by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Thomas Frank

Bat Segundo returns with a big bang in this jam-packed one hour conversation with Pity the Billionaire author Thomas Frank. With talking points ripped from headlines just in the past few days, the conversation gets into populist politics being co-opted, the tendency of politicians to reinvent history, a neighborhood where half the population has PhDs, NASCAR, Ayn Rand, and Frank’s collection of proletarian fiction.

Thomas Frank appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #428. He is most recently the author of Pity the Billionaire.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering why Grover Norquist keeps leaving voicemails about tax pledges.

Author: Thomas Frank

Subjects Discussed: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s notion of “compromise,” the Republican failure to acknowledge Reagan’s complete history, Reagan’s Continental Illinois bailout, efforts to “erase” liberalism from Washington, Barack Obama’s failings, Congressional disapproval by the American people (as reflected by recent polls), how George W. Bush became a toxic Republican figure, the Tea Party movement, the Great Recession, how the Right co-opted populism after 2008, the 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts and Bernie Sanders’s filibuster, Obama signing the NDAA “with serious reservations,” the Democratic Party less about the working man and more about expertise and technocrats, Obama’s TARP bailouts vs. Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation bailouts, government agencies that become instruments of Wall Street, “purified” capitalism, firing bank managers, conservatives mimicking progressive ideologies of the past and protest movements of the 1930s, co-opting outrage, Orson Welles’s influence on Glenn Beck, The War of the Worlds, being subscribed to Beck’s email newsletter, Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, the Republican base being united over the past few decades by “quasi-military victory” and lack of civility, Howard Phillips and “organized discontent,” why the Democrats are allergic to discontent and anger, Roosevelt’s tendency to stump and explain legislation vs. Obama’s failure to do so, the Democratic tendency to use experts as a selling point, Jon Stewart and the New Political Privilege, the Rally to Restore Sanity, Occupy Wall Street, blue-collar invisibility in DC, living in a neighborhood in which 50% of the population have PhDs, NASCAR, idiosyncratic hangover cures, diffidence and resistance against righteous indignation in the last few years, the hard times swindle, Scott Walker and attacks on the Wisconsin labor movement, attempts to investigate why liberalism can’t stick in recent years given The Wrecking Crew‘s suggestion that people inherently expect a liberal state, the myth of small business job creation (specific data breakdown on new jobs creation from 1992-2008 from Scott Shane discussed by Correspondent and Frank), George Lucas calling himself an “independent filmmaker,” C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, small business serving as a propaganda front for big business, America’s reticence in discussing how we are all corporate slaves in some sense, Tea Party memorabilia, Glenn Beck’s CAPITALISM painting, Rep. Nan Hayworth’s dodging questions about Verizon with empty utopian bluster, whether it’s possible to take back the term “small business,” the Black Panther Party, ways to organize political movements, whether it’s possible to build a dedicated base to combat a corrupt two-party system, legal blockades to third party movements, protesting out of resentment and self-pity, self-pity and the resurgent Right, whether the Tea Party is protesting with a shared sense of humiliation, populist politics as a gateway drug, searching for good things to say about the Tea Party, liberalism and populist movements, Atlas Shrugged, Walter Issacson’s Steve Jobs biography, Jobs being selfish with his money, why selfishness is a uniquely American draw, retreating into laissez-faire purity, Ayn Rand’s prose style, capital strikes as fantasy, leftist versions of Atlas Shrugged, John Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Frank’s collection of proletarian fiction, Upton Sinclair, the cold sex and descriptions of steel and machinery in Atlas Shrugged, the connections between recent political movements and mythology, German sociologists from the 1930s, the social construction of reality, Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, how the Left might find political possibilities in passion, pragmatism, and anger, the neutered Left falling prey to forms of mythology that are just as nefarious as present myths on the Right, organized labor, Steven Greenhouse’s The Big Squeeze, how politics tends to inspire perverse behavior, and train wrecks.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We’re talking only a few nights after a really fascinating 60 Minutes interview with [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor. I’m not sure if you saw this.

Frank: I didn’t see it.

Correspondent: Well, it was interesting. Because it reminded me very much of your book. I’m about to talk with you and this happens. So [Cantor] appears. And it’s this fairly amicable, typical segment. And then Lesley Stahl basically says, “Will you compromise in any way?” And he dodged the issue of being able to compromise on anything. And then Lesley, of course, brings up the Reagan tax increase.

Frank: The 1986?*

Correspondent: Yes. And he denies that Reagan ever did that. And then, to add an additional monkey wrench into this, there’s an off-camera press secretary who says that’s a lie. And then, of course, they play the clip.

Frank: What?

Correspondent: Yes! And they play a clip of Reagan using “compromise” as a verb** when he’s talking about this tax increase. So this seems a very appropriate beginning to some of the issues in your book.

Frank: That’s amazing. That’s exactly what I’m writing about. These people who are essentially blinded by ideology. But when I say it that way, it sounds like some kind of slang term. Or something like that. But I mean it in a very serious way. That these are people who have bought an entire utopian way of seeing the world and are able to close their eyes to things that are obvious. And what you just said about Reagan, that would be a juicy detail that I would have loved to have had for the book. But there are so many other examples — essentially, they deny. Look, I went to a graduate school and studied history. One of the baseline things that historians agree on is that for the last thirty or forty years, we’ve been in a conservative era. That people around the world — governments, politicians, elites around the world — have discovered the power of markets and have moved in this direction towards markets that are deregulated, have privatized, have done all these things. This is common knowledge. A conservative movement today — you talk to a guy like Eric Cantor? No, that’s never happened. We’re still living under socialism. And we have been since Woodrow Wilson. Or something like this.

