March 31, 2023: 19th Century Humor: Ah Sin

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]

On the fine line between satire and stereotypes.

First and foremost, it’d be April Foolish of me not to link to this piece by my dad Stephen Railton, part of his award-winning website Mark Twain in His Times, on Mark Twain and Bret Harte’s play Ah Sin, a Play in Four Acts (1877). Dad has far more in-depth knowledge of the play than I, and a great deal to say in that piece about the play’s complex relationship to the era’s anti-Chinese prejudices (on which I focused a good bit of my third book and am continuing to think about in my current project), as well as both the two authors’ public roles and reputations as prominent humorists and the often razor-sharp line between the satirical and the stereotypical (or, to quote one of the funniest works of all time, between clever and stupid) when it comes to humorous engagements with social issues.

That line is a seemingly eternal element within humor, and one not limited to ethnic or racial comedy. Take Amy Schumer’s sketches about gender, sexuality, and rape—is she satirizing our culture’s problems with those issues, or using stereotypes to gain laughs and ratings (or, as always, some combination of the two, one dependent in no small measure on the knowledge and perspective an audience member brings with her or him)? But at the same time, ethnic and racial humorists seem particularly prone to walking the fine line between satire and stereotype, and to prompting passionate debate about where on that spectrum they fall. From Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, and up to contemporary works like Key & Peele and Black-ish, African American humorists have been at the center of many of those debates in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. But the same questions apply to any and all cultures and identities, and Asian American comics and performers such as Margaret Cho and Ken Jeong have faced the same responses and critiques.

Of course, Ah Sin represents another side to the issue—a satirical yet stereotypical work about Asian American identities created by two white artists, if ones who (as my Dad’s piece notes) were already on the record in support of Chinese Americans (especially relative to their very xenophobic moment). Yet while there’s no doubt that outsiders to a culture or community have to tread the line even more carefully if they choose to create humorous works about that group (and have to recognize that they’re opening themselves up to justified critiques in the process, regardless of their specific choices and work), I would argue not only that they have the right to do so, but that doing so represents an important part of humor’s role in a society and culture. Indeed, no other artistic genre can highlight in the same ways the absurdities and myths that surround us—and humorous works can do so whether they satirize those elements, deploy them as stereotypes, or, as is so often the case and was for Twain and Harte’s play, do both at the same time.

March Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 30, 2023: 19th Century Humor: Melville’s Chimney

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]

On the deeply strange story that proves that ambiguity and allegory can be funny.

Before doing the research for this post, I had only read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1855) once, some 25 years ago as a second-year college student. Yet Melville’s text had stuck with me across those decades, far more fully and deeply than have other texts I’ve read much more recently. It didn’t do so because of its quality, necessarily—like Pierre (1852), the novel with which Melville followed up his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851), “Chimney” is a text I would describe with words like “interesting” and “provocative” rather than “successful” or “good.” And indeed, perhaps the most interesting thing about “Chimney” is how much it refuses to give in to audience expectations—the story of an unreliable (possibly unhinged) narrator obsessed with his titular home furnishing, and of an evolving war between the narrator and his wife over that chimney and what seems to be a hidden room inside it, seems destined to head into the terrifying territory of Poe’s “The Black Cat”; but no such thrills or chills ever appear, and the story ends as ambiguously as it began.

So if “I and My Chimney” isn’t a Gothic horror, what is it? In part, it seems to be an experiment in narration, an opportunity for Melville to create a first-person narrator far more consistently central to his story, yet at the same time far stranger and harder to sympathize with, than Moby-Dick’s Ishmael. That narrator, in turn, is involved in an extended experiment of his own: identifying himself with the oversized chimney that dominates his home and life (and marriage), and taking that personal analogy to depths of detail and philosophy that need to be read to be believed. So thorough is the analogy between man and chimney, in fact, that it seems fair to describe it as an allegory—only I admit to having very little idea, upon this second reading of the story (and I remember feeling the same back when I first read it), about what that allegory might mean or illustrate. There seems to be some theme of how we come to be linked to our homes or settings, but that point alone feels far too pedestrian to which to devote such an extended text.

So I don’t think “Chimney” is a great story, and I don’t really know what (if anything) it means. But I do know this: it’s pretty darn funny. Take the story’s opening paragraph: “I and my chimney, two grey-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day.” Or these lines from a couple paragraphs in: “When in the rear room, set apart for that object, I stand to receive my guests (who by the way call more, I suspect, to see my chimney than me) I then stand, not so much before, as, strictly speaking, behind my chimney, which is, indeed, the true host. Not that I demur. In the presence of my betters, I hope I know my place.” Indeed, hardly a paragraph in “Chimney” goes by without producing at least one wry smile, and I laughed out loud a handful of times as well—no small feat for a 170 year old story written in the style and language of its time (and its notoriously challenging author). Whatever else Melville’s strikingly odd story is, it’s most definitely humorous—and as this week’s posts can help remind us, that’s a significant and meaningful thing to be.

Last humorist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 29, 2023: 19th Century Humor: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]

On the writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow.

