Home For The Holidays

Amy Jean Porter is an artist who likes to draw.

by Caledonia Kearns

Second in a pair of essays today on Louis C.K. Previously: The Louie Bubble.

Winter is the season of television discontent. Months remain before the third season of “Louie” and the second season isn’t on DVD yet. I was late to “Louie,” but once I started, I couldn’t stop. I spent a summer weekend in a sweaty fugue state in my hotbox of a 6th-floor Brooklyn apartment, unable to move, obsessively watching the entire first season. I got to an episode where his daughters are off with their mother for a week and he goes on a bender of pizza, ice cream and pot, and then I experienced something oddly meta. My living room wasn’t littered with take-out boxes, but coffee was the only thing I’d consumed for hours and the only limb I’d moved was my right arm — to click the track pad of my laptop to order the next show. My torpor was induced for the same reason as Louie’s — my daughter was out of town with her father.

If you share custody of your kids, “Louie” serves as a meditation on single parenting in this way. There have been television shows about single mothers (“Julia,” “One Day at a Time,” “Kate & Allie,” “Murphy Brown”), and there was Fred MacMurray’s 1950’s single widower on “My Three Sons,” but an adult in a joint custodial situation is rarely seen on a screen of any size and then always as an “alternative” lifestyle, not as a given. My girl goes back and forth between her father and me nearly every other day. TV-Louie has his kids for half of each week, and his show vividly plumbs the depths of the particular kind of existentialist crisis that such an arrangement elicits.

When my ex-husband and I first separated and I found myself wandering aimlessly around Brooklyn without my daughter, I felt like the part of my identity that had been most constant for four years had been stripped away. Sadness about the loss of my marriage was not at the forefront of my grieving, it was that grieving for my marriage took a back seat to this: I had not signed up to be my child’s mama part-time. I was unprepared for the adjustment that needed to happen and even now, nearly eight years after the fact (along with the relief that time to sleep late, date and exercise brings), I am occasionally bereft when she is with her father for a longer chunk of time and our day-to-day routine is on hiatus, however temporarily. I know what to do now, even if it is just to enjoy being alone, but it still can feel strange.

A couple months ago WNYC announced — like five times in one hour of morning news! — that the percentage of single fathers in New York City had increased by 9%, though single mothers make up 83% of the city’s single parents. This was both surprising and not. Even with the increase, that is still pretty low. It seems to indicate that the dating pool for single mothers must not include many single fathers. And this brings up something about “Louie” that is annoying for the single mama. The dude is always getting propositioned — the unmarried mom at school wants to have uncomplicated sex, the younger woman thinks old men smell good and arranges a one-night stand. It is not that the sex is enviable — in one episode the single mother turns out to be brutally damaged and that Louie jumps through her many hoops is incomprehensible — it’s that dating in New York when you are over forty makes it even more clear it’s a man’s world for simple mathematical reasons. Louie talks about being fat and the sorry state of his package, but he still gets laid — though the women Louie sleeps with are an odd and diverse cast of characters. To his credit, he even shtups Joan Rivers. A single father at 43 in New York City has a library of pussy between 26 and 76 from which to choose; a woman of 42 is not necessarily presented with similar abundance.

Then there’s the difference in the perception of a single dad and a single mom. A father taking care of kids is attractive to women, while a mother on her own is not attracting men like a moth to a flame. Generally, men are praised when they are good and responsible parents. Generally, people don’t applaud a woman for taking on the responsibility of raising her kids; they pity her because she is alone, or remark condescendingly that she is brave and strong. Not to mention that going to a bar and taking home a strange man is not necessarily thought of as a responsible thing for a mother to do. And if she does, unmarried and childless men may be perfectly happy to sleep with her, but they can’t be blamed for preferring the unencumbered.

