BAE 2014 read by Christy Wampole: November Thirteenth

I had nearly finished a piece inspired by The Best American Essays of 2014 on the topic of essays as containers. Then Paris happened. Since the attacks on November 13, public discourse has hovered around uncontainability. The containers essay suddenly felt irrelevant. Luckily, some of the essays in the 2014 collection could allow me to write about (to process, to manage – whatever metaphor you prefer) the attacks. Specifically, Mary Gordon’s “On Enmity” and Dave Eggers’ “The Man at the River” give language to some of the abstractions that have clustered around the death cult called Daesh.

Some background: I am an assistant professor of French literature, I have lived in Paris, and spent my life trying to understand and explain French culture to others. In order to rationalize the attacks, a phlegmatic person who understands the historical landscape might point toward France’s colonial landgrabs, the brutalities of the Algerian war, the marginalization of immigrants to the banlieue in cities like Paris, or the country’s progressive Americanization. But I am not phlegmatic, nor sanguine, nor choleric. I’m a melancholic, whose moods are governed by black bile and spleen. Unlike the cholerics who hunger for vengeance or the sanguines who champion a quick return to restaurant terraces and dance clubs as a sign of defiance, my saturnine self looks toward the attacks with weariness and despondency. Last night at my university, during the candlelight vigil that honored the victims of the Paris slaughter as well as those of recent attacks in Kenya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey, I kept thinking, “Humanity’s will is to self-extinguish. There is no other explanation. Everything in the world is set up for us to live right, and yet we persistently choose to live wrong.” The November breeze made my candle flicker each time I had the thought. The wax ran down the candle but congealed before reaching my fingers, fixed in time by the breeze. 

That was last night. And just now on campus, I sat near a stage and watched the Peruvian Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa in conversation with Philippe Lançon, a French journalist whose face was partially pulverized by bullets from the Kouachi brothers’ guns in the Charlie Hebdo office in January. This conversation had been planned for months. No one could have anticipated that the room would be filled with people trying to understand a newer, bloodier slaughter in the same city. They showed us Charlie Hebdo cartoons as they spoke about freedom of speech, fanaticism, barbarism, and recovery. The darkness of French humor has always aligned well with the darkness in my own soul. A world without space for this kind of humor would be bankrupt. Philippe looked small there on stage, a frail silhouette before the looming cartoon of Mohammed or of the Frenchman riddled with terrorist bullet holes whose just-drunk champagne spouts out of his body like a fountain. Philippe looks over his shoulder at the cartoons and smiles at them, even though a quarter of his jaw has been shredded. He’d played dead as the brothers walked from body to body after the room had fallen silent, shouting “Allahu akbar” and delivering one bullet per corpse, systematically. 

In her essay “On Enmity,” Mary Gordon keeps a notebook of free associations on the figure of the enemy. There is no system to her system; she just freestyles her way through the word “enemy,” improvising a definition here and tossing out an anecdote or distraught memory there. She works through several problems: Is an adversary the same as an enemy? Is it wrong to delight in the death of an enemy? How do animals choose which members of their own species are enemies or allies? What caught me in her piece was a short anecdote about Georges Bernanos, the right-wing French Catholic writer and Simone Weil, the left-wing French factory worker and Christian mystic. Gordon writes:

Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos both, or each, traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos for the right-wing press, Weil for the left. Each wrote: This war is hopeless, it is impossible to tell good from evil, there is such evil, such cruelty, such barbarity on both sides. Simone Weil wrote to Bernanos, “I thought you were my enemy, but you are my brother.”

Does anything about this anecdote apply to our terror war? The body of the civilian has become the prime site of cruelty in this shapeless war. Civilian bodies are torn to ribbons by drones, by AK47s, by homemade bombs, anytime and anywhere: at home, a place coded in theory as sound and safe; at the university, a haven for the humanities and humanity; at the peace rally, whose symbolism is too disturbing for proponents of terror; in the airplane, the thread that tethers one place to another; at holy sites, where God’s untouchables are touched; at weddings, where the matrimony of souls is witnessed; at the hotel, the locus of leisure. The primary targets aren’t just bodies but also abstractions like comfort, safety, and peace of mind. I wonder how many pacifists are left who have thus far resisted the pull of enmity. The ugliness of these acts lures even the most indulgent hearts toward hatred. 