Correspondent: But why is it that Cantor and the Freshman Republicans want to just keep their blinders on about history? About their man Reagan? Is there a specific…

Frank: They have to have a hero and they’ve thrown George W. Bush under the bus. Because of the bailouts. But at the end of the day, look, it’s opportunism. Reagan is very popular. Bush is not popular. Nixon is not popular. So they have to have a hero. And it has to be someone who is beloved. Ipso facto, it has to be Reagan. But they have to deny all sorts of thing about Reagan. For example, Reagan bailed out Continential Illinois Bank — at the time, the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. Reagan, as you’ve just mentioned, raised taxes. Reagan sold weapons to Iran. You remember that one? Iran-Contra. I mean, there are all sorts of other crazy things that Reagan did that don’t look so good. I mean, Reagan really liked Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan was a more complicated person. But none of that is admissible. If you’re going to follow this ideology and this utopian vision that they have of what I call “market populism” — if you’re going to follow that all the way — and, of course, part of the idea of this is that you’re going to have to follow it all the way — and we’ll get into that a minute — you basically have to whitewash history. I mean, it’s almost Soviet, what you’re describing.

Correspondent: The phrase you use in The Wrecking Crew. “The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism not by debating, but by erasing it.” And I’m wondering if there’s any past political precedent that would suggest they could entirely efface liberalism from our political machinations.

Frank: Or from our memory.

Correspondent: Or from our memory. It’s very strange.

Frank: Well, that was the big subject a few years ago — when The Wrecking Crew was published. One of the topics of conversation was these grand schemes that the Republicans kept coming up with. The Republicans in Washington here, I’m talking about. I’m not talking about your rank-and-file Republicans. But the Republicans in Washington kept coming up with the grand schemes for some kind of political checkmate. Some kind of move that would end the debate forever and yield victory for their side forever. And they include — privatizing social security was a big one. Another one — the one that I focused on in The Wrecking Crew — is deficits. And that, I’m sorry to say, I turned out to be right about the one. By deliberately running up the deficits in the Bush years, it doesn’t give them permanent victory, but it does stay the hand of whoever, whatever liberal follows — in this case, Barack Obama — and it has worked exactly as they planned it to. Although Obama pushed it a little farther than they thought possible with the stimulus package. But now look at what’s happened with the debt ceiling catastrophe and all that sort of thing. So that turned out to be effective. They were able to limit the debate by some deeds that they pulled while they were still in power. And some of the other things that they are trying or will try or I predict they’ll try, they are things about tricking the franchise. Somehow keeping or dissuading people from voting. That sort of thing. But there’s always this search for the doomsday device. Yes, and it still goes on.

Correspondent: But this level of no quarter, no compromise. I mean, isn’t there some kind of “uncanny valley” or Hubbert’s Peak to what they can do before it’s just not acceptable? I mean, there was that latest Rasmussen poll where Congress got a 5% approval rating. That was a few days ago.

Frank: 5%?

Correspondent: 5%.

Frank: Well, that makes a difference in the Presidential Election. But that really won’t make a whole lot of difference, strangely enough, in the Congressional Election. Because people might hate Congress, but they like their own Congressman. That’s the classic, the old saw. But, look, what you’re getting at is a really interesting phenomenon of these people, instead of being pulled to the center — as all of your political science theorizing and all of your DC punditry insists that the gravity of politics pulls people to the center. Political scientists have believed this for fifty years. And this is a pet peeve of mine. Because I think it’s rubbish, okay, for reasons that we’ll go into. But it’s been just dramatically disproven in the last couple of years. Think back to 2008. You had the Republican Party in ruins. You had all these scandals in the Bush Administration. All this corruption. And then it ends with this catastrophic meltdown in the market. The housing bubble bursts. The banks start to go under, one after another. Then Wall Street starts shedding 700 points per day. It’s this crazy disaster. The financial crisis. And then they do the bailouts, forever sealing Bush’s fate not only with the general public but with the Right. One of the most unpopular Presidents of all time. The Republican Party is in ruins in 2008. And you have pundit after pundit weighing in and saying, “These people are done for. Bush led them too far to the right.” The era of George W. Bush was where they went too far to the right, and Tom DeLay and all those guys, they went too far to the right, and now they have to make their way back to the center or they will risk being irrelevant forever more. Or for the next twenty years or something like that. And look what happened. They did the opposite. Guys like Eric Cantor, they did not embrace the moderates in their party. They excommunicated them. They purged them. I mean, these guys, they behave like Communists in a lot of ways. This is one of those things. They purged these guys. They throw people out. And they don’t want them in the Party anymore. And they moved deliberately to the right. Way to the right. That’s what the Tea Party movement is all about. And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. They just scored their biggest victory in eighty years. Or seventy what — a whole lot of years in the 2010 off-term elections. They had a huge victory. So obviously that strategy has vindicated for them. It worked! It paid off! And there’s no reason why they would go back on something that just succeeded. It was a success.

