Archives for June 2017

From 2007:

Nostalgia is incommunicable. Try as we might, we cannot share it with those who stand outside the magic circle of common memories. So I can’t tell you what it really felt like for me to drive through the Great Smoky Mountains National Parkon Monday morning, or to walk along the main street of Gatlinburg, the Tennessee resort town where my family spent several of its summer vacations some forty-odd years ago. Even if you’d been with me, you wouldn’t have seen what I saw from the Sky Lift whose swinging yellow chairs look down on the town, or smelled what I smelled when I walked into the Ole Smoky Candy Kitchen in search of chocolate taffy logs. What I saw and smelled was, of course, myself when young, and you didn’t know me then…

Read the whole thing here.

“‘There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard unfamiliar things, there is here—hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise—but only to his father’s state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.’

“‘That is not so. Your children have not done better than you.’

“Mary Rommely sighed. ‘That may be my fault. I knew not how to teach my daughters because I have nothing behind me excepting that for hundreds of years, my family has worked on the land of some overlord. I did not send my first child to the school. I was ignorant and did not know at first that the children of folk like us were allowed the free education of this land. Thus, Sissy had no chance to do better than me. But the other three…you went to school.’

“‘I finished the sixth grade, if that is what is called education.’

“‘And your Yohnny’ (she could not pronounce ‘j’), ‘did too. Don’t you see?’ Excitement came into her voice. ‘Already, it is starting—the getting better.’ She picked up the baby and held it high in her arms. ‘This child was born of parents who can read and write,’ she said simply. ‘To me, this is a great wonder.’”

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I was amusing myself on Twitter before turning off the light and going to sleep last Friday night, and had occasion to post this deliberately curmudgeonly sentiment: “For the gazillionth time: ‘No problem’ is NOT the correct reply to ‘Thank you very much.’”

I had no reason to suppose that more than a handful of people would bother to respond to my trivial little exercise in inter-generational trolling, and I assumed that most of those who did so would react pretty much as Mrs. T did when she saw it: “Prig.” (For the record, she was kidding, but on the square.) To my astonishment, it went viral, albeit in a modest way. I received some two thousand direct replies, far too many for me to easily break down along pro-con lines, though my impression—possibly mistaken—is that they split more or less evenly.

I don’t think I need to say much about those who agreed with me. They felt, as I do, that there is something tin-eared and unresponsive about “No problem,” even when, as is often the case, it’s sincerely meant. As for those who begged to differ, I received a couple of hundred replies that said, “Hey, no problem!” That got old after about ten minutes, though five other “funny” replies did make me laugh:

• Chillax, bro.

• Prescriptivist codswallop.

• Will this be on the test?

• You’re right. The correct response is, “Kiss my ass, boomer scum.”

• “The contemptible Millennials ONCE AGAIN fail to bow when my litter enters the Starbucks.”

What surprised me far more than the sheer number of replies was the fact that so many people were made angry—really, really angry—by a total stranger’s expression of tepid distaste for a now-commonplace conversational mannerism. This inspired me to cull the most noteworthy negative replies and sort them into four illustrative categories. The tweets posted below are representative of dozens of others just like them. (All replies are unedited.)

The vast majority of my angriest respondents were millennials, among whom the use of “No problem” is widely thought to be second nature. It is, I’m led to understand, their way of being polite, though you couldn’t prove it by the ones who wrote to me in a die-soon-old-man vein:

• we get it, you’re old as fuck, calm down

• Sure thing, no problem. (PS fuck the old.)

• I’m gonna put you in a home old man. This world doesn’t belong to you anymore.

• ohmYGOD STOP BEING SO OLD. LANGUAGE CHANGES YOU GRUMPY OLD FUCKS

• Nobody cares old man. Pour yourself another prune juice and lighten the fuck up.

• it’s going to be great when all the boomers are gone

• The folks most upset on this thread are the ones denying the objection. Your intolerance is intolerable. You are old-minded.

• Bookmarking for the next time I see a thinkpiece about easily-outraged young people with their microaggressions

• delete your account and never log back in. sincerely. this is not the place for you. you’re a relic & nobody cares what you think.

Many other responses were specifically class- and politics-driven:

• Shut up newt gingrich

• Hey Terry, did you know the arctic is melting?

