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The Delivery Will Be Televised: The Office & The Pop Culture Birth Narrative

March 13, 2010 in General, Staff Posts with 1 Comment

Brad Fruhauff has no illusions about children. Pictured here being whacked by his own son.

Brad Fruhauff has no illusions about babies

In a special “Saturday Edition” of our blog, Brad Fruhauff has good things to say about the birth of Pam and Jim’s child on The Office in context of our popular notions of childbirth.

The Genre of Birth Narrative

Until my wife and I got pregnant, we had not given any more thought than the average person to the phenomenon of the American birth narrative. Yet when the instructor of our childbirth class complained about all the “crisis” births on TV and in the movies, I instantly knew what she meant.

We all know what a birth “looks like” – that is, on TV. The father becomes a frantic, bumbling mess; the family is so excited they only get in the way of the parents’ “private” experience; the mother becomes a monster who abuses her husband, renounces sex, and screams like a banshee while pushing the baby out. Once the baby is born all the drama is effectively over and the family gathers around the beatific parents and shares a tender moment (perhaps peppered with a few gags).

This kind of drama and comedy makes for good TV, and it would be fruitless and perhaps irrelevant to complain that it is unrealistic, but surely it is pitiable that such a farce is the primary image many of us have of childbirth. Parody is most effective when the thing parodied is well-known, but since birth has moved out of the everyday and into the hospitals, most of us have to wait until we have our own children to appreciate the distance between the parody and the reality.

Re-Imagining Birth

That’s one reason I appreciated the recent birth episodes of The Office. While participating in the familiar genre, they also manage to present a more nuanced and, to me, emotionally satisfying birth story than even such great shows as Mad About You.

One important way they manage this is by refusing to let Pam act like the roaring, demon-possessed woman from The Exorcist. Instead she remains mostly calm and self-possessed throughout the hours leading up to the delivery.

She and Jim disagree and bicker throughout the episode, but it is about something plausible and partially external – their conflicting desires to deliver the baby safely and to maximize their poor HMO benefits. The narrative acquires dramatic tension because it respects both these desires rather than placing us viewers in a superior position of the “rational ones.”

Though Jim does become the “crazy father,” it’s less due to genre expectations than his valid concern for Pam and the baby. In fact, part of what is both funny and poignant is precisely how uncomfortable Jim is with his own anxiety. Used to being in control of himself, he finds suddenly that he is subject to Pam’s stronger will.

We do have a dysfunctional family in the Dunder-Mifflin crew themselves, but perhaps just because they are not biological family, the moments when they escape their own self-involvement to show kindness or concern have a sweetness to them.

The Deliver Will (Not) Be Televised

But the most important factor may be the naturalistic style in which The Office is filmed. The very premise of the camera crew existing within the story we are watching gives the show many of its characteristic features, including and especially the self-awareness of the fact of being filmed – for the characters as well as the viewers. Thus, when it comes time for the actual birth, the show goes against all dramatic logic and denies us entry to the delivery room because we are not family.

We are not totally cut off – Michael’s presumptive intimacy with his employees takes him to the delivery room door often enough to let us hear Pam’s groaning (not screaming, significantly) and then the baby’s first cries, but the show forfeits the dramatic potential of being in the room itself for the sake of its own commitment to representing these characters as people like us who live in a world like ours – a world where you don’t let strangers into your delivery room.

The intrusive presence of the cameras is mirrored in Michael’s and the others’ sometimes oppressive presence around the couple. When Pam becomes afraid of having the baby and Jim comforts her, they are also surrounded by Michael and Kevin, who second and comment upon everything Jim says. It’s certainly funny, but as the camera zooms in tight on this huddle of people, it also reveals that our presence is no less strange than Kevin’s – perhaps moreso, in fact.

The naturalistic camera, finally, dispels the sentimentalism of the “happy family” moment. Jim, Pam, and the baby do share a quiet, tender moment together, but that’s all it is – no soft piano music, no framing them in an idyllic tableau.

What I appreciated most was the time they spent after the birth – the birth was only the first climax of a two-part episode. Afterward, we see Jim and Pam adapting to this new little person, particularly with respect to nursing and sleeping. My son had similar trouble nursing at first, and I felt the show captured, in its brief and subtle way, many of the strange emotions this evokes: worry, sadness, doubt, shame, and finally joy and relief.

One last thought: these episodes contained muted critiques of insurance companies and hospitals that would certainly resonate with a certain kind of parent (like my wife and I). I’m of two minds whether this was simply part of the show’s naturalism or was an intrusion of an agenda. I’d like to think that such reimaginations of the birth narrative don’t have to come at someone’s expense, but one could just as easily argue that denying the economic factors of birth (which are many) would only reinscribe the romanticization of our existing narratives.

