The Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport is taking place this weekend in Cleveland — a gathering of some of the smartest people exploring these issues on the planet. I spent yesterday chairing two research sessions at the conference, as well as taking in the fascinating keynote address by sports historian Robert Bellamy, a professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
The multitude of topics provided for a day of intense thinking among panelists, chairs, and the audience. I found the summit intellectually stimulating, but simultaneously disconcerting. On the one hand, I feel personally indebted to my own limited sports career for developing some of my leadership skills and ideas I hold about the necessity of hard work. I have also written quite a bit about sports, particularly in the book: Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan’s Game and Beyond. In fact, I will continue working on sports-related topics, including a three-volume anthology examining the history of sports in America across its broad history, which will be published by Praeger.
Yet, on a deeper level, I also revile the public’s intense preoccupation with sports. The NCAA Tournament and resulting “March Madness” is a perfect example, as it seems the round-the-clock coverage of the games feeds directly into the 24×7 news cycle, basically diverting people’s attention from virtually everything else. Most troubling is the role sports plays as a tool for establishing the way people view others.
One of the most intriguing ideas that scholars at the Fourth Summit on Communication and Sport returned to repeatedly was the way sports directly or indirectly shapes the public’s most fundamental beliefs. For example, Meredith M. Bagley, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas - Austin discussed how the idea of female athletes playing a “pure” version of sports such as basketball and hockey is actually coded language that inhibits the perception of women athletes and pushes the notion that they are less athletic than men. In another session, Bagley spoke eloquently about how sportswriters shape the public’s understanding of WNBA athletes by discussing them in terms of how they act as mothers and their looks, rather than as gifted athletes. Placing them in this narrative enables the public to view them in “acceptable” terms.
In these instances and thousands more, one sees sports and sports communication accentuating negative stereotypes. For example, I tuned into a couple minutes of the first half of the St. Mary’s–Villanova men’s basketball game and heard the announcer waxing on regarding the intelligence and “smart play” of St. Mary’s center Omar Samhan, the kind of talk that is often used to describe non-black players across sports, just as in the NFL, white quarterbacks are noted for smartness and the ability to strategically manage a game, while black quarterbacks are described with coded language, such as “athletic” or “quick.”
What seems increasingly more apparent in my own life is that fascination or obsession with sports amounts to a monumental waste of time. As a kid, growing up as ESPN launched, I remember watching the game recaps all summer, while playing the board game All Star Baseball and keeping in-depth statistics on my make believe leagues. Then, I would meet up with my friends and play whiffleball, basketball, baseball, and other sports until sundown. Most nights, we would turn on the garage lights and shoot baskets late into the night.
Now, so many decades later, I wish I would have put that kind of effort into more productive avenues. And, when I consider the future of my now-four-year old daughter, my fervent hope is that she does not obsess about sports the way I did. If the choice is between basketball star and math league captain, I pick the latter, if nothing else in hopes that she avoids many of the nagging injuries I sustained and pay for daily.
The more I think about the role of sports in society, the whole equation seems like little more than a giant shell game to make small numbers of people a whole lot of money off the backs of the many, with the added bonus of diverting the attention of people from issues that need attention, such as joblessness, the national debt, warfare, injustice, and the millions of other points that need addressed.
I understand that it is somewhat hypocritical to complain about sports and its role in society when I am actually contributing to the problem. However, when I look back at a lifetime of true sports obsession on my part, I am ashamed that I wasted this time. Certainly, there were physical benefits and perhaps psychological ones too, but I can’t help but come to the conclusion that I am deluding myself.
Perhaps the real issue at hand is that the more I study and think about popular culture, the more I am forced to see it as a bad thing. At one point earlier in my career, I promised myself that I would not become one of those older scholars who disparaged popular culture. Yet, the distraction it causes as a means of diverting attention from important issues nearly forces me to that conclusion. Since sports is such a central feature of popular culture, then it is logical that my feelings about sports would change too.
Born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, John Updike would have been 78 years-old today. Below, I present “Conclusion — Evolution of a Literary Lion” from my recent dissertation: “Racing Toward the Apocalypse: John Updike’s New America.”The study examines Updike as a writer, particularly in the last years of his life, using ideas from symbolic interactionism and reception studies to open new interpretations of his work. I focus much of the dissertation on Updike’s controversial novel Terrorist (2006).
