Salvage Heart

My review of Carl Hiaasen's Flush, his new kids book, ran in The Oregonian on September 25. That only leaves about a week of it being cached in the free archives, but here is a link.

The previous week, my review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book Bait and Switch ran. Here is a link to that; no guarantees on how long they'll leave it active. For a related bit, see the earlier posted review (a Salvage Heart exclusive!) on Working Stiffs, which I read after Nickel and Dimed, and which I liked better (yeah, they're different, but I can compare un-alikes and pick a favorites).

Un-Alikes:
Pie better than Cobbler
Bacon better than Link Sausage
Swimming better than Diving

...no, wait, these are Alikes...

UN-Alikes:
Pencils better than Scissors
Sidewalks better than Plywood
Rivers better than Brackets

There. A useless sidenote.

From Louis Menand's August 8, 2005, "Critic at Large" column in The New Yorker on critic Edmund Wilson, "Missionary: Edmund Wilson and American culture":

....Why shouldn't there be errors and omissions? Wilson was opinionated and arbitrary about the subjects he covered because he was a writer, not an expert. He was not obliged, as professors are, to pick out a single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career was devoted to the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important, and, by doing the homework and taking care with the exposition, make it interesting and important to other people. There is no point in comparing Wilson--either unfavorably, as Hyman did, or favorably, as people contemptuous of English professors sometimes do today--with academic critics. He operated in an entirely different environment. "To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity," he once explained. "You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject." He wrote in a world where print was still king, and literature was at the center of a nation's culture--circumstances that gave glamour to literary journalism. He sensed that that world was coming to an end before most people did, and he declined to compromise with the future. In the last week of his life, he was taken to see two movies, "The Godfather" and "The French Connection." As always, he recorded his observations in his journal. "Bang bang" was all he wrote.

Here is a wikipedia entry (the new Warhol 15 minutes: We shall all have a wikipedia entry).

Episode 100 of National Public Radio's Open Mic, part of the All Songs Considered Web site, went live today. First song of the five is by Bill Santen. Attaboy, Bill! Track comes from his debut solo record, In the Night Kitchen (with Bill Santen), "Captain Blood and St. September."

You can link to his own site here, or to his music and birddog site here.

You can go to the NPR site and rate the song, and you can listen to it via RealAudio (my computer thinks that Adobe GoLive is how I want to listen to it, but it's wrong), but if you don't have something nice to say (like, a 4 or 5 rating), then please don't. Nobody wants that kind of feedback. Negative. We hate that.

NBC's long-running late-night comedy-sketch program "Saturday Night Live" recently issued another in its Best of series, this one featuring the Best of Tom Hanks.

Two things:

• Tom Hanks worked with a lot of funny individuals on those episodes (at least seven appearances); and
• "Saturday Night Live" was never funny.

Jon Lovitz was funny. I would almost watch Todd Solondz's Happiness again just for the opening scene with Lovitz on a date. Kevin Nealon was tall and necessary. Mike Murphy had a series of worsening haircuts. Adam Sandler was a bit player (sometimes when I sing to myself in the car, and realize that I'm annoying even that audience of one, I remind me of him). Victoria Gilbert seemed very blonde. Phil [name] could carry a scene. Will Farrell could carry a scene. Conan O'Brien lands a bit part as a doorman to the Five Timers Club. Chris Rock! Steve Martin! Elliot Gould!? A five-time host?

But Hanks' appearances cover several years and casts. Funny people. Unfunny skits. And almost every one staggers on at least half as long again as it should have, so that the awkwardness is almost funny were it not so awkward.

People (Lorne Michaels!) herald the early years, but looking back, where are the laughs? Outrageous actors and commedians. But what percentage of skits are unwatchable in part? As a whole? Most.

It's an argument more or less moot, one would think. But occasionally someone comes to work Monday morning (or worse, having TiVo'd, any morning) claiming that they watched SNL and it was great or bad or good, and then out come the arguments about when it actually was good.

It was good when you were 12. Whatever era that was. And then you grew up and it was boring unless you've a mind to reiterate catch phrases that you hear on tv and the radio.

So sure, watching Tom Hanks air "unseen" footage from Big, in which he stays in school and knocks kids around is funny. When you're 12. And "Mr. Short-term Memory" is hilarious in the same way.

For what it's worth. Footnote: Oh, and here's looking at the new network fall schedule. 30+ new shows! Who will be the first to fall?

Iain Levison's A Working Stiff's Manifesto (Soho Press, 2002) is a memoir of the past ten years he spent working.

"In the last ten years, I've had forty-two jobs in six states. I've quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes it's hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldn't be right for you to show up any more."

He has a "$40,000 English degree" but he spares the issuing agency the embarrassment of association: "where" is never listed. Sufficed to say, he feels like that degree was less than a savvy investment.

In some ways, Levison's memoir is a '90s version of Ben Hamper's Rivethead, the story of working for Detroit auto manufacturers in the 1970s, the bloated inefficiency of the union, and the inanity of spinning your life as a corporate cog on the assembly line. Levison's is that story without the union (or after the plant closes): a would-be writer hops from job to job, learning how to lie to get hired, and learning when to quit. He illustrates the flawed logic of paying minimum wage and abusing workers (they steal from you) and makes me hope that the mackerel I eat is not the same that he describes being cut.

Levison's description of a job advertising for English majors with military experience, which turns out to be a water filter sales scam, is typical of the opportunities that prowl on this level of the workforce, with "investment opportunities" that lead to easy money.

"People after my money always have an interesting way of describing it, as if my money was just a pain in my ass. Nobody who wants you to buy something from them reminds you how many days you had to get up early and drag your ass into work, how much humiliation you had to endure from abusive boses and the eternally irritated public, just so you could earn that money. To them, it is stretching the leather on your wallet. That money is 'doing nothing.' Money should be used to earn money, they'll tell you. Even if you don't have a job. Especially if you don't have a job. Only dullards save their money for rent. Dreamers invest in WATER FILTER SALES!!!"

For abject humiliation, perhaps no place is better than Alaska, where the wildest of the wild still trek in search of easy gold, now found in the fishing industry. Levison's best stories might be in the chapter "On the Slime Line," in which he details a sordid assortment of quick jobs and characters that he meets in Alaska. But he also offers apt assessments of drug testing policies and life in the chain restaurant business.

Where A Working Stiff's Manifesto veers from, say, the writing of Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed is that, though he isn't necessarily resigned to his status as wage slave, he is beyond outraged. There isn't much refection on the societal condition that makes such a trap so easy to fall into, although he does express concern at the apparent expendability of labor, which makes things like stock options and health care always a bridge too far.

You can buy this books at Powell's Books; an interesting note: the various editions changed the subhead from "A Memoir" to "Confessions of a Wage Slave" to "A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember" as the publishing houses corrected their course. Their site also lists Since the Layoffs (Soho Press, 2003), the apparent debut novel that hung over Levison's head during those jobs.

The edition reviewed is the first, hardcover. Other changes may have appeared in subsequent editions. I'm sure they are fine.

As for Levison, he recently drummed up some work for Philadelphia Magazine, warranting a mention in Larry Platt's "From the Editor" column for the February 2005 issue.

Additional Links:
Soho Press page
NPR "Day to Day" interview from September 2003