18. Train (band)
17. Snowpiercer
16. Polar Express, movie version
15. Little plastic trains, Ticket to Ride
14. Darjeeling Limited
13. Shy Guy’s Perplex Express
12. Link’s trains, Spirit Tracks
11. Mrs. Cabobble’s Caboose
10. Orient Express
9. Thomas
8. Polar Express, book version
7. Demon Train, Spirit Tracks
6. Charge Man, Mega Man V
5. Quad City DJ’s C’Mon ‘N Ride It (The Train)
4. Hogwarts Express
3. Midnight Train to Georgia
2. Phantom Train, Final Fantasy VI
1. Soul Train
(Final thoughts on Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore. See my initial impressions here.)
Joe Gould was a man obsessed. In the 1930s and 40s, he wanted to record everything ever said in a collection called “The Oral History of Our Time.” “Joe Gould’s Teeth” by Jill Lepore begins as Lepore’s attempt to find the hundreds of notebooks rumored to contain the History. The History was never confirmed to have existed. “Shouldn’t someone check?” Lepore asks.
Gould was made famous when New Yorker writer Joe Mitchell profiled Gould in the magazine in 1942. The Joe Gould paradox reminds me of a 1920s Bling Ring — the group of teens who wanted to be famous, so they stole from famous people, then ended up famous themselves, in a subjunctive way. Lepore writes, “Very little of what most people write is saved, and nearly all of what is said is lost. That’s why Gould was writing the thing in the first place. […] Gould wanted to save the ordinary; the ordinary was hard to save. But when “Professor Sea Gull” appeared, it made Gould famous. And what famous people write is saved.”
In a way, all writers want to be Gould, a man who suffered from Graphomania. Lepore writes that graphomania “is an illness, but seems more like something a writer might have to envy, which feels even rottener than envy usually does because Joe Gould was a toothless madman who slept in the street. You are envying a bum: has it come to this, at last?”
Gould biggest mental weakness appears to be his lack of introspection. He once wrote, “The fallacy of dividing people into sane and insane lies in the assumption that we really do touch other lives. Hence I would judge the sanest man to be him who more firmly realizes the tragic isolation of humanity and pursues his essential purposes calmly.” By his own definition, Joe Gould is fucking crazy. He turned against friends at the drop of a hat. He destroyed property. He whipped out his penis at parties and measured it. He was anything but calm.
But Gould also wrote this, “If we could see ourselves as we really are, life would be insupportable.” Maybe he was more sane than I give him credit for. He knew if he were to look into the mirror of his soul, he would crack. Or maybe he did look into that mirror, and that’s why he was a broken man.
*
As Lepore meticulously traces Gould’s steps back in time, she stops envying the toothless crackpot. She realizes Gould’s work wasn’t about preserving history as it is, but shaping it in a way to further Gould’s own racial biases. Involved with the eugenics movement and friends with the viciously anti-Semitic poet Ezra Pound, Gould’s so-called “History” drips with white superiority. “History, [Gould] liked to say, was fiction.” That is why it’s important to know who writes your history.
Joe Gould’s Teeth is a very short book–151 pages–not including copious footnotes and resources at the book’s end. In the end, Lepore appears to realize she doesn’t give a shit about Gould’s Oral History. “Shouldn’t someone check?” she writes again. “Not me.” She seems to think, Why should anything this man have curated be put on display? What gives him the right to have a voice?
Her decision to stop looking makes “Joe Gould’s Teeth” a book not about his Oral History, or his teeth, or even Gould himself, really. Like “Orange is the New Black” in which a white lady serves as the gateway to a story about non-white inmates, Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Trojan Horse. Its most intriguing subject isn’t Gould, but Augusta Savage, a black artist who is the object of Gould’s perverse obsession.
Gould said he loved Savage. He pursued her constantly, despite her repeated pleas for him to stop. Lepore writes, “He said he was trying to save her, but really he was trying to drown her.”
Lepore assembles as much information as she can — or wants to — about Savage. Joe Gould is sad. Pathetic. Pitiable. But Savage is a travesty, a woman trying to make art about her race during a brutal time when the vast majority of people wouldn’t give a shit about her, or anything she has to say, as a black woman. Simply by trying to make art, she was often accused of “want[ing] to be white.”
I wanted to know more about this tragic figure. Either there isn’t much information about Savage (I found a kid’s bio about her online, but not any other published work after some cursory Googling), Lepore gave up, or she’s saving a book about Savage for later.
At the end of Savage’s life, “Some people believe she collected as much of her work as she could, and smashed it.” Joe Gould’s Teeth is, in a way, Lepore’s attempt at not necessarily rebuilding her work, but finding the pieces, showing them to us, and saying, look what once existed.
*
I have to wonder how much Joe Gould’s obsession and objectification of Savage affected her self-perception. We don’t know why she did what she did. But if she felt worthless or ashamed because of her treatment by Gould — and white society as a whole — it’s infuriating.
This book made me very angry at times. In my blog post about Joe Gould’s Teeth, I said I wanted to kick Joe Mitchell’s grave. Joe Mitchell is the New Yorker writer who spun Joe Gould’s story into a folk legend in 1942, and tore him apart posthumously in 1964, all for the purpose of serving Joe Mitchell. That asshole wouldn’t even deliver the eulogy at Gould’s memorial service.
