I admit it. I want to rewind the clock to 1850, when there was some kind of consensus in Universities about what the “Great Books” were in each discipline. I want to sit in dusty libraries in Oxford, studying the Roman poets, Milton and Shakespeare. I want a high, leather-backed chair, a pipe, a tweed coat and mahogany furniture. Things are too confusing nowadays…
I want people in academia and society at large to come to some kind of agreement that we are all, in some sense, working together to make sense of the world. I want people to stop calling each other racists and sexists and promoting the idea that nobody can understand or relate to anybody else’s experience—the idea that there is no such thing as common Human experience (Love? Death? Youth? Aging? Fear?) and dismissing the past as something wrongheaded, dangerous and best forgotten.
I admit, too, that I believe that some books are better than others because they manage to encapsulate experiences and feelings that most people can relate to--even though these are rarely the most popular books, because the majority of the people don’t read much and therefore lack the skills necessary to make sense of complicated sentences, or are so preoccupied with their own lives that they cannot connect with the experiences of fictional characters whose lives, on the surface, seem different from their own.
The charge of “elitism” that has been leveled again and again at the traditional canons of literature is both valid and not so. In Maoist China, the People’s Army threw doctors out of hospitals and replaced them with ordinary, medically untrained citizens on the grounds that specialization was “elitism,” and that everybody is “good enough” to be a doctor. These new “doctors” performed operations: patients bled to death or died of infections.
It is certainly true that past canons of Western literature seriously underrepresented just about everybody except Anglo/Christian and Helleno/Pagan men. It is true also that they tended to favor certain forms and themes to the total exclusion of others. This has been changing, albeit slowly, and must continue to change. But it is not necessary to burn something to the ground in order to improve upon it. Shakespeare may be a “dead white man,” but his plays are only as dead as we are deadened to their language and meaning. Have we produced more powerful expressions of the emotions connected with young love than Romeo and Juliet? Have we managed to capture the alienation of old age better than King Lear does? Falstaff, Richard III, Hamlet—has anybody come up with more complex and living characters than these? Maybe. But cultural artifacts aren’t like computers—obsolete after four years and replaceable. The best ones hold their charge, because they say something we may once have known, but have forgotten, or have never heard said in quite that way before…
I grew up without much of a sense of history. I dropped out of AP World History because the book was just too dense. All I remember from High School Roman History is Caligula's "minnows." My seventh grade American History class, which was taught by the football coach, was a disaster: I spent the whole year occupied with trying (and failing) to memorize details like whether the “Shot Heard Around the World” was fired in Lexington or in Concord.
In fact, most of my reading over the years has been limited to fiction. Much of what I know about history comes from novels: I learned some of the history of Russia from Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky. From Dickens I learned a little about Victorian England. Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers showed me the American South, pre- and postwar. Most recently, I’ve been seeing the Old West through Cormac McCarthy’s eyes. Getting your history this way has its obvious disadvantages, in that some of the work of interpreting the past has been done for you, but it does teach me how people, wherever and whenever, shape and are shaped by external circumstances.
Increasingly, I’m becoming convinced that studying actual history is essential, too, if we don’t want to be blown around aimlessly forever in the winds of political and social fashion.
Even if the formal discipline of history has become the same kind of theoretical quagmire everything else is, it at least has the advantage of being in the past. Time has passed, people have thought and written about what any given historical event meant to the people who lived through it, and what new meanings it may have acquired over time. Historians may debate the causes leading up to the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan, but there is a finite and immutable sequence of events and pile of evidence there for us to interpret.
I understand that things get more complicated the more closely you look at them, and that just about everything has multiple causes and meanings. But causes and meanings are not infinite—they cannot be, because they are limited by the factors that give any thing its thing-ness. “Ulysses” will never contain one word more or less than it now contains. The trap into which I fear we have blithely pranced during my lifetime (though the foot was lifted maybe 10 years before I was born) is one in which, because everything is possible, nothing is possible. Because everything is equally valid, nothing has validity. People call each other names—speak from within mutually unintelligible frameworks.
This has recently manifested in the form of attacks on the media by both “Liberals” and “Conservatives.” Three times in the past two weeks I have heard somebody say that the New York Times is “the liberal media.” The Republican government has (unsuccessfully, thank God) tried this year to shape the content of National Public Radio’s programming to include more “conservative” messages, so that each program would be “balanced.” And every good liberal knows that Fox News can’t be trusted because it is run by Rupert Murdoch, an arch-conservative.
The bottom line of all this is the total erosion of the idea of “objective” reality. It is one thing to problematize objectivity—it is quite another to utterly annihilate it. The “trustworthy” source of information, in this climate, becomes the one that reinforces whatever subjective beliefs you already hold. Those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened in Germany have websites supporting and reinforcing their “position.” Those who, in the face of incontrovertible, carbon-dated evidence of the biological development of species, continue to insist that Adam and Eve populated the Earth 4000 years ago, are publicly defended by our president and by powerful lobbyists, who feel that “all sides of the issue” deserve a voice. There is no “issue.” Carbon-dating is not a matter of faith. By being “fair” to Creationism, you render science meaningless: simply another “choice” among many.
If the Great Libraries were to burn to the ground tomorrow, would we be hard pressed to decide between saving “The Canterbury Tales” or Stephen King’s “Pet Sematery”? Some might answer: “Yes. Absolutely. There is no empirical qualitative difference. The judgment that “The Canterbury Tales” is superior to “Pet Sematery” is the result of class-based aesthetic and moral tendencies that are relevant only to a small portion of the population.” But I would maintain that humanity would profit more by the preservation of “The Canterbury Tales” than by that of the Stephen King book, simply because the former is more densely packed with human nature and experience. “Pet Sematary” is scary and fun, but “The Canterbury Tales,” if all else were lost, could remind us of who we once were and re-teach us how to communicate.
I’m talking about criteria, both aesthetic and philosophical, for what constitutes badness, okayness, goodness and greatness in, well, in anything, but for now let’s stick with literature. I don’t pretend to believe that I am in a position to establish these criteria; they must represent the consensus of as many readers and writers as possible, and they must be flexible, so as to accommodate future development--so as not to become a kind of “Academie Francaise” of snooty culture police.
“Consensus” is the key word here: If we could begin with some kind of agreement that everything is not completely relative, the next logical step would be to try to outline what we do know. Then, at least, we could have a conversation...
Friday, June 23, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
A Crazy and True Vignette. I Swear That This Really Happened, and That I Was Witness to it…
It was 1992 or 93. One Summer day, my then-companion and I were in the East Village, on the Eastern side of Tompkins Square Park (Avenue B, I think it is). She was in a used furniture store (a garage in which a man was selling furniture he had found on the sidewalk, in front of the garage), browsing, and I was waiting outside.
From a deli adjacent to the garage there suddenly sprang a young black man, running like a bat out of hell. Several seconds later, the Chinese storeowner burst forth in hot pursuit. The latter, in an attempt to fell the kid, leapt into the air, poised to deliver a mean-looking flying sidekick. The kid, by this time, was out of range, and disappeared around the corner. Meanwhile, the Chinese storeowner, who had hung, suspended in the air, for what felt like a minute or two, descended, delivering his powerful kick straight through the grill of a truck parked in front of the used furniture garage. His foot was stuck in the plastic grill, which now had a foot-sized hole in it, and from the base of which coolant was now pouring out onto the street. With some difficulty (and, I'm thinking, embarassment), the storeowner extracted first his foot, then his shoe from the broken grill and limped back into his store.
From a deli adjacent to the garage there suddenly sprang a young black man, running like a bat out of hell. Several seconds later, the Chinese storeowner burst forth in hot pursuit. The latter, in an attempt to fell the kid, leapt into the air, poised to deliver a mean-looking flying sidekick. The kid, by this time, was out of range, and disappeared around the corner. Meanwhile, the Chinese storeowner, who had hung, suspended in the air, for what felt like a minute or two, descended, delivering his powerful kick straight through the grill of a truck parked in front of the used furniture garage. His foot was stuck in the plastic grill, which now had a foot-sized hole in it, and from the base of which coolant was now pouring out onto the street. With some difficulty (and, I'm thinking, embarassment), the storeowner extracted first his foot, then his shoe from the broken grill and limped back into his store.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Paradise Delayed
So it is Tuesday, June 20, and I am not in Turkey. At 2:30 PM last Friday, two hours before D—and I had to leave for Newark airport, she discovered that my passport had expired on May 19th of this year. I blanched, began trembling, and almost burst into tears. After many months (years, even—we tried to arrange this trip last Summer, but couldn’t get out of the country due to D’s pending green card status) of meticulous planning, I stood, once again, face to face with the big red hand of Denial. “No,” said the Hand. “You shall not pass.” “Nay, Hand,” said I—“I am Man, and would be master of material things: warden, protector, and landscape designer of the Earth. It is my birthright as the thinking animal—the one with the opposable thumbs. Stand aside.” The hand was silent, immobile, unimpressed.
Well, what you can’t hack through or climb over, you have to walk around. D—flew to Turkey. I came down to Maryland to spend the week with my folks and resolve this passport situation. If all goes as planned, I’ll fly out this Friday from Dulles.
Yesterday I went to a 24 hour Passport Procurer in Silver Spring. The man, whose name was Steve, weighed at least 400 pounds and was in a kind of Humpty Dumpty costume: Red suspenders being the axis about which the outfit revolved. Behind him, to his right, sat a silent business associate with a prosthetic arm that might have been borrowed from a department store mannequin. The two men sat there, hemmed about by stacks of papers and files and strange historical bric-a-brac like traffic lights and an enormous brass motorboat throttle, as if some huge, insane child had placed them there long ago as centerpieces of a mad diorama.
Steve does passports, notarizing, faxes, printing, stamp-making and ID cards. Prominently posted about the office are signs reading:
1) “Only Robinson Crusoe gets his work done by Friday.”
2) “Your carelessness and lack of planning do not constitute my emergency.”
