LUDIC LIVE

Note:  due to some ingredient acquisition issues, the Sandwich Century project is going to go off-book as far as alphabetic order for a week or so.  We’ll try and set things right by the next entry.

There are certain things that come to possess an iconic status not because of any inherent superior qualities they possess, but because they just seem right.  Their form, function or whatever seems to us to contain the elements that the ding of which it is a sich is supposed to have, and thus it becomes more than a specific example of whatever thing is under discussion:  it becomes a Platonic ideal.  It becomes a shorthand symbol for an idealized icon.  The martini (or more specifically, the cocktail glass into which it is poured) is our ideal of ‘alcoholic drink’; the floppy disc is a universal symbol of computing, even if it’s no longer used as a storage medium.  The sandwich is the symbol of food.  And the bologna sandwich is the symbol of the sandwich.

It’s so basic that it’s almost invisible, but it’s truly an iconic symbol of sandwichosity, the perfect expression of what the Earl of Sandwich was trying to do when he stuck some meat and cheese between two slices of bread so he could carry on being a degenerate gambler.  It’s the meal that launched a billion lunchtimes.  That hard-hat sitting on a beam with the Manhattan skyline behind him, pulling his lunch out of a metal pail in a thousand New Yorker cartoons?  He’s about to eat a bologna sandwich.  It’s what’s stuck under the sound board in the opening credits of the early seasons of SCTV, proving its international appeal.  It’s cheap and simple, but in a working-class, all-American way:  if you’re impoverished and jobless, the stereotype has you eating ramen noodles.  But if you’re just a working stiff doing an honest day’s work, you eat a bologna sandwich.  And you do it with pride.

THE SANDWICH: Bologna.  Cheese.  Some kind of dressing.  What do you want, a road map?  It’s a sandwich you can make in under a minute, with two and a half kids clamoring at your feet as the yellow school bus pulls up to the curb.  Some people get all fancy and cut off the crusts, but if any sandwich resists all attempts to glamorize it, it’s the bumoney-and-cheese.  It’s more than just comfort food; it’s food, period.

THE INGREDIENTS: Two slices of white bread, one slice of cheddar (my one gesture towards gourmanity; it’s probably more apt to use the chemical abnormality known as ‘American’ cheese, but I think of that as being more of a building material than a food, as we will explore in later entries), and, depending on how hungry you are, three to five slices of bologna.  (Replacing the bologna with mortadella or the like is a sure sign that one is approaching this sandwich with entirely the wrong spirit.)  No toasting, no baking, no prep.  I layer the cheese at an angle to the bread for aesthetic reasons, but this is just frippery on my part.  Most times, this sandwich would call for mayonnaise, but I opted instead for Woeber’s Sandwich Pal, a venerable spread not unlike McDonald’s ‘secret sauce’.  It’s a tad more flavorful without being pretentious, and come on:  Sandwich Pal.  It just wants to be friends.

THE TASTE TEST: Okay, well, here’s where we have to turn off the faucet to all the grandiose talk of patriotism and Aristotelian ideals.  It’s just a fucking baloney sandwich, folks, it’s not going to win any James Beard awards.  I’m sure it would seem like manna if you’ve just returned from the Bataan Death March, but otherwise, this is functionality with a capital funk.  Even if you use quality ingredients, it reduces lunch to an extremely utilitarian exercise.  It tastes…practical.  There’s a reason that nobody has ever founded a successful fast food restaurant franchise based on the bologna sandwich.  Its charms lie in its simplicity, its serviceability, and its ease of use, but ask around and see when was the last time one of your friends craved one.

Key Largo, as can be sniffed out from its somewhat stagey, cramped qualities, had its origins as a stage play.  It bears little resemblance to the original product — a bit of a surprise since Maxwell Anderson was, at the time, an extremely popular playwright and a go-to source for Hollywood — but it still comes across as a movie that had its origins on the hardwood.  As a result, like a lot of movies that began in the modern theater, it really ends up relying on the success of its stunt casting.  As far as the leads go, there’s not much to complain about; it’s the final pairing of married couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and may be their best-known team-up.  If the logistics of the team-up don’t make any sense (leaving aside the age difference between the two, Bacall plays the daughter-in-law of Lionel Barrymore, who was running down his 70th year at the time), the charisma more than makes up for it.  The awkward plot mechanics that got in the way of their smoldering back-and-forth in Dark Passage are gone, and if they aren’t as powerfully connected as they were in The Big Sleep, they’re at least on the same level as To Have and Have Not (from which book Key Largo‘s ending was cribbed).