For a long time, late 19^th century local color writing—and specifically women’s local color writing—and even more specifically New England women’s local color writing—was dismissed by many scholars as narrow and parochial, historically and socially representative but not particularly significant in broader, lasting, literary terms. Over the last few decades, many scholars have pushed back on those ideas, seeking to redefine the writing as “regionalist” rather than local color and to recover and re-read many of the individual authors and works within that tradition. Yet outside of academia, I don’t know that such efforts have led to nearly enough public consciousness of these writers—and if I were to make the case for why they should, I might well start with the very talented New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930).

Freeman’s prolific career and prodigious talents were certainly recognized in her own era, as she was awarded the 1925 William Dean Howells Medal for distinction in fiction and in the following year became part of the first group of women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. While she began her career writing children’s stories, and published works in multiple genres, it was her local color short stories for adults, collected in volumes including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Silence and Other Stories (1898), and The Givers (1904), that most established her reputation and these culminating accomplishments. And yet in the half-century after her death those same stories came to many scholars to represent Freeman’s limited scope, interests, and talents, and thus to categorize her as precisely an example of a once hugely successful local color writer whose works now retain only historical or social interest.

I could push back on those ideas and make the case for Freeman in any number of ways (as have many of the scholars I mentioned in my first paragraph), but I don’t know that there’s a better way to do so than to ask you to read my favorite Freeman story, “The Revolt of Mother” (1890). “Revolt” has all the hallmarks of New England local color, from its setting on a New England farm to its characters’ dialect voices; like most local fiction more broadly, the story’s tone is mostly light and witty, with surprising character and plot twists leading to an unexpected conclusion. None of those are bad things nor disqualify the work from literary significance, of course—in fact, they make it engaging for readers, a goal of just about any author in any genre. But Freeman’s story is at the same time deeply wise in its portrayals of every member of its focal family, individually, as a community, and in their histories and evolving present and future identities. It reveals a great deal about its particular historical and social setting, about gender and marriage, about parenting and generational change, and about human nature at its most flawed and its most hopeful. In short, it does just about everything great literature and art can do, and does it all well.

Next humorist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 28, 2023: 19th Century Humor: Fanny Fern

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]

On the very serious side to one of our most talented humorists.

There are all sorts of reasons not to take Fanny Fern (1811-1872) seriously. First there’s that name—when Sara Willis (later and perhaps best known as Sara Willis Parton) decided in 1851 to publish her first newspaper columns and articles under a pen name (Willis was a widow with two young daughters to support, and while she had been writing on her own for many years she did not begin publishing until that year, at the age of 40), she opted for a name that parodied the alliterative pseudonym of one of the period’s most prominent authors and columnists, Grace Greenwood. Perhaps if Willis had known that she would within four years’ time be the highest-paid newspaper columnist in the country (as she became in 1855 when the New York Ledger paid her $100 a week), she would have chosen a name based more on her own identity and less on parodying that of another writer.

But even if we leave her name aside, much of Fern’s published work was, by its own admissions and in its explicit purposes and genres, relatively light. One of the catchphrases with which her columns were often described was “witty and irreverent,” and indeed the majority of them, including her first article “The Governess” (which appeared in the Boston newspaper Olive Branch), comprised humorous takes on various social and domestic situations; when those columns were collected and published in book form, it was usually under titles (such as Ginger-Snaps [1870] and Caper-Sauce [1872]) that seemed to emphasize their lightness. Many of her other writings were directed explicitly and solely at youthful audiences, such as all those pieces collected in Little Ferns for Fanny’s Little Friends (1853), The Play-Day Book  (1857), and A New Story Book for Children (1864). Neither humorous columns nor children’s books are without their value—not only as cultural and historical documents, but also as works of literature in their own right—but compared to some of Fern’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries as extremely prominent women writers, especially Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller (but also for example Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a magazine-published phenomenon in the same year that Fern began publishing her columns), these works seem significantly less serious in theme and perhaps less meaningful as a result.

Well, maybe some of them are—and when you’re writing columns as frequently as Fern, it’s difficult to imagine that many of them wouldn’t be somewhat light or forgettable—but any extended engagement with Fern’s writings reveals not only a hugely prodigious talent but an unquestionable ability to connect her humor and style to some of the most serious topics of her own or any other era. Her autobiographical novel Ruth Hall (1854) certainly illustrates both talent and that ability, and illuminates quite effectively the particular situations and settings out of which she was working throughout these years. But we don’t have to leave her columns to find ample evidence of this rare combination of funny and serious, engaging and deep. To cite only two: “Male Criticism on Ladies’ Books” (1857) responds with vigor and passion to a New York Times book reviewer’s overtly sexist perspective on women’s writing, and manages both to skewer that critic as thoroughly as one can possibly imagine and to engage thoughtfully (all this in only a couple paragraphs!) with some of the most complex and important questions of gender, art, and audience; while “Blackwell’s Island” (which begins on page 29 in that linked book, and was part of a series begun in 1858) narrates a journey to the women’s prison located on that New York island and engages at length with a number of critical sociological and psychological factors and effects in the identities and lives of the women Fern encounters there. The two pieces feel quite distinct in many ways, but that of course is part of my point—her columns and writerly roles required her to give her talents quite free reign over a wide variety of topics and focal points, and the common denominator, quite simply, was those talents themselves.