So, while this isn’t a “perfect” birth story, it does begin to show us that birth can be dramatic, sweet, exciting, and funny without becoming farce and so is really a very fine birth narrative.

***

Brad Fruhauff is Poetry Editor for Relief. His poetry and book, film, and music reviews have appeared occasionally in small press or online journals such as Salt and Burnside Writers Collective. His story, “The Strangler,” appeared in the first issue of Ankeny Briefcase. He currently lives in Evanston, IL, and teaches college English.

White Sheep, Black Sheep: The Literary Kinship of Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay

March 11, 2010 in General with 1 Comment

Brad Fruhauff (pictured in hat)

Brad Fruhauff considers the ways unlikely things can come together in the works of two American poets.

It’s possible to look too closely at a poem. As Billy Collins exhorts his students, one should “waterski / across the surface of a poem” rather than tie it down and “torture a confession out of it.” When I teach a new poet I’m just as likely as my students to become consumed with understanding “what’s going on” in a poem; it takes some cultivating to give yourself the freedom to hear and feel a poem at the same time as you’re deciphering its explicit content.

The atrophy of our culture’s ability to range freely within a poem is perhaps a topic for another blog (you might read Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?”). My thoughts turned to this while seeking a subject for this blog. I started paging through my Norton Anthology of American Literature, from which I’ve been teaching this semester, and read over the selections on Edna St. Vincent Millay. These poems had caught my attention already for their ability to combine a modern candor and explicitness (e.g., female sexuality) withing the traditional form of the sonnet. But reading them again I found myself improbably comparing them to none other than Emily Dickinson.

This is an unlikely matching in terms of personality. Millay was a bohemian of the early-20th century while Dickinson was a proper Puritan of the mid-18th century. Millay apparently had a sexually “open” marriage while Dickinson lived a hermitic, single life and hardly had any male friends outside her father and brother. Millay was a kind of “bad girl” of American poetry even as Dickinson was being blessed as one of its most important early voices.

But I think there is a more than intuitive connection between the two. Consider these lines from Millay:

I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory’s halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

(“I Think I Should Have Love You Presently”)

There’s a powerful, assertive “I” speaking, and yet that self is not so stable or concrete that she can’t inhabit another’s consciousness or see herself as if from a distance. Then there’s the surprise ending that has a tinge of sadness to it; one could almost see one of Dickinson’s characteristic dashes setting it up, as in “I heard a fly buzz – when I died.” Like Millay’s, Dickinson’s spirit roams at whim between worlds (the physical and metaphysical, in this case) yet remains a powerful “I,” capable of dying and resurrecting, communing with nature and with other souls. And just as Millay plays with the sonnet, Dickinson plays with the sing-song meters of hymns:

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

(“I died for beauty”)

Both poets find it unremarkable that they should be ephemeralized, that their minds and bodies might be divided – in fact, they own it and find agency in it: Millay “cherish[es] . . . the stakes I gained” and Dickinson goes on to speak with the other body and to find common cause. Body and mind join up again at poem’s end in an image as melancholy as Millay’s:

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

The moss silences the bodies and erases their names, removing them from the human world, just as Millay’s woman who would have loved the man “in a day or two” only lives in a possible world other than this real one.

Millay also shares a certain allegorical imagination with Dickinson, exploring the imaginative potential of a metaphorical comparison or personification. In “I Too beneath Your Moon, Almighty Sex,” Millay apostrophizes “almighty Sex” itself, something often associated with odes. She admits that she “go[es] forth at nightfall crying like a cat” and abandoning “the lofty tower” that she labored to make of her life. Desire and character conflict in this odd juxtaposition of medieval architecture with an urban alley at night, and that tension motivated an explanation or defense:

Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own;
Though it was reared To Beauty, it was wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

Whatever we might think of Millay’s personal life, we can appreciate her candor even as it is restrained by her choice of form and allegory. Indeed, Millay’s honest admission of the power of sex and lust is just the kind of thing that makes us Reliefers feel at home. Literature, after all, as C.S. Lewis said, reminds us we are not alone (though maybe not in Millay’s sense).

Dickinson treats something similar when she writes, “The Soul selects her own Society – / Then – shuts the Door – .” We seek intimacy in many forms. And again Dickinson’s poem ends with a surprise heaviness that hits with a similar emotional power as Millay’s as she explores this personification of the soul (“her,” below):

I’ve known her – from an ample nation -
Choose One -
Then – close the Valves of her attention -
Like Stone -

Millay’s tower “To Beauty” is made of less than beautiful things, and the soul’s intimacy in Dickinson becomes a kind of stone tomb. The differences between the two woman are still marked – Millay’s voice is far more personal, more desperate, more borne down upon by a chaotic world without a center, while Dickinson begins her adventures with some sense of having a safe home to return to – but both wrestle with the tensions between different worlds they belong to and compellingly represent this through putting pressure on inherited forms.

