March 24, 2015 by Sean Carswell

Pop Culture Pap

Illustration from Razorcake #51 by Brad Beshaw

I walked across the campus at UCLA a half hour before the hullabaloo was scheduled to begin. A middle-aged woman in Birkenstocks walked toward me, accompanied by a dog that looked like a fat greyhound. A squirrel darted through the planter to my left. The dog bounded off after the squirrel. The woman hadn’t had a tight enough hold on the leash. It slipped out of her hand. The squirrel made for a tree—his only hope. The dog took three steps, swooped the squirrel up in her mouth, and bam. Two shakes of her head and the squirrel’s neck was broke. He hung there limply in the dog’s mouth. The woman screamed, “No! Macy! Put it down!” But it was too late for the squirrel. Macy knew this. She took off running down the hallways of what looked to be a Biology building. The woman ran after her dog.

It all seemed futile to me. She could give that dog all the yuppie names she wanted and scream at her all she wanted, but Macy had thousands of years of genetic memory telling her to eat that squirrel. Yuppie names and scolding in a language the dog doesn’t speak are no match for that. I wanted to tell the woman, “Relax. Let the dog have her little squirrel. It’s just the way the world works.” Instead, I minded my own business. I thought to myself, this has to be a metaphor for something.

A half hour later, the hullabaloo ensued. Crowds filtered in, writers performed readings, panels of other writers talked about their books, publishers hawked their wares. The LA Times Festival of Books was underway. I set up a chair adjacent to the table of Gorsky Press books and let the festival wash over me.

I was working half of the Gorsky Press/Manic D Press booth. Jennifer from Manic D had asked me if I would split a booth with her. From about ten seconds after I said I’d do it, I regretted my decision. I hate working at book festivals. I hate the retail aspect of it. I hate having to give a sales pitch for a book that I’m selling for five bucks. I mean, come on, five bucks? What else can you get for five bucks? A burrito. Someone poured his heart and soul and years of his life into this book, I spent several months working with the author, editing, typesetting, designing the cover, and creating the actual artifact. And you can get it for the cost of a burrito. Don’t ask me to give a sales pitch.

Thus, I started the day grumpy.

To make matters worse, the Gorsky/Manic D booth was right next to the LA Times Stage. This is where all the “celebrity” authors (or is it celebrity “authors,” because you know Cloris Leachman didn’t sit down at a laptop and type seventy thousand words of an autobiography) read from their works and answered questions from the audience. Whether I wanted to or not—and believe me, it was a not—I had to hear Winnie Cooper talk about math, Marsha Brady talk about her cocaine addiction (she bragged about blowing a quarter million dollars on coke, then scolded someone in the audience—probably some little girl—by braying, “Don’t you ever do drugs. Drugs are bad!”), and a few different celebrities whom I’d never heard of whine about being recognized everywhere they went. Bob Barker was there. I’m not sure what he talked about, but I couldn’t help feeling like he was trying to sell me a washing machine.

There’s something hauntingly painful about giving a sales pitch to a customer who’s clearly not interested in the book that you poured sweat and blood and thousands of dollars in, and giving that sales pitch not because you want to, but because he asked. And you know he only asked because he’s killing time until the Dancing with the Stars host takes over the stage. And you can hardly hear yourself grumble to yourself because Tori Spelling is squawking through the P.A. behind you.

Our booth number was 666. Before the festival, a friend asked me if that was a coincidence. I didn’t understand how it could be. I’m not satanic. After a seven-hour assault from the LA Times Stage, I knew what he meant. It was a coincidence because I was in hell.

Beyond the celebrities and customers, there were my fellow publishers to contend with. Not so much Jennifer from Manic D, but the publishers who stopped in to chat. The trendy fear this year is digital book readers. Publishers are convinced that everything will be going paperless within ten years. Books will be a thing of the past, surrendered in favor of the Kindle or the Sony Reader. And, as much as I like to indulge on unfounded panic, I just couldn’t commiserate with my fellow publishers.

