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Paul Fussell:
The most profound tectonic shift in our literary culture in 2012 was one that, by and large, no one noticed. The last of our great curmudgeonly essayists — Gore Vidal, the art critic Robert Hughes and the historian and social critic Paul Fussell — died this year. Add to this list of punishing, witty and literate writers Christopher Hitchens, who died at the end of 2011, and it begins to seem as if the Mayan calendar, which predicted global ruin, took aim instead at our stinging public intellectuals, our necessary horseflies.
It makes sense that an anagram of these four writer’s first names (shrinking Christopher to Chris) is “A Republic Gets Horror.” Their deaths mark the end of an era, the passing of a certain kind of greatest generation. The most underrated of these provocateurs, and long my favorite among them, is Fussell. He was a war hero — he won the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts while fighting with the 103rd Infantry Division in World War II — who came to loathe the romanticization of war. The damage it inflicted was not merely to life and limb, he declared, but to “intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and irony, not to mention privacy and wit.” Similar values fill his many books.
Fussell’s masterpiece is “The Great War and Modern Memory” (1975), a book that’s of permanent literary interest; his prose and quality of observation are uncommonly fine. This book altered the way historians write about World War I. A literary scholar as well as a soldier, Fussell attended to (of all things) that war’s poetry and observed how it exposed the yawning gaps between the myth and reality of armed conflict. “Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected,” Fussell wrote. “Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends.”
It’s almost always a mistake to read only a first-rate writer’s masterpieces. A great deal of Fussell’s best, most perceptive and, frankly, most hilarious work arrived in books like “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System” (1983). The idea of talking about social class is so taboo in America, Fussell reported, that when he explained his book’s topic to strangers, they reacted as if he had said, “I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.” It’s a book that, especially if you are uncertain of your own class status, can still draw blood.
Perhaps the best places to encounter Fussell’s grit, erudition and whimsy are his two essay collections, “The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations” (1982) and “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” (1988). In the controversial title essay in “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” Fussell demonstrated little patience for moral commentators about war who had not fought overseas. About John Kenneth Galbraith’s postwar arguments against dropping the atom bomb on Japan, Fussell wrote: “What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.”
In 1987, the inspired editors of GQ magazine sent Fussell to a far-flung nudist colony, and the resulting essay, “Taking It All Off in the Balkans,” is something to behold. It contains dozens of memorable observations. Among them: “Fat people look far less offensive naked than clothed. Clothes, you realize, have the effect of sausage casings.” About penis size, Fussell said: “You will learn that every man looks roughly the same — quite small, that is, and that heroic fixtures are not just extremely rare, they are deformities.”
Like Vidal, Hughes and Hitchens, Fussell was an intellectual malcontent, weaned on Orwell and on William Hazlitt, who wrote the surprisingly sunny essay “On the Pleasure of Hating.” We are unlikely to see their kind again.
Neil Armstrong
B. 1930 | By TOM SACHS
This drawing, a rendering of Armstrong’s Apollo 11 suit, was based on the artist’s study of the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
Art Modell
B. 1925 | By DAVE ZIRIN
In 1995, fans in Cleveland were incensed by the team’s planned exodus. The death of Art Modell brought with it not only tributes and tearful remembrances but also a new round of denunciations from the Cleveland Browns faithful. Modell had effectively told them to go to hell, and Cleveland Browns fans have spent the last three months returning the favor, some 17 years since he took the team from the city.
Modell was certainly neither the first nor the last owner to move a team from its home city for the sweet promise of greener, taxpayer-subsidized turf elsewhere. These stadiums, monuments to corporate welfare, grew like multimillion-dollar weeds starting in the 1990s, and Modell simply followed the money. Cleveland, like so many blue-collar cities in the ’90s, was hemorrhaging jobs, young residents and hope. Many of these cities, like Pittsburgh, Detroit and, yes, Baltimore, built football stadiums in lieu of real economic-development policy. But Cleveland never believed Modell would leave, thinking the team as much a part of the landscape as the Cuyahoga. They were wrong.
Modell, during his 35-year tenure as owner in Cleveland, became something of a civic leader. It was 1961 when the 35-year-old Modell led a group of investors to buy the team for $4 million. Over the next three decades, as Modell morphed from young upstart to respected elder, the N.F.L. grew from a peripheral form of entertainment to the nation’s favorite gladiatorial spectacle. By the time he sold the team in 2003, it had increased in value by about 2,300 percent. This wasn’t sheer luck. Modell played a significant role in the N.F.L.’s transformation into a leviathan.
