eeen's blog

Baseball: America's national pastime

Jakle's description of American tourists' “Automobile Travel between the World Wars” seems to illuminate a widespread American fascination with statistics: not the field of study, but the numbers themselves, as if they could stand in for something meaningful, as if they were standardized units of experience. All that seemed to matter to many of the motoring tourists was mileage: more miles seemed to mean more vacation experience, more value for their two weeks off work. They would generally be far more concerned with beating their daily mileage records than actually looking at what they were driving through, eyes alternating only between the narrow road and the odometer. According to Thomas Wolfe, it was more important to “make” all of the national parks than to actually see what was in them. One brought back pennants and stickers signifying all of the places one drove through and plastered them all over their windshields, like kill marks on the noses of fighter planes.

It seems that not that much has changed in the tourism trade, but we can also see this affinity for ranking real things, experiences and events as numbers and tokens, and then caring more about those signifiers than what they supposedly represent. Whenever I go to a concert, the majority of the audience seems more interested in taking photos and videos of the performance (and of themselves in front of the performance) than actually listening or dancing, reminiscent of, say, tourists in front of Old Faithful. Last.fm, a website which automatically tallies what music you listen to and charts it, has, for some, come to dominate instead of reflect their musical preferences: they cater their music listening to how it will make their public Last.fm profile look. Excessive reliance on statistics in (for example) educational systems is similar: teachers and students who are forced to fulfill certain statistical quotas or curves quickly learn to game the system, because all that their superiors see is a simplified representation of so-called performance on a sheet of paper, but there can be any number of ways to produce the desired result.

All of this seems to come down to an ignoring of the detail, richness and complexity of experience, a numbing of the senses in favor of simplification and easy abstractions that are easily communicated. The actual experience of travelling, going to a concert, listening to music, or of education itself is often glossed over by a need to look to the future, to communicate the validity of that experience through bumper stickers, Facebook photos, Last.fm charts, and standardized tests. The present experience becomes dominated by this desperate reaching for validity, and the experience itself is missed entirely. Were you there for the park, or the park's gift shop? Did you ever look at those sights with your own eyes, and not through a viewfinder? Did you listen to that song because you liked it, or because you want other people to like you? You did great on the SAT, but did you learn anything besides how to take a standardized test?

Nathanael West today: dead like everyone else

Nathanael West's A Cool Million is not merely a Horatio Alger parody, but actually depicts the hapless protagonist, Lemuel Pitkin, as believing he is living a Horatio Alger story. It's a disturbing bit of social commentary—and also a bit pomo—in that Lem's wide-eyed, naïve understanding of how the world works is constructed out of such stories. The satire lies in the contrast of Lem's expectations—that of the nice mythic rags-to-riches tale that he thinks he's living—and reality, which West depicts as Hobbesian, insanely cruel and brutal, and especially exploitative of those who hold these kinds of rose-tinted beliefs. Lem blunders into becoming largely dismembered, murdered, and ultimately a posterchild for American fascism.

West gives us an important lesson, even if he does beat us over our heads with it in the process: your life isn't a story until it's over. Expectations of “what should happen” almost never pan out, and you usually don't get to choose what your own life story's about, in part because it's bigger than you, and also because whoever survives you can make that decision in your absence. West does a fairly good job of writing a story about how stories are deceptive, and he's largely able to do this through sheer force of blunt satire: it's very difficult to compose a nuanced and satisfying story about life being essentially devoid of reason or meaning, because the brutality and mindlessness in such stories has a strong tendency to undercut any degree of satisfaction. Still, a number of people have made excellent efforts in recent years; I would recommend David Mazzucchelli's comic Asterios Polyp or any of the most recent Coen bros. films.

The classic Jersey Devil drawing, from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 1909.

Browsing through the WPA Guides to the states, I noticed that a number of the books have chapters on folklore, and so I figured comparing these might be a good way to look at the differing characters and values of the states. Much of the Midwestern states' folk tales are similar, exaggerated Bunyanesque stories about impossibly immense fields, crops, and animals, and the superhuman local heroes that tended them.

