I recently read a message board comment where someone asserted that the characters in The Sun Also Rises might be shittier people than the characters in The Great Gatsby. After I read this, I thought to myself, “man, in spite of my many robes, degrees, and learnings, I have no idea how to decide that one.”
And so, as part of my enduring quest for knowledge, I have produced this, the EG Revue’s rankings of the most awful people in the LGGANU (Lost Generation Great American Novelistic Universe). Their particular sins are noted in parentheses.
Tom Buchanan (accessory to murder; accessory to manslaughter; racism; infidelity; domestic violence; went to Yale)
Daisy Buchanan (vehicular manslaughter; shirt fetish; was probably drunk the whole time she was pregnant)
Mike Campbell (defaults on debts to friends; terrible restaurant patron; is more anti-Semitic than his friends, which is saying something)
George Wilson (straight-up murders a dude; amazingly this only gets him to #4 on the list)
Lady Brett Ashley (relishes producing chaos; selfish in relationships; leaves the bloody ear of a bull in the drawer of hotel nightstand for maid to find; probably didn’t tip)
Bill Gorton (shit-stirrer; uses a lot more racial slurs than you remember)
Jay Gatsby (oversees vast criminal enterprise; fails to respect boundaries with neighbors; has spent nearly a century being a bad influence on Lloyd Dobler types)
Robert Cohn (infidelity; assault and battery; writes mediocre novels)
Owl Eyes (symbolically linked to distant indifferent God; judges people by the contents of their bookshelves)
Jake Barnes (enabler; betrays the ethical code of bullfight aficionados; wastes the valuable time of a Parisian sex worker)
Myrtle Wilson (infidelity; fails to respect rules of the road)
Jordan Baker (cheats at golf; tells long-winded Kentucky-based anecdotes)
Meyer Wolfsheim (fixes the World Series in such a way that it is won by a team from Ohio)
Nick Carraway (finance bro; went to Yale; is “Minnesota nice”)
Pedro Romero (tortures animals for a living)
The Green Light (launched a thousand tedious term papers)
Frances Clyne (has a point; won’t let it go)
Montoya (kinda judgy)
Klipspringer (leaves shoes everywhere)
Count Mippipopolous (honestly, the Count seems like a good hang)
In conclusion, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway are important works of American fiction which contain many jerks. This has been demonstrated first with an introduction, and then with a ranking of twenty jerks. As I look back at the list, I see that four of the top six are from Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s classic has the higher body count (well, human body count anyway). So I guess The Great Gatsby contains worse people than The Sun Also Rises.
The reading of poems at Presidential inaugurations is a relatively new event in American history. A couple weeks ago, Amanda Gorman became only the sixth poet invited to read at a Presidential inauguration. Five of these inaugural poems have been presented in the last 28 years, with the only exception being Robert Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.
There’s probably an essay to be written about why inaugural poetry might have emerged at this late date, at least among Democrats, as a nascent tradition. Is it just Kennedy’s charisma still looming over his party? Is it an example of a secularizing country (or party) looking for a non-religious means of solemnifying a civic event? Is it a perverse joke wherein a three-minute poem is rolled out to atone for denigrating the arts and humanities at all other times of year?
As someone who teaches students about the history of poetry, I have a more speculative question: what might inaugural poetry have looked like through the years if it were a longer-standing tradition? What poets and poems might have appeared? The obvious truth is that if poems had been read at every inauguration ceremony, most of them would have been milquetoast work from poets long-forgotten. Such is the nature of art placed in the service of decorum. It’s not like anyone with actual power would ever let Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, or Danez Smith anywhere near that dais.
But since inaugural poetry has, through most of American history, been a thing that never happened, I’m free to daydream about what might have been especially good poems for the occasion. I thought about going truly nuts and proposing a poem for literally every inauguration since 1789. But since I have an actual job which currently presents me with a maze of brush fires, I limited myself to picking a handful of poems from the early-to-mid twentieth century that might have been particularly powerful commentaries at one of our core civic ceremonies.
