Hey, Pete: Why not a Job for Casey too?

It appears that one of the nation's worst former mayors -- whose claim to that distinction includes convictions on ten felonies committed while in office -- has a new job. Detroit media have been abuzz with the news of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's hiring by Covisint, a subsidary of software products and services provider Compuware. During the scandal that would end Kilpatrick's tenure in office, Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos remained a vocal supporter of Kilpatrick. "He certainly should not resign," said Karmanos, "because he's the best we have."


Karmanos, it seems, would set the bar much lower than would the citizens of Detroit or the news media. An April 2005 Time magazine article named Kilpatrick one of America's worst municipal chief executives; the mayor had just eliminated 3,000 city jobs and ended 24-hour bus service in the face of a $230 million budget deficit -- while he maintained a 21-man security detail and shortly after his admittance of using city funds to rent a Lincoln navigator for his wife. "A tin ear for symbolism" was how Alan Ehrenhalt of Governing Magazine described Kilpatrick's apparent deafness to context.


So it would seem that Karmanos suffers the same sort of hearing impairment. The Kilpatrick hiring came as Compuware laid off 250 workers, or about 4 percent of its total workforce. But in local interviews, Karmanos cited Kilpatrick's "talent" and "charisma" as the reasons for the hiring.


All of which got me thinking about another potential reclamation project for Karmanos: Casey Anthony.


The parallels between Anthony's character and Kilpatrick's are more fundamental than their public faces would seem to suggest. Each suffers from some sort of compulsion to obscure the factuality of a situation, yet neither actually possesses the brains to tell a convincing -- that is, freeing -- lie. Anthony might have forever concealed her inability to conceal, had she not given birth at such a young age, while her apparently soft moral core still privileged shit-faced shenanigans over maternal duty. Likewise, the true dreadfulness of Kilpatrick's mayoralty might never have come to light, without exposure of the infamous Manoogian party. The title for this episode in the national reality show? Why not: "For the Life of the Party"?

I would have to argue that Kilpatrick is the more compromised of the two. As no rumor of Kilpatrick's misdeeds has proved false, it's tough for me to imagine that he had no hand in the murder of Tamara Greene. Anthony, meanwhile, never bilked a city out of $9 million or ruined the careers of any honest cops.

Anthony may not have Kilpatrick's "talent" and "charisma" (indeed, these may be euphemisms for Kilpatrick's narcisstic willingness to broker shady deals). But she is young, female, hedonistic -- and pretty, albeit in a "Girls Gone Wild" sort of way. It's hard for me to imagine that that wouldn't count for something, to Karmanos, whose name has become synonymous with the accused in a recent sexual-harrassment suit...

So, I'm waiting for Karmanos to foot Anthony's legal bills and create a high-paid position (as it were) for her once she's released. At least there'd be no questioning Karmanos's motivation, questionable though it would be.

Poor Yorick

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. At a length of 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and with its fondness for gags, pharmacology, cultural theory, popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe that David Foster Wallace's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but nor is it the fodder for the Moronic Inferno that Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms does truly capture their milieu and their fixations. Wallace hits false notes, however, using that same language to draw the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house, as if they were operating from the same frame of reference as the rich kids at the tennis academy.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake in a work. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts (and Wallace's pretentious character names), not Wallace's rendering of boy or his story, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, Don Gately, a thirtyish petty thug recovering from drug addict at the nearby halfway house, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation and his more advanced age. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise be willing to invest in him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does -- and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But there's disparity between a laundry list of contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these. And that disparity is, well, just about limitless.

Juan Bobo Goes to Hear Mass

The following is my translation of “Juan Bobo va a oír misa” by Rosario Ferré. I will confess to a lack of familiarity with Ferré and her writing style, which could not have helped this translation.

Juan Bobo is a character from Puerto Rican legend, and the simpleton his name implies.

Juan Bobo Goes to Hear Mass

“Ma! I wanna go to mass today!” Juan Bobo said to his mother one Sunday.

“Oh, Juan Bobo, mijo,” his mother replied. “How wonderful it is that you want to go to mass! But I can’t take you. I’m very sick.”

“Don’t worry, Ma. Don’t worry,” Juan Bobo said. “Tell me where’s the church, so I know what I half to do!”

Then his mother told him which way to go and that where he saw a lot of people coming in and going out, right there was the church. Before she’d even finished speaking, Juan Bobo put on his new windbreaker and left to look for the church.

