The Necessity of Hope
Reflecting on the end of a bizarre year, stylishness in writing, and my favorite reads from December
I’m trying to avoid any of the innumerable phrases that have become cliché this year: “in an unprecedented year” or “in these uncertain times” and the like. As writer Ben Fowlkes wrote earlier this year about combat sports, clichés tend to “do one of two things: make something that’s crazy seem normal, or make something that’s awful seem glorious.”
This applies to how we talk about the pandemic, too. Daily tallies of new cases and deaths have become as dull and dismissible as box scores, and the endless examples of desperate people coming together to support one another are reported as inspirational stories of human perseverance instead of indictments of our feckless and incompetent leaders that left those people stranded in the first place.
I don’t need to litigate any of the trials and tumults of 2020, since we were all subjected to them in one way or another. I’ve been lucky to have been spared of most of the worst Covid consequences; a few stir-crazed months and two cancelled trips are minor sacrifices in the big picture.
Despite some substantial personal low-points, in a lot of ways 2020 was actually pretty good for me. I finished building and moved into our house, got a second dog, and started teaching again. I wrote more than I ever have, started a column for Civil Beat, and snuck into the Notable section of Best American Sports Writing. I did a public essay reading, spoke to journalism students at Waynesburg University, and hopped on an MMA podcast.
I also failed a lot and in a lot of different ways, which I can hopefully parlay into some learning.
Turning over a calendar page is unlikely to effect any real change, but I still find myself feeling a little hopeful. New Year optimism may be delusional, but it’s a necessary delusion I think.
I started out trying to avoid cliches, but I’m afraid I can’t escape ending with some, because I couldn’t have done anything without the outlets that publish my work, the editors that make it better, and the readers that make it all possible. With a million different ways to direct your attention, I’m eternally grateful for those who spend what little time they have in this life engaging with my work. It means everything.
In case you missed it, I recapped the year of reading and writing in a previous post.
Favorite reads from December
Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity by Patrick Wyman, Substack
Millions of people listen to Joe Rogan when he talks to Jocko Willink, Tim Kennedy (the Green Beret and MMA fighter and increasingly open right-wing figure), or Cameron Hanes (who advocated for Eddie Gallagher’s release). They’re warriors. Joe Rogan isn’t a soldier, but he’s a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a former competitive kickboxer, a bowhunter, and a firearms enthusiast. If these are the people at the core of Bro Culture, a culture that directly touches tens of millions of American men, then there are bound to be knock-on effects. If they’re constantly telling their listeners to be ready, to be tactical, to be prepared to fight and to be good at it, that means something.
Koreans Believed America Was Exceptional. Then Covid Happened by Catherine Kim, Politico
“Is the U.S. actually a No.1 country?” [Korean reporter Kim Won-jang] questions in his article, published on Nov. 9. “It can’t even manage a presidential election, the largest event in the country. Yet again they need the help of the police. And if things get out of control, they aim at citizens. It’s like Zimbabwe. The president denies the election results, and social trust is at a rock bottom.”
‘This Must Be Your First’ by Zeynep Tufekci, The Atlantic
Maybe in other languages, from places with more experience with this particular type of power grab, we’d be better able to discuss the subtleties of this effort, to distinguish the post-election intervention from the Election Day injustices, to separate the legal but frivolous from the outright lawless, and to understand why his party’s reaction—lack of reaction—is not just about wanting to conclude an embarrassing presidency with minimal fanfare. But in English, only one widely understood word captures what Donald Trump is trying to do, even though his acts do not meet its technical definition. Trump is attempting to stage some kind of coup, one that is embedded in a broader and ongoing power grab.
And if that’s hard to recognize, this might be your first.
2020: The Year Sports Should Have Stopped by Dave Zirin, The Nation
Sports, as scribe Jane McManus reminded us early in the year, is a sign of a functioning society. Our society is profoundly dysfunctional, ripped apart by disease and inflamed by racism, and sports reflected that. Far from being a respite of hope, it was a sclerotic reminder that so many of us lived this year either in a state of isolating agony or abject and dangerous denial. They served us slop and called it hope, which provokes the question about whether that’s crueler than serving nothing at all.
December book review
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The first Tom Robbins book I read was Skinny Legs And All (1990), and I loved it for its wild imagination and sentence-level playfulness. It was smart and funny and totally original, stylish in a way I had never encountered before. Two years later, I read his 2003 novel Villa Incognito, and felt a bit let down. It attempted a similar narrative convergence but didn’t quite pull it off, though I wondered if it were indeed a lesser novel or if I was just less impressed because it was my second time seeing the same maneuvers (I still enjoyed the line-by-line writing in Villa Incognito).