But I realize that kicking Mitchell’s grave would make me more like Mitchell himself, attacking a man who could no longer defend himself. And maybe it would also make me like Gould, a man unable to control his primal impulses. I know that if I were to kick Joe Mitchell’s grave, or Joe Gould’s teeth, that the dead men wouldn’t feel it. But me, I would hurt my own foot.
(Thoughts on Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore – Part One – Meo Tempore)
Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore is about Lepore’s quest to find Joe Gould’s “The Oral History of Our Time” a rumored, but never validated, collection of umpteen notebooks filled with historical everyday observations. Joe Gould was made famous in 1942 when New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell said the Oral History existed, and famous-er in 1964 when Mitchell said the Oral History didn’t.
How did Mitchell think something this massive existed? Why did he take this man’s word on it?
Because it made a good story. Lepore addresses this when talking about Mitchell’s two Gould-centric stories, writing, “It made a better story in 1942 if the Oral History existed. It made a better story in 1964 if it did not.”
Joe Gould’s Teeth is also about Joseph Mitchell, a writer whom “admitted to Gould that he made up facts.” And this man is basically the father of creative non-fiction.
His subject, Joe Gould, “did not consider this kind of thing a kindness.” And why should he? Joe Mitchell made Gould, an already mentally fragile man, into a fictional folk hero.
I’m not sure if I want to go back and read Joe Mitchell’s two Gould stories, “Professor Sea Gull” and “Joe Gould’s Secret,” because I don’t trust Joseph Mitchell. I trust Jill Lepore, and not just because of her excellent Wonder Woman book which I reviewed last year.
I trust her because she seems trustworthy. I hate this phrase, but Jill Lepore has no skin in this game. Mitchell was drawn to Gould “because he is me.” Lepore bluntly writes, “Not me.”
She continues, “A century on, Gould looks bleak, his mental illness looks serious, and modernism looks fairly vicious, actually. Gould’s friends saw a man suffering for art; I saw a man tormented by rage. To me, his suffering didn’t look romantic and his rage didn’t look harmless.”
Jill Lepore isn’t a man who needs to validate his own shortcomings.
Validation appears to be Joe Gould’s main quest. It was his mission for the early part of his life when he was interested in eugenics. “One reason Gould was interested in eugenics was because he’d come to understand–maybe his failures had helped him to see–that he hadn’t earned the extravagant opportunities he’d been given in life, he’d inherited them.”
He wanted to justify his racial superiority instead of admitting it was artificial.
And it appears the Joseph Mitchell saw this quest of validation in Joe Gould, a desire he himself possessed. By making Joe Gould “real” Mitchell made himself real. As Lepore writes, “The defense of invention has its limits. Believing things that aren’t real and writing fiction are acts of imagination: delusion and illusion.”
Mitchell allegedly continued working for the New Yorker for almost three decades after “Joe Gould’s Secret” was published in 1964, yet he never published another story. Talk about privilege, getting paid to sit an office all day and never produce. Mitchell and Gould had that in common — producing nothing of value for decades — except Mitchell made a living off of Joe Gould and Gould lived in the streets.
I want to kick Joe Mitchell’s grave.
Joe Mitchell’s grave is located in South Carolina, according to findagrave.com. I don’t know who wrote the blurb on Joe Mitchell’s findagrave.com listing, but that person says that Mitchell “respected people on the fringes, and wrote about street preachers, Bowery bums, bartenders, prodigies, and unsung angels of mercy.” If his treatment of Gould is any indication, Mitchell had no respect for these people, and this line is as much a fantasy as Mitchell’s non-fiction writing. Mitchell didn’t care about these people; Mitchell cared about a story without regard to the subject.
A plaque which appears to be in Mitchell’s burial place in North Carolina reads that Mitchell was “one of the best reporters and interviewers of his time.” A man who made shit up was one of the best reporters of his time. I hope times are changing.
(Read my final thoughts on this book here.)
Thoughts on”Bog Girl” by Karen Russell, published in the New Yorker June 20, 2016
Bog Girl is a short story about Cillian, an Irish teen who finds a girl’s body in a peat bog. She had been murdered 2,000 years ago, strangled by a rope, her body dumped in the bog and preserved for two millennia. Cillian decides to keep her, to bring her home, to dress her in his mother’s clothes, to bring her to school. Everyone acts like it’s normal.
I love Karen Russell and I love absurd fiction when done right, but I don’t think she did this right. I’m struggling to pinpoint what she does wrong.
The story reminds me of a David Foster Wallace story I read in the New Yorker years ago, a fiction story about a boy who wanted to kiss every part of his own body. It was absurd and strange, but I liked it then. Maybe it had more to it. Maybe my reading tastes have changed. But “Bog Girl” feels more like weirdness for weirdness’ sake.
After Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Russell’s last short story collection, Russell appears to be veering more toward a fantasy horror style of storytelling. Her last New Yorker story, “The Prospectors” (published almost exactly a year prior to “Bog Girl”) was about kids investigating a haunted ski resort.
My problem with that story, and this one, is in the endings. Russell has never been particularly strong at endings, but horror it’s necessary to have a good ending, I think. Both stories end on similar beats: the “horrors” disappear, and we don’t get to see what consequences the events had on the characters.
That leads to another problem, and maybe what Russell is currently lacking: tension. “Bog Girl” feels like a slack rope, which is ironic given the rope around the Bog Girl’s neck. It tightens under your fingertips at the end, but then the story stops. Does the rope slacken again, or does it break?
Chance Lee 