The most interesting of these characters for me was Nebraska's Febold Feboldson, who, among other feats, “spent fifteen years breeding eagles with bees until he had bees as big as eagles”. (106) Another good one is Hels Helsen, “The Big Swede”, who fights Paul Bunyan in an epic battle that shatters an inverted mountain, the debris of which formed the Black Hills. (South Dakota Guide, 80-82) Cowboys are also a common theme, their exploits wildly exaggerated, with many real figures like “Wild Bill” Hickock appearing in numerous guidebooks. The Iowa guidebook notes that many of the folktales are essentially embellishments of local historical events. Many of the more fanciful stories in Iowan folklore were apparently lurid and macabre tales about Indians, and “Local residents point out cliffs where Indian maidens leaped to their death until it would seem that the first duty of all Indian girls was to jump off cliffs.” (82)

Kentucky has some particularly interesting folklore, typified by “a sense of something evil”, often involving gambling with the Devil, possession and witchcraft. (90) I couldn't find much further in the South or on the West Coast, mostly due to a dearth of guidebooks available online. The California guide, though it lacks a folklore section, does mention San Francisco's Joshua Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, a real person who needs no folkloric embellishment. (284) New England, however, is well-represented, with Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island guides all bearing tales, many about Indians, particularly in the context of white settlement, pirates, and especially witches and ghosts. Many of the stories are moralistic, though their tones range from spooky to quite funny.

My favorite, though, is from my own home state of New Jersey: the infamous Jersey Devil, also known as the Leeds Devil. This creature was born to a Mrs. Leeds, who, unhappy about having a child, “in a petulant moment, cried out that she hoped the stork would bring a devil.” (126) What she ended up getting was a strange beast whose characteristics vary widely depending on the storyteller, but which the guide describes as “Cloven-hoofed, long-tailed, and white; with the head of a collie dog, the face of a horse, the body of a kangaroo, the wings of a bat, and the disposition of a lamb”. (126) And indeed, despite his maybe-frightening appearance, the Jersey Devil is by many accounts shy, curious, and even an intellectual: one report states that he was writing a thesis, A Plutonian Critique of Some Awful Aspects of the Terrestrial Life. Other accounts I have read depict him as only having a few friends, all of them ghosts, who he occasionally takes tea with. What this says about New Jersey, I have no idea.

Not the same thing: Photos from Stephan Vanfleteren and Tailfeather, respectively.

A major concern today for travelers, at least of the young, American college-kid sort that I am and have generally known, is how we reflect and fit into social and historical contexts. Having studied abroad twice and traveled through Europe a bit in that time, I've encountered a staggering amount of worry and guilt, presented as if these were equivalent to the conscientiousness and respect that we try to embody.

One issue is the awareness of inequality: there are many who can not afford to travel the way we do, or for the same reasons. We walk by the homeless in the streets of every city in the world and wonder at the disparity between ourselves and these people we are separated from—physically by only a few feet, but structurally by a grand network of support into which we fit and they do not. Many of us react merely with the shame, guilt and feelings of helplessness that come from being extremely aware of social inequality and the knowledge that there is no easy, catch-all solution to all of the world's problems. Many of us just feel more aware of how little knowledge we have about other cultures and their problems, and have a sense that the barrier between ourselves and such knowledge is insurmountable. Our experiences can not be authentic, because we are not suffering—or, at least, we are not suffering as much as they are.

But this seems to arise from a peculiar kind of self-pity, that we are so privileged that we are denied that more essential privilege of "authentic" experience. The shame that we feel doesn't merely come from a belief that we are not doing enough to help people, but also that we have no place in doing so because we haven't had the “real” experience of living in poverty or “on the streets”, or as a hobo. We may not have these experiences, but it does not follow that these are the only valid experiences from which can be derived valid opinions. If it did, then the elimination of poverty would mean the elimination of authenticity, and of the ability to have a valid opinion.