Dave Eggers’ “The Man at the River” somehow gets us closer to understanding our encounter with those who differ from us. His innocuous tale is jam-packed with truth. An American man visiting South Sudan has a dilemma. His Sudanese friend wants him to cross a river with him, but the American, who has a small wound on his leg, doesn’t want to risk contracting “some parasite or exotic microbe” in the river. He tells his friend he’d prefer not to cross. His inept American politeness knots up the exchange between them until it cannot be untangled. The cultural misunderstanding continues, with another friend arriving and trying to persuade the American man that according to their customs, the Sudanese are required to accommodate him and that he, in return, is required to accept their hospitality. They recruit a passing fisherman to shuttle the hapless American across the river, against his will. The Sudanese are irritated, “forming, or confirming, an idea of this American and all Westerners: that they will not walk across a shallow river, that they insist on commandeering canoes from busy fishermen and being pulled across while they squat inside. That they are afraid to get wet.” The American man fails to convey his inner monologue to them, a monologue that would have explained everything, perhaps: 

But the American did not want to go across the river at all. He did not ask for this. He did not ask for any of this. All he wants is to be a man sitting by a riverbed. He doesn’t want to be a guest, or a white man, or a stranger or a strange man, or someone who needs to cross the river to see anything at all.

We did not ask for any of this. We are not our governments. We never conquered anyone. We did not personally launch empires. If anyone is complicit in anything, it is that by fact of birth, we are woven into a system in such a way that even going off the grid is not enough to extract ourselves fully from history and politics. The grid is everywhere anyway. The roots of all of this were festering before we were even born. We are fighting the battles of our forebears. Like Eggers’ American, we want to push a reset button that doesn’t exist. We want to unravel the stereotypes of ourselves, to emphasize our singularity in a system that tries to uniformize us. We want to exist away from demands to accommodate or be accommodated. We just want to be. We are jarred that global politics – about which we know almost nothing – might loot us of life and limb. 

This is our great dilemma in the moment of encounter with the world. It is easy to schematize the actions of another and to project some preconception on this schema. One only sees those features in the other that best confirm what one already believes. I sympathize with Eggers’ American, having lived similar hopeless moments in which I failed to get across what I really meant through all my cultural fumbling. “I’m not one of them,” you try to convey, referring to the caricatural Americans on the television. The American is much more complex than global and domestic media allows. This is true of every population on the planet. Reductive portraits are in part the cause of bloodshed. 

In terms of cultural (un)translatability, the example that has stayed lodged in my mind since the attacks last Friday is the band Eagles of Death Metal, whose members are now undoubtedly traumatized for life. How to explain to a religious fanatic the subtleties, ironies, richnesses of such a name, of such music? How to explain to them that metal is a bloodless outlet for people across the globe? That the tough exterior of metal dudes can only be matched by the tenderness of their insides? My brother is a metal drummer whose various band names have always referred to mortality or evil or violence. From the outside, it is easy to read all of these signs as the devil’s work. But read more closely and spend your life with metal dudes as I have, and you’ll discover that the vast majority of these gentle giants use their music as armor against the oppressive aspects of capitalism and corrupt power, against conformity and the surrender to injustice. Surely every young man of our time, across the globe, is faced with the forked road, making one of several choices: destruction of self, destruction of others, or an attempt at reconciliation with the pitiless planet. It seems unlikely that solid body six-strings will replace Kalashnikovs any time in the near future, but I can’t help but hope that some young man, somewhere, will understand that raging against the machine can take form as fertility or impotence. Destruction is ultimately the choice for impotence. 

I take comfort in the fact that in this battle against the impotent abstraction called “terror,” we have on our side the fertile impulses of music, art, literature, (mostly) free speech, sex, experimentation, science, philosophy, and other forms of creation. For this reason, we’ve already won.



Christy Wampole is an essayist and assistant professor of French literature at Princeton University. Her first book, titledThe Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation, was published in 2015 and analyzes various aspects of American culture, including awkwardness, distraction, self-infantilization, irony, and consumerism. Her upcoming book, titled Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor, will appear in spring of 2016 and explores the overlap of politics and ecology, genealogy and identity, as they relate to the tendency of imagining ourselves as rooted beings. Why do we literalize the metaphor, believing ourselves to be rooted to a specific set of coordinates or a specific cultural heritage?

Read More →

BAE 1986 read by Sven Birkerts: A Ramble Around BAE 1986, edited by Elizabeth Hardwick

Dear Essay Daily Readers,

Welcome to our yearly Advent Calendar. Though your store-bought Advent Calendars may well start with the first of December, ours begins today, since Advent begins today. For me, Advent—and its calendar—isn't a religious occurrence inasmuch as it is a form, a way of focusing some thinking in an unfocused, distracted age.