Correspondent: But in the chapter in this book, “The Silence of the Technocrats,” you describe this collapse of Democratic populism from 2008. You point to the failings of the Democrats to challenge the Tea Party, people at the town hall meetings. You point also to the manner in which they formed corporate alliances with healthcare and also the bailouts that we were just talking about. The failure of the stimulus package. The list goes on. Only a few days ago, Obama signed into law the NDAA, which essentially gives the government the right to detain any citizen, and he had this whole “with serious reservations” claause that he did while he signed it. So the question I have is: if Democrats are offering the defense that Obama is being forced into this predicament…

Frank: They’re listening to the pundits. The Republicans did the opposite of what the pundits suggested. The Democrats are listening to them. There’s this DC elite that the Democrats are listening to. This is what Obama’s Presidency is all about — it’s looking for a grand compromise. But the Republicans, they’re not interested. Make him come to us, they say. He can come to us. He can compromise in our direction. Look, at the end of the day, this is something you can figure out with game theory. It’s really simple. If they’re the side that stands pat and makes the other guy come to them, they win. But that’s neither her nor there. I think the Democrats really misplayed the hand they were dealt with. I mean, misplayed it in a colossal manner. In a catastrophic manner. And Obama may well get re-elected in 2012 at this point. Who knows at this point?

Correspondent: Well, with the crop of candidates, it’s a big clown car.

Frank: Elected for what purpose? After what’s happened, why bother? They didn’t understand the needs of the moment. The cultural and political needs of the moment, which were populist. They didn’t understand that all that political science theorizing that I was telling you about, where the center is where the gravity always pulls you — you have to move to the center. You have to make compromises with the other side. That all of that old way of thinking about everything was discredited. The financial crisis. The Great Recession. The huge business slump. We were going into Great Depression II, it looked like back then. And what was called for was 1930s style politics. The conservatives offered it. The Republicans offered it. Or I should say the Tea Party offered it and has since grafted it on the Republican Party. And the Democrats behaved as if everything was just as it was in the 1990s. That if they acted like Bill Clinton, everything would be fine. They did not understand that the old scheme was completely out the window.

Correspondent: Why though would they continue to act as if they wished to rise above partisanship? This notion…

Frank: That’s who they are.

Correspondent: I mean, even after the whole debt ceiling showdown. That whole business.

Frank: Can you believe that? Don’t you think that that would be the big convincer?

Correspondent: But why do you think this is? I mean, why didn’t Obama just go to the people and say, “Look, this is going to have serious actions even if I approve it or veto it. I am actually going to you, the American people, and I am explaining to you that the Republicans want to throw the Bill of Rights into a flaming trash can…

Frank: (laughs)

Correspondent: “So I can’t in good conscience sign this.” Why do you think he can’t do that?

Frank: Well, the point where this really got out of hand — I mean, there were several big turning points in the Obama Presidency, but the one that really just blew my mind because it was such a misplayed moment. And we think Obama’s a very intelligent man. And he is. I met up. He’s a super-duper smart guy. But some of the political moves have just been total rookie mistakes. The one that got me was when he still had a Democratic Congress. It was a lame duck session. This would have been at the end of 2010. And he renewed the Bush tax cuts. Why not make the Republicans come to him and offer something in exchange for that? No. He just gave it to them. It’s like the biggest prize on the table. And he just handed it over.

Correspondent: Leaving Bernie Sanders to do that long filibuster. But that ended up being all for nought. Even though it was an impressive theatrical display. Everybody was behind Bernie Sanders. Finally somebody standing up.

Frank: Oh sure. But it wasn’t up to Bernie Sanders. It was up to Barack Obama. And he just gave it away — the one ace he had in the hole, he just gave it away. And so maybe he did it as a good faith gesture to the Republicans. And look what it got him? This terrible smackdown with the debt ceiling crisis.

Correspondent: An embarrassment.

Frank: The kind of naivete that that takes. To not understand that that’s how these guys play the game. There’s plenty of journalists that wrote about the DeLay Congress and the Gingrich Congress. We know how these guys play. Or George W. Bush. Look at the career of Karl Rove. These guys play to win. They don’t mess around. And the innocence of Washington that it took to make a blunder — let’s call it what it is. A blunder like that is shocking to me.

Correspondent: If he’s so smart, why does he constantly come to them? I mean, why give the game away like that?

Frank: Because that’s who they are. That’s the Democratic Party nowadays.

Correspondent: It’s been like that for a while though, you know?

Frank: It has. And, hey, let’s be fair. Obama isn’t the — all of their last six Presidential candidates have been cut from the same cloth. I think Obama is, in lots of ways, smarter and a better speaker, and more talented than a lot of their previous leaders. But this is who the Democratic Party has become. Many years ago, they were the party of the working man. Everyone knew that. They were also a party that had an ideology. An ideology that arose from organized labor, that arose from the New Deal. And that has been lost. They are the party of technocrats now. Look, everything I’m telling you right now is right on the surface down at Washington DC. The big Democratic Party thinkers talk about this all the time. We are the party of the professional class. And if we aren’t that yet, that’s who we’re going to be when we’re done. We’re going to get there eventually.