The other, related, issue is that of historicity. We look back at the travelers that went before us, and we see how our experiences are different. We wonder if the tourism trade has made various “destinations” less real than they once were, so that we can not only never recover them but are contributing to their sanitation by our presence. We wonder if couchsurfing is somehow an insult to the memory of hobos, because of how we glorify them while using a comparatively safe and convenient method of living and traveling, outside of the more conventional and expensive systems in place.

We look back at the past, when things were in many ways worse than they are now, and we look at other places, which are in many ways poorer than the places in which we were raised, and we act as if those times and places are the only ones in which a person can truly experience anything. We only insult the memory of hobos or the experience of the beggars if we merely try to be them; we come from a very different context—with problems of our own—and the best we can do in this regard is emulate them shoddily. In doing so, we also insult the memory of our parents and forebears who worked hard to get their children—us—the privilege that we so lament. We insult ourselves by disregarding our own knowledge and experiences, the validity of our selves, and that we can use our privilege and the personal freedoms that it affords to not only know ourselves better but also learn about our past and about other cultures and the poor. We have an outsider's perspective on many of these issues, but the outsider's perspective is still a perspective, and it may even prove to be a useful one.

We don't have to think of ourselves as inauthentic hobos when we couchsurf and hitchhike. We can be aware of what hobos did and also recognize that they were a product of the time and place in which they lived, and that we do not live in that same context. We are not, and can not, be hobos in the Great Depression. We should be aware of them, and whatever similarities we may find between them and ourselves, but we must also be aware that we are people too, just as they were, and we have our own context. We don't need to look at couchsurfing as a bastardized “living on the bum”: we can simply look at it as couchsurfing—a very useful way for people to help each other travel cheaply and meet people who actually live in the places they visit.

It is not enough to be aware of others' plight and of those that suffered before us; we must acknowledge our own suffering and our own privilege. We must become aware of ourselves and our own experiences before we can become aware of others' experiences, and how we can relate to them. We must, first of all, learn to be ourselves and respect ourselves.

Primo Levi

Slogging through the misery and abuse of Waiting For Nothing, I couldn't help but be reminded—and yes, I know this is a stereotype of hyperbolic comparison, sorry—of the Holocaust. Let me explain: my most vivid encounter with the history of the Holocaust, aside from actually visiting several of the camps, was reading Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, a book of essays on life in the camps. In particular, the section of the book that has really stuck in my mind in the years since I read it was a description of how the prisoners were taken to the camps, packed into trains.

The Nazis saw their prisoners as less than human, as disgusting animals, and beat them, starved them, and packed them like sardines into freight cars with no light, no toilets, and no food for days at a time. When they let the prisoners out occasionally, they would be filthy, delirious, and would relieve themselves in plain sight. The Nazis, of course, took this as evidence of their conviction that these prisoners were subhuman: look at how shameless they are, they would say, and how filthy, animalistic. We would never do that, we have some pride. We are better than that. And this confirmation would justify further beatings, further abuse, further disregard for the humans they were destroying.

The connection here is not the trains, but the system of positive feedback that we can see both in the Nazi mentality and in the well-to-do and authority figures of Kromer's book. These figures relentlessly abuse and debase the down-and-out, driving them to animalistic desperation and violence. They then take that desperation as evidence that they are an inherently worse class of people, filthy, depraved and violent, thus justifying yet more abuse.

One of the "animal" qualities that Levi also touches upon is the compression of time into the present moment that occured in the extreme desperation of the prisoners. He describes how the constant struggle for survival in the camps so crushed the human spirit that the prisoners came to live only for the immediate moment, with no time to think of the past and no ability to project a future. Kromer seems to imply this as well, not only in the rising desperation in the book, but also in how each chapter is a disconnected episode, in which money, food and people come and go, and nothing is held over, there seems to be no history to any of these chapters, and none of them has a future.

