Elements of Stale, with Luke Mazur: Leaving the Green Lane Country Club
by Luke Mazur
Maybe some of that $15 million Columbia University just received for a center devoted to digital journalism can be used to figure out why there are, as of now, two Jersey Shore posts here on this website, over the course of just two days. The same grant can pay someone to parse how Avatar, Katie Roiphe’s favorite authors and pop sociology intersect with any of this. Until then, let me do my part.
We know, from reading Newsweek, and from looking around, that our institutions and communities are eroding.
We’re not regulating or joining bowling leagues as much as the generations before us have. My grandmother Genevieve used to play cards with her mostly Polish-speaking friends all the time. They were active in the local Republican politics-way back when Republicans and any political party would have considered use of the word “Negro” polite. And though I never met my dad’s dad, I assume that as the son of Polish immigrants living in Buffalo, NY, Alois got to some bowling alleys.
Avatar expounded on this notion that our real-life communities are disintegrating. But the movie also offered that we’re plugging into virtual reality, at least in part, to interact with vast new worlds. Hence my dad announces when he has reached 100 Twitter followers and my mom logs into Yahoo to manage her fantasy football league. To be sure, underpinning my dad’s tweeting and my mom’s fantasies are weak social bonds. But gone for good are the tattooed ties to a country your ancestors moved from 100 years ago. Gone is the group-building that grows out of the casual use of derogatory words.
Except, it seems, at the Jersey shore? Italian-American groups have criticized MTV for airing the program, arguing that it feeds off of and perpetuates negative stereotypes. And, wow. The series revels in the tics, the lexicon, and the wardrobe that give the cast its identity. What’s more, the cast members seem to revel in them too; a recent Funny or Die video starring Snooki, Pauly D and the The Situation in which they flip on and off their accents suggests as much.
But not everything down on the shore is pretense. The seven roommates dine together and say grace together like any pre-Bowling Alone, pre-Internet family would. When Sammi refuses to wash the dinner dishes one night, The Situation demeans her mean-spiritedly, and in the manner that only a younger sister could excuse. On Sunday mornings, their actual moms (who double as their actual roommates) wake them up with trays of baked ziti. There’s something at once anachronistic and communal and magnetic about the whole bit.
Fifty some years ago, Neil Klugman found himself plunged inside the world of Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks. Because Philip Roth wrote Goodbye, Columbus, it is heady and emotionally complicated and lyrical. And very much unlike a summer on the Shore, Neil’s summer involved a diaphragm and a Harvard student.
On the last page of the novella, Klugman rejects the wealthy Brenda and her assimilated suburban goyishe lifestyle in exchange for old world Newark, where he lives with his thickly-accented, oh-so-ethnic aunt. He arrives back in Newark “just as the sun was rising on the first day of the Jewish New Year.” And as such, Roth tapped into the pull of a subculture where provincialism trumps the way we live now. Does that situation sound familiar?
Snooki’s not Jewish. But her heart is still half a prophet. (That’s a Yiddish proverb inscribing Goodbye, Columbus.) And her show, with a bit of a stretch and a bit more Yiddish, well, it could be The Jersey Shtetl. Maybe?
Luke Mazur is still allegedly our grammar columnist. He still does his best thinking on his parents’ couch.