of the way through the book, about the time it actually gets interesting for a while. He describes how he came up with his absurd comedic style:

"In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. ... What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgement that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. ...

"These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comedic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told when to laugh.

"To test my ideas, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: 'I'd like to open up with sort of a 'funny comedy bit.' This has really been a big one for me ... it's the one that put me where I am today. I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause]. And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it.' "I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds. Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, 'Thank you very much.' 'That's it?' they thought. Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit.

"Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. ... Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them. ... "My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh."

Most importantly, he mentions my hometown: "Bill had put me on the road, opening the show for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and I am grateful to them because they really didn't need me. We went everywhere. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there."


However, the writing through the first 3/4 of the book is soporific at times. For instance, in some stretches, so many of his sentences are loose (that is, they basically begin subject-predicate then add stuff to the end) that it lulls the reader (me) into a daze. To wit, here are the beginnings of consecutive sentences on the last page I read, page 59:

"The show consisted of..."

"I appeared in..."

"Fortunately, I ended up with..."

"The opening night was attended by..."

"The play was followed by...

later, on page 94-95, he adds dead "to be" verbs to the loose sentences to create Valium in print:

"The Trumbo house was..."

"The walls in the living room were..."

"I had never seen..."

"In the entry was..."

"In the dining room was..."

"There was..."

"These artists are..."

"Gropper's art depicted..."

Along with the weak syntax, Martin's editor failed to excise too many cliches. People are "rail thin," albums "break ground," surprised people are "saucer-eyed," clotheshorses are"dressed to kill," neophytes get "taken under the wing" of others, and sketchy comedy acts are "hit and miss"

If cliches aren't the problem, then maybe it's the redundancies that often result from a pileup of adjectives and adverbs:
"His sheepdog, an ecstatic, ball-chasing mop named Winston, dove repeatedly into the deep snowy banks to retrieve our enthusiastically thrown snowballs. Winston didn't seem to mind that they would vanish white on white, and he earnestly pursued the impossible, digging, digging, digging."
OR
"My mind was a blank. Blanker than blank. I was a tabula rasa. I put paper in the typewriter and impotently stared at it." Is the word "impotently" necessary there?

When Martin finds that his diction and syntax aren't injecting enough life into his writing, he moves too quickly to the exaggerated simile, such as:
"I bounded down the massive steps, waving the onionskin envelope aloft for Phil to see, as though it were the lost map of the Incas."
OR
"I lived in suburbia at a time when a one-hour drive to Los Angeles in my first great car...seemed like a trip across the continent in a Conestoga wagon."

I probably could have forgiven the lapses in writing if he was actually opening up and telling something deep, something real. But many times he simply elides the most important parts of the story. For instance, when describing a difficult breakup with a woman he truly loved, this is all we get: "painfully for me, we drifted apart." Is that it?

OK, so maybe he didn't want to get personal, but even when describing his career, when he gets a chance to tell us what really makes him tick, he gives us a rhetorical question instead of an answer: "Even though the idea of doing comedy had sounded risky when I compared it to the safety of doing trick after trick, I wanted, needed, to be called a comedian. I discovered it was not magic I was interested in but performing in general. Why?....My answer to the question is simple: Who wouldn't want to be in show business?" Is that it?

So, in the end, though it had some laughs, Born Standing Up was a pretty weak effort. Martin kept the story fairly surface level, so I think he ended up trying to punch it up with some middle school tricks. I would have liked to have seen what an attentive, demanding editor could have evoked from Martin.

The NYT Shows Its Cojones

The New York Times has added a new columnist--a conservative. No, this is not a weak token member of the opposition like Alan Colmes. Instead, the new columnist is heavyweight William Kristol, one of the leading lights of the conservative movement. Kristol is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel.



The New York Times is a liberal paper. But it is now also home to two of the most well-respected conservative writers alive: Kristol and David Brooks. This is great news, especially if it is a harbinger of future decisions by other news organizations.



The only hope we have for restoring a spirit of bipartisanship and unity in the U.S. is to learn again to listen to the opposing side. However, we live in a time when many people get all their news from virtual echo chambers, be they Air America or Fox News. Many of us can go months without hearing one opposing view--we can have all of our media tailored to our preformed ideas.



This is why I heartily applaud the Times' decision to include another conservative columnists in its liberal pages. Liberal readers will now be exposed more often to opposing views, and I hope this exposure will lead to a renewed dialogue in American politics.