* — This is a very pedantic stickler point, but one that nonetheless demands clarity. Reagan raised taxes twelve times during his administration. Frank is referring to the Tax Reform Act of 1986. But, to be clear, Stahl was specifically referring to Reagan’s 1982 tax increase in the 60 Minutes segment.

** — Another highly pedantic (and perhaps needless) stickler point. Reagan used “compromise” as a noun, not as a verb: “Make no mistake about it, this whole package is a compromise.” And while Reagan’s specific words convey the same point (indeed more definitively with a noun), it is important to remain committed to painstaking accuracy — especially when the corresponding approach being discussed over the hour involves how political parties cleave to mythology.

The Bat Segundo Show #428: Thomas Frank (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Early Fiction of Sarah Hall

On the occasion of Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference, this essay outlines how Hall’s striking literary voice developed in her first three novels.

(In an effort to ensure that all of Sarah Hall’s work is covered in some form on these pages, I am collecting all material I have written on Ms. Hall. What follows is an essay, which covered all of Hall’s fiction up to Daughters of the North and appeared elsewhere in slightly different form in 2008. Hall’s fourth novel, How to Paint a Dead Man, was the subject of a roundtable discussion that was published on these pages during the week of September 7, 2009: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five. An essay on Sarah Hall’s fifth book, The Beautiful Indifference — infuriatingly without an American publication date, but available in the United Kingdom and Canada and well worth your time — is forthcoming. You can also listen to my one hour interview with Hall, conducted in 2008.)

Sarah Hall’s fiction ekes out a territory somewhere between Scarlett Thomas’s “novels of ideas” and David Mitchell’s narrative know-how. In her first two novels, Hall examined the dramatic effect that the construction of a reservoir has upon a small town (Haweswater) and chronicled a tattoo artist’s journey from a gritty English seaside resort to Coney Island, its fraternal twin across the Atlantic (The Electric Michelangelo). Her third, Daughters of the North, adopts aspects of dystopian fiction reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, presenting a world in which women’s reproduction has been regulated, the economy has collapsed, and environmental resources have been whittled away. An isolated army of feminist revolutionaries represents slim hope for human progress: Daughters‘ futuristic time frame, its more concise prose, and its first-person perspective would appear, at a cursory glance, to be at odds with the 1930s settings, lengthy descriptive passages, and omniscient narration contained within Hall’s first two novels. But the novel represents both an extension and an evolution of what might be best perceived as a narrative inquiry into the relationship between humanity and environment.

This close connection is intimated by Hall’s tender attention to terrain. In Haweswater, the earth’s manipulation is an essential part of the story, with a river “redirected out of the lake — flowing within a man-made channel away from the heart of the building arena.” One of the women in Daughters has a “blue tattoo above her ear ran all the way around her skull, down the median of her neck, disappearing at the hem of her jersey.” These passages share a unique directional quality that provides a moody map for the reader, reflecting the deeply tactile manner in which Hall’s characters relate to their world.

But Hall’s characters must also contend with a constructed world of their own making, a topographical tapestry of makeshift structures and occupied edifices, closing in. Michelangelo‘s hero is mostly confined to a hotel and tattoo tents. In Daughters, an initiation ceremony involves throwing a new revolutionary recruit into a dog box for a period of time. And the harsh price to pay for this self-actuated world is not unlike that embodied by the child in Ursula K. Le Guin’s philosophical essay “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” who is forced to live in a small, squalid room so that others might enjoy a constructed utopia.

The body itself is frequently as scarred as Hall’s environments. Haweswater‘s main character, the farmer turned anti-reservoir activist Janet Lightburn, has a star indentation on her forehead, the result of a bullock’s kick and “a reminder that her life has included the sporadic brutality of her family’s trade.” Likewise, in Daughters, one of the female soldiers has a dent in her forehead, described as “the mark of a perpetual frown, an expression that seemed to be worn perhaps even when she did not mean for it to be present.” In both cases, the mark serves not so much as a stigma but as a proud physical badge of hard work. It’s as if these women are the new Zeuses of the landscape, with untold deities springing from their foreheads to follow in their footsteps.

Michelangelo‘s chief protagonist, Cy Parks, grows up in Morecambe, working with his mother in a hotel for consumptives. He is horrified by the bloody basins he must collect in the halls, but this leads him to be relatively inured when he serves as an apprentice to Frank Riley, a bawdy tattoo artist who teaches him his artistic skills. Interestingly enough, Cy’s mother shares the steely fortitude of Haweswater‘s Ella, who is Janet’s mother. Ella likewise contends with the visceral horrors of nurturing the wounded when serving as a World War I nurse but has no problem inhabiting this “brutal landscape of the mind.” Indeed, Hall’s female characters are often stronger than their male counterparts. During Cy’s encounter with a dissatisfied customer, Grace stops this contentious banter with the flash of a knife, telling Cy shortly afterward, “You are a kind man. I think if you ever truly had to sting someone, you wouldn’t survive it.”