We started the site a few years ago largely to facilitate this kind of focused thinking and conversation about essays, essayists, and The Essay, present and past. We are told, after all, that we live in the Age of the Essay. David Shields calls Facebook a personal essay machine. For me, I'm not sure if we're in the Age of the Essay or not, but there sure do seem to be a lot of them. And it's no surprise that the Age of the Internet, the most rhizomatic information technology since the book (and possibly ever), corresponds to the age of the essay, the most obviously rhizomatic of our literary forms.

There are a lot of essays out there. This is just one of a thousand (a million?) published today. That's largely why we're here: to draw attention to the good ones, the most interesting ones, whether present or past. This year we'd like to direct our attention to the Best American Essays series, founded in 1986 and edited ever since by Robert Atwan in collaboration with a yearly guest editor. The series just released its thirtieth edition—! That makes BAE the longest-running and highest-profile filter for essays that aspire to art in the last century, and, whether you agree with the guest editor's rationale or selections, or—more usually—not, you being an essayist probably, and thus by nature cranky, BAE always feels essential to talk about. So this year we're writing about and to and after the Best American Essays.

As you know, if you've visited us before, each year during Advent we present to you an essay a day from some of our favorite writers and thinkers and people. This year we are honoring the Best American Essays series with essays each framed around one of the yearly BAE anthologies.

Though we won't be going consecutively, I do think the place to start is with Sven Birkerts, who chose the BAE's very first edition, in 1986. Allow me, then, to get out of his way. Check back each morning during Advent for another essay on another year of the BAE as read by another of our favorite writers. —Ander Monson

*

A Ramble Around Best American Essays 1986, edited by Elizabeth Hardwick

Sven Birkerts

*

I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel it like a stab when I open an old paperback and the binding comes apart with that sound of cracking glue. What had been whole has suddenly been rent and of course I extrapolate in all directions. It’s clear as can be that the world is going to hell.
     It happened just recently. I’d been asked if I would pick a volume of the Best American Essays series and use it as a prompt to reflect on the series and how it is with the essay these days. So I made my dutiful way up to the attic, to the shelves where my more orderly younger self had decades ago started arranging the annuals, and where they now make a fairly decent display of spines. When I extracted the very first volume—1986, edited by Elizabeth Hardwick—I found myself doing a little inner head-shake. The cover typography and colors were so familiar—it all came rushing back to me. I had carried the book around in my bag for years when I was teaching composition. I had assigned essays from it to my students, and had mined it for examples for the HOW TO part of my instruction. It was when I then opened—cracked--the cover that I felt the whole thing break loose in my hand.
     An insult, an injury—it was as if a part of the past itself had just calved away from the mother berg. But the mind on assignment is uncannily opportunistic. I had not even set the book aside before I was starting to sketch a notion in my head. The breakage, I thought, was a sign. That I should choose this very volume, of course.  But that I should also use the literal break as some kind of metaphor. Something about this being a rupture with the past, a big signifier…But my better sense was already countering: that was too easy a gambit, too obvious. Also, I knew before I had even looked at the Table of Contents that it would be wrong to pitch this first volume as a last link to some lost golden age, as in “they broke the mold…”
     They didn’t. The mol is fine. I’ve been reading this series for years, and can attest that the 28 successor volumes of BEA published so far represent an amazing range and diversity. The contents, reflecting the colorations of the respective editors’ sensibilities, confirm that the form is alive across the whole spectrum of races, genders, and ages (go read Roger Angell’s reflection on life in his 90s in the 2015 collection!). I bet I could name fifty current brilliant practitioners of the form without pausing for breath.
     Having staked myself on writing about Robert Atwan’s debut volume—edited by Elizabeth Hardwick--I asked myself what there was to say? Decades have passed, Ms. Hardwick has passed away, my copy of the book has all but fallen apart in my hands…Yet—here’s my lead: when I now see it here on the table next to me, I feel an old and familiar stirring of interest and possibility. The word “essay” still gets to me. But there’s also some stirring memory of what’s inside the covers, and knowing how I’ll feel when I start reading the pieces again. This is what we know about the best writing—reading does not use it up; it keeps its power. This not by virtue of the reader’s forgetfulness, but through its own intrinsic merit. The right words in the right order are that way because they can be encountered again and again. Real work does not melt away when the eye registers it.
     A high-sounding assertion, I know, but it’s also one that can be tested. And I’ve decided to do that here. Not exhaustively, but suggestively--by sampling, by opening the book at random as the ancients did with Virgil’s Aeneid—though not so much for divination as for a kind of quality control. It is not the future I’m looking toward so much as the not-so-distant past. Nearly 30 years have passed since publication of the collection--can I find through this exercise some confirmation of the lasting value—the artistic merit—of the writing inside?
     Making my first random pass, I land on Gerald Early’s essay “The Passing of Jazz’s Old Guard,” (page 107) and after reading around for  context settle on this bit of reflection on the career of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk:

I suspect that Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) knew that Monk would cease to be vital once he gained wide acceptance, and so Baraka wrote the essay called “Recent Monk” which appeared in Downbeat in 1963, an essay which said in one breath that success wouldn’t spoil T.S. Monk, while saying in another breath, ‘say that it ain’t so, Thelonious, that you sold out to the moguls on the hill.’