So I have Louie, my TV alter-ego boyfriend, who, though he tries hard not to come off as a mensch, is so clearly a mensch. A not-so-subtle subtext of the show is that his daughters make him a better man. He seems to viscerally understand how important it is that he is there for his girls. The tricky business of being a single parent is that the doing it all is both the drudgery and the reward. No one else cleans the kitchen or washes the toilet. No one pours you a glass of wine and asks you how your day was, but when your child is home and the chores are done, you sneak into her room, smooth back her hair, press your lips into her forehead, and give thanks for the gift of your life and your ability to care for her. Like all reasonably competent parents, you feel satisfied you have both survived another day. Louie intentionally, or not, makes us applaud him for doing what millions of women around the world are doing solo: taking care of our kids.

And it is hard not to join the chorus. The show makes me both want to fuck Louie and to rock him to sleep. His sexual encounters have been harsh for their complete lack of intimacy and yet here is a man who is besotted by his girls. Until the second season’s episode in which he confessed his love to his single mom friend Pam, there was an odd disconnect. What I had most wanted for Louie was to have was an authentic moment with a woman where he wasn’t just coming onto her or in her but where he was (even for a nanosecond) open to the possibility of letting the right one in. Even though he’s a comic who reveals what most of us would leave unspoken, he would not let down his TV alter-ego’s guard.

And I questioned the possibility of Louie having it all — being a father, emotionally vulnerable, or at least attempting this with a grown woman, while maintaining his caustic sense of humor. Pam also considers Louie a friend and tells him he did a good job declaring his love, but Pam is the man, and Louie, though he has found a worthy object of affection, is thwarted. While Louie’s female viewer may have fallen for him, in Pam he has met his match. She is wary and shrewd, and amazingly funny. Her own sad history is written all over her face, and she will not let down her own guard, not to mention that she is not attracted to Louie. (And I won’t give away this season’s finale.)

Unlike Heather Havilesky, who wrote this summer about the portrayal of divorce on TV for the Times, I don’t think Louie is miserable post-marriage. Searching and a bit lost, maybe, in possession of a depressive gene or too, sure, but there is a sense that he’s relieved to be able to figure out how to be a parent on his own. His girls frustrate him but they also make him feel necessary and alive. Single fatherhood is an opportunity for him to discover himself in some important way. I get this. My ex-husband is a much better parent alone than he would have been had we stayed together.

I’d like to think it is possible for single mothers and fathers to go to work, to love and be loved, fuck and be fucked while taking good care of their kids and creating a supportive home in some kind of integrated way. I’d also like to think that second happy partnerships are possible, as is sharing the load. There are times this feels more attainable than others. Though my daughter once wisely informed me “There are no princes in Brooklyn,” I never thought there’d be so many frogs to kiss. And while it can be lovely to make out with amphibians, I find myself wanting more. In the meantime, while I wait for season three, “Louie” reruns are good company. Divorced, funny, and fortysomething, he is doing the best he can parenting his girls. He makes visible that there are other dwellers of this in-between place: single, not childless, looking for love while their ex is with the kids.

Caledonia Kearns’ poems have appeared in the New Haven Review and Painted Bride Quarterly. She is the editor of two anthologies of Irish American women’s writing, Cabbage and Bones and Motherland. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter.

by Ben Dolnick

First in a series of two essays today on Louis C.K. Next: Super-Stud in Divorceland.

Let me start with a couple of stipulations:

(1) Identifying bubbles in real-time is notoriously difficult, and;

(2) I really, truly love Louis C.K. I’ve tried (and failed) on multiple occasions to see him live; I’ve watched all of his specials, including some of his weird, almost unrecognizable early appearances in Boston clubs; I’ve even, despite knowing full-well that one should never, ever do this, recounted his routines, through snorts of my own laughter, to my politely smiling friends.

Nonetheless: I’m ready to declare that we are, right now, in the midst of a Louis C.K. bubble.

