Some suggestions for Esquire's list of books for men

Esquire recently posted an item on its website: "The 80 Books Every Man Should Read."

One thing I have to give the staff credit for is its honesty about the nature of the list: "An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published."

That confession leaves them free from the standard response to such lists -- How could you leave off [insert personal favorite here]?!?!

For instance, I could complain that they include Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums rather than On the Road.  I am not arguing quality, just the perceived essentialness to American masculinity.  If read at the right age, On the Road can send young men off into fantasies of hitting the highway and seeing the country and having adventures.  If read at a later point in life, the novel can make men grateful they got rid of friends like those a long time ago.

But I cannot really make that complaint because the producers of the list did not make claims of objective quality or worth.  They simply made a list of books they think men should read.

However, I did notice a couple of peculiarities.  There is just one book by a woman.  It is a collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.  It seems that men, heterosexual or homosexual, should want to read about the world from a female perspective, since they make up about half the population.  I would venture a couple of suggestions. Perhaps Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.  For something less grim or stark, the list could include a personal favorite, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks, which is a funny, bi-curious coming-of-age romp set in the 1960s and 1970s.  (I could say Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, but then everyone has heard of that one. Alther's book is funnier and less well-known.)

The other peculiarity: The absence of a book by an American Indian. I say this because three of the books have Indians in them: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, and Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall. [Correction: Five books have American Indian characters.  The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien features one American Indian soldier. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is narrated by an American Indian character.]  I have not read Harrison's book, so I cannot comment on its depiction of American Indians.  But McMurtry's most famous novel has the problematic character of Blue Duck, a psychotic killer who is a mixed-blood Comanche man who is a major obstacle for the novel's protagonists.  Blood Meridian has no major Indian characters, and their depiction is no worse than that of the murdering, soulless leaders of our band of "heroes."  But the creators of the Esquire list produced an odd blurb with which to praise the novel and suggest its tone:

Just try sleeping after the scene in which the Apaches thunder over the hills wearing the dresses of the brides they have killed.

Every page of that novel drips with blood, it seems, but of all the scenes of terror and butchery perpetrated by the band of Americans making their way across the West to the Pacific Ocean, the list-makers chose a scene that suggests the Apaches are the scary ones.  I would say, try sleeping after reading any page of that novel, which is one of the grimmest, most nihilistic exercises of naturalism I have read in American literature.  In my Goodreads review of it I said this:

This is an exercise in nihilistic naturalism with prose that is sometimes poetic and other times a rambling trainwreck of sentences pretending to profundity. If Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Sam Peckinpah had congress in some kind of demonic three-way, this novel would be their child.

The events are sometimes engaging and compelling, but just as often they are predictable. Just about any thing (human or animal) introduced will be shot, stabbed, scalped, or hanged within a few pages. It has some memorable characters, but it offers too little insight to the workings of their minds (at least for me).

In the theater of masculinity that Esquire presents with this list of novels, the American Indian plays the role of savage.  But American Indian men have experienced trials and triumphs that are worthy of inclusion in this list.  They have had experiences other men, regardless of race, could relate to.  If I could add one novel that would match the general tone of other titles in this list -- the titles tend toward alienation, moral struggle, and conflicted relationships with wives and fathers -- I would add James Welch's Winter in the Blood.  Published in 1974 it is the story of an American Indian man fighting his way through the grief over the separate deaths of his father and brother years before, struggling

against the alcoholism in himself and his family, and regaining his sense of worth after the failure of his love relationship.  And it manages to be funny at times.  Coincidentally, there is a film version of the novel now playing the festival circuit.  Learn more about it here.

If I could add, instead, my favorite James Welch novel, that would be Fools Crow.  One thing I like most about it is its setting: Its events take place before the Crow Indians have been overwhelmed by the Americans.  There is no major white character in it. This is a story about an Indian world -- it is being invaded by another world, granted, but the natives are the center of the story. It is the story of two young men who choose different paths: one who chooses life, love, and family; and one chooses pride, anger, and revenge. It is filled with sex, violence, comedy, tragedy, hope, and history.

America still has the urge to purge

If you are tempted to say "This changes everything!" then odds are good that it doesn't.

This came to mind when I saw Esquire magazine's The Culture Blog entry titled "Texas Chainsaw in the New Age of Violence."  Stephen Marche notices that "massacre" is missing from the usual title for this franchise, the latest installment being Texas Chainsaw 3D.  He suggests the deletion was strategic, a post-Sandy Hook omission.  He writes, "It is a horror movie that seems totally unaware of the current nature of horror."

He continues: "Horror movies exist to allay our fears through purgation.  But this is a film that scratches an itch that no longer exists..."

