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Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
Before Facebook, there were facebooks. When I was in college, “the facebook” was one name for the (ink and paper) Pomona student handbook’s most-perused section, the photo directory of incoming freshman. Other designations were the lookbook and, more crudely but most aptly, the menu. Plenty of schools had them and many also called them the facebook. Facebook corporate mythology has it that founder Mark Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook from the facebook issued by his high school alma mater, Phillips-Exeter. In any case, this kind of directory is surely what the company was named after.
Presumably, college students don’t need facebooks anymore because they have Facebook. I doubt they’ve been totally phased out, but I do wonder if they are still colloquially referred to as facebooks. Wouldn’t that be too confusing?
There are plenty of cases when a brand name became the de-facto generic name for something, like Kleenex or Coke (at least here in Atlanta) or Oreo. But this is a different phenomenon, wherein the brand name takes a generic thing’s name and applies it to a new form of that thing, thereby making the generic name and thing obsolete.
My father frequently uses the construction “all a-twitter.” Twitter is, after all, a verb meaning to make successive chirping noises (hence the Twitter bird icon) or to tremble with excitement (my dad’s usage is somewhat of an amalgam). Surely, much as people don’t say “gay” to mean “happy” anymore, uses of the generic verb twitter–when not in reference to micro-blogging–will diminish to nothing. But this still isn’t as extreme as the Facebook example, in that people are no less happy for not being called gay, and birds cheep no less for not being described as twittering, whereas colleges really might stop printing their own facebooks now that there is one big Facebook.
I’d love to hear if anyone can think of any other examples of this phenomenon, especially older examples–or was Facebook the first to murder its forebears?
Image by Nik McCue, via ESPN
On Tuesday, I took a walk along the beach in Perdido Key, Florida, where my parents have a condo. It is my favorite place. The sand is white and cool even in summer; the water is clear and, since the Gulf is shallow, it gets warm enough to swim comfortably by late spring. The condo itself, six stories up, wrapped with balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows, is consolation for my parents’ selling the much-beloved house I grew up in (for far more than they paid sixteen years earlier, to people who razed it except for the chimney and put a McMansion in its place).
This is the part of Florida known as the Redneck Riviera. A mile down the road from us is the Flora-Bama Lounge, where donated bras crowd clotheslines across the ceiling and where you can play the LobsterZone (like those games where you grab for a plush toy with a metal claw, except instead of toys there are live lobsters). On nights when we don’t feel like cooking, we choose between the Crab Trap and the Shrimp Bucket. I usually opt for some kind of fried seafood–gulf shrimp, gulf oysters–with an appetizer of fried (blue) crab claws, a dish that I’ve never seen outside of the Florida/Alabama gulf area. Much more so than in Atlanta, where I’m from, there is truly a local cuisine in those environs. Smoked tuna dip. And the famed Royal Red shrimp — a lobster-like variety that swim through our waters for only a very short period during the year. Add some slaw and hushpuppies, plenty of tartar and cocktail sauce, maybe some new potatoes or sweet corn, and you’ve got a proper panhandle supper.
So I was on this walk. Nothing was different yet. A hermit crab grumped along the edge of the water in his chickpea-sized trumpet shell of a home. Gulls did their dive-bombing and toddler-with-food stalking. A great blue heron strutted around looking typically elegant and above it all. A (human) couple waded to hip-depth and canoodled, aware that being in water is the international PDA carte blanche. READ MORE >
Best food writing award goes to Zach Golden and Russ Phillips for their website, What the Fuck Should I Make for Dinner. Seems to be new every time it is refreshed. Via Natalie Lyalin.
In 1983-1984, while writing Cigarettes, Harry Mathews followed Stendhal’s dictum of writing “twenty lines a day, genius or not.” In 1988, Dalkey Archive published the notebook of all of Mathew’s daily 20 lines. Lots is genius. Here are 20 bits (though I will note that the real pleasure is in the accrual of the bits in daily sections and in the whole project, so if you like the bits then just think!):
No matter how much one loves sunshine, its assault here on the eyes and skin makes shade delectable. One knows one’s tan will have more fuel than it can use.
…even if the air was cluttered with social smells and substances.
Or should one aim at portraying objects that are perpetually in flux or, better, that are transformed by our very description of them, like this page?
…but even if the basis of simile is continuity, to compare wobbly daffodils to invisibly moving stars is like comparing white bunny tails to snowy mountain peaks. So let’s do that.
…how to manage disagreeable emotions by scheduling them…
‘Nothing will ever be the same,’ except oneself, and who wants to rely on that pathetic little monster?
Do I now run errands to make the outdoors safe? Why does buying things, especially ones that are relatively expensive, calm me so extraordinarily?
But watch out: ‘fragmented, exciting’ mustn’t become an excuse for getting less done.
Every morning–early every morning–I’ll set aside ten minutes and concentrate exclusively on feeling anxious about sitting down to write. The most rudimentary sense of absurdity should get me going by minute number three.
Yesterday, I wrote about my unwavering belief in the power of a serious engagement with the aesthetic to bring us closer to, as Sontag says, “a fuller humanity.” The comments on the post, especially regarding my claim that this is not a privileged position because all humans need beauty (in its most expansive, heart-changing sense), led me to think that I needed to back up the claim a little more.
Four years ago, brilliant anthropologist Laura Jones and I decided that we wanted to do something to contribute to the recovery of New Orleans, a city dear to both of us.
We secured funding from Rice University to launch the Katrina Writing Project. Then we partnered with a charter school whose students were doing summer internships related to Katrina relief. During the summer, we taught the students to write personal essays about their Katrina experiences, which we then collected, published, and distributed to educators worldwide. You can download the collection here for free.