3) “Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.”
Let me address the first two: Steve’s Yellow Pages ad says “Passport in 24 hours!” “Emergency Passport service!” So, as I understand it, my carelessness and lack and planning should, by definition, constitute his emergency. Especially since he charges $200 on top of the $120 the government takes for an expedited passport. Also, if I come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and pay for 24-hour passport service, won’t Steve have to get this “work done by Friday”?
I sat on the couch awaiting my turn, next to the oxidized copper bas-relief of a lighthouse and an...island(?), my confidence eroding gradually but irrevocably, like the Pacific Coast Highway, as Steve shuffled about looking for lost passport applications…but what choice did I have? I, like all of Steve’s customers, am desperate, helpless. I will pay whatever he asks. I will run the risk of having my passport sold to Azerbaijani arms dealers because Steve has an “in” at the State Department, which will not give Joe Citizen, if he should walk in there, a new passport in less than two weeks. Me, I got to get to Turkey. I have to get it done by Friday. Please, Steve, bury not my papers amid thy towering stacks. Wrap not thy sandwich in it. Use it not to line thy cat box. I am in your swollen, meaty hands…
Well, what you can’t hack through or climb over, you have to walk around. D—flew to Turkey. I came down to Maryland to spend the week with my folks and resolve this passport situation. If all goes as planned, I’ll fly out this Friday from Dulles.
Yesterday I went to a 24 hour Passport Procurer in Silver Spring. The man, whose name was Steve, weighed at least 400 pounds and was in a kind of Humpty Dumpty costume: Red suspenders being the axis about which the outfit revolved. Behind him, to his right, sat a silent business associate with a prosthetic arm that might have been borrowed from a department store mannequin. The two men sat there, hemmed about by stacks of papers and files and strange historical bric-a-brac like traffic lights and an enormous brass motorboat throttle, as if some huge, insane child had placed them there long ago as centerpieces of a mad diorama.
Steve does passports, notarizing, faxes, printing, stamp-making and ID cards. Prominently posted about the office are signs reading:
1) “Only Robinson Crusoe gets his work done by Friday.”
2) “Your carelessness and lack of planning do not constitute my emergency.”
3) “Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.”
Let me address the first two: Steve’s Yellow Pages ad says “Passport in 24 hours!” “Emergency Passport service!” So, as I understand it, my carelessness and lack and planning should, by definition, constitute his emergency. Especially since he charges $200 on top of the $120 the government takes for an expedited passport. Also, if I come in on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and pay for 24-hour passport service, won’t Steve have to get this “work done by Friday”?
I sat on the couch awaiting my turn, next to the oxidized copper bas-relief of a lighthouse and an...island(?), my confidence eroding gradually but irrevocably, like the Pacific Coast Highway, as Steve shuffled about looking for lost passport applications…but what choice did I have? I, like all of Steve’s customers, am desperate, helpless. I will pay whatever he asks. I will run the risk of having my passport sold to Azerbaijani arms dealers because Steve has an “in” at the State Department, which will not give Joe Citizen, if he should walk in there, a new passport in less than two weeks. Me, I got to get to Turkey. I have to get it done by Friday. Please, Steve, bury not my papers amid thy towering stacks. Wrap not thy sandwich in it. Use it not to line thy cat box. I am in your swollen, meaty hands…
Friday, June 16, 2006
Bound For Distant Shores
Tomorrow morning, at this time, I will be in Istanbul, Turkey—which, as near as I can estimate, is around 8000 miles from here. It boggles the mind. The mind can’t process it. Like in the Summer of my seventh grade year, when I went out West on a trip with some classmates and Mr. Dyroff, the geology teacher, and remarked that the mountains in the distance looked like a painted backdrop. They still looked that way to me in 2003, when D—and I circled the country on our honeymoon.
Last night friends and I saw “The War Tapes”—an Iraq documentary pieced together from footage shot by soldiers during a yearlong tour of duty. Looking at the dead, dismembered bodies of “insurgents,” I was struck not by the intense, visceral reality of it all, but by the sense that, somehow, I was still disconnected from the experience. Watching the twin towers fall on CNN had a similar effect. Even going to Ground Zero, looking at the twisted, smoking metal felt somehow like being on a movie set. Strangely, what hit me most intensely was the sight of a shoe display in a store window near the site, all of the shoes covered in a thick layer of white dust. I thought all at once about the fact that some of that dust was once people—people who might have passed this display on their way home from work and stopped in to try on a pair of shoes.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is a brilliant exercise in trying to make people really experience an event that is removed from them in time and space. When you go in, as I remember, they give you a card to wear, which bears the photo and vital information of an actual person who died in a concentration camp. In a sense, you become that person for the duration of your visit.
You start at the top floor of the museum and gradually descend, stepping at one point through a boxcar that carried people off to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Piled next to the car are the real suitcases of deportees, who marked them with their names in hopes of claiming them again at journey’s end. In one empty, white room you sit on a wooden bench and listen to recordings of camp survivors telling their stories. There are piles of shoes, children’s drawings done in the camps, and an airshaft running from the top of the museum to the bottom, its walls filled with thousands of family photographs of victims.
Nobody talks. I was there with four other people and yet I remember it as an intensely solitary experience. Mostly I remember the kids’ drawings: Hanukkah candles, hopeful, happy stuff. Typical kids drawings that could have been done anywhere in the world, at any time, but happened to have been done inside a concentration camp, by kids who would not live to see their next birthdays.
So what controls how fully we experience things? Even things that are really happening to us, in present time, sometimes feel unreal and cinematic. And even those things that feel most real to us in the moment fade quickly into a kind of unreality in our memory—so that, when we try to recall them, we remember at most a flash of emotion, or a couple of isolated, seemingly random snapshots of related scenes. You try in vain to summon up the time, the place, the people, as a complete, organic reality. Complicating this even further is the almost unconscious way in which we reshape our memories into a sensible, more aesthetically pleasing narrative. I do this, I think, to an unusual extent: I don’t trust my own memory of events at all—of when, why, or how they happened, because in rethinking and retelling them I am always trying to make a better story. I’ll give you an example:
I remember the first time I got drunk. I was 13 years old and my parents had gone out for the evening, leaving me alone in the house for the first time. For some reason, they did not have their keys with them, so I was going to let them in when they got home.
I sat down in the family room to watch a rerun of “16 Candles” on tv (already, as I write this, I’m thinking that the release date of “16 Candles” may prove that I was older than 13 when this happened). I liked anything with Molly Ringwald in it. I thought she was cute. Suddenly the idea occurred to me to go get a full glass of Maneschewitz (sp?) Passover wine (the only alcohol I had ever been given before) and see what getting drunk felt like. I watched “16 Candles” and drank maybe 16 ounces of Maneschewitz. Then I got another glass and drank it, immersed in Molly Ringwald’s freckly cuteness. Then I started tasting other things—vodka, whiskey.
I passed out on the white couch. I woke up. I threw up purple wine all over the white couch. Drunkenly, I staggered to the kitchen, where I procured Glass Plus and a paper towel. Back in the family room I swabbed in vain at the spreading purple stain. Then I overturned the pillow, not noticing that the zipper side was now facing out. I passed out again. I awoke to the banging of my father’s fists on the glass family-room windows over my head. Remember, they didn’t have their keys with them. I let them in. Drunkenly, I muttered something about being very tired, excused myself and went to bed. The next morning I awoke at dawn, filled with terror, and ran into my parents’ room. Eavesdropping, I heard them discussing me, and drunkenness. I burst in: “I could not help overhearing,” I said, my voice dripping with righteous indignation, “the accusations you were making against me. I was not drunk last night. I was tired. I am shocked, amazed and disappointed that you would accuse me of such a thing!”
The matter was temporarily dropped. That day, I had a play rehearsal at school. My dad drove me there in silence, and afterwards he drove me home in silence. Entering the family room from the garage I saw my mother, my grandmother (what she was doing there I don’t know), and my sister standing around the overturned, deeply-stained couch-pillow. “It smells like wine,” said my mom. “Can I talk to you guys alone?” I said to my parents. My sister and my grandmother left the room. “Mom, dad,” I said, “I have been feeling depressed. Last night, I ate a bottle of aspirin. It made me throw up. I was drinking cranberry juice before, so that’s why it’s red. I didn’t want to tell you.” Their anger melted into compassion. Therapist visits were arranged. I went, every Wednesday night for the rest of that year, to an office in a man’s house, sat on his leather couch and talked about feeling depressed.
I have no idea which parts of this story are true and which I have made up completely or stitched together from other, unrelated events. Actually, I do know that I got drunk on Maneschiewitz, and that I passed out and threw up, and that my parents couldn’t get into the house. And that I did go, at one point, to a therapist with a leather couch and an office in his house. Beyond that…? I’m going to ask my parents for their version of the story, and publish it here in a later post.
9:40 pm, Newark Airport…D and I will be in Turkey for the next two months, but I’ll have Internet, so more thoughts, memories, and impressions are definitely forthcoming. Please stay tuned…
Last night friends and I saw “The War Tapes”—an Iraq documentary pieced together from footage shot by soldiers during a yearlong tour of duty. Looking at the dead, dismembered bodies of “insurgents,” I was struck not by the intense, visceral reality of it all, but by the sense that, somehow, I was still disconnected from the experience. Watching the twin towers fall on CNN had a similar effect. Even going to Ground Zero, looking at the twisted, smoking metal felt somehow like being on a movie set. Strangely, what hit me most intensely was the sight of a shoe display in a store window near the site, all of the shoes covered in a thick layer of white dust. I thought all at once about the fact that some of that dust was once people—people who might have passed this display on their way home from work and stopped in to try on a pair of shoes.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is a brilliant exercise in trying to make people really experience an event that is removed from them in time and space. When you go in, as I remember, they give you a card to wear, which bears the photo and vital information of an actual person who died in a concentration camp. In a sense, you become that person for the duration of your visit.