Not long ago, we had such a thing as a Reagan Democrat. Today, I can't imagine such a beast. Polarization in politics has led to ossified, visceral opinions on each side--opinions that won't change, that can't change, because the holders of those opinions never hear the other side.



I hope this decision begins a procession of intermingling of right and left, of conservative and liberal, which can lead (imagine) to the two sides actually listening to each other.



And maybe now Fox News will start respectfully giving air time to liberals like Paul Krugman or E. J. Dionne. I eagerly await the imminent announcement.

His Year of Flops

The Onion's A.V. Club (a non-satirical pop culture site annexed to the satirical pop culture site) has had a running feature this year called "My Year of Flops," in which a writer watches 104 movies (two a week, for the calendrically challenged) that were deemed flops on their releases, and he determines whether the movie was a failure, fiasco or secret success. I can't really tell the difference between failure and fiasco, but I know they're different from secret success.

Anyway, the series ran a good article recently about Albert Brooks' last film, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World." I love Albert Brooks, but the reviews were atrocious, so I avoided the film. However, since the writer of the series, Nathan Rabin, pronounced the movie a secret success, I'll have to put it on my queue.

This week's flop is "Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction." Of course Rabin considers this movie a failure, but the joy in reading the review is gems like this:

The naughtiness continues as [Sharon] Stone vamps her way through an interview with shrinkologist David Morrissey, a young man with Liam Neeson’s bulky frame and the charisma of beige wallpaper. Stone stalks around Morrissey’s office like a heavily Botoxed panther in the midst of a steep, permanent professional free fall. Morrissey diagnoses Stone as a thrill-seeker with a “risk addiction,” which sounds like the cheesy subtitle for a lame erotic thriller because, well, it is the subtitle for a lame erotic thriller.

Later, Rabin adds this on Morrisey's talent.

Now I don’t want to suggest that Morrissey is not a dynamic performer, but I suspect that the producers could have replaced him halfway through shooting with a handsome mahogany coat rack and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

Find the latest installment of "My Year of Flops" here.

Simon Rich

Simon Rich is a very funny writer. I first heard of him after reading an article in The New Yorker in the "Shouts and Murmurs" section. Usually I don't find the section funny, but Rich's articles were clearly hilarious. They are made up of brief snippets like the one that follows: the premise is established in the title, then the piece briefly works through the premise.

Here is an excerpt from one of his pieces.

I. A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.

MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.

FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

MOM: Now everything is fine.

DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

MOM: There was a big sex.

FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

(Everybody laughs.)

MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?

ALL: Yes.

GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

Read the rest of the article here.

Check out his book, "Ant Farm," here.

One bad sentence, one good review

From a review of a new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson comes one of the worst sentences I've read in a long time. I know that the author of the review, John Updike, is a master prose stylist, one of the greatest American authors alive, but this sentence is confusing and terrible, and made worse because it sounds like it's trying so hard to impress.

Nor, herself a feminist symbol, though not a member of any feminist organization, did she neglect the cause of gender equality.

This sentence could be reworded ten different ways, each time making it clearer and less showy. To wit: "Though she was a feminist symbol who attended to the cause of gender equality, she did not belong to any feminist organization."

Other than this ugly sentence, the review is interesting, making the book, and the subject of the book, sound fascinating.

In 1927, she established a temple commissary that, as the Depression settled in, emerged as “one of the region’s most effective and inclusive welfare institutions.” According to Epstein:

When the schools stopped feeding children free lunches, Aimee took over the program. When city welfare agencies staggered under the load of beggars, the women of Angelus Temple sewed quilts and baked loaves of bread by the thousands. When bread lines stretched for city blocks . . . Angelus Temple was the only place anyone could get a meal, clothing, and blankets, no questions asked.

She brushed aside the distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor, and that between legal and illegal residents. One Mexican, the actor Anthony Quinn, who as a teen-ager acted as a translator for her, told an interviewer, “During the Depression . . . the one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson. All you had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and within an hour there’d be a food basket there for you. . . . She literally kept most of that Mexican community . . . alive.” In an era when anti-black racism was freely expressed, not least loudly by fundamentalist white Protestants, she persistently tried to make “interracial revival a reality at Angelus Temple,” bringing a series of black leaders to its pulpit and welcoming into the congregation poor Southern blacks who had recently immigrated to a Los Angeles of increasing racial tensions. The same week of the Detroit race riots, in June of 1943, McPherson publicly converted the notorious black former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson on the Temple stage, and embraced him “as he raised his hand in worship.”

Read the entire article here.