There are a lot of Williams poems I could choose, since few major poets outside of Whitman have been so inclined to take America itself as their subject matter. But “It Is a Living Coral,” Williams’ celebration of the Capitol building, feels especially poignant after January 6, so we’ll assign WCW the task of dignifying the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge.
Williams’ poem, which first appeared in 1924, turns the solidity and mass of the Capitol into a living, lovely thing: “a dome/ eight million pounds/ in weight/ iron plates constructed/ to expand/ and contract with/ variations/ of temperature/ the folding/ and unfolding of a lily.” Williams then spins into a giddy catalog of the paintings and sculptures that fill the Capitol dome, and the poem starts to feel like a not-quite-orderly montage of American history. With his pure energy and capacity for slightly irreverent awe, Williams makes this “archaic” building a metonym for a nation he hopes can be as flexible as it is massive.
Despite the title, this poem is primarily about the US; it just takes Moore a few lines of epigrammatic takes on foreign country countries before she settles into her main topic, America, “where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions,” and where “letters are written/ not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/ but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” It would be fun to watch Senators and Justices try to puzzle out whether and how much this is supposed to be funny, and to what degree the joke is at their expense.
I hope that someday a Republican invites a poet to read at the inauguration, as inaugural poems have thus far been a strictly Democratic affair. Moore would have been honored to read at the 1929 inauguration, as she came from a pro-GOP family that held Herbert Hoover in great esteem for his WWI-era relief efforts. At the end of her poem, Moore insists that if culture is hard to find in America, “must one imagine/ that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.” It would also be nice to imagine that poetry needn’t be confined to one party.
In an alternate universe where poems had been read at every inauguration, it’s safe to assume that the list of poets would have been exclusively white for a very long time. I’d like to believe that a person of color would have been chosen as an inaugural poet long before Maya Angelou in 1993, but if I’m being honest, I also suspect that inaugural poetry’s color line would have endured longer than Major League Baseball’s.
So I very much doubt that Sterling Brown would have been selected to read at an inauguration in 1933. But in an alternate universe where a black poet could have read at FDR’s first inauguration, Washington D.C. native Brown, whose best poems are deeply democratic and American, would have been a fantastic choice.
“Strong Men'' in particular is a perfect poem for public performance, and not just because it sounds amazing. Brown celebrates the cross-generational resilience of African-Americans in the face of slavery, violence, and segregation, but he is also optimistic about the future: “Strong men keep a-comin’ on,/ Gittin’ stronger.” And surely, in a year as difficult as 1933, such a statement of optimism would have been a powerful thing.
“The Book of the Dead” is the final section of Rukeyser’s long poem of the same name, which appeared in 1938, and combines poetry, interviews, and documentary research to tell the story of the hundreds of workers who died of silicosis as a result of shoddy safety practices at a West Virginia mining operation. Of all the poems I’ve mentioned, this is probably the least likely ever to be allowed to be read at an official American political ceremony, not only because of its topic, but also because of Rukeyser’s politics, which were well to the left of Roosevelt.
But that said, the individual poem “The Book of the Dead,” which is a much more traditional lyric poem than most of the rest of the book, has long struck me as one of the great poems about what America is, and what it could be. Rukeyser writes the poem in Dante-echoing tercets, which is fitting for a book about workers descending into an industrial hell. But within that form Rukeyser crafts a sprawling Whitmanic travelogue through the American countryside. Indeed, much of the poem is very pretty, though Rukeyser avoids Whtiman’s tendency to float up from the soil to the ether, and instead challenges the reader to support the workers crushed by their nation’s quest for progress. Near the end, she implores us to “Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,/ to photograph and to extend the voice,/ to speak this meaning.”
If I just describe what this poem is about, you’ll wonder why I chose it for such an august occasion. The speaker wanders through midtown Manhattan, checks out some construction workers, contemplates lunch, window shops, looks at billboards, thinks about movie stars, eats a burger, and remembers a few of his recently deceased friends (one of whom is Jackson Pollock). All of this unfolds over a couple pages of loose, chatty, enjambment-propelled free verse. O’Hara conveys the energy of a pleasant nothing of a day, but like all great art that alchemically captures something so ephemeral, it also feels poignant. Perhaps it feels especially poignant nowadays, when the pleasures of strolling aimlessly through a crowd are denied us.