After walking a while, he arrived at a house where a baptism was being celebrated. Many people were coming in and going out from the house, and Juan Bobo moved closer, to see what was happening. The table was set, and all sorts of trays sat on the lace tablecloth, illuminated by silver candelabra. The trays were filled with an array of exquisite dishes: sausages of veal and chicken, golden-fried pork, cold baked ham, duck jelly, pickles, pickled meats, soft cookies, deep-fried bananas filled with meat, fried cornmeal, fried strips of codfish, and so on and so on.

Juan Bobo approached the table like someone who passes the gates of delight. But seeing the world on its feet greeting each other and making polite conversation, he kept himself in a corner, watching everything without breaking in to try anything. The child baptized and anointed with oils and salts, the obligatory congratulations between priest and parents fulfilled, the guests came to the table, where with great elegance they ate and drank everything. Finally, they left the church, saying goodbyes as they went. When Juan Bobo found himself alone before that table, with a feast of leftovers and crumbs like he’d never seen in his life, he had his afternoon snack and dinner all at once, scarfing down what they’d left him. As soon as he was full, he ran back to his house.

“Hey, Ma,” he said. “If you only knew what a great mass I heard! I stayed there until the end, and boy, did I eat!”

“Eh, muchacho, but what have you done!” his mother said. “God knows where you’ve been. I was very afraid you wound up where there was no mass.”

The next week, Juan Bobo said, “Listen, Ma. I wanna go back and go to mass this Sunday.”

“Oh, yes, mijo,” his mother said. “How nice that you want to go to mass! But be careful where you stick your nose, and remember, the church is over where all the people are coming in and going out.”

Right away Juan Bobo put on his jacket again and, as misfortunes seek and find the unlucky, he went out in the street to look for the church. He actually came across it this time.

When Juan Bobo cam in through the atrium, the main mass was being held. He greeted the whole world with great ease. At the back of the nave he made out a great table laid with beautiful lace tablecloths and lit by silver candelabra, something that reaffirmed his confidence that he was in the place he’d been looking for. He stopped at the door of the church, and saw how all of the people coming in dipped their hand in the stoup of holy water and made the sign of the cross. Juan Bobo thought that, as they were very refined people, they would only come over and, with their fingertips, try he delicacy at the bottom of the stoup. He kept himself stolen away in a corner, waiting for all of them to go by. When he found himself alone, he grabbed the stoup of holy water with both hands and drank it all in one gulp.

“Avemaría purísima! What a salty stew!” he said. “Why, if they ate all the stew and left me nothing but the water…”

Juan Bobo waited for the ceremony to end. When he saw that the parishioners, at communion time, approached the altar on the tips of their toes, he kept himself put one last time. Then he drew himself closer and closer, with great affectation, to where the priest stood. He opened his mouth wider than a funnel, so that he too might be given something to eat. But when his turn came and the host was placed on his tongue, he shouted out, “Avemaría purísima! What a sick-looking little cookie they’ve given me!” And, sticking his hand in the chalice, he grabbed ten more hosts and swallowed them in a single gulp. With that, the priest rose, indignant, calling to the usher. The two of them threw Juan Bobo out of the church on his ass.

Juan Bobo beat it out of there, and as soon as he arrived back at his house, went to where his mother was and sadly told her of what had happened.

“Oh, Ma, if you knew what a crappy mass I heard! I feel like I haven’t even had breakfast! I got to the church and waited patiently for the ceremony to end. But when mealtime came, they wanted to give me a little pot of salt water and a little cookie, and when I asked them to give me more, they beat the crap out of me. I wound up where I shouldn’t have.”

And Kikirikí, Kikirimoche, this story is over. To anyone who takes a turn, may you shit during the day, not at night.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockey

It’s still impossible for me to describe: the feeling of taking a five-dollar bill from the outstretched hand of Gordie Howe. It’s taken more than a decade to sort out in my mind what probably didn’t add up to thirty seconds in the presence of Mr. Hockey.

I was working as a grocery store cashier back then. What remained of my adolescence was being drained by days behind the register and in sleepy undergraduate classes. My nights were spent alone, at my parents’ house, staring at a news magazine or a new video release. Everyone else my age seemed to have found a more joyful, hedonistic way of killing of the rest of youth. But I’d finally been cured of the acne that had turned my boyish skin into a landscape of blemishes that ran the spectrum of purples and reds. Clean skin, as I saw it, was a both an auspicious sign in general, and one that boded particularly well as I entered adulthood more and more fully.

By that time, just over a decade into his second, final retirement from professional hockey, Gordie Howe had reached the usual retirement age of the world’s assembly line workers and engineers – a remarkably short gap, considering that the longest-lived careers in the sport rarely extend into an iron man’s forties. Naturally, he was no longer the specimen he’d been through his playing days. White-haired and bald on his crown, carrying his extra weight in the rear and gut, his body was more like that of a bottom-heavy cartoon penguin than of the sleek bird on the Pittsburgh squad’s jerseys. He set down on the conveyor belt a box of a dozen doughnuts and a bottle of Coca Cola. My sebaceous glands started pumping double time, at the thought of the snack.