I’m not glad to be saying this. And it’s our fault, not his. He is, I believe, among the best working artists we’ve got going right now, and his work-ethic — his capacity for churning out top-quality material at a rate that would make Joyce Carol Oates blush — is somewhere between inspiring and terrifying. The best bits of his stand-up (about the world’s saddest hand-job, or about the unappreciated miracle of flight) will make you laugh until your throat-cords burn; his show is a weird and occasionally wonderful alternative to the insipid, frenetic current crop of network sitcoms. I’m profoundly grateful that his comedy is in the world.

However: we have now, I believe, arrived at that moment in the party — some time between drinks three and four, say? — when the pleasurable wave of drunkenness gives way to the first intimations of nausea. He’s reached that full boil of fame at which his ticket-sales crash web servers; magazines scrabble to outdo each other with rapturous profiles and assessments; his personal and professional quirks (did you know he doesn’t let his kids watch TV? did you know he edits his show himself, ON A MACBOOK?!) have acquired an aura of divine relics. Last week he put his latest stand-up special on his website, and within a couple of days more than a couple hundred thousand people had downloaded it, at five dollars a piece… at which point, of the million-plus dollars, he gave at least a quarter of it to charity. There is the upcoming appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Liking him has come to feel not just like a marker of good taste but, somehow, an indicator of virtue. Which is to say: a note of desperation, of something less to do with rational evaluation than with a fear of being left out of something transcendent, has crept into our culture’s assessment of him. He is the stock market, and we who hang on his every word and Tivo his every late-night appearance are collectively writing Dow 36,000.

Cultural bubbles, like economic ones, arise with chart-able regularity. A year ago it was Jonathan Franzen and Freedom; a few years before that it was Radiohead; before that, Ricky Gervais. I remember a moment, in the fall of 2004, when I woke up to an op-ed in the paper by Larry David and realized that he could, just then, announce that he was running for president and (among the segment of the population that wakes up and reads op-eds, anyway) he could have himself a voting majority by dinner-time.

We’ve tended, understandably enough, to hear and read a lot these past few years about the ugly impulses that underly the creation of bubbles — the greed, the recklessness, the willful ignorance. But cultural bubbles, with their lack of potential for exploding the global economy, allow us to see another, less unpalatable set of impulses beneath bubbles’ creations. There’s a sadness, an almost sweet hopefulness, in the fervor with which we inflate certain figures and objects to places of undue worship. No one, after all, wants to live in an era of mediocrity. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to believe that there is right now, brewing away on someone’s Macbook, a work of art that will live on long after the polar ice caps have melted to the size of postage stamps? Wouldn’t it make you feel a little more hopeful about the world if a certain book, stacked in the front of the Barnes and Noble with a special embossed medal on its jacket, were not just good, not just something to read on subway trips after your iPhone battery has died, but something truly amazing? Something to rejigger your notions of what people are capable of? To make you write the creator a letter of abject-est admiration, not even caring if you get a response?

Here’s the tricky thing about bubbles, though, and the thing that assures their ongoing creation: there’s always a chance, however slim, that the show that everyone’s watching, the asset that everyone’s insisting you stock up on, really is the thing that will endure. There’s no law, after all, that ours must be an era devoid of genuine, time-capsule-worthy greatness. While Homer recited the Odyssey, there must, somewhere in the crowd, have been a moron whispering to his friends that this was all just middlebrow claptrap. And for all I know Louis C.K.’s comedy — or Seinfeld, or The Simpsons, or Kid A, or Freedom — really will still be consumed a hundred years from now, taught to bored undergraduates who can’t wait to get back to their Virtual Sex-Pods.