There are specific and very contemporary and salient reasons to read each of those texts, and many others of Fern’s besides (such as her “A Law More Nice Than Just,” written in response to the story of a woman who had been fined for wearing men’s clothing in public, which engages with issues of gender, performance, appearance and identity more clearly and meaningfully than any dozen 1980s literary theorists). But I think the best reason is precisely Fern’s talent itself. In an era when far too many columnists seem unable to string together two coherent thoughts, much less to take our breath away with a phrase—and I’m not trying to sound like an old-timer pining for a Golden Age of writing; I think this is more about an emphasis on achieving partisan political aims and pleasing built-in constituencies and less about a waning of quality in and of itself—Fanny still packs a serious punch. Next humorist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 27, 2023: 19th Century Humor: Irving’s Knickerbocker

[For this year’s installment of my annual April Fool’s Day series, I wanted to AmericanStudy some 19^th century humorists. I’d love to hear your humorous responses and nominations in comments. No really, I’m serious!]

On the humorous creation that was way, way ahead of its time.

An extensive and entirely straight-faced viral media campaign, an elaborate hoax which creates a fictional character (a curmudgeonly historian), passes him off as a real person, and notifies the public that he has gone missing and is being sought. A ramping-up of that campaign as the release of said historian’s most extended (but of course entirely fictionalized) work (a history of his native state of New York) approaches, including equally fictional newspaper “responses” by other (fabricated) locals who have known the historian and have information about his whereabouts. And the deeply meta-textual and multi-level satire that is the book itself, beginning with a straight-faced account by the (actual) author of finding said book “in the chamber” of the historian, and publishing it “in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind”; and continuing into no less than three different prefaces To The Public, including one by another fictional character (one of those who had published a newspaper notice) about his experiences with the fictional historian.

Sounds pretty postmodern, doesn’t it? Like a 21^st-century literary equivalent to The Blair Witch Project (1999); like, in fact, one of the new century’s most inventive and postmodern novels, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). But the book I’m talking about was published over two centuries ago, in 1809, and was authored (along with the whole media hoax) by Washington Irving, a figure often associated instead with some of the Early Republic’s most genteel and Anglophile images and texts. Irving certainly deserves those associations in many ways, but a return to this striking first major book of his, A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, can help us to see just how satirical and subversive our nation’s first professional author (a somewhat debated but not inaccurate title) could be and often was. And while the satire and subversion are most overt in the hoax and the book’s equally fictional prefatory materials, I would argue that the whole of the book comprises a more extended and in-depth, and certainly more thematically and methodologically significant, effort to satirize and subvert many of his period’s conventions of history-writing and understandings of the world. This effort begins with Book I’s Chapter I, “Containing Divers Ingenious Theories and Philosophic Speculations, Concerning the Creation and Population of the World, as Connected with the History of New York,” and doesn’t let up throughout the text’s seven Books and many centuries of world and local history.

Those satires and subversions can feel somewhat directly pointed at other historians and writers, and reading the whole of the History is thus, while fun (in an 1809 kind of way), not necessarily crucial for large numbers of 21^st-century Americans. But Irving was not done with Knickerbocker in 1809, and one of the subsequent stories that he attributes to the character, “Rip Van Winkle” (first published in an 1819 collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon [another fictional character]), illustrates just how fully he could turn that satirical and subversive eye to more broadly and meaningfully American subjects. Much of “Rip” is just funny and silly, from its opening portrait of Rip’s extreme laziness and extremely hen-pecking wife to its folkloric, myth-making (literally, as it leads in the story to local myths about thunderstorms) central encounter with a dour Hendrick Hudson, his supernatural bowling buddies, and the sleep-inducing potent potable that Rip imbibes in their company. But Rip’s twenty-year nap coincides directly with the American Revolution, so that the story’s images of one village and its society become very overtly (if with no one clear point or argument) symbolic of American life before and after the Revolution’s shifts and transformations. I’ll leave it up to you—as I do with my students when I teach this story in my first-half survey—to decide what you make of the story’s closing pages and images of post-Revolution America; in any case, Irving’s story represents one of the earliest literary attempts to grapple seriously with both the Revolution’s effects and meanings and, most relevantly for our own (and every) era, the nation that we were and are becoming through and after them.

Irving was one of post-Revolutionary America’s first, and remains one of our most unique, literary voices, and was as the viral media hoax illustrates ahead of his time as a self-promoter and multi-layered meta-textual writer, and there’s a good deal to be said for reading him for those reasons alone. But underneath the fictional narrators and fictional commentators and humorous jabs at most everything and everybody lies, especially in these early works, a commitment to challenging and satirizing and reimagining some of our deepest beliefs and ideas—a profoundly American project for sure. Next humorist tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other humorists you’d highlight?

March 25-26, 2023: Bruce in 2023

[This past Monday, I finally got to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to this special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On three moving layers to how Bruce’s 2023 concert both reflects on the past and continues to fight for the future.

1)      The opening four songs: Bruce has always worked to start his concerts with a series of sequential songs that set the tone for what’s to come, and on this tour that opening combination was particularly striking. It featured two songs from Letter to You that are overtly concerned with both the past’s legacies and the work Bruce has striven to do throughout his career, “Ghosts” and “Letter to You.” And back and forth with those it included two songs from long ago, “No Surrender” and “Prove It All Night,” that would seem quite distinct from both those themes and from each other, but that when reframed in this context became anthems for not just survival but endurance and collective triumph in the face of time’s inevitable losses. By the end of these four, we were all right there with Bruce and the Band.