Whatever else America is, it’s definitely Times Square and cheeseburgers and getting lost in the bustle. Inaugural poems needn’t all be stuffy; we’re not British, after all. And so we’ll let O’Hara, poet laureate of the everyday, take the hypothetical stage.
An inaugural poem for 1965 surely should have celebrated the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. Hayden’s poem about Douglass, which had first appeared in The Atlantic all the way back in 1947, packs celebration, prophecy, and challenge into a mere fourteen lines. Hayden imagines a day when freedom “is finally ours,” when it will be as instinctive as “brain matter, systole, diastole,/ reflex action,” and become something more than “the gaudy mumbo-jumbo of politicians.” When that day comes, we will finally be worthy of being from the same nation as Frederick Douglass, “this former slave, this Negro/ beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world/ where none is lonely, none hunted.”
I should stop quoting it and you should just go read it. Recited at a presidential inauguration, Hayden’s poem would elevate the occasion rather than the other way around.
It’s safe to say that no poet would ever be invited to Washington to “respond” to the President, but since this exercise is entirely speculative, I’m going to imagine Jay Wright reading at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Wright’s 1971 poem “The Homecoming Singer” is initially full of energy, as the speaker travels across a Nashville “livid with lights,/ as if the weight of all the people/ shooting down her arteries had inflamed them.” But the poem gets quieter and more contemplative until eventually concluding with the speaker in a dream where he hears a woman sing a sad, operatic song that “brings up the Carolina calls,/ the waterboy, the railroad cutter, the jailed,/ the condemned, all that had been forgotten/ on this night of homecomings, all/ that had been misplaced in those livid arteries.”
In the middle of the Nixon era, Wright dreamt of a song for those who are actually silenced, actually forsaken; not a silent majority but a silenced reality. In all of its sadness and anger, Wright’s poem is also a meditation on what “coming home” could mean for those swept aside, or for the poem’s lonely speaker, or for a nation where displacement is a way of life. It is, in a sense, a poem about the realities that are hidden by traditions, which in a roundabout way would make it perfect for the occasion.
This summer, I watched the Springfield, MO music documentary The Center of Nowhere, which was a lovingly-made
bit of boosterism that included some genuinely cool interviews and historical
footage. It was pleasant, if a bit sad, to watch it in a year when I can’t get
back to Springfield for the usual occasions. I found after watching the film that
I was immediately assembling my own list of my favorite songs by Springfield
bands. And so, after a few months of hemming, hawing, and typing, I have
assembled a list of my ten favorite songs of Springfield, MO.It would be much more fun to drive down to
the Ozarks, catch up with friends, and argue about this stuff over a whiskey or
four, but I guess a blog post will have to do for now.
The number of years since I moved away from Springfield at
age 18 far exceeds the number of years that I lived there when I was growing up.
Listening to music from the Ozarks has long been a way to feel connected to a
place that still means a lot to me, even if that place seems to the rest of the
world like a backwater.
I hope that the following list will be taken in the spirit
intended, which is as one music fan’s love letter to the town where
he grew up. I have no more authority than anyone else to make such a list, and
far less authority than some people. So think of it as a mixtape as much as a
ranking. And I always scribbled way too many liner notes on mixtapes.
Okay, some caveats and clarifications:
*I make no claims to this list being definitive. If you care
about Springfield music, your mileage will almost certainly vary, and that’s a
wonderful thing.
*I’ve listened to a lot of stuff from Springfield over the
years, but as I said, I haven’t actually lived there full-time since 1995. So I
don’t necessarily know all the new bands, and what I do know is inflected by the
recommendations of friends. Brett Miller and Jenny Edwards in particular have
pointed me to a lot of good stuff, though neither of them bear any blame for my
deficiencies of taste.
*There’s obviously the question of how to define “songs of
Springfield.” I’m defining it to mean songs written and performed by artists
associated primarily or exclusively with Springfield or its immediate environs.