But I think that we don’t entirely do our favorite artists, or works of art, a favor when we rush to declare them the Greatest X of The New Millennium, or the Man/Woman/Show That is Redefining X, or the Perfect X for These Troubled Times. Because cultural bubbles, like economic ones, leave us sheepish, and angry, and feeling obscurely (or not so obscurely) duped. I wouldn’t, I don’t think, feel quite so queasy about Ricky Gervais — I wouldn’t greet his embarrassingly self-aggrandizing tweets, or his unfunnily nasty Golden Globes appearances, with quite such unhappiness — if I hadn’t, however many years ago, convinced myself that The Office was not merely an excellent show but a kind of comedic paragon. I wouldn’t have felt quite such searing disappointment during the last season of The Wire — and good God, did I hate watching those episodes in which McNulty developed his absurd plan to impersonate a serial killer — if I hadn’t insisted quite so often or so loudly in the years before that The Wire was the greatest work of art to have appeared in my lifetime.

And so, in the hopes that it isn’t too late for Louis — that we might not be so far along in the bubble cycle that we will have to be vaguely nauseated when, years from now, he appears again on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” to hold forth on the indignities of aging — let’s resolve be freer with our deflationary thoughts. Let’s love him less so we can love him longer.

Here goes my small contribution: the much-celebrated, hour-long episode set in Afghanistan actually kind of sucked. Especially the ending. That scene in which the duckling escapes from Louie’s hands and melts the Afghan soldiers hearts was on the level of those excruciating “Modern Family”-endings when all the characters put their arms around each other and jump in a swimming pool.

There. I feel more sensible already.

Ben Dolnick lives in New York. His new novel, You Know Who You Are, may or may not be taught to bored undergraduates who can’t wait to get back to their Virtual Sex-Pods.

“It was once the lingua franca of science, used to name animals and plants with precision. But now botanists will no longer be required to provide Latin descriptions of new species. The move is part of a major effort to speed up the process of naming new plants — because in many cases it is feared they might die out before they are officially recognised.”

December 22

Houston -6 At Indianapolis
Can Indy’s back-up
quarterback beat Houston’s third-
string QB? Who cares. PICK: COLTS

December 24

At Kansas City -2.5 Oakland
Deal with the devil
Chiefs struck to beat the Packers
lasts another week. PICK: CHIEFS

Denver -3 At Buffalo
Tim Tebow comes to
Buffalo, beats the Bills and
parts Niagara Falls. PICK: BRONCOS

At Tennessee -7.5 Jacksonville
This game matches up
Two teams I’d like to contract
out of existence. PICK: JAGUARS

At Cincinnati -4 Arizona
The Bengals need this
to stay in playoff hunt but
they’re still the Bengals. PICK: CARDINALS

At New England -9.5 Miami
The Patriots rest
Tom Brady and Wes Welker.
Start Damon, Affleck. PICK: DOLPHINS

At Baltimore -13 Cleveland
Only on Christmas Eve
Could the Browns battle proudly
to beat this huge spread. PICK: BROWNS

At NY Jets -3 NY Giants
This Game’s Loser should
have to change their name from New
York to New Jersey. PICK: GIANTS

At Washington -6.5 Minnesota
“Luck” is a weird show
on HBO but Andrew Luck
may soon be a Vike. PICK: REDSKINS

At Carolina -7.5 Tampa Bay
I feel sorry for
all twenty devoted fans
of the Buccaneers. PICK:PANTHERS

At Pittsburgh -15 St. Louis
Steelers don’t have a
quarterback, but that shouldn’t
be a big issue. PICK: STEELERS

At Detroit -2.5 San Diego
The Chargers are now
suddenly fierce, just in time
to fire their coach Norv. PICK: LIONS

San Francisco -2.5 At Seattle
Seahawks have won
three straight since I started to
wear their knit green cap PICK: SEAHAWKS

At Dallas -2 Philadelphia
This is a game with
huge playoff implications.
Romo will screw up. PICK: EAGLES

At Green Bay -13 Chicago
’Twas Christmas Night and
nobody should watch this game.
“Peanuts” is better. PICK: BEARS

December 26

At New Orleans -6.5 Atlanta
This is secretly
the league’s best rivalry.
Jambalaya Bowl! PICK: FALCONS

Last week’s Haiku Picks went 11–4! A Holiday Miracle! Season to date is 106–116–6. Can we get to .500?!