Hall’s environments sometimes take on the metaphorical characteristics of a body. In Michelangelo, Coney Island is a “fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicket smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far.” That both Coney Island and Morecambe are “made up of a multitude of interdependent entertainment cells designed to remove a person from the dimension of ordinary life” suggests that these vacation spots are not so much living and breathing organisms, but complex environments presenting alternative ways of living to the commonwealth. And if this desire for an alternative existence is so seductive, it might also explain what causes Daughters‘ protagonist, Sister, to venture northward to Carhullan, a farming community run by an idealist with the telling “Tricky Dick” name of Jackie Nixon.

But as these environments become anthropomorphized, the faces of Hall’s characters, in turn, reflect the fierce qualities of landscape. In considering a career-ending assault upon Riley, Michelangelo‘s Cy notices “how a man’s face in barbarity will show traces of compassion even though it is already determined in its fulfillment of cruelty.” When Cy first meets Grace, the muse he falls in love with, Grace’s face is described as “pale and vividly sloped.” Pages later, Hall observes that “the face under the make-up seemed not be hers.” As Grace watches Cy draft a sea of illustrated eyes upon her body, her face one rare part of the canvas left bare, Hall describes the “dark red hair pinned back off her recessive face.” The phrase invokes “the old distinguished grace” of Yeats’s “Upon a Dying Lady”, who reclines “her lovely piteous head amid dull red hair….rouge on the pallor of her face.”

Equally important in this interdependent relationship is the way that Hall, in her first two novels, separated her descriptive prose from the chatty islets of her dialogue, as if unable to unite these components into a singular narrative landscape. But in Daughters, Hall began merging dialogue and description within the same paragraph, causing an altogether different postmodern device to emerge from this blending. The novel, which is the fictional statement of a female prisoner, has much of its “data lost.” And this lost testimony involves unseen violence. This is a particularly striking elision, considering the grisly consumptives and tattoo customers in Michelangelo and the brutal deaths of expendable reservoir workers in Haweswater. Hall appears to be sharpening her own formidable talents for novels of greater complexity and accessibility. There may be masterpieces in the future, but, in the meantime, these three fine novels present a great novelist in bloom.

by Edward Champion

Dmitry Samarov’s Hack

In which a thoughtful volume on what it is to live as a cab driver (and a human) is compared against the needless privilege promulgated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

It was recently suggested by The New York Daily News‘s Alexander Nazaryan that Jonathan Safran Foer’s purported “truth about human experience” could be instantly dismissed due to Foer not really knowing a life without bona-fide hardship. Nazaryan came to this viewpoint not necessarily because he is bitter (he claims to be, but I don’t think he is), but because he was raised in Soviet Russia.*

Fortunately, one recent book is committed to a less abominably assumptive approach to human existence. Like Nazaryan, artist, author, and cab driver Dmitry Samarov also experienced a childhood in Soviet Russia. And I suspect that this background is one very salient reason why Samarov’s insights into everyday life in Chicago are so real and winsome, rather than trite and didactic like Foer. Eschewing prepackaged claims of Taxicab Confessions authenticity (although the show is mentioned twice), Dmitry Samarov’s Hack (University of Chicago Press, $20) is a slim yet thoughtful volume on what it is to live as a taxi driver. The book bristles with an intriguing street poetry, referring to a gas station’s “welcoming neon glow” as “fool’s gold” when Samarov describes the difficulties of finding a place to relieve himself and depicting the unusual dernier cri (“a straw cowboy hat and a green Day-Glo bracelet”) which elude the monied charlatans who hole themselves up in vacuous manses. Samarov is clearly interested in people, but, like the prostitutes, the journalists, and the psychotherapists who cater to their clients in similar fashion, he knows very well how his fares perceive him. He registers his observations in a rapid-fire yet unpretentious manner (many of his anecdotes originated on a blog), as if he has only a few minutes to capture a few sentences (or sketch one of the many illustrations accompanying his stories) before hustling for the next fare.

Samarov is candid enough to express his understandable self-interest, describing how he wants his cheeseburger more than an “angry man with a backpack [who] marches right up to the window and demands service” at a McDonald’s which prohibits walk-ups (and which generates a quick fare stream for wayward cabs in the area) while also showing us his reticence to reveal certain personal details to his more probing clients.

And why should the hack spill? After all, when we enter a cab with the idea of entering a conspiratorial trust with the driver, how much of our taxicab conversations do we truly remember? Isn’t there something inherently troubling about placing our trust with a stranger like this? Perhaps. This may be one of the reasons why so many “confessions” of this sort often depict the taxi driver as some dutiful stoic who has seen it all. But this take severely underestimates the hack’s ability to understand the implications of his observations. As Samarov himself writes when trying to peg a woman pushed into the back of his cab by a disheveled old man, “There’s no polite way to broach such a subject, so I content myself with speculating.”

Samarov is willing to impart his fears and dangers, even when they reveal unexpected thoughts about on-the-job dignity. Of dealing with incompetents and ireful types on the road, he writes, “I wouldn’t be caught dead out here if there wasn’t money at stake. The fact that the masses submit to it of their own volition makes me question my membership in the species.” Does this need for the take, often ruthlessly pared down by a cashier when checking the cab in, make Samarov any less superior to Foer? Not at all. But it’s refreshing to see Samarov marvel at the universe even as he seems conflicted about it. It’s this marvelous duality of being alive that books, especially in the hands of the prissy and the uptight, too frequently take for granted.