2)      “Last Man Standing” and “Backstreets”: Because this was a full-E-Street-Band concert, there wasn’t as much time for talking as there is when Bruce is on stage by himself. But right about the midpoint of the show, he does stop to tell an extended, deeply moving story about joining his first band (when he was just 15), and the moment 50 years later when the last surviving member of that band besides Bruce (George Theiss) passed away. He segued directly from there into a solo acoustic rendition of “Last Man Standing,” the Letter to You song about that precise experience, which was logical enough. But then the full band segued directly from that into the opening of “Backstreets,” a profoundly familiar Bruce anthem that suddenly became just as much about these lifelong experiences, losses, and persistences—especially when Bruce ended it with one more monologue, about all from Theiss (and everyone) that he will keep with him in his heart.

3)      Two closing tributes: It’s no surprise that a concert so thoughtfully constructed ended just as thoughtfully as it began. That began with the final Band song—after introducing the members of this current iteration of the Legendary E Street Band, Bruce led them in a celebratory performance of “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” culminating in an incredibly moving video montage of clips of the Band’s two deceased founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. And then, for his one final encore, Bruce returned to the stage solo to perform an acoustic version of “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” Letter to You’s beautiful closing track about how and why “death is not the end.” While all these layers to the concert were particularly meaningful to this BruceStudier as he watched by his sons’ side, I’m quite sure there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Concert reflections, on Bruce or any other artist, you’d share?

March 24, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Born in the U.S.A.

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two ways to argue for the patriotic possibilities of an easily misunderstood song and album.

In one of my first-year blog posts (back in those silly mid-2011 days before I used hyperlinks, dear reader), I used an article by music journalist Ben Schwartz on the battles over Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” (the song) to think about questions of audience readings and misreadings, of whether and how an artist’s choices can contribute to them, and of why I’d still make the case for “Born” as representing some of the best and most thoughtful (rather than most bombastic or simplified) visions of American identity and community. Many of those same questions and lenses can be applied to the Born in the U.S.A. album as a whole, of course, which consistently weds arena and bar rock sounds to dark and painful lyrics and situations. No fewer than three of the album’s songs end with main characters under arrest or in prison, and yet two of them (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”) are also among the album’s most upbeat-sounding rockers. As I argued in that post, I believe audiences should be and are capable of looking beyond sound and music to hear and engage with songs on lyrical and thematic levels as well—but I also called “Born” a split-personality song there, and the same can definitely be said about the album as a whole.

The most overt way to read “Born” as uber-patriotic is, as I also wrote in that post, likewise both a misreading and a further emphasis on sound over lyrics (the first line of both the song and album is “Born down in a dead man’s town,” after all). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, and important, ways to think of both song and album as patriotic nonetheless. In recent years Springsteen has consistently described one of his central and lifelong artisitic goals as charting “the distance between American reality and the American Dream,” and the album’s opening and closing songs (“Born” and “My Hometown”) chart particular aspects of that distance with clarity and force. Like another easily misunderstood song of Springsteen’s, “We Take Care of Our Own” (the lead single from and first song on 2012’s Wrecking Ball), “Born” creates an especially clear representation of that distance between ideal and reality in the back and forth between its patriotic chorus and its far more dark and critical verses (although the same could be said of “My Hometown,” with a chorus that recognizes the value of a foundational place even while the verses chart that place’s decline and limits). I’ve written a lot in recent years, including in my fourth book (NB. and then doubly so in my sixth book), about the concept of critical patriotism, and both this overall idea of distance and the specific representations of it in these songs and their structural shifts exemplify critical patriotism.

There’s another, even more overarching way to think about Born in the U.S.A. as a patriotic album, however. The album’s most optimistic song is its exact midpoint, “No Surrender,” an anthemic tribute to Springsteen’s lifelong musical companion Steve Van Zandt and to the power of rock and roll (“We learned more from a three-minute record, babe, than we ever learned in school”). But what if we read that central song as a mission statement for the album itself? That is, to put it in first-year writing terms, what if “No Surrender” is the album’s thesis, “Born in the U.S.A.” and “My Hometown” are its introduction and conclusion, and the remaining songs are the evidence paragraphs? In that case, even if the songs are consistently darker in their themes and images, the acts of creating and performing them, of assembling them into an album, of sending that album out into the world, of touring to share it with audiences, and so on are all optimistic recognitions and extensions of the power and importance of rock and roll, and of the role it can play in helping America move toward a better future. Perhaps that future comprises the “romantic dreams” that the speaker of “No Surrender” still has in his head, dreams that animate—if not without challenge and complexity—the critical patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.

Concert reflection this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 23, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “American Skin (41 Shots)”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two more reasons I have come to love my long-time favorite song.

I’ve written on at least two prior occasions in this space, as well as at length in the opening of my second book, about Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” (2000; I still prefer that 2000 Live in New York City version to any subsequent one, although this post-Trayvon Martin performance from 2012 comes very close for sure). But I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned in this space a very cool complement to my own love for the song: my younger son’s early and continuing affection for it as well. Of course that began with my playing it for the boys, but I’ve played plenty of songs for them, and it was “American Skin” that really grabbed my son and has endured across many years and many other shifts in musical taste. To hear him sing along to my favorite lines—“We’re baptized in these waters/And in each other’s blood”—has been one of those singularly moving moments that parenting can offer.

