Sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due. In this case, I have to give credit to “Regular Car Reviews”, mostly for doing something I never had the courage to do.
When I wrote my first print column for Bicycles Today magazine some twenty-four years ago, I was already deeply and thoroughly involved in the navel-gazing quasi-discipline of English lit-crit. I could spout chapter and verse about text and meaning and the New Criticism and Eliot and Pound and so on and so forth. I approached this stuff with the deadly seriousness commonly reserved by saner people for the handling of radioactive waste or irritated ligers. I bristled at the mention of “authors” like John Grisham or Anne Rice. I made a permanent enemy of a professor for standing up in the classroom and describing our reading assignment of the week, Mary Gordon’s Men And Angels, as “the sort of culturally impoverished white trash garbage that appeals to the moron within every so-called intellectual prole whose parents earned their living by digging ditches and waiting tables.”
When my professor turned crimson, I then said, “But what could I expect from someone whose idea of a scholarly work is a —” and here I sneered as best I could while wearing a bright-red Chicago Bulls Starter jacket, “—hagiography of someone like E.L. Doctorow.” At the end of the semester, when I received a “B” from that fellow, one of just two “B”s I’d receive from that department over the course of four and a half years, I resolved to punch this guy in the face the next time I saw him, a plan I confessed to another faculty member and was promptly shamed out of pursuing. What can I say. I was, and remain, an uneasy mix of painfully shy intellectual and pit-road assailant, and I never know which half of me is going to show up at any given time.
This inclination towards the pedantic has always mixed uneasily with my chosen topics of public discourse, and it’s often caused me to be unnecessarily recondite about…
…okay, hold on. Let me try again. Sometimes I’ve messed up perfectly good articles about bikes and cars and guns by trying to elevate the tone unnecessarily. As you can see in the previous one-sentence “paragraph”. Over the course of my writing career, I’ve tried to sneak in everything from first-person Updike riffs sprinkled between the Profile cranks and “Leary” BMX tricks to a discussion of John Fowles and the Viper TA. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’ve always thought of the lit-nerd stuff as seasoning to mainstream writing, not the main course of a dish you could serve to the one billion English-speaking monkeys out there on their computers across the globe.
The Regular Car Reviews guys, on the other hand, as Robert Downey, Jr. would say, “go full retard” every chance they get. Except the “full retard” is really something like “full pop-culture lit-crit.” This interview says it all:
“We know how to do a close reading, and we can approach a car from both the primary source, which is the car itself, and all secondary sources,” said Mr. R. It’s important to be able to look at a car and find “what influenced this car in the time of its design… what was going on in the world, or in the local community, where the design firm was. When the car was being made. And possibly how can you make an argument, with whatever was going on in the world, affecting this car.”
Oh, boy. The phrase “close reading” is the literature major’s equivalent of “reharmonization” or “Gantt chart”. The word “reading” doesn’t always mean “reading”; you can perform a “close reading” of anything from Pulp Fiction to a sculpture. The word “close” really means “divination”. As in, you’re trying to guess the author’s intent, both conscious and unconscious. Mr. Regular’s further discussion in the paragraph indicates that he is one of those “close readers” who focuses heavily on context. Not everyone does, which is why some Shakespeare critics are obsessed with source texts and contemporary performance notes and others prefer to read the plays as bare texts without a single thought as to what life was like at the Globe Theatre or in the Elizabethan period.
As a consequence, the Regular Car Reviews are rarely about the cars themselves. They’re about the cars in context. As such, they combine the guilty pleasures of every VH1 “I Love The (Insert Decade Here)” show with the ego-stroking reassurances people of my generation got from knowing some of the references in the song “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” I can still remember my girlfriend’s roommate singing that song and then patiently explaining what “JFK - blown away!” meant. My God, that was one stupid young woman. Unfortunately for me, she pushed all my buttons in the worst possible way. How odd to think that she long ago disappeared into the miasma of rural motherhood while I remain myself, at least to my eyes:
And I will go on shining
Shining like brand new
I never look behind me
And my troubles will be few
The RCRs have the sheen of intellectual accomplishment without the substance. Like a film studies class, they provide a veneer of deep thought, carelessly glued to the fiberboard of pop culture junk. But in a world where the average person spends more time listening to Drake or the Zac Brown Band than they do reading an actual book, they represent a genuine service to car people. I have no doubt that many viewers have opened up Wikipedia and spent time learning about a diverse array of topics after hearing some of those topics popping up in an RCR.
In short, they’re like Thin Mints. They’re not good for you, but you could do worse.
Mr. Regular is now a co-columnist of mine at Road&Track. In his honor, I wrote a rebuttal of his debut piece. I’m hoping we’ll have many more chances to tread this kind of loamy soil, rich with easily-gleaned significance and sugary-sweet with the frothiest sort of intellectual satisfaction.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to turn from Jekyll to Hyde, fire up my motorcycle, and ride it down the sidewalk next to the city daycare.
