#jay gabler

[tetesnoires]

Jay Gabler Talks Têtes 4 Women's History Month

Clever Jay Gabler, we like him a lot. He writes/produces for Minnesota's The Current. Earlier this year, Jay wrote about the Têtes for Women's History Month. Went down memory lane and raked up musical memories. Also, Zuzu's Petals, Pink Mink, Babes in Toyland.

[tcdailyplanet]

I thought of a cartoon by the late Leo Cullum, one of the first cartoons published by The New Yorker after 9/11. A woman, sitting at a bar, turns to a man wearing a loud checkered sport coat and says, "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket."

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/arts/2013/04/17/what-say-and-not-say-social-media-when-tragedy-strikes

[emilybooks]

Sociologist and critic Jay Gabler was an early Emily Books adopter who was so enthusiastic out of the gate that he even founded a Minneapolis chapter of Emily Books that met in person and drank and discussed our books. They've gone dormant -- the fate of most IRL book clubs, in our experience -- but maybe this will motivate them to start back up again with Speedboat? We hope so. We also trust that we can crash on Jay's couch when we're in town for Ruth's 10 year college reunion.  Here, Jay tells us what he's reading now, why Minneapolis is a literary mecca, and the fungible boundary between "author" and "rapper." 

Emily: Jay, how did you first hear of Emily Books?

Jay:  From Emily via Twitter, I think. I was immediately fascinated with the idea, which seems like a great way to bring the much-vaunted "personal touch" of independent bookstores into the 21st century.

Emily: You had an IRL Emily Books club in Minneapolis for a while, which is amazing.  How did that go?  Our own attempts to have book club meetings IRL have been a mixed bag -- I think in part because they've been an awkward mix of our friends and total strangers, and the strangers feel left out, understandably.  Having meetings outside New York that arise organically is a dream of ours. Should we go on tour to Minneapolis?

Jay: Yes, you should come to Minneapolis! We'll show you a good time, and Ruth can take us on a tour of all the Northfield places where she went streaking, did keg stands, and argued about Kierkegaard. The Emily Books Twin Cities club had about ten different participants over a several-month period, with a core group of four or five. We liked having a book club where you spend zero time discussing what to read next, and some of the books we really enjoyed. When we hit a string of books we didn't like, though (Inferno, The Buddhist, Lightning Rods), things got rocky and there was some loss of interest that we never quite recovered from. I think it's time to give it another go! We still have a Facebook group, and the most recent post says, "We should do this again because I miss drinking beer and letting you guys make me feel smarter."

Emily: Minneapolis is kind of a literary mecca, right?

Jay: Right now, I think Minnesota is a great place for readers and writers, but it hasn't necessarily always been that way. Three of our most famous writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Schulz, and Garrison Keillor—all had deeply conflicted feelings about Minnesota. All three left Minnesota with the intention of never returning, though all three eventually came back for varying amounts of time.

In recent years, though, Minnesota's literary center of gravity has moved from St. Paul (where Fitzgerald and Schulz were from, and where Keillor now lives and pontificates) to Minneapolis, and the Twin Cities are now home to a strong nexus of independent publishers (Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Coffee House Press) and bookstores (Magers & Quinn, Keillor's Common Good Books). The Open Book complex in downtown Minneapolis has become a central hub of literary life, and organizations like Paper Darts are supporting a very social literary culture that bridges online and IRL. The Twin Cities also have strong spoken word, storytelling, and hip-hop scenes, and there's a very fluid boundary between being a "rapper" and an "author."

Louise Erdrich doesn't rap (yet), but her life and career illustrate what's exciting about Minnesota's literary scene today. She writes, she reads, she runs an independent bookstore, and she's an inspiration to writers from all backgrounds, especially women writers and Native writers. She's a hell of a lot happier here than F. Scott Fitzgerald ever was.

Emily: What are you reading right now? 

Jay: I've quit Catholicism, but I still feel weird if I don't give anything up for Lent—so I've given up starting new books, since as of Fat Tuesday I was switching among 14 different ones. I've now finished six of those and I'm down to eight.

Roger Ebert was the writer who inspired me to be a critic, so I was excited to read his autobiography Life Itself. It's frustratingly episodic, but I'm going to finish it anyway. I'm also reading Confederates in the Attic, which I started when my girlfriend was living in Mississippi; and Short Stories from the New Yorker, a vintage collection. I'm working on Philip Roth's 1967-1972 Library of America volume and starting to read/reread my way through Bruce Chatwin's books with In Patagonia. Then, finally, I'm trying to rekindle my teenage love of sci-fi with Robert Charles Wilson's Spin (blah), Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (James A. Michener in space), and Isaac Asimov's stories about men who constantly smoke, read microfiche, womanize, and argue with robots.

Emily: What were your favorite Emily Books? Least fave?  Which one made you quit?

Jay: My favorites so far have been Making Scenes (hard to put down) and Sempre Susan (fascinating character study). My least favorites have been the buddhist (what was the deal with her marriage?) and Lightning Rods (about twenty times as long as it needed to be).

Postscript: we chided Jay about his mono-gender reading list and he promises that his next book is our next pick, plus A Spy in The House of Love.

[altlittvguide-blog]

2 Boiiiis, 3 Forties

A very cozy gathering. I enjoyed what little I was able to experience.