You start at the top floor of the museum and gradually descend, stepping at one point through a boxcar that carried people off to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Piled next to the car are the real suitcases of deportees, who marked them with their names in hopes of claiming them again at journey’s end. In one empty, white room you sit on a wooden bench and listen to recordings of camp survivors telling their stories. There are piles of shoes, children’s drawings done in the camps, and an airshaft running from the top of the museum to the bottom, its walls filled with thousands of family photographs of victims.
Nobody talks. I was there with four other people and yet I remember it as an intensely solitary experience. Mostly I remember the kids’ drawings: Hanukkah candles, hopeful, happy stuff. Typical kids drawings that could have been done anywhere in the world, at any time, but happened to have been done inside a concentration camp, by kids who would not live to see their next birthdays.
So what controls how fully we experience things? Even things that are really happening to us, in present time, sometimes feel unreal and cinematic. And even those things that feel most real to us in the moment fade quickly into a kind of unreality in our memory—so that, when we try to recall them, we remember at most a flash of emotion, or a couple of isolated, seemingly random snapshots of related scenes. You try in vain to summon up the time, the place, the people, as a complete, organic reality. Complicating this even further is the almost unconscious way in which we reshape our memories into a sensible, more aesthetically pleasing narrative. I do this, I think, to an unusual extent: I don’t trust my own memory of events at all—of when, why, or how they happened, because in rethinking and retelling them I am always trying to make a better story. I’ll give you an example:
I remember the first time I got drunk. I was 13 years old and my parents had gone out for the evening, leaving me alone in the house for the first time. For some reason, they did not have their keys with them, so I was going to let them in when they got home.
I sat down in the family room to watch a rerun of “16 Candles” on tv (already, as I write this, I’m thinking that the release date of “16 Candles” may prove that I was older than 13 when this happened). I liked anything with Molly Ringwald in it. I thought she was cute. Suddenly the idea occurred to me to go get a full glass of Maneschewitz (sp?) Passover wine (the only alcohol I had ever been given before) and see what getting drunk felt like. I watched “16 Candles” and drank maybe 16 ounces of Maneschewitz. Then I got another glass and drank it, immersed in Molly Ringwald’s freckly cuteness. Then I started tasting other things—vodka, whiskey.
I passed out on the white couch. I woke up. I threw up purple wine all over the white couch. Drunkenly, I staggered to the kitchen, where I procured Glass Plus and a paper towel. Back in the family room I swabbed in vain at the spreading purple stain. Then I overturned the pillow, not noticing that the zipper side was now facing out. I passed out again. I awoke to the banging of my father’s fists on the glass family-room windows over my head. Remember, they didn’t have their keys with them. I let them in. Drunkenly, I muttered something about being very tired, excused myself and went to bed. The next morning I awoke at dawn, filled with terror, and ran into my parents’ room. Eavesdropping, I heard them discussing me, and drunkenness. I burst in: “I could not help overhearing,” I said, my voice dripping with righteous indignation, “the accusations you were making against me. I was not drunk last night. I was tired. I am shocked, amazed and disappointed that you would accuse me of such a thing!”
The matter was temporarily dropped. That day, I had a play rehearsal at school. My dad drove me there in silence, and afterwards he drove me home in silence. Entering the family room from the garage I saw my mother, my grandmother (what she was doing there I don’t know), and my sister standing around the overturned, deeply-stained couch-pillow. “It smells like wine,” said my mom. “Can I talk to you guys alone?” I said to my parents. My sister and my grandmother left the room. “Mom, dad,” I said, “I have been feeling depressed. Last night, I ate a bottle of aspirin. It made me throw up. I was drinking cranberry juice before, so that’s why it’s red. I didn’t want to tell you.” Their anger melted into compassion. Therapist visits were arranged. I went, every Wednesday night for the rest of that year, to an office in a man’s house, sat on his leather couch and talked about feeling depressed.
I have no idea which parts of this story are true and which I have made up completely or stitched together from other, unrelated events. Actually, I do know that I got drunk on Maneschiewitz, and that I passed out and threw up, and that my parents couldn’t get into the house. And that I did go, at one point, to a therapist with a leather couch and an office in his house. Beyond that…? I’m going to ask my parents for their version of the story, and publish it here in a later post.
9:40 pm, Newark Airport…D and I will be in Turkey for the next two months, but I’ll have Internet, so more thoughts, memories, and impressions are definitely forthcoming. Please stay tuned…
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
From a Letter To A Friend
My Dear Man,
Yes—I called around Memorial Day weekend, in order to remind you not to forget our troops. Personally, I never forget them. Not for one second. Even as I write this they are hacking through the vines of my brain with machetes, bivouacking in my cranial folds, rationing biscuits among my neural dendrites. Our troops are cursing up a storm in my medulla oblongata, playing Texas Hold ‘Em with erotic playing cards. An ectoplasmic Bob Hope is doing a USO show in my frontal lobe, while Rita Hayworth shimmies in a floor-length Hermes gown. I try not to forget about our troops because if they were to forget about me, even for an instant, I would not be here writing to you. For it is by the will of our troops only that I have air in my lungs, and by their dispensation that blood courses through my veins. Who, gazing upon a peacock-blue sky or the distant, crenellated mountains, cannot discern the mark of our troops upon them? Why, even the tiniest flower bears their seal, their signature!
Lately, though, I have been somewhat troubled by certain...signs. For example, yesterday, while commuting to work, I was standing upon a streetcorner upon which it is my custom to stand of a morning, awaiting the bus. Yesterday, as you may remember, there were heavy rains throughout the morning, and the gutters were flooded to overflowing. All of a sudden, as I stood there, a minivan passed by close to the curb, splashing me with water, ruining my merino wool pants and my fine English shoes. At first I thought nothing of it, so occupied was I with wiping the mud from my shoes...but as the day progressed, an impish thought nagged at me, drive it away though I would: If, I reasoned, our troops are both Good and Always Thinking About Me, and if having one’s merino wool pants and fine English shoes ruined by a passing minivan are Bad, as I think you will agree they are, then how could this event ever have occurred?
With considerable mental effort, I managed to expunge this thought, but it left me badly shaken. This morning I arose early and headed for town, where I purchased a large quantity of yellow adhesive ribbons reading “Support Our Troops.” These I have affixed to many of my belongings, including my priceless T’ang Dynasty sugar bowl, in case doubt should again overtake me, and I forget by whose leave I live to enjoy these possessions. I advise you, as your friend, to do the same.
Sincerely,
Jason Gots
Yes—I called around Memorial Day weekend, in order to remind you not to forget our troops. Personally, I never forget them. Not for one second. Even as I write this they are hacking through the vines of my brain with machetes, bivouacking in my cranial folds, rationing biscuits among my neural dendrites. Our troops are cursing up a storm in my medulla oblongata, playing Texas Hold ‘Em with erotic playing cards. An ectoplasmic Bob Hope is doing a USO show in my frontal lobe, while Rita Hayworth shimmies in a floor-length Hermes gown. I try not to forget about our troops because if they were to forget about me, even for an instant, I would not be here writing to you. For it is by the will of our troops only that I have air in my lungs, and by their dispensation that blood courses through my veins. Who, gazing upon a peacock-blue sky or the distant, crenellated mountains, cannot discern the mark of our troops upon them? Why, even the tiniest flower bears their seal, their signature!
Lately, though, I have been somewhat troubled by certain...signs. For example, yesterday, while commuting to work, I was standing upon a streetcorner upon which it is my custom to stand of a morning, awaiting the bus. Yesterday, as you may remember, there were heavy rains throughout the morning, and the gutters were flooded to overflowing. All of a sudden, as I stood there, a minivan passed by close to the curb, splashing me with water, ruining my merino wool pants and my fine English shoes. At first I thought nothing of it, so occupied was I with wiping the mud from my shoes...but as the day progressed, an impish thought nagged at me, drive it away though I would: If, I reasoned, our troops are both Good and Always Thinking About Me, and if having one’s merino wool pants and fine English shoes ruined by a passing minivan are Bad, as I think you will agree they are, then how could this event ever have occurred?
With considerable mental effort, I managed to expunge this thought, but it left me badly shaken. This morning I arose early and headed for town, where I purchased a large quantity of yellow adhesive ribbons reading “Support Our Troops.” These I have affixed to many of my belongings, including my priceless T’ang Dynasty sugar bowl, in case doubt should again overtake me, and I forget by whose leave I live to enjoy these possessions. I advise you, as your friend, to do the same.
Sincerely,
Jason Gots
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Brooklyn
When I was at NYU, nobody I knew lived in Brooklyn. Crossing the East River was like crossing the Mississippi must have seemed to the first settlers who did it: a scary and irrevocable transgression. Across the water lay, to my knowledge, only “Domsey’s”—a multi-storeyed used clothing store in Williamsburg to which friends and I would occasionally venture, passing on the way through the Satmar Hasidic neighborhoods, whose residents we would eye with voracious anthropological curiosity. Who could live there? It would be like moving onto an Amish farm! Good pretzels, but where’s the bar? Furthermore, we reasoned back then, who wants to have to take a subway across the river after late night rehearsals? No, no…Brooklyn simply wasn’t done.
In 1995 I moved from New York to Santa Fe (more on that later), and from there, two years later, to Jerusalem (more on that later, too.). Then to DC for three years, and finally, inevitably, back to New York in September 2001—three days or so before the Two Towers came down (coincidentally, I assure you.)
By 2001, everybody was living in Brooklyn. Rents in Manhattan were ludicrous, laughable! Mostly people lived in Williamsburg—an industrial wasteland suddenly peppered with very hip restaurants, nightclubs and art galleries, many featuring indoor ponds, for some reason. I was prejudiced against W-burg from the outset, having heard about its recent explosive hipness and fearing that living there would be like moving back into an NYU dorm. My first post-NY-homecoming visit to the area (to see a friend) immediately confirmed my worst suspicions: Stepping out of the subway in Williamsburg before me was a young man in his early twenties with an Atari symbol tattooed on his upper arm.