There are obviously other ways one could do this. A list of nationally known
artists who spent some small portion of their career performing or recording in
Springfield might lean heavily to Brenda Lee, the Carter Family, or Robbie
Fulks; a list of songs written by Springfieldians but made famous by national
artists would give you “Danger Zone,” “The Letter,” and “Always on My Mind.”
But my list is about songs that are of, by, and to a great extent for
Springfieldians.
*I am the age I am, and like anyone I’m partial to the music
of my teens and twenties. In my case, this means the 90’s and 00’s. I also have
my own genre preferences. I particularly enjoy Americana performed by
smartasses and indie rock performed by dorks. I like hooks. I mistrust
virtuosity. All of that is reflected here.
*This is a Springfield list. Not a 417 list. There’s no
Branson. No Knobbers. No Shojis. Anything located within five miles of a
fucking wax museum is out. That said, I did consider including the “Fire in the Hole” theme song.
*Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Here’s my list: The EG
Revue’s Ten Favorite Songs of Springfield, MO.
Everything else I’m putting on this list is at least ten
years old. I really like both of these songs, but I haven’t yet had the chance to
burn out on them and then come back later, which is always the biggest test.
So, they get placed in a #10 tie, which will probably strike me as far too low
or high a few years from now.
Izabel Crane on “Spring Fed River” continues the long tradition
of Springfield artists revisiting gospel in other genres. It’s a baptism song
of a sort, but a decidedly secular one. I could imagine Isabel Crane gaining an
audience beyond Springfield. Certainly anyone who likes Gillian Welch ought to give this a listen.
Dragon Inn 3’s Double
Line is one of my favorite albums of the last couple years. Philip Dickey
of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin near-fame (more on them later) went
out and recruited a band of vocal ringers, and they recorded some synthed-out Crockett-and-Tubbs
jams. “Bad Boy” is the best thing the 1980’s have given to Springfield since
Charlie Spoonhour.
It’s possible that Matt Netzer, who sings on this one, is a
good enough friend that I should exclude Honky Tonk Chateau from consideration.
But on the other hand, this song’s great, so I’m rolling with it. Also, I
didn’t really know Matt yet when this album came out, so I first experienced it
as “a thing I bought at CD Warehouse”[1]
rather than “a thing I bought at my friend’s album release show,” which seems
an important distinction.[2]
There was plenty of hard-driving grain belt rock coming out
of the Show-Me State right around the turn of the century, and this song is a
fine example of the form. I’m not entirely sure what the song is about beyond
“relationship troubles” and “driving,” but what other topics do you really
need?
The subtext of this list is whiteness. This is a very white
list of artists, and while some of that is due to the limitations of my own listening
interests, it is also a reflection of the fact that Springfield is one of the
whitest cities in the US. Springfield was 89 percent white in the 2010 census, and
remarkably enough, that means the city is much more diverse than it was when I grew
up there during the 80’s and 90’s. The musical genres to which Springfield has
made its biggest contributions reflect those demographics: country, rockabilly,
folk rock, roots rock, bluegrass, alt-country, indie. We haven’t made a dent on
the polka charts, but give it time.
Both of these songs are about white privilege and law
enforcement. In “No Sir,” Big Smith’s Mark Bilyeu writes about an anxious
traffic stop in Oklahoma, where he definitely doesn’t want his car searched.
But in the end, he doesn’t have much to worry about. The fact of the matter is
that “The only words in Spanish/ On Highway 44/ Say ‘Checkpoint straight
ahead’/ So you know who they’re lookin’ for.” The young white protagonist is
able to “wriggle through the net” of the justice system, free to pursue a
career performing hillbilly music, well-aware that people who don’t look like him
might not have fared so well.
The Skeletons are even more blunt in their rewrite of a
Leadbelly classic: “Thirty days in the workhouse,/ Don’t you shed no tears./ If
I’d been a black man/ They’d a’ give me thirty years.” It’s “don’t you shed no
tears” that makes this one sting. Lou Whitney was willing to lean into unlikable
narrators, and it’s plenty revealing that the speaker assumes we would shed
tears for the slap on the wrist given to a white shitheel but not for the
thirty years given to a black man. The Skeletons tended to play this song with
a manic, unhinged intensity, whereas Big Smith’s take on the same basic topic
in “No Sir” is mournful. But perhaps manic and mournful is an appropriate set
of responses to an American reality that sits at the intersection of tragedy
and insanity.