You almost slid the Zac Brown band over to intellectual-bad-bad-bad.
I dated a woman who wouldn’t shut up about the Zac Brown Band. I wanted to be more mean-spirited about it than I was but I thought — hmmm, maybe that’s the reason she’s willing to date a 240-pound man with a full beard.
Jack, you put into words exactly how I’ve felt about ‘Mr. Regular’ from the moment I heard the first (and nearly only) word out of his mouth. Totally the guy to drop a Derrida quote in front of girls. He seems funny to guys that want to feel smart, so they laugh at the references they don’t get even harder. Boring as fuck and half as funny.
I mean, just look at that quote you included from them. Can’t even separate the message from the medium, caught up in the image of ‘intellectualism’. You’re explaining why you use that style, you weren’t supposed to engage in it while trying to explain it! And the pop culture references he makes seem to want to give the impression of some intellectual nonchalance, yet his whole schtick seems built around just adding a sheen of smart to otherwise cliched takes. (Sorry for all the comments today)
You would have been a muy caballero swordsman in Golden Age Spain. (You should see Viggo Mortensen’s performance as the fictional historical character Diego Alatriste, in the movie made of Perez-Reverté’s series of Alatriste books. Not great lit, but not bad, and a great way to spend a couple of hours. Also the kind of movie you can enjoy and a woman with you will enjoy significant parts as well.)
But I want to know (a) have you seen the movie from the 60’s or 70’s where Elliott Gould is a grad student, who gets badgered by a prof at his orals, trying to force him to acknowledge that Fitzgerald’s Zelda was really a man-if you never saw it, the movie is worth it for that one scene of acting alone. And (b) if you have, was that before or after you launched WW III with the prof in your lit class?
I too blazed through my upper division, once a discovered things better than beer, things that didn’t interfere with comprehension of computer theoretical stuff. But I had one prof, a frustrated grad student who was a brillian compiler guy, but was never going to make his Ph.D.
And he had a theory that no one should graduate engineering school with a 4.0, so he waited til the last week of class before finals to give out his semester programming projects for his ALGOL compiler. Most of the students could do them over the summer after taking an “I”, but he knew I had booked a graduation trip to Mexicco and Colombia for a month, the week after class ended. So I graduated with a 3.97 insteead of a 4.0, while my arch-nemesis avoided him, and dodged a B.
I was more than a little pissed, though traveling in Latin America while getting by with my Spanish was a fairly sweet revenge. And I could have taken him out, but it just wasn’t worth the blowback. And he was on his way up the ranks of the chess world, and I didn’t want to scramble his brains. I mean I did, but I didn’t.
But just as you tend to win more than your fair share of lotteries, I have had more than a fair share of success seeing people who wronged me end up metaphorically on a tire wall, or doing an agricultural detour of their chosen life course.
But poor Charley ended up catchin some rare brain infection a couple of years later, and died in his mid thirties. I mean, I did want revenge, but not that much. Thouhgh I had nothing to do with his demise.
But as you figured out, it often isn’t worth the blowback, and often karma, while not instant, may be swift and decisive. I have hairier stories than the one about Charley, but they are not for here. One involved an evil snitch who came to an end I had longed to bring, for what he almost did to my former life, but he met an ugly end at a time when I was in a classroom with two dozen other people, a thousan miles away. Just one of four or five such things, though not all involved death.
So I have learned that if a situation demands redress, often it does not demand that I provide that redress.
Redress has a way of happening to those who merit it.
But I would give a lot of things to have a GoPro version of your classroom tirade.
Now tell me how you really feel about that reading assignment. 🙂
Did people label you “An Excitable Boy”? Jusat wondering. I was a much angrier young man than I am now, mostly because I have managed to eliminate a lot of things from my life that used to bring me to what I believed was righteous anger.
Though I am not as sure now as I was then…as Dylan aptly put it “I Was So Much Older Then, I’m Younger Than That Now.”
But that edge is still there, just below the surface. And every once in a while, some *-hole who richly deserves it gets in my crosshairs. And when they do, I am not hindered in the least by fading youth, or any other reason.
Some things simply must be put in one’s crosshairs. But I believe that you, like I, have learned to hang back for most relatively minor irritations. But do not tread on me, one does so at their own risk. And it is not idle boasting…
A coffee table book of photography of Sicily has a photo of a Sicilian fisherman-smuggler, who is quoted as saying that “Mafia is not first an organization. It is first about never suffering so much as a fly to land on your nose without making it pay for the insult.”
I like to think that he and I would have gotten along well, understanding clearly each other’s boundaries.
