It’s the first day of classes in the second term for me, folks. Keep yourselves out of trouble. And remember: Aaaaaaaaaaa!

Source.

He Might Be Giant!

Woman wonders who’s your itchy friend?

Woman says I thought he was with you.

Woman says I though he was with you!

They slowly back away from him. 

At last, he’s very interesting

His brushes with success were just an accident.

No one likes New Hampshire man.

detail from Carrie M. Becker's "Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse"

Via Susie at Suburban Guerilla, we learn of “Barbie Trashes Her Dream House” by artist Carrie M. Becker.  Be sure to click the previous link and marvel at the level of detail and layers of junk that Becker meticulously crafted, including an extremely disgusting toilet in the Dream House bathroom.  (I’m only slightly ashamed that my office looks a bit like this detail, at right, only with many more books and many fewer cardboard file boxes.)  If you live in or near Witchita, you can go see the installation yourself in September 2012, when Becker takes hoarder Barbie to the Riney Fine Arts Center Gallery at Friends University.

Speaking of real life in miniature:  remember that miniseries about the Kennedys that was protested by Kennedy loyalists and then dropped by the History Channel?  I’ve watched 6 episodes so far, and it’s really quite entertaining.  I can’t speak to its historical accuracy on the fine points, as I’m not a modern U.S. political historian, but Greg Kinnear’s performance as John F. Kennedy is pretty good and rather sympathetic.  It looks like all of the men who play JFK’s inner circle–McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Bobby Kennedy, etc.–are having a blast playing dressup and Situation Room together.  Those of you who remember fondly The West Wing and 24 will appreciate the similar style of the script, cinematography, and musical score.

There appears to be nothing libelous in the movie–all of the less attractive stuff about the Kennedy family saga is very well-known and extensively documented:  Joe Kennedy’s history as a bootlegger and adulterer, his softness on Nazism, and his political ambitions for his sons; John Kennedy’s Addison’s Disease and orthopedic problems stemming from his war wounds; JFK’s other women.  If anything, the movie downplays JFK’s extramarital sex life inside the White House because (I think) it wants us to see Katie Holmes’s Jackie in a favorable light, and if it portrayed the full extent of the President’s priapism she’d look like too much of a victim for modern audiences to still like and respect.

The actors do their best to imitate the unique Kennedy diction.  All I can say is that their Kennedy accents are less annoying than most other attempts to mimic them.  If any of you have seen The Kennedys, I would welcome your opinions in the comments, especially those of you who can speak to its historical accuracy.

Finally, have any of you seen my watch?  It went missing two days ago, and I can’t tell you how out of synch I’ve been ever since.  Maybe I should mow that pile of crap off of my desk, and see what turns up.

The Violent Femmes, from sometime in the 80s, judging by the cut of the trousers, the wife-beater tees, and the style of Gordon Gano’s dress.

It’s a space race Cold War holiday season!  In Russian and English.

Russian cards from here.  Anyone for some Space Food Sticks and Tang?

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter Z.  Before the era of big game hunting in Africa gave us Z for Zebra, a “zany” was frequently used to illustrate or exemplify the use of the letter Z in children’s alphabet primers.  This beautiful colored illustration is from The Child’s Colored Gift Book, with one hundred illustrations (London and New York:  George Routledge and Sons), by Edward and George Dalziel.  I found this image originally at Eek She Cried, but you can see the whole book with two different illustrated children’s alphabets, and more, at Archive.org.  Isn’t it just perfect (for American political history purposes) that it’s riding one exasperated-looking ass? 

Z for Zany was probably more common in eighteenth century alphabets.  Is that where Mitt Romney hails from, the eighteenth century?  It’s not just that he has no apparent command of modern political invective, and he’s now running against the master of modern political invective.  Every time he opens his mouth, he seems to confirm that he really isn’t of our time, place, or planet. 

Mike Huckabee must be kicking himself that he didn’t run.  A conservative populist like Huck–think Pat Buchanan minus the racism–could potentially mop the floor with Barack Obama next year, but all the Republicans have got at this point is the chilly and profoundly strange Romney, and the bloviating fool Newt Gingrich.

This is not a post about plagiarism. (But it could be, depending on what I find in my exams!)

What struck me about this melee is the nakedly racial ressentiment of Vendler’s critique.  (Vendler is a white Harvard professor of poetry, Dove is a black poet and scholar at the University of Virginia.)  Although Vendler doesn’t say so, she is a Wallace Stevens scholar, and she’s apparently outraged that Dove’s choices meant that Stevens must share space in this volume with unworthy “multicultural” poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and others of the Black Arts movement.  Here’s Vendler:

Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches.

What is this, a flashback to 1988 and the Western Front of the Culture Wars:  Battle of the Poetry Canon?