On the one hand, I could see the benefits of these digital readers. Because everything published before 1923 in the US is part of the public domain in the US. No one holds the copyright on it. So, if I wanted to publish Moby Dick tomorrow, I could. And since the Herman Melville’s estate isn’t going to get a dime, it doesn’t make sense for Barnes & Noble or Penguin to charge as much as they do for their copies of that novel. You can get a free copy of it online at Project Gutenberg. So, if these digital readers became popular, anyone who wanted to read a pre-1923 book could download it for free. I think that would be a good thing. But you can already read most of those books for free online. And I still buy the books. Because Moby Dick is hard enough to read without having to read it off a glowing, flickering screen.

And that’s the problem with these book readers. The manufacturers swear that the screens don’t glow or flicker. But I’ve seem these readers. They glow and flicker.

Besides, if more people went to the digital book readers, I could sell a whole lot more Gorsky books without having to print, store, or mail them. And, sure, more people would be illegally downloading these books, but I could live with that. At least more people would be reading our authors.

On the other hand, I have trouble believing that these readers will take over. For one thing, I’ve never seen anyone using one of these digital readers in the world at large. I see a lot of people reading books down by the beach or on airplanes or in diners or on campuses, but I have not seen one single person reading a digital reader outside of the store that sells that reader. And I’ve been looking. For years, I’ve been looking.

When we started Gorsky Press more than a decade ago, people told me then that, within five years, everything would be paperless. Ten years later, people are telling me that, within five years, everything will be paperless. Will I hear the same thing in ten more years? I don’t know. I do remember buying an LP back in 1984 and the clerk telling me that cassettes would make LPs a thing of the past. Twenty-five years later, the LP is more popular than it’s been in a decade.

This goes to show that the future, like the present, isn’t binary. Sure, people probably will start buying more of those readers. Maybe they will get more popular. But for the rest of my lifetime, at least, people will still buy books for the same reason people still buy records. We want the artifact. We want the ceremony of lifting the record onto the turntable, hearing the crack and pop of anticipation, and listening to that warm fuzz of analog. Likewise, when we read a book, we want to be able to pause with our thoughts, gaze at the cover, flip back through the pages. We want to dog-ear pages and underline beautiful sentences. We want to smell the musty pages of a book that we’ve read twenty years ago, and reread that book and let the smell and the browning pages connect us to our earlier selves. I can’t see myself giving that up for a glowing screen. I can’t see readers like me giving that up for the next fifty or sixty years, at least.

Of course, I didn’t tell my fellow publishers this. Nothing bugs people like mixing your reason in with their panic.

So that was the LA Times Festival of Books. Vacuous celebrities, whiny publishers in a retail purgatory, and me grumbling. But there was this beautiful moment, too.

With only a couple of hours left in the book fest, with another celebrity chattering away on the stage behind me, I left the Gorsky/Manic D booth, made my way across campus, and watched a reading sponsored by an organization called “Dime Stories.” Aspiring-but-little-known writers read three-minute, slice-of-life stories about commuting on public transportation and thinking about their aunt and that kind of thing. I watched five or six of them. They were at times funny, clever, and thoughtful. All of these writers, though, clearly spent a lot of time crafting these little three-minute stories. They thought about every word. It was big deal for them to read at the Festival of Books.

The crowd was bigger there than it had been at the celebrity stage when I left. I was happy to see that.

Twenty minutes into Dime Stories, who should take the stage but Razorcake’s own Jim Ruland. He read a twisted story about a guy obsessed with Nietzsche and pro sports. It got a little edgy at the end. Some spectators who’d brought their young children squirmed in their seats. I felt a little swelling in my chest, proud for ol’ Jim.

Was his reading so powerful, so beautiful that it vindicated my whole experience at the Festival of Books? No. Clearly, I’m still grumpy about it all. I was just glad to see that among this vacuous display of a culture in ruins that passes itself off as a Festival of Books, at this homage to pop cultural pap where honest attempts at communication are lost in the clutter, at least organizations like Razorcake, Gorsky, and Manic D still have a foothold.