Hobo: by Stephan Vanfleteren

Rail-riding hobo culture has been traced back to just after the Civil War, when many men who had fought rode the rails to get home, venture west for work farming, laying rails, and similar temporary work, or simply were unable to rejoin conventional society. Some claim that from this time up until the 1920s was the golden age of hobodom, when hobo culture, language, conventions and art emerged—these were hobos who willingly lived as migrants, unlike so many of the hobos of the '30s, who were forced into that life.

Just how free these early hobos were and how difficult their lives were is lost to history, but the texts by Reitman, Guthrie and Anderson were early peeks into their world, informed by varying degrees of experience and colored by fictionalization. These inform America's hobo myth, which is in many ways the only way the traditional hobo lives on today. Though some still ride the rails, changes in industrial and agricultural technology, consolidation of rail companies, faster trains and more effective security have for decades eroded hobo culture to the point that the camaraderie of yore has all but disappeared.

“Photo” Bill Daniel, who rode the rails for years while taking photos and filming a documentary about hobo graffiti, described the modern rail-riding world as much more difficult and dangerous than the good old days. In addition to the problems mentioned above, the breakdown of hobo culture means that nobody's got your back, and there are apparently many riders who look to rip off and attack others. While there are still some riding the rails looking to work—nowadays, mostly Latino migrants—most who ride today either scam the food stamp system in various states or are recreational hobos, more akin to the “tramps” that rode before, those who traveled by rail but didn't work if they could help it. These new hobos often revere and document the old hobo culture, but they are not migrant workers—many are actually college students and yuppies—and so are not hobos in the original sense of the term, which all but died decades ago.

A picture is worth a thousand words: but Agee will give you those thousand words anyway

The subject is wildly different, and so is the motivation and source of worry and fear, but the manic lyricism and often excruciatingly evocative description of Agee's writing reminded me more than anything of articles I've read by Hunter S. Thompson, working some decades later. Both writers—journalists, in theory—seemed to have their styles emerge out of desperation more than anything else, borne of an inability to maintain the fiction of objective distance, to relate an experience as if from a detached, omniscient perspective, as if they could know all of the events, connections, and motivations, as if the observer could avoid impacting the observed.

Both were concerned with truth and communicating experience, but though their writings bear many similarities, their approaches were radically different. Thompson would blend outrageous and picaresque fictions with actual reporting, (arguably) achieving what director Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth”: “Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. . . . There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Agee, on the other hand—along with Walker Evans, his partner-photographer—tries not to invent or fictionalize at all: for him, the distinction is not between “fact” and “truth” as different concepts, but is instead one of degree: telling the “truth” means giving every fact; everything he experiences must be included, breaking from journalistic tradition by recording his inner feelings, desires and associations.

Evans' hands-off approach to his photography reflects this as well; the families may do what they want, wash up, pose, anything, not only out of respect for them, his subjects, but for us, his audience. He did not want to deceive the families by taking their photos in secret, but he also did not want to deceive the audience by posing them himself or requiring that they pretend he was not there. In the photographs, the subjects acknowledge the photographer, and so the audience must as well. This is also reflected in how the photos were presented without captions. This demonstrated—as well as could be demonstrated—how Evans and Agee saw those people: looking back at them aware of their presence, with no pithy quip or heart-wrenching slogan dangled beneath them.

The fundamental tie that I see linking Agee's and Evans' work with HST's—and Herzog's documentaries—is that all of them recoiled from the presumption that the documentarians or journalists could somehow separate themselves from their subjects, that their perceptions could be somehow divorced from their own experiences and reactions, and still retain truth.

We've read a lot of grim tales so far, to be sure, but one thing's been bugging me—not about the plight of the “chiselers” and “shovel-leaners” but about why this class is called “The Travel Habit” and not “The Great Depression”. While the down-and-out are certainly an important and relevant subject for discussion, as evidenced by the majority of posts on this blog to date, it could also be useful to address a different aspect of these writings, the actual travel aspect, and what it entails.