With those two stalwarts holding things down, it’s the supporting performances that can make or break a movie like this, especially when its plot (here, a cynical war vet engages in a battle of wills with an exiled gangster during a hurricane) is a tad shaky.  Getting the bad news out of the way first would entail ignoring most of what comes out of Barrymore’s mouth:  not only is it overblown moralizing that is completely unnecessary to establish the unsavory character of the film’s villain, but it’s delivered by Barrymore, always an overly theatrical actor, in the manner of a Virginia ham that’s been hooked up to a hot air pump.  Even his one killer scene, where he spooks the mobsters with a tale of the massive devastation wrought by the 1935 Matacumbe hurricane, could easily have been handed to someone else to spare audiences his woozy delivery.  Every other scene he’s in is either gummy hero-worship of Bogart, phony tough-guy talk to Edward G. Robinson, or general why-won’t-the-lord-take-me hand-wringing that makes you actively wish for his demise.

Happily, though, almost everyone else is hands-down terrific, which no doubt accounts for its justified reputation as ace noir mood piece.  Edward G. Robinson, now past his headlining years, has had time to really grow into the role of the sneering, hateful, contemptuous Johnny Rocco.  Exiled to Cuba after a federal case, he grinds his teeth in angry disbelief at how he’s been treated:  “An undesirable alien!  Me!  Johnny Rocco!  Like I was a dirty red or something!”  In his lowest moments, he is called on to be afraid, but they only work because in his highest ones, he seems like a giant confined to a squat little body.  He drips with scorn for the two-bit lawmen who threaten him, and his cruelty to his drunken, degraded moll may be the key that unlocks his downfall, but it’s also one of the most stone-cold evil moments in noir history, the act of a man who positively will have everything his way, even if it’s a completely pointless gesture of cruelty.  That moll, of course, is played by Claire Trevor, one of the greatest actresses of the genre, and she collected a well-deserved Oscar for her performance as Gaye Dawn.  When we first meet her, she’s a friendly, blowsy barfly, the only one of the gang with a kind word for Bogart, happily spouting forth her system for betting on the horses; but we soon learn that, like a lot of alcoholics, she stays drunk all the time because it’s the only way to forget how deeply unhappy she is.  Her shattered a capella rendition of “Moanin’ Low” is the nadir of her misery, and though it’s the most famous scene in the movie, it’s also terribly hard to watch, even today, in the era of humiliation as comedy.  Character actor Thomas Gomez is enjoyably oily and nasty as one of Rocco’s flunkies, and future Tonto actor Jay Silverheels shows up as one of a pair of outlaw Native American brothers.

John Huston directed Key Largo in a rush, and there are times that it shows, particularly in the still-stagey setups and the restrictions of setting up shots on a hastily assembled soundstage.  But he’d long before proven adept at using tight shots to add depth and flavor to his characters, and he does so here; it’s not his best-directed film, but few filmmakers could have done better under the circumstances.  His screenplay, which won him a WGA nomination along with collaborator Richard Brooks, usually fumbles where it remains closer to the source material and soars where it departs.  There’s some truly memorable lines — Bogart suggesting that Robinson pull his gun on the hurricane has always been a favorite of mine — and while the movie has what at first seems to be a ‘happy’ ending, it’s really more morally complex than it appears.  In the play, Bogart’s character is a Spanish Civil War vet, and he dies at the end; here, he’s a WWII major, and he lives.  But it doesn’t deliver that alteration in the form of a predictable happy ending.  The movie’s Frank McCloud is deeply distrustful of people and fed up with blood from his experiences from the war; he’s a former idealist who’s disgusted by the way the promise of FDR’s New Deal has soured into crime and corruption.  He’s repulsed by users like Rocco, but his wartime experiences — which he sugarcoats out of kindness towards Bacall and Barrymore — have poisoned his soul.  And when he triumphs over Rocco’s gang, it’s by murdering them one by one.  The lesson that violence can defeat evil is reinforced, but it’s that very lesson that turned McCloud into the dead-eyed cynic he was when the movie began.  He’s won; he’s once again a hero — to everyone but himself.

Humans are the only animals that can make metaphors or moral judgments.  Unfortunately, we make far too few of the former and far too many of the latter.  The appealing thing about placing social problems in a moral context is that it allows you to start ignoring the problem; if things like poverty, AIDS, obesity, homelessness, or unemployment are simply a matter of other peoples’ bad behavior, after all, it’s nothing you have to worry about.  You can, in one quick assumption of a moral pose, transmogrify real social ills like crime, drug addiction, or educational deficiencies from a complex problem that must be dealt with by everyone to a mere manifestation of bad behavior that can be addressed by simply punishing the identified wrongdoer, or at least not rewarding them with any kind of assistance.