Modell helped negotiate national television contracts for the league, which included the blackout policy that blocks games from local television if they do not sell out. The Browns were renowned for having fans buy thousands of tickets in the final hours to make sure friends and neighbors could watch the same mediocre spectacle from home. Modell, meanwhile, became a wealthy man. But perhaps his biggest windfall came with the television-revenue-sharing agreement, which split revenue equally — something Modell supported. Over time, this created a situation wherein a team from Green Bay or Cleveland could compete with teams from New York and Chicago. Famously, Modell once described N.F.L. owners as “26 Republicans, and we run our business like socialists.”
After winning one championship in 1964, the Browns have yet to win again. Through it all, the team sold out most games at Cleveland Stadium, a place Modell was effectively given by the city, pocketing the profits from every last beer and hot dog, and even renting it to the Indians in the off-season. When the Indians got their own stadium, depriving Modell of the extra revenue, he decided against an offer to refurbish Cleveland Stadium at taxpayer expense and left for Baltimore.
The Browns, when they moved, became yet another big business high-tailing it from Cleveland. Now there is a second Browns franchise housed in a soulless, new publicly financed stadium that cost taxpayers some $241 million. The Browns play there 10 times a year. As in other cities, the promise that it would be an economic life raft has gone unfulfilled. Unlike in other cities, the historical thread to the past has been snapped. In its place is an expansion team unable to find its footing after more than a decade, at great taxpayer expense.
Modell said upon leaving, “I leave my heart and part of my soul in Cleveland.” Perhaps. But Cleveland would have preferred he left the team.
Ray Bradbury:
The Untortured Artist
Shortly before his 90th birthday, when asked which moment of his life he’d return to were time travel possible, Ray Bradbury told his interviewer: “Every. Single. Moment. Every single moment of my life has been incredible. I’ve loved it, I’ve savored it, it’s been beautiful — because I’ve remained a boy.” Bradbury was a rare and necessary antidote to the tortured-genius myth — that toxic cultural narrative that requires great creators to suffer lest their work have no depth, no gravitas, no legacy.
Bradbury left high school with plans of going to college, but no money. So he set out to educate himself by going to the library three days a week, a regimen he continued for 10 years, never romanticizing poverty or the so-called writer’s life. Instead, he celebrated the joy of writing itself. In 1951, living in Los Angeles with his wife two and two infant daughters, he got a bag of dimes and rented a typewriter in the U.C.L.A. basement for 10 cents a half-hour. He wrote “Fahrenheit 451” for $9.80.
His secret? “You remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past — you just explode.”
Paradise Park, N.J.
B. Est. circa 1951 | By MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
Lori Dibble, who lost her trailer and much of its contents, amid the remains of Paradise Park, Nov. 1, 2012. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images) Three years before the storm, Liz Margolies, a psychotherapist from Manhattan, took a ferry ride to Highlands, N.J., an old fishing village tucked into the corner of Sandy Hook Bay. She was looking for a second home, “a tiny little house — a place where I could read the newspaper in the sun and ride a bicycle.” Near the end of the ride she saw a narrow strip of beachside land — she remembers “a spectacular jutting isthmus” — at the end of town. The eastern edge of the settlement lay beside a marina. The northern tip pushed out into the bay, a few feet above the waterline. Along the asphalt lane were 53 mobile homes.
Unpersuaded by brokers who tried to steer her away from living in a trailer park, Margolies and her partner, Scout, eventually bought No. 7 from a sea captain for $15,000. They named it the Bisquit, after the batter-like color of its old appliances, and were soon spending weekend afternoons lying at either end of the couch, reading novels and watching the seasons change the tree outside their window.
Residents of Paradise Park, 2006, top to bottom: Joseph Haag; Lori Dibble; Tim Touhy; Walter Cuneo (left) and Bob Dickerson. (Alison Davis/Paradise Park Homeowners Association) Google Maps called it Paradise Trailer Park. The people who lived there just called it Paradise. When Margolies and Scout moved in last year, several neighbors approached to introduce themselves, and a few came over for New Year’s Eve. One, an antiques dealer and creator of erotic art, gave them a gift of a glass vase and vintage coasters. Another, upon learning that Margolies would be away on trash-collection days, offered to help. Each morning, Margolies would see a different person walking the same Jack Russell terrier for a neighbor who could no longer do it himself. She learned that Lori Dibble, president of the homeowners’ association, would leave her car key in her Volkswagen for neighborly use. “I immediately felt that I was part of something,” Margolies said.