These days I just think Williamsburg is ugly. I go there now and then to see shows or eat at a restaurant, and the shows and the food are always good, but the place still feels like a graveyard of warehouses: everything square and brick and industrial—no trees, no parks, no kids laughing and playing.
The neighborhood I moved to that September, and where I live now, is called Kensington. It has no definite character—being a collage of “All In the Family” style townhouses and postwar apartment buildings, demographically a mixture of recent immigrants from China, the former Soviet republics, and Bangladesh, alongside more entrenched, working-class Italians. No one nationality dominates—it is truly the American Melting Pot, or Mosaic, or Tossed Salad, or Jackson Pollock painting. Recently the “artisten” (a Yiddish term used by the Hasidim to disparagingly describe the young, mostly white hipsters that are invading their neighborhoods), of which I suppose I am one, have begun discovering this place. Why not? It’s affordable, 30 minutes from the Lower East Side, clean and safe. Park Slope, which is within walking distance, has extended its pseudopod up 7th Ave. as far as 20th St., which borders this neighborhood, and will no doubt continue seeping our way.
Some of my Kingsborough students said recently of Brooklyn that they would feel less comfortable here, walking hand-in-hand with a lover of a different race, than in Manhattan—the lines between neighborhoods and cultures, in most of Brooklyn, being so deeply drawn. My Grandmother Beatrice, who died two Thanksgivings ago, used to say that when she was a kid here, an Italian kid crossing into a neighboring Jewish block would get beat up, and vice versa. A West Indian student of mine last semester told me that there is some kind of cultural pride parade every year on Kings Highway, and that if you happen to try to party on the Hatiian float, and you happen not to be Haitian, they will stab you with a knife. So I guess times haven’t changed all that much.
Still, go to Prospect Park on any sunny day in the Spring or Summer and you will see Brooklyn in her full glory—the whole world in microcosm, every continent, culture, and sexual orientation in evidence—everybody playing, laughing, enjoying the sun the trees and the sky. Nobody’s stabbing anybody. Some kids might be throwing water balloons at each other, but that’s as aggressive as it gets.
But Brooklyn is changing, fast. The developers are all over the waterfront. Coney Island is getting a multi-million (billion?) dollar facelift. Bruce Ratner and Frank Gehry will soon be building this massive complex downtown: a stadium encircled by jutting, crystalline towers…people I know have already started to make the unthinkable, irrevocable pilgrimage across that little tributary of the East River, into Queens.
In 1995 I moved from New York to Santa Fe (more on that later), and from there, two years later, to Jerusalem (more on that later, too.). Then to DC for three years, and finally, inevitably, back to New York in September 2001—three days or so before the Two Towers came down (coincidentally, I assure you.)
By 2001, everybody was living in Brooklyn. Rents in Manhattan were ludicrous, laughable! Mostly people lived in Williamsburg—an industrial wasteland suddenly peppered with very hip restaurants, nightclubs and art galleries, many featuring indoor ponds, for some reason. I was prejudiced against W-burg from the outset, having heard about its recent explosive hipness and fearing that living there would be like moving back into an NYU dorm. My first post-NY-homecoming visit to the area (to see a friend) immediately confirmed my worst suspicions: Stepping out of the subway in Williamsburg before me was a young man in his early twenties with an Atari symbol tattooed on his upper arm.
These days I just think Williamsburg is ugly. I go there now and then to see shows or eat at a restaurant, and the shows and the food are always good, but the place still feels like a graveyard of warehouses: everything square and brick and industrial—no trees, no parks, no kids laughing and playing.
The neighborhood I moved to that September, and where I live now, is called Kensington. It has no definite character—being a collage of “All In the Family” style townhouses and postwar apartment buildings, demographically a mixture of recent immigrants from China, the former Soviet republics, and Bangladesh, alongside more entrenched, working-class Italians. No one nationality dominates—it is truly the American Melting Pot, or Mosaic, or Tossed Salad, or Jackson Pollock painting. Recently the “artisten” (a Yiddish term used by the Hasidim to disparagingly describe the young, mostly white hipsters that are invading their neighborhoods), of which I suppose I am one, have begun discovering this place. Why not? It’s affordable, 30 minutes from the Lower East Side, clean and safe. Park Slope, which is within walking distance, has extended its pseudopod up 7th Ave. as far as 20th St., which borders this neighborhood, and will no doubt continue seeping our way.
Some of my Kingsborough students said recently of Brooklyn that they would feel less comfortable here, walking hand-in-hand with a lover of a different race, than in Manhattan—the lines between neighborhoods and cultures, in most of Brooklyn, being so deeply drawn. My Grandmother Beatrice, who died two Thanksgivings ago, used to say that when she was a kid here, an Italian kid crossing into a neighboring Jewish block would get beat up, and vice versa. A West Indian student of mine last semester told me that there is some kind of cultural pride parade every year on Kings Highway, and that if you happen to try to party on the Hatiian float, and you happen not to be Haitian, they will stab you with a knife. So I guess times haven’t changed all that much.
Still, go to Prospect Park on any sunny day in the Spring or Summer and you will see Brooklyn in her full glory—the whole world in microcosm, every continent, culture, and sexual orientation in evidence—everybody playing, laughing, enjoying the sun the trees and the sky. Nobody’s stabbing anybody. Some kids might be throwing water balloons at each other, but that’s as aggressive as it gets.
But Brooklyn is changing, fast. The developers are all over the waterfront. Coney Island is getting a multi-million (billion?) dollar facelift. Bruce Ratner and Frank Gehry will soon be building this massive complex downtown: a stadium encircled by jutting, crystalline towers…people I know have already started to make the unthinkable, irrevocable pilgrimage across that little tributary of the East River, into Queens.
Eulogy For Joseph S. Gots, My Grandpa--Died this Easter
My grandfather, who we always called Pop-Pop, was a man of few words—the cliché “still waters run deep” might have been invented for him. As far back as I can remember, he presided over our family’s Passover table: Passover was always magical—never perfunctory, never boring or rushed. When Pop Pop opened the door and announced that Elijah was coming to drink the wine, you believed it—and the surprise on his face when we all opened our eyes and saw that the cup was empty—was always real, even though, being the curious soul that I was, I had peeked once and seen Pop-Pop quickly downing Elijah’s cup.
I remember him as strong, solid, sometimes formidable, often very funny. For some reason so many of my memories of Pop-Pop are connected with Passover. Here’s another one: every year, when he would hide the afikomen (the matzo at the end of the meal), the hiding place would become more difficult, the riddle more complex. I wish I could remember some of the hiding places—I think one was behind a mirror and another was in a book—what I remember is that he was playful and smart. He was challenging our intellects (mine and my sister’s). He deliberately made the thing progressively more challenging to push us to think harder—to use our brains. I think I always knew, even before I had much of a concept of intellect, that Pop Pop was a very smart guy. That meant, and means something to me—it lends a kind of genetic reassurance to my own sense of self.
Also, he and Mom-Mom traveled all over the world, and were always showing us slides and seashells. That, without question, inspired and continues to inspire me to see life not as a mindless, money-making venture but as an opportunity to reach out and to learn—as an adventure. I have traveled, often thinking of his and mom-mom’s legacy, to Finland, France, Turkey, Mexico, Costa Rica, Leningrad and other countries, and travel will always be an important part of my family’s life. I also want to learn to scuba dive—maybe this Summer in Turkey where it’s easy to get certified because they’re not as concerned as we are about safety.
I am a teacher, like he was. Although my work is more in the realm of words and ideas and imaginary people than in cells and Petri dishes, I am motivated, as he was, by curiosity and the firm belief that, if you pay close enough attention, there are things to discover in this world. I do not exaggerate when I say that Pop-Pop’s life and work lend me a sense of deep entitlement to stand in front of students and teach. Like him, I try to make them laugh. Like him, I push them to think, to ask questions, and not to trust easy answers. Unlike him, I don’t throw worms at the students, or mix the occasional nude lady in with my slides. But that’s only because the former wouldn’t make much sense in a Literature class, and the latter would get me summarily fired.
Beyond all of this, I loved him—he was and always will be an enigmatic, powerful, and inspiring figure to me. I remember his kindness, his patience, his stillness, and the sense he always had of a deep wisdom mixed with playfulness—as if he were somehow very ancient and very very young at the same time. I believe he was a good man and I’m proud that he was my grandfather. He was what I think grandfathers are supposed to be to grandsons: a good example of how to be a man.
I remember him as strong, solid, sometimes formidable, often very funny. For some reason so many of my memories of Pop-Pop are connected with Passover. Here’s another one: every year, when he would hide the afikomen (the matzo at the end of the meal), the hiding place would become more difficult, the riddle more complex. I wish I could remember some of the hiding places—I think one was behind a mirror and another was in a book—what I remember is that he was playful and smart. He was challenging our intellects (mine and my sister’s). He deliberately made the thing progressively more challenging to push us to think harder—to use our brains. I think I always knew, even before I had much of a concept of intellect, that Pop Pop was a very smart guy. That meant, and means something to me—it lends a kind of genetic reassurance to my own sense of self.
Also, he and Mom-Mom traveled all over the world, and were always showing us slides and seashells. That, without question, inspired and continues to inspire me to see life not as a mindless, money-making venture but as an opportunity to reach out and to learn—as an adventure. I have traveled, often thinking of his and mom-mom’s legacy, to Finland, France, Turkey, Mexico, Costa Rica, Leningrad and other countries, and travel will always be an important part of my family’s life. I also want to learn to scuba dive—maybe this Summer in Turkey where it’s easy to get certified because they’re not as concerned as we are about safety.