This sort of thing is especially popular nowadays when budgets are tight and we need every penny to pay for things like bank bail-outs, anti-anti-missile missile missiles, and the last couple of wars.  Sadly, since moral judgments of this sort are usually completely unsupportable by anything resembling reason, we back up the argument truck and load in a few metaphors, usually drawn from the instructive world of nature.   This is all well and good as long as you don’t mind that the metaphors are complete gibberish, as was one I happened to hear this afternoon on my local public radio station.  On an allegedly scientific program discussing our current obesity ‘epdemic’, one public health expert — a young man who had completely rejected another guest’s many suggestions that environmental and social factors, er, weighed heavy in the fattening of America — pointed out that only humans have an obesity problem, and that you never see a fat animal.

I love moral arguments backed up by nature-centered analogies, because they almost always illustrate how people are so concerned with making the moral point that the natural analogy utterly ignores the bountiful evidence provided by nature.  Anyone who has never seen a fat animal has probably never seen an animal at all.  There is an obesity problem amongst house pets almost as severe as the one amongst humans in America, because we tend to overfeed our dogs and cats on unhealthy junk as much as we tend to overfeed ourselves on same.  The huge and enormously profitable meat industry thrives on making animals fat; cows, chickens, pigs (especially) and any other animal humans eat are routinely overfed so as to yield more meat.  And while the conditions on factory farms are certainly inhuman, one scarcely needs to force an animal to overeat; most animals, with their instincts attuned to the possibility of deprivation, will eat as much as they are allowed to eat in anticipation of a time when there is no food.  And once acquired, overeating becomes a habit in animals just as it does in humans.

One doesn’t even need to use these examples, where animals are deliberately overfed by humans, to prove the point.  Fat animals are common in nature:  there are fat raccoons, fat squirrels, fat chipmunks, fat rats, and fat pigeons.  Any animals who live near humans and the vast amount of food waste we produce are prone to getting hold of our food, and, again, with a mind towards staving off starvation in lean times, will overeat like mad of their own volition.  Placed in a situation where food is plentiful, and where their own survival does not depend on being quick and strong — placed, in other words, in the same environmental conditions under which most first-world humans live — any animal can, and does, get very fat very quickly.  It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with morality, or even that nebulous concept ‘choice’; it’s a completely natural response to a major change in environmental conditions.  That doesn’t mean obesity isn’t a problem; it’s just not one that’s going to respond to scolding.

(You used to hear the argument much more often that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’ because it didn’t occur in the animal world.  This lasted about as long as it took zoologists to point out that in the animal world, and especially amongst man’s closest relatives, the higher primates, homosexual behavior is tediously common.  Strangely, though, this is rarely used as a defense by gay rights advocates; whether it’s because they’re trying to sell the idea that homosexuality is an inborn and exclusive trait — that is, that people are born gay, and that they are born just gay — or whether they simply don’t want to be associated with the crass behavior of chimps, it is not for me to say.)

One is reminded of the frequent argument that Americans (due, presumably, to their combination of laziness and gluttony) have somehow contrived to become the fattest people on Earth consecutive to being the wealthiest people on Earth.  It’s a compelling argument — so much so that no one really bothers to check if it’s true.  Were they to do so, they would learn that the fattest people on earth are, in fact, the men and women of Papua New Guinea, a country where the majority of the population still live under tribal conditions on the equivalent of less than two U.S. dollars per day.  We are indeed lucky to have so many latter-day Aristotles, pronouncing as fact what they have deduced by argument, with none of the tedious and time-consuming bother of actually testing to see if it’s true.

I want to like Stephen King.  I really, really do.

He’s undeniably an important writer, at least insofar as he’s written a ton of books that have sold enormously well, and become virtually synonymous with “contemporary American novelist”.  He’s managed to remain successful even in a terrible downtime for fiction, and even if you’re a detractor, those sales numbers cannot be ignored.  But sales numbers aside, he’s got a lot of respectable, even admirable qualities:  he’s prolific, hard-working and intelligent; he’s generous, politically involved, and very active in a number of worthwhile causes; he tries his best to be socially relevant, which is a positive trait even when it doesn’t pan out; and he seems like a very decent person who it would be worthwhile to know in private life.  He’s an advocate of literacy, and he’s got a lot of opinions about writing — some of them are even good ones, although I often wish he’d follow his own advice, or better yet, the advice of others.  Still, many writers are more attuned to the faults of others than they are their own, and I am certainly no exception, so I can’t throw stones in that regard.