[thetangential]

In a recent New Inquiry post, George Scialabba agrees with author Morris Berman’s argument that America is the new Rome, that our shallow hubris has led to a free-fall that shows no signs of stopping, that “the monastic option” may be our best bet to preserve our progress—our intellectual progress, at least—while our cities inevitably burn. Whoa.

I’m not going to get into all that, but I was a little surprised to find that when it came time to cite social failures in the litany of doom, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) still represented the state of the art. I was a grad student in sociology when Putnam’s book came out, and I remember it receiving immediate popular acclaim—such as weighty and heavily-sourced proclamations of apocalypse tend to attract—but skepticism among academics.

Putnam argued that “social capital” (in other words, meaningful community connection) in the United States was in steep decline, with potentially dire consequences for all. No one doubted Putnam’s facts—the title refers to the decline of bowling leagues, held up as exemplars of the sort of rich social ties Americans used to have before we shredded them all to watch TV and go online—but his interpretations were seen by many as going a bridge too far.

One type of organization, for example, held up by Putnam and others as an example of what’s been lost was the fraternal organization: the Lions and the Elks and the ilk. Certainly, local Rotaries are not what they once were—but my academic advisor, Jason Kaufman, published an entire book arguing that fraternal organizations are not to be mourned. For one thing, Jason pointed out, the decision to join one of those organizations was often as much about pragmatics (they provided early versions of health insurance) as about any sort of desire to build social ties.

More damningly, Jason demonstrated how deeply segregated those organizations were by race and ethnicity (in many neighborhoods at the turn of the century, Italian immigrants didn’t just, you know, hang out with Irish immigrants) and by, of course, sex. Americans weren’t bowling alone in those supposed glory days of yesteryear—they were bowling with other Americans who were of the same class, ethnicity, and sex they were!

Scialabba also cites other facts from Putnam that sound terrible until you take a second and think about them. “Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent” (now, we eat out), “card parties declined 50 percent” (God forbid), and “reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent” (even if we take this to be an actual per-capita increase in aggressive driving rather than just the reporting of aggressive driving, consider that America has been rapidly urbanizing, so you’re less likely to know personally that driver you’re cutting off).

But then we get to the crux of Putnam’s argument: the supposed consequence of this declining social capital. “Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent.”

According to Berman via Scialabba, this rush to disconnected individualism has always been embedded in the national DNA, in America’s “innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is…hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism.” If that’s been America’s “soul” from day one, why have we seemingly hurtled so far towards our dark destiny in the last 20% of our national history?

I think Putnam, Berman, and Scialabba tell too tidy a tale. Just as humans want to believe in gods, we want to believe that nations have “souls” that shape destinies. We love Freud’s idea that preverbal conflicts seal our individual fates, and we’re all ready to sign on to an argument that somewhere in the genesis of American society is the master key that unlocked our intemperate response to the challenges of recent decades, thus insuring our decline and fall.

America has certainly fucked a lot of things up in recent years, but a naive nostalgia for the golden years of card parties and bowling leagues will not help us solve any of our problems. Urbanization is a reality. Advances in communication and transportation technology are also real. An increasing need for an educated workforce and the challenge of adjusting to that new economy are real. Those are challenges faced by countries around the world, and blaming America’s hollow “soul” for its failure to respond as well as it might have is a neat rhetorical trick, not a statement of fact.

Look around your American community, if you’re in America. There are still community meetings, and parties, and bars and restaurants bustling with patrons. Dating sites are bursting with singles striving to make connections, and social media are tying us ever more closely to our local, national, and international neighbors.

And don’t tell me that tweeting with an interesting friend in another country via my damned “flickering screen” is by definition an inferior sort of social connection when compared to joining a bowling league with the other white guys in the neighborhood. Scialabba’s dismissal of “idiot deans, rancid rappers, endlessly chattering sports commentators, an avalanche of half-inch-deep self-help manuals; a plague of gadgets, a deluge of stimuli, an epidemic of rudeness, a desert of mutual indifference” is a poetically written but profoundly condescending and reactionary appraisal of American social life that would crumble to bits if tested against actual anthropological evidence about the ways people navigate their daily lives.

The world, America included, is alive with social connections, with promise and possibility. The average American is less likely to want to make friends—well, how many friends does the average American have these days? It’s hard to believe the number is less than the corresponding number for someone living in a 1950s suburb. Maybe we have enough friends.

As for trust…well, yes, our communities are less homogeneous. I don’t trust the guy across the street as much as my parents trusted their guy-across-the-street, but I hardly feel that’s because I’m isolated in my studio-apartment bunker, afraid to go out and bowl or play cards or whatever. I live in the big city now, and so do most people my age and younger. You’ve got to watch your back—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selfishly and fearfully turning it. Unless, of course, you think it’s time to give up on America and become a monk.

- Jay Gabler

[erinmeansireland]

8. Single people go completely off the rails on major holidays. Because on New Year’s when you’re single, what do you do? It’s a lot more likely to involve drinking vodka, ingesting a controlled substance, and waking up next to an awkwardly adoring on-again off-again fuck buddy than what someone in a couple is apt to get up to.

Jay Gabler, "Why Single People are More Interesting than People in Couples"