Jitterbug Perfume (1984) didn’t clarify that question as much as I had hoped. On one hand, I thought it was distinctly better than Villa Incognito, so my response to that novel isn’t simply a matter of familiarity. The flipside to that, though, is a growing feeling that if you’ve read one Robbins novel, you may have very well read them all — or at least a couple of them.
The most consequential of Jitterbug Perfume’s multiple narratives follows Alobar, a king from ancient Bohemia, and Kudra, a widow from ancient India, both of whom escaped ritual death sentences. Together — and with plenty of help from pagan deities — they seek out and find a way to live forever without aging. They end up living over a thousand years, in defiance of cultural customs set for them, as well as death itself. Their story directly informs and eventually intersects with the second narrative, which focuses on competing perfumeries in Seattle, New Orleans and Paris in the present-day.
There was a bit of a doldrum in the latter half of the novel, but it coalesces well in the end, particularly with a nice couple of pages riffing on the idea of floral consciousness as the next stage of human evolution. His sentences are vivid and lively as always, despite some groaners like a “sadder Budweiser” wordplay on the effects of drinking too many beers (and this is coming from someone who embarrassingly wrote a “blow bayou like wind in a swampland” line in my college application essay).
The story is full of Robbins’ trademark musings and meanderings, from the philosophical underpinnings of religion to the metaphorical nuances of the beet. But at the heart of the story is the righteous and radical pursuit of individualism. It makes sense that someone as different as Robbins revels in the wisdom of self-actualization, focusing on the “self” as the only real path to the “actualization” part. This idea, while well-presented and not without its virtues, is also a repeating theme in the other Robbins novels I’ve read, which stunts some of its impact for me. Maybe if I read this first I would have responded to it more strongly.
Ultimately, Robbins does what he does, and not only does he do it well, there aren’t many other writers doing it. But such dominant stylishness is a gift and a curse. It makes his writing distinct yet predictable, original yet formulaic. And while he has a gift for saying things in uniquely imaginative ways, I’m getting a sneaking suspicion that it may be a way to cover for not having much to say.
With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation.
With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate.
With floral consciousness, we’ll have empathetic telepathy.
A floral consciousness and a data-based, soft technology are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and a pacifist internationalism are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and an easy, colorful sensuality are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers are more openly sexual than animals. The Tantric concept of converting sensual energy to spiritual energy is a floral ploy.) A floral consciousness and an extraterrestrial exploration program are ideally suited for one another. (Earthlings are blown aloft in silver pods to seed distant planets.) A floral consciousness and an immortalist society are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers have superior powers of renewal, and the longevity of trees is celebrated. The floral brain is the organ of eternity.)
Lest we fancy that we shall endlessly and effortlessly be as the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, let us bear in mind that reptilian and mammalian energies are still very much with us. Externally and internally.
Obviously there are powerful reptilian forces in the Pentagon and the Kremlin; and in the pulpits of churches, mosques, and synagogues, where deathist dogmas of judgment, punishment, self-denial, martyrdom, and afterlife supremacy are preached. But there are also reptilian forces within each individual.
Myth is neither fiction nor history. Myths are acted out in our own psyches, and they are repetitive and ongoing.
Beowulf, Siegfried, and the other dragon slayers are aspects of our own unconscious minds. The significance of their heroics should be apparent. We dispatched them with their symbolic swords and lances to slay reptile consciousness. The reptile brain is the dragon within us.
When, in evolutionary process, it became time to subdue mammalian consciousness, a less violent tactic was called for. Instead of Beowulf with his sword and bow, we manifested Jesus Christ with his message and example. (Jesus Christ, whose commandment “Love thy enemy” has proven to be too strong a floral medicine for reptilian types to swallow; Jesus Christ, who continues to point out to job-obsessed mammalians that the lilies of the field have never punched time clocks.
Reading now
I started a collection of short stories on my phone titled Any Other Place by Michael Croley, as well as an essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang. I’m really enjoying both so far: Any Other Place for its sense of yearning for Elsewhere, and The Collected Schizophrenias for its clarity and insight into what it’s like to live with schizophrenia.
December writing
For Honolulu Civil Beat, I wrote about education twice: the first a practical suggestion for a delayed student return after winter break, the second a reflection on what it’s felt like teaching through the pandemic these past few months.
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