on lists (on Yom HaShoah)

I just walked across the quad to my office. I'm teaching Walt Whitman today. It's Yom HaShoah. A list of names is being read over a PA.

I’m fascinated by roll calls. Lists of proper names carry a dense sheen of reality: grade-school rosters, the granite-etched names of casualties at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., the names I hear read over a PA on the quad as I walk to my office. Lists can be a concordance of common experience. They can be the ties that bind Americans to what passes (sometimes) for a union.

We probably owe the impulse to unify by listing to Walt Whitman, whose catalogues are famously democratizing. They capture the simultaneity of civic space; the comings and goings of prostitutes and presidents alike are contemporaneous. So are slurs. Placed together, “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff” become an alliterative nickname train.

Whitman’s poetry counteracts the otherwise evaluative nature of recounting. When we only call out the names, when we generate a composite list that is not (yet) resolved into a system of subordination that sorts out the somewheres from the elsewheres, we invite the visceral experience of democracy.

But of course, Whitman was as much a New York poet, praising “Mannahatta,” as he was the roughneck of the original frontispiece of Leaves of Grass.

Even the most democratic listing strategy becomes hierarchical, especially in the U.S.

I remember how heartbroken I was to learn that the vamp verse at the end of Huey Lewis’s song, “Heart of Rock and Roll” (1983) was tailored to regional markets. While all versions of the song included the line “D.C., San Antone, and the Liberty Town, Boston, and a Baton Rouge. Tulsa, Austin, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Francisco, too,” and whole verses about “New York, New York” and “LA, Hollywood,” the pairs of cities that follow “in Cleveland … Detroit!” change from market to market. While I heard “Chicago … Kansas City!” at the song’s finale, other Midwestern markets heard Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee.

Adjacency always leads to subordination; the mapmaker has to place the compass rose somewhere, and that somewhere is always an elsewhere. Always a Hoboken. 

The Kids of Today Should Prepare Themselves for the Seventies

images courtesy of the EPA's Documerica project (1971-1974)

I put up these fliers advertising a course I’m teaching in the fall, about the legacies of the 1970s, and students have been asking questions. Why are the 70s so big right now?

Here are some reasons why I decided to draw my American Literature Since 1945 course into the vortex of that polyester decade.

First off, this song by Mike Watt and Eddie Vedder has been one of my favorites for going on two decades:

Also, why wouldn't we want to spend a semester examining the art and fiction of a decade that included the resignation of Richard M. Nixon,

the fall of Evel Knievel,

the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam,

the arming of Patty Hearst,

the bombing of the State Department by the Weather Underground, and the Roe v. Wade decision. Not to mention all those cringeworthy fashion and design trends.

But quirk and kitsch are not the decade’s only sources of allure. I'm teaching the course, in part, because I want to get to the bottom of why so many Instagram filters make digital photos look like Polaroid pictures and why, last Christmas as my family sifted through old photo albums, my twentysomething niece, when she found a photo of her mother drenched in the analogue crepuscularity of a seventies sunset, vowed to start a band just so she could use that photo as an album cover.

My hunch is that 70s are important to fiction writers today because a 70s setting is an ideal backdrop through which to imagine a way of being in the world that feels granular, like the opposite of the interface-fractured conveyor belting we do these days. In explaining why she wrote her seventies-set novel, Rachel Kushner admits to finding irresistible the “particular, slightly romantic glow” of its gritty mis-en-scène.

Another reason why the 70s are magnetic now is that it's the last decade where young people got to live the life of the mind without having to feel like freaks. American triumphalism was asleep during that decade. We hadn’t yet elected the Hollywood movie star who single-handedly change the point of college from it’s-where-you-go-to-develop-a-meaningful-philosophy-of-life to it’s-where-you-go-if-you-want-to-be-well-off-financially.

Look at this graph that measures student rankings of various objectives for attending college. At the start of the 70s, fewer than 40% answered “Being very well off financially” and almost 70% answered "Developing a meaningful philosophy of life." Today, those percentages have pretty much flipped.

So part of what makes me optimistic about 70s nostalgia is the possibility that it’s actually a nostalgia for a time when one wasn't scorned for wanting to organize her life around some principle other than financial gain.

Which is to say that the seventies are to this English professor as the fifties are to his mother. It is a magical decade in which radical political change was still possible, anyone could live in SoHo, and an heiress might take up arms against the pigs. 

Here's a possible reading list for that 70s course:

Louise Meriweather, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970)

Nicholasa Mohr, Nilda (1974)

Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude (2003)

Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (2006)

Junot Díaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Sean McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Rachel Kushner, Flamethrowers (2013)