Back then, I thought that there was something sad in the sight. I, too, had been a hockey player, and a Gordie Howe fan even though his playing days had ended before mine began. Growing up in a part of the country where hockey wasn’t much more than a footnote in the sports pages, I gorged myself on the kid-friendly player bios the local library did stock. In his day, Howe had been a Greek god on ice, helmet-less and greased-haired, his physique so powerful and efficient that the thin protective equipment of his playing era seemed useless on him. My own hockey equipment was growing mold in my parents’ basement, where I’d consigned it not long after the revelation that my playing days were over, the highlight of my career likely skating, in double-digit losses, against a kid who would go on to be a marginal big-league player for the better part of a decade. My old barbells were rotting down there, too. And I could feel it, in a way, standing behind the register, my back aching like it never would have before I’d given up the barbells.

It was my first college roommate, a fullback on the football team, who had given me my initial firsthand glimpse of the unmanly self-absorption and petty cruelty that are like the birthright of male athletic prowess. Fresh back from their start-of-the-year orientation trip, he and his new friends gathered in our dorm room to down massive quantities of cheap beer and relive, again and again, his bringing to tears some homely girl who had been on the trip with them. Soon, he would befriend a lineman known throughout the college as Mr. Date Rape; and by the end of the semester, he would have cheated so often on his girlfriend, halfway across the country, that even the distance could not keep the rumors out of her ears. Ten years after leaving the grocery store, I would witness a coda, of sorts, to this strain of boorishness. In the early hours of the morning, my housemate and her boyfriend the ex-pro football player would burst into the house, screaming at each other about the abortion she refused to have.

“Hockey is a man’s game,” Howe once said. If the statement now seems retrograde, it would not be unfair to contrast Howe to the prefab celebrity athletes who fill the professional ranks today. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, the young Howe building his legendary strength through work on the family farm in frigid Floral, Saskatchewan, as the Depression gave way to the Second World War. It’s even harder to imagine my old roommate or my former housemate’s ex in the sort of caretaking role Howe has assumed, as his wife struggles with Pick’s Disease.

And so Gordie Howe turns eighty today.

For years after our encounter, I continued to believe that the physical decline of Gordie Howe was somehow sadder than anyone else’s – as if Mr. Hockey had not merely stepped off the ice at the Olympia one last time, but had descended from Olympus to the world of mere mortals. But I’m no longer so sure, now that the flashes of my own inevitable decline are getting a bit too clear and regular. And I don’t regret the dead end that my hockey career turned out to be: Better to know you just don’t have it than to wander through life convinced otherwise.
Not that Gordie Howe has lost much. Just taking that five-spot from him, I could feel that he was the strongest person who had ever graced me with his presence.

Fallen Angel, Rising Pop Star

I am as put off as John and Jane Q. Public by unctuousness on the part of public servants, especially when the self-styled angels reveal themselves to be practicing exactly what they have sermonized against with so much zealotry. But I am not gloating at the fall from grace of ex-New York governor Eliot Spitzer. One possible outcome of his trysts with alleged call girl Ashley Alexandra Dupré must represent the most perfect union of word, deed, and supposed intention of the man's career -- unintended though the union certainly was.

Spitzer gained his crusader reputation in large part from the vehemence and tenacity with which he prosecuted prostitution and sex trafficking rings. But prosecution alone of the sex trade comes with no guarantee of a new and better life for the women the trade has exploited. Even less likely is the sex worker's chance of life anew as an entertainment celebrity, that Holy Grail of American popular culture.

It has been well-documented that Dupré is an aspiring pop singer, and that the scandal has spiked the demand for the tunes she is selling through the music site Amie Sweet. ("For Ashley Alexandra Dupré, Selling Music Beats Selling Sex") It's hard not to wish for Dupré to rise to fame, as she was promoting herself rather innocently through My Space and Amie Sweet rather than through her work as a call girl. And if her My Space postings and statements to the media are any indication, Dupré had been humbled by experience well before the scandal broke. (Ex-Governor Spitzer, take note.)

So, the public servant blessed with every opportunity in the world now retreats from public life, disgraced, his kingdom for a pricey romp in the sack. Should Dupré become a bonafide pop star, Spitzer will have (inadvertently) created the sort of opportunity for a sex worker that none of his work in law and goverment ever did -- or ever could have. The sanctimonious arbitrator of human law will have helped enact divine, poetic justice.