Two Lists

I’ve spent the past several days contemplating newly released lists. The first is Esquire’s list The 75 Books Every Man Should Read, and the second is One Story’s Top 10 Short Stories of All Time. The first, Esquire’s, caught negative attention for its lack of diversity: the only female on the list is Flannery O’Connor. The second, One Story’s, went fairly unnoticed insofar as I can tell.

I’m always confused by the notion of diversity as represented merely by color and gender. I often feel, and maybe incorrectly, that people who are immediately drawn to these more obvious lines of division have not spent much time around people from other cultures and social statuses. The concept of the “dead white male” feels entirely American to me. I’m more like black males from America than I am like white males from Russia. I’m more like women from Texas than I am like men from Vermont.

I’m not here to play apologist to sexists. I have a two-year-old daughter, and I’d beat any future man who would deny her anything based on her gender. At the same time, I never want her to be merely “included.” I don’t know how these feelings are reconciled. I think it’s bigger an issue than my mind can grasp.

As a young man I spent a summer digging ditches with short, chiseled men newly immigrated from Mexico. They spoke no English and my Spanish was paltry. We worked in triple digit temperatures moving dirt with our bodies. We’d tunnel under homes with thin bladed shovels to get at pipes busting with shit. During the hours we’d spend, either beneath homes or under angry sunlight, we spoke very little. We could only communicate with guttural utterances and physical comedy. To pass the time we’d race each other — sort of Cool Hand Luke showdowns. In the evenings we’d get paid in cash. They’d ride off in vans together, and I’d drive home in my decrepit Isuzu Trooper.

I bring this up because it occurs to me that I am more like those men than I am David Foster Wallace or Ben Marcus — two men from my own country, of my own race, belonging to my own generation (apporoximately), and having university educations. I own both Infinite Jest and The Age of Wire and String, and I cannot read either of them. I’ve tried, only to feel my time being wasted. Now, it has been often the case that I come back to texts I despised and later come to find I enjoy them, but, as it stands right now, I would rather dig ditches with those Mexican immigrants in an arresting South Texas heat, for a month of back-aching days, than lift either the slender Markus or girthy Wallace in front of my eyes for a half hour.

Back to the lists. It’s slightly unfair to compare them, as one has 75 members and the other 10, but, in scrolling through the 10 members of One Story’s list, you get the certain sense that all of those folks could sit around a dinner table together, and of the 75 on Esquire you can definitely see, if you got them all together, that fist fights would erupt, or, at the very least, shit would be talked. Of the two lists One Story’s is, in many ways, less diverse than Esquire’s.

Aesthetically the Esquire list is more diverse. Historically, the Esquire list. There is one translated work on One Story’s list and four on Esquire’s (the percentage of representations going in One Story’s favor). The earliest title on the Esquire list is Moby Dick (1851). The earliest title on One Story’s list is “The Dead” (1914). The most recent title on Esquire’s list is Winter’s Bone (2007). The most recent title on One Story’s list is ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” (2004). James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are the only writers on the One Story not from the United States.

The glaring difference between the two is that Esquire’s list is nearly devoid of female writers. Only one, Flannery O’Connor, is given the “Should Read” distinction, and anyone should be able to immediately think of women writers they’d include. Indeed, it is as if Esquire set out to piss women off. In fact, of all female American writers, O’Connor’s work could arguably be considered the most masculine (she blinds preachers and kills children). But I think you’re lying to yourself if you look at both lists and see One Story’s as more inclusive. Arguably, One Story set out to offend. Where is Poe? Where is Hemingway? Faulkner? Chekov?

It is most likely expected that One Story’s scope would be more narrow, as they probably offered this list as guidance for the throngs of emerging writers who beleaguer that publication with submissions continuously; however, I’m not certain how the same could not be said of Esquire, who themselves publish fiction and take submissions. And, if you were to look at Esquire’s list as advice of what to read before submitting, you would again find a much broader appreciation for varieties of form. James M. Cain and Jorge Luis Borges. Try to find two people on the One Story list with literary aims further removed from the mainstream.

No, the One Story list is as safe as the Esquire list is offensive, and in that regard is just as nauseating. I’m not entirely certain what to make of either. Why the polarization? Why the exploitation of emotions? Attention: as long as people pander to the edges there will be no advancement. It’s as American politics works today. Affirmation less than information. Enrage rather than engage.

It’s all so boring that it should be covered with dust. And it is.