Overheard

[Loud, and louder.]

“I never read!”

[Laughter.]

Related reading
Aliteracy (Wikipedia)
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
“Proud non-reader”

Gospel of Intolerance

“The filmmaker Roger Ross Williams reveals how money donated by American evangelicals helps to finance a violent antigay movement in Uganda”: Gospel of Intolerance (New York Times).

DFW on writing by hand

David Foster Wallace liked using pens and typewriters:

Writing by hand and typewriter not only brings out the best in me — it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there. . . . It is this — not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens — magical — and it simply doesn’t happen on a computer.

From a letter to Sven Birkerts, quoted in D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (2012). Ellipsis in the original.

Related reading
A page from “the earliest substantial draft” of Infinite Jest (New Yorker)

National Handwriting Day

Today is John Hancock’s birthday, and thus it’s National Handwriting Day. I’ve posted samples of my handwriting, even one from fifth grade, on previous NHDs. But my favorite post marking the day is this one: Five pens, an autobiography of sorts in writing instruments.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[I think that reports of handwriting’s death are greatly exaggerated.]

Innocence and idiom

“I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night”: a widely used expression, though I heard it for the first time only last night. Now I wait for the chance to use it.

Domestic comedy

“And the dew point is -2°.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It’s fun pretending to understand the weather.]

Dear Downton Abby

“Of course, there’s one place where everyone behaves properly — and everyone has terrible personal problems. Perhaps they need an advice columnist.” Bill Madison steps in: Dear Downton Abby.

Detropia

[Piano to the left. Click for a larger view.]

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's documentary film Detropia (2012) is everything that Michael Moore's Roger & Me (1989) is not. There is no tidy, ironic narrative of decline here: Ewing and Grady explore the wreckage of a city that has already failed. (Moore's narrative plays fast and loose with chronology.) No one is on camera to be laughed at: the men and women we hear speaking are angry, dignified, and, often, wise. And Ewing and Grady (makers of the 2006 film Jesus Camp) are present only as unheard, unseen observers and editors. The know that the story is not about them.

Detropia juxtaposes scenes of unimaginable blight with scenes of resourceful citizenship and entrepreneurship. We see residents who refuse to resign themselves to the absence of police in their neighborhood. We see other residents who are determined to keep the Detroit Opera House alive. (One man chooses to stay in the city because he sings in the chorus.) We see the workings of a (sometimes literally) underground economy: a man who cuts hair in the basement of his house, another who fashions barbecue pits from storage drums and bedrails, a woman who plans to set up a cart selling eighty-proof snowcones. And everywhere, there are small groups scavenging metal from abandoned buildings. The cruel twist is that China is a principal market for American scrap, so the scrappers are feeding the very forces that have led to lower wages and massive unemployment in their city. Perhaps the strangest development in this surreal landscape: the presence of immigrant hipsters, attracted by the prospect of living in what one calls, without irony, a “dead city.”

In the theater of my imagination, Detropia and The Queen of Versailles (dir. Lauren Greenfield, 2012) would make a perfect double-bill.

The films’ websites
Detropia
The Queen of Versailles

Inauguration Day

I thought it was an excellent inaugural address. I hoped to hear the president speak of climate change, equal marriage, gun violence, immigration reform, and poverty: he did. He even made reference to the struggling city of Detroit.

The most remarkable moment for me was the reference to Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall, joining three movements into one ongoing struggle for human rights and the widening we of “we the people” — the phrase that served as the kernel of the president’s address.

Now it’s time for Beyoncé.

[Having just seen Detropia, I wondered: would the city’s name be heard on Inauguration Day? And yes, I’ve been typing through Richard Blanco’s poem.]

MLK

CBC correspondent Eleanor Fischer interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. in 1961, 1966, and 1967. Now WNYC has made available for the first time the unedited recordings of these interviews. Here is a passage from the final interview, from February 1967. If you know King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” (April 4, 1967), you’ll recognize some of its language here:

I think our country, which, I must say, is the richest, most powerful country in the world, has at points become enamored of its power. I think we do suffer from a kind of pride of power, an arrogance of power that can bring the curtain down on the whole of American civilization. We are arrogant in our assertion that we have everything to teach other nations and nothing to learn from them. We are arrogant in our feeling that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world. And I think we are arrogant in our failure to move progressively and forthrightly toward bridging the gulf between the haves and the have-nots of the world. . . . I do feel that we are on the wrong side of a world revolution. I feel that because we have too often identified ourselves with the wealthy and secure and we have ignored the poor and the insecure.

King goes on to warn that if the United States kept to its current course, it would find itself in more Vietnams — in Latin America, Africa, and “many other Asian countries.” Forty-five years later, as we see the wreckage that neo-conservative foreign policy hath wrought, these words sound painfully prophetic.