So that’s one way I’ve come to love Springsteen’s song even more fully. But another is the reason I’m highlighting it today (NB. when I first shared this post in February 2018): this afternoon I’ll be giving Fitchburg State University’s biannual Harrod Lecture, focusing on the topic of my book in progress, We the People: The 500-Year Battle over Who is American (2019). I’ve been thinking about those themes pretty much nonstop for the last couple years, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered a cultural work that more succinctly and powerfully highlights both of them than does “American Skin.” Even the title alone features both ends of the spectrum: Amadou Diallo was killed because of the color of his skin and what it meant to certain other Americans; but by calling it his “American skin,” Springsteen reminds us that those racist and exclusionary attitudes do not and cannot deny Diallo his full participation in an American community and identity. That we still so desperately need to hear that message is just one more reason to keep listening to “American Skin (41 Shots).”

Last Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 22, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Wrecking Ball and High Hopes

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two entirely different and equally inspiring recent albums from an all-time great.

As is no doubt obvious from this blog, many of my favorite American artists died long ago, meaning that (barring surprising rediscoveries) I have long since run out of new works of theirs to encounter and experience. As a result, I believe I get even more excited about new releases by the living artists I love—like John Sayles and Jhumpa Lahiri—than would already always be the case. There is, of course, always the possibility that these new releases won’t live up to the artist’s past work or overall career; but as I wrote in that Sayles and Lahiri post, I’m an optimist on this score as on most others (yes, even in 2023 when it is getting very hard out here for an optimist). And when it comes to my single favorite artist, Bruce Springsteen, I’m happy to say that his most recent two albums (NB. as of 2014 when I wrote this post) have entirely rewarded my excited anticipation, if in almost entirely different ways.

2012’s Wrecking Ball is one of the most thematically unified yet stylistically diverse albums I’ve ever heard. Every song on the album, including the two bonus tracks, represents a response to the 2008 economic collapse and its many ongoing effects and meanings in American society; yet almost every one utilizes a distinct style, engages with a different musical tradition and sound, with which to do so. For both reasons the album has been compared to The Rising (2002), Springsteen’s post-9/11 masterwork; I would agree with that comparison, yet to my mind, because September 11^th has inspired so many responses and representations (in every artistic genre), Wrecking Ball is an even more unique and significant social and historical document. While it might not have any individual songs that crack my Springsteen top 10, I would say it’s one of his couple best albums—and that’s pretty impressive for a record released forty years after an artist’s debut!

About a month ago (NB. in January 2014), Springsteen released his most recent studio album, High Hopes. But to be honest, High Hopes isn’t really a unified album at all, existing at the other end of the spectrum from something like Wrecking Ball—it’s a collection of (mostly) previously unreleased tracks, representing the last couple decades of Springsteen’s career (if not even further back, since a song like “Frankie Fell in Love” feels more like his 1970s works). Interestingly, the most thematically unified songs, the title track and the concluding “Dream Baby Dream,” are both covers of other artists, the first time Springsteen has included covers on a studio album in his long career. And that last clause is precisely what makes High Hopes so inspiring to me—that even forty-two years into his recording career, Springsteen is continuing to experiment and innovate, trying new things, pushing himself in new directions, refusing to rest on that already impressive body of work. I didn’t really think I could love Bruce more, but these last couple albums have indeed raised the bar.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 21, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: “State Trooper”

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two very different ways to AmericanStudy one of Bruce’s most ambiguous songs.

As my 2013 series on ambiguous songs (and any other time I’ve written about music on this blog) no doubt proved, when it comes to music I’m a lyrics guy—by which I mean not just that I listen to them closely, but that I try to figure out what they mean, even when (as with one of my favorite 21^st century bands, The Killers) that’s damnably hard to do (“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”?!). There are no artists to whose lyrics I’ve listened more frequently and more attentively than Bruce Springsteen, and thus few Springsteen songs that I haven’t obsessively figured out. But there are still some that remain elusive to me, their ambiguity defying my repetitive listens and analyses. And at the top of that list would have to be the most eerie and evocative song on an album full of them (and about which I wrote yesterday as well), Nebraska’s “State Trooper” (1982).

From its title track on, Nebraska can be located in the American tradition of what we might call outlaw romanticism, valorizing—or at least sympathizing with—the misdeeds of those who find themselves living and dying outside the law. The opening verse of “State Trooper” concludes with an indication that its speaker sees himself as precisely such a justified outlaw: “License, registration, I ain’t got none / But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I’ve done.” Seen in that light, his repeated injunction to “Mister State Trooper, please don’t you stop me,” might reflect an outlaw code of honor, a sense that while the speaker and the law are by necessity opposed, he hopes to avoid violence whenever possible, particularly against innocent men who “maybe … got a kid, maybe … got a pretty wife.” “My argument is not with you,” says Jason Bourne to a Moscow policeman at the start of his trilogy’s final film (NB. since I wrote this post that has turned out not to be the final Jason Bourne film, but in this household it will always be!), before he takes his outlaw fight to the heart of the American power structure.