Conclusion – Evolution of a Literary Lion
I set up shop rather innocently, naively, as a professional writer…I don’t really do much else but write. And I write every morning and the books, the manuscript pages, do pile up.
—From a 2006 interview with John Updike, (“Bartos Forum”)
Updike’s public persona and self-identity merge in the epigraph above, which makes it appropriate that he delivered it at a forum sponsored by the New York Public Library. The first part of the quote puts the reader (listener) in familiar Updike territory – that he embarked on his career seemingly by accident, as if he stumbled upon the idea one day walking home from the grocery store.
The second sentence accounts for Updike’s self-image of writer as professional craftsman, in his mind, not much different than anyone else who plies a trade and then realizes the results of the effort. This Updike takes the reader back to his early career, typing away in a dingy office above the Dolphin Restaurant in tiny Ipswich, Massachusetts. The final piece addresses Updike’s prodigious output by placing it in modest terms, which implies that through consistent, hard work, the pages materialize or mystically accumulate.
What one realizes when attempting to methodically unravel Updike is that finding out who he is at his core is impossible. There is too much intertwined, from his discussion of celebrity as a mask that eats at the face to the different roles he admits playing in an effort to cope with internal demons and public demands. While these layers confound the researcher attempting to get at the heart of an author, perhaps the inability to do so contains a large part of the magic of literary studies. We can infer, interrogate, analyze, and examine, but in the end, all roads must lead back to what the author has written.
Maybe the closest we can get to a writer is to simply identify them as “storyteller” and proceed as if the entire life is one of creating narratives. Updike would be the first to tell the enterprising scholar that writers are professional liars. In that case, can anything be known about them, but what they have written? While some scholars view fame as a negative aspect of popular culture, creating a public identity does not automatically determine that a celebrity is nefarious. Perhaps, if one believes Updike and Mailer, it is closer to erecting a brick wall around the perceived notion of inner-self as the fountain for authorial material that he must draw upon. In this case, then, inventing a public persona is a necessity, because without access to the inner source of experience or the well running dry, the writer is left without a narrative.
***
My dissertation explores two critical points in understanding John Updike’s recent career. First, I examine him from a perspective outside the heavily-studied Rabbit teratology. Focusing on Updike’s novel Terrorist, I attempt to counter the common misperception that he has little of to offer beyond the chronicling of middle-class, suburban America. Instead, this work digs for a deeper understanding of Updike as a writer.
Next, I consider Updike’s role as an artist, professional writer, and celebrity to draw out a sense of the writer’s life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using him as a case study enables the analysis to include his changing role as a literary writer who also had major bestsellers, as well as his standing as a celebrity and public intellectual. Rather than dismiss these cultural influences, I explore how they intersect with audiences, readers, and critics. For example, it seems naïve to believe that Updike’s role as a public figure did not play a part in how critics and scholars assess his work. A rising star among journalistic critics could gain a reputation for toughness by attacking an author with Updike’s prominence. Likewise, anyone looking into the publishing industry aspect of being an author (appearances, marketing, etc.) would be remiss in not assessing Updike’s role in building up his particular public persona. Piecing together his commentary regarding fame and celebrity creates a model of the public Updike that scholars can examine.
The central task of this dissertation is a close examination of Terrorist, including the themes Updike addressed and literary techniques he employed to promulgate those ideas. From this textual analysis, Updike’s vision of America and the world in the twenty first century emerges.
By reassessing Updike’s evolution as a writer, both in subject matter and literary technique, one realizes how his work reflects an increasing preoccupation with global issues, from American imperialism to terrorism. This study broadens the general conceptualization critics and scholars hold regarding Updike’s work by exploring the themes and literary techniques he used to portray the broader world.
Focusing on Updike the writer and his final standalone novel, this dissertation helps Updike scholars and critics address a central point that very well may define his historical reputation: Is there an Updike beyond the Rabbit novels and is there an Updike beyond suburban nostalgia? I argue that Terrorist reveals a great American writer at his full powers, as the world around him undergoes a watershed moment.
***
Let’s return to the initial thesis – Updike matters. What follows (and will continue to appear from my sweat-sopped brow for the next couple of decades) is an attempt to prove this declaration. Within the endeavor, though, is also a more encompassing aspiration: to prove that writing and reading still matter in an “Age of Technology” dominated by Google, television (reality and scripted), and film. As outdated a notion as it may be, I remain committed to the idea that reading is important, even as college students sell back textbooks still in the original shrink wrap, instead choosing to obsess about Facebook status updates and text messaging.