6. Someone Still
Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Sink/Let It Sway” (2010)
SSLYBY is my favorite Springfield band by a pretty wide
margin. They were attuned to the blog-rockin’ 00’s in a way that gave them a
small-but-devoted audience well beyond Missouri, but they’ve always sounded to
me like a band from the Ozarks in the same way that Big Star or REM or the Elephant
6 bands sound like they’re from the South. They don’t play it up, but it’s in
there.
“Sink/Let It Sway” is one of Yeltsin’s catchiest songs, and
a real showcase for what a great guitar sound they had. And while it’s true
that “Best Music Video from Springfield” is a fairly slim category, the Point Break tribute filmed for this song
is without rival.
I’ve always remembered this song as a fun little
quick-hitter of 90’s alterna-pop, but listening to stuff for this list, it
jumps out to me how much “He Fixes Things” sounds like the Skeletons: it’s got
driving growly guitars and tight drums, it’s hooky, it’s unafraid of being a
little silly, and it’s not a second longer than it needs to be.[3]
Much of the best music out of Springfield has been willing to indulge in not
just humor but corniness (Springfield ain’t Branson, but it ain’t far from
Branson). “He fixes things but he broke my heart” seems at first glance like it
ought to be the chorus of an AM country song, but it works delightfully as a
90’s rock song.
This song always reminds me of that era when downtown was
nothing but Nonna’s, the antique stores, the DMV, and the weirdos. Every time I
get back to Springfield, it seems more and more impossible that such a time
ever existed.
It’s fun to imagine the reaction of some University Heights
father walking past his daughter’s room, just a few months before she graduates
as part of Parkview’s first senior class, and overhearing her listen to this growly
rockabilly record. “Linda,” declares the paterfamilias, “if this boy takes
these kinds of liberties with English grammar, what other liberties might he
take?”
I hope Linda was done being grounded in time to join her
fellow Lassies at the sock hop.
“Bop-a-Lena” was a bigger hit for Self (and “I’m Sorry,”
which he wrote for Brenda Lee, was a way
bigger hit), but to these ears, “Ain’t I’m a Dog” is the A-side.
Alright, time for some honesty that might anger some
Springfieldians: I kinda hate the Daredevils. “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” is
boring. “It’ll Shine When It Shines” is saccharine. “Chicken Train” makes me
want to go full Belushi on a mouth harp.
But then there’s “Jackie Blue.”
“Jackie Blue” is so good, y’all. “Jackie Blue” sounds like
someone raised on Ozarks church music discovering cocaine, malaise, and women
who like cocaine.[4] No
matter how good your stereo is, “Jackie Blue” always sounds like a tinny
speaker nailed to a utility pole at Hydra-Slide. It sounds like denim cutoffs
and root beer at the Fair. It sounds like a lifeguard at Fassnight Pool who’s
more worried about her tan than her job.
As far as radio airplay is concerned, this is the biggest rock
song ever recorded by a Springfield band. And so the Daredevils’ smoothest
contribution to the freaky 70’s lands at #3 on this list, which was also its
peak position on the Billboard Hot 100.
2. Someone Still Loves
You Boris Yeltsin, “Think I Wanna Die” (2008)
Back when SSLYBY still played shows it seemed like the crowd
mostly got excited about the more anthemic stuff, but for me “Think I Wanna
Die” is their greatest hit. Lyrically, it has quite a bit of fun wearing a
Morrissey mask. Musically, it’s a sidewinder—it spins and darts and hesitates
and builds, hooky as hell the whole time.
The line where they apologize for being twee cracks me up. Most
of the music on this list is more than a little chicken-fried, and when SSLYBY
came along one of the many delightful things about them was that they were
perfectly willing to be the least dangerous band in Springfield. Which in this
case extends not just to being twee, but apologizing for it.
Springfield is the birthplace of Route 66. That isn’t a
marketing slogan, by the way. It is literally true that some guys sat down in a
hotel in Springfield in the 1920’s to select a number for the Chicago-to-LA
highway. And so, the top song on this list almost has to be a car song.