And, it’s just comical when a Harvard University professor wonders where the American poetry ”establishment” might be, and mocks the concept of an “establishment” in her comments on Dove’s analysis of the Black Arts movement:

We’re back to that “poetry establishment” again. The members (whoever they are) of this so-called “establishment” “entrench” themselves (as in a war) and, implicitly racist, appear “whitewashed” like the “whited sepulchres” denounced by Jesus. How is it that Dove, a Presidential Scholar in high school, a summa graduate from college, holder of a Fulbright, and herself long rewarded by recognition of all sorts, can write of American society in such rudimentary terms?

We pulled you off the plantation and let you into the “establishment,” Rita Dove!  Apparently, it’s like Fight Club:  The first rule of the “establishment” is you do not talk about the “establishment!”  Rita Dove is a very bad, very unworthy ingrate, isn’t she?  What a disobedient daughter!  What an undeserving recipient of establishment largess!  Dove, in her reply, comments on how racially reductive is Vendler’s analysis:

It is astounding to me how utterly Vendler misreads my critical assessment of the Black Arts Movement, construing my straightforward account of their defiant manifesto as endorsement of their tactics; she ignores a substantial critical paragraph in which I decry the fallout from the movement (“Against such clamor and thunder, introspective black poets had little chance to assert themselves and were swept under the steamroller,” I write in my introduction) and instead focuses on that handy whipping boy, Amiri Baraka, plucking passages from his historically seminal poem “Black Art” in which he denigrated Jews, thereby slyly, even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies. Smear by association…sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth. (I could argue equal opportunity offensiveness by having printed Hart Crane’s “A liquid theme that floating niggers swell”—but perhaps that makes me racist as well.)

In the same breath, Vendler—no slouch when it comes to lumping poets together by race—makes quick work of dismembering Gwendolyn Brooks, dismissing my description of Brooks’s “richly innovative” early poems as “hyperbole,” perhaps because I dared to compare those poems to “the best male poets of any race.” Evidently the 1950 Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Ms. Brooks to award her the prize in poetry, at a time when there was little talk of diversity in America and the expression “multiculturalism” had yet to enter the public discourse. Analogous praise today, however, amounts in Dame Vendler’s eyes to nothing but “hype.”

(Full disclosure:  I was alerted to this smackdown by a close relation of Dove’s.)

I’m sure that anthologists of twentieth-century poetry in the middle and at the end of the twenty-first century will make different choices than Dove made.  I’m sure that an anthology of nineteenth-century American literature published in, say, 1911, would have been quite different from one published at the end of the twentieth century.  Dove freely admits that she aimed for breadth over depth in her effort to anthologize the twentieth century, but maybe that’s part of the reason for Vendler’s evident pique.  Vendler responds to Dove’s anthology as though Dove is proclaiming once and for all that she has compiled a definitive statement on Literary Truth and Beauty, whereas Dove herself is much more modest about what she can possibly accomplish barely a decade after the close of the twentieth century:

“From [Dove’s] choices no principle of selection emerges,” Vendler grouses, and at last we arrive at the crux of her predisposition: in her system, an anthologist must have an agenda and is expected to drive that agenda home, sidelining her enemies and promoting her preferences with no attempt at impartial judgment. Actually, I am proud that no principle of selection emerges. My criterion was simple: choose significant poems of literary merit. That these poems happen to illuminate the times in which they were crafted should come as no surprise; that the stories they tell of the twentieth century have many intersections and complementary trajectories is fortuitous, a result of having been forged by and reacting to shared sensibilities.

Dove’s goals seem to me more about providing a collection of useful primary sources for literary historians of the future to sift through and analyze.  That doesn’t strike me as a bad way to go about compiling an anthology so soon after the closing date of the twentieth century, but then, I’m a historian and neither a poet nor a literary scholar.  What do the poets and literary scholars among you have to say?

Here’s yet another melancholy Christmas song that loses a lot when it’s wrested from its context in the film, White Christmas (1954). The first rendition of the song in that movie takes place as part of a Christmas celebration in France in 1944, as the gathered troops wonder when (or if) they’ll ever again take part in family holiday celebrations. Much like Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), it’s really a three-hanky operation (and right at the start of the movie!), not at all a happy, light, and cheery little number.

We missed seeing White Christmas again last weekend, but today we’ll make it to the showing of A Christmas Story at our local retro-movie house. Bring the whole family, patronize the bar, and tip your servers generously!

I particularly enjoy the scenes in Ralphie’s school and among his peers there. Although I think I went to elementary schools at least 30 years later, there are remarkable continuities about the sociology and dynamics of third grade, from the 1940s to the 1970s and even into the 2010s. (Ralphie would never be terrorized by Scott Farkus today–he’d be delivered to school in an SUV or a minivan with heated seats instead of walking to school. But then, he’d never have the opportunity to take revenge on Farkus either.)