To my ear, and my very amateur apprehension of all things jazz, this seems critical-reflective prose of a very high order. It situates us in a historical moment, balancing off necessary accuracies of description with an emotional plea that is attributed to Amiri Baraka but also orchestrated within the sentence so that we feel the pressure of the author’s own feeling. Though it’s not within my scope to discuss it here, the essay goes on to become an impassioned exploration of the trials facing the black artist—and man—in a music industry (culture) controlled by white money and white artistic criteria. It would not be beside the point, either, to remark the jazzy syncopation of the sentence itself, the Monkish wobble of that “’say it ain’t so, Thelonious…’”
     My next stab plants me inside Donald Barthelme’s “Not Knowing”  (17), where I find:

If the writer is taken to be the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist, this changes not very much the traditional view of the artist.

Barthelme’s essay, written back in the heyday of literary theory, offering itself as a  smart lay reading of that whole vast academic agitation (it’s hard to bring it all back now), hits an intellectually bemused tone, an ironic knowingness that has fallen largely from favor. Still, we can applaud the cleverness of the conceit, Barthelme’s turning Richard Dawkins idea of the “selfish gene”—that our point as humans is mainly to pass genetic contents along—to artistic ends; we can also wrinkle our foreheads over whether or not his view really is the traditional view. Barthelme is, as he was never not, clever and provocative. For the ages? This is harder to say, as we are apparently not here to judge, but only to serve as vessels for the necessary work to come into being.
     Open yet again, this time to find William Gass’s  “China Still Lifes” on page 155. The observant nit-picker following along at home will have noticed by now that I am only looking to odd-numbered right-facing pages. I do so because I can hold these pages flat while supporting the left side of the book between index and fore-finger, thereby not aggravating the problem of the glue-shattered spine any further.

The big cities now have vast blank squares like Tian Anmen in Beijing—they are people pastures, really—fit mainly for mass meetings, hysteria and hypnotism, while the new wide and always wounding central arteries are suitable for totalitarian parades and military reviews; although it was no different in the old days, since some of the courtyards in the Imperial Palace can hold a hundred thousand heads together in a state of nodding dunder. 

     I once referred to Gass as our greatest living “champion of the sentence,” and this nugget does not make me change my view. The passage, from the writer’s travelogue of a visit to China, intrigues in its construction and thinking, but also for the eerie hindsight reminder that three years later that same square, widely known  as Tianamen, would be the site of an explosive and violent mass demonstration. Gass’s sentence-making—and this one can be taken as completely representative—has always been sui generis, propelled by his love of sound-play (“nodding dunder”), his unexpected twists of diction (“fit mainly for mass meetings, hysteria and hypnotism,” “always wounding central arteries”…), and proclivity for outspoken assertions like the one ventured here. Gass has, I believe, appeared in a number of the BEA volumes since this first inclusion.
     Finally, I open to Cynthia Ozick’s  “First Day of School: Washington Square, 1946 on page 219. A woman! And I did not rig it that way, either. It’s true, Ozick is one of only three women essayists included, along with Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Hollander—but the gender representation has improved significantly in recent years. Her selection, like a number of others in the book, is a memoir essay. Here are the first two sentences:

I first came down to Washington Square on a colorless February morning in 1946. I was seventeen and a half years old and was carrying my lunch in a brown paper bag, just as I had carried it to high school only a month before. 