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

You have heard, I’m sure, that today is the darkest day of the year. This is why it was so hard for you to get out of bed this morning, and why you probably feel like killing yourself a little more than you usually do. Don’t do it. Instead, get back into bed, with your computer this time, and watch these YouTube videos of songs to match your mood. And remember, this is the second day of winter, not the first. Only 90 more days to go, which is less than 91.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIdIqbv7SPo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfyPZ6YHJpU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNwj0ExB1No

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE2qhVEeTiI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mbBbFH9fAg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWddBTxPDYQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNoZPLD1PVU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVyTRjv38Yg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKFOjfwlprM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBxbWkf4z-E

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Manischewitz

Red wine, the cure for common sobriety — 
dizzy tea, sweet like molten meat — is just as Jewish
as any rite, any tight briar of Hebrew letter, any fetter
of Israelite slave or Yid-friar. No one should build a pyramid
with a hangover, I think it’s written, but still that Jew-gang,
tendons stretched like strings of sitars, Seder-clenched their livers
at the green pea Nile, slurped purpled red wine,
clacked bricks, and acted Exodus, the awe, optic, the carafe,
Coptic; Pharaoh punch-drunk, Hieroglyphic-fistic.
Six thousand years later, my Semitic clan unfurls,
cousin to cousin, to swat about a dozen pecks of Exodus lexis.
No taupe grape, either, for my smashed stock,
for my drunken kin who swirl the swill, fawn over Passover for
eight days, eight of their about-twenty-six thousand; six thousand
years later, the latent Seder just as filled with Jews, just as catered.
We live the Passover miracle of the ladled vine, the Passover
miracle of the fourth glass, and the greater miracle of the fifth.
My cup gripped in my Jew-paw like a bulb, ruddy filament fluming,
I truly believe Egypt was Elysian. I can hold my religion. Next to me,
unlike Aaron, Uncle Jacob, sloshed like Moses,
parts the Red Sea over and over again in his glass.

Abraham Lincoln Decides Against “Count Lincula”

That’s just perfect, I thought, the ingredients
In order and the sketch of Lincoln for the box with one thumb up
And the other hand signing the word “Illinois” and a neon American flag bow tie.
Ready to print. The verdant bubble writing, occidental, turbo curve.
A house divided. There, the sparkling cinnamon, in the divided house.

The moments of emergency and the novelty of the name
Lincoln O’s gave him egregious heartburn for a month.
This was not the Abraham I knew. Where was the moral giant
Swaying like a uvula? The glitzy example of disease? Equipped

With mangy aphasia, Abe had bent over his apolitical writing desk
For weeks with slates of oats and four types of humours. His recipe deadline
Was in February and strict and clammy as seashell, the Cereal Bosses called
On him nightly until one died of a blood disease. Where that one fell

Four more filled the puckering void, and I could count the days since
The ample hydraulics of Abraham Lincoln had clenched
To orate. Isomer Lincoln arranged the wheat from most puce to least.
From yaw to pitch to punch.

Megan Amram is a recent graduate of Harvard University and comedy writer living in Los Angeles.

O, poems, poems, poems/we made them out of clay/and if you want more poems/The Poetry Section’s vast archive is this way.

You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Good news for nerds, outcasts, homos and freaks: those dudes winning on your school’s football team are going to bomb out of life: the more winning there is, the more their grades go down. You should totally cite them this survey while they’re beating you up.

Look, we are at this point HOURS AWAY from the winter break. Please do not make me consider the possibility that Earth has two moons. I mean, it actually makes sense, in that the one moon we see all the time is A USELESS PIECE OF GARBAGE THAT CLEARLY CANNOT PULL ITS WEIGHT, but really, I’m SO TIRED RIGHT NOW. I just… can’t.

I’m not gonna lie, I really needed this today. If bears are not your thing, there’s bonus footage of a pig and a dog frolicking together below.