The rest of civilization? Depends on the person, the day of the week, and the nature of their actions…but I too don’t like to allow even a fly on my nose, and I will bet that you are the same.
Would I be missing the mark here, or not?
I won’t pretend to fully grasp the moribund, yet felicitous undertones of this piece, Jack. That’s a ring into which I’d rather not step, suffice to say I immediately understood what you meant by “reading” despite never hearing it used in that way prior. Which, I guess, is meant to be a compliment.
My own one-sentence paragaphs (hmph, clever typo - it stays) pale in comparison. I’d like to offer that I like the cut of your jib, sir; and thoroughly enjoy reading your work, only slightly less, methinks, for the topics than the style. There’s a certain pleasure which stems from partaking of something deliciously substantive.
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
Loved it, man. I read Mr Regular’s piece and found it annoying. The mocking of the professional intellectual while posturing as an intellectual is something of which I’ve grown tired. The ‘what intellectuals don’t know about the world’ trope is tedious. His story deserved a rebuttal, and I hope you’ll continue to provide clever responses - I always enjoy your work!
The 403 was not a big block.
Strictly speaking, you’re correct. It was a big-bore small block.
“big block” and “small block” are technically only valid terms for Chevrolet engines, based on their bore spacing. The 265/283/305/327/350/400 are “small blocks,” the 396/427/454 are “big blocks.” The terms have been “bolted on” to other engine families, either based on arbitrary characteristics (crank journals or deck height) or clear delineations (Chrysler A/LA vs. B/RB.) I don’t even know how one would determine what constitutes a Ford small block/big block given their unholy mess of engine families back then.
The Oldsmobile “big block” has an inch more deck than the “small block” — we’re not exactly talking about the size difference between a mouse and rat motor. But yeah, I agree. People like to make their distinctions, no matter how useful they are…
true. Pontiacs had the small journal and large journal engines, Olds had the short deck and tall deck.
IMO the only non-GM manufacturer to have a clear division between “small” block and “big” block V8s is Chrysler, with the LA 273/318/340/360 on the small end and the 383/413/426/440 on the big side.
While they can be entertaining, a little bit of Regular Car Reviews goes a long ways, and the style is ripe for parody.
OTOH, the guy is probably making some good coin from YouTube and managed to swing a column at R&T. Have to respect that.
“…titanium-bladed Cuisinart.”
Am I reading too much into this reference? Given that I know you’re aware of the ephemeral nature of any Cuisinart-branded item, I don’t think I am. Cleverly left handed.
I think this may be one reason I’m still holding onto this comparatively ancient I30: I can’t imagine anyone trying to figure out exactly where it fits into the Zeitgeist.
Above the Maxima but below the ES300?
Fair enough. I try not to take the Infiniti badge too seriously — if anyone asks, I will happily divulge that it’s basically “a Maxima in a prom dress” — but I do get a lot more obsequiousness from the parts counter at the Infiniti dealership than I ever did from any Nissan store, and I’m just old enough now to appreciate the virtues of being sucked up to.
After graduating with his MBA in Literature, Mr. Regular may well have found himself to be a part of an intellectually enlightened, yet highly unemployable caste of people. Under mountains of debt and few financially viable prospects, his freshly jaded reality offered little hope in professional wordsmithing. When avoiding his shame was no longer possible, a beat up old car turned subject of scorn proved to be platinum material on YouTube. Suddenly his rotating public outbursts of pandering intellectualism mixed with filth began entertaining thousands of young adults who had perhaps outgrown their old noisy Honda civics, but unfortunately now believe having a twirly mustache and suspenders in Brooklyn is cool.
Did I do my “close reading” right?
Mr. Regular’s straw-man professor embodies the same tropes as the self-righteously whinging Arthur Foyt character from the Cannonball Run movies. Like a lot of stereotypes done for laughs, there’s a kernel of truth wrapped in a thick husk of hyperbole.
I *did* laugh … but, I’m also the right age to remember that in the late 70s, Cadillac’s monster 500-cube V-8s were struggling to pull land-yacht de Villes from 0-60 in 11 seconds. At that same time, Volvo and Saab were building 9-second cars with turbo 4-bangers of literally 1/3 the size. As a kid I learned that the V-8 motor only sometimes lives up to its fabled exceptionalism - not unlike America itself.
To paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes a car is just a car.
said every Camcord buyer ever (present company excepted.)
I think that to the extent that there was no clearcut difference in blocks, and people just arbitrarily assigned those names, many people seem to feel that any engine over 400ci is a big block engine, and those of lesser displacement are small block engines. Of course, that doesn’t hold completely true even for the one pair of blocks that has a clear distinction and that almost splits along that line, namely mouse motors vs. rat motors.