Despite their cynical attitudes toward the law and power, such outlaw narratives tend to be ultimately optimistic, at least in their sense that there are those who will fight back—and their admiration for such figures. Yet from the final lines of its opening title track—“They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”—Springsteen’s album is far more dark and pessimistic, portraying its outlaws as embodiments of a fallen and perhaps irredeemable America (although the album does end with another ambiguous song called “Reason to Believe”). While the speaker of “State Trooper” is apparently driving “to my baby,” the final lines suggest that he has nowhere to go: “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi-ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” Seen in this light, the speaker’s injunction to the state trooper is simply a threat of more darkness and violence to come, in a world “where the great black rivers flow” and where “the only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life.” This is the land of the American nightmare, and its outlaws are simply symptoms of the disease, not a potential cure.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 20, 2023: Bruce on the Blog: Executioner Songs

[This week, I finally get to cross off one of the very top items on my bucket list—seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert with my sons! In honor of that truly momentous occasion, I wanted to share a handful of the past posts where I’ve featured Bruce on the blog—leading up to a special weekend reflection on the concert!]

On two striking similarities and one important difference in a pair of pop culture serial killer texts.

Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1979) and Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” (1982) both consistently link the story of their real-life serial killer protagonists—Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s novel and Charles Starkweather in Springsteen’s song—to key women in the men’s lives. Although Mailer’s opening section is titled “Gary,” it begins instead with the perspective of Brenda Nicol, a cousin and childhood friend of Gilmore’s who remained linked to him through his final killing spree; parts two and three are titled “Nicole” and “Gary and Nicole,” after the girlfriend (Nicole Barrett) who stayed with Gary through his execution and on whom much of Mailer’s portrait of Gilmore focuses. Similarly, Springsteen’s song uses the 19 year old Starkweather’s relationship with 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate, who accompanied Starkweather while he took part in his own killing spree, as its linchpin, from the song’s opening lines, “I saw her standin’ on her front lawn/just twirlin’ her baton,” through to Starkweather’s culminating desire to have Fugate “sitting right there on my lap” when he is executed. These family and romantic relationships certainly humanize Mailer and Springsteen’s protagonists, but they also seem tied to the men’s crimes in complex ways that echo the links between sex and horror I discussed in this post.

Mailer’s and Springsteen’s works also similarly feature a near-complete disappearance of their creators in the course of the texts. That’s perhaps more expected in a song like Springsteen’s, but I don’t just mean that Springsteen doesn’t refer to himself in any overt way; even the voice in which he sings “Nebraska” is strikingly affected and distinct from Bruce’s own (and an entire departure from the voice in which he had sung any of his five prior albums), and since this was the first song on the album, would have taken contemporary listeners entirely by surprise. The absence of Norman Mailer from his book is more striking still, as the book is as the subtitle puts it “A True Life Novel,” and one based (as he writes in a brief “Afterword”) on extensive interviews and conversations between Mailer, Gilmore, and many other individuals. Yet to the best of my recollection Mailer does not appear anywhere in the book’s more than 1000 pages, engaging with his role in producing the text (and even participating in the text’s events in the closing period of Gilmore’s life) only in that brief concluding coda. As a result, Mailer’s mammoth book feels as closely focused on Gilmore and everything within and connected to his life and identity as Springsteen’s intimate song does on Starkweather, even though in both cases the texts are the careful, artistic constructions of two deeply talented creators in their respective genres.

There’s one key formal difference between the two texts, though, and it significantly impacts their portrayals of the two serial killers. As he does with all but one of the songs on Nebraska, Springsteen sings the title track in the first-person, speaking directly as Starkweather (the only historical figure among the album’s first-person speakers); Mailer’s book features a fully omniscient third-person narrator, one who can provide the perspectives of any and all of his historical figures (including Brenda and Nicole among many others) alongside Gary’s. Due in large part to that narrative distinction, Springsteen’s song forces its audience into a direct and unfiltered relationship with Starkweather’s raw voice and cynical worldview, as in its nihilistic concluding lines: “They wanted to know why I did what I did/Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Mailer’s more sweeping narration, on the other hand, situates Gilmore as part of broader communities (family, romantic relationships, neighborhood, prison, region, nation) and offers more of a sociological than a psychological engagement with his identity and perspective. I wouldn’t say Executioner’s Song is optimistic, exactly, but it certainly offers its audience more ways to understand its serial killer subject than does “Nebraska”—while the latter lets us see through that subject’s eyes, whether we want to or not.

Next Bruce blogging tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

March 18-19, 2023: Wild West Stories: Wyatt Earp

[175 years ago this weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to this weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On Wild West myths, realities, and how to split the difference.

While the mythos of a figure like Billy the Kid very much began during his (brief) lifetime, it seems that the myth of Wyatt Earp only truly began to be created after his January 1929 death at the age of 80. Earp had been living in Los Angeles for the last couple decades of his life, trying among other things to get a film of his life made; to that end he had been working with Western author Walter Noble Burns, whose book Tombstone, an Iliad of the Southwest (1927) had really begun the mythologizing of Earp. The process accelerated significantly with Stuart Lake’s authorized biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931), a bestseller which was based on many conversations between Lake and Earp but which nonetheless (or perhaps as a result) established many of the iconic details of the Earp myth that have endured to this day. It is those details, centered on the shootout at Tombstone’s O.K. Corral but also and especially framed by stories of a lifetime of legal and extralegal justice delivered with his trusty pistols (and alongside his brothers and his best friend Doc Holliday), that became the basis for pop culture representations, from TV shows like The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) to films like Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994) among many others.