• Imagine having so few problems in your life that this bothers you.

• Prescriptivist policing of casual phrasing is the refuge of ableist cowards who wish to feel superior to others.

• Fascist gonna fascist

• [minimum wage worker tries to get through the day] [haughty theater critic rages internally]

• Guarantee you this guy is a shitty tipper.

Several respondents, presumably in the name of intersectionality, played the race card:

• When will old white men get over themselves lmao

• ah, when a weird guys rant about modern colloquialisms devolves into literal racism

• Yup, the peasants are getting uppity and the servants need a beating and more training. They should be grateful always to their white lord.

• No surprise coming from someone who’s got a giant stick parked up their ass over informal conversation. Love to hear you rant on ebonics.

• You had a hard time when it wasn’t okay to call African-Americans “colored” anymore, didn’t you

Most of the harshest responses, however, amounted to little more than reflexive how-dare-you-disagree-with-meism:

• How’s “blow me” suit you

• The correct response is kiss my ass bitch

• At work, when a customer says thank you to me, I say “of course”, “no problem”, and “sure!” Literally eat my ass

• For the gazillionth time: stop fucking policing the way people speak.

• Hi, Terry. Kindly go jump up your own ass and pull your linguistic prescriptivism up there after you. No problem!

• Okay lemme try: “bite me fuckwit” did I do this good who cares

• you’re a fuckboy.

• “Shut the fuck up, you feckless abortion” is the correct response to a Terry Teachout tweet.

Does any of this really matter? I didn’t get any death threats, after all. Come Saturday morning the outrage robots had found juicier bones on which to gnaw, and by Sunday we were all preoccupied with the latest terrorist assault on London. But writers, being writers, are compelled by their nature to seek significance in unexpected events (writers gonna writers!). So I couldn’t help but put on my thinking cap as my “notifications” box bulged with the irate replies of people to whom my passing grump did matter—enough, at any rate, for them to tell me off in startlingly large numbers.

It goes without saying that a great many of these latter replies betoken the diminishment of civility enabled by the social media, and in particular by Twitter, which facilitates anonymous hit-and-run sideswiping. I was struck by the high percentage of my respondents who tweet under pseudonyms, especially those whose tweets contained the word “fuck.”

I was also struck by their humorless touchiness. These respondents clearly aren’t accustomed to being criticized, however mildly, and just as clearly don’t know how to deal with it, civilly or otherwise. Indeed, my impression is that they actually feel threatened by criticism, and think themselves entitled to respond to it in a way whose tone speaks for itself. We’re seeing a lot of that kind of thing nowadays, especially on campus.

Above all, though, I was struck by the furious resentment that came boiling into my Twitter feed as a result of my casual observation, as well as by the assumptions implicit in this resentment. It was, lest we forget, a one-sentence tweet devoid of context. Nevertheless, many respondents seem to have taken it for granted that I was portraying a real-life encounter between a haughty middle-aged man of means (i.e., me) and a poorly paid millennial convenience-store clerk (i.e., them). And while hundreds of people earnestly assured me, some pleasantly and others less so, that there is no definitional difference between “No problem” and “You’re welcome,” I soon lost count of the responses which made it crystal-clear that there is, at least for these particular respondents, a huge and purposeful difference.

These two tweets were characteristic:

• This may come as a shock, but it might have been. I’m sorry old folks like to assume everyone should be grateful to serve them.

• They’re telling you that you’re not welcome, that they’re simply being forced into helping you as part of their crappy job.

It happens that I know something about crappy jobs. When I was in my twenties, I spent several years working as a teller in an inner-city bank. It was, in fact, a perfectly decent job as jobs go, but I still hated it, in part because I feared that I’d hit a dead end that I might never be able to steer around.

As I later wrote of this painful part of my life:

At night I was a writer, on weekends a jazz musician. During the day, though, I was a servant. My nameplate was displayed for the world to see, and strangers, seeing it, called me by my first name….Once I had been a young man of unlimited promise. My teachers had predicted great things for me. Now I spent my days making change. My promise was running dry, my great expectations turning sour. I was sure I had gone as far as I could go. I expected to spend the rest of my life punching a clock.