I was particularly taken by the selections from Ernie Pyle's Home Country, especially his ruminations on the unusual perspective of the country afforded by constant travel, and his description of the very real travel habit he and “that Girl” developed. What began as immediate shock at each barren, desolate, ruined field soon became a kind of numbness, an acceptance that everything everywhere in the “Drought Bowl” was, is, and will continue be so ruined. The much deeper shock came later, when Pyle realized how he, like the farmers who lived on the land, had so matter-of-factly resigned himself to this desolation, and the “stupendousness” of it all. Not living in one place for any period of time made his connection to individual places rather shallow, but the breadth of his experience was truly incredible, and showed him a “big picture” that was stunning in its magnitude.

Pyle developed a real habit out of travelling, as he describes in the last chapter, both making himself and his wife a family that lived and could rest anyplace and noplace. Any mode of living becomes habitual, solidifies certain aspects of itself into routine, and has its own advantages and disadvantages. For most people, tied to some degree to a particular place—land, a house, an apartment, a neighborhood—much of their perspective and understanding of the world comes from the habits that that place provides or requires of them, both enriching and enmeshing them in that place. Making a habit out of leaving such places severs such habits that are particular to a place, an instead pulls habits from the experience of moving through the open space between them: of leaving and arriving, of short encounters, maintenance and correspondence.

Woo! Vacation!

To return to the down-and-out, many of those who lived a life of travel in the '30s did not do so out of choice or inclination, as did so many writers of the time, but out of desperation. They too developed a travel habit, but theirs was very different, generally far more difficult and at the mercy of chance, as described by Adamic in “The Girl on the Road”. The habit of the vagrant, though they travelled many of the same roads as the writers, did not offer some broad, stupendous picture of the country; they already had a perspective borne of hardship, deep and narrow and pertaining to themselves and their places and those they knew. Many people of the era traveled simply for tourism and sight-seeing and for them, the travel habit was part of living a stationary life, an occasional diversion, a way to appreciate what was at home and what was out there while maintaining a home to go back to, always. The perspective afforded by their travel habit remains a narrow one, deep only at home, vacation destinations serving to contrast or extend the home through shallow but delightful exoticism.

The Road West

Adjustment has been for me a fascinating theme in The Grapes of Wrath. We see it first at the very beginning of the book when many of the sharecroppers quickly adjust to the new industrialized, monolithic agricultural system, turning out their neighbors and plowing their fields. It's most evident and most pointed, however, in how the dispossessed farm workers adjust to the brutal existence they are thrust into.

Steinbeck tells us how many of the families on Rt.66 adjust quickly and completely from living and working on their own land to life on the road, moving from camp to ad-hoc camp, and of the informal laws, etiquette and customs the migrants develop. We learn also about the Hoovervilles, which work much in the same way, only there the people must learn to deal with the police raids and burnings as if they were some particularly violent force of nature: brutal, but also regular, inevitable and unstoppable, and thus just not worth getting angry about.

On the one hand, we can be deeply saddened when we see that the Joads are joyous and count themselves lucky to live in half of an old boxcar, that that is what now passes for a kind of aristocracy among the workers. We can see how far they have fallen, and in many of the others—especially those who have truly lost their dignity, like the store clerk at the peach farm or the saboteurs at the square dance—how far they can still go. On the other hand, we can also be truly amazed at the human ability to cope and adjust with extreme hardship, and especially that ability to make nearly any place into a home, from a jalopy to an ad-hoc campground to a boxcar, as long as they are not totally corralled.

Part of the book's journey is the transformation that the family endures, from a stable, dependable world ruled by a fairly rigid hierarchy of men in the beginning to the totally unstable, unpredictable world of vagrancy in which Ma Joad really comes into her own as the leader. This is both a demonstration of ability and inability to adjust. Pa, the erstwhile patriarch, depended too heavily on the stability of the farm to ground his power, but Ma is much more flexible, for her power had little official status before the family was uprooted.