* And if you’re truly on the fence about whether or not Foer is a loathsome human being and/or an astonishingly overrated individual, consider the fact that Foer had the audacity to apply, and win, one of the coveted Cullman Center fellowships (which awards a $65,000 stipend, an office, and considerable resources to each winner) offered by the New York Public Library this year — this when Foer himself owns a $6.75 million brownstone in Park Slope (purchased in large part through the family’s coffers), is doing extremely well with the Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close film rights and foreign sales, and this after Foer’s equally pansified wife, Nicole Krauss, won a Cullman grant two years prior to her husband. A source informs me that Foer resigned from the fellowship, which explains why his name is no longer listed among this year’s fellows. Still, why would any remotely decent person do this? I suspect the answer is quite self-explanatory. If you go for an evening stroll through Prospect Park, especially when it is colder and more desolate in the wintertime, you can listen to the gelid pelt of Marie Antoinette-like sweat oozing from the west without surcease from Nicole Krauss’s privileged pores, which is siphoned into a special stock for the children so that they too can sup from the free ride tureen well into early adulthood. Given all the recent dialogue involving the richest 1% taking everything from the remaining 99%, it’s astonishing that the Foer family’s unrelenting selfishness and unfathomable avarice has gone without remark or rebuke by the literary community. But I digress.

by Edward Champion

Ocean Marketing: The Dramatic Reading

In an effort to provide appropriate journalistic context for the Ocean Marketing debacle, I have performed several dramatic readings. (I have replaced all instances of “LOL” with suitably melodramatic laughter.)

It began, as most forms of Internet frontier justice do, with a post that spurred outrage. Ocean Marketing, a firm that had promised to deliver an Avenger game controller before the Christmas holidays, failed to live up to its pledge. People did not get their controllers. There was an email exchange whereby aggrieved parties attempted to seek restitution with Ocean Marketing. But Ocean Marketing, failing to comprehend one time-honored maxim (‘The Customer is Always Right”), decided to get huffy about rectifying its mistakes, with the company’s representative becoming mind-numbingly arrogant when it came to the power of memes and the potential for serious screwups to create viral PR nightmares. The result was a public outcry and subsequent investigation that revealed even more astonishing sins, including plagiarism and phony charities.

In other words, the whole Ocean Marketing mess quickly became a veritable rabbit hole: a fascinating and time-consuming parable on how a representative’s poor conduct revealed a company’s true disgrace buried not especially deep beneath the dirt.

Others have done a commendable job of following this ongoing story. So in an effort to provide the appropriate journalistic context, I have performed several dramatic readings of the more snottier Ocean Marketing emails. I hope that my performances have appropriately represented the smarmy and self-serving behavior which galvanized this mighty electric storm. (Please note that I have replaced all instances of “LOL” with suitably melodramatic laughter.)

Ocean Marketing: Dramatic Reading #1 (Download MP3)

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Ocean Marketing: Dramatic Reading #2 (Download MP3)

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Ocean Marketing: Dramatic Reading #3 (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Report from Toronto

In this 2,500 word piece, our correspondent spends a few days in Toronto and is charmed by several friendly people, many sociological details, and Honest Ed’s.

Toronto is the first city in a long while in which the locals haven’t asked me for directions. Perhaps the Canadians know the true me: the jocular jake who walks into a room and who somehow gets involved in some sprightly banter in which some questionable expertise is detected. Maybe it’s the cold knife that carves your face into redcheeked conviviality whenever you step into the cold outside. The moon is noticeably lower up here at night. “Bowed” is the first descriptive modifier entering my head mere minutes after I have touched down at Billy Bishop Airport, crossing water on a brisk two minute ferry that feels anticlimactic after the ten minute wait. (The question of why nobody thought to build a bridge over such a comically short distance is one I consider taking up, but my inquiries are put to a halt when I learn of a 1971 collective effort in which Toronto managed to stop an obnoxious Robert Moses-like project called the Spadina Expressway, which surely would have obliterated vibrant neighborhoods and is an admirable example of Canadian can-do.)

Toronto is bowed because the red hands at the crosswalks have more of a curved edge at the tips of their digits than their American counterpart. (As for the wan man who lets you legally cross an intersection, his legs are more noticeably spread, resembling the bottom half of an X and suggesting, quite rightfully, a metropolitan commitment to hardcore ambling which I quickly take up.) Toronto is bowed because the bay windows one sees in residences just north of Kensington Market jut forth with a modest commitment to bumps (and I am also impressed with the acute-angled gables, which mimic the crosswalk men) and the expensive waterfront high rises feel compelled, despite their obdurate vertical reach into the sky’s whites, to extrude half-elliptical bulges many floors above the bustling traffic. Toronto is bowed because even if you walk down a prominent downtown drag like Bloor or Yonge or Bathurst, you feel a slight but not unpleasurable list when you squint into the distance. Toronto is bowed because, from what I can tell, the taxi cabs are very much committed to free market anarchy. There appears to be no dominant color or company. I observe red, green, beige, and yellow cabs, sedans, minivans, and myriad car body types, but the only common denominator is a large TAXI sign atop each vehicle, much larger than the notices I’ve seen in many American cities. Like much of Toronto, its edge is bowed.