“Trans-Am” is an upbeat song, but there’s also some darkness
here. The speaker longs for a Trans-Am, but does not actually have one. The
second verse is about the shoddiness of American cars, and the third is about
registering for the draft, which adds a note of urgency to what is ultimately a
carpe diem song.“Ride around while you
still can,” we are told by a band called The Skeletons. And how do you say
carpe diem in the Queen City of the Ozarks' English? By emphasizing“car,” of course.
Everybody now: T-R-A-N-S-A-M!!!
[1] It
was disc #20510 in the CD Warehouse file cabinet, per the “Disc at Counter” sticker
I still have on my copy.
[2]
Speaking of things your friends made, thanks for reading this blog!
[3] Skeletons
frontman Lou Whitney has an engineering credit on the album. Of course, he
probably has an engineering credit on like 70 percent of the rock albums made
in Springfield from 1980 to 2010.
[4] I
should note that I have no proof of what substances the Daredevils were
actually into. On the other hand, they were a popular rock band in the 70’s. I
just opened to a random page in Supe Granda’s autobiography (which actually
exists) where he talks about touring with The Steve Miller Band and The Flying
Burrito Brothers. On the next page I turned to he talks about transporting “fresh
green buds” direct from a farm in the Ozarks to the A&R Department of his
record label. I’m done researching.
Swift and Company in City of the Big Shoulders: Chicago 1895
If you are my opponent and we have a cordial business relationship, I shall invite you to the Annual Pork Ball, the social event of the 1895 season. But should you tank my stock...oh sir or madam, you shall be snubbed! Where’s your invitation? At the bottom of the Chicago River, right next to my accountant--that’s where!
Luke Skywalker, Rebel Commando in Star Wars Miniatures
I won the 2010 Missouri Regional Tournament with a squad built around this bad boy, so it’s all love. The great skill of this version of Luke is to levitate his allies into combat. That’s not exactly how it worked in the movies, but whatever.
Phobolog in Terraforming Mars
This corporation helps you build big stuff in space, and it’s fun to build big stuff in space. Plus your turns end up being really short, so you can go drink while the other players plant trees and build quonset huts on the Martian surface. Also, as Terry Wilson likes to note, you can pretend that your company is a blog about Vietnamese soup.
The United Kingdom in Axis and Allies
Playing the UK was lots of fun back in high school when Stefan Zarins played Germany, because he got really into playing Germany. Maybe too into playing Germany? Anyway, you have a lot of options with the Brits. Build aircraft carriers. Bomb Dusseldorf. Industrialize the colonies. Fun for the whole family!
The Cursed Pirate in Dice Throne
The Pirate is not the most powerful Dice Throne character. That would be the Shadow Thief, who is too overpowered to be entirely fun. But the Pirate is hilarious. You throw exploding powderkegs at people, your playmat uses words like “aye” and “booty,” and you slowly evolve from a sassy redhead pirate into a rapidly deteriorating skeleton pirate with superpowers. Always fun to drag your opponent down with you into the briny deep.
Bards in Dungeons and Dragons
I’ve never gone to the level my brother Nick has where he’s purchased costumes and actual musical instruments for purposes of better portraying a D&D Bard. But he’s absolutely correct that the Bard is the most fun D&D class--they’re highly customizable, you get to talk to NPC’s, and you don’t have to worship some deity that Gary Gygax invented in his basement.
The Thimble in Monopoly
Apparently they recently got rid of the thimble, which is awesome, because it means that I get to boycott Monopoly for the rest of my life.
Puck in No Holds Bard
This was a game in development that I played at GenCon once, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Board game fightin’ with Shakespeare characters! I hope the guy who designed it gets somewhere with it. Anyway, Puck was exactly the chaos agent you would want him to be. And yes, his special move is to affix a donkey head to rival characters.
The Roman Empire in History of the World
Do I really need to explain why the Roman Empire is awesome in a game called History of the World?
Athena in Mythic Battles: Pantheon
Makin’ corpses of Spartans,
Behind the Parthenon
With you, my grey-eyed girl.