When the hullabaloo subsided, I packed the unsold books back into my truck and thought about the dog and her squirrel. I tried to make sense of the metaphor. Who was the dog in this scenario? Who was the squirrel? What were we genetically programmed to do? How was nature running its course?

I still don’t know. I’m sorry.

I wish I had a better answer for you.

Author’s note: This is the seventeenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote. It originally ran in Razorcake #51. For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.

March 10, 2015 by Sean Carswell

Let Him Go

Illustration from Razorcake #48 by Brad Beshaw

I was checking out Chester Himes’s first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, the other day, trying to remember how that rhyme went. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a… And I couldn’t remember what you were supposed to catch by his toe. I remembered how I learned the poem, but I knew that wasn’t right. I knew there was something else you were supposed to catch by the toe, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what it was. I dug around in the recesses of my brain, trying to bring it up. It wouldn’t come to me. I didn’t want to look it up on the internet because 1.) I don’t want wikipedia to become my long-term memory and 2.) come on, I had to remember what I was really supposed to let go if he hollered.

Eventually, I gave up thinking and slunk back to my computer to look it up. Tiger. You probably already know this, but it’s a tiger that you catch by the toe.

I sat there, looking at my computer screen, thinking, who the fuck ever heard of catching a tiger by his toe? I looked at all the different versions—fishy, piggy, monkey—and none of them sounded familiar. One British version caught a fairy by his toe. I could’ve pictured us as kids using that one, if we’d been British, if someone had thought of it. But we never did. So tiger. It must’ve been tiger.

The thing is, though, we never said tiger. When I was a little kid, hanging out with all the kids in the neighborhood, divvying up teams for wiffle ball or whatever, we always said, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” I find it hard to picture now: a bunch of cute little White kids, mostly blond, tan in the Florida sun, gathered up for a game of something in the street, looking as all-American as can be. And we were all-American with our little rhymes of “catch a nigger by his toe, if he hollers let him go.”

I don’t know what we said when Rudy Smith played with us. Probably the same thing.

By the time I was old enough to know better, I’d quit making my choices using that rhyme.

I’m not sure where it came from. I’m sure my parents didn’t teach it to me that way. I don’t blame it on the fact that I grew up in the South, either. I remember hanging out with some older cousins in New York. I was only five or six years old. One of my cousins had taught me a joke, and he was prodding me to tell the other cousins. I wasn’t all that stoked on telling the joke because I didn’t get it. I told it anyway: “Sammy Davis, Jr. walks onto a bus. The bus driver says to him, ‘Back of the bus, nigger.’ Sammy Davis, Jr. says, ‘But I’m not a nigger. I’m a Jew.’ So the bus driver says to him, ‘Get off.’ ”

I didn’t know who Sammy Davis, Jr. was. Hell, I didn’t even know what a Jew was. I did know that jokes like that got me in with the older kids.

Then, there was this other time. I was in my late twenties, living back in Atlanta, hanging out a the Little Five Points Pub. A guy walked in the door. It took me a second to recognize him. He sat two stools over from me and took his own couple of seconds to remember me. His name was Andy. He’d been a regular at another bar where I used to work the last time I’d lived in Atlanta. We said our hellos and chatted for a bit. Andy said, “It’s been a long time.”

And it had been a long time since we’d seen each other. The two years that separated my lives in Atlanta flashed through my head. I’d lived in a couple of other towns, made and lost friends, traveled all around the continent, held a few jobs, got fired from one of them and almost got into a fistfight with my boss just so that I could pry my final paycheck from his fingers. The two years seemed like dog years to me. So I expressed this passage of time to Andy the best way I knew how. I said, “Yeah, it’s been a coon’s age.”

“A what?” Andy said, suddenly angry.

“A coon’s age,” I said. “You know, like a raccoon could have been born and lived his whole life in the time since I saw you last.”

“Oh,” Andy said, but he seemed like he was done talking to me.

The bartender came along, chatted with both of us, and the afternoon started to while away.

A few minutes later, I remembered that “coon” was a racist term for a Black person. I was White. Andy was Black. We were sitting deep inside of Georgia. Fuck.