From this experience originate my beliefs about the vitalness of art in a broken world.
Our students had endured unthinkable tragedy and cruelty.
Dudley Grady’s family was turned away from a hotel only to see a white family check in moments later.
Josef Pons and his family were put on a plane. He writes, “The thing was, we didn’t know we were going to Arizona until we were in the air.”
Donnanice Newman writes, “When I finally got up, I noticed that my family was praying that the rest of our family was safe. I saw a policeman, and I asked him about New Orleans East. The policeman was talking about something that I kinda didn’t understand. But he finally said, “Baby, there ain’t no East.”
The alienation and separation of evacuation caused Anitra Matlock and her girlfriend to break up. Meanwhile, as she writes, “After the storm, random people felt that they needed to tell me why Katrina happened. The most memorable of reasons was that God sent the storm to cleanse the city of its homosexuals and sinners. If ever I needed to cry, it would be when I heard this, and when I saw my home.”
I’ve put my favorite Susan Sontag quotation in comment fields here, but I’m going to recall it again:
And the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot, I venture to say, be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness. Indeed, the various definitions of beauty come at least as close to a plausible characterization of virtue, and of a fuller humanity, as the attempts to define goodness as such.
I believe this with every bit of me. And I am completely convinced that, as egregiously privileged as I am, this is not a privileged position. Susan Sontag had radical left politics, but she put the aesthetic first. She’s a lot smarter than me, but I’m still going to try to make some sense of that position here.
Politics are terminal. They are finite. We might say we are interested in raising questions when we talk about gender or race or other categories that are defined and upheld by politics. But politics is really about finding answers. This has its place, but its place is not in art.
Artists know that finding real answers is not possible in this world. The failure of politics to recognize this fact is why the lasting thing from any culture has been its expression. Desperate people turn to story, turn to verse, performance, art. When nothing is assured, when help doesn’t come, when standards aren’t met and good people suffer, the only thing left is to confront mystery, to confront tragedy and eternity.
The aesthetic means simply the representation of all this mystery, tragedy, eternity without the dissembling claim of wrapping them up neatly. Keying into the aesthetic instead of the political in a work of art is about asking what choices of form the art-maker made to best help the audience to access the mystery, the eternity. To help the audience feel human.
Thanks to a tip from brilliant anthropologist Laura Jones, I found out about this thing called the Sorted Books Project, wherein the artist Nina Karchadourian has, since 1993, made these lovely little collage poems out of book spines from libraries and private collections. You read the titles in order to get the full text. Below, some of my favorites. On the site itself, you can click through any picture to get more images of collages made from the same collection.
Apparently something about the Restoration, after all the Charleses and Jameses and Cromwells and who is Catholic and who is Anglican or Puritan, got poets to thinking about the whole versus the part, w/r/t criticism. Thus John Dryden, who was politically moderate but eventually found he had some inclinations toward Rome, on critics who “think this or that expression in Homer, Virgil, Tasso, or Milton’s Paradise to be far too strained”:
Tis true there are limits to be set betwixt the boldness and rashness of a poet; but he must understand those limits who pretends to judge as well as he who undertakes to write: and he who has no liking to the whole ought, in reason, to be excluded from censuring of the parts. (from “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Heroic License,” 1677)
This seems a good rule. I perhaps unfashionably quite enjoy reading good criticism for its own sake, and I believe a person can display a purely critical genius, though their work ought to follow Wilde’s dictum of being a creative act in its own right. I think, here, that Dryden makes a key distinction. He is taking to task critics who profess no taste for any muscular poetry, for the “the hardest metaphors and the strongest hyperboles,” and who then critique individual works of heroic verse that by definition display that muscularity, hardness, and strength.
Check out the new issue of Guernica, guest edited by Brenda Wineapple, who selected three lovely essays all by women. In a collagistic tour-de-force called “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nonfiction czarista Sara Faye Lieber* reminds us that the bugs–bedbugs–are very real, and they pose a threat to nothing so much as–get this–our books. Find out why, and much else besides, in the essay.
You’ll also find out why I did not choose a close-up photo of a bedbug, and why even the one I selected is probably still an irresponsible choice, if less so.
You’ll also find out what else bedbugs can destroy.
You’ll also find out that you can’t wait to read the book that Sara is working on.
*Full disclosure: Sara is my friend. A big part of the reason I made her my friend in the first place was because she told these hilarious stories about her experience with bedbugs.
PINK AND HOT PINK HABITAT
Thursday and Friday are Sethdays in Natalie Lyalin Week. Today we have poet and frozen vegetable czar Seth Parker, editor of SKEIN, serving up his prophetic ghost vision of Natalie’s poetry. Plus, Seth reminds us: You can buy Natalie Lyalin’s first book of poems, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books) now. Check out her unbelievable journal, GlitterPony, online, and see her read her work at Divine Magnet.
GET OUT OF HERE, GHOST
All these days were real. Before hunting season
we met on the courts, in manicured gardens,
next to man-made water. This whole time I
was deep sleeping. I was packing the dirt in
and being happy. Looking inside a python I saw
two tracts of digestion. Outside. Outside is
an obvious danger. Gun and killer kind. At
night they come in and we battle them back
out. Get out of here. Get going with your
pitchforks. In wedding season we talk
colors. We talk delicate and scalloped.
How it is only human to have the fontanel.
Yes, make an ancient signal to carry over
all the side of the ocean. If no, send creepy
letters to your most annoying friends. Be
a mistress, or a lost sister coming back.