Yoooooou myyyyyyyyyyy….grey-eyed girl.
Last Place. Helping Candamir Chop Wood in Candamir
I have officially run out of gas on my self-appointed task
of doing a blog post a day for five days, and so I turn to the last refuge of
the lazy writer: a list. It’s a catalog, an odds-and-ends, a deadline listicle...it’s
Johnson’s Veritable Miscellany!
So anyway, here’s ten more things I have found vaguely
pleasant amidst this (insert your favorite synonym for “bad”) year:
*The fact that the Rutgers tomato plant Ruth bought for our
garden is actually producing tomatoes. We buy a Rutgers tomato plant every
year, because I love the Knight life, but usually our Rutgers plant does about
as well as a drunk freshman trying to hold down his first Fat Darrell. But this
year our plant is a suitable tribute to the Garden State.
*Rhea Seahorn’s performance as Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul.
*Bear Review
editor Marcus Myers’ recitations of his favorite poems by Kansas City poets (which
he recorded and posted during the late spring). It was a lovely celebration of
great writing, and introduced me to a lot of stuff I didn’t know.
*The book came out 30 years ago, so it’s only a 2020 thing
for me, but a few weeks ago when I just needed to read a damn novel, I finally got
around to reading AS Byatt’s Possession. It’s
outstanding—lots of po-mo research/mystery novel stuff a la Nabokov or Pynchon,
but put in the service of a more realist and even humanist aesthetic
sensibility. I dug it.
*Joshua Weiner’s new translations of Nelly Sachs’ poetry
(which appeared in Poetry in April—the
full book comes out next year). I wasn’t previously familiar with Sachs, which
is kind of embarrassing—she won the Nobel Prize in 1966—but I’m glad to be
introduced to her elegiac, formally inventive poems. Anyone who is interested
in the modernist literary response to WWII, or in Jewish literature in general,
should give her a read.
*The takeout Easter dinner from Pot Pie. Ruth and I got like
four meals out of that thing. I flash back to the lamb whenever I need to go to
my happy place. Which I guess means I think about the lamb a lot.
*Having friends who bought a house with a pool. Folks,
swimming in a pool you do not have to maintain is truly the American Dream.
*My students in the spring semester. I’ll forever be sad
that the in-person semester was cut off in the middle, as all of my classes had
students who were thinking, saying, and writing interesting things, and I
really enjoyed our discussions. That said, I still got to read a lot of very
interesting papers my students wrote even after we went virtual. They did good
work, and I learned a lot from them.
*Sporting KC signing a competent striker. Who could have
guessed that paying for talented attacking players would lead to more goals?
*And finally, this picture of my dad’s quarantine hair:
Last night, as I contemplated falling asleep, I instead stumbled upon the movie Wimbledon. Then I woke up and wrote the following, which I believe constitutes the most time anyone has spent thinking about Wimbledon since it came out sixteen years ago.
Spoiler alert: In the
text below, I discuss many “plot points” from the “film” Wimbledon.
1. The meet-cute in the 2004 romantic comedy Wimbledon happens the day before
Wimbledon begins, when our male lead, the never-quite-made-it-big British tennis
player Peter Colt (Paul Bettany), is assigned the wrong hotel room, and
accidentally walks in on rising American tennis star Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten
Dunst) while she is the shower. Lizzie is surprisingly chill about this situation—she
never for a second seems even vaguely surprised or worried. I get that the
screenwriters are trying to suggest that she’s cool as a cucumber and doesn’t
have hang-ups about her body or whatever, and later it’s revealed that she
knows who Peter is because she’s seen one of his matches. But I have to think
that even a super-sex-positive, tennis-aware woman with icewater in her veins
is going to display at least a moment’s shock when a tall male stranger walks
into her hotel room. Regardless, the audience reaction to a meet-cute probably shouldn’t
be “why the hell isn’t this woman calling security?”
2. Lizzie Bradbury would be a much better name for a girl
detective than a women’s tennis player.
3. A young Jaime Lannister appears in the movie in the “wisecracking
buddy” role. He’s supposed to be German, but I initially thought he was trying
and failing to sound Irish. Just let the man be pretty and English—that’s why
God put him on the Earth.