I thought about that expression. Did it really mean what I thought it meant? Was a coon’s age really the lifespan of a raccoon, or something that makes less sense but is more racist? Was Andy sitting there, fuming that he had to sit next to a racist motherfucker like me? Should I apologize? Would it help?

I don’t remember how I handled the situation. I probably just had another drink.

I thought the word “pickaninny” referred to the braids that little Black girls wore. I thought this because I remember once standing with my mom and one of her friends, who was an elementary school teacher at the school that I went to, and my mom’s friend saw two little Black girls with braids and said, “Oh, look at the cute little pickaninnies.”

I was very embarrassed when, decades later, I learned what pickaninny really meant.

I’ve been thinking about all of this stuff lately, and probably for obvious reasons. I think I was a member of the last generation in America that was raised amidst such flippant racist language. In the late eighties, the whole Political Correctness movement came along. And it got a lot of backlash because no one knew what it was okay to say and what it wasn’t. The term African American doesn’t exactly work, because what about someone like Charlize Theron, who grew up in South Africa, immigrated to the U.S., and is White as hell? Isn’t she an African American? And what do we call Black people in Europe? And the terms black and white don’t work because we’re talking, in all cases, of a variety of browns. So you can capitalize White and Black to indicate that you’re referring not to a color but to a social construct, but even as I capitalize these words in this column, I feel like a pretentious jerk. So, granted, Political Correctness is a pain in the ass.

Still, it’s got to be preferable to allowing an otherwise nice little kid like myself to grow up chanting “catch a nigger by his toe.”

As I’ve said, whatever term you use now, it’s going to be inexact. The term “people of color” may seem like the silliest because not only are all people “of color,” but the term itself is just a syntactical variant of the old racist term “colored people.” Regardless, if we go beyond these pithy little observations, we can recognize that, at least as a society, White people stopped saying “nigger.” That has to be a great thing.

The term itself was created by a slave holding society. It’s the derogatory term that reasserts White superiority. Every time it’s used by a White person, whether he’s a Nazi or a little kid deciding who’s going to be the captains of the wiffle ball teams, it’s reasserting racial superiority. This is more serious than we typically acknowledge. There have been various neuroscientific studies recently that show that language causes us to react in ways that we’ve only recently begun to understand.

The word “nigger” is a good example of this. It’s a difficult word for me. I can type it and use it in this column, but I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, even here in my office, where I’m completely alone. I had a vague idea of why this was. I knew it was something about hearing that word in the voice of a White guy who has the accent of a former slaveholding state. But then I came across a book called The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. Pinker explains that when we use certain words, it triggers a flow of oxygen into the limbic system in our brain. “Nigger” is one of those words. When we hear it or say it, our thought patterns flee the more rational frontal lobe of our mind and race down to the reptilian part of our brain. We literally race back to an early stage of evolution. This isn’t to say that saying the word makes you dumber, it just means that, when you say this word, you’re using the dumbest part of your brain.

So then I think again about Political Correctness and all the backlash against it. I can understand how it can be a pain in the ass. Everything that leads to progress can be a pain in the ass. Some people felt like restricting the words we can say is a form of censorship. Well, it can be. But in the case of attacking the word “nigger,” no one banned you from using it. You’re welcome to use it. You just look like a jackass if you do. And you should look like a jackass. You’re using the least evolved part of your brain when you say it. But I shouldn’t say “you” here. Chances are you’re not doing this at all. Chances are, you’ve evolved.

I’m not saying that demonizing the use of that one particular word has ended racism and paved the way for a Black U.S. president or anything drastic like that. I’m just trying to understand how we teach things like racism to little kids and how it was taught to me. Also, I think that demonizing certain terms has stuffed racism into the closet, as opposed to making it something that is overtly indoctrinated into us.

Hopefully, we’re all better off catching tigers by the toe.

Author’s note: This is the sixteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote. It originally ran in Razorcake #48. For more information about the collection, read this post. If you enjoy reading my Razorcake columns, please consider subscribing to the magazine.