The result in reading both is a sense of something both familiar and wonderfully strange, something ordered and yet brimming with an anarchical energy that thrills us even as we are glad it is contained.

Deleted Scene: The Scar

March 8, 2010 in General, Writing and Publishing with 1 Comment

Lisa Ohlen Harris

Lisa Ohlen Harris provides us with a short passage that didn’t make it into her forthcoming book Through the Veil. (This post first appeared on her website LisaOhlenHarris.com.)

I stayed home with the baby that night. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa, because when I woke about midnight, Todd wasn’t home yet. The gathering at the Manning’s house must have run late, I thought.

While I was putting on pajamas and brushing my teeth, Todd was helping Tim out of the wrecked taxi. A couple of Arab shabab stopped at the scene of the accident to ask if they could help; they took Tim to the emergency room to have his head sewn shut.

When they left the Manning’s house, the guys had waved down a taxi. Tim sat in the front seat, because his Arabic was better than Todd’s. There was a seat belt on the passenger’s side, Tim remembered later, but it was grimy and dusty. He thought briefly that he should put it on anyway, but pushed the thought away knowing that the driver would interpret this as an insult to his driving—and a lack of trust in the will of God.

Todd woke me up when he finally got home, early in the morning. It was still dark, but I remember hearing the birds sing outside our bedroom window. When I turned on a lamp, I saw blood all over Todd’s sandals and a deep gash between his toes, almost splitting his foot for an inch or so. It should have been sutured, but he hadn’t noticed his own injury while he was at the hospital with Tim. Todd’s wound took weeks to heal, and he still has the scar. It’s easy to hide under socks and shoes.

We didn’t see Tim over the weekend, and when he came to the language school that Monday he had a big piece of gauze taped over the wound. When his forehead healed enough he took gauze off, but it wasn’t until the sutures were removed that we all saw the jagged crescent.

———-

So there’s the “deleted scene.” The guys were in a taxi crash. Tim hurt his head and ended up with a crescent-shaped scar. It’s kinda interesting, but so what? I mean, really, why would this story matter to anyone but our family and Tim’s? I might tell about the accident when we get the old gang together, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s book-worthy.

As I assembled my chapters for Through the Veil, I wanted each memory, each chapter to say something more than, “This happened then that happened, now isn’t the Middle East exotic?”

Ultimately, the taxi accident memory just didn’t make the cut.

***

Lisa Ohlen Harris is Relief’s Creative Nonfiction editor. Her Middle East memoir, Through the Veil, will be published by Canon Press in 2010. Lisa’s essays have appeared in journals like River Teeth, Arts & Letters, and The Laurel Review, and have received special mention in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses (2009) and in Best American Spiritual Writing (2008 and 2010). Lisa enjoys mentoring and editing the work of emerging writers through her critique service.

Lent: The Ultimate Sacrifice

February 25, 2010 in General with 0 Comments

Stephen Swanson, despite his public expressions of dislike of columns governed by the calendar, writes about a personal struggle with “snark”.

“Snark”, a Definition and Use

In addition to the definitions from urbandictionary that I link to above, I think it important to give a personal definition in order to further what might be perceived as an overly general terminology.  “Snark”, the combination of “snide” and “remark”, fills a large quantity of time in on-line communication and chiefly serves as a tone for self-righteous indignation and belittling of others.  For that reason, my omission of snark for the coming weeks might appear as a wholly beneficial enterprise, and to some degree, they have significant points.

At the same time, my snarkiness also serves as an outlet of frustration and a mask for more overtly offensive reactions to others.  Rather than calling someone an idiot or just staring at them aghast and their comment question, I can compose a snarky reply in my mind which I will post later.  It allows for some degree of fantasy play where I star in an amazingly hilarious sit-com filled with cutting commentary and insightful absurdity.

The Cost of Snark

However, as with all fantasies, there remains a significant price to be paid.  Just like hours-upon-hours of GTA can breed a desire to not stop for a stoplight or an urge to pull in front of a better car and pull the driver out to claim their wheels as your own, snark can explode or, in my case, leak.

