Category: Features

“A typical case of a small-town boy who betrayed his roots”: David Foster Wallace as a Midwestern writer

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Features

[Chicago Reader]

In this week’s Chicago Reader, I’ve got a long review-essay on David Foster Wallace. The review part centers on Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max’s new biography of the author, and the book is just OK. Still, it let me explore Wallace’s relationship to the Midwest  — that’s the essay part — and I hope readers find it intriguing and persuasive.

Now, I could go on about this stuff all day — about how Max’s book corroborates Jonathan Franzen’s essay on Wallace’s inner ugly side; or about how much I’ve come to respect the work of David Lipsky, who consistently got the best quotations out of Wallace (and whose reporting Max relies on relentlessly). But I’ll limit myself to one final aspect of Wallace and the Midwest, and that’s how the region responded to his own writing about it.

The best example comes in the reaction to Wallace’s Harper’s essay on the Illinois State Fair. (You can find a .pdf here.) An editor at the magazine had heard about Wallace moving back to Illinois, and he called the novelist — his U-Haul was still sitting in the drive-way — and pitched him the idea of reporting on the 1993 State Fair. Out of this assignment sprang the nonfiction style that Wallace would later describe to Lipsky as “basically, you know, welcome to my mind for twenty pages. See through my eyes.”

The essay came out the next summer, and it was pure Wallace  — funny, intellectual, empathetic. But most local readers didn’t see it that way. In fact, in a column that ran in Springfield’s State Journal-Register, Toby McDaniel blasted Wallace and his “poison pen.” The State Fair’s organizers were even more outraged, and McDaniel quoted Joe Khayyat, a fair spokesman, at length:

There are so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in this story, it really doesn’t deserve a response. In fact, the only thing the author seems to be consistent with is his gross misrepresentation of the fair and his use of profanity. It’s a typical case of a small-town boy who betrayed his roots when the big city went to his head.

This defense gets deployed any time a Midwestern author produces non-brochure copy about the Midwest, and Wallace’s essay proves how wrong it is. So too does his response to Khayyat and McDaniel. In the State Journal-Register‘s second story on the affair, which ran a few weeks later, a different reporter, Mike Matulis, asked Wallace for his side. “To be perfectly honest with you, Khayyat’s comments bother me,” Wallace told him. “If the piece came off that way, as some one sneering at the Midwest, then that’s really a deficiency in the piece. It really wasn’t meant to do that.”

For the rest of the story, Wallace praised the State Fair — “There is an intensity about the livestock shows that is the same intensity you see in Lincoln Center” — and the state itself.  “It’s incredibly cheap to live here, and I haven’t heard a car alarm since I moved,” he told Matulis. “I’m not kidding.” Wallace was only getting warmed up: “People smile and say ‘hello,’ I don’t have to lock my house every day and women sometimes walk at night by themselves. And when there is a ghastly murder here, it’s an enormous deal.”

He ended the interview by reaffirming his affection for the Midwest: “My resting pulse rate is lower here. It’s really very nice.” And yet, as late as 2010, the State Journal-Register was still smarting about Wallace’s essay. It’s a colorful and, I think, telling episode about Wallace’s personality and his relationship to readers. But while Max includes some interesting details about the accuracy of Wallace’s nonfiction (“We quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for,” Wallace’s sister tells him), he never mentions this little State Fair dust up. Nor does he examine the way Wallace’s journalism evolved from “welcome to my mind” to the intensely rhetorical style of his later pieces. These are just a couple examples of why Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a disappointment, both in terms of its details and its interpretations.

The closing of the Wigwam (and the state of Indiana basketball)

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Hoosiers, Sports

[New York Times]

In Sunday’s New York Times sports section, I’ve got a long feature on the closing of the Wigwam, the 8,996-seat arena in Anderson, Indiana, that ranks as the second largest high school gym in the world. Or ranked, rather: Anderson’s school board closed the Wigwam last summer, in a decision that frustrated many fans and seemed to strike another blow to the city’s struggling self-image. Those elements certainly belong in this story, but I also tried to focus on the positive — the way the Anderson Indians got a chance to create, in the words of their coach, Joe Nadaline, “a new tradition.” I also took Nadaline’s idea one step further. What could the Wigwam’s closing reveal about the current relationship between Indiana and high-school hoops? Short answer: while it’s taken a few steps back, it remains powerful and pretty much without compare.