Updike too – looking like an antiquarian fuddy-duddy – fought this battle over the last decade of his life. As a professional writer, he criticized the potential demise of publishing at the hands of Google’s desire to create a digital version of every book ever written and e-book publishing, wondering where the writer-as-creator fit into the picture when a reader no longer needed to purchase the product. In other words, who pays for the content in a world where content is free?
Updike the lover of words found an easy mark in the Internet, blasting it for turning books into “something impalpable and instantaneous.” As one who cares about culture, he worried:
The Web is conjured like the genie of legend wit a few strokes of the fingers, opening, with a phrase or two, a labyrinth littered with trash and pitted with chat rooms, wherein communication is antiseptically cleansed of all the germs and awkwardness of even the most mannerly transaction with another flesh-and-blood human being” (Due Considerations 73)
You see, Updike willingly took the highly-publicized flack from journalists and the technology intelligentsia because he believed in the power of books.
Obviously, Updike had a chit in the game, as it were. His livelihood depended on selling books and magazines. Yet, we as proponents of the written word have no less stake in its propagation. As such, do we furrow our brows at the latest Dan Brown thriller selling 1 million copies on its release day or the publishing empire of J.K. Rowling, now one of the richest women in the world?
My goal is to advocate for literature and settle for reading. As a teacher, that means exploring (great) written words (and worlds) for the lessons they dispense and to continue interrogating authors and texts to reveal what might be learned. As a writer, this effort entails writing books, essays, and articles that engender critical thinking on the part of readers, asking them to create new ideas from the material as it interweaves with their own knowledge, lives, and experiences. Part of this task is to explore the work of writers like Updike in hopes that the scrutiny will appeal to future readers and, just maybe, instigate them reading either more of his work or researching themes, eras, and topics themselves.
Updike’s death in January 2009 resulted in renewed interest in his work. Knopf published a posthumous collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories that received widespread critical appreciation. His passing caused others to reexamine the several books published in the last year of his life, including the nonfiction anthology Due Considerations and novel The Widows of Eastwick. Even his final posthumous poetry collection, Endpoint and Other Poems, gained wider readership and more mainstream reviews than his earlier poetry books. In this regard, Updike carries on the popular culture tradition of a celebrity or artist gaining broader appeal after death. That he left behind enough work to sustain this initial push was most likely a mix of Updike’s realization that he faced death, thus producing more at the end, and Knopf’s desire to meet the uptick in demand for his work.
Most interesting for those hoping to keep Updike’s legacy alive, a core group of scholars (spearheaded by James Plath, Marshall Boswell, Lawrence Broer, Jack De Bellis, and James Schiff) launched The John Updike Society on May 24, 2009. The society plans to publish The John Updike Review, with Schiff as editor. Included in its mission statement is the goal of “awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike’s literary works” (“History/Mission”). While one wonders why it took so long for such a group to organize, the society’s advent signals a positive for Updike’s enduring legacy. As of mid-September 2009, The John Updike Society membership nears 100 and its founders are planning its first national meeting in Pennsylvania scheduled for October 2010.
***
Of course, the nation changed dramatically over Updike’s long career. In contrast to other artists, writers, actors, and musicians who could not adapt across the span, however, Updike remained one of the nation’s foremost writers. It is in the guise of America’s storyteller that Updike excels. And, one must admit, Updike’s own story is part of that effort.
At the end of the day, I argue, readers can still learn much from his work, even as today’s Internet-based society seems like it could pass him by. Although it is difficult to quantify the notion that books simply do not matter as much as they used to, one can find evidence supporting this idea by looking at the drop in book sales, particularly in “literary” fiction, or by talking about reading habits with young people.
Perhaps more troubling, when considering Updike’s long-term reputation, is that the focus among scholars and critics is onto other topics and new impulses, such as multiculturalism, gender studies, the “other,” and those privileged and unprivileged by literature. It is this negative, rather narrow view of Updike that raises the hackles of those, such as David Foster Wallace and others, who denounce him and his contemporaries as “phallocrats” or relics of a male-dominated canon. For them, Updike exists primarily as a stand-in for Rabbit, an American “everyman” easy to pick apart for his shortcomings.
While the stakes in Updike’s historical reputation are only really important among a relatively small group of literary scholars, one can imagine Updike falling into the second tier of American writers, mimicking, for instance, the status of a Sinclair Lewis or William Dean Howells. However, he could be elevated in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald to stand among the nation’s greats.