I find myself leaking snark in a variety of ways.  First, I make noises.  A not-so-subtle “humph” or a snicker that is not quite masked by a cough can emerge at the most inopportune times, faculty meetings for example.  Second, my eyes tell my story.  It is not just the huge eye-roll of adolescence.  Even a looking away or a squint can be noticed and queried by a friend, student, family member, or coworker.  It’s unavoidable.  We are conditioned to pick up non-verbal cues, and when they are left unexpressed, the audience can interpret them as they will, often to my own detriment.  After all, people will often assume the worst when left to their own devices.

What to Do?  What to Do?

Well, I’m hoping to employ a two-pronged approach.  First, I’m going to work on composing the snark into specific communications, things I CAN actually say or write to people.  This will not only still allow me to think and create an outlet for my feelings but also force me to channel that into something public and more productive.

For example, this week in a college meeting, I was growing increasingly frustrated at the lack of direction in the meeting.  We’d been there two hours and not really made any progress.  A member of the campus communications and marketing area was having a devil of a time of pinning faculty down on who they were supposed to reach out to and what the message needed to be.  Generally, I would spend that time creating snark.  It’s fun.  It makes for good bar/party stories and generally makes me feel better.

However, it does not really solve the underlying problem, and that’s the problem that I’m really seeing with snark, especially when compared to effective satire or critique.  It papers over the issue and ignores the underlying causes, and I’ve determined that these sorts of communication represent central concerns in any hope in overcoming significant issues to our culture today.  It’s much easier to snarkily point out others and label them as such.

As I tell my students, it’s easier to construct a fallacious argument or a general opinion than it is to construct something thoughtful and useful.  I need to give it a try.  I need to cage the snark.

***

Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.

Challenging Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son) to a Battle to the Death!!!

February 23, 2010 in General, Writing and Publishing with 0 Comments

Jason Hubbard Derr joins the blog to write about challenging another writer (who just happens to be the son of the Stephen King) to the death.

When Chris Fisher asked me to do a blog post to help promote my story – “Live Nude Girls” – in the latest issue of Relief my mind jumped to several immediate possibilities. I felt I could talk on a range of topics like:

  1. The writing life
  2. How when someone like Neil Gaiman, fantasy author extraordinaire, goes on about not believing in God and then writes stories populated by Gods and uses them as a metaphor to explore human life and the human condition I immediately being to believe that his atheism is not at all what he thinks it is.
  3. On the nature of being a MA graduate with an MA in theology and most of a BA in creative writing but no job what-so-ever so if you want to hire me to do some freelance writing work please contact me.

Instead I have decided to challenge author Joe Hill to a duel to the death. Mr. Hill is the author of Heart Shaped Box and the forthcoming Horns and is the son of Stephen King.

In life – as both a human being and as a writer (not all human beings are writers, it’s a much longer process for us) it is important to have a nemesis. If possible one should indicate their nemesis in writing and make several public declarations of the relationship. I should point out that having a Grown-Up-Professional nemesis relationship and, say, a Deep-Wish-For-Harm-To-Fall-On-the-Guy-Who-Made-your-Life-Torture-In-Grades-4-And-5 are much different things.

I am sure that you have already begun to ask yourself: why be the nemesis of Mr. Hill. Because he is Stephen King’s son and had publishing connections from the earliest glimmer of a desire to publish? Is it because in ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ he took what could have been a clichéd King-esq horror novel and instead – through a truly unique lead character – gave us a story that was as much about growing old and taking stock of our lives as it was about past sin? Or is it because he is doing what I want to do with life – writing comics and books (the comic I created but was not allowed to write? Apparently it’s coming out soon!)?

Yes. It’s that one!

But I won’t belabor the point – part of the fun of having a secret nemesis is that you get to keep your funhouse mirror life justifications to yourself in, say, a journal or in mad midnight ramblings.

In the end I feel Joe Hill would be a good nemesis because he seems like a nice guy – that as he ridicules your work he may actually say something nice about it. And I feel he may not agree with my weird pre-Acclaim Valiant Comic book fascination but he would get it.

So, Mr. Hill I want to do what you do: write stories of wonder that plumb the depths of humanity. And I’m a few years behind you. But I will catch up. And, oh lets say in 10 years, I want to challenge you to a Duel-to-the-Death on the top of the empire state building.

But before that – can we get a beer? Maybe poke around a used bookstore and would you autograph my copy of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’?

***

Jason Hubbard Derr is a theologian, author and independent scholar living in Vancouver, BC with his lovely new bride. Jason is a contributor to PopTheoloy.com, has been invited to submit to an academic journal and will soon see his MA thesis published. He has most of a BA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and and all of a MA in Theology from the Vancouver School of Theology. Jason’s story “Live Nude Girls” can be found in Relief Issue 3.2.

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