Earp did work off and on as a lawman throughout his life, but it was his brother Virgil who was working as a Deputy U.S. Marshal in Tombstone (Wyatt was working as a stagecoach shotgun rider at the time). And in any case, the through-line of Earp’s life, at least from his first police work in Wichita, Kansas when he was in his mid-20s through his move to LA in his 60s, was not any one profession but rather constant sojourns across a series of Western boomtowns in an effort to strike it rich. The settings also included Dodge City, Kansas; Deadwood, South Dakota; Tombstone, Arizona; Eagle City, Idaho; Nome, Alaska; and San Francisco. The get-rich-quick schemes included participating in numerous silver and gold rushes, owning and operating saloons, dealing faro (a popular card game at the time), racing horses, and refereeing boxing matches. If the latter doesn’t sound like a way to get rich quick, it’s worth noting that Earp was suspected of having fixed the December 1896 heavyweight championship bout in San Francisco between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey, an accusation that haunted Earp until the end of his life. Earp’s brothers and Holliday frequently joined him in these endeavors, as did his multiple wives, reinforcing these pursuits as the most consistent part of his identity.

So beyond simply noting oversimplifications and inaccuracies in the pop culture stories (a somewhat useful but too often pedantic exercise), how do we put these different stories in conversation with one another? I’d say one important way to do so would be to recognize that work as a lawman was simply one of many professional paths for Earp (and his brothers and friends), and indeed one through which he and they were likewise hoping to prosper. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily corrupt, but rather that the system and society of these towns, of the late 19^th century West more broadly, and of Gilded Age America overall was one in which law and justice were very much caught up in power and prosperity, gold and greed, the American Dream and its darker undertones. Those interconnections are somewhat specific to the world of the “Wild West,” not in its mythic meanings but in its all too fraught realities. But, as Monday’s focal voice Richard Slotkin would no doubt remind us, those interconnections are also definingly American, one more reason why the Wild West has retained its powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 17, 2023: Wild West Stories: True Grit

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On how a classic Wild West story both uses and challenges elements of the myth.

I think it’s fair to say that most audiences still know the story of True Grit through the 1969 film starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn (a performance for which he would win his one Oscar and which he reprised six years later in a film sequel named for the character). Many others (like this AmericanStudier, who has a lifelong aversion to all things John Wayne) have come to the story through the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version. But after greatly enjoying that 2010 film, and with the recommendation of my favorite fellow reader Ilene Railton, I picked up the original source material, Charles Portis’ 1968 novel (originally published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post!). While much of the story and characters are very similar between all three versions, I’m focused here on Portis’ novel; not only because it was the original, but also and especially because I think it represents a particularly interesting engagement with Wild West tropes, one written not at all coincidentally right toward the tail end of the Golden Age of Westerns.

The character of Rooster Cogburn became popular enough to warrant a sequel not just because he was played in that first film adaptation (and played well, even I will admit having watched lots of clips to write this post) by John Wayne. No, I would argue that in his novel Portis clearly and purposefully creates Rooster as a living (if of course aging) embodiment of Wild West myths, and indeed of those myths at their most idealized—of that titular characteristic of “true grit.” Idealized doesn’t mean he’s without his flaws, and indeed Rooster is a profoundly flawed man; but even those flaws fit well into Wild West stereotypes of the ornery lone gunfighter, a man who has great difficulty getting along with others or even living his day-to-day life, but who can absolutely be counted on for both his talents and his tenacity in a shootout. Moreover, the way he genuinely comes to care about and for the novel’s youthful protagonist and narrator Mattie Ross, his eventual role as a father-figure to a young woman whose own father has been murdered, makes him a powerfully appealing such gunfighter, one whose true grit is in service of protecting those who need it most.

As I wrote about Walt Longmire earlier this week, there’s nothing wrong with using and adapting such familiar and even mythic character tropes, especially not as well as Portis does with Rooster. But I don’t think True Grit would be nearly as interesting if it weren’t for that other main character, Mattie—a protagonist who, both as the story’s youthful character and as its much older narrator, significantly challenges Wild West myths. It’s not just that Mattie is a 14 year old girl who can more than hold her own with men like Rooster (and the novel’s other main characters, all of whom are likewise hardened Wild West types of one kind or another). It’s that in her perspective, even at that young age and doubly so in her narration, she directly questions the stories and myths themselves, refusing to settle for accepted visions of anything (from gender and age to fundamental themes of right and wrong). There are all sorts of ways to create a revisionist Western, a genre that features two of my all-time favorite films, Thunderheart (1992) and Lone Star (1996). But I’m not sure anyone has done it better than did Charles Portis with Mattie Ross.

Wyatt Earp birthday post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 16, 2023: Wild West Stories: Annie Oakley

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On three figures who each and together help us see the human realities behind the mythic sharpshooter.

1)      Frank Butler: By the age of 15 Oakley (then known by her birth name Phoebe Ann Moses) was already well known in her native Ohio as a sharpshooter. But it was when she bested famous traveling trick shooter Butler in an 1875 Thanksgiving Day contest in Cincinnati (or maybe an 1881 one—it can be tricky to discover the realities behind the myths!) that she really became Annie Oakley, in every sense—not only due to the acclaimed victory, but also and especially because she and the 28 year old Butler soon married and began touring together (with Oakley now going under that stage name). Their age gap and respective ages at the time might seem creepy; but the date of their meeting is a bit unclear, it was the 19^th century, and in any case this was without question a lifelong partnership—when Oakley died in 1926 at the age of 66, Butler apparently stopped eating and died less than three weeks later. For half a century and even after death, Oakley and Butler were genuinely inseparable.