Though Ozick can do fresh lyric compression with the best of them, here she opts for the straight clean strokes. Two adjectives, “colorless” and “brown,” and just the basic establishing facts. I might be guilty of projecting my sense of Ozick’s great and proven gifts onto what I read, finding in these simple sentences the confidence of tone that is the surest indication that a writer fully owns her material? But no, reading the full essay confirms me. Ozick here has the prose equivalent of a steady camera hand. She also has the shrewd instinct that identifies the resonant detail and knows how to position it as she builds a beautifully paced and proportioned remembrance of her literary coming-of-age.
     I stop after four. I am of course well aware that one could do what I have just done with any volume from Atwan’s series and that in choosing as I have I have argued nothing. I have maybe, at best, extracted a tissue sample from the debut gathering. But truly, what can I say about this grouping that could not be said of many that have followed, and that happily keep coming? Do I see any evidence of the essay somehow changing in this past quarter century, or would it be more honest to propose, again, that any perceived differences in style and subject have mainly to do with the sensibility of that year’s editor? Are we less staid now, more lyrical, freer with various kinds of open structure? I consider Joseph Brodsky’s relentless observational iterations in “Flight From Byzantium,” or Barthelme’s careening intellectual improvisation, and I say ‘no.’ I look back at Joyce Carol Oates’ sui generis take on boxing, which somehow gets Rocky Marciano and William Butler Yeats into the same paragraph, and Julian Barnes’s fascinating flanerie on a theme of Flaubert—and I say it again: no. These essays are as assertive and edge-testing as any being written today. There is, true, less evidence of the collagist’s fracture-and-rejoin aesthetic, or the kind of two- and three-ply lyric weave that we see so much of these days. But at the root, in the place of imagining and daring to speak truth, things don’t feel different at all. The essays of 1986 are on a direct continuum with work by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Charles D’Ambrosio…
     What the collection does affirm for me—it did so all those years ago, and does so now, as well—is that the form remains a species as adaptable as the cockroach, and that it flourishes exactly to the extent that thinking and invention flourish in any given time. A gathering like this not only legitimizes and disseminates our flights of imagining and reportage, but it also heartens and inspires. “A writer,” said Saul Bellow famously, “is a reader moved to emulation.” My experience with the BAE series—reading it and teaching from it—confirms this.  I have only to only to see the individual volumes standing at attention all in a row and my typing fingers start to twitch. The writer’s version of air-guitar, slightly embarrassing.

*

Sven Birkerts' most recent book is Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf Press). He currently directs the Bennington Writing Seminars and edits the journal AGNI at Boston University.

Read More →

COMPETITION ENTRY CAE FREE SAMPLE 2015

Greatest actor competition.

Meryl Streep is regarded as one of the greatest actresses in the world, and her work is highly praised and recognised  not only by the critics but also by the audience. But what else do we know about her apart from the fact that she is a wonderful actress? 

First of all, it is no secret, that she is a wealthy woman, holding a fortune of $45 million dollars. Second of all, Meryl Streep and her husband run a charity, which indicates that in addition to her career, she has a variety of noble interests and inspirations. It clearly makes her even more admirable. But how has she managed to become a world-class person?

To answer this question we should explore some facts of her life. Nowadays, all the films that she has taken part in, are regarded as highly recommended by critics and journalists. "It seems that Meryl Streep joins the race for the Oscar any time she appears in a movie", quoted the Daily Mail; and it is really true because she is undeniably talented.

A not so well known fact is that, it was not always like that. The movie star, as everybody else, has experienced some ups and downs in her life, but she has never let her heart be broken or fallen into depression. She has a strong and very cheerful character, which is in my opinion the more reason, for her to deserve her rewards and recognition.

Sent by Marina Savchits, 
from Russia.

#words 240

Read More →

Around the World in 80 Days

What a whirlwind travel season that just was! I previously posted about all the incredible journeys the team here in the Office of Admission made the last few months. I was fortunate to get to see some great places this travel season by recruiting students on three continents and nine countries. I'm finally home in New Orleans, and it feels great to be back.

I wanted to take a moment to tell you all what we are thankful for this season... and that is YOU! We've received thousands of amazing applications for our Early Action and Single Choice Early Action deadlines, and our team is currently reading your thoughtful essays and your counselor's heartfelt letters of recommendation. We're thankful to have so many great applicants who have chosen to apply to Tulane. So... thank you!

As you sit down to enjoy your Thanksgiving with you family this week, we hope you have a relaxed and stress-free break. And we mean that- an actual break:

"This week, as you gather with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, be mindful of the high school seniors seated at the table. Odds are they don't want to talk about their college applications any more than you want to talk about work." -Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I'll leave you with a few shots of my travels. One other thing I am thankful for is finally being back home. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

A little Tulane love at the Petronas Towers in Malaysia 

Shanghai!

London!

Edinburgh! 

Read More →

UGLINESS

A letter in the November 23^rd New York Times from Bonnie Berry, the author of “Discrimination and Social Power,” expresses her approval of Julia Baird’s November 9^th Op-Ed essay “Being Dishonest About Ugliness,” which I unfortunately missed.

In that piece, Ms. Baird argued that we “assign moral judgment against the unattractive,” which she and Miss Berry reprehend. In her letter, Ms. Barry notes, “I am working with two research teams examining police reaction to suspects’ appearance and public reaction to crime victims’ appearance.” She adds, “I can barely wait to see what we discover.” Surely it is easily predictable what they will discover.