That doesn’t mean we should lapse into lazy “Indiana basketball” rhapsodies. (For example.) But it does mean the state continues to offer a surprising level of passion, quality, and, given its smallish size, talent. One way to see this is in the person of John Harrell. I quote Harrell briefly in my story, and his delightfully lo-fi website offers an indispensable resource for any local fan.

Harrell started writing for the Huntington Herald-Press while he was a senior in high school. He migrated to the Bloomington Herald-Times‘ sports desk in the early 1970s. Around the same time, Jeff Sagarin, a sports stats guru who now helps with the BCS rankings, also moved to Bloomington. Harrell started delivering him hand-written lists of Indiana’s high school basketball scores; Sagarin started churning out professional-grade rankings for the state’s programs. (Another reason to be optimistic about Anderson going forward? They played one of the 20 toughest schedules in the state, according to Sagarin.)

“It all developed into this website eventually,” Harrell told me. “I had all these records laying around.” In 2000, Harrell started uploading those records (and the latest scores and schedules) to his personal website. It became crucial for coaches, ADs, journalists, and super-fans, with data that goes back to 1993. Harrell says he still has the earlier stuff — it’s just stuck on a computer that can no longer transfer files to more modern machines. He may get around to transferring it by hand now that he’s retired. “I haven’t been as busy,” he said. “I’ve had more time to devote to the site.”

Like any longtime observer of the Indiana hoops scene, Harrell brought up class basketball and attendance numbers before I could even ask the question. He admits the switch has hurt attendance, but also points out that fan interest has been slowly, steadily declining for decades. (I agree: when you crunch the numbers, you see that class basketball, more than anything else, provides an easy scapegoat for angry nostalgics. See this terrific Indianapolis Monthly story for more.) One thing’s for sure, according to Harrell: class basketball is here to stay. “The small schools have gotten a taste for Indianapolis now,” he said with a laugh.

A profile of Xavier’s Chris Mack

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Sports

[Cincinnati Magazine]

In the March issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a long profile of Xavier head coach Chris Mack. It centers on the lead up to the Xavier-Gonzaga game on New Year’s Eve, and while we continued to tweak the story as Xavier’s season progressed, that lead time makes it feel a little . . . strange, especially since this week Xavier pretty much ended its NCAA hopes by losing to St. Louis. I hope the access and the reporting help compensate for this lag. One thing that definitely helps is Mack himself. He was the most honest and upfront interview I’ve encountered in the sports world, and I’ll try to do a couple follow up posts with stuff we couldn’t fit into the profile — especially his discussion of the theory and praxis behind Xavier’s pack-line defense.

Before getting to that, though, I want to highlight (and substantiate) what I suspect will be the most controversial part in the profile. It deals, to no one’s surprise, with the Xavier-U.C. brawl at the end of this year’s Crosstown Shootout. Near the end, I write:

But there’s a bigger problem here, and it gets at Xavier’s dirty little secret: The brawl has been a long time coming.

From the beginning, Mack’s been up front about wanting a nasty team. That’s why he practices the way he practices. (Mack pushed his players so hard in a January practice that he blew out his knee again while attempting a motivational dunk.) That’s why he recruits the way he recruits. You can find evidence of this from former players and coaches, from on-court incidents, and from opponents. But here’s a particularly telling example: In October, before the season even started, Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports stopped by a Xavier practice and noted how the team relied on a potentially combustible edginess. “We’re straight tough,” guard Mark Lyons told him.

The profile makes lot of the comparison between Skip Prosser and Chris Mack, and I should say that Prosser also ran a tough team. In Michael Perry’s excellent book Xavier Tales, he quotes the following Prosser pep talk: “You’ve got to hit them first; don’t give up a step.” Perry also quotes former Xavier player (and later, assistant coach) Pat Kelsey on Prosser’s practices: “It was three hours of just up-and-down the floor, bodies flying around; it was almost like you needed helmets and shoulder pads.”