2)      Lillian Smith: In 1885, after touring together for a few years, Oakley and Butler joined one of the period’s most famous entertainments, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was there that Oakley met one of the few Americans who could genuinely be said to be her match—Lillian Smith, who was a 15 year old shooting prodigy when she joined the show in 1886. It seems likely that at this time Oakley began reporting her age as a few years younger in order to compete more directly with Smith, leading to another level of subsequent mythic confusion over basic details of her story and identity. What’s definite is that Oakley left the show for a time, returning only when Smith herself left in 1889. When she returned Oakley became the show’s second-highest-paid performer, after only Bill himself, so it was clearly a smart business and career decision—but also one that reflects human uncertainties behind the sharpshooter’s supremely and justifiably confident performance.

3)      Sitting Bull: If romantic partners and rivals are two kinds of distinctly human relationships behind a mythic story, then certainly good friends are a third, and one of Oakley’s closest friends happened to be one of the most famous Americans of the era. The Hunkpapa Lakota warrior Sitting Bull met Oakley in 1884, famously requesting a picture with her, and perhaps not coincidentally he likewise joined Buffalo Bill’s show in 1885. He gave her a new nickname, “Little Sure Shot,” that she used for the rest of her career; and the two became so close that he symbolically adopted her as a daughter (his own had tragically died young) and into his tribe. As Oakley would later write, “he had asked me to take the place of the daughter he lost.” A mythic moment behind two American legends to be sure, but also a powerfully human one—and while Sitting Bull was himself tragically killed in 1890, there’s no doubt that his legacy stayed with Oakley for the rest of her life.

Last Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?

March 15, 2023: Wild West Stories: Walt Longmire

[175 years ago this coming weekend, Wyatt Earp was born in Illinois. Earp would go on to become one of the most iconic Wild West figures, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy stories of that complex and mythic region and history. Leading up to a weekend birthday post on engaging Earp!]

On clichés, classic and revised, and a character who straddles the line.

However far back you want to go to define the origin of the cultural genre known as the Western—Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) is a popular choice, but you could go further back to the Gilded Age’s Wild West shows or dime novels, among other possibilities—one central feature has been a very particular type for its protagonist: the strong, stoic, stubborn cowboy-lawman, good with a gun and horses, true to his word, a noble and mythic frontier archetype. By the early 20^th century moment of Wister’s novel that type was already largely a relic of an earlier era (if it had ever existed at all—as many Western historians have noted, neither frontier lawmen nor cowboys were much like the myths), and thus quickly became more of a cliché than anything else, a shorthand way to signal a specific kind of hero and storytelling. But few American cultural clichés have had more resonance or staying power, as illustrated by one of the 20^th century’s most iconic and influential actors: John Wayne, that identity itself a persona or construction of Marion Morrison’s.

While that type has found its way into various late 20^th and early 21^st century cultural texts as well—Timothy Olyphant’s Marshal Seth Bullock on Deadwood, as well as his modernized version of the same character on Justified, come to mind—many of our recent Westerns have offered complicatedly revisionist depictions instead. These revisions don’t tend to undermine the Western hero type exactly, so much as to suggest layers and contradictions while nonetheless keeping core elements of the cliché and myth intact. I’m thinking of Clint Eastwood’s retired gunfighter turned quasi-lawman (for hire, at least) William Munny in Unforgiven (1992), or Val Kilmer’s dying and sarcastic gunfighter turned lawman Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), or Christian Bale’s rancher turned reluctant lawman Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma (2007), among many others. Sharon Stone’s gunslinger out for revenge Ellen in The Quick and the Dead (1995) and Will Smith’s smooth-talking lawman James West in Wild Wild West (1999) offered gendered and ethnic revisions of the archetype, but still retained many of those core elements. Despite their many differences, all of these characters and texts reflect a desire both to carry the Western hero forward and to look for layers or quirks beneath the mythologizing.

Robert Taylor’s Walt(er) Longmire, the titular sheriff protagonist of Longmire, is in many ways a classic Western hero. All of the descriptions I employed in the opening sentence above apply quite precisely to Walt, and in a couple telling moments in the show’s later seasons he was characterized directly as a man born in the wrong time, one who would have been more comfortable in an era long past. But at the same time, Walt features layers and contradictions beyond those most mythic Western qualities, character traits often highlighted by his closest friends and loved ones (his daughter Cady, his deputy and potential love interest Vic, and his best friend Henry Standing Bear, on all of whom see those respective posts) but also seen in encounters with his perceived enemies (such as the ambiguous casino developer Jacob Nighthorse, on whom see that post). Without spoiling any of the details of the show’s final seasons, I would say that the tension between the most heroic and the most complex sides to Walt became a defining thread as the show moved toward its epic yet thoughtful conclusions. And while I’m generally in favor of complexity and revision, in this particular case (again, without any spoilers) I’ll say that it was entirely appropriate that there remained elements of the Wild West Walt in the character with whom we ended the wonderful story that is Longmire.

Next Wild West story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Wild West stories or histories you’d highlight?