Manhood for Amateurs

[Soundtrack for this post: Stan Meets Chet and Kill to Get Crimson]

I bought Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs last week. It’s a collection of essays about being a father, husband, and son. I’ve never read anything by Michael Chabon (pronounced, according to him, Shea like the stadium, Bon like Bon Jovi), but I really like the movie Wonder Boys, which was based on one of his novels. I heard him giving an interview on NPR last week and thought the book sounded like something I could learn from and perhaps identify with. [n.1]

I’ve read the first three or four essays and each one has either caused me to think back to my childhood or my experiences as a new father, and they’ve all sparked a desire to write down those experiences and the related stories. So that’s what I plan on doing. As I read through Manhood for Amateurs, I’ll post responses to the essays that cause a spark that leads to ignition.

But before I do that…

I’d like to comment on the back cover of Manhood for Amateurs. It contains “praise for Michael Chabon” in the form of six quotations. Here are excerpts from the first four: (1) “Probably the premier prose stylist—the Updike—of his generation”; (2) “He is one of the best writers of English prose alive” [n.2]; (3) “The best writer of English prose in this country”; and (4) “A prose magician.” My point, in case it isn’t obvious, is that HarperCollins must really like the word prose, or maybe reviewers feel like it is a mandatory buzzword when talking about Chabon. Either way, it’s ridiculous.

The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts

Before I start with the stuff in the book, I’m going to begin with an essay that Chabon has up on his website (you can find it here). This essay is similar to the stuff in the book and it’s called The Kingdom of Snow and Ghosts. The gist of the essay is that when he was young he had five channels on his TV, received through “rabbit ears,” and he discusses how the change to the present’s hundreds of always-on channels is in some ways a loss for his kids and their peers. He talks about the incredible, in some ways marvelous, boredom that resulted from the dearth of programming options, and how kids will watch anything, no matter how bad, rather than nothing.

This might sound like a typical “kids these days” or “things were better back in the day” type essay, and maybe it is, but I don’t read it that way an that’s not what I want to focus on anyway.

The “kids will watch anything rather than nothing” thing really hit home for me. When I was young, say 12 and under, I would watch just about anything, even if it pained me. I remember watching Pink Floyd The Wall repeatedly with my sisters in my parent’s bedroom. I was probably seven. My sisters rented it and watched it three times in one day. I hated it. I had no idea what was going on and it bored me into a near coma-like state, yet I watched it with them. I watched it with them three times and bitched and complained the whole time. I could’ve left the room, I could’ve watched the other TV, I could’ve gone outside, I could’ve done countless other things, but I sat there and watched three times over a movie I absolutely loathed. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it was a desire to try to get into what my older siblings were into. Maybe it was a fascination with the film even though I had no idea what was going on—I still recall the scenes with the children falling into the meat grinder and the bullets on the train tracks. Maybe I just wanted the company.

The same thing happened with the Little House on the Prairie. I hated that show too, but I still watched it. I even briefly got into the Young and the Restless one summer when my sister broke her leg and was more or less bedridden—every day I’d actively go into her room and watch it with her, even though (at least at first) I hated it.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think I agree with Chabon that there was something magical about that boredom, a level of boredom I haven’t felt since.

That’s not to say all I did was watch TV. I feel like a had a pretty idyllic suburban childhood, despite a one or two year period where I had a deep fear of being murdered in my sleep that required therapy (a topic for another post) and more than a few problems in my parent’s marriage that ultimately lead to divorce. I had a tight group of excellent friends, and we spent a great deal of time playing outside, running games of football or baseball at the top of my cul-de-sac, making M80-charged cannons in my backyard, playing hide-and-seek or freeze tag or “swords” or gun fighting. We also spent most summer days and evenings in my pool, sometimes only getting out long enough to eat. I also once built a very elaborate cat trap in my garage, something similar to what you put together in the game Mouse Trap, to catch stray cats that I thought were holing up in the garage. I actually caught a cat, which, considering my trap, bordered on miraculous (now that I think about it, I can’t help but wonder if my parent’s rigged it). We of course also played our fair share of video games, but as with the TV it never seemed like it got in the way of our more active fun.

Now that there is so much more TV programming—and the Internet with its social networking, online video, and all—I can’t help but wonder if it’ll reduce the amount of old fashioned (?) outside fun. When I was young we had cartoons available for an hour or two in the afternoon on weekdays and on Saturday mornings. Now you can watch cartoons whenever you want with the Cartoon Network and the kid specific channels out there, not to mention DVRs.

There’s something to be said for limited opportunities. I remember sitting in my friend Chad’s room when we were probably around seven or eight trying to record songs off of the radio. We’d have a tape in the deck and would sit there and wait for a song we wanted to come on and then we’d hit record. Once Chad was hoping to get a copy of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. I wonder how long he waited, how many songs he sat through that he didn’t know and didn’t care about before he got it, if he ever got it. I couldn’t imagine doing that now, and my son will almost surely never know what its like to have that experience. Within seconds he could find a copy on iTunes or even a video for the song on YouTube. My son will never know what it’s like to miss an episode of a TV show and have no way of finding out what happened, only hoping that it will be rerun sometime, most likely months later. He’ll never know what it’s like to stay up late enough to see the channel “sign off” with the Stars and Stripes waving proudly before turning into a wall of static. He’ll never know what it’s like to have to sit through 45 minutes of the inanities of the nightly news to catch his favorite team’s score or, worse, have to wait until the next day’s newspaper.

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, being able to find out the Dodgers’ score in seconds on ESPN.com, or even “watch” the whole game on GameCast, compared to having to wait for the results in tomorrow’s newspaper, isn’t a huge loss. Of course in many ways it’s a big gain, but it is a change that will certainly have an effect on how he relates to sports and information in general. While I certainly appreciate being able to get my scores with a single click of my touchpad, I think there is absolutely something good lost with the forced waiting and patience, the anticipation, and it’s a loss to be mourned.

Note 1: About my use of “identify with” [Did I end my sentence with a preposition? So fucking what if I did.]: I initially wrote “relate with” but then wasn’t sure if it should be “relate to.” I did an Internet search, because I was too lazy to get up and get a book, but wasn’t satisfied with the results, [n.1a] so I had to get up and get my copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage. Garner—a man for whom I have a deep respect nearing reverence—calls relate to a “voguish expression,” which in Garner-ese is a damning pronouncement indeed. He links relate to to identify, and under identify he notes that identify in the sense of “to understand sympathetically or intuitively, esp. through experience” is “often disapproved of because when used in that way, identify is a VOGUE WORD—more specifically, a pop-psychology CASUALISM—bearing a nontraditional sense.” OH SNAP! and DAMN! He continues to say that a more conservative writer would simply use understand. But come on, understand doesn’t mean the same thing in this context, and I was too lazy to try to think of a different way to put it, so I went with indentify with. Deal with it.

Note 1a: I often do Internet searches when I’m looking for a quick answer about grammar or usage. The top results given by Google always contain English language forums where “non-native” English speakers discuss grammar, usage, words, et cetera. There are almost certainly all sorts of sample size problems here, but it makes me think that non-native English speakers work a whole lot harder at speaking English properly than most native speakers do.

Note 2: I think that would be better as “one of the best living writers of…” Don’t you? [n.2a]

Note 2a: Sorry, again, for the notes. Anne, I swear I’m not doing it to piss you off. But really, you’ve got to admit that none of this belonged in the main text, but I wanted to mention it, so . . . .