Who's the Man?

David Foster Wallace? Tim Walz? David Letterman? JD Vance?

Masculinity is in the air this week, electorally-wise.

On the Ezra Klein Show, Klein brought out journalists Christine Emba and Zack Beauchamp to talk about the contrasts in masculine presentation between Republicans and Democrats, particularly the rise of Tim Walz as a happy, but still sufficiently manly, warrior on the trial working on behalf of a woman at the top the ticket.

Times columnist Ross Douthat counter-programmed, arguing that the Democrat’s happy warriors aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and the Republicans aren’t necessarily the he man women hater’s club, given that 2nd Dude Doug Emhoff once had an affair with his children’s teacher and JD Vance and Josh Hawley let their wives have jobs.

Masculinity is in the air and I’m thinking of David Foster Wallace.

Just about 35 years ago to the day, my mom sent me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s second book, and first short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair. It had been recommended by one of her sales representatives as a book that young people were going to be interested in. I was a freshman in college.

The sales rep was correct. I read it over Labor Day weekend, rather than doing whatever I was supposed to be doing for school. This was a consistent pattern throughout my life that has served me well.

I’d never read anything like those stories, not necessarily because they were so new or innovative - they were to an extent, but plenty of DFW’s postmodern forebears had been experimenting in similar ways - but simply because I’d never read anything like them before.

Reading the book expanded my view on what sorts of things might be worthy of consideration and exploration. I thought things like television and things like books were separate, one substantive, one not.

I may be thinking nostalgically or romantically, but I tend to see reading Girl With Curious Hair as perhaps the inciting incident of the journey that would result in me deciding that writing about things I found interesting was a worthy use of one’s time. It’s taken a lifetime to figure this out and remains a work in progress, but there’s no doubt that Girl With Curious Hair was an important moment.

One story, “My Appearance,” was particularly arresting to my young self, a narrative told from the perspective of an actress appearing on David Letterman’s late night show, being coached by her husband about what she should say and do, and how she should act under Letterman’s gaze.¹

David Foster Wallace often explored masculinity, particularly toxic masculinity, as in his story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a project that suggested to me at some level all men are capable of being hideous.

Wallace may have been fascinated by the subject because he was one of these toxic men, most notably stalking, threatening, and assaulting the writer Mary Karr. Wallace understanding that men can be - or maybe even simply are - a danger to women did not inoculate him from being one of these hideous men.

“My Appearance” is a story about hideous men imposing themselves on the central character of the actress narrating the story. The first hideous man is David Letterman himself, who is characterized by the actress’s husband: “he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist.”

The story is referring to the way Letterman treats women as guests or participants in comedy bits on his show and the evidence presented in the context of the story is pretty convincing. But of course, the scrim of irony that covered all of Letterman’s comedy allows the audience some measure of distance from that misogyny. Letterman’s persona meant to communicate that everything was a lark, unserious. Why be bothered by something that’s just kidding around? I can’t say it ever bothered me at the time.

Years later we’d learn that Letterman had been carrying on an affair with an underling, revealed when someone attempted to blackmail him over it. Memoirs by Merrill Markoe, who essentially co-created Letterman’s show, and was also his romantic partner, and Nell Scovell, a comedy writer who worked briefly on the show, but found the atmosphere ultimately intolerable despite having significant experience with intolerable atmospheres, shows that the ironic, comedic misogyny was rather sincerely applied behind the scenes. This was not at all unusual in the comedy world of that era, and persisted well beyond the 80’s and 90’s era of Letterman’s heyday.

In 2010, Jon Stewart was publicly called out for his almost exclusively white and male writing staff at The Daily Show. Stewart later expressed regrets about the unthinking (literally) ways he perpetuated those power structures. Letterman appeared to be very sincere about the harms his affair visited upon his family and the workplace he headed. Post show he’s become a much kindlier, avuncular presence who seems to be trying to make up for past sins. His Netflix interview show is entirely irony-free, aside from the occasional self-deprecating joke.

This is progress, and should be acknowledged, even as we can recognize the harm we’ve done in the past and maybe even recognize some price must be paid, as has happened to David Foster Wallace and his posthumous reputation when the full extent of his treatment of Karr and other women became known. In an interview about Wallace and her book, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance, Clare Hayes-Brady was asked whether or not David Foster Wallace was a misogynist and she said:

I will not bother to catalog the myriad ways I’m sure I’ve perpetuated the kind of misogyny Hayes-Brady is describing. What she says, is to my mind, undeniably true. What we’re supposed to think and do about that seems to be one of the touchpoints of the current election. I try not to spend a lot of time self-flagellating over my personal sins of the past. It seems more productive to move forward.

The discussion on the Ezra Klein Show explored the chasm between two factions of the Republican coalition, the traditional neopatriarchy view embodied by Vance, and the so-called “Barstool conservativism” (named after the frat bro ethos sports media company) represented by Donald Trump.

The Barstool conservatives essentially want to be left alone to objectify women and say sexist stuff without being ostracized. They love women because they’re sexy and you can have sex with them. They’re all for sex out of wedlock, reproductive rights and the like, but are irritated by the “wokesters” who want to rain on their parade by making them treat gay and trans people with dignity or women as people who have value beyond their appeal to the male gaze.

