O Commerical, My Commercial!

Sunday night a new cartoon premiered after the Simpsons. The TV was still on, chattering idly as I worked on learning how to "Sit" with Bao the puppy. The new show was pretty bad, so bad a commercial caught my attention as more interesting. It was a Levi's ad with a voice-over that sounded vaguely familiar - not the sound of the voice, but the words being spoke.
Today I stopped by the Mall of America to pick up new pages for the old Franklin planner. (Yes, I'm a member of the Franklin-Covey 7 Habits planning cult.) Wandering past the Levi's store I noticed a big poster proclaiming the source of their new ad campaign: Walt Whitman. The Walt Whitman - they guy whose poem "Song of Myself" was such a big part of my undergraduate poetry class. Remember in the movie "Dead Poets Society" when Robin Williams clapped his hand over his heart and shouted, "O Captain, my Captain!" That was Walt Whitman he was quoting, words that inspired me to choose a major which involved three hundred pages of reading a week. How could the words of Walt Whitman, the abolitionist and champion of the poor, be abused in the purveyance of $100 jeans?
English majors all over the country are furious. Poor Walt is probably turning over in his grave. How sad to see his words stolen away for the vain purposes of commercialism.
Whitman is a guy I can look up to. We've done a lot of the same things; teaching, typesetting, and working at a newspaper. If only I could hope to be one-tenth as decent a person as he, and one-hundredth as good of a writer.
Along with Emerson, Thoreau and Frost, Whitman rounded out the group of happy poets I liked to read as an undergrad. To me, Whitman is relentlessly optimistic. In "Song at Sunset" he writes there is "good in all" even "In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age, In the superb vistas of Death." In the next stanza he cries out, "Wonderful to depart; Wonderful to be here!" Mr. Whitman, I wish you were here. You could put Levi's in their place, or at least shame them into donating the proceeds from your words to a worthy cause.

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Hear Whitman reading from his poem "America" on the site of the Walt Whitman Archive. He doesn't mention jeans even once.

Fargo Rock City

Fargo Rock City : A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I had to rate this book as amazing because it features an entire chapter on Guns'N'Roses. I spent around a year, year and a half, where I listened to Appetite for Destruction once a day either on my way to or from work. Now that I know someone else out there has done the same, I don't feel so bad about my level of obsession. In addition to being obsessed with Axl Rose, Chuck Klosterman is both a humorous and insightful writer. I recommend Fargo Rock City to any metal head or anyone who has to live with one.


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Quick Book Review: Toni Morrison

What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction by Toni Morrison

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
The book's format of short essays and brief writings was a refreshing approach. Ms. Morrison delves into heavier topics, such as family, race, feminism, and black history, with an incredible skill to convey points deftly and with poetic language.


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I'm reading this winter as a part of the "Winter Jackets" reading program through Minnesota MELSA libraries. Readers of my column in the Farmington Independent might already know that I already won a lovely gift basket through the Winter Jackets program. There are cool prizes, free Dunn Brothers coffee, and lots of other treats for Winter Jackets members. Sign up today!

A Winter Book Report . . .

What did I do on my holiday vacation? Read, of course! I put together a little book report on one of the books I read for the site Goodreads.com.



One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A few pages into the first chapter, I almost set this book aside, finding it a bit too hard-bitten and cynical to complete during a harsh Minnesota winter. I like to do my serious reading in the summer, next to the pool, when my spirits don't need buoying after an icy commute.

I ended up finishing this book despite its dark commercial overtones about the wedding industry and business of getting married. Rebecca Mead's stellar writing is the reason. Her lucid descriptions of the characters she met along her research path kept me enthralled. The many brides and grooms are described sometimes in ungenerous terms, and for their sake I'm glad Mead kept their names secret, unlike the wedding professionals interviewed for the book. Mead does an wonderful job of straddling the two diverse spheres of brides presented by the wedding industry, in one sphere the divine maiden, in the other, the foul-mouthed Bridezilla. She struggles into the middle area where real brides and grooms exist, neither profane, nor sacred, just fallibly human. In the end, a single honest sentence and a half in the epilogue made this entire book worth reading. Mead writes of her own wedding as an atheist, " . . . we had no choice but to invent a wedding for ourselves. In just about every dimension of our lives we were at liberty from tradition's infringements, and grateful for it; but we were without tradition's anchors and consolations, too." Mead's book shows how most modern American brides and grooms are free to choose from any commercially endorsed traditions or none at all, but how the price of this freedom is a loss of assurance and comfort in the traditions of culture or religion.


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