Ugliness is not merely a disadvantage; it is, at least in most people’s reaction to it, tantamount to a sin. This has always been so and will, I am afraid, never entirely change. Yet there are some exceptions even now. Some of the most obvious villains in art, like most of the villains in Dickens and Victor Hugo are really ugly. But even those innocents who only look ugly, e.g., Quasimodo, are suspected of villainy. That is so in romantic fiction in general.

Good places to start looking for the archetypical equation ugliness equals evil, are fairy tales, which embody centuries of folk “wisdom.” Prime example are the wicked witches. Why did these creatures have to be old and ugly, when they could just as easily have been young and beautiful?

Think of the worthy citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, and the witches they hanged, who, contrary to some romantics’ notion, were not beautiful but old and ugly. Their supposedly innocent victims, however, were young and attractive, which made the wicked crones even uglier, physically as well as morally. To this day, to vilify a woman, she is often referred to as a witch.

There are, I repeat, exceptions, though far less numerous. Sirens and mermaids are evil and dangerous because of their treacherous allure, but they are, it would seem, more infrequent than witches. And some of them even are good: think of the Little Mermaid, or Medea, a witch who, in love, becomes good (except to a brother), but who, betrayed, turns killer.

Noblesse oblige, the French saying has it, but ugliness, too, obliges, at least in the public imagination, to be bad. If, by the way, I keep coming back to fairy tales, it is because, whoever claimed their authorship by putting them in writing, nevertheless gathered them from the great mouths of the anonymous. In other words, they were folk tales, representing popular beliefs and attitudes.

So we come to Cinderella and her wicked sisters who, signally in the ballet versions, are always grotesque, grotesque being the ugly when it is comical. Their purpose, among other things, is to offset and distinguish the pretty and good one that much more. Much the same is true also of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. Though they are not evil, indeed quite the opposite, they do serve as contrast to and enhancement of Snow White’s beauty. More often, though, we get evil dwarves, as in the novel “Klein Zaches” by E. T. A. Hoffmann or in Rapunzel’s fairy-tale tormentor.

Wizards, too, if they are evil—which they most often are, think “Swan Lake” and “The Firebird”—are also ugly, even if the title Magician might hint at the opposite. So, too, in “The Fiery Angel,” Prokofiev’s marvelous opera, the Magician Agrippa von Nettelsheim, master of the diabolical arts, is usually represented as ugly. But no one could be uglier than the wicked Svengali, as the illustrations show, in Gerard du Maurier’s “Trilby,” whose lovely eponymous heroine he viciously dominates. Svengali has even become a generic term for evil manipulators.

Hollywood, before it became obsessed with various forms of violence, initially had looks playing the first fiddle. Here, too, less good looks, if not explicit ugliness, attested to flawed character. Thus Barbara Stanwyck often played less than sympathetic heroines, although leading actresses, no matter what their parts, were never outright ugly, unless they played a witch, such as Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz,” of whom I wrote that, although 83, she didn’t look a day over 82.

The male villains also could be very ugly, none more so than Peter Lorre, an otherwise excellent actor in both European and American films. By the way, I seem to recall reading that he, in spite or because of it, received oodles of fan or love letters from (no doubt perverse) women. Other specialists in Hollywood evil looked either totally scary, like Boris Karloff, or displayed a horrible hypocritical slipperiness just as bad, like Bela Lugosi.

In no sense though is ugliness considered stupidity or lack of talent. Otherwise one would have had to view a fellow like Stravinsky (supremely ugly), or the great poet Leopardi (a hunchback), negatively in a play or movie. In fact, Iago, though usually played as somewhat ominous-looking, is the epitome evil, but by no means stupid.

There are also a number of characters in various arts who do start out as ugly, but  turn out to be even physically transmuted into beautiful, this being the ugly duckling syndrome, as he turns into a lovely swan. That kind of ugliness is not only not bad, but a message of hope to the unsightly, who may yet dream of miraculously becoming beautiful. And so, be it said, in lovers’ eyes they do.

Let us finally turn to the world of opera, which being anyhow usually topsy-turvy. Here it generally requires no ugliness to be evil. Thus Salome is beautiful enough to drive her stepfather and the young officer nuts, and Lulu, though not basically bad but driven so by men, is likewise beautiful, indeed fatally so.

But even in life, is ugliness a sign of wickedness? Few women were uglier than George Eliot and George Sand, yet they were surely not evil. Fickle perhaps, as in the case of Sand, but not evil. And some of the most amoral ones, like Alma Mahler and perhaps (though not latterly thought so)  Lucrezia Borgia, were the very antithesis of ugly.