I am a teacher, like he was. Although my work is more in the realm of words and ideas and imaginary people than in cells and Petri dishes, I am motivated, as he was, by curiosity and the firm belief that, if you pay close enough attention, there are things to discover in this world. I do not exaggerate when I say that Pop-Pop’s life and work lend me a sense of deep entitlement to stand in front of students and teach. Like him, I try to make them laugh. Like him, I push them to think, to ask questions, and not to trust easy answers. Unlike him, I don’t throw worms at the students, or mix the occasional nude lady in with my slides. But that’s only because the former wouldn’t make much sense in a Literature class, and the latter would get me summarily fired.
Beyond all of this, I loved him—he was and always will be an enigmatic, powerful, and inspiring figure to me. I remember his kindness, his patience, his stillness, and the sense he always had of a deep wisdom mixed with playfulness—as if he were somehow very ancient and very very young at the same time. I believe he was a good man and I’m proud that he was my grandfather. He was what I think grandfathers are supposed to be to grandsons: a good example of how to be a man.
The Squid Is Not Conventionally Handsome
The squid is not conventionally handsome.
His sliminess and tentacles are strange.
And then there is the matter of that one enormous eye
Staring at you quizzically as he’s floating by
Who would conceive of such a thing? Or more precisely, why?
But much as we might like him to, the squid will never change.
The squid is really very sweet and tender
If you can see beyond his ugliness
He finds transcendent joy, I’m told, in memorizing Yeats
And sometimes stops and weeps, it’s said, at cemetery gates
And cares much more for intellect than sex appeal in mates
But sadly, I admit, he is repulsive nonetheless.
His sliminess and tentacles are strange.
And then there is the matter of that one enormous eye
Staring at you quizzically as he’s floating by
Who would conceive of such a thing? Or more precisely, why?
But much as we might like him to, the squid will never change.
The squid is really very sweet and tender
If you can see beyond his ugliness
He finds transcendent joy, I’m told, in memorizing Yeats
And sometimes stops and weeps, it’s said, at cemetery gates
And cares much more for intellect than sex appeal in mates
But sadly, I admit, he is repulsive nonetheless.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Age 13: The Michael Jackson Phase
When I was in Six and Seventh grade, which are universally recognized to be circles of hell worse than anything Dante could imagine, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson. Nowadays, people throw that word "obsessed" around a lot: "I'm, like, so OBSESSED with Wittgenstein!"--but this Michael Jackson thing was a true, possibly clinical obsession.
Nothing sexual here--at the time I was a budding (though still closeted) heterosexual, nursing crushes on 1) the cute and very popular blond girl in the class and 2) the cute and very popular curly redheaded girl in the class. My thing with Michael was more identity-worship: wanting to BE him. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to me why a sensitive little fella like myself, adrift in the maelstrom of adolescence, would want to be somebody else. BUT WHY HIM?? Well, this was the Eighties--"Thriller" had come out recently and, to the rest of the world outside of my Six and Seventh grade classes, was one of the coolest albums ever. Michael was the man. I wanted me some of that cool. Thing was, all the people in my life who were in a position to acknowledge or deny my coolness--i.e. my schoolmates--thought Michael Jackson was gay, and that anyone who liked him (or worse, wanted to BE him) was gay by association. Being gay, in the worlds of most 13 year olds, even in these more enlightened times, is very much like being a leper was in the Bible. If 13 year olds had the power to create a "gay colony" and exile to it anyone suspected of this offense, they would definitely do so.
But for me, in my world, Michael Jackson was BAD. I videotaped his performance of "Billie Jean" on the Grammys and rewound it a thousand times to learn the moonwalk and that leg-shaking move (anybody know what that was called?). I dressed, for Halloween, in a costume my mother had made (Enabler!) of that sort of glittering international diplomat outfit he had, with the epaulets. I had the Thriller jacket, which I reluctantly purchased from the women's department of Hecht's because that's the only place you could get it, and lived in fear that somebody might one day notice that the zipper was on the wrong side.
I had two "the glove"s: one, from Spencer Gifts (anyone remember that place? I remember scratching my head as a, like, 10-year-old in front of the edible underwear and the 2-person "funderwear"), was covered in rhinestones, and was less ghetto (and therfore more highly prized) than the one onto which my mother had painstakingly sewn thousands of sequins.
In Michael Jackson drag I went one time to a roller rink with my friend Jason Smink. I had on the diplomat outfit, Porsche Carrera sunglasses (fake), and "the glove." As I skated around to "Eye of the Tiger," which always filled me with an undefined sense of optimism and power, I caught the eye of a young lass, who I remember as being somewhat rabbit-toothed (my aesthetic demands being all out of proportion to my reality, given that I was a complete and utter Geekazoid from the Planet Geekzor). She approached my friend, as was the custom in those days, and gave him her number to give to me. Of couse I never called her: rabbit-teeth notwithstanding, I was terrified of girls.
My Sixth grade year culminated in a thing called "Punk Party," a party I co-hosted in the gameroom of my house with a popular boy from our class (this alliance being a well-advised political move for me). We decorated the gameroom in crepe streamers, spelling out "Punk Party" on the wall, and people sprayed their hair with temporary green and blue dye from this place in Georgetown...something Lizard...repository of silver skull rings, dog-collars, and all things subversively cool. I dressed as Michael Jackson at the Grammys (bowler hat, sparkly sash, yellow pants, loafers). Everybody from the class was invited--this party was a very sweet attempt on the part of my mom (who wore a kind of Pat Benetar/Olivia Newton John getup to it, with a t-shirt that said "Get Physical") to popularize me with my peers.
For hours we danced to the soundtrack to "Footloose" (this being, after all, a Punk Party), ate chips and m&m's, and had a good time. I kissed the curly redheaded girl and we were "going out."
At a predetermined time, the party transitioned to the Family Room, where, in front the big screen tv (one of those early, three-color projection numbers) playing the video of Michael Jackson's Grammy performance of "Billie Jean," I dance-synched the same routine. It was received ok: the crowd was feeling indulgent, having gorged itself on Kenny Loggins and m&m's. They clapped, we took photos, and everybody went home flushed and happy. It was a kind of drunkenness--all that glitter and music and junk food and dancing and punked-out hair...
PART TWO--IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN
So the Fall saw my entrance to St. Albans School For Boys, a gothic, Dickensian, ivy-covered bastion of Anglophilic education in the shadow of the Washington Cathedral (the school was started for choir boys around the turn of the last century, after, I believe, they had stopped castrating them). At STA there was a pretty strict dress code: Jackets, ties and slacks were the norm, though turtlenecks and sweaters were also permissible. Any kinds of shoes were ok, which in Eighth grade resulted in my accompanying a navy-blue ensemble with multicolored, fluorescent Vans hightops. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
Seventh Grade, Halloween. I dress as MJ--the Grammy outfit again, I think. At lunch the MC (a teacher) calls me up to the microphone to be introduced to the school and to receive the prize for "the costume we least want to see ever again." Everbody laughs and laughs. I slink, lizardlike, away.
This experience puts me in mind of the scene in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (one of the greatest films, EVER, as far as I'm concerned) where Sir Richard Burton gives a drunken monologue (did he ever give any other kind?) about when he was a kid, how he went out to a drinking hall with his classmates, taken there by the "gangster father" of one of them, and ordered "bergen"--and how, for the rest of the night, people were ordering "bergen" and laughing, and pointing at him and laughing again.
As a 13 year old kid, new to the school, I didn't have a sense of humor about my little affliction. I was a morbidly sensitive little dude, which is not a good thing to be at St. Albans (or any boy's school, I imagine), where things can get way Darwinian--very "humiliate-or-be-humiliated." I went home crying to my folks, who promptly called the teacher who had given me the prize and demanded a public retraction.
This was the worst thing imaginable. The next day, at lunch, I was called up to the mic again to receive a Michael Jackson puzzle and a public apology. If it were possible to evaporate at will, I would have become a faint gaseous trace and drifted up through the roof of the Refectory and into the Washington sky.
But negative publicity is still publicity, and all of this put me on the St. Albans map, laying the groundwork for a future coolness and sense of belonging that, at the time, I could only dimly imagine. People forgot about the incident, but they knew who I was. All of the Michael Jackson paraphenalia were consigned to a dresser drawer, the posters came down and were replaced by John Lennon, U2, the Who and the Cure. When the album "Bad" came out, I didn't even buy it. Over the next few years, I would do some more shape-shifting, becoming a "preppy," a "hippie" and a "goth," but never again would I stand before a poster, praying to wake up as somebody, anybody other than me.
Nothing sexual here--at the time I was a budding (though still closeted) heterosexual, nursing crushes on 1) the cute and very popular blond girl in the class and 2) the cute and very popular curly redheaded girl in the class. My thing with Michael was more identity-worship: wanting to BE him. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to me why a sensitive little fella like myself, adrift in the maelstrom of adolescence, would want to be somebody else. BUT WHY HIM?? Well, this was the Eighties--"Thriller" had come out recently and, to the rest of the world outside of my Six and Seventh grade classes, was one of the coolest albums ever. Michael was the man. I wanted me some of that cool. Thing was, all the people in my life who were in a position to acknowledge or deny my coolness--i.e. my schoolmates--thought Michael Jackson was gay, and that anyone who liked him (or worse, wanted to BE him) was gay by association. Being gay, in the worlds of most 13 year olds, even in these more enlightened times, is very much like being a leper was in the Bible. If 13 year olds had the power to create a "gay colony" and exile to it anyone suspected of this offense, they would definitely do so.
But for me, in my world, Michael Jackson was BAD. I videotaped his performance of "Billie Jean" on the Grammys and rewound it a thousand times to learn the moonwalk and that leg-shaking move (anybody know what that was called?). I dressed, for Halloween, in a costume my mother had made (Enabler!) of that sort of glittering international diplomat outfit he had, with the epaulets. I had the Thriller jacket, which I reluctantly purchased from the women's department of Hecht's because that's the only place you could get it, and lived in fear that somebody might one day notice that the zipper was on the wrong side.
I had two "the glove"s: one, from Spencer Gifts (anyone remember that place? I remember scratching my head as a, like, 10-year-old in front of the edible underwear and the 2-person "funderwear"), was covered in rhinestones, and was less ghetto (and therfore more highly prized) than the one onto which my mother had painstakingly sewn thousands of sequins.