All fine and good, except for this: Texas Chainsaw 3D was the highest-grossing film last weekend.  Granted, its ticket sales of $23 million are not astonishing, but this does suggest American moviegoers have an itch such horror films can scratch.

Marche complains that Texas Chainsaw 3D is a "palimpsest of cliches," and I imagine he is right (I'm certainly not going to find out by seeing it).  But I think that is what horror-movie audiences want.  Such bloodfests are somehow reassuring in their predictability, like baseball but without George Will's bow ties.

Marche notes that Gangster Squad (either the dumbest or the most precise film title in a few years -- or perhaps it is both) was delayed after the Aurora shootings because the film features a shootout in a movie theater.  He writes: "The producers felt it was too close to reality for comfort.  Texas Chainsaw 3D has the opposite problem.  It is completely out of touch."

The problem, Marche says, is that Hollywood's monsters, such as Leatherface, are not as scary as the real monsters we face -- psychotic young white males with access to semiautomatic weapons and lots and lots of ammunition.  He feels films such as this no longer offer Americans that purgation they desire because their monsters are so unbelievable and unrelatable: "The vision of evil in this movie is too ridiculous even to be amusing.  Right now, in the middle of a time glutted on real-life horror, the ridiculousness borders on the offensive."

Implicit in his blog entry is the idea that "everything is different" after the events in Sandy Hook and Aurora.  I doubt they are.

The purgation he attributes to horror films is not designed to realistically deal with those things we find frightening in our real lives.  The purgation may excite audiences, but it has always left their world unaltered.  That is, it purges the audiences of anxieties and so re-establishes the social order they live in.

If monsters were realistic, the films might be imagining solutions to real-world problems.  Then they would not offer the cathartic experience Aristotle supposedly prescribed for the theater; they would offer catalyzing experiences, inspiring or inciting action from the audience.

Films such as Texas Chainsaw 3D may scare audiences, but they are designed also to reassure audiences that everything is OK.  While you might be jealous of the perfect bodies of the movie's victims, you certainly would not want to be chopped up with power tools -- and you probably don't have to worry about either.  It is unlikely you will keep your New Year's resolution to visit the gym more often, and it is even less likely you will be attacked by crazed killers in the woods.

There is another side to this argument.  While Hollywood reassures audiences that monsters do not present real threats to their safety, in other movies Hollywood reassures audiences that there are easy solutions to big problems, and these solutions usually involve high-caliber guns.  And that brings us back to Aurora and Sandy Hook.  (But that is the subject of a different blog entry.)

I do not think audiences will hunger anytime soon for realistic villains and monsters. Nor do I think Hollywood will offer us solutions to the actual threats we face every day.

The Joy of Socks

No one is going to accuse me of being a fashionista.  That portion of my wardrobe not purchased at JC Penney or from L.L. Bean is devoted to t-shirts -- for powwows and pop culture references mostly.  But the thing that apparently would offend the sartorially sensitive is my drawer full of socks.

I have noticed in the fashion advertising for men in Esquire, GQ, and other magazines that few of the male models are wearing socks.  I know that for some shoes the socks are optional.  For instance, sandals require socks only if you are a British tourist visiting Venice Beach.  I have seen plenty of men sans socks in boat shoes, penny loafers, and drivers.  But I never see in the real world what I have seen in many ads: men without socks in more conventional leather shoes, even in wingtips and ankle boots.

Some folks might think this is tres chic.

All I can think is stinkfoot.

And ankle bones chewed raw.

A recent ad campaign from Banana Republic features a bevy of white folks having fun at Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern California.  They are wearing all sorts of clothing inappropriate for climbing rocks and hiking in the desert.  Look at this young man leaning against his car.  Look at his shoes.  Note the absence of socks.  Think about his sweaty man-flippers in those leather puppies.

What will Dr. Scholl say when they bring this guy into the ER with bloody ankles and fetid feet?

This even happens in the real world.  Kanye West has ditched his socks for the red carpet. I know, I know.  I am a straight man, so why am I looking at Kanye's naked ankles when Amber Rose is in the picture?  (I am sorry, Amber.  I will try harder.)

Some of this trend made more sense when I saw a photograph of a hot  fashion designer in Esquire.  No wonder male models have been shorn of their socks.  The designers hate them!  There is Michael Bastian, wearing a blazer and a tie -- and no socks.  I know he is wearing penny loafers, and those can be worn without socks.  But for me the jacket and tie dictate the need for them.  And as if that didn't make him tool enough, he's sitting on the mantle piece.  He seems to have issues.

Someone should introduce him to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.