To return, however, to Ms.Berry’s letter: despite the bias against bad looks, there may be some consolation for uglies in that even the attractive may not be attractive enough, like those who strive, as she puts it, for a job at Abercrombie & Fitch (a peculiar choice) or a career in modeling, but do not make it.

And is there not perhaps a reverse ugly duckling syndrome, whereby the not quite attractive enough turn sour, and from sourness to meanness, and ultimately ugliness? That may be saddest case of all.                                                                                          

Read More →

S. L. Wisenberg: Thou Shalt Not be Political

Thou Shall Not Be Political 

(1)

And lo there is a great fear among you
among ye gathered here—
for it is said 
that practitioners 
of the art 
of creative nonfiction 
shall observe, they shall observe closely,
minutely—
they shall note 
the dialogue of others
and the actions of others
that they may observe or
recollect such things
and they shall manufacture the braid
the collage the mosaic the lyric and the 
witness
the hermit crab
the spiral going up
the spiral coming down 
the spiral spiraling out of control
and back
and the spirulina—
the spiritual
the essay and the memoir—the rant
the travelogue the commentary the parody
the satire the confession the diary entry 
the monologue the nature piece
the juxtaposition and the scene, 
yes, the scene,
most holy of holies: 
THE SCENE—
and the sketch
the review, the review-essay
the essay-review
the stunt, being one year of this, or another 
year
of that—
the stunt double
the profile
the portrait
the double portrait
the notes 
the notations
the meditation the consolation
the column the feuilleton (how European)
the experiment, the aphorism
the list the letter 
the lyric and the flash
the mini and the maxi
the micro and the macro
the hoax the mystery
the dreamy mythic and the new mythic and
the proto-new-wave mythic
the personal reportage
the fanciful and the frothy
the sportive, the investigation—
if it’s literary,
and journalism—if it’s literary
the interview—if it’s literary
the puzzle—if it’s literary
the biography, the history, the 
autobiography—
if they’re literary. 

BUT NOT—

BUT NOT—
the polemical the diatribe-al
the argument-ical
the political, the contextual and theoretical
the Marxist or the
feminist, neither Third Wave nor Second.

NOT
the analysis of power
the radical
the partisan-ical
the fundamental
the conserva-cal
the liberal
the neo-revolutionary
the post-revolutionary, the pre-revolutionary
the nationalist or the universalist
the regionalist or
the anti-nationalist—the public—
the intellectually public
the publicly intellectual

BECAUSE—
The ‘60s are over
and to be political is to be
too political.
To be political is to be
politically correct—
or
politically incorrect.
To be political is to be
polemical. To be polemical
is too much 
to be.
In short,
to be political is to be
impolitic. 



(2)

Your Muse is Not Neutral.

White is not the default race.

You can’t be neutral on a moving train.

If you’re not part of the solution
you’re part of the problem.

If you do not criticize the status quo
you are supporting it. 

You don’t live in a vacuum.

We all live inside of history 
whether we acknowledge it
or 
not. It comes before 
and after us and we follow
its stream. 



(3)

Why we can’t write politically:

I’m not a political person.
I’m too white to be multicultural.
I’m not OPPRESSED.
I don’t think that way.
Everything isn’t political.
I’m just writing about myself.
Politics will make my work
un-beautiful
will corrupt
my finely honed
voice,
will turn it robotic
and besides
I’m middle class
or upper middle class
or lower upper class
or lower middle upper class
or middle upper upper class
or one percent of the 1 percent.
I am not OPPRESSED.
I have no right
to be political.



(4)

Every ten years or so
I hear the same thing
from this former student
from a beginning journalism class,
back when first years were called
freshmen—
Every ten years or so 
he thanks me
because I said, 
If you state the race
of someone in your story,
you should state the race
of EVERYONE in your story.
If you identify the blacks
the Hispanics the Chinese
the Asians the African-Americans
the Chicanos the Native Americans
the East Asian Indians &
so on.
if you identify them by their color
their background their background color—
if you identify them
and not the people who are
white
then you are saying,
White is the default race.
White is the normal race.
White is the standard race.
White is Us and everyone else
is Other.
You are saying all that
without saying
a thing.



(5)

I want to talk about
Marxism and feminism,
about how you can use
a Marxist or a feminist
lens
to evaluate your work.
To see it in new light. To identify the power
relations—to note who has power and who
does not, to identify class, not necessarily class
struggle, but class and the status quo—
to call attention to patriarchy—
but I will ease into
it
by talking about
context. 
CONTEXT.