In Michael Jackson drag I went one time to a roller rink with my friend Jason Smink. I had on the diplomat outfit, Porsche Carrera sunglasses (fake), and "the glove." As I skated around to "Eye of the Tiger," which always filled me with an undefined sense of optimism and power, I caught the eye of a young lass, who I remember as being somewhat rabbit-toothed (my aesthetic demands being all out of proportion to my reality, given that I was a complete and utter Geekazoid from the Planet Geekzor). She approached my friend, as was the custom in those days, and gave him her number to give to me. Of couse I never called her: rabbit-teeth notwithstanding, I was terrified of girls.
My Sixth grade year culminated in a thing called "Punk Party," a party I co-hosted in the gameroom of my house with a popular boy from our class (this alliance being a well-advised political move for me). We decorated the gameroom in crepe streamers, spelling out "Punk Party" on the wall, and people sprayed their hair with temporary green and blue dye from this place in Georgetown...something Lizard...repository of silver skull rings, dog-collars, and all things subversively cool. I dressed as Michael Jackson at the Grammys (bowler hat, sparkly sash, yellow pants, loafers). Everybody from the class was invited--this party was a very sweet attempt on the part of my mom (who wore a kind of Pat Benetar/Olivia Newton John getup to it, with a t-shirt that said "Get Physical") to popularize me with my peers.
For hours we danced to the soundtrack to "Footloose" (this being, after all, a Punk Party), ate chips and m&m's, and had a good time. I kissed the curly redheaded girl and we were "going out."
At a predetermined time, the party transitioned to the Family Room, where, in front the big screen tv (one of those early, three-color projection numbers) playing the video of Michael Jackson's Grammy performance of "Billie Jean," I dance-synched the same routine. It was received ok: the crowd was feeling indulgent, having gorged itself on Kenny Loggins and m&m's. They clapped, we took photos, and everybody went home flushed and happy. It was a kind of drunkenness--all that glitter and music and junk food and dancing and punked-out hair...
PART TWO--IT ALL COMES CRASHING DOWN
So the Fall saw my entrance to St. Albans School For Boys, a gothic, Dickensian, ivy-covered bastion of Anglophilic education in the shadow of the Washington Cathedral (the school was started for choir boys around the turn of the last century, after, I believe, they had stopped castrating them). At STA there was a pretty strict dress code: Jackets, ties and slacks were the norm, though turtlenecks and sweaters were also permissible. Any kinds of shoes were ok, which in Eighth grade resulted in my accompanying a navy-blue ensemble with multicolored, fluorescent Vans hightops. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
Seventh Grade, Halloween. I dress as MJ--the Grammy outfit again, I think. At lunch the MC (a teacher) calls me up to the microphone to be introduced to the school and to receive the prize for "the costume we least want to see ever again." Everbody laughs and laughs. I slink, lizardlike, away.
This experience puts me in mind of the scene in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (one of the greatest films, EVER, as far as I'm concerned) where Sir Richard Burton gives a drunken monologue (did he ever give any other kind?) about when he was a kid, how he went out to a drinking hall with his classmates, taken there by the "gangster father" of one of them, and ordered "bergen"--and how, for the rest of the night, people were ordering "bergen" and laughing, and pointing at him and laughing again.
As a 13 year old kid, new to the school, I didn't have a sense of humor about my little affliction. I was a morbidly sensitive little dude, which is not a good thing to be at St. Albans (or any boy's school, I imagine), where things can get way Darwinian--very "humiliate-or-be-humiliated." I went home crying to my folks, who promptly called the teacher who had given me the prize and demanded a public retraction.
This was the worst thing imaginable. The next day, at lunch, I was called up to the mic again to receive a Michael Jackson puzzle and a public apology. If it were possible to evaporate at will, I would have become a faint gaseous trace and drifted up through the roof of the Refectory and into the Washington sky.
But negative publicity is still publicity, and all of this put me on the St. Albans map, laying the groundwork for a future coolness and sense of belonging that, at the time, I could only dimly imagine. People forgot about the incident, but they knew who I was. All of the Michael Jackson paraphenalia were consigned to a dresser drawer, the posters came down and were replaced by John Lennon, U2, the Who and the Cure. When the album "Bad" came out, I didn't even buy it. Over the next few years, I would do some more shape-shifting, becoming a "preppy," a "hippie" and a "goth," but never again would I stand before a poster, praying to wake up as somebody, anybody other than me.
What I'm Reading Now
I suspect that this post will be of limited interest to anybody but, um, me--but maybe the topic will serve as a springboard to broader ramblings. I just finished "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (subtitled "A Study in Human Nature"), which is a series of lectures delivered by William James in England (I think) around 1902. Basically, he is analyzing religious experience--people's individual, private, widely varying experiences of the divine--and asking the question: "Is there anything in this religion thing?" He believes that there definitely is. Not in organized religion, whose political will to power/survival he blames for many of the atrocities that besmirch the name of "religion," but in the "purer," more "original" experiences of saints and musts and holy madmen/women from which religion's baser forms are derived.
He is a "pragmatist," in that he looks first at religion's effects on the lives of the religious-- and at their effect, in turn, upon the world. If, he says throughout the book, we discover that religiosity is fruitful for life in a positive way, then metaphysical speculation about what form exactly God should take (a six-armed goddess, an invisible force, many gods) is irrelevant. That is, if religion "works," then "how" it works is a secondary consideration.
But he does end up by considering this, too, and concludes that there is, indeed, something like God, which is somehow connected with our subconscious minds, and that prayer (or any act of active communion with that Something) can connect us to and imbue us with positive, powerful, healing, creative energies that we can use in our lives. He bases this on the numerous cases he has examined (many of which are excerpted in the book) of individuals who claim to have had a personal experience of God (in whatever form).
James is a tremendously enjoyable writer, and the case studies he includes are fascinating to read. His writing style (in this book at least) is warm, colorful, engaging, natural, informal, and often very funny. He also offers a devastating (and incredibly prescient) critique of what has recently come to be known as the "intelligent design" theory--pointing out that the human mind has a tendency to arrange reality into patterns--noticing and remembering only those elements of reality that organize themselves neatly. If you gave me a pile of beans, he says, I could take them away one by one until only a neat grid of beans remained on the table, and I could tell you that the pattern had been concealed there from the beginning. He points out that, in reality, there is infinitely more chaos in the world than order.
But he does not deny anybody the right (or the necessity) to experience religion according to their nature and abilities. Quite the opposite, in fact--James suggests that the variety of religious experience is in accordance with the variety of human nature: happy-go-lucky natures tending toward a Disney-fied kind of religion (which he calls "the religion of healthy-mindedness") and more dour, and according to James, deeper natures tending toward a more problematized, complex, graver view of God (he calls this type of nature "the sick soul," and accords it more respect than the "healthy minded" nature--pointing out that the "sick soul" is keenly aware of both the beauties and the horrors of the world, and must somehow reconcile them. I must confess to taking a certain narcissistic pleasure in the fact that I am definitely of the psychological type James describes in this lecture. Go Hamlet!). In both cases, also, there is the matter of degree/intensity of religious experience, and both "types," James points out, have their destructive and productive extremes.
Sometimes when reading this book I found myself scoffing at ideas that seemed antiquated or just silly--like when the author explains that alcohol and...it was either nitrous oxide or ether...put the human mind into a semi-mystical state of connectedness with a higher, unifying power. Also, I generally found it hard to swallow his belief that the religious state creates positive, healing energy in people's lives. But then again, I am definitely to some extent a product of the materialist scientific schools James criticizes as being blind to any aspect of reality that is not right in front of their noses. He says that religious experiences, and for that matter "God" (in its many forms) are FACTS, in that people have experienced and can describe them, and that the limiting of the definition of "fact" to things that are objectively visible, cold, and dead, is a mistake. Facts, he says, do not have to be objective.
A great book--I will definitely be dealing with the ideas in it for a long time to come.
Now that I've finally finished it--it took me a couple of months (what with school and doing absolutely nothing every day after coming home from school except reading blogs and playing "Super Mario Bros")--I'm starting Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" (God I love that title...). It is AWESOME (If I may be permitted to revert to middle-school Valley Girl for a sec). I'm just 50 pages in and am already in utter awe at the man's explosive use of the English language--like Pynchon self-limited to the use of black, white, and red. It is beautiful and violent and breathtaking--poetic and vulgar--the Western raised to epic, universal status. I'm even starting to like the quotation mark-less dialogue. The only thing that kinda sticks in my craw (though I might end up liking it, too) is McCarthy's constant use of weird, archaic terminology I've never heard before--architectural terms, names of now-defunct tools--I don't know where he learned all of it. I don't think anybody else has ever heard of a "guyrope" or a "vernier sight" or a "tang." On the one hand, it's cool--it lends the book atmosphere--authenticity. On the other hand, I have no idea what the hell half these things are and it would sort of disrupt the aesthetic pleasure of reading the book to go running for a dictionary of Western vernacular every five minutes. Happily, McCarthy obviously just doesn't give a shit: an essential characteristic of every great artist.
It would be hilarious to write a book "designed by committee"--that is, on the premise that you, the writer, had taken into consideration the individual critical opinions of hundreds (or thousands) of readers, and tried to please all of them. It is hard to imagine what such a book would look like. Actually, this is how most Hollywood movies are made...
I've been meaning to read McCarthy for a while now. A guy I used to live with in Santa Fe ten years ago was reading “Blood Meridian” and got me interested in it. Then my mom bought me The Border Trilogy but, for some reason I found it too dense to get into the two times I tried. I'll definitely be trying again. Then, recently, the New York Times polled a couple hundred writers and thinkers about the "best 25 American books of the 20th century." While many of them agreed that this was a ridiculous and impossible task, they did manage to vote, and "Blood Meridian" was way up on the list. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" was number one. I remember reading it in high school at the behest of my then girlfriend, and liking it--but I haven't read it since. Also high on the list were Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain"--both of which are on my Summer reading list.