Notice, though, that I haven’t said much about King as a writer.  That’s no coincidence. It’s not that there’s nothing to say about him in terms of his literary talents:  he’s very creative, he’s done a lot to make genre fiction more respectable, and, as we’ll get to in a moment, he demonstrates a mastery of one particular aspect of writing that is astonishing, even unparalleled in the world today.  It’s just that his shortcomings so outweigh his strengths that it’s easy to become frustrated with his books, to the degree that I’ve begun to wonder if he’s so successful these days that no one even bothers to edit his material.  I re-approach his work every half-decade or so just to see if I’m missing something vital — a tendency I often indulge with popular art that doesn’t immediately appeal to me — and so I just finished his most recent major novel, Under the Dome.  Again:  I wanted to like it.  I really, really did.  I’ve liked King before, if never truly loved him (‘Salem’s Lot, Carrie and a number of his short stories are favorite examples of making the most out of genre), and The Stand comes very close to greatness.  But Under the Dome is so full of clunky moments, so shabbily put together, so totally indulgent of King’s worst tendencies as a writer that I question how anyone can call it a good book.

I’m not going to bother going into much detail about the book — there are a million sites that will do that for you.  (I’ll also refrain from doing as some critics did and pointing out that the basic plot — a small town becomes trapped under a mysterious and impenetrable force field — has been done before.  Originality of idea is hugely overrated.  It’s originality of execution that is wanted.)  Instead, I want to talk about what King does well, and what he does badly, and why I think these things matter to his overall reputation.  First, let’s discuss what he does well — what he does, in fact, so incredibly well that I think it’s probably blinded people to how poorly he does just about everything else.  Stephen King knows how to keep a story moving.  Once the mechanics of his plots, however rickety, get moving, they never stop, and the effect is to create an illusion of constant motion, even when nothing is really happening.  His stuff pops.  He is, to get all literary, an undisputed master at creating what Roland Barthes termed the proairetic sequence — the combination of actions and sequences that give a narrative drive, and create in the reader an almost physical need to find out what happens next.  King is quite aware of his gifts in this area:  in Misery, his authorial stand-in discusses the “gotta”, the quality that turns a book into a page-turner and makes the reader stay up into the night because he’s gotta see where the story is going.  He would likely reject the intellectual framing — King is no fan of post-structuralism or literary theory in general — but he is nonetheless precisely describing the proairetic code, at which he is staggeringly adept.

The thing is, though, the proairetic sequence is not enough.  It’s valuable; it’s perhaps even of paramount importance.  But if it’s all you have, your work is incomplete and flawed.  Do you know what art form is the most accomplished at creating proairetic sequences, at hooking its readers so that they compulsively return to the text to see what happens next?  The soap opera.  And there’s a good reason nobody claims the title of high art, or even good art, for soap operas:  because creating these sequences, these little scenarios of build-up and revelation, are all they can do.  They lack almost every other quality of great fiction.  And while it hasn’t always been this way, so, too, do the novels of Stephen King.  One of the reasons he might want readers to rush through a thousand-page book is so they don’t notice what’s missing.

And what’s missing in Under the Dome?  Almost everything.  Let’s start with style:  Raymond Chandler, who knew a few things about it, called style the single most important investment a writer could make with his time.  But Stephen King — perhaps the most well-known writer in the world today — doesn’t have a style.  One could not reproduce him stylistically, because he does not have a stylistic signature.  Everything about his books is plot, plot, plot, but he never approaches a sentence as something beautiful, something to be crafted and loved.  Try and quote a line from a Stephen King novel; your memory will betray you, since he does not write sentences that are memorable.  He can turn in respectable dialogue, but it is almost entirely functional, a product of the massive amounts of exposition his plot-heavy novels require.  Instead of style, King has tics and tendencies.  Where other writers produce work that can be identified by its unique flavor, King simply shows off his range of tics:  a tedious belief in the deep moral character of dogs.  A love of corny regionalism and hokey as-my-old-granny-used-to-say phrases.  A love of heroes who are writers and villains who are popular teenagers.  (Under the Dome is a particularly heinous example of this one; Big Jim’s fascist police force is filled with callow, dumb jocks for no apparent reason than King has never gotten over his 50-year-old loathing of the type.)  An addiction to citing name brands.  And, for all his massive investment in plot, an inability to avoid freshman plotting mistakes.

This is perhaps the most striking element of King’s writerly qualities:  he’s (correctly) highly praised for his ability to string together action sequences in the semblance of a plot, but he gets away with sloppy construction that an 11th grader would be taken to task for.  He’s worse at ending his stories than that other Big Steve, Spielberg; he rivals M. Night Shyamalan in his ability to throw an out-of-nowhere plot development into the latter part of a story, completely defusing all the conflict that came before; and he’s developed a gift for the anticlimax that’s downright staggering.  The Stand at least earned its apocalyptic non-confrontation between good and evil; the ending of the massively overhyped Dark Tower saga was simply pitiful, with a final showdown that would have seemed weak and inconsequential in the first book of the series, but in the last, was tantamount to an insult.  And in Under the Dome, we learn nothing about the origins of the force field until well past halfway through the book, and then we learn almost nothing more for the duration.  The ending is, essentially, a major character convincing an alien that humans are people too, at which point the completely unexplored extraterrestrial turns it off and goes away.  I exaggerate not even a little, and after a thousand pages, if you’re not feeling ripped off by that ending, I wonder what other joys you get out of reading.