(6)

My friend the writer Natalia Rachel Singer
uses this exercise:
Write a first sentence about the year you
were born and link it with something
cultural/historical/political. Or link a 
personal event with a public event.

Her examples:
“In the year 1908, Pierre Bonnard painted
‘The Bathroom’ and my mother was born.”
—Mary Gordon, “Still Life”

“When the stock market reached its peak, my
mother came to town to buy me a bra.”
—Natalia (herself)

This is from a book I am writing
about the American South: “I used to place myself 
like this: I was born 10 years after
the end of the war (for me, The War is World 
War II). Only recently have I 
considered: I was born in a 
segregated hospital in Houston, Texas, five months
after Emmett Till’s tortured
body was pulled out of the
Tallahatchie River in 
Mississippi, twelve days
after Rosa Parks refused to 
give up her seat on a 
Montgomery, Alabama, bus.”

In this way
I am changing identities—moving
from an almost-victim
of genocide—if my grandparents
had not immigrated
to the US. In this way
I am moving from a blameless
role to that of—potential
oppressor: a Southern white
female
in the age
of 
Jim Crow. A Southern white
woman led to the lynching
of Emmett Till—he either looked her
in the eye or
whistled at her
or else whistled as a way
to keep
from stuttering. The Chicago
kid did not know
his place. And the
white man 
had to teach him a
lesson.



(7)

I read a fine
essay
about a small
endangered
animal. The essay expanded
to embrace the notion of 
boundaries and ambiguity
and the nature of time.
The writer said, The habitat
of this small creature
is disappearing.
If the writer had used
a Marxist
lens
or was informed by
Marx
the writer might have
asked:
Why is the habitat
growing
smaller?
WHO BENEFITS
from the munching and
gulping of the place
that this animal—this frog
or turtle or bird this
otter or salamander
or fish—
lives?
Where is the
unseen POWER?



(8)

This is Rebecca Solnit on the 
California Gold Rush museums. 
“When you tour the museums of the 
Gold Country, as the Sierra Nevada
foothills are still called, you see
children dressing up in historical
costumes and playing at panning for gold—“
THAT
is pure description, eye witness. But
the rest of the sentence
which I’ll read in a second,
is Opinion,
is Political
conveys Attitude
it enlarges the topic
rings
and more rings
THIS
is the rest of the sentence:
“but it might be more educational for
them to play at testing for clean water,
imitating mercury-poisoning madness,
reading a corporate prospectus, or 
conducting a wildlife survey. More
educational, but less fun….” 
[“The Price of Gold, the Value of
Water,” in Storming the Gates of 
Paradise: Landscapes for Politics]



(9)

Solnit considers:
WHO has the power and
who is making the decisions and
who benefits? questions that can
overwhelm. You don’t have to answer
everything yourself. In The Adventures of
Cancer Bitch
I quoted a blog
called 
I blame the 
patriarchy. I
quoted a book
that criticized pink-
ribbon culture. In my notes
in back—I love my notes
in back—I gave proof of
disparities in the death rates of
black women
and white women
with cancer. In the notes
I gave proof
for my claims about
the link between cancer
and the degradation of
the environment.



(10)

In my book I wrote
about gender. My aim
was to begin with the
personal and expand
to the political. I wrote:
“Once in high school a
girl looked at my fingers
and exclaimed: ‘You have men’s
hands’ because I had hair growing
on them. Hair that I must have
bleached at least once
when I was bleaching the
hair
on my entire
arms. “We bleached
and shaved—‘a way of lying
about our bodies,’
Adrienne Rich was 
writing and thinking
at that time, though
in my teens I’d never heard of
her. It was female to shave our legs
and underarms, but still
shaving was something we did
so we wouldn’t look
manly.” In my notes
in back I quote
Rich: “We have been expected
to lie with our bodies: to bleach,
redden, unkink or curl our
hair, pluck eyebrows, shave
armpits, wear padding
in various places or lace
ourselves, take little
steps…wear
clothes that emphasized our
helplessness.”



(11)

Because you have choice. Because there is a
crossroads. Because you can describe what is
right there in front of you. Or
you can Expose with Exposition
you can Expand
with Expansion
from a tiny circle
to rings and rings
of concentric circles
reverberating
from it.
Then you can go
deep
and deep
and deeper.
As deep
as you
DARE.

*

S.L. Wisenberg performed this piece at the NonfictioNow 2015 session, "What Does Theory Have to Do with It?" Her most recent book is The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa Press) and she's working on an essay collection about the U.S. South. She is an editor and coach for writers near and far.

Read More →