I have two other reading projects going on simultaneously: 1) The Great Religious Books of the West and 2) American Studies.
1) I started this project sometime last Fall--the idea being to read the New Testament (which I had never read cover to cover), the Qu'aran, and The Tanakh (a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament with the books in the pre-Christianized order and maybe plus or minus a text or two). I read the NT and maybe 150 pages of the Qu'aran and had to drop it for school-related reading (Orwell's 1984). I will definitely be getting back to it...
2) I picked up a number of non-fiction books, mostly collections of essays, that fall under the heading of "American Studies," an academic discipline whose existence I have recently learned of, and in which I'm very interested. Interestingly, one of the books, by Louis Menand, begins with an essay entitled something like "the meaning of William James' nervous breakdown."
I'll be taking these books with me to Turkey. Between studying Turkish on CD-Rom, reading them, visiting with people, and traveling when my folks and grandmother get there, it looks like I'll be keeping busy, which, for me, is a very good thing.
He is a "pragmatist," in that he looks first at religion's effects on the lives of the religious-- and at their effect, in turn, upon the world. If, he says throughout the book, we discover that religiosity is fruitful for life in a positive way, then metaphysical speculation about what form exactly God should take (a six-armed goddess, an invisible force, many gods) is irrelevant. That is, if religion "works," then "how" it works is a secondary consideration.
But he does end up by considering this, too, and concludes that there is, indeed, something like God, which is somehow connected with our subconscious minds, and that prayer (or any act of active communion with that Something) can connect us to and imbue us with positive, powerful, healing, creative energies that we can use in our lives. He bases this on the numerous cases he has examined (many of which are excerpted in the book) of individuals who claim to have had a personal experience of God (in whatever form).
James is a tremendously enjoyable writer, and the case studies he includes are fascinating to read. His writing style (in this book at least) is warm, colorful, engaging, natural, informal, and often very funny. He also offers a devastating (and incredibly prescient) critique of what has recently come to be known as the "intelligent design" theory--pointing out that the human mind has a tendency to arrange reality into patterns--noticing and remembering only those elements of reality that organize themselves neatly. If you gave me a pile of beans, he says, I could take them away one by one until only a neat grid of beans remained on the table, and I could tell you that the pattern had been concealed there from the beginning. He points out that, in reality, there is infinitely more chaos in the world than order.
But he does not deny anybody the right (or the necessity) to experience religion according to their nature and abilities. Quite the opposite, in fact--James suggests that the variety of religious experience is in accordance with the variety of human nature: happy-go-lucky natures tending toward a Disney-fied kind of religion (which he calls "the religion of healthy-mindedness") and more dour, and according to James, deeper natures tending toward a more problematized, complex, graver view of God (he calls this type of nature "the sick soul," and accords it more respect than the "healthy minded" nature--pointing out that the "sick soul" is keenly aware of both the beauties and the horrors of the world, and must somehow reconcile them. I must confess to taking a certain narcissistic pleasure in the fact that I am definitely of the psychological type James describes in this lecture. Go Hamlet!). In both cases, also, there is the matter of degree/intensity of religious experience, and both "types," James points out, have their destructive and productive extremes.
Sometimes when reading this book I found myself scoffing at ideas that seemed antiquated or just silly--like when the author explains that alcohol and...it was either nitrous oxide or ether...put the human mind into a semi-mystical state of connectedness with a higher, unifying power. Also, I generally found it hard to swallow his belief that the religious state creates positive, healing energy in people's lives. But then again, I am definitely to some extent a product of the materialist scientific schools James criticizes as being blind to any aspect of reality that is not right in front of their noses. He says that religious experiences, and for that matter "God" (in its many forms) are FACTS, in that people have experienced and can describe them, and that the limiting of the definition of "fact" to things that are objectively visible, cold, and dead, is a mistake. Facts, he says, do not have to be objective.
A great book--I will definitely be dealing with the ideas in it for a long time to come.
Now that I've finally finished it--it took me a couple of months (what with school and doing absolutely nothing every day after coming home from school except reading blogs and playing "Super Mario Bros")--I'm starting Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" (God I love that title...). It is AWESOME (If I may be permitted to revert to middle-school Valley Girl for a sec). I'm just 50 pages in and am already in utter awe at the man's explosive use of the English language--like Pynchon self-limited to the use of black, white, and red. It is beautiful and violent and breathtaking--poetic and vulgar--the Western raised to epic, universal status. I'm even starting to like the quotation mark-less dialogue. The only thing that kinda sticks in my craw (though I might end up liking it, too) is McCarthy's constant use of weird, archaic terminology I've never heard before--architectural terms, names of now-defunct tools--I don't know where he learned all of it. I don't think anybody else has ever heard of a "guyrope" or a "vernier sight" or a "tang." On the one hand, it's cool--it lends the book atmosphere--authenticity. On the other hand, I have no idea what the hell half these things are and it would sort of disrupt the aesthetic pleasure of reading the book to go running for a dictionary of Western vernacular every five minutes. Happily, McCarthy obviously just doesn't give a shit: an essential characteristic of every great artist.
It would be hilarious to write a book "designed by committee"--that is, on the premise that you, the writer, had taken into consideration the individual critical opinions of hundreds (or thousands) of readers, and tried to please all of them. It is hard to imagine what such a book would look like. Actually, this is how most Hollywood movies are made...
I've been meaning to read McCarthy for a while now. A guy I used to live with in Santa Fe ten years ago was reading “Blood Meridian” and got me interested in it. Then my mom bought me The Border Trilogy but, for some reason I found it too dense to get into the two times I tried. I'll definitely be trying again. Then, recently, the New York Times polled a couple hundred writers and thinkers about the "best 25 American books of the 20th century." While many of them agreed that this was a ridiculous and impossible task, they did manage to vote, and "Blood Meridian" was way up on the list. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" was number one. I remember reading it in high school at the behest of my then girlfriend, and liking it--but I haven't read it since. Also high on the list were Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain"--both of which are on my Summer reading list.
I have two other reading projects going on simultaneously: 1) The Great Religious Books of the West and 2) American Studies.
1) I started this project sometime last Fall--the idea being to read the New Testament (which I had never read cover to cover), the Qu'aran, and The Tanakh (a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament with the books in the pre-Christianized order and maybe plus or minus a text or two). I read the NT and maybe 150 pages of the Qu'aran and had to drop it for school-related reading (Orwell's 1984). I will definitely be getting back to it...
2) I picked up a number of non-fiction books, mostly collections of essays, that fall under the heading of "American Studies," an academic discipline whose existence I have recently learned of, and in which I'm very interested. Interestingly, one of the books, by Louis Menand, begins with an essay entitled something like "the meaning of William James' nervous breakdown."
I'll be taking these books with me to Turkey. Between studying Turkish on CD-Rom, reading them, visiting with people, and traveling when my folks and grandmother get there, it looks like I'll be keeping busy, which, for me, is a very good thing.
Music, the Poconos
So I just spent the past two days in a resort/timeshare in the Pocono mountains, near the Delaware Water Gap, sitting with my father and my brother-in-law David on plastic couches, swapping cds and talking. This was technically the "Manis Girls' Weekend"--an annual event (as of last year) brought about by the passing of my Grandma Bea and her imprecation to my Aunt Judy to "keep the girls together." Somehow the men of the family ended up as part of the whole thing--we get our own townhouse and do not see the females for three days. It's kinda silly, but kinda fun too. It's really the only time I ever get to spend basically one-on-one with my pops.
Last year it was just me and him in the Boys' house. We canoed down the Delaware river for four hours, which caused me to get heatstroke (because, like a complete idiot, I failed to put on any sunscreen) and be confined to my bed for the rest of the day and night. This year, it was me, David (my sister's husband) and my Dad, and outside there raged a biblical storm--so it was vinyl, beer, whiskey and music, punctuated by a couple of meals out.
My dad just got an ipod--60GB--and is in a process, not unlike the Google/Library of Congress Scan Everything Project, of putting all of his music into it. Mostly he has jazz (an extensive collection based on recommendations by a dour but aesthetically acute uncle of mine who sometimes writes Jazz criticism in magazines) and old musicals like Brigadoon. On this visit, he was open to new influences, so I chose a stack of my CDs for him to rip, including some fairly challenging (for my dad) material ( Gogol Bordello, Radiohead) , and some tamer stuff (Beth Orton, Nick Drake).
While we were ripping CDs, we talked about why I hate Frank Sinatra: how our generation has a completely different sense of authenticity in music from my dad's generation--I find most crooners (johnny Hart, Johnny Mathis, Sinatra, Bennett) soulless and difficult to tolerate. My dad, on the other hand, can't seem to get into Bob Dylan. "That voice! It's like nails on a chalkboard! How did that guy ever get a recording contract?!"
We also talked about musical self-education: how David and I, when we were kids, systematically bought and listened to everybody IMPORTANT (to modern music)--Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, The Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols. How nowadays we just listen to whatever we have any reason at all to believe we might like--because the foundational understanding is there to anchor anything new that comes along. That sounds kind of fusty and square--like all new music must somehow be contextualized within the neural net of everything that's come before in order to have meaning...but I suppose it's true, for me, that most worthwhile pieces of art can be understood better in relation to their influences, than simply on their own terms.
We listened to Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed on the radio. His advice to writers was something like: "Write in such a way that your reader will not feel that his time has been wasted."
On the way back home, we passed a kind of Bosnia of roadside deer corpses, including that of a very tiny fawn. It was quite sad. I don't understand why there were so many recently dead deer along that one stretch of route 80--there were six or seven.
In other animal news, there was a family of groundhogs living in a huge hole/tunnel at the foot of the steps to our townhouse. Every time we would come home, they would run out from under the house (God knows what they get up to under there...) and disappear into the hole like three fat croquet balls in quick succession. Also, there was a small bird with a worm in its mouth who kept trying to peck through the sliding glass door this morning. When that failed, he tried running against it a couple of times.