Still, I think Mack (and, as we’ll see, Sean Miller before him) took this nastiness to a new and more intentional level. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but I believe it created a tension with the Prosserian classiness most people associate with Xavier — and certainly, it made the fall out of the brawl that much worse.

So, what’s the evidence I alluded to above?

  • Former players: Before his first Crosstown Shootout, Mack showed his team a five-minute montage of previous Shootouts — the fights, the shoving, the dirty plays — to motivate them. After the game (and I’m drawing all this from Scott Gaede’s book NeXt in Line), Jordan Crawford said that U.C. “tried to come in and be the bullies, and we wanted to be the bullies, too. We ain’t going to back down from nobody.” Later that year, in the Butler game that ended with a bizarre game-clock error, Tu Holloway had to be restrained from charging into the crowd. Afterward, a Xavier player allegedly tore a water fountain off the wall of Hinkle Fieldhouse. I mentioned this to one of Xavier’s media guys, and he maintained that the player meant to slam a table but hit the fountain instead; the age of Hinkle Fieldhouse did the rest. That may be true, but as far as defenses of militant behavior go, it seems a little lacking.
  • Former coaches: This seems like the most telling evidence, to me. When an Arizona reporter asked Sean Miller about the brawl, he said this of his former team: “They’re deep, they’re tough, they don’t back down. If Cincinnati tries to do what they did today, they’re going to get a fight. That’s what happened. So I’m proud of those guys.” The reporter followed up with Miller after he’d seen the tape: “Happens every game,” Miller reaffirmed. “I’m proud of those guys, I really am. I would fully expect there to be a fight.” Miller tried to walk these statements back the next day, but I think they reveal how central this nastiness was to his team’s culture and to his coaching identity. Remember that in one of Miller’s Crosstown Shootouts, Derrick Brown started a small fight and was ejected. It seems clear that Miller expected the Musketeers to react this way because he (and later, his former assistant Mack) stressed these qualities on a regular basis.
  • Opponents: On his radio show, to take one instance, Matt Painter said of Xavier that “right away from watching film, they talk! And they talk a lot. So that was one of the first things we talked in a scouting report was that, ‘Don’t get caught up in that.'”

I asked Mack about the Painter example. “That’s Matt’s opinion,” he said. “That’s not who we are nor who want to be. It has nothing to do with the talking on the floor, the false bravado. It has everything to do with being the first person to dive on a loose ball.” Again, this may be true, but I think it also creates a tension with Xavier’s broader image. That tension was really the only thing Mack was less than candid abut.

Let’s end with a great example of what I’m talking about — and an example that suggests this tension bothers Xavier’s administration, as well. Almost a month after the brawl, a university dean announced mandatory “reflection sessions”  for the student section based on their behavior at the game. Xavier cancelled the sessions, after they were widely mocked, but what’s truly interesting is that the university decided to react to the student section only post-brawl. After all, Matt Howard of Butler, who was surely one of college basketball’s most widely traveled players, called the Cintas Center and Xavier’s student section the most hostile he’d ever experienced. That’s the way Xavier has grown used to doing things, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it does seem odd to freak out, but only after being caught.

The Bengals, Hamilton County, and the world’s worst stadium lease

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Features, Politics, Sports, The Icky Shuffle

[Cincinnati Magazine]

Well, after a couple teasers — a miscellany of quotations from the county official who became a Bengals exec; an appreciation of Mike Brown as a “near-brilliant litigator” — my feature on the Bengals and their stadium lease is finally here. The story doesn’t break much news, other than a few hints about a potential solution to this 15-year mess. But I do think it synthesizes that mess into a coherent story.

It’s also a very depressing story. If you follow Cincinnati sports and want something a little more uplifting, check out the previous story I did for the magazine — on the Reds and their efforts to win back their fans.