This dissertation advocates a broader examination of Updike, encompassing his complete catalog. I argue that those who invest the effort will find the author offers a forceful critique of the United States, particularly evident in Terrorist. As a result, the reader will confront racism, the role of individuals in a consumer-based society, faith, commitment, authority, and the pitfalls of popular culture. This is Updike full steam ahead.
The good: Melanie Formentin, a gifted former student and friend, received a fully-funded TA spot in the strategic communications management doctoral program at Penn State.
The bad: She also received the dreaded thin-envelope rejection letter from Ohio State.
I advised her to jump for joy over the former and forget the latter, but in the back of my mind, I cannot get the “rejection” out of my thoughts. Clearly, there is something amiss. I could spend this whole post chatting about Melanie’s strong points, ranging from her excellent work as a student and teacher to her clipbook (as thick as the NYC phone book) and the published article that we co-authored for Public Relations Review. She is simply a star performer and has the CV to prove it.
The broader issue that needs addressed, however, is the treatment people receive when they make these kinds of major life decisions, such as choosing a college or graduate school or applying for internships and jobs. Despite all the whiz-bang technology and talk about social media improving audience-organization relations, when it comes down to it, there is a communications breakdown between applicants and institutions. The situation is — in a word — reprehensible.
For many people, life can seem like a long series of formulaic rejection letters. Why, Melanie might ask herself, did she not get into a school that she invested a great deal of time and money applying to? The application process is literally and emotionally expensive. Yet, in so many cases, the thin letter is a mass-produced template. Even the signature is usually stamped. One pours heart and soul into the effort and in return gets a flaccid, shabby, and inhumane reply, utterly devoid of empathy. Writers and other creative individuals are also familiar with the form letter rejection.
The situation is even worse when one considers the employment game. We all have personal tales (maybe even dozens or hundreds) of applying for a position that seems as if it were written directly from our resumes, to then hear nothing from the organization regarding the application or its fate. Often, we do not even know if the position got filled, let alone the qualifications of the person who won it.
The easy answer is that organizations are inundated with resumes and that a personal reply is simply not feasible. Doesn’t this excuse ring a little hollow? I know that it does for the many people waiting to hear something (anything!) from the organization. Disappointingly, many of us have even heard stories of people who made it to the interview stage who never received a follow-up call, letter, or e-mail.
The sad aspect of this situation is that it constitutes a communications breakdown. Organizations fail themselves by taking the path of least resistance, which is basically opting to not be truthful with applicants, whether it is college admission officers or human resources directors. Furthermore, we fail ourselves by accepting this treatment. There are a myriad of convenient rationales for not informing people of why they did not get a particular job, scholarship, internship, or whatever the case may be. I assume that the underlying reason is the threat of potential lawsuits. Most organizations are much better at “CYA” management than treating people like human beings.
An article in The New York Times last summer confirms that the lack of response is on the rise. The piece correctly pins some of the blame for the gaping electronic hole on candidates who scattershot their resumes all over the Web, as if they are qualified for every job that appears. Still, is it too much to ask for some clarification? It would be difficult to quantify the cost of an angry applicant, but there certainly is a financial impact, particularly in an age in which companies seem willing to fight for the business of every individual they can get.
Returning to Melanie’s case for a moment, how difficult could it have been for someone on the search committee or an administrator to provide her with some feedback? College search committees are notorious for this kind of behavior, but Fortune 500 companies cannot claim the higher ground either. Laura Marcus suggests that job applicants request feedback, which can certainly do damage to one’s mental state, but at least (if truthful) would help the candidate prepare for the future.
Perhaps the larger issue at hand is that there is no clear distinction in today’s society between reality and unreality. The two are so intertwined that there is no hope for “the truth” to be revealed. Rather than provide honest evaluations, we hide behind form letters. Instead of thoughtful critique, one gets legalese — or worse — hears nothing at all.
What I have a difficult time delineating is whether most people would even want the truth. Americans are really good at evading the truth by wrapping themselves up in whatever popular culture impulse occurs at any given moment, so perhaps the truth would be considered in some way un-American. For example, as if telling a person why he didn’t get into the college of his choice would be keeping him from achieving his dreams.
I like to think that we are a bit tougher than that. And, we would be, if we lived in a culture that valued the kind of dispassionate evaluation that would be necessitated by such an environment.