That King populates his stories with nothing but plot, and then makes the plots clangingly dumb, rushed and incomplete makes his other sins seem less dire, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  The stories are frequently utterly implausible, not because of the supernatural elements, but because the characters don’t behave in any recognizably human way (Big Jim’s degeneration into a small-town Hitler makes no sense in light of the fact that it plays out in front of the whole world with massive media attention; it would have been much more sensible if communication with the outside had been cut off, especially since that communication plays no other worthwhile part in the story).  He’s never been good at listening to the way people really talk, and that only gets worse as he gets older (the scenes between Joe McClatchy and his friends are unbelievably embarrassing as representations of the way actual adolescents converse).  He’s created a handful of memorable characters, most of them villains, but the only time I find myself re-reading his books is to look up characters’ names, because I can’t tell one from another based just on their portrayals.  He doesn’t seem to have any interest in portraying the great themes or conflicts; he will frequently toss in a heavy-handed metaphor that doesn’t tell us anything new (the government is incompetent, powerful people are not to be trusted, ugly things lurk behind kindly facades), but one searches his work in vein for an interesting idea, a unique moral position, or a genuinely powerful observation about human nature.  Indeed, his books have little re-read value at all; it’s all to tempting to wonder if the reason people praise his “readability” is because his books are so easy to read.

I could go through Under the Dome chapter by chapter to complain about how disappointing it is, but I haven’t the time and you haven’t the patience.  (I will single out the introduction of Chef, the chapters starring Joe McClatchey, and the final five chapters of the book as especially egregious.)  But it all ads up to this:  Stephen King possesses, of all the desirable qualities of a good writer — plotting, theme, tone, characterization, dialogue, setting, scene, beginning, ending, and so on — only one in abundance.  Everywhere else he is deficient, and has more or less been deficient since the 1980s.  His novels are unconscionably padded and crammed with pointless and meandering detail.  His work contains much business, but no insight.  That he is one of the most important writers of his age is indisputable; that he is not a good writer is increasingly hard to ignore.

“I never met anybody,” Richard Pryor once pointed out, “who said when they were a kid:  I wanna grow up and be a critic.”  Did he ever meet anyone who said ‘I wanna grow up and watch movies and listen to music and read books all day’?  That will remain forever unanswered, but it probably serves as another in the endless series of proofs that the answer you get depends on the question you ask.

Criticism, despite the resistance to it by its subjects (and its amateur practitioners), is valuable.  It’s probably not invaluable, or even ‘necessary’, whatever that means.  One can certainly appreciate a great work of art without ever encountering a critic’s opinion of it, just as one can eat a great meal without salt.  But at its best, it is a lively, dynamic art form of its own, a thing that can be appreciated on its own merits as well as help us understand, appreciate and contextualize other art forms.  It is, simply, the art of thinking about art.

As currently constituted, though, criticism is in a bit of a slump.  (I’ll reserve ‘crisis’ for things that have a bit more practical weight.  Criticism in America today is in flux; criticism in Stalin’s Russia was in crisis.)  While there is more criticism than ever — and media such as video games, comic books and episodic television, previously not thought worthy enough of serious discussion, are the subjects of regular review — the level of genuine, worthwhile criticism is lower than ever.  The number of critical opinions on any given creative work is forever on the increase, but the percentage of those that are worth rereading or reprinting, those that shed some genuine insight onto the subject, those that fulfill the most important role of criticism — to relate, as Anatole France put it, the adventures of a soul among masterpieces — are increasingly scarce.

The reasons are many.  (And, of course, I am certainly guilty of contributing to them, both here and in my career as a professional critic.  I do not pretend that I am an exception to anything I say here, and I accept that my own sins will render many people unwilling to pay any attention to the points I’m trying to make.  I have no one to blame for that but myself.)  Our good friend the Internet, trite as it has become to say this, is probably the main offender; not only has it allowed people to be published who lack once-necessary qualities of intelligence and competence, but it gives people for free what they once had to pay for.  This has been a disaster for criticism as a profession, and curiously, it hasn’t even had some of the predicted benefits.  The internet removes the necessity of timeliness and brevity from written criticism, but rare is the online critic who writes at length.  And, as the internet is a hi-tech medium, it’s led to the development of a mathematical approach to an artistic endeavor; so-called ‘aggregators’ like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic present us with the percentage of reviewers who liked a movie as if that meant anything whatsoever.