I’m guessing the Canadians aren’t asking me for directions (although they are talking with me and, from what I can detect, genuinely curious and highly pleasant) because I haven’t yet learned that my “restroom” is actually a “washroom” up here or because I haven’t peppered my speech with the numerous “yeahs” proffered to confirm any compelling point. I’m a big “yeah” guy myself, especially when I am in an exuberant mood and wish to encourage my colleagues and peers, but my “yeah” frequency pales in comparison to the Canadians. I am hardly the first to remark upon this linguistic phenomenon, but I’m marveled by it all the same. There is scant profanity and, aside from the occasional commitment to holding hands, far less public displays of affection than I see in New York. I observe a man around my age step out of a restaurant and painfully stub his toe on Bloor Street. He shouts out “Ow!” with the same declarative resolve in which I would loosen a “Fuck!” or “Shit!” mere microseconds after my nerves registered some minor and easily bandaged physical affliction. I’m not sure I have it in me to rid myself of this vulgarity, but I don’t want to suggest that Canadians aren’t committed to the profane. A Toronto newspaperman I meet hours after the toe-stubbing incident serves up at least five “fuckings” during our animated talk. In the men’s room (sorry, men’s washroom) at the World’s Biggest Bookstore (which I learn to my dismay is owned by a corporate chain), after my wet hands run afoul of a malfunctioning blower, a man next to me says, “No paper towels? To hell with this.” And I enjoyed his clipped yet confident masculinity, which I wish to see imported into Williamsburg back home, perhaps planting a seed among the indecisive and often passive vegan men with the pipe-thin arms who are fond of wearing T-shirts as dry in their fashion as a handful of the bad sweaters I’ve seen up here. (More bathroom notes. A graffiti in the stall reads: “GOT BLOWJOBS? ASK FOR EDDIE.” Also, American Standard is still the urinal of choice.)

The Downtown Toronto area, where I’m staying for two days, is hardly a reliable sample size with which to remark upon the multifaceted Canadian character, which keenly interests me. But on the whole, Canadians are quieter and more polite than Americans. In a bar, I observe them modulate their collective voices with a greater collective intuition than I usually see in my homelands quiet and swank places when a very young man begins fingerpicking Christmas medleys on his guitar. There appear to be more smokers here, but they tend to burrow themselves into the deep square recesses of buildings. (Did I mention that it was much colder up here? When I packed in a rush, I forgot to bring gloves with me. But Honest Ed’s, a splendorous place which I’ll get into a bit, saves my hands with a two dollar offering. There’s an almost Chekhovian beauty in this moment, but I’m getting ahead of myself.) Yet I also notice a curious geometric quality in the way people walk. Like New York, you will get cut off if you dabble on the sidewalk for even a minute. But this isn’t rudeness. It’s some collective commitment to an unspecified formula, involving time required to get freezing ass to indoor destination and minimum number of steps or this rectilinear stretch of the journey as vital variables, passed down through generations of pedestrians.

I walk up Yonge and discover a modest street theatrical scene at the corner of Dundas. There is a man dressed in a Batman costume (I am to learn later that Toronto has a fairly solid and far from obnoxious science fiction community: Bakka Phoenix remains a prominent bookstore fixture), several 9/11 truthers thumping the Infowars hard line, a handful of breakdancers, two lone drummers banging their sticks to a modestly appreciative audience, SpongeBob SquarePants, and a guy hawking copies of the Bhagavad Gita. They remind me of the eccentric types who tended to congregate around the 16th and Mission BART station when I lived in San Francisco. Yonge Street is a curious main drag, in that you will find unsightly chain stores, half-decent kabob houses (one night I scarf down a falafel for around five Canadian dollars) not far from payday lenders and adult business establishments like the Stag Shop. And judging by a few flesh-themed fliers I see bolted to poles, I conclude that Toronto has nestled its concessions to seediness within its apparent good cheer. It is remarkably difficult to purchase a six-pack of beer or liquor up here outside of a bar. For the former, one must go to a chain called The Beer Store. You will not find beer in convenience stores or pharmacies. I’ve been taking my American luxury for granted. I am told that the liquor authority is less uptight in Quebec.

I’m unsure what Toronto does with its homeless or those who don’t have a place to crash in the evening frigidity, but, beginning at around eleven at night (and sprinkled throughout the day), you can find them sleeping on grates which expel warm air. At 5:30 AM, I observe a drunken woman saunter though the Hotel York corridors, talking into a tape recorder with a curious admixture of bitterness and cheer. It appears to be some tape for some boyfriend, now long gone, about the good times they experienced in the past. I walk through various hotels at early morning hours and observe people sleeping in chairs. They all seem to be tolerated. I don’t see anybody calling the police. For that matter, whenever I enter a store, I am never asked to check my bag (unlike America). The sign so commonly observed in dense American metropolitan areas (RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY) is nonexistent here, and it’s not just because WASHROOM has been swapped for RESTROOM.

Nearly everyone I talk to about the local government has nothing but hostile words to say about the mayor, who many describe as a buffoon. I ask one Torontonian if he can be compared to the Antichrist just before forgetting that my American sense of cathartic invective may not quite align with Canadian civility (although Hunter S. Thompson is read here). He stops short of this, but I’m wondering what he’ll say if I ply him with more drinks. The mayor is a man named Ford who made extravagant claims about closing a major budget deficit that he couldn’t carry through. It is an old political tale. Restless population wants regime change, votes any old dummy in. But one can’t entirely blame the locals. Ford appears to have charmed or possibly played some members of the media in his rise to office. I’d be a bit pissed about this too.