5. And then there’s the problem of Dunst’s tennis form,
which is terrible. During the tournament montages, they mostly mask this problem
with clever editing, but there’s a scene where Dunst and Bettany play flirtatious
pantomime tennis in the park, and when she fake-serves it looks like the Elaine
Benes dance from Seinfeld.
6. There’s a whole plotline about how we know that Peter is
a good guy because he looks worried when ballboys get hit by errant serves.
That seems a low bar to clear.
7. Peter and Lizzie spend a lot of time driving around
England on picturesque dates. To be clear, they are doing this in the middle of
the Wimbledon tournament. I know that players have off days, but I really doubt
that Roger Federer is taking romantic strolls through the countryside the day
before the quarterfinals.
8. In real life, ten out of the eleven tournaments staged between
2000 and 2010 featured at least one Williams sister in the Wimbledon final. On
four occasions Venus and Serena played each other in the final round, including
the two years immediately before this film came out. I bring this up because I
cannot recall a single black person appearing in the movie Wimbledon.
9. It’s a romantic comedy, so there is of course an airport
scene early in the third act (Lizzie and her father are flying home while Peter
plays in the men’s final). Bear in mind that this is an airport scene in 2004,
depicting two people waiting to board an international flight from Europe to the
US. Now consider that Lizzie and her father just straight-up abandon their bags
in the terminal. I was genuinely more interested in knowing how long Heathrow got
shut down for the bomb-sniffing dogs than I was in who won the match, but alas,
my questions were never addressed.
10. Late in the second act, Lizzie tells Peter that she does
not want to continue seeing him because tennis needs to be her first priority.
After some hijinks involving trellis-climbing, he breaks into her apartment the
night before a big match and she seems...surprisingly okay with it. Being down
with having her privacy violated appears to be a core trait of Lizzie Bradbury’s
character. Anyway, the next day she plays badly and gets knocked out of the
tournament, at which point she breaks things off with Peter and leaves town.
Later, Peter gives her a big public apology, but the apology is quite vague,
and it could easily be read as him apologizing not for breaking into her apartment,
but for rocking her world so thoroughly that it made her bad at tennis.
11. Indeed, to that last point, the question of how sex the
night before a match impacts one’s tennis performance is discussed frequently
in the movie. The film suggests emphatically that sex makes men better at tennis,
but it makes women worse.
12. At least that’s its opinion regarding hetero relationships.
The film has gay and lesbian characters, but they are all queer quippy sexless
sidekicks of the sort that future film historians will be led to believe were
omnipresent from 1998 to 2005.
13. Peter wins the Wimbledon final. His opponent is portrayed
as a bad guy, though his bad guy bona fides are that he is cocky, he is
slightly less concerned than Peter is when ballboys get hit in the face, and he
makes a pass at Lizzie at one point (though unlike Peter he stops pursuing her
when she says she’s not interested). He also has really good hair. He is, to
put it mildly, a poorly realized villain.
14. I would not have guessed at the time that the actor in Wimbledon who would have the most Hollywood
success over the next sixteen years would be Jon Favreau. But then, who could
have foreseen Baby Yoda? I also don’t think I would have guessed that Kirsten
Dunst would end up engaged to Landry from Friday
Night Lights. Crucifictorious forever!
15. Both our leads have “wacky families.” There is the
inevitable wisecracking sibling, and an overprotective yet wise father. Also,
Peter’s parents are in the middle of a madcap marital dispute that has led to
Peter’s father living in a treehouse—that’s like ten percent of the film. The
movie would have been much better if most of the family stuff had been removed,
in no small part because then it only would have been about forty minutes long.
16. The sports movie/rom-com hybrid is truly a mutant
hellbeast, combining as it does two of the most formulaic movie genres. Bull Durham is the only example I can
think of that is especially good. So is Wimbledon
more successful as a rom-com or sports movie? It’s honestly a tough call. What
it has to say about romance is more offensive, but the way it imagines sports
is considerably dumber. Guess we’ll just have to score it a deuce.