Yet it never occurred to me to resent the customers who, as most did, went out of their way to treat me nicely. I responded in kind to their kindness. The only customers I resented were the ones who treated me like a servant, and there weren’t all that many of them.

I can’t help but wonder exactly who’s treating my angrier respondents like servants and who, like me, is treating them with genuine, agenda-free politeness. I often get the feeling that young people are startled by my politeness—that it is something experience has taught them not to expect as a matter of course. I wonder, too, whether what my Twitter feed told me over the weekend was that many millennials are touchy and resentful precisely because they fear that service is their destiny and that they’ll never know any other way of life. True or not, that’s a terribly sad thought.

Just in case you’re wondering, I always behave with perfect courtesy whenever people say “No problem” in response to my thanking them for doing me a service. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else, much less being anything other than gratified by a well-meant response, regardless of whether or not it happens to suit my linguistic tastes. Somehow I doubt that my more outraged respondents could make the same claim under different circumstances.

Incidentally, I like millennials—a lot. And I’m a big tipper.

* * *

The Who perform “My Generation” in concert in 1967:

A scene from Ghost World, written by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, directed by Terry Zwigoff, and starring Thora Birch:

All three of the commercials that appeared during “Of Human Bondage,” a Studio One adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel that was sponsored by Westinghouse and originally telecast by CBS on November 21, 1949. The first two ads were “performed” live, the third on film:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn’t know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.”

Randall Jarrell, “On the Underside of the Stone” (New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1953, courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Hartford Stage’s production of Heartbreak House. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

What makes a play classic? One possible benchmark is that of permanent relevance: It portrays its own time in a way that illuminates ours. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better example of that kind of classicism than “Heartbreak House,” in which George Bernard Shaw, writing in 1919, cast a cold eye on his own class, the educated liberals of Vicwardian England, and came to the damning conclusion that World War I had revealed them to be morally bankrupt. “Heartbreak House” was insufficiently appreciated in Shaw’s own time and for long afterward, in part because of its length (the first performance ran for four hours). But now that the script has entered the public domain, meaning that it can be performed in abridged versions, “Heartbreak House” has become one of Shaw’s most frequently produced plays, especially in this country. Now it’s come to Hartford Stage in a version staged by Darko Tresnjak, the company’s artistic director, that is not without flaw—more about that later—but nonetheless brings an elusive play to life in a way that is lively and immediately accessible….

The setting, a country house that looks like “an old-fashioned high-pooped ship,” is the home of Captain Shotover (Miles Anderson), an octogenarian seaman whose bristling energy cannot conceal the fact that he’s losing his wits. He has two daughters—one a frivolously sexy bohemian (Charlotte Parry), the other a high-society prig (Tessa Auberjonois)—who between them embody all that Shaw thought wrong with the English national character.

This being a country-house comedy, the Shotover house is full of guests, nearly all of whom are, as one of them says, “most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.” The capitalist in the woodpile is Boss Mangan (Andrew Long), a bloated, parasitical businessman. He is, of course, doomed—but so, too, are the other delightful but ineffectual occupants of Heartbreak House, who lack the will to reconstruct their corrupt society along properly Shavian lines….

The younger Shaw might well have written “Heartbreak House” as a didactic comedy with a hopeful ending. By 1919, though, World War I had blown the progressive optimism out of him, leaving nothing but the frustrated will to power that would lead him to embrace Soviet Communism in his senescence. Before that, though, he wove his despair into a tragicomedy that works as theater precisely because it offers no neat solution, only the enraged poetry of a great artist.

Understanding this, Mr. Tresnjak, who has a near-miraculous knack for staging “well-made” plays, has given us a “Heartbreak House” that is bright in tone and light on its feet, thereby allowing you to take the point by yourself….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A trailer of scenes from Heartbreak House:

“The Capitol Tower,” a 1958 promotional short about Capitol Records’ Hollywood headquarters, designed by Lou Naidorf. Among the Capitol recording artists featured in the film, which is narrated by Tennessee Ernie Ford, are Ray Anthony, John Browning, Moura Lympany, and Leonard Pennario. The actual singing voice of “Kathy” was dubbed by Sue Raney, another Capitol artist:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“When you rejoice over being young, and notice how well you feel, that is age.”

The Journal of Jules Renard (entry, March 1903)