Nastiness in criticism, once an enjoyable deviation reserved for the worst artistic botches, is now commonplace; whether it’s to establish a critical persona, to engage in a sort of high-wire act (a la Armond White), or simply to reflect the author as a joy-hating shit, it’s become as commonplace and predictable a character as the prop comic.  Criticism can and should sometimes be a painful thing, in the same way that pain calls attention to something amiss in the body.  But it should never be about robbing people of the joy of art.  The role of the critic is to examine art closely, to see what it’s made of whether wondrous, fraudulent, or nothing at all.  Critics should never judge people by how they react to art.  The only fool greater than someone who uses criticism as a tool to beat happiness out of others is someone who allows a critic to beat the happiness out of him.  Revealing through deep reading what is hidden in art can be a transcendent human experience; calling someone a fool because a song makes her smile is the most wasteful activity imaginable.

Of course, what is wanted is not necessarily the opposite.  While it’s good for art, especially underpublicized art, to have a champion among critics, the most enthusiastic boosters have become people like the Ain’t It Cool News crew, whose critical stance is so positive that it can no longer be described as critical.  There’s also the trait, common to dabblers but endemic in the critical personality, of not wanting to be taken advantage of, of not wanting to be played for a chump, which translates into one review after another of bet-hedging cosi-cosa criticism.  Some critics are so reluctant to give anything either a rave review or a complete pan that it makes me wonder if anything suits them at all.  Why bother being a critic at all if everything falls in the mushball middle?  Finally, the consumer-advocate approach towards criticism is both useful and admirable (and is, these days, the only way of putting money in the pocket of a serious critic).  But it is problematic in two ways:  first, it eats away at the critic’s time and attention by requiring him, as George Orwell pointed out over a half-century ago, to have an opinion about things that barely deserve one.  Second, while it’s valuable as a journalistic tool, it’s next to worthless as an artistic endeavor; the criticism of consumer advocacy reaches the level of true art about as often as do commercials.

Criticism is one of the most vital of the arts.  The critic is to the artist what the artist is to the world.  We can always use better art; but we especially need better criticism.  Indeed, the more and better art we have, the more we need criticism.

It was in summer of the first year of his second term that the President decided that he didn’t want to go anywhere anymore.  It was announced rather precipitately to the public although it was certainly known to his inner circle for quite some time, because when you’re the President you simply can’t do things on the spur of the moment like a regular person.  In fact as it turned out the whole thing had been causing all kinds of hell in the White House since early March and in that time, everyone was trying to convince the President to abandon his intentions.  But in the end there was nothing for it and here is how everyone found out.

There was a state dinner for some visiting diplomats from South America, well-fed men in excellent suits who made their points firmly and didn’t like to ask questions.  As it happened this was exactly the kind of function that the President wanted to avoid going to and so he just didn’t show up.  A spokesman was sent out to explain that the President wasn’t there and at first everyone was very polite and assumed that he was ill or something similar.  But over the next few days, the President’s press secretary got a right lambasting from reporters and finally he had to admit that the President didn’t want to go, and he wasn’t going to go anywhere else ever again, and that was all there was to it and now he would like to get on with the important business of running the country and leave this topic lay for the foreseeable future.  Of course the visiting diplomats were outraged at such a grave insult but the ensuing controversy was so terrible that no one even remembered to register their outrage and by now it’s the rare bird in Washington who can even recall what countries they came from.

Naturally enough everyone jumped to the conclusion that this was an act of official policy and before a week had passed there were predictably blustering editorials in all the big city papers about how arrogant was the behavior of the current administration towards the press and the public.  But it soon became clear that no one in the President’s inner circle thought that it was a good idea for him to not go anywhere anymore, and cabinet appointees were falling over themselves to explain that were it up to them the President would have an absolutely hectic travel schedule.  And it was a very difficult situation, because the President was quite popular and no one on his staff wanted to be seen as overly critical or disloyal, but just the same, were they going to stand up before the American people and say they thought it was great that the President had holed himself up in the White House and there he would stay for the duration?  It wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Just the same the President was sticking by his guns, and sticking by his guns is what people liked about him so the whole situation never developed into anything like open revolt.  Obviously no one could talk about anything else, but the debate was never as one-sided as you might have expected it to be if, five years before, you had turned to your mother’s sister and said “Aunt Mildred, mark my words, some day the President is just going to up and decide not to go anywhere anymore.”  If anything could be said to have been curious about the ensuing debate it would be that it didn’t break down along strict party lines as there were an equal number of Democrats as Republicans who said that what harm is it doing, the President not leaving the White House, it’s not as if the man can’t govern, while those loyal to the G.O.P. as well as the party of opposition said well now that’s just ridiculous, the President has places to go and it’s his job to go to them and that’s all there is to it.