If you dine at some restaurants and you use your credit card, the server will perform the transaction with a portable device at your table. This reminds me very much of a practice I observed in pre-Euro Germany, whereby the server came to your table with something resembling a bento box, the slots all filled with coins. Bookstores are more robust here than in New York. I count at least five nestled along Bloor Street during one of my many saunters throughout Toronto. But prominent literary tastemakers assure me that Toronto has, like other regions, taken a hit.

I am surprised by how few establishments are open at around 11 AM along Queen Street. I begin to believe that there’s a sizable slacker cluster in Toronto, until I am informed, rather remarkably, that the idea of stores open on Sunday has only been introduced in the last three decades. Throughout Toronto, I notice several bike racks where you can rent a bike over 24 hours for five Canadian dollars. My dormant criminal impulse, which I tend to confine to idle contemplation, begins to wonder how the appropriate bicycle authorities can trust people to return to bikes. Well, the machine sucks up your credit card, which contains your address. And if you don’t return the bike in decent condition, there are fines. And the process isn’t perfect. Some bicyclists who sign up for this scheme discover that they are being charged $2/hour atop the $5 charge, and the process of restoring one’s financial dignity involves an unpleasant battle with ruddy tape.

Yet the environmental idealist will surely have a wet dream over the fact that public trash containers are likely to give you a wet dream. They are very often divided into four slots: GARBAGE / BOTTLES, CANS, CONTAINERS / PAPER PRODUCTS / COFFEE CUPS ONLY. It’s too bad this hasn’t gone down in America. On the other hand, I do notice that residential trash containers are curiously proprietary. In addition to the addresses written in dominant type, the containers are all numbered and contain a bar code. But I wondered if, when the garbage men do come, the amount of trash is weighed and possibly scanned and collected. How much trash information does Canada collect on its citizens? It’s a fair question to ask, seeing as how CNN (one of my few news sources up here, given that I decided to largely abstain from the Internet up here) is reporting on a UN climate change conference with serious concessions and Toronto itself has some of the most impressive street cleaning units I’ve ever seen. On the latter point, I am fortunate to catch one of these vehicles, which resemble a giant vacuum. There is a long black neck which sucks up debris from the curb. It’s so much more targeted than the buffing approach in America. I am nearly consumed with a desire to start vacuuming the streets myself before I remember (a) it’s fucking cold out and (b) I am sure that there are strict and vigorous Canadian safeguards that would prevent some whimsical Brooklynite from doing this.

Honest Ed’s is a national treasure – and not just because its now dead proprietor shares my name. As someone enamored with the quietly eccentric and as someone who has maintained a pious disposition regarding the acquisition of items out of vocational necessity, I cannot say enough wonderful things about this marvelous place. Established by an impresario named Ed Mirvish, this capacious store not only sells numerous items you may or may not need (Elvis busts and seven dollar fedoras, all size 11, for example) at ridiculously cut-rate prices (and is quick to remind you of this fact), but it boasts some of the greatest cornball jokes this side of the Catskills. “Honest Ed’s a Nut! But look at all the ‘cashew’ save,” reads one sign outside. There’s another one inside in which Honest Ed is declared an idiot because of his “cents-less prices.” I had thought that my high point of Canadian cheese would be a silly TV commercial involving “The Loan Arranger,” with a man in a Mountie costume playing up the groans as he attempted to sell jewelry. But I was wrong.

The common message, listed outside Honest Ed’s in red lettering and several times inside within the maze of white and unadorned rooms, is: DON’T JUST STAND there!! “BUY SOMETHING”! And one is so alarmingly impressed by this goodnatured excitement that it is very hard to ignore. For Honest Ed’s – established in 1948 – is very much a time capsule for how a certain type of human lived in the last six decades. Upon encountering one negligee in the “lingerie department” (actually one small corner of the room), I noticed a large dark stain. But because Honest Ed had went to the trouble of getting someone to compose a friendly theme song – a little ditty on a guitar that was somewhere between calypso and Slim Whitman with the lyrics “How can be honest / When his prices are so low” – piping through the speakers, I was very hard-pressed to resist the urge. (Indeed, the shivering souls gathered outside Honest Ed’s just before it opened seemed to quiver about not so much because of the cold, but because they needed to perform some civic duty transcending mere Christmas shopping. Keep in mind that, on Honest Ed’s 88th birthday in 2002, 60,000 people showed up. There is a Mirvish Village and an Ed Mirvish Theater along Yonge.)

Honest Ed’s may very well be the secret to why Toronto is what it is today. It is cheerful, inviting, and willing to use any method of getting the casual bystander to see the humor in a common situation. I had heard of a Santa Speedo Run, whereby numerous men and women ran half-naked for charity, that had gone down and I remain certain that Honest Ed’s influence was partly responsible for such a goofy gathering coming into fruition. Yet someone who was fairly well-schooled in the Mirvish legacy told me that Honest Ed’s is now facing an uncertain future. I certainly hope this isn’t true. Every city needs its larger-than-life icon, its glorious excuse to bow in the presence of strangers.