Bunch of Amateurs Read Free Page A

Amateur Theatre of the Air
, which dates to the early 1930s and gave us the careers of Beverly Sills and Frank Sinatra. And before radio, various small theaters thrived on weekly amateur shows, like Miner’s Bowery Theater in Manhattan, which discovered Eddie Cantor, or Halsey’s Theater in Brooklyn, where Jackie Gleason first appeared. And before that, vaudeville would tour the country and perform in the local opera houses. The shows typically featured a local amateur contest—both to draw nearby audiences into the seats to watch their neighbors perform and, given the chance, to discover someone they could convince to tour with them, as they did Bob Hope and Milton Berle.
    These amateur nights weren’t just entertainments but confirmations of what Americans believe is true in every sphere. There is no realm that is understood to be off-limits to the lowest or newest citizen here. Americans affirm this idea in every aspect of their vernacular life (“Anybody can grow up to be President”). It’s the essential faith of the amateur and the creed of America. It’s why George Washington opted to be called Mr. President instead of going with the pompous alternative “Your Excellency.” Every four years voters typically affirm their suspicion of “professional politicians” by elevating an inexperiencedpol to the White House (with, arguably, a very wide range of results). The amateur narrative is encoded in our national DNA.
    The cyclical return to the garage is happening now, as Americans sense that some great turn in history has come. It’s time to tear down the fortresses and build them again, which is always traumatic. When one of the
New Republic
’s professional writers, Lee Siegel, was discovered to have posed online as his own fan, fluffing himself with cringe-inducing praise, he was suspended. The people who brought him down were bloggers who figured out that he was engaging in sockpuppetry (yes, there already was a word for online onanistic praise). Later, Siegel wrote a book about how horrible these amateur journalists were that were attacking him. “I love the idea of the amateur—that’s what popular culture is all about,” he told
New York
magazine. “But what the Internet’s doing is professionalizing everyone’s amateuristic impulses.”
    I don’t quite understand what that sentence means, but I think it’s safe to say that the pros occupying the barricades of expertise never like it when it happens.
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
was a bestseller devoted to the lament—also a perennial when amateurs appear—that the great palaces of tradition are being wrecked by constant attacks from unschooled outsiders. It’s one more entry on the bookshelf of apocalyptic American literature. But this is not the end of anything. This is the gyre of our own history coming around once again. What I want to argue here is that the cult of the amateur, once you step back, is the soul of America.

    After hiking out of the Gungywamp, I went back to the state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, and pressed him on some of the details. Hesuddenly shifted his tone, if not his position. “It’s well within the range of probability that Irish monks came here,” he told me. “It’s just that we still have no physical evidence for it.” It seemed strange that he would hedge so quickly, but once I looked into the history of this kind of history, Bellantoni’s caution did not seem so strange.
    The source of Gungywampers’ optimism about their theory goes back to 1960, when scholars ate a big helping of archaeological crow with the discovery of a Viking encampment in the New World, specifically at L’Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland. The man who made the find was a self-taught amateur and one-idea obsessive. Helge Ingstad was a lawyer by training and small-town politician (governor for three years of a Norwegian territory in the Arctic, the Svalbard Islands). Eminent scholars