The President himself was hardly reticent to talk about it.  He had more press conferences in the subsequent eight months than he had had during the whole four years of his first term, provided they took place in the White House.  A lot of people, especially people who didn’t like the President in the first place but to be honest a lot of his friends too, said that he must be crazy.  He certainly didn’t seem irrational in any way other than the obvious:  it reminded you of when some mad killer would end up in the dock and the prosecutor and defense attorney both would call in smart psychiatrists to argue over whether he was sane or insane, and you would always find yourself thinking “I reckon he seems plenty sane, but then he killed all those people, and that’s not something a sane man would do.”  At any rate, he spoke willingly, even congenially, with the press, and made his case quite simply:  he was the President, and he felt that when you get to that level of achievement, there are certain personal decisions that you are entitled to make.  And he didn’t like to travel and it made him worn out and peevish and how might he govern if that was the state he was in all the time?

Since the President was always thought of in the public imagination as a simple man no one made too much of a fuss when he didn’t answer follow-up questions in any depth.  By this time lines of opposition had been pretty clearly drawn and the President just went about business as usual and let everyone else make his arguments for him.  You had to admit that his detractors made a lot of cogent points:  leaving aside that the President has a certain responsibility to do things as the premier representative of the American people no matter how much he might not want to do them, all you had to do was look at how upset he was making everyone else in the world.  And just when you would find yourself nodding in agreement, the people who were making the point would show a picture of those stupid South American diplomats, who let’s come right out and admit it were a little red-faced and bloated and quite honestly not that much to look at by anybody’s reckoning.  So then his supporters would pipe up and say look, it’s a different world these days, with computers and the internet and wireless telephones and satellite hook-ups and so forth, and it’s not as if the President is unable to run the country, or make policy decisions, or communicate with foreign leaders or members of the Congress.  Which was completely true.  But then something would happen like a plane crash and then you’d find yourself on the other side again wondering what was such a goddamn big deal that he couldn’t show up at the funeral.  And Air Force One is just sitting there, your taxpayer dollars paid for it and no one’s even using it.

The issue got to be so ponderous that it seemed as if a new social order was coming into existence and you defined yourself by where you came down on whether or not the President should have to leave the house every once in a while.  Everybody had an opinion about it.  The only person who didn’t seem to care was the First Lady.  She would just say “I think the whole thing is very silly”, and that’s all she would say about it.  Unfortunately, that didn’t tell anybody anything, and her very lack of a position on the matter became a heated point of debate itself.  Some people said that what she meant was that the debate was silly, and that everyone should just leave her husband alone because he was doing a fine job, while other people said that what she meant was that the President was silly and that frankly, she was sick of him hanging around the house all the time.  The everyday business of making appearances at rallies and for important votes and in meetings with foreign dignitaries began to fall increasingly on the Vice-President, who started to look rather put upon.  But he had to remain publicly loyal to his superior, because he had designs on the presidency himself, and there was a campaign to run, and besides, what could he do?

After a while the issue reached a kind of heavy, frenzied omnipresence.  It was all anyone ever talked about.  The papers had exhausted their ability to editorialize about it in a meaningful or informative way, and besides that, they were beginning to worry about losing readership – after some extremely dire reductions in his popularity, the President was beginning to regain his support, and it was becoming difficult to criticize him straight out for deciding not to go anywhere anymore.  For a time, different tactics were taken, and the argument became more nuanced.  The White House is a very old building, some of the writers would say, and it can’t be pleasant to spend all your time there, and even the least among us like to get out of a summer day and enjoy the sunshine and breezes, don’t we?  But this was met with derisive jeers.  “Are you saying that the White House is a dump?”, the Secretary of Labor asked a reporter in late September.  It was thought unpatriotic to suggest that one wouldn’t want to spend every day inside a house as grand and storied as the White House.  Eventually even the overseas press decided to leave the President alone, although there were a number of mocking tones detected whenever the Vice-President came to visit.

In the end it turned out not to be such a big thing.  There weren’t any wars or trouble that came about as a result of the President deciding not to stay at home.  For all the talk about it setting a dangerous precedent, no other chief executive made the decision to spend his entire term in the White House, not even his own Vice-President, who we had figured probably had his fill of traveling.  The temptation is to say that it didn’t matter much, but here we are now, still talking about it, thirty-four years later.  What does that tell you?  It has to tell you something.

When I was thirty-two and still living alone in the rented house near the river, I found myself in conflict with the radio announcer.

Nowadays I need quiet to write; I cannot abide even the softest music, or the flicker of the television with the sound off.  But then I found it easy to work on my books with the radio chattering away every minute.  I was in the habit of listening to a jazz station that broadcast out of New Orleans.  I would get up very early in the morning, just after dawn, to walk the dog, and by the time I got back, the radio was beginning a broadcast which would accompany me as I wrote – continuous ragtime, uninterrupted by advertising (it was a publicly subsidized station), broken up only occasionally by news broadcasts.

