The Importance of Being Earnest

Above: Construction graffiti. Although, I think it should be the other way around? Or maybe that’s the joke.

Friends,

Yesterday was a mixed bag. A lot of smarter people than me have already written a ton about the election. If you’re looking for voice recommendations, may I offer Vann Newkirk II , Jelani Cobb , Anne Helen Petersen , Carol Anderson , Jamelle Bouie , Adam Serwer , and Abby Livingston ? In my neck of the woods, things went better but not good enough. I’m particularly confused by how my county broke Democrat for Beto, Hegar, and Nelson but didn’t to vote against Sid “ We Need Confederate License Plates ” Miller. Miller called Clinton a c-word, has posted about atomic bombing the “Muslim World,” posted a “joke” about calling the suicide hotline and getting someone from Pakistan who asked if he could drive, and regularly posts obviously fake news stories, among other terrible things. He won his statewide election by 5%.

Yeah, I know. My blood pressure and heart rate rose just rereading that last sentence. Makes me want to find a way to destress — and lately I’ve turned to soothing music, games, television, or hot apple cider more and more. My enjoyment and entertainment is almost entirely anxiety- and stress-free these days. It means I don’t really watch dramas or anything suspenseful, I don’t listen to angry music, and I have no appetite for cynical or sarcasm-filled writing. Instead I rely not entirely, but significantly more than I used to, on feel-good, happy ending, meditative stuff, no matter the medium. Great British Bake Off for TV, rewatching Amélie for the millionth time if I need a movie, listening to lofi hip hop music (as I’m writing this, a song just sampled a line from The Runaway Bride ), and if I didn’t have an incredible guilt complex about always needing to read new stuff, I’d probably reread Harry Potter or Tristram Shandy or Gilead . Again.

Which is to say that I desire the sentimental, the straightforward, the optimistic or at least optimistic-adjacent, the earnest in the art I consume as a counterbalance for the rest of reality. In literature, the history of sentimentality is a long and hotly debated one. There’s the 1993 DFW essay, “ E Unibus Pluram ,” in which he basically argues that irony/sarcasm/cynicism had become the default mode in television, using examples like this Pepsi commercial or the Joe Isuzu commercials , and that its pervasiveness in TV was infecting fiction. Which, I guess? But to me it’s more like a pendulum, that as cynicism becomes the prevailing mood we crave more sentimentality, and when sentimentality is the mainstay then we want something harsher. In other words, sentimentality and earnestness are reactionary, and that’s not a bad thing. I see the pendulum swinging in the path from family sitcoms of the 80s to Seinfeld to Friends to South Park/Family Guy/Curb Your Enthusiasm to How I Met Your Mother to etc. etc. etc. Or more simply, the attitudinal change from The Office to Parks and Recreation . For more reading on the subject, check out this thorough piece from EV De Cleyre, which focuses on the writing on the subject from Leslie Jamison and Mary Ruefle. Jamison’s essay, “In Defense of Saccharine,” is probably the best contemporary writing on the subject. It’s not online, find it in The Empathy Exams , but this interview captures the ideas.

So sentimentality has its defenders, myself included, but it’s a national pastime to criticize earnestness. While I was writing this essay, I came across a book review of Jonny Sun and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s collaborative illustrated book Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You . The review, entitled “Gentle Reminder: You Are a Goddamn Adult,” is a fun read. We so rarely get to read a straight up exquisitely negative book review, and in this case we don’t have to worry about the effect upon the book’s creators or publishers: they’re going to be fine. But while I enjoyed reading the review, I disagreed with it completely. The thesis is basically that the self-care zeitgeist has become performative, infantilizing, and, ultimately, meaningless, and that Gmorning, Gnight! is pandering to a slacktivist audience that wants to be fed empty positivity without doing any work to effect real positive outcomes. The author refers to Sun and Miranda’s work as “mental-health advice” and lumps it in with goop’s health advice . The review leads with a requisite dig at Rupi Kaur’s popularity. And, frankly, the whole thing is crap. People have things they go to in order to feel good, to feel comfort. Art, food, a blanket, whatever. How, exactly, are the bursts of ephemeral, nearly nonsensical positivity that Sun/Miranda bring to your social media feed (and now to your bookshelf) worse than those other things? Sure, if a movement starts that takes messages like “please take a sip of water” as a substitute for legitimate mental health, then we can have a serious conversation about the dangers of @tinycarebot. Until then, this review is reactionary smugness guilty of the same type of pandering it accuses Sun/Miranda of. Except, instead of pandering to people who get a little joy from “inspirational ‘Live Laugh Love’ pablum,” it’s pandering to the brand of better-than-you pseudointellectualism that says that people who derive any kind of positivity from plain, unnaturally positive or self-evident truisms is worthy of scorn. The review is basically a virtue-signalling accusation — relevant quote: “the phrase serves two functions: to make your opponent look shallow, while at the same time (the irony) signalling your initiation into a more sophisticated level of discourse” — but against an acceptable (to its twitterati audience) target. How dare you enjoy something so simple, it cries. As if you can’t spend a few seconds appreciating a tweeted platitude then go back to something else. Art consumption is not a zero-sum game.

As for myself, I have plenty of room for simple in my life.

By the way, have you read Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest ? You should. You should also tell me what good, contemporary satirical but fun works are out there.

Best book I’ve read this month: All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung.

Further reading:

• I wrote a little thing about RateMyProfessor’s now-deceased chili pepper.
• Midnight Breakfast ’s latest issue is a great one; it’s one of the few times I’ve sat down and read all of the pieces of an issue of something (well, besides Gravy ). I’d like to especially point you to my friend Leticia Urieta’s essay, “ No Aguanto .”
• Leticia also had an illuminating conversation with good person PE Garcia for Ploughshares .
• WTF is Going On?: Alaska Edition .
• I’m really proud of the work my university’s newspaper and radio station do. Here’s a recent difficult-to-read (content warning) investigation into “Sugar Daddy” arrangement sites . For a lighter read, learn about the day-brightening Bubble Believers (or maybe write an article about how dumb people are for enjoying their simple positivity, what do I know).
• Two Unwinnable (a literary video game site) essays I enjoyed: On being a queer game developer showcasing at the Kentucky State Fair , and on the appeal of the mundane in Earthbound .
• Related: Random celebrities tweeting about video games makes me unreasonably happy. This month it was Lil B and Lady Gaga .

As always, I hope this missive finds you well . I’m going to infantalizingly suggest that upon receipt of this message, you prepare yourself a hot beverage to relax and treat yo’ self. Recipe: sauce pan on low heat. Add a cinnamon stick, two star anise pods, three cloves. heat until fragrant (you can also go with allspice berries, but like dried bay leaves, I think allspice berries’ flavor is placebo). Add lemon or orange slice and two mugs’ worth of apple cider. Cover, let simmer for 15 minutes. Serve with an optional shot or two of whisky.

-g