Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.
By lifting the literature of the academic elite above the literature of the masses, English departments imply that the masses are unimportant and further the belief that English is a field and degree of little consequence. The inclusion of commercial fiction in university and college English departments would help lessen the perception that English majors are unemployable, better prepare students to work in the commercial book market, and attract students deterred by current curricula.
In the hogan I was miserable, not enlightened, felt funky and slimed. All the individual animal and species sins poured out of me, not as catharsis or healing, but as reminder and irritant, and I did not believe in sin. This was not my culture, my ceremony, my victory, my tribe. It was like being put to death slowly and humiliatingly for my presumption.
The Spillane biography is a good book, if only to remind us of how important Mickey Spillane was to American Letters and American popular culture. Now, if only someone would write a solid biography of Frank Yerby.
Howard Bryant, a senior writer at ESPN, has examined baseball’s tangled racial history in books such as Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. Like these books, Rickey combines impressive journalistic legwork, clear narrative writing, and sensitive analysis of the unique burdens endured by Black athletes.
Telling the story of bald eagles in America is like telling the environmental history of our nation. Jack E. Davis tells it well in The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, skimping on no details.
Instead of isolating specific, idiosyncratic causes, we have to look at the larger framework. Because something about where U.S. society has landed is giving dark emotions more of a foothold. Resentment and despair are not new. Guns are not new. But shootings at this level and frequency are.
The memories I treasure tend to follow some sort of risk or effort; they feel earned. Like making a painting or a sweater or a wooden box, they rewarded and commemorated an investment of time, patience, sweat, courage, and attention.
Marketers are throwing themselves at us. Repeatedly. And because we drop newspaper subscriptions and fast-forward through commercials and prefer streaming to broadcast and block ads on our computers, marketing has become a flat-out wrestling match.
Decades ago, Hannah Arendt wrote of a “common world” that could only exist if “differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.” Now the common world has exploded.