It was these news breaks that caused the conflict.  The morning disc jockey I had no quarrel with, a hush-voiced cipher who barely registered in my consciousness.  It was the newsman.  He was, I began slowly to realize, taunting me.  Certain inflections in his voice, the way he would over-enunciate foreign names, seemed designed to infuriate me.  After a while the mockery and often lewd suggestions that came out of his mouth spilled over into the content of the news itself; there would be stories specific to my region of the state that I never heard anywhere else and which were obviously designed to instill in me a fear of violence or injury.   Soon enough he began to ask me questions directly:  “Do you think you’re better than me?  What are you doing, with all your education?  Am I supposed to fall down to my knees and crawl around in the filth and dust just because you call yourself a writer?”

At first I thought I might be going insane.  I would bother my friends (it seemed too bizarre a request to make of my neighbors) to come over and listen to the broadcasts with me to assure me that I heard what I thought I heard.  It so happened that I wasn’t just hallucinating, but that came as little comfort.  “Did you hear that?” I would ask, panicky.  “Did you hear him read that story, about drug violence in Opelousas?”  My friends would say of course they heard it, they heard it exactly as I did, but what was the big deal?  So there’s drug violence in Opelousas.  I’m sure it’s all over the news.  These things happen.  I shouldn’t take it personally.  It’s just a news story, they would say, and it isn’t about you, everything doesn’t have to be about you.  They similarly dismissed my objections to the odd inflections and curious pronunciations the newsreader would employ as paranoid.  It was pointed out to me more than once that we lived in a part of the country with highly idiosyncratic regional accents and there was nothing so unusual about someone pronouncing things different than I did.

“What about the questions, though?” I would ask.  “Did you hear him ask those questions?”  They did.  But the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the questions were meant to be rhetorical and were directed at a sort of universal and idealized member of the listening audience and not to me at all.  Perhaps he is trying to be controversial, my friends would say; perhaps he is trying to make a name for himself.  There’s certainly nothing sinister about it, was the consensus.

I didn’t believe it.  Now that I knew I wasn’t insane, I determined to fight back against the newsreader’s attempts to tyrannize me.  I would shout back at him when he asked his insinuating questions:  “Who are you?”, I demanded.  “Who are you to judge me?  You’re a small-time newsreader on a public radio station!  You don’t know me!  You can’t judge me!”  I made it a special point to go on about my daily business in town on those days when the news reports were the bleakest, to give him the message that I would not be intimidated.  But I wasn’t getting any work done.  He read the news from 6AM until noon, and after disputing with him all morning, I had no time for writing – I had to get to class and the entire day was shot with nothing to show for it.  Something had to be done.

The more I would try to ignore him, the more vituperative his reports would become.  Eventually I began to see bright red flashes of light in front of my eyes whenever I would hear his voice.  The back of my throat felt hot all the time and I was a tangle of knotted muscle and unfocused rage.  I decided that the only thing to do would be to shoot him in the head, to still his voice forever.  I was not thinking clearly, but whose fault was that?

I purchased a huge, silver-skinned revolver from the man who lived at the end of my street and repaired motorcycles.  He didn’t even ask what I wanted it for.  I went home, carrying death in a wooden box that seemed bigger than a suitcase, and set it down next to the telephone in the dining room.  Dialing the number of the radio station, I cradled the headpiece of the phone against my left shoulder and slid the bullets into the cylinder, one for each ring.  They made a heavy, satisfying clacking noise as they went in.  The gun was terrifically heavy.  I couldn’t stop staring at it, at its oiled pureness and perfect metal form, as I talked to the girl at the front desk.  I asked her how I might be able to meet the newsreader, spelling his name slowly and over-enunciating each letter in savage parody of the way he spoke.

She told me that he didn’t work for the New Orleans station.  He came in over a national feed from the public radio group that syndicated the news.  She was gracious enough to give me the number of their headquarters, though God only knows what a wreck I must have sounded.  I telephoned them in a haze, and I can only remember the pale green light-up buttons of the telephone through a sickly pink haze.  After half a dozen transfers from department to department a producer told me that the newsreader was gone, that he had quit that very day to pursue other interests with a news bureau in a foreign country.  I don’t remember hanging up the phone and I very well might have passed out.

The gun was sold at a charity auction sponsored by the university a few months later.  I don’t remember who bought it, but I remember thinking how curious it was that no one asked me to present any credentials for owning the thing.  My friends don’t speak to me often about this period, and when they do, they use words like “episode” or “phase” or “disturbance”.  It was not.  It was not.

It was a victory.