What else shall I tell you, dear reader? Let's leave it there, for now.
--Jason
Last year it was just me and him in the Boys' house. We canoed down the Delaware river for four hours, which caused me to get heatstroke (because, like a complete idiot, I failed to put on any sunscreen) and be confined to my bed for the rest of the day and night. This year, it was me, David (my sister's husband) and my Dad, and outside there raged a biblical storm--so it was vinyl, beer, whiskey and music, punctuated by a couple of meals out.
My dad just got an ipod--60GB--and is in a process, not unlike the Google/Library of Congress Scan Everything Project, of putting all of his music into it. Mostly he has jazz (an extensive collection based on recommendations by a dour but aesthetically acute uncle of mine who sometimes writes Jazz criticism in magazines) and old musicals like Brigadoon. On this visit, he was open to new influences, so I chose a stack of my CDs for him to rip, including some fairly challenging (for my dad) material ( Gogol Bordello, Radiohead) , and some tamer stuff (Beth Orton, Nick Drake).
While we were ripping CDs, we talked about why I hate Frank Sinatra: how our generation has a completely different sense of authenticity in music from my dad's generation--I find most crooners (johnny Hart, Johnny Mathis, Sinatra, Bennett) soulless and difficult to tolerate. My dad, on the other hand, can't seem to get into Bob Dylan. "That voice! It's like nails on a chalkboard! How did that guy ever get a recording contract?!"
We also talked about musical self-education: how David and I, when we were kids, systematically bought and listened to everybody IMPORTANT (to modern music)--Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, The Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols. How nowadays we just listen to whatever we have any reason at all to believe we might like--because the foundational understanding is there to anchor anything new that comes along. That sounds kind of fusty and square--like all new music must somehow be contextualized within the neural net of everything that's come before in order to have meaning...but I suppose it's true, for me, that most worthwhile pieces of art can be understood better in relation to their influences, than simply on their own terms.
We listened to Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed on the radio. His advice to writers was something like: "Write in such a way that your reader will not feel that his time has been wasted."
On the way back home, we passed a kind of Bosnia of roadside deer corpses, including that of a very tiny fawn. It was quite sad. I don't understand why there were so many recently dead deer along that one stretch of route 80--there were six or seven.
In other animal news, there was a family of groundhogs living in a huge hole/tunnel at the foot of the steps to our townhouse. Every time we would come home, they would run out from under the house (God knows what they get up to under there...) and disappear into the hole like three fat croquet balls in quick succession. Also, there was a small bird with a worm in its mouth who kept trying to peck through the sliding glass door this morning. When that failed, he tried running against it a couple of times.
What else shall I tell you, dear reader? Let's leave it there, for now.
--Jason
Letter to the World
(Note, this and the two posts that follow it were originally hosted on MySpace, hence all the baffling references to MySpace.)
I have wanted for a long time to "blog," at the risk of (or perhaps for the purpose of) making a complete fool out of myself by putting my words out there for anybody to see. This is going to be one of those blogs where the guy just writes whatever the hell is in his mind, and the reader be damned (no offense).
For some reason "advanced text editor" won't work on Safari or Firefox (Anti-MacIsm, I guess), so I can't use Italics, which sucks because they are totally integral to my writing style. Without them, I feel like I felt in France, age 13, as an exchange student trying to talk to girls: like my personality is buried beneath an alien facade that in no way resembles me.
MySpace is very strange. I mean, actually it's pretty mundane. What's strange is that I and so many other seemingly reasonable people have MySpace pages. It seems like something that only 13 year old girls would be into. Actually, I joined it to post music, so that random passersby could find it. Only after creating this non-music page did I realize that there's a separate kind of MySpace music page. So I made a page there, too (www.myspace.com/jasongots). The trouble is, you can't post any of your interests to a myspace music page, so I kept this one, too.
Actually, it occurs to me now that I have no idea which of the two pages I am blogging on right now.
Ok--so--a little about me. Among other things, I'm what David Foster Wallace describes as a "SNOOD" (Syntactic Nudniks of Our Time)--one of those people who gets inordinately irritated by public misuses of grammar ("Ten Items or Less") and by those cutesy little phrases that seem to appear out of nowhere and infect advertising and public speaking with incredible virulence. Phrases like "It's a No-Brainer" and "At the end of the day,..." and neologisms like, well, "blog" for instance, drive me up a tree.
Its a very private pain, though, as nobody wants to hear about it (except for the rare fellow SNOOD one runs into occasionally). I announced to a roomful of writing tutors at the college where I work, several weeks ago, that the television ad for this college, which I had seen the day before on TV, makes the less/fewer mistake. "It says 'Twenty five students or less!' I shouted, expecting the room to collapse with laughter. Instead, everybody looked confused. 'I don't get it,' said one guy. I tried to explain the concept of countable and non-countable nouns. More silence and confusion. NOT ONE PERSON IN THAT ROOM OF PROFESSIONAL TUTORS UNDERSTOOD WHY "LESS THAN 25" IS WRONG.
Whatcha gonna do? Just sigh and prepare for the day when we end up back where we started--communicating via grunts and clicks.
Even as I write this I am aware of how impossibly snobbish it would sound to 99.9% of the English speaking world.
I wonder whether your "blogvoice" evolves over time, as you get used to the idea of sending messages out to the entire world. In reality, I have no idea how many people will read this. Most likely only a couple of my close friends. Still, this blogging is interesting--it's like writing a novel knowing that it is definitely going to be published--knowing that you have an audience. Or speaking into a microphone that is hooked up to an extended network of hidden speakers all over the world, any of which may be switched on or off at any time.
There's no question that blogging appeals to a person's vain, inner middle-schooler--that scrawny little kid who used to fill up spiral notebooks with solipsistic rants about how mean and stupid his parents and teachers were, with obscure metaphysical sonnets and creepy drawings of trees. But so does any kind of writing or act of creating something to be seen or heard publicly--it's always a tension between showing off, trying to connect, seeking approval, doing the thing for the love of doing it...there's not much sense I suppose in trying to pin down which one of those forces is dominant at any given time.
And although someone might stumble across this blog, read it, and think that it is the most boring, self-centered piece of shit imaginable, somebody else might find it entertaining or informative (or Shimmeringly Brilliant and Razor's-Edge Witty). And, basically, I'm going to do it because I feel like it.
More to come...
I have wanted for a long time to "blog," at the risk of (or perhaps for the purpose of) making a complete fool out of myself by putting my words out there for anybody to see. This is going to be one of those blogs where the guy just writes whatever the hell is in his mind, and the reader be damned (no offense).
For some reason "advanced text editor" won't work on Safari or Firefox (Anti-MacIsm, I guess), so I can't use Italics, which sucks because they are totally integral to my writing style. Without them, I feel like I felt in France, age 13, as an exchange student trying to talk to girls: like my personality is buried beneath an alien facade that in no way resembles me.
MySpace is very strange. I mean, actually it's pretty mundane. What's strange is that I and so many other seemingly reasonable people have MySpace pages. It seems like something that only 13 year old girls would be into. Actually, I joined it to post music, so that random passersby could find it. Only after creating this non-music page did I realize that there's a separate kind of MySpace music page. So I made a page there, too (www.myspace.com/jasongots). The trouble is, you can't post any of your interests to a myspace music page, so I kept this one, too.
Actually, it occurs to me now that I have no idea which of the two pages I am blogging on right now.
Ok--so--a little about me. Among other things, I'm what David Foster Wallace describes as a "SNOOD" (Syntactic Nudniks of Our Time)--one of those people who gets inordinately irritated by public misuses of grammar ("Ten Items or Less") and by those cutesy little phrases that seem to appear out of nowhere and infect advertising and public speaking with incredible virulence. Phrases like "It's a No-Brainer" and "At the end of the day,..." and neologisms like, well, "blog" for instance, drive me up a tree.
Its a very private pain, though, as nobody wants to hear about it (except for the rare fellow SNOOD one runs into occasionally). I announced to a roomful of writing tutors at the college where I work, several weeks ago, that the television ad for this college, which I had seen the day before on TV, makes the less/fewer mistake. "It says 'Twenty five students or less!' I shouted, expecting the room to collapse with laughter. Instead, everybody looked confused. 'I don't get it,' said one guy. I tried to explain the concept of countable and non-countable nouns. More silence and confusion. NOT ONE PERSON IN THAT ROOM OF PROFESSIONAL TUTORS UNDERSTOOD WHY "LESS THAN 25" IS WRONG.
Whatcha gonna do? Just sigh and prepare for the day when we end up back where we started--communicating via grunts and clicks.
Even as I write this I am aware of how impossibly snobbish it would sound to 99.9% of the English speaking world.
I wonder whether your "blogvoice" evolves over time, as you get used to the idea of sending messages out to the entire world. In reality, I have no idea how many people will read this. Most likely only a couple of my close friends. Still, this blogging is interesting--it's like writing a novel knowing that it is definitely going to be published--knowing that you have an audience. Or speaking into a microphone that is hooked up to an extended network of hidden speakers all over the world, any of which may be switched on or off at any time.
There's no question that blogging appeals to a person's vain, inner middle-schooler--that scrawny little kid who used to fill up spiral notebooks with solipsistic rants about how mean and stupid his parents and teachers were, with obscure metaphysical sonnets and creepy drawings of trees. But so does any kind of writing or act of creating something to be seen or heard publicly--it's always a tension between showing off, trying to connect, seeking approval, doing the thing for the love of doing it...there's not much sense I suppose in trying to pin down which one of those forces is dominant at any given time.
And although someone might stumble across this blog, read it, and think that it is the most boring, self-centered piece of shit imaginable, somebody else might find it entertaining or informative (or Shimmeringly Brilliant and Razor's-Edge Witty). And, basically, I'm going to do it because I feel like it.
More to come...
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