Hurricane Sandy struck Paradise off the map. The storm raised up boats and hunks of dock from the marina and flung them through walls and ceilings. Some homes were peeled off their frames. Others survived only to have their particleboard flooring warped beyond repair by floodwaters. Bottles of pasta sauce, soggy encyclopedias, VHS tapes, bathroom tiles and alarm clocks lay crushed in the mud like seashells. Today the park looks like a pile of broken toys.
Before the storm, Joseph Haag, the antiques dealer, loved the view from No. 38. “The atmosphere of being away,” he said. “Of being on vacation. Of not being in a trailer park, not being in New Jersey. On my deck you could be anywhere in the world.” At night, walking along the beach, you could see the lights of Manhattan twinkling. “I probably saw more sunsets and sunrises the first year than I saw my whole life.”
Luke Jenks, who lived in No. 37, has worked as a clammer since he was a boy. “The solitude is what made the place special,” he recalled. “I grew up in a house with 10 people. The house was not big. There were always fights. I had to steal my brothers’ shoes because I didn’t have any. I liked to come back to my little place on the water, flop down, read the paper and take a nap.” Two or three nights a week he would find himself eating dinner with an assortment of neighbors. “It was almost like we were a family, living in the same house, different rooms.”
In the evenings, Eric Lenz, who lived in No. 30, liked to walk with his wife from house to house, saying hello and inviting his neighbors to dinner. “We had clammers, teachers, a real estate developer, a millionaire, L.G.B.T. activists, a Vietnam veteran,” Lenz said. Like Margolies, Lenz had chosen Paradise for his second home. “After 37 months in Paradise, I know more of my neighbors than I do after 10 years in Montclair.”
Highlands, a tiny borough of 5,000, takes its name from the 250-foot bluffs that loom high over Sandy Hook Bay. The town’s well-to-do tend to live on higher ground. Many of its working class call themselves clamdiggers, after the Highlands tradition of making a living on the water. Along with the town’s old bungalows, Paradise Park was one of a few places in New Jersey where anyone could afford to live near the beach. “Bye Bye Paradise,” reads graffiti on No. 45. “It was nice while it lasted.”
Lenz’s trailer had bay views from three of its four sides. After the storm, he returned with his wife, Lisa, to find it bent like a drinking straw, having moved several feet and lost large chunks of its walls. In the street, mixed in with Paradise’s flotsam, were their neighbors’ keepsakes — wedding invitations, birth announcements, letters and stacks of photographs, which they collected, drove back to Montclair, brushed off and laid out on newspapers. Across the floors and tables of their home were pictures of babies in cribs, a toddler grinning in front of a fireplace, a young girl blowing out a row of birthday candles, pets, houseplants, Little League games, the waters of the bay. When the photos were dry, Lenz and his wife sorted them and brought them back to their owners, most of whom were living near Paradise with friends or in FEMA-financed hotel rooms.
Along the strip of ruined trailers, only one, No. 57, has not been abandoned. The owner, Matthew Piccini, makes ornamental railings and gates. He wore dirty jeans and a white sweatshirt with an airbrushed mastiff named Woofer. Utilities had been cut off, so he bought a generator with money from FEMA and kept a barbecue grill in the kitchen for warmth. His trailer was one of the few to survive the storm with little damage. “My home is a viable home,” he told me in early December. Living with him for the time being was Joseph Serencses, formerly of No. 56, who had planted fig trees and hatched racing pigeons and generally kept to himself. “Go ahead, Joe, talk!” Piccini said. “Tell him how much you’re gonna miss Paradise!”
“I like the freedom,” Serencses said, softly. “You can go down to the beach and go fishing.”
Somewhere in the tangled skeleton of No. 32 are the files of Lori Dibble, who had led the residents’ failed attempt to buy the rented land that lies under their trailers. Dibble informally served as Paradise’s social worker and mayor. She does not approve of the terms “trailer” or “trailer park.” “When people hear ‘trailer park,’ they think trailer trash,” she told me. “The people who live here have been so othered. They’re living on marginal lands because they want to live within their means. They believe in the American dream.”
Dibble is pursuing a doctorate in anthropology. Among her storm-tossed papers are satellite images from East Africa, where she studies how ancient fishing communities adapted during the early Holocene. Somewhat like the Jersey Shore residents, the region’s waterside civilizations struggled with climate change. “The lakes dried up,” she said. “The rivers dried up. They became pastoralists, nomads.” One unanswered question, she added, is whether the region’s original people adapted to the changing environment, or whether there was an exodus and repopulation.
On this day, several thousand years later, she drove back from a FEMA-financed hotel room to pick through what was left of her home. The back was a jagged hole looking out on the bay, and a layer of twigs had settled over the tufts of wet insulation spread out across the floor. “Now I’m becoming a nomad, too,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html