The neopatriarchs are “pro-family” as in, go have as many kids as possible and raise them according to traditional (overwhelmingly Christian) values. Ross Douthat, as a neotraditional (rather than neopatriarchry) type himself, gets his dander up a bit at the criticism, and counters Zack Beauchamp:

I don’t want to be unkind to Douthat or JD Vance or Senator Josh Hawley, whose wife has argued cases before the Supreme Court. Clearly they have no problem with smart, accomplished, professional women, but it seems as though the point of entry to being respected for your professional accomplishments is also making sure to also fulfill the role of wife and mother. Childless cat ladies need not apply.

Policing the boundaries of what counts as a worthwhile life based on the role you fulfill “as a woman,” with procreation being central sounds pretty misogynist to me. The neopatriarchs would argue that this is as god wills it. Don’t blame them.

The reason Walz’s brand of middle-aged husband/dad feminism seems so refreshing is because it feels so natural, unforced, even joyous. It’s strange that this joy is so threatening to some factions.

There’s something inherently fragile about the Barstool conservatism, or even the flirtatious misogyny of that Letterman era. The fear of rejection introduces a distancing, literal in the case of Barstoolers who want women to be seen, not heard, or more symbolic in the case of Letterman, who uses irony as a shield against admitting to his fears and desires and the way those things intersect.

Wallace’s characters were tortured by the strength of their own desires, and the impossible quest of experiencing anything truly sincere. Wallace was fascinated by the media and consumer detritus of our lives, was veritably seduced by it, but also simultaneously disgusted by the ease with which he was seduced.

Wallace famously didn’t own a television, saying, “What it is is too much good stuff, combined with my sick little head thinking there’s something better on the next thing.” When he says “better,” he doesn’t mean “meaningful,” or “transcendent” he means stimulating, distracting. The notion that we could be captive to a desire directed towards the truly trivial was a consistent concern of Wallace (see: Infinite Jest), and it bothered him. It was a defect, one he (and maybe everyone) was prone to.

Letterman used to constantly mock his own show as silly, beneath his or the audience’s time, and yet he did it for over 30 years. The irony was funny. Letterman’s manner seemed to say, Can you believe this shit? We, the audience were entertained, but the man himself appears to have been tortured, and because of that, at least occasionally hideous.

Donald Trump is nothing if not hideous, but he is undeniably also compelling, though I sense, I hope that the fuel of what makes him compelling has been nearly exhausted.

What does it mean to spend so much time on something you can’t convince yourself is truly worthwhile?

In “My Appearance,” as Rudy, the husband of the actress starts to coach her on how to properly understand what it means to appear on Letterman, he says:

Some of the reaction to Tim Walz on the campaign trail coming from the right seems built on this idea, “I don’t want you to think the hokeyness is real.” Letterman’s cornpone was saturated in irony. Tim Walz’s public, and apparently also private, persona, is not.

It’s like they can’t imagine a man of Walz’s age and mien who hunts and coached football, but can also relate to women as full human beings and believes gay people should be able to get married.

Some particularly humor-challenged online warriors tried to spin Walz’s self-deprecating joke about liking “white guy tacos” as somehow racist against white people.

This is the kind of reaction that makes the “weird” label stick like superglue. It’s faking being offended, the exact thing they accuse the identity-politics left of doing.

But what if being hokey can be sincere?

Tim Walz seems to have no fears. Doug Emhoff looks like he’s having a great time. They may not be up on the latest terms and norms among progressive circles regarding shifting language norms, but they seem willing and even eager to change and learn. There is a flexibility, an inherent accommodation, a curiosity to their world views.

It looks like freedom.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune, I look at Evan Friss’s new work of history, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, and how he cleverly tells a story about bookstores today, by looking at bookstores through history.

At Inside Higher Ed I reflected on Ben Sasse’s brief tenure as the head of the University of Florida, during which he ran his office as a system of spoils for his cronies, a fact exposed by some very talented student journalists.

If you’re at all interested in my musings above, I recommend Rebecca Traister’s piece on the “nice men of the left.”

The finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize have been announced.

The Onion, defying recent precedent, is returning its publication to print. You can get a discounted annual subscription here for less than the price of your average Substack.

These are the coolest bookstore bars in America. I have been to zero of them, so I have something to aspire to.

Via

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

and by Leslie Ylinen, “If Tim Walz is America’s Dad, These Are America’s Other Family Members.”

Recommendations

1. Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl
2. Runaway by Alice Munro
3. The Whole Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik (that's actually 9 books but... counts as one!)
4. The English Understand Wool by Helen Dewitt
5. Big Swiss by Jon Beagin

Lola M. - Philadelphia, PA

For Lola I’m going with a lesser known book by Rachel Ingalls, but a delightful read nonetheless, Binstead’s Safari.

1. Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin
2. We’re Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How ‘90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy byJason Klamm 
3. A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories by Norman MacLean
4. Bobby Womack, My Story, 1944-2014: Midnight Mover by Bobby Womack
5. Sly & The Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin

Mark D. - Harrisburg, PA 

For Mark, I’m recommending a truly perceptive look at comedy that very much relates to what I’m writing about today, Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture--And the Magic That Makes It Work²

Well, that was all very surprising. Had no idea what was going to come out when I wrote that first line. I hope it was at least a little interesting.

How is everyone else feeling these days?

See you all next week, ICYMI, I had the real pleasure of talking to Alison Espach about her latest novel, The Wedding People, as well as some other things. Link below the signature.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. The story is apparently based on an appearance by the actress Susan St. James of Kate & Allie fame, who is married to longtime television executive Dick Ebersol.

2. All books (with the occasional exception) linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income for this year is $83.80.