*  *  *

One more thing: I should elaborate on one part of my stadium-fund story — the end, where I claim the Bengals’ mistreatment of Carson Palmer “tells you everything you need to know about Brown.” After the issue went to press, the Bengals traded Palmer in one of the most slam-dunk deals of all time. That might seem like a vindication of Brown’s pettiness. After all, the Bengals now have two extra draft picks to go with their promising rookie quarterback. But I think this misses the larger picture. Throughout this saga, Brown treated Palmer, maybe the best (and certainly the nicest) player he’s ever drafted, with zero class. After the trade, Palmer took time to call the Cincinnati media, saying all the right things and handling the whole thing like a professional — like an adult. What did the Bengals do? Well, in the team’s statement — and you could obviously forget any interaction with the media — Brown didn’t even bother to thank Palmer for his years with the team. Marvin Lewis stooped even lower, bashing Palmer to reporters.

So here’s a question: how do you think players around the league perceived this? The Bengals have long struggled to lure free agents to Cincinnati. This offseason, Jonathan Joseph, a free agent and one of their best defensive players, bailed on the team despite its best efforts to resign him. Right now, it seems the Bengals can’t give their money away. Here’s a second question, then: What happens in five or six yeas when those two new draft picks become free agents?

“I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded”: A profile of Stephen Greenblatt

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Academia, Books, Features

[The Boston Globe]

In Sunday’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, I’ve got a profile of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. In his new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt writes about the fifteenth century’s rediscovery of Lucretius and his poem On the Nature of Things. Given Greenblatt’s subtitle, it’s no surprise that the book continues his push into the world of popular writing, a push that started with his Will in the World.

Actually, Greenblatt’s been writing reviews for The New Republic and op eds for The New York Times since the 1980s; nothing about his career is easy to summarize or diagnose. Still, writing a Shakespeare biography for Norton seems far different than writing an academic book for the University of Chicago Press. I asked Greenblatt about this (and N.B. that none of the quotations in this post made the profile — Greenblatt’s a compulsively quotable guy). “For me, there isn’t a big gap between the two,” he said about academic and popular writing. “It wasn’t like I was deciding to write detective fiction.”

After doing two interviews with Greenblatt, and reading or re-reading many of his books and essays, I’d say this is one of his defining traits: a weird inability to admit that anything he’s ever done was intentional, programmatic, or calculated. When I asked him about the genesis of New Historicism, for example, he said, “We weren’t a group of people who thought we were going to plot the transformation of the field.” Yet Greenblatt transformed his field — and not enough people point this out — through some very deliberate and unglamorous channels: he edited collections of academic essays; he co-founded a journal and book series; and he conjured up not only broad theoretical concepts, but also specific close-readings (of Marlowe, Spenser, and many, many more) that still occupy specialists in those fields.

So, Greenblatt’s The Swerve highlights his transformation from highly specialized academic to . . . literary journalist? (The Swerve doesn’t have much original scholarship, so far as I [or a scolding Michael Dirda] can tell. Unlike Dirda, though, I think it’s a good book; name me a literary journalist who could pull off as many fun and learned tangents as Greenblatt does in his book.) But The Swerve highlights another transformation for Greenblatt, and it’s the one that drives my profile: How did the scholar who argued that not even Shakespeare could escape the limits of his culture end up writing a book whose subtitle claims that, thanks to one book and one author, The World Became Modern?

It was very, very hard to get Greenblatt to address this. At one point I rather desperately read him the passage from Renaissance Self-Fashioning that comes up in my profile, then asked what his 1980 self would think of his 2011 book. “I think he’d like it,” Greenblatt replied. (He’s also compulsively sly.) Still, after some prodding, he admitted that “I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded. I’m a little more optimistic now.”

Greenblatt remained uneasy about his publisher-provided subtitle. “I’m skeptical about any straight-forward teleology,” he said, like any good scholar. Still, he took literary scholars to task for their retreat from the public sphere. “Our work is important. But something about how that work is presented is self-diminishing, self-defeating.” Greenblatt added: “Why do we spend our lives on this? Why is it exciting? Why is it fun? Is it really just ideological demysticifcation? That’s fine, but there can’t be a full diet of that.”