The male-dominated system on the farm was simply too brittle, and the “jerk”, as Ma called it, of losing the farm was enough to break it. “Woman,” she says, “it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on—changin' a little, maybe, but goin' right on.” (577) It may be what Ma sees as an essentially female flexibility and fluidity that is necessary to weather this new kind of hardship, not one merely of bad crops and hard work, but of changing categories and social structure.

The Joads flee to California along with what at times appear to be the entire populations of Oklahoma and Kansas. But why? Why California, specifically? Can it really be that they believed it to be a land of easy living in white houses and orange groves? Would they believe any pamphlet you handed them? They might, if it just gave them hope. The Joads come across as naive and tragically hopeful, leaning heavily on confirmation bias to inform their decisions and world view.

As readers, we see the foreshadowing in all of the warnings and admonishments from those travelers who have experience with California, that life is no better there than anywhere else, but the Joads and their fellow travelers are able to forgo this information and rely instead upon the narrow authority of the pamphlet, building on this tenuous base an entire structure of hope and expectation, which they are reluctant to tear down even when the reach California and the reality of the Hoovervilles. Only Uncle John and Connie have been able to do that so far.

"You know when you see an advertisement for a casino, and they have a picture of a guy winning money? That's false advertising, because that happens the least. That's like if you're advertising a hamburger, they could show a guy choking: 'This is what happened once.'" --Mitch Hedberg

I'm reminded of many people I know who want to become successful musicians or artists or writers or filmmakers, and who blindly follow the narrow routes presented to them by media execs and those already in the industry; they integrate themselves into structures which, though they have produced a few wildly successful careers, are certainly not reliable means of satisfying those dreams. Those careers are held up and displayed like the photo of the white California house surrounded by oranges, or a photograph of a man winning the lottery outside a convenience store. Hope can be a great support in a time of need, as it is for the Joads, but there are those that will manufacture and sell their own brand of hope.

A friend who grew up in a far worse neighborhood than I did told me he felt professional sports were one of the worst aspects of our country's culture because of the false hope it gave many of the kids he grew up around. He said that a lot of the inner-city poor feel they are presented with three ways of rising up in the world: drugs, music, and sports. The first we can instantly recognize as dangerous, and more likely to get you killed than rich. (And even if you do get rich, you'll probably still get killed.) The second we know is a hell of a long shot, and there are enough stories about musicians getting ripped off by their labels to give us pause. But the third, we often think, though also a long shot, it may at least get you into college. And that's a good thing, right?

Remember the rigged slot machines from the diner chapter? Well.

Well, most kids just aren't that good, and the vast majority of the people who do go on to college on sports scholarships never rise above the level of college sports. Those that do almost always have incredibly short careers. We can look at Shaq's $21M salary and 17 years in the NBA, but he's just another white house in California. Most players that make it into the NBA are out within 5 years. Pro football players sustain incredible injuries all the time that ruin their careers. At my high school, there were at least two gym teachers I knew of who were failed pro athletes (1 near-olympian, 1 near-NFL player), both of whom ended up being accused of stealing money from the school. And the gym teachers are the ones who've done okay for themselves. Many go through college without much difficulty--or learning--and come out the other side with a degree signifying nothing. Maybe they'll have a blip of a sports career, but then what? A quarter-way through their life expectancy their luck's run out and they don't know what to do.

The long-winded and circuitous point I'm making here is that the Joads typify a common problem with poverty that undercuts the despicable image that headed my last post, which correlated poverty and laziness. The poor, especially those born into it, often aren't shown any way out except through exploitative systems that offer elusive pie-in-the-sky rewards. These systems, as the Joads find out in a Hooverville, use that promise to get lots of people to do whatever they